The Way We Are, No. 2
Shine on, O perishing Republic. —Robinson Jeffers
If Western man in the future should recover his analytical ability, our times will be known as the age in which trivia replaced culture and bureaucracy replaced life.
Economic stimulus: On the face of it, the proposition that we can borrow and spend ourselves into prosperity is lunacy.
Actually, it is worse than lunacy. It is a means of enjoying luxury by shifting the costs to posterity. But, then, Americans no longer are conscious of any posterity, any more than they recognise any ancestors.
It was recently reported that the Feds are forbidding sale of and destroying all children's books published before 1985 (allegedly for reasons of health). This is just the beginning of the campaign to rewrite the past. As Orwell put it, he who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future. (But, of course, it is "for the children." Like Waco.)
Politicians lie whenever they can get away with it and it is to their advantage. It is their stock-in-trade to pretend competence and integrity that they do not have. So strong is the habit that some even lie when they don't have to.
A great many Americans refuse to speak obvious truths because the truth is not "nice" and might lower their respectability.
This allows politicians to to lie safely. Two of our most acute foreign observers, Tocqueville in the 19th century and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, found the predominant characteristic of Americans to be a desire for respectable conformity.
The poet Edgar Lee Masters (and poets see things that other men do not) wrote about a characteristic American "refusal of the truth."
One fears that the voters can no longer distinguish cleverness from wisdom. But, of course, that has been true for a long time.
An American goody-goody statement that you have heard all your life: "Fighting never solves anything." This is absurd. One of the very few potentially positive things about fighting is that it sometimes does solve things. This statement is made by the same people who think peace will be promoted by disarming everyone except the government and other criminals.
I just checked the Constitution again and I don't find where the government is supposed to promote "diversity." I also don't find where President Obama has any mandate for enlisting me in "the remaking of America" and in "duty to the world" as he recently told me.
I remember with shame that years ago, in youthful ignorance, I actually pulled for William Buckley over Gore Vidal during that famous TV altercation. I am thankful that time has given me the ability to distinguish a genuine man of letters from a pompous pseudo-intellectual poseur.
It is a simple unquestionable truth that no public official or other public person in the U.S. today could meet the minimal ethical standards of the founding generation of Americans. If the founding generation is the measure of wisdom, integrity, and patriotism, then present-day leaders don't even make the farm team.
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"Living is easy with eyes closed,
Misunderstanding what You see,
It's getting hard to be someone,
But it all works out.
It doesn't matter much to me........"
I heard the song at the age of 12, growing up in Communism and just beginning to "handle English". Statement just stuck in my mind.
As soon as this trouble fades we can all return to business as usual and forget about reflections. Lennon's statement will remain though.
In the mean time we should really do nothing at all, with particular care not to help current President in any way.
Is that it?
Would that be when Vidal called jr. a "fascist" and jr. retorted with,"call me a fascist again and I'll punch you [Vidal] in the God d-mn mouth?"
If so,what happened after that?
Vidal's Burr and Creation will easily outlast anything by Buck jr..
A profound and important insight, with many ramifications.
We have forgotten not only our blood ancestors but also our spiritual ancestors, the great minds and great saints of the past (Plato and Shakespeare are my ancestors, though I am neither Greek nor English by descent). A critical failing, of economic policy, sexual mores, education, and more.
2. As best I remember, Buckley called Vidal "a queer" and bragged that he (Buckley) had been in the army. To which Vidal, a WW II veteran, replied: "And never saw a shot fired in anger, I'll bet."
"Actually, it is worse than lunacy. It is a means of enjoying luxury by shifting the costs to posterity."
A pastor of mine labeled such a way of living as "the Canaanite lifestyle" in a discussion at my church a year and a half ago.
"........self indulgent nonsense........."
Simon Cowell, American idol, season 2009.
Cute, appropriate.
Brendan, your pastor was unkind to the Canaanites. They still depended on agriculture, family and had overweening imperial neighbors to deal with. We're even worse than the overweeining imperial neighbors (Egypt, Assyria, Mittani).
"A great many Americans refuse to speak obvious truths because the truth is not “nice” and might lower their respectability."
AND
"I just checked the Constitution again and I don’t find where the government is supposed to promote “diversity.” I also don’t find where President Obama has any mandate for enlisting me in “the remaking of America” and in “duty to the world” as he recently told me."
Last weekend in my capacity as headmaster, I was with our eighth-grade class, the teacher and some chaperons in South Louisiana - Lafayette and Baton Rouge.
We encountered, among other things, the following:
The docents, to a man, now speak of slaves, not as "slaves," but as "enslaved people." This was true in a federal national park museum, in a state museum and in two different not-for-profit historical site. They were all speaking of "enslaved people" and avoid the use of the word "slave" like the plague. The history teacher, who has often made these annual trips to these same places also noticed the shift and said that this was the first year that he had heard the term used in these museums.
The narrator of a film on the Acadians at the federal museum let us know that the slavery was alien to Acadians but that regrettably, when they got to Louisiana, some of them took up the evil practice. The interpretation is as follows: A people involved in slavery have no worthy story to tell. The Cajuns, unlike the Creoles, Spanish and Americans around them, were an innocent people. Some of them, in their innocence, were entrapped by the evil around them. Therefore, since some of them were in their innocence entrapped by slavery, i.e. became slave holders (enslaved people holders, their story, unlike the story of the rest of the Southerners, is worthy of telling.
We visited a state outdoor museum onto which several plantation buildings had been moved, including the homes of "enslaved people." The docent said that they were fortunate to have the quarters of enslaved people because in the early 1970's, many owners of such houses were feeling guilty about their ancestors having owned slaves and were destroying the buildings. She also compared the quarters of the enslaved people to the "big house," which the pupils had just seen. I was compelled to point out two things: I lived through the seventies as a young adult, knew many people who owned such houses and never encountered a modicum of guilt among them; and my immediate ancestors, just one generation before me, had as yeoman farmers lived in quarters quite like the ones before us.
There are statues of four Louisiana governors in the hall of the state capitol building. The docent spoke at length about three of them. One she did not mention: Henry Watkins Allen, Confederate Governor of Louisiana. I made sure that the pupils with me learned about him.
Another interesting thing was noticed by all of us in the guided state capitol tour: they have completely changed the official story on the assassination of Huey P. Long. I have, over the years, beginning with my own eighth-grade experience in the early sixties, taken this tour many times. The official story has been that Dr. Weiss shot at Long, Long's bodyguards killed Weiss and likely inflicted wounds on Long from which he would die. The new official story is the old conspiracy theory: Weiss never fired. The only bullets fired came from the guards. Accident or assassination? The new version might well be closer to the truth. The question that we all had is, "Why have they changed it?"
I pointed out to my pupils that Cajun culture, dying as it although it is, has held out precisely because it was geographically isolated and religiously and linguistically insulated from the encroaching cultures. Its enemy was and is diversity. The intellectual elites of the United States, France and Louisiana tried to "save" Cajun culture by imposing international French on the Cajuns of South Louisiana and on us Saxons and Scotsmen of North Louisiana. My Cajun friends resented the modern French Jacobins thrust upon them in the 70's and 80's as much as they resented cultural Americanization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My friend sees things as they are. He perceives that Cajun culture itself has been abstracted and impose on all of Louisiana, so that today, we North Louisianans eat crayfish and go wild over Mardi Gras. He understands that the abstraction of Cajun culture is as much a theft of that culture and as much a threat to that culture as was the work of those who wanted to erase it a generation ago. We North Louisianans seem to have three choices: become abstract Cajuns, continue to be subsumed into the bland and banal culture of "America," or become Hispanics. By 2050, a year which I will not see but think to foresee, my bet would be on Hispanic! At least the parasite of diversity/multi-culture will die with the host as our descendants will all speak a vulgar Spanish and eat adulterated "Mexican" food which will have transitioned from the real thing much as killer bees are pacified as they move northward.
Actually, Vidal called Buckley a "crypto-Nazi." Vidal had a snotty mouth and got what he deserved. Much more amusing than Buckley is Norman Mailer slapping Vidal silly backstage before a joint TV appearance because of Vidal's snippiness and smartass. Mailer cuffed him around and shoved him out onto the stage reeling like an addled drunkard.
I always preferred Vidal the writer to Vidal the personality.His writings,especially his novels,are markedly more "right wing."
I'm afraid he's something of a fraud.But fraudulent or not,he's got Buckley Jr. beat by a mile.
Also,I've never quite understood his obsession with Amelia Earhart.
"Actually, it is worse than lunacy. It is a means of enjoying luxury by shifting the costs to posterity. But, then, Americans no longer are conscious of any posterity, any more than they recognise any ancestors."
Neither ancestors nor posterity exist for modernity/post-modernity because these generations have come to prefer to live in the irrational and unreal no-man's-land between a cosmic order which flows from the very nature of the God who created it and in which we have our being and purpose and the chaos of an existence in a meaningless universe with no god. As finite and fallen creatures, the members of these generations have "chosen," as if we really have a choice, to reject a cosmic order which is an expression of a holy God but have refused to embrace the only other alternative, that without a cosmic order as an expression of a holy God, there is only chaos and meaninglessness. They, therefore, think to be able to will a reality into existence, as if they themselves were gods, that makes them comfortable to live without God and which holds the looming abyss of nothingness at bay.
Contemplating ancestors and posterity makes them uncomfortable because such comtemplation suggests purpose; and purpose suggests order; and order suggests an Orderer. These generations want nothing to do with such!
#8, Dr. Peters, I don't know if it is the same in Louisiana, but in South Carolina hardly any of the plantations belong to the original families. Almost all are owned by rich Yankees. Some of them, bless them, have respected the property and restored or preserved it. Others have behaved as you would expect. I know of one case where a Yankee evicted the black families from the land they had been on for generations since their homes did not project the right polished image. A friend who sells high end real estate tells this story. A wealthy couple, who had a notion they wanted to own an antebellum Southern home, flew in. As soon as they saw the number of black people living in the antebellum town he showed them, they bugged out as fast as they could.
Dr. Wilson @ 12
No few of the antebellum homes in our area are owned by rich doctors and lawyers from Houston and from Dallas. Some few of them are real Texas looking for a tax shelter or tax deduction. Most are faux Texans like the Bush clan - Yankees.
"It is a simple unquestionable truth that no public official or other public person in the U.S. today could meet the minimal ethical standards of the founding generation of Americans."
Ron Paul?
I'm often met with surprised looks when people find out my wife and I have five children. Questions about money, social responsibility, and simply "how you handle it" often follow. In a culture where heterosexual, married couples find it odd that others in their demographic have children one has run into catastrophic problems.
One of the most common questions I get is, "What made you decide to have five kids?" I used to respond with "Christianity," or "Marriage." Now I just tell folks that someone is going to have to be around to fight the Muslims. People think I'm kidding.
"If Western man in the future should recover his analytical ability, our times will be known as the age in which trivia replaced culture and bureaucracy replaced life."
Truly brillant. I have noticed increasingly that it is more important to be witty and quick, especially with trivial details, than it is to be substantial and in pursuit of knowledge that takes longer than 10 seconds to explain. This is even more exaggerated in the groups just five years younger than I.
@15, Mr. Anderson, my advisor tells a similar story. Upon sharing the news around the halls of our esteemed academic institution of higher learning that his wife was pregnant with their fifth child, he did not receive one congratulation or expression of joy; just shock and incredulity.
I think this comes from the false security associated with planning things. So many parents, for some unknown reasons, think they hold some deterministic control over the outcome of their child's life. The attitude of being able to "afford children" boggles my mind, but I do understand it as well. Our country now is vicious to people without means.
A somewhat related complaint/pet peeve of mine is when people utter the statment, "We're pregnant."
Jeff Anderson,
Your five is nothing, I'm going to have twelve. It's too bad that, in this day and age, if and when that plan comes true, my family will be notorious as those weird backward people who've never heard of contraception. As though thwarting the true purpose of sex by wickedly and hedonistically using it only for recreation is the enlightened and commonsense way of living.
Just a few decades ago it was couples who were different-race, athiest, or who purposely did not have children who were looked upon as strange and not to be trusted. Now traditional couples who are white, churchgoing, and producing children like rabbits are the ones ostracized. I hope I'm ready for what's coming to me if I'm gonna do this, and it scares me to think of exactly what might happen should I run afoul of my evil government's plans for their subjects . . . Ruby Ridge comes to mind.
Brock H.
The socialists have the Chinese model in mind. I predict in 20 years that it will be considered 'patriotic' to limit your offspring to two or face onerous penalties and/or forced abortion. Large families of the past will be viewed with the same bemusement as we consider Old Testament polygamy. Additionally. when you reach a predetermined age you will be expected to voluntarily terminate your existence for the betterment of mankind. Scant resources will need to be focused on the young and productive and not to the old and sick. BTW, I have six.
"One fears that the voters can no longer distinguish cleverness from wisdom."
Many of the voters here in Texas can't find the state on a world globe––some can't even find America. Many have no idea what the word "distinguish" means, let alone accomplishing the comparatively elevated feat of perceiving a wise man from a sophist?
I also don’t find where President Obama has any mandate for enlisting me in “the remaking of America” and in “duty to the world” as he recently told me.
Joke:
Q. What do you call the president of the United States after he leaves the room?
A. A nagger.
@17 Brock
Go get 'em! I'll buy your firstborn a set of McGuffey's Readers which will be available on the book black market even if I have to xerox my personal set. At least you'll have a secure old age, better than the gullible society which trusted in fiat money. Buy 80 acres of arable land in the middle of nowhere.
Etienne,
They darn well might be illegal by the time I do get hitched and bring forth my firstborn. The John Birch Society sells them in its online store . . . at this time, anyway, don't know for how much longer. God in Heaven knows I'm going to have to find some good Christian homeschooling material somewhere and somehow, 'cause I'm not letting my kids through the doors of one of those Marxist Youth Camps, a.k.a. public schools.
I'm also going to buy a rifle for each of my boys, and we'll go hunting at least twice a year. And my daughters will wear dresses that go all the way down to their feet with tops that go up to the neck. My sons will wear flat-front khakis and matching dress shirts, the kind that button up along the middle, with a tie or bowtie now and then.
Even then I'm sure there will be difficulties. My daughters' eyes will catch one of those slutty bikinis at a Wal-Mart whose bottoms cover no more than 1/3 of the butt and top barely covers the nipples, and they'll mention that girls they see on TV and in the public pool in town wear those, and guys give THEM a lot more attention than they do my daughters.
And my sons will mention how cool and hip those rap stars on TV and in the tabloids look. Can't I just get a pair of pants, tanktop and headrag like that, Dad, they'll ask. Worst of all, they'll each get at least a little curious about those harmless-looking public schools, and they'll want just a little tour. Lord, prepare me for the future, for my work is cut out for me.
"I also don’t find where President Obama has any mandate for enlisting me in 'the remaking of America' and in 'duty to the world' as he recently told me." A few days ago, a young friend of mine suggested to me that Obama's mandatory program of public service by Americans from youth to seniors was a subtle means of increasing the size of U.S. armed forces, since an overt military draft would be highly unpopular, politically speaking, for the administration. He is personally worried as he is only 24 years old and does not want to serve in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or in any other interventionist entanglement. Obama's program is tyranny plain and simple.
@21 Brock
I hope you can find a sturdy young lady who shares your vision. More than 2 kids means no college. No big deal since college campi are even worse for enforced conformity and groupthink than the totally illegitimate government schools system. Look to the amish who shun TV and farm for profit and seem to game the cash economy to their advantage. Teach your kids German, our stupid Martian leaders are afraid of the Hun, yet in love with the Aztec/hispanic.
@15 Jeff
I have been asked by church-going evangelicals, "don't you know where they come from?" No wonder the so-called prolife movement has amounted to nothing.
And in the good news, America's premier abortion franchiser cashed his chips in trying to land his private plane in Montana in an attempt to vacation at his luxury mansion at the Yellowstone Club. The mainstream gutter press swept his profession under the rug.
Belay my last -- Feldkamp is unfortunately still alive, it was his children and grandkids who died.
Brock @21: buy the girls rifles too! And if you follow Etienne's advice about that 80 acres, why in the world would you want to be watching television anyway and exposing your children to all the perversion you mention?
"But, then, Americans no longer are conscious of any posterity, any more than they recognise any ancestors."
Reminds me of a Biblical verse:
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord:
And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. - Malachi 4:5-6
@15 "I have noticed increasingly that it is more important to be witty and quick, especially with trivial details, than it is to be substantial and in pursuit of knowledge that takes longer than 10 seconds to explain. This is even more exaggerated in the groups just five years younger than I."
Often the witty and quick trivial detail is a quote from a Will Ferrell movie, sexual reference, or both. Try and tell a five minute story about an interesting or funny experience (with numerous asides for color) and you will see the eyes of most twenty somethings gloss over after, as you say, 10 seconds. If they havent walked off after a minute, you get the courtesy laugh at the end of your story (which graduates into an uncomfortable pause and then genuine laugh once the sitaution is saved by Will Ferrell).
@18 Patrick
Don't believe their lies: you won't be killed, you will be Renewed through Carousel.
On child hating:
My wife recently bore our fourth son. When I told various people at my workplace the news, very few of them (one, perhaps) congratulated me. The other reactions ranged from raised eyebrows to downright eye-rolling derision.
Here's the really sad part: Had I said that my wife was going to have an abortion, because she just can't handle having a fourth, the reactions would have tended to be much more respectful.
People respect death and murder more than life and prosperity. To me, it illustrates how empty and unfulfilling our culture and its entertainment really are. Instead of anticipating greatness for newborn babies (a new artist, poet, writer, builder, artisan, public servant) I suspect people anticipate the same bleak, post-modernistic exisitence they themselves have.
Indeed the Canaanites had qualities that our degenerate society lacks. Through this young man's brief study of history it does seem inevitable for every nation to decay into debauchery. That has been the inevitable fate of any people due to the accumulated curses of sin. I would point out, Mr. Bass, that the Canaanite sons of Heth appeared civilized and cultivated when Abraham was purchasing Sarah's tomb. It was also in that era that in the fertile plains east of the Dead Sea Sodom and Gomorrah existed. It was in that area the nephilim were present according to Genesis. Over four hundred years later as the Israelites were scouting Canaan the nephilim had appeared there. Throughout the Bible you hear a similar refrain repeated over and over regarding the course of many nations of people.
"And in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the wickedness of the Amorites is not yet full." -Genesis 15:16
I have a feeling in my gut we are on the brink of a societal collapse. I feel like I see just too many cracks making the U.S. particularly unsound even compared to Europe where at least people still stay close to kin instead of my family that is dispersed over thousands of miles between the two coasts. I think a nation with no regard for ancestors nails it on the head as I try to gather up genealogy documents from ambivalent or downright hostile first cousins of my parents. Those of my grandparents generation who are still around have always been helpful towards me. Those of the Baby Boomers always rebuff me with statements like how they're "more concerned with the living than the dead" after telling me how they threw all the boxes of records and photos passed given to them by the prior generation in the trash.
Though civilizations may be inclined to follow their natural course, through Christ all things are made new. However, the Church needs pruned as John Wycliffe remarked in regards to the judgements of famine, death, and plague that were striking down swaths of the population of Europe in his lifetime.
I thought I would mention that the my most difficulty in my genealogy work is with ancestors who were older stock Pennsylvanians. Their families really began to shrink in the late 19th and early 20th centuries so there aren't very many distant cousins kicking around. These small family sizes really explain why the population was completely swamped by later immigrants. My Virginian grandmother's family managed were exhaustive in the amount of family history records that had been recorded and passed down which made things easier.
Mr. Vaughan, my wife and I, proud parents of six(and who knows how many more), receive looks of shock all the time. The Mrs., on two occasions, has been told by older women that a way has been found to prevent having a large family. However, we find having a large family to be a fantastic positive, the most rewarding achievement in our lives. Occasionally, maybe two or three times a year, we are complimented at restaurants by older folks for raising such a brood. On one occasion, an older woman insisted on paying for our breakfast, she was so astounded to see such a large family eating breakfast together.
Mr. Leaberry,
I admit to being a wimp when it comes to confronting people who express disdain for new children, perhaps because their comments come sandwiched into conversation that is otherwise pleasant or benign.
Maybe a good response would be "Why would I want to have a small family?" I think I'll use that from now on, and watch the socialized liberals do the stammering. As long as I'm willing to keep speaking to them, they should dig themselves into a hole rather quickly.