The Nazification of Bowling Leagues

An old one, via Steve Sailer:

Could Bowling Leagues and the PTA Breed Nazis?

... In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Germany had an exceptionally vibrant civil society that included clubs involved in hiking, animal breeding, shooting, gymnastics, bowling, firefighting and singing. The authors’ principal finding is that in cities with dense networks of clubs and associations, Germans were far more likely to join the Nazi Party.

I understand the average person not wanting to figure out Nazi Germany for himself but it's unconscionable for a pundit to throw around the other N-word without some kind of understanding beyond "Nazis are bad." If they're such a bugaboo, wouldn't we benefit from a richer understanding of the movement and its consequences?

I recommend Richard Evans' Third Reich series, which is probably the most thorough history we'll see in our lifetime. We're at a strange time in Nazi history because the last of those alive in that era, even as children, are few and far between. With so few left to defend themselves, progressive historians have begun to paint pre-Nazi German culture as irretrievably evil, making the horrors of Nazi genocide the product of the sinister German Volk rather than the corruptible nature of humanity. Evans' work does much to combat the notion.

This article is especially interesting because it's both a repeat of the Nazi's original intention and a very bad understanding of history. In short, the Nazis took over the bowling leagues. That is, if you were a member of the North Munich Strike Squad, you would have walked in one day to find that your league had been disbanded and you were now invited to join the Strength Through Joy Nazi Bowling League. Membership in the Party was probably something less than optional.

Take the much-referenced Hitler Youth. We are instructed to understand that this was a youth group made up of rabid young Nazis. In fact, it was the Nazi replacement for the Boy Scouts. The boy, like our former Pope, who wanted to go camping and tie knots had no other social outlet than the one with the Fuehrer's name.

It was in this way that the Nazis consolidated power. There was no assembly that didn't have the swastika attached. Nothing was outside of the Party's purview and everything had to be turned towards the Party's goals.

Understanding this, it's both frightening and hilarious that the progressives have come to a similar solution as their arch-rivals the fascists. The bowling league, when directed only towards bowling and camaraderie, is a potential petrie dish for ideas contrary to the Powers That Be. Thus, they should be monitored.

The only saving grace is that a progressive-controlled bowling league, with its quota-mandated teams and handicapped scoring, would be so little fun for anyone that it would die on the vine.

A Word on Pope Francis

I figured that the conversation about Pope Francis' long interview would have faded by the time I adjusted to fatherhood and returned to the blog. That was apparently too optimistic.

So, my two cents:

So far, I haven't been thrilled about Francis the way I was with Benedict. Then again, Benedict was my "return to the flock" pope, so my warm fuzzies may be colored by sentimentality. My interest and path back to the Church has been moral philosophy, so Benedict often seemed to be addressing what I wanted to know.

Not so with Francis, who often seems to be speaking to the liberal worldview. He's from Latin America and a Jesuit, the main sources of the discredited liberation theology. The danger, traditionalists fear, is that his Jesuit background and life surrounded by Marxist politics (though Argentina is hardly the worst of the region) will allow Leftist thinking to infect the pontificate. This will cause, in typical Leftist fashion, the moral authority of the Church to hollow.

I will allow that Francis' statements have been alarming to me and I won't strike the possibility that he may weaken the Church in some manner. However, I believe, as we are called to believe, that the Church is holy and the Bride of Christ. If the Holy Spirit has placed Francis where he is, and we are called to believe that, too, then there is no cause for worry, even if the immediate results look dire.

The Church will always be under siege, even from within. But the highest Power of all is guiding it; there is no need to despair.

Quick Review: Mike Doughty's "Circles..."

I've watched Mike Doughty's discussions of his new album with a sick fascination. He decided to re-record several of his old band's most popular songs, despite the outcry from Soul Coughing fans.

Soul Coughing has a lot of props in the alt-world and one hit, "Circles," is a good example of what they did, stripped-down and slowed-up for the mass market. My opinion is that the band was probably the best amalgamation of the alternative rock movement and hip-hop. Doughty didn't try to rap, which was the most common mistake artists made in the 90s, but instead used the forceful delivery of MC punchlines with a hint of melody. The rest of the band took the influence of sampling and break-beats and delivered something similar to a Bomb Squad (of Public Enemy) sound, aired out for live instrumentation. The old saw is that great artists steal, and Soul Coughing stole the thinking behind hip-hop's sound to create their own.

Doughty is a recovering drug addict and most of his reasons for re-recording these tracks are about band acrimony and general bad memories about his time with them. I can understand trying to reclaim them; I saw him maybe eight years ago and everyone requested SC songs (which he mostly refused)--it must be difficult to be reminded of the worst time in your life every time you step on stage. But I suspect that this is a "Fuck you" to his old band-mates; Doughty can claim a larger amount of the royalties for the same songs.

How's the album? Terrible, mostly. Useless, certainly. None of the songs seem to be re-imagined. They are arranged very similarly to the originals, only wimpier and with a few extra light samples thrown in here and there. The vocals are pushed forward, which is probably gratifying for Doughty but take away from the texture that made SC so good. Without the tension and input of the rest of SC, Doughty's songs lose a lot of their urgency.

Years ago, I read a book about The Beatles' Get Back sessions, the aborted album that was later shaped into Let It Be. The author took each tape and more or less gave a synopsis, ie, the songs they played and the discussions in between. The primary lesson I took was that it's difficult to determine who actually wrote a rock song. Paul would come in with a melody, a chord progression and a couple of lyrics and the rest of the band would flesh it out, making suggestions all the while. Someone might come in with just a riff. The final product is often much different than the original idea. So, who gets the credit?

The real pop revolution of the rock era is that the recorded performance is as important or even more important than the song. "White Christmas" may have been popularized by Bing Crosby but any performer can sing it with impunity. Rock doesn't allow that--witness the popular decline of Pat Boone, who covered R&B tunes as if they were "Three Coins in the Fountain." In the modern pop era, instrumentation and production matter as much as the quality of the song itself.

Doughty's problem with his band-mates ultimately circled around writing credits, just like so many other bands. Doughty was the frontman and originally a solo folk artist and poet. SC's albums are credited to the band, and so they get publishing rights as much as performance royalties. The new album is credited to Doughty alone, but that doesn't mean you should buy it. A good band is a chemical reaction while Doughty's newest is inert.

Ideal of Freedom: Sex Like a Gay Man

What I've found most productive when looking at the world is to be flexible in my philosophies. Not to swear allegiance (though I've had those moments) but to try on a lens and see how the world looks through it.

This is my thinking when I'm exploring conspiracy theories, most importantly the satanic, Illuminati theories. Not only do they apply a level of meaning to otherwise shallow pop culture, they create a new image of the world I know and through which I can compare the map with the territory.

So it is with a layer of credulity and another of skepticism that I read HenryMakow.com. Makow is a (I believe) former professor in Canada who started as an anti-feminist blogger. His interest widened into the global satanic conspiracy, with a bit of Jewish conspiracy thrown in. The Jewish stuff is as non-anti-Semitic as is possible for such a site, emphasizing again and again that the average Jewish person is as much a victim of the conspiracy as the gentiles. A fine line, I know.

The site's quite a hodge-podge of topics, with angry Canadian Muslims criticizing their universities to disgruntled recovering feminists to gloating satanic conspirators contributing. What I've found most enlightening is his repeated assertion that we are being driven to a sexual morality that mimics that of male homosexuals. Lust ranking high above love, casual encounters, group sex, habitual breaking of taboos, emphasis on appearance over everything else.

Reading Vice this weekend, I had that familiar shock of reading something that fits one of my filters. Try "Learning How to Have Sex Like a Gay Man" by Fiona Duncan.

For years, my best women friends and I have bemoaned our inability to bang like our gay male peers, who seemed to practice an ideal of free love we longed for, full of equal opportunity objectification, elective nonmonogamy, unashamed sluttiness, and a communal acceptance of all of the above. Gay sex land was, to us, a magical place where traditional monogamy was possible, maybe, but usually questioned; where jealousy wasn’t nonexistent but it could either be ignored or made hot.

It's the mark of our academic Left that they insist their instincts are wrong and that their theories are right. I can see where Makow is going with this, because going against one's instincts in order to find transcendent bliss is the core of occult esoterica. Duncan reaches the promised land on mushrooms while getting fingered in the midst of a crowd of gay men at a music festival:

I was at the center of a queer Dionysian cabal, and in my post-orgasm rush, I saw God. High in the sky, she rose up: a hologram above the rainbow stage lasers and the sea of bodies.

We could all argue with Duncan and those like her about the dangers of this behavior both to herself and to society but it would make no difference. They have been trained, and trained themselves, to view all resistance as oppression, even if that resistance comes from within.

In the past, I hadn't approached men not because I didn’t want to or men didn’t want me to, but because of the power dynamics of traditional heterosexual relations. The scripts of courtship are well rehearsed: singledom as a path to coupledom and coupledom as defined by a property-oriented monogamy. The woman is the beloved, the man is the lover, pursuer and pursued, blah blah blah. None of this ever fit me. I envied my gay male peers, because they got to start fresh and write dynamics to suit their desires, rather than forcing their desires to fit some predetermined model.

You see, her reluctance to "jump" men wasn't the natural order of the complementary relationship of the sexes, it was a product of "power dynamics" and "scripts." She had to overcome these instincts and to do so she had to make them alien, a role-play injected into her brain before she could make her own decisions.

That, in a nutshell, is why I'm pessimistic about the American experiment. As we've driven further into waters only charted a priori, we've also cut off all paths of retreat. Any phenomenon that disproves the theory is already discounted as fear or ignorance or as a tool of control. The only way back, it seems, is for each individual to wake up, one by one. Most will not until they realize they live in a ruin.