Tom Towers Reads Again

Volume One, Two Reviews and a List

Gone With the Wind: the Most Disturbing book I’ve Ever Read?

I always found it baffling that Colonel Sanders cosplayers are so enamoured with Faulkner. No other American novelist wrote with such a visceral sense of self-loathing in the righteous condemnation of their own culture—outside of James Baldwin.

Yet Faulkner’s characters, as despicable as they are, are nevertheless sympathetic and pitiable. In such a shitty society, who wouldn’t turn out to be a piece of shit themselves? So too in Baldwin. Thus, we may choose (if we relate to the enslavers of negroes in Faulkner or the enslavers of women and children in Baldwin) to confront, excuse, or even ignore the evil of ourselves and our ancestors.

So I think I’m kinda beginning to understand Faulkner’s popularity among people nostalgic for the confederacy.

Gone With the Wind, on the other hand, offers no comforting way out of confronting the evil of North America’s uniquely degenerate version of slavery.

In spite of the frustrations Scarlet O’Hara is faced with due to her sex, at no point does this result in her even getting an inkling of the fact that maybe enslaving another human being just because they’re a negro might be a shitty thing to do in much the same way that it kinda sucks she can’t be an industrialist without dudes laughing at her cause she doesn’t have a dick—no matter how much of a dick she tries to be to compensate!

What really sticks in her, and her confederate comrades’, craws (other than the absence of anything being stuck in her cunt), isn’t just that the comfy cotton wool in which Southern belles were wrapped in by the ultra patriarchal society of the pre-war South and the comfort of the contrast between crackers (rich whites not inbred enough to be a part of the aristocracy), white trash (poor whites who have to work for a living), negroes (house niggers) and niggers themselves which formed the genteel hierarchy of the South, but the actual violence with which this hierarchy was maintained!

In this new and horrific society being imposed upon the self-pitying Southerners by the carpetbaggers and Yankees, honest labour (the enslavement of negroes to work in your place) no longer gets you paid: now you must work for yourself like white trash (with whom you must now interact with as if they are equals), and the rule of law is being extended to niggers so you can no longer summarily execute them to keep these child-like imbeciles three days out of the jungle in line.

This last point, in particular, is unbearably perturbing to poor Scarlet and her fellows.

Of course the summary execution does continue, but this is small consolation for poor Mrs. O’Hara because now her menfolk must lynch the savages hidden, as if what they do is shameful, behind masks like common outlaws; when all they are doing is protecting her and her sisters from the rampaging black cock which the coons’d wield as freely as the puny white prick has been wielded if the KKK didn’t make sure to allow white women to experience the magisterial brilliance of black erections and ejaculations only when aroused by the noose.

It’s terrifying, fascinating, and utterly unflinching in its depiction of the psyche of its protagonists and, unlike Baldwin or Faulkner, at no point is their depravity justified by causation—and for that reason, strangely, it is all the more unavoidable: we are forced to ask of ourselves not, if I were treated so poorly would I behave so badly but, if I were treated so well at the expense of others, would I be willing to give up my status just for their sake?

Indeed, with this method we are left with the greatest dystopian novel ever written: the non-conformist protagonist’s own frustrations with the repressive nature of the society in which she lives does not translate into her realising that this may apply to other others in her society, and we can very easily see how such a horrific society would be so attractive to the people who benefited from it; even if, as it is for her, some may have lost as well as gained.

And as society collapses around her, she and her fellows gleefully choose as the old world’s legacy the evils of its power structures, transforming them into new versions of old violence; even in the face of military occupation and legal reform.

As a narrative of conserving a culture in the face of desolation, it’s even a little inspiring—making it all the more horrific.

Only Brave New World and Island by Aldous Huxley come close to this level of complexity in the willingness to explore the pleasures and benefits of evil in society.

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker: Literally the Worst Book I’ve Ever Read

All you need to know about Professor Pinker is that he used to be an anarchist when he was a kid, until he witnessed a police strike: looting broke out, and a mini-revolution over transportation to and from airports successfully crushed a local monopoly.

Somehow this surprised the young Pinker so much that he became a classical liberal.

Yet this is precisely what anarchism predicts: only through the coercive use of violence can private property exist, and only through state protection can monopolies survive. Hell, the local biker gang—freed from police persecution—mutually aided the revolutionary taxi drivers in their righteous fight for justice; and it wasn’t the violent anarchists or the bikies who killed anyone, but the peaceful, law-abiding citizens who had previously enjoyed the support of the police! Sadly for these limousine-driving capitalists, even though they managed to kill someone and wound many others, without the overwhelming power of the police, this display of violence amounted to nothing but creating martyrs to a successful cause!

So not only would anarchism predict precisely what happened, but the anarchists won the day! And because the police were only on strike and thus soon returned, the property that the proletariats won through anarchist action was theirs to keep, and the monopoly found itself, in turn, suppressed by the police—having lost their property, and thus their rights to police protection.

Happy days!

Thus we can only conclude that Pinker must actually have been a classical liberal all along: a position which holds that private property is an extension of rationality, and has nothing at all to do with force—which is why it’s so important to enforce private property through the threat and use of force.

After all, the only thing savages understand is violence!

Speaking of savages, apparently the salting of the earth in Vietnam was the fault of Ho Chi Minh for not surrendering to the Americans and welcoming their peace offering of liberty bombs and freedom bullets with open arms.

What a disgusting—and just plain stupid—human being.

Good, clean fun:

C.S. Lewis’ Sci Fi Sex Tapes
G.K. Chesterton’s post-modern Christian nationalism
The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison
The Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Bird Parliament by Farid Al-Din Attar
Best We Forget by Peter Cochrane
Listen, Little Man!, Dialectical Materialism, The Psychology of Fascism, The Sexual Revolution and Character Analysis by Wilhelm Reich
The Return of the Native by Thomas hardy
Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlow
The Maubignon
Drawing the Global Colur Line by Marilyn lake and Henry Reynolds
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
D.H. Lawrence Sons and lovers
The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade
Re-reading Edgar Allan Poe
A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
The Decameron by Boccacio
The three Theban Plays by Sophocles
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Junior
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Ashimov
The London Hanged by Peter Lindebough
David Hume
Secret Art of dr. Seues
Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson
Trips to the moon by Lucian of Samosata
Inuyashiki
The Years of the Sword by R.j. unstead
The Book of Enoch
Transmetropolitan
The Ghost in the Shell
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
The General Theory of Employment etc. by Keynes
The Incal
Economic Policy for a Free Society by Henry C. Simons
Debt by David Graeber
Mutual Aid by Peter Koroptokin
Moore’s Irish Melodies
An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Grey
We The Living by Ayn Rand
Global Inequality edited by David Held

Disappointing in one way or another, though not necessarily bad:
The Story of the Volsungs
Planned Chaos by Ludwig von Mieses
War is a Racket by Smedley D. Butler
Flying Saucers by J. Posadas
Complete works by Rimbaud
Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher
The Society of the Spectacle by Guy De Bord
No Country for old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
On the Road by Jack Kerouc
Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes
Male and Female by Margaet Mead
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
Justine by Marquis De sade
Re-reading Edgar Allan Poe
The Last Man by Mary Shalley junior
John Locke two treaties of government
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Night by Elie Wiesel
Dialectical and Historical Materialism by Joseph Stalin
The Year of Our War by Steph Swainston
Frederic Tuten
Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault
Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke
The Fable of the Bees by Bernard Mandeville
John Stuart Mill
The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation by David Ricardo
London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew
The Hanging Tree by V.A.C. Gattrell
Everything except Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
The Incal
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
The Christian Life by John Calvin
Payback by Margaret Atwood
Uprooted by Noami novik
The Levinas Reader
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Altered Carbon by Robert K. Morgan
Population, Capital and Growth by Simon Kuznets
China Mieville’s shlock
Aphra Behn
The Pisspot by Henry James
The Turner Diaries by Post-Modern Hitler