Midatlantic

It has been a long day for this straight European male. O’Hare Airport is a decompression chamber between Middle America and the rest of the world: rude United clerks who act as if they own the airline; the gauntlet of guards at the X-ray machines, none of whom is able to speak English; and everywhere the stench of the Disney world cuisine—pizza, hot dogs, and every few feet a McDonald’s, whose blend of grease, sugar, and MSG is the olfactory signature time of the New World Order.

If they still make movies for my particular minority, they are never shown on transatlantic flights. In the past few years, I have been subjected to Whoopie Goldberg as a make-believe male WASP on Wall Street, Robin Williams as the fag who puts the straight Gene Hackman in his place, and countless other propaganda exercises designed to give European and American Christians an inferiority complex.

The minority pecking order is clearest in commercials, from who gives advice to whom, who are the wise and who are the schnooks: Kids, for example, are always smarter than grown-ups, women smarter than men, blacks smarter than whites. It is a caste system that mocks Christianity, demonizes the European, and lets us know that people like me are in the untouchable class. Frankly, I prefer it this way; I do not wish to be touched by the people who make and watch commercials.

The dumb/evil white man stereotype is everywhere, not just in ads for laundry powders that make things whiter than white. Today’s “in-flight feature” stars Antonio Banderas as the new Zorro, who avenges the death of his brother by killing the American blond devil. After two drinks and as much wine as the battle-hardened stewardesses are willing to bring me, I enjoy The Mask of Zorro, which for all of its anti-Spanish/anti-European message still celebrates the manly virtues of courage and honor and loyalty—even if the heroine handles a sword about as well as the hero.

Anthony Hopkins, as the old Zorro, is wonderfully miscast. Have they forgotten, in Hollywood, that the whole point of putting Hopkins in movies is to portray the Englishman as an ugly, sagging, incompetent? In between sword fights, I leaf through an Italian newspaper, La Repubblica. The front page includes an essay on politics by Salman Rushdie, who denounces Aristotle—”the Macedonian philosopher”—for his views on women, slavery, and “barbarians.” Why does he take Aristotle’s position on barbarians personally? My ancestors were probably just as barbaric as Mr. Rushdie’s, but I (like all civilized men) identify with the Greeks against the Persians.

Rushdie’s musings inspire a number of questions that keep me from sleeping. By what curious process did this renegade Muslim, who hates his own tradition as much as he despises ours, become the spokesman for the West? What kind of a newspaper would let Rushdie get away with describing the entirely Greek Aristotle as a “Macedonian”? If making money out of foreigners makes you one of them, then Mr. Rushdie would be an Englishman. I think of Joyce Gary’s Mr. Johnson, sipping tea and talking about the queen. What are copy editors for, if not to correct the ignorance and effrontery of literary poseurs? Would looking up Aristotle in the Oxford Classical Dictionary constitute a sort of thought-crime against the Third World’s contempt for fact and logic? All that talk of non-contradiction, if s so left-brain.

I used to be haunted by the usual Gold War nightmares of a Soviet conquest of my beloved country. What would it be like to be ruled by aliens who imposed thought control on your children, teaching them to despise their parents, hate their ancestors, and spurn their cultural birthright? In the Union of Soviet Socialist Americas (which would include Canada and Mexico), George Washington would be alternately worshipped as a predecessor of Lenin and denigrated as a slaveholder. What fools we were to worry about the Russians, when all the time we were building “communism in one nation” here in America. NAFTA stripped away even the fiction of a sovereign United States, and now that Mexican-Americans enjoy dual citizenship, we may as well have a dual (or triple) government. Perhaps we should brush up our French and move to Quebec, where half the people still want to have a nation of their own. Better to be an alien abroad than an alien at home.

The great mistake made by conservatives was to equate Marxism with a false economic theory. Marxism is only incidentally anti-capitalist. Fundamentally, it is a particularly virulent strain of leftism whose one and only object is the destruction of the Christian religion and the civilization it created. If international corporations can do the job (as they are doing), then it is only natural for communists like Mikhail Gorbachev to embrace the “free market.” As one of my Italian friends observed, all Western governments are fundamentally Marxist now, especially the American government, which devotes a large part of its resources to bulldozing the last remnants of civilization, not only in North America but all over the world.

There is no point in whining about the situation, though: We willingly inflicted this cultural alienation on ourselves and our children. The same people who want us to kill our babies to solve the population crisis are also responsible for the flood of Third World immigrants into the United States. It is immoral either to have children or to seal the border. We let our enemies get away with this bad faith and bad logic (more left-brain stuff) because we have been taught to hate ourselves and will not be content until the last straight European male has been made a sex slave in the sultan’s harem.

Milan

It is small wonder if European conservatives hate the United States. My room at the Hotel Granduca di York is cramped, too small to fit in a practical writing desk but big enough to hold an American window on the world—a TV set. Next door is the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, which holds a priceless collection of manuscripts, rare books, and paintings, but here in my room I have everything an American could need: CNN, 24 hours a day, as well as a variety of channels—Italian, French, German—all replaying episodes of Hunter, Friends, or Mad About You (that’s Dingue de Toi in Paris, if you are interested). For a more local flavor, I turn on one of Italian TV’s endless number of variety shows. This one featured a Dennis Franz look-alike dressed in a three-piece suit without a necktie, a typical look: Every Italian TV show features fat ugly men surrounded by half-dressed beautiful girls. Is there a message here?

The co-host is popular actor Gigi Proietti. As the two hosts look on, a group of genetically disadvantaged and aesthetically challenged punks take the stage and, while performing their rendition of Italo-rap art, proceed to strip to their bikini shorts, bumping and grinding with grim determination. The little girls in the audience emit the obligatory squeals of delight. Later in the show, a group of American mulatto girls—better looking and in much better shape than the flabby white punks— come out in their underwear (some of it see-through) and perform a far more convincing bump-and-grind. Enough is enough, and I switch to CNN’s coverage of the presidential bump-and-grind, which is even more disgusting. I flip back to catch the end of the variety show: A dopey-looking farmer with his cow is on the stage, and he is gradually surrounded by the punks in briefs and the girls in their underwear, as cast-members, guests, and audience members come on stage to join the performers in their mock-erotic monkeyshines. Only the cow preserves her dignity.

It is not that the show lacks professional entertainment. Gigi Proietti did an absolutely amazing impersonation of Dean Martin singing, “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, / that’s amore,” down to the last detail of Dino’s Sicilo-American pronunciation of “pasta fazul.” Proietti has come on the show to plug the new made-for-television film he directed. Gigi stars as an architect, a sort of liberal democrat who (as the Corriere della sera summarized the plot) “plans to open up a non-discriminatory welcome center, ‘multi-ethnic’ as he declares, but gets upset when his daughter introduces her fiancé Mony, a young man of color. The point of the film is understanding (la comprensione).” It is the sort of comprehension we are all scheduled to attain, once we have watched enough television, taken the right courses, and read the right newspapers. Some years ago, “Rockford’s own” Aidan Quinn starred in a film version of Robinson Crusoe, in which the natives re-educate Crusoe into the realization that European man is a scourge upon the planet. The actor did not need the program, obviously, since he had attended public schools.

There is more to Milan than the TV in my hotel. Lionel Richie (a name I had not heard in some time) is coming to enrich the city where Leonardo and Verdi worked. Mr. Richie’s musical genius has not quite caused La Scala to close its doors, but the season’s blockbuster is not an opera by Bellini or Donizetti. This week, the news is all of the production of Wagner’s Gotterdämmerung. I look in vain for some evidence that the land that invented opera has disdain for the pretensions of Gothic composers, but no, the only contioversy is over Wagner’s antisemitism, the problem of performing Wagner in Israel, etc., etc. But Wagner has to be forgiven his little vice: After all, he hated Judaism because it was a source of Christianity. Emanuele Severino, a culture journalist, chortles that Wagner had foreseen the twilight of all gods—get it?—”non solo quelli dell’antica mitologia germanica.”

So Wagner takes La Scala by storm. Elsewhere in Italy, it is not the Goths but Turks, Kurds, Albanians, and Tunisians who are invading. The television news shows are filled with stories of a pipeline from Bari to Como, bringing teenage Albanian prostitutes who ply their trade along the roadway, and of a murder case involving two gypsy brothers who are accused of killing an 11-year-old boy. The Romany community closes ranks and denounces the government and the press for their racism.

The morning papers all display pictures of a shipwrecked freighter filled with Kurds: “Drammi dell’immigrazione.” Italy’s Kurdish problem became a Turkish problem when the government of Turkey tried to extradite Occalan, the Marxist guerrilla leader, as a Kurd terrorist. Occalan is, of course, a terrorist, but the count of his victims falls far short of one percent of the victims of Turkey’s genocidal war upon the Kurds. This is mere logic-chopping to the Turks, who defend to the death (yours, that is) their right to massacre anyone they damn well like.

As more and more Italians react with panic to the immigration crisis, the “ex”-communist prime minister, Massimo D’Alema, calls for calm. Attending a meeting in Lecee, D’Alema listens to Kurdish immigrants as they sing hymns to nationalist leaders who have been denounced as terrorists by the Italian government. Prime Minister D’Alema smiles and applauds, later commenting that “Racism is horrible wherever it appears, but with us it becomes ridiculous, because we are a meeting-place of peoples—Greeks, Normans, Arabs.” D’Alema forgets to mention that Greeks, Normans, and Arabs (as well as Carthaginians, Goths, Lombards, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Austrians) came as conquerors. He also overlooks the obvious fact that most of Italy’s conquerors were ethnic cousins, and that most invaders shared a common religion and a common culture that are entirely foreign to the Kurds, Albanians, and Somalis who are currently taking up residence as clients of the Italian welfare state.

As if to prove that the right can be as destructive as the left, Italy’s tycoon “conservative,” Sylvio Berlusconi, has now sided with the Turks and virtually recognized the state of Turkish Cyprus, currently menaced by the sale of Russian missiles to the Greek Cypriots. The Greeks have the effrontery to want to defend their lives and property against the Turks.

Paris

Not so long ago, a man’s level of civilization could be measured, almost literally, by the size of his French vocabulary. (Never by his accent. A good accent, I remind myself, is always in bad taste: It puts one on the same level with the Frogs.) French is now about as much used in American schools as ancient Greek, and even when there are courses, the students learn little or no French, except for schoolboy slang. It was my son’s third-year French book that taught me “dingue,” and I am delighted when a French mother corrects her seven-year-old son, telling him to say “fou” instead.

On Sunday, I go to Notre Dame, despite the signs warning tourists to stay out—the American and Japanese tourists are forever wandering in and out. The older American women are the worst: Bursting out of their jeans and jogging suits, they look like overfed seals wearing fanny packs, barking and gabbling about their shopping. They long ago jettisoned any evidence of femininity without ever acquiring the small virtues of the American male—a kind of shy inoffensiveness that some foreigners continue to find endearing.

In several days of meetings with French conservatives, pagan as well as Catholic, the inevitable topic—approached as delicately as the rumor that one has cancer—is America’s role in the world. With a kindness and delicacy I had not expected, they ruefully explain that they cannot help regarding the United States as the enemy both of European civilization and of world peace. Many French conservatives believe that Clinton will seize any pretext, no matter how slim, for bombing Iraq, and over dinner with the leader of the Nouvelle Droite, we agree that the bombs will probably fall before Christmas. I wonder, vaguely, the next day (December 14) if the tight security at Charles de Gaulle is an indication that something is up.

Rockford

I am happy to board the flight to Chicago, and not only because the United stewardesses are pretty and gracious French girls, who make my free seat in steerage seem like first class. As much as I admire French and Italian conservatives, they are the subjects of the imperium americanum, and even though we here in the States are as much victims of this regime as anyone, it is comforting to think that the evil empire is, at least, our evil empire. I’m back, back, back in the U.S.S.A.