Pierce’s comment that he had no one living to take his place has haunted me. After his death, his great words and movement lost the coherence he had given it. One reason for this may have been that Pierce was TOO brilliant. He would have been dissatisfied with anyone because no one had the breadth of knowledge he had.
I am an old man with experience to relate, knowledge to share, a Porch Talker. All of us raised with the Porch Talkers were given what young people SHOULD be given, a non-nonsense world view, a Way of Thinking. Grandpa never told us he was a hero like the Greatest Generation or what we had to believe to be Real Men. Grandpa never claimed to be as brilliant as Dr. Pierce REALLY WAS.
Old Grandpa used to say…” never end with a point of absolute Doctrine. And he did not give us that overworked capitalized term, Wisdom. He gave us the real thing, the small-lettered wisdom.
Porch wisdom was not aimed at What You Youngsters Should Be. It was not What You Youngsters Should Believe. It was little bits of practical mental experience that can be used by a priest or an atheist, a doctor or lawyer or Indian Chief. In fact it was the kind of real wisdom that put the Indian chiefs out of business while they spouted Ancient Wisdom.
For that we were supposed to go to the Preacher on Sunday. The Preacher was boring and he got us there by force. We listened to porch talk with pleasure. I remember when I had an exam coming and I had to study my books while I could hear the talk going on when an old guy was visiting. It was torture! I wanted to be out there so BAD!
As a commenter notes, porch wisdom consist of “This is how I did it right and this is how I did it wrong.” No self-righteous Mommy Professor demanding you adhere to The Line.
In fact, I can tell WHICH old man’s porch talk my family is quoting without their giving the name. He had a consistency there, as clear as the Preacher or Mommy Professor, but it was not how to Avoid Damnation or Mommy Professor’s constant theme of How Great the World Would Be IF Me and My Fellow Idealists and Intellectuals ruled the World.
You certainly can’t identify a particular preacher or Mommy Professor by quoting him. Mommy Professors all say the same thing and the Preacher always says something that clearly came from a Pulpit, and not just on religious matters.
But Porch Talk IS consistent. The old man has a worldview, or, less grandiosely, he has a tested idea of WHAT WORKS. His stories range around a whole lifetime, but if you listen, the VIEW is consistent, which is why we can tell WHICH old man said it.
And each of them left a LEGACY, not a set of carbon copies.
#1 by BGLass on 02/07/2010 - 9:39 am
Never thought about it, but a LEG-acy does require LEGS walking it. Ancient is distant and impersonal. In a non-Wordist, tribal world legacy can express a personal experience of the tribal ancient wisdom, porch talk. Now alien ancient ideas get laid over white wisdom, like in a transparency and school is about re-interpreting personal life stories into a pro-gay, anti-racist, class-conscious paradigm. So, you’d tell a porch story for a teacher, then h/she/it would mark it up in anything but a red pen, b/c the teacher, not the pen, was red now, and red used to mean bad, but now students were never wrong, b/c they were kids and smarter than their parents)– then the teacher would say, ‘You must have felt victimized by that?” Or, “can you further explore how this man in the story mistreated you?” Or “elaborate on those negative feelings! Get them out! You’re onto something here!” Or “the same sex person in your story? Did you have any…feelings for them?” The upside: any idiot could have gotten straight A’s. Unfortunately, grades indicated we weren’t equal, so everybody just got check marks, usually in purple. Purple seemed the most popular in the seventies.
We used to hear stories from oldsters about them re-meeting their teachers from the past—how wonderful it was, how the teacher was thrilled to see how they’d grown. Everybody I know who made that journey said they were going to “confront” the teachers and get some answers. The only thing worse to be –when youngsters come back to meet you nowadays— would be a child psychologist, probably. I figure they use the “Leg” in their kind of legacy–to run. Sad.
#2 by BGLass on 02/07/2010 - 10:45 am
PS: I guess that’s why NY & LA have NO PORCHES. It can’t be due to lack of tax-paid funding. Wordist stories are just too boring. Even novels can’t be stretched over 80 pages. In recalling ‘those big old Russian novels,’ teachers always told us, ‘no one has TIME to read those now.’ But it was the 70s and everybody had time b/c they were laid off. So no kids believed it, no more than when teachers said, Pound was just “too difficult.” Jean Genet was longer than 80 pages, but he told serious truths about watching his prostitute mom, prison and anal sex. He had even organized with Danny “The Red” Cohn-Bendit, and so he was always “worth it.”
#3 by Dave on 02/07/2010 - 10:56 am
Key words are, “consistent and no nonsense.”
A key question is: Why do people say what they say?
A key phrase is “temporal provincialism”.
Today’s temporal provincialism = “Tea Party”. Tea Party = HOKUM.
Tomorrow, the MSM media will invent more HOKUM.
Social sciences = HOKUM. Election cycle = HOKUM. Mommy Professor = HOKUM.
MSM = HOKUM. Federal and State Judges = HOKUM. Israel calculating measures for survival = HOKUM
Russia’s footprint in the world = HOKUM
HOKUM HOKUM HOKUM
HOKUM HOKUM HOKUM
HOKUM HOKUM HOKUM
Whatever endures has a real reason for enduring.
The thought and writings of Robert Whitaker will endure.
They will endure. They will endure. They will endure.
I know you BUGSTERS don’t really believe it, but they will endure.
Here’s what Pierce and all the rest the intellectuals never understand or understood: SOMEBODY HAS TO GODDAMNED DO WHAT IS NECESSARY TO BE DONE.
SOMEBODY HAS TO!
The world is bigger than Sarah Palin and the personal bills she owes. The world is bigger than Tom Tancredo and his idiotic mouth and pathetic career. The world is bigger than some shivering white man walking down the street too cowardly to see the world from the perspective of the mutts playing basketball at the hoop pad in the projects.
The world is bigger than all that.
And what is transpiring here at BUGS is going to endure. I know you don’t really believe it, but you are wrong. It is going to endure.
#4 by shari on 02/07/2010 - 11:12 am
When I was a child, I liked fantasy stories and old time stories. While I never thought that my parents didn’t love me, I always felt that I needed to get back behind them somehow. That I couldn’t look to them. Now I know why,those feelings were there. I think that it’s an amazing thing, and it’s RACIAL, how stuff is passed down, even in a very difficult time. “Mad dog liberalism” simply can’t be passed down. I’m glad I never poured myself into succeeding, on mommy professor’s terms.
#5 by BGLass on 02/07/2010 - 5:22 pm
On the upside: Someone may take Pierce’s place who isn’t yet born, since long-gone porch talkers so often save the living. One book can be enough, no one even needs a whole library. In today’s world of technological textuality, it would hard to hide all the pertinent stories. And book collectors never let go.
#6 by shari on 02/07/2010 - 8:31 pm
Or Somebody who was born,died,and rose from the dead.
#7 by AFKANNow on 02/10/2010 - 5:03 pm
If we define “White Nationalism” as being a Rockwell and post-Rockwell phenomenon, we see Rockwell putting aside the NSDAP garb, as it had done its duty to shock people into seeing the point Rockwell wanted to make – “Reds (communists) are the current manifestation of Jewish politics” – and he was working on developing political initiatives – in time, a political party that consciously organized us along racial lines.
Pierce, for all of the good he did, always failed to move towards the obvious next step – some sort of aboveground political organization.
Ironically, he did attract first rate people, to the best of all Causes. He simply didn’t use them to fulfill the Purpose embodied in the Cause.
My criticism of Pierce for this isn’t that he did not see anyone competent to take his place, it’s he didn’t remotely try to develop such people, with the possible exception of Robert Mathews.
I also suspect the untimely end of Robert Mathews simply proved to him that any attempt at developing a poltical organization would be hopelessly infiltrated, and compromised.
Note that our Opposition is always developing a new team to take the field, having farm teams at all levels of all organizations that interest them.
THAT is the example we must follow, starting where we are.
Incidentally, note how easily the manufactured nominal Opposition known as the Tea Party has been taken over.
Lessons in applied practical politics, indeed!