Category: CULTURE

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22 December 1808


Public events sometimes exceed the real time shared experience to take on in retrospect a certain transcendent quality. As the event subsequently becomes elevated to an iconic cultural status, the number of people who actually were “there” and their memories of it, are exceeded by the ever larger group of people who over time tie the event so fundamentally to their life experience that they also become convinced they also were “there”.  In our own life timelines, there are famous examples.  “Woodstock” defined the sixties generation.  The “Ice Bowl” mythologized the transcendence of a game into the very definition of Sport. The USA – USSR Olympic hockey upset almost overnight  reversed the defeatist psyche of a world power and inexorably exposed the other from a veneer of irresistible force to one leading to eventual collapse.  Events can define an era and announce a significant reordering of the traditional world into exciting, uncharted waters.  December 22,1808 was such a night in Vienna of the Holy Roman Empire.  The most amazing thing is almost anyone who was there to observe the kindling of a revolution had little idea that was exactly what just happened.

Ludwig Von Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany in 1770 and for the first twenty years of his life gave little indication the massive talent that was to emerge.  He showed sufficient musical ability to overcome the relatively mediocre instruction he received initially from family and instructors, soon  to be”discovered” and gain notoriety  from local regents due to his growing performance ability on the clavichord. He was supported to go to Vienna to perform and develop, the city standing then as the capital of music with Mozart and Haydn.  He had superficial interactions with Mozart, but somewhat more intense “mentoring” from Haydn, who found him obstinate and difficult and assumed he would not have the discipline to take advantage his talents even Haydn could clearly appreciate present in the young man.

Neither Haydn or Mozart, nor any sovereign in Europe, could comprehend the power of Aufklarung, or Enlightenment, changing the relationship of the growing population of educated people and their leaders.  The first matches went off in America, but the ultimate explosion was the overthrow of the oblige estates of France and the entry of a revolutionary governance.  Beethoven was at the periphery but felt the rush of energy. He began to perform music with individuality and edge, and was more than aggressive in making sure no one took advantage of his increasing command of composition.  At the time, composers had severe limitations in making a living and protecting their intellectual property.  The incomes were often at the whim of benefactors, and performances, outside of some operatic theaters, were usually in salons of the wealthy.  The idea of artist copyright and intellectual property was foreign to the 19th century at the time of Beethoven’s ascendance.  Once the creation ended in the hands of a publisher, control over further publishing, or by whom, including preventing “adjustments” to scores,  were gone for good.  Attaching a public premiere of works orienting to their publishing was, in Beethoven’s mind, a level of control that would confirm unique capabilities, secure some much needed independent income, and forever put his stamp on how the music would be appreciated or compared to others.  By arranging an ‘Akademie’ or public performance of his works alone, performed by him and conducted by him, there would be no doubt who was responsible for his genius and vision.  The event was scheduled for December 22, 1808, at the Theater and Der Wien in Vienna,  and Beethoven  looked to change the very dynamic of a composer from one who entertains, to one who transcends time and culture.

A veritable revolution in music had been proclaimed with  Beethoven’s massive Third Symphony,  first performed in 1804.  Standing the music world on its head with the size of the orchestra, the length of the piece, and the complexity of the structure, Beethoven further devised  the concept of theme foundationally securing the entire piece.  Avoiding both the entertaining and the sacred classically used to safely appeal to the royal elite, the Third thundered forward on the heroic  of the individual.  Individuality and power attained from ones own capacities was a revolutionary and dangerous prospect to the world order.  Initially, Beethoven dedicated the symphony to “Bonaparte”, as he saw the initial triumphs of Napoleon representing the heroic zenith of the Enlightenment ideal, only to become disenchanted as Napoleon became a driver of conquest and dominance and declared himself Emperor.  He renamed the symphony “Eroica” to preserve the revolutionary status, while not glorifying the darker reality.  What the Eroica Symphony did more than anything else was close the door on the Classical Era in music and herald the birth of the Romantic.

Many composers have achieved greatness only to forever frustratingly attempt and fail to reproduce the magical uniqueness of the vision.  Beethoven’s so called middle period of composition rewrote the book on musical genius.  In the crowded years of the first decade of the nineteenth century, Beethoven’s prodigious creativity simply put out the mark that every OTHER composer to follow him would try to live up to.  The Akademie performance on December 22, 1808, presented, among other pieces,  the world premiere of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and his Choral Fantasy, each a conceptual masterpiece that cemented Beethoven as the elite musical genius for all to compare.  Two hundred and fourteen years later, the first three make or break any professional orchestra’s reputation and concert season.  The fourth led eventually to th highest calling of symphonic expression, the Ninth Symphony and its Ode to Joy.

Typical for the times, neither the rapidly assembled orchestra for the Akademie performance nor its fiery and unforgiving, as well as progressively deaf, composer had any time or financial support for any serious review and rehearsal prior to performance.  The  night of the performance proved as confusing for the audience as well as the orchestra, as Beethoven himself drifted, jumped  and bellowed in an effort to direct the performers through revolutionary music he could only hear in his head, and the performers could barely see on hastily scratched out scores barely illuminated in a dimly lit and unheated hall.  Four and a half hours of complex, revolutionary musical creation took a back seat to confusion and downright audience exhaustion.  Most reviews were derogatory.  A few, however, recognized that what they had just witnessed could never be absorbed in one sitting, and the immensity of the achievements would declare itself over time.

The immensity of the achievements have declared themselves over time.  Particularly the core three pieces changed music forever and will never grow old or fail to inspire.

The Fifth Symphony stands alone as the singular musical expression of classical music. The use of a motif, three short notes, followed by a longer note, “dadada daaah”, weaved brilliantly through four distinct movements, forever removed the need for a composition to express a creation upon a melody. Baser, human emotions and primordial forces, married by rhythm, propulse throughout and led future musicologists to define what Beethoven was expressing was “Fate, knocking on the Door”.  It is unlikely that Beethoven himself felt the dot dot dot dash of the motif to be any specific realized expression of “Fate”, but he was clearly defining Struggle, Man’s inevitable battle, and eventual triumph, the core of his desire to reconcile the enlightened intellect and the forbidding romantic concept of the dark Unknowable.

The Fourth Piano Concerto may not be as accessible as the Fifth, but remains my favorite for its revolutionary character. There was little hint in Beethoven’s first three piano concertos that he was going to swerve so dramatically from the classical concerto relationship of the performer and the orchestra.  Gone is the orchestra declaring the theme and the performer echoing and accompanying with synchronicity the alliance.  Beethoven’s Fourth starts instead with the soloist individually projecting a tentative, dignified theme only to have the orchestra enter in another key and unrelated response.  The two then joust through the first movement in unbalanced conversation reaching only at the very end a brief melodic  truce. The second movement in five short minutes abandons all hope for unity.  The soloist searches for dignity with greater and greater desperation, constantly interrupted by unfeeling orchestral demand for breaking of individuality, and imposed subservience.  The clash grows until the soloist is left in a brief cadenza some of the most desperate, dissonant tones ever evoked prior to the twentieth century move away from tonality, and the listener is emptied and utterly exhausted – until Beethoven releases the suicidal tension and forgives, in the light Rondo conclusion.  Some are disappointed in the conclusion , but Beethoven knew the emotion could not go lower without breaking the listener’s spirit forever, he had to turn away from the abyss.  Expressed in the second movement, there may not be five greater minutes in music.

The Sixth Symphony was as far from the Fifth as one composer could possibly be while fulfilling the revolutionary whole.  The Sixth, designed purposefully as an “impression” rather than a reproduction of a pastoral experience forecasted the massive nineteenth century conversion to the musical creation of imagery as tone poem.  Scenery, brooks, sounds, and storms are not so much imitated as evoked.  Beauty and nature as an experience is created with sound in a fashion that Bizet would attempt to emulate and Debussy would go beyond, but neither would exceed.  As much as the Fifth would remove melodic constraint, the Sixth  would inject musical color, and compositional rules were stretched and reoriented in such a fashion that the future composers feared challenging at the the risk of forever falling short.

The final piece, the Choral Fantasy, was hastily put together but was no less influential.  Beethoven began to imagine the synthesis of composer, soloist, orchestra, and chorus into something greater than the coalescence  and summation of its parts.  The creative skeleton of olympian Ninth is there in its construct, and the eventual expressions of Wagner in leitmotif and “Gesamkunstwerk” or the total work of art.  Beethoven knew what he was creating, but found the greater motif in the Ode to Joy to realize his vision 15 years later.

The three works, married to the vision of the fourth, performed in one sitting, left everyone else behind for good.  Beethoven, in the shadow locally of Mozart and Haydn, was now the singular talent to which all other creative intellects would struggle to overcome.  Sitting in Vienna, in the shadows of Beethoven’s immense accomplishment, left Franz Schubert to maintain his orchestral works in dresser drawers to avoid side to side comparison, leaving those magnificent creations to remain hidden until a later generation brought them to light. Composers subsequent to Beethoven feared ever putting forth a Ninth Symphony, to prevent their work defining composition being seen as a pale imitation.

Thankfully, Beethoven was never afraid of his own massive shadow, and continued to reach farther and farther out to the bounds of musical expression, despite becoming completely deaf and experiencing horrendous health challenges.

On the night of December 22, 1808, Beethoven put down his marker as one of humanity’s greatest creators, and each of those singular creations forever refresh our spirit and enrich us all.

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Shelby Foote and the American Iliad

A quant relic of a long ago age that in preceding decades was quite commonplace among small towns throughout the eastern half of the American continent, is a now rarely witnessed event – a civil war battle re-enactment. Local and regional commonfolk would take the opportunity to meet in bivouac, dress in period clothing, utilize uniforms and arms consistent with the Civil War era, and re-enact major battles of the war on a farmer’s field or semi-forested prairie to link themselves, in some fashion,  to ancestors long gone who had participated in the very real thing. Crowds would gather to see the camps, watch the maneuvers, smell the gunpowder, and immerse themselves in what it must have been like to have left home and risked all in a battle to save a nation, or defend a home state. The untold message of such events was the quiet dignity reflected of having achieved  a modern modicum of tolerance for each others views, that had at one time had created a state of passion so intolerable to live within, that it could not be salved without a fight to the death .  The war itself, as the culmination of a decades long ever more intense disagreement of the very nature of the nation’s founding, was foundational class work material for all educational levels to attempt to deal with the logic and decisions that led to a tragic conflagration and almost a hundred years of subsequent strife, to both live up to and eventually make the nation worthy of the terrible sacrifice.

The re-enactments helped bring palpability to the history that ran through the veins of both participants and onlookers.  History of such intensity that emotions at the sight of a battleground, a flag, or gravesite are still capable of tears 160 years later.  It is a history current    cultural warriors try to simplistically frame on racial terms and paint the country’s spasm a outgrowth of original sin, the ugly stain they glean from the nation’s very founding.  The re-enactments have been demeaned, the statues removed, the anniversaries ignored, story tellers reviled.  It is easier to redefine the issues and causes in a more indoctrinatal way if the palpable reminders are physically eliminated.

There are bulwarks against the modern revisionism.  Ken Burns created in 1990 a special form of palpable history with his miniseries cinematic essay on the American Civil War.   It introduced a humanity to the events and combatants that prevented easy labelling, and brought to celebrity a heretofore obscure southern novelist and historian to immense national prominence – Shelby Foote.  Foote had spent thirty years of his life producing a history of the war that emulated an ancient Greek tome.  Told in the vernacular and view of the times, heroes and villains, dangerous and enormous trials of courage, surprising warrior complexity and moments of sheer terror and boredom, the three volume trilogy spoke to the essential essence of the people of the conflict, and the conflict that made or broke them by the thousands.  Foote translated to Burn’s cinema a tragic timbre to the events and engrossed millions of viewers who had only peripherally connected with the conflict.  Foote brought his unique perspective of the foot soldier and particularly the southern infantryman, of whom it is simplistically assumed were motivated by race and the slavery issue.  As Foote reminded all, the great majority of southern soldiers owned no slaves and had no direct investment in this part of the conflict.  As Foote explained, when the southern soldier was asked his motivation for fighting so fiercely, he often retorted, ” its because you’re down here.” Place meant more then anything when armies threatened homes a thousand miles distant, in a time when most had never been thirty miles away from their own home.  Foote’s soft drawl, deep insight,  and novelist framing made for riveting history.  As Homer had his Iliad, Foote’s treatise helped bring a tragic beauty to a dark and violent story.

So as you might imagine, thirty years later, as statues of heroes come down to serve the modern narrative, the cancel culture has turned its heat on Shelby Foote.  Foote died in 2005 at age 89, and thankfully is not around to see the frivolous  assault on 19th century history and southern symbols.  His Wikipedia page however is laced with efforts to degrade his southern view into racist doggerel and try to link him to prejudice and hate.  It is anathema to imagine something trying to explain the world view of the average 19th century American without correcting with 21st century caveats.  The historical ignorance of such approaches avoids the very real, complex arguments that made a peaceful evolution to the ideals of equality so difficult – concepts of destiny, tribalism, states rights versus founding philosophies, societal hierarchies throughout history.  Despite all, the country found the courage to test its original idea of all men are created equal in an existential conflict, that destroyed huge swaths of the country and took nearly a million lives to answer in the affirmative.  People didn’t hold the views they held regarding society because they were stupid, they held them because they felt their own world view deserved existence in a revolutionary society.  Foote gathered from his own ancestors, the stories of his youth, and his own sense of the sweep of history to bring alive the distant time in a manner few others have ever done in explaining the American experiment .

If you are willing to listen to distant voices to better understand own own times, read Shelby Foote’s magnificent history, watch the Burns cinematic miniseries, immerse yourself in the Lincoln Douglas debates, and take time to read both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas. A years investment of time will bring you ever closer to a nuanced and rational grasp of your own time, and avoid the silly nonsense of our current “experts” on what plagues society. We should never be afraid of what inspired us in an earlier time, and Shelby Foote gave us one of the great reflections of our all too human journey.

 

 

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9/11 Twenty Years Later – The Reckoning

The harrowing image even twenty years later sears with heat from distant memory. On a beautiful, crystal clear morning, September 11, 2001 , a vicious gash of reality was lanced across America’s psyche by determined Islamic terrorists orchestrated by an international collective looking to decapitate America’s confidence and vitality in a ruthless and brilliant multi-pronged attack.  America’s smug and lax view of its own potential vulnerabilities, reinforced by a fifty year victory in the cold war against communism leaving it the solitary superpower in the world, and utterly ignorant of a new threat despite multiple sentinel attacks – the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center,  the 1998 bombing of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the brazen 2000 attack on the USS Cole- left an America woefully unprepared for the inevitable next step in a war, attacking the enemy’s very citadels of power.  The self declared leader of the enemy force, Osama Bin Laden, had interpreted the complete lack of retaliatory response from the United States from the previous various attacks as marking the United States as an impotent, paper tiger.  September 11th was an attack of ultimate disdain , directly striking the financial center, military headquarters, and sans the heroism of a group of passengers on Flight 93 to defy fate, the political heart of the enemy Capitol itself.   The simultaneous blows brought America to its knees.  All transport and economic activity halted. The country watch in horror as the Pentagon burned, a plane fell out of the sky in Pennsylvania, and the two identically injured massive Manhattan  towers suddenly crumbled like so much paper mâché in New York, taking thousands of lives.

The immediate reaction was revulsion, followed by angry resolution.  The President declared those that had committed this national atrocity would find no quarter – not the individuals, nor the countries that harbored them.  The giant arm of aggression was mobilized. Monies were traced and frozen. The country was placed on war footing – phone calls and computer traffic  were monitored, airports, trains and ports were stiffened with military patrols and intense screening of passengers and freight.  The military organized to strike at the acknowledged criminal lair of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and swiftly with knife like precision drove the terrorists into caves and the overlord Taliban out of power and wrenched back to Pakistan.  One by one, the worst culprits, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Zacharias Moussaoui, and eventually Osama Bin Ladin himself were hunted down and either captured or killed. World wide cooperation was nearly total, even from the Saudi Kingdom, out of which the radical strain of Islam, Wahabiism, had been protected and nurtured to such an extent that 16 of 19 of the 9/11 hijacker suicide terrorists proved home grown.  The response seemed serious and relentless, and the threat imperiled to near extinction.

Yet, almost from the beginning, the weakness and vulnerability Bin Laden prophesied would  lead to America’s downfall, like exploited cracks in supposedly impregnable  ramparts, began to show. The cracks have grown and remain a present danger, every bit as much as was felt present by Bin Laden September 10th, 2001.

Internal Retribution:  Almost immediately the brief period of national unity and patriotic purpose was turned upon by the loathe America and western civilization  crowd. The lefts’ re-branding of the horrific event started forthwith. Islam is a peaceful religion. The Saudis that flew the planes as repurposed  flying bombs, killing over three thousand Americans, were driven by the oppressive poverty of their upbringing, and together with America’s unflinching support of the occupier Israel, unleashed their desperation. America is guilty of a world hegemony view that has lead to overreach and arrogance among oppressed peoples.  Christianity with the Crusades showed the West as foundationally culpable for the current state of Islamic hatred.  America profiles because other cultures are viewed as inferior – therefore profiling must be banished.  All phones must be equally monitored.  All passengers must submit to humiliating airport searches. Apologies must be made to set things right.  America has no right to identify good and evil when the very nature of its founding was racist and evil.  The west must accept occasional violence to the point of bombings and beheadings of teachers and priests,  rigorous policing of free speech to prevent any perceived insult, and acceptance of sharia informed upon its own citizen as representing “culture”.   After 20 years of focused, painful, and expensive investment of lives and treasure, one finds the Taliban once again in control of Afghanistan enforcing sharia and the obliteration of western concepts of free speech, equality, and artistic expression, and the Shia Iranian theocrats pulling the strings in Iraq, Yemen,  and Syria.  The West and America are locked down, churches abandoned, free speech and free commerce restricted, and constant battering regarding western principles that had one time achieved a classless, opportunity driven, post racial society.

Sense of Mission: The precise and surgical identification of the problem and routing terrorist cells in Afghanistan was almost immediately cluttered with delusional and distracting “nation building” and “exporting of freedom”.  The festering problem with Saddam Hussein and Iraq was intentionally packaged with the original criminal clique of radical Islam,  the United States and Britain leading a “hunt” to remove weapons of mass destruction, which rapidly evolved into the “you broke it, you own it” admonition of Colin Powell coming true. With the spectacular elimination of the Baath army of Iraq and capture and execution of Hussein, the “nation builders” moved in and established an oversight “administration” that the Iraqis immediately hated and saw as colonial , and initiated a nasty, bloody six year insurrection that cost thousands more American lives and limbs and hundreds of British troop casualties, as well as collapse of the consensus mission  in the entire area.  The eventual subduing of the insurrection at great cost was arbitrarily given up by Obama to focus on the “good” war in Afghanistan, along with an apology tour that only magnified the appearance of weakness to America’s enemies and horrified its allies in the region.  Syria and Libya collapsed with American incompetence and local radical explosion. By 2016, radicals overran Syria and western Iraq, returning the medieval caliphate concept, made Libya a living hell, and threatened Yemen and Egypt.  A brief respite in the mission creep, achieved by the Trump administration, crushing ISIS and taking out Al-Baghdadi and Soleimani, was nullified by Biden’s obsession with being the Anti-Trump, resuming humiliating subservience to the Iranian Theocrats and disastrously blowing the Afghanistan withdrawal, putting the same Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives back in charge that the original mission had pointedly identified , captured and placed in Guantanamo (only to be released by Obama in obscene payment for the return of an American army deserter).

Recognition of American Cultural Identity:  The calamity of 9/11 had focused clarity on what was so offensive to the radical terrorists that planned and performed the  attack – American culture itself, most specifically freedom.  The story of the hijackers, particularly as personified by Mohammed Atta the lead hijacker, was their hatred of American influence.  As reported regarding Atta and his particular crew, they were particularly disgusted by their own weakness living in America in preparation for the attacks.  They found themselves in dance clubs, strip clubs, participating in debauched acts that only magnified their need to strike back at the Great Satan and cleanse themselves.  American freedom, American interracial  and inter sex mixing, music, abundance at the stores, even easy access to “flight schools” with no particular training or study necessary to initiate self improvement were indications of the temptations they realized would only destroy their home cultures as they interpreted them, clinging to a ninth century interpretation of Islamic culture, superior to the western model but subjugated by the satanic influences of western individualism and hedonism.  Their war was the Long War, and they counted on the globalist anti-American clique to eventually fight their fight for them.   American freedom as proposed by the Founders was a virus upon the world, and had to be irradiated at its source.  Their willing allies are the global elites who disdain the average Americans’ unwillingness to surrender to a generic globalist definition of good, a ‘world citizen” subservient to consumption, identified and categorized by sex and race not accomplishment, restricted in self actualization by strict obedience to directives on “health” and “climate”, and oblivious to preserving any borders that would maintain a national consensus and identity.

The consensus appears that twenty years in the interval between the attacks of 9/11 and the withdrawal from Afghanistan on the twentieth anniversary of those attacks reflect a one sided victory for Bin Laden’s prophetic vision of the eventual outcome of his diabolical plan.  An estimated 80 million Americans were born after 9/11. They and millions more have no direct memory of any of the emotions or consequences proceeding from that terrible day. The vision of their world has been firmly formed by the cadre of intelligentsia in schools that form the core of the loathe America crowd.  Its no small wonder that the American President felt he could abruptly and cavalierly give up all the hard won gains of the past twenty years and abandon Americans in-country to the wrath of the Taliban without consequences.  After all, what is an American that would necessitate special consideration?  Nothing exceptional at stake here, please move along.  Good and evil are antiquated concepts to this antiquated President.  We best learn to keep our heads down, mind are own business, and get on with the excision of the American Ideal forever from the American Mind.

It may turn out that the devil Bin Ladin and his operational chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were right all along.  America and its obsession with freedom is a relic, it just needs a push to initiate its own self destruction, and the rotted edifice will come tumbling down.  We shall see.  Like all harsh realities in life, as free individuals, know what ramparts are worth defending and defend them with your very being.  The defense is only as strong as its weakest link. Ultimately, stand tall, acknowledge your core beliefs, and with sustained resolution,  you will survive.

If not, payback’s a bitch.

 

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Calvin Coolidge and the 4th of July

 

In the early morning hours of August 3rd, 1923, in the unincorporated hamlet of Plymouth Notch, Vermont, the local justice of the peace and notary public John Coolidge lit a small kerosene lamp in the small front parlor of  his home.  The lamp provided critical illumination for an epochal event, as the little abode was without electricity or telephone, highlighting two of John Coolidge’s most cherished elements of his life, the family bible, and the hand and face of his son Calvin. Just a few minutes earlier, a knock on the door had awakened the family, and a courier provided the news that the twenty second president of the United States Warren Harding had died the previous day of a heart attack. The extreme remoteness of Plymouth Notch and the Coolidge’s resistance to modern contrivances such as a telephone led to the unique circumstances in the middle of the night, but John Coolidge understood his duty as a justice and an American citizen, and proudly delivered to his son Calvin, the Vice President, the oath of office as the twenty third President of the United States.

Such humble beginnings for an American Presidency are alien to our  modern sensibilities.  Presidents at this time come from elite families, elite universities, and often publicly acquired wealth.  Coolidge was from the other America, the rural  backwaters that are derided by elites who have fallen in love with  experts and pedigrees.  His humble circumstance imbued his Presidency with corresponding humility in his approach and his governance, confusing the academic custodians who can not bring themselves to interpret such characteristics as representing great leadership.  Coolidge is routinely derided by liberal academics as “ineffective and reactionary”, and is often placed in the lower half of Presidential rankings.   Yet, such backwaters have produced leaders such as Jackson, Lincoln, Coolidge, and Truman.  One could argue the guardianship of the American Experiment have been safest in the hands of such men.

July 4th, the accepted inauguratory day of our nation’s founding, has witnessed the death of three Presidents, Adams, Jefferson, and Monroe, but the birth of only one, Calvin Coolidge, on July 4th, 1872.  Independence Day forever fit Calvin Coolidge better than most Presidents.  Coolidge’s preparatory life and subsequent Presidency were intimately true to the founding documents, and he did not inject power from his elected position where power had not been placed by the founders.  His Presidency presided over six years of some of the most prosperous years of the United States through the so called roaring 20’s, achieving massive prosperity and dramatic modernization of the country, essentially  by  staying out of the way.  His nuanced understanding of the perfectly woven powers of the Constitution , to his way of thinking, prevented him from performing  actions that were not his to perform.  His reticence was legendary to the point where he was derided by the press with the moniker, Silent Cal.  Oft told stories describe this unique Presidential attribute to a tee.  The highly educated and articulate Coolidge refused to comment where he felt his opinion was not appropriate.  It was said that President Coolidge was “silent in five languages”.  Once at a Washington dinner party, a chatty guest placed next to him to draw him out commented to Coolidge, ” Mr. President, I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” Coolidge blithely replied, “You lose.”

Coolidge’s stand back demeanor and philosophy in no way defined his fertile and intellectual grasp of multiple complex subjects, particularly the circumstances and basis for the American Experiment. Coolidge sagely recognized and articulated elegantly the unique marriage of the genius of the founders’ documents to the success of the United States and remained principled and confident in his approach and leadership as a result.  The paucity of spoken words belied an astute intellect and a deep and articulate capability for discourse when he felt the need.  He expounded with clarity and conviction unpopular opinions of the time on female suffrage,  black and indigenous people’s civil rights, and the obligations of the successful citizen to give back and care for those less fortunate.  His comments particularly on race for the time bordered on radical, but he felt no compunction to hold back because he saw the Declaration of Independence and  Constitution explicit in foundationally supporting his views.

The best example of underestimating President Coolidge is likely found in one greatest documents ever produced by a President,  Calvin Coolidge’s speech on the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, given July 5th, 1926.  The entire speech is worth many reads as it is magnificent prose, and so beautifully argued as to put more famous presidential addresses to shame.  In today’s historical vacuousness, there is a clumsy and ignorant clamor to see the amazing events of 1776  and the Declaration of Independence as a reactionary time of men consumed by their prejudices and possessions.   As I said, ignorant.  Coolidge weaves the careful precedents and revolutionary and radical concepts that make the Declaration not a document of its time but a timeless testimonial as prescient and relevant to our present and future as any peon to the past.  Witness Coolidge’s calm but impassioned logic in the below excerpt, as we wander aimlessly to find our core among the superficial post-modern babble that passes for educated rhetoric on this July 4th, 2021:

“About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”

God Bless this great nation on its birthday, a nation that from its birth has time and again produced unique souls in people such as Frederick Douglasses and Calvin Coolidges in equal bursts of brilliance , that stand athwart the glassy eyed dimness of those who can not see what they have so uniquely been given.

Happy Birthday, America.  And stand tall.  Don’t let anyone try to take our beautiful idea down.

 

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History Redoux

It took an election of a President who started his political career in the 1970s to bring back all the gifts of that wonderful decade for a whole new generation of Americans to experience.  The list in the four short months President Biden has been in office affecting history is eerily familiar .  Gas shortages. Inflation.  Poor job growth.  Race tension. Drugs poring over the border.  Middle East on fire. Communist dictatorships on the ascendance. American withdrawal from an overseas military debacle. Cratering American confidence in its institutions. The difference this time is all of this was on purpose.  What would possess a country with the natural abundance of materials, talent , and freedoms of America to willingly subvert its own innate proclivity for success?  The simple answer is leadership exhaustion, requesting we simply learn to accept that maintaining exceptionalism is too daunting. It appears it has taken a leader in obvious personal decline to show the rest of us how we can find happiness in a national decline.  As the left sagely informs us with its post modern weariness for personal initiative, Buck up comrades. Soon it will be curtains, and no one will feel left behind.

The malaise of the 1970s, was officially named by President Carter as the country’s pathologic diagnosis towards the end of the decade.  It appeared the American experiment was out of ideas and out of energy.  This was not an entirely unpredictable outcome of the awesome responsibility the conclusion of World War II forced upon the United States, to have a traditionally isolationist people take on the mantle of leadership of the free world.  This uncomfortable responsibility was as a consequence of exiting the war with the country’s massive manufacturing infrastructure intact, fully 50% of the the world’s economic capacity.  The cold war for dominance between the Soviet Union and the United States forced a perpetual state of proxy wars as a direct confrontation in the nuclear age was simply unthinkable. The constant pressure to address external challenges left the US vulnerable to internal restlessness and contradictions given its own long standing inequities in civil rights, environment, and infrastructure.  The solitary injection of self esteem coming from  the spectacular accomplishment of the national crusade of landing a man on the moon and returning the crew safely within a single decade of the sixties, left the nation surprisedly bereft of energy for the next technological leap forward.  Assassinations of political leaders and an excruciating political debacle in Watergate that took down a President and left the assumed Constitutional stability wobbly and bruised, was followed by ignominious loss of Indochina despite the painful investment tens of thousands of lives and a trillion dollars.  The country seemed lost from its moorings, friendless,  and feeble against an ascendant Soviet empire.

Gas prices soared along with interest and jobless rates.  Cities became dens of uncontrolled crime and pollution. A generation of young people had seen the American promise of a better life with each succeeding generation a hollow facade.  The President of the United States in his frustration stated the obvious.  The problem was with people and their malaise, and his only advice was to …hunker down.

The amazing, recurring characteristic of America since its 1776 has always been its stubborn counterintuitive resiliency at times of apparent mortal peril and despondency.  The winter of 1777-78 found the American army in frozen taters at a point of virtual collapse at Valley Forge while the greatest military power in the world inhabited all the major cities.  1781 saw the spectacular reversal of Yorktown  with Cornwallis surrendering his entire army and with it the last tendrils of hope of maintaining the British dominance of the colonies.  The British took their revenge on a helpless United States in 1812 burning the White House down humiliating the fleeing US President Madison. 1814 cumulated in the obliteration of the British at New Orleans by Andrew Jackson and the removal of British influence forever between Mexico and Canada. By 1861, an irreconcilable view of the country’s reason for being and the core rationality the founding documents led to a horribly violent schism and the deaths of three quarters of a million Americans.  Massive loss and destruction, and the martyrdom of a President proved insufficient to prevent the eventual hard one reconciliation and the inexorable forces that finally corrected America’s great flaw a century later. The spectacularly horrific thirty years of two brutal world wars bracketing a world wide depression seemed to risk the very existence of the American experiment against massive economic and totalitarian forces.  Yet by 1948, the American Colossus stood economically unique in the world, and opportunity for every American seemed to have finally attained the wildest dreams of the genius founders.

The culmination of the events of the 1970s were similarly  felt by the elites to have finally positioned America in a post modern position of having its destiny determined by others, and many of the elite felt America deserved its fate.  Yet, once again, from an entirely unexpected source, a so-called second rate film actor turned politician named Ronald Reagan, an American renaissance was borne so great that it was to last almost 40 years, the tide incredibly bringing down the Soviet empire, freeing hundreds of millions of people, and restoring the American capacity for risk and innovation, birthing and developing the Information Revolution.

The past ten years seem to reflect how this tendency for American rebirth sticks in the craw of the American elite.  President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” struck at the heart of America’s seeming providential awakenings.  For socialist ideology, a history of repeated massive failure on the world stage only deepens the resolve of the leftist need to destroy American exceptionalism, for as long as it exists, the narrative to simply accept the delivered justice to the masses by the terminally educated who know better about the appropriate societal strata.  The flaming orange comet that was Donald Trump only incited a great desperation to destroy American resilience once and for all, and get it line with the other countries that had left striving for greatness behind for simple co- existence. Trump had to go, and with each unbound, irrational success he had in somehow restoring Americans taste for the hard work of recovery, the elites task became more determined, and more deadly in targeting.

Succeed they did, and now the Presidency is in the hands of a shell of a husk of a carton of a man who in his prime was sub-prime, and in his deteriorated state, simply a blank canvas upon which the agenda can be painted and the narrative to be guided.  This time, they hope, it really is over.  Gas lines, exploding interest rates, unbounded debt, existential crises, and a floundering flounder of a leader.

This time, they got us beat, don’t they?

Could America achieve one more Awakening from this debacle?

 

 

 

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Across the Fruited Plain…

RUSH LIMBAUGH 1951-2021

The news this morning February 17, 2021,  of the passing of Rush Limbaugh was a gut punch but not a surprise to his many millions of fans.  With his brave announcement last year acknowledging a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer, the inevitable denouement of a terminal disease was ordained, and Rush knew it and faced it without ambiguity.  He spent the last year doing what he had done for thirty years, projecting the voice of a great unrepresented populous into the national discourse, making it impossible to ignore by the elites, who yearned for the day when he, and they, would go away.  The day has come.  Most obvious is not the great emptiness of his passing, but of a great silence, because into the breach there was  only one spiritual voice, the Great MahaRushi, reaching out to millions who felt somebody stood up for them and their quant, old fashion values of liberty, individualism, and patriotism.  It is now gone.

The magic elixir that was Rush Limbaugh was never really understood by the elites, even those who stood to make millions from the popularity of his program.  Limbaugh was Twitter before there was Twitter, the Internet before there was Internet, connecting people in a shared experience three hours a day, year after year.  With Rush coming to the national stage in 1988 from a short run as a talk jockey in Sacramento, California to a small but national platform in New York on the ABC network, the idea of an opinionated point of view projected over the duration of three hours maintaining audience interest was unheard of.  Opinion was something left to the back pages of newspapers, informing people the “correct” way to think on issues and was considered unseemly and definitely unprofitable in public discourse.  Conservative opinion was treated like a zoo animal, to be viewed from a safe distance as absurd esoterica on programs such as William Buckley’s Firing Line.   The assumption I suspect of the producers at ABC hiring the Missouri born rock and roll deejay was that it would fill a couple months of  air time creating publicity, until they could think of something else.  The rapidly developing truth of the matter was that no one foresaw the pent up demand, because no one had really wanted to know it was there.  Ronald Reagan had been an enigma to them, appealing to a massive group of people that crossed party lines and therefore identified as “uncontrollable”.  With Reagan gone, the assumption was this transient cultural anomaly “died” with the end of his Presidency.  Limbaugh perceptively interpreted Reagan’s special connection with average Americans and converted it into a daily revival meeting.

The syndicated show started as a few score of syndicated stations, and rapidly grew into the behemoth of over 600 stations in 50 states reaching over twenty million people daily.  Five days a week, every week, the middle of the day was tied to a spot on the dial of an assumed defunct technology, radio, over the previously archaic radio AM frequency  in nearly every town in America.  People listened at work – in their cars, in trucks, down highways, at construction sites, on tractors – fulfilling their good feelings for the day with a complete dose of Limbaugh’s unique mix of unfettered opinion, biting satire, and out and out entertainment.   A phenomena in the 1990’s were the development of “Rush” rooms – places in restaurants or work cafeterias where people could eat and drink and in a communal fashion share exclusively Rush.  The most liberal of cities had to face the reality of talk radio breaching the liberal consensus, for the simple reason it made money, and if the station had Rush, it made massive money, and a bunch of careers.  Alternative media was born, and Limbaugh invented it.  Limbaugh opened the revival all those years with the stirring opening notes of the Pretenders’ anthem “My City Was Gone” and a statement he was reaching out “across the fruited plain” to all of the millions who sought him out, the first telling recognition and smack back at  the developing elite snobbery regarding that ‘backward’ land mass between the coasts they derided as “Fly Over Country”.   The elites could not possibly stand him, because progressively they could not stand being restrained by those who would not submit to the post-history world of globalism, special interest groups, and international consumerism.

The undeniable impact of Limbaugh was his singular effect on trumpeting the 1994  “Contract with America”, Newt Gingrich’s multi-point take down of Washington elitism as a strategy for nationalizing congressional elections.  Limbaugh’s incessant  mantra for support for the radical conservative idea brought untold  political power to bear, and what had been casually derided as a blustering, buffoonish “shock jock” schtick,  became revolutionary political science, with the Democrats losing what had been over 40 years of uninterrupted congressional supremacy –  the stunning outcome of over 60 seats turning republican and Gingrich vaulted into the Speaker’s chair.  Limbaugh was greeted by the incoming representatives with thunderous applause and ‘honorary” membership in the class. He was credited by most with being the difference maker, the revolutionary.  From that point onward, no political national campaign to could hope to progress without securing their “Limbaugh” flank.

Limbaugh grated at the misconception that he was a Republican front; he saw himself as a conservative and saw no rational alternative from the democrat side of the aisle. The ever more progressive fracture of the common sense middle left him labelled as a party insider to the media and frequently he felt stuck supporting candidates he felt had abandoned his conservatism.  He tolerated Bush, grated at McCain, and overlooked the formless Romney to support the fiscal conservative Ryan.  He began to see real heat from Washington elites when he stated that if their anointed messianic figure, the new President Obama, was to govern on a socialist agenda, he hoped he would fail.  Obama had already been re-invented as a uniting figure, having cracked the invisible race barrier to power, and Limbaugh’s alternative opposition was something that could not be tolerated.  The attacks regarding Limbaugh’s  frailties became personal, and incessant. A rehab stay for opioid addiction resulting from his multiple back surgeries made his private medical history somehow fair game for a “crusading”district attorney.  His sudden deafness left his unique gift- the art of communication, in maximal peril.  He soldiered on, performing the almost impossible task of doing a talk show for three months unable to hear his own voice, until the technology of cochlear implants saved his gift, and our access to it, for another decade.  He became an elite outcast, but his loyal audience never buckled  and continued to grow.

Limbaugh kept his one of a kind cultural bonafides thirty years into his career, when he recognized, before almost all others the phenomena that was Trump.  In 2015, confronted with a packed slate of Republican candidates that dominated the establishment conversation, Limbaugh instead listened to his audience and realized that the irregular newbie politician Trump connected with the “fly overs” like no other candidate.  To the amazement of many, Limbaugh started promoting the Trumpian movement long before there was any semblance of documented electoral support.  As with Gingrich’s revolutionaries of 1994 and the Tea Party of 2010, Limbaugh saw through his audience a yearning and loyalty to the brash Trump that no other establishment candidate could hope to achieve,.  Limbaugh presciently saw in Trump a real chance at defeating his arch nemesis Hillary Clinton, and her drive to install the permanent marriage of crony capitalism and the eternal government ruling class.  November, 2016, Limbaugh was once again right regarding the American pulse, and the pundits left breathless at the stunning Trump win.

The Trump years for all their achievements left Limbaugh having to defend the combustible Trump with a diminishing set of rhetorical weapons through vicious counter attacks led by the marriage of political opposition and a media no longer hiding their uniform bias against all the Limbaugh principles of a successful American society.  Two impeachments, a devastating pandemic, and Limbaugh’s ominous diagnosis left both Limbaugh and Trump terminally wounded.  Trump spasmed into post-electoral incoherence and was washed from the scene not by the millions who supported him, but a ludicrous clinging to a “rigged” election and the pathetic band of capitol interlopers that thought they were somehow protesting an injustice.  Limbaugh fought the ever more devastating  effects of radical chemotherapy, sapping his strength, and eventually succumbing to the irresistible force of the malignancy.  February 2nd proved to be the last on air time for the great one.

And now he belongs to the ages.  El Rushbo has led his last revival and we have been allowed into the great radio tent of liberty, attending the “Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies” for the last time.  The ever present three hour conversation lead by El Rushbo and his Excellence in Broadcasting Network across the American fruited plain with millions of us Americans who harbored the quant notion that the founders had been on to something great, is no more.  The great heart of liberty, individualism, and optimism for America’s future through its original calling, has been silenced.  Somehow, we at the Ramparts, absent our great captain, will carry on.  Thank you Rush , for all the hours and laughs, restored convictions, and pride in this great country we shared – together.  God Bless.

 

 

 

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The Unmoved Mover

ARISTOTLE                                      ascr.wikipedia

It is a testament to the concept of towering intellect when your ideas, only partially preserved over the ancient recesses of time, contribute to the fundamental core of our understanding of just about everything 2400 years later.  That is the essence of the man Aristotle (384BC – 322BC) who lived in Greece at the time where the means of measurable information was minuscule and the depth of thought and reason by those observers of their world  immense.  In the ancient world,  Greece swung way above its tiny weight in relative resources and manpower on the basis of its celebration of the intellect.   In the realm of reason, giants lived – Socrates begot Plato and Plato begot Aristotle.  Aristotle was uniquely among them a true polymath.  Everything interested him; he spent his 62 years learning and expounding on diverse topics such as zoology, physics, logic, the arts, psychology and economics.  Of particular note was his interest in the meaning of everything, that world where the human intellect goes to understand the why things are, and have come to be.  The world of metaphysics is not for the casual afternoon of contemplation.  The arguments that form the foundation of a logic explaining existence, causation, effect, time and space have absorbed the greatest of our perceptive thinkers over the eons.  Understanding the abstraction of things helps to bring clarity to the underlying essential truth, independent of the point of observation.  Aristotle, reaching across the 24 intervening centuries, has much to tell us about our current intellectual vacuousness and lack of rigor and casualness regarding truth.

Aristotle perceived a world that existed not as some abstract projection of reality, but as full of real substance under constant tension from the sum of its parts.  In a beautiful contemplation well beyond my power to deliver or do justice in a few sentences, Aristotle dealt with the basic conundrum of whether it is possible that something could ever emanate  from something else; how is it possible that something could seemingly come from nothing, an impossibility if existence is real and not a projection or simulation.  The first concept was that which exists, or actual, has the potential to change, but requires that its specific, associated potential to change be actualized by another entity, or actualizer.  In simple framing, as described by Edward Feser in his wonderful treatise,  Five Proofs of the Existence of God,  a hot cup of coffee left out over time cools, yet, while hot, its coolness does not yet exist, but must come into being affected by another.  The hot coffee, though hot, has a potential to coolness, but requires an outside force, an actualizer- i.e. the cool air around it, or the ice cube you drop in it.  The air has the potential to cool the coffee but only if it has sufficient potential for coolness actualized by the air conditioner that acts upon it.  The air conditioner’s potential to cool air is actualized by the freon that circulates within it.  The freon’s potential to circulate is actualized by the motor that actualizes the circulation of the freon.  The motor’s potential to actualize the circulation is actualized by electricity, the flow of electricity actualized by the power plant, and so on and so on.   The potential each entity has to change is actualized by an actualizer, and so change occurs all the time through actualizers moving upon the actualized until one gets to the point of existence from non-existence, at which the first actualizer must be self actualized or could not exist , its existence always actual and not affected by change. That self actualized entity moves causation without being acted upon because it is inherently fully actualized and therefore devoid of potential to be acted or moved upon.  It is the core of all existence, Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover.

I am not so foolhardy to think that the above paragraph talking superficially about a cup of coffee remotely orients one towards Aristotle’s concepts regarding an Unmoved Mover, a fully actualized, “unique, immutable, eternal, immaterial intellect that is the uncaused ultimate cause of everything other than itself”.  Aristotle was not concerning himself with questions of man’s reason for existence or the possible existential relationship of the thinking being towards the devine.  He was concerned with metaphysics, not divinity.

The logic however has much to teach us about our society’s looseness with truth, and current disdain for the accumulated thought of the generations that came before them.  Post modernists and their reliance on narrative to describe the world around them rather than any rationally derived understanding of underlying truth leads to the vacuousness of today’s lives and crisis mongering.  Approaching the search for truth as a device that must be actualized by a narrative or not exist at all, is codified in all our modern misunderstandings of man as both the maker and breaker of our age’s ills. Man is ultimate, and ultimately destructive.  We must therefore remove ourselves from yesterday’s mistakes, and accept our burden to cleanse the ignorant past. The narrative expresses itself as “settled” or “unmoved” by alternative potentials or actualizers.   The world’s climate existed in ideal form before man, and man’s effect upon it is conclusive and ultimate in its “change” toward the worst.  Wealth is finite, and therefore one man’s accumulation of wealth actualizes another becoming poorer – redistribution is the only “settled” science to restore appropriate balance.  Sex is fluid; the concept of “man” or “woman” is an intersectional perception not a biological truth.  God does not exist, because if He did, there would not be inequity and evil.  Science is fully realized truth, and any rational outcome simply awaits the unveiling of that truth through more science.  Our failings as a society are systemic, and inherent because of our biases, not our individual potentials. The settled narrative substitutes for truth.   Our politics are devoid of consensus, because that would require rationalizing cause and associated effect.  We fall for conspiracy theories, fragments or distortions of facts, collective blindness and fear mongering that fits our narrative, because the more complex, nuanced underlying truth is potentially going to challenge us and take us to places we do not wish to go.

Aristotle taught his students, including his most famous pupil, Alexander the Great, that ultimately the universe functions far beyond us, upon its own logic, on its own timetable, and with potential outcomes dependent upon the forces that actualized the potential.  Human beings can only attempt to conceptualize the larger truth, but are owners only of their place in existence, awaiting the actualizing of their potential by the untold number of forces that are actualized themselves in an innumerable series of interactions.  It is left to each human the intellect that perceives the appreciation of what was possible, what was actualized, and what was inevitable.  It is our unique gift among species.

It is left to the Unmoved Mover alone, to be responsible for it all.

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Freedom of Speech

 

America is a hot mess.

Conceived with two of  the greatest foundational documents in history on the principles and means to “redress grievances”, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with its associated Bill of Rights, the country instead has determined to dissolve itself into a morass of retribution and moral incoherence.

Faced with the realization of a concluded verdict on an electoral process that transmogrified into the mother of all sorriest excuses for electoral integrity, a randy group of self absorbed “protesters” acted upon their outrage, predicated on the thinnest of veneers of understanding of the above rights , to invade the capital building and pathetically try to overturn the result.  Their deluded president, convinced that what was obvious to him should be obvious to all, railed against the legitimacy of the process that for more than two hundred years has maintained the stable and peaceful transfer of power associated with the world’s oldest democracy.

What we are now left with is a hot mess. A emboldened congress with the weakest of mandates nevertheless feeling empowered to blow up the documents that have served us so well in times much harsher than the current one.  Can’t cotton the current President? Impeach him again.  Don’t recognize the damage done to the confidence of the voter by destroying the link between the integrity of the vote and the will of the people? No matter, make the offending processes permanent.

Most grievous of all, offended by the thoughts of others to disagree with your opinion, make the contrarian opinions disappear.  Make their platforms for expression disappear.  Make their words and ideas invisible.  And if possible, isolate, humiliate, and ostracize from the perfected society.

It’s this last unpardonable sin that will outlive all the emotional immaturities of the current mood.  Freedom of expression, freedom of speech itself is the bedrock of what elevates humanity from the other species.  Discourse, however objectionable and at times painful, is what sentient, thinking  beings do to solve problems, improve understanding, and avoid conflict.  It is the most precious jewel of the freedom of man, and stands for that singular reason in the very first statement of inalienable rights and the first principle of the declaration of rights in the constitution.  It is the core of what stands to protect all from what Churchill so perfectly tomed as the risk of “sinking into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister and perhaps prolonged by the lights of perverted Science.”  Our current world stands at such an abyss, where small groups of elites feel empowered to censor, silence, dismiss and if necessary remove any opinions that does not fit their world view.  On colleges, debates have been removed for their supposed power to injure the sensitive and intellectually vacuous  who can not tolerate dissent from another’s  truth. In academia, history is being rewritten to intrepret actions on modern prejudices rather than as a mechanism to better understand ourselves  from our accumulated past.  On social media, voices and their thoughts are banned by “committees for the public good’, so powerful that the President of the United States was banned from defending his views.  In Congress, “science” on social justice, climate change, and individual speech will soon be settled.  Sites like Ramparts may find themselves no longer able to articulate a defense of “western civilization” without civic minders determining acceptable content.  The Orwellian world, once thought science fiction, is upon our doorstep.

If we let it happen.  If we don’t recognize that what is lost in our recent travails is not a labile, undisciplined populist and his temporary hold on the bully pulpit, but access to the very rights that allowed this man to speak his peace, and the rest of us to think and contemplate our place in the world and our future against other versions. Strength does not come from fearing another’s views or ability to persuade, but rather our ability to think for ourselves and push back if need be.

Christopher Hitchens was an irascible atheist with contempt for those who feelings were hurt when he spoke his mind, but we miss him now more than ever because he was a warrior for free speech and could articulate better than most why even the most hateful speech protects the search for the noble and the ultimate truth.  The video below is worthy from beginning to end as a raw introduction to free expression.  Prepare to be insulted by Mr. Hitchens and his,at times,  nasty opinions about religion. He would have it no other way if it stimulated you to read more, think more, converse more, and ultimately express why his views miss the eternal truth that sources the happiness he always searched for and never found.  Let’s return to learning what we need to know, and confront the current tyranny against expression.  It is, ultimately,  an age old tyranny as fragile and frail as the comfortable lies it attempts to sustain. It will strengthen our resolve and our confidence for what we now see clearly as the great  challenge of our time.

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The Politics of Anarchy

Anarchy in Portland photo attrib. OregonLive.com

Whatever impulse for righteous protest propagated by the tragic death of George Floyd is long gone.

Around the world, in a very organized fashion,  protests presumptively positioned to speak for people who have been profiled and abused by police, have exploded into calculated anarchic violence. From Tulsa to Tel Aviv, groups of agitators and their willing legions have used the premise of racial animus to invade city centers, loot, burn, and create general havoc with the solitary purpose of revealing the representatives of civil society to be totally impotent.   Like all revolutions designed to overthrow the established order, the current actors show all the elements for a successful outcome.  First, the environment is stoked by an event that creates an initial sympathy for the expressed rage, by those who see themselves as fair minded and willing to interpret protests as positive mechanisms for exposing flaws in society.   Second, the actions are taken in rapidly progressive fashion identifying targets that are well beyond the scope of the original outrage and probe instead  foundational structures of civil discourse and rule of law.  Third, these actions are focused in cities where the local leaders believe that they are not only in sync with the agitators’ agenda but are convinced there is political advantage to be had in removing the population’s natural aversion to destruction and “managing ” the politics.  Last, the great secret sauce  is the financial and logistic support by wealthy elites who see great opportunity in using non-democratic means to more rapidly accomplish their objectives.

Any hope that legitimate reform would come out of the George Floyd arrest and similar events is now a forlorn prospect.  In the United States, all the elements of a perfect storm are present for a real crisis in the society’s hard won civility.  For three and a half years, the establishment elite opposition to the undisciplined and uncontrollable President Trump and his overturning of their unquestioned control  has been brutal, underhanded, and sustained.   The complete neophyte and flawed Trump was felt to be an easy target for a spectacular effort to undermine and hopefully overthrow, initially focused on an absurd piece of opposition party research blown up into a hoax of vast reach, implying the very security of the country was threatened by foreign powers using Trump as the Manchurian candidate.  The lie was retrofitted onto a media only too willing to believe the worst, turning ridiculous, unrelated tendrils of contact into a massive conspiracy that was blasted night after night to the public as if it was unquestioned fact.  Having failed miserably to produce a single actionable connection despite a special prosecution team built”not to fail”, rules of lawful behavior were thrown aside in an increasingly desperate effort to smear and hobble permanently their prey, the President.  Coming up empty handed required new means of destruction,  impeachment,  propagated by a Trumpian off hand comment delivered on  a secure phone call with the Ukrainian president, exposed by an internal spy positioned by the opposition to continue the deluge.  Finally, with the failed impeachment, the convenient calamity of the pandemic offered a weakened President and a restless public as perfect bait for the explosion waiting for the right event.  George Floyd was the unfortunate trigger, but events suggest any trigger would have provided the tinder radicals were looking for,  feasting upon a weakened target and generating renewed flames of chaos the establishment was needing to remove Trump.

It is no coincidence that lawlessness is the political weapon of choice selected by opponents to weaken the President to the point of defeat in November.  Attack on the rule of law has been the mechanism for decades, permitting establishment figures to skirt the law while regular citizens have often been made an example.  Lawlessness reveals foundational weakness, and forces either acquiescence or reactions that further stoke violent tendencies when actions are driven beyond the proportion required by the inciting event.  Democrat leaders look fondly at the chaos, for they see only two outcomes to allowing the continuing and growing violence, a president who looks weak by constitutionally  leaving local authorities to secure their jurisdictions, or monstrous, by escalating the reaction to local tulmult with a massive federal response.  The lives and property that will be the sacrifices to the violence are not of interest to Democrats righteous need to restore the natural order Trump radically threatened. The modern, increasingly radicalized Democrat Party remain extremely confident in their ability to maintain solidarity of the message of aggrievement, and the capacity to “call off the dogs” when they have been sufficiently restored to power.  For them, chaos has a potential expiration date, and it is November 4th, the day after Trump’s defeat.

The problem is of course, nobody is going to be able to control anarchists, as long as the flames of anarchy are allowed to proliferate.  Anarchy built on a demand for a profoundly new order of global overseers and complete eradication of capitalism  and traditional social order will not exactly be easily placed back in the bottle when success has been tantalizingly been placed in front of them.  It did not work for Kerensky against bolsheviks, Hindenberg against the Nazis, or Chiang Kai Shek against the Mao led communists , and Joseph Biden is no Kerensky, Hindenberg, or Chaing Kai Shek.   Joe Biden, so close to the prize that has eluded him for decades, finds himself almost a cognitively empty vessel at the very moment of triumph.  If handlers tell him his road to victory is paved with chaos, he will take the win, and let others handle the intellect and ruthlessness required to adjust after his long sought goal to ultimate political conquest.  Such confidence is misplaced when the agitators see Biden and his clique, the last appeasing  obstacle to their final triumph.

 

As Churchill once said so presciently, the appeasers feed the crocodiles, hoping they will eat them last.

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Cultural Brutalism

 

Lycée Sainte Marie-Lyon | Lyon, France –                                                                                                                                                                                                    domus-18-roberto-conte-brutalismo.jpg.foto.rmedium

Slabs of irregular stained concrete, exposed metal framing on windows, and stacked geometries connected by sterile stairwells declining as much as elevating,  metastatically dominate the classic gabled tower, roofline and arches of the near by buildings in Lyon, France.  I suspect no citizen of Lyon was likely asked their opinion as to whether their vision of their city would be elevated by such a structure.  They were likely passive supplicants in an elite drive to “modernize” the society.  This brutal building, purposefully juxtaposed to obscure a classicist past with a post humanist future, was ironically constructed as a place of learning, a secondary school of education.  What it teaches us instead is how far we have lost our way in understanding the elements of our own humanity that would call out for reserving a place for learning at all.  The derision and displacement of the past is not an invention of our current societal strife as expressed through the seemingly disjointed and random nature of the current vandalizing and destruction of our monuments to the past.  It is part of a deep, primordial need to self-destruct rather than accept the challenges required by nature to evolve.  If anything, the self destructive drive appears to be gaining real traction.

Destruction of monuments is nothing new in human history.  Each succeeding regime has looked to replace the symbols of past glory with those of their own.  The Roman destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, the Visigoths’ looting of the Roman Forum, the Islamic conquest of Byzantium, the Spanish seizures of the American Indigenous Empires all resulted in replacement of older venerations with newer versions extolling the superiority of the conqueror’s virtues to that which preceded. Though birthed in violence, the new regimes often assumed  the virtues of the previous regime in that in doing so, the extent of the success was magnified and evolved.  The Romans took their architecture, philosophy and religion from the Greeks, and eventually from the monotheistic Jews.  The Visigoths and their descendants the Franks absorbed the Roman Empire and through the Roman’s recent conversion to Christianity, converted themselves and made their conquest  Holy Roman.  The Ottomans converted the Hagia Sophia to a mosque.  The Americans took from the defeated British Empire its rule of law and its legislative  structure.    Statues were toppled, but they were replaced like phoenixes out of the ashes with other statues and monuments  glorifying a  reverence of a more evolved and complete version of the ancient virtues-  heroism, prudence, courage, justice, and beauty.

With the French Revolution something broke.  A nihilism took over, not previously seen with such enthusiasm.  The reign of terror sought to eliminate the past without building upon it.  A year zero was declared and  prior history was to be rejected and erased.  The Cult of Reason threw out the acknowledgement of a Greater Being to emulate or aspire. Claiming a mandate of individual rights, the mob empowered justice soon became authoritarian and turned upon its own, treating other thought as heretical and the solution the guillotine of thousands.  It so consumed its own rationality for existence it became the prey for a usurper who could project competence and discipline, Napoleon Bonaparte.  The birth of Nihilism found root however, projecting in the 19th century through Nietzsche, Engels, and Marx.  The rejection of thousands of years of evolved human thought.  Virtues were a sign of weakness – the only beliefs acceptable were those that projected a truth that removed individual exceptionalism, an supported an intense drive for the collective and equality of outcome. The twentieth century brought the massive attempt at realization of such brutalistic themes in the flowering of Communism, Fascism, and the devastation of two world wide conflagrations consuming several hundred million lives.  A herculean effort was required to stop the destructive darkness,  but what appeared to be defeat in 1989 was only a brief respite.  The core need to destroy ancient virtues and thereby eliminate individuality has flamed in the suicidal nihilism of the Islamic terrorist, the drive toward globalist domination of elite authoritarians in promoting the climate apocalypse, and the recent need to decapitate the past through the un-education of a generation of youth by injecting  emotional “truth” and seeking the elimination of rational truth – the difference between the sexes, the sanctity of life, the pursuit of happiness through meritocratic accomplishment.

“You will smile here at the consistency of those democratists who, when they are not on their guard, treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst, at the same time they pretend to make them the depositories of all power.”
― Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

The nihilists feel it is 1792 again, and the time is ripe for victory.  They are no longer happy with forcing the rest of society to accept a brutal building, destroying the beauty and the clarity of the surrounding architecture.  They won’t be satisfied with a grievance culture that brutally ignores the cataclysmic  statistics of ruined lives that are associated with their policies glorifying  grievance.  They are no longer satiated with screaming down rational conversation and attempts to solve problems through enlightenment.

They are again hungry for the brutal clarity of “truth” that is the guillotine.  They are practicing first on the statues.