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

[C. G. Estabrook]

I gather that that's on Sun Yat-sen's tomb, in Nanjing -- four characters that 
can be translated as, "What is under heaven is for all," or "The whole world 
belongs to all people."  You can see why different political tendencies claim 
him -- like Jefferson.  --CGE

E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
> 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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