Dancing with Ghosts

As many of you know, I spend a few days each week at my mother’s house. I enjoy the solitude of her spare room for work, but in the last few years my visits have been more for her and her husband. My mother is quite elderly now, and like most boomers has not taken care of herself. Despite decades of goyslop and a cornucopia of pharmaceutical products taking their toll, she is fairly healthy for her age and doesn’t necessarily need my assistance, but her husband sadly does. A pair of hereditary illnesses and the inability for modern medicine to do much about his particular pair of defects has lead him to death’s door.

For the last few months, I’ve helped him and my mother in their struggles with insurance, healthcare, and hospitals. I could write volumes about how evil and broken our healthcare and insurance systems are, but all of you reading this are already keenly aware of how miserable it is to deal with the H1B-bioleninism brigade which staffs all our large institutions. Despite my best efforts and the endless prayers of dozens of people, it has not gone well for him.

He is dying, he is in pain, and there’s nothing we can do but watch and pray.

My mother’s husband is a kind man. When you think of the quiet, mild-mannered White man who no one knows but the entire company would fall apart without, it’s exactly him. He’s of German descent and hails from Lutheran Minnesota, and he exemplifies his ethnic heritage. He detests political talk, never voices strong opinions, and does his best to be as neutral as possible on all topics. I know him personally, however, and his outlook and beliefs are quite based, and if he was 40 years younger he would be a fellow frog joining the meme war.

In over 20 years of knowing this man personally, he has never made a single comment about how awful things have become. It makes him uncomfortable when I become vocal about such things, despite him agreeing with me about nearly every subject. He is very much of the ‘keep your head down, do as you’re told, and hopefully have a problem-free life with a good retirement’ type of boomer.

Like most of his and my mother’s type, he has always enjoyed sportball and television. In the last 10 months, he has been unable to do anything that requires more than the most basic of physical exertion, but much to my surprise he hasn’t been watching much TV. Last week I spent time with just him, a rarity since my mother is almost always present. She was busy dealing with hospital paperwork, so he and I spent quite a bit of time together for the first time in a few years.

He likes fantasy and science fiction, especially novels and old movies, so we often talk about those things. During a lull in our conversation about Herbert’s Dune, I asked him why he wasn’t watching much TV, thinking it was probably because he wanted to read books he’d been meaning to get to before he died.

His answer shocked me.

After waiting a moment to consider his words, he sighed and simply said, “well, it’s like nothing on TV is for us anymore.” Intrigued, I asked him who he meant by ‘us’, and he replied with, “you know, you talk about it all the time.” We both let that comment linger a while before speaking again, and he told me that’s why he’s just reading books instead of watching TV. He wants his last months, assuming he can’t be helped, to be a time of joy and reflection, reading fiction and history by ‘us’ instead of the slop on TV which clearly isn’t for ‘us’ anymore.

This lead to a lengthy conversation about all the things we love about fiction of the 1900s. We of course discussed Dune, but also Dungeons and Dragons, Krull, Lord of the Rings, Conan the Barbarian, and a dozen other novels, movies, cartoons, comics, and video games. Despite his age, he’s enjoyed video games since the 1980s and is surprisingly knowledgeable about ‘gamer’ topics, so it was a lovely conversation despite the morose tone.

In the days since, I’ve ruminated on that conversation, and it lead to this article.

For the last few years I’ve felt my age more acutely than ever. It’s not because I feel weak of mind, sickly, nor behind the times. I feel quite virile in those respects. The age I feel is one of loss. Genuine mourning for things now gone, for people no longer relevant or alive, for a culture that died when I wasn’t even paying attention.

The novels, cartoons, movies, and games which have given me so much joy and fulfilment lost their magic for me a few years ago. After being red-pilled as they say for so many years, I struggle to feel any solace at all from the various forms of fiction that were once my entire reason for living. Those of you who follow my Morning Walk vlog know I’ve battled this malaise for years. However, I now know why I feel such loss and have discovered the words to express it.

Dancing with ghosts.

Dancing with a person is for a mix of joy, intimacy, expression, and entertainment. To dance with a ghost is to knowingly invest your time and energy into someone who is already dead; someone who cannot create new experiences or contribute to your life anymore; someone who’s time has passed and is no longer part of the living world. This in all ways describes my relationship with art and fiction, as well as how I view my ethnic identity as an American.

Speaking with my mother’s husband at length made me realise I’m not the only one dancing with ghosts. I think this macabre allegory perfectly describes realising your culture is dead, your ethnic identity has been subsumed or nullified by powers beyond you, and the skein through which you are supposed to have community with others is revealed to be a wicked succubus. In our fractured, deracinated state we have no choice but to seek identity and belonging - our very nature drives us to. But what do we find on this seeking? Hollow surrogates for identity based on sexuality, sportball, nerd hobbies, or picking a side in the political circus.

Cul-de-Sacs of these surrogates are where the ghosts gather, waiting for dance partners like lazy, undying sharks. Whether they are the works of Tolkien, excellent old video games, classic comic books, or fictional role playing settings from BattleTech or World of Darkness, these ghosts are eager to feed from our pathos. In return they provide solace, a temporary reprieve from the bleak hellscape of reality. They gladly take our hands and fill us with romantic notions of peoplehood, moral superiority, and a hunger for righteous vengeance.

The ghosts know what we crave, and it’s why so many of us spend an unhealthy amount of time dancing with them. We know the emotions and visions they share with us are illusory, but we indulge nonetheless. Dancing with them provides us with better company and a healthier sense of identity than the poison reality seeks to feed us. In this surreality we find a measure of genuine camaraderie or even community, and I believe that’s why so many White men, especially dissident ones, use these ghosts as a way to communicate their metaphysical, political, and spiritual ideas.

Our men today, especially younger ones, know they have been lied to, tricked, economically enslaved, and sabotaged by society. They can’t shake the feeling their only fate is to be used up and discarded by a system which not only hates them, but actively seeks to deprive them of identity and progeny. So more and more they dance with ghosts, drinking deeply from the chalice of masculine dreams, and are inspired by spectres of a romanticised past. The ghosts of the past want bold things, and are desperate for more pathos. They fill men’s heads with a yearning for conquest and adventure - with a desire for righteous crusades, glorious revolutions, and jubilant masses celebrating the heads of traitors on pikes.

I can’t help but wonder where this will lead. If every man of merit, strength, and moral fibre becomes disenfranchised, where do they turn? How do they find meaning? If the purposeful destruction of Western culture continues, then all our men will have left are these ghosts. When there is nothing for them in reality but a nightmare of emasculation, White erasure, and wifeless poverty, will they awake with clenched fists and gritted teeth, ready and willing to do the bidding of ghosts?

People like me who are aware of these things but are also old enough to remember what things were like in the 80s and 90s live on the cusp. We are entering the eclipse between eras, and soon I worry we will be the new ‘ghosts’, doomed to float through a reality that isn’t ours, only remembering what once was and beckoning young men to listen to our tales of loss and pride - desperate to feel hope for a future we can’t see or join. I worry in our fading desperation, will we cause what’s coming to be even worse? Despite how we ghosts envision crusades and revolutions, the reality of such will not be like our stories and games. They will be dark and bloody, harkening a time of great loss, turmoil, and misery.

Such events will create a severance from the past and generate a new creation myth for our people in whatever country, protectorate, or city state arises, and those of us from the before-time will not belong there. We may still linger for a time, long enough to share our wisdom and experiences for those who must live after the new dawn.

I hope and pray we haunt those men responsibly.