I’m going to show you a thundering herd of links. In a very deep sense, Oxford University is the compleat brain of the United Kingdom. If you’re to understand this post, you’re going to have to read, to look at long lists and deep piles of evidence. Their impact is simply too big to summarize in a neat way. Oxford is the intellectual culture of Britain, and its impact on the United States is not calculable so much as huge and inevitable.
In 1946 the English novelist Evelyn Waugh infamously proclaimed that he did not write satire. Satire, Waugh wrote, “presupposes homogeneous moral standards” which, he suggested, did not exist in the twentieth-century West:
Satire […] exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue.[1]
Like much of what Waugh wrote, this statement is a sophisticated satirical performance that seeks to produce the very feeling it denies the twentieth century is capable of: shame. Waugh’s use of this word recalls the unforgettable entry of the feeling (or its signifier) sixteen years earlier, in the second chapter of 1930’s Vile Bodies. Upon entry to England, party girl Agatha Runcible is mistaken for a jewel smuggler and strip-searched by Dover customs officers: “too, too shaming” says Agatha of her abuse by the customs officials, before relating all to the evening newspapers.[2]
Vile Bodies has disturbed readers and critics alike since its publication. Particularly troubling is the novel’s abrupt shift in tone, from delight in the Bright Young People’s “too, too shaming” scandals to the unsettling pitch of the final chapters as their giddy world descends into total war. Waugh, though long seen as a conservative moralist, has increasingly come to occupy a position at the fringes of modernism; certainly he is a major satirist of modernity. Vile Bodies in particular is frequently read as modernist in feeling and construction, particularly in its rejection of sentimentality and emotion. Waugh ruthlessly expunges all interiority from his characters; they become as Rebecca West remarked in a contemporary review of the novel, like a deck of cards shuffled and spread out. In this flat world, intimacy or emotion is rendered illegible; it is effaced and replaced with mere talk.
The hardest thing in comparisons is getting some sense of scale. Do numbers matter? Some. On the first landing of Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Society (otherwise known as The Institute of 1770) there’s a row of portraits called ‘From the Pudding to the Presidency’. There were in my day, six pictures on the wall: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy. Six out of 40+ presidents in 200 years. A creditable performance, no?
Imposing, yeah? Where CHYOS Club comes in. The only presidents with Harvard credentials who didn’t belong to the Pudding were George W. Bush and Barack Obama. They never went to Harvard College. They belonged to CHYOS grad schools instead. We should remember that this is actually a significant percentage of all U.S. Presidents. 8 out of 45. Harvard is 150 years older than the nation. Big deal, huh?
No. Small potatoes, in fact. Oxford University has produced no fewer than 28 Prime Ministers of Great Britain, many Tory but mostly Labour. We could end right here. But there’s far more to the story. Why Evelyn Waugh chose to blow the whistle on the whole scam. We’ll begin with Monty Python.
Oh, wait. There’s an aside here that turns out not to be minor. Harvard has 8 presidents, but Yale by hook or crook has 5 (2 Bushes, one Clinton, one Ford, and 350 lbs of William Howard Taft). The two together account for almost 20 percent of U.S. Presidents (okay, 17.7 %). But Oxford also has a sidekick, called Cambridge, which has done half as well as Oxford, almost, in the prime minister department with a total of 12. Why, these days, the two universities are lumped together under the sobriquet Oxbridge, which I probably should have used in my original CHYOS post. Oxbridge has produced 40 of Britain’s 55 prime ministers, which amounts to nearly 90 percent of the total. In business terms, that would be called a monopoly. The Harvard-Yale connection doesn’t have a name because the linguistic alternatives are crap: Haryale? No. Harvale? No again. But if you doubt the connection, look at the current Supreme Court: 8 of 9, which is 88.8 percent. What do the Brits have to compare? The Archbishop of Canterbury, self-admitted atheist and nominal direct report to the Queen as head of the Church of England, went to Cambridge. (And let me tell you, you have to search to find this out. His official bios don’t mention it.)
Where were we? Monty Python. The Brit counterculture of the 1970s and 1980s. All of whom went to Oxford or Cambridge (except for the lone American, graphic genius Terry Gilliam, who went to Obama’s undergrad alma mater, Occidental.) So Oxford and Cambridge presided over the creation of the Brit colonial empire and then the ridicule and destruction of same with a post-sixties irreverence cribbed from American political, musical, and pharmaceutical behaviors.
There’s a thing called a constant feedback loop. America and Britain have been in one of those for 50 years now. It has utterly destroyed Britain, and it’s about to destroy us as well.
Monty Python was the vehicle for completing a circle that first began in the 19th century with an Oxford essay arguing for the inevitability of atheism. It was at first denounced but slowly captured the university after the horrific trauma of WWI, until it came to dominate all British intellectual endeavors and had, finally, to be delivered to the masses in the form of popular culture, specifically entertainment.
Monty Python is symbolic more than instrumental. We’ll get to instrumental later. Python in the U.S. was largely a function of PBS, a brand of intellectual superiority for the elites through the mechanism of humor. Whatever they were making fun of was also a means of declaring their fundamental identities as elites who could see through it all. The challenge they posed was getting the joke, whatever it was and however obliquely it related to the lives of their audience. You get the joke, you’re in the club.
The dead parrot sketch. Dead is dead. The aristocratic twit competition. No, we weren’t born with titles, we’re just smarter… because Oxbridge. Are you? The old ladies in kerchiefs, Pythons in drag, hilarious and easily translatable to dim Midwestern moms across the pond. Just a joke. Did you get it? BBC presenters with their manicured west London accents and dully pompous questions. They know nothing. Why listen? The Ministry of Silly Walks. What your government is spending your taxes on. Lumberjacks who are secretly gay cross-dressers. Manliness is not a thing anymore in the Oxbridge scheme of things.
What were they up to? I don’t believe their intentions were bad. Comics are allowed to be funny, whatever Will Smith thinks. My own favorite Python sketch was a lampoon of The Scottish, of which I am one. Loved this:
But, you see, I am also a member of CHYOS Club, no longer in good standing, but I still get the joke. Whatever they intended, Monty Python was definitely in the business of reinforcing the British Caste System. Which has not changed in any material way for 300 years, including the last 100 years under mostly Labour governments. Caste in Britain is a function of language, accents, which never change at any level of society. You talk the way your parents talk, and it doesn’t matter how high you rise; even if you can, everyone will always know whether you are of the quality or of the trash who maybe got lucky.
The Python sketches use language to define people, just by the way they talk. They’re not impressed. They don’t think you should be impressed. But here they are. They’re the smart ones. From Oxford and Cambridge. You should be too. It’s the only way out of the damning, degrading, downward cultural spiral.
They didn’t stop with sketches either. They demolished King Arthur and Christianity in movies, almost in passing. It’s so easy when you’re Oxbridge. Critics loved them for it.
Still, Monty Python was only a sideshow. Count back the years to the British Invasion. John Lennon didn’t go to Oxford. But he grew up in the Brit caste system, and he was pissed. At authority, at religion, at his home country, and he came HERE to express what he couldn’t get away with saying at home. What did he believe in? I can’t believe so many people still love this suicidal, nihilistic song…
But here’s what he was really saying. Didn’t sell quite as well, but it was the truth.
Long long while back. Whence it finally seeped down to Lennon, who finally said, “We’re more important than Jesus Christ.” As it turns out, he was probably right.
More Oxford. Harvard’s had a lot of poets, Yale a few. Oxbridge has more. It took the French to kill architecture (Le Corbusier), but it took the English — and Oxford — to kill God and Western Civilization and print literature.
The Brits have been crushed by their elites. We are staring down the barrel of the same fate. Who’s in charge? The CHYOS Club.
This post was last updated at 4:30 PM., Wednesday, September 17. Latest entries are “An American Turning Poinr,” “A Mission from Gahd,” and “For Those in Hell,” The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses. .. Undernet Black was updated September 17. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s, and I made my own pilgrimage t...
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