Counter-Currents
Popcult Humor from Wilmot Robertson
Remembering Wilmot Robertson
(April 16, 1915–July 8, 2005)
Margot Metroland
2,487 words
In the early 1980s I was involved with the startup of a “humor magazine” that never went anywhere after its colorful-but-vague pilot issue. Apart from a couple of National Lampoon veterans, we were mostly post-collegiate types, full of quirky, off-the-wall ideas from our own days at colorful-but-vague college humor mags. It was around this time that one of my colleagues mentioned, as a bit of curious arcana, that he had heard that somewhere out there was a racist humor magazine.
No! You don’t say! I said. Or something like that. I didn’t ask the magazine’s name, because that would have been showing untoward interest. Furthermore, the colleague in question was the same guy whose mother raised her kids to believe that if you bought Welch’s Grape Juice, you were funding the John Birch Society. Thus he was a great source of whimsical urban legends with little to back them up.
Knowing the name of the periodical was beside the point. The point was that this rumor existed, and that notion was funny in itself, because you could just imagine what sort of wild, rancid crap might be in there. It’s like today when you tell aging midwits that there are White Nationalist media outlets out there, and they go, “Oh! Stormfront?” Something they heard about 25 years ago but would never want to investigate further. They have an idea what it’s all about, and that’s good enough for them.
In this case the unnamed “racist humor magazine” was presumably Instauration, and the rumored “humor” must have referred mostly to its silly/incisive/tiresome cartoons of Willie and Marv. (Willie was a gloriously afro’d 1970s negro holding a boombox, while Marv was a snide, stoop-shouldered Jew in a cardigan.) A few years later, after my startup humor rag was long dead and buried, I ended up contributing odd cartoons and text squibs to Instauration — just to keep my hand in, you know. A little later, editor Wilmot Robertson retired the by now very dated Willie and Marv.
Beyond that, I can’t think of an awful lot of straight-up funny business going on in the pages of that beloved magazine. Overt attempts at humor were mostly snarly and leaden. For example, the snooty-bitch “society column” written by someone calling himself Cholly Knickerbocker, serving up plausible-looking newsbriefs mixed in with off-color fantasies about miscegenation, AIDS, Jewish supremacy, and other variants in degeneracy.
Or the November 1983 cover photo of Anthony Blunt, former knight, former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures — sweetly captioned OLD FAG ANTHONY BLUNT, Of Stalin’s Snobbish Spy Network.
Confusingly enough, two issues later our cover boy was Michael Whitney Straight “Majority Renegade of the Year.” Scion to wealth and onetime Cambridge Red, Straight’s main claim to fame — or greatest sin — was that he was the one who shopped his old friend Sir Anthony to the American and British intelligence services. (But surely that was a good thing?)
Like the quasi-Leftist critic Dwight Macdonald, Instauration had a reverence for High Culture, particularly that which was somewhat obscure. No room here for kitsch, or Macdonald’s “Masscult and Midcult.” If there was an article about sculpture, it would probably be on Praxiteles — or, better yet, Arno Breker! If Instauration had a composer on its cover, it might be Carl Orff — who, it was emphasized, stayed put in National Socialist Germany and didn’t run off to Hollywood. Or perhaps Percy Grainger, another “folkish” composer, one who specialized in writing pastiches of Morris dances and Irish reels.
This leaden stuff is why the letters pages, known as “The Safety Valve,” were such must reading, and remain so today. You got big laughs, lots of venom, and — best of all — occasional mention of things that were happening in the present-day Real World. Movies and TV, and sometimes even sportsball. Pop culture.
You can buy Charles Krafft’s An Artist of the Right here.
From what I knew of Wilmot Robertson, the ventings excerpted in “The Safety Valve” were more reflective of his personality than most of what appeared in the magazine. The fact is, people who wrote for Instauration didn’t have much to say about popular culture because they didn’t follow it or read about it. Mainly they read things like . . . well, like Instauration . . . and heavy tomes on history or philosophy. But every once in a while, a discussion of old-time showbiz or society personalities would find its way into the magazine.
One of my favorite exchanges with W. R. concerned the late, great Ethel Merman. Now, especially in her latter years — that would be anytime after about 1940 — she had a memorable look and loud, brassy personality. Because of that, and the fact that her real name was Ethel Zimmerman, a naive person could easily assume that she was Jewish. But, of course, she was not. Merman’s ancestry was Scots and German, going way back, and she was raised in a churchgoing Episcopalian household. On the other hand, Wikipedia informs me that when young she modeled her voice and persona on Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice, amongst others, thus she was deliberately molding herself in that direction, not Doin’ What Comes Naturally. So, maybe so.
Anyway, I shot a little note off to Instauration and got back a reply — was it a letter or phone call? — from the man himself. “Madame,” W. R. said, drawing himself up to his full 6’2” height (or so I imagined), “if there is an archetypal Jewess anywhere, it is most definitely Ethel Merman.” A few weeks later a longer, less jocose reply appeared in the magazine’s “Safety Valve” letters section (June 1986).
It turns out I had actually written in to correct a columnist who’d referred to the late, great Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich as Jewish, and I tossed in Ethel Merman as another example of the same misapprehension.
So far as high-class popular-culture criticism goes, it’s hard to beat “King Cole,” a beguiling analysis of Cole Porter’s musical oeuvre that appeared in Instauration in August 1977.
“The Majority composer who never sold out.” That’s the kicker.
The author briefly alludes to Cole’s often louche and debauched private life, but he puts it in the context of the times, beginning with an expatriate life in the midst of people such as the Murphys and Fitzgeralds:
Porter was a member, at home and abroad, of various, and admittedly somewhat dissolute, “sets.” What would have made him a phenomenon in any group was his dedication to composing. Even in the early 1920s, when he affected the outward lifestyle of an expatriate playboy, he was working hard; and he had some success in Paris in 1923 with his score for a modernistic ballet — since revived — Within the Quota. (The settings and story line were provided by Gerald Murphy, who had been Porter’s friend and sponsor at Yale. A truly archetypal expatriate, Murphy was also a friend to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and served as a model for the hero of the latter’s 1934 novel, Tender Is the Night.) Deciding that his metier was writing songs for the musical theater — he had long been “crazy” about Gilbert and Sullivan — Porter steeled himself to deal with its minority entrepreneurs and set to work.
Minority entrepreneurs. Well, you know what that means. For most of the previous century, popular-song writing and publishing had been dominated by second-, third-, and fourth-generation Ulster Scots and Irishmen such as Dan Emmet, Stephen Collins Foster, Harrigan & Hart, Chauncey Olcott, George M. Cohan, and Walter Donaldson. But by the 1920s, Tin Pan Alley — an actual place, a block of West 28th St. — had gained quite a different cast. In that context Cole Porter’s work was inevitably unique, rather weird in fact. With his Gilbert and Sullivan influence, he tended to default to complicated patter songs and “catalog” numbers that recited an endless litany of people and places. (E.g., “Chinks do it, Japs do it, Up in Lappland little Lapps do it”; or, “You’re the top! You’re the great Houdini! You’re the top! You’re Mussolini!”)
Elsewhere in the topic of showtunes, in the November 1999 issue we get an incisive, if somewhat sour, takedown of Irving Berlin, a one-man schmaltz-and-standards machine for a half-century. Instead of laboring over unusual key shifts and Gilbert & Sullivan-style patter songs about society, Berlin kept his melodies simple and singable, usually in the pop-standard key of E-flat, which happened to be the only key Berlin himself could play. (The author here, “Wolfgang Keller,” garbles that factoid to say that Berlin composed all his songs on the black keys!) Berlin kept his lyrics firmly aimed at the cheap seats. I find this passage particularly hilarious:
His 1913 song, “Snooky-Ookums,” is an example of the sort of tripe he was churning out at the time: “She’s his jelly elly roll/ He’s her sugar ugey bowl.” Presaging the inanities of MTV-style music videos, his 1946 musical, Annie Get Your Gun, featuring noisy Jewess Ethel Merman, had virtually nothing in common with any true form of musical theater. In its original production it had no discernible story-line and was more like a series of unrelated vaudeville sketches than anything else.
(Oh look! It’s that erroneous Ethel Merman trope again!)
As to the issue of Annie Get Your Gun’s disjointed plot structure, this was because Berlin was under the gun to crank out a bunch of rollicking songs, very quickly, for a proposed Annie Oakley musical that was due to be mounted in a few months, but which so far had a very sketchy book. It seems the perpetually busy Rodgers and Hammerstein had been sought out originally to do the music and libretto, but they hadn’t the time. But they agreed to produce this spindly notion of a show, though someone else would have to write the songs.
And so they called in . . . Jerome Kern . . . finest melodist of his time . . . to do the score for Annie Get Your Gun. But then Kern dropped dead! Truly. Right there on the sidewalk! A brain hemorrhage.
What a cursed production!
Last-gasp step: They brought in Irving Berlin, who thereupon cranked out “No Business Like Show Business” and a few other standards in a couple of days, the way you or I might slap together a cheese-and-cracker board. The whole production often looked like a mistake, but with all these last-minute efforts it became a money-maker, a bountiful hit. Critics panned it for having little plot and being little more than a collocation of hummable songs . . . but it’s songs that live on and on, not drama.
Now we move on to something that was supposed to be a shocker in 1984: The Cecil Beaton Scandal of 1938. This was derived from Caroline Seebohm’s recently-published The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Condé Nast. Irving Berlin peeps in again here, or rather his wife Ellin Mackay does, in tiny scrawled rumblings about society figures, in Beaton’s wonderfully amateurish pen-and-ink drawings.
You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s collection The Cultured Thug here.
What was scandalous about these illustrations was that they showed newspapers filled with gossipy columns about Hollywood and society “kikes,” as Beaton called them. (“Mr. R. Andrew’s Ball at the El Morocco brought out all the damned kikes in town.“) Beaton had penned in these remarks in minuscule letters, so small that one might need a magnifying glass to read them.
This February 1938 issue of Vogue was already out on the stands before someone spotted Beaton’s prank. Walter Winchell screamed about it in his own gossip column, and then the house fell down on Cecil Beaton. Condé Nast himself sadly called him in and fired him.
One of the few all-out popcult endorsements from Instauration came in 1988, a couple of years after The Bonfire of the Vanities was published. FOUR-STAR SATIRE! it was called.
It’s not top criticism, but a very favorable review of the Tom Wolfe book, and one of the few notices Instauration ever gave to contemporary bestsellers. You should read it, though maybe not if you’ve read the actual novel — because it’s impossibly naïve and silly. An accurate picture of “Zoo City,” Robertson rejoices, not having been in New York for many decades, but gleefully imagining it from his perch in Frog Hollow, North Carolina. Except that it was the city Tom Wolfe had chosen to live in, and had spent most of his life in. Surely a town with a Tom Wolfe can’t be all that bad.
For a while it seemed Tom Wolfe had written The Great American Novel. Then the movie came out, and it was supposedly a stinker, and people didn’t rave about the book anymore.
This was not Tom Wolfe’s first appearance in Instauration. He was in the very first issue in 1975 — the subject of a cover story, in fact, about his book on modern art criticism, The Painted Word. Headlined “Berg, Berg and Berg,” the article wittily summarizes the story of how Abstract Expressionism and other nonsensical art fads of the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s were encouraged among painters and imposed upon the public by three critics, all Jewish, named Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg. Almost certainly, this review was written by Wilmot Robertson himself. But, like Wolfe, Robertson leaves out the interesting but inconvenient fact that the real progenitor of this venture, the political theorist who goaded Greenberg and others to propagandize for obscurantism in modern art, was a non-Jew and non-art critic I’ve mentioned before: Dwight Macdonald. Macdonald wasn’t being destructive or mischievous; he’d just come to regard most representational art as old-hat, “Masscult” stuff, stuff that pandered to the public. Too much Grant Wood, Norman Rockwell, Thomas Hart Benton. Macdonald wanted High Art, and that to him meant basically inaccessible. But that’s another story for another time.
See also the following about Wilmot Robertson at Counter-Currents:
The Ethnostate:
By Wilmot Robertson:
- A Case for Optimism (excerpt from Robertson’s The Ethnostate).
- Obituary for Martin Heidegger (from Instauration).
Podcasts:
- Kevin MacDonald on Wilmot Robertson.
- Sam Dickson and Mark Weber join Fróði Midjord on Guide to Kulchur to discuss Wilmot Robertson.
Articles about Instauration:
- Peter Bradley, “Profound Insight for Troubled Times,” Part I, Part II.
- Margot Metroland, “Wilmot Robertson and the Oppressed Majority.”
A note about online sources: Instauration issues, with index, have been scanned and uploaded to a number of websites. The Internet Archive appears to have a complete set (look for “Instauration Magazine”), but it isn’t really string-searchable. Both the archives of Instauration Online and Big Lies are alternative sites with a search function.
Reviews and essays about Robertson’s books:
- Spencer J. Quinn reviews The Ethnostate.
- F. Roger Devlin, “On Wilmot Robertson” (French version here).
- Peter Bradley, “Four Hundred Years Together: Wilmot Robertson on ‘The Negroes’.”
- Peter Bradley, “Wilmot Robertson on Conservatism” (Czech version here).
- Peter Bradley, “Wilmot Robertson on Francis Parker Yockey.“
Articles peripheral to Wilmot Robertson and his writings:
- Andrew Hamilton, “Remembering Richard Nixon.”
- Margot Metroland, “Revilo P. Oliver and Francis Parker Yockey.“
- Margot Metroland, “They Sometimes Called Him Al: Remembering Willis Allison Carto.“
- Douglas Olson, “Why We Can’t Wait”
See also articles tagged Wilmot Robertson.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate at least $10/month or $120/year.
- Donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Everyone else will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days. Naturally, we do not grant permission to other websites to repost paywall content before 30 days have passed.
- Paywall member comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Paywall members have the option of editing their comments.
- Paywall members get an Badge badge on their comments.
- Paywall members can “like” comments.
- Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, please visit our redesigned Paywall page.
10 comments
Loved this. Thank you. For “racist humor” it’s hard to beat the Christmas poem from the cover of the December 1992 issue. A household gets robbed by a black thug and his 8 homeboys.
“His eyes, how they smoldered–such inchoate fires!
His hair was all corn-rowed, his lips like spare tires.”
Ah, Instauration. That brings back memories of better times. Thank you for that.
I got introduced to Wilmot Robertson’s “The Dispossessed Majority” and Instauration by none other David Duke in ~ 1991. I had fled Zoo New York City and experienced extreme, very personal experiences with the worst Black underclass, 3rd world immigration, libs.
I thought I new the JQ, but thought the problem was that the Js were “Liberal”, “Leftists” because of their bad experiences with Right Wing Conservatives, Catholic Spanish Inquisitions, Czars, Fascists and the Js always taking the Black A side was knee jerk Liberalism but that the Js were getting better, Israel allied with White South Africa and Js become more Conservative, Neo Conservatives. I was wrong. There was so much to love about the Dispossessed Majority and Instauration. IMO Robertson’s analysis about the White Northern European British WASP and kindred people, assimilatable minorities like The Irish, Northern Italians and specifically TDM chapter on “Splinters in the Ranks”, White Majority traitors was THE BEST. Robertson lists these specific types of traitors both for Blacks, 3rd world causes and pandering to Js. 1) Grachites – Whites from wealthy noble families who do what they do against us, because they get power by championing the masses of lower class POC – they do so out of selfish self interest. Best American examples of Grachites – FDR, Adlai Stevenson, Adlai Stevenson JR, The Kennedy’s (That Camelot thing), Hollywood Lib Actors – George Clooney, the Rockefellers.
2) Trucklers – low class White WASPs from rural, hick places, stations of life who do what they do, championing Black causes, POC, 3rd world immigration etc because they are going with the flow, Black Civil Rights causes are the ticket to acceptance in elite places like Washington DC, New York, Ivy League colleges. Best examples are: Harry Truman, LBJ, lots and lots of lower middle class religious leaders, Mike Huckabee, Mike Pence, LDS Mormon pols are real bad trucklers – Orin Hatch, Henry Skoop Jackson.
3) Pussy Footers, Cuckservatives – Whites who don’t like hanging with violent anti White revolutionaries, don’t like Black gangster Rap Music, don’t openly champion anti White causes but rarely if ever take a stand against anti White causes. They like their nice, suburban, country club life – are very scared of being called “racist” – basically cowards.
4) Old Believers – those Whites that insist that everything in our chaotic, violent, anti White country, society of 300 million plus warring races, tribes, sexual deviants with our media dominated by White hating Js – everything would be OK if everyone supposedly went back to some old system, old culture before… LBJ’s welfare state, before the sexual revolution, before porn, homo rights, before forced bussing, forced integration, before the 1965 immigration act, before the Federal Reserve act, before the UN. These types yearn for the past – the safe and moral 1950s or maybe even the 1850s. Old believers often overlap with “True Believers” those Whites who really do believe, insist that all our racial, criminal, sexual, cult marxist problems would go away if everyone in the the USA or the world embraced the right form of Judeo Christianity, or implemented their free market, Libertarian policies, hard money system etc.
5) Proditors – those White WASP and WASP assimilated who openly hate their/our own people out of some resentment of their parents, some embrace of something foreign, exotic and these types will go for pretty much everything and anything that works for the destruction, replacement of our people and our civilization. They’ll support or defend/deny the most extremist forms of Islam and the most extremist LGBT, homo, drug culture. Black underclass, Malcolm X at his most hateful or Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. Examples are John Brown, Jane Fonda, that San Francisco suburban boy John Walker Lindh who joined the Taliban. White Rastafarians etc. These 5 categories of anti Whites are reserved for real Whites, not Js, mixed race men like Barack Obama, Gen Colin Powell. We’ve written about this Wilmot Robertson “The Dispossessed Majority” and Instauration Magazine’s White Renegade Traitor of the Year over at Occidental Dissent. We/I also convinced Jared Taylor to resume Instauration Magazine’s year end White renegade traitor of the year award.
Jaye Ryan Occidental Dissent
TPC Radio Show
Instauration was hilarious and nothing since has taken its place in terms of right-wing humor. Here is a good example of the racial humor that (almost) doesn’t exist anymore:
“Browsing through a San Antonio dept. store recently, I encountered a small dark urchin who was giving a good impersonation of an air-raid siren as he darted in and out among the sweaters and coats. No more than six, he was rampaging about and screaming at the top of his quite remarkable lungs. Mamma — they have long ago dropped the traditional “mammy” — was browsing somewhere and paying scant attention to her offspring’s Simian antics. Nothing really unusual in all this. White kids also act bratty in public. But suddenly the pint-sized dynamo sprinted up to the saleslady in charge, pointed a tiny finger and screamed, “Gimme all yo munni!” Half a dozen white customers giggled nervously. The pickaninny tried again, even louder and more demanding than before: “White lady, I sayd gimme all yo munni fum dat cash res’stuh! Now!” Assorted chuckles emanated from the whites. “Isn’t that darling!” “How cute!” Even the obtuse saleslady smiled indulgently. A sharp whack on his nappy skull from mamma, a grunted, “Qui dat,” and he quickly subsided into muffled whimpers.”
(“The Safety Valve,” February 1993, p. 4.)
Bernie: Instauration was hilarious and nothing since has taken its place in terms of right-wing humor…
Instauration had more than its share of humor in a time when we desperately needed it, but I disagree that nothing has taken its place for marrying racial facts with hilarity.
The prolific Douglas Mercer ruthlessly employs humor as he chronicles our demise. Today alone he submitted seven new articles at not particularly right-wing WhiteBiocentrism.com — possibly in honor of the Leader’s 135th birthday — including this one, “Sanctuary State,” about California governor and race traitor Gavin Newsom:
Recently Newsom made some news by appointing an under-qualified Mexican as his Judicial Appointment Secretary. In announcing this race crime Newsom laid the Rainbow Nation blather on thick:
Luis Cespedes has championed the cause of civil rights, equal justice, diversity and inclusion throughout his storied legal career. I am proud to have him join our team and look forward to his counsel as we continue to build a bench that reflects the rich diversity of California.
That means a whole lot of Mexican judges are coming Californians’ way.
The White man need not apply.
Cespedes main recommendation was that he was once a farm worker. And, glory of glories, he once worked with no less a personage than Cesar Chavez. California has a state holiday for Chavez (March 31). And one of the grand ironies of California history is that this man, who has his very own day in anti-White California, used to tell his goons to go down to the border and bust the heads of those he called “wetbacks” — that is, the river-crossing Mexican invaders the ag-money boys used as scabs to break his union.
Chavez knew that these illegal aliens would undermine the wages of his men. By the 1980s, though, you could see pictures of Chavez mugging it up alongside pro-invasion politician Ted Kennedy as they swooned over the new pile of anti-White laws of that decade. Perhaps Cesar got kicked one too many times in the head by a mule or, more likely, he saw which way the winds of the future were blowing, and he got on board the ship USS Mass Invasion to “secure” his posthumous reputation. Indeed, his daughter Julie Chavez Rodriquez joined the Joe Biden team recently as a something-or-other in the field of “Latino Outreach.” Lucky for her there were not too many questions about the head-busters and the “wetback” scabs. That might have been thorny.
California is now a great big tamale ripe for the Mexican picking….
Thank you for your reminiscences of W.R., Margot. Instauration was the best chronicling of the pro-White cause every month during its 25-year run. We now know his given name was John Ireland, but many do not know that for security reasons Instauration was not headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at all, but in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and that it was Mrs. “Robertson” who held things together to meet the publication deadline each month, not “Wilmot.” What would our cause be without such uncelebrated heroines who contributed so much for so long?
After my tour as Ben Klassen’s XO and editor of his church’s monthly tabloid, Racial Loyalty, in 1988-89 came to an end, I “went to the woods” to reenergize after losing my first wife and basically burning out — but remotely did artwork, including a couple of Instauration covers, and contributed a number of notes for the magazine that were published anonymously over my Zip Code like everyone else’s.
When I went to work for Dr. Pierce as the National Alliance’s XO in 1992, I had in my mind that there should be a gathering of our own “Learned Elders”: Klassen, Robertson and Pierce, if such a meeting could be arranged. They already loosely knew one another — Pierce had written for Instauration under his pen name Andrew McDonald. But it took Pierce’s purchase of Klassen’s Church of the Creator property in western North Carolina in 1993 for the opportunity for a face-to-face meeting of these giants.
Robertson was not interested in meeting with radically anti-Christian Klassen, however agreed to meet with Pierce at his home in Black Mountain. On one of several trips, moving Klassen’s library, computers, furniture, tools, etc., from COTC headquarters in Otto, NC, to NA headquarters in Hillsboro, WV, Pierce, his wife Sue, and I stopped along the way for a very pleasant overnight visit with the Robertsons.
I must say, one of the most memorable highlights of my so-called “racist career” was to sit on that sofa in the Robertson’s guesthouse between William Pierce on my right and Wilmot Robertson on my left — for seven hours! — as they discussed the state of our cause and its future prospects. My takeaway recollection is that Mr. Robertson was asking most of the questions with Pierce offering answers.
Something else many do not know is that when former NA member and leader of The Order, Robert Jay Matthews, took out an insurance policy on his life prior to being murdered by the feds, the two beneficiaries of that policy were none other than William Pierce and John Ireland.
Excellent reminiscences of Dr. Pierce, W. Robertson, and Mrs. Robertson. Back in the 80s, I figured the major domo who got Instauration out every month was dutiful editor Bob Lenski.
John Ireland was a fine actor, one I often mistake for Arthur (“Biff”) Kennedy when I spot him in an old noir, but the birth name of Wilmot Robertson was actually Sumner Humphrey Ireland! I’ve gone back to 1920s censuses and passenger manifests right now, just to confirm this.
He was called Humphrey by the family, and went by that except for a brief period in his teens when he tried being a Sumner. (Sometimes you get forced into that when teachers decide to address you by your recorded first name.) After which, e.g., on his draft registration and in the military, we find him as (Capt.) Humphrey Ireland, plain and simple. He was already using the Wilmot Robertson pseud in the 1960s when he was living in Berkeley, presumably to keep his business and family interests separate from dank political interests. His later use of a Cape Canaveral, Florida address after he’d moved to Swain County, North Carolina, had the same protective motive, one many of us will readily understand: he had family, after all. And friends.
I knew him only in passing, and there are all sorts of questions I wish I’d asked him…one of which will be featured in a forthcoming footnote to a marginally related essay.
Margot Metroland: May 1, 2024 …I knew him only in passing, and there are all sorts of questions I wish I’d asked him…one of which will be featured in a forthcoming footnote to a marginally related essay.
—
I look forward to that, Margot. The few essays and comments of yours that I’ve seen here at C-C are all interesting and well written.
I don’t know how Instauration treated the murder of John Lennon 40-plus years ago, but it’s doubtful in 1980 that humor was employed to report the murder of the admittedly talented and influential idol of the liberal boomer generation. It wasn’t time for that.
Now, however, not just humor is used but an inescapably sober lookback at what this hypocritical race-mixing icon of the Jew-led counterculture movement really was is welcomed from pro-White spokesman Douglas Mercer, “Imagine There’s No Lennon.”
This reasoned piece by Mr. Mercer first appeared at National Vanguard in December 2020 when he was using penname Kenneth Roberts: Imagine There’s No Lennon | National Vanguard
My fondest recollection of this prize nincompoop was in the days after he died. Radio stations everywhere were playing nothing but Lennon or Beatles’ songs, though strangely one that they didn’t play was “Happiness Is A Warm Gun.”
A search of C-C archives found this from 2011 mentioning how Lennon’s voice was influenced by the homosexual Black screamer Little Richard and by Elvis Presley, widely acknowledged as the first White Rock & Roller who introduced Black music to a White audience: The White Singing Voice in Rock & Pop (counter-currents.com)
Bonfire of the Vanities was the first serious contemporary adult novel I read, at the end of high school, although at the time I didn’t differentiate it from Clavell’s Tai-Pan. I had been to New York in the early 1980s so I knew who the people were who were selling drugs and stolen electronics openly on the streets. I can remember, whilst in my twenties, dreading the day when my beautiful white homeland would be swamped with Africans, although, using the default liberal calculus, I then thought it inevitable and morally right that this should eventually happen. After all, racial preference was inadmissible. I was that brainwashed.
Funnily enough, no-one has made a slick televisial treatment of Bonfire, nor to my knowledge have A Man in Full or I am Charlotte Simmons had one. The earlier Wolfe novel is the best. Merci Madame Metroland.
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment