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

[E. Wayne Johnson]

tian xia wei gong.

On 5/18/2009 2:29 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> ...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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