Satires

Menippus Revivivus

Menippus Revivivus is a Cynic satirist who writes with a quill of porcupine and an ink of acid. His sketches may rile as much as they inform

The Lost Art of Sprezzatura

The stealth bombing of the Iranian nuclear loci this week has furnished us an approximate showcase of sprezzatura in power politics. This phrase denotes the effortlessness of what is intricate, and is applicable to any complex action executed with nonchalance. Trump might like to be a pure student of the old principle of sprezzatura (hit them fast, hard, and with style), but the on-demand, social media consumer world makes the warrior’s craft of stealth impossible (as does “notifying Congress”). The Iranian strike amply displays the problems of sprezzaturic statecraft in democratic societies where war and politics are consumptive entertainment.

You should believe those incredible disparities of the old battle statistics from ancient warfare (the envious historians will say they were “propaganda”). Technological superiority was a factor but a lot of it was psychological ingenuity (they go together in the best cultures). The ancient Greek phalanx warfare was always focused on breaking the psychological spirit of the enemy with a heady dose of sprezzatura. The psychological effect of “rolling up the right” saved the battle from descending into bloody attrition. At Plataea the Athenians wanted to face off against the Persian “elite” force Immortals instead of the Theban phalangites but the Spartan supreme commander Pausanias wisely overruled them. The Greek-on-Greek combat of the Theban traitors would tend to stall into costly attrition, and the Spartiates had a better chance than the Athenians of “rolling up” the Immortals for psychological effect. Of course, this is what happened, and the Thebans broke when the Persian right was crushed. The casualties for the Hellene allies were very low. At Gaugamela, almost all the casualties came from post-engagement pursuit. Alexander won the battle in 10 minutes by breaking the Persian right (and the spirit of the whole assembly) with a well-timed cavalry press.

Democratic warfare always needs to make a lot of expensive and pointless noise to placate the gawking public back home (they’ll get spooked by the violence three months later and insist it was too much). The bourgeois crudity and clumsiness of “shock and awe” just ends up killing civilians and encouraging the enemy to “go underground.” If you really wanted to “win” the Vietnam War you’d just bomb target politically significant sites and monuments to Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam over and over and tell the public it was a “limited mission.” One well-timed blast at Dien Bien Phu (on the anniversary!) has more psychological impact than thousands of bombed peasant villages, and you could even give the operation a French name to really rub it in. Instead we bombed a dirt road again and again, killed thousands of American servicemen in pointless “patrols” and annihilated millions of Vietnamese peasants and trees. This is the key to the Western dilemma of “guerrilla” warfare. The Napoleonic “decisive” battle requires notions of aristocratic honor, and means nothing to barbarians (they’d always lose anyway). Don’t start clearing brushwood, “patrolling” and bombing the place into a crystal desert to ferret out the “combatants” (they breed and hide like cockroaches). It just leads to stagnation, wasted lives and money and political unease at home. You can’t “beat” the Taliban any other way than by unsettling their barbarian spirits. They can simply outlast the British, Russians, and Americans because they live in the inferno anyway and there’s nothing but time for them. Find something they care about, and bomb it with sprezzatura. I think it was a little unfortunate that we had an elite Navy “stealth” mission to kill Osama. What we really should’ve done is drive a commercial fuel-loaded American Airlines plane straight into his compound. If we couldn’t do it by remote control, train a pilot to parachute or maybe even tell some Guantanamo prisoner that he can have his freedom if he cooperates and somehow manages to eject. You might say it had to be a quiet, stealth mission because we were “violating” Pakistani “sovereignty.” I promise you our Pakistani “allies” might’ve been a little piqued that some “civilians” died and they had to clean it up (it’s not like it was Manhattan) but they would have understood.

Rant on the Airlines

Nowhere can you perceive today the awful, crushing fusion of peasant need and bourgeois utility like in pondering the ingenious monstrosity of air travel. Commercial air travel is a vast obelisk of human ugliness, and would have appalled even the most vulgar peasant of 13th century Europe. The airports are the best example of how our societies accommodate the double (and always genocidal) oppression of the bourgeois need for things to be efficient and the peasant need for them to be safe. Of course, the bourgeois have learned you can always trick the peasants and just cater to the appearance of herd safety with undignified red tape. The crucial security innovation is the one they never talk about (it’s not elaborate and invasive enough to satisfy the masses): The sealing of the cockpit pressure door from passenger (and even flight attendant) access. That’s about all that needed to be done. Most of the lobotomized security miss everything of real concern, and because they know this they feel the need to compensate and make easy hay of something. You can actually feel the press of masturbatory glee of the fat guy who looks at naked outlines all day, especially when a beauty passes through. Once I even saw one taking pictures and flaring with the nervousness of insect eyes. All those dumb rules about bags under seats, “buckle time,” and taking out electronics in the filthy bins (no one cleans them ever but the airports do have a welfare program of derelicts on Zambonis doing nothing but compressing the herd) are an attempt to show to some corporate bureaucrat that we’re doing something to be better. In one especially crunched security line I tried to find music in the movement of the herd as aesthetic succor. But all those cordoned-off lanes meant to facilitate easy movement only makes the rabble more confused, and their movements are horrid dissonance.

This intentional missing of the forest for the trees is true of all meticulously blockheaded corporate constructions of egalitarians like banking regulation, school districts, and tax law. But the free liberal society has respect for rights! If you don’t want to be naked on the cancer scanner, you can get a pat down by a same-sex (no doubt repressed homosexuals are drawn to the job, you notice where they linger) officer and he’ll even only brush your testicles with the back of his hand. But the modern legal world goes further. What if the pat down is too public? Liberal compassion will swoop in to protect your rights once more. Let’s take it into an enclosed room, where the gawkers can’t see you. But then you have to absorb the awkward excitement of the officer, who clearly thinks you went there for your own perverse satisfaction. I have no special dislike of airline workers, who are no better or worse than others, and surely bludgeoned more than the rest of us. They were not meant to live their lives in the oppressive industrial dankness of the factory farm of the airport and the metal tubes. The peasants of old were locked to the dirt but they always had the open sky. I once sat next to a very refined elderly lady on a flight to Paris who was holding aristocratic decorum for my sake from going into fits because of the impossible cacophony of horrid smells. I don’t recommend you refine your senses too far, especially that of smell, if you still walk in the common world, because that way madness lies. But the worst part of planes is the jumping, desperate barbarism of people (always in the back) to get ahead of just the single row (or maybe two) in front of them when getting off. I once saw the terrible agony of a true French beauty who could not bear to get up from her window seat for fear that the rummaging hordes would swallow her. Some Irish geezer finally let her go in front of him on the assumption that he would get to talk to her down the off-flight ramp, and all he could muster was a crass joke making fun of her English.

Of course, we know Covid (and all future “pandemics”) spread by the impossible density of people in airports. We got our “necessary” security and “affordable” sardine tubes and then killed millions with unsanitary density. This is the end result of all bourgeois efforts to manage and respond to a political problem or consumer demand. They end up layering it with density, and not only crush the spirit but actually inflict mass death.

Sibling, Science and the Romanovs

You notice in cluttered, peasant, and middle societies that the parents want the boy first for “the name.” This is a sure indicator of deficient aristocratic disposition in a culture. The precedence of girls in the unfolding of a bloodline is an aesthetic refinement in the art of childbearing. A boy with no siblings or who leads always has a difficult psychological draw, more so than the rare no-sibling girl. The girl who precedes the boy gives great advantage to her brother, for he is always accelerated in social comprehension of women. The pattern also helps forge artistic geniuses like Mozart and Mendelssohn. Girls who waste psychologically often had distant, older brothers who they revered but couldn’t understand why no else did (her brothers couldn’t figure out how to get a girlfriend because they had no older sister). For a father, bearing a son might be a sign that the apex of his procreative power is on the wane (which is good if the time has come) and the mother must transfer her primary cross-sex affection to her son. Ideally, a son would be a coda to a host of daughters, and when he doesn’t come the youngest girl makes for an awkward finale to the love of fathers. Cordelia must bear the press of the son who was not to be.

The greatest childbearing always produces a brace of beautiful daughters and finally the hero. In the old aristocratic dynasties of Europe, you see that the girls come first more frequently than in the childbearing of the lower classes (it wasn’t just Henry VIII). The boy with Graces for elder sisters always turns into a man on the heights. In Hesiod, Zeus is the youngest of the six children of Cronus and Rhea and the austerely refined and motherly Hestia the eldest, and this is the real reason he became the ruler of the gods. He emerged into godhood under the sisterly tutelage of the nymphs (and not in Cronus’s stomach). I’m in awe of those upper bourgeois Texas families with four blonde beauties and finally the kid brother athlete. We should just give them a hereditary principality straight up because it’s clear God is with them.

You can see the pinnacles of aristocratic childbearing in the final Romanovs, the last great family of the empowered European aristocracy. I have little doubt that the beautiful Romanov family was a choice expression of the pro-creative Muse. All the daughters had effervescent and affectionate personalities, especially Olga, who would’ve been one of the most wonderful mothers we’ve ever known. They each had distinct kinds of beauty. I can never stop being haunted by that angel of sharp shadows Tatiana, who nobody has ever looked like before or since. It makes you wince with nostalgic pain to think how Maria and Anastasia never made it to the full flower of womanhood. I think it’s likely that the Tsarevich Alexei’s hemophilia was some kind of oracular purification (Rasputin understood this) and would have left him if he had a chance to emerge into heroic manhood.

You get the sense that something truly unbearable was lost with the Romanovs among the refined men and women of broken Europe in the hopeful myths of Anastasia’s survival. With the death of the Romanovs, the politics of barbarian resentment completed its final demolition of the ornate beauties of old, aristocratic Europe. Since then, all the glories of the continent have been the shadows of the past. It’s one of the great human tragedies that the British never sent some mission of heroes to save them (it might’ve been possible). Instead, they were too preoccupied with securing “resources” in the Arctic. You might say the barbarians would’ve killed them sooner, but the sublimity of that family was worth every effort of salvation.

What lingers most is not the horrific murders, but the slow psychological collapse of the forever childless beauties in their attempts to create some pretense of royal routine and attain some remnants of the old feelings of space and freedom. You immortal lovelies have them now.

Paean to Alcibiades

When I was a ten-year-old boy, I would play Peloponnesian War with my brother. The lake buoy was our Sicily, the canoe our trireme and the wiffle bats our dorata. About that time, I had the idea of becoming a reincarnation of Alcibiades, who is forever the masterpiece of the male art of personality in the world (so no Hamlets). Even in youth, I realized how much color and space I lacked compared to him. The spirit of Alcibiades was forged among the beautiful expanse of the agora and Arcadia and the mountain peaks of Hellas. I gladly take this burden as a necessity of my time, but there will always be something cramped in me that the eight-year-old blooming youth Alcibiades easily overcame. The character of Alcibiades is a testament to the sublime possibilities of human personality cultivated in artistic space or the world as canvas.

At no point did Alcibiades obscure his perfection for anyone. When you see the problems he caused in the glorious classical Greek world, you can only imagine what would happen if he lived today (none of our celebrities, or Trump, are even close to the aura projected by the justified self-worship of Alcibiades). He would get in trouble for something incredible like climbing to the top of the Washington monument with his bare hands, or letting loose some chipmunks in a bloviating Senate committee hearing, or seducing a hot Mormon wife into sneaking him into Mitt Romney’s final initiation ceremony at the Salt Lake Temple. If he killed someone, a mob of women would actually storm the prison like it was the Bastille and set him free (Mangione only got letters and TikTok videos). He would cue some famous actress walking down the red carpet and she would abandon all decorum and beg him to take her right there. And this isn’t even addressing the fact that he would dominate world politics far beyond even Trump. You think I’m exaggerating, but you have to get through your head that we don’t have men anywhere near this anymore. If we brought Alcibiades from the past, the shock (especially to the ladies) would be like nothing we’ve ever seen.

You might think he was an unstable “turncoat,” but I promise you, Alcibiades had to leave the situation when he felt the constriction of envious resentment or possessiveness begin to press too hard. It wasn’t his problem that he left a divine aftertaste in his wake, and if a man is to leave a trail of nectar behind him, he best beware his shadow is not a tail. If Alcibiades had stuck around Athens, he would’ve become Sir Walter Raleigh. If he had stuck around Sparta, the Spartan queen would’ve become Anna Karenina. If he had stuck around Sardis, the satrap’s entire harem would have sparagmosed him when they found out he had them all. If Pericles and Thucydides were running the show in Athens for the Sicilian venture, you might’ve seen a recognition of Alcibiades’ necessity (like Eisenhower with Patton) and Athens might’ve won the war (the Syracusans had deep aesthetic appreciation and let captured Athenian phalangites go when they recited Euripides — the best of them would’ve been happy to be under Alcibiades’ personal tyranny). But instead, the Athenians didn’t give their best man his necessary space, and their glory days were over.

Since he was mortal (as far as we can tell) he knew to behave like the gods but never to stick around when resenters wanted to deal death or density to him. The man with extreme natural superiority must have loyalty only to himself and to God (the extreme beauty is the same). Once you look at things with a truly refined eye you will see that every part of the life of Alcibiades was perfect, right down to the beautiful Timandra burying him with her tears after the cowards sent to kill him couldn’t bear to look into his flaming face as they brought him down with arrows. Maybe some poets and holy men saw aspects of transcendent space that no else did, but no man we know has truly lived like Alcibiades. He should be the model of every man for the beautiful active life, and you should read Plutarch’s biography of him a hundred times.

Against the “Nation of Laws”

The bourgeois conservatives love their “nation of laws.” But the immense hydra of the law codes is just an impossibly dense instrument to cudgel the confused and frustrated lower class over and over. I envy your ability for false and stubborn idealism if you actually believe any Western nation has “equality under the law.” Of course there’s no equality under the law. The baffled poor get endless term “extensions” and malicious plea deals they can’t possibly understand for acting up in the actual prisons and also the bureaucratic prisons of egalitarian-meddling low-income neighborhoods. Eventually many long-term felons “give up” in frustration and decide that the partially controllable restricted space of the prison cell is better than the constant bureaucratic confusion of paroles, public attorney “consultations” (they have no idea what she’s saying), pleas and court appearances, so they attack a cell mate or a corrections officer. Meanwhile the “elites” snort from the hookers, and traffic their underage sex toys in yachts and charter planes their whole lives long. I don’t point this out to try to impose more puritan egalitarianism. Excessive puritan cudgeling will only make everyone uneasy and if the bourgeois truly knew what the high classes were doing they would probably lash out in even more tactless sexual barbarism.

Please don’t think I’m a libertarian. The libertarian itch comes upon those with a nostalgia for an aristocratic class system, but insufficient courage to proclaim it in this time. The great egalitarian mistake, that different natures are all compatible in the same social mishmash and under the same “code,” inflicts catastrophic psychological genocide. It makes the peasants violent, bewildered and sexually uncontrollable, and it makes the “aristocrats” sneaky and more perverted. The old healthy sexual promiscuity and long-leashed conduct of the French ancien regime, that brought so many oppressed rural beauties and refined wits into the sublime space of the Versailles court, is by far the best we can do for general psychological healthiness. There’s nothing a society can do about peasant behavior on the farms (or in the inner cities) and it only becomes a problem when they violate the space required for the higher natures. You can see this acknowledgement in certain privileged minority sub-quarters, like how the Minnesota authorities have given up (they never tried) curbing the ubiquitous practice of infant girl genital mutilation among Somali “immigrants” (they should all be in Somalia).

Through the long and slowly flailing egalitarian experiment in the West, we should remember that the old social ordering and distance of aristocratic cultures was so much healthier to the spirit and psychological healthiness of all. The laws have become so dense that we’re slowly getting to the point where everything is possibly illegal and that the clarity or artistic and charismatic power (or “multicultural” exemption) of your criminal act is your best chance to escape punishment. We should get a printer (3D!) to print out the trillion pages of local ordinances, bureaucratic forms, state law, and federal statutes, and hold a splendid auto da fe in front of the Capitol. The joy and revelry among the high spirits would touch sublimity.

The Constipation of the Libertarian

The abdominal agitation felt by the true libertarian was always rooted in the question: Why am I enslaved to the same endless rules and regulations as all these derelicts? Without the open acknowledgment of different natures libertarianism just becomes another utopian political fantasy that wishes people weren’t the way they are. The less intellectually-stuffed of them always had a hunch that their ideas were ridiculous below a certain threshold of refinement and self-control. They say “allow drugs” because some entrepreneur they know became a hard-working millionaire off his reliable cocaine connection. But giving cocaine to the masses leads only to mayhem, especially if we have to “care for them.” The most self-righteous libertarians get irked tremendously by the obvious farce of “equality under the law” because they’ve swallowed one too many delusions of egalitarian idealism. Since the libertarian is a timid creature by nature, he struggles to follow his insight to the logical necessity of egalitarian denial.

I don’t remark on the hypocrisies of the legal system to suggest more “investigations” of the wealthy and the politicians (they all break the law because they know how and it’s impossible not to). Even the successful bourgeois “small business” owners realize their “accountant” misses things that might get them in trouble if the IRS voyeurs wanted to actually work. The truly malicious “Soviet-style” operatives want it to be this way because it is a great tool of control for people with means and dissenting spirits. But most people caught in the regulatory slaughterhouse have no idea what’s going on, and just assume the “rules” are “important” for unknown reasons. Most “billionaires” stay in line as best they can (and are afraid to go into politics) because they know that some bureaucrat could find hundreds of financial “crimes” if he really wanted to go after them (they don’t have the charismatic power of Trump to nullify it into gibberish). The whole edifice has to be torched. Why do we have to pretend the laws are equally applicable for everyone? We know they aren’t in practice already. Just abandon the facade. The peasants have “Communist” tendencies because they are subject to avaricious instinct and have a constant fear of famine. Let them go back to (urban!) villages and communes and do whatever they want in their sequestered space. If they get uppity and resentful and start wanting to take (we’ll give them welfare) just tell them no (or crush them if they’re in revolt). Why is it better for the peasants to be psychologically destroyed by constant prison sentences, fast food profit, greed, “social workers,” and “education”? The peasants are healthiest and at their best when they manage their own affairs (they used to have “health insurance” based on folk remedies and social taboos and didn’t get obese or addicted and actually lived longer). The old aristocratic lineage and patronage societies (no paperwork or expensive degrees) essentially had their own “code” and the peasants and craftsmen had theirs. The aristocrats didn’t mind the lower natures regulating themselves as long as they kept at the appropriate distance.

What really constipates the honest libertarians is what they dare not say in the egalitarian ideological quagmire: The high natures are oppressed by all the middle nature bureaucracy and meddling needed to partially control the low nature in the egalitarian stew. The crucial step to a free society for the high is to recognize natural aristocratic distinction (beauty, charisma, refinement) and then choose to construct a social order in respect for Nature’s laws (this is the more difficult step, because it requires the population not be seething resenters).

The Spinster

The lower classes are generally free from sexual envy (unless they’re ho-swapping), because they don’t have the notions of space to really comprehend what anyone higher is doing. Sexual envy requires a higher conception of space that resents what others elsewhere are getting. It is a bourgeois and not a peasant phenomenon. The violent incel and the feminist rage fiend are always intelligent. But if they don’t develop a measure of social refinement, they are generally unworkable because there’s nothing we can do for their illustrious expectations. They’re just not desirable to anyone they feel they deserve. Bourgeois monogamous idealism might have suppressed them (or paired them) before, but it can’t now. They see too clearly what everyone else has on the trillion eyes of the Internet. The truly volatile incels need to be sent on some exploratory and dangerous quest where they will either die or learn sociability, and the spinsters need to be controlled in the households of their happily married sisters.

If the spinsters (and I include unhappily married spinsters) keep “voting” they will absolutely destroy us all out of spite. All that sexual frustration makes them geniuses for political organization, ideological propaganda, and bureaucratic mayhem. This is the formula for the vicious and back-up plan lesbian (there is no other type unless you’re counting the hop-on-anything sex girl). The convenient bourgeois social myths of “soul-mates” and “Mr. Right” were once helpful but have now become resentment fuel. The unselected women especially assume that it’s the high man’s job to take and love her as she is. When this doesn’t happen, she turns to inward rage and takes her vengeance in the form of meddling and sometimes genocidal political participation. If you attend a city council (or homeowner’s association) meeting anywhere in an American suburb, you’ll find that it’s always the 40-year old divorcee or spinster member who wants to put up the public housing grotesquerie, curtail (or disband) the police, raise municipal fees and get the city into even more debt with some new “bureaucracy” or “social initiative” that will flood the city with barbarians. She feuds endlessly with the old veteran council member (he’s been mayor three times and she’s keeping him from retiring) who wants to protect the elders and long-term residents in the neighborhoods and raise revenue by cutting insane red tape. Of course, she always gets re-elected because she has her quasi-lesbian friends “door knock” at the houses of clueless residents who vote for her just to keep her away (they have no idea what she does in the city council, and she doesn’t have a “D” warning next to her name on the voter card).

You really have to understand that all of this is psychologically rooted in female sexual resentment and erotic deprivation, and it is endemic to local government and bureaucracy across the country. The school boards are even worse than the city councils for meddlesome, sexually-seething middle-aged harpies. The endless catering of the spinster to barbarians may be a re-directed maternal instinct, but I think it’s more likely that it’s just unholy spite. She likes the chaos they cause in society because she wants the world to burn (by tinkering!) because it found her unworthy. She certainly doesn’t want to risk her own personal safety, and that government or charity check is more than enough to keep her away from the worst mayhem she causes (for now). These types of women love to get other women’s sympathy (and hopefully draw their envy) by saying they were “followed” and “harassed” (maybe they were — they helped bring him here). I feel compassion for the true spinsters, even though they are destructive, because no one ever taught them how to develop the nobility of personality that always blossoms into physical beauty. Many of them get to a point very early (high school) where they will never allow a suave man (unless he endures her unpleasantness for a long time) to teach her, and her “girlfriends” are never going to do it, so she never learns. She ages in spinsterhood or a terrible marriage and does her part to make a bonfire of civilized society.     *