End of an Era: Mad Men & the Ordeal of Civility
James J. O’Meara
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015
104 pages
About The End of an Era
AMC’s Mad Men (2007–2015) was an instant hit, winning fifteen Golden Globes and four Emmys and “redefining television.”
Already a slew of books have appeared to examine its cultural impact. Now comes The End of an Era: Mad Men and the Ordeal of Civility, bringing to the discussion a unique perspective: race realist and Traditionalist. Drawing in equal measure from Kevin MacDonald and René Guénon, and able to marshal a stunning array of pop culture reference points, James J. O’Meara — himself a child of the ’60s and a product of America’s long-dead industrial heartland — examines the hidden agendas and social implications of the Mad Man phenomenon. At its center is a bravura, two-part essay analyzing the disintegration of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce agency as symbolic reenactment of the archetypal struggle of the Aryan and the Judaic for control of Western civilization. From the culture-creating powers of the three-button suit, to the dissolution of the Aryan Ego in the hot tubs of Esalen, The End of An Era delivers one stunning insight after another. You’ll never watch a rerun of Mad Men the same way you did the first time.
Praise for James J. O’Meara
“James O’Meara is a cultural alchemist scrying the flickering images of TV series and old films for signs of perennial wisdom lying dormant at the heart of postmodernity. In End of an Era he focuses on the TV show Mad Men and reveals Traditional archetypes at war with Judaic crypsis for the soul of the series.”
—Christopher Pankhurst, author of Numinous Machines
“This short collection of essays is an invigorating romp through contemporary American culture, such as it is. James J. O’Meara’s concept of ‘Judaic inversion’ unlocks the mystery of why so much Hollywood and television fare is what it is: the recurring Jewish desire to exact revenge on a WASP society that (allegedly) excluded Jews. John Murray Cuddihy (The Ordeal of Civility) would surely approve of O’Meara’s readings of the hit TV series Mad Men. As O’Meara writes, ‘Don Draper is really Dick Whitman (= white man), guilty of desertion and manslaughter, both capital crimes. After all, we all know every successful WASP is a big old phony, right?’ Understanding this spirited book will help you understand the mentality of the hostile elite that has been corrupting our culture for generations. And understanding is a critical step in trying to take back our own culture.”
—Edmund Connelly
“James J. O’Meara brings his ‘paranoiac-critical method’ to bear upon the singular TV drama Mad Men, and the reader emerges with fresh insight on this iconically ironic pop-culture phenomenon.”
—Andy Nowicki, author of Lost Violent Souls
“James J. O’Meara’s ingenious and mutually illuminating juxtapositions of popular culture and arcane theory (in this case Mad Men and Traditionalist wisdom) bring to mind a thinker with a very different worldview, namely Slavoj Žižek, author of such books as Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. James J. O’Meara is the Slavoj Žižek of the Alternative Right.”
—Greg Johnson, author of New Right vs. Old Right
Also by James J. O’Meara
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2021 - 248 pages
James J. O’Meara
Passing the Buck:
Coleman Francis & Other Cinematic MetaphysiciansWelcome to Metaphysical Science Theater 3000. This collection is the first comprehensive attempt to place Traditionalism within a major field of modern popular culture-cinema, good and bad – and to recognize how each can clarify and illuminate the other.
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2020 - 351 pages
James J. O’Meara
Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson, & Other Populist Gurus
A new kind of spiritual teacher or “guru” has emerged in the 20th century, one more interested in methods, techniques and results than in dogmas, institutions, or – especially – followers. James O’Meara examines these “populist gurus” from a wide variety of perspectives, including substantial chapters on well-known figures such as William Burroughs, Aleister Crowley, Colin Wilson, Alan Watts, Neville Goddard, and Julius Evola, as well as such fringe phenomena as Chaos Magick and even the origins of the Internet’s ‘meme magic.’
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2017 - 250 pages
James J. O’Meara
The Homo & The Negro
James O’Meara’s The Homo and the Negro brings a “queer eye” to the overwhelmingly “homophobic” Far Right. In his title essay, O’Meara argues that the Far Right cannot effectively defend Western civilization unless it checks its premises about homosexuality and non-sexual forms of male bonding, which are undermined not just by liberals and feminists, but also by Judeo-Christian “family values” advocates. O’Meara also uses his theory to explain the stigmatization of Western high culture as “gay” and the worship of uncultured oafs as masculine ideals.
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2015 - 252 pages
James J. O’Meara
Green Nazis in Space!
World War II has been over for decades, but Nazis are everywhere! From girls boarding schools in Scotland to fashion shows in Peking, from utopian desert islands to New York nightclubs, from intellectually fashionable Paris cafés to campy flats in Chelsea Square. They’re even in the War Room, and—my God!—they’re already in outer space! James J. O’Meara, the New Right’s most provocative writer, uses his “paranoiac-critical” lens to reveal the method of Judaic culture-distortion—such as the youthful “girl-craziness” that conservatives think of as the “good old days” but was manufactured by Hollywood to undermine traditional forms of male friendship and social organizations (and start World War II)—while demonstrating that it just can’t prevent the eternal return of the “Fascist Other” throughout our popular culture.
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2014 - 244 pages
James J. O’Meara
The Eldritch Evola . . . & Others: Traditionalist Meditations on Literature, Art, & Culture
“James J. O’Meara is my favorite literary and cultural critic. A virtuoso essayist who can reveal the most startling connections, O’Meara brings Traditionalist spirituality and a New Right sensibility to bear on both high and popular culture, showing that Tradition, like Cthulhu, still lives in the depths and can rise to the surface again, if you know what to look for . . . or if the stars are right.”