Variations and vagaries

Dr. Dan Blatt of GayPatriot makes some FB comments on the Iliad and on works derived from it. I am reminded of the Achilles-Patroclus bonding. And Mary Renault's books. And then Mr B made a joke on the phone about the "Native Americans" and the berdache.

As far as I can tell, the public institution of male love in ancient Greece was significantly different from our construct of gayness in that, rather than challenging the role of masculinity in society, it served and solidified it. It was an initiatory part of the patriarchal system and bound by clear rules, ritual and boundaries. That does not mean that the men did not love each other; after all, marriage is also constituted by rules, rituals and boundaries. But it was an older-younger format, and temporary. The rules, rituals and boundaries appear to have been concerned to avoid societal shame, which I take to mean likeness to woman or slaves. Both men had to act with honor. It seems that sex between them was supposed to be intercrural, not anal: that would have been shameful for the younger receiver. Of course it does not mean they always kept all the rules, but the expectation was there.

In a funny way, it might be compared a little to the institution of the royal mistress. I am thinking of Prince Edward and Lillie Langtry as an example. In the elaborate court and gender etiquette of that publicly prim Victorian time, it was well known that she was his mistress, but again, with a set of rules, rituals and boundaries designed to foster the institution of marriage. And to give her definite power, dignity and social position within them. When she later became pregnant (by another prince), she had to go to France and she raised the child as her niece.

(Dan B reminds that Alexander had Hephaistion...not really the same as a male mistress though, but also not erastes-eromenos...how often did such pairings occur?)

And although gay cultural-studies types like to use the berdache institution as some kind of vindication of the non-homophobia of the wonderful Gaia-loving sustainable Indians, as they do of the martial and philosophical Greeks, that set-up also fostered rather than challenged the dual-gender regime of the tribes and was equally constructed of clear rules, rituals and boundaries. It was really closer to transgenderism than to homosexuality because it was focussed mostly on gender roles and symbols rather than sexual behavior. Berdaches were males who were ritually transferred into the world of the female (and much more rarely, females into the world of the male.) They dressed, acted like and, crucially,  were restricted to the work of their new gender. As far as I know, there was no institutionalizing of a marriage-like relationship between two fully fledged men.

In the Greek case, the older male-younger male dyad was a training ground for the kind of men that the Greeks desired. It served societal masculinity and solidified it; it had, to my knowledge, no subversive or "alternative" function. The Indian system was a gender-crossing one, quite different from Greece. But it also supported the gender system, precisely in the way it allowed for exceptions. The exceptions proved the rule. And although berdaches had some status in the tribes, at least among the Blackfoot, joking about them was common.

To me, the novelty of contemporary gayness was...or could have been...the assertion that two fully fledged men could make an erotic and emotional bond that was not just initiatory but long-lasting and could do so as men, not as gender-benders. A combination of elements of the Greek and AmerIndian styles in something new. But it has turned out to be something else.

In the "gay" frame, with its founding structures of victimism, feminism and progressivism, being homosexual now means attacking and subverting masculinity (and femininity as well). While gay culture fetishizes masculinity physically and sexually, (witness gay porn), it critiques and contests it in every other way. Its activist leaders have taught gay males to find that a plus. But both societally and psychologically I find that attitude dangerously one-sided. And a lost opportunity.

It was summed up for me one day at my late lamented gym. One of the trainers was working out next to me and we did a little chatting. He had a bodybuilder's very worked-out frame and was quite handsome. With his string of attractive boyfriends (and his videos), I assume that he had a sexual energy to go with all that. But in many ways he had the personality of a teenage girl. And when I asked him --given his build-- if he had ever played football in school, he replied, "Oh, God, no. All that stupid breeder boy shit? No way."

For Ms Fluke and her sisters

HT above to Mr Freeze, below to Aftermath

Did you know, continued

that in dirt-poor Liberia, the country founded for and by freed slaves from America --who now are only a tiny minority among the 3.5 million who live there-- that their Constitution restricts citizenship to persons of Black African ancestry only?

BTW, I have no objection to this in principle. What is the point of having a country if you can't choose who you want to be your fellow-citizens? Citizenship is exclusive by nature; it only depends on what the grounds are. For most of the world, ethnicity is, and should be, primary. A country or nation is in many ways The Tribe writ large. Of course there is no international outcry from the Highminded against this Liberian restriction because it is not a White country. But you knew that.

It seems that the issue largely arises from complaints by the resident Lebanese community there. The Lebanese belong to that class of commercial middlemen cultures that Thomas Sowell writes about. No one loves these folks: Indians in Africa, Chinese in Southeast Asia, Jews in Europe, Armenians, etc. I am sure that they are doing better financially than most of the Black citizens there. The Jews of Liberia, so to speak.

The joys of tech

Windows 8 is out, in preview form. It's quite different from 7, so I decided to try it. Partitioned my hard drive and initiated the download, which took 3-4 hours. I had to leave for work, so when it asked if I wanted to install it now or later, I chose later. And on returning I find that it has disappeared. Checking the net, I find that I am not the only one with this experience.

I am not much irked. Long experience with Microsoft has prepped me for things not turning out as advertized. We'll try again tomorrow.

Part 2: It's tomorrow.

Downloaded a version overnight that did not disappear. After one false step, I am moving along to the point where I can burn a copy of W8 onto a DVD and then install it from there to the new partition. But I don't have any RW DVDs. So it will have to wait til I get some.

Later

Bought some R+ DVDs at Walgreens. Burned the ISO image of Windows to it using ImgBurn. Then did the reboot to install on the new partition drive. After filling in some forms, up it came and it worked. For the most part. Getting to my data files on the original drive is a little cumbersome and Office 2000 doesn't work on it (I am using LibreOffice), but it seems fine. It's clean and crisp and when it finally becomes The Norm some day, I won't hate it.

The W8 Desktop

Took some doing to find out out to sign out and shut down. Like the Hotel California, they don't want you to leave. But I did it and now am back in Windows 7. On re-starting, I can choose which system to use. All in all, a decent tech experience without disasters.

Racist criticism

Once you get to watch a racial or ethnic group other than your own it is not very hard to find their flaws. Usually what is called stereotypical and offensive is pretty much on the money. (If it weren't so close to home, it wouldn't hurt.)

Of late I have formed the opinion that one of the biggest flaws of Whites is moral arrogance and blinding narcissism.

I indicate what I mean by one example: Alinsky's Law which says that the radical should "use their own rules against them." Something which has worked spectacularly well.

Whites are given to grand, universal-sounding, abstract forms of moralizing. Once cut off from the healthy group self-interest which actually tempered that ethical compulsion, Whites are now the most foolish race on the planet. All someone has to do is achieve victim status, cry or bleed a little, blame it on the inconsistency between White morality and White behavior, and surrender is immediate. For this alone, Western civilization is unravelling. Atonement by suicide.

But this is not White, this is liberal, you may say. (Ex Cathedra has often said as much.) But who, I ask, could have come up with liberalism save for Whites?

No other group on earth would allow themselves to be tied up in knots and gutted by this kind of tactic, merely on principle, even funding and enlisting in the forces of their enemies for the sake of unselfish goodness. And think well of themselves in the process. Or imagine that they would be thought well of.

I can think of no precedent in history for this kind of cultural suicide. Plenty of culture and civilizations come to an end and, according to Toynbee, many of them die by their own hands. But never, as far as I can tell, with such a sense of pathetic righteousness.

If indeed America and the West unravels, it will be out of arrogance and pride. Not the kind that led to empire, but the kind that gave it up for noble reasons.

State as Church

I wrote a few weeks ago that the unforeseen outcome of the "separation" clause is that in the absence of a State Church, the State itself has become the Church. Mark Steyn points out how.

And from what I've read, the Obama administration intends to back down not at all about the contraception issue with Catholic and other religious objectors. At a meeting with the White House staff, the US Catholic Bishops were apparently lectured on theology. As in the other Henry VIII's time, many parts of the Church have long ago rolled over.

Honest

I didn't go looking for this.

Some worthless H*******d **** writes with glee about some film awards event she was at. She adds:

On another note, given the dominant image of Republican religious/conservative bellicosity perceived around the world - it was nice to see honors going to films from Iran and Pakistan. Earned honors in art serving as visual diplomacy.

****.

Sensate flaw

I still get the 4th and the 6th mixed up.

What gives you the right?

One of the changes in the last five decades is that we are inundated with the language of rights, civil rights and human rights. Rights have gone viral. And, IMHO, haywire.

One of my thoughtful commentors recently asked me about where rights come from. I am afraid that's a bit above my pay grade. I know enough to know that it is not a simply answered question. It requires elucidating views about human nature, human communities, history, the world and God.

On the homepage of the Dominican Order, its justice-and-peace devotees have articles up like this one: Brazilian street orphans and education: a human rights perspective. Without reading beyond the headline, you know that they will argue for a rights-based duty on the part of the Brazilian state to provide education for these kids. For most of the folks who speak the lingo of human rights, anything they think a person needs becomes a positive right. In America, we are now asked to believe that free health care is a human and civil right. (And that balking at "free" aka paid-for-by-someone-else contraception amounts to a "war on women") Where does it stop? Jefferson's deeply ambiguous phrase about a right to pursuit of happiness is now heard as a right to happiness itself.

With a HT to Canuckistan curmudgeoness-in-training Kathy Shaidle, a critique of the "human rights" regime and industry in far-advanced Europe by Luke Samuel:

But there is a more fundamental reason that liberals should be sceptical of human-rights law: because it makes us all less free. Human rights are not ‘rights’ in a liberal sense at all. They bear no resemblance to the ‘rights’ fought for by the radical liberals of the English Civil War, or the French and American revolutions, which sought to limit the power of the state and protect the autonomy of citizens. Instead, human rights treat people as fundamentally vulnerable and in need of state protection. This view of human vulnerability, in the eyes of the human-rights lobby, justifies the granting of absolute power to the state to set the boundaries of freedom.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg recently advised the remorphing Egyptian State not to use the old and limiting US Constitution as a model for their new make-believe democracy.  Her suggested models were the new-fangled and much more high-minded versions found in Canada and South Africa. She was right, but for the wrong reasons.

Since she was part of the Kelo decision, it probably does not bother her that the shiny Trudeaupian Charter of Rights and Freedoms lacks any recognition of the right to property. Or that no matter what kind of armchair glories the South African paper might describe, it does nothing to prevent world-class rates of robbery, rape and race-revenge murder*, to say nothing of the tribalism and corruption endemic to Third World countries (which Black "Truth-and-Reconciliation" South Africa now is). Anyway, we all know how respectful Arab Muslim states are when it comes to constitutional fidelity, so Ginsberg's advice is just pissing in the wind...(can females do that?)

*More White farmers have been slaughtered by Blacks there since St Nelson Mandela's ANC victory in 1994 than all the Blacks lynched in the US since the Civil War.

My point is that the American Constitution, while a product of both the English Protestant temper and the (AngloScottish) Enlightenment, was uniquely adapted to the peoples it was designed for: the Original Thirteen States. It stood on massive cultural, social, philosophical, economic and religious assumptions and on very particular political grounds. It was not the French Revolution's grandiose Declaration of the Rights of Man (parent, of course, to the UN's verbose paper frauds). Most of it was designed to create a limited government, a structure of purposeful inefficiency which would attempt to thwart or at least to slow the natural drift of any State toward tyranny. The Bill of Rights was a set of  amendments.

What strikes me more and more is that while democracy and human rights and dignity is touted around the globe as the unquestioned currency of civilized discourse, even by the Roman Catholic Church, it is as strange to human nature as it is rare in history. It is an opus contra naturam, requiring the skill, dedication and discipline of an alchemist searching for the gold hidden in the lead.

Mr Samuel puts his finger on the root difference between the once-robust and now fading-into-history American sense of rights and the Eurotopian version: ours assumed that the what people most needed was protection from the State. On the Old Continent --and its backwash here-- it's protection by the State.

A world of difference.

And as our demographics become more and more disconnected from the culture that gave birth to us, it is likely that, regardless of what the Dead White Men's document says, the collectivism deep in the human psyche will triumph. To say that we are a Creedal Nation, not an Ethnic one, is as much a deception as imagining that either Nature or Nurture have power unconnected to the other.

The group most likely to carry on the American tradition of rights, as opposed to the European, is the group most like the one that created it: White Christian Males. And that group is like the duck in Peter and the Wolf. The groups who naturally fall into the arms of the Statists, shown clearly by their voting patterns, are urbanites, women, Blacks and Hispanics, gays, Jews and Catholics. And we all know how much more White and rural the country is becoming.

Two men I'd love to have dinner with

Victor Davis Hanson, of course.

And Andrew Klavan, novelist, screenwriter and culture observer. In an interview, he is asked about the nihilism and relativism pervading popular culture, all the "shows about nothing". He opines that you can't make a good story or a good movie based on those values. An example of his charm:

That's why the movies that the Left makes in Hollywood are so bad and why people are staying away from them in droves, unless they're French...