In Reading a Word from the Outer Dark, a book of poetry by Robert E. Howard, published by the curators of his family home turned museum, I came upon this quibbling disclaimer of Howard as a man of his age, presumably in an attempt to keep the politically correct wolves of modernity at bay:
“He assigned certain characteristics to these [ethnic] heritages, and thereby to himself, a popular belief structure of the time.”
Imagine, if you will, an insane world in which our racial heritage placed us at certain advantages and disadvantages, a world in which:
Nordic people were better adapted to low light,
Tropical people were better adapted to heat,
Highlanders were better adapted to low oxygen,
Lowlanders were better adapted to high humidity,
West African boxers had quicker hands,
Polish boxers were stronger,
English-Irish boxers had more stamina,
Italian boxers hit harder,
American Indian boxers [Mexicans] were tougher,
Asian students scored higher on math tests,
Jewish students demonstrate better linguistic skills…
Imagine such a sick misguided world, a savage place in which people of certain ethnicities were at a higher risk of certain diseases.
Imagine a world where Native Americans, forced to abandon a meat diet in favor of a grain diet, suffer outrageous levels of diabetes.
Imagine that such an inhospitable place existed, a place where greyhounds were better runners than bull dogs, where pit-bulls were better fighters than poodles, where collies had better herding instincts than terriers.
Robert E. Howard dared to imagine such a world and also dared to imagine civilizations so far in decline that the elite failed to appreciate their own ethnic and moral distinctions and spiraled into hopeless degeneration.
In other words, Robert E. Howard predicted—over and over again in various fantastical mockups—Modern, Politically Correct, America, with vapid people living under a tyranny of taboo words, in which an ancient evil might return to snatch the degenerate at any time and he therefore wastes away in a drugged slumber.
Should we not feel embarrassed that a young writer from rural America, not yet out of his twenties, predicted our plight over and over again, and we, with an average age of 35—the traditional age of enlightenment at which a man is judged competent to hold presidential office—have utterly failed to even notice the dire social straights which engulf us.
The Great Train Wreck of the West
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