Throw together an English Roman Catholic terrorist from 1605, a 1930’s noir atmosphere, a damsel who is only somewhat in distress, a government that makes Ingsoc look humane, some psychedelics, some fortuitous but random evangelical proof texting of The Collected Works of William Shakespeare, some references to the mass killings of the twentieth century, a bit of Ray Bradbury, Max Ernst, and Patrick McGoohan, a rather tame lesbian romance, a fictional 1980s that went exactly against what actually happened, and two young cocksure perfectionist English artists who wanted to avoid mimicking their American counterparts.   You probably still would not end up with the disturbing masterpiece that is V FOR VENDETTA.  J

A penny for the English guys.

Written in the first third of the 1980s but not published as a graphic novel until 1988, V FOR VENDETTA broke into the cultural mindset of the intellectual rising generation like nothing else.  

For someone growing up in that decade—with New Wave, Blade Runner, Reagan, Rush, New Wave, Macintosh, Red Rain, and Nuclear Winter—V FOR VENDETTA took the extreme desires and fears of a whole generation and made them into a coherent (mostly) tale.  

If John Hughes captured our most adolescent suburban libertinism, V FOR VENDETTA made them into our most terrifying libertarian nightmare.

The story, written jointly by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, takes place in the late 1990s.  In 1983, a Labour government replaced the Tories, kicking out the American nuclear missiles, thus leaving the U.K. free from destruction.  Soon, the Americans and the Soviets went after each other, leaving America, especially, in ruins.  

The resulting economic turmoil in Europe led to the rise of a National Socialist/Fascist government in Britain.  Though the leaders personally gave into every lewd pleasure in and out of the bedrooms, they outlawed homosexuality, non-whites, and non-Protestant Christians.  Those who weren’t deported or executed found themselves in prison camps, the playthings of progressive eugenicists, willing to see the body contorted in every possible manner to “perfect the race.”

Under the slogan “England Prevails,” the fascists maintain control through mass surveillance as well as through armed thugs known as “Finger Men” who have the power to kill, rape, and pillage at will, all in the name of England.  Signs litter the streets with the hypocritical propaganda: “Strength through Purity; Purity through Faith.”

Of the internment camps, one of the most brutal was the Larkhill Settlement, out of which emerged the anarchist anti-hero, V.  The authors intentionally keep his identity hidden, as he represents an idea more than an individual person.  Still, the reader does come to know that V had been interned and had survived the experiments.  In some way, never explained, the experiments made him more human than human, endowing him with extraordinary powers of resistance to bodily harm, astounding concentration and memory, and near perfect agility.  It would, however, be better to describe the final product of the experiment as the creation of a Batman rather than a Superman.  The only one of the test subjects to live, V gained the favor of his captors, set the camp aflame, and departed.

The main story takes place years after the destruction of Larkhill.  Now, one by one, every person who ever worked at Larkhill is being systematically murdered.  Though, the more appropriate term would be “assassinated.”  V, of course, is proudly the killer.  He not only kills his victims, but he does so with immense poetic justice.  Each person assassinated—reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno—dies according to his or her vice.

https://www.news-journal.com/opinion/navarrette-america-s-dirt-y-secret-latinos-are-disappearing/article_2ff55d14-43d5-11ea-9b26-0f83e6abdf84.html?fbclid=IwAR3KcrrB4NYmIqacheFr1Cv0sQF3hCdWOrZ_6xYxIxSqLszaCnNF-aIoauo

Many years ago I was reading Don Quixote in the original Spanish for the first time. I remember I encountered the word “Latino” for the first time. So there are “Latinos” in Don Quijote. But wait! The way Cervantes meant the term it didn’t mean “Latino” but “Latinist” that is someone who could read and write Latin. Ruben Navarrette writes:

“Of course, I speak about what the Latino literati has been referring to cryptically — and often angrily — as “the book.”

The book is “American Dirt,” and it’s a novel, which is to say that the admittedly riveting story it tells — about a Mexican woman and her son who leave their comfortable life in Acapulco and head for the U.S.-Mexico border as they flee drug cartels — never happened.

How fitting, then, that this make-believe story would be written by a make-believe Mexican.

New York City-based Jeanine Cummins was born in Spain, but only because her Navy father was stationed there. She has lived her entire life in the United States, where she has identified as “white” and studied English in college.

Cummins does have a Puerto Rican grandmother. But she doesn’t appear to have spent much time over the years identifying as Puerto Rican.”

Of course, you know being born in Spain and having a Puerto Rican grandmother DOES make one (if one wants to claim it) officially Hispanic. Of course, as we know there are elites among Hispanics themselves so i don’t need to list them.

Suffice it to say if one’s father is a medical doctor and one’s mother was a teacher in a private Catholic academy and one graduates from a private Jesuit academy one is very privileged and more likely to succeed in an American high school or junior college.

Only a small minority of my students are high school graduates (from overseas) but those who are or who graduated from the 8th grade in Mexico or Central America usually have an advantage and usually graduate from high school and go on to college. It is an advantage, even if one knows little English, to have studied Latin, to know the parts of speech, to have a high level of cultural literacy in one’s native language as compared to someone with a very spotty elementary education or perhaps not even a native Spanish speaker (being a native speaker of an indigenous language).

I grew up speaking two languages (other than English), including Spanish (my father and uncle could speak Spanish reasonably well -my father read, Garcia Lorca, Machado and Cervantes in the original -he was an avid amateur linguist). But I never once claimed to be of Hispanic origin (because I am not) or even a national from another country (though I have strong cultural and linguistic ties to the Gaeltacht). None of my grandparents or great-grandparents were native English-speakers.

Of course, by heritage, I am a Gael but I know and have always known that I am the last of my race; my children and grandchildren will all be part of la raza cosmica. At this point every person in my family under the age of 40 is a native Spanish speaker and most are Mexicans or Mexican-Americans. How they identify themselves in the future is up to them. I just take for granted they will not speak my language or know much if anything about their paternal grandfather’s culture. The languages of Empire and the highest utility triumph. That’s why Gaulish and Celtiberian are extinct and most Native American dialects. Spanish and English are world languages as my language is not and I cannot lament the disappearance of our language (only a few people over age 60 speaking it in our family now and no one under the age of 64). As my grandfather told me more than 50 years ago -and he did not speak to me in English- “We lost the war. English is the language of the banks and the long-range guns.”

The languages of the big battalions and Empires always have an advantage over scattered broken tribes and clans. My English-speaking friends cannot understand the persistence of Spanish. I tell them it was CREATED and FORMED as a universal language of Empire. The Empire might be gone but the roots of that culture and thickness of the trunk are both deep and wide. In North American Spanish is the only possible rival to English. In my opinion, Spanish will survive into the 22nd century.alongside of English.

My language probably will not. The writing was on the wall for the Gaels long ago -Flodden, Kinsale and Culloden. The last leaves of that linguistic tree will fall sometime this century.

Stephen Humphries: Playlist January
— Read on stephenhumphries.blogspot.com/2020/01/playlist-january.html

We built only for the moment, not even for the future, as we eradicated the past.

The loss of manners, he especially decried, had coincided, necessarily, with the loss of beauty in society. Nowhere, it seemed, did anyone take decorum seriously—whether in one’s soul or one’s society. If order in one’s soul leads to order in the commonwealth, disorder in one’s soul leads to the disorder in the commonwealth. The totalitarians of the present age, Kirk feared, wanted to control not only the present, but also the past and the future as well. “The totalists say that the old order is a corpse, and that man and society must be fashioned afresh, in grim fashion, upon a grim plan,” he wrote.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/01/russell-kirk-beauty-civilization-bradley-birzer.html