Of Legally Blonde and Madison Grant

Looking back on those times when I was wrong about the commercial prospects of a major feature film release I suppose that the time I was furthest off the mark was in my guess about the original Legally Blonde. I thought that what looked a very cheap comedy would flop hard and be quickly forgotten. Instead the movie was a near $100 million hit in a period when that was more like $200 million today, such that afterward Reese Witherspoon was not just a Known Face from films like Cruel Intentions, or a respected performer in critic's darling films like Gary Ross' Pleasantville and Alexander Payne's Election, but a genuine, bankable, movie star, particularly in the then still commercially significant romantic comedy genre, as the movie became a near-instant "New Classic" and general cultural touchstone.

Admittedly my expectation that the movie would flop and pass into obscurity was a gut reaction rather than a well-founded analysis in response to a movie that was aimed at a very different demographic from myself, but that was hardly all of it. The film's promotion was also like nails on a chalkboard to me because of two particular aspects of the premise. One was its stridently ultra-conformist elitism--its Cult of the Good School exaltation of the ultimate object of said cult's snobbery, Harvard, its Cult of the Professions exaltation of lawyers, and worse still, the combination of the two in its placement of Harvard Law School on an unreachably high pedestal.

The other aspect was its being one long blond joke. I have never found these amusing, and in fact long been annoyed that the "politically correct," "woke," etc. give them a pass in spite of their being exceedingly racist. Not only is it the case that racism is racism is racism no matter whom it is directed against, but the identity politics-fostered stupidity that treats some groups as "protected" and others as not, on top of its rarely protecting those most in need of protection, overlooks the fact that this unevenness in guarding against bigotry normalizes it until no one is protected--with the state of America in 2026, where talk of "cultural Marxism" and the "Great Replacement," are now practically mainstream, testifying to the miserable failure of that mentality as society's defender against prejudice. Indeed, blond jokes specifically reflect and reinforce the exact system of old twentieth century racism that the supposed anti-racists claim to oppose, certainly to go by such an important summation of such (pseudo)scientific racism as Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916), the very book that Adolf Hitler praised as his "Bible."

This may seem surprising. How can racism against the blond--the Nordic--be part of the old baggage of Western, American, racism? Didn't these racists preach Nordic superiority? Yes, indeed they did--but there are many ways in which racists might claim superiority for one group over another. If racists of Grant's generation did attend to it--indeed, his acolyte Lothrop Stoddard all but wet his pants with excitement at the apparent advent of means of "proving" the inferiority of other races with the emergence of the I.Q. test in his screed against human equality, The Revolt Against Civilization (1922)--they did not claim an absolute Nordic superiority in intelligence over all other groups. The Nordic's fellow Caucasian, the Mediterranean, was, as Grant put it, "probably . . . the superior . . . in intellectual attainments," the more intelligent, the more creative, and also the more adaptable to the demands and conditions of modern urban life than Nordics (such that, in Grant's very zoological analysis, they more often succeeded in establishing and reproducing themselves in urban milieu than their Nordic peers). Where the Nordic was superior was in moral as well as physical "stamina," in "stability and steadiness," in fidelity to country, family, law, and the principles of "loyalty and truth," all of which Grant held made of Nordics the more responsible and patriotic and generally better citizens, and the superior fighters and superior rulers (at least, so long as the "Berserker blood rage" did not get the better of them), and this what Grant set the greater store by. Thus, if among the Caucasian/White the darker-haired were on average the more intelligent, in a population containing both elements the blondes were still likely to be the ruling elite ("prince and princess are always fair" in Celtic, Classical, Medieval legend, "a fact rather indicating that the mass of the people were brunet at the time when the legends were taking shape," with this implied by "tapestries show[ing] a blond earl on horseback and a dark-haired churl holding the bridle"). Indeed, Grant remarked that "the modern novelist or playwright" was still prone to make his hero a tall, blond, honest and somewhat stupid youth and his villain a small, dark and exceptionally intelligent individual of warped moral character" (emphasis added)--"dumb" in contrast with their less stable and steady, less faithful or principled, but considerably cleverer, adversary.

So, yes, "Hitler's Bible" held the blond to be "dumb" in relation to their dark-haired counterpart, while as the quotations from Grant's book presented above show its endurance has gone along with the endurance of other parts of the "package." Thus is there in America a tendency to associate blondness not just with a lack of mental sharpness but the outdoors, privilege and an uncomplicated, honest nature, be it in the farmer and rancher, the prom queen and the preppie youth, the flower child and the surfer dude, and the virtues of the soldier, with Americans tending to picture the members of their country's more elite combat units as Nordic. (Indeed, the author of a recent investigative report about the storied Navy SEALs could not help remarking that the Caucasian-but-no-earl-on-a-Medieval-tapestry Richard Marcinko was not what a legendary SEAL might be expected to look like.) So does it go with the contrasting stereotype of the "small, dark and exceptionally intelligent individual of warped moral character" exemplified by the clever but indoorsy, "creepy" nerd, and the stereotypes of Mediterranean Latins and others as given to crime or subversion (as seen in Anti-Italian bigotry and the place of the Mafia and Sacco and Vanzetti in it), and at the same time extreme un-soldierliness (exemplified by the sneering treatment of the Italian armed forces by Anglo-American historians), with, of course, much of this carrying over to those other predominantly Mediterranean-type Caucasian peoples on the southern and eastern shores of the Middle Sea. It is quite possible to go on and on in this vein, but I think this makes the point--the blond jokes aren't just stupid and racist, but to anyone who knows the history a lot less innocent than so many make them out to be, just as with so much else that prompts the idiots all around us to respond to any even slightly critical observation with flippant dismissal.

Incidentally, both Grant and Stoddard were Harvard Ph.ds--something to remember the next time some dimwitted pseudo-intellectual bully commits the cluster of logical fallacies involved in defending a piece of foolishness by standing on its promulgator's holding a degree from that institution in the manner to which the idiots of the "But He's So Smart!" brigade are so prone.