Green Nazis in Space: New Essays in Literature, Art, and Culture Read online

  GREEN NAZIS IN SPACE!

  NEW ESSAYS ON LITERATURE,

  ART, & CULTURE

  by

  JAMES J. O’MEARA

  EDITED BY GREG JOHNSON

  Counter-Currents Publishing Ltd.

  San Francisco

  2015

  Copyright © 2015 by James J. O’Meara

  All rights reserved

  Cover design by Kevin I. Slaughter

  Published in the United States by

  COUNTER-CURRENTS PUBLISHING LTD.

  P.O. Box 22638

  San Francisco, CA 94122

  USA

  http://www.counter-currents.com/

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-935965-97-8

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-935965-98-5

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-935965-99-2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  O'Meara, James J., 1956- author.

  Green Nazis in space! : new essays on literature, art, & culture / by James J. O'meara ; edited by Greg Johnson.

  pages cm

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-1-935965-97-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-935965-98-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Literature and society. 2. Masculinity in literature. 3. Men and literature. I. Johnson, Greg, 1971- editor. II. Title.

  PN51.O45 2015

  809'.93358--dc23

  2015001416

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1. Green Nazis in Space!

  2. Welcome to the Club: The Rise & Fall of the Männerbund

  in Pre-War American Pop Culture

  3. The Leaven of the Pharisees: The Judeo as Cuckoo

  4. Kafka: Our Racial Comrade

  5. Michel Houellebecq’s Sexual Anti-Utopia

  6. The Fraud of Miss Jean Brodie

  7. To Cut Up a Mockingbird: Harper Lee’s

  Go Set a Watchman

  8. Sour Cream: Michael Nelson’s

  A Room in Chelsea Square

  9. “The Wild Boys Smile”: Reflections on

  Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John

  10. From Odd John to Strange Love

  11. From Ultrasuede to Limelight: Halston & Gatien,

  Aryan Entrepreneurs in the Dark Age

  12. Reflections on Sartorial Fascism

  About the Author

  This book is for

  Jeremy Reed

  Poet Laureate of Pop

  “But for those who live their dreams, the angel of Death wears black lipstick.”

  PREFACE

  If I were forced to give it a characterization of some sort—and Mr. Publisher certainly insists that I do so—I would say that this collection continues the themes of my first two collections1—most fundamentally, the Aryan Männerbund versus Judaic Family Values2—but rather than rooting them out in culture high (Henry James) and low (H. P. Lovecraft), here I concentrate on the popular middle ground of prestige Hollywood films, bestselling novels, and the worlds of high fashion and urban nightlife. Seen from that angle, my most recent publication, a small, novella-length3 collection of mediations on Mad Men,4 serves as a kind of amuse bouche preceding the feast that awaits you herein.

  Lest it be thought that this move to the study of Pop Culture is turning away from serious, Traditionalist matters in a last, desperate stab at fame and fortune—or only that—let me once more call the reader’s attention to the inspirational insight of the archetypal—and archetypical—poet Jeremy Reed: that the hysterical fascination of the pop fan with his idol is not so far removed from the fanaticism of the spiritual devotee and his icon.

  And in torch singing, the diva’s passionate devotion to unrequired love and the flamboyant gestural vocabulary that accompanies the singer’s resignation to loss is not so far removed from the poet’s desperate realization that only a part of his inner vision will be transmitted to the page.5

  Please accept these pages, dear Reader, as my own series of flamboyant gestures of passionate devotion and desperate resignation. Enjoy!

  As per usual, my thanks to Dr. Greg Johnson, for all his efforts on behalf of myself and our race; to Mr. Kevin I. Slaughter, for cobbling together another outstanding original cover design out of my mute, inglorious gestures; to Dr. Kevin MacDonald, who accepted an earlier version of Chapter Two that was greatly improved for publication by his critical comments; and above all to the small, distinctly disturbed band of Constant Readers at Counter-Currents.com, for whom most of these small patterns of white and black were first composed.

  Rust Belt, USA

  December 23, 2015

  GREEN NAZIS IN SPACE!

  Green Lantern (2011); 114 min.

  Director: Martin Campbell

  Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan/Green Lantern; Mark Strong as Sinestro; Peter Sarsgaard as Hector Hammond

  “In brightest day, in blackest night,

  No evil shall escape my sight,

  Let those who worship evil’s might,

  Beware my power, Green Lantern’s light.”

  “I pledge allegiance to a lantern, given to me by a dying purple alien.”

  —Hal Jordan

  When I was growing up in Detroit in the 1960s and ’70s, comic books weren’t that big a deal—contra Boomer and Hipster re-booting of pop culture as comic-centric. But during the few years I paid attention to them, comics were a DC joint, if only by default. I occasionally noticed a Marvel “mag” as they would say, but a quick glance revealed them to be not really the soul-feeding material I was looking for; in fact, they seemed—cover your eyes, fanboys with Stan Lee boy-crushes!—well, creepy and weird; for losers, like Disneyland or the Beatles.6

  Today, of course, I recognize what the problem was—they were the second wave of Judaic culture, in which the mask slipped a bit and a little more of the reality was exposed, deliberately or not.7

  Yes, of course, I know that comic books per se are a Judaic invention, but the initial, first wave—like Hollywood—was rather sedate, almost entirely Aryan in look and feel (I mean, whatever the “hidden meanings,” come on, Superman?), while Marvel gave off, quite deliberately I gather, an unmistakable whiff of the foetor judaicus.8

  That would be all the elements the fanboys love: “conflicted” heroes, moral “ambiguity,” stopped-up kitchen sink “realism,” relentless concentration on “urban” and “only in New York, folks!” settings and “in your face” attitudes, etc. In short, what I’ve called the Cockroach Culture.9

  At least I wasn’t scarred for life like this poor contemporary of your author:

  Amazing Spider-Man #5; October 1963. My first Marvel comic ever, bought off the rack when I was six years old. This was the most totally shocking comic I had ever read! Why? As a DC Universe fan, I was shocked to see the heroes in this book constantly fighting with each other. It was so bad I wasn’t even sure who the HEROES were supposed to be.10

  “Heroes” constantly fighting each other? Divide and conquer bitchez!

  The book’s star, Spidey, seemed to come off pretty badly almost all the time. He wasn’t famous and respected, like Superman. And the people and heroes in this book didn’t look anything like the people drawn by Curt Swan. They were all weird and . . . Spidery! I didn’t know why at the time, as a kid, but of course now we all know why: STEVE DITKO. Reading this book was like opening the door to another universe: the MARVEL Universe. I was hooked . . .

  Hooked indeed! And “bought off the rack”. . . they weren’t Walt White enough to make the first one free.

  With the triumph of this Judaic element in our culture, it’s no surprise that this fairly straightfor
ward screen adaptation of the Silver Age Good Guy living in Coast City, CA, would be met with howls of execration.

  For example, a blunt judgment from DVD Verdict Jury Room, “Green Lantern or Douchebag in Space”: “Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) . . . is probably the worst superhero ever portrayed on screen.”11 Or from Amazon:

  [T]oday’s movie superhero fans expect a guy in a cloak that’s just like you and me without any of the world-spanning baggage. Green Lantern’s guilty of being true to Green Lantern, spandex, mask, ring and all. For those who find it implausible, maybe a superhero powered by a jade-colored light source isn’t for them.

  Indeed. Just like us—a cockroach in a cloak.

  Since no one saw the film, here you go, from our friends at DVD Verdict:

  Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds, Buried) is a cocky test pilot with a troubled past and disdain for authority. His reckless ways in the air land him in trouble with his employers and his on-again-off-again love interest Carol Ferris (Blake Lively, The Town). That’s the least of his worries, though, after an alien spacecraft crash lands on Earth and its dying pilot, Abin Sur (Temura Morrison, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones) gives him a powerful ring and lantern, telling Hal that he is a Green Lantern.12

  What’s a Green Lantern? That’s what Hal learns as he’s whisked off into space, to the planet Oa, where he discovers he’s the newest member of an intergalactic peacekeeping force. There, he meets his trainers, Tomar-Re (Geoffrey Rush, The King’s Speech) and Kilowog (Michael Clark Duncan, Daredevil), along with the esteemed Sinestro (Mark Strong, Sherlock Holmes), who has some radical ideas about how the Green Lantern Corps is to be run.13

  Back on Earth, quirky scientist Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard, Orphan) becomes infected with a piece of Parallax, the alien who killed Abin Sur. Now Hector is getting smarter, more grotesque, and more bloodthirsty. In conjunction with this, Parallax itself is headed straight for Earth. Is Hal Jordan’s will strong enough to conquer his fears, save the world, and prove himself worthy of the Green Lantern name?

  I don’t have much memory of Green Lantern, and I gather the film is in fact rather unfaithful in several aspects of the Silver Age version; this Sinestro chap is actually supposed to be a super-villain, not a mentor, and GL actually becomes this Parallax guy, etc., but for the reasons already given, I never read a comic book after about age 12 and never will have the patience to work through the several decades of ret-cons and rebooting that DC has gone through in a fruitless attempt to “marvelize” itself as part of its surrender to the Cockroach Culture.14 Let’s just take the movie as it is.

  Of course, a lot of that might have been added or explained away if the movie hadn’t bombed and the producers, drunk on visions of another comic book franchise, had had the chance to produce the trilogy that seemed to be their ultimate goal. As it is, it looks like they stirred in plenty of Lord of the Rings stuff for luck. There’s the usual “humans are too dumb/primitive to help.” Oa looks like a Lovecraftian version of Rivendell, while Sinestro seemed to be doing a lot of Hugo Weaving-ing. On the other hand, he even forges another ring to supposedly fight the Bad Guy with his own Evil Power, as Gandalf advised against, though as far as I remember that subplot simply disappeared. If the Council of Elrond was the UN Security Council, the meet-up of all the alien Green Lanterns went one better in size and variety of species, sort of like the General Assembly.15 Of course, like the UN, bigger does not mean better.16

  But really the problem lies with the most basic decision that the producers made: imposing the same old “superhero movie” template on far more interesting material. A reviewer at Amazon is perceptive enough to deserve quoting at some length; after Hal arrives on the aforementioned Oa:

  At this point I excitedly waited for the film to really take off. Until now there had been some exciting action and nice character work. Hal had been firmly established as a screw- up, adrift in life, hoping for something bigger, and now that fate has handed him the chance to join the Green Lantern Corps, he presumably has a chance to right his course in life. But in an incredibly contrived moment, he decides that he’s not up to snuff, quits the corps, and returns to Earth (although, strangely enough, he is allowed to keep the ring). Instead of the epic space opera I was expecting, the filmmaker decides on something far more quotidian: a superhero movie. The rest of the film goes through the usual superhero motions . . .

  Green Lantern is a decidedly schizophrenic movie. Where the first half of the film provides the perfect setup for the “hero’s journey,” a story about one character being plucked from the mundane world and lifted into an exciting realm of adventure, the second half of the film seems content on playing superhero connect the dots. . . .

  Unlike Batman, Spider-Man, or even Superman, the Green Lantern Corps lends itself to interplanetary superheroics more in the vein of Star Wars and Flash Gordon than Iron Man. But this is also what makes the character exciting. Where we have seen the basic outline of a superhero movie time and again, Green Lantern offers the chance of more science fiction tropes, which could potentially differentiate him from the glut of other superhero movies. Instead of shying away from the imaginatively bizarre, the filmmakers should have embraced the alien aspects of the Green Lantern mythos. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Green Lantern is that it represents a missed opportunity. . . . Trying to make Green Lantern like Iron Man was a grievous error in judgment. I expected more from Martin Campbell.17

  This, I think, is why the second half is not only uninvolving but wrong-headed. I’m no more interested in “space operatics” than “super-heroics,” but what this reviewer has tumbled on is that the basic Green Lantern story—both how an individual deals with his fate and the creation of an Order of such men—is much more than “the usual superhero motions”: an actual Traditionalist myth—or mythos, for you Lovecraftians.

  While Superman just falls ass over teakettle into superpowers, and Batman struggles to become, really, just a vigilante in need of psychiatric help, the third-string player on DC’s roster is far more interesting: he is offered the chance to remake himself, become his own creator. It is a hermetic if not heroic quest.18

  As IronFanofSteelofThunder (sheesh!) recently noted:

  The difference is this: Green Lantern is the one guy who not only had some really cool powers and adventures thrust upon him, he was required to be actively responsible as well. Superman could’ve just stayed a farmer. Batman could’ve been a normal person and gone through some therapy rather than becoming the world’s finest ninja. Billy Batson could’ve been Batman. Bilbo could’ve stayed in his hole! The difference between Green Lantern and those other guys is they didn’t really have a choice and because his power chose him in spite of him. . . . Green Lantern is kind of a loser, but can conquer his own fears. That’s what makes him a winner. Because he doesn’t really have a choice. I mean . . . he does. But does he?19

  Well, it is hard to tell, when it’s a man and his fate. Does he choose it, or does it choose him?20

  “The ring chooses you.”21

  He, like us, doesn’t really have a choice, if he wants to be a real man.

  Jef Costello recently made use of a couple of D. H. Lawrence quotes he picked up from Derek Hawthorne, and I’ll use them here too:

  “It is the desire of the human male to build a world: not ‘to build a world for you, dear’; but to build up out of his own self and his own belief and his own effort something wonderful. Not merely something useful. Something wonderful” (Fantasia of the Unconscious, p. 18).

  And:

  “Primarily and supremely man is always the pioneer of life, adventuring onward into the unknown, alone with his own temerarious, dauntless soul. Woman for him exists only in the twilight, by the camp fire, when day has departed. Evening and the night are hers” (Ibid. p. 109).

  Whereas, of course, the superhero is the far more conventional figure, saving the innocent and winning the girl, living happily ever after.22

  This dichotomy, as Law
rence postulates it, is in harmony with the division Baron Evola makes between society, the realm of women and family values, and the State, the realm of war and men.23

  In that light, here’s IronFanofSteelofThunder’s summary of what we’ve been calling the Green Lantern Mythos:

  Fearless adrenaline junkie, Hal Jordan, suddenly has the most powerful weapon in the galaxy, the Green Lantern’s ring, forced upon him. He goes to the home planet of the Green Lantern Corps, Oa, and finds out that he is a member of an exclusive force of super space cops.

  Now, that’s a movie!24

  I think in general we can say that tempting as it is to see the “superhero” genre, either as comic book or movie, as one of the last locations for manly heroism, it represents a corruption—a rendering ineffective—of the Aryan Hermetic Quest; the Hero is constantly expected to put his self-actualizing on hold while saving Untermenschen and pining away for some female. Back to the campfire, in short.