This Must Be the Place – The Culturist Review

‘This Must Be The Place, a film by Paolo Sorrentino, shows how the shock of the holocaust infantilized Western culture and its citizens.  As jihadis presents us with images that make the holocaust photos look tame, the West must again contend man’s dark side.  Watching this film and ISIS videos can help the West grow up.

Sean Penn does a superb acting job as an aged 1980s rock star, Cheyenne, who has never changed his 80s look, even though he hasn’t performed for 20 years.  Coming too late to his estranged father’s deathbed, Cheyenne takes up his newly departed father’s hunt for his Auschwitz tormenter.   The gorgeous and poetic chase leads him through a beautifully, nostalgically, portrayed American landscapes and homes.    

Cheyenne has not spoken to his father in 30 years.  And at one point, he says, “not having had children has really screwed me up.”  The NAZI he is hunting is also estranged from his son.  And, a boy Cheyenne bonds with during his NAZI quest, appears to have lost his father in one of America’s Middle East wars.  The absence of fathers is – to put it lightly – a theme.

And, now my editorial begins . . . It has always amazed me that the 1960s generation followed on the heels of the WW II generation.  One generation stared down evil.  The next tried to convince us that bad guys were only an illusion to be overcome by love.  The hippies’ dream has led to our multicultural nightmare, wherein all cultures, no matter how NAZI-like, are considered idyllic and to be embraced with love and kindness.

Cheyenne didn’t speak to his father for 30 years because his father rejected his goth make-up.  Though not in the film, I have tried to imagine this holocaust survivor staring at his 1980s son playing at evil.  It would have stirred emotions and been hard to take seriously.  As in punk, the fifteen-year-old goth would be trying to acknowledge the evil their hippie parents ignored. But punk and goth lyrics aimed at imagined suburban kid horrors.

My analysis gets vindicated when Cheyenne meets a tough-looking, heavily-tattooed man in a bar, who is really just a nice guy.  Cheyenne asks drolly, when informed that his new acquaintance is a tattoo artist, “Have you noticed how nobody works anymore and everybody does something artistic?” Yes.  I have noticed both grown children playing tough guys littering western cities and the avoidance of responsibility.

Both Cheyenne’s father and the caught NAZI, lament having their “lightheartedness” and childhoods stolen from them by WW II.  Now in a Freudian transfer, our multicultural generation just wants happy depictions of all cultures.  In our post-holocaust world only being a victim has merit.  In such a world, being dominant and macho can only be a crime.  It is a formula for emasculation.  An absence of manliness.

After confronting his father’s NAZI guard Cheyenne grows up.  Today, a new generation is seeing evil first-hand in jihadis’ tiny youtube videos. Perhaps the jihadis’ cruelty will end the West’s childlike multicultural fantasy. 

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THE ISIS HUMANITARIAN CRISIS – THE CULTURIST VIEW

There has been a surge of ISIS terror in Iraq.  We are told that this group’s killing is creating a humanitarian disaster; that we must intervene.   But this is not a humanitarian disaster, it is an Islamic disaster.  The West is not Islamic.  We need to distance ourselves from this action, not get involved.

 From a humanitarian perspective, western nations must stop the blood shed in Iraq because generic people – global citizens - are in need of protection. The humanitarian, globalist, multicultural vision, sees all people as essentially the same and on the same side geopolitically. Culturism believes in a ‘clash of civilization’ model.  In this clash, western nations are not on the same side as Islamic nations - we are antagonists. Rather than a ‘humanitarian’ obligation to aid or arm our enemies, we have a culturist obligation to protect ourselves.

 To keep the West out of the Iraqi conflict, we need to replace ‘humanitarianism,’ with culturism.  When people declare themselves globalists, tell them that you are NOT a ‘global citizen;’ you’re a western culturist; a citizen of your western nations, part of the family of nations that believes in freedom of speech, the relative separation of church and state, democracy, individualism, and women’s rights.  Recognizing that we belong to the western side is the first step to dismantling globalists’ ‘humanitarian’ calls to arm Muslims.   

 Culturism will also help us avoid having to take in refugees from the Iraqi conflict. Multiculturalists tell us that western nations are culturally neutral space.  Iraqi Muslims are just as western as anyone else.  This is not true. Iraqis come from the Muslim world.  The West is not a part of that sphere. Iraqis speak a non-western language, have non-western heroes, and hold values antithetical to ours. If Muslim refugees need asylum, let an Islamic nation take them in.

 This ‘humanitarian’ crisis actually provides us with a golden opportunity to defeat multiculturalism.  When multiculturalists tell us to ‘celebrate diversity;’ we can point to ISIS’s terrorist campaign. Diversity includes cultures that celebrate beheading.  Cultural diversity includes cultures that honor beheading people.  We don’t want to celebrate that.  So we are not ‘celebrating diversity,’ we are honoring our own values.  As we use the example of ISIS to wake people up from the multiculturalists’ attempt to blind us to the importance, the real extent, of cultural diversity.

 In fact, the ISIS crisis even gives us an opportunity to defeat the globalist ideal of ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘human rights,’ because it demonstrates that these are western concepts. If the West falls, Iraq will not champion ‘human rights’ in the world.  They are fighting for Islamic domination.  China doesn’t believe in ‘human rights,’ free speech, democracy and such. If we want to protect so-called  ‘humanitarian’ virtues, we must realize that they are only western virtues and protect the West.  Giving Muslims funding or letting them into our country undermines our ability to defend our western rights-based values. 

 To keep us from sending aid to Iraq or allowing refugees into the West, we must replace the globalist, multiculturalist, humanitarian ideologies with a culturist one The barbarian behavior of ISIS gives us an opportunity to spread culturist doctrine.  You can do so by using the words ‘culturism’ and ‘culturist’ in your conversations.  Take action; do so today.  

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The Magic Mountain - The Culturist Review

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a classic of Western Literature.  Starting just before World War I, it follows a middle class bourgeois, Hans Castrop, to a tuberculosis sanitarium on the top of a mountain (hence the title).  His intended 3 – week visit to his cousin, turns into a seven-year internal odyssey among the sick.  

The Magic Mountain is written as a bildungsroman – a genre wherein the main character develops his character via experience and help from guides. In this version, an advocate of Enlightenment values Settembrini and the Nietzscheian Naphta fight over Hans’ soul. 

Settembrini is working on an Encyclopedia of suffering in order to help expunge suffering from the world; Naphta dreams of returning to Middle Ages values in which people knew their place and accepted suffering and shortcomings as a part of life.  Settembrini’s dreams are based on science and progress; Naphta’s require and celebrate a bit of violence and oppression to keep man in order.

And this battle for Hans’ soul reflects that battles over the Weimar Republic that Mann faced as he wrote the Magic Mountain.  Many bought Naphta’s appeal to save Germany via order during the inter-war period; they killed communists by the 100s and spawned the Third Reich.  In turn, the Weimar Republic called for calm and appealed to Settembrini’s enlightened ‘republican’ (small r) values.

Hans’ never really buys either proponents’ position.  He liked Settembrini’s Enlightenment ideals, but found them shallow and dull.  And though he admires how easily Naphta destroys Settembrini in arguments, he understands that Naphta is a misanthropist and a monster. 

In an exciting climax, the two intellectuals agree to a duel.  As a pacifist, Settembrini fires into the air. Naphta then calls him a coward, and commits suicide.  The intellectual battles over, Hans languishes, nowhere in thought, far removed from society, on top of that mountain.

Eventually, Hans leaves this sanitarium, to go back to the real world.  He leaves arid thought to engage in life’s day – to –day struggles.  Ironically, as World War I is on, he actually returns to the front lines of a thoughtless battle.  We hope - as the book is a bildungsromans – that he is improved.  Perhaps with irony, the narrator tells us that he hopes love will bloom from this carnage.

As a culturist, I understand the pull between the rational and the irrational.  In Mann’s sanitarium, wherein bourgeois slowly rot, in the face of Islamic aggression and ghetto culture, we do nothing out of fear of being called ‘racist.’  I hope the term ‘culturist’ can allow us to have reasonable discussions about negative impacts of cultural diversity, sans the ‘r’ word.

But, as a culturist, I study cultural dynamics.  I know that dry reasoned debates do not wake people up as much as the English Defense League smashing the offices of pro-immigration politicians offices would.  So I too am torn between Settembrini’s placid debate and the evil attraction of Naphta.

The political correctness police should understand that by using Settembrini’s “universal” (not) “global” (not) Enlightenment values to stifle any sense of western pride, they are preparing the way for a backlash of Naphta’s irrational violence.  As such, we culturists need to safely develop national pride and discussions of cultural diversity.  Otherwise, as with Hans, we will have no option but to cower on a mountain top or join in mass carnage.

A Culturist Challenge to Black Men

I am struck by a paradox: 

In the National Basketball Association (NBA) we laud the competitive grit of black players.  Seven points down with two minutes left?  Blacks don’t give up!  Down 3 to 1 in the series?  Believe! FIGHT!  You can do it!!!

The paradox comes from comparing the Blacks’ never-say-die fighting attitude in the NBA to their constant victimization in social depictions.  High crime rates?  Blacks are victims of poverty.  Poor school performance?   Blacks are victims of hidden racism.  Just hints of name-calling, apparently, causes black men to fold off the court. 

To illustrate the paradox, in 1950, Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton became the first black person to sign an NBA contract.  You never hear black people say, “We cannot compete in basketball because we were kept out of the NBA until 1949.”  But, we hear, “We can’t compete because we were kept out of white schools until the early 1960s,” all the time. 

Instead of toughness, on and off the court we get constant cry-baby reactions from blacks. “Waaaa!” They cry, “He used the N-Word!  Waaaa!   And we reply, “Oh. We feel your terrible pain widdle one. Do you want the government to punish the bad man who hurt your widdle feelings?  Can you stop crying now?  Is the ouchy better?”

Instead our reaction should be, “Shut the F up and grow a pair!!!! As on the court, don’t dwell on the unfair call from the last play. Stop crying get back to competing!!!! MAN UP!!!  And, while we’re on the subject blacks commit insane amounts of crime, parent irresponsibly, suck at school, and rely on the government to feed them way.  

The whining reply to the prior statements, “Mommy he was waaaaycist.” It is a sad little trick.  The above facts are not racist, they are culturist.  They’re not statements about your genes; they refer to how much of your culture sucks off the court.  These are not irrational bad calls, they are totally accurate depictions in the weakness of your off-court game.

So man-up black man! The Asians are dunking on you in the game of life. Hell, even the Latinos are stealing your balls! Don’t cry because I mentioned it.  Drink some testosterone, put on your big boy pants and start playing off the court with as much grit as you do on it.

John Kenneth Press, Ph.D.

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