[Peace-discuss] (Con)serve the People Wholeheartedly

[E. Wayne Johnson]

Bill Kauffman outdoes himself on this one!

Flakey Foont meets Mr. Natural's Old Man.


On 5/18/2009 1:50 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>  Found Cause
>     DON’T CALL ME A CONSERVATIVE.
>     By Bill Kauffman
>
> IN EDWARD ABBEY’S after-the-collapse novel Good News, Sam the Shaman 
> tells the valiant anarchist cowboy Jack Burns, “There’s one thing 
> wrong with always fighting for freedom,
> and justice, and decency, and so forth.”
>
> “Only one thing?” replies Burns. “What’s that?”
>
> “You almost always lose.”
>
> In deference to Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology poet and 
> anti-imperialist states-rights Democrat, I shan’t quote Clarence 
> Darrow’s line about lost causes being the only ones
> worth fighting for. Masters had been Darrow’s law partner, and he 
> disdained the Chicago loudmouth as a headline-hogging welsher.
>
> Still, there is the matter of the lostness of our cause. Peace, it 
> seems, often passeth understanding.
>
> Is The American Conservative a contrail in the sky of a dying America 
> or the bright harbinger of revival—of a better, more humane Little 
> America? I do not say this better America would be a more conservative 
> America because for half a century, “conservative” has been a synonym 
> of—a slave to—militarism, profligacy, the invasion of other nations, 
> contempt for personal liberties, and an ignorance of and hostility 
> toward provincial America that is Philip Rothian in its scope. The 
> conservative movement, like the empire whose adjunct and cheerleader 
> it is, is a daisy chain of epicene dissemblers and vampiric 
> chickenhawks who feast on the carrion of our Republic. The c-word is 
> quite simply beyond reclamation. The anarchist founder of the 
> Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Frank Chodorov, had the right idea, 
> even if it did contradict his pacifism: “Anyone who calls me a 
> conservative gets a punch in the nose.” If we have to play Name that 
> Tendency I’d opt for Little American, front-porch republican, 
> localist, decentralist, libertarian, or, to borrow Robert Frost’s 
> term, plain old Insubordinate American—anything but C! (With a nod to 
> Shel Silverstein.)
>
> Be not deceived that a few opportunistic Republicans who said 
> absolutely nothing in defense of our America during the Bush octennium 
> are now sending up false flags of state sovereignty and the Tenth 
> Amendment. Their Contract with America doppelgangers pulled the same 
> stunt a decade ago before signing on, without any apparent qualms, to 
> the brutally consolidationist Bush-Cheney regime. Recall that Bob Dole 
> carried a copy of the Tenth Amendment during his flaccid 1996 
> presidential campaign, presumably in the same pocket that held the 
> pills he needed to gulp in order to entertain the gracious Liddy. If 
> these people were anything other than cynical party hacks I would be 
> enthusiastic, but for God’s sake, Charlie Brown, how often does Lucy 
> have to yank the football away before you wise up?
>
> The national “conversation,” to misuse that word, is and has been 
> limited to belligerent neoconservatives and liberal imperialists for 
> many years now. Ed Abbey’s Jack Burns is sooner to wind up on a 
> Department of Homeland Security watch list than he is on CNN. But so 
> what? We dishonor our forebears if we whine that the rulers and their 
> lackeys are nasty, tyrannical, and placeless. Of course they 
> are—they’re rulers and lackeys.
>
> The great John Randolph once explained his contumacy: “I found I might 
> co-operate, or be an honest man. I have therefore opposed them and 
> will oppose them.” This is even truer today, though mere opposition is 
> a debilitating condition for all but the most friendless crank. 
> Standing athwart things is a good way to get neutered. Luckily, we are 
> for things—a restoration of the Republic, the rebirth of citizenship, 
> social and political life on a human scale, a peaceful America that 
> minds its own damn business. These goals will confound those who mimic 
> the attitudes (never the Beatitudes!) blared from the rectangular 
> soul-stealer in the living room, but among those who think up their 
> own notions and sign their own names, to borrow Edmund Wilson’s 
> phrase, we have company. Anyone who engages in authentic civil or 
> social life—ref in a pickup basketball game, drummer in a cowpunk 
> band, secretary of a ladies’ study club, rhubarb-cutter in a community 
> garden—is acting upon the healthy, voluntaristic, 
> small-is-not-always-beautiful-but-at-least-it’s-human impulses that 
> animate the first, last, and best alternative to the empire.
>
> Whether we ever get together politically remains an open question. 
> Protest politics is mostly boring street theater overseen by 
> puppet-master choreographers in service of the two parties. True 
> dissenters who undertake national campaigns—Ron Paul, Ralph Nader—are 
> mocked, libeled, or ignored. Words are stripped of their meaning, even 
> inverted, so that a vote for change produces Joe Biden, and a cheer 
> for family values brings forth Newt Gingrich. I used to be disgusted, 
> but now I try to be amused, though how much, really, can one take? And 
> for how long? Sixty-one years ago the disgusted but amused H.L. 
> Mencken covered his last campaign, which pitted the double atom-bomb 
> dropper Harry Truman versus the little man on the wedding cake, Thomas 
> E. Dewey. Was Obama versus McCain really that much worse a choice?
>
> Our decline predates the Bushes, the Clintons, even the Kennedys. 
> Trace it, if you like, back to the overthrow of the gentle Articles of 
> Confederation and the triumph of Hamilton, Madison, and James Wilson 
> over Patrick Henry, Luther Martin, and Melancton Smith in 1787-88. We 
> have a helluva losing streak going, but there is a value in showing up 
> for a game and taking your swings even if you have no chance. To give 
> in is a sin.
>
> So many of the vital and flavorful American political traditions go 
> utterly, offensively, incredibly unrepresented in national discourse: 
> the Anti-Federalists, the Populists, Brahmin anti-imperialists, 
> independent liberals, prairie socialists, Old Right libertarians. It 
> is our ennobling duty to keep these fires burning, even in the present 
> darkness. For they illuminate the hopeful signs in our midst: 
> homeschoolers, communitysupported agriculture, independence movements 
> from Vermont to Hawaii, the kids fired up by Ron Paul.
>
> “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts,” advises Wendell 
> Berry. Excellent advice.
>
> Our country is Wendell Berry, Townes Van Zandt, Mavis Staples, Ken 
> Kesey, Cormac McCarthy, Levon Helm… How can one despair with these by 
> our sides, at our backs, in our heads? Editorialists in the New York 
> Times and Washington Post, shouters on the television, sallow callow 
> master bloggers who jerk out their vitriol over dissenters: they 
> aren’t worth the scorn in a thumbnail vial. Their depressing and 
> ephemeral work dissipates with the air it befouls, the paper it 
> poisons, the screen it scars. The real country endures. It produces 
> whatever books and songs and films and paintings add up to American 
> culture. It is where sandlot baseball and farm markets come from; it 
> is where peace dwells in this nation of perpetual war.
>
> Sursum corda, pals. We ain’t dead yet. Turn off the TV. Reject the 
> chains they have fashioned for you. Live as if in a free country. Look 
> again at the things nighest unto you. That’s America. That’s worth 
> saving.
>
> Bill Kauffman’s most recent books are Ain’t My America 
> (Holt/Metropolitan)
> and Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin (ISI).
>
> http://www.amconmag.com/pdfissue.html?page=28&Id=AmConservative-2009may18&s=large