Brotherhood of Man Pt. XIII

It was a grey winter Saturday in Tel Aviv. The wind was howling, whipping rain around in sheets, the sea lapping violently against the jetties. Ari was in bed reading a book when he heard a terse, demanding knock at the door of his studio apartment. Opening up, he saw Damien on the landing, sweaty and heaving, stooped over, hands on his knees.

He looked up. “I need you to do something for me,” he said, struggling to catch his breath. There were three rectangular wooden boxes stacked behind him. Red cedar. Damien exhaled decisively and stood up straight, pointing back at the boxes. “I need somewhere to store these.”

“What are they?”

He lifted the top box, grunting as he hauled it inside. “Three soldiers killed in Lebanon. You’d be doing me a huge favor. A service to the country, actually. I just need to keep them here for a little while.” Grunting, he gingerly set the box down in the tiled entryway.

The request was so odd, Ari didn’t know how to refuse. They hoisted each of the other two coffins, one man to each end, until all three were stacked lengthwise along the wall opposite the kitchen, facing west, toward the window and the balcony. They were heavy enough that it seemed unlikely Damien had carried them all the way up the stairwell on his own. It was as if he simply materialized with them on the landing.

The two made their way back toward the door. In just three months, Ari would be going into the army and Damien would be getting out of it. 

Damien could see Ari was anxious. The two made eye contact for a moment. “There’s a creature in Lebanon,” Damien said, with tremendous gravity.

“A…. creature?”

“Something paranormal. In a cave southwest of Kfar Shouba. These air force commandos went in the night before last to try and extricate it. We recovered their bodies before dawn today.”

“Cut the shit! Who’s ‘we’? What creature?!?”

“All we know for certain is that it’s virulently anti-semitic. Or…. we thought we knew. But the reality may be a lot more complicated.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Damien gazed over Ari’s shoulder out the window, hesitating, then looked Ari dead in the eyes. “Based on radio traffic we received from these boys before they met their fate, we have reason to believe that the creature is…. That the creature is….” Damien shuddered.

“That the creature is what?”

“That the creature is Jewish.”

Ari felt flecks of rain whipping into the apartment from the window opposite the doorway. He turned around and saw that the shutters were open—but he hadn’t opened them. When he turned back around, Damien was gone. The front door was shut, but Ari hadn’t heard it close. A sudden, howling gust of wind slammed Ari against the drywall as it blew the shutters off the window frame and tore the cover off the top coffin in the stack, revealing the exsanguinated body of a nineteen-year-old in a khaki class-A uniform, white as a sheet, his lifeless eyes wide open.

Ari met his gaze. Then he awoke, covered in cold sweat and gasping for air.

Cthulu Swims Left Because You’re a Leftist

triumph of the will

Nietzsche’s dictum that man is something to be overcome is nowhere better illustrated than by the various dung mushroom species of antisemitism now converging on apocalypse. Nazism and Judaism are these twin elephants that never seem to leave the room of civic discourse because they figure in the narratives of every faith and ideology known to modernity. But while revisionist heterodoxies are fast devouring the postwar liberal orthodoxy, their proponents are sure to never unclench their “dissident” self-pity. By all means, let’s be perfectly frank about this topic. As a kid in school I was periodically subjected to non-white terror; as a college student I was periodically subjected to leftist terror; and I instinctively recognize the Nazi as the same basic megalomaniacal untermensch and reprobate.

Incidentally, the Kanye West affair continues this week. Ye’s latest missive is food for thought:

This take is unintentionally apt in a way that only an idiot savant like Kanye can be. For a nigger, in essence, is an untermensch supped on narcissistic delusions of unrequited nobility, whose only will to power is vengeance, meaning specifically that he can never fully individuate because his personality can only be validated in reference to some third person.

Is there anything about the rabble of degenerate louts who call themselves “dissident nationalists” that this does not apply to precisely? Facile criticisms of the ADL aside, I have already amply documented how the frequency and viciousness of antisemitic violence is actually downplayed in the West. It won’t win me any points for edginess by saying so, but Sartre’s dictum, about the inexorable logical terminus of antisemitism being murder, is self-evident. So Kanye is correct: an anti-semite is a nigger, because a Nazi is no less low-caliber and criminal-minded than a rapper, or a gang-banger, or a campus radical. The psychology of the nigger and that of the antisemite are one and the same. Fascism is not right-wing. It is vaginal. 

The following tweet is an example of what is widely taken for right-wing thought, but is actually an excellent example of left-wing thought:

There is nothing more clichéd nowadays than the proposition that some silent majority of Snapchat users (and future glazed-over cubicle invertebrates) is fundamentally noble and being systematically deprived of meaning in life. But revealed preference is a bitch: people very much want to live in an economic zone while fantasizing about “a people and a culture.” They very much want to sit on Twitter while fantasizing about “touching grass.” That is why they follow “the dissident right” in the metaverse. Power is amoral by definition, and everybody wants some. The meaning so many of them are longing for is any crime’s truest accomplice—a rationale:

This pumpkin spice sentimentality and perpetual high-dudgeoned adolescence is pure projection. A singularly infernal antagonist is always a welcome relief from introspection. It represents total freedom from moral restraint. That in spite of hating each other, black radicals, neo-Nazis, Muslim and Christian fundamentalists all arrive at one accord on the status of Jews as this antagonist exposes each of these systems as totally morbid and negatory. The extent to which antisemitism is the predilection of the half-educated, its inseparability at all times from manic and capricious fanaticism, simply cannot be overstated. It is low-status, not elite; criminal, not authoritarian.

One thing that’s interesting to note, in this connection, is that the Nazis virtually never prosecuted Jews for the sundry crimes they constantly declared were habitually Jewish in nature. You know: price fixing, wage clipping, money laundering, pimping, corrupting public morals…. Even with the benefit of emergency laws and a farcical show-trial system, the Nazis lacked the courage of their convictions. Literally every action the Nazis took against Jews was extrajudicial. The volksgerichtshof specialized, instead, in sentencing ethnic Germans—mostly students, social democrats, and clergymen—to death for criticizing the regime. The latter-day adherents of these chickenshits now have the cynical and abysmally stupid temerity to claim they stand for freedom of speech:

Sure, the Nazis denounced Jewish usurers and smut peddlers, but the overwhelming majority of Jews they kidnapped, tortured and murdered had nothing to do with all that. Many were converts to Lutheranism and WWI veterans who’d fought on the German side. And not only was every action the Nazis took against Jews extrajudicial, but invariably resulted in confiscation of assets. “Let’s just kill our neighbors and take their shit” is an impulse so primitive that today it only exists among Africans. Nazism was a looting operation under cover of vindictive moral rectitude, no better than Black Lives Matter or Muslim grooming gangs acting with clerical and scriptural dispensation. The Church once taught that God preserved the Jews to be a living illustration of the perils of rejecting Christ. Leo Strauss turned this on its head when he postulated that the purpose of the Jews was to prove that there’s no salvation. They were both wrong. The purpose of the Jews, apparently, is to provide a universal litmus test for furtive and embittered criminality.

Today’s online neo-Nazis like to portray Jews as subversives and arch-criminals, but Jews, as a general rule, are educated and law-abiding taxpayers, homeowners, and professionals. When the franchise was restricted at the outset of this country’s history, those were the prerequisites of citizenship. Either stereotype accuracy means something, or it doesn’t.

At least in the 20th century, Jews have contributed more per capita toward western arts, letters, sciences and jurisprudence than any other people, and the State of Israel remains a paragon of order, progress and liberality. Its Arab enemies orchestrate the most cowardly acts of terror and massacre against women, children, and elderly, and then run a sideline in propaganda everywhere from Malaysia to the CBS Evening News, insisting that Israel’s mere contingencies against these clear and present dangers constitute “genocide” and crimes against humanity. Ultramontane Catholic apologists for the worst rats’ nest of pederasty the world has ever known vituperate about yiddish pornographers. Black radical celebrities who openly support “racial justice” in the form of a wave of street crime and horrific assaults claim they are being “enslaved” by Jewish moguls who’ve extracted them from the ghetto and paid them each millions annually to throw a ball around a basketball court. And terminally online Nazi pseuds—heirs to the kind of potbellied shopkeeper’s mediocrity that lent Nazism its most ardent base of support—claim that listlessness, masturbation, and every consumerist bad habit have all been foisted upon them by kikes.

These are the psychological defenses of a mass of reprobates, the rigor mortis of dead minds, and the more they feel emboldened, the more you’re going to be hearing from them about Jews, a topic you’ll almost never hear about from anyone who truly values order, progress, decency, and civilization.

The Only Good Journalist

Would those who believe the world is run by Zionism please explain how this BLM-tier agitprop made its way onto—nay, became—primetime CBS?:

It has all the bells and whistles. There are the melanotic, dystopian-future studio anchors. There’s the grave intonation, the “human rights” framing, the clergyman inveighing against disproportionate force, the ideologue “expert” holding forth primly on events she witnessed only seconds of on a janky bystander phone camera (an American law professor, no less, drawing very very serious conclusions in the almost total absence of reliable evidence). The repeated claim in this and related reports has consistently been that Israel is “targeting” journalists. Who the hell uses a euphemism when accusing another of murder? It’s very strange.

I’ve seen as little of this current snafu as the little Rutgers law prof on CBS did, but I’m 100% certain that after years of traversing and reporting from the West Bank, Shireen Abu Akleh’s death came as a surprise to Shireen Abu Akleh. All the reports about her death contain expressions of shock from her colleagues in the West Bank press corps that anything like this could ever have happened—in the fucking war zone of Jenin. These people feel no sense of danger from the IDF, and Israel has conditioned this expectation by protecting them. Obviously, if Israel was “targeting civilians” the Palestinians would be far more circumspect about affronting the IDF. If, indeed, Israel was “targeting journalists” (as the frivolous line now goes) there’d be no journalists in the West Bank.

But the West Bank is crawling with journalists, reporters and camera crews as far as the eye can see, from everywhere in the world. (I was there some years back as an IDF serviceman – it was like being on Cops.) Due to the intense diplomatic and media scrutiny Israel always elicits, the West Bank exists in a kind of fishbowl, where smarmy, collegiate members of the international press corps (many of whom fancy themselves partisans in the conflict) feel just the right ratio of danger to safety—not unlike yuppie patrons of a dive bar in an up-and-coming urban neighborhood. Where else can you stalk an army raid of an insurgent safe-house, filming all the while—as a supporter of the insurgents—and still make the Brasserie for a digestif by midnight?

Relative to other theaters of battle, this state of affairs is unique in all the world. Detroit is not so safe. For journalists to enjoy cover of democratic scruples in Afghanistan or Iraq meant embedding with the occupation force and parroting its side of things, at least to a degree. Lebanon on a good day is no less dangerous for the western press than Gaza is on a bad one. Syria? Forget about it. Those reports get filed from Athens. Ditto the whole of Africa and just about anywhere in the former Soviet space where live fire is being lain.

The distinct motives on either side bear examining as well. What the Israeli army was doing in Jenin was pursuing a band of insurgents (to put it restrainedly) responsible for the murder—the deliberate homicide, with malice aforethought—of women and children. No one who truly believes that Israeli soldiers deliberately kill non-combatants could possibly feel the need to be so coy as to refer to this euphemistically as “targeting.” While we don’t know which side’s bullet ultimately did her in—and if it turns out to’ve been Palestinian you can be sure the calls for “accountability” will abruptly fall off—we do know that Shireen Abu Akleh chose to put herself at the scene of a firefight, as a media partisan for the murderers of children, to slander their pursuers. Not unlike the peaceful protests we see stateside many an election year, these journalists are championing crime, and undermining social order.

 

We Are Hyperborians, Lebowski

Of all the dumb schisms in the DR, Christian versus pagan is by far the most persistent. What’s dumb about it is the longing for a static attachment to creed, which is very Christian but negates paganism entirely. The unnamable is the eternally real. Religion is just an abstraction; a mature man recognizes truth wherever he finds it.

But while I feel strongly (and, over the years, pretty consistently) that in its broad strokes Christian metaphysics is sound and perhaps superlative, as for this alt-right schism, I have to say that Christianity carries a great deal of wistful baggage that paganism does not, and I think the one question that puts the lie to the devotion of alt-right Christians is to ask whether they could worship Christ if they knew for certain he’d been a black man.

On Easter Eve I had a vision, a kind of night-reverie, where I saw an image of the living Christ, all sparkly and bedecked in golden light. But when I dared to gaze more closely I began to realize—like the lookout in Blazing Saddles—that the Lord is a nigger. In a split second the part of me that was perturbed by this—and it was deeply perturbed—welled up, and then burst. All of a sudden I began laughing maniacally. Imagine my relief—if that is Christ, then all debts truly are forgiven. 

Could an alt-right Christian have reached such a conclusion from this experience? Of course not. He’d have to fall on his face and fellate this Jobu, right alongside all the rainbow-flag Episcopalians and George Floyd mourners, because the widening-gyre god of Christianity and that of the liberals is one and the same. He is small, this Christian god. The true Christ has not given us leave to examine him so closely. And if the DR stands for anything, it is the first ecstatic stirring of something well and truly beyond, something nameless and timeless and sufficient unto itself, that inhabits a part of us that we’ve forgotten.

After visiting the village of Leukerbad in the Swiss Alps, James Baldwin wrote:

For this village, even if it were incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive.

Baldwin is one of my favorite authors, a writer’s writer whose talents were sharpened against the lifelong deficit that came into focus for him so dramatically in that village in Switzerland. To say Another Country lies outside the Western cannon is just false. But in our day you’ll never meet a black man so self-deprecating, because the West—which Baldwin frankly acknowledges is something racial—is dead.

In The Rebel, Camus posits that rebellion can only have meaning in Western civilization, “where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities.” (If you don’t believe him, try thinking of a counter-example. It’s like rhymes with orange.) What’s bemusing about this remark is that it applies equally well today in the inimical context: whereas Camus was writing as a leftist and, essentially, an egalitarian, bemoaning the inequalities in western civilization and supposing that rebellion is always aimed in the direction of greater equality—that type of thinking is precisely how western civilization’s egalitarianism today covers over the great factual inequalities of nature, and it is in favor of that natural inequality that today’s rebel asserts himself. Stripped of Camus’s obvious intent, the statement that rebellion can only have meaning in the context of western civilization is profoundly racist and authoritarian.

That is why American pop culture’s association of rebellion with blacks over the past century is so deeply unsatisfying. Despite periodically having to defend myself in school from non-white terror, by a complex system of mental canal locks I was never allowed to view this problem directly. The whole culture around me awarded these people a kind of animal authenticity that it forbade me, as a white boy, because my parents’ generation had traded it for easy living. From a very young age I recall perceiving the post-industrial domestic hedonism, the corporate pop-psychology and consolidation of ownership of the Clinton-era boom years with foreboding. I remember when Office Space and American Psycho belonged to the left. Contrarianism itself was something liberal, and it was from that perspective that I first understood the whole edifice of modern comfort and convenience as a kind of facade, sclerotic, doomed to expend itself utterly, its dying energies devoted to an endless capacity to rationalize—and here we are. Yet this clarity was obscured by the cataract of a saccharine and fanatical egalitarianism, so that rebellion meant rejecting the possibility of order and dominance utterly.

It was seeped in that weltanschauung that I came of age right around 9/11. The widespread anti-war sentiment of the Bush II aughts was characterized by a masochistic rectitude, something vegan, estrogenic, and dogmatically unreconciled to the Jungian shadow, and it seemed to me that this ideology correlated more closely with the lithe nihilism and having-it-both-ways of bourgeois corporatism than its purveyors were ever likely to admit. Zionism became a way for me to reject all this. In 2002, Israel had narrative. America’s then-narrative was that a man who cohabits with a goat and sounds like Noam Chomsky incinerated the World Trade Center because he hated consumerism, but that God was thankfully on the side of Spencer’s and Hot Dog on a Stick. Israel’s narrative, on the other hand, was that the plucky little Dwarves had persevered against odds and fought their way back to Erebor. Israel was the Joker to First World campus liberalism—unabashedly militarist, colonialist and racial (at the street level, if not always the diplomatic one) with none of the false motives that came to characterize America’s foray into the middle east. For example: because Jews believe that the soul of a person whose corpse is scattered in pieces can have no rest in the afterlife, when a Palestinian IED destroyed a tank in the early 2000s, the IDF sent a massive force into Gaza and cordoned off the area so that infantrymen under rabbinic supervision, crawling on hands and knees, could recover every last scrap of human flesh for identification. Make of this superstition what you will: what other modern country would ever deploy its armed forces to protect the souls of the dead?

But when you drink Zionism to the bottom of the glass you find exactly the kind of alienation that Baldwin experienced in the Alps. It’s not just bad mustache man and the Arch of Titus. It’s the cathedral at Chartres, Shakespeare, Beethoven, the Hermitage, the fucking Pyramids—for Jews these are all just symbols of persecution. The reason why Jew of Malta is long forgotten while The Merchant of Venice will never be forgiven (despite Marlowe being a thousand times more anti-semitic) is because Merchant is accurate.

For a long time, the Indo-European world understood itself intrinsically as something distinctive, unitary, imbued with special destiny and incontestably superior to any given runner-up. The swastika, for example, can be found all over the place in late 19th century America. It was still emblazoned on the leather binding of the yearbooks at my alma mater as recently as 1932. So it’s silly to trace the decline of the West to Plato or St. Peter or the French Revolution. The West wasn’t even getting started back then. It wasn’t until the period circa 1880-1945 that the transcontinental railways were built, the British Empire spanned the globe, Shackleton and Hedin made their expeditions, and Siberia, the Yukon, the southern capes and the heights of the Himalaya were all finally conquered. 

Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia is a remarkable travelogue of Argentina in the 70s, that memorializes this outpouring in the form of anecdotes from elderly British and German settlers living at that time in the southern Andes, who still remembered the influx of Europeans three-quarters of a century earlier, their conquest of the remotest lands, and the Odyssean sailors who transported its wool to market in London and Seattle, following nigh to the heels of Tennyson’s ancient mariner. Kipling, Jack London, the pre-Raphaelites, the Beaux Arts, and especially the children’s literature of that period all testify to the self-awareness of the West as something unitary and incomparably dynamic. The decline begins around the same period: the cynicism and malaise portrayed in Chekhov and Oscar Wilde, the banker’s coup of 1913, and the Great War, which precipitated maudlin Nazism, Wickard v. Filburn, the Stalinist purges, and the unseemly domestication of the American 1950s.

No literature encapsulates the awareness of a constricting malaise during this time better than the Lost Generation. When I was in high school in the 90s, back when reading was mandatory, The Great Gatsby was still mandatory reading. Tom Buchanan was taught as anti-racist satire, Meyer Wolfsheim shrugged off as a product of the book’s time. But Gatsby is incredibly based and prescient: not only is the portrayal of Jews there (and their relationship to the kind of arrivism  revealed in Gatsby’s fawning remark over lunch about the criminal Wolfsheim’s superior intelligence) exactly what it seems, but Tom Buchanan is not being smeared as a racist—he’s being smeared as a degenerate. Call of Cthulu was contemporaneous and its message is likewise deeply racial.

The Sun Also Rises is also incredibly based, with the capricious and overcompensating Jew, Robert Cohn, too googly-eyed and childish to ever be loved; the lapsed Catholic narrator, Jake, who’s too cynical to ever love again; and the bankrupt and cuckolded aristocrat, Michael, drowning in debt and drink. Likewise the ruined old nobles of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, overtaken by the merchant Lopakhin, of peasant origin, and played off by a Jewish orchestra. Lady Chatterley (and Forster’s Maurice) are altogether cast from the same mold.

I once read somewhere that The Big Lebowski is about the death of God, with each of the characters representing one of the several inadequate, cookie-cutter responses that Western culture has been acting out ever since, trying to cope and compensate. And yet the one personality the film seems to have left out entirely is that of the fascist. There are nihilists and a neocon, yes—but no Nazis. Or are there? 

It’s always dark in The Big Lebowski. Most of the action takes place at night. It seems to me that the various characters do indeed represent the empty masks we cling to like buoys of fake meaning on a sea of dread, as we navigate a dark night. The nihilists’ mask is simply the pretense of not wearing any. And this pretense may have many analogues, but fascism is certainly one, because it is pathos-laden and purely vindictive. It cannot resurrect an age of martial valor. It can only lower itself to the challenge of bestiality and dementia.

Consider the recent demonstrations by operatives of the so-called Rise Above movement, and their slogan, “white lives matter”:

Perhaps the principal conceptual shift that occurred during the 2010s was the passing of the torch of (advocating for) consumerist creature-comfort to the liberal class and its orcs from the withered hand of (more or less) conservative middle America, whose vanguard now takes to the streets to annunciate exactly the same kind of simpering and pathos-laden victimology the blacks once did. Indeed, this is the entire tendency of right-wing politics today. Does a virile and forward-gazing people need to debase itself in this manner? The unnamable is the eternally real, and true dominance is always implicit.

For everyone else, there’s the so-called dissident right.

Rise of the Normie Fascist

I’ll show you no nut November

“Progress and civilization, religion and the ideal have closed life in a mortal circle where phantoms most grim have erected their viscid reign.” —Renzo Novatore

“Beware of those who talk much of their ‘justice.'” —Nietzsche

I have a confession to make: I can’t stand Tucker Carlson. It’s not that I disagree with him much. It’s just that…. Some evils are so ubiquitous, so predictable, that I can no longer be bothered with anyone who’s still gawking at them.

It would be difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when the 2010s alt-right merged completely into basic conservatism. It didn’t happen all at once. For me, I think the first sign came a few years back, when the tattooed, pot-bellied pastor at a boys’ church activity group I take my youngest son to told the parents (apropos of what, I can’t recall) that “Strong men make good times, good times make weak men,” etc. But there have been lots of little moments like these over the past ten years, Yarvin on Tucker being the most recent. Or when The Tim Allen Show parroted the “white people built civilization” trope (which is true, but also pouty and cringe), or when rumors were going around that Steve Bannon was fond of Julius Evola. And who can forget this Chestertonian slop-gob, which made quite the rounds a few years back:

It’s always sad when your comedy heroes confess to being humorless. The verbiage, the sentiment…. It’s a perfect illustration of Wilde’s definition of a cynic. Note the outrageous abuse of the word “stygian.” The Enlightenment was a milestone in the history of consciousness. Its assassins are who is lurking in wait, and they’re all so…. tiresome. Little do alt-right Twitterers realize, when they skewer the uncouthness of Marjorie Taylor Greene, that they’re looking at their own souls in the mirror.

In late 2012 I was in college, when I encountered an article on TakiMag. Before long, I was reading Jack Donovan, then Radix and Alternative Right. It was all so heady and subversive. At the outset, the alt-right was equal parts Tyler Durden ontology and Tom Buchanan shitshow bombast. But the sense of alienation it spoke to was so raw, the venue it emerged in so incompatible with the catharsis of being punched in the face, that before long the alt-right went from skewering puritanism to practicing it. The moment of clarity for me came in 2013 when an alt-right page on Facebook shared a Counter Currents article condemning the Kansas City JCC shooter—but purely for tactical reasons, “optics” and the like. It wasn’t long before the whole thing became a Nuremberg rally, just another exhibitionist ring-around the fetid altar of full-retard anti-semitism.

The thing about fascism is that it’s all bark. Whereas Zionism started out with great feats of daring against precipitous odds, only to degenerate into a liberal consumer culture and a victimology, Nazism started out with bawdy talk and broken glass, only to take on precipitous odds that its ersatz heroism was insufficient to overcome—Tolkien’s “ruddy little ignoramuses,” stroked with assurances of their congenital fortitude, morality, and entitlement.

But we shouldn’t be too hard on the Nazis. After all, the complexity of nature and of human life is lost on ideologues, who are always in the vanguard of far dimmer wits—the man with one eye, leading the proverbial blind. For as I have sung many a time in the shower:

When one reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery, is the one and only condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed man, and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and ‘faith.’ To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing many things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly—these are conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same token they are antagonists of the truthful man—of the truth…. The believer is not free to answer the question, ‘true’ or ‘false,’ according to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on this point would work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic—Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon—these types stand in opposition to the strong, emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses—fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to reasons.

The party-men of the alt-right are on trial this week, in a federal court in Virginia, and things look to be going badly for them. Little do they (and their opponents) realize that they’ve already won. They got what they wanted—they radicalized the normies. Conservatism in 2021 is completely isolationist. Jews are about as popular as they were in 1937. Old-time religion is enjoying a resurgence. The Great Replacement is on Fox primetime. Everything is “based.” Alt-right memes and tropes are everywhere among normie conservatives and Trumpists, who in 2021 are finally as alienated as the readers of Radix were in 2012. The only problem is, they’re no less stupid for having been radicalized. The circus of American public life absorbed these poison darts, and carried on. The vanguard led its child army to the Holy City, and the windswept streets whispered “Rosebud” (and a promo code for MyPillow. Thanks, Jack Posobiec.)

Pay careful attention. I say this as a Pale Horse-before-it-was-cool conspiracy theorist: such an outcome is far, far beyond the abilities of Dr. Woland, Project Monarch, or the Elders of Zion. It depends on the constitution of the human creature—and his apotheosis, the American—something that can only be ascribed to the sick sense of humor of God Almighty. The problem was not hatched in a Prague cemetery, it was ordered loud and clear with a Dr. Pepper and a large fry.

Some carnival barker called Darren Beattie—a self-styled genius whose star is rising among right wingers, because they lack all sense of style—proposes that the antidote to left-wing moral fervor is right-wing moral fervor:

Juxtapose the slogan ‘Silence is violence’ with ‘Don’t tread on me.’ ‘Silence is violence’ is morally imperialist, and it will always beat ‘Don’t tread on me,’ and [this] registers the fact that the left, for all its faults, has the moral high ground, and that’s why they win. And so, until Republicans can be just as confident in being protectors of civilization against barbarism and destruction and defend civilization as such with the same kind of moral fervor that the left attempts to tear it down [using] words like ‘racism’…. Until they’re prepared to do that, they will lose. And so that’s the moral framework, and having the moral high ground gives you the confidence to hold frame in a discussion.

Where to begin with these brain contusions? The Republicans as “defenders of civilization”! “Civilization” is a buzzword, an affliction to which its sufferers apply the snake oil of moralism the way a junkie uses smack. This right wing junkie hates the left because the left has better smack. He needs the good stuff because getting help is out of the question—he cannot work for a living, he’s too far gone. “I’ll see your AOC and raise you a Father Coughlin and a No Nut November.” Is public discourse not insufferable enough? Who that lived through the summer of George Floyd could possibly want more moralism? This lunatic’s will to power is a game of blackmail anybody’s mother-in-law could beat him at, yet he intends to “defend civilization” with it. Sad!

Here is what this Beattie’s “moral high ground” looks like in practice:

The French and Indian War? Why not the Battle of Thermopylae? These dimwit spergs are everywhere now, with nothing to say for themselves but this Ancestry.com trivia. Outhouse intellectuals, consumer dissidents and high school football has-been dad bods who’ve learned the word “oligarchy.” The oligarchs couldn’t wish for choicer enemies, Beattie’s moral rectitude is the extent of their power:

Has the baggy-eyed soul of Spiro Agnew acquired a new flesh suit? The awakened Saxon would like to please speak to a manager. The cowboy reveals himself at length as a company man, a bourgeois conformist who vanishes without a trace unless he has a master to defer to. This loyalty-oath fetishist thinks the military is too woke because he doesn’t realize that civilizations have a life span. National and parochial loyalty in this day and age is not merely misplaced—it’s a pretense and a coping mechanism that can only become meddlesome and destructive. Hate me for saying so, but I don’t make the rules. Loyalty must be visceral—anything less is a waste of life, and I wouldn’t waste a minute on ideologies and institutions, or on making common cause with patriotic louts and moralfags against woke fairies and loons. If our rights don’t derive from government, but from God, then why this obsession with power? I don’t know about you, but my rights derive from me, and I don’t give a fuck what God or America has to say about it.

Reductio Ad Iudaeoram, Pt. II

innocence is bliss

Dave Chappelle is woke as fuck. He traffics in every NPR tote-bag trope from hair touching to food deserts, and tops off each of his specials with grave sermonizing about racism. His recent tranny bit was a fig-leaf for Netflix, and his “Space Jews” bit only made the whole thing palatable for consumer-dissidents of every variety, whose bravest ego-defense will always be Palestine.

What do I mean by this? Full-retard anti-semitism is not a garden variety prejudice, but its psychological mechanism is textbook projection, which works the same in every fanatical creed, its object being to salve the conscience while relinquishing one’s freedom. Moderate, “implicit,” classical liberal racism is sober and mature—the subtle recognition of ontological differences that makes mutual respect possible. Full-retard anti-semitism, in contrast, is dishonest precisely because it arises from a sense of innocence, something cunning and vindictive mediocrities are always in the market for.

As an illustration of what I mean by a sense of innocence, here is Congressman Thomas Massie commenting apropos of the recent controversy around the congressional progressive caucus’s mostly meaningless rejection of an allocation for Israel’s missile defense system:

I like Thomas Massie. I’d make him President if I could. But his Twitter feed is full of this Pollyanna bilge, and his formulation (above) is a good illustration of psychological distancing. Obviously, both of these things (“fantasy” and “reality,” above) are true, and they’re interdependent because a lot of the time it’s Foreigner A exerting influence on Congress to suborn U.S. influence over Foreigner B. But even supposing Massie’s tweet is correct as formulated: in order to buy influence, you have to have someone who is willing to sell, someone who holds power and is willing to hire it out. What Massie was implying instead—and certainly what those applauding him inferred—is that foreigners are corrupting Americans who would otherwise be quite innocent in foreign affairs.

Well I like America fine, okay? But that’s pure idolatry. Ever heard of Brown Bros. Harriman, or Mr. Potter? How about the Contracts Clause, or Lin Manuel Noriega? This country was structured on peonage and patronage and foreign wars from day one. Horatio Alger was a pederast for chrissakes, and Reverend Dimsdale was a paragon of “a moral and religious people.” Show me a man who thinks the problem is Jews, and I will show you an exhibit of the psychology needed to willingly go on having a problem when the debt for it comes due. And as for those earnest liberals who now essentially view Israel entirely from the Palestinian perspective, if I was King of the Jews I’d relinquish everything up to the 1949 armistice lines just to force the purveyors of this thoroughly conventional iconoclasm to say what they really think.

Oh, and by the way: $4 billion per year in military aid to a country whose military is constrained by this arrangement to spend $20 billion here, annually, equals negative 16 billion dollars, geniuses.

Literally Violence, Pt. V

It’s dusk in mid-October. We’re situated in a row, slumped behind an embankment along a muddy, sulfuric canal somewhere outside Ramadi, flush against the ground at about an 80 percent grade, craning our necks with our spines curved in and trying not to slide downward. The earth beneath our bellies is loose, blond and gravelly, making the SAW difficult to set in place without burying the tripod and sending kitty litter down into our faces. But the reeds poking up from the canal side are profuse and they’re good cover.

About a hundred yards north across the desert, three old Toyota pickups come into view, traveling eastward with a squad apiece hunkered into the flatbed. That’s them – the martyrs of the local God-Knows-Who-Brigades, of which there are too many to keep track in Iraq nowadays. For reasons unbeknownst to us, our assignment is to torch these motherfuckers extra crispy. We crawl toward the crest of the embankment and begin firing wildly into the encroaching darkness. The crawling was about as much coordination as we had in us.

The trucks all come to a halt. The one in back plows into the one in between, but the one in front floors it in the direction of a mud brick shanty down the mesa, about 200 yards east. At that point we all directed fire toward the escaping lead, like cats tracking a ball of yarn. This gave the back two squads respite to bail and take cover behind their vehicles – the guys who weren’t dead, anyway.

Under fire, the lead truck managed to make the shanty, and now we’ve got x out of a dozen or so guys dug in real good, and we’re taking fire from two directions. The shanty has no roof but there are pretty high, thick walls and it’s farther away than the two trucks, but Lieutenant orders some of the guys with M4s off to my left to start firing grenades at it. Obviously these would be better spent on the dudes behind the trucks, and pretty soon Sarge and Lieutenant are conferring at the tops of their lungs. 

Sarge and Lieutenant are way off to my left, about a dozen guys over; I’m at the far right, on the 240, so naturally I’m firing in the direction of this stupid hut. Because of the high walls, our counterparts don’t have a real good way to aim, but they manage, and every minute or so a spurt kicks up dirt and rocks right in front of me. Pretty soon a game of telephone makes its way down, and the guy to my left is shouting into my ear to do exactly what I’m already doing. Then all of a sudden I hear the shrieking of the Jav. In the darkness the back blast blinds my left peripheral vision, and in seconds the building I’ve been firing on is a cloud of ash and smoke. 

The boys have been on those two trucks with the grenades meanwhile, and as the dust from the mud brick hut is settling, the return fire from that direction starts to die down. Then a lone Iraqi staggered out from behind the Toyotas, which were shredded pretty badly. He wasn’t moving fast, but he was ambulatory, and he just started screaming curses at the sky as he made his way toward us, firing his Klatch erratically. Then Sarge stood up, slapped a mag into the 249, and emptied it into him.

Back: Part IV

Literally Violence, Pt. IV

With no job I was pretty discouraged, so I decided to join the military. This was an old, recurring fetish of mine. You know: heroism, adventure, they’ll be sorry when I’m dead; that sort of thing. There was a recruiting center out by the mall south of town, off the highway. I took a bus.

The building was a U-shaped strip mall, with a PayLess, a coffee shop and a dojo all facing the surrounding parking lagoon, and the recruiting offices arrayed around an inner courtyard in back.

First, I went to the Navy. The recruiter was a big horse-faced ruddy peckerwood who looked to be playing snake on a flip phone when I walked in. After making me wait a minute he looked up and smiled wide, right at me. “Good to see ya, brother. What can we do ya for?”

“Well, I’m thinking about joining the service.” I walked over and reached across the desk. His red hand was massive, his handshake smothering. I took a seat across from him.

“You’ve made a bold decision. Boy I’ll tell ya, joining the Navy was the best thing I ever done in my life.” Judging by his folksy accent, he didn’t seem to be from the area. “I’ve been to Hong Kong, Saipan, Australia, the Philippines, paid off m’truck.” He jerked a massive thumb in the direction of the window facing the back lot, where a Dodge Ram was parked, lifted on ridiculously large tires, with Monster Energy decals and a star-spangled Punisher skull on its tinted back window, and an “America’s Navy” sticker on the bumper. Then he leaned forward, looked left, looked right, then straight at me with one eyebrow raised. “You ever been to a brothel?”

“Uh, no?” There was an awkward pause. I looked down at my feet. He leaned back, sighed, and put his feet up on the desk.

“Well, I’ll tell you what. Decision’s yours, but I’d sure like to make it easier on you by having you take a practice exam and get some idea of what you’d be qualified to do for America’s Navy. You got your driver’s license, state ID card, something like that?”

“Uh, I think I left it in the car.”

In the summers it’s always foggy in Santa Carla. I walked back out to the front and looked up at the soupy grey sky. Then I went back around again, but along the opposite side of the building so the Navy guy wouldn’t see me go into the Marine recruiter’s office across from him. I waited there in the front entrance for a couple minutes until a neckless, Sponge Bob shaped little Hispanic Oompa Loompa came waddling intensely from the back in jogging gear and dropped a Walkman loudly on the front desk. Scowling, he pointed at me and asked, “You think you got what it takes to be a Marine?”

“Uh…. Yes?” We each took a seat across from one another at the desk.

“Name’s Marquez, but you can call me Sarge,” he said, self-importantly. “It’s rough out there nowadays. Unless you wanna join one of these inferior branches of service and jack off all damn day, your only other options is pretty much delivering pizzas.” It was clear he had practiced this little monologue many times over. “So, what do you do for a living right now?”

“Uh, I uh, I’m uh….” I paused for a minute. “I’m a stand-up comedian.”

An awkward couple of seconds passed with him staring at me blankly. Then all of a sudden, this taciturn little beaner let out a belly laugh like he’d just heard an incredible joke. “No way!” he bellowed. “Hey Richie, Satchmo, come on out here.” He swiveled around, shouting down the hallway around the corner from his desk. “We got ourselves a comedian!” He turned back to me, smiling ear-to-ear with his mouth agape and a vacant look in his eyes. Before long a rail thin blond-blue farmboy-looking high school jock in fatigues materialized behind Marquez, along with a diminutive black dude in gym shorts, a Marines t-shirt and thick glasses.

Marquez leaned back in his ergonomic chair, arms akimbo. “Let’s hear a joke!” They all had the same open-mouthed smiles, preemptively transfixed in anticipation of raucous laughter.

I lobbed a one-liner. “Uh, I go to hospitals and sell imaginary friends to sick kids.”

Crickets. Same fixed, grinning stares.

“Yeah, that one’s no good. Okay, okay, how ‘bout, uh…. Oh! I know.” I cleared my throat. “You really gotta watch out for undercover cops in this town,” I started. “The other day a homeless dude asked me for fifty cents. I told him, ‘Suck my dick!’ and next thing I know I’m under arrest for soliciting prostitution!” Their faces just stayed the same, all three of them, like wax figurines. Vacant eyes, gap-jawed grins. It wasn’t just that the material was lousy. They didn’t realize they’d missed the punchline.

“Hey, listen guys. I think I left my ID in the car.” I left and walked over to the Army office.

Behind the front desk sat this tall, gangly Asian in coke-bottle glasses with a snide, jaded mug. The name on his shirt was Park. He glanced up from his paperwork, gave me a once-over, then back down at his desk and continued filling out the form he’d been working on. “You sure you wanna do this?”

“Well, I like a kiss before I get fucked.”

“Can you count to ten and touch your toes?”

I gave a demonstration.

“Know how to read?”

“Backwards and forwards.”

“Well then you’ve got the makings of a goddamned hero.” He looked up and motioned toward a chair. “Have a seat.”

Forward: Part V

Back: Part III

Literally Violence, Pt. III

That first semester in community college went poorly. My weed money was running out, and my dad wasn’t going to help me if I wasn’t passing my classes. I could’ve begged him for help and promised to change my ways, but that would’ve been a lie. Groveling was not beneath my dignity, but lying was. So instead I just forgot to enroll in spring classes, went downtown the day after Christmas and got a job bar-backing at Fred’s Tiki Lounge, a dive bar so filthy your shoes stuck to the floorboards whenever you tried walking around in it.

Fred was a greying, mustachioed little gay Jew who liked to wear denim short-shorts and Hawaiian shirts with his ginger chest hair flaming out the top. He had a house promoter, this gangly, sullen hipster named Lonny Abrams, and a gimpy, ginormous bald biker doorman called Forehead. On slow nights, Forehead used to summon me to his stool in the front entrance for special assignments. He’d be getting off his flip phone, hand me the key to a padlock and specify some boarded up shack down by the beach where he wanted me to hop the chain-link gate to the overgrown back yard, wade through the cat feces and rusty cans (that part was never specified) and bring him back the box of laptops in the tool shed without asking questions (that part was amply specified). Or else he’d tell me to go down to the trestle, look for a guy in a tracksuit with a camouflage backpack, and bring it to the office around back of the club. He never paid me less than $250 cash for these odd duties, and I never thought about the legal ramifications, because the unknowable consequences of refusal or failure were far less pleasant to contemplate.

Anyway, Lonny Abrams used to put on a stand-up comedy showcase every Wednesday night. Stand-up’s pretty ballsy, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, so one week I slapped together a routine, and Lonny gave me a four-minute warmer set that went so well, they let me keep going for ten minutes. Flush with success, the following week, as I was writing my next routine, I hit on a real edgy theme that I figured was sure to gratify the counter-culture crowd by pushing the limits of free expression.

That Wednesday night I was in high spirits as I mopped the bathroom floors and replaced the urinal cakes ahead of the show. When the time came, Lonny introduced me, and as he handed me the microphone, I could see through the stage lights that the crowd was decent sized. I cleared my throat. “In this diverse, wonderful country of ours, there are so many ways we can all get along. But to make clear just how many, I wrote for you a song. The yellow, black and brown are here, the beige, pink, red, and tan, and they all have different ways to appreciate their fellow man. Some are gay, some are straight, but in our own special way, we all know how to hate. You could be a slope who hates darkies, a mick who hates spics, or a wee parish priest who thinks kids are for tricks. You could be a raghead sand nigger suckin’ camel cock for kike money, and if you think it ain’t funny, go blow yourself up for bus money!” I had another couple dozen stanzas of this, but before I could go on, my mic stopped working and the lights in back of the house came on. The place was dead silent. Then, as Lonny ran over to hustle me off stage, I heard a lone guy, way off in back, heaving with maniacal laughter.

Forward: Part IV

Back: Part II

Southern Exposure

There’s only one great road trip in Israel, a three-hour drive from Tel Aviv’s sweltering, interminable bumper-to-bumper through a great empty desert of sandstone canyons and date palms and camels, downhill all the way to the little manicured pubic-strip of beachfront hotels along Israel’s flea-speck of Red Sea shore. The Arava is a single arroyo so big you can see it from space, straining south toward furthest Arabia, punctuated by a massive below sea-level crater you can see a hundred miles across as you descend into it along serpentine switchbacks to its soft, sandy belly. Emerging at the other end, from eastward the craggy red mountain spine of Jordan leers down at you the remainder of the way to Eilat.

This dramatic topography belies the relative size of the speck of map that it crosses, and the contrast gives itself to a sensation of wild freedom comparable to driving from Denver to Taos, or from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe. When the highway finally reaches Eilat, you’re still looking downhill, across a long, gentle slope extending between foothills through town, down to the water and off down the coast of Saudi Arabia, as if the whole southern half of the country was one great funnel-shaped beachhead. To the east of you is Jordan, Egypt is immediately to the west, and the bay is full of Panamax tankers. No other place so small and narrow as Eilat could ever feel so wide open.

“They’ve got all these crime families in Israel, kafkazi, Moroccan. Mafia, mafia,” Boris informs me in slow, steady Hebrew as if he’s talking to a chinaman. We’re cruising south in Betzalel’s Lamborghini, top down, full moon beaming, the cool night air swirling in the desert around us. Boris is a street-wise general contractor who grew up in a pnimia, a kind of low-class boarding school for foster kids. Shrewd and charismatic, he has dreams of getting rich and a habit of cultivating useful friendships: Betzalel is the indolent and airheaded rich-kid pushover, and I am the American. I regard Boris with wry skepticism and he respects me for it. Plus we have a mutual sort of anthropological interest going on.

“And it’s true they pimp and run drugs,” Boris continues, “but would you believe where the bulk of their income is derived? From recycling. Municipal recycling! You get 10 agorot for a Coke can, right? Half a shekel for a bottle. So these guys extort restaurants and falafel stands for recyclables. Isn’t that wild?”

“No one in America would think to make a criminal enterprise out of saving the planet,” I respond. “That’s for damn sure.” (Actually, nowadays that’s not true anymore.)

Yotveta is the last stop before Eilat. We pile out. Boris and I grab chips and chocolate milk while Betzalel fills the gas tank.

It’s 1 AM on a Friday night when we check into the hostel. The room’s like a county jail cell, with eight bunks for a total of sixteen beds, a couple of violently buzzing fluorescent lights and a shitty ceiling fan. It’s not Betzalel’s kind of digs, but he was going along to get along because he didn’t want to be too generous.

A boisterous group of guys our age is drinking arak and playing dominos around a card table, monopolizing the space in front of the room’s single window, overlooking a boulevard where revelers are transiting back and forth loudly. These roommates are a half-dozen hairy kafkazi guys in skinny jeans and beaters, with two raven-haired broads standing, because the guys have all the chairs. One of the girls is frumpy and the other is pretty. They’re both wearing heavy layers of make-up. We nod to this group and the girls glance at us furtively, but I can tell the cute one had been looking at Boris.

We go out. We bar hop. We drink and dance and try to pick up chicks. Everyone comes to Eilat in discrete groups and it can be difficult to separate the women. Eventually the night finds us at a bar in this little cabana type place by the water. A largish group shuffles in behind us and in the dark I make out our roommates. As they pulled out stools Boris looked wary, but Betzalel struck up with them very amicably and before long we were all up the street in a nightclub with strobe lights, fog machines, a DJ and everything. Some drunk, sweaty chick was grinding on me, spilling her RedBull and vodka down my shirt in slips and slops, when I realized Boris and Betzalel had vanished. My dance partner was way too drunk for me to fuck honorably, and she smelled like faded Axe body spray and patchouli, so I took off looking for my friends. I found Boris around back by the dumpsters, making out furiously with the cute kafkazi girl from the hostel. Betzalel was off a ways, puffing on an L&M with his collar popped and pissing against a chainlink fence.

I walked right over. “Hey Boris man, where are those guys? You sure that’s a good idea?”

He tore himself off her face like a suction cup and looked around blankly. Then he said, “We’re taking a cab back to the room. You coming?”

“Uh…. Yeah, but what about those guys? You’re not worried?”

“Just stand guard down the hall for me.”

Ten minutes later I’m leaning on a vending machine with Betzalel when our douchebag roommates come bowling up the stairs like West Side Story. You could hear Boris fucking the shit out of this girl down the hall. “Hey, guys, how’s it going?” I put on a shit eating grin and tried to distract them, but they brushed right past me and into the room. I wasn’t gonna let them beat up my friend, but as I started to follow them in they burst out, dragging Boris by the scruff of his neck, shoeless with his belt buckle dangling. As the girl came slinking out, shamefaced and shoulders arched, Betzalel slipped into the room behind them and shut himself in. Betzalel’s grandfather owned an oil refinery in Greece, meat-packing plants in Israel, and God-knows what else. I’d been trying hard to like him but the fact was he was exceptionally stupid and contemptible.

In any case, I decided I’d play dumb with these kafkazi guys and see how far it got me. I trailed close but not too close behind them as they made their way to the parking lot, and when we emerged into the early morning I put on the thickest, most ham-fisted American accent I possibly could. “Hey where we going guys? We going back to the club?”

“Go back to the room, Sam!” Boris entreated. But as they opened the sliding side-door on their Mercedes Sprinter I slipped in behind the driver’s seat. “We going for breakfast or something guys?” I tried to look as moronic as I could. They all glanced at each other sidelong and kind of shrugged. Then they shoved Boris in beside me and five of them hopped in behind us. The sixth and runtiest one had bad acne, a ridiculous overbite and coke-bottle glasses with a headband. He grabbed the girl by the hair and slammed her face against the passenger-side window, then walked calmly around the front to the driver’s side. She snuffled and wiped a profuse stream of blood from her nose up her forearm, then from her forearm onto her pants. Then she climbed in the front passenger seat resignedly and buckled up.

There’s a ring road that goes up around Eilat into the burnt hills and comes out at a highway that winds up to an observatory and on along the Egyptian border. Dawn was breaking over Jordan as we turned east off the highway down a dirt track and off onto an endless, sandy mesa. Pretty soon we pulled over by some bushes and the driver snuffed the engine.

Boris was not the kind of guy to go quietly like he had, and the fact that no explicit threats had been made nor weapons brandished told me that on the one hand, these guys had good reason to be confident of being feared, which was very bad for us; but also that the situation was negotiable, because if you don’t need to make a threat explicit you don’t lose face by back-peddling. The question was how to give them latitude.

I hopped out ahead of the other guys in back as they dragged Boris out by his armpits like he’d been condemned to a firing squad. They threw him on the ground. I helped him up. Then they surrounded us as the biggest one, this choad-like, walleyed kid with a ginormous globule of neck fat separating his head from his shirt collar, brought out a tire iron and waddled over to right behind the little guy with the glasses. The runty one got right in Boris’s face.

“The name Benziad mean anything to you?”

“Yes, of course.” Boris replied. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I didn’t know.”

Eyal Benziad was one of the most feared names in Israel. I hadn’t lived in the country eighteen months and barely spoke the language, but even I knew that. The resemblance suddenly asserted itself: we were face to face with the son and protege of a mass murderer.

“Guys please,” Boris continued. “This is all a misunderstanding. I apologize. I really mean it. I didn’t know. I’m sorry. Please….” His voice was breaking. He was on the verge of tears.

Now, we may have been facing death, but I wasn’t going be murdered without my dignity, and Boris’s groveling pissed me off. At that time the U.S. wigger imitator of boogie lip-flap was a well-known comedy trope internationally, and I’m not proud to admit that I was going through a bit of a phase myself. In fact, at that moment I was dressed in a Sprewell jersey, Timberlands and basketball shorts down to my ankles. I looked like J-Rock from Trailer Park Boys. I even had on a sweatband. That’s when it dawned on me. I knew just what I had to do.

“Yo dawg, this some bullshit dawg!” I shoved Boris aside and got right in this kid’s face. “This my boy, dawg. We aint’ going out like no punks!” I said all this entirely in English, gesticulating as niggerishly as I possibly could. I tapped the runty kid lightly in the chest. “You fuckin’ with my boy, you fuckin’ with me dawg! We ain’t goin’ out like that. My boy ain’t no punk.”

The others tightened the circle around us. I’d tried, but now we were completely fucked. Just then the corner of the runty kid’s mouth turned up, and he glanced wryly around at the others. The walleyed kid in back burst out laughing like an orc receiving a handjob. That set off a chain reaction. First, the runt started cackling, then the others until they were gasping for breath. Boris glanced at me for a nanosecond, subtly enough to not be seen, with a look of supernal relief and amazement.

“What’s this guy’s name?” the runt asked Boris in Hebrew.

“Sam.”

“Sam? Nice to meet you.” He gave a mirthful snort as he stuck out his hand and we shook. “You America? America good. George Bush. Dr. Dre. You many good, many ha ha ha.” He said all this in English. “You friend name?”

“Boris,” I replied.

“Okay, Boris,” (now in Hebrew). “I think we can call this a misunderstanding. You need to have respect and be aware of who you’re dealing with in the future.”

“Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you.”

Then we all went back into town for omelettes and hair of the dog.