Category Archives: Culture

Hate & Perversion in the Catcher in the Rye

It's "only three-quarters of a great novel"

I read “The Catcher in the Rye” when I was 18, and was disturbed by it. This review by Spencer J. Quinn of J.D. Salinger’s famous novel goes some way in enabling me to verbalise what exactly it was that disturbed me.

Excerpts:

Literature can shape the way we look at the world — even without our knowing it, or being beware of the specific literature in question. A Bible verse shared during a church service or a few lines of poetry offered in a classroom can have this effect. With novels, well-drawn characters can stick with us until we view life through their fictional eyes. I imagine Ernest Hemingway had this in mind when he claimed that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” There is a little of Huck Finn in all of us, in other words.

By the 1960s, however, Huck Finn had been largely replaced by Holden Caulfield in the American imagination. Despite what an original character Holden is and how deftly author J. D. Salinger developed him in the 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, that’s hardly a good thing.

[…]

Holden Caulfield is indeed a wonderful, unforgettable character. But then why is The Catcher in the Rye only three-quarters of a great novel? Why is it bad that Holden has replaced Huck as the character through which so many Americans see their world?

[…]

None of this would be to the detriment of the novel had Salinger not molded Holden as the poster boy for revenge-minded alienated youth. Holden is treated so sympathetically by Salinger, especially at the end, that the reader is constantly tempted to view life through Holden’s jaundiced eyes — as if it’s the world that’s at fault, not Holden. This is dangerous. Given the connection between The Catcher in the Rye and John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, and others like him, yes, this is dangerous. Huck Finn may have viewed himself as an outlaw for helping Jim escape slavery, but he never saw himself as a predator constantly at odds with most of humanity the way Holden Caulfield seems to be at times.

What further enables the psychopath-as-hero reading of The Catcher in the Rye is the fact that so little is nice in Holden’s world. So much of it is dingy, seedy, or vomity, and, boy, does Holden Caulfield love dwelling on that. Other than during his dreamy walk through the museum, Holden fixates on the ugly and the revolting in New York City, as if that’s all there is. And his penchant for exaggeration doesn’t help. A hotel lobby smells like “50 million dead cigars.” Walking down steps to the sidewalk, he nearly breaks his neck over “10 million garbage pails.”

Even worse, Salinger normalizes sexual perversion. In a hotel Holden finds “a few pimpy-looking guys, and a few whory-looking blondes.” Through the open windows of his hotel, he sees a man trying on women’s clothing and a drunken couple squirting alcohol at each other from their mouths. “The hotel was lousy with perverts,” he states.

[…]

Most tragically, when a man Holden admires touches him inappropriately and forces him to flee into the night, Holden wasn’t even terribly surprised. He admits that “perverty” things like that have happened to him “about twenty times” before. Rounding that down to the more accurate-sounding once or twice, we still have the normalcy of perversion. It’s as if most American boys in Salinger’s world are forced to deal with unwelcome come-ons from grown men.

Who wouldn’t want to shoot up a world like that?

With such a splendid character as Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye could have been a much greater contribution to Western literature. Salinger only needed to tone down the murder in Holden’s heart and the perversion in Holden’s world. Instead, however, he was happy to paint the world to be a darker place than it really is, and make it cool to hate your fellow man.

“Question authority”

"Until we take over", the new authoritarians said to themselves

Writes Tom Woods in today’s newsletter:

What are the textbooks going to say?

That’s what I asked Scott Horton on the Tom Woods Show in our episode on the Durham Report [also here], which definitively exposed the “Russiagate” nonsense as the hoax any non-comatose person knew it was.

But here’s the problem.

American historians are reliable stenographers of the regime. They tell the story the way the Establishment wants it told. Can you imagine an American history textbook admitting that in their zeal to get Trump, entire agencies compromised themselves and major political figures fabricated bizarre stories of Russian collusion?

Historians — some of whom probably once believed the old leftist slogan “question authority” — dearly love the FBI, the CIA, all these agencies. A handful tell bad stories about them from the past, but those stories from the past evidently inspire zero skepticism about them among historians today.

“Question authority” was never meant to be taken seriously. It meant: undermine authority until we take over, and then use that authority to entrench ourselves via lies and dirty tricks.

Matt Taibbi has been on the left his whole life, and has no particular reason to want to exonerate Donald Trump. Except for one thing: he dislikes lies and liars.

Here’s Taibbi’s response to the report:

“I read Special Counsel John Durham’s ‘Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns’ yesterday in a state I can only describe as psychic exhaustion. As Sue Schmidt’s ‘Eight Key Takeaways’ summary shows, the stuff in this report should kill the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory ten times over, but we know better than that. This story never dies. Every time you shoot at it, it splits into six new deep state fantasies.

“I’ve given up. Nearly seven years ago this idiotic tale dropped in my relatively uncomplicated life like a grenade, upending professional relationships, friendships, even family life. Those of us in media who were skeptics or even just uninterested were cast out as from a religious sect — colleagues unironically called us ‘denialists’ — denounced in the best case as pathological wreckers and refuseniks, in the worst as literal agents of the FSB.”

I myself hear the words “Russian disinformation” or “Russian asset” or “Russian talking points” and instantly think: I am speaking to a very low-IQ, highly suggestible person, who repeats whatever phrases are fed to him.

Time after time these fantasies of Russian conspiracies have proven false, and yet the story won’t go away.

Here’s hoping this time they’re slayed for good — heck, even Anderson Cooper admitted the report was “devastating” to the FBI.

Neil Oliver warns against digital central bank currency

In this 15 minute video.

Reminds of the “mark of the beast“:

“Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.” (From Revelation 13:16-17)

Thomas R. Schreiner writes about this on crossway.org:

“The beast is not confined to the Roman Empire; it refers to Rome but applies also to every manifestation of evil in all governments throughout history, and also to the final conflict to come at the end.”

Officials were warned of the dangers of the Covid vaccines

In late 2020, and went ahead nonetheless

See this article from 4th December 2020 (!):

Doctors petition EU to stop all COVID vaccine studies due to grave risks

Due to significant safety concerns, a former vice president and chief scientist for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, has joined a prominent German physician and past head of a local public health department in petitioning for the immediate suspension of all COVID-19 vaccine studies in Europe.

Dr. Michael Yeadon, who held Pfizer’s most senior research position in the field of allergy and respiratory medicines prior to his departure in 2011, and epidemiologist and pulmonary specialist Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg have filed their petition with the European Medicines Agency (EMA), which is responsible for approving drugs in the European Union at large.

Ex-Pfizer VP: COVID vax push a ‘supranational operation’ intended to ‘maim and kill deliberately’

Dr. Michael Yeadon speaks

Article here.

Excerpts:

In a separate correspondence with LifeSiteNews, Yeadon summarized, “[t]he alleged vaccines were designed to injure, maim and kill. Multiple obvious toxicities were deliberately built into their designs, with the result that there would be high expectations of blood clots, autoimmune attacks and cytokine storms all over the body, depending on where it went in a given individual.”

“Finally, the mRNA agents were formulated in lipid nanoparticles, which was known from 2012 to cause accumulation in certain viscera, notably ovaries. Negative impacts on fertility were also virtually assured.”

“None of this could possibly be defended as inadvertent,” he concluded.

The Covid Deception: The Dire Consequences of the Lack of Accountability

Only accountability can rescue freedom from tyranny.

Paul Craig Roberts summarises the current situation.

Excerpts (my emphases):

Reiner Fuellmich, who has been investigating together with thousands of attorneys and scientists assembled in the German Corona Investigative Committee the toxicity of the vaccine, has collected enormous evidence that the vaccine is toxic.  The puzzle has been why some suffered death or injury and others did not.  The answer is the inconsistency of the vaccine batches.  Experts, such as former Pfizer vice president and chief science officer Dr. Michael Yeadon and former head of the Health Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Dr. Wolfgang Wodran, have concluded that “criminal acts are being committed” and that “a big crime is so obvious.”

You can read the report here, I encourage you to do so.  I am now going to turn to its implications.

We know for a fact that the “Covid pandemic” was a fear-driven orchestration, and that no aspect of the treatment protocol was effective or made any sense.  The masks do not protect. The lockdowns did more harm than good. Human rights were violated by coerced mandated involuntary vaccinations with a substance untested and put into use under an emergency authorization that required that there were no known treatments or cures.

The emergency use requirement meant that known cures successfully used in other countries, such as Brazil and India, had to be denied and prohibited from use in the US and other parts of the Western world.  US public health authorities and the presstitutes lied through their teeth that Ivermectin and HCQ were dangerous and unapproved drugs.  Ivermectin was said to be a horse medicine dangerous to humans.  In actual fact both drugs had long been approved for human use and had many decades of use and perfect safety records.  Ivermectin is routinely taken as a preventative of river blindness in those parts of Africa where the parasite is prevalent, and HCQ has long been used as a preventative of malaria.

[…]

Remember also that hospitals were incentivized to maximize Covid deaths as they were paid some $39,000 for each Covid death.  Consequently, nearly all deaths were reported as Covid deaths, even motorcycle accidents, thus maximizing the reported Covid death rate and driving people to vaccination.  

Remember, the PCR test used to diagnose Covid was said by the test’s inventor to be incapable of diagnosing Covid.  The PCR test produced up to 97% false positives, thus immensely exaggerating the pandemic.

Remember too, that the original explanation for Covid was infected bat meat sold in a Chinese market.  We now know for a fact that Covid was an engineered virus and that the “gain-of-function” aspect, which made if contagious, was financed by NIH at the University of North Carolina and when criticism arose due to concerns it violated the Biowarfare Convention, the funding was moved to Wuhan in China.  Remember also, that initially DARPA was involved in the manufacture of the virus.

The new story is that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, but more alert people believe the Covid virus was intentionally released.

There are many independent scientists with no Big Pharma conflicts of interest who regard the “vaccine” as not only more deadly than Covid but also as a bioweapon.  Clearly, the fact now revealed that 5% of the doses account for the adverse effects implies motive and intention.  This must be investigated by independent scientists and organizations.  It is difficult to expect Congress, as dependent as its members are on Big Pharma campaign funds, and the regulatory public health agencies, FDA, NIH, CDC, agencies that are revolving door Big Pharma marketing agents, to honestly investigate the “Covid pandemic” and the toxic batches of the vaccine.

If there is no investigation and no accountability, you can expect worse orchestrated pandemics in the near future.  There are indications that the US has been experimenting with weaponizing ebola, and within the past two years I reported that vials of deadly smallpox had twice been discovered lying about on counters instead of being under lock and key.

[…]

Bioweapon research is Satanic and contrary to the Biowarfare Convention. That the US continues this illegal research is a danger to every American and to the entire world.  Moreover, it shows a reckless unconcern on the part of the US government and its scientists for law and life.  

Government agencies that operate secretly outside the law can lie forever to Congress and can invoke “national security,” a holy cow for Congress, and escape accountability.  We are currently watching the FBI and DOJ continue their protection of Joe and Hunter Biden while pursuing President Trump with false charges.  

Nuclear war is a real possibility.  The neoconservatives’ hostility toward all countries capable of serving as constraints on US unilateralism, together with the Kremlin’s endless tolerance of provocations, are leading to nuclear war.

We face equal risk of extermination from the US government’s weaponization of deadly viruses.  This work continues unobstructed and justified with every kind of false argument.  “Our enemies are doing it, so we must also in order to protect ourself.”  Or as Fauci, Gates, and others claim, we have to make deadly viruses in order to study them so we can be able to preempt them with vaccines.

These arguments are false.  Moreover, the consequences for humanity and all life of nuclear war and bioweapons are so horrific that it makes the pursuit of peace the ultimate of all goals.  But Washington is pursuing hegemony, which is a guarantee of war.

The danger of our situation cannot be exaggerated.  Only accountability for the orchestrated Covid pandemic can re-establish human life as more important than Big Pharma’s profits and rescue freedom from tyranny.