They knew all the right people, they took all the right pills.
They threw outrageous parties, they paid heavenly bills.
There were lines on the mirror, lines on her face.
She pretended not to notice, she was caught up in the race.
— Life in the Fast Lane
Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists. ‘Degeneration’ by Max Nordau (1892)
The French have an idiomatic phrase — “nostalgie pour la boue” –which means, roughly, “the yearning for the mud.” This compulsive “yearning” most often comes over people whose lives have veered into the fast lane of the secular life; a life without spirit, or, at best, a phony “spiritualism” such as yoga or transcendental meditation. In France, they play with “nostalgie pour la boue” as a kind of dabbling in degradation. In America, where anything worth doing is worth overdoing, many who yearn to emulate the French have gone pro.
“Yearning for the mud” in America is a compulsion that comes over people when they have, for complex reasons, a need to immerse themselves in self-degradation. It’s usually a combination of drink, drugs, and weird sex until the soul is obliterated by the abused flesh; until their personal porn film becomes their own private self-snuff film. Why? Hard to say but it is often the case that some people when they look at themselves can’t stand what they see.
This obliteration of the soul and the abuse of the flesh is one of the central tenets in many of our post-modern, secular lifestyle religions. For them, the “signo” of “In hoc signo vinces” is the full body tattoo project, an earlobe plug, and the multiple facial piercings with a coke nail as an accessory.
Most people try some of these things for a time in their youth but grow out of it as age and experience get the upper hand. Others grow out of it via deep psychoanalysis and a few trips to the prison and/or the monasteries of our moment, the rehab clinic. Others are simply killed by it, their lives bracketed by dates that are far too close together.
Many, however, never kick this yearning for the mud and were once pointed out as “perverts” but now as only “differently minded.” Seeking the safety of numbers they gravitate towards those urban sinkholes of the soul they laud as “enclaves of Alternative Lifestyles.”
Once ensconced in their enclaves they busy themselves with bad design projects, bad art, bad fashion statements, bad life decisions and bad politics. Because America is rich and kindly as a culture we generally let them be despite their endless moaning that they are “oppressed.” Once comfortable in their cultural redoubts, however, they think it their duty to sally forth from time to time and infest the rest of the nation. Not content to live their stunted lives among others of similar stature, the self-degraded think it is incumbent upon them to get all other Americans “down in the hole that they’re in.”
A minority among the degraded make a career and a fortune out of nostalgie pour la boue, and are generally known as “pundits,” “media personalities, or “celebrities.” In reality, they’re just perverts with positive cash flow whose job it is to normalize their perversions through assertion and repetition.
An example might be the ( Still) too often seen Janeane Garofalo whose mind and body bear all the markers of a mud person except for a bone through the nose, and that’s probably on her “To-Do” list for this winter. The fact that this creature is a “go-to” person for comment from her fellow blobfish Bill Maher tells you all you need to know about both them and the audience that tunes them in. Down in the mud of the All-American perverts’ daisy chain, there’s a lot of cross-over between celebrity culture and media culture. Indeed, at a lot of levels, it is becoming hard to tell them apart. Both factions live, for the most part, in an insulated bubble of blather that is impervious to personal moral, psychological, spiritual, or political change; one that ruthlessly exacts the penalty of shunning and expulsion from the bubble in the event of any sudden shifts and heresies from any accepted pervert. Like junkies of all eras, once the ideological needle goes in, it never comes out.
Alas, this nostalgie pour la boue is starting to bore these creatures and they will, when bored, like junkies in all ages, feel the need to “increase the dose;” to move on to another, more powerful, and more deadly socio-political drug. And this is exactly what they are doing. I’d like to suggest that there’s another kind nostalgie going around in this hybrid culture that glories in the mud: nostalgie pour la defaite — “yearning for defeat.” Given the war record of the French in the 20th century, this nouveau nostalgie is also tres Francais.
Nostalgie pour la defaite is that state of the eviscerated soul when an American, who either came of age in the Vietnam era, or who was taught and mentored by many leftists or liberals of that vintage, yearns for the defeat of America, and acts accordingly in word and deed.
This compulsion is now not only required to keep their residency in their subcultures but to keep their status in the same as well. The more virulent their articulations of hate of America, the more shrill their calls for the death of the host that sustains their parasitic existences, the higher their regard by their peers. Neither children nor even infants are safe from their depravities. The norming of the perverse is their norm.
Nostalgie pour la defaite is a perverted form of “confirmation bias.” In a way, joining this group is like joining a gang — once you’re in, getting out is not an option unless you seek social and political death. Once articulated, Nostalgie pour la defaite is confirmation that his or her worldview — and that of their social milieu — is the correct view and correct milieu. To operate otherwise would throw not only all the progressive views, assertions, and actions of the last seventy years of diseased perverted politics and sham social theories into question but the entire structure of the perverted personality as well. It is not just life in the fast lane but life inside the lie.
An America that is ascendant rather than retiring; an America whose policies are aggressive and not apologetic, is an America the People of the Lie are simply unequipped to inhabit or report on. They have, quite frankly, an empty toolbox when it comes to this task and no raw materials with which to build.
The only America they can support is one that supports them and their lies without question. They want a blank check for money and means; they want unceasing regard and praise for their perversions. They most deeply desire an endless opportunity to smear the lie on all comers hoping to increase their numbers through adoption and perversion since they have reduced their own procreation through nonfertility and abortion.
Our current infestation of American media personalities and American celebrities with Nostalgie pour la defaite rises from decades of belief in an America that is best as a “pitiful, helpless Giant.” The current media tsunami of TrumpHate is a kind of “Nostalgie pour la jeunesse perdue” — nostalgia for lost youth. Their entire professional and personal lives, from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, from the Hamptons to Beverly Hills are based on the grand assumption that America is unworthy and unfit to live now that the normals, for a bit, have begun to steer the ship of state not into their deepening dark but towards the morning star.
The degraded has lived in their lie of “normalcy” for so long that they’ve come to believe — like some depraved Velveteen Rabbit — that they are normal and not freaks. They’ve had Presidents and Presidential candidates that, raising money from their child-lite or child-free bank accounts, have confirmed their specious “normality” to them. Their coworkers in their digifrittering jobs confirm it for them. Their ceaseless flow of “significant others,” drawn from the same chitinous ranks, confirm it for them. The parties they attend, the awards they ceaselessly give and receive like the swapping of spit at orgies, the places they vacation, the books they read and the films they make and see, all confirm it to them over and over again. It is not only the only America they know, it is the only America they can know.
Anything that confirms the Nostalgie pour la defaite is news the depraved can use. Anything that confirms American exceptionalism is not news at all. Anything that actually represents American exceptionalism is bad news and must be crushed and erased by any means necessary.
Several generations of these diseased Americans have been raised and trained to desire that, in all things, America should always lose and become less of an important force in the world. The results of a weaker America do not concern them. It is only important that America become and remain weak and hamstrung.
If America is to become weak, what do they propose in its place? The short form for their vision of the future is “an empowered United Nations.”
At which point they step from their Nostalgie pour la defaite back into nostalgie pour la boue — the yearning for the mud. In the final analysis, it isn’t that big a step. The mire is where they feel most at home.
Can the depraved and degraded be saved from themselves? Not all. Not even most. The only thing that can save them from themselves would be themselves, and that is a rare transformation. It does happen, just as for some individual junkies the personal addiction can be brought under control “one day at a time”, but most of these bad Americans are stuck forever in their armed cultural hamlets and redoubts. They assure us of the truth of the motto,
“Once a bear is hooked on garbage, there’s no cure.”
Towards us came they, and each one cried out:
“Stop, thou; for by thy garb to us thou seemest
To be some one of our depraved city.”
Ah me! what wounds I saw upon their limbs,
Recent and ancient by the flames burnt in!
Gerard Van der Leun
Comments on this entry are closed.
Gerard, this one really deserves to be one of your annual reposts.
I’ve read A.D. for a few years now, and I’ve always found something interesting in the evidence you provide of your inner trip from Left to not-Left which can be seen once in a while.
I’m linking this at the Leftist Tears group on GAB if you don’t mind.
https://gab.ai/groups/1b04dca8-034b-4dba-b660-2208016b7ee3
Until about 15 mins ago I yearned for the mud. Shannon and me was sitting on the porch skarfin down some Prairie Farms vanilla ice cream in 90+ degree weather and by the time I got to the bottom of the bowl, and Shannon was looking at me longingly cause she wanted to “lick the platter”, I sat the platter down and she tore into it and I mosey’d in and fired me up a mud. Folgers. Instant. A heaping spoonful each of Folgers, sugar, dry cream, and then top it off with vitamin D milk. siiiip…..ahhhhhhh….. I felt my yearning ease away. For now. After supper I’ll have another. They help me keep my school girl figure, and get stuff done.
“If America is to become weak, what do they propose in its place?”
Notice if you will that they have no vision of a future without the assistance of the white man, the man that made all of this possible for them. Children, like communists and wild animals, are incapable of thinking long term. They think such a thing is frivolous. “Oh fiddle dee dee, tomorrow’s another day” sort of thing. But no one screams as loudly as a communist forced to live under the same rules he espouses for others.
Laziness is at the root of all adults that behave as children. As long as they can get a handout they will exist. In shithole countries they die by the millions, as they should, because there is no handout to give. They would die here in america too except for the american communists that steal from the productive and give to the anti-productive. The american communist run gov’t is thwarting Darwins law and the rest of us get to pay for it. 1000 trillion dollars in the red, to create and support a suicidal tendency that will only partly work. Some of us simply won’t go along with it, ever. You cannot kill an idea.
It would be interesting to see some of these communists spirited away in the middle of the night without a trace, never to be seen again. How many would have to disappear before the remainder sought refuge, mostly thru modified behavior? IOW, hiding in place by pretending to be upstanding adults, fearful that they may be the next to disappear. Personally I don’t care if they are truthful or just pretending as long as they leave me alone.
I’m hopeful that my decision to avoid metropolis’s and other crowded venues will prevent me from having to shoot these vermin’s in the face multiple times. I know my limits. siiiip……ahhhhh…..
Simply brilliant, Gerard. What happens when those who yearn for the mud become fully immersed and slathered in it? They try to destroy those who are looking at the stars.
Oh my, On Advent, I am very very flattered that you should remember that effort. I think I’ll put it into reprint rotation as well.
I’m with Monty on the annual reprinting of this. I’m guessing you’ve lived far closer to this than I ever will, having stayed out of big cities, though I’ve lived in a couple smaller ones.
Just, wow…Again.
YOWZUH YOWZUH YOWZUH!!!
Those are some scary looking dudes up in the top pic. Imagine how frightening they’re gonna’ be once they discover the wheel.
JWM
Hope this works.
Someone that looked at the stars and down at the Earth.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DiuUe7hWAAE6oJz.jpg
Yearning for the mud.
What used to be called a moral inversion, or what Ayn Rand was wrote was hatred of the good for being the good.
We are all fallen creatures, and flawed and imperfect. But reaching up for the stars is a lot better than rolling around in the mud of self loathing and calling it virtue, and an ideal to be emulated.
A lot of people who are “other directed” are confused by the noise of the news media and the entertainment rabble, and their chorus of self-loathing. This is the poisonous nourishment that the young and impressionable are being fed.
There’s a reason no one’s died of smallpox in a long time. This country had the power to make it so and continues.
Gerard replied, “Oh my, On Advent, I am very very flattered that you should remember that effort. I think I’ll put it into reprint rotation as well.”
Well, one reason I remember it – other than that it is a simply splendid essay – is because of this tag line at the end: “For Donald Sensing who put it in my mind, and for Solomonia who pointed me to the picture. First published 2006-11-27”
I wish I knew how I put it in your mind!
OK, where that WoodPile is?
http://www.woodpilereport.com/
Bravo, bravo, bravo! Wonderful..
Bravo! Please repost this every six months or so. The world needs it!
Good article and I also wonder:
Woodpile Report is late Again. Any news?
Interesting remarks about rolling around in the mud vs. looking at the stars.
Isn’t that exactly what happened? While American heroes were looking to the stars, landing on the moon, the degenerates decided to roll around in the mud and asked to be accepted as equally-valuable. Those hippies couldn’t do useful work, so went into education.
There is no greater dichotomy than those degenerates at Woodstock rolling around in the mud contrasted with the heroes landing on the moon (and all who supported that effort).
One of the finest expositions on the normalization of deviancy I have ever read. Thank you
You paragraph on the Garofalo-Maher connection is spot on. One thing I still cannot figure out is where and how these Marxist degenerates get the economic sustenance to survive? Garofalo has not made a film in years, and her residuals cannot be all that much. How large an audience can that creepy reptilian Maher have to keep his “show” functioning?
Answering my own questions, I can only figure out that the collective (((forces))) of darkness are funding these dangerous fools to propagate their degenerate treason. I suppose if I did enough “follow-the-money” research, I would discover the funding source not only for these two candidates for the National Razor, but other useful idiots such as the weenie-armed Mr. Hogg, Code Pink, and several other Mudlarks. But at this juncture, it is more important to me to keep sharpening the hatchet, working out, going to the range, harvesting and canning, and tending to my tribe. Bleib ubrig, one and all. November is coming. So is Winter.
‘Life is beautiful. Life is sad. That is all you need to know.” Nabokov
Re your comment,
“This compulsion is now not only required to keep their residency in their subcultures but to keep their STATUS in the same as well. The more virulent their articulations of hate of America, the more shrill their calls for the death of the host that sustains their parasitic existences, the HIGHER THEIR REGARD by their peers.”
Always knew we are driven by social status, but there is no more concise and correct analysis of the why and how of the human urge to status than in Rory Miller’s – “Conflict Communication: A New Paradigm in Conscious Communication”. Lizard Brain, Monkey Brain, Human Brain. Short read, well worth the effort. It’s in the library, not pushing sales. Read it. May raise your status. It WILL make you laugh and cry.
Proof that the current BLM riots are class reunions for the Mud People: Andy Ngo reports on the body count in Kenosha the other night: “Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, was the first one killed. . . . Rosenbaum was a registered sex offender for a sex crime involving a minor. Anthony Huber, 26, was shot & killed . . . . He has a criminal history that includes charges of battery & repeat domestic abuse. The third who was shot (& survived) is Gaige Grosskreutz, 26. He’s a member of the People’s Revolution Movement. . . . He has a criminal record that includes being intoxicated & armed w/a gun.”
https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1298833015548739587
Mug shots of the feral freaks at the link.
So, here we are, two years later and the more things change, the more they stay the worst. The mud worshiping Orcs are still on the march with numbers increasing daily, Garofalo is still uglier than home made sin and self-abusing herself before the cheering masses, and Remus has checked out again, permanently this time and more’s the pity for that. Not to mention the plan-demic and there’s an asteroid approaching with possible intent to cast its vote in person, presumably without a mask BFYTW. There are other inconveniences as well. I’m tired of this movie. Let’s do something else.
PA Cat,
Oops! You let some facts out of the bag. But Anthony Huber, it seems, was “mostly” law-abiding – except when he was engaged in criminal activities. https://www.kenoshanews.com/news/local/2-gofundme-fundraisers-set-up-by-loved-ones-of-anthony-huber-26-year-old-kenosha/article_5983c871-c03f-5b22-bfa0-c0a7530a4a0c.html
Being intoxicated and armed with a gun is a crime?
Those fucking elk should be happy I’m noisy when tipsy.
“Their entire professional and personal lives,….are based on the grand assumption that America is unworthy and unfit to live now that the normals, for a bit, have begun to steer the ship of state not into their deepening dark but towards the morning star”. Gerard, this is such an excellent piece. While I read AD almost everyday, I rarely, almost never comment, but I truly appreciate your insight, writing talent and the very existence of this blog.