Notes on An Essay on "Jewish Themes in THE GRADUATE(1967, dir. Mike Nichols)" by Brenton Sanderson

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/07/26/jewish-themes-in-the-graduate-1967/

The Jewish Angle in THE GRADUATE has been much discussed. But whatever its implications and meanings, there's no denying the brilliance with which Mike Nichols made the movie, something that eluded him in later works... though CATCH-22 has its moments and CARNAL KNOWLEDGE is pretty compelling as an arty take on the Sexual Revolution. So, the talent has to be discussed in relation to the film's impact. THE GRADUATE would likely have failed with critics and audience in lesser hands, whatever its message. It's like almost no one talks about GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER or just about anything by Stanley Kramer. Though Nichols ultimately didn't turn out to be a great director, he made one great movie, THE GRADUATE, much like Ridley Scott surpassed his limitations one time with BLADE RUNNER. Likewise, other key works by Jewish directors of the period must be considered(even in criticism) with an appreciation of their power as artists, wits, dramatists, expressionists. Even if there is a Jewish angle to THE GRADUATE and other works by Jewish artists, there is much more than mere ethnic propaganda. Stanley Kubrick made 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Roman Polanski made ROSEMARY'S BABY. Stuart Rosenberg made COOL HAND LUKE. Arthur Penn made BONNIE & CLYDE. Arthur Schlesinger made MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Richard Brooks made IN COLD BLOOD. Earlier in the decade, Blake Edwards made BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S. Though Sidney Lumet would come to greatness in the 70s and 80s, he was emerging as a force as well. (Norman Jewison, who made IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, isn't Jewish despite the name.)
Now, not all the above-listed directors attained greatness. Rosenberg made one great movie, COOL HAND LUKE, but was mostly a journeyman director. But for whatever reason, it was the Jews(and then some Italian-Americans) who were most adept at hitching onto the new sensibility and conceiving new possibilities for Hollywood. Of course, many new or newer talents were not Jewish. Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, and the like. But Jewish film-makers were among the key figures in the development of New Hollywood. They were bolder, hungrier, more curious, more radical, more hip to trends. They were also among the most admiring of the great European directors(most of whom were not Jewish) and some Japanese ones. Their impact on cinema was somewhat akin to Bob Dylan's on Rock Music, though it's arguable that the only Jewish film-maker to match the cultural significance of Dylan was Stanley Kubrick who struck a chord with both critics and the audience. To be sure, cinephilia of the Film Generation was somewhat different from the attitudes of Youth Culture. Whereas Rock fans had close to zero interest in pre-Rock music and foreign music — though Folk Rockers were more reverent of the past and other cultures — , Film Culture was about remembrance and international curiosity. So, the seminal film critics of the 60s didn't just discuss the latest trends and hottest hits but wrote extensively about foreign cinema and classic Hollywood. College kids who had no interest in music prior to Rock might nevertheless look up to Howard Hawks and Orson Welles as cultural heroes and icons.
Still, despite the respect accorded to the Old Hollywood greats by Andrew Sarris, Peter Bogdanovich, and their acolytes, the fact is the culture was changing fast. So, while even young cinephiles might marvel at a John Ford Western or Frank Capra comedy, they no longer believed movies could or should be made that way. There was a new spirit in the air, and Jewish film-makers were among the first to run with it. And yet, the Europeans and Japanese had been ahead of American Cinema in personal expression and experimentation. In a way, the new batch of Jewish film-makers had a greater affinity for non-Jewish-controlled foreign cinema and were rebelling against the Hollywood System controlled by old-fashioned Jewish executives and careerists. And they had their chance because the Old Studio system was either dead or moribund, just barely hanging on, as the result of Hollywood's loss of theater monopoly and the rise of TV.

One can socially critique movies like COOL HAND LUKE, THE GRADUATE, BONNIE AND CLYDE, and many others as hostile and subversive, and there is certainly a Jewish angle to this. Still, the real power and effectiveness of these works owes to their artistry, brilliance, and deeper implications than their apparent message, be it blatant or esoteric. It's like Shakespeare's HENRY V is more than a 'nationalist' piece of propaganda. Also, they were refreshing because there is a bit of anarchist in each of us that roots for the oddball, eccentric, maverick, outsider, or underdog. (The audience rooted for Sylvester Stallone in ROCKY because whites had become underdogs in boxing.) And the similar strains could be found in European and Japanese movies that were, if anything, even bolder in thumbing their noses at the established order and social norms. Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura, and Hiroshi Teshigahara were not Jewish. Neither were European directors like Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, Bo Widenberg, Fassbinder, Gillo Pontecorvo, and etc. So, in some ways, the Jewish American directors were following in the leads of European and Japanese cultural pioneers and enfants terribles, though one could argue that modern radicalism anywhere in the world was inspired in part by Jewish Influence.

At any rate, Jewish Power of Propaganda cannot be understood apart from the talent and visions that go far beyond whatever the original 'political' intent may have been. In some ways, David Mamet is an unpleasant Jewish chauvinist, yet he is also artist and thinker enough to raise questions and face truths that challenge his ethnic biases. (In contrast, Aaron Sorkin is a mere propagandist-hack, albeit a talented one.) Sergei Eisenstein's propaganda films are crude as message but works of genius as experimental formalism. ROSEMARY'S BABY would likely have been a third-rate movie in the hands of someone other than Polanski, just like JAWS would have been one more dumb monster movie if not for Steven Spielberg. (Polanski and other Eastern European directors are a special case. Whereas most of the great Western European directors were non-Jewish, many of the Iron Curtain's 'new wave' directors, especially in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, were Jewish. Though the White Right generally sees Jews as radical leftists, many of these Hungarian and Czech 'new wave' Jewish film-makers were problematic to communist authorities for their espousal of individualism, irreverence, satire, and/or something approaching libertarianism. Most were liberal than leftist, highly problematic as communism regarded liberalism as a bourgeois conceit. And even if not pro-capitalist, they leaned more towards social democracy than communism. Polanski detested communism, and Milos Forman, the Czech Jew in exile, found great success in Hollywood with ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, which would be very un-PC today, and AMADEUS, a work that is, at once, subversive of authority and defensive of genius as natural hierarchy.) Talent goes a long way, and whatever ideological agendas or ethnic biases may have shaped the works of Jewish directors, the top Jewish talents were not only born with natural intelligence but grew up with a genuine appreciation of arts/culture. As such, Mike Nichols' main objective was to make a popular but personal art film inspired by the cinema of Europe. (Nichols was especially impressed with Fellini's 8 1/2. THE GRADUATE also has nods to Michelangelo Antonioni and Francois Truffaut.) But if some American directors miserably failed at making Art Films— THE SWIMMER had all the elements to be a great piece of personal film-making but suffered from strained uneven direction, and Lumet's PAWNBROKER is an embarrassing assemblage of obvious homages to European Art House — , others found their own stride, and THE GRADUATE may be the most significant work in this spirit. At first glance, it seemed a Hollywood movie riffing on European Art film mannerisms, and yet, it was so genuinely American and Hollywood. Moreover, Nichols, unlike Lumet before him, totally made the work his own. Instead of imitation, he drew inspiration and found his own beat and rhythm. As such, while THE GRADUATE may resemble a work like BLOW-UP by Antonioni, it has a uniqueness all its own. Also, the great appeal of movies like THE GRADUATE and MIDNIGHT COWBOY owed to American Jews being less hung up with intellectual conceits. As much as they admired European cinema, they also loved humor, effect, and fun. Increasingly with European Cinema, there developed the purist notion that true art cannot be much fun or rely on time-tested conventions. Also, theory began to dominate practice. For instance, Pier Paolo Pasolini began his film career with lively works with expressive actors, but along the way, he got this idea that actors shouldn't act dramatically. Godard's films got increasingly self-conscious. Ingmar Bergman's films grew colder. Now, an artist who really knows what he's doing can make it work, as in the case of Robert Bresson. But too many aspiring auteurs in Europe became allergic to doing anything that might violate the monastic or radical mission of cinema as art or commitment.
In contrast, Nichols had far fewer such hang-ups. So, even as he drew certain ideas from European cinema, he was mindful to lots of humor along with the songs of Simon and Garfunkel, whatever worked. Such use of songs might have aeen deemed as cheating or relying more on non-cinematic expressions than on the pure possibilities of cinema. But the use of songs did wonders for THE GRADUATE, just like the use of classical music added another dimension to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. So, Nichols and others like him had the best of both worlds: The new language of Art Cinema as personal expression but also the eagerness to please and win over the audience with timeless tricks of entertainment. And that is why THE GRADUATE, like HAROLD AND MAUDE, works on so many levels. It is seriously committed to cinema as art but also shameless in presenting a good show. New Hollywood was closer in spirit to Serious Rock — Later Beatles, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, CCR — than Modernist Music that took out all the fun from music.

So much of PC mentality is reductionist in evaluating works for their 'toxicity' level, e.g. 'racism', 'misogyny', 'sexism', 'homophobia', 'antisemitism', and etc. It's too bad that this tendency exists on the Right as well. Now, it's fair game to notice socially or politically problematic ideas and messages in any work, but the question still remains, why do certain works, regardless of their moral or political content, have such power and influence on the audience? And here, we have to address the matter of talent, brilliance, originality, and/or genius. While THE GRADUATE isn't the work of a genius, it is a brilliant piece of film-making, one where everything clicked together. (It both supports and subverts the cult of the 'auteur' as its miracle couldn't have been possible without Mike Nichols' guiding hand but also depended so much on the chemistry among the assembled cast and crew.) And also a poetic one, even if it amounts to pop-poeticism, like the songs of Simon and Garfunkel. Likewise, THE GODFATHER movies would likely have been nothing special and soon forgotten but for the understanding, knowledge, and skills brought to it by Francis Ford Coppola. There's no point to condemning or praising an entire work because of its said politics.

Turman bought the rights to the book for $1,000 and sent it unsolicited to Jewish director Mike Nichols (born Mikhail Peschkowsky) who signed on to the project. Turman’s search for financing led him to Jewish film mogul Joseph E. Levine—“the schlockmeister of the world”—who put up $3 million... Nichols assigned Jewish screenwriter Buck Henry (born Henry Zuckerman)... Songs by the Jewish duo Simon and Garfunkel were used for the soundtrack. Given the many Jews involved in the film’s production, it’s hardly surprising that Jewish sensibilities and ideological fixations pervade the final product.

But Jewish finance and Jewish producers had long been a dominant force in Hollywood. Also, Jewish writers had been embedded in Hollywood since its inception. And many music composers were Jewish. So, THE GRADUATE is hardly different from works of Classic Hollywood in the preponderance of Jewish money and talent.

In the hands of director Mike Nichols, however, the story became a scathing critique of bourgeois WASP American culture and the oppressive burden it purportedly imposed on young Americans. Nichols employs two recurrent visual metaphors to symbolize this oppressive culture: black-and-white stripes and water.

Many people saw the movie that way, but I'm not sure Nichols meant it that way. When pressed about Elaine and Benjamin by a young female fan of the movie, he answered that they'd probably end up just like their parents. Also, even though there is gentle mockery of upper middle class life, it's hardly hateful. (If anything, even as the audience is glibly laughing at the 'shallow' people in the movie, they are attracted to displays of affluence and the good life, also true of works like LA DOLCE VITA and LA NOTTE. Would THE GRADUATE have been as successful if it were about a working class guy living in a tenement? MARTY with Ernest Borgnine proved to be more or less a one-off thing.)
Benjamin's woes have less to do with social oppression than loss of youth. He's worried about the future, i.e. it has arrived, he's living in it, so it no longer exists for him. This is a universal problem faced by people all over the world. When you're young, the future is always something in the distant horizon. It's always a day ahead, like the song from ANNIE. Or consider how Scarlett in GONE WITH THE WIND always assures herself that 'tomorrow will be another day'. This procrastination about the future loomed larger among the boomer generation as more of them grew up in affluence, could attend college, and followed their bliss, that was as long as one was young and still at work or play. But school eventually ends, and one must be an adult with responsibilities and burdens. So, even though the movie is based on Charles Webb's novel, its spirit also flows from CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger. Braddock is not a victim of social oppression, that is made clear. His parents provided him with everything. He has a nice big room all to himself. He could attend the college of his choice far from home. His graduation gift is a fancy sports car. And as the movie makes clear, his parents pretty much allow him to do as he pleases. At one time, his father expresses displeasure with Ben's taking it easy, but he doesn't do much about it. Also, Mr. Robinson's advice to Ben is that he should sow some wild oats and have the time of his life(without realizing it would lead to an affair with his wife). Later, when his mother asks him what he does all night long and his answer isn't forthcoming, she just walks away and leaves him alone; she's a very understanding, even permissive, parent.

Ben also has no problem with job prospects. 'Plastics', he can make lots of money working for corporations. Or, he can continue with his education, especially as he got a scholarship. So, what is bothering him? His youth is over and thrill is gone. Whether work or more school, he feels his youth slipped by. It went from looking-forward-to-life to life-itself. He's going through what might be called the Beginning-Age Crisis, the crisis that befalls someone who realizes his youth is definitely over and his first chapter as an adult begins. He doesn't want to be like his parents or their friends, but it's not because he hates them. It's because it means just working, making money, and then growing old and retiring. Such is life, and there is no escape, and it's something everyone must accept at some moment, but Ben simply isn't ready yet to make the transition. (Perhaps, he feels especially cheated because his youth passed him by without him even having gotten laid or fallen in love or done something truly exciting.) And in the 1960s when youth itself became an identity in its own right, the boomers developed this notion of Forever-Young. They said stuff like "Don't trust anyone over thirty" without realizing they themselves would be over 30 sooner than later. So, Ben's problems are essentially personal and psychological(and generational) than social or cultural. The problem is not lack of freedom but too much freedom that he came to associate with youth. Finally, with graduation, he will have less freedom as a full-time worker who just grows older and becomes just another suburban man. Granted, there is a certain irony in his transition from student to full adulthood. On the one hand, he has more freedom after graduation. He doesn't have to attend classes anymore. He's his own man and can do whatever he wants. And yet, it's a freedom of responsibility, a kind of drag and burden. In contrast, while as a student he was more under the control of institutions and his parents who paid his tuition, he wasn't responsible for himself. As a son and student, his sole responsibility was to attend school and get good grades. He was taken care of, and furthermore, he could focus on knowledge and learning than on mundane matters of life. And he could always look to the future as something special. But the day finally arrived, and it just proved to be another day, and all the days following that day will turn him into just another suburban man. His life will be comfortable and affluent but not particularly meaningful, as only a tiny handful of people actually get to pursue their dreams.

The water metaphor is less about societal weight on Ben's shoulders than about Ben's emotional state of melancholy and confusion. In a way, the watery depth is more a solace than a prison. Notice how he keeps running back to his bed room from the graduation party full of admiring friends of his parents. These people are full of affection and praise for Ben. Hardly oppressive, but he finds the situation insufferable because they all remind him of what he will be in two or three decades. So, he would rather be in his room staring into the aquarium. Thus, he feels comfortably numb. The fish, like the ducks in THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, may stand for a more ideal existence. Unlike Holden Caulfield who doesn't know what to make of his life, the ducks naturally know to fly south for winter. The fish in the aquarium need not worry about anything as the tank is cleaned by humans and as they're regularly fed. Having graduated, Ben is out of the fish tank of childhood for good and in the river of adulthood. Later when we see Ben having a good time with his affair with Mrs. Robinson, we see him floating on the water glinting with sunlight. There's the memorable moment with the rain, but I think it was more for effect and mood than symbolism. It also foreshadows his desperate race against time later in the movie. Of course, as he sweats up a storm, he's his own rain-maker.
A special thing about THE GRADUATE is it finds a special beauty in the melancholy. In a way, Ben wants to break out or break on through to the other side, but the meaning is in the struggle, not in the victory. He studied hard all his young life to be a top student and graduated with honors, but it seems hollow once it's behind him. Same with his 'second graduation' with Elaine as trophy wrested from the church wedding. His greatest desire is to win her heart and make her his. It becomes an all-consuming passion and obsession... but once he has Elaine with him in the bus at the end, he begins to feel somewhat empty again. The dream is always sad, even a bit depressing, because its realization seems so elusive, even impossible. The dreamer hopes the dream will become reality, but per chance it does, the result is always bound to be anticlimactic. So, Ben is caught in a psychological trap. A neurotic-romantic, he's given to aching for what's beyond his reach. And yet, upon attaining his dream, he realizes that he was truly happy when he was in yearning. It's like hunger calls for satiation but, once satisfied, soon fades in pleasure.
Once he gets it, he realizes it's just one more trophy and life goes on. It's like the scene in BLOW-UP where a bunch of guys tussle over a broken guitar neck, but it is tossed aside soon after it's taken by one guy. It's the curse of a dream coming true. It just becomes more of mundane reality and loses its luster as future vision.

In a way, Ben's problem isn't all that different from the personal crisis of the young man in BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES. War was hell, and he dreamed of returning home alive in one piece. But as a civilian, he's just another Joe, just another guy working 9 to 5 to make ends meet. As horrific as war was, he was a hero and felt more alive precisely because death was everywhere. But back in the States, where life is everywhere and so humdrum, he feels empty. And when he sees the many bombers rusting in the airfield waiting to be scrapped for metal, he senses another kind of death. End of war means life, but the airfield looks like a graveyard of heroism. Feeling alive isn't the same thing as life. There can be lots of life but no sense of being alive, feeling alive. In contrast, one could feel most alive around death. While Ben hardly had to worry about death, the experience of growing up and graduating from school to school was a kind of adventure of mind and spirit. Every year meant he was rising another level, growing into adulthood. But once an adult, there is growing older but no more growing up. It's like once peak height is reached, there is advancement in years but not in inches(except around the waistline).

Ben's situation in the final part of the movie is like David and Goliath. It’s the same reason we root for Tony Montana who defies the chief kingpin in SCARFACE and takes on all-comers. Ben is the scrappy fellow who pursues his dream come what may and runs off with the girl. But what he does isn’t normal. It’s not normal to expect a relationship with a girl whose mother you had sex with. It’s not normal or very honorable to come between a woman and her prospective groom. The scene where he informs his parents about the marriage says it all. They assume Elaine and Ben came to an agreement, but Ben says he decided on his own and that Elaine doesn’t even like him. And unbeknownst to his parents, there is the problem of Mr. and Mrs. Robinson. (We are not sure when exactly Mr. Robinson found out about the affair.) Ben's father says his plan is half-baked, and Ben says, no, it’s completely baked. And it is. The normal and honorable thing would be for a guy to accept the reality of the girl being betrothed to another. The proper thing is to walk away, but Ben just won’t. To be sure, he decides to call it quits after Mr. McClusky(Norman Fell as landlord) threatens him with eviction, but then, Elaine tells him not to leave until he has a definite plan. And then, Ben is back to his crazy dreamer self.

Things can never be normal with Ben and Elaine even if they do eventually get married. After all, she made her wedding vow and is legally wed to Carl Smith. So, she must go through the whole legal rigamarole of filing for divorce. And if Ben and Elaine were to tie the knot to make it official, they will still be estranged from their parents, especially the Robinsons. Ben’s father can’t be too happy either as his partner in the law firm is none other than Mr. Robinson. In time, Ben and Elaine as married couple will likely end up like their parents, but their lives can never be normal due to strained situations with their parents(and perhaps the scandal of the wedding crash).

That said, THE GRADUATE had an almost universal appeal because it was as sentimental as it was cynical. It was like the Beatles and SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND, an album beloved not only by youths but older people and even highbrow types. It was a Rock album pandering to Summer of Love and Youth Culture, but it was also arty and even a bit old-fashioned, with tunes like “When I’m Sixty Four” and “She’s Leaving Home”, a song that is rebellious in message but traditional in delivery. (A HARD DAY’S NIGHT was also a winner with both young and older audiences.) Young people regarded Ben as a rebel-hero who says hell to ‘plastics’, experiments in free love, seeks authenticity, and takes action to realize his dreams. And yet, even non-radical or non-experimental boomers could relate to him because he initially comes across as something of a square and stuff-shirt, someone who focused more on books than all the groovy things happening around the period. Charles Webb's novel came out before Counterculture happened, whereas the movie was made in its midst. The scenario feels all the more alienating for that reason. It's like an early 60s mindset time-traveled to the latter-60s. Now, one might say that those were just a few years, but SO MUCH happened between 1963 and 1967. That sudden sense of change was the subject of FUTURE SHOCK by Alvin Toffler. If Ben were graduating from high school in the movie, he might be ecstatic. Alas, he graduated from college and officially became an adult just when the culture of youth was taking off to new dimensions. He's too young to identify with his parents generation but just old enough to feel out of sync with the youth culture. Thus, he feels alienated from old and young. And yet, he feels attracted to Mrs. Robinson who, though twice his age, seems defiant of growing older by making up her own rules. And part of the reason he may feel such attraction to Elaine is she's still in school and therefore symbolizes the youth that has passed him by, at least in official capacity. Ben was following the track of being an Organization Man than a Creative Soul. Or, at the very least, he's like an Early Beatle with suit-and-tie who suddenly finds himself transported to the Age of Aquarius. For older or more traditional audiences, it was a story about a guy who initially finds escapism with easy sex with an older woman but then falls in true love and wants commitment and marriage. As for the ending, it can be seen as a rebellion against social norms(as how many people crash weddings?) or confirmation of true love, the classic fairy-tale of a hero saving a damsel from distress.

Now, why would Elaine be attracted to Ben when Carl Smith is taller and more handsome(and has good prospects as a doctor)? Ben has personality. Also, Elaine has a soft side and feels for others. Carl Smith is so sure of himself whereas there is a passive/aggressive boyish side to Ben that needs mothering. So, her maternal instincts kick into gear in the presence of Ben. (She is actually more mother-like than Mrs. Robinson who seems bitter that her youth was cut short by pregnancy and marriage.) Also, Ben is a funny guy, and humor goes a long way. Furthermore, love isn’t only about sexual attraction but the feeling of being appreciated. A person can fall in love with the love shown him/her by the other. For Carl Smith, Elaine may be a good catch but not the only one. If she slips from his grasp, he will likely find another good catch. But for Ben, Elaine is the ONLY ONE, and she senses the depth of his passion for her.
And it’s also what happened between them at the night club. Ben was acting like a total ass but later confesses that he went against his nature due to parental pressure. Of course, that’s not really true as the real reason he tried to sabotage the date was because Mrs. Robinson had forbidden him to date her daughter. Anyway, something clicked in that moment. Elaine is a physically a fully blossomed woman, but there is still something of the little girl inside. You can tell she hasn’t yet lost her innocence, and she lives in something like a paper doll world. Ben realizes how much he hurt her, and he does everything to make amends and this creates a special bond between them. With the kiss, Elaine goes from weeping girl to a real woman, and Ben goes from a confused adult without direction to a man who finally understands what gives his life meaning: Elaine as his true love. (At the same time, there is a quality of puppy love.) With Mrs. Robinson, he was toyed with and used, and he used her in turn. It was just about sex and to stave off boredom. An escapism from life. But with Elaine, there is no guile and gamesmanship. He feels natural in her presence. His plan was for a short date where he’d act the jerk, make Elaine dislike him, take her home, and be done with it. But Elaine’s reaction in the night club is more that of a vulnerable girl than an angry bitch. He sees a side of her he never expected, and in turn, he feels born-again when he tries to console Elaine. It's as if he's finally found his true self and no longer feels so alienated. Thus, the problem was less social alienation than auto-alienation. It suggests that an individual is only half-a-person, therefore a person can only be complete when he meets one's soulmate. It lends a mythic overtone to the movie — Greek mythology says Zeus separated men and women from their embrace, therefore life is about men and women trying to reconnect with their lost mates. Much has been made of the Christian and Jewish angle of the story, but perhaps the main appeal is closer to Greek mythology and Western fairy tales. Earlier in the decade, there was a hit French movie called BLACK ORPHEUS, the telling of the Greek myth with black actors. THE GRADUATE is like the Jewish Perseus. At any rate, it was this ‘subversive’ and multi-faceted blend of cynicism and sentimentality that made THE GRADUATE so special. But the same could be said of THE GODFATHER, which is both a heart-warming family story and a cold & ruthless gangster tale.

The perennial theme of Jewish alienation from a WASP-dominated mainstream American society played an important role in how the character of Benjamin Braddock—and the entire film—were conceived by Nichols—though this only became fully apparent to him after the film had been made.

But it works in the movie because even the character in the novel is alienated. Indeed, many leading characters in novels and movies are outsiders, eccentrics, oddballs, or mavericks. We find such characters more interesting. Even Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan is alienated from the System he works for. John Wayne's character in THE SEARCHERS is something of a misfit, at odds not only with Indians but with fellow whites. Marlon Brando and James Dean became famous as malcontents. Orson Welles said he cast homosexual Anthony Perkins because his closeted neurosis might add something to the character of Joseph K. in THE TRIAL, and it seems Nichols had something similar in mind in having a Jewish character play Ben. I think it works better than it would have with Robert Redford, though a younger Paul Newman, as half-Jew and half-Aryan, might have been even better. Redford, though a capable actor, was rather colorless and inexpressive. The movie wouldn't have been half-as-funny with Redford as Benjamin. Dustin Hoffman was an actor of limited range but fantastic at his best. His Ratso Rizzo in MIDNIGHT COWBOY is genius-acting.

Also, Hoffman-as-Ben has an ambiguous presence in the movie, making it all the more interesting. He's both Jewish and Wasp. Boy and man. Awkward and aggressive. Timid and bold. Calculating and chaotic. The Jew/Wasp tensions within the character intensifiy the contradictions within Benjamin who is both eager and afraid to be free. Hoffman is short but physically fit. Topless, he does have the physique of a long-distance track star. Also, while not handsome, the young Hoffman is rather attractive from certain angles. There is also something of the 'cute' quality that Ringo had. And then, there's the timing and intelligence in his acting, something truly rare in cinema as most actors aren't known for brains.

Ben’s scream in the church is so reminiscent of Rod Steiger’s wailing at the end of THE PAWNBROKER. As for Wasps trapped in the church, that has nothing on the ending of DIRTY DOZEN where Nazi officers are barricaded in the basement and roasted alive with gasoline and grenades. That is one cynical movie. Nazis are so evil they deserve to be slaughtered like animals. But American heroes are a bunch of crooks, criminals, thugs, and psychos. It’s like an insane hashing of BRIDGE ON RIVER KWAI and THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. Truly a dirty movie.

Nichols cast Hoffman, “despite the fact that he was virtually unknown and looked nothing like the leading man described in the script, which called for a tall, blond track star, not a short, Jewish guy with a schnoz for the ages.”

But in the end, we must judge by results, and I think the success of THE GRADUATE is inseparable from Hoffman's shell game of drama and humor. While an actor like Redford or Ryan O'Neal might have been closer in looks to the character in the novel, Hoffman had that blend of straight man and clown that made the role so different and unique. Also, the final part of the movie when Ben is speeding back and forth from LA and Berkeley has something of the silent comedies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, the tales of underdogs who overcome all obstacles to end up with the girl. Robert Redford running off with the girl would seem less amazing and outrageous than Dustin Hoffman doing so. Buster Keaton was a short guy but one who out-maneuvered the competition and usually came out ahead. Same goes for Harold Lloyd, and especially as Nichols came from comedy background, he was looking for the most comic as well as dramatic actor, and he hit gold with Hoffman.
Now, take Jack Nicholson in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. The character in the novel is much stronger, a tough Irishman who takes on three Negroes in the shower and beats them all up. Nicholson's McMurphy is smaller and weaker and no match for the Negroes, but it's a masterly performance, and he came to own that role. Many, indeed most, movies deviate from the novel or the original screenplay, but at the end of the day, the only question that matters is "Does it work"? Hoffman made it work. But then, Victor Mature played Samson and Charlton Heston played Moses, and they made it work, at least as entertainment.

Hoffman’s anti-heroic character gave the green light for Hollywood to promote “the ethnic Jewish matinee idol and youth icon in the forms of George Segal, Elliot Gould, Richard Benjamin, Charles Grodin, and Gene Wilder.”[9] These Jewish romantic leads were invariably paired onscreen with beautiful non-Jewish actresses like Marsha Mason, Candice Bergen, and (in the case of Dustin Hoffman) blondes like Mia Farrow, Faye Dunaway, Susan George, and Meryl Streep.

It's been said that THE GRADUATE changed the rules of who can be a star in Hollywood, but this is a gross exaggeration. Hollywood always had lots of room for Jewish, ethnic, different, ugly, short, and weird actors, even among Wasps. Alan Ladd was a short guy. Humphrey Bogart, though Wasp, looked ethnic and could have passed for Italian, Greek, Spaniard, or Jew. But he was a big star. Short and funny-looking Mickey Rooney was one of the biggest stars of the 40s. James Cagney was no looker but a tremendous star. The Jewish Paul Muni was in many prestigious roles. Peter Lorre and Edward G. Robinson, both Jewish, became world famous. Short actors were nothing special in Hollywood. Many actors, if not downright short, were hardly tall. James Dean was 5'7. Marlon Brando was 5'9, not exactly short but far from tall. It could be that shorter men gravitate to acting because they have to be more expressive to gain the kind of attention that taller men usually get. How tall is Tom Cruise? Long before Dustin Hoffman became a household name, Frank Sinatra was a big movie star. He was only 5'7, had pocked face, and was Italian. And movie stardom was often less about looks than the hook. Certain actors and actresses, even if not handsome or pretty, had a certain screen presence, an allure. Take Charles Bronson who could even be said to be ugly. But he had a great movie face. Same was true of Telly Savalis and Anthony Quinn. Tony Curtis the Jew played a Norseman in THE VIKINGS and did a pretty good job.

As for George Segal, Elliot Gould, Richard Benjamin, Charles Grodin, and Gene Wilder, they usually starred in lesser or more 'independent' productions. Among the new batch of Jewish actors, the only one whose success matched that of Hoffman in the 70s and 80s was maybe Gene Hackman(though Henry Winkler hit pay dirt as the Fonz on HAPPY DAYS, but that was TV). Richard Dreyfus seemed to be on the up and up but soon faded. Of course, one could count Harrison Ford as Jewish, or half-Jewish. Woody Allen might qualify but he was appreciated more as 'auteur' than actor. (Correction. Gene Hackman doesn't seem to be Jewish.)

Hoffman won the role over Charles Grodin, another Jewish actor who was no model of conventional WASP good looks.

Grodin, though no heartthrob, had a certain goofy charm. And unlike in THE GRADUATE where everything is 'crypto', THE HEARTBREAK KID is very much a public airing of the Jewish Male obsession with the 'shikse'. It is in satirical than romantic mode(as in the case of THE GRADUATE) and, as such, cinematically less interesting but even more revealing of the Jewish sensibility. Hilarious stuff.

Such overt anti-Christian imagery jarred with the film’s first audiences—but was only the start of Hollywood’s disparagement of Christianity, and seems tame by today’s standards.

Maybe Jews are doing white people a favor by bashing Christianity, a religion that originated from renegade Jews. In a way, what is more 'crypto-Jewish' than Christianity? Though Christ is often depicted in Western Art as an Aryan-looking fellow, He was actually Jewish and probably looked more like Norman Finkelstein or Noam Chomsky. And speaking of neurosis, how about the story of a Man who claimed to be the Son of God and got Himself killed over it? Western Civilization is founded on Jewish Neurosis. So, even though Hoffman the Jew plays a Wasp in THE GRADUATE, white people over the eons have been worshiping a Jew with a big nose in the image of European whites. And look at the sculpture of David by Michelangelo. I'm thinking that David, being Jewish, looked more like Jerry Seinfeld or Sean Penn, but the statue resembles something out of Greco-Roman mythology.

At any rate, when will whites find their own covenant with the ultimate power of the universe? As long as whites keep with Christianity, it means they are forever beholden to the imagination and vision of Jews. Also, Christianity, if followed to the letter, is a death cult as we are now seeing in the West. If Christian West was powerful in the past, it was because it heeded only about 1/4 of Jesus' teachings. Go beyond that, and you end up dead. And if you don't, you get blamed for hypocrisy, preaching 'turn the other cheek' while using violence to conquer and control the world. Christianity has been a great religion, but it is now dead. It's very sad in a way, but it means the white race must finally GRADUATE toward a new consciousness with prophets of its own that can meditate on the ultimate power and receive the covenant that has meaning to whites and whites alone.

By the way, thing in the church happens so fast that it hardly registers as an anti-Christian screed. And, whatever the significance of Ben wielding the cross as a weapon, it is funny as hell, and as the characters in THE WILD BUNCH say, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.” The outrage element is part of the fun. A little irreverence never hurt anyone.
Also, just look at the church. Its design is so Californian, so modernist and soulless. It looks like a bleached shell devoid of spiritual meaning. A church as status-symbol of the affluent and modern. So, it’s less a Christian ceremony than a matter of custom. They get married in a church because it’s just what people do. And who are among the attendees? None other than Mrs. Robinson, hardly a virtuous character. And there’s Mr. Robinson who pressured his daughter into marrying Carl Smith out of his seething rage at Ben. We don’t know much about Smith the ‘make-out king’, but he doesn’t seem the spiritual type. So, even without Ben’s presence, the wedding is just an empty show, a ritual devoid of spiritual or even much moral meaning. Elaine is getting married to console her father. Her heart is really with Ben.
Ben’s wielding the cross as a weapon could be seen as a desecration of Christianity, but it could also mean he’s the christ-like figure for true love. He’s willing to sacrifice everything, even sanity and limb, for the girl he loves.

The problem with clinging to Christianity in our age is it no longer provides the answers. As such, people need to seek out new visions and find new directions. It’s like a horse. It is highly useful when strong and hardy. But what use is a dead horse? Christianity is now a dead horse. In Europe, it’s totally dead. They say America is still religious, but no one gets fired or blacklisted for insulting God, Jesus, or Paul. But you may be fired and blacklisted even at a so-called ‘conservative’ Christian institution if you criticize Fentanyl Floyd or Jewish promotion of globo-homo. For many Christians, even those on the ‘right’, the highest holies are Jews, Negroes, and Homos. Indeed, many churches would have us believe that god and jesus serve Jews, homos, and blacks than anything else.

Christianity has become a suicide pact. If Christianity still had martial spirit, it would be in much better shape. In the past, Christianity served the West well in the form of 'hypochristianity'. Christianity had to be hypocritical in order to survive and expand. The teachings of Jesus, such as ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘meek shall inherit the earth’, don't do much for worldly power. Jesus urged people to give away all their wealth, live in righteous poverty, and meditate on spiritual matters. But people who act that way end up dead or oppressed. If they believe in Heaven, they may expect something better in the afterlife. But most people are attached to the real world, and power is about money, weapons, hierarchy, and violence. So, the Christian West at its peak preached one thing but practiced something other. Now, the West wasn’t purely hypocritical and much of its values & practices derived from Christian morality. Still, the kindly side of the West relied on the hard side that kept and expanded power by ruthless means.

But such kind of hypocrisy is no longer tenable, especially as Jews gained power in the West and never lose sleep pointing out all the hypocrisies of the West. This shame has been internalized by most whites. This has led to whites either rejecting Christianity or trying to practice a Christianity that is closer to the spirit of Jesus’s teachings… which can only serve as a death/suicide cult. Worse, there are so many idiots or opportunists who seek to use the church as a club for other agendas, often satanic in nature, like globo-homo and worship of savage Negro as Magic Negro. And of course, many non-religious and anti-religious people are possessed of a zealotry derived from puritanical strains of Christianity. If the church in our times is an empty shell devoid of spiritual passion, post-Christian passion of radicals is like fanaticism without a meaningful vessel. Shell without flesh and flesh without shell are, of course, both doomed. Form without content and content without form are both ultimately useless. Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, is dead as a useful and virile creed. When the Vatican has Pope Francis as top leader, what does that say? What is Mainline church in the US but promotion of globo-homo and Magic Negro? What is Evangelicalism but about More Wars for ‘Muh Israel’? There is the Orthodox Church, but it has no meaning to most Greeks who are secular. And in Russia, it is a museum culture than a living one despite all the new cathedrals built.

In the first scene of the film, Benjamin rides to the left on an airport conveyor belt as everyone else accedes to the airport’s public announcement system’s request to “Please stay to the right.”

I think 'stay on the right' in that moment meant stay to the right on the conveyor belt or in walkways, which is conventional rule in all places. It's like people usually walk on the right side no matter which way they're going.

In One Dimensional Man, he argued that advanced industrial societies like the United States repress their populations by creating false needs via mass advertising, industrial management, and modes of thought which resulted in a “one dimensional” universe of thought and behavior which stifled people’s capacity for critical thought and oppositional behavior.

Even if we disagree with Herbert Marcuse's solutions, was he wrong in his critique of consumer-capitalism? Look all around today, and corporate-consumer-capitalism is a big part of the problem. The rise of Pop Culture as Main Culture has led to the one-dimensional idiot. And we need critical thought and oppositional thought more than ever.

In the end, the real problem of whites was not 'authoritarianism' but complacency. Post-war boom made white people lower their guard and care mostly about the good life. They became passionless with crass materialism. The boomer generation rebelled against such complacency with utopian dreams and commitment to authenticity, but they too came under the power of materialism as their main inspirations came from pop music and TV. Like Peter Fonda said in EASY RIDER, 'We blew it'. If the Greatest Generation drowned in alcohol, the boomers failed to find nirvana in pot smoke, which is now just more big business.

Reich claimed the role of traditional “repressive” Western sexual morality was “to produce acquiescent subjects who, despite distress and humiliation, are adjusted to the authoritarian order.” Marcuse agreed with Reich that the “liberation of sexuality and the creation of non-hierarchical democratic structures in the family, workplace and society at large would create personalities resistant to fascism.”

There is obviously some truth to their claims. Any form of repression, sexual or otherwise, is to create a more stable order of unity and consensus. And it is true that 'sexual liberation' will undermine fascism as each boy and girl will be more into hedonism and self-gratification than suppressing one's individual desires for the good of the whole, the volk. If German youths in the 1930s had mostly been into sex, drugs, and rock & roll, would they have paid any heed to Hitler? And same could be said for youths under communism, which is why communist nations did all they could to suppress individualism as expressions of capitalism.
More interesting is why Marcuse and others blamed capitalism for the repression when it was obviously the forces of capitalism that were leading to the triumph of hedonism, 'sexual liberation', individualism, and youth culture of impatience. Maybe, it was difficult to immediately abandon the ideology, Marxism, that had shaped them for so long. Consciously or subconsciously, maybe the Frankfurt School was seeking to serve as the bridge that would allow the left to go from communism to capitalism as the more useful ideology.

The Frankfurters were right that 'sexual liberation' would be bad for fascism. But they overlooked how 'sexual liberation' would lead to the rise of new barbarism. After all, sexual politics is hardly egalitarian as alpha males usually win and as women prefer winners over losers. Some women seek out long-term winners who gain success in professions, but other women seek out short-term winners: the thugs, studs, and athletes. So, instead of resulting in the peaceful eternal summer of love where everyone is happy with good vibes, it has led to the rise of demented heavy metal culture, rap culture, pornification of even kiddie culture, and countless displays of narcissism & vanity, indeed as if everyone is a diva, his or her own 'hitler'. Fascism represses and channels virile barbarian energies in the service of civilization whereas the raw barbarian energies of 'sexual liberation' has led to the degradation of family and society, resulting in lots of violence and stupidity. Black African savages demonstrated that sexual licentiousness is no immunity to ultra-violence. Being sexually far less inhibited, blacks were generally unable to repress their wilder energies for the development of civilization, but they were murderous just the same. And the European barbarians long long ago were less hung up about sexual morality(before the coming of Christianity and its stricter ethos), but did that prevent them from rampaging other communities and raping and pillaging, i.e. acting like Alex and his droogs in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE? Indeed, people like Marcuse seem blind to the fact that National Socialism gained in popularity precisely because Jews pushed the most demented kind of anti-values in the Weimar Period, leading to a new barbarism. Degenerate personality leads to social chaos, which leads to people demanding an authoritarian personality to clean up the mess.

Frankfurt School was right to critique capitalism-consumerism and its mind-numbing and conformist influences, but its proposed solutions were useless because people like Herbert Marcuse were not honest, not least with themselves. Marcuse wailed against fascism, but he meant goy fascism. As he was pro-Zionist, he was for Jewish fascism. This is a key truth about Jews. They are so virulently anti-fascist precisely because they want fascism only for themselves. It is through fascism that both the right wing and left wing of a people can unite into a combined force. Fascism serves as the bridge and bond between left and right. Don’t make them fight one another but work together. This was the basis for National Socialism and Zionism. Where both ultimately failed morally is they went from nationalism to imperialism. Just like Jews hated Christianity and Islam for passing the secrets of the Jewish God to goyim, they hate fascism because it allows goyim to develop the kind of power specialized by Jews. Leo Strauss was a ‘rightist’ while Herbert Marcuse was a ‘leftist’. But what did they have in common? They were proudly Jewish and Zionist. For all their ideological discourse, identity came first. Zionism was created by Jewish socialists and Jewish capitalists working together. So, even as whites should give credit where it’s due — Frankfurters made useful criticism of capitalism and consumerism — , they must forge their own answers and solutions to problems, one that prioritizes the needs of whites. Jews are often interesting in their critique but useless in their proposed solutions, at least for goyim, as the utmost priority of Jews is to maximize Jewish power, not to make goyim more powerful. Frankfurt School is like a doctor that diagnoses the disease but advises the wrong cure.

In a way, much of modern form of Jewish Alienation derived from acceptance by White Society. Jews were both ragging Wasps for not being sufficiently accepting of Jews AND fretting too much assimilation may lead to loss of Jewish identity.

So, even as Jews felt alienated from Wasps, they also felt increasing alienation from their own roots. The more they became modern and Western, the less they felt traditionally bound to Jewishness. It’s one reason why Jews cooked up ersatz-form of being Jewish, such as being fixated on the Holocaust or celebrating Globo-Homo. Barbra Streisand’s YENTL is both celebratory and critical of Jewish Tradition, and it features a woman posing as a man to be accepted into the world of Rabbis. Around the same time, Blake Edwards made VICTOR/VICTORIA and soon after, there was TOOTSIE where Hoffman plays a ‘woman’. And Woody Allen made ZELIG. Paradoxically, Allen’s film seems to imply that the thing that Jews most fear as being harmful to Jewishness, which is assimilation, is also what most defines Jewishness. In other words, Jews have developed remarkably adaptive strategies of assimilation. And yet, even as Jews morph and blend into goy societies, at the end of the day, they revert back to Jewishness; they don’t really transform into the other. It’s like an octopus can take on all sorts of shapes but returns to being an octopus. But if an octopus is so fluid and flexible in its shape and structure, is there a core structure to octopus-ness? Or is the essence of the octopus to have no definite form? It’s no wonder Jews are so into trans-business where there can be infinite number of ‘genders’. It’s like sexual Houdini-ism. ZELIG is almost like a satire of an intellectual Nazi movie about Jews.




More Notes:

Plenty of white goy novelists had written about vices. Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books are about lost souls who indulge in all sorts of dubious behavior. SUN ALSO RISES is more ‘degenerate’ than THE GRADUATE, book or movie. THE GREAT GATSBY is a deeply disturbing novel, about both wasps and Jews. The anti-Semite Celine pioneered a new kind of writing, and his stories were filled with people of questionable character, to say the least.

Also, Jews at the time were making fun of themselves. Don Rickles roasted everyone. Woody Allen loved to crack jokes about Jews(as well as goyim). Mel Brooks made THE PRODUCERS in 1967. It mocks everyone, especially homos.

And if anyone subverted conventions of the movie Western(which owed a lot to Jewish Hollywood), it was the Catholic Italian Sergio Leone.

One notable advantage of Jews in arts & letters for the longest time was they had to grit their teeth and tolerate and even accept things they didn’t like. In other words, they couldn’t keep kosher in dealing with the wider world. There were too many goyim, and they were too goyish and too Christian and too powerful, as well as often anti-Jewish and willing to express such feelings. And yet, this made Jews stronger in a way. It may be that losers can’t be choosers, but those who are forced to choose everything can take ideas from all sides and can grow in empathy. Jews couldn’t cancel Celine, and so, he wrote and came to be a major influence on Jewish authors such as Philip Roth. Jews couldn’t cancel Richard Wagner(except in Israel), and so many Jewish composers drew inspiration from him. Jews couldn’t cancel Christianity, so they wrote some of the best Christmas songs. So, even as Jews felt resentment, they drew ideas and inspirations from the other side. They had no choice, but this made them stronger. If a vegan is forced to eat meat, he may resent it but he will grow stronger with extra protein. If anything, he will grow weaker if he has the power to ban meat and stops eating meat. Because Christians and whites could either ignore or suppress Jews in the past, they could keep only with what they liked. In contrast, because Jews had to deal with goy culture that was all around them, they came to learn a trick or two from what they didn’t like. Kubrick used Richard Strauss in 2001, but suppose Strauss had been canceled and banned because he worked in Nazi Germany.

In a way, it could be Jewish cultural power could now be waning precisely because they’ve gained the power to shut down things they don’t like. So, many interesting talents and thinkers are canceled and blacklisted. Jews may feel safer and more secure as the result, but they’re also creating a culture where everything must be Jew-friendly and suck up to Jews. We now live in a world when Jews can cancel people like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, TS Eliot, Richard Wagner, Celine, Gore Vidal, Knut Hamsun, and many others for their antisemitism, real or imagined(or exaggerated). By suppressing lively goy cuture, Jews have less inspirations to draw from the goy world. Indeed, just look at American Conservatism once it canceled people like Joseph Sobran. As the new rule revolved around ‘Is it good for Jews?’, conservatism turned into all-out cuckservatism.

Maybe Jews realize the dangers of this development on some level. In the past when Jews were surrounded by plenty of goy culture and expressions that weren’t always Jew-friendly, they learned to adapt, learn, draw inspiration, and be vigilant. But in a Jew-power world that has made everything so kosher-friendly and Jew-secure, not only will Jews have less ideas to draw from the goy world(as Jew-friendly hacks are favored over controversial talent) but Jewish kids may grow up nonchalant, apathetic, and lazy. Why should the young ones worry when every goy is always praising Jews and when Jews can easily cancel anyone deemed ‘antisemitic'(or even ‘homophobic’ or whatever)? Jews will become like spoiled princeling brats. That may be why Jewish Power exaggerates the ‘antisemitic’ threat just when goyim are more slavish to Jews than ever. It could be that Jewish Power is nervous that Jewish young may become slack and take things for granted in an overly kosherized world. So, tell them there are nazis lurking everywhere because… uh… anyone Jews don’t like is a ‘nazi’. The more Jews gain nazi-like power for themselves, the more nazis they see everywhere.

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Ethnic actors were a big thing in Beach Party movies.

Frankie Avalon. And brunette Annette Funicello the cutie surrounded by blondes.

Lovely moment:



And a decade after THE GRADUATE, there was the musical GREASE where ‘greaseball’ Travolta hook up with blonde Olivia Newton-John.


Two kinds of youth movies: Ones made in the moment and ones that dwell on nostalgia or autobiography.

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, THE GRADUATE, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, BREAKING AWAY, and RISKY BUSINESS reflect the times in which they were made.
In contrast, AMERICAN GRAFFITI, FOUR FRIENDS, DAZED AND CONFUSED, and C.R.A.Z.Y revive bygone eras. The latter films have less chance of becoming dated because they were made after the fact with more perspective.
And then, there are movies made in the moment but reflecting an earlier era. Scorsese’s MEAN STREETS is set in the 70s, but he drew inspiration from his youth in the late 50s and 60s. As such, the character of Charlie seems somewhat obsessed with moral hangups of an earlier era. Something similar is afoot in SOCIAL NETWORK. Aaron Sorkin projected his generation’s Jewish neurosis onto Zuckerberg, a creature of the 2000s whose world was very different.

A precursor of THE GRADUATE was A MAN AND A WOMAN. It used the stylistics of the French New Wave in service of pop romantic fantasy, and it was a hit and won awards. But Lelouch’s technical mastery was questionable and he resorted to too many musical montages and visual trickery to compensate for weak plot and characterization. There is a lot for film-makers to learn from THE GRADUATE but not so much from MAN AND WOMAN, which only works in short bursts as proto-music-videos. Still, what a nostalgic journey to a France that is now lost to Diversity.


Another film that might have inspired Nichols may be IL SORPASSO(THE EASY LIFE), especially in its use of music.


While some white guys may not want to see blonde girls with Jews or Italians, it’s much worse now as the blondies are with the Negroes.

But then, white men pioneered this race-mixing business. They impregnated the browns of South America. They got black women pregnant in the South. There was the legend of Pocohontas. And plenty of white soldiers overseas had affairs or sex with women in Asia and South Pacific. There was SAYONARA before THE GRADUATE. Marlon Brando had a strange fetish for brown women.. and Robert DeNiro only seems to go for blacks. And James Bond got it on with women of all races.

Jewish Hoffman played a Wasp in THE GRADUATE, and David Lean chose Egyptian Omar Sharif to play a Russian in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. Sharif also played Genghis Khan, and so did John Wayne. Brando as Okinawan in TEA HOUSE OF AUGUST MOON was funny as hell, but Rooney as Japanese in BREAKFAST was even funnier. Anthony Quinn as Greek in ZORBA really did work.

Italians often got Anglo or Northern European actors to play Italians. They were into dubbing.


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THE GRADUATE has great film-making. As different as DOCTOR ZHIVAGO and THE GRADUATE are, they clicked with the audience. LOVE STORY also had memorable music(pretty good schlock), but the film-making was only adequate/good, nothing more. In contrast, THE GRADUATE really is a visual and rhythmic marvel with Nichols throwing so many tricks out of the left field and without being too showy about it. (Both DOCTOR ZHIVAGO and THE GRADUATE are about discovery and struggle of True Love amidst familial concerns, personal commitment, ideological struggles, and power manipulation. Zhivago truly loves Lara but is married to a nice girl. Lara truly loves Zhivago but is also married. She married her first boyfriend quickly as escape from the tormented affair with an older man. But if Zhivago ultimately doesn’t get Lara and had everyone weeping in the theater, Ben does get Elaine.)

I agree the Simon and Garfunkel songs are great. Minus the music, the movie would seen more satirical, sardonic, and biting. It’s the music that softens the edges and provides a romantic mood, sentimental shading.

When the image and sound really click together, it makes no sense to discuss them apart. It’s like the alchemy of Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone, Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Hermann, Hiroshi Teshigahara and Toru Takemitsu. Nichols and Simon hit it off like Ben and Elaine. Nichols and Simon clicked not so much because they saw eye-to-eye but because the music served as counterpoint as much as padding. “Sounds of Silence”, “Scarborough Fair”, and “April Comes She Will” add something missing in Nichols' comic-cynical style. The song with which the two sensibilities finally converge is “Mrs. Robinson”, a tongue-in-cheek rendition of Middle Class Americana comparable to Rolling Stone’s “Mother’s Little Helper”.

I can understand why many people are put off by Hoffman’s presence or personality, but it is brilliant acting. Also, his voice, being both throaty and nasal, perfectly convey’s Ben state of mind and stage in life. He’s both man surging with testosterone and boy who wants to run back home. And, his deadpan demeanor mixed with shaky nerves is for the ages. With Anne Bancroft, he’s like a shy dog being played by an experienced feline. It’s both cartoony enough for laughs and human enough for tension.

Genuine mood is really hard to do. There are cheap ways to create mood with filters and lighting, but Nichols sustains a consistent mood throughout the film, through light and dark scenes.

And the camerawork is purposeful and edgy, making it both classic and radical. It seems perfectly perched between the rule-book and burn-the-book. The tricks of timing Nichols honed in comedy and sense of staging he got from theater did wonders. Welles also specialized in Audio Entertainment(radio) and theater before entering cinema. Nichols borrowed various styles but matched them seamlessly. The hand-held camera is reminiscent of Cassavates and Godard but pieced subliminally with other styles.
And he went for unconventional perspectives. For instance, when Ben is walking to the right through the guests at the graduation party to head for the stairs, the camera faces away from the stairway leading opposite to Ben's direction. As such, Nichols has to ‘awkwardly’ jerk the camera leftward to show the stairway except it’s done so deftly that this breaking of rules seems natural than false or gratuitous.
Later, when Ben and Elaine are running from the church, can anyone think of a better way to show the bus than by tilting the camera from top to bottom, creating an impression of a bus dropped from the sky, manna from heaven? And the cut from a telephoto shot of Ben and Elaine running from the church that grows blurry to a long shot conveys the sudden shifts in mood and momentum in that charged instant. Nichols was so attuned to every moment, something generally missing in Old Hollywood and even most European cinema, albeit exceptions like JULES AND JIM, a work that is both classic and experimental.



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TIGER MAKES OUT, also released in 1967, was Hoffman’s first film. A small role. He shows up at 5:20 in the video below. The movie seems a more raw expression of Jewish hang-ups.



PRESIDENT’S ANALYST, also a 1967 movie, pushed the satirical tone of THE GRADUATE to the hilt. THE PRESIDENT’S ANALYST was prescient about the future of technology and mankind. Big Tech taking over everything.
It was both written and directed by Theodore Flicker, Jewish. As such, it is a more personal work than THE GRADUATE. The Liberal father is the guy who played Ben’s father. (He also played a Liberal parent in TWO FOR THE ROAD, another 1967 movie that was hip to new trends. Written by Frederic Raphael, a Jew with massive chip on his shoulder.)




Robert Redford did take on a romantic comedy role in another 1967 movie BAREFOOT IN THE PARK. 1967 was quite a year.


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Some other interesting ethno-swapping.

The TV movie GETTING MARRIED has an ending not unlike that of THE GRADUATE. In it, Richard Thomas plays an Italian-American.


In BREAKING AWAY, some guy in Indiana pretends to be an Italian-American, as if that will make him appear more romantic and exotic to an All-American Girl. Oddly enough, its snobby Waspy character was actually played by Jewish Hart Bochner. And Robert Redford was one of the leading contenders for the role of Michael Corleone.


Maybe the most vicious and disturbing scene about Wasp-Ethnic tension is the wedding scene in FOUR FRIENDS, written by the guy who wrote BREAKING AWAY and directed by Arthur Penn of BONNIE & CLYDE fame.


THE GRADUATE seems to draw certain strains from THE GREAT GATSBY via CATCHER IN THE RYE. Later, when movies like BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY came around, they seem to be riffing GATSBY and GRADUATE, both of which have come to shape American cultural consciousness and love and class. (Michael J. Fox, another shorty, like Davey Jones of THE MONKEES, which also had half-Italian Mickey Dolenz who looked racially so ambiguous. I wonder if Charles Webb was influenced by Kingsley Amis’ LUCKY JIM.)

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/07/oaf-magnificat-kingsley-amis-lucky-jim-thomas-banks.html



Despite THE GRADUATE looking very mod, I wonder if young people today can relate to technological limitations of the period. If the story were to take place today, Ben would be looking on the internet to find information about where Elaine is getting married than driving back and forth between L.A. and Berkeley. And the dial-up phone at the gas station, what an ancient artifact. They still had those back then. Now, even poor people have handy cellphones, even ‘smart phones’, something unimaginable even to billionaires in the 80s, even the 90s. Many young people could relate to BOURNE movies because the guy was so ‘wired’ techno-psychologically. Very tech-savvy young man outwitting all the institutions that made him what he is.

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Too many people ignore everything but the plot and characters. They respond as if they’re reading some second-rate novel. It’s like judging a song by its meaning. Most songs are trite or banal in what they have to 'say'. It’s the same old story about love, heartache, and etc. Beatles' “Yesterday” offers no greater meaning about love or sadness than a million other songs. Then, why is it special? The words, even if banal, are just right. And the melody and delivery create a unique mood. (Same goes for John Lennon's “Norwegian Wood” and Brian Wilsons' “God Only Knows”.) So, we don’t listen to a song mainly for meaning but feeling and mood. Take “Drive” by the Cars and “Every Breath You Take” by the Police. In terms of meaning, we’ve heard countless songs about broken hearts and romantic obsession. But the style and expressions of those songs are so original and overwhelming that they make conventional or ‘tired’ themes exciting and edgy again. Take the song “Brandy” by Looking Glass, a one-hit-wonder band. The story it tells is one found in a thousand dime store novels, but the melody is infectious, the rhythm soulful, and the performance inspired. As such, it is a one-of-a-kind song, as is “If You Could Read My Mind” by Gordon Lightfoot.

The fact that some people just see the themes or spot-the-Jew in THE GRADUATE means they are cine-illiterate. It’s like reading poetry as if it is prose and focusing mainly on meaning. Anyone can make pizza. The basic ingredients are well-known. In basic ingredients, great pizzas are 95% like all the other pizzas, even frozen ones, but they have something extra, subtle but crucial that differentiates greatness from mere goodness or acceptableness. TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA has many of the elements of countless other action movies, but why does it tower over the rest? William Friedkin was on fire, got hold of promising material and fine talent, and everything just clicked. Same goes for MIDNIGHT RUN. Everything came together beautifully.

Nichols got just the right ingredients, and the preparation, timing, and delivery were near-flawless in the balance of comedy, drama, romance, and near-tragedy. It made a difference upon release because it was the bridge between Art Film and Hollywood, between Old and Young, and between Sunlight and Rain. There’s a scene in THE WILD BUNCH where the Gorch brothers look across the river at Mexico and says, “It looks like more of Texas as far as I’m concerned”, and Angel says, “Ah, you have no eyes.” Many people have no eyes. For the blind, there is no difference between Orson Welles' tremendous MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and the lame one directed by Alfonso Arau. After all, they tell the same story with the same characters. But comparing those two movies illustrates what a difference a directorial vision can make.

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Anne Bancroft looks like Maria Callas, lending a classic greco motif to the story. Oedipus had sex with his mother, and there is a sub-oedipal underpinning to THE GRADUATE. THE GRADUATE is like an experiment of what-if Greek comedy was blended with Greek tragedy.

No Direction Home Like a Rolling Stone — How Modern World Is about No Home Away from No Home Away from No Home Away from No Home or Crazy upon Crazy upon Crazy upon Crazy...

There are several sides to human nature. It can be understood in terms of Good and Evil, Body and Soul, Light and Darkness, Yin and Yang, and etc. What goes for human nature also goes for social/political values. One should never trust anyone who defines himself/herself a entirely ‘rightist’ or ‘leftist’. While some people see more value in rightism than in leftism or vice versa, it would be foolish to define oneself as totally committed to one ideology or worldview. Also, everyone needs to adjust his/her own worldview or values according to the changing realities. While it’s easier to go with the flow — it’s certainly easier than to swim against the currents — , when most people mindlessly are blindly going in one direction, one could end up going over the cliff along with them like so many lemmings. Even a self-designated rightist should lean somewhat leftist in a world that is overly rightist, and vice versa. While wearing a coat in wintertime is essential, it certainly isn’t in summertime with 90+ degrees. Good advice in one context can be dumb advice in another, yet this obvious truth is so often ignored in political debates where the so-called ‘left’ has ONE solution for ALL problems NO MATTER WHAT and the so-called ‘right’ has its own version of the ONE solution plan; also, in the Current Era, both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ ideologically are agreed on the blind conviction that all human groups are equal in ability/temperament, and therefore, what works for Swedes will work for Somalis(and if it doesn’t pan out that way, the ‘left’ blames ‘racism’ while the ‘right’ blames ‘socialism’ while both overlook the reality of race).
Anyway, without such corrective counter-measures, society could dangerously lean one way(like the Tower in Pisa)... to the point where it just collapses from its own weight of bias. Consider what radical ideological purity did to Russia under Stalinism, Germany under Hitlerism, and China under Maoism. And the mindless Shlomo-Worship that has become the new religion of the West has led to woeful imbalances in life, values, perceptions, and policies. (Granted, Shlomo-Worship has more to do with ethno-idolatry than ideology. After all, we are to revere and serve Jews REGARDLESS of their ideology, i.e. we must favor Liberal Jews over Rightist Goyim, but we must also favor Conservative Jews over Leftist Goyim, such as those progressives who support BDS, a movement for Palestinian justice.) We need a National Humanist form of Neo-Fascism because fascism understood the need to balance the right and the left. Instead of reaction vs revolution or capitalism vs communism, fascists understood the need to draw ideas and inspirations from various spheres of political philosophy, tradition & modernity, spirituality/mythology & materialism, and human nature. While fascism was ultimately more rightist than leftist, it understood the need for leftist counterbalance against the right. It’s like most people are right-handed but still find the left hand/arm invaluable in their daily activities. Likewise, both spheres of the brains are necessary to make us fully human. This is why all the political debates about ‘right’ vs ‘left’ are so tiresome. Even radical communist Josef Stalin realized it simply wouldn’t do to wipe out all vestiges of conservatism if Soviet Union were to stabilize into a relatively sane society. And the good side of Adolf Hitler was he understood the need to fuse nationalism with socialism because a world totally dominated by capitalists would only care about profits and power of the globalist elite class(largely Jewish).

Where Hitler failed was in his intoxication with Richard Wagner’s prophecy of the future where it would all be decided between the Aryans and the Semite. While Wagner’s NIBELUNGEN operas were prophetic in envisioning the twilight battle between the crypto-Aryan gods and crypto-Semitic dwarfs(presented as ‘spiritual’ proxies of Jewish Nature) — several of David Cronenberg’s films have also fixated on the fascinatingly fertile, feverish, and ultimately fatal friction between the Aryans and the Semites — , Hitler would have been wiser to treat the prophecy as a cautionary tale and warning than as a blueprint that, in the end, incinerated the German Castle, exhausted the German soul, and castrated German manhood, what with the tragic but triumphant Jews towering over all. (But then, even if Germany had avoided war, it’s possible that Jews would have gained predominance over Anglos and Anglo-Americans in the UK & US and become masters of the world just the same. But then, minus the WWII & Shoah Narrative, powerful Jews would have far less moral shield for their power.)

Anyway, there is more than one side to human nature. This could be said of all life-forms, observable in cats for instance. Anyone who has owned a cat knows that cats prize having a home, a place of shelter where they feel safe and are provided with food/affection. A cat that loses the way back home finds itself in a pitiable state, and few things are sadder than homeless cats or dogs. Cats like to have a place of security where they can relax and feel at ease. Even cats in the wild possess an innate sense of territoriality and mark constantly with bodily scents to demarcate what-is-mine and what-is-not. Of course, territoriality in the wild is far less stable and certain than territoriality of home provided by humans. While animals in the wild are never in a state of full relaxation(as dangers lurk everywhere for them and their offsprings), cats and dogs can be fully at ease in the homes of their masters. And this secure sense of place is something that cats and dogs innately appreciate.

And yet, that isn't the full nature of the cat. Cats are also natural hunters and intelligent mammals with curiosity. This is no less true of dogs. So, cats also love to venture outdoors and often demand to be let out to stalk mice, birds, and other small animals. Or, they just love to be stimulated by sights, sounds, and scents. They feel most intensely alive in such adventures. Therefore, it would be simplistic to say that Cat Nature is purely home-centric or purely wander-centric. Cat Nature is both, and indeed both tendencies rely on each other, no less than the military is about both defense and offense. An effective military needs both a solid base of operations, defense, & security — a castle, fortress, or encampment — AND a means to mobilize, maneuver, & attack swiftly. It’s like what is said of the Takeda Clan in Akira Kurosawa’s KAGEMUSHA: "Swift as the wind, quiet as a forest, fierce as fire, immovable as a mountain." In order to hunt, a wild cat has to move around, but it also has a sense of territoriality. If it wanders too far off, it could be in the territory of another cat, and it could be dangerous. Therefore, the cat outside its territory must return to its own or fight to claim the turf. Also, if the cat is a female with cubs, it hunts not only to satiate its own hunger but to take the kill back to the den(home) to feed the young ones. Its ‘meaning’ of existence comes from procuring food for its offspring.

In that sense, one could argue that human territoriality has a political basis in the behavior of male animals and an emotional basis in the behavior of female animals. Male cats defend or fight for new territory to gain more food and material advantage for themselves. It is a matter of pride and property, not of sentiment. In contrast, the female animal’s sense of ‘home’ or territory is intricately and inseparably linked to its emotional affection and attachment to its offspring. And both concepts of territory is found among humans. There is a side of us that sees territory, land, or place in terms of property and product, things of utilitarian value. Such view can operate at the local, national, or imperial level, and it’s a contest of wills as to who can gain more material(and/or military) advantage. Such a mind-set may be willing to fight long and hard over territory, but it’s not about sentimentality or a sense of home. Such is not driven by nostalgia or memory. Rather, as with the tycoon played by John Huston in CHINATOWN(the movie by Robert Towne & Roman Polanski), it’s about The Future. Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan were extreme examples of this kind of male-centric territoriality, and it was the reason for what ultimately became a kind of madness. In contrast, the female-centric view of territoriality is essentially conservative; it's about home and hearth, the place most suited for rearing of children; it's about attachment to land and each other. In SEVEN SAMURAI, the bandits represent male-centric territoriality, and the peasants the female-centric territoriality.


Humans are much like dogs and cats in certain regards. Like them, humans want and need a base, shelter, sanctuary, or home-sweet-home. Even people who live outside their own nations as expatriates, businessmen, or workers need a place to which they can return after work or play, a place of rest and security accessible only to oneself through lock and key. It’s like even birds, though masters of the sky, must come down to ground and rest in the nest, also a place where the new batch is hatched and raised to perpetuate the species. Thus, no matter where we are, there is the Wander Principle and Return Principle. Both a person with a nation but without a home and a person with a home but without a nation are not complete in their Return Principle. An Estonian in Estonian has a nation to call his own but would be a sad creature without his own place of residence. His endless wanderings about as a hobo would be draining, physically and psychologically. Without a place of his own, it'd be difficult to rest and clean oneself. Furthermore, his mind would never be at ease without a place where he could feel fully relaxed and homey. No matter where he goes, even in his own nation, he would be a stranger. In contrast, a person with a home or residence outside his own nation would have a place to call his own at the private and legal level, but as a foreigner, he would always know that he’s not really part of the nation. Still, if his own nation exists in some part of the world, he knows he could go back and join his tribe. However, if a person has a home but no place in the world to call his nation, he would be in a state of permanent diaspora, like the Jews before they attained(or regained) Palestine/Israel as their own homeland. The fact that Jews worked so hard to gain a nation of their own shows how important it is for a people to have a place where they, as united community, can truly feel at home.
The story of America is one of both wander-ment and settlement, the creation of a new homeland. In virtually all Western stories, there is the thrill of adventure & discovery but also the dream & promise of a new home. Unlike the two great stories of the Return, Exodus and Odyssey — where Hebrews and Odysseus respectively seek their way home — , the American Narrative was about Reborn than Return. In the New World, Europeans ‘fleeing from tyrannies’ would find new homes and start new lives as ‘Americans’. There was the promise of both adventure and sanctuary. People would scramble for the vast spaces in America but ultimately to mark territory and build a home to call their own. Thus, even when one is far away from one’s original homeland(even permanently), there is a psychological need to have a home and new homeland. A person can be taken out of his homeland, but the home instinct cannot be taken out of the person. Even away from home, he goes about setting up a new home, the one he can return to every night to relax and feel secure. It’s like a bunch of gerbils taken out of their original homeland of Mongolia will go about burrowing and creating a new home of underground tunnels wherever they are released. Even if a people cannot(or will not) return to their original homeland, they go about in accordance to the Return Principle and create an approximation of Home, one to which they can return every evening to relax, clean, sleep, and even raise a family. America developed as an extension of European Civilization, after all.

We all like to go out and see new/different things. On occasion, we want to venture to faraway places where things are alien and exotic. It’s the curious side of us. Or, we just want a change of scenery, like we don’t want to eat the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner day in and day out. That said, we would be lost without a home-base to return to. Even deracinated cosmopolitan hedonists, after a wild night out, crawl back to their abodes to relax, sleep, and replenish their energies. While the cabin fever of being stuck at home feels like imprisonment, it’s even worse to venture outdoors and never find one’s way back home. The Wander Principle and Return Principle were wonderfully captured in a painting by Norman Rockwell that contrasts the eagerness of the family embarking on a trip and its exhaustion on the way back as the only thing on the family members’(and the dog’s) minds is to be back in Home-Sweet-Home.

All of us can relate to the emotional states of the family to-and-from the trip. Intuitively, we can all sense that life is like a pendulum that swings back and forth, going both ways. Life isn’t always about Home nor is it always about Wander. It is the constant process, even a ritual, of venture and return, venture and return. Birds fly from the nest to obtain food for chicks in the nest. Parents venture from the home to make money and to buy food to feed the family. In a savage community, hunter-warriors venture away from the village to make a kill to drag back to their waiting kinsfolk. The human mind is curious and naturally attracted to stimuli, but it is also easily exhausted and wearied, seeking sustenance by returning home where everything is familiar, secure, and comfy. Anyone who’s been to an art museum knows the mind cannot focus on too many objects. It soon grows bored or tired. And even movie-lovers find it daunting to see more than, say, two movies a day. In the Sean Penn film INTO THE WILD, the main character rejects the very notion of home — though there are episodes when he recharges his batteries by staying with certain folks for extended periods — , and he keeps moving from place to place to place, as if his mission is to lead a life of endless adventure. And yet, despite a certain idealism/heroism, he predictably comes to a sad and terrible end, dying all alone of hunger, toxins, and exposure. His radical will to be totally natural was actually against human nature. He fails to understand like Dorothy in WIZARD OF OZ that there is a need to return to home. After all, even or especially savages who live close to nature know that they cannot survive as free spirits wandering aimlessly. No, they must form tight-knit communities. Consider Mel Gibson’s APOCALYPTO that begins with a hunt, but what do the men do with the felled tapir? They hurl it back to their primitive village where the womenfolk, old folks, and children are. It is among their own kind in their community that they feel most relaxed and homey. The Mayan raid is so terrifying precisely because the very sense of familiarity and security is eviscerated so suddenly. The attack comes like a storm out of the blue that blows and washes away everything.


Be that as it may, it’s understandable why Liberals have gained the upper hand in modernity. While both the liberal fascination with novelty and conservative love of familiarity are essential, the former is far more likely to strike gold(even if it turns out to be fool’s gold in the long run) because it goes beyond the tried-and-true that, without improvement or replacement, can become rusty or stale. As modernity thrives on change, those who are more open to it will gain an upper-hand over those who resist it. In both Frank Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE and Darren Aronofsky’s MOTHER!, despite the crucial roles played by the ‘conservative’ wife-mother figures in maintenance of home & stability, the agents of dynamic action are the husband-father figures who are more drawn to novelty than to familiarity. And yet, the Man in MOTHER! must keep recreating a Home, and George Bailey realizes in the end that there's no place like home. And in BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER, the orphaned daughter who cuts all human ties and embraces nihilism nevertheless feels a need to find herself back to her New Home, one she set up with the Devil.




What goes for individual humans also applies to culture as a whole. Burt Lancaster as Ned Merrill in THE SWIMMER is instructive of what happens to individuals who lose their sense of home. In some ways, Merrill is exciting, even inspiring, as an all-American romantic, but in having led a life of thrill to thrill to thrill on an impulse, he never established a clear sense of home for his family. Indeed, he’s so deluded in his search for adventure that he has mentally blocked the sad fate that has befallen him and his family. At once, he is seeking thrills and a way to return home. Except his record of neglect and irresponsibility led to the loss of family and home that sits desolate and boarded up. At the films end, weary of mind/body as the cold storm approaches, he bangs on the door of his old home, except there is no one to greet him. A life that is all thrills and adventure, whether based on impulse or idealism, is a road to madness. There is a need to wander but also a need to have a clear sense of home and the ritual of return. After all, one of the joys of parenting is to come home from work every day and greet the spouse and children; and for young children, nothing is more reassuring and happy than their father returning every evening. Consider the love between George Bailey(James Stewart) and his kids at the end of IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. Though it is sad, even tragic, that George Bailey’s ambition was thwarted by the needs of his hometown, he realizes nothing is more important that having a home and family. Also, even though he didn’t see the whole wide world, he got to know everyone in town and did so much for them; as such, his life was a kind of adventure, a soulful one at that. One can find a universe through a microscope as well as through a telescope. And in understanding the importance of home, he did what he could to procure homes for others in the town, which is so different from the operative mode of people like Paul Singer who makes Mr. Potter seem like Mr. Rogers by comparison.

The problem is not the move away from home but the failure to ritualize one’s return to it. Even in exile(which can be tragically permanent), one must recreate a sense of the home, both personal and tribal, to maintain one’s mental and emotional health that relies on both the Wander Principle and Return Principle. For example, even in what seemed like permanent exile, Jews created in goy nations their own ghettos that served as centers of Jewish life and religion, and of course, in traditional Jewish life, the family was central to one’s existence. The profession of a peddler, money-changer, or tax-collector wasn’t the most pleasant as the Jew had to haggle, negotiate, and/or contend often in a hostile and distrustful manner with the goyim. Then, one can understand how much of a relief it was for the Jew to finally return home where he could be himself with his family, culture, and tradition than the much-loathed merchant behind the mask. (Still, having a home in an alien land is always risky, like what happens to David Sumner[played by Dustin Hoffman] in Sam Peckinpah’s STRAW DOGS. He is pushed to the limit and fights to defend his 'house', but it’s really the house of his estranged wife’s late father, and Sumner is an American in a small town in England.) The sad thing about Arthur Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN is that the Art of the Deal(and the American Dream of Capitalism) has come to define Willy Loman so much that even when he’s back home, he can’t think of anything but money, status, and pride. Though Loman isn’t explicitly presented as Jewish, he is a deracinated Jewish figure who has allowed Money and Success to define everything in his life. Among traditional Jews, there would have been meaning, mainly ethno-spiritual in nature, as counterbalance to materialist competition. In decades following WWII, many Jews found meaning in Zionism and/or the Shoah, but throughout most of the first half of the 20th Century, the main theme of Jewishness was, "What shall replace the old and fading Jewish themes and ties? Universalist Ideology of Communism, Individualist Idolatry of Capitalism, or the Nihilist Indulgence in Gangsterism?" Willy Loman is all for capitalism, and when his dream fails to materialize, he grows mad. Even though Loman has a home to return to, he’s always on the road, even when he’s at home with his devoted wife because his measure of a man is all about licking the world and showing off emblems of one’s success and wealth. In that sense, he’s found his own kind of madness just like Ned Merrill in THE SWIMMER. It’s natural for us to feel restless at times, but if we become rootless in the bargain, we wash away like a mudslide along a deforested hillside.

Anyway, what happens to a culture when it loses the sense of roots, base, core, and foundation? It’s natural for individuals and even society-at-large to be deviant at times, but there must be a return to form and restoration of normality. It’s like all of us have our crazy moments, but we come to our senses and return to sanity, the normal state of mind. Indeed, the ‘crazy’ and ‘normal’ feed off each other, just like the Wander Principle and Return Principle. If we were normal at all times, we would never venture to ponder the different, the strange, and odd. Sometimes, new ideas and thoughts arise from going beyond what is accepted as Normal or Common Sense. And yet, most of craziness is just crazy or meaningless. Thus, people mustn’t dwell in the ‘crazy’ state of mind for too long. Just like a mountain climber must come back do ground and a deep sea diver must return to the surface/land, we must return to normality from abnormal or ‘crazy’ states of mind. It's like when things get really crazy out there, the female astronaut longs to return to Mother Earth in GRAVITY. Thus, normality restrains the excesses of ‘craziness’ while moments of ‘craziness’ shake off stuffy doldrums of same old same old. It’s good to have a bit of ‘punk’ spirit in everyone. But as enlivening and enticing as ‘crazy’ may be, one must return to base, just like a battery has to be plugged to be recharged.
This was the function of the church in Western Civilization and History, especially as white peoples became dispersed around the world, often permanently separated from their places of origin. I would wager most Greek-Americans born in the US never went back to Greece. Most Anglo-Americans probably never went to the UK. Most German-Americans never visited Germany. And of course, traveling across great distances was far more daunting and expensive in the 19th century world of horses, trains, sails, and steamships. And yet, wherever white folks went, they built churches in their communities, and church attendance used to be quite high. By attending every Sunday, they were touching base with the House of God. This had both spiritual and historical significance. The Church was like a bathhouse where, once a week, one scrubbed away one’s sins and trespasses throughout the week. Just like bodies and clothing need regular washing, it was deemed souls need regular cleansing too. But there was also a sense that, by attending church, one was touching base with all of Christendom that had stood across the many centuries. Thus, one could be in some far-flung territory in America, Canada, or Australia, but when one entered the church house, it was as if one was united spiritually-historically-culturally with all of one’s forbears and kinsmen in other parts of the world.

Over time, the Church lost much of its historical/cultural significance as Christianity went from an essentially Western/White religion to a World Faith. The Church now has meaning as a sanctuary and fountain of spiritual values as it must appeal to all of humanity that has converted to the Faith. In contrast, the Jewish Temple still retains its historical/cultural significance because it is for The Tribe alone. As for Western Christianity, it’s now only a matter of time before it fades from history. The Western church has gone from a bathhouse of spiritual cleansing to a bathhouse of globo-homo-maniacal celebration with ‘gay rainbow’ colors, indeed as if jesus died on the cross to bestow god’s blessings on sodomite fecal-penetrators and tranny penis-cutters. Unless the white race finds a way to transform Christianity into a Faith that allows separate covenants for different groups, races, and nations, it will continue to slide into oblivion or madness under increased deracination, jungle-boogie, globo-homo decadence, and mindless worship of the Jew.

It wasn’t too long ago in macro-historical terms that most of humanity resided in the countryside. Most people were farmers or herders. They were close to the soil, and as their lives were a never-ending toil and struggle for survival, they had an elementary sense of life. It’s like the Joad family in THE GRAPES OF WRATH are focused on the essential needs of life. Some people have tended to romanticize traditional rural life, the pastoral setting, as idyllic and peaceful, but it was a tough and grueling existence. But farmers tended to work as a family than as atomized individuals. And there is something deeply meaningful about planting seeds and watching food grow from the ground. Also, as the dead were often buried on the property, the living felt a direct connection to the dead, the forbears. It was a world where everyone depended on others. Even today, with modern technology in communications, a person who becomes ill in some rural part of the world will have a harder time getting emergency help; it is all the more reason why rural folks must form a sense of mutual aid and support. There is much to be said about the city, but there is something real and authentic about life close to the soil, to plants and animals, in a community where folks are not strangers but neighbors who often meet in the same churches on Sundays. And there was a time when most Americans could trace their roots back to the people of the soil. Indeed, during Thanksgiving, many city folks would move back to the places of their rural origins to make contact with kinfolks and soil again. Even if someone was born in the city, he might have parents in the countryside. Or even if one’s parents were born and raised in the city, one might still have grandparents who knew of the rural world of soil and town church. And because of such connections(growing ever more tenuous with each passing generation), even those who were born and raised in the city might follow their parents or grandparents back to the countryside. Or, even if they didn’t return, they would hear tales of rural life that was about family, church, cooperation, and hard work. A place where one had to grow food than just pick stuff from shelves at a supermarket. Then, we can understand the appeal of films such as HEARTLAND, PLACES IN THE HEART, and DAYS OF HEAVEN(though a dark and twisted tale). Also, IN COLD BLOOD and MIDNIGHT COWBOY that, though hardly sentimental about rural/country life, diagnoses symptoms of the modern malaise. And we can understand why the great humanist directors of Italy, France, Sweden, and Japan, despite their urban upbringing and experience, made films of the countryside. Who can forget Jan Troell’s HERE’S YOUR LIFE and EMIGRANTS/NEW LAND? Even as city folks, they still had connections and/or memory of their kinfolks who’d lived close to the soil. Or they adapted national literature that paid tribute to men and women of the earth. And Pearl Buck did this for the Chinese in THE GOOD EARTH.

Now, humans being humans, it would be foolish to idealize or romanticize country folks. Rural life can make people petty and bitter. Many go crazy with boredom. Some country boys even get it on with farm animals. Rural folks have been known to be rednecks and ignoramuses whose culture consists of singing "Old McDonald Had a Farm" and jumping over dungheaps. The films JEAN DE FLORETTE and MANON OF THE SPRING show the dark underbelly of small-town provincialism and a folksy kind of crookedness that is hardly less detestable than that found among city-slickers. Wherever one goes, scoundrels will act like scoundrels, and those naturally predisposed to hyper-neuroticism or psychopathy will go mad. And the prostitute/porn characters in TAXI DRIVER and BIG LEBOWSKI make it amply clear why they ran from their humble origins for the excitement of urban life.

Still, in the generic sense, there is something about rural/agricultural life that is missing in urban life. (The problem with certain towns that are too developed to be rural but too limited to be truly urban is that its inhabitants miss out on both soil and the buzz.) Urban life can be crude and dangerous, but it lacks the elemental nature of rural life where one’s work and existence are so closely linked to one’s surroundings. With lots of money, one can afford a fancy place in the city, but it never feels like home in the cultural or historical sense. Everything is a price than a place. Properties are bought and sold at breakneck speed. Of course, given the takeover of much of US agriculture by corporate conglomerates and the fact that only 2% of Americans are directly involved in agriculture, when we speak of ‘rural America’ we generally mean small towns and even small-sized cities than rustic countryside. One thing for sure, the connective link to the country has eroded close to zilch in the decades following the 60s. How many Americans in urban areas still return to rural villages or small towns from which their ancestors sprung, especially since so many Americans have been on the move across the vast plains, with families ever more dispersed with every generation? How many relatives are still on the farm? Truth is, just like the great majority of Puerto Ricans just moved to America, most Americans have moved out of farmlands, and their children have no idea where their grandparents, great grandparents, and great-great grandparents may have lived. It is no wonder that so much of American Conservatism is defined more by guns and 'Muh Constitution' than by sense of place or origin.

But it’s not just a matter of rural vs urban. While urban life was always more rootless than rural life, it also had advantages in the procurement of meaning and preservation of memory. Due to emphasis on manual labor, limited access to books/culture, and relative isolation, many rural folks were ignorant about culture and history. Indeed, through most of history, the literate folks were mostly in the cities, whereas most farming folks couldn’t read or write. It was in the cities that museums preserved past artworks, centers of learning passed down received knowledge to future generations, concert halls kept alive the tradition of classical music, and the great churches radiated their authority throughout the entire domain. However, because for most of human history city-folks were a minority in relation to the majority of rural/agricultural folks, they had to be mindful of the importance of country folks; besides, every city folk had kinfolks in the countryside. Also, as the economy mainly relied on agriculture, there was respect for those who harvested the grains and fruits(though, to be sure, much of that respect was hogged by aristocratic landowners who didn’t do the farming themselves but reaped most of the rewards). Furthermore, as Christianity in the West and Confucianism in the East valued humility, thrift, and hard work, both tended to favor farmers over urban merchants, at least in the moral/spiritual sense. Furthermore, prior to the rise of hyper-modernism, even urban culture mainly emphasized continuity, tradition, hierarchy, propriety, and respect. Aristocrats, even those who resided in the city, understood that their wealth mainly came from land and agriculture. Also, the church and clergy played a key role in the culture of civilization. As aristocrats had a lofty view of culture, they believed the arts should touch upon and express the higher aspirations of man, the timeless virtues that bound men of now with men of the past and the future. Thus, in many ways, urban life & culture were, in more ways than one, an extension of rural life & culture. Sure, the city had bigger & nicer things and was the repository of all that was best and most precious, BUT those assets & advantages were used to represent the values and aspirations of everyone in the domain. It was less a matter of city vs the countryside as the city as the culmination of all that was good and true in the countryside.

But in the late modern era, as more and more people left the increasingly mechanized countryside for the city to work in factories, urban life and culture took on a life of their own no longer in concert with the ways of the countryside. The fading of church authority and the decline of the aristocracy also meant the rise of a new urban sensibility that was far less morally-spiritually inclined and, if anything, favored mass appeal, hedonism, individualism, profits, and narcissism as the primal themes. Initially, the ascendant bourgeoisie, full of anxiety over their status and reputation, upheld a culture of respectability and seriousness that were mindful of tradition, deeper themes, and higher aspirations, but modernism’s obsession with novelty and experimentation made bourgeois attitudes seem stuffy, outdated, and unimaginative. Also, as the core mindset of the bourgeoisie was status anxiety and reputation, they could easily be swayed to uphold the ‘new’ and ‘radical’ if such were deemed most prestigious. The essence of bourgeois mentality was to keep one’s head above water, not to probe for deeper meaning. As such, fashion became The Thing, and urban culture lost its connection to the past and to larger humanity within the domain.

Of late, Western Culture seems like it has lost its direction home. This is true on both the micro-and macro-level. In the Age of Empire, the British colonialists, though dispersed around the globe, still looked to King/Queen and Country. They oversaw colonial affairs in other parts of the world but never forgot where they came from. And when the empire finally came to an end, the colonists had a homeland to return to. It’s like the British soldiers in Christopher Nolan’s DUNKIRK are relieved to make their way back to Mother Britain. During the Age of Empire, the Anglos had both a powerful sense of Wander and powerful sense of Return/Home. They had both, which is why the empire was so powerful. In contrast, Germanic barbarians that overran much of Europe upon the fall of Rome had a weak sense of home-base, and it’s hardly surprising that their order soon came to nothing until the reconstituted Christendom radiated its authority all across Europe. Despite journeying far from home in great voyages of discovery, trade, and conquest, the Anglos never forgot where they came from. And the one bunch of Anglos who made a decisive and clean break with the Mother Country, the Anglo-Americans of course, still had the closest relation with Britain up to the 1960s when the US, under the rising Jewish elites, leaned more to Israel as the #1 political ally and spiritual mentor.

Anyway, if Europeans once had a sense of home, they no longer do. Consider the shift in European worldview since the end of World War II. With the fall of empires, the British colonists were welcomed back in Britain, French colonists were welcomed back to France, Dutch colonists(mostly in Indonesia) were welcomed back to Holland. But today, Holland will not take back the Boers who are facing potential genocide in South Africa. The message is clear. Boers better get used to being ‘white Africans’ because the Dutch in the Netherlands no longer identify with them. Worse, the Dutch don’t even identify with their own kind in their own nation. If anything, any Dutchman who says Holland belongs to the real Dutch, the white Europeans, will be dragged to court and fined/imprisoned. Rather, all Dutch are taught to believe that Holland belongs to all the world that wants to come: It is no more European than African or Muslim; or ‘European’ no longer means native folks of Europe but any bunch of newcomers who deign to be ‘New Europeans’. Thus, politically and psychologically, white folks have lost a sense of homeland, a ‘world of our own’, a place of roots, and the right of return(and rejuvenation). Thus, not only are Boers in South Africa a diaspora people without a country — the black majority looks upon them with hatred and the white Dutch in Holland looks upon them with disgust or indifference — but the Dutch in Holland no longer believe their home is their home. It’s like someone who wakes up one morning and decides to implement an all-year round open-house policy for his home. With the front and back doors flung wide open, the house is no longer the home of its owner but belongs to anyone who decides to come and stay and mooch.

The politics of this phenomenon cannot be divorced from the psychology. While it’s true that the mind reacts to matter or the material world, it’s also true that mind shapes matter. After all, the reason why Jews ‘regained’ Palestine/Israel as their homeland was because they were psychologically determined and prepared to do just about anything to turn the Holy Land into a nation for Jews. Without that vision and will, there wouldn’t have been Zionism and Israel. If a people-with-will-but-without-land can use the will to gain the land, a people-with-land-but-without-will can lose the land without a fight. And this is why Jews find the media and academia so useful. Via control of the Dogma and Narrative, Jewish Power robbed white psychology of the Will to Homeland/Return. It is then hardly surprising what has been detailed by Douglas Murray in his book, THE STRANGE DEATH OF EUROPE. Actually, it’s not so strange when we consider the Jewish role in taking over the academia and media in the US as the new metropole for all the West. Indeed, Jews not only robbed white psychology of the Will to Homeland but infected it with the Will to Diversity. In other words, the Suicide of the West isn’t merely the product of apathy but passion for abnegation. From white elites in ivory towers to Antifa riffraff in the streets, what they all have in common is the Jewish-written mental program that calls for Righteous Renunciation of Whiteness by Whites.

One reason why Jews have such power over whites in relative peacetime could be that a stable society favors brain power and legalism. This is especially true in urbanized nations where the vast majority of people live in or around big cities, small cities, or big towns. In a world of war and adventure, the men of physical prowess, courage, and daring have much respect and power. In the Age of Empire when so many whites were involved in sea voyages and endless battles with rival empires and/or natives, the men of action were among the main decision-makers. Manpower also counted for much in a world where most people were farmers or factory workers. But as the West turned increasingly into a white-collar and managerial society, those who were most adept at money-making and manipulation of the law gained the most prestige and power. Once the physical stage of development passed into history, it was mostly about the mental state of competition. This was true also of gangsterism. While Jews played a big role in organized crime in the past, they also had to contend with Irishmen and Italians who were just as or even more willing to take physical risks to get their way. In such a brutal topsy-turvy world of competition, the gangster with the gun had much respect. But as things settled down over the years, gangsters with briefcases had a decisive advantage over those with guns. Furthermore, if you control the law, you get to decide what is legal or illegal. Under Jewish power, entire drugs have been legalized, and gambling, once regarded as a vice, is now seen as the Christmas-Place-To-Be all across America. And Jews have even pushed to virtually decriminalize illegal aliens, especially in places like New York and California but throughout the nation as well. Besides, even rural elites were educated in PC-pushing colleges and get their news/entertainment from Jewish-dominated globo-homo corporations.
As Nicholas Roeg’s film EUREKA shows, the Anglos have felt most alive in the mode of discovery and adventure, whereas Jews have been most adept at conspiring behind closed doors, like Hyman Roth in THE GODFATHER PART 2.

Having been lobotomized(or globotomized) of the Will to Homeland, white folks began to lose their material homeland as well. But it wasn’t only due to Jewish manipulation of ideology & idolatry but owed to the very nature of popular culture, celebrity, the cult of youth, and general rise of decadence that comes from having too much(and taking too many things for granted). Compare the boomer generation that came of age in the 60s with the successive generations up to the present. Quite possibly, the boomers were the last generation to feel any kind of direct connection to tradition and normality even if they rebelled against so much of it. The boomers sought the new and different(and in their minds, better), and to be sure, many of their ideas arose not from themselves but were taken from more radical members of the older generation. Still, one could say the boomers had the best of both worlds because they had one foot in tradition and another in fashion. They enjoyed the new liberties and choices, but they were also grounded in matters of roots, family, and community. When things got too weird or crazy, they could return to their parents and regain a sense of stability. Though boomers embraced the cult of youth, they nevertheless had contacts(even if grudging) with parents and grandparents whose character was molded in a time and place that emphasized adulthood and maturity.
The boomers were part of the first nearly universally affluent society. As such, they didn’t have to worry about hunger or want. But many boomers knew of their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents whose lives were about struggle, suffering, and even sacrifice. Even though the boomers rebelled against the older generation for its hypocrisies and limitations, they gained much from the older generation's upkeep of some semblance of social decorum, cultural maturity, normality, and seriousness. Academia were about higher-learning, and spirituality was about true religions and reverent worship, not pop and pap. Perhaps, the boomers developed the delusion of taking for granted that the older generation will always be there, not least because they regarded themselves as the forever-young generation. Thus, even though the older generation was growing older and dying(never to return ever again, not even as zombies) and the boomer generation was growing older and becoming the new elders of society, the boomers were cemented in an attitude that they were always up in arms against the Older Order. This mentality lingered even as the older generation retired and began to die out. People with such attitude can never fully mature. There is no such thing as forever-young. Youth is a phase, not an identity one can cling to forever. But the boomers were stuck in youth rebellion mode and never matured and took full responsibility for their own dominant role in society. The result for the next generations was most dire.
If boomers in the 60s had an opportunity to improve things with the new while also drawing inspiration from the best of the old, the next generations, especially the millennials, were cut off from the stabilizing factor of the old. Boomers could go a bit crazy(not necessarily in a bad way) with social, ideological, or cultural experimentation, but when things got out-of-hand, they still had a traditional family, normality, spirituality, and patriotism(the true kind) to turn to. Consider Rosanne Arquette's character in BABY IT'S YOU who goes kinda nuts in college but still has solid middle class Jewish parents to return to.

They had both Mick Jagger and John Wayne(who made movies into the 1970s). But when the millennials came of age, much of the older generation prior to the boomers were senile or dead. To them, the boomers were the old generation, but the boomers no longer represented anything resembling normality, responsibility, familiarity, and tradition. Boomers looked old but didn’t act it. The fact that so many caved to nonsense like ‘gay marriage’ shows a total lack of confidence in their role as elders and guides for the young; rather, their main obsession is to be ‘cool with the youth’, and so, if the Jewish Power brainwashed young morons to worship Holy Homo, then of course, the boomers just had to follow suit to be ‘hip’ and ‘with it’.
The 60s libertine-ism led to an explosion of new expressions, but for every artful treatment, there were hundred others that were pure exploitation. For every THE WILD BUNCH, there were soon to be a hundred mindless gore-fests. For every LAST TANGO IN PARIS, there were hundreds of porn flicks such as those featuring Ron Jeremy sucking his own dick. When the cultural transformation was happening, the boomers had the best of both worlds in that they could watch something like BONNIE AND CLYDE and THE WILD BUNCH but still feel a connection to the moral affirmations of works by John Ford and Howard Hawks that were routinely featured on TV. There was the movement toward the new but also the possibility of return to the old, which was still part of the mainstream culture. There’s a telling scene at the end of BABY IT’S YOU where a college dance rocking to the latest hits eases into a electric hipster rendering of Frank Sinatra’s "Strangers in the Night". The students initially feel put off by the song, but a part of them understands its sentiments that they know from their parents. For a moment, there is a realization that youth is just a phase and life goes on. Or consider the cultural role provided by the father in the French-Canadian film C.R.A.Z.Y.

For all their limitations, the prior generations believed in the essentials of adulthood, maturity, family, and normality. Sadly, the oldest son in C.R.A.Z.Y comes to a bad end with drug addiction and overdose. Still, how fortunate it was for him to have grown up with a father who still understood and played the role of patriarch. The son went for a crazy libertine life but still had a true family life to lean on. Now, imagine having as a parent someone like the oldest son in the film. It’d be crazy upon crazy than crazy upon normal. The boomers had the best of both worlds in that they were living in a crazy-upon-normal world. They could go to Woodstock and fry their brains on bad drugs, but if need be, they could return home and be in a world of the normal, the stable, and traditional. After all, even Archie Bunker, for all his faults, is a man of God and country in ALL IN THE FAMILY. But millennials came of age in the world of crazy-upon-crazy(or crazy-upon-crazy-upon-crazy) as the boomers never really grew up. Consider the fate of Billy Boy Clinton. Or the sheer ridiculousness of George Dubya Bush. People have praised Obama of being a respectable Negro, but this is someone who worships globo-homo as the new cult.


Jay McInerney’s BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY, though no great work of art(as book or film), understood this factor of existence. The main character, Jamie Conway, is very much a city-slicker who lives the high life, has a nasty cocaine habit, and clings to his estranged wife Amanda, a shallow & narcissistic fashion model who dumped him. The night life with its dance clubs and easy sex & drugs has its allure and excitement but offers no meaning. If there’s any meaning left in Conway’s life, it’s from emotions swelling within when he remembers his late mother who was stricken with cancer. There is something to be said about the glitzy appeal of the ‘crazy’ life, but like fireworks, it cannot be the basis of a meaningful life. In reminiscing about his mother, the bright as well as the dark, Conway recaptures, if only for moments on end, a sense of a life deeper than ‘get paid, get laid’. Indeed, it seems his marriage fell apart not least because both he and Amanda care more about the self than the other. It is through unity of man and wife that one attains a continuity with past and future. Still, at the very least, Conway knows that something is not right in his life, and he longs for restoration of balance. The story takes place in the 80s, and that means the parents of the main character were still of a generation that believed in the norms of family, obligations, propriety, and respectability. Jay McInerney was born in 1955, and Conway is several years younger, born around 1960. That means his parents grew up in the 40s and 50s before things got really crazy in America. Therefore, Conway, though living in a world where ‘craziness’ as choice is easily available anywhere, grew up supported by a world that was more sane, stable, and reliable. Sadly, too many Conways of the 1980s failed to grow up into emotional adults. (The Reagan 80s ultimately failed to resuscitate any kind of meaningful conservatism as libertarianism came to define yuppie-dom; as for the Moral Majority of Christian Fundamentalism, it was too anti-intellectual and lacking in talent to gain control of institutions and culture.) And the Amandas of the world got worse because women, like homos and trannies, are naturally more vain and narcissistic than men and more likely to betray anyone and anything for a leg up in society. Conway himself was born when many women still saw wifehood and homemaking a proper and essential role for themselves. Since then, so many men lost jobs to women, and so many women chose the life of harlotry, idolatry, and ideology that have degraded the cultural and spiritual fabric of Western Society.

Indeed, just imagine having a shameless blue-haired & tattooed skag, skank, skrun, or skiggrel as a mother or aunt? Imagine the kind of kids they will raise. Then, imagine having a shameless blue-haired & tattooed over-the-hill skag, skank, skrum, or skiggrel as a grandmother and having her even worse child as your mother. It’d be crazy upon crazy upon crazy, with hardly any memory of the sane, responsible, and stable. The old black woman in RAISIN IN THE SUN didn’t have much book-learning, but she had a strong sense of values, but does anyone in the black community even remember any such cultural archetype anymore? Black churches still exist in strength, but it seems they are mostly about rapping and jiving. Not that idiot white churches are any better; many are worse, openly and shamelessly celebrating sodomy and tranny-penis-cutting as the ‘rainbow’-like wonders of god.
It is part of life to make mistakes. It is part of life to make a fool of oneself and do crazy things. But at some point, one must pick up the pieces, put away childish things, soberly assess one’s place in time and place, and carry on the torch. But for so many people, the torch has been lost. All they have are flickers of fake light emanating from their various electronic devices tossed around hither thither. Apart from age difference, it’s difficult to tell adults from the kids. Gavin McInnes made this very point in his columns, but then he went off to kiss Milo Yionnopoulos on the lips and stick a dildo up his ass to prove he’s hip with the homos and the Jews. When even the messenger act like a retardo teenager, is there any hope left?

Of course, the world didn’t suddenly turn immature in the 60s. It’s always been a part of human nature to dispense with morality, obligations, & responsibility and have a good time as ‘prodigal son’ or carefree grasshopper. Especially young ones of any age, from ancient to modern, have been drawn to glamour and glitz, anything that seems most exciting in the moment. In a way, even the appeal of great moral, spiritual, or ideological movements often owed more to the excitement they generated than any ethical concerns. Whether it was communism or fascism, or Christianity and Islam for that matter, many jumped on the bandwagon not simply or mainly for the ‘politics’ and the credo but because it happened to be the most passionate or electrifying thing happening at the moment. In that sense, there is a psychological link between Christian rapture, Jihadi fever, theatrics of Adolf Hitler, and Beatlemania. People often latch onto movements inspired by profound ideas for sensationalism than profundity, something they really have no use for, but in doing so, they create the impression that people choose the deep over the shallow. That so many people were willing to drop true Christianity and go with globo-homo is proof that what matters most is the marketing, not the meaning. In that sense, it's likely that the predominance of Christianity through the ages owed more to its presentation than its preachment, at least until Elvis the Pelvis and Globo-Homo came along. John Lennon: "We are bigger than Jesus." Granted, pop idols come and go, but because there are always new batches to capture the imagination of yet another shallow and trashy generation weaned on hyped-up nonsense, there is hardly any room for depth and meaning in the Current West. Both the advantage and disadvantage of capitalism has been the ability to dispose of the old and generate the new object of mass fervor. Its cult of ever-changing novelty creates the illusion that something really groovy and far-out is happening at all times. And yet, this is also a disadvantage because it means the capitalist order has no essential, eternal, or core theme, a tradition that transcends fashion. In contrast, communism sought to establish Proletarian Power as the eternal theme for all generations, but what had once seemed exciting and revolutionary came to be regarded as dreary for the weary masses starved for sensory stimulation.

Anyway, it’s not like human nature suddenly changed in the 60s(though it is changing due to radical transformation in mating habits); it was the same human nature that Americans had before, but the socio-economic changes that placed the cult of youth, hedonism, escapism, petulance, and idolatry at the center fundamentally changed the way people saw themselves and others. The greatest thing was being a consumer, and since young people, women, homos, crass materialists, and bling-obsessed Negroes are the most conspicuous consumers, they came to matter the most. Those who consumed less became non-persons. Consumer culture wasn’t about consuming what one needed but consuming what was trendy and fashionable. As fashion became the center of life, those in the fashion/advertising industry, many of whom were Jews and/or homos, came to dominate not only pop culture but the ‘new morality’ and ‘new spirituality’ of the New Normal. In the past, even big corporations paid lip service to the values of tradition and normality. (In Whit Stillman's METROPOLITAN set around 1969, an office building still lights up with a Crucifix during Christmas season. Today, they light up with 'gay' colors.) They made products and sold them. What now passes for social values and morality are mainly generated by ‘woke’ corporations in cahoots with ‘leftists’ who’ve been raised on corporate junk. There is talk among conservatives of the symbiotic relation between greedy capitalists and ‘far left’ Marxist-types. This isn’t true at all. In the 1966 film MASCULIN-FEMININ, Jean-Luc Godard pondered the generation of Marx and Coca-Cola. Well, the Coca-Cola totally won out over Marx, and today’s so-called ‘leftists’, far from being communists or even socialists, are just pop-culture addled minions whose idea of ‘progress’ centers on worshiping and celebrating homo neo-aristos, billionaire Zionists, and crass black celebrities overloaded with cash & bling. And their kids talk like characters in computer-animated cartoons. While it’s true that mega-corporations take their ideological and neo-‘spiritual’ cues from the academia, the fact is people in the academia are very much the products of mass-popular-culture, all the more so due to the breakdown of the high-brow/low-brow dichotomy. There was a time when those in the academia felt duty-bound uphold the high, deep, true, and meaningful against the pressures of Big Money and Mass Culture, but those days are long gone. Recently, John Simon, perhaps the last of the Old Guard passed away, but even he, in his final days, was reduced to hosting a show along with some lunatic tranny freak. And Harold Bloom, who died not long ago, bemoaned the transformation of academia into a hotbed of identity-vanity politics and pop culture, what with even educated people praising HARRY POTTER books as works of great cultural significance. Thus, there is no longer a meaningful separation between academia and big business. People in academia happily work with businesses fixated on profits via advertising companies, think tanks, and publicity agencies. Just like today’s journalists work hand-in-glove with big capital and deep state, today’s academics easily rub shoulders with money-men and hype-artists.


In a way, the cultural transformations were the result of mass urbanization, material abundance & eradication of hunger(and most diseases), extensive safety nets, explosion of individual freedom/choice, fixation on fantasy ideals(disseminated by idolatrous pop culture), endless electronic distractions to fend off loneliness & boredom, the cult of the ‘cool’, identification with idols than with close ones, Jewish agenda to weaken goy identity & roots, homo vanity & decadence, and Afro-primitivism. Mass urbanization physically removed people from soil & roots. They became like Antaeus lifted from the ground. Material plenty and disappearance of hunger made people less tribal and territorial. Human Nature changes according to Hunger Nature. This is also true of animals. In the wild where hunger is the general state of being, animals are especially aggressive, anxious, and territorial. Hungry dogs will growl and fight each other. But well-fed dogs tend to favor play than fight with other dogs. Thus, once Hunger Nature is satiated, Animal Nature becomes friendlier. Likewise, well-fed humans tend to be less hostile, distrustful, aggressive, fearful, and territorial than hungry ones. That said, it's also true that hunger can be manipulated to make people less tribal. While hunger generally makes people more committed to defend and fight for what they have, if they are offered with plenty of food in exchange for their identity/territory, they are likely to comply. The reason why so much of the world has become willing accomplices of the American Empire is that the US has lots of food and stuff that it can offer to elites and masses around the world in the form of aid, goods, bribery, and immigration to America. As hunger prioritizes basic needs, it will fight for what little a people have, but the same people may well trade what they have in terms of identity/territory for lots of free stuff offered by an outsider force. In the past, Americans were hungrier and more territorial about what they had. Also, as the majority were farmers, they identified with the land that they knew their folks had conquered, settled, and were buried in. But once urbanized and uprooted Americans, especially the boomer generation, became fatter and forgot what it meant to be hungry, they lost much of their territorial instinct. They became like a satiated dog that doesn’t much care what other dogs eats from its bowl. Its own stomach is full, and it would rather rest or have fun than guard the bowl.
And then, more individual freedom, though a good thing in many ways, led too many people to choose the wrong things in life, those with short-term rewards but long-term consequences. Gambling is an obvious one. Whatever fun one might have at a casino, it is a stupid way to waste time and money(and degrade one's soul). So many young people became immersed in individual freedoms that had no long-term meaning; of course, they realized this only when they ruined themselves. Also, as pop culture became the main culture and bombarded people with endless images of glamour, glitz, sensationalism, cult of the ‘cool’, and etc., people lost their sense of human dimensionality. As most people aren’t special, people became estranged from their parents, relatives, workers, and even friends who didn’t measure up to the Pop Cultural Ideal of the superstar or idol. Electronics created the illusion of life where there is no life. Prior to electronic gadgets, people could easily grow bored or lonely without human company, without a community. And so, they sought out friends and mates; they stayed connected to family members. But with electronic gadgets filling people’s lives with the illusion of always being connected or stimulated by ‘cool’ stuff, people became increasingly divorced from real people. The cult of the ‘cool’, as the song "Hey Jude" warned, made the world a little colder. It made people afraid of human emotions as ‘uncool’. Vain homos in culture emphasized fashion, and black culture emphasized animalism devoid of history and restraint. And Jews, while guarding their own identity and territoriality, sought to deracinate the goyim, rendering them easier to control.

Just because a culture prioritizes maturity doesn’t mean everyone will be mature. It’s like a culture that emphasizes intelligence and cultivation won't guarantee that all or even most people of good sense and taste. People can superficially act mature while remaining immature, child-at-heart. And plenty of people who’ve attended elite schools and talk intellectually are really idiots. Still, the emphasis of a certain norm or ideal does act as a restraint on brazenly negative attitudes. So, even though seemingly mature people actually be immature, they will think twice about acting shamelessly immature in a Mature Society. Likewise, even though seemingly intelligent people can be pretty stupid, they dare now openly wallow in stupidity in a culture of intelligence. At the very least, the norm or ideal may serve as a reminder that eventually pulls the prodigals back to home-base. Consider the film HUSBANDS by John Cassavetes. Born in 1929, Cassavetes was closer to the ‘Greatest Generation’ than to the Boomers, and his films recorded the (not-so-)quiet desperation of the American Middle Class that kept up appearances but often drowned in alcohol and other vices. HUSBANDS is about the kind of men who came of age about a decade-and-half prior to the rise of the boomers. They still belonged to an age when boys were expected to grow into men and girls were expected to become women, then wives and mothers. And yet, throughout the film, we see so much neurosis, bouts of alcohol, even debauched acts. Still, at the very end, the characters played by Cassavetes and Peter Falk finally sober up, return home, and get on with life. All said and done, they still retained a sense of family, responsibility, and home, the stuff of normality and morality. PEOPLE NEXT DOOR is another instructive film about the problems of the American Middle Class. Even though the parents are far from perfect, they still managed to start a home life, produce children, pay taxes, and keep up with the mortgage. Then, why are the children so different? Much of it’s due to the blessing(and curse) of more freedom and choice. Unlike the parents who grew up in leaner times and in a culture still anchored to traditional values(even if fading fast), the children have lots of freedom, don’t have to grow up fast & work to make ends meet, and are heavily affected by Pop Culture & the cult of youth. (Despite all that, the son seems like a rather upright character despite his hippie-ish antics.) If the parents and children were reversed, the children would surely act like the parents and vice versa. Even though the kids are not bad people and the parents aren’t particularly good people, the latter have a basic sense of what life is about and a person’s responsibility to oneself, family, and community. This basic sense seems to be missing from the daughter who is usually zonked out on drugs or worse; the drugs brought her face-to-face with ‘profundity’ with an untrained and inexperienced mind unable to process it meaningfully. She could easily be one of the zonked-out zombies in the Rolling Stones documentary GIMME SHELTER. One might even say she is halfway possessed by the Devil like Linda Blair’s character in THE EXORCIST. The girl comes close to losing her mind, but the seeds of discord were there in the parents. Even though they’ve done the duties as parents in providing stuff and affection for their children, they seem like run-of-the-mill materialistic keep-up-with-the-joneses type of Americans. Such materialism both defined the boomers and animated them against it, leading to a strange hybrid of revelry and rebellion. To an extent, the kids who went to Woodstock were saying they don’t want any part in the consumer society that is all about ‘plastics’, the latest appliances, status, and property values. Instead, they wanted meaning and authenticity. And yet, their 'quests' relied on lots of leisure and material support made possible only because of American materialism. After all, who made all those Rock albums, vans & motorcycles, bandannas, foods, and toilets? Who made all the roads that made it possible for the guys in Dennis Hopper's EASY RIDER to cruise around with such ease and convenience? What made prolonged youth possible for the boomers? Economics of plenty and surplus. So, even as the boomers rebelled against the LOOK of materialism, they wallowed in its substance, often without knowing it(but then willfully naive people tend to be fools). But then, we can’t expect young ones to know much or realize things on their own. The fault of the parents in PEOPLE NEXT DOOR is they naively assumed their kids would eventually grow up sooner than later like earlier generation; they permissively thought pop culture was just recreation for the kids when, in fact, it became the defining 'philosophy' and 'spirituality' for the kids. They failed to understand that the boomers grew up in a very different culture than they themselves did. Boomers grew up with TV, Rock, and the Cult of Youth. As such, from a young age, they were sucked into the TV-lala-land and musical wonderland. Beatlemania now seems rather ‘innocent’, but it was a sign of things to come. But then, as there had never been anything like the boomer generation in the history of mankind, we can’t be too harsh on the ‘greatest generation’ for their fatal blind-spot. (If permissiveness ruined many boomers, the solution isn't repression either. VIRGIN SUICIDES is about parents who say NO and deny their daughters the sinful ways of the world, but a void hungers to be filled by something. Therefore, children must be instilled with rich and meaningful culture that acts as bulwark against junk culture. The 'NO' must be followed by a 'YES' of higher/deeper culture. 'NO' alone will lead to neurosis, leading to either sheepish submission or raving rebellion.)

One major problem for Americans since World War II was the loss of racial, cultural, spiritual, and historical identity. Even prior to the boomers, Americanism came to be defined by what you have than what you are or where you came from. Indeed, what is MILDRED PIERCE about but a hardworking and decent woman who nevertheless ruins her daughter’s life because, despite her devotion and sacrifice, the main theme of life she imparted to her child is that Money and Status are what counts most. Now, everyone knows money and nice things are good to have, but they shouldn’t be at the core of the meaning of life. Despite Mildred Pierce’s decency and caring, she gave her daughter no meaning except that money and only money can lead to nice things that make life worth living for. While the parents of PEOPLE NEXT DOOR aren’t so fanatical as Pierce, they seem to have relayed nothing to their kids of deeper meaning. The father, played by Eli Wallach, and the mother seem like pretty good people. Hardly saints but certainly not scoundrels. They provided the kids with their own rooms, TVs, record players, clothes, food, and etc., but did they offer the kids any sense of meaning, a deeper sense of inheritance, connection, and obligation? It seems they left it entirely to impersonal public education to teach their kids the stuff to be good citizens. The parents, driven to desperation, even go for family counseling and finally commit their girl to an expensive mental clinic. And yet, as in the Beatles’ song "She’s Leaving Home", all that weren't enough. According to silly Paul McCartney, the girl left home to have FUN. Fun-fun-fun is all very nice, but that doesn’t explain the problem of so many boomers who went astray. After all, plenty of them had lotsa fun and then some, but if anything, their problems got worse. Fun is good but it cannot be the end-all or ultimate meaning of life.




This is where SERIOUS MAN by the Coen brothers is most instructive. Like PEOPLE NEXT DOOR, it takes place in the 60s with social upheavals happening all around, even in a quiet suburb somewhere in Minnesota. These changes affect the main character’s personal life as well as his wife intends to leave him and other problems. Like so many parents of the 60s, he has to contend with his kids who are immersed in conspicuous consumption and/or pop culture. In one hilarious scene, he gets an 'emergency' call from his son because of TV antennae problems. To the son, THAT is of the gravest importance. The father himself is obviously far more modern than his forebears. He’s pretty tolerant of his children’s behavior and even tries a joint(marijuana) for the first time with a rather loose next-door neighbor. But there’s another side of him that appreciates the old ways. Though surely into pop culture like rest of America, there are quiet moments when he listens to traditional Jewish music. He seeks advice from rabbis. And most importantly, he feels it is his duty to ritualistically initiate his son into the Tribe via Bar Mitzvah. And this proves crucial. Unlike the East Asian father in the film whose main concern for his son is about grades, school, money, & status and the white American father whose mode of acculturation for his son is about guns & hunting(anachronistic in post-Wild-West America), the Jewish father imbues his son with a sense of ethno-identity inseparable from history & spirituality. The son and his best friend are no less into 60s Rock/Pop culture than any other bunch of kids throughout America, but the ONE thing that distinguishes them from most American kids is this contact with the legacy of the Covenant. Even though the son irreverently smokes marijuana before the ritual, the ceremony has a truly transformative effect on him; ironically, the pot ends up intensifying the moment, thus making him feel even more profoundly Jewish in the occasion: It’s like a combination of Bar Mitzvah and what Aldous Huxley conceived in THE ISLAND where the children of an utopian world are initiated into adulthood through a rite-of-passage involving hallucinogenic substances.
Now, what is the difference between the family in PEOPLE NEXT DOOR and the one in SERIOUS MAN? The parents are much the same. Father has a job, the mother takes care of the home. And both sets of kids are into Pop Culture, hedonism, and More Freedom/Choice. The key difference is that even though the Jewish kid in SERIOUS MAN is lured(and despoiled) by the same temptations, he is also a receiver of a tradition & legacy that reminds him that there is more to life than the Trendiness of Now. The entirety of his being doesn’t just bow to fashion because he is imbued with a sense of roots that anchors his soul to something deeper than ever-changing fashions. There is some of this in the movie THE JAZZ SINGER. Even though the cultural distance between father and son is much wider than the one in SERIOUS MAN and even though the son who’s into black music(and black-face) disappoints his traditional rabbi father, something of the father leaves an imprint on the black-faced son because the old man is something more than one’s pa but a reverent, proud, and even profound inheritor and bequeather of something bigger than any individual Jew. So, even though the son’s face and sense of rhythm is ‘black’, his soul remains Jewish. This deeper sense was shared by Jewish gangsters also. Even though they did loutish and brutal things, they nevertheless felt they must work for the Tribe. By Christian morality, one’s worldly and ego-driven sins must be redeemed by serving all of humanity. One must reject the ego and one's tribe. In contrast, according to Jewish morality, one’s sins and trespasses can be redeemed by serving one’s Tribe. This is where Jews were different from Italians. Even though gangster movies about Sicilians/Italians show mobsters to be tribal, they really aren’t. After all, there is no spiritual covenant associated with Sicilian-ness or Italian-ness. For Sicilians/Italians of organized crime, the highest loyalty was the family or the clan, not the Tribe. So, if, at the end of the day, Jewish mobsters donated so much of their ill-gotten loot to Jewish causes and Israel to wash away some of their sins, the Italians/Sicilians were not averse to butchering one another endlessly for the sake of the family or the clan. In GOODFELLAS, we are told that one had to be 100% Sicilian/Italian to be ‘made’, but despite the fact that all ‘made’ men are Italian, they never seem to have a higher unified purpose pertaining to their ethnic identity. In contrast, however filthy, lowdown, and contemptible Jeffrey Epstein certainly was, he did it for a higher cause: To collect materials to blackmail powerful people in service to Zion. Epstein’s case shows how Jews will even weaponize vice and perversion to serve what they deem to be a higher cause and deeper identity. As long as Jews place Jewishness at the center of their lives, even their non-Jewish activities gain meaning in ultimate service to Jewish survival, Jewish power, and Jewish supremacy.
But when ultra-liberal Jews emphasize something other than Jewishness as their core, it leads to the kind of neurosis exhibited by Rachel Sontag whose father was no less pushy, controlling, and insistent than past Jewish fathers but in the service of egomania, intellectual conceits, and cultural attitudes. Fixing the radio so that it won’t play anything other than NPR isn’t sufficient to form a meaningful identity. Also, especially because Jews tend to have strong personalities, they tend to become egomaniacal without something higher to serve and deeper to honor and perpetuate.


Barry Levinson’s DINER is a film that follows the lives of young men who were among the last to have a direct connection to the world of tradition. In a way, it is about the proto-60s generation that came of age in the era of consumerism, youth culture, and predominance of TV. And yet, they came to maturity before Beatlemania, rise of sex-and-drugs, and Counterculture. It was still a time when plenty of young men preferred Frank Sinatra or Johnny Mathis to Elvis Presley, then still considered somewhat risque and vulgar. All the hallmarks of 60s youth attitudes are present in the characters in THE DINER, but they’re still reined in by social norms and expectations. There is an understanding that men must put away childish things and grow up. There is still a commitment to the rites-of-passage, a sure farewell to youth. Also, as the parents and grandparents, whether conservative or liberal, of these youngsters still practiced the traditional life-substance of family life with father and mother in proper roles, their adventure into novelty was balanced by something stabler and rooted.
In this sense, Levinson’s other movie, AVALON(though overly sentimental and decidedly inferior to DINER), is a companion piece for it shows a Jewish-American world where one’s identity and culture were defined mainly in relation to family, ancestors, and community. Even as Jews in the movie become Good Americans and celebrate Thanksgiving — and Jewish kids do what other American kids do — , what makes them distinct and special is the sense of who they are and where they came from, and much of this has to do with direct familial connections among grandparents, parents, and children. The family in the movies goes into the TV business and does pretty well, but the final scene has a child staring into the TV set while the grandfather grows old and senile in a nursing home. The TV generation developed a kind of phanta-identity in front of a TV set than on the laps of grandparents.

Still, despite these changes, Jews have done better than other groups for two reasons. They have the Covenant and the rituals. When goyim celebrate Sweet Sixteen, it’s only about being old enough to go on dates, drive car, and enjoy more freedom. In contrast, Bar Mitzvah puts one’s body and soul in spiritual connection to all the ancestors going back to Abraham who received the Covenant. Another reason why the TV and media have been less damaging to Jews is they've controlled the programming and ran many TV shows and made many movies that celebrate and pay tribute to Jewishness. In contrast, Jews have used the media to impugn, deride, insult, and smear Christianity, the white race, and goyim in general(especially Muslims who’ve bene mostly depicted as terrorist scum).

Perhaps, what is most sorely in need among goyim is to formulate a means to rear their children in a way as to instill an identity and meaning beyond the dictates of pop culture, fashion, and shallow ideology(that is now concocted by a consortium of Big Capital, advertising companies, Monopoly Media, and decadent academia). This is more necessary than ever because the current pop culture and ideologies are more debased than ever. After all, if one consumed ONLY pop culture in the 1940s, it would have meant listening to Frank Sinatra & Big Band music and watching John Ford & Howard Hawks movies. How corrupting could they have been? In terms of ideology, even New Deal Democrats believed in family, patriotism, and all that.
But look around now, and Pop Culture consists of ‘twerking’, pornography easily accessible to young ones, degenerate TV shows about trannies, homos, sluts, & jungle fever; mindless nihilistic superhero fantasies of wanton destruction, and the crudest kind of standup comedy. As for the ideology(and neo-spirituality), it’s about gushing about trannies reading books to children and displaying ‘rainbow’ globo-homo sodomy flags in churches. There was a time when, even if one’s life was devoid of roots, high culture, family values, and etc., one wasn’t so corrupted or debased by popular culture or ideologies. But now, all the scum-scam are out of the woodworks and crawling all over the place. It’s so easy for people, especially young ones, to become infected with all kinds of ludicrousness. The Power gets them when they’re young because children’s and childish minds are so easy to mold and manipulate. Even if many people may eventually break out of the programming later in life, the damage will have been done as they would have spent so much of their young productive lives chasing after fairytales or worshiping at the altar of Mammon.

So, what can be done? In THE GODFATHER, Michael Corleone is forced to make something like an ‘aliyah’ to Sicily, the homeland of his folks, and the experience stirs something within him that is deeper than A-B-C lectures about the Constitution and American freedom. The US Constitution is a great document, and American culture of freedom is liberating, but it is in Sicily that Michael Corleone realizes those aren’t enough. The Constitution is a set of laws, and besides the Power will always bend the law. And as fun and liberating as American freedom and mass culture may be, they don’t provide a special and distinct meaning for people like Michael Corleone. After all, just about anyone in America regardless of race/ethnicity(or for that matter, anywhere in the world) can understand the meaning of democracy or enjoy American pop culture. The ultimate question is what makes the Corleones different from the Mass of Humanity? To understand this, one needs cultivate and preserve a sense of family, culture, and roots. Even as Italian-Americans must learn to get along with other groups in America, they must guard their unique identity or they’ll just become part of the Human Blob. Of late, when we look around, it seems Italian-Americans have utterly failed in this and produced future generations of Tony Sopranos and JERSEY SHORE morons. But what was lost can be recovered even though it will take resolve and commitment. Maybe white Americans can develop a culture of pilgrimage. This wouldn’t be just another family trip to get away from home. Rather, it would be a carefully mapped out trip with well-thought-out family narrative about where the forebears had lived, worked, died, and buried the dead. Also, national memorials will have deeper meaning if historical events are explained in terms of their intersection with members of the family and relatives. After all, the Vietnam War Memorial is especially moving and meaningful to the families of those who died. Muslims have the Hajj. White folks need some rituals of remembrance. Perhaps, so many whites wouldn't be dying of drugs & degeneracy or soul-rotting with tattoos & piercings if they had a deeper sense of who they are and where they came from. But the fact is they were raised on pop culture by parents(often single mothers) who also took to pop culture as their main cultural staple. Crazy upon Crazy in a world where pop culture has gone from moral entertainment to utter degeneracy, the kind concocted by Quentin Tarantino and the like.

Stuff like Catholic Communion has meaning, but it’s universal-spiritual, and as such, doesn’t connect one’s identity to roots of ethnicity and history. Christianity, though a great religion, is open to all and is timeless in meaning. Ideas and creeds are not enough. People need rituals and roots in combination. Also, we need patriarchs. Michael Corleone owed much to his father who, though a ruthless mobster, fulfilled his role as husband & father and then some. Now, imagine having someone like Gavin McGinnis as your father. Mama Corleone was a fine woman. Now, imagine having as a mother someone who wears a ‘pussy hat’, is splattered with tattoos, and has green hair. Who needs a father like dorkboy George W. Bush, scumbum Billy Boy Clinton, or cucky-wuck James Comey whose wife and daughter are decadent shits.

In the 1965 song "Like a Rolling Stone", Bob Dylan mocked a young woman who lived for the moment and ends up lost in a world of strangers. At some point in life, Dylan feared such would be his fate, and so, he veered off the fast lane to regain his sense of self. He needed a period of retrenchment from the excesses and egotism. As for those who demanded that he be the Leader of Counterculture, he understood(despite his monumental self-confidence and biting arrogance) well enough the value of humility. He was no Moses but an inheritor of a tradition created by the great Jewish prophets. It’s like Muhammad Ali knew he was the greatest in boxing but a humble student of Muhammad and servant of Allah.