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 8:30 AM., Saturday, August 30. Latest entries are “A Time Capsule that’s just been sitting there waiting,” “The New Dem Strategy,” and “Poetry Across Scales.” The Instapunk Times is on the racks.. Undernet Black was updated August 30. 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 pi...
Minimalism has been a periodic ideal of modern and post-modern esthetics. Purely arbitrary, of course, though not without possibilities and even infinities of its own. For example, there are those who regard Haiku as a sort of supreme test of the poet, since poetry is commonly defined as the best words in the best order. This leaves the door open for imagining that there is an absolute minimum definable for capturing profound truth in the fewest of the best words in the least of the best order. In Haiku there must be 17 syllables, some reference to a season (ensuring universality I guess), and a prohibition against rhyme to prevent cheating (another guess). What if this definition of the minimum is wrong? What if there’s some way to reach great truths in less than 17 syllables? In less than a single word even? And, gasp, in less than a single letter on the page? Impossible? Well, why the hell not? I propose that the graphic above is a poem, subject to meaningful exploration, inte...
It’s time for me to do something I really dislike having to do. I need to write a book that will be printed on paper and will also consist as entirely of words as I can manage. It has been many years since I have regarded that as my preferred medium of expression. I find it confining, technologically and artistically retrograde, and I would avoid doing it if I could. Not that I can’t do it. I have done a huge chunk of work that way. But that aspect of my writing was supposed to be over nearly 30 years ago. The author of every creative project is a unique persona. He is the state of his consciousness during the period of producing it. What medium or genre he is working in. What his original intention was. What in personal life and in the world around him was drawing his attention at the time. And what was changing in him as he moved from intention to completed work. Instapunk is a persona, an artificially created one who started as a performative voice and became an alternative mo...
Just got my usual wake-up notification from the standard Instagram donkey expressing disbelief that Trump’s latest press conference didn’t land him in the loony bin. He was particularly outraged that “there is no more national media” to protect us from the President’s insanity. Which is to say that Trump met his objective for the press conference: goading the moribund Democrat Party to keep sawing at the limb of the tree they’re sitting on. I went looking for an animated cartoon that illustrates my point. Unable to find it even with the help of Google’s AI know-it-all, I cobbled one together on my own. Simple and brief as it is, my little animation shows what the lefties are hoping against hope for, that blessed moment when the saw severs the link to the poisoned tree for good and saves them from it. There follows that brief stretched out moment when the limb remains suspended alone in midair while the tree falls. Then the illusion ends and the limb crashes to the ground as the la...
IMPORTANT NOTE 8/4/25 : The ‘Shuteye Nation’ files of which The Glossary is a component are stored under the Wordpress application. Wordpress itself is in corporate limbo, unreachable even by fully paid up customers. I can no longer sign in even though I still own the site. Why there is a block against reaching the files the first time you try. It’s simple to bypass. When you click on one of the frames below, you will see a screen saying it is a private file. Click the option offering More Information. The next screen will give you the option of seeing the files anyway. Click on that. THEN refresh your screen and the file will appear. This is the only time in the current session when you will have to do this. It’s an annoyance. That is all. Click the graphic to go right to The Glossary I know there are those out there in the Facebook Universe who do come to look at the longer thought pieces I generally reserve for IPR and other of my websites. The traffic here, by the way, i...
Most of the TDS we see and react to originates in the figurative space we call Inside-the-Beltway. Politicians, mass media opinion-shapers, deeply entrenched bureaucracies in the federal government, including the judiciary, the intelligence services, the innumerable money-dispensing and regulatory agencies, and the bicoastal social elites generally, who are bound to DC by ties of family, friends, and financial affiliations. We know that this sizeable group of powerful people hates Trump for very personal reasons, mostly fear and envy. He is a direct threat to them in every part of their lives, from career security to potential scandals involving corruption and/or sex. But what about all the people from outside the Beltway? The otherwise ordinary 75 million people who voted for an utterly unqualified candidate in the 2024 election. A woman who rose to the top the old-fashioned pre-feminist way, on her back, and proceeded to fail or phone in every position or responsibility she ha...
(1957-1966) You’re going to think this is as bad as being directed to the Hallmark Channel, the Lifetime Movie Network, or reruns of Fantasy Island. It isn’t. Yes, we found it because we’re old and remember when we watched it with grandparents or at home on Blaxk and white TVs. But this is one of those rare cases where the experience of seeing it again is better than the clichéed memory. There’s a lot more to watch than the one true plot of Perry identifying the murderer on the stand against all odds and confounding D.A. Hamilton Burger and Lieutenant Tragg yet again. You realize almost immediately that you’re visiting a skillfully produced presentation of a completely different, bygone world that makes every episode fun to watch. The first two or three years will do. Unbelievably, they made 30 a year from 1957 to 1960. Each episode is 52 minutes long, which means advertising was confined to about 7+ minutes, compared to the 12-14 minutes per hour of ads on network shows no...
Saw a short but evocative post from Michael Smith on Facebook yesterday that struck an immediate chord with me: It struck chords with a lot of people in fact. We’d already been through this once with all the guiltiest talking heads in the media interviewing all the accomplices in the political class about how the fact of Joe Biden’s serious dementia could have been covered up so thoroughly. Nauseating to watch. Now we have a similar but not quite identical phenomenon of the complicit talking heads in the huge set of hoaxes designed to destroy the Trump presidency inviting some of of the prime perpetrators on to deny the truth of Tulsi Gabbard’s charges with a straight face. Nodding all around as more lies are piled on top of the mountain of old lies. Does no one realize they are, if possible, making matters worse for themselves when the investigators bring their charges? Reading Smith’s post and the comments appended to it made me think of a movie I had seen as a kid. It w...
It’s August going on September. Vacation time. Where we’re all supposed to be. Except maybe for mass media news outlets who still haven’t recovered from the late starts and early “lids” of the Biden days. They’re all still phoning it in, repeating the same lies, even the 10-yo ones about the Steele Dossier, the Epstein case, and the impeccably fair system of elections throughout the nation. Also still pleased with the 4-yo lies about poor, virtuously democratic Ukraine besieged by a corrupt authoritarian state outside their own borders, and the treacherous complicity of OrangeManBad in covering, again , for Putin and raining down death and destruction on innocent migrants, corpse-looking federal judges, and everyone else who isn’t a white man with a billion dollars. Yeah. Got it. Here’s an idea. Let them all keep playing amongst themselves with none of us watching until they fall asleep or something. In the meantime I’m having a little get-together here for my e-friends. Got the...
The normal term of gestation is almost done. Apologies to Kubrick. What have we got to go on so far? What kind of President is 2.0 going to be? The 1.0 version was naïve about the extent of corruption and poison in Washington, DC. He got stabbed in the back a lot. Like most of us, he was not nearly suspicious enough of the massive healthcare/pharmaceutical complex and learned the hard way that their “science” is just as fraudulent and mercenary as the Climate Change Mafia. He got a lot done in the first term, but they were successful in removing him from power. What can we expect now. How different is 2.0? Here’s an assessment of who Trump has been since January 20. He is boldly but carefully revolutionary. I say carefully because he is playing the long game and when he drops a big rock in the water he lets the system absorb the shock and respond. People stung by his second term tweets overlook the fact that tweets these days are a frequent substitute for ignoring the law and for...
Comments