A Contrarian’s Journal, Part 2
July 2022
The heat wave devastating much of Europe and America probably will peter-out in the next few days. The expression “peter-out,” traced by some linguists to 1845, has its origin in gold mines, said to have petered-out when over-prospected. It also may be related to?saltpetre, an element in gunpowder. Once a shot has been fired, the saltpeter may be said to have petered-out.
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.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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.)