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| The Contrarian, Andrée and Dublin, about to board |
July 2022
In any case, the heat wave, attended in California by forest
fires more destructive than the mal-administration of Governor Gavin Newsom,
will in due course peter-out. One may wish the same fate upon environmental,
end-of-the-earth predictions – all “based on science,” of course, in much the
way that books theorizing the Mafia killed President John Kennedy in collusion
with then Vice President Lyndon Johnson are “based on facts.” What grand political
misdirection during the past 246 years of the American Experiment in Republican
Government has not been “based on fact?”
I suppose I might ask my nephew in San Francisco at what
point ALL the forests in California might peter-out, owing to widespread
forest fires, as common in California as hopeful Hollywood starlets or sun-drenched
gold prospectors. How many poorly maintained forests can be left in California
after a three decades spate of fires?
But, then, my nephew, like most productive citizens, perhaps
is too busy to engage in pointless speculation.
Political cynics – God bless’em – are now claiming that
Connecticut is California East. Barry Goldwater, relatively indifferent as to
whether he would win a presidential election, once said, “If you lop off
California and New England, you’ve got a pretty good country.”
Some in Connecticut, anxious to outwit grasping politicians
who wish to mine wallets for gold, as did the prospectors of an earlier day,
are preparing to take necessary measures at the polls in the off-year 2022
elections. Nearly all polls strongly indicate voters are hankering for a
political “course correction” – something in the American character does not
love a foolish consistency, “the hobgoblin of little minds” said Ralph Waldo
Emerson – a prospect that has caused Democrats to pass around the smelling
salts. There are signs, even within Democrat Party precincts, that Biden’s hyper-progressive
administration s is starting to peter-out.
_______________________
Connecticut’s motto remains "Qui Transtulit Sustinet -- He Who Transplanted Still
Sustains." The “He” in the motto undoubtedly refers to God, here
capitalized because the word “God” is the proper name of the “Thou” in the 80th
Psalm – "Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt: thou hast cast out the
heathen, and planted it."
One does not detect much casting out of political heathens
in Connecticut, a haven for anti-Puritans.
None of the minor postmodern deities in Connecticut’s
General Assembly have yet suggested that the motto engraved on the colonial
“Public Seal of Connecticut" should be redrafted to better express current
cultural affinities.
Since the legalization of recreational pot use in the state,
“A pot in every pot” might be a more appropriate state motto. Of course, we
also have become the “casino state,” owing to our Native American owned
gambling hot spots.
None of the lesser gods in the state’s General Assembly have
yet put forth a bill legalizing prostitution, an oversight perhaps. There are,
one suspects, limits to assaults on the habits of those who live in “the land
of steady habits,” the most destructive of which may be cleaving to outworn
habits, such as voting reflexively for Democrats, no matter the consequences
that follow the vote.
Should some legislative genius pluck up the courage to void
the last prohibition, that of prostitution, the state might adopt the motto – “He (or She) who prostitutes still sustains”
the state’s treasury through sin taxes. And one may bet on it – the formerly
proscribed activity certainly will be taxed, along with other former “sins”
such as intemperance, gambling and, prospectively, voting Republican.
__________________
The opposite of lucidity in politics is ambiguity. Melville
wrote a whole novel, poorly received during his own day and ours, on the
subject, Pierre or the Ambiguities,
one of Andrée’s
“read-again” books. I first read it to her when we lived in Bethel and again,
after years of inattention, here on the lake. Such re-visitations are always
disappointing. While the past is not over, not even passed – see Faulkner on
the point – repetitions, precise recreations of the past, are unlikely.
Time flows like a river, and it is impossible to step in the
same river twice. Still, one may take courage from that scene in Virgil’s Aeneid
in which Aeneas escapes burning Troy carrying his father on his back and
clasping his young son by the hand. If Homer’s Iliad is about the wrath of
Achilles, the subject of Virgil’s Aeneid is Roman piety:
‘Come then, dear
father, clasp my neck: I will
carry you on my shoulders: that task won’t weigh on me.
Whatever may happen, it will be for us both, the same shared risk,
and the same salvation. Let little Iulus come with me,
and let my wife follow our footsteps at a distance.
You servants, give your attention to what I’m saying.
At the entrance to the city there’s a mound, an ancient temple
of forsaken Ceres, and a venerable cypress nearby,
protected through the years by the reverence of our fathers:
let’s head to that one place by diverse paths.
You, father, take the sacred objects, and our country’s gods,
in your hands: until I’ve washed in running water,
it would be a sin for me, coming from such fighting
and recent slaughter, to touch them.’
Forsaken Ceres is the Roman goddess of
agriculture, grain crops, fertility and motherly relationships.
In the postmodern period, ambiguity is what happens when
politicians and confused academics – rarely these days is there any other kind –
have finished mauling controversial, i.e. overheated, politicized, subjects
such as abortion, or the utility of the filibuster, or the demographic danger
of willful infertility, or the importance of fathers in family formation, or a
score of other so called “cultural” subjects.
Republicans in Connecticut have in the past avoided the political
mare’s nest of culture, even though many of them fully understand that politics
lies downstream from culture, which is to say politics is a product of culture,
for all but post-modern progressives who wish to use politics to radically
change the culture.
Connecticut’s political landscape is littered with the
bodies of Republican office-holders no longer in office because they viewed
cultural issues as the state’s “third rail.” They have in the past subscribed
to the barren notion that cultural issues, the exclusive province of postmodern
progressive Democrat challengers, should not be addressed by Republicans in
campaigns. Cultural formation should be left entirely to postmodern progressive
Democrats with knives in their brains. These Republicans, a vanishing species, have
styled themselves in past campaigns as “fiscally conservative but socially
liberal.”
The division is a dangerous fiction, particularly in the new
post-Marxian world of Antonio Gramsci, mentioned here: Connecting
The Dots: Critical Race Theory And Gramsci Marxism
The truth is there can be no separation between fiscal conservatism
and cultural conservatism so long as revisionary-Marxists are determined to
change the whole nature of politics by radically altering the culture.
No one writing today about Connecticut and national politics
understands the connection between the two better than Chris Powell, the now retired
Managing Editor and Editorial Page Editor of the Journal Inquirer. Powell
continues to write columns for the paper.
The chief problem in anarchic cities, even in Connecticut,
lies in seemingly permanent urban subcultures.
Culturally, cities have become politically produced poverty reservations,
where people have been walled off from the larger culture in which the poor and
deprived are permitted through personal energy and self-reliance to rise above
their momentary stations in life. In societies based on class divisions, the
divisions are more or less permanent. The possibility of upward mobility here
in the United States had strangled a European styled class system in its crib –
until now.
______________________
Many people do not know that Karl Marx, who wrote columns
for a New York newspaper, also produced, along with capitalist Fredrick Engels,
a fairly readable short book on the Civil War, which he sent to President
Lincoln, along with a ponderous manifesto on the class system in the United
States. Lincoln handed off the communiqué to a member of his cabinet, who
politely disputed Marx’s central premise.
But Lincoln boldly confronted the Marxian premise in another
speech. I quoted extensity from the speech in an address given at Meriden’s Fourth
Annual Lincoln Day Dinner cited below.
______________________
Lincoln
Alive: His Relevance To Modern Politics
Lincoln, who believed
that men and women should retain the wealth they had earned by the sweat of
their brows, was neither a progressive nor a socialist.
Three lines are
sometimes quoted from Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address to show that he
harbored socialistic tendencies. Here are the lines: “Labor is prior to and
independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never
have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital,
and deserves much the higher consideration.” One imagines Karl Marx, whose
articles appeared in New York Papers from 1852-1861, nodding his head in affirmation.
The First Inaugural Address was delivered years earlier than Marx and Engles’s
Communist Manifesto, and if both had paid close attention to it, incorporating
its measures into their ideology, the world would have been spared much
trouble.
It is true that labor
is superior to capital and must be attended to. “The effort to place capital on
an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government,”
Lincoln says, leads to a series of false assumptions. The false assumption that
capital rather than labor is preeminent leads to other dangerously false
assumptions.
Here is Lincoln again:
“It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that
nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces
him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that
capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent,
or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so
far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or
what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired
laborer is fixed in that condition for life.”
The notion that
laborers, once fixed in their jobs, do not advance and improve their lot but
remain part of a permanent class – the central presumption of Marxist socialism
and, it should be said, southern plantation owners – is simply not true in
Lincoln’s United States.
Listen closely to a
uniquely American perception of the relationship between labor and capital:
“Labor is the superior
of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights,
which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that
there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital
producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of
community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few
avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor
for them. A large majority belong to neither class--neither work for others nor
have others working for them. In most of the Southern States a majority of the
whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters, while in the
Northern a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their
families--wives, sons, and daughters--work for themselves on their farms, in
their houses, and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and
asking no favors of capital on the one hand nor of hired laborers or slaves on
the other. It is not forgotten that a considerable number of persons mingle
their own labor with capital; that is, they labor with their own hands and also
buy or hire others to labor for them; but this is only a mixed and not a
distinct class. No principle stated is disturbed by the existence of this mixed
class.”
Lincoln never thought
in bumper-sticker captions. His last law partner, William Herndon, said of him
that Lincoln “not only went to the root of the question but dug up the root and
separated and analyzed every fiber of it.” A fellow attorney, Leonard Swett,
warned, “Any man who took Lincoln for a simple-minded man would very soon wake
up with his back in a ditch.”
Listen now, and try to
hear Lincoln’s words with the ear of your heart:
“Again, as has already
been said, there is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer
being fixed to that condition for life” – no permanent class structure. He
continues, “Many independent men everywhere in these States a few years back in
their lives were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world
labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for
himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires
another new beginner to help him. This is the just and generous and prosperous
system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and
progress and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to
be trusted than those who toil up from poverty; none less inclined to take or
touch aught which they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already
possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of
advancement against such as they and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon
them till all of liberty shall be lost.” (Emphasis mine.)
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