The Kingless Generation

A quick, chatty, catch-up episode recorded in a park in central Tokyo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this podcast I have often argued against the “anti-conspiracy left”, but now that everyone and your mom can’t help but be noided, the relevant question is no longer, “If you’re on the left, can you be noided?” but rather, “Since you’re noided, should you be on the left or the right?” To argue this question, I do a quick hate-read of the Bible of 20th-c anti-revolutionary ideology on the cusp of the End of History, Fire in the Minds of Men, by Ronald Reagan’s Librarian of Congress—followed by a wide-ranging conversation with the roaring River, of the must-listen podcast River to Reality. The final song my incompetent rendition of “Happy Paddle”, a song about going by canoe to a festival, composed by Casey James of the Musqueam nation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Much modern scholarship on King Arthur has revolved around the question of his historicity and origins, the recent greatest example being Higham’s magisterial 2018 survey of all the major theories—except the one that I advance here: Arthur was only one of many legendary chivalric heroes with whom continental Crusader and Reconquistador storytellers populated the North Atlantic archipelago, in their imaginations the spiritual homeland of a fictional Europe innocent of Semitic influences (both Muslim and Jewish). First, we run through all the major Arthurian theories—including the all-time banger whereby Arthur was a Croatian-Roman general who led nomadic Iranian horse-rider recruits to fight off the Angles and Saxons in the last days of Roman Britain—as exhaustively investigated by Higham. Then I state the obvious: that all the most distinctive features of the Arthur story appear for the first time in French chivalric romance (with many parallels in Spanish, Italian, and Catalonian stories featuring other characters) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as the new Crusader concept of taking territory “back” from Muslims became the conceit of knightly adventure and conquest of “islands that the Emperor of Rome could not hold”, and the phenomenon of Crusaders bringing back relics from the holy land grew into legends like that of the Holy Grail. Finally, we explore one of foundational Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki’s very first literary ventures, the Arthurian story “Kairokō” (“A Dirge”, 1905) and the modern, pseudo-modern, or hyper-modern twists and turns that it imposes on earlier Arthurian stories by Malory (1485) and Tennyson (1833), while trying to steer clear of allegedly un-civilized and un-modern predecessors in Edo-period kabuki and puppet theatre—which were perhaps in fact more authentically modern because rooted in Afro-Asiatic silk road capitalism. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this final session, we put the proverbial big old boulder into the sweltering primordial pond with meditations on myths of brother-sister marriage and divorce from the Kojiki (712), the taboo on sibling incest in the mother-right kinship structures of Trobriand Islanders as seen in the anthropology of Malinowski and his debates with dogmatic Freudians in the 1930s, and finally the persistent postwar Japanese cultural theme of Japan as hotbed of incestuous “bed-creeping” (yobai), a feature which is either the dysgenic cause of the nation’s staunch patriarchy, persistent class rule, and gangsterismo (as in less helpful versions), or (as Nathan and I think) rather the effect of the mythopoetic comprador infestation of working-class movements and Indigenous resistance to dispossession which we have been discussing in this series. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This time we hit our stride, discussing the interplay of Indigenous state and deep state, chief and secret society, sometimes in resistance to colonization and sometimes in service of comprador opportunism—though as Nathan points out, which it might be in any given moment is worked out through a collective mythopoetic process. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.