June 12, 2013

Merion Golf Club and the decline of WASPs

Ben Hogan, 1-iron to Merion's 18th green, 1950 U.S. Open
The U.S. Open golf tournament starts tomorrow (assuming it's not inundated by thunder storms) at Merion Golf Club in Philadelphia's Main Line suburbs. The US Golf Association is taking a major financial hit to bring the Open back to where Bobby Jones finished his Grand Slam in 1930, where Ben Hogan came back from his seemingly crippling 1949 car crash, and where Lee Trevino tossed Jack Nicklaus a rubber snake before beating him in a 1971 playoff.

A century ago, Merion club member and amateur golf architect Hugh Wilson brilliantly wedged the club's new golf course into only a little over 120 acres, less than most municipal golf courses. So, ticket sales and corporate entertainment tents must be limited this week. 

Why go back to Merion instead of a more lucrative site? Lots of reasons, but partly because it's one of the world's great golf course designs. The USGA functions as a sort of crypto-WASP pride organization that keeps alive the reputations of works of artistic genius from early in the 20th Century.

But that also serves to illustrate the fairly inevitable dissipation of cultural dynamism. Once your civilization has reached a point where it creates golf clubs like Merion, the descendants of the founders tend to be more apt to spend their time playing Merion rather than creating new and even better monuments.

By the way, from 1898 onward, before the construction of the current course, the Merion Cricket and Golf Club was very active in women's golf. Merion's orginal course, for example, hosted the USGA's Women's Amateur championship in 1904 and 1909. We hear a vast amount about feminist history and the rise of a new wave of feminism in 1969 after the first wave of feminism from 1840s into the 1920s. What's seldom made explicit, however, is that American WASP culture was much more pro-feminist than the newer immigrant cultures that rose to power in the mid-20th Century.

By the way, if you someday get invited by a member to play Merion, here are the rules:
• A FEW POINTS TO BE AWARE OF • 
Cell Phones: The only place you can use your cell phone, pager, or blackberry (or any form of PDA), is in your vehicle. 

This is a mark of a high-tone club. I recently got roped into serving as a volunteer at a social event at the nouveau riche Sherwood club where Joe Montana, Will Smith, and Angelo Mozilo are members. (The club newsletter had a picture of the winners of last month's member-guest tournament: the winning member was Wayne Gretzky. Second place was Kenny G.) There were signs on the outside of the clubhouse designating locations where cellphone use was permitted. This may have something to do with the intersection of tax benefits and anti-discrimination laws: by restricting the holding of business discussions on premises, this frees up clubs to avoid EEOC investigations into their membership diversity. Or maybe they just have good taste and their members like to concentrate upon golf rather than their stupid phones.
Changing shoes: Shoes are not to be changed in the East Course parking lot or in the Caddiemaster’s Office. Please come up to the Men’s or Women’s Locker Room where our locker room attendants will be happy to get a locker for you. 

Changing into your golf shoes in the parking lot says Muny Golf.
Attire: Hats, caps, and visors worn by gentlemen should be removed while they are under cover (Dining Terraces & in the Clubhouse). “No cover under cover.”

Merion has a famous outdoor but canopied verandah lunch area right behind the first tee. Remove your cap before you set foot under the canvas. This sounds like one of those rules for the sake of having rules that WASPs enjoy.
Gentlemen are to have their shirts tucked in at all times. Bermuda shorts are permitted for men and women; knee length is preferred for both men and women, not to exceed 3” above the knee; golf skorts and skirts not to exceed 4” above the knee. Several items are considered inappropriate, and will not be permitted on either golf course, on the practice range, or in or around the clubhouse: tank-tops, short sleeve mock turtlenecks (men only), t-shirts, denim of any color, cut-offs, tennis-length skirts, short shorts, flip flops, crocs, leather sandals (men only), cargo shorts/pants, and jogging attire. 
Smoking Policy: Smoking is prohibited inside the Clubhouse and all outside dining areas. Smoking is only permitted in the designated area of the Front Porch (driveway side). 
Golf: There are no “mulligans” allowed on the first tee. Merion is a walking golf course.

Over the last generation, walking-only has become the mark of elite golf courses. This has led to a revival of caddie programs, although the demographics have shifted. Caddies are rarely anymore local urchins or colorful blacks with nicknames like "Cemetery" (the monicker of President Eisenhower's favorite caddy at Augusta National because he'd somehow survived getting his throat slashed in a dispute over a lady's affections). Caddies are more likely Wharton or Haverford students. Thus, professional golfers now come from uniformly upper middle class backgrounds, unlike in the old days where a Hogan or Sarazen could learn golf as a caddy.
Carts are only given with written authorization from a doctor due to a medical condition. 

Merion has a fine second course, Merion West, a mile away that allows carts, which makes it easier to preserve Merion East as a shrine to Golf the Way It Should Be.
The use of distance measuring devices (range finders) is prohibited.  

Get a caddy.
Pace of Play: Starting in 2006 the Board of Governors has emphasized the elimination of slow play. Please be prepared to play in 4 hours or less. Be prepared to play at all times. Always carry an extra ball. Be ready to hit when it is your turn and feel free to play ready golf. Always rake your own fairway bunker and replace your own divot. Repair ball marks and prepare to putt while others are playing their ball. Play from the appropriate tees (guests with a course handicap of 10 or higher may not play from the back tees). If you reach your maximum allowable score, pickup.

Elite private courses emphasize fast play. Elite public courses like Pebble Beach or Whistling Straits tend to have very slow play.

By the way, I realize nobody is interested in the arcane topic of country club memberships, but I still want to call attention to this little reminiscence by U. of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan about the late sociologist Father Doctor Andrew Greeley's study of ethnicity at Beverly Country Club just southwest of Chicago, with its fine Donald Ross course:
He was interested in assertions that Catholics were not segregated from Protestants, especially in Midwestern cities like Chicago. As evidence against segregation, Father Greeley told me, many people pointed to Chicago institutions that included significant numbers of both Catholics and Protestants. The Beverly Country Club on the southwest side of the city was one of those institutions, and in fact had roughly equal numbers of Catholic and Protestant members. 
Father Greeley wondered whether the club was nonetheless highly segregated on the inside, but, working long before the days of surveillance cameras and eye-recognition software, was faced with the challenge of measuring internal segregation. He approached the caddy master at the club, who kept records on which club members played golf and at what “tee time.” Up to four members could play golf together, and in doing so they would have a common tee time. Father Greeley was permitted to examine the tee sheets and found that Catholics and Protestants rarely shared a tee time: Catholics and Protestants might have been at the same club, but they were not golfing together. 
(If you are wondering how tee sheets would indicate religion, Catholics in the Beverly neighborhood were primarily Irish and had distinctly Irish surnames. Moreover, Father Greeley was the assistant pastor at a Catholic parish in that neighborhood and knew many of the families).

I'm slowly collecting information for an article on country clubs and ethnicity around 190-1970. The role of WASP clubs in turning down granddad for membership in current elites' views on, say, immigration can hardly be overstated. Yet, the actual history turns out to be much more complicated and interesting than the stereotypes.

105 comments:

  1. "But that also serves to illustrate the fairly inevitable dissipation of cultural dynamism. Once your civilization has reached a point where it creates golf clubs like Merion, the descendants of the founderstend to be more apt to spend their time playing Merion rather than creating new and even better versions."

    That's why we need immigration, to restore that cultural dynamism. Donald Trump, grandson of German immigrants, doesn't look at Merion and despair; instead, he charges on, building bigger and flashier golf courses.

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  2. Christ on a bicycle, American golf is slow.

    When I was a lad, etc, etc.

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  3. "This is a mark of a high-tone club. I recently got roped into serving as a volunteer at a social event at the very expensive club where Wayne Gretzky, Will Smith, and Angelo Mozilo are members. There were signs on the outside of the clubhouse designating locations where cellphone use was permitted. This may have something to do with the intersection of tax benefits and anti-discrimination laws: by restricting the holding of business discussions on premises, this frees up clubs to avoid EEOC investigations into their membership diversity."

    Interesting. There's apparently a similar rule about not conducting business at the University Club in Manhattan. I didn't know about this, and was invited there by a family friend once who wanted to discreetly discuss a business proposition. When I pulled out a pad and pen to take notes, he looked horrified and told me about the rule. I never considered the EEOC angle.

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  4. only one golf course in my town, only a couple of rules, the grass is dead on it and dry. full of spindly eucalpytus trees. not the best looking course, its next to a caravan park. i don't play golf, golf is far too hard to learn.

    those cell phone restriction rules sound great though. would love it if those rules applied everywhere at all times.

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  5. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-11/dollar-general-sued-over-use-of-criminal-checks-in-hiring.html?cmpid=yhoo

    Not hiring black crooks to handle cash be 'racist'.

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  6. deBretteville6/12/13, 3:11 PM

    Gee, Merion doesn't sound like it's really trying very hard. Compare the San Francisco Golf Club. Not only do they have every rule you mention here, but how about this? No shorts. And, slacks have to be wool - no cotton. Just too prole, even if you're wearing Ferragamo.

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  7. You can have clubs that are really exclusive, but with a certain "fratty" segment. I wounder what could have prevented this from happening: http://www.businessinsider.com/letter-from-president-of-atlantas-piedmont-driving-club-over-drunk-behavior-2012-6

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  8. WASP in exile6/12/13, 3:14 PM

    Those rules about not conducting business openly in places of leisure are much older than the EEOC. It's true, though, that in the good old days they used to be unwritten; presumably the need to spell them out reflects the new legal and social realities.

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  9. Simon in London6/12/13, 3:17 PM

    I guess I'm glad the WASPs are still mostly in charge in the UK. OK they're ruining it, but at least they're ruining it WASPily. Samantha Cameron is a lot less viscerally disgusting than Cherie Booth.

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  10. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/20/imelda-marcos-sweet-sauce/

    We shouldn't laugh.

    We didn't turn Japanese but we're turning Filipino.

    Silly, silly, silly.

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  11. The summer climate in San Francisco -- "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco," Mark Twain -- makes a wool trousers rule more feasible.

    But, yeah, the San Francisco Golf Club is out-of-sight elite. They don't host U.S. Opens, they leave that for the more mass market Olympic Club next door. Their 7th hole was the sight of the last formal high-class duel in California history: a U.S. senator v. the ex-chief justice of the California supreme court.

    http://www.tillinghast.net/Tillinghast/Duel_Hole.html

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  12. http://youtu.be/VcZPTB5C79o

    This aint no sport.

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  13. deBretteville said..."Gee, Merion doesn't sound like it's really trying very hard. Compare the San Francisco Golf Club. Not only do they have every rule you mention here, but how about this? No shorts. And, slacks have to be wool - no cotton. Just too prole, even if you're wearing Ferragamo."

    Any civilized club doesn't allow men to wear hats indoors nor the use of cellphones in all but a few designated areas. The "no shorts" rule in the Bay Area isn't as restrictive as it seems. Other bay area "elite" clubs also have the rule (California Golf Club, Cypress). There are very few days where shorts would be preferable to pants. Old men in shorts look terrible. East coast and Southern clubs allow them due to the heat and humidity. You'll notice the PGA Tour does not, no matter where they're playing.

    Also, I've played San Francisco GC many times and there is no rule against cotton slacks. Or if there is they don't tell anybody and it's not enforced. I know because I've worn cotton slacks every time I've played there.

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  14. " What's seldom made explicit, however, is that American WASP culture was much more pro-feminist than the newer immigrant cultures that rose to power in the mid-20th Century."

    For example, my WASP great, great grandmother had a graduate degree in the natural sciences. College has been de rigeuer for all the women in my family since not long after the Civil War.

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  15. "Merion is a walking golf course.

    Over the last generation, walking-only has become the mark of elite golf courses."

    Or Canadian ones. It outrages Americans when they golf at Canadian public courses and have to tow their own bag.

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  16. Given that Will Smith is a member, the Sherwood club doesn't have to worry about diversity complaints.

    Peter

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  17. Cell Phones: The only place you can use your cell phone, pager, or blackberry (or any form of PDA), is in your vehicle.

    Maybe the difference between Jews and Wasp's is that the latter mean it? I was at a JCC last year and they had a 'no cell phones' sign in the locker room. So naturally this big-lipped lawyer starts yakking with his wife at the locker across from mine. I upbraid him for it, and he goes whining to the management about what a prick I am and how I didn't speak to him respectfully.

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  18. "Any civilized club doesn't allow men to wear hats indoors"

    When I was in the Army Reserve, they made a big deal about that too (the only exception was if you were carrying a weapon -- then it was okay to wear a hat indoors for some reason). Maybe the military tradition has similar roots.

    " I upbraid him for it, and he goes whining to the management about what a prick I am and how I didn't speak to him respectfully."

    And what did the management do? My gym ($20-something per month) isn't fancy, but it has a no cell phone policy too. Some jerk was yelling into his cell phone headset a while back, and I confronted him about it. He told me to tell the management, so I did, and they sent their most muscular trainer out to reiterate the policy to him.

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  19. The prohibition against discussing business in old style country club is due to the idea that business, while important, is not the only thing that matters in life and that civilized men should be able to converse about non-business topics. Traditionally workaholics with no other interests were considered to be unbalanced, immoral characters like Scrooge, Bernie Madoff or Donald Trump. Now they are lionized.

    Also, the wives of country club members didn't work back then and thus would've been excluded from conversation.


    Gloria

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  20. 1/ Philly doesn't seem to be a destination for a lot of immigrants, lately. Has that made it better or worse?

    2/ 'Samantha Cameron is a lot less viscerally disgusting than Cherie Booth'.

    How unpatriotic. Cherie Booth is related to one of America's most famous/infamous acting families.

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_family

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  21. Auntie Analogue6/12/13, 4:59 PM


    I'd like to know if Merion's and other WASP clubs' "no cover under cover" rule was intended as means to exclude Jewish men.

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  22. smead jolley6/12/13, 5:05 PM

    San Francisco Golf Club memory:

    I was caddying there as a teenager around 1973. My guy was named Cronin, a corporate lawyer with an old-line firm called Brobeck, which went belly up in the tech bubble. This guy couldn't play to save his life, but he had the most expensive clubs available, which at that time meant the then-trendy fiberglass shafts. So on the
    18th hold he's under a Cypress tree. He takes his backswing, hits a branch, and the shaft breaks into a dozen pieces. Good times.

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  23. I'm a member of National and Steve has played there with me. Small compensation for losing control of American foreign policy.

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  24. And, once again, thank you very much!

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  25. "But, yeah, the San Francisco Golf Club is out-of-sight elite."

    I got the chance to play SFGC on a Monday (maintenance day) a few years ago. The caddies were out playing as well. Whatever the demographic shift in caddies that's taken place elsewhere, does not hold true for SFGC. These guys were borderline homeless drunks. They smelled like stale piss. I'm sure they clean themselves up for the members, but I wouldn't be surprised if they went by names like "Cemetery."

    Also, the course itself is as pristine as you could imagine.

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  26. Attire: Hats, caps, and visors worn by gentlemen should be removed while they are under cover (Dining Terraces & in the Clubhouse). “No cover under cover.”

    This was common in general in the past. Men weren't supposed to wear hats indoors. Boys weren't allowed to wear caps in school. Etc. Only women were supposed to wear hats inside.

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  27. And what did the management do? My gym ($20-something per month) isn't fancy, but it has a no cell phone policy too. Some jerk was yelling into his cell phone headset a while back, and I confronted him about it. He told me to tell the management, so I did, and they sent their most muscular trainer out to reiterate the policy to him.

    Looks like you were too beta for him to listen to you.

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  28. The Catholic members of Beverly Country Club wouldn't necessarily be from the local area. In the 60s/70s you had to be very wealthy to be a member there and the local area (besides Beverly Hills) was mainly working class. Also, Greeley wouldn't know if someone from several parishes away was either Catholic or protestant. The best way to tell would be a person's last name. Most Dutch, Scandinavian, English and about half of Germans would tend to be protestant. Most other European ethnics were Catholic.

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  29. Auntie Analogue:'I'd like to know if Merion's and other WASP clubs' "no cover under cover" rule was intended as means to exclude Jewish men."

    No, it's simply good manners. Men were supposed to remove their hats when indoors.

    Also, I rather doubt that the kind of Jewish men who would have been angling for membership would have been observant

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  30. Any decent golf club or military officer's mess in the Commonwealth has a portrait of Her Majesty on the wall; and of course a man should remove his headdress in the presence of the Queen.

    However, you Americans, to paraphrase English Bob in Unforgiven, have no Queen. Perhaps there is a photo of Obama on the wall at Merion?

    Gilbert P.

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  31. I'm a member of National and Steve has played there with me. Small compensation for losing control of American foreign policy.

    ...

    And, once again, thank you very much!


    Steve, this actually sounds like a good business opportunity for you. You have a lot of middle-aged to older male readers (I imagine most of your readers) who'd probably pay to hang out with you at a bar, restaurant, golf outing, ball games, etc. and pick your brain, shoot the shit, etc. You cover all kinds of topics on your blog - politics, science, sports, movies, etc. - so you could talk about anything when you hang out.

    You could probably charge at least a few hundred per person for "Dates with Steve" or "Chill with Steve" or something. Plus free drinks, meals, golf outings, tickets, etc.

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  32. Do you mean WASP in a class or ethnic sense? The George Bushes are WASPs in a class sense but Bill Clinton and Donald Trump are WASPs in an ethnic sense (Trump is German and Scottish. That's certainly close enough to "Anglo-Saxon".) I knew a guy in Philadelphia who belonged to Merion and he was a bond salesman from Iowa with a German surname. He seemed to be accepted by the old money types there just fine even though he was new money.

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  33. "I'm a member of National and Steve has played there with me. Small compensation for losing control of American foreign policy."

    Was this it?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyydT8dy3Hs

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  34. "Traditionally workaholics with no other interests were considered to be unbalanced, immoral characters like Scrooge, Bernie Madoff or Donald Trump. Now they are lionized."

    Yeah, its even weirder to listen some guy making 150K a year mooning over Bill Gates or Zuckerman.

    Boobs never stop being boobs.

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  35. A suggestion for the new ruling anti-WASP elite. Start a campaign to rename English. Start mocking the name. It's antiquated, too exclusive, unrepresentative etc. Refer back to the buckles on the pilgrim's shoes, the powdered wigs etc link it to 'English'. No we need a hipper name that is more representative and inclusive for modern users. Modern International? Common International?

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  36. "But, yeah, the San Francisco Golf Club is out-of-sight elite. They don't host U.S. Opens, they leave that for the more mass market Olympic Club next door. "

    Somebody said that the members of Olympic work for the members of San Francisco.

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  37. "he prohibition against discussing business in old style country club is due to the idea that business, while important, is not the only thing that matters in life and that civilized men should be able to converse about non-business topics"

    I thought one of the main points of playing golf was to cut business deals?

    I always wondered how true that was.

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  38. In her days as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, my sister worked a couple of summers at Merion Cricket Club, the club so WASPily stingy they evidently couldn't deal with the expense of golf, so they lopped off the golf course into a separate club some time in the 20th c.

    Anyway, if you want the full-on high-test high-WASP golf experience, Mr. Sailer, I'd be happy to host you at the Norfolk Country Club in Norfolk, CT, a town that of course hosted our President when he once visited his girlfriend there thirty years ago or whenever it was.

    The club's nine-hole Tillinghast-designed course is pretty nice. The way they deal with speed-of-play issues, tee times, etc. is by not stating anything about any of it. You show up and start playing, and you play at whatever your pace happens to be. I don't even like golf that much, but the NCC's dispensation makes the whole business almost agreeable, even to me.

    Anyway, lemme know.

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  39. I'm still looking for a coffee house that has a large sign on the door: "No Wi-Fi".

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  40. David Davenport6/12/13, 9:31 PM

    A suggestion for the new ruling anti-WASP elite. Start a campaign to rename English. Start mocking the name. It's antiquated, too exclusive, unrepresentative etc.


    That's been the, umm, Scots-Irish program for quite a while, hasn't it?

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  41. competitive golf is the only sport in the US in clear decline in terms of participation rate. number of boys playing competitive golf for US high school teams over the last 10 years:

    2003 162805
    2004 163341
    2005 161025
    2006 161284
    2007 159747
    2008 159958
    2009 157062
    2010 157756
    2011 156866
    2012 152725

    a slow but steady decline of 7%, while every other sport has grown.

    interestingly, girls golf has increased over the same time period:

    2003 62159
    2004 63173
    2005 64245
    2006 64195
    2007 66283
    2008 69243
    2009 69223
    2010 70782
    2011 71764
    2012 71086

    up 14% over the last 10 years. is this due to asian girls getting into the game?

    source: http://www.nfhs.org/Participation/SportSearch.aspx

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  42. anon from NY6/12/13, 9:32 PM

    please don't ever, ever complain to "management" about fellow guests ,,, get them drunk, argue with them, whatever, but don't "complain"...
    also, the no cell phone rule is, for some people, a cousin of the Hollywood John rule (paying for the privilege of having an excuse not to speak to the woman one has recently enjoyed sexual intercourse with). Not that I would know, as I restrict myself to cheap golf courses and women who are fun to talk with...

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  43. I'm surprised the more exclusive golf clubs encourage faster play. I would've thought they'd be more about slow play.

    Is there a reason they're more pro-fast play?

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  44. anon at 9:32 - get them drunk and put them in a taxi, of course ... the ones with designated drivers are not hard to get along with in the first place

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  45. "A good walk spoiled." - Mark Twain on golf

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  46. But, yeah, the San Francisco Golf Club is out-of-sight elite.

    Here's Richard Nixon on San Francisco's out-of-sight elite:

    http://www.prisonplanet.com/032604nixontape.html

    "But it's not just the ratty part of town. The upper class in San Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time--it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco."

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  47. Below the professional level, faster play correlates with better, more socially elite golfers. For example, the top private course in the British Isles, Muirfield, expects a foursome playing two balls to get around 18 holes in about 2.5 hours. In contrast, the Waveland (now Marowitz) municipal on Chicago's lakefront took 3 hours ... for 9 holes.

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  48. "competitive golf is the only sport in the US in clear decline in terms of participation rate."

    Golf is a sport that appeals most to men from maybe 25 to 45. The Baby Boom has finally aged out of that range and the recession that has been going on in golf since the 2001 recession is likely to continue indefinitely.

    The only thing that has helped golf in recent years are the huge drivers that make it easier to hit the ball a long way off the tee. If somebody could figure out how to make the rests of the clubs easier to hit, that could help golf.

    But, most of the trends are toward making golf more expensive. For example, from the unveiling of Harbour Town in 1968, there was a trend toward narrow golf courses that discouraged hitting driver off the tee. They used less land. But hitting driver is fun, so new courses are designed with wide fairways to accomodate golfers swinging from the heels off the tee with their huge drivers. But that means golf courses need significantly more land, and real estate, they aren't making any more of it. So, the long term trend is toward golf in American being like golf in Japan.

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  49. "Looks like you were too beta for him to listen to you."

    Or he wanted to save face on the phone with his cop friend. In any case, it worked out for the best. Riled up from my shouting match with him, I made a PR on my next set of squats, and he stopped yapping on his cell phone annoyingly.

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  50. middle aged vet6/12/13, 10:28 PM

    unfortunately, someone has figured out how to make the rest of the clubs (besides the drivers) easier to hit ...but its not a good thing - chronic, but relatively mild, pain in a centrally located part of the body (i.e. prostate, vertebrae, back of the neck) gives the unfortunate victim a multiple-houred lesson in where the center of balance is, leading to a more consciously and perfectly balanced deployment of the wingspan used in the golf swing ...that is possibly why some senior golfers seem so accurate ... on a cheerier note, cheap golf courses combined with women who are fun to talk to, that sounds like halfway to heaven

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  51. Dr Van Nostrand6/13/13, 12:15 AM


    Do you mean WASP in a class or ethnic sense? The George Bushes are WASPs in a class sense but Bill Clinton and Donald Trump are WASPs in an ethnic sense (Trump is German and Scottish. That's certainly close enough to "Anglo-Saxon".) I knew a guy in Philadelphia who belonged to Merion and he was a bond salesman from Iowa with a German surname. He seemed to be accepted by the old money types there just fine even though he was new money."

    You have certainly a broad definition of WASP. Now Germans and Scots are WASPs because one is Saxon and other borders Anglo?!
    Benjamin Franklin actually didnt prefer Germans immigrated to America.
    He and some other founders(I think it was Jefferson) actually preferred Jews to Catholics(somewhere Pat Buchanan is weeping in his pillow..or biting..these Paleos as Justin Raimondo can be pretty weird)

    Bill Clinton is descended from English speakers from Northern Ireland who in turn who were a hodgepodge of ethnicity-lowland Scots, English working classes and aristocrats(Duke of Wellington, Dutch Calvinists,German mercenaries and farmers and French Huegenot refugees.
    In short Northern Ireland was almost like a proto America with the Irish Catholics cast unflatteringly in the role of the heathen savage ala Native Americans.
    It was only logical that this lot populate and define American culture and popular institutions.

    WASP has become broader in recent years contrast the 1950's parody of descendant of Swiss German Anabaptist Eisenhower as a WASP with the cultural jihad(to use posters term) against German Americans during WWI.

    All of white HBD's nowadays LOVE LOVE LOVE(hat tip whiskey) whites even if they are not Northern European or Protestant.
    This wasn't the case in the past , Italians,Greeks,Spaniards and Portuguese only scraped by in the whiteness test a 100 years ago.
    The impeccably pale skinned Irish were so loathed for their "pagan" Catholicism that often they were treated only marginally better than blacks.
    Once you acquire your white utopia bereft of all these irritating darkies and Catholics..what future holds for the dark whities such as the Mediterranean and whiter Catholic types?( who were probably used as cannon fodder in your wars against blacks and Hispanics as seen in south Boston and brooklyn,NYC)
    Lets face it much of this so called rational,objective white HBD thinking is just a intellectual fig leaf for pro Nordic mysticism.
    I really dont see the difference between Theodore Roosevelts views on the Italians circa 1910 (damn dagos) and this lot here.
    Lets not get into the shameless attempts by the Nordicists to misappropriate Greek and Roman culture as their own!

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  52. Dr Van Nostrand6/13/13, 12:57 AM


    The prohibition against discussing business in old style country club is due to the idea that business, while important, is not the only thing that matters in life and that civilized men should be able to converse about non-business topics. Traditionally workaholics with no other interests were considered to be unbalanced, immoral characters like Scrooge, Bernie Madoff or Donald Trump. Now they are lionized."

    DVN: Its pretty easy for establishment old money types to makes such rules since they dont have to work their ass 80 hours a week to put food on the table.This is obviously not excusing the actions of Scrooge ,Madoff et al.
    But even a lot of noveau riche types, not just the working and middle class at whom such derision is targetted, dont have the time to cultivate culture and breeding that this lot has.


    Also, the wives of country club members didn't work back then and thus would've been excluded from conversation."

    DVN: What then explains the all male clubs? Men often join such clubs to get away from their wives be they pleasant or nagging harridans.
    I would imagine there would be more business talk in a mens club than a mixed club but I could be wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  53. Steve, in your Chicago years, you must have been so cloistered on the North Side that you never learned where anything was down on the gritty South Side.

    That's fine though -- you're in good company. With the obvious exception of South Siders themselves, nobody else in Chicago knows where anything is on the South Side.

    After all, why would anybody know those things?!? It's not like there's any good reason to go down there.

    For the record though, Beverly Country Club is in the Beverly neighborhood , on the South Side of Chicago. So Beverly C.C. isn't "just southwest of Chicago."

    Beverly is still actually quite nice, even though the surrounding area isn't (it's a historically Irish neighborhood that's full of stately old mansions and that borders neighborhoods that are ... uh ... mostly non-Irish neighborhoods).

    ReplyDelete
  54. Beverly aside, the old country club on Chicago's South Side that is synonymous with segregation is South Shore Country Club.

    In the early and mid 20th Century, South Shore was a middle class/ upper middle class Jewish neighborhood (there were gentiles there too, but it was heavily Jewish) on the shore of Lake Michigan, just south of Hyde Park on Chicago's South Side.

    Marv Levy, Karl Malden, James D. Watson and Larry Ellison grew up in South Shore. The neighborhood has changed though, and more recent products of South Shore include Michelle Obama and Kanye West.

    South Shore Country Club was an old, highly exclusive, WASP club that famously excluded Jews (and probably Catholics as well, though that's not for certain, since Catholics don't complain about it).

    South Shore C.C. has been gone for a long time (the old clubhouse is now the home of the South Shore Cultural Center, and community leaders are trying to get the Obama Presidential Library to locate there), but the legacy of South Shore's historic exclusion of Jews is still a pretty major sore spot for many in Chicago.

    BTW, because of the severe thunderstorms that came through Chicagoland this evening, yours truly watched an online video in which popular Chicago meteorologist Tom Skilling broke down a scouting report on the storms that was more thorough than Mel Kiper, Jr. giving his scouting report on some cornerback from an SEC school who ran a sub 4.3 40 at the NFL combine (Skilling is the brother of convicted Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling).

    At the end of the video, Skilling instructed viewers to check his blog for up to the minute updates -- but he never gave the URL for the blog. So I had to run a search for it.

    When I started typing "Tom Skilling" into Bing, "Tom Skilling gay" came up as a suggestion before I could finish typing his name (let along type the word "blog").

    ReplyDelete
  55. The Irish Catholic as underclass thing is more prounounced in the US than in other Anglosphere places where there is a realisation that that the AngloSaxon versus Celt dichotomy doesn't really hold up well especially when there are so many hard cases such as recussant English Catholics and Irish Anglicans

    To many Commonwealth -and Irish - observers the American nomenclature on Anglo Celt varieties seems so 18th century-a time when people born a hundred miles apart were viewed as quite different

    Mind you people will always disagree about who exactly qualifies to be "people like us "

    ReplyDelete
  56. There does seem to be some confusion over who or what is a proper American WASP. WASP's would include non-low class Englishmen and Welshmen and Lowlands Scots, and the English gentry of Ireland. Your religion should be Episcopalian, but it could also be acceptable, depending on the US region, to be Presbyterian or Quaker or Congregationalist. The lower classes adhering to their Baptist faith would not be included, nor would Scots-Irish, Highland Scots, or Irish, nor anyone out of the gutters of Cockney or Liverpool. On the other hand, the oldline Dutch Calvinists of New York would, and it was perfectly acceptable to intermarry with French Huguenots, which they did. Germans and Scandanavians are not WASP's. Any outmarriage beyond the Hudson Valley Dutch and the French had better be to the likes of a Prinzessin or a Contessa or you would be read out of polite society.

    The stereotypical WASP of yore was a sandy-haired Anglo-Norman Episcopalian who would have been a descendant of the English class of Country Gentlemen. They would work in a respectable profession and be discreet about money and retain ownership of an old family estateor home of some sort. There are a few of us around still like this who can trace our roots back to the real old country - Normandy. If you are this sort of person, you also know how to weed out and see through the new money crowd and upstarts, including English upstarts raised to the Gentry or Knighthood after the Reformation.

    As Steve likes to note, ethnicity is really an extended family, and WASP ethnicity, as described above, is the extended family of the Norman conquerors of Normandy and England who spent centuries intermarrying amongst each other in Normandy, England, and then the Colonies, so as to form a vast cousinage. Being part of a family is something that cannot be bought for any price, which is why new money will never gain you admission to old society.

    ReplyDelete
  57. DVN: Its pretty easy for establishment old money types to makes such rules since they dont have to work their ass 80 hours a week to put food on the table.This is obviously not excusing the actions of Scrooge ,Madoff et al.
    But even a lot of noveau riche types, not just the working and middle class at whom such derision is targetted, dont have the time to cultivate culture and breeding that this lot has.


    Just to point out that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the mean for employed persons run to about 34 hours per week. The only sectors which break 40 hours are primary activities (mining, logging, farming). They have some old histograms on the distribution of the labor force according to hours per week. They indicate the share working more than 49 hours is around 18% of the workforce, so it seems quite a few people are not working 80 hours.

    By the way, one of their surveys indicates employed persons put in a mean of 9 hours at work and in related activities on a typical work day and 2.5 hours at sports and leisure pursuits. Seems lots of people have hobbies...

    ReplyDelete


  58. Dr Van Nostrand:"You have certainly a broad definition of WASP. Now Germans and Scots are WASPs because one is Saxon and other borders Anglo?!"


    The Scots have always been counted as Anglo. Germans are a tad trickier, as they first have to dump German culture and replace it with Anglo.

    Dr Van Nostrand:"Benjamin Franklin actually didnt prefer Germans immigrated to America."

    Well, yes. He wanted to keep America for the English.He was a very smart man.

    Dr Van Nostrand:"He and some other founders(I think it was Jefferson) actually preferred Jews to Catholics(somewhere Pat Buchanan is weeping in his pillow..or biting..these Paleos as Justin Raimondo can be pretty weird)"

    Allowing large scale Catholic immigration to the USA was definitely a bad idea, one for which we are still paying.

    Dr Van Nostrand:"Bill Clinton is descended from English speakers from Northern Ireland who in turn who were a hodgepodge of ethnicity-lowland Scots, English working classes and aristocrats(Duke of Wellington, Dutch Calvinists,German mercenaries and farmers and French Huegenot refugees.
    In short Northern Ireland was almost like a proto America with the Irish Catholics cast unflatteringly in the role of the heathen savage ala Native Americans."

    Well, yeah, the Catholic Irish were a pretty unpleasant lot

    DR Van Nostrand:"It was only logical that this lot populate and define American culture and popular institutions."

    They did? Somehow I though that it had more to do with Southern Anglican elite (Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, etc) and New England (Emerson, Franklin, John Winthrop, etc) than with the Scots-Irish.

    Dr Van Nostrand:"WASP has become broader in recent years contrast the 1950's parody of descendant of Swiss German Anabaptist Eisenhower as a WASP with the cultural jihad(to use posters term) against German Americans during WWI."

    It has become broader because the "jihad" against German culture in WW1 was so successful. The threat posed to Anglo culture by the Germans was destroyed.Sadly, the current American elite seems to have lost the will for such things..

    Dr Van Nostrand:"All of white HBD's nowadays LOVE LOVE LOVE(hat tip whiskey) whites even if they are not Northern European or Protestant."

    Speak for yourself, dear boy. I am a White HBDer, and I feel little love for non-Anglos.


    Dr Van Nostrand:"This wasn't the case in the past , Italians,Greeks,Spaniards and Portuguese only scraped by in the whiteness test a 100 years ago."

    Scraping by is all that counts, dear boy.

    Dr van Nostrand:"The impeccably pale skinned Irish were so loathed for their "pagan" Catholicism that often they were treated only marginally better than blacks."

    Uh-Oh, the "poor put upon Irish myth" rears its head again.The Irish were treated vastly better than the Blacks, dear boy. Look up things like chattel slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, etc, some time.And while I'm on it, the NINA (No Irish Need Apply Sign) never existed.

    Dr Van Nostrsnd:"Once you acquire your white utopia bereft of all these irritating darkies and Catholics"

    Pipe dream, dear boy....It's never ever going to happen.

    Dr Van Nostrand:"..what future holds for the dark whities such as the Mediterranean and whiter Catholic types?( who were probably used as cannon fodder in your wars against blacks and Hispanics as seen in south Boston and brooklyn,NYC)"

    Again, nothing.


    Dr Van Nostrand:"Lets face it much of this so called rational,objective white HBD thinking is just a intellectual fig leaf for pro Nordic mysticism.
    I really dont see the difference between Theodore Roosevelts views on the Italians circa 1910 (damn dagos) and this lot here.
    Lets not get into the shameless attempts by the Nordicists to misappropriate Greek and Roman culture as their own!"

    MMMM, dredging up the Nordic boogeyman, eh?Nothing like tilting at shadows and straw men, I suppose.

    syon

    ReplyDelete
  59. "DVN: Its pretty easy for establishment old money types to makes such rules since they dont have to work their ass 80 hours a week to put food on the table.This is obviously not excusing the actions of Scrooge ,Madoff et al.
    But even a lot of noveau riche types, not just the working and middle class at whom such derision is targetted, dont have the time to cultivate culture and breeding that this lot has."

    One of the reasons why an old money elite is so necessary. Someone has to think about the higher things.


    syon

    ReplyDelete
  60. Anonymous:""But it's not just the ratty part of town. The upper class in San Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time--it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.""

    Nixon, of course, was a very vulgar man. Highly intelligent (I believe that he has the highest tested IQ of any president)but utterly lacking in the qualities of a gentleman.

    syon

    ReplyDelete
  61. I have to take slight disagreement with your take on the rule on fast play.

    First, it is just good etiquette. So by incorporation most courses encourage it some form or another.

    Those that are sticklers for it, often have large memberships. Whereas, a course like Augusta National could really care less (aside from just wanting to be overly formalistic like some of these places tend to be) if Bill Gates and Warren Buffet mosey around 18 holes in 5 hours. They aren't likely to caught by any members behind them.

    I'm familiar with Indiana's most exclusive course (I realize that isn't exactly high up on the golf food chain), Crooked Stick in Carmel. They have a similarly limited membership, with the idea being that you don't have to wait on anybody to shoot, and they don't have to wait on you. The few times I've played it, I don't recall seeing more than a handful of other golfers out there.

    ReplyDelete
  62. Anonymous said: "But, yeah, the San Francisco Golf Club is out-of-sight elite. They don't host U.S. Opens, they leave that for the more mass market Olympic Club next door. "

    Somebody said that the members of Olympic work for the members of San Francisco."

    One thing not a lot of people know about the Olympic Club is its an athletic club, not merely a golf club. Golf is one of the many organized sports they play. Olympics' men's basketball team is loaded with former D1 players and a few years ago beat Stanford's mens team in an preseason game. I don't remember if Stanford was any good that year or not, but for a rec team to beat any men's D1 team is impressive.

    Olympic has a lot of members, something like 5,000. A small subset have full golf privileges. The "downtown" members can use the course, but have to pay green fees, have a limited number of tee times, and are very restricted in terms of guests.

    Olympic is a very Irish club, old San Francisco. Lots of cops and firemen and grown children of cops and firemen. Its not a stuffy place at all.

    ReplyDelete
  63. Luckily for me, my Catholic ancestors were more interested in procreating and taking care of children than joining country clubs and playing with sticks and balls. Maybe that's why the WASPs declined.

    ReplyDelete
  64. Bill Clinton is descended from English speakers from Northern Ireland who in turn who were a hodgepodge of ethnicity-lowland Scots, English working classes and aristocrats(Duke of Wellington, Dutch Calvinists,German mercenaries and farmers and French Huegenot refugees.

    German and Dutch soldiers might have been in King William's army but they had minimal impact on the local gene pool. Huguenots, though, are another story: Huguenots of Lisburn

    Incidentally, during the peace process negotiations in the late 1990s, Bill Clinton tried to play up his Ulster background in a failed attempt to make him seem more trustworthy to Ulster Protestants who had serious misgivings about any American brokered deal with Irish Republicans. The man had no shame.

    ReplyDelete
  65. Dr Van Nostrand6/13/13, 1:20 PM


    "DVN: Its pretty easy for establishment old money types to makes such rules since they dont have to work their ass 80 hours a week to put food on the table.This is obviously not excusing the actions of Scrooge ,Madoff et al.
    But even a lot of noveau riche types, not just the working and middle class at whom such derision is targetted, dont have the time to cultivate culture and breeding that this lot has."

    One of the reasons why an old money elite is so necessary. Someone has to think about the higher things."

    DVN: I agree. Im in favor of some sort of aristocracy as long as it is not hostile to the populace.
    And I realize it is against Americas egalitarian mythos but most civilized socities are bound together by these small hypcrisies.

    Anyway I may indulged in hyperble as Art Deco pointed out most of the "common folk" dont work that hard but my point was that they seem to work more than old money people.
    Again I dont begrudge them their wealth which is why I am against the estate tax but the WASP upper class types shouldnt be so quick to judge the others lack of breeding

    ReplyDelete
  66. Nixon, of course, was a very vulgar man. Highly intelligent (I believe that he has the highest tested IQ of any president)but utterly lacking in the qualities of a gentleman.

    syon


    No, he actually wasn't vulgar. That's just the image that's been promoted and firmly embedded in the public consciousness by non-WASP ethnic partisans.

    He was a staid, sober middle-class WASP, of the type that used to dominate the country and make up its core demography.

    ReplyDelete
  67. Dr Van Nostrand6/13/13, 1:42 PM

    Dr Van Nostrand:"You have certainly a broad definition of WASP. Now Germans and Scots are WASPs because one is Saxon and other borders Anglo?!"


    WASP GUY:The Scots have always been counted as Anglo. Germans are a tad trickier, as they first have to dump German culture and replace it with Anglo.

    DVN: Interesting. I was under the impression that the Highland kilt wearers were proudly Celt but the lowland guys were more inclined to be Anglo.
    I realize Anglo Saxon came from well German Saxon but that was a long time ago and it didnt Churchill(who was of paternal Saxon descent with little NOrman blood) of utterly devastating German with the blessing of the German origin English Royal Family.

    Dr Van Nostrand:"Benjamin Franklin actually didnt prefer Germans immigrated to America."

    WG:Well, yes. He wanted to keep America for the English.He was a very smart man.

    DVN: "Posterity" and all. Perhaps, if their heart was in it, shouldve elaborated it in the Constitution.

    Dr Van Nostrand:"He and some other founders(I think it was Jefferson) actually preferred Jews to Catholics(somewhere Pat Buchanan is weeping in his pillow..or biting..these Paleos as Justin Raimondo can be pretty weird)"

    WG:Allowing large scale Catholic immigration to the USA was definitely a bad idea, one for which we are still paying.

    DVN: Why was it bad and in what way are you still paying?

    Dr Van Nostrand:"Bill Clinton is descended from English speakers from Northern Ireland who in turn who were a hodgepodge of ethnicity-lowland Scots, English working classes and aristocrats(Duke of Wellington, Dutch Calvinists,German mercenaries and farmers and French Huegenot refugees.
    In short Northern Ireland was almost like a proto America with the Irish Catholics cast unflatteringly in the role of the heathen savage ala Native Americans."

    WG: Well, yeah, the Catholic Irish were a pretty unpleasant lot

    DVN: Poverty and oppression does that to you!

    DR Van Nostrand:"It was only logical that this lot populate and define American culture and popular institutions."

    WG:They did? Somehow I though that it had more to do with Southern Anglican elite (Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, etc) and New England (Emerson, Franklin, John Winthrop, etc) than with the Scots-Irish.

    DVN: Oh those were the elite institutions such as the Ivy League,Diplomatic Corps,Generals,CIA, Social Register etc but the more populist such as bulk of the army, western settlers, country music,bootlegging,stock car racing ,the cowboy mythos(admittedly lifted from Mexicans)is their's

    Dr Van Nostrand:"WASP has become broader in recent years contrast the 1950's parody of descendant of Swiss German Anabaptist Eisenhower as a WASP with the cultural jihad(to use posters term) against German Americans during WWI."

    WG:It has become broader because the "jihad" against German culture in WW1 was so successful. The threat posed to Anglo culture by the Germans was destroyed.Sadly, the current American elite seems to have lost the will for such things..

    DVN: Where was the threat by Germans against Anglos in WWI. Unless you are talking about their go ahead for the Mexican invasion of Texas.Both Texas and Mexico had considerable German populations but they were of the pacifist type(Texas born Eisenhower's mother consoled him after the hothead got into a fistfight with a passage from Scripture- he who conquers his anger is greater than he who conquers a city.Obviously he did not heed her counsel during WWII!)

    ReplyDelete
  68. Dr Van Nostrand6/13/13, 1:42 PM


    Dr Van Nostrand:"All of white HBD's nowadays LOVE LOVE LOVE(hat tip whiskey) whites even if they are not Northern European or Protestant."

    WG:Speak for yourself, dear boy. I am a White HBDer, and I feel little love for non-Anglos.

    DVN: My statement was tongue in cheek. It was meant to imply opportunism and hypocrisy on their part by allying with non Anglos white and yes it does occur if you follow the paleo blogs.


    Dr Van Nostrand:"This wasn't the case in the past , Italians,Greeks,Spaniards and Portuguese only scraped by in the whiteness test a 100 years ago."

    WG:Scraping by is all that counts, dear boy.

    DVN: It may do to you old man! But to them , those who created Western civilization ,it was quite demeaning.

    Dr van Nostrand:"The impeccably pale skinned Irish were so loathed for their "pagan" Catholicism that often they were treated only marginally better than blacks."

    WG:Uh-Oh, the "poor put upon Irish myth" rears its head again.The Irish were treated vastly better than the Blacks, dear boy. Look up things like chattel slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, etc, some time.And while I'm on it, the NINA (No Irish Need Apply Sign) never existed.

    DVN: And WASPs never had "Dogs and Jews need not enter" signs in front of their country clubs either but it doesnt mean it didnt exist!
    I am talking about earlier times circa 17th century when race hadnt caught as it did later on.Yes Irish were considered heathen savages.
    And you just said that the Irish were an unpleasant lot and their immigration to U.S was a bad idea.
    No contradiction between your positions?

    Dr Van Nostrsnd:"Once you acquire your white utopia bereft of all these irritating darkies and Catholics"

    WG:Pipe dream, dear boy....It's never ever going to happen.

    DVN: I am not white so I dont dream about it pipe or bottle. Just hypothesizing.

    Dr Van Nostrand:"..what future holds for the dark whities such as the Mediterranean and whiter Catholic types?( who were probably used as cannon fodder in your wars against blacks and Hispanics as seen in south Boston and brooklyn,NYC)"

    WG:Again, nothing.

    DVN: Most likely a return to the status quo of the 1910s!


    Dr Van Nostrand:"Lets face it much of this so called rational,objective white HBD thinking is just a intellectual fig leaf for pro Nordic mysticism.
    I really dont see the difference between Theodore Roosevelts views on the Italians circa 1910 (damn dagos) and this lot here.
    Lets not get into the shameless attempts by the Nordicists to misappropriate Greek and Roman culture as their own!"

    WG:MMMM, dredging up the Nordic boogeyman, eh?Nothing like tilting at shadows and straw men, I suppose.

    DVN: I dont consider Nordics to be boogeyman but instead of dismissing it with Buckleyesque and Quixotic imagery , address the issue. Do northern whites tend to claim Greek and Roman civilizations as their own and on what basis?

    ReplyDelete
  69. Anyway I may indulged in hyperble as Art Deco pointed out most of the "common folk" dont work that hard but my point was that they seem to work more than old money people.

    The BLS is not publishing any stats on the matter, but I suspect if you researched it you would find the only people working in the range of 80 hours per week would be medical residents, a modest share of the self-employed, and a scatter of corporation executives and big law attorneys. Some politicians and such (e.g. Robert Dole) have claimed 80 hour work weeks as a matter of routine. I think most of us would be happier if they devoted fewer hours to lousing up the world.

    ReplyDelete
  70. Anonymous:"No, he actually wasn't vulgar. That's just the image that's been promoted and firmly embedded in the public consciousness by non-WASP ethnic partisans.

    He was a staid, sober middle-class WASP, of the type that used to dominate the country and make up its core demography."

    Nixon's tapes provide, shall we say, eloquent evidence as to his utter vulgarity..... Such coarse speech.The fact that such an ill-bred man occupied the same office as Washington and Theodore Roosevelt is a sure sign of a culture in decay.

    syon

    ReplyDelete




  71. DVN: "My statement was tongue in cheek. It was meant to imply opportunism and hypocrisy on their part by allying with non Anglos white and yes it does occur if you follow the paleo blogs."


    MMM, in my case, it's more a matter of allying with people who have been properly Anglicized....housebroken Germans like Eisenhower and Pershing.




    DVN: "It may do to you old man! But to them , those who created Western civilization ,it was quite demeaning."

    When you take up residence in another man's house, you are obliged to follow his rules. Doing otherwise is churlish.My own family is an example of this. My mother's father is a Jew from Riga, but she is thoroughly Anglo.Indeed, she feels nothing but contempt for the shtetl culture of Eastern Europe. If the Italians didn't like conforming to Anglo norms, they could always go back home.





    DVN: And WASPs never had "Dogs and Jews need not enter" signs in front of their country clubs either but it doesnt mean it didnt exist!

    Cherished myths die hard, dear boy, but it is true. There is no evidence whatsoever for the "No Irish Need Apply Sign." Well, that is to say, no evidence outside of Irish self pity.For a peek into the scholarship on the matter, read Richard Jensen's "No Irish Need Apply":A Myth of Victimization.It's online.



    DR V Nostrand:"I am talking about earlier times circa 17th century when race hadnt caught as it did later on.Yes Irish were considered heathen savages."

    Because they were savages...Read some of the primary sources. Grim stuff.

    Dr V Nostrand:"And you just said that the Irish were an unpleasant lot and their immigration to U.S was a bad idea.
    No contradiction between your positions?"

    How so? Allowing them in was a bad idea. Look at all the time and effort that it has taken to civilize them. For a peek into the history of the matter, read Thomas Sewall.



    DVN: I am not white so I dont dream about it pipe or bottle. Just hypothesizing.

    Hypothesizing in cloudcuckooland.


    DVN: Most likely a return to the status quo of the 1910s!

    Sounds like someone has been hitting the steampunk crack pipe.





    DVN: "I dont consider Nordics to be boogeyman"

    Could have fooled me, dear boy, seeing how much you harp on it. Be of sterner stuff. After all, my maternal heritage is Ashkenazi Jewish and I'm in the Salma Hayek complexion range, but you don't hear me whining about "Nordic Supremecists."


    DVN:" but instead of dismissing it with Buckleyesque and Quixotic imagery ,"

    You are too kind.


    DVN:" address the issue. Do northern whites tend to claim Greek and Roman civilizations as their own and on what basis?"

    What do you mean, as their own? Northern Europeans are part of Western Civilization, if that's what you mean. The Roman Catholic Church did a highly effective job in the Middle Ages of spreading Western Culture to the least civilized corners of Europe (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, etc).Indeed, I've though that it was too bad that the Russians had to miss out on being Westernized and had to settle for the quasi-Oriental culture of Byzantium.


    Syon

    ReplyDelete





  72. DVN: Interesting. I was under the impression that the Highland kilt wearers were proudly Celt but the lowland guys were more inclined to be Anglo.

    Highlanders are just transplanted Irishmen. Hence, it has taken some time to Anglicize them.The Lowlanders, in contrast, were merely an Anglo variant.



    DVN:"I realize Anglo Saxon came from well German Saxon but that was a long time ago and it didnt Churchill(who was of paternal Saxon descent with little NOrman blood) of utterly devastating German with the blessing of the German origin English Royal Family."

    Anglo-Saxon comes out of the merger of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.
    As for Churchill putting the hammer down on the Jerries, your point is?





    DVN: "Posterity" and all. Perhaps, if their heart was in it, shouldve elaborated it in the Constitution.

    Oh, I agree. The USA should have been kept an Anglo enclave. Still, no use crying over spilt milk. Anyway, the Germans have been pretty thoroughly Anglicized.The Catholic Irish are still, in many cases, rather resistant, but I expect that they will fully knuckle under at some point.





    DVN: Why was it bad and in what way are you still paying?

    Allowed in hordes of Catholic Germans and Irish, with all of their loathsome customs. As for how we are still paying for it: John F. Kennedy, Irish political machines, the support that the RC Church extends to massive immigration, the list goes on...





    DVN: Poverty and oppression does that to you!

    Sure they do...and culture has nothing to do with it, I suppose.



    DVN: Oh those were the elite institutions such as the Ivy League,Diplomatic Corps,Generals,CIA, Social Register etc but the more populist such as bulk of the army, western settlers, country music,bootlegging,stock car racing ,the cowboy mythos(admittedly lifted from Mexicans)is their's

    I try not to waste my time with the pastimes of the rabble.


    DVN: Where was the threat by Germans against Anglos in WWI.

    The threat of being non-Anglos, dear boy.Prior to WW1, the Germans had a fairly strong cultural foothold in America (cf Mencken's boyhood for a good illustration).Many of them were imperfectly Anglo at best. Theodore Dreiser, for example, actually wanted to see a German viceroy in London. During WW1, however, the German cultural incubus was expelled.

    SYON


    ReplyDelete
  73. Nixon's tapes provide, shall we say, eloquent evidence as to his utter vulgarity..... Such coarse speech.The fact that such an ill-bred man occupied the same office as Washington and Theodore Roosevelt is a sure sign of a culture in decay.

    Except it wasn't "utter vulgarity" or particularly coarse.

    The whole idea that he was somehow "vulgar" and "ill-bred" was and is just promoted by non-WASP partisans with an ethnic animus.

    ReplyDelete
  74. Anonymous:'Except it wasn't "utter vulgarity" or particularly coarse.

    The whole idea that he was somehow "vulgar" and "ill-bred" was and is just promoted by non-WASP partisans with an ethnic animus."

    MMM, you must have been listening to a different set of tapes, dear boy.Of course, Nixon was no worse than, say, LBJ, but it's still a pretty deep descent from the heady days of true WASP gentleman like Theodore Roosevelt....When will we have a president of TR's calibre again...

    SYON

    ReplyDelete
  75. Nixon's tapes provide, shall we say, eloquent evidence as to his utter vulgarity..... Such coarse speech.The fact that such an ill-bred man occupied the same office as Washington and Theodore Roosevelt is a sure sign of a culture in decay.

    You mean statements like "I don't give a [expletive] about the lira" are evidence of 'utter vulgarity' and 'cultural decay'? He worked in a stag environment (except for Virginia Knauer, Diane Sawyer, and Rose Mary Woods). You need to get out more.

    ReplyDelete
  76. Steve,

    If you want to combined your interest in all things WASP-y with golf, look at the blog of a man you has played all of the top 100 golf courses. http://top100golf.blogspot.com/

    Having a hobby like this is definitely a wasp-y thing. The reviews of the golf courses on the blog shows how many of the elite courses have tough rules because when everyone is rich and there is a waiting list of people who want to be members, the members just do not have to put up with jerks.

    ReplyDelete
  77. Art Deco:"You mean statements like "I don't give a [expletive] about the lira" are evidence of 'utter vulgarity' and 'cultural decay'? He worked in a stag environment (except for Virginia Knauer, Diane Sawyer, and Rose Mary Woods)."

    MMMM, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Theodore Roosevelt: They all worked in "stag" environments, yet they somehow avoided such grotesque banalities.


    Art Deco:" You need to get out more"

    MMM, as a graduate student in the humanities, I get out quite a bit, and in rather shady parts of town, too (it's all in the name of research)...not to mention the fact that I am continually exposed to the non-stop obscenities that emerge from the wrinkled lips of aging leftist professors (the female ones usually outdo the men in terms of vulgarity, the feminist legacy, I assume)...

    Syon

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  78. Thanks. So, he finally got to play Augusta National to finish off his Top 100 list. Good for him.

    I always wondered what his home club was that he was trading rounds upon to get a round at all these other clubs. I think he's an Italian-American from greater NYC, so I'm guessing Winged Foot, which was pretty Catholic back in the 1980s. Or maybe he belongs to one of the two new Wall Street accessible New Jersey industrial wasteland courses -- Liberty National or Bayonne?

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  79. Incidentally, lest anyone get the wrong idea, I'm actually rather fond of Nixon. As post-WW2 presidents go (wonder how much longer that temporal divider will hold up?), he ranks fairly high . Granted, he was no Eisenhower (easily our best post-WW2 President), but he was infinitely preferable to JFK, LBJ, Jimmy Carter (A president named Jimmy.....). I still have my grandfather's autographed copy of SIX CRISES. Yes, boys and girls, a Jewish immigrant from Riga was a staunch Republican and Nixon supporter.Indeed, I can still recall him fulminating, decades after Watergate, how Kennedy's crimes were glossed over by a leftist press corps...

    Syon

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  80. MMM, you must have been listening to a different set of tapes, dear boy.Of course, Nixon was no worse than, say, LBJ, but it's still a pretty deep descent from the heady days of true WASP gentleman like Theodore Roosevelt....When will we have a president of TR's calibre again...

    Wow, you're dumber than I thought. TR deliberately cultivated a vulgar public image of himself.

    Nixon was a staid Quaker who did not project vulgarity.

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  81. You mean statements like "I don't give a [expletive] about the lira" are evidence of 'utter vulgarity' and 'cultural decay'? He worked in a stag environment (except for Virginia Knauer, Diane Sawyer, and Rose Mary Woods). You need to get out more.

    Yeah, if you listen to the tapes, they're not really vulgar and very few swear words are used. It's very mild.

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  82. Anonymous;'Wow, you're dumber than I thought."

    Always glad to provide a surprise.

    Anonymous:' "TR deliberately cultivated a vulgar public image of himself."

    MMM, I think that you are mistaking TR's vitality for vulgarity.One can be boisterous and exuberant without being crude. As for myself, I find it hard to call a man vulgar who read Tolstoy to keep himself awake whilst he was escorting three outlaws. Perhaps my standards are too low?

    Anonymous:"Nixon was a staid Quaker who did not project vulgarity."

    Nixon...a "staid Quaker?" Somehow, "staid" is not a term that I would use.

    SYON

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  83. Anonymous;"Yeah, if you listen to the tapes, they're not really vulgar and very few swear words are used. It's very mild."

    "It's very mild": Rather reminds me of David Milch's comment about the anachronistic obscenities used in DEADWOOD. Actual 19th century vulgarisms were too mild. One can't get a rise out of jaded 21st century audiences with something as milquetoast as goddamn. One has too use the language of gangster rappers instead...


    So, yes, I'm sure that Nixon's vulgarities seem "mild" to our debased ears.

    SYON

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  84. Nixon...a "staid Quaker?" Somehow, "staid" is not a term that I would use.

    Yes, because you're either a non-WASP with ethnic animus or someone who's imbibed the portrayal of Nixon by non-WASP ethnic partisans.

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  85. So, yes, I'm sure that Nixon's vulgarities seem "mild" to our debased ears.

    No, it's very mild even for Nixon's time.

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  86. Anonymous:"Yes, because you're either a non-WASP with ethnic animus or someone who's imbibed the portrayal of Nixon by non-WASP ethnic partisans."

    Or maybe simply a man who recalls former times with higher standards...

    SYON

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  87. anonymous:"No, it's very mild even for Nixon's time."

    Well, that's my problem, then. I am judging Nixon by the standards of former ages: the eras of Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, etc.Of course, in their eras, gentlemen spoke like gentlemen....


    Yes, I suppose that by the unspeakably vile standards of the 1960s, Nixon's speech was mild and unremarkable....which is itself a sad commentary on how far America had declined....One wonders what will pass for mild vulgarity in 2050?

    SYON

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  88. RE:Nixon,

    If it make you feel better, JFK and LBJ were both vulgar as well....And, needless to say, Bill Clinton was probably the most vulgar man to ever sit in the White House.

    SYON

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  89. Dr Van Nostrand6/14/13, 1:06 AM


    DVN:"I realize Anglo Saxon came from well German Saxon but that was a long time ago and it didnt Churchill(who was of paternal Saxon descent with little NOrman blood) of utterly devastating German with the blessing of the German origin English Royal Family."

    Anglo-Saxon comes out of the merger of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.
    As for Churchill putting the hammer down on the Jerries, your point is?


    DVN: With every post of yours,Im less and less surprised that you dont get the point.
    Your point was addressed to the original poster who considered Germans as WASP because they were well Anglo Saxon. An argument that did not impress that Germanic Eisenhower or the Saxon Churchill


    DVN: Why was it bad and in what way are you still paying?

    Allowed in hordes of Catholic Germans and Irish, with all of their loathsome customs. As for how we are still paying for it: John F. Kennedy, Irish political machines, the support that the RC Church extends to massive immigration, the list goes on...

    DVN: JFK style personality and identity politics are not unique to Irish. See what they the Brits did with Churchill and Thatcher.
    The Catholic church is hardly unique in its support for immigrants, illegal or otherwise.



    DVN: Poverty and oppression does that to you!

    Sure they do...and culture has nothing to do with it, I suppose.

    DVN: Jeez! Of course they do. But poverty,degradation do corrode culture and arrest its growth.Thats the point



    DVN: Oh those were the elite institutions such as the Ivy League,Diplomatic Corps,Generals,CIA, Social Register etc but the more populist such as bulk of the army, western settlers, country music,bootlegging,stock car racing ,the cowboy mythos(admittedly lifted from Mexicans)is their's

    I try not to waste my time with the pastimes of the rabble.

    DVN: Well ladee fuckindaa. That stuff is not my cup of tea either but I would never think of them in such a patronzing manner. Are you for real or are you trolling?

    DVN: Where was the threat by Germans against Anglos in WWI.

    The threat of being non-Anglos, dear boy.Prior to WW1, the Germans had a fairly strong cultural foothold in America (cf Mencken's boyhood for a good illustration).Many of them were imperfectly Anglo at best. Theodore Dreiser, for example, actually wanted to see a German viceroy in London. During WW1, however, the German cultural incubus was expelled.


    DVN: So what if they were imperfectly Anglo? Is that a crime? Were they prone to criminals and neer do wells due to their non Anglo nature. No, for the most part they minded their own business and wished to be left alone in their breweries.Speaking of which the Prohibition started by pin headed Anglos was another cultural jihad against the Scots Irish and the Germans but something tells me that aspect of it appeals to you.

    Also who the heck cares what Soviet sympathisizing novelist Theodore Dreiser thinks?Since when he was he influential in setting policy.So he bet on Germany during WWI. Does that make him a demon. U.S wasnt really even interested in the war and didnt enter until late when the tyrant Woodrow Wilson backtracked on his promise of staying out the war and unlawfully persecuted those who opposed him.
    If you have to be a crass ethnocentrist atleast try and be logical

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  90. Dr Van Nostrand6/14/13, 1:24 AM

    DVN: "My statement was tongue in cheek. It was meant to imply opportunism and hypocrisy on their part by allying with non Anglos white and yes it does occur if you follow the paleo blogs."


    MMM, in my case, it's more a matter of allying with people who have been properly Anglicized....housebroken Germans like Eisenhower and Pershing.

    DVN:You are looking to housebreak Germans in all the wrong places. You could Saxe Coburg Gotha in England(who was related to the Kaiser) and "Windsor" one of whose Nazi loving crown prince thankfully abdicated to marry some silly woman.



    DVN: "It may do to you old man! But to them , those who created Western civilization ,it was quite demeaning."

    When you take up residence in another man's house, you are obliged to follow his rules. Doing otherwise is churlish.My own family is an example of this. My mother's father is a Jew from Riga, but she is thoroughly Anglo.Indeed, she feels nothing but contempt for the shtetl culture of Eastern Europe. If the Italians didn't like conforming to Anglo norms, they could always go back home.

    DVN: No one is talking about conforming to Anglo norms.That is not the point.
    The issue is the Nordic types claim that Greek and Roman civilization were created by Nordic when there is scant evidence at best to prove this and indeed counter evidence -Romans disdained both Germanic and Celtic peoples.



    DVN: And WASPs never had "Dogs and Jews need not enter" signs in front of their country clubs either but it doesnt mean it didnt exist!

    Cherished myths die hard, dear boy, but it is true. There is no evidence whatsoever for the "No Irish Need Apply Sign." Well, that is to say, no evidence outside of Irish self pity.For a peek into the scholarship on the matter, read Richard Jensen's "No Irish Need Apply":A Myth of Victimization.It's online.

    DVN: I shouldve been more clear. I meant that while there were no signs to that effect,there was discrimination that kept "outsiders" out.

    .

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  91. Dr Van Nostrand6/14/13, 1:25 AM

    DR V Nostrand:"I am talking about earlier times circa 17th century when race hadnt caught as it did later on.Yes Irish were considered heathen savages."

    Because they were savages...Read some of the primary sources. Grim stuff.


    DVN: And the English who used to stick their enemies heads on pikes and jailed little girls for years on end for stealing loaves of bread were....

    Dr V Nostrand:"And you just said that the Irish were an unpleasant lot and their immigration to U.S was a bad idea.
    No contradiction between your positions?"

    How so? Allowing them in was a bad idea. Look at all the time and effort that it has taken to civilize them. For a peek into the history of the matter, read Thomas Sewall.

    DVN: Sowell does rip into the Irish like he does with blacks but he lays blame at the feet of identity politics.Yes Anglo culture was something positive to aspire to as see by the example of the Scots which Sowell also articulated.
    Irish seemed to have a better chances of being Anglicized in America than in Ireland



    DVN: I am not white so I dont dream about it pipe or bottle. Just hypothesizing.

    Hypothesizing in cloudcuckooland.

    DVN: Do you even know what hypothesis means? Todays cuckooland is tomorrow's reality.
    Anyway it is not my hypothesis but the dream of many of the posters here


    DVN: Most likely a return to the status quo of the 1910s!

    Sounds like someone has been hitting the steampunk crack pipe.

    DVN: I dont know what this means but Im sure you think it is very clever.I leave you to your delusions which are more severe than any compelled by pipes be they crack or opium





    DVN: "I dont consider Nordics to be boogeyman"

    Could have fooled me, dear boy, seeing how much you harp on it. Be of sterner stuff. After all, my maternal heritage is Ashkenazi Jewish and I'm in the Salma Hayek complexion range, but you don't hear me whining about "Nordic Supremecists."

    DVN: Weasel alert! Any charge of bigotry often is countered with "but some of my friends are ..." or "my mother's side is.." ! Who cares what your mother's side is! What is your father's side?
    I suppose by your logic Greeks should be best friends with Ottoman Sultans because so many of the latter mothers were Serbian or Greek noblewomen.

    DVN:" but instead of dismissing it with Buckleyesque and Quixotic imagery ,"

    You are too kind.


    DVN:" address the issue. Do northern whites tend to claim Greek and Roman civilizations as their own and on what basis?"

    What do you mean, as their own? Northern Europeans are part of Western Civilization, if that's what you mean. The Roman Catholic Church did a highly effective job in the Middle Ages of spreading Western Culture to the least civilized corners of Europe (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, etc).Indeed, I've though that it was too bad that the Russians had to miss out on being Westernized and had to settle for the quasi-Oriental culture of Byzantium.

    DVN: Byzantium is nothing more than Eastern wing of the Roman empire.
    Russian orientalism owes much to due to its Asiatic genes ,culture and geography.Not so much to Byzantine whose Greek Orthodox culture is considered quite Western by Middle Eastern people no matter deranged posters like you think

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  92. If you want slow play, be the first group on the tee after the women's member/guest.

    Steve, is Muirfield more exclusive than Swinley Forest?

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  93. I caddied for the fathers of the debutantes who recruited me to be an escort or part of the stag line.

    The golf course and the deb parties and balls taught me much about what life is like.

    I owned a tuxedo and little else then.

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  94. Good question: Muirfield is on TV hosting the British Open every seven years or so. Swinley Forest is out of sight upper class, where the British foreign service entertains ambassadors and the like, and 95% of the people trying to get on Muirfield have never heard of it.

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  95. Well, that's my problem, then. I am judging Nixon by the standards of former ages: the eras of Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, etc.Of course, in their eras, gentlemen spoke like gentlemen....

    Yes, I suppose that by the unspeakably vile standards of the 1960s, Nixon's speech was mild and unremarkable....which is itself a sad commentary on how far America had declined....One wonders what will pass for mild vulgarity in 2050?


    You don't have private tapes of Washington, Roosevelt, etc.

    Gentlemen have always spoke like gentlemen in public. And they've also had a tendency to resort to different speech at times among close confidantes.

    Nixon was no different, and even his private speech was not particularly vulgar for his time or times past.

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  96. Or maybe simply a man who recalls former times with higher standards...

    Yes, right, those former times where you hung out with George Washington and Teddy Roosevelt in private.

    ReplyDelete
  97. DVN: With every post of yours,Im less and less surprised that you dont get the point.
    Your point was addressed to the original poster who considered Germans as WASP because they were well Anglo Saxon. An argument that did not impress that Germanic Eisenhower or the Saxon Churchill"

    Of course Germans in Germany are not WASPS. However, after proper training over the generations (breeding out the Hun, one might say) they can become WASPS..






    DVN: JFK style personality and identity politics are not unique to Irish."

    Dear boy, JFK was as bog Irish as it gets. Strip away the Harvard veneer, and he was a jumped up Irish street thug.



    DVN:" See what they the Brits did with Churchill and Thatcher."

    Churchill and Thatcher were Anglos. Makes all the difference in the world, dear boy.



    DVN:"The Catholic church is hardly unique in its support for immigrants, illegal or otherwise."

    Sadly true, but they are a large and powerful organization, one that is devoted to letting in as many Mestizo Catholics as possible.







    DVN: "Jeez! Of course they do. But poverty,degradation do corrode culture and arrest its growth.Thats the point"

    MMM, and how would the growth of Irish Catholic culture help anyone, seeing as how the culture is itself base, crude, violent, etc?





    DVN: Well ladee fuckindaa. That stuff is not my cup of tea either but I would never think of them in such a patronzing manner. Are you for real or are you trolling?


    Trolling? Hardly. The genuine conservative stands for elite culture, not for the gutter products of the proles.






    DVN:" So what if they were imperfectly Anglo? Is that a crime? Were they prone to criminals and neer do wells due to their non Anglo nature. No, for the most part they minded their own business and wished to be left alone in their breweries."

    Of course it was a crime. America is an Anglo country. Immigrants must abandon their non-Anglo ways and become Anglicized. If they don't want to be Anglos, they should stay in their home countries.


    DVN:"Speaking of which the Prohibition started by pin headed Anglos was another cultural jihad against the Scots Irish and the Germans but something tells me that aspect of it appeals to you."

    Of course it does, dear boy. Sometimes stern measures must be applied.

    DVN:"Also who the heck cares what Soviet sympathisizing novelist Theodore Dreiser thinks?Since when he was he influential in setting policy.So he bet on Germany during WWI. Does that make him a demon."

    Dreiser's pro-German thoughts (like Mencken's) reveal their lack of acculturation. That thinkers of such prominence in American life were not really Anglo was a danger.


    DVN:" U.S wasnt really even interested in the war and didnt enter until late when the tyrant Woodrow Wilson backtracked on his promise of staying out the war and unlawfully persecuted those who opposed him.
    If you have to be a crass ethnocentrist atleast try and be logical"

    Actually, the USA should have been in the war from the start. Anglo civilization was being threatened by the Germans. Sadly, it took Wilson years to realize that. Theodore Roosevelt would have had us fighting the Germans in 1914, had he been elected president in 1912.

    SYON

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  98. DVN:"You are looking to housebreak Germans in all the wrong places. You could Saxe Coburg Gotha in England(who was related to the Kaiser) and "Windsor" one of whose Nazi loving crown prince thankfully abdicated to marry some silly woman."

    Oh, I would be all for kicking them out and replacing them with people who were more thoroughly English...







    DVN:" No one is talking about conforming to Anglo norms.That is not the point.
    The issue is the Nordic types claim that Greek and Roman civilization were created by Nordic when there is scant evidence at best to prove this and indeed counter evidence -Romans disdained both Germanic and Celtic peoples."


    What, are you talking about Nordicist idiots? Who cares what they think.
    They are vulgar morons.Needless to say, they are, of course, wrong. The Greeks and the ancient Romans were mostly of Mediterranean stock.









    DVN: "I shouldve been more clear. I meant that while there were no signs to that effect,there was discrimination that kept "outsiders" out."


    MMMM, very mild discrimination. Frankly, the Catholic Irish, as is typical, vastly overstate what went on.I mean really, am I supposed to care that Joseph P. Kennedy could not get into the Porcellian Club while he was at Harvard? Cry me a river, darling...

    SYON

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  99. DVN: "And the English who used to stick their enemies heads on pikes and jailed little girls for years on end for stealing loaves of bread were...."

    ...vastly superior to the Irish.Just goes to show you how bad the Irish were.





    DVN:" Sowell does rip into the Irish like he does with blacks but he lays blame at the feet of identity politics.Yes Anglo culture was something positive to aspire to as see by the example of the Scots which Sowell also articulated.
    Irish seemed to have a better chances of being Anglicized in America than in Ireland"

    America should be run for the benefit of Americans, not foreigners. Who cares if the Irish had a better shot at being Anglicized in America than back home in Ireland. America is not a reform school for would be Anglos.







    DVN: "Do you even know what hypothesis means?"

    Absolutely, dear boy.Furthermore, I also know which hypotheses are more likely to actually occur.


    DVN:" Todays cuckooland is tomorrow's reality."

    MMM, I better start investing in flying cars then.


    DVN:"Anyway it is not my hypothesis but the dream of many of the posters here"


    And I am supposed to take dreams seriously?






    DVN: "I dont know what this means but Im sure you think it is very clever.I leave you to your delusions which are more severe than any compelled by pipes be they crack or opium"

    Well, at least I am not so delusional as to think that the racial/ethnic politics of 1910 stand any chance of ever coming back.





    DVN: "Weasel alert! Any charge of bigotry often is countered with "but some of my friends are ..." or "my mother's side is.." ! Who cares what your mother's side is! What is your father's side?"


    I certainly don't care, dear boy. I am merely eternally thankful that she never cultivated her Eastern heritage.


    DVN:"I suppose by your logic Greeks should be best friends with Ottoman Sultans because so many of the latter mothers were Serbian or Greek noblewomen."

    MMM, how would that work "by my logic?" The example of my mother proves the exact opposite, dear boy.








    DVN: "Byzantium is nothing more than Eastern wing of the Roman empire."

    Yes, dear boy, with emphasis on the Eastern...


    DVN:"Russian orientalism owes much to due to its Asiatic genes ,culture and geography."

    Certainly, the Tatar Yoke did the Russians no favors in terms of culture...


    DVN:"Not so much to Byzantine whose Greek Orthodox culture is considered quite Western by Middle Eastern people no matter deranged posters like you think"

    ...And the opinions of Middle Easterners should be counted as authoritative because...?No, dear boy, Byzantium was not Western. Byzantium was, instead, a sister civilization, closely related but distinct


    SYON

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  100. Anonymous:"You don't have private tapes of Washington, Roosevelt, etc."


    Too true. Of course, just imagine how much more vulgar we would sound if we did...

    AnonymousL:"Gentlemen have always spoke like gentlemen in public. And they've also had a tendency to resort to different speech at times among close confidantes."

    Yes, and the degree of divergence reveals the gulf between the true gentleman and the cad.



    Anonymous;"Nixon was no different, and even his private speech was not particularly vulgar for his time or times past."

    Certainly not for his fell era, but he was monstrously vulgar compared to Washington, just as George W. Bush was monstrously vulgar compared to Nixon.

    SYON

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  101. anonymous;"Yes, right, those former times where you hung out with George Washington and Teddy Roosevelt in private."

    If only I had! On second thought, perhaps not. Just imagine how debased and decadent I would feel in comparison to them, truly a "Hyperion to a satyr."

    SYON

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  102. Yes, and the degree of divergence reveals the gulf between the true gentleman and the cad.

    Nixon wasn't a "cad".

    Certainly not for his fell era, but he was monstrously vulgar compared to Washington, just as George W. Bush was monstrously vulgar compared to Nixon.

    No, neither Nixon nor Bush were "monstrously vulgar".

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  103. Dan Jenkins wrote that you can't be a member of Swinley Forest if anyone in your family ever had a job.

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  104. Anonymous:"Nixon wasn't a "cad".

    Compared to Washington he was.Indeed, here is a choice bit of Nixon's vulgarity. He loved to watch an unbelievably crude TV show called POLICE WOMAN starring Angie Dickinson...the mind reels



    Anonymous:"No, neither Nixon nor Bush were "monstrously vulgar".


    MMMM, this is starting to remind me of a debate that I once had on this blog about the merits of LED ZEPPELIN. Some benighted souls actually tried to argue that they were equal to the immortal Beethoven....obviously, when taste has fallen to so low a state, very little can be done. One must simply leave children to play with their toys.


    So, if you really cannot detect the vulgarity of Nixon or George W. Bush, I can only grant you my pity. None are sop blind and all that...

    SYON

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