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

[C. G. Estabrook]

...quanxin quanyi wei renmin fuwu...

E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
> 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 
> 
> 
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