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Jan. 7, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
59:28
The Other Confederacy
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Hello, everyone.
It's the latest installment of Left, Right, and White.
I am Chris Roberts, and I'm joined, of course, by Gregory Hood.
Today, we are going to be discussing the John Kennedy Toole novel, Confederacy of Dunces, and I wanted to just give an intro to this book with a very American Renaissance story, which is that during my first tenure at AmRen in 2016, I was trying to put together a big list of recommended books by all of our major contributors.
One work of fiction and one work of non-fiction.
And Greg was the most difficult person to get answers to these two very basic questions from.
I must have emailed you, I don't know how many times, being like, man, can you just give me one non-fiction recommendation and one fiction recommendation?
And after, like, I don't know, the seventh try, You finally did reply, but in your reply you gave no explanation to either of your recommendations.
You just gave me two titles and two authors, and your selected work of fiction was, in fact, John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces, which is still on our recommended reading list with absolutely no explanation from one Gregory Hood.
I don't believe in explanations.
Yeah, which helps explain why we're doing a whole podcast about this book, because we don't believe in explanations, right?
Right, we don't believe in analysis, which is why we're going to talk about this for an hour.
So, why did you recommend that specifically in the context of... Oh, I see what this is.
You're finally getting me to answer.
That's right.
It'll be five and a half years, but yeah.
Yeah, I'm getting what's mine.
I mean, the way I always, first of all, as I think anyone who has read it would confirm, it's probably one of the funniest books ever written.
Yes, strong, fully.
Tom rivals Wolf at his best.
I mean, there are parts where you just can't And this is actually one reason that some people complain about it, because it almost comes off as just like one long joke.
And some people think, well, you know, is there a point to any of this?
You know, it's just kind of all these absurd things happening to this guy.
Well, that's why Simon and Schuster rejected it.
They said explicitly that it seemed pointless, like there was nothing to it.
It had no meaning.
Yeah, that's actually something that I wanted to take issue with here.
I mean, his mom at the end, not to say that any character in this book is a paragon of virtue or vice, but Towards the end of the book, I mean, the protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, is a highly educated but, shall we say, eccentric individual with strong views on theocracy and medieval theology and the plight of the modern world.
And he clearly knows a great deal from books, but it doesn't really have much of an impact on his real-world actions, in terms of how he behaves, in terms of how he conducts himself, even though he thinks it does.
And his mother says, toward the end of the book, basically says, for all you're learning, you never learned how to be a human being.
To me, I don't think that every single story has to be the hero's journey.
I don't think every single story needs to be a person starts out, goes through certain experiences, comes out, transformed on the other end.
One of the things that we see in fiction now, which is very annoying, is, you know, Mary Sue's for female characters and then I guess whatever would be the male equivalent of a character who's just utterly perfect, right?
And we see this a lot with political correctness.
It makes it hard to write a non-white or a female character because if they have any flaws, that can be perceived as offensive.
So, you know, it makes a lot of these things kind of boring.
Ignatius J. Reilly, of course, is not.
I mean, he's a white male, and he's pretty reactionary, even by my standards.
But what I thought was really cool about it was he doesn't really learn anything, but he transformed—everything about his condition is transformed by the end, and there is a kind of salvation in it, in the fact that he basically pairs up with this person who he's clearly meant to be with, Even though, on paper, they're completely different in every possible way.
It reminded me a lot, actually, of Fight Club, where you have the modern male, basically, who has been stripped of his identity, stripped of his masculinity.
No meaning, no purpose.
Our great war is a spiritual war.
He gets... he starts off all this... He gets involved in all these radical things.
He gets something moving, which he doesn't really control.
He realizes he doesn't actually want it, and then at the end, as the skyscrapers are blowing up and everything else, he basically finds his salvation in a fairly conventional, I would even say, you know, small-c conservative relationship with a woman.
And that's sort of what happens to Ignatius Riley, who goes through all this stuff, has all these various adventures, isn't quite as productive or inspirational, if you want to say that about Fight Club, about certain things that happen in that book.
He still ends up in sort of the same place.
And one of the things that's referenced again and again, because he's always talking about medieval theology, is Fortuna.
The idea of the Wheel of Fortune spinning you in one place, bringing you on an upswing, bringing you on a decline.
And this idea of not having any control over your own fate.
And this idea of there being almost a destiny for you.
But somehow, Your choices and your free will manifest that destiny, and I think that's kind of what happens to the character here.
To set the stage, it's also...
This is probably the quintessential New Orleans novel, I would say, right?
I mean, wouldn't you agree on that?
And it's got to be a contender for one of the top ten southern novels, I would think.
People certainly say, like all the critics agree, that this is the quintessential New Orleans novel.
I have no comment on that, because I've literally never stepped foot in the city of New Orleans.
So I really, really could not say.
What I will say is that it's something that I loved about it when I read it, and this is maybe sort of selfish, but something about it that I found so inspirational was how much like Flannery O'Connor the prose is.
It really embodies that southern gothicness and that just unbearably dry humor, just that killer wit.
And for me, it was this moment of, oh man, that means that it's literally possible for other people to write like Flannery O'Connor.
It's not just her, it's not just one in all of human history.
Others can do this.
Even people who weren't her contemporaries, because O'Connor is of course often compared to Carson McCullers as well.
They were writing at the same time, they were relatively close in age, and John Kennedy Toole was not, by any means.
I mean, he had a very different kind of life than Flannery O'Connor did.
Flannery O'Connor grew up super rich in a really close-knit family, and meanwhile, Toole got drafted and was sent to Puerto Rico, and his family was broke.
There are a lot of family issues going on throughout his life, which you definitely see in a big way in Confederacy of Dunces.
I think you could say that it's one of the best southern gothics, but it's like second wave southern gothic, if you will.
Yeah, there's one quotation, if I can just jump in real quick, towards the end of the novel when he's preparing his escape.
He's gathering up his notes, you know, with his girlfriend, who, you know, he won't admit is his girlfriend, and he says, We must not let these items fall into the hands of my mother.
She'd make a fortune with them.
It would be too ironic.
And, of course, this is sort of what Happened because John Kennedy Toole of course famously killed himself and then his mother went on this kind of crusade to get this book published and It secured his and by extension her immortality and it also gave it a kind of tragic grandeur and some people who don't like the book quite as much will say well, there's real talent here, but
It won the Pulitzer and has this reputation precisely because the author killed himself before his full potential could be realized.
And so, you know, John Kennedy Toole could be a character in a, you know, one of her novels, I think, in terms of like, I mean, he is, the author himself, is like a Southern Gothic character.
More than Ignatius Riley, I would think, who is, I think, It's so comic that it's hard to see.
There's definitely an undercurrent of sadness to it.
There's definitely an undercurrent of pessimism, but it's sort of undercut by the fact that Riley's view on the world is so deeply pessimistic that it's hilarious.
So for example, you know, he sounds like Spengler sometimes.
He says things like, oh, you know, optimism is like at the root of All of our misfortunes.
He pines for a good authoritarian Pope, but then when the church does something he says, this is why I can't stand with the church.
His schemes for improving the world always come from a deeply reactionary place, so he gets a civil rights movement of a sort going.
But of course he calls it the Crusade for Moorish Dignity.
And it ends up in a farce because he starts calling for violent attacks against the people who work with him in this office, and the blacks are looking at him like he's crazy and just say, man, I'm not going along with this.
And leave him there.
He is constantly referring to this book, The Constellation of Philosophy, and talking about his rich inner life, which somehow justifies his complete lack of action throughout the entire novel.
I mean, the only reason he even does anything is because, partially because of his own fault, he and his mother get into an accident.
His mother, basically drunk driving, causes some property damage.
She has to pay for this property damage or she'll go to jail.
Therefore, he has to get a job and His utter inability to exist in the modern world and to function as an adult is what drives all the struggles going forward.
It's also interesting from a racial point of view because this is the character Jones is probably one of the very few I don't know, priest, civil rights, black characters who is just a character.
You know, he's not, this isn't something where it's, oh, he's so noble and I as a white person can feel good about myself because he's so saintly and I'm taking his side.
He's also not some depraved criminal or anything like that.
He's just a guy.
Who has very human motivations for everything he does, but you also can see the politics changing in the way he talks when he says that at one point he's confronted by his employer for, you know, not mopping the floors quickly enough and he says, you know, times are changing and I could get a mob in front of this business and get you on the color TV real fast.
And even then, I mean, we're talking, you know, late 60s, before that.
Even then, there was already the understanding of, oh, okay, this is how the media works.
Minor Mitkoff, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, she's the, again, almost stereotypical Jewish, extreme, leftist, lives in New York City, constantly looking for causes, constantly berating Riley for not throwing himself into the politics of everything and getting involved with this movement or another.
This is the woman who's the protagonist's on-again, off-again, maybe, kinda, sorta girlfriend.
Well, it's implied they were together in some way when they were in college, right?
But they basically write these tremendously abusive letters and telegrams back to each other and in a way, I mean it sets up sort of the polarity where you have the ostensibly traditionalist Southern Catholic and then the caricature of the Northeasterner and I mean at one point she says that she's handed a pamphlet by somebody And she's so taken with the pamphlet that she starts trying to promote it to all these trendy lefty magazines.
And one of the things she really likes about it is that the author of the pamphlet really, really hated wasps.
And that by itself tells her that this guy is really sharp.
But then, and the pamphlet is going on and on about Catholicism and how the Pope is You know, this reactionary force who's gonna do all these terrible things.
But of course what she doesn't figure out until later was that the author was apparently a Klansman.
And she was so caught up in her own moral drama that she couldn't, she didn't quite get it.
And then of course she's horrified, not so much because of the Klan, but because of the association with her now.
And that's not trendy.
She's doing a lot of the same things with Riley where At one point she's talking about how he needs to get involved with real world politics and social movements to be truly authentic.
And I think she references, I believe it's a Kenyan exchange student whose name is like Unga or something like that.
And again, it comes off exactly the way white liberals talk about blacks now, where they're essentially some sort of pet for them, and a way for them to get some sort of self-realization.
It's like, oh, he's so real, and he's so authentic, and he's so deep.
But then the guy blows her off and doesn't go to some political meeting she's trying to do.
And she says, well, as far as I'm concerned, he can just get the sent right back to Africa.
And of course we see.
I mean, that's pretty typically liberal, too, in terms of.
If these people don't play the role that they have set out for them, they have no use for them anymore.
Everything is conditional on their own self-exploration and their own rich inner life.
But for all the talk about either restoring some traditional moral order, as Riley fancies it, or as his girlfriend would put it, you know, realizing some form of justice or something like that, nothing is actually accomplished.
Every step they try to do ends in catastrophe.
A lot of times they end up advocating the exact same things on paper, For wholly different reasons, and it ends in complete absurdity.
So, for example, again, we'll go through the plot very briefly, but it's almost not... I mean, this is sort of the Seinfeld of books in a way, in that it's sort of a book about nothing.
I mean, it's just sort of this guy's musings on the world and how he just kind of blunders from catastrophe to catastrophe.
The plot itself is very simple.
The plot is they get in this financial hole, he has to get a job, he can't get a job because he's too dysfunctional for the modern world, and all these Side characters revolve around all the catastrophes that he's inadvertently causing, and then at the end, his girlfriend basically drives down from New York City to rescue him as a kind of political act, as a kind of political ministry, and he flees the city.
And that's it.
So, you know, I'm not taking anything away from you by revealing the plot here.
Yeah, especially since just every sentence is just such a pleasure to read.
Like, just in terms of prose, this book is just masterfully written.
Yeah.
I mean, very early on, you get a sense of it where he says, I'm at the moment currently writing a lengthy indictment against our century.
When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
And then his mom adds in, like, he does make very good cheese dips.
And.
You know, this is this also breaks up how it's been received since, because back then it was, well.
Here's this fallen hero.
Here's this person who could have done all these great things and he killed himself and it's very sad.
And I think we should actually talk about suicide and the reactionary temperament and the leftist temperament a little bit later.
But at the time, People reading this thought this was hysterical.
And then later it was seen as sort of, well, you know, is there really anything to this?
Is it perhaps a bit overrated?
But now I want to quote from an article that was written about it in the New Yorker.
This is the conclusion.
Early in the novel, Ignatius tells us, I am an anachronism.
People realize this and resent it.
In 1968, Tools Hero mystified one of the country's finest editors of fiction.
In 1980, he seemed harmless.
Forty years later, this red-pilled malcontent calling for a theofascist revival seemed something else entirely.
Ignatius J. Reilly, the godfather of the internet troll, the Abraham of neckbeards, the 4chan edgelord to rule them all, was no anachronism.
He was a prediction.
Where did you find that?
It's the New Yorker, man.
And this is the thing, is that as absurd as Ignatius Riley is, he's less of a caricature and less absurd than a modern journalist.
Like, anyone who could write that parag- like, that paragraph has more inherent humor and absurdity than this entire novel.
And I think this is probably the funniest novel ever written.
It's funny that he mentions internet trolling and stuff because Ignatius is so terrified of interacting with other human beings.
What I was thinking when I was looking over the novel before this podcast is, it reminds me of that Japanese word that I'll of course mispronounce, but it's like hikikomori?
MRI something like that or like it's it's just these total hermits even though they're in their teens or 20s
They just they sit at home and they just do nothing, you know, they just play video games or mess around online or
whatever Because that's really what he's doing
I mean, as you said earlier, the book gets rolling because suddenly this totally dysfunctional weirdo has to go out and get a job to help his mom pay for this property damage that happens through the sort of comedy of errors of drunk driving.
Which, although the mother was driving, Ignatius certainly shares a great deal of the blame for that car accident, but I'll let you all discover the details about yourselves when you read it.
This is not the kind of book where I really need to get into the plot details too much.
It's more about what it's saying.
And, again, to bring it back to, you know, who is Ignatius J. Reilly, one of the reasons why I like this, I mean, you could say, the obvious thing here, let's take this New Yorker thing at face value.
Let's say that if you're a typical midwit, journalist, academic, whatever, you could say, oh, conservatives like this book because they see some of themselves in Riley, even though Riley, of course, is completely, I mean, he's disgusting.
Much of the humor of the book, and I mean that not in a moral sense, I mean, well, maybe partially that too, but in a physical sense, he's fat, there's a great Yes.
of prose expended on the various functions of the body and how often he
farts and his questionable choice and attire. I mean he's he's repulsive. Yes, in
every way imaginable. Yes, and there's there's nothing redeemable about that.
The only thing that you might find interesting about it is the fact that he
has these anachronistic views, which of course the novelty of that wears off
very quickly.
I mean, if you, you know, like, oh good, I want a good authoritarian Pope.
Well, I mean, I'll give the New Yorker this credit.
I mean, I can name about like 300 people on Twitter who are probably writing up something about to that sort right now.
But I actually saw it as something of a of a challenge in a way, and this goes for the leftists too,
who are also, you know, living vicariously through the struggles instead of
actually really accomplishing anything, which is the total disconnect between the ideals and how he's
actually living his life.
So he'll go to the movie, he'll go to the movies, even though he doesn't really think movies should
exist, and he'll deliberately seek out the films that have people involved in the production who
have outraged him in the past. And he'll do that. And he'll do that. And he'll do that.
And then he'll start screaming stuff in the theaters about how this shouldn't be allowed and everything else.
He talks about how we need to be, you know, recenter morality and theology and all of these things.
But at the same time, he also thinks that one way we might be able to get, this may be another reason this book may not age so well to some progressives, is if we can convince everybody in the military to be gay.
Because then they'll be too busy prancing around and doing everything that this will inadvertently lead to world peace.
And so, like, taking the path of sin will somehow actually lead to a greater glory, which is world peace.
And of course, he sends a telegram.
to uh Myrna about this scheme which doesn't explain it very well at all and even though Myrna is literally giving lectures with titles like erotic liberty as a weapon against reactionaries encourages him to go to counseling she says you must have therapy soon or you will be a screaming queen so and that's fairly typical as well in that Every other page, both of these people who are the poles of the story, even though Myrna doesn't really show up until like the last few pages, they're constantly contradicting themselves.
Yeah, yeah.
Both of them fail to live to their ideals completely.
I think that's a big part of their attraction to one another is that on some level they are with their kindred souls and that they you know, have all of these lofty ideals and, you know, pen
these diatribes and these sort of manifestos and all, you know, all of these goofy things.
But she's just an academic cliche. And, you know, he's, he's an incel living with his mom. Yeah,
that's exactly right. What is the, I mean, she's, she's so perfect too, because she is in the
world in some ways that Riley is not.
Of course Riley does not want to engage with the world at all.
She actually is there trying to get involved in causes, trying to start all these groups.
At one point Riley says that he wants to start a party of divine right.
Where our leaders would be chosen by divine rights through some sort of mechanism.
And she agrees with this plan because the fascists are gaining power and America needs a third-party system.
And this is precisely the kind of thing that will splinter away a faction.
So she says, yeah, I'll help you start a chapter up here in New York City.
So she is in the world in some way.
She is talking to people.
She's constantly organizing.
And this is the thing with leftists, right?
Like organize, organize, organize.
You don't do anything all day except organize and organize.
But there's no actual human connections being made except for this fat reactionary who lives in New Orleans whom she presumably hasn't seen in years and writes abusive letters to back and forth.
Yeah, they're constantly challenging each other and getting under one another's skin and it's all so... I mean, three pages before he's essentially rescued by her, because what essentially happens is his mother, at the beginning of the novel, is She understands that her son is a failure to launch, but she still loves him.
But by the end, she's so exhausted that she's essentially going along with a scheme where he's basically going to be put in an asylum.
And whether that was actually going to happen or not, Ignatius clearly takes this threat seriously.
And so that's why he flees with Myrna, who comes down, and Ignatius has enough sense to understand how Myrna is viewing him.
She's looking around, you know, looking at where he lives.
Looking at the front of the building and she's recording it.
She's putting it into her memory.
It's a very meta thing in that this is a cinematic moment.
This is the movie and I, the great progressive, am now saving this benighted soul.
I am the hero of this story.
But At the same time, I mean, it is, like, the only authentic, like, human connection she probably has.
Because every other thing that we follow vicariously through her letters ends in complete catastrophe.
And she goes from going on what she calls these investigations of the South, pre, or I guess we would say early, Civil Rights Movement, And telling stories about, you know, so terrible and dogs and this and that, how brutally these people are being treated.
But, you know, she's thrilled.
She's so happy to be talking about how horrible it was.
And one begins to suspect, you know, it probably wasn't that horrible at all.
But she has to seek out this stuff to give herself meaning.
Yeah, which is an unending sort of leftist I don't know, almost like a psychological trope of just that eagerness and that glee in finding injustice and discovering poverty and, you know, unearthing inequity or something.
It's like, oh, here we go.
This is the stuff.
Good, good, good, good, good.
You know?
Yeah.
Muckraking, essentially.
I mean, I think Theodore Roosevelt, whose views of the world are closer to mine than Ignatius Riley's.
I mean, as he put it, the point of muckraking was not to deny that there were social injustices or that there were things that needed to be changed.
I think very few people would accuse Theodore Roosevelt of not wanting to change things, and after all, he did run as the head of the Progressive Party.
But the point is that if you're just focused on the mud all the time, you don't see the chandelier overhead.
It's kind of inherent to the leftist project that not only do you not see what is good in the world, but you actively have to bring it down, because you have to cultivate misery.
You have to create problems when there are no problems, because if there are no problems, what's the point of your life?
Whereas Riley kind of comes at it from the other side, where His ideal world is this world of an immovable king, in a divine order, with a great chain of being.
You know, he doesn't exist now, but he imagines it to have existed at some point in the past, and through kind of abstract contemplation of geometry and things like this, we can just sort of be, and not actually have to do.
And in that, we'll find our greatest happiness and contentment.
And so I think that the charge is that there's no journey here.
Yeah, the characters don't really learn anything.
I mean, I don't think Riley has learned anything from his experiences, and his girlfriend hasn't learned anything from her experiences.
The mother has some sort of an arc in the sense that, you know, now essentially the albatross of her son being cast off, it's presumed that she can marry and have relationships and have a life again, essentially, being beyond a glorified babysitter.
The reader clearly has a journey, which is that you're being taken sort of this philosophical tour de force of like, this is how these worldviews, which seem diametrically opposed, are actually coming.
They're basically the same thing.
And furthermore, This is the problem with both of them, and they share essentially the same problem, which is this idea of being in the world.
And again, we're getting into like kind of existentialist or Heidegger territory here,
but this idea of being in the world.
That there's not, there's nothing that you can just freeze in place and say, this is it.
This is how everything has to be.
Because if you're Riley and you're imagining this perfect divine order that's been upset by
various degenerative forces, which by the way, you keep patronizing.
Or if you're a progressive who thinks that, you know, nothing is good about the world and you just have to run around throwing yourself into causes and everything is political and everything is an abstraction and there's no actual people beyond this behind the correctness or incorrectness of their views, which of course just is another way of saying whether you like them or not and you just sort of read to put an ideological spin on that later.
I mean, you're really missing what life is, because life is not something that can really be grasped in abstractions.
That's why, you know, a good novel is so hard, is because once something is put in words, it kind of ceases to be true.
And so the best you can do is sort of, as a reader, you want to experience something.
You don't want to just be told it.
And I think the reason why this book is so good is because I think Tool did have a point.
I think there was a theme here.
I think he did want to tell us something, but he did it in a way just like a good movie does.
You don't tell them, you show them.
And he showed us with words, which is a very, very hard thing to do, especially when you're dealing mostly with abstractions and worldviews.
And then, of course, you know, it's just fun to read.
I mean, Riley...
You know, going out there having to sell hot dogs but he can't make any money because he keeps eating all the hot dogs while lamenting the fact that this occupation even has to exist.
I mean, this is... it's perfect.
It's comedic gold and every page of it is like this.
Or when he accidentally ends up at a gay sort of house party.
That's a really wild scene as well.
Yes.
And what ends up happening too is that he He ultimately, it's not that he's not doing anything.
I mean, he does have all these, like, kind of scattered notes all around the room of these incomplete manifestos and everything else.
I have to admit, that cut a bit deep.
I mean, because I think a lot of us can relate to that, but the utter shamelessness of it Is what makes it perfect, you know, the fact that he writes stuff on like scribbled bits of loose leaf and puts the footnotes are to references to things that he himself wrote and like delivered to a public library just like by putting it on the desk and so like he doesn't even know if it's still there anymore, which he acknowledges in the footnote.
But also the views of race, I think, are significant, too, because this is, of course, a book set at the time just before, I guess, what we would call the New South.
This is sort of the last gasp of the Old South, the real South.
And this is also something about, you know, New Orleans itself is sort of a character of the book.
And there's the quote at the beginning with New Orleans being part of kind of this lost Hellenistic sort of civilization.
This sort of port city that has a culture which somehow you can glimpse in places like Lebanon and things like that in Beirut.
Because there's just this, this cosmopolitanism, but also somehow this deep rootedness.
And I think now when I went to New Orleans, the only times I've gone a few times, but they were all pre Katrina, from what I've been told, it's just, you know, never really come back in terms of with crime and everything else.
When you're looking at the South in this book, you also, one of the great things about the book is that you see how these racial things played out in real time.
I mean, Riley's mother says things like, oh, you know, well, the poor colored people, they have it rough.
But we all have it rough.
You know, life is rough.
Sometimes you'll, someday you'll learn that.
And you don't have people screaming about Killing blacks or, you know, you don't have blacks getting ready to riot every five minutes, you just sort of have these people where they understand there's sort of this social order where the blacks are perceived to be below, but it doesn't quite work out that way all the time.
You certainly have Riley who tries to do, I guess what critics today would call the white savior trope, with his crusade for more dignity, where he's trying to organize these blacks who are working with him at, I believe it's a pants factory, jeans factory.
He is doing this because he's just trying to get back at somebody.
Yeah.
But they ruin it by not going along with it, because they realize this is a farce and this guy has no connection.
And furthermore, and Riley himself is like disgusted and outraged when he hears them singing their spirituals, because to him that this is so low and, you know, low church Protestantism, he wants nothing to do with it.
He's offended on an artistic level and therefore on a moral level from his point of view.
Yes, because he's got that medieval obsession of connecting aesthetics and morals, of the two things being intertwined.
Which is amusing, because another part of the reason why the blacks in this factory don't go along with him is because they find him to be so physically repulsive.
And they find one of the banners he made to be particularly physically repulsive.
But again, I'll let you listeners read that scene and really understand what I mean when I say that.
Still, it's interesting how even in passing you see things like, and again this is before what we think of as sort of the remaking of America, there's the throwaway line, you know, one of the more powerful civil rights organizations will no doubt cover me with laurels.
Again, Jones's assumption that he can get a mob together and the media will have his back and your name will be in the news, you know, you business owner, and then that will be the end of you.
Everything that Minkoff, you know, his girlfriend says, as I've told you time and again, you must commit yourself to the crucial problems of the times.
Ho hum, Ignatius yawned.
And then this is her letter, she's continuing, subconsciously you feel that you must attempt to explain away your failure as an intellectual and soldier of ideas to actively participate in critical social movements.
But of course, as we see in the book, Her participation in quote-unquote critical social movements is also a catastrophe.
And a lot of it is also compensating for some personal things.
We just don't get a glimpse of those things as fully as we do with Riley.
And I think that also may be why this book is not as... I mean it was something almost like avant-garde I would consider it.
Maybe a couple decades ago, right?
It was interesting.
It's certainly unique.
It's got the typical, oh, tragic death of the author type story.
So there's that romanticism that goes along with it.
It's like, you know, some pretty girl in the 19th century dying of tuberculosis or something.
And now you just kind of get these references of like, well, it's funny, but I'm not sure we should be laughing at this anymore.
Because this is serious business, guys.
And like, we really can't be doing this.
Which, of course, I mean, they're falling into the Minkoff trap.
I mean, they are becoming the caricature.
And the thing with Ignatius Riley, the caricature is so obvious.
Because it's presented to us in very, over and over and over again, very physical terms concerning burping and flatulence and fat and everything else.
But now, I mean, could you even get away with that?
Because these things that people would take to be self-evidently absurd, I mean, Leave aside, you know, body positivity or something like that.
His most harebrained scheme is the idea of just getting gays in the military.
I mean, how would you even... How would you even describe transgender generals in the military?
Like, weeding out the troops to make sure that they're not, like, right-wing or something like that.
It's also interesting, too, because the skepticism of a lot of these movements... I mean, Reilly is portrayed, obviously, as sort of this far-right extremist, but repeatedly he's calling people Nazis and fascists and everything else.
One of the more hilarious things at the beginning, you know, he dislikes one of his people associated with his mother because he keeps referring to him as an aged fascist.
He thinks the proprietor of this one place is a literal Nazi.
There's an old man at the beginning who's, you know, calling.
He says, just as a throwaway line, like, all the police are communists and everything else, and they get really offended by that, and the police are saying, who are you calling communists?
You can't call us communists.
We'll lock you up just for that.
And so you have this kind of absurd world where people are throwing around terms, very emotionally charged terms that have real consequences, but Tools created a world where you can laugh at this.
Now we can't do that anymore.
So these are terms that are being used for comedic effect in the book.
But of course, now these are the weapons that are used to determine whether you have a livelihood or not.
These are the weapons to determine whether you're allowed to participate in the economy or not.
These are the weapons that are used to participate to determine whether you're allowed to participate in social life or not.
I mean, I guess the ultimate irony of all this is that the system we have now is creating The caricatures of right and left that are lampooned in this book because right-wingers of any sort
Whether you consider yourself a Catholic reactionary monarchist or whether you consider yourself whatever else.
I mean these kind of distinctions are not going to be made.
I mean you're basically just going to be stuck inside your own head.
Not going outside and basically left to your own degeneracy.
Cultivating a rich inner life perhaps but most people probably aren't because you need to have a You need to have like a real social life to be healthy.
And leftists, meanwhile, have ceased to be human because they can't make meaningful social interactions anymore.
All they can do is just scream and yell about this cause or that cause or what label people fit under and everything else.
I mean, that's why I think this book is probably more timely than ever.
And I think that its portrayal of the racial situation is very interesting because it challenges the timeline that we've all been taught in schools, which is that the South was essentially this bastion of white supremacy and snarling dogs and people were going nuts.
And actually, even back then, it wasn't quite like that.
And also the civil rights organizations and the media It's so nice to be able to read a book where
Race or racial dynamics isn't like absolutely everything about it.
You know, like you compare this to something like To Kill a Mockingbird or something, and this is so... God.
Even, you know, this is just so sort of like neutral.
It's like, it takes place in New Orleans, so there are whites and blacks, but that's, you know, not the end-all be-all of the story, which is really refreshing in fiction.
Oh, yeah, To Kill a Mockingbird.
I mean, do you remember the, did you read the sequel to that?
I did not.
Well, it was a big thing because, you know, the heroic lawyer or whoever else says some mildly...
Segregationist views?
I haven't read the sequel, so I'm just going on the media coverage, which is of course hysterical, so I'm trying to be a little cautious here.
So don't quote me too much on this, but essentially he's saying that... He supposedly says that you have to, like, move the South along a bit more gradually.
It's not so black and white.
Wait, really?
and that even the sainted lawyer may have had racist views and this like demolished the world
view apparently of all these people just like you know jk rowling uh supposedly not being
friendly enough to transgenders or as john i think john stewart uh decided today that there
were anti-semitic caricatures in the harry potter movies so people are upset about that too wait
really i didn't hear about yeah yeah that's that's what's going well i mean that's the thing
You don't, you don't want to hear about these things.
You don't want to, you don't want to be very online.
You don't want to be interpreting reality this way.
And this is sort of, I mean, the reason why this book is so good is because it's telling you that life is not found in a book and that it's not, you can't like derive the entire purpose of your existence from Imposing an ideology that is so absolute and unconnected with reality and then trying to live it out your whole life like it's some sort of absolutist moral drama.
That doesn't mean you don't have convictions.
That doesn't mean that you don't have things that you're willing to fight for or even die for.
But they have to be real.
I mean, they can't just be abstractions in your head.
Or, if they are ideals, you have to have at least some conception of how these things work out in reality.
I mean, you can't just say, like, I am going to die for my wife, but my wife is an abstraction.
You actually have to have, like, a person.
You can't just be Nothing.
And I think that's why this book has become increasingly unpopular, at least among journalists and academics and people like that, is because they've sort of lost the ability to think.
I mean, what do they have other than this?
Well, that's, I mean, that's another thing the book has in common then with Flannery O'Connor is she's becoming increasingly unpopular, again, for, you know, racial insensitivity and all of this stuff.
Well, she was just so, well, and there's also, you know, the touchings of hardcore Catholicism in her works as well.
Although, you know, this one I think it's played for laughs more than anything else.
Yeah, still.
So, I want to talk a little bit about the author.
I mean, we kind of went over it briefly at the beginning of the show, but he really considered this book to be his masterpiece, and It not getting published seems to have really kind of been the final straw for driving him completely mad.
I mean, obviously there was other stuff going on, but he sent it to Simon & Schuster, which is like the best publishing house in the country at the time, at least that's the reputation it had.
He knew a guy there, and he thought that he had an in with this publishing house.
And it just didn't happen and he was absolutely devastated by that and he tried various rewrites and all sorts of things but there was something he felt so connected to this book that it's rejection by the mainstream is something he really never recovered from and I mean most people attribute That rejection to, you know, as being the biggest reason for his suicide.
And shortly before he did commit suicide, he tried to visit Flannery O'Connor's family property in Georgia.
he drove up to it and this intense attempt to kind of like, I don't know, gain wisdom from
his biggest intellectual influence, like by geographic osmosis, but it was closed for the
season, like they were revamping it or something. So he drove around somewhat aimlessly thereafter
and then ultimately committed suicide. And his friends and family and his colleagues and all
the people he knew were so Catholic that only three people went to his funeral because they
were so outraged that he'd taken his own life because it was still considered such a cardinal sin.
The Catholic Church has actually lightened up on that position in the subsequent decades.
Probably because everybody keeps committing suicide.
I mean, I don't think it's just moral.
I don't think they're rethinking it or, you know, that there's been... I mean, maybe you could say that there aren't any good authoritarian popes that are holding the line on the most rigid doctrines anymore.
I do think that there is something of an undercurrent of despair to all this and that the discomfort with the modern world expressed both by Riley and by his Leftist girlfriend.
I mean there is something real there that nobody is satisfied with the way things are and all of the trends that You know, they're taking pot shots at it in kind of limited ways, but it's still there.
But all of those things have just become worse and worse and worse in the decades since.
Yeah, a lot more people commit suicide now than in Tools Day, it's true.
But for what it's worth, I mean, not to get too in the weeds under this, but I spoke to a Catholic priest about this once, and he said, basically, just that the church had come to understand Just like the how distorted people's minds are when they are depressed that they consider that you can still have a Catholic burial after committing suicide because you were not your true self when you did it.
Ergo you weren't really sinning.
It's sort of like yeah if you it's like a schizophrenic committed a sin it's you know sort of something something different.
It's almost like a it's almost like a insanity flea like in a trial if you just didn't really know what you were doing.
Right.
I think the Mormons have a similar doctrine or something like that.
It's, I mean, it's an interesting thought because, you know, the book does kind of raise some questions of what is the, what is the self and also what is the self in terms of being part of a people?
One of the times when Riley and his girlfriend sound pretty much identical is when they're talking about Blacks in the South, because they can't really understand them.
I mean, they deal with them less directly than some of the side characters who have more authentic relationships with these people who they're working alongside and talking to and everything else.
But they see them solely as sort of these... Riley has a different view on it, but he sees them as this romantic vanguard that he could lead for what he wants.
Whereas his girlfriend sees them as these downtrodden that she needs to come in and save.
And I do want to... This is when he's working and he's getting ready to launch his crusade.
I do want to just read this one part.
This is in the letter.
He's talking about possibly doing a book about his experiences as a working, as a working boy, as he puts it, even though he's hasn't really done any work at this point.
Quote, I do admire the, and this is also why This book, you can't fit it into one category, which is why it won't really be popular now, because you'll hear a line and then immediately the afterbath is something that you just wouldn't be allowed to say or tweet or whatever else.
Quote, I do admire the terror which Negroes are able to inspire in the hearts of some members of the white proletariat and only wish, this is a rather personal confession, that I possessed the ability to similarly terrorize.
The Negro terrorizes simply by being himself.
I, however, must browbeat a bit in order to achieve the same end.
Perhaps I should have been a Negro.
I suspect I would have been a rather large and terrifying one.
Continually pressing my ample thigh against the withered thighs of old white ladies in public conveyance is a great deal, and eliciting more than one shriek of panic.
Then, too, if I were a Negro, I would not be pressured by my mother to find a good job, for no good jobs would be available.
My mother herself, a worn old Negress, would be too broken by years of underpaid labor as a domestic to go out bowling at night.
She and I could live most pleasantly in some moldy shack in the slums in a state of ambitious-less peace, realizing contentedly that we were unwanted, that striving was meaningless.
However, I do not wish to witness the awful spectacle of the Negroes moving upward into a middle class.
I consider this movement a great insult to their integrity as a people.
You know, the recognition, the assumption that they're being held down.
There are no good jobs.
You just can't have a job.
But that suits them somehow because they naturally lack ambition and are content to live in moldy shacks.
But you can't put the... and essentially both of them think that way.
And so you can't put them, I mean, again, his girlfriend saying, oh, this exchange, he's so real.
He's so authentic.
There's something vital, you know, we're not even alive.
We have to take all our inspiration for what it means to be human from these people from the dark continent.
And then when she lets him down politically, like, as far as I'm concerned, he can go right back to Africa.
I mean, that I think, if anything, has only grown stronger, that viewpoint.
And it's because there's no sense of irony or self-awareness when it comes to racial stuff at this point, particularly with those who hold media power, which is real power in this society.
Everything is a caricature.
Everything is simple-minded.
Everything is about taking words like racist and fascist and Nazi that have an emotional connotation but no longer any real
meaning and just pinning it on people you don't like and then using that as a weapon. And at the end
of the day nobody's really helped by it but who cares because we're all you know Ignatius J. Reilly's
crazy neurotic communist girlfriend trying to seek self-actualization by throwing yourself into
one cause after another.
That's every journalist, that's every professor, that's every politically involved student.
That's all the people you saw marching in BLM.
And at the end of the day, what happened?
You had a bunch more blacks killed in the inner cities and nobody cared.
Including the people in those so-called communities.
I don't know.
Maybe Riley was right.
Maybe that was an insult to their integrity as a people.
Well, any final thoughts on it?
Yeah, to end on kind of a lower note, I was looking at some of the statistics.
We've all seen the statistics.
About suicide and self-reported mental illness, it's obviously much higher for people who self-identify on the far left.
Which is amazing, of course, because they can control what gets counted as mental illness and what doesn't.
At least in political terms.
I mean, after all, when... I mean, homosexuality itself used to be considered a mental illness, and that was basically removed because of a political campaign.
Transgenderism used to be... I mean, yes, there are people who have an actual medical condition, like it is a thing.
I hate to speak about it so imprecisely, but it's hard to define because it is such a small thing, but now it's just become everything.
It's become something where...
You can't get a beer when you're 18, but you can start taking hormones when you're 9 because of, you know, as a little kid how you felt that day, supposedly.
And even in this climate where you have essentially total control by the progressive left, They still tend to be more depressed.
They still tend to be more suicidal.
At the same time, I think we can also think of a lot of right-wingers and traditionalists who are so out of place with the modern world that they either take their own lives or they Do become sort of like Riley.
They sort of go into a living death where you just say, there's no point in struggle.
There's no point in getting involved or trying to do anything because, you know, the ladder was pulled up behind the people who were ahead of you.
And so they play video games all day and don't do anything.
Just kind of coast and think that somebody's going to save them or think that they can live in a fantasy world.
And I see the first faint glimpses of that here, because for all the talk about God in the book, God's not really there.
I mean, it's just it's an intellectual affectation.
Love is there of a sort.
By the end, although who knows how these two will end up, if he had ever written a sequel or how those characters would end up, but it's also unspoken and maybe that's why that's the only thing that is sort of real.
Once you try to take something like God or love or meaning and And turn it into just a word or turn it into a political weapon, it ceases to have any real importance.
And right now we live in a society so totally dominated by verbal manipulation and the use of economic power to punish people who use the wrong words that people out there think their lives are meaningless.
So, I think this was sort of a dark prophecy in a lot of ways, for as funny as it was.
Man, you've kind of gobsmacked me.
I don't know.
I tend to get existentialist on anything.
Don't get me started on 40k.
Right.
I won't.
I'm not going to get you started on 40k.
All right.
I think that'll do it for this week.
But thanks to everybody for listening.
And thanks to all of you who've been emailing me about how happy you are that this podcast got restarted.
Because I had not realized how many fans we had.
It's always nice to hear from you guys.
Yeah, definitely like hearing from you.
And if you have any thoughts on both the content, any of the technical aspects, trying out a new technical setup this week with help from some supporters.
So we're always happy to hear from everybody.
So keep those emails coming.
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