Lovecraft is certainly a… complicated and problematic figure, though it is worth noting that he shifted politically over the course of his life. He was a Republican and a borderline reactionary in the 1920s, but the Great Depression shifted his political views to the point where, by the time of a 1936 letter to C. L. Moore, he was describing himself as a New Deal Democrat and describing his erstwhile party as such:
Quote:
As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.
(Plus ça change…)
However, despite the shift in his political views, Lovecraft remained quite racist until the time of his death; his political shift seems to have been motivated largely by economics. More here, for those who are interested.
Incidentally, the shift in Lovecraft’s political views creates some interesting debates in the interpretation of his work. Although it was not published until 1936, At the Mountains of Madness was written in 1931, at the height of the Great Depression but before FDR was elected, and readers and critics continue to debate whether Lovecraft intended audiences to sympathise more with the Elder Things or with the Shoggoths (or, indeed, with either one).
In any case, Lovecraft Country looks spectacular (and what a pedigree!), and I’ll have to watch it next time I have HBO.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
__________________
Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.
I am not disappointed. Well ... I am not entirely convinced by the "shoggoths" which were more like human actors in motion-capture suits than the amorphous blobs I imagined. They do have lots of eyes, though.
Most of the horror in the initial episode, however, is just white people, and that's as it should be. Both mundane and more horrific than I imagined, and more plausible.
... That state of normal was one of not just reinstating all the protocols and rituals of high office, but of the pastoral hand of the president. Biden will now “heal” the nation and rebuild America’s standing in the world. “Civility” will cleanse the US of the previous administration’s toxicity.
But against the backdrop of the past four years in general and the previous two weeks in particular, the ceremonials all felt a bit flat, like trying to burn incense to banish the smell of a rotting corpse. Trump may be gone as president, but the morbidities he exposed remain. ...
Exactly. "Normal" is just a thin veneer of supposed sanity over the engulfing cosmic horror at the heart of America (for example, but not only) for the past 400 years (for example). Hence this thrad. The whole country is Lovecraft Country.
And if the Biden administration assume this will be easy - just repairing cracks - or if that's all they manage to get past the cultists on the other side, which is dangerously likely - nothing will change.