#dimes square

If someone PayPals me $5 or buys one of my books, I’ll read Gasda’s play and tell you if it’s any good apart from the subcultural scenester and culture-war chatter. 

It would be a good way to cap “The New Conservatism” as a critical topic, since this movement is itself fractionating the more victories it scores against current hegemonic left-liberalism. The split is roughly between those with substantive right-wing cultural commitments of various sorts and those whose primary objection to wokeness was always the moralism and iconoclasm. On the one side, The Perfume Nationalist:

This pride I’m grateful for the increasing division between the dirtbag left/moralizing trad axis of poor unfortunate souls living in a doomed political fantasy of the past and the psychedelic 20s DH Lawrence gays, guys, and gals forging a future of creativity, freedom, and art

On the other, J. D. Vance:

“Again, we made a political choice that the freedom to consume pornography was more important than the public goods, like marriage and family and happiness,” he continued. “We can’t ignore the fact that we made that choice and we shouldn’t shy away from the fact that we can make new choices in the future.”

Vance, oddly, understands why you can’t ban guns in America but doesn’t understand why you can’t ban porn. 

Take it from me, you’ll feel better if you make your peace with the fact that this country was founded as a very particular or peculiar kind of utopia: a place where individual liberties could be carried as far as is minimally consistent with civic order. Alternate utopian ideologies generated in the crowded dark warrens of Europe—Catholicism, social democracy, communism—don’t apply. Myself educated in grade school by Catholics and grad school by Marxists, I spent some time in my early life dismayed by this, and God knows it’s a tough country by design, but I can’t spend the rest of my life in the style of clenched miserabilism with which the Marxists torture themselves (more than the Catholics, who can remain happy warriors since their goal is transcendent rather than immanent). My life, as the man said, is not an apology, but a life. 

Paradoxically, I can even ground my groundless individualism in my ancestry: the immigrants of a little more than century ago on my father’s side, who came because they were killers, and the immigrants of a little more than half a century ago on my mother’s side, who came to get rich. Among Gasda’s back catalog, I see he wrote a book of poems called The American Sublime, which is Harold Bloom by way of Wallace Stevens or maybe vice versa, so I trust he understands. But, this being America, you’ll have to pay me to find out for sure if he does or not.

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?

When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
Blinking and blank?

But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?