Thinking About Joe Sobran
[See also:
Those of us who were personally involved in the
internal struggles [4]
of the American Right in the 1990s are naturally
fascinated by them—but I do believe that, as
Neil
Freeman has noted [5],
the corruption of
National Review was a first step to the astonishing diversion of the
conservative movement [6]
to the
Invite The World-Invade The World [7]
heresy that occurred under the catastrophic regime of
President
George W, Bush. [8]
The fate of
Joe
Sobran, [9]
who died September 30, after a terrible struggle with
diabetes, was a harbinger.
Joe
Sobran proposed to me the epigraph for my 1995 book,
Alien Nation: Common
Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, [10]
from his
celebrated [11]
knowledge of Shakespeare:
Shall sum my count [12]
(Sonnet II)
He
also contributed one of its key concepts:
Alienism [13].
As he pointed out, contemporary American political
language
"…abounds in words
for the hostility of the
native for the
alien, [14]
the
majority for the minority, [15]
the
respectable for the
marginal [16],
white for black, Christian for Jew, and so forth. We
have prejudice, bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism,
nativism,
xenophobia [17],
bias, discrimination, and so forth. But these words are
themselves prejudicial: They sum up, one-sidedly, a vast
range of sentiment and behavior without admitting
reciprocal moral realities: the hostility of Jew for
Christian, black for white, marginal for respectable,
minority for majority, alien for native, abnormal for
normal…
"…If we can sum up
the worst attitudes of one side in the term "Nativism",
then we ought to have some such term, as "Alienism"
(with
apologies to the
psychiatric profession [18]) to sum up those of
the other."
(The Natives Are
Restless [19],
By Joseph Sobran,
National Review, February 22, 1985.)
But
although
alienism [13]
remains the
driving force [20]
in the immigration debate—and although Joe justified his
resistance to Middle East wars by citing his sons who
would have to fight in them, exactly as I began
Alien Nation
by worrying my baby boy's future in the policy-created
majority-minority America of 2050—Joe never drew the
obvious conclusion about immigration. [21]
Until almost the end, he remained in what a state of
what theologians from his own
Roman Catholic Church [22]
call "invincible ignorance [23]"
about the topic.
Of course, Larry
Auster was quite wrong to
say [24]
in his obituary that Joe became a
"liberal
Christian fundamentalist on immigration".
I don't believe Joe ever went the whole
hierarchical hog [25], or secretly entertained the delusional
hope that
immigrants would Catholicize America [26].
Such people do exist, sometimes in
surprising places [27],
and Joe may have become too dependent on them after
William F. Buckley destroyed his career by
purging [28]
him from National
Review in 1993, but I don't think he was one of
them. For one thing, in 2006, the very year that he
infuriated patriotic immigration reformers with his
notorious remark that
"I
can't imagine Jesus standing on the border to turn them
[illegals]
back", he
also
announced [29]
his formal conversion: he had been
"against
my will, shaken and convinced"
by Pat Buchanan's
State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and
Conquest of America [30]
.
(Auster now
admits [31],
alas with his characteristic bad grace, that he
overlooked this, although, oddly, he
blogged on it in 2008 [32]).
Needless to say, Joe's 2006 proclamation was irritating
to me personally, because I'd been making similar
arguments—as Buchanan has
acknowledged [33],
with his characteristic good grace—and in
National Review, [34]
since before Joe was fired.
More seriously, I had a pretty good idea that Joe would
not be joining we happy few, we band of brothers in the
immigration battle—even if he had been well enough,
which he was not. Like many really creative thinkers (I
speak as the editor of
Steve Sailer [35]
and
Paul Craig Roberts [36]),
Joe was self-engrossed to the point of solipsism. He was
interested in the things he was interested in,
predominantly cultural rather than political—and in
these he was very interested indeed: Aaron Wolfe
remembers [37]
him spontaneously
humming and discussing [38]
his way through all of Bach's Cello Suites [39]
at one Chronicles dinner. But he had a
distinctly Not Invented Here attitude to the things that
others e.g. me were interested in.
I'd guess he simply never read my writings on
immigration and never thought systematically about the
issue—or even at all, until confronted by someone he
really respected, namely
Buchanan [40].
(I'd also guess it helped that
Buchanan was a fellow Catholic [41]).
One of the last times I saw Joe was at a lunch I fed him
in Old Town Alexandria. He arrived very late, looking
awful (although he had not yet grown the beard that
latterly gave him an unfortunate resemblance to Saddam
Hussein) and exhausted from battling the
appalling northern Virginia traffic [42],
about which he began to complain loudly. I teased him
by pointing out that
sprawl [43]
is
a direct result of immigration. [44]
He was taken aback, and then began to bluster.
The idea had quite obviously never occurred to him. And
he didn't like it much.
Joe's mugged career was significantly parallel to
that
of his friend [45]
Sam Francis. But whereas
Francis [46],
in
Jared Taylor's [47]
brilliant
phrase [48],
would greet you on the phone as if you were a bill
collector, Joe was completely different in his warmth
and dazzling charm. His voice positively undulated with
empathy and his eyes twinkled with such affection that
you had to remind yourself that you really didn't know
each other that well. No surprise that, although in his
person and lifestyle an extreme Bohemian, as Taylor has
delicately chronicled [1],
Joe married twice and attracted the interest of
beautiful women [49]
(ardently reciprocated) to the end of his life.
On the other hand, I was far from alone in finding him
irritating.
"Joe's first wife went mad and tried to kill him with a
shovel," Linda Bridges once told me when we working
together at
National Review—ironically, I think
on
my 1992 immigration cover story [50]
or perhaps on the
responding symposium [51].
She went on: "Now
that in itself, if you were married to Joe Sobran, would
not be evidence of insanity. But she really was mad."
At
that point, Joe was coming up to New York from
Princeton, New Jersey, and camping overnight in his
office. It resembled a bear's lair, with a sleeping
hollow distinctly visible amid the
accumulated books, papers [52]
and goodness only knows what else. Visitors to
National Review would be taken to view it, as a sort of natural
wonder.
Another entity that Joe succeeded in irritating was the
Internal Revenue Service [53].
This must have been quite difficult to do, because
no-one at National Review made much money (apart
from Buckley, whose
plutocratic life style [54]
the magazine subsidized to a scandalous degree). Yet the
IRS's garnishing of Joe's salary became so extreme that
he was literally destitute and Buckley directed
National Review's publisher, Ed Capano, to pay him
in cash—exposing Ed to significant legal risk.
This and other aspects of Joe's life must raise the
question of the extent to which men make their own luck.
Infuriating his natural allies in the
patriotic immigration reform movement [21]
is only one example. I was very far from the only editor
to
find [3]
he would not take direction, or meet deadlines. This was
a problem even when he was writing for his own
newsletter [45]
(to which, I am proud to say, I subscribed from start to
finish). You don't go far into Sobran lore without
finding atrocity stories, like that of the welcoming
committee, from a conference at which he was to be paid
to speak, discovering he was not on the flight that they
had booked for him and in fact wasn't coming at
all—because he had decided he didn't feel like coming,
and just hadn't bothered to let them know.
But no conceivable personal failings could have had the
same impact on Joe's career as the relentless and
significantly unreported way in which he was pursued by
the
Furies [55]
of Political Correctness, especially after
Buckley had betrayed him. [56]
No doubt the younger conservative writers who (bravely
if unwisely) have memorialized him with the usual pious
qualifications (see
here [57]
and
here [58])
have no idea of its ruthless vindictiveness. Just a
couple of years ago, I found myself talking to the
supporter of a small Midwestern foundation who was
astonished at the orchestrated pressure, on officers,
media and donors, that had forced his group to renege on
an invitation to Sobran to speak on a completely
innocuous topic.
Joe himself told me, with unusual bitterness, that he
thought the people who had wrecked his career had
themselves to blame for where he was able to speak.
VDARE.COM has
suffered [59]
from this kind of
affinity group [60]
Stalinism. I sympathize.
What exactly was Joe Sobran's great offense against
political correctness? Here (disagreeing with
Chronicles
Scott Richert [61])
I appeal to the authority of the New York Times'
obituarist [62]
William Grimes:
"He took a skeptical line on the Holocaust and said the
Sept. 11 terror attacks were a result of American
foreign policy in the Middle East, which he believed
that a Jewish lobby directed. Not surprisingly, he spent
much of his time defending himself against charges of
anti-Semitism.
"'Nobody has ever accused me of the slightest personal
indecency to a Jew,' he said in
a speech [63]
delivered at a 2002 conference of the Institute for
Historical Review. 'My chief offense, it appears, has
been to insist that the state of Israel has been a
costly and treacherous '"ally" to the United States. As
of last Sept. 11, I should think that is undeniable. But
I have yet to receive a single apology for having been
correct.' "
(Hyperlinks in original). I think this is a fair
summary—which will do Grimes's career no good. Indeed,
Deborah Lipstadt [64]
issued an
encyclical letter of complaint [65]
(October 4, 2010): "I
am unsure what it means to be 'skeptical' about an
established historical event."
(The answer, presumably, is that you question its
provenance, details and implications—as with every other
non-sacrementalized historical event.)
None of this, of course, is VDARE.COM territory. But I
am obliged to note that Joe's firing from
NR did not occur, as so many accounts seem to think,
because he challenged
neoconservativism [66],
but because he
exposed [67]
Buckley's private
contempt for his Irish Catholic supporters ("You don't need those
people [68]").
That, shamefully, is what triggered
Buckley's always-imperative ego [69].
The conventional conclusion here would be to cite the
ringing rhetoric of the Christian church. But, instead,
I draw on Joe's beloved Shakespeare, deliberately and
hopefully truncated:
"He was a man, take him for all in all." [70]
Peter Brimelow [71] (email [72] him) is editor of VDARE.COM [73] and author of the much-denounced Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, [10] (Random House - 1995) and The Worm in the Apple [74] (HarperCollins - 2003)
Links:
[1] http://www.vdare.com/taylor/101001_sobran.htm
[2] http://www.vdare.com/taylor/index.htm
[3] http://www.vdare.com/misc/101003_sobran.htm
[4] http://vdare.com/pb/buckley.htm
[5] http://spectator.org/archives/2006/08/04/nr-goes-to-war
[6] http://www.vdare.com/francis/movement.htm
[7] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:vdare.com Invite The World-Invade The World&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
[8] http://vdare.com/sailer/060910_five_years.htm
[9] http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:vdare.com Joe Sobran, &btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
[10] http://www.vdare.com/alien_nation/
[11] http://www.sobran.com/oxfordlibrary.shtml
[12] http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/iicomm.htm
[13] http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2010/07/30/michael-gerson-attacks-lindsey-graham-on-birthright-citizenship/
[14] http://www.vdare.com/fulford/return_nativist.htm
[15] http://www.vdare.com/sailer/100801_racism_schmacism.htm
[16] http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_100710.htm
[17] http://www.vdare.com/pb/anation_review_23.htm
[18] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alienist
[19] http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5002116467
[20] http://www.vdare.com/pb/100619_redneckophobia.htm
[21] http://vdare.com/pb/060605_gulag.htm
[22] http://www.vdare.com/fulford/mary_queen_anglos.htm
[23] http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07648a.htm
[24] http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/017492.html
[25] http://www.vdare.com/sutherland/open_letter_egan.htm
[26] http://www.vdare.com/walker/060111_migration.htm
[27] http://vdare.com/misc/080514_pendleton.htm
[28] http://www.sobran.com/columns/2002/020924.shtml
[29] http://www.sobran.com/articles/leads/2006-09-lead.shtml
[30] http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http://www.amazon.com/State-Emergency-Invasion-Conquest-America/dp/0312360037/&tag=vdare&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325
[31] http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/017522.html
[32] http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/009901.html
[33] http://www.vdare.com/pb/061204_books.htm
[34] http://www.vdare.com/misc/ponnuru_golden_door.htm
[35] http://www.vdare.com/sailer/index.htm
[36] http://www.vdare.com/roberts/index.htm
[37] http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2010/09/30/joseph-sobran-r-i-p/#comment-204151
[38] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU_QR_FTt3E
[39] http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http://www.amazon.com/Bach-Cello-Suites-Nos-1-6/dp/B000002RUY&tag=vdare&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325
[40] http://vdare.com/buchanan/index.htm
[41] http://vdare.com/buchanan/090330_notre_dame.htm
[42] http://www.vdare.com/jwall/times_sprawl.htm
[43] http://www.vdare.com/williamson/ever_learn.htm
[44] http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/sprawl.htm
[45] http://www.sobran.com/articles/francisTribute.shtml
[46] http://vdare.com/francis/index.htm
[47] http://vdare.com/taylor/index.htm
[48] http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2005/02/sam_francis.php
[49] http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2010/10/07/ann-coulter-on-sobran/
[50] http://www.vdare.com/pb/time_to_rethink.htm
[51] http://www.vdare.com/pb/control_borders.htm
[52] http://vdare.com/guzzardi/prisoner.htm
[53] http://vdare.com/roberts/democracy_serfs.htm
[54] http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_100208.htm
[55] http://www.in2greece.com/english/historymyth/mythology/names/furies.htm
[56] http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/07/16/specials/buckley-anti.html
[57] http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2010/10/10/seig-heil-to-christopher-badeaux-book-burning/
[58] http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2010/10/01/i-will-miss-joe-sobran/
[59] http://www.vdare.com/pb/070101_guilty.htm
[60] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affinity group
[61] http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2010/09/30/joseph-sobran-r-i-p/#comment-204183
[62] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/books/02sobran.html
[63] http://ihr.org/conference/14thconf/sobranconf.html
[64] http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/
[65] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/opinion/l05sobran.html?_r=1
[66] http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-q=neoconservatism&sp-a=sp0a298a00&sp-advanced=1/&sp-p=all&sp-w-control=1/&sp-w=alike&sp-d=custom&sp-date-range=-1&sp-start-month=0&sp-start-day=0&sp-start-year=&sp-end-month=0&sp-end-day=0&sp-end-year=&sp-x=any&sp-c=2
[67] http://web.archive.org/web/20061010192252/http:/www.federationofstates.org/buckley.htm
[68] http://reasonradionetwork.com/?p=9015
[69] http://vdare.com/pb/080228_buckley.htm
[70] http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.1.2.html#190
[71] http://www.vdare.com/pb/index.htm
[72] mailto:pbrimelow@vdare.com
[73] http://www.vdare.com/
[74] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060096616/vdare