Orrin,



>> Pro-Mailer and anti-meat?


Pat Buchanan--what a hipster!



Ed

Both articles are rather good, actually. AmCon is trying to be more than an echo chamber, like you have with the Holy Trinity--NR, WS and Comm. That means publishing articles that question the current orthodoxies, most especially conservative ones.



Like it or not, Mailer is one of the most important American writers of the late-20th century. During most of the interview he eloborates on why he is a "Left Conservative." It doesn't entirely hold together, but it is an interesting theme of his, and worth reading.



Scully's article deals with animal abuses in slaughterhouses, and he does it from a biblical perspective: the good stewardship thing. I don't see how sadism to animals is a conservative issue.



I admit these are different articles, out of the mainstream, but they are far more readable than Danny Pipes umpteenth screed on why we must declare war on all Islam--for Islam's good, of course--or V.D. Hanson's latest discovery that Polybius' Histories foreshadows the End of History and the coming of Diet Coke. Seriously, it's hard to tell one mainstream conservative magazine apart from the others, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell their issues apart. One week merely brings in a yet another tired repition of what was written last week.

Derek,

I don't think any informed man will view Pipes as a "conservative." I think he was a big fan of enlarging the current bureaucracy to track potential terrorists within the U.S. Hanson is more in the mold of an agrarian conservative but his support for an agressive immigration policy would necessarily entail the creation or expansion of the existing bureaucracy to fully address the desired policy.



TAC suffers from a dearth of realistic ideas about the role of government. The article about tained meat would not lead to a lessening of current regulations but, rather, an expansion of the FDA's staff to help police all of those slaughterhouses and meat packing plants.



I would point out, respectfully, that the questioning of existing conservative orthodoxies is not, itself, a conservative principle. It is the principle of those who want to effect radical change.

Derek:



I agree there's plenty of room for contrarian conservatism, but Mailer was over the day Jack Abbott shived a waiter.

If seedy lives and stupid mistakes disqualified writers' work from consideration, then we'd lose quite a few talents. For example, before WWII, T.S. Eliot hung around with some fairly loathsome characters on the French Right who would later turn collaborator under the German occupation. In fact, Ezra Pound--whose "insanity" I rather doubt--was his mentor. None of this means Eliot's work isn't worth reading or that his insights should be ignored a priori
.

Agreed, but when's the last time Mailer produced something that anyone "needed" to read? I suspect it was the pieces on the '68 convention, unless you count his plagiarized Executioner's Song. I care less about his politics than the frittering away of whatever talent he may once have had.

AUTHOR: Paul Cella
EMAIL: pauljcella@hotmail.com
IP:
URL: http://cellasreview.blogspot.com
DATE: 12/17/2002 11:05:00 PM
AUTHOR: Paul Cella
EMAIL: pauljcella@hotmail.com
URL: http://cellasreview.blogspot.com
DATE: 12/17/2002 11:05:00 PM

Paul:



Is the opposite of neoconservatism necessarily anti-war, anti-Semite, anti-immigration, etc.?



Immigration is a particularly interesting issue given that the magazine is run by the Germano-Irish Catholic Pat and his drug-busted Greek partner, neither of whom would be admitted to a country where only people like the Founders were allowed in.

Your point about Mailer frittering away his talent is quite cogent, Orrin.



As to anti-Semitism, these charges are based on quotes that are wildly distorted out of context, a la Buchanan's review of Toland's Hitler bio.



When it comes to anti-immigration, the neocon consensus is actually turning rather "nativist," actually. A day doesn't go by now when Davey Horowitz's Frontpagemag.com doesn't run a story fretting about the "invasion."



As to the "anti-Israel" position, at least it's a change from the monotonous, unquestioning worship given that foreign power by the Holy Three. If you want tedium, they're the place to go.

Orrin: who ever said "only people like the Founders"? How about "only people who obey the law"? By the lights of our Open Borders crowd, an "anti-immigrationist" is merely someone who objects to systematic disregard of the law, and a studied indifference to that disregard by those sworn to enforce the law. In fact most think this country is perfectly capable of assimilating rather large numbers of immigrants. The principal grievance is that for the most part they are not, currently, coming in legally, not deported when convicted of crimes, not tracked with any regularity, etc. A secondary complaint is that there is no honest discussion of precisely who it is we should be letting in as immigrants. Educated or uneducated? Refugees from tyranny? Should greater consideration be given to Christians, say, or should religion play exactly no role? These questions are hardly even asked, much less discussed.



And what relevance does the ethnicity of various opponents of mass unregulated immigration have to do with this? Only those who have -- what? -- five generations of ancestry here can speak to matters of immigration policy? Maybe that's way no one pays any attention to Michelle Malkin: she's a daughter of immigrants, and therefore, has no right to speak about immigration?



It's also interesting that Israel maintains, by the defintions of my friendly opponents, a profoundly "nativist" immigration policy, but no one bats an eye. I myself do not think it inherently wrong that a country develop its own immigration policy with respect to how it sees itself as a nation, but my opponents seem to regard that as morally indefensible. Perhaps they owe us an explanation.