The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Buy It Now: ‘The Last Falangist’ Review; Wombat Shows the Hard Face

Posted on | July 11, 2014 | 57 Comments

In case you don’t recognize the name Kevin Trainor, he is our very own Wombat, the co-blogger who compiles the daily “Live at Five” headline roundup and now the author of The Last Falangist: Essays on Culture and Politics in America — CLICK HERE TO BUY NOW.

Wombat points out in the introduction that he is not actually a member of the Franco’s Movimiento Nacional, just a very conservative Catholic from a military background. Nor is his book merely a compendium of reactionary nostalgia, despite the fact that much of it was written in the Good Old Days, when George W. Bush was president and almost nobody outside Chicago had ever heard of a guy named Barack Hussein Obama. It is a shock to realize that this time in history now seems almost as distant as the era of the Generalissimo’s rule in Spain.

How far back does The Last Falangist go, you ask? On Page 59, we find an entry from January 2005 that begins thus:

“I’ve been thinking about the long comment Allahpundit left on Michele’s old blog . . .”

Yes: In 2005, there was no HotAir.com and Allahpundit was just another dude hanging out in the blogosphere.

The Last Falangist: Essays on Culture and Politics in America
ONLY $1.99! CLICK HERE TO BUY NOW!

Excuse the heavy-duty sales hype, but the purpose of publishing an ebook is to sell the ebook to people who will read the ebook, and supporting our ethos of shameless capitalism compels me to point out that such a transaction requires that you actually click the link. (Although there are still a few old-timers like Wombat and me, the online world nowadays is crawling with noobz who don’t understand how this here innerwebs stuff works.) If living well is the best revenge, surviving long enough to tell the story of the people who f–ked you over is maybe the second-best revenge, and did I ever mention that Wombat is divorced?

Hate was not an option. Hate was the enemy. Hate had to be ruthlessly suppressed, choked off, buried so deep nobody outside my skin could find it. Hate was weakness, because to hate someone, you must care what happens to them, and I no longer cared. . . .
The only option was to soldier on, show the hard face, and cultivate apathy like a poisonous plant. F–k It. Drive On.

This is not just excellent prose, it’s also an expression of Stoic philosophy. To “show the hard face,” as Wombat so brilliantly describes it, is to deprive bad people of the sadistic pleasure they ordinarily get from f–king other people over. If you can “cultivate apathy” toward the Evil Lying Bitch From Hell, you win.

The Last Falangist: Essays on Culture and Politics in America
ONLY $1.99! CLICK HERE TO BUY NOW!

Of course, this isn’t Charlie Sheen-style “winning,” and if Wombat is cavorting with porn starlets half his age, he is being awful secretive about it, but what other options are available? Toward the end of The Last Falangist — Page 114, to be exact — we find Wombat returning to the subject to acknowledge the pain:

The whole point of having a mother and a father working together is so that you have backup when one of you drops the ball; the other one is there to quickly scoop up the errant pigskin or maybe make the catch and run it in. Unfortunately, divorce screws up that neat metaphor, because all of a sudden Mom and Dad aren’t really on the same team any more. . . .
When you and the Mrs. are constantly fighting over every little thing, when a lot of her energy is going toward building up the new boyfriend and tearing you down for not being a passive, enabling doormat, it becomes damn near impossible. Because the kids know what’s going on. They may not understand it, but they know.

If “the personal is political,” as the feminists insist, what is the politics of Stoicism? It might involve an indifference to the endless whining of self-declared Victims of Society, the people who insist that they are oppressed by the rest of us, as if we don’t have enough problems of our own to keep us busy, as if we had time to bother discriminating against them — Social Injustice as a hobby.

The Last Falangist: Essays on Culture and Politics in America
ONLY $1.99! CLICK HERE TO BUY NOW!

Did I mention that Wombat is not only Hispanic on his mother’s side, but also Jewish? Yep: His maternal ancestry is traceable to the Sephardic “crypto-Jews” of New Mexico, as we learn on Page 81 of The Last Falangist, so if you don’t buy his book, you’re not only a xenophobic anti-Latino yanqui bigot, but also a Jew-hater. Such is the logic of the Obama Age, where all opposition to the president’s policies is explained by the mainstream media as a byproduct of some kind of irrational hate. It is therefore amusing to read Wombat’s reaction (Page 73) to a Jay Rosen essay:

His point that bloggers rely on the MSM for news collection is very well taken, but he goes astray when he elides the distinction between bloggers who attack media bias because they can’t stand the hypocritical claim of objectivity and conservative bloggers who want the Gang of 500 taken out, shot, and impaled as a warning to others who cross the Right-Wing Death Beast Party. There are certainly bloggers in the latter category, but the former type can be found all over the political spectrum, and a lot of us agree that the problem would go away for us if ABC/CBS/CNN/NBC/PBS would just come out of the closet and admit they’re a bunch of Democrats.

That was written in 2004. Sic semper hoc.

Such flashback reminders of what has changed (and what hasn’t) in the past decade are scattered through The Last Falangist, and if you won’t spend $1.99 to enjoy the excellence of Wombat’s insightful analysis, you’re obviously an agent of the Comintern.

Do not smirk, Comrade — despite the title of Wombat’s book, there are probably still a few other Falangist holdouts, and you subversives will regret it if Movimiento Nacional gets their hands on you.

 

 

Category: Books

Comments

57 Responses to “Buy It Now: ‘The Last Falangist’ Review; Wombat Shows the Hard Face”

  1. Wombat_socho
    July 12th, 2014 @ 6:52 pm

    I think the Generalissimo made the right choice in opting for the Bourbons.

  2. The Osprey
    July 13th, 2014 @ 12:44 am

    Ah, La Guerra Civil. When hombres were hombres, mujeres were mujeres, and the aviones had wheel pants.

    http://youtu.be/EHZyi5sfXSc

  3. The Osprey
    July 13th, 2014 @ 1:06 am

    Sounds like you have read “Homage To Catalonia”.

    It’s my favorite of Orwell’s works.

    If you read that, and then go back and re-read “Animal Farm” and “1984” you’ll get much more out of both of those books.

  4. RichFader
    July 13th, 2014 @ 1:47 am

    “…conservative bloggers who want the Gang of 500 taken out, shot, and impaled as a warning to others who cross the Right-Wing Death Beast Party.”

    …shot?

  5. rangerider
    July 13th, 2014 @ 7:04 pm

    A good book on the Stoic life is A guide to the good life by William B Irvine:-)

  6. Wombat_socho
    July 14th, 2014 @ 1:59 am

    Well, I guess we could impale them first.

  7. Wombat_socho
    July 14th, 2014 @ 2:21 am

    Thanks for the recommendation!