Is Rick Perry…
…just too mean, too ornery, and too Texan to be elected?
Boy, do the chattering classes ever hate this guy! If he is elected, the furor against him will make BDS look like a love affair. Perry is everything the press and progressives pretended Bush was: a “real” Texan, neither kinder nor gentler, and a gun-totin’ guy who went not to Yale but to Texas A&M.
And he just may express the loose-cannon American spirit, according to professor of public policy Bill Schneider:
Could Perry defeat Obama? If things get bad enough, and voters are desperate enough for real change, there is no telling what they might do. D.H. Lawrence once wrote, “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.”
[NOTE: That last quote from Lawrence made me wonder what the British author knew about America, anyway. I turned to handy Wiki, and discovered that Lawrence had lived in New Mexico for several years and wanted to make America his final home, but returned to England because of ill health. His ashes rest in a chapel in the mountains of New Mexico. Lawrence’s politics have been described this way:
Critic and admirer Terry Eagleton situates Lawrence on the radical right wing, as hostile to democracy, liberalism, socialism, and egalitarianism, though never actually embracing fascism…Rather than a republic, Lawrence called for an absolute Dictator and equivalent Dictatrix to lord over the lower peoples.
My goodness.]
Reminds me of Woody Allen’s astonishing statement that Obama be granted dictatorial powers.
Has there ever been an Eagleton, any Eagleton, that got something, anything, right? Dictatorship is radical right-wing?
It would save a world of trouble if a lot more people knew of Lawrence’s observation. Coupled with there is an end to patience.
I think Lawrence continued, “It has never yet melted,” or something like.
I read a lot of Lawrence during my brief stint as a literature major. Aldous Huxley wrote him in as a character in his book “Point, Counteroint,” and as far as I know there hasn’t been a better depiction of Lawrence anywhere.
Te quote about Americans being killers comes from Lawrence’s book on American literature, if I remember correctly. The essential thing to understand about guys like Lawrence – and if anyone here has read Henry Miller, you understand Lawrence – is that they belong to a particular segment of late-19th Century Romantic thought. They were not political guys, and whenever Lawrence mused about nonsense like the Dictator and the Dictatrix – or eugenics, for that matter – it was all of a piece with his nostalgic primitivism.
Basically, Lawrence looked at the modern world and saw a place where natural beauty was eviscerated: the simple sensual beauty of men and women; the ripples of a lake; the shine of the sun; the field flowing in the wind. This is a sensibility, an aesthetic view of life that has no place for serious political thinking or economics or even metaphysics. Is it beautiful? Then it’s “natural.” Is it not “natural”? Then it’s ugly.
Lawrence hated poor people in modern societies because, contrary to the Marxist view, he saw them as thoroughly and essentially corrupted by the machine and the factory. Lawrence also hated rich people, because they dealt with mammon. He was a misanthrope; he basically hated everyone, with one possible exception – he loved primitive people (which is why he went to New Mexico; to commune with Native Americans), because they still had that antedeluvian pagan plug-in to natural beauty. In theory. He found that that wasn’t really true, and that natives the world over had been “corrupted” in various ways. Such is the way of the late Romantic – loving the world, loving life, loving people all as a big aesthetic postulate; but in detail, in reality, in the world as it is, loathing it all.
Point being that Eagleton is wrong to think of Lawrence as an ideologue of the right or of any side of the political spectrum. Lawrence hated politics, period. His totalitarian musings were merely half-baked ways of trying to express a political system that would have no politics in it.
This sort of anti-political political musing was, again, very typical of a certain type of Romantic (think of Carlyle and Ruskin as the archetypes), and the bottom line is that they didn’t know anything about politics, didn’t want to know anything about it, and whenever they talked about it the purpose was to express their aggressive ignorance and the disgust they felt when encountering anything political.
Lawrence was not right-wing, nor was he left-wing. He was no-wing.
kolnai: thanks for the explanation. I’ve never delved into Lawrence much, but what you write has the ring of truth.
I don’t think Perry can persuade me to support Perry. Perry’s enemies might persuade me to support Perry.
From an American viewpoint, what’s not to like about Perry? He grew up on a small farm with no money. He was an Eagle Scout. He went to a state university. He became an Air Force officer and pilot. He was a state secretary of agriculture. He is the governor of one of our largest states with a strong record of job creation. He gives good speeches without a teleprompter.
In so many ways he is what America is all about. The intense negative reaction he triggers from the left tells me the left is, get ready, unAmerican.
Still like Palin better maybe because she’s never been my governor, and Perry has.
This article neatly encapsulates the multi-layered class/political warfare of this election season:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903392904576512831505614652.html
Nutshell: Liberals play the top (well-connected financial elites and government workers) and bottom (welfare lollipop recipients) against the private-enterprise middle.
Taxation and regulation drive away private manufacturing jobs, and the Left’s cultural agenda removes the ladder to meritocratic success (quality education) and the foundation it stood on (stable families).
Tea Party = the restive middle finally taking action.
The author uses the sad history of New York City’s decline to trace out this story.
This is really all you need to know – and helps Tea Partiers and other conservatives articulate what they’re about. We should be linking this article far and wide.
Got hooked into a chick flick, “Eat, Pray, Love”. Somebody told Roberts’ character in the ashram piece of it that she had it in her to love the whole universe. Great. Then what?
I don’t know if anybody asked a romantic, in kolnai’s description, that, but I expect the response wouldn’t have been clear.
As for Perry being too ‘extreme’, it’s the same drivel liberals and RINOs used about Reagan. Mark Levin makes this excellent point on his program nearly everyday that the so-called sophisticate classes used virtually the same language to dismiss Reagan as they use now with Palin and now Perry.
Superb article on the wsj site, Ben David, and a very trenchant D.H. Lawrence comment, Kolnai.
Ahhh, but there’s still Palin. Michael Moriarty prefers Palin.
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/mmoriarty/2011/08/23/todd-and-sarah-palin-are-my-heroes/
Regardless, with so many tea party candidates to hate and spit at, the media clowns might just oblige us by collapsing in a giant collective apoplectic fit.
From my perspective Perry, Palin, Paul, and the rest are not extreme enough. I want a leader who tells the complete truth: we are far up caca creek, the waters are rising and filled with giant crocodiles, a bloated bureaucracy is controlling the volume of the water, and we have no paddles.
I never voted for Perry. The Kinkster got my vote, as in “none of the preceding.” But I do like Perry’s willingness to speak his mind, even if I don’t agree with every bit of what he said.
Hong’s point about Reagan being painted as an extremist is very well taken.
I can see Perry taking a blowtorch to the Washington bureaucracy. That prospect does not make me tremble with fear. Au contraire.
Ditto Neo’s response to Kolnai’s explanation of the “politics” of DH Lawrence.
There’s a fine blog called “Never Yet Melted”, btw. Highly recommended. But what I really wanted to mention was an observation on the quote: “Terry Eagleton situates Lawrence on the radical right wing… though never actually embracing fascism”. Where did we get the idea that fascism is right-wing? As I recall, it was “National SOCIALISM”. And just look at the similarities between Nazi and Soviet art and architecture, or even the similarities between a Nuremburg rally and a May Day parade in Red Square. Fascism and Communism are twin mutant children of the left, I would say.
The latest Gallop Poll has Perry leading other GOP candidates including Romney by a wide margin. So his awkward early campaign statements don’t seem to have hurt him among Republicans.
Here’s a link to the Gallop Poll:
http://tinyurl.com/3db3y8s
I found it especially interesting that he essentially tied Romney in the East and lead Romney with women.
If he gets better in toning down his statements a bit we may have a winner here.
Oh…also found it interesting that the “Obama Team” has said it wants to take on Perry. Why would they have any incentive to say something to hurt his chances at being nominated if they aren’t afraid of him? Why? 🙂