Exchange with a reader from New Zealand

(Below, the discussion segues into an attack on, and a defense of, New York City.)

Stuart L. writes:

May I say that you and your website (and others similar) have been a great discovery for me. I’m an everyday person with no University education. But for years now I’ve found that reading the MSM is like grappling with an octopus in the dark, only worse, and more dangerous. It’s so superficial. Blindly reading about symptoms, with little analysis of the root causes of the events all around us.

I’m grateful to have benefited from the rise of the internet and the free availability of websites like yours, and others similar. You know in your heart what’s real, what’s true, and your website is like a slap in the face—a slap of reality, not like the usual B.S…

LA replies:

Thank you very much. I’m glad you’ve found the more serious conservative parts of the Web including VFR.

“… that reading the MSM is like grappling with an octopus in the dark, only worse, and more dangerous.”

That is extremely well put. This is precisely the state that most modern people are in, because modern liberalism operates by never stating an idea clearly, never stating what its own principles really are or where it is heading. We’re just shoved around by slogans which, if you examine them, make no sense or are completely contradictory or lead to destruction. For a thinking person, it is a kind of hell. And the only way out of that hell is to think one’s way out of it, to figure out what that hell consists of, how it operates, what its messages are, where it is really tending. And at the same time to rediscover non-liberal truths that pre-exist liberalism. Then eventually we find ourselves standing on separate ground from liberalism and are no longer under its power.

LA continues:

If you don’t mind my asking, I see your time tone is Greenwich plus 13. So I guess you’re writing from Australia?

Stuart L. replies:

I’m in New Zealand, and am a citizen (born here) but spend a lot of time in Australia, and have spent time in the U.S.—I love New York City.

New Zealand suffers from a left-wing government, drives me crazy…Anyway, like many others here, I love America, for all the right reasons, the constitution, freedoms, wealth creation, history etc. I call it the “idea” of America. So much negativity is expressed about America over here, but in my opinion its the greatest country ever and has given more hope, freedom and opportunity to more people than any other. Sorry, don’t mean to ramble on. My family were (some still are) farmers here and I’m self taught re history, business, the world etc, sometimes the best way, i.e. no indoctrination…regards Stuart L

- end of initial entry -

Howard Sutherland writes:

Glad to see Stuart L is a USA fan, but I hope he’ll come see that America is a real country, not just an idea. Also, he should see more than NYC, which epitomises so much of what is wrong with America today.

Sebastian writes:

This may be a petty issue to write in about, but I take issue with Mr. Southerland’s characterization of New York. Having lived in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Miami and Milan (Italy), let me say New York remains a bastion of certain traditions in the finer arts, ballet and opera, sartorial style, calling card manners, unapologetic upper class consciousness, genuine femininity and even masculinity. Only Milan can compare. One can still be a bohemian aristocrat here in the tradition of John Randolph. Sure, vulgarity is the norm today, but at least serious New Yorkers don’t strut around in shorts and baseball caps calling themselves “conservatives.” I always enjoy having my California friends turned away at the door of East Side institutions because of their khakis, fleece sweats and sneakers. Women here remain feminine compared to the androgyny found across northern cities. In Cambridge, my ex was accused of playing into sexism for wearing make-up and a skirt. Ever go to Cleveland, Buffalo, Seattle?

New York’s local tradition, from Fernando Wood’s proposed secession to the city’s general ungovernability, speaks to an independence that reminds me of the south, where I grew up. I’ll take our ranting, soap box anarchy to the sexless, joyless puritanism of the New England anti-smoking crowd any day. Even our baseball team has a stoicism and lack of showmanship that is almost Roman. There are worse places to be a conservative than New York, where VFR hails from, by the way.

There is no other city in America today that still celebrates the remnants of Western Civ like New York, where I attend the ballet six times a year and date proper women with manners and style. We have Shakespeare for the masses (which is a good thing), and art institutions that compare only to those in Europe. Yes, they have all been degraded, but they are to be saved by us. The banking and finance sector here remains a man’s world, where un-PC jokes abound and a healthy male rivalry outstrips the ongoing project of emasculation. The week I spent at our branch in Chicago was an exercise in sensitivity training and female vulgarity.

There is more to traditionalism than hating liberals and neocons. Carrying on the crafts and manners of Western Civ, however besieged, finds a home here in our obscure shops, Brooklyn warehouses and one-room apartments. Virginia is a wonderful place, and South Carolina, Georgia and the rest have their own distinct traditions that I enjoy. But as far as cities go, New York is still in the league with Milan, Rome, London and the greats. New York is home to the best and the worst. It is not “what is wrong with America.” Los Angeles is.

Let us not mistake traditionalism with provincialism or working-class consciousness.

LA replies:

I wonder why Sebastian would say that his e-mail is petty. I like his defense of New York. Here is a brief defense of living in New York that I once once posted, with a follow-up by John Carney, who posted at VFR in its early days.

Also, Sebastian writes:

“Women here remain feminine compared to the androgyny found across northern cities.”

I won’t speak for northern cities generally, but I agree that no one would say that women in New York are androgenous. They walk around like self-possessed goddesses. The problem is that they reveal too much, way too much, of themselves.

Sebastian replies:

“I wonder why Sebastian would say that his e-mail is petty.”

Because it’s a bit of a rant and I do have a disciplined mind somewhere in here. What attracted me to your work is that unlike most moralists on the right, you appreciate Western Civ and the American tradition warts and all, from Monteverdi to Lynyrd Skynyrd as I say. What is happening today is an attempt to erase us altogether and create an undifferentiated mush of “humanity.” I’m less interested in traditional left/right economic debates. For example, I would welcome a patriotic English working-class movement, even with the usual welfare state overtones, that defended the interests of the families that fought the Blitz and saved their little island; the ones now displaced and forgotten by advanced Blairism. I think we are in an epic struggle to preserve the whole thing, all of it, the good and the not so good, and New York does capture a certain vitality and spirit that is purely Western, where the high and low mingle on the same streets and people are called out to give an account of themselves. I like that; it reminds me of Boswell’s London Journals.

LA replies:

I’m glad you said that. That is central to my sense of traditionalism, and it’s something almost no conservatives today have. In one way or another, most of them reduce the West to some idea or a set of “values.” Even many paleocons, reacting against neocon univerasalism, tend to reduce the West to the idea of small-scale particularity, of “peoplehood” in the narrowest, tribal sense. To me what defines traditonalism in the broad sense, and can bring together more particular types of traditionalism under one umbrella, is a sense of membership in Western civilization as a whole, experienced a concrete living thing, extending over centuries—“an instinctive love of European man.” That’s what Westerners used to have, and what’s been lost.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 03, 2007 08:51 AM | Send