The Way We Are Now—More Melancholy Observations
by Clyde N. Wilson
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“The spiritual life of a nation is more important than its territory, and more important, even, than its level of economic prosperity.”
—Solzhenitsyn
If you want to measure the quality of honesty and justice in your federal government, just read your tax instructions. Or read the list of campaign contributions to your Congressperson. Or look up how many former Congresspersons are lobbyists for foreign governments and corporations.
Take a close look at the current raft of aspirants to the Presidency. Remember, we are not electing the most popular and best-liked to be senior class president, or even the Most Valuable Player, but the occupant of the most powerful office in all of human history. How many of them have shown any really extraordinary wisdom or moral gravitas, or indeed talent for anything other than self-promotion? How many have actually done anything significant to truly benefit fellow human beings?
In fact, at least a couple of them ought to be in jail—but never will be.
Do you want to know the contribution of American culture to the world? If your stomach is strong enough, look at the music and cinema that we have exported in the last ten years or so. Owen Wister remarked prophetically almost a century ago: “The mission of America is to vulgarize the world.”
Is it not strange that in our country, said to be founded on the proposition that all men are created equal, more wealth is concentrated in fewer hands than in the traditionally class-ridden. European countries?
Leading European politicians doubtless are corrupt and cynical, but I cannot think of any who who are as dull-witted as numerous Americans who have achieved high power. In fact, public office in the U.S. is to a significant extent the preserve of dumb rich boys. (Little Bush, Teddy Kennedy, Dan Quayle, Nelson Rockefeller—shall I go on?)
One such son and heir, a congressman from an upcountry South Carolina district, certainly one of the most naturally conservative and native born districts in the United States, was reported as saying that he had to support Bush’s illegal alien amnesty because to oppose it would make him look like a neo-Nazi. Doubtless he got this strange idea from an idiot card supplied by the Republican National Committee.
What should a representative of the people do when faced with a controversial issue?
1. Ascertain and follow the opinion of the majority of people in the matter?
2. Consider carefully what is in the long-term best interest of society?
3. Obey his party leader’s opinion of what will serve the best interest of the party in future?
Give me a Republican and I’ll take 10 to 1 odds that he will choose No. 3 every time. This has been the modus operandi of the Republican party throughout its existence because the real goals of the party controllers are not the same as those of the saps who are to be fooled into voting for the party. It is always urgently insisted that the party do this or that to get elected. Why it should be elected is never made quite clear. You could fill a big room with Republican congressmen who declared their undying support for “our” President Nixon and then bailed out en masse when he became a liability.
VP Cheney’s lesbian daughter is now a proud mother, through artificial insemination. We were in the past urged to tolerate the “alternative lifestyle” because what took place between consenting adults was none of our business. But now we are talking about non-consenting children.
The leadership of the Party of Family Values has exhibited in the last ten years or so a greater percentage of homosexuals than the libertine Democrats. Not to mention other moral problems. Which party appointed as Czar of Humane Learning and Eternal Values “Dr.” William J. Bennett, better known in Vegas and Atlantic City as “Black Jack Bill”?
Has anyone noticed that the erstwhile party of the Working Man has been collaborating cheek by jowl with the party of Big Business in an immigration policy that is giving away all the gains made by labour in the last century for the benefit of the rich and foreigners?
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1 Comment by Thomas Asheton on 30 May 2007:
“Give me a Republican and I’ll take 10 to 1 odds that he will choose No. 3 every time. This has been the modus operandi of the Republican party throughout its existence because the real goals of the party controllers are not the same as those of the saps who are to be fooled into voting for the party. It is always urgently insisted that the party do this or that to get elected. Why it should be elected is never made quite clear. You could fill a big room with Republican congressmen who declared their undying support for “our” President Nixon and then bailed out en masse when he became a liability.”
Unfortunately, this is the very reason that the South has been “recreated” in the Republican image; recreated, not reconstructed.
2 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 30 May 2007:
Am I mistaken to have noticed in your writing, Clyde, as in Dr. Fleming’s in the latest issue of Chronicles, not only melancholy, but also a note of futility, resignation, if not even the sotto voce suggestion that we all adopt quietist inaction? Are we “paleoconservatives”/“Old Right” now to imitate the French Legitimists after 1883 – our cause dead, our hope dashed, our action arthritic – and thus to abandon the political fray, “to retire to our castles in the countryside” (as the phrase goes), to slam the gate, lower the portcullis, raise the drawbridge, and from the Olympic heights of our crenelated walls watch the squalid scene below us, – ourselves replete with Classical calm, sardonic jests, or Romantic longing for the Carlist King over the Pyrenees (the Blancs d’Espagne), as the Jacobites pined for “the King over the water”?
3 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 30 May 2007:
Sid, if you knew my speaking and writing commitments (at 66 years of age) you would not think that I have given up and withdrawn. My purpose (which may not work as intended) is to convince folks of the utter badness of the American Empire so that they will begin to imagine an alternative. And I have to admit, there is a lot to be said for the King-over-the-Water.
4 Comment by Sid Cundiff on 30 May 2007:
Glad to read, Clyde, that you’re still in the fight!
By the way, the King-over-the-water LIVES! See http://www.jacobite.ca/kings/index.htm
and http://www.royalstuartsociety.com/succession.html .
So we Jacobites might better off then the French Legitimists. I’d take Josef Wenzel, Prinz von und zu Liechtenstein, for my king any day over our current leader and his would-be successors — or at least most of them: I kinda like Ron Paul.
5 Comment by robert m. peters on 30 May 2007:
Does there yet in some hidden garden grow the White Rose, which when the 10th of June comes to dawn brings to recollection the King-over-the Water? If a rose of such color, wight and fair, indeed graces some well-groomed trellis or shyly hides herself as a wilding in some forgotten wood, is she mere cold symbol of things long lost never to return but in the flawed memories of men who would have been heroes had they lived in that other age; or is she an icon, a gateway, to something real and of great essence which might quicken us in the very midst of the decay with which we are surrounded. Such must always be the question of ancient legacy and of current heritage which claims to be the incarnation of the former in the modern world.
6 Comment by Michael Kenny on 31 May 2007:
During my short stay as a teenager in NJ 40 years ago, I remember hearing a story of a chaplain of Congress who was asked what his duties consisted of. He replied: “At the start of each session, I stand up in front of the House, take a look at the members and pray for the country”.
7 Comment by MarkL on 31 May 2007:
Currently, both parties are just two sides of the same coin. “The Corperate Party.
8 Comment by MarkL on 31 May 2007:
Currently, both parties are just two sides of the same coin. “The Corperate Party”.
9 Comment by Sean B. on 31 May 2007:
I always enjoy reading these articles, Clyde.
10 Comment by robert m. peters on 1 June 2007:
My wife tells me that I reside in a world of metaphors. There comes to mind pursuant to Mr. MarkL’s posting(s), the following.
In 1860, the cockatrice, conceived in the very Constitution which should have been its bane, its embryo tucked in the hidden places of the “general welfare,” the so-called “elastic clause” and the extra-constitutional phenomenon known as the “implied powers, hatched from its egg in the form of Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party. This cockatrice was the nascent empire, which by 1865, had murdered both manifestations of the Republic – these United States of America and these Confederate States of America. Dead the Republic lay in the ashes of total war. The wraith of the empire, not ready to reveal its true nature in an age which remained cautiously skeptical, animated the corpse of the murdered Republic and has so masqueraded ever since. Now it would seem, the skin is beginning to slip from the still rotting cadaver of the Republic and gaps in the putrefying flesh of the Republic are beginning to appear, exposing the demon within. Thus, we are on the cusp of despair and hope; for a demon exposed gets angry, rising up in his reality and revealing himself for what he is to destroy in terror and horror those who would dare openly oppose him; yet, revealed, the demon is known and in knowing the enemy, finally understanding what he really is, men of courage have an opportunity to slay him.
Or put into another metaphor. The leviathan is a two-headed monster – Democrat and Republican – bloating itself on the wealth produce by free men and consuming therewith their precious liberty as well.
11 Comment by John MacIsaac on 4 June 2007:
RON PAUL is one the “aspirants for the Presidency”, and a man who has shown “great wisdom and moral gravitas”. – Watch any one of speeches, especially before the US House, wherein he consistently condemns the Iraq War, the U.S.’s foreign policy, the monetary system, and a host of other federal activities incompatible with the Constitution. (see: ronpaul2008.com)
The integrity of Ron Paul can almost be measured by the hostility shown toward him by the Republicans, who seem to hate him more than Democrats do. The neo-cons definitely hate him more than the liberals do.
Your failure, Mr Wilson, to recognize or acknowledge, let alone support, Ron Paul, makes me wonder about your worthiness as a source for understanding, let alone improving, current events.