(See also: A Rant, A Screed, A yelling at the sky… )
To quote Dr. John Rao, Democracy is today a thing of deity. We must all bow down and sing its praises if we are to be allowed free speech under its benevolent umbrella: alas, I simply haven't the time...
Conservatives in America today practically worship the founding fathers of our great Nation. No emotion can describe this phenomenon except for religious fervor. The political dialogue today shifts between the progressives, who in their American manifestation wish to move beyond the limitations of an overused and dated constitution, and the conservatives, who wish to return to the glory days of the past in which constitutional liberties were upheld by law, and states were free to express the American spirit in their own way, free from undue federal influence. The bill of rights, the constitution, the declaration of independence. These make the doctrine and creed of the Church of America, and the writings of the founders their scripture. The protestants of that church, those who today go by the name once assigned to the founders, “liberal’, seek to find the pure faith, bogged down by all the business of religion and doctrine defined in those pesky Creeds. After all, those men were corrupt, bad popes! They owned slaves, raided natives, and laid unjust claim on their land. The Conservative of today finds himself in the position of that very church from whence he once departed in protest, whinging at the self-destruction of his children, as they go awry with strange doctrines, having the feel of Americanism, the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but finding themselves after so many words in a barren and fruitless desert of thought, in which lay only the specters of the oldest and most savage paganism. The worship of nature, the sacrifice of children, and the castration of their youths. I shall here add the single disclaimer that I intend the following not as a comment on the ideals of this Nation's founding, but rather on the reality of their realization.
It is a rare mind that can make the jump back further than 1776 to look for “where it all went wrong,” and fewer still who would endure the humiliation finding out. But it is not to plumb these depths that I today write, but rather to look forward, not to our Reformation, but to our peace of Westphalia. I entitled this essay so for a purpose. The first block in setting right the current national dialogue is the realization that this nation, as it stands, was not founded in 1776, but in 1865. It is no nation that aims cannon at countrymen, and we err if we imagine the dream of 1776 to have been fulfilled then, or any time in the century ending so tragically in that most deadly of pre-industrial wars. An objection would here be raised that the civil war presents an evolution of the founding idea, towards a “more perfect union.” To this I reply that it most certainly did not. The result of the Civil War was the guarantee that the will of the people’s government would know no opposition that could not be met with deadly and severe force, be it the laws of State, or the laws of God. In short, whatever be the whim of the masses, there existed no corner of that nation where an army would not march, if needed, to enforce the same. Our Peace of Westphalia was this, not that our nation be segmented for the protestants in the south, and the orthodox in the north, but rather that the protestants bow to the will of the orthodox, and, should the parties of power shift, the orthodox, to the protestants. It is this latter outcome that I propose defines the contemporary landscape, and to unweave ourselves from it, we must look to what was the nature of that second founding, and what indeed is the constitution not to which a brave 52 men affixed their signature, but rather for which a braver multitude in the hundred-thousands bled.
For it was at this most critical of historical junctures that, under the auspices of a new Washington in the man Abraham Lincoln, a loose cooperation of an oligarchic nature seized the reins of the nation in the quiet of night, and have since allowed the continuance of that public play we call democracy so long as it be disallowed from interfering with the will of the oligarchs. This new power had two enemies. Leadership, and the threat of invasion. Leadership, for any man of significant virtue and singular vision once elected to the highest office, or any of sufficient strength, might notice the impotence of his position, and assert his will on the nation’s course, and undo much that they had worked for. Invasion, because it could disrupt their game, and upset their fortunes. There have been times when one evil was allowed at the expense of another. A true leader is allowed when the external threats loom too closely, and invasion is allowed when it supplants too strong a leadership.
let us examine the character of this new power. What are it’s wishes, and has it succeeded in obtaining them? Firstly the oligarchy is not in government, it needs not be, for the government “of the people” is an easily governed thing for those holding the power of entertainment and news, and its coffers are easily looted in time of financial crisis. It is in the private sectors of industry, banking, weapons-making, entertainment, and sales. For the oligarchy I speak of is not a secret power mumbling in a smoke filled room as many imagine, it is, simply, the holders of the new wealth. Much as the nobles of Europe’s past seized their lands and incomes from the church coffer, and fostered treaty or fomented war insomuch as either enabled their keeping of these new goods, the nobles of this nation, the holders of the new incomes from machinery, the factories, industrial agriculture, urban fashion, and war, played the orthodox and the protestants like the bitter and weary fiddle strings they had become to secure their own interest in the burgeoning wealth of a power in its first strides towards a dominion such as the world had not known for 2 millennia. These men were not political, they had no interest in the paltry issues of the War of Succession, it had left them rich, unopposed, and in excellent position to extend the limits of both. Like Thomas Cromwell and William Cecil, they paid what lip service was needed, first to the orthodox in the birth of Capitalism, and now to the protestants in the confusion of leftism. Always bearing that banner of the side most in power, they guide the nation only in that direction that secures for them hordes of wage slaves crammed in their factories, millions of eyeballs on their television shows, the incomes of the public in their banks, and the crowds of the newly urbanized in homes they could only obtain through rent or mortgage. From Carnegie to Tim Cook, they accomplished it all, through the cast of the “enlightened” culture, those characters of Macintyre: the aesthete, the therapist, and the manager. The Aesthete, as he could always be sold a new pleasure, the therapist, to take away his shame after such indulgence, and the manager, to keep from him any real responsibility that might otherwise awake him to a state approaching that of manhood.
For this new founding was not accomplished by establishing one Nation under God, but rather one nation under Debt. Religion was no obstacle of course, don’t the faithful need new houses? An abundance of clothes? The latest fashions? Entertainment? God wants them to have such things no? We had no need for that stench of old religion that decried usury and deified poverty, encouraging service and the appreciation of beautiful things that last. You could buy care for a parent at a very affordable price these days. There was one feature of religion however that posed it a great threat. Children. Namely, having many of them. For a man with a large family might leave the system of the oligarchs. He may instead farm land with his army of willing laborers, or become that most dreaded of things, a Leader. People were still needed however, to support the rapidly decaying system of usury, wage slavery, and consumerism. Therefore that one enemy of theirs, invasion, was allowed to rebalance the scale of population. As for the members of this brave New World, they were given the unholy grail. A little pill. With this they could limit their familys to “manageable” sizes in their manageably sized homes. Or, they could have none, and dispense with that whole family business altogether. Family businesses were at last, the only internal barrier to the seizure of all wealth. And that pill did one more favor for the oligarchs. It gave them a whole new workforce. With more to turn the handles of the factories, wages could be further reduced, and the business of "education" - that is of course, not the honing and cultivation of the soul, but the training for wage slavery, or the management of the same - be extended to all the young. For with no hand rocking the cradle, those new souls could be made ever more willing servants of their faceless rulers. And the aesthete, therapist and manager waited eagerly to mold and shape those new minds in their own image, till a culture was brewed of Reformed Puritans who condemned smoking in any form, and encouraged abortion without limit, so long as you ride to the clinic wearing a seatbelt. Of course it would be ridiculous to suggest that the new power intended or in any meant way shaped the outcome of their culture, they merely rode the wave of it, so long as that wave increased GDP, spending, and debt per capita.
There was outcry of course. The Orthodox crew at the protestants for encouraging such unholy progress, the protestants cursed at the orthodox for their encouragement of this bastard of “capitalism.” The conflicts of the 20th century shocked what bare bones of a nation did exist into sanity on a handful of occasions, Great leaders were even elected in times of supreme threat of invasion. But on the whole, that seed of mammon persisted. Greed is but one vice to serve, there are luscious others. It mattered not if the ploughboys all had their own bibles, they also had cheeseburgers, free porn, and contraception. Everything the base passions of man have wanted since time immemorial. For religion is to Americans an ornament, be they Catholic, Protestant, Moslem, or Buddhist. For as in Old Babylon, that great state of Pagan Rome, it matters not what creed one possesses in their heart, or professes in the public square, so long as it be done alongside that other creed, the worship of Caesar, the spirit of the state, the creed of New Babylon: tolerance.
We are long past the resolution of old debates, and the reactionaries of today may be piling into old churches and buying flip phones, yet we cannot resolve this present malaise of culture if we do not recognize its source. We have been cut off from the origin of all that is good, true, and beautiful, and waste time fighting for the scraps that remain. I propose that until we address the fact of this nation’s second founding, we will be forever in threat of renewal of that bloody War, and cowering in fear of what our neighbor will vote for next, unable to raise in dispute the course which the nation has taken to any but a crowd of ears so small as to produce no effect by their wholehearted agreement. We cannot return to the past. We should not wish to if we could. History holds as many spectres as the present, often more. Oligarchies are not new, neither are republics or democracies. But there is something new in this nation, the cooperation of the secular protestant evangelists of Freedom and Equality to all, no matter how many souls are uprooted from time, place, and God thereby, with the industrialist oligarchs. The creation of a culture of self-realization, the music, entertainment, indulgent consumer goods - a formula of cultural export never before achieved in the history of empires - has created a demand for the American ideal unrivaled by any other civilization. The new Faith, the new Christendom - where tolerance by human-rights-tribunal and equality by affirmative-action allow the realization of any self willing to impose himself on all others, wether he be wearing turban or vagina hat - has at last come to full form in opposition to the Old. The God of Self-Sacrifice has at last met his cultural match in the god of “one perverts’ genital pleasure”, or by another name, Freedom. And the faith is spreading like wildfire. In nations where the Orthodox Americans do not exist to resist, this faith has made much more progress than in our own. Many nations more venerable than ours lack the reactionaries, the hold outs, the old bags, and the disciples of those American popes of the 18th century, who had that vision of a New world quite lost now in the smoke of that bloody Second Founding. For their nation is a nation that wasn’t. Our nation, is a nation that Isn’t, and in the future, a nation that will be no more. Our borders are too vast, our religion too broad, and our military too necessary for world peace to ever maintain it long, the People’s government has indeed received all it’s wishes, good and hard.
There, now that I've yelled at you, perhaps you will set about that business that would bring me the most sincere joy of all, proving me wrong, your's penitentially,
- D. M Hoven
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