To be honest, I'd rather be eating than writing right now. So I'm going to do the next best thing and write about food. Although everything I write is horribly offensive to non-Last Ditch types, I'm trying for a light touch here, hoping that some of us could use a distraction from the murder of children, ambulance drivers, and taxi passengers that we've been forced to finance in a certain distant land. Ooops — there, you see? Already I've gone and been horribly offensive.

Horst, my liberal friend who used to read the print version of The Last Ditch, once twitted me about one aspect of my "Pride in the ruins" series, where I dealt at length with what remains to us as white Westerners and what we might do with it. Near the end of the second installment, which appeared in TLD 15, I observed that "millions of us every day choose to deal with Negroes and Third World interlopers instead of whites," and I said that "wise race-conscious whites — people interested in preserving their race and civilization — may want to look at the wider context of their economic decision-making to try to figure out what will really maximize their overall utility, long-range." (p. 9)

Now, in an endnote, I did say I wasn't actually proposing a wholesale boycott of non-Majority enterprises, and I addressed some of the big problems that a conscientious boycotter would face. In the note, I proposed only that we strive for a "heightened awareness" of the costs as well as the benefits of dealing with our civilizational enemies, which would "encourage us to shun at least the worst and most obvious offenders." (note 21, p. 11) Perhaps I could have undermined some of Horst's twitting if I had incorporated all of that material in the main text.

But still, it is plausible to read Strakon as having a general prejudice against voluntarily dealing with non-Majority, nonwhite types, and against buying their products. The difficulty, as Horst saw it, was that I am a notorious lover of Mexican food. When my friends and I discuss where we might dine on a particular evening, my typical contribution is: "Messkin! Do you really have to ask? I could eat Messkin every day!"

Really, though, I couldn't — or wouldn't — and not only because of possible hazards to my waistline or digestion. (My waistline is a lost cause no matter what.) One big reason I don't eat Mexican food every day is that it always has a rather alarming soporific effect on me. I'm not the only one, either. It has a similar effect on a certain other prominent member of the TLD family.

During a visit by that editor to TLD World Headquarters a few years ago, the two of us faced a daunting mission: we had to meet Virginia Dare's plane at the Indianapolis airport — 125 miles away — at seven the next morning. We had to make sure we arrived promptly, because as regular readers of TLD will remember, Miss Dare tends to have trouble in airports. In order to extract her with dispatch from God knew what insupportable outrages, we would have to arise in what was, for us, practically the middle of the night. We could not indulge our habit of sitting up 'til the wee hours, smoking cigars and settling the problems of Man and the Universe.

But how to short-circuit our predictable tendencies? The answer was simple: "Messkin!" After we laid waste to a tableful of tortillas, salsa, guacamole, quesadillas, burritos, tacos, enchiladas, refritos, and arroz, I managed to navigate the two of us back to WHQ without nodding off at the wheel, and we wasted no time in stumbling into bed — about 8 p.m. We got to the airport early.

In that instance, the soporific effects of Mexican food served the noble cause of white Western productivity and efficiency. But a steady diet of those marvelous comestibles would not heighten my productivity and efficiency. In fact, I know better than to eat Mexican food for lunch on a work day. Now, the old image of the Mexican, sombrero tipped over his eyes, leaning against an adobe wall and snoring the afternoon away, is a canard: I would not care to join the mestizo or Indio peasant in the fields for even a single broiling, back-breaking hour. At the same time I cannot help but believe — assuming the racial differences between whites and mestizos/Indios are not even greater than I think — that eating Mexican food day in and day out, and in a hot climate no less, has unfortunate effects on many Mexicans: unfortunate for their productivity and creativity, and for the progress of their civilization. Even if mestizos' and Indios' metabolism offers some special protection against food-driven narcolepsy, from my own experiences and those of my editor I have good reason to fear adverse civilizational consequences among those of Northwestern European heritage.

I have no intention of mounting some tortured defense of my taste for Mexican food (de gustibus non est disputandum ), but I have no intention of ever going teetotal in the interests of ideological or civilizational purity, either. The truth is just this, and no more: it is in my interest to take Mexican food in moderation and under controlled circumstances.

***

From the foregoing comedy I venture to generalize seriously: it is in my interest as a member of the American white Majority that alien influences be present in my society in moderation or, at least, present in circumstances under which I can moderate their influence on me and mine. In the wake of some particularly egregious minority outrage, I often fantasize about how nice it would be to live in a lily-white society — heck, I like the food at Chi Chi's, and there's not a real Mexican within miles of Chi Chi's — but I would settle pretty readily for the sort of moderation I describe.

Clasping alien influences to our breast — or shoveling them into our belly — doesn't just risk comic physical consequences, such as the loss of consciousness I risk by indulging in a Mexican feast. There are serious cultural risks, too. I'm a considerable fancier of Chinese food (this really is turning into a confessional), and so far as I can tell, it has nothing but positive effects on my system. But I must recognize that there are some circumstances under which my frequent indulgence in Chinese food could engender a net cost to my "civilizational integrity."

When I set off in pursuit of Oriental cuisine, I actually head west instead of east — down the road a few miles to my county seat, where a Chinese family operates a restaurant of reliable quality. It's a town of about 16,000, and the restaurateurs in question are one of only a handful of Chinese families. But what if, over the past couple of decades, some crazed church group, Red Guard foundation, or fascist transnational corporation had imported 5,000 Chinese immigrants into my county seat? — in a project of cultural and racial destruction similar to those undertaken against the white residents of Wausau, Wis. (employing Hmong tribesmen), Fargo, N.D.-Moorhead, Minn. (Africans, Haitians, Kurds, and Southeast Asians), Storm Lake, Iowa (Somalis, Laotians, and Mexicans), or a hundred other places in the (previously) white Heartland?

I'd take 5,000 Chinese, fresh off the boat, to 5,000 American Negroes any day, if that were my only choice. But, unquestionably, a Chinese influx of that magnitude would destroy the little county seat I grew up with. Maybe the replacement town would be better in some ways — the mathematics and physics departments at the local college might really start to flourish — but as Jared Taylor says, "We have the right to be us, and only we can be us." And that is true even if (as is the case with me) we cannot tell differential calculus from chow mein. So if such an influx were to occur, insofar as I remained a civilizationally conscious, self-respecting white Westerner I would have to think twice about indulging my periodic craving for pork lo mein. Out of considerations of cultural self-defense, I might have to start demonstrating more loyalty to purveyors of that centerpiece of authentic Hoosier cuisine: the breaded pork tenderloin sandwich. (I am becoming very hungry now.)

Some alien groups and influences are our civilizational enemies, period. Anti-Majority power-elite Jews and their machinations are a good example. (In view of my love for hot pastrami on rye and crusty potato pancakes with sour cream on the side, I'd better declare plainly that the above is not to be taken as an attack on the proprietors of Shapiro's Deli in Indianapolis.) Other alien influences become inimical to our civilizational health only when we cease ingesting them in moderation and begin gorging ourselves on them. Or when our rulers pinch our noses closed, hold our jaws open, and ram them down our throats.

That being the case, for as long as the road signs here in Indiana are still in English and undefaced by Hispanic gang graffiti, and as long as I don't have to drive past mobs of Hispanics demanding supremacy for la Raza, I'll be comfortable telling my friend Horst to hop into the Toyota — I'm heading for El Café Soporífico. At the same time, I understand that that's thin gruel indeed for my readers in South Texas or Los Angeles or Dade County — or maybe even Fargo — so I add this. As we exercise moderation in tasting non-Western flavors, we need also to remember Mom's meat loaf — or lasagne, or schnitzel, or (God help us) haggis. That is true even if Mom was a terrible cook. The point is that she was our Mom; that she loved us and fed us; that we are what we ate, and heard, and learned, and felt, at her table. The remembrance of that is our soul food.

October 7, 2000

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