Corporate Times

It is difficult to understand the ways of God, but sometimes one gets a glimmer of understanding. For instance, I can understand why God did not pick our own time or country as the ideal time and place to enter history. The problems, while not impossible for God to surmount, would have been enormous. First, His earthly father would not have been able to make a living as a carpenter. Joseph would not have been able to make a living, selling his woodwork for a profit in competition with the cheaper woodwork made by Chinese sweatshop labor and sold at Wal-Mart. He would have had to take a job at Wal-Mart during the day and a job as night cook at Denny’s in order to keep up the payments on the humble dwelling he shared with Mary and the Christ Child. And Mary would not have been able to be a stay-at-home mom, with taxes and the cost of living being what they are. She would have had to get a job at McDonald’s. There would be no paintings of the Madonna with the Christ Child, because the Madonna would have been flipping burgers, and the Christ Child would have been getting slapped around in daycare.

And if Christ had decided, in His infinite mercy, to stick it out through daycare and public school in order to fulfill His mission, there would have been enormous difficulties in spreading the message. St. Paul would not have been able to make a living as a tent-maker because, like St. Joseph, he would have been undersold by Wal-Mart. Hence, he wouldn’t have been able to evangelize; he’d have been stuck in two or three dead-end jobs. Oh, he would have tried to get booked on the talk shows to spread the word, but they wouldn’t have taken him. Too much of a downer without any marketing skills.

But hey – the loss of the Christ Child is a small price to pay for the great deals we can get at Wal-Mart, right?

The Deserted Village

One Christmas time I was in a bookstore where the proprietoress felt the need to editorialize to her patrons. Being the only patron at the time, I was treated to her opinions, including a tirade on the insanity and immorality of the capitalist crusade in Iraq. I was certainly able to agree with her on that topic. Thinking she had a soul mate, she then launched into some editorials in favor of all the radical ‘isms’.

The woman was evidently in the midst of chemotherapy, so I refrained, at first, from disagreeing with her. But when she persisted, I did, as gently as possible, let her know that we were not on the same page, nor were we soul mates. She was surprised and confused because she thought that since I was anti-capitalist, I must be a radical.

This is a common mistake that Americans make, equating capitalism with conservatism, but it is an especially egregious error when made by a proprietor of a book store where one can find the works of all the great poets of Europe. If she had read less commentary on the poets and more of the poets, she would know 1) that all of the great poets are conservative – they are the defenders of the permanent things – and 2) there are very few poetic defenses of capitalism (Carl Sandburg’s work is an exception) because capitalism destroys the permanent things – and in fact the mantra of capitalism is that there are no permanent things and that everything is malleable and changeable.

The law of the jungle is the law of capitalism. The strong devour the weak, and the many overwhelm the few. There is no divine law above free market jungle law in the capitalist world, which is why the Christian poets have always shown that ‘ism’ so little mercy.

Dickens was the supreme critic of capitalism, but there were others before him. Oliver Goldsmith, author of The Vicar of Wakefield, was an intensely conservative writer who loved the village church and the small farm. During a five-year period of his life when he made excursions from London to the country, he observed that the large landholders were squeezing out the small farmers, creating a landless, laboring class, setting up an agrarian version of Wal-Mart.

He begins his poem “The Deserted Village” with an apologia for the permanent things as embodied in the simpler rural life (idealized, yes, but an ideal with a basis in reality), and then proceeds to depict the brave new world of free market capitalism that has replaced the old world.

Sweet Auburn!
Loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the laboring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid,
And parting summer’s lingering blooms delayed;
Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,
Seats of my youth, when every sport could please,
How often have I loitered o’er thy green,
Where humble happiness endeared each scene!
How often have I paused on every charm,
The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm,
The never-failing brook, the busy mill,
The decent church that topped the neighboring hill,
The hawthorn bush with seats beneath the shade,
…
Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn!
Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn.
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green.
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain.
No more thy glassy brook reflects the day,
But choked with sedges works its weedy way;
Along thy glades, a solitary guest,
The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest;
Amidst thy desert-walks the lapwing flies,
And tires their echoes with unvaried cries.
Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,
And the long grass o’ertops the moldering wall;
And trembling, shrinking from the spoiler’s hand,
Far, far away thy children leave the land.
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade—
A breath can make them, as a breath has made—
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
…
Even now, methinks, as pondering here I stand,
I see the rural virtues leave the land.
Down where yon anchoring vessel spreads the sail
That, idly waiting, flaps with every gale,
Downward they move, a melancholy band,
Pass from the shore, and darken all the strand.
Contented Toil, and hospitable Care,
And kind, connubial Tenderness are there;
And Piety with wishes placed above,
And steady Loyalty and faithful Love.
And thou, sweet Poetry, thou loveliest maid,
Still first to fly where sensual joys invade;
Unfit, in these degenerate times of shame,
To catch the heart, or strike for honest fame;
Dear charming nymph, neglected and decried,
My shame in crowds, my solitary pride;
Thou source of all my bliss and all my woe,
That found’st me poor at first, and keep’st me so’
Thou guide, by which the nobler arts excel,
Thou nurse of every virtue, fare thee well!
Farewell! And oh! where’er thy voice be tried,
On Torno’s cliffs, or Pambamarca’s side,
Whether where equinoctial fervors glow,
Or winter wraps the polar world in snow,
Still let thy voice, prevailing over time,
Redress the rigors of the inclement clime;
Aid slighted truth with thy persuasive strain;
Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain;
Teach him that states of native strength possessed,
Though very poor, may still be very blest;
That trade’s proud empire hastes to swift decay,
As ocean sweeps the labored mole away;
While self-dependent power can time defy,
As rocks resist the billows and the sky.

That capitalism was a radical serpent in the European garden was ever the opinion of the European poets. Capitalism became associated with conservatism in this country largely through the influence of National Review. In the early years of that publication there were some writers such as Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk who held genuinely conservative views, but their voices were not the dominant ones. The soul of National Review was a capitalist one. And as the magazine acquired influential converts like Ronald Reagan, the magazine became less tolerant of anti-capitalist dissenters and more dogmatically capitalist.

Capitalists always label their critics socialists, but the only way to rid the world of socialism is to rid the world of capitalism because capitalism spawns socialism. Gross inequalities in wealth create a demand for an excessive equality in wealth. The only effective antidote to capitalism is the Christian society depicted by Goldsmith.

Our Economy

According to the experts, our economy is not doing well right now, but I don’t think it has been doing well for a long time. It all depends from what viewpoint you look at our economy. From my standpoint, our economy was terrible in the supposedly good years of the Clinton administration, and it is terrible now. What do I base that assessment on? Our economic system is anti-family. Although many modern Christians, who are not Christians, think a family can be anything at all – two women, two men, etc. – the Christian family is only one thing: it is a patriarchal family. And by this I do not mean the 1950s patriarchal family in which the father earns the money, plays catch on Saturdays, and leaves the education of the children to the State. Nor is the patriarchal family the one envisioned by the Muslims wherein femininity itself is seen as evil.

I refer to the patriarchy described by St. Paul:

Wives, submit yourselves until your own husbands, as unto the Lord.

For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word.

And to the patriarchy described by Katrina, the repentant shrew:

A woman mov’d is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee

All non-Christian patriarchies, like those of the Muslims, take the first part of St. Paul’s injunction, “Wives submit,” and leave out the second part, “Husbands, love your wives.”

What then is so anti-patriarchal about our present economic system? The unskilled male (and by unskilled, I mean unskilled in the latest technology) cannot, if he can find work at all, support a wife and children on the wages doled out by the capitalist financiers. We are constantly told how the average family income is going up, but the average family income is only going up because it is taken as a given that the wife as well as the husband must work for wages. Often the man has two minimum wage jobs and the woman at least one. “And why not?” asks the capitalist. “Are we not all economic units who live to serve the market Moloch?”

We are quickly going back to those evil days (halcyon days, to the capitalist) when children and women worked in the “satanic mills” because they could be gotten cheaper than men.

Following the logic of capitalism always leads to the transformation of human beings with family, racial, national, and religious bonds, into single digit economic units without ties to any religious, family, or racial group. Theoretically one can do what one wants in one’s “free” time, but how can one raise a family when denied the means to do so, or when one must spend one’s entire waking existence fighting for the minimum material needs of one’s family?

One of the biggest lies told by the free-market conservatives is that they are pro-family. How can the advocates of a market society that makes no distinction between parent and child, illegal immigrant and native-born, male and female, be pro-family? Only the communists, those children of the capitalists, have been as consistently anti-family as the free-market conservatives.

And what about the labor unions? Have not they, with the support of the churches, been a humanizing influence on capitalism? Yes, they have, but the churches, along with labor, made a crucial error. They sold their birthright for a large pot of lentils. Capitalism is an intrinsically evil system; it cannot be humanized. In exchange for a share of the capitalists’ booty, labor joined the diabolists, thinking they could sup with the devil with impunity. But the capitalists have gone global in their unremitting war against labor. The no-borders policy has killed the small farmer, and the ‘move-the-plant-to-Mexico-or-China’ policy is destroying labor.

There should be no compromise with capitalism. It must be replaced from without, not temporized with from within. Father Luigi Ligutti, the leader of the Catholic agrarian movement, always stressed that you could not teach your children good solid family values and then send them out into the anti-family capitalist world. The vast majority of children will become what the world is – which is why Father Ligutti stressed the need for a Christian agrarian world in which Christian children would stay pro-family and Christian.

Now those men who have made it in the capitalist world, the diesel engine types like Josiah Bounderby of Coketown and Rush Limbaugh of conservative fame, will assert that the capitalist system is the very best possible system and that only envious ‘sickies’ (see Ernest Van den Haag’s book, Capitalism: Sources of Hostility in which he asserts precisely that), who can’t ‘cut the mustard’ criticize capitalism. But the diesel engine types achieve their success at the cost of others’ livelihoods and at the cost of their own souls. And even many of the diesel engines must worry about losing their high tech jobs to lower paid techies from another country. After all, the “free” market is no respecter of persons.

Our economy fails to support the patriarchal family, and it also fails on another important level. The work done in our economy kills the souls of the men and women doing the work. The family farm has been replaced by the large, corporate farm, and the family cobbler has become a factory worker in a Payless Shoe Store. But lest we despair, we are told that there are plenty of jobs left at MacDonald’s and Taco Bell. Even the high tech jobs that pay well generally consist of making products that are unnecessary, and then convincing people that they will die without them. The type of lying that goes on to sell useless products, which has become second nature to us, debases our culture. C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers were the last people I’ve read who still talked about the soulless nature of work in the 20th century. If a man works at his computer for a company that makes replacement buttons for tuxedoes, or if another man works in a factory putting one piece of machinery into a machine with thousands of parts, will either man really have a soul left at the end of his working life? Or if a woman is forced to work outside the home and devote her energies to serving millions every day at MacDonald’s, will she still be able to claim a soul that is her own?

The ultimate dream of the capitalist is to wake up in the morning, walk out on his balcony, and see an array of Wal-Marts, hamburger franchises, corporate farms, and ball-bearing factories, all owned by him and controlled by him through the Internet. He will also be a supporter of family values, in the broadminded sense of the term, of course.

We have lived with the notion that there are only two economic systems, communism and capitalism, for so long that we forget that both ‘isms’ are relatively new. Frank Owsley’s work on the pre-Civil War South and Walter Scott’s various historical books and historical novels all give us glimpses of societies that at least attempted to arrange their economic lives as if the Christian God had once visited this earth.
___________________________________________________

“The national dustmen, after entertaining one another with a great many noisy little fights among themselves, had dispersed for the present, and Mr. Gradgrind was at home for the vacation.

“He sat writing in the room with the deadly statistical clock, proving something no doubt—probably, in the main, that the Good Samaritan was a Bad Economist.”

--Charles Dickens in Hard Times

Capitalism, School Shootings, and Warehouses

The capitalists made their first breach in the wall of the traditional family when they took the father away from the farm and away from the family business. The second breach was made when they took the woman away from the home to work for wages beside her husband. Massive immigration has made it impossible for the working poor to raise a family on one income. As long as the capitalists have an endless supply of cheap labor, they will never pay a family wage to one of their workers.

And yet the pernicious poor people will reproduce. And then the warehousing of children begins, and then the shootings in the schools occur, and then several corporate giants donate large sums of money to schools to build athletic facilities to keep the kids off dope and out of trouble. Does anyone see something wrong with this picture?

The Southern Tradition

Book Review: The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism by Eugene D. Genovese, Harvard University Press, 1994

Mr. Genovese, a former Marxist but excellent historian nonetheless, brings before us an array of Southern agrarians who should be studied but who are generally ignored by mainstream conservative-liberal pundits. Genovese does justice to the varied opinions of M. E. Bradford, Andrew Lytle, Alan Tate, and Richard Weaver while also focusing on the common ideas shared by all the agrarians. While they differed on the subject of what a just government should be, all the Southern agrarians were united in their critique of capitalism – the religion of the Yankee conservatives.

The agrarian critique of capitalism is, in my opinion, irrefutable. The problem with the free-market capitalism of the Buckleys, the Novaks, the Gilders, and the Limbaughs, is that an unrestrained free-market completely destroys the traditional values necessary to sustain a free-market economy. If families, neighborhoods, and God himself is made subject to the free-market, then all is cheerless, dark, deadly, and chaotic. People will turn to socialism or fascism to escape the capitalistic nightmare. And it is indeed a nightmare. Capitalism has shown itself to be more devastatingly destructive of hearth and home than communism or socialism. As dreadful as Poland was under communism, the Polish people did not face as great a danger to their faith and their families as they now face in the form of the democratic capitalism so adored by the late Michael Novak, Wall Street, and Rush Limbaugh. Our benighted nation, far from holding out a beacon light to the rest of the world, instead illustrates the terrible dangers of unchecked human pride. We are indeed a "city built on a hill" – we are a satanic city built on a hill of technology and dead souls.

Yet the free-market conservatives drone on and on, preaching happiness for all, if we would just support the capitalist crusade in Iraq and adopt the flat tax.

The free marketers wish no one ill, but their happy dream of a well ordered international economy of morally indifferent affluence for many and misery for those who cannot compete – a dream that constitutes my own private nightmare – is becoming a reality. We may indeed be on the threshold of a brave new world of affluent depravity for a good many people, perhaps even a majority of Americans. If so, I am glad to be too old to have to live with the worst of what is coming.

I have no quarrel with Mr. Genovese's presentation of the Southern agrarian case against capitalism. I do disagree with him on the issue of racism. While admiring the agrarians, Mr. Genovese deplores their racist support of segregation. Donald Davidson is especially singled out for his opposition to integration. Mr. Genovese is schizophrenic. He fails to understand that without segregation, the values of white Southerners whom he admires, such as Donald Davidson, would be no different from the values of the Northern capitalists, whom he deplores. New south "conservatives" like Newt Gingrich can be part of the New World Order because they are willing to trade Christian civilization for the new multi-racial, free-market world. But it is a spiritually impoverished world that Newt and the integrationists love, and it will come crashing down on everyone's head regardless of color. And then there will be, oh rapture of raptures, equality – albeit the equality of the dung heap.

Dislocation

While reading Slavomir Rawicz’s account of his long walk (The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom, Lyons Press, 1997), I was struck with certain similarities between his life and that of the fictional hero, Dr. Zhivago, from Boris Pasternak’s novel of the same name. Let me briefly describe Rawicz’s life as he relates it in his book.

The author was a young Polish army officer in 1939, and while on leave at his home near the Russian border, he was arrested by Russian Communists. The Russians, in their infinite wisdom, knew that all Polish army officers living on the border were spies, so Rawicz was taken to prison and tortured for a year and then sentenced to serve twenty-five years in Siberia.

But Rawicz did not want, for some inexplicable reason, to spend twenty-five years in Siberia, so he and six companions escaped and walked through Siberia, Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, and the Himalayan Mountains to freedom.

The critics hailed Rawicz’s odyssey as a triumph of the human spirit, which it certainly is, but I would label it a triumph of the Christian spirit. It isn’t the fact that Rawicz and the other men survive that matters most, it is the fact that they survive while maintaining their human dignity that counts. For instance, when a young, attractive Polish girl joins the seven men early in their escape (she had escaped from another camp), all the men treat her in a protective, fatherly fashion. She is not made into a company whore but is instead treated as a Madonna figure.

In addition, when a person falls and cannot continue, the others refuse to go on without him. That kind of deep blood Christianity demonstrated by the seven men and the girl is what makes this book special. (Alas, three men and the girl do not make it.) Incredible survival stories are interesting, but it is the way these men and the girl conduct themselves that sets this survival story apart from other such stories.

One of my favorite sections of the book is the white moment when one of the men, a gentle giant from Latvia, performs a Herculean feat of strength and a supernatural act of charity. After going countless days and nights without food or water, he still manages to carry the young Polish girl through the desert.

“Stick beside me, Slav,” said Kolemenos. “I am going to carry her.” And he lifted her into his arms, swayed for a moment as he adjusted himself to the weight, and staggered off. He carried her for fully two hundred yards and I was there to ease her down when he paused for a rest.

“Please leave me, Anastazi,” she begged. “You are wasting your strength.” He looked at her but could not bring himself to speak.

We made a shelter there and stayed for perhaps three hours through the worst heat of the day. She lay still—I do not think she could move. The ugly swelling was past the knees and heavy with water. Kolemenos was flat on his back, restoring his strength. He knew what he was going to do.

The sun began to decline. Kolemenos bent down and swung her into his arms and trudged off. I stayed with him and the rest were all about us. He covered fully a quarter of a mile before he put her down that first time. He picked her up again and walked, her head pillowed on his great shoulder. I can never in my life see anything so magnificent as the blond-bearded giant Kolemenos carrying Kristina, hour after hour, towards darkness of that awful sixth day. His ordeal lasted some four hours. Then she touched his cheek.

“Put me on the ground, Anastazi. Just lay me down on the ground.”

I took her weight from him and together we eased her down. We gathered round her. A wisp of a smile hovered about the corners of her mouth. She looked very steadily at each one of us in turn and I thought she was going to speak. Her eyes were clear and very blue. There was a great tranquility about her. She closed her eyes.

Rawicz never returned to Poland to see the young bride that he had married only months before his imprisonment. He does not make it clear whether his first wife was killed by the Communists or whether he was simply unable to get back to her. He merely says she was lost to him. He also never saw his mother and father or his friends in Poland again. He lived in exile in England, and married an English woman who gave him four children. At the time of the book’s publication, he was in his eighties.

In comparison, Dr. Zhivago’s life spans the last years of the Czars and the early years of the Bolshevik’s regime. He is married and working as a medical doctor at the time of Russia’s entry into World War I and is conscripted into the Czar’s army to work in a hospital near the front. After finishing his work for the Czarist forces, he attempts to return to private life, but after a few years of family life he is forcibly abducted into the Bolshevik army. He eventually escapes by taking a long walk across Russia but never sees his wife and children again. He is also, eventually, separated from his second common-law wife and daughter through the exigencies of the Communist Revolution.

What the fictional character Zhivago and the author Rawicz have in common is that they both are uprooted from a traditional way of life by the new materialist, Communist system. They could not hide themselves in the new system as one could hide in less totalitarian systems. “Is there no escape for him? Couldn’t he run away?” “Where could he run, Larisa Feodorovna? You could do that in the old days, under the Tsars. But just you try nowadays.”

I suppose one could read Rawicz’s book or Pasternak’s novel and come up with the American response, “Thank God we are a free country and not a Communist one.” But such a response would be off the mark. The essence of Communism is its materialism. When individuals are no longer seen as members of communities, churches, and families, but as consumers, workers, and producers, they have ceased to be human in the eyes of those who rule and have become inhuman cogs in an inhuman machine of government. Dislocated lives such as those lived by Zhivago and Rawicz are the result of such materialism. But we must realize that our own materialistic economic system has perpetuated the same type of dislocation that materialistic Communism has. The methods of coercion differ but the goal of both the Russian Communists and the U. S. capitalists is the same: a Utopian, machine-based society governed by an elect few and peopled by robot-like human beings. The Russian Communists tried the masculine method of coercion: “Do what we say or go to the Gulag.” The American capitalists took the feminine approach and seduced their victims first. The seduction has been more successful than the closed fist. In America we do willingly what the Communists had to force their people to do. We send our children to state schools, treat men and women as economic units only, and sever all ties with kith, kin, and place in order to “go where the jobs are.”

The question, “Who are you?”, used to be answered in the Old Country with an answer like, “I am Michael, son of Jonathan, the blacksmith in the village of Avoca.” Now, one answers the question with, “I am Mike, super computer whiz and a child of cyber space.” Economic systems can bear a certain amount of dissection and reorganization, but human souls cannot. They are made for the “the tilled field and hedgerow, linked to the ploughed furrow, the frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingerings, the cultivated garden plot.” They are not made for the dynamo.

The two great Utopian states, Communist Russia and the United States, have denied the one thing that is necessary for mankind to breath: the human soul. And yet the U.S., having consumed the Russian heresy, has tottered into the 21st century with no signs of repentance. Dislocation, so long as it is not accompanied by the harsh physical suffering of Rawicz and Zhivago, will be looked upon as normal, and those who resist will be labeled as psychologically unstable or even criminally insane. Thus sickness will be health, and health, sickness, and the deaf will shout warnings to the deaf.

__________________________

“Then he made John sit in the machine and he himself sat beside him. Then he began pulling the levers about and for a long time nothing happened: but at last there came a flash and a roar and the machine bounded into the air and then dashed forward. Before John had got his breath they had flashed across a broad thoroughfare which he recognized as the main road, and were racing through the country to the north of it—a flat country of square stony fields divided by barbed wire fences. A moment later they were standing still in a city where all the houses were built of steel.”

-- from The Pilgrim’s Regress by C. S. Lewis

The Ancient Rhythms

It would be difficult to imagine a society more uncongenial to Christianity (save that of Islam) than our present, capitalist, post-Christian society. The capitalist dynamic is diametrically opposed to Christianity. Historically, Christian societies have tended to be agrarian and traditional: “the tilled field and hedgerow, linked to the plowed furrow, the frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingerings, the cultivated garden plot.”

In contrast, Christianity does not do well in societies that,

…pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.
Lay me on an anvil O God.
Beat me, hammer me into a steel spike.
Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into central girders.
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.

--from “Prayers of Steel” by Carl Sandburg

Although there are those who will advise us that we can have Christian skyscrapers, I think we must reject that advice as either maliciously deceitful or stupid in the extreme. Steel-girder societies based on greed and avarice will never be compatible with societies of evening lingerings.

Resistance to steel-girder capitalism, however, seems doomed to failure, because so much effort must be expended in trying to survive and stay above the lower half of the pyramid that one has no energy for counterrevolution. (I don’t see why Enron executives were singled out for running a pyramid scam when all of our economy is based on one.) Nevertheless, since the only alternative to counterrevolution is a surrender to capitalism, even the tired and poor need to be summoned to the counterrevolutionary ranks. One fights for victory, but even in defeat there is the supreme consolation one has saved his soul through the strife against the dragon. This is not always apparent while the battle is raging, but it becomes clear afterward.

The Scottish Highland culture was seemingly dead forever after Culloden. But whenever the Scots want to feel their culture is in tune with divine rhythms and in opposition to the base, materialist, Whig culture surrounding them, they turn to the bagpipes and play a tune that evokes Prince Charlie and the days of the clan over the corporation, the village over the city, the farm over the factory, and the blood oath over the lawyer’s brief.

Likewise in the South, when Southerners want to feel connected to something and someone greater than themselves, they don’t sing songs and write poetry about how they just sold a worthless piece of real estate to a rich widow. No, they sing of Robert E. Lee, of Forrest, and of the Great Cause.

I see the smug capitalist laughing in the corner. “I’ll permit mere nostalgia. Let the Scotsman play his bagpipe in weekend parades and let the Southerner whistle “Dixie” and go to Civil War re-enactments, but just make sure both men are back in the office on Monday.”

Yes, a counterrevolution must be more than nostalgia. But the nostalgia should prime us for the counterrevolution. From whence comes the nostalgia? Why do we yearn for the evening lingerings? Because we have souls. Capitalism needs men without souls for its steel girders, but our Lord only takes men with souls into His kingdom. A steel spike does not to heaven go.

For the Greater Good

I can identify with a writer for Little Geneva Report who claimed he could not listen to Rush Limbaugh for more than a minute. Limbaugh is truly one pig of a man. But he is just a cruder version of Ludwig von Mises and Adam Smith, who both sought to convince the Western world that it was better off with capitalism than it had ever been before under any of the other –isms. And von Mises, because he came after Adam Smith, could show with statistics how much better off Western man was.

The problem with the statistics is they showed an aggregate increase in wealth, but they did not show the increase in poverty and the decrease in the soul of Western man. The great defenses of capitalism from Adam Smith to George Gilder always make the ‘greater good for the greater number’ argument. I don’t think even that argument is correct, but let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that this argument is correct. You know what the answer to it is? All the greater good in the world cannot make up for one eight-year-old boy getting up and going to the coal mines to work. Case closed on capitalism.

And the capitalists have never ceased their efforts to atomize the human race. They want no children, no men, and no women, only atoms. When, for instance, various Christian groups compelled the capitalists to allow children to go to school at age eight instead of to the mines, the capitalists counterattacked. They turned the schools into training grounds for the factories. When the neocon, Mort Zuckerman, brags about the docility of the American workers, he is giving a pat on the back to our public school system, which produces moral eunuchs and functional illiterates but successfully turns out soul-dead zombies fully capable of adjusting to the soulless life style of the ‘free market.’

And where does it all end? In hell, of course.