Kevin 'Whitey' Power & D.H Lawrence sodomizing the American Eagle

The Irish novelist and academic, Dr. Kevin Power writes in the Independent

Novelists ...have often speculated about what the end of American democracy might look like, and have offered warnings about what might happen if a future government chose to dispense with constitutional checks and balances.

It is worthwhile making a distinction between the end of something and the interruption of a service associated with that something.  We understand that some aspect of the Rule of Law in a Democracy may, by Democratic means, be suspended due either to exigent circumstances or culpable malfeasance. But this is not to say that Democracy has ended.

Novels have certainly been written about the interruption of Rule of Law Democracy or even about its trajectory changing quite radically. But, to my knowledge, the canonical American literary imagination has never stretched to picturing a truly post Democratic America.

Even in pulp fiction, something of this sort obtains. H.P Lovecraft was able to envision a post Human world of utterly mad 'elder Gods'. But the point about that horror was that it remained nameless for nothing could exist to signify its alterity. There is no political equivalent to Lovecraft. The nearest thing to it is the "Left Behind' novels about the End of Times. It is interesting that when Philip K Dick imagined a Nazi ruled America, he came to the conclusion that the 'wabi/sabi' haecceity of 'epiphanic' things in that Universe would themselves point to its unreality and light up a path out of it. Only Democratic America was compossible with the innermost reality of things. In the Matrix films, sure, the US could be anything you like. But, if you take the red pill, you are left with the same Democratic ideal of America as that which enables me, a practising Hindu cannibal, to find the Left Behind books quite readable. American Democracy is like Superman in the Superman comic book titled 'What if Superman never existed?'. If it doesn't exist it immediately begins to be created, as it was in fact created, precisely for that reason.

Dr. Power takes a different view. He writes-

Watching Donald Trump threaten to deploy the military to quash the Black Lives Matter protests, and seeing viral videos of armoured and unsmiling troops guarding the streets of Washington DC, it's difficult not to be reminded of some of those warnings.

I think Kevin, or Whitey, as I like to call him, Power is wrong, not because Whitey Power is evil but because Whitey didn't rede nuff comix in Collidge. Whitey was all like 'A PhD in Amrikan Litterchur? Yes please!' whereas I was all like- 'stick it up your bum! Gimme a complimentary MBA from Wharton along with my Happy Meal.'

The canonical American novel of tyranny is It Can't Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis. Written in three months flat and intended as "propaganda for American democracy", it tells the powerfully upsetting story of hick operator and "actor of genius," Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, who hijacks the 1936 Democratic nomination, becomes president and, following the fascist pattern set down by Hitler and Mussolini, transforms America into a land of concentration camps and midnight arrests.

Lewis's book educated Americans about the evils of Hitler and even Mussolini (who wasn't that bad) by comparing them to the sort of local con-man ordinary folk were familiar with. What is severely lacking in Lewis is a vision of what a truly post-Democratic America might look like. It is one thing to imagine a situation where were-wolves take over the organs of State. What follows is a story of humans killing were-wolves or being turned by were-wolves. We don't have a picture of what a were-wolf society would look like in itself. Any attempt to render it would Americanize and Democratize the were-wolf. Indeed, this is what happens in Sci Fi series about alien invaders. They become humanised and factionalised and so it's back to politics as usual with a generic Sci Fi or Horror backdrop and Theophrastian characters of a scenes a faire type.

The book's evocation of an all-American dictator has a certain prescience.

Nonsense! Huey Long was already dead. Harry Truman, it is true, was humbly born, didn't have a College degree and once flirted with the KKK. But Truman is on the right side of history. Leaving him aside, no vulgar con-man ever rose particularly high in America. Trump has a degree from Wharton and was a very successful property developer. By the Eighties he had international recognition as a sort of Business guru.

Buzz Windrip, Lewis writes, "was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his 'ideas' almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a travelling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humour the sly cynicism of a country store".

So the guy was nothing like the son of a multi-millionaire who became a billionaire.

It Can't Happen Here enjoyed a mysterious sales boom after the 2016 presidential election. Incidentally, the novel's reply to the assertion made by its title is: "The hell it can't."

Which only proves that people who buy books, as opposed to those, like me, who read comics, are as stupid as shit.

Composing his own fable about the end of democracy, Philip Roth also found inspiration in the decade of dictatorships. The Plot Against America (2004) begins in June 1940, as the aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh accepts the Republican nomination for president. In reality, of course, Lindbergh - who famously flew solo across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St Louis in 1927 - confined his political interventions to the occasional speech blaming Jews for leading America into war.
In Roth's alternate telling, Lindbergh becomes president in November 1940. Like Buzz Windrip, he gets there by entirely legal means. And like Buzz Windrip, he presides over a regime founded on racism and fear. If Lewis, in It Can't Happen Here, recounted the suffering of minorities only incidentally, Roth understands that no authoritarian regime can function without an enemy to despise: in this case, the Jews, as embodied by a fictionalised version of Roth's own family.

This book of Roth's is utterly shit- on a par with Heller's 'Good as Gold'. American novelists should do a Salinger and quietly fuck off while the going is good.

Why is Whitey Power mentioning Roth? Is he pretending Trump is anti-semitic?

One of the first things Buzz Windrip does in It Can't Happen Here is divide America up into rationalised "districts".

But America was already so divided up. So is Britain. Fuck is Whitey Power's getting at?

He might have got along with the architects of Panem, the post-American dystopia of Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy (2008-2010). Famously, the impoverished Districts of Panem are compelled, by the ruling Capitol, to send their children as "tributes" to die on live television. Here the tyrannical ruler is President Snow - as in, "white as Snow". The Districts are divided up not just economically, but racially too.
It would be surprising if these books hadn't spurred some young readers to think about big political questions for the first time.

Whitey Power seems to forget that those young readers were seeing the Donald as a fatherly figure on 'the Apprentice' program.  Instead of getting Appalachians to kill and eat each other, the Donald was getting them to make money and improve their lives and lift up their families into a more gilded version of the American dream.

Looked at from one perspective, the Hunger Games books are powerful allegories of 21st century inequality and injustice. Looked at from another, they're instruction manuals for revolution: a model of the kind of subversion you can get away with, if people think you're 'just' writing for young adults.

Fuck off! Kids get that killing people will cause other people to kill you. By contrast wearing a shiny suit and doing business deals creates cascading wealth, not poverty. Every gang-banger has the 'instruction manual for revolution'. Kill cops and set fire to all the stores in your hood. Then watch your life turn to shit the same as it has done in other places which had 'Revolutions' against 'inequality' and 'injustice'.

"A republic, if you can keep it." But of course, the American republic invented in 1787 in Philadelphia excluded not just women, but slaves too.

Very true. George Washington chased Martha out of the house. She was forced to live in a kennel. Slaves would have been slaves of indigenous tribes if they happened to prevail over Whitey. Of course, some slaves might slit enough throats to become slave owners themselves. It should also be remembered that different States had different laws. Some held slavery to be abhorrent and illegal.

In other words, for women and black people, America has always been a kind of tyranny.

No. America has always been a place where freedom and equality was not just possible but most highly conducive to the general good. Some places in America were worse than others. It was also thought that returning to Africa might be better for one's descendants. Sadly, the reverse was the case.

The African-American science fiction writer Octavia E Butler spent her career dramatising this insight. In the sequence of novels called Lilith's Brood (1987-1989), omnipotent aliens called the Oankali resurrect humanity in the aftermath of nuclear war, and begin breeding them for their own scientific and cultural purposes. These books offer a savage analogue for the history of colonialism, and an unforgettable description of what it is like to live under a tyranny that you are powerless to topple or change.

I think there is something more to them. The late Sir Wilson Harris has illumined some corners of the vast Jungian continent that connects the great civilizations of West Africa and Latin America and ancient Egypt and India. We are entitled to envy a genius her ancestral heritage for, in her hands, it is richer than ours, but if we apply labels to her in a Philistine manner- as a slave trading Hun might appraise the market value a Greek Sophist looking only at the size of his muscles- then we harm most and most harm ourselves.

DH Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1924) is an overlooked but still highly pertinent volume.

This isn't true. The fellow was barking mad when he dashed it off.  But Literature Professors have a soft spot- in the head- for him.

The critic Susan Sontag called it "the most interesting book ever written about American culture," and she was not far wrong.

Because no book about American or Indian or British or Irish or Russian culture isn't utterly shit. At least Lawrence was off his head when he wrote that shite. I hope he got paid. When not crazy, he could write well about stuff he knew first hand.

In a sequence of essays about various American classics, including Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter and Leaves of Grass, Lawrence creates a rich psychological portrait of the US - a country, he says, founded on the unprecedented instruction: "Henceforth be masterless!"

Whitey Power misrepresents Lawrence who is saying people run off to America to escape from themselves- an obviously futile ruse which is like totally female and hysterical and which can only be remedied by salutary sodomy bent over the kitchen table while the kids look on in horror.

The complete quotation is-

 Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about the things they are not. Unless of course they are millionaires, made or in the making.

Fuck is wrong with being a millionaire in the making? Why emigrate if you want to be poor and have a shitty life in your new country?

Whitey Power, coz he studied a shite subject at Uni, doesn't get that what Lawrence is saying is Americans are shit. To sort them out good and proper you gonna get shit on your dick. That's it. That's the whole story. Lawrence is broadcasting the folk wisdom of the proletariat- or, in my case, the Curry & Chips Cockney Cost and Management Accountant- to those fuckers wot dun well Stateside. Except they haven't really. They think that just coz they iz rich and got nice wives and smart kids that they have done well! Hysterical nonsense! Only a good cornholing will restore them to their senses.

American democracy, Lawrence says, is best understood as the means by which the New World shook off the old.

No. Lawrence says that it was his own people who remained in England who did the really creative stuff. Americans were hysterical- i.e. female- and needed a salutary 'bit of brown'- i.e. sodomy like in Mailer's 'the time of her time'. This is a shit point of view. But Lawrence was completely crazy and married to some Teutonic nutter. Allowances should be made. Look at the following drivel-

Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters. There is always a master. And men either live in glad obedience to the master they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine. In America this frictional opposition has been the vital factor. It has given the Yankee his kick. Only the continual influx of more servile Europeans has provided America with an obedient labouring class. The true obedience never outlasting the first generation.
But there sits the old master, over in Europe. Like a parent. Somewhere deep in every American heart lies a rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe. Yet no American feels he has completely escaped its mastery. Hence the slow, smouldering patience of American opposition. The slow, smouldering, corrosive obedience to the old master Europe, the unwilling subject, the unremitting opposition.
Whatever else you are, be masterless.
"Ca Ca Caliban
Get a new master, be a new man."
Escaped slaves, we might say, people the republics of Liberia or Haiti. Liberia enough! Are we to look at America in the same way? A vast republic of escaped slaves. When you consider the hordes from eastern Europe, you might well say it: a vast republic of escaped slaves. But one dare not say this of the Pilgrim Fathers, and the great old body of idealist Americans, the modern Americans tortured with thought. A vast republic of escaped slaves. Look out, America! And a minority of earnest, self-tortured people.
The masterless.
"CaCa Caliban
Get a new master, be a new man."
What did the Pilgrim Fathers come for, then, when they came so gruesomely over the black sea? Oh, it was in a black spirit. A black revulsion from Europe, from the old authority of Europe, from kings and bishops and popes. And more. When you look into it, more. They were black, masterful men, they wanted something else. No kings, no bishops maybe. Even no God Almighty. But also, no more of this new "humanity" which followed the Renaissance. None of this new liberty which was to be so pretty in Europe. Something grimmer, by no means free-and-easy.
America has never been easy, and is not easy to-day. Americans have always been at a certain tension. Their liberty is a thing of sheer will, sheer tension: a liberty of THOU SHALT NOT. And it has been so from the first. The land of THOU SHALT NOT. Only the first commandment is: THOU SHALT NOT PRESUME TO BE A MASTER. Hence democracy.
"We are the masterless." That is what the American Eagle shrieks. It's a Hen-Eagle.

So it must be sodomized to cure it of its hysteria. Mellors must provide 'a bit of brown' to eradicate that hysteric's stain of 'black revulsion' so Whitey Power can have a Literature he can get a PhD for studying.

Fuck this shite. The truth is America has always been okay as have all its various peoples. But the same is true of Nottingham and Nigeria and such portions of North India as remain uncontaminated by them nasty Iyengars. How dare they suggest that I put garlic in the sambar? Why not just say beef-fat and be done with it? Who was it who ethnically cleansed Iyers from Iyerland- now renamed Republic of Eire by a homosexual Marathi named Varadkar? That's not a rhetorical question. Seriously, Whitey Power, if you know the answer do let me know. I'd love to return to my ancestral homeland and get married to a nice Colleen and father a family of leprechauns and get into fights when of strong drink taken and wake up in the sty cuddled with the 'gentleman who pays the rent'.

Sadly, Whitey Power has no interest in getting us Iyers back to that Emerald Isle where the fair Hesperides, or Nolan sisters, preside over an endless golden afternoon imperceptibly melting into night such as this in which I now write, last of the Aisling poets, sipping a Rum & Coke. Or trying to. I've run out off Bacardi. Alas! the Black Ale I myself make, I can not drink any of it!

Neglecting the cri de coeur of this dusky Iyer, Whitey Power quotes Lawrence

"Democracy in America is just the tool," he writes, "with which the old master of Europe, the European spirit, is undermined. Europe destroyed, potentially, American democracy will evaporate."

America is admirable because ties of blood and Christian neighborliness and 'Mussar' Judaism and other stuff I iz too iggnirint to mention, enabled people to marry and form communities and do brave, good, useful, things despite differences of race and religion and degrees of wealth. Lawrence was against that sort of thing. Why can't people just bend over and get cornholed and TRY FUCKING LISTENING TO ME FOR A CHANGE? As Lawrence says-

 There are these peoples, these "savages." One does not despise them. One does not feel superior. But there is a gulf. There is a gulf in time and being. I cannot commingle my being with theirs.

There they are, these South Sea Islanders, beautiful big men with their golden limbs and their laughing, graceful laziness. And they will call you brother, choose you as a brother. But why cannot one truly be brother?

There is an invisible hand grasps my heart and prevents it opening too much to these strangers. They are beautiful, they are like children, they are generous: but they are more than this. They are far off, and in their eyes is an easy darkness of the soft, uncreate past. In a way, they are uncreate. Far be it from me to assume any "white" superiority. But they are savages. They are gentle and laughing and physically very handsome. But it seems to me, that in living so far, through all our bitter centuries of civilization, we have still been living onwards, forwards. God knows it looks like a cul de sac now. But turn to the first negro, and then listen to your own soul. And your own soul will tell you that however false and foul our forms and systems are now, still, through the many centuries since Egypt, we have been living and struggling forwards along some road that is no road, and yet is a great life-development. We have struggled on in us that on we must still go. We may have to smash things. Then let us smash. And our road may have to take a great swerve, that seems a retrogression.

Whitey Power thinks this racist shite, published a hundred years ago, is 'highly pertinent'.  It isn't at all. We all know that the 'first negro' was the ancestral Eve from whom we all descended. Few Americans really want a 'one drop rule' to sunder them from their own potential posterity. Lawrence's demented 'Racial Consciousness' finds few takers outside the Prison-Industrial system.

If you want to know about American Literature, you must listen to Americans. Don't quote some crazy, racist, English shithead. Dr. Kevin Power is misleading his readers by publishing nonsense of this sort in the Independent. Fuck is his major malfunction?

What happens, Lawrence wonders, when America - itself now old - no longer needs democracy? On that day, he says, "America will begin." He doesn't say what this might mean. But the words have an ominous resonance, nonetheless.

Did Whitey Power not read the book he quotes? Or is he just shit at 'comprehension'? The fact is, some stupid cunts, a hundred years ago, believed in segregation. Miscegenation would lead to the worst attributes of both races being concentrated in the progeny. It is a law of nature that like must consort with like. An elderly Iyer man must marry another elderly Iyer man. It wouldn't do for him to marry an elderly Irish lady who might want to cook him some nice scones or anything like that.

We all know that Lawrence was a lunatic. There are no 'ominous resonances' in some shite that shithead scribbled a hundred years ago.

Nor is there anything 'ominous' about Whitey Power writing this dreck. He is not a Racist. He is not Evil. But he has a PhD in American Literature. Thus his brains have been buggered to buggery. He is not responsible for the lunacy he writes. The fucker probably thinks it is politically correct and like Black Lives Matter and shit.

Or maybe not. The Iyengars may have gotten to him. The Independent article ends on this dispiriting note-

Kevin Power teaches in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. His new novel, 'White City', will be published by Scribner UK in 2021.