July 13, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

How Southerners Committed Cultural and Political Suicide

 

Friends,

Today I pass along the latest installment of the Kennedy Twins Newsletter.

As undoubtedly many of you know, both James “Ron” Kennedy and his brother, Walter “Donnie” Kennedy, are prolific writers and staunch defenders of (what is left of) Southern tradition and heritage. Among the titles of their books are, most notably: The South Was Right! (newly revised edition 2020),  Punished With Poverty: The Suffering South, and  Yankee Empire: Aggressive Abroad and Despotic at Home…all strongly recommended to Southerners interested in how their heritage and traditions have been subverted and devastated by the forces that dominate modern America…and how just possibly a revival of that heritage and those traditions might occur.

But only—only—if Southerners begin to understand how we reached our present disastrous state of affairs.

The task of understanding has been and is incredibly difficult. And it has much to do with the present politics of the former Confederate states and the fact that good intentions and normal reactions to adverse conditions can lead to bad results.

How we got here, a comprehension of how we arrived at our present woeful situation, demands that we understand the lineaments of post-War Between the States history, in particular the choices our ancestors—and we—have made.

After Appomattox and the other Confederate surrenders, the South, the former Confederate States, experienced first occupation, then Reconstruction. Eventually coming out from under those onerous impositions, in virtual poverty and shorn of most of the political influence that they had prior to the War, most Southerners, naturally, inclined toward the Democratic Party. Indeed, it had been the Democrats, including many in the North, who had either opposed the War on the South, or, at least, advocated more reasonable and, as it were, “softer” policies after the War’s conclusion.

The Republican Party was seen, rightly so, as the party of conquest, of harsh Reconstruction policies, and anti-Southern bigotry. Not that it was in principle necessarily pro-black or favored expansive “civil rights” measures: only when directed at the conquered South were such actions merited, certainly not at home in their Northern bastions.

The South, the states of the former Confederacy, thus became uniformly Democratic strongholds—“the Solid South.” And, growing up in rural North Carolina how many times did I hear my elders declare: “I’d vote for the town drunk if he ran on the Democratic ticket!” Voting straight party became second nature to Southerners; granddad had done so. Indeed, some of us had grandparents even born in the late nineteenth century who knew and heard from their parents about the barbarity and degradations that came after 1865.

Thus, the Democratic Party became a kind of refuge for most Southerners. And Northern Democrats, at least for a goodly part of the century after Appomattox, welcomed them and allowed them to occupy positions of authority. Even under such social liberals as Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Southern solons in Congress—remember Senators Harry Byrd Sr., Josiah Bailey, Richard Russell, and others, who controlled the US Senate and Senate committees (and thus legislation)—and not to mention the various Southern Congressmen who dominated equally in the House of Representatives—held a considerable amount of power.

Of course, both Northern Democrats and their Southern allies had to find compromise at times. Generally, the Northerners let the South alone in its local governing, as long as Southerners generally supported measures nationally that their brethren advanced. Along with this occasionally troublesome collaboration, Northern Democrats—and Northern folk in general—agreed to let the South celebrate its history and its heroes and its heritage.

As Professor Clyde Wilson and others have described it, the years between the end of the nineteenth century and the election of Lyndon Johnson were a kind of “second era of good feeling” for the South. Southern honor, Southern heroism, Southern history and heritage were celebrated not just in the South, but everywhere in the nation. Summing up the view of most Americans of that period, President Eisenhower spoke admiringly of General Robert E. Lee, and he was in many ways expressing the general view of most Americans of the South back in 1960:

“General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle. Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.” 

But not just on the lips of our national leaders, but in the public imagination, in the popular media, and in Hollywood, the South, and in particular Southerners in the War for Southern Independence, were treated largely with respect, if not outright admiration. Southerners had fought nobly and honorably, and were depicted as such in works of literature, by movie-makers, and by our political leaders.

Hollywood gave us not only a cinematic treatment of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind,” but numerous other pro-Southern and Confederate-friendly films.  Who of a certain age cannot recall such major Hollywood products as “Jesse James” (with Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda) and its sequel, “The Return of Frank James”? Or any of several epics starring Errol Flynn (“Santa Fe Trail” and “Rocky Mountain”) or several of the memorable John Ford-directed masterpieces: “Judge Priest,” “The Sun Shines Bright,”  and “The Prisoner of Shark Island,” from 1936 (on the brutal and extra-legal imprisonment of Dr. Samuel Mudd after the Lincoln assassination)? And most actors in Western movies—John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, Audie Murphy, and others—carried the theme of Southern honor and respect into that popular genre.

In fact, in the classic Western I would suggest that there exists a sub-genre which I would call “the Southern Western,” essentially using the War and its aftermath as a plot basis for dozens of films…a trend that has continued in a small way into more recent times with the continued fascination with Jesse James and the Border conflicts (e.g., “The Long Riders,” 1980; “Ride With the Devil,” 1999;  “American Outlaws,” 2001; and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” 2007.)

The great “Civil War Centennial” of 1961-1965, with its commemorations and celebrations, marked the end of the “bargain” between North and South, a final salute to the South as a noble adversary in “the late Unpleasantness.“

Dramatic changes in American culture and the way many Americans saw themselves in the 1960s and 1970s, would alter Southerners’ attachment to the old Democratic Party and perhaps just as significantly, radically transform the Northern branch of the party into something incompatible with the views of most Southern folk.

But even as late as the 1960s John F. Kennedy had a successful “Southern Strategy” which enabled him to win election in 1960 (with Southern votes), despite his later alterations and the turn-around of President Lyndon Johnson.

But in many ways that was the “last hurrah” for the “solid Democratic South.” The rise of Goldwater Republicanism, Kevin Phillips’ “Southern Strategy” (outlined most notably in his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority), and the emergence of the avowedly conservative Ronald Reagan in 1976 and 1980, signaled the final demise of the second era of good feeling. Phillips worked closely with President Richard Nixon, and outlined his plan to win the South (and Middle America) for a newly-christened “conservative” and victorious GOP. And by the ‘70s, and more like a tidal-wave in the 198os, conservative Southerners turned Franklin Roosevelt’s picture to the wall and became Republicans (at least in their voting habits). The solid Democratic South would continue to be “solid,” but not Democrat.

Increasingly, in the years even before the election of George W. Bush in 2000, signs of unease and doubt arose among a few more thoughtful Southerners. Yes, the GOP paid initial lip-service to traditional values and commonly-held views which most Southerners shared. But in action many leaders of the Republican Party, including a new crop of home-grown Southern GOP politicos (think here of Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott of the thoroughly “red” state of South Carolina), had traveled much further to the definable political and social Left, further than many Southern folk realized, even as many blindly followed along.

“I’d vote for the town drunk if he ran on the…Republican…ticket!” And how many times do we hear: “I HAVE to vote for the GOP candidate, even if he is terrible, since the Democrat is even worse”?)

It should have been apparent when Graham urged the removal of Confederate symbols from the South Carolina Capitol (“The flag had to come down. And thank God it has!”), or when he (and other Southern GOP leaders) essentially endorsed same sex marriage. But they are just the tip of the political iceberg, the chameleons who inveigle far too many Southern conservatives.

Influenced profoundly by the feculent remnants of a zealous Trotskyite globalism and its radical commitment to an expanding concept of “civil rights” (same sex marriage, transgenderism, etc. are now increasingly acceptable among conservative elites), and by a constant diet of Neoconservative commentary spouted by Fox News, Newsmax, and so-called “conservative” talk radio, incorporating that template, in large part Southern Republicanism  and establishment Southern “conservatives” have become largely indistinguishable from their Northern brethren.

How many times each day do we hear representatives of what Old Right scholar Paul Gottfried calls “Con Inc.”—Establishment Conservatism—praise the legacy of radical Frederick Douglass or the “vision” of Communist-inspired Martin Luther King Jr.? Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Levin and Brian Kilmeade on Fox, Rich Lowry at National Review, Michael Anton and cohorts at the Claremont Institute, Larry Arnn at Hillsdale College—you take your pick: they all condemn the historic South, its traditions and heritage. They all accept a warmed-over and refashioned post-Marxist globalism and expansive view of “rights,” even if they also support Donald Trump.

It’s a vision that has no room for Confederate symbols and monuments. It’s a vision that has led almost all Southern Republican solons in Congress to vote to do away with names of American military installations and forts if they bear the names of Confederate generals (or slaveholders).

It is, in fact, a Neo-Reconstruction, this time led by our supposed defenders who came to power when the old Democrat Party went bad. But, as we now find, the Leopard has not changed its spots. Despite all the pious campaign promises for this and for that, despite the soothing words of assurance and the pledges to defend what is left of our traditions and heritage, slowly at first and now more rapidly, our reputed defenders have, when not poisoning progressively our minds and outlook, delivered us over to those very enemies, those very forces that seek our elimination and extermination.

I never tire of quoting the great Southern writer, Robert Lewis Dabney’s superb description of “establishment conservatives,” written 140 years ago, but absolutely applicable today.

Here is what he wrote:

“This is a party [established conservativism] which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it he salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious, for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always—when about to enter a protest—very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its ‘bark is worse than its bite,’ and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent rôle of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it ‘in wind,’ and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip."

 How true, how prescient, how totally and equally valid today in 2021!

Until Southern folk conscious of their heritage and traditions comprehend what has and is occurring, until they—we—become far more discerning and willing to stand forth and demand an accounting, the same rot, the same inevitable hemorrhaging, the same putrefaction of the South we love, the South we remember, the South now rapidly slipping away, will continue.  The efforts of such enterprises as The Abbeville Institute, Clyde Wilson’s Reckonin.com, journals such as Chronicles Magazine are laudable and to be strongly encouraged, but they are still far from being well known.

Every Southerner, aware of who he is, “remembering who we are,” to use the late Mel Bradford’s phrase, should become a true missionary for a re-conversion of “our people” before that becomes an impossibility in the Behemoth State we now inhabit.

The pro-Southern poet Robert Lee Frost, in his poem “The Black Cottage,” sums up both our hope and our task:

“For, dear me, why abandon a belief

Merely because it ceases to be true.

Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt

It will turn true again, for so it goes.

Most of the change we think we see in life

Is due to truths being in and out of favour.

As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish

I could be monarch of a desert land

I could devote and dedicate forever

To the truths we keep coming back and back to.”

That must be our task, our role: to keep alive our heritage, our past, our memory, to rededicate ourselves “to the truths we keep coming back and back to,” before our Ancestors and before Almighty God.

*****

I urge you to read Ron Kennedy’s latest commentary (link below), on the continuing treason of our elected leaders, Southern Republicans, who joined with Democrats to rid Statuary Hall in the US Capitol of all Confederates and “racists.”  Until we rise up and denounce them, and defeat them, this will continue…and time is becoming our enemy:

http://www.kennedytwins.com/articles/Responding%20to%20Southern%20Congressmen.pdf

                                                       July 3, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

Independence Day and the Perversion of American History

 

 

Friends,

July 4, “Independence Day,” has become for most Americans little more than another holiday, a day off from work, and a time to barbecue with family and friends.

Yet, the Declaration of Independence and the day we set aside to commemorate it should make us reflect on the sacrifices of the men who signed it and what they intended. Representatives from thirteen colonies came together to take a momentous step that they knew might land them on the scaffold. They were protesting that their traditional rights as Englishmen had been violated, and that those violations had forced them into what was actually in many ways America’s real “civil war”: English subjects in America against the English government at Whitehall.

For many the Declaration of Independence is a fundamental text that tells the world who we are as a people. It is a distillation of American belief and purpose. Pundits and commentators, left and right, never cease reminding us that America is an “exceptional” nation, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Almost as important as a symbol of American belief, we are instructed, is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Lincoln intentionally places his short peroration in the context of a particular reading of the Declaration. He bases his concept of the creation of the American nation in philosophical principles he sees enunciated in 1776, and in particular, on the idea of “equality” and a new national unity undreamt of by earlier generations. With this understanding, he charts a new and radical departure:  “this nation…shall have a new birth of freedom,” an open-ended invitation to future revolutionary change.

In his view, America is a nation whose unbreakable unity supersedes the recognized and prior rights of the states and which finds that unity in “mystic chords of memory.” The problem is that this interpretation, which forms the philosophical base of both dominant “movement conservatism” today - neoconservatism - and the post-Marxist multicultural Left, is basically false.

Lincoln opens his address, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth ….” There is a critical problem with this assertion. It was not the Declaration that “created” the new nation; the Declaration was a statement of thirteen individual colonies, announcing their respective independence from the mother country, binding themselves together in a military and political alliance. It was the Constitution, drafted eleven years later (1787), after the successful conclusion of the War for Independence, which established a new nation. And, as various historians and scholars have pointed out, in 1776 the American Founders never intended to cobble together a nation with a unitary government based on the proposition that “all men are created equal.”

A brief survey of the writings of such distinguished historians and researchers as Barry Shain, Forrest McDonald, M. E. Bradford, George W. Carey, and more recently Kirkpatrick Sale, plus a detailed reading of the commentaries and writings of those men who met in Philadelphia, give the lie to that claim.

The Framers of the Constitution were horrified by “egalitarianism” and “democracy,” and they made it clear that what they were establishing in 1787 was a limited republic, which owed its existence to certain powers conceded by the respective states, a republic in which most “rights” were retained zealously by the states, including the inherent ability to decide who would participate in governing and on what basis. The Tenth Amendment, too often overlooked or disregarded, spells that out: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  

A survey of the correspondence and the debates over the Constitution and its meaning underscores support for this regionalism and anti-egalitarianism, as Professor Bradford methodically demonstrates in his volume Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constition and also in  Founding Fathers: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United State Constitution.

Obviously, then, Lincoln could not found his “new nation” on the U. S. Constitution; it was too aristocratic and decentralized, with non-enumerated powers maintained by the states, including the implicit right to secede (admitted by almost the entirety of constitutional interpretation prior to 1861). Indeed, slavery was explicitly sanctioned, even if most of the Framers believed that as an institution it would die a natural death, if left on its own.

Lincoln went back to the Declaration of Independence and invested in it a meaning that supported his statist and wartime intentions. But even then, he verbally abused the language of the Declaration, interpreting the words in a form that its Signers never envisioned or intended. Although those authors employed the phrase “all men are created equal,” and certainly that is why Lincoln made direct reference to it, a careful analysis of the Declaration does not support the sense that Lincoln invests in those few words. (See the Professor Shain’s detailed examination, The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context: American State Papers, Petitions, Proclamations, and Letters of the Delegates to the First National Congresses). Contextually, the authors at Philadelphia were asserting their historic — and equal — rights in law as Englishmen before the Crown, which had, they believed, been violated and abused by the British government.

Like the Framers, the Founders rejected egalitarianism. They understood that no one is, literally, “created equal” to anyone else. Certainly, each and every person is created with no less or no more dignity, measured by his or her own unique potential before God. But this is not what most contemporary writers mean today when they talk of “equality.”

Rather, from a traditionally-Christian viewpoint, each of us is born into this world with different levels of intelligence, in different areas of expertise; physically, some are stronger or heavier, others are slight and smaller; some learn foreign languages and write beautiful prose; others become fantastic athletes or scientists. Social customs and traditions, property holding, and individual initiative — each of these factors further discriminate as we continue in life.

None of this means that we are any less or more valued in the judgment of God, Who judges us based on our own, very unique capabilities. God measures us by ourselves, by our own maximum potential, not by that of anyone else — that is, whether we use our own, individual talents to the very fullest (recall the Parable of the Talents in the Gospel of St. Matthew).

The Founders understood this, as their writings and speeches clearly indicate. Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” would have certainly struck them as radical and revolutionary, a veritable “heresy.” Even more disturbing for them would be the specter of the modern-day neoconservatives — that is, those who purport to defend our Constitutional republic against the abuses of the multiculturalist left — enshrining Lincoln’s address as a basic symbol of American political and social order.

They would have understood the radicalism implicit in such a pronouncement; they would have seen Lincoln’s faulty interpretation of the Declaration as grafting on to the Constitution a meaning which it does not have and, in fact, a revolutionary denial of its original intentions; and they would have understood in Lincoln’s language the content of a Christian and millennialist heresy, heralding a transformed nation where the Federal government would become the father and mother and absolute master of us all…all in the name of “our democracy.”

Thus, as we commemorate the declaring of American independence 245 years ago, we should lament the mythology created about it in 1863. And we should recall the generation of 1787, a generation of noble men who comprehended fully well that a country based on the centralization of power in the abusive hands of a few and on egalitarianism is a nation where true liberties are imperiled.

In 2021 we have reached a nadir in our history, nearly as defining as the defeat on the battlefield of the older constitutional republicanism in 1865. The expressed fears of the Framers have been fully realized.  The hopes of our ancestors have been turned into nightmares for us, their progeny.

It is time for patriots to once again invoke the name of “God, Our Help in Ages Past” and, each in his own manner, mount the barricades.

                                                          June 23, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

The Film “Dixie,” Bing Crosby, and the Story of an American Treasure

Friends,

In past columns I have written about some classic films, some of which have been effectively banned or “cancelled” by our contemporary cultural gatekeepers.

The case of the immortal Disney hit, “Song of the South,” is perhaps the most egregious. I wrote about it back in July 2019 in an essay published by The Abbeville Institute, also describing a seller who made it available privately to purchasers in an excellent, pristine Technicolor copy. Alas, since then apparently Disney, now part of a progressivist “woke” conglomerate which includes the ABC broadcast network, has insured that the seller cease and desist offering copies to the public. Yet, just recently another superb copy showed up for sale, this time marketed by Amazon.com. The seller is listed as Brian’s Retro Collection. Fearing the same thing which happened to the earlier release, I quickly ordered a copy. It’s also excellent. And as of this writing it is still available, reasonably priced.

But “Song of the South” is just the tip of the iceberg. Potentially hundreds of politically-incorrect films that compose the rich history of American filmography may come under the “woke” microscope. At present the fanatical social justice warriors, intent on imposing their anti-Western, anti-white philosophy, have in their crosshairs mainly the more noteworthy cinema productions associated with our history and heritage, or what they term “systemic white supremacy” and racism--thus films like “Gone With the Wind” or “Song of the South.”

But as the impotent opposition to their cultural ravages—establishment Conservatism, Fox News and most Republicans—daily cedes more ground to them, the more their unquenchable search for targets expands. For their object is, in fact, the complete and total extirpation of Western culture, including its cinematic history.

Just the other day combing through the catalogues of several private film sellers I came across a title that was unfamiliar to me. The movie is “Dixie,” a 1943 Technicolor musical released by Paramount and starring Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, and Crosby’s first major color musical. It appeared just as his “Road to” series with Lamour and Bob Hope was becoming very popular with moviegoers. And, despite mixed press reviews at the time, it ranked 15^th in audience popularity in 1943.

The film recounts the story of Dan Emmett and his composition of the song “Dixie,” and it does so spotlighting Crosby’s notable vocal talent. Presently the movie is owned by Universal Pictures, a division of NBC Universal, and was last screened on television back in the early 1980s by American Movie Classics, but don’t look for it being aired any time soon.

As an account of the creation of what has been one of the nation’s most popular songs, “Dixie” combines historical fact, with a pinch or two of Hollywood magic. Dan Emmett, of course, was not originally from the South. Born in Mount Vernon, Ohio, in 1815, he was soon attracted to American folk melody and traditional popular tunes, joined a traveling circus, and by the 1840s had organized America’s first troupe of blackface minstrels, “The Virginia Minstrels.”

The film begins with Emmett (Crosby) singing his major hit “Sunday, Monday or Always” to his beloved Jean Mason (Marjorie Reynolds), whose father tells him that he cannot marry her, as he had just left his lighted pipe in the Mason home, which caught the house on fire. Only when he would return a success would that be possible. Emmett then assembles a minstrel troupe and travels, and finally arrives in New York continuing his composition and singing. Variously we hear Crosby in superb renderings of traditional favorites: “”Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Old Dan Tucker,” “Buffalo Gals,” and “She’s from Missouri.”

Historically “Dixie”—published as “I Wish I was in Dixie’s Land”—was first performed in New York on April 4, 1859, with Emmett in blackface. After its phenomenal success Emmett related several different versions of when he composed it, ranging from a couple of days before the initial performance to a period of over years prior (the version adopted by the film).

It was apparently “Dixie’s” performance at the French Opera House in New Orleans in March 1860 that soon made it the national hymn of the South and the soon-to-be-born Confederacy. Recounting the event, the film shows cinematically how that came to be.

For the French-descended aristocrats of New Orleans and the Louisiana planters, the French Opera House was a renowned cultural and artistic treasure. In truth it was the first major opera house in America, presenting premieres (in French) of such classics as Flotow’s “Martha,” Thomas’s “Mignon,” and Saint-Saens’s “Samson et Dalila.” But the theater also hosted grand carnival balls, concerts, and other types of entertainment.   The film rightfully illustrates that there would have been a hesitancy by some of its patrons to a musical variety show…all in blackface. But their qualms put aside, “Dixie” reaches its climax as Crosby, in blackface with around forty others equally in blackface, begins to sing the song that made Dan Emmett famous.

At first he intones it very slowly, having insisted that he wanted to sing it that way. But noticing a small fire in a side dressing room, the orchestra speeds up to a much more rapid pace. Crosby shouts: “What are you, just a bunch of Yankees?” The elite audience, at first unenthusiastic, now joins in with gusto. An audience member stands and gives what would become in a couple of years a classic “rebel yell,” and soon the entire audience is possessed by the magic and patriotic delight and erupts in singing the song.

And Emmett wins his bride, as the film ends with the triumphant strains of “Dixie” echoing over the credits.

In addition to Crosby and Lamour, the cast includes the inimitable Raymond Walburn (who also adds delightful humor to the story), classic vaudevillians Eddie Foy Jr. and Lynne Overman, and some of Paramount’s capable character actors, including Olin Howland, Billy de Wolfe, Stanley Andrews (later of “Death Valley Days” fame), and Willie Best, a fine black actor who performed comic roles in the 1940s and ‘50s.

As the last scene unfolded and Crosby began singing “Dixie,” joined in by the chorus and then the audience, and the music swells, emotion came over me, and I wanted to stand and join in, as well.

That has been—and continues to be—the power of this song, this part of our history, an indication of the power of music to evoke the most sublime of emotions: the love of country, of family, of heritage. And the film “Dixie” does it justice that will warm the heart of any Southerner or patriotic American.

The movie “Dixie” is available, in a very good Technicolor print (online orders) from the Vermont Movie Store. But, like in the case of “Song of the South,” my advice is to act soon. The Woke Monsters never sleep. As St. Peter warns us (I Peter 5:8):  “Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil walketh about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”

                                               June 11, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

  

The Battle for the West is Also a Cultural One

 

 

Friends,

One-hundred and eighty four years ago Danish playwright, novelist, and, most famously, fairy tale author, Hans Christian Andersen, published one of his most memorable stories: “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Appearing at the same time as another of his noted fairy tales, “The Little Mermaid,” that endearing story of pomposity and pretentiousness, finally revealed as one of a public convinced by fakery, has been translated into over 100 languages.

Children everywhere since have read it and heard it. It’s one of those quaint little stories from our past we were exposed to, we picked up, or maybe our parents told us.

Commentators have sometimes used the tale as a metaphor. In that sense it can mean the ability of adroit and cunning public opinion leaders—especially politicians and TV newscasters—to convince people to believe what they say and ignore what we actually see. In common modern parlance: “Who you gonna believe, what I say or your lying eyes?”

As a parable, in our contemporary age, it perhaps has more relevance than ever before.

Just recently several news outlets reported on a major artistic event which occurred in Italy…or should I say, a kind of mindless replication of Andersen’s tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”?  You see, noted Italian sculptor Salvatore Garau just sold his latest “object d’art,” an “invisible” sculpture for the fat price of 15,000 Euros ($18,300 US). Titled “Io Sono” (Italian for "I am"), the sculpture is "immaterial," meaning that the sculpture does not actually exist. It’s invisible. The buyer paid $18,300 for…nothing…only receiving a “certificate of authenticity” for his Euros!

Garau defends his “artistry” and the high price, telling reporters that his work of art is not really “nothing,” but a “vacuum.”  And a “vacuum is nothing more than a space full of energy, and even if we empty it and there is nothing left, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that 'nothing' has a weight…Therefore, it has energy that is condensed and transformed into particles, that is, into us." Additionally, the now-purchased “creation” (if we can call it that), according to Garau’s strict instructions, “must be displayed in a private home free from any obstruction, in an area that is about 5 ft. long by 5 ft. wide.” No doubt, the new owner will want to proudly offer visitors an unobstructed and admiring view of his purchase.

Let me add, this is not the first such sculpture Garau has produced; even more striking, if I can use that word, is his “Buddha in Contemplation,” which is now displayed (sorry for the physical description!) in the historic Piazza della Scala, in Milan, Italy (photo above). For this “object d’art,” since it cannot be seen, its “location” is taped-off—obviously to prevent curious viewers from bumping into it. In Garau’s words:

"Now it exists and will remain in this space forever. You do not see it but it exists. It is made of air and spirit. When I decide to 'exhibit' an immaterial sculpture in a given space, that space will concentrate a certain amount and density of thoughts at a precise point, creating a sculpture that, from my title, will only take the most varied forms."

Ah, yes, and the propinquity of “Buddha in Contemplation” to one of the most historic and fabled opera houses in the world, the Teatro alla Scala, cannot but be noticed.

Regarded as perhaps one Italy’s supreme artistic treasures, arguably the leading opera theater in the world (along with the Vienna Staatsoper, the Metropolitan in New York, and the Bolshoi in Moscow), La Scala was built under the inspiration of the Empress Maria Theresa and inaugurated in 1778. The opera house has produced major works of musical art for 243 years. Equally, from an architectural viewpoint, it is quite stunning in its classical style, a remarkable icon of Western culture and tradition.

Reading this account, I remembered as a youngster experiencing the joy of discovering and listening to music, especially the great classical music of Western civilization.

I would do that in some curious ways.

Like a lot of boys my age, we would watch “The Lone Ranger” or “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon” on our little black and white TVs. For me the beginnings of my musical education had a lot to do with the music I heard played for those programs. Who can forget the stirring opening strains of “The Lone Ranger,” with its dramatic call, “Hi! Yo! Silver,” accompanied by the gallop of Rossini’s overture to “William Tell”? You could get an entire musical education listening to the background music of “The Lone Ranger.” Or, Emil von Reznicek’s delightful “Donna Diana” overture introducing each week the exploits of Sgt. William Preston, his dog King, and horse Rex?

During my first summer job for the North Carolina State Archives, I became friends with a person equally interested in classical music. One day he could not wait for me to “hear” his latest discovery: a 1952 work by American composer John Cage, his composition 4′33″, which is performed in the total absence of sound!  Musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is the sound of the environment heard by the audience during the performance, nothing else! I kept waiting in vain for an instrument to break in, something, anything…but just silence, and maybe a distant cough or muffled sneeze to punctuate the piece.

I thought: maybe I could write something just as good, and receive a hefty stipend like Cage would probably have gotten? I bet that my “nothing” would have been better than his!

Reading the account of Garau’s sculpture put me in mind of John Cage: we increasingly live in an age of “the emperor’s new clothes.” And we do that especially in what has become of—what we have done or allowed to be done to—our culture, our cinema and entertainment, and in the more generally, in the “fake news” that dominates our airways.

Music, architecture, painting, sculpture, and the arts in far too many cases no longer have roots in the traditions, history and culture of a people. Whereas Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas drew from the chorales and music of his German homeland, and built upon long and cumulative traditions of Western music, our modern artists it seems take delight in severing themselves from the culture they have inherited. In too many cases they create in rebellion, in rejection of what they have received, of the two millennia vouchsafed to them as a trust. And in so doing, they also disconnect themselves from the lived traditions and the wisdom of historic society, where our artistic heritage organically developed.

Now, with that separation, and lacking the recognition and appreciation of our civilization’s inheritance, we are starved for true greatness. Real inspiration in the arts has largely dried up, or, worse, become “Buddha in Contemplation” or “4’33”—a rotten porridge in lieu of what our ancestors confected and passed on to us as a trust.

Just watch a PBS “Great Performances” these days…or try to find a radio station, especially a commercial one that programs classical music. Even “educational” or university-connected stations have stopped doing that.

Have you been to an art museum lately and seen the accretions of “modern art”?

A culture—and its artists—which cuts itself off from its past, which rejects and debases it, will eventually dry up and die, its inspiration scattered and corrupted. Instead of “standing on the shoulders of giants,” as 12^th century philosopher Bernard of Chartes declared that we must, and adding thereto, we despoil—and enable educators and politicians to destroy—our civilization and its culture. They are disparaged as “racist” and the product of “white supremacy” and hegemony, which must be canceled, banned, torn down, or ripped out. Far too many of our fellow citizens now think that way thanks to our educational system.

Too often these days I hear the echo of William Butler Yeats in his prophetic poem, “The Second Coming” (1919):

  “…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.”

Our choice, then, is either to disappear into the pages of history, scorned and reviled by future generations, or, to fight like hell for our patrimony, our inheritance—because it is worthy of the fight, because it is glorious, and because it is ours.

We may not see victory in our lifetime or in our children’s, but Yeats’s words later in his poem point the way to our Hope, if we persevere:

          “Surely some revelation is at hand;
          Surely the Second Coming is at hand….”

 

 

 

 

 

                                             June 3, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

The Federalist, Abraham Lincoln, and the Misinterpretation of American History

 

The Federalist online magazine has a problem. It’s a condition that characterizes and infects almost the entirety of the present national conservative media.

This hit home for me on May 31, in an essay by Leslie McAdoo Gordon. Founded in 2013 by Ben Domenech, thefederalist.com it is not connected to The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, which is composed of conservatives and libertarians dedicated to reforming the current legal order.

I read thefederalist.com Webzine almost every day, and occasionally it is the source for items of value and good information. But Gordon’s ill-informed attack on Confederate iconography was not one of them.

Peddled as a defense of retaining “Antietam” as the name of an American naval vessel, she begins her piece: “There is a move these days to revisit our monuments and the names we choose to publicly honor. This movement is good and just. It is a sign of our mature democracy that we can choose to stop honoring things that do not reflect our American ideals and celebrate those that do,” including rejecting anything related to the Confederacy.

Honoring and celebrating the history and symbols of the old South, once a common occurrence in the pages of the conservative quarterly Modern Age or in National Review, are now verboten, beyond the pale. General Robert E. Lee, praised by President Eisenhower in 1960 as “one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation...noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history,” is now exiled from the conservative pantheon, as is anything memorializing or commemorating Confederate heroes and iconography. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Colonel John “the Gray Ghost” Mosby, General Nathan Bedford Forrest—are now canceled, their monuments ingloriously pulled down, and their exploits stricken from textbooks, or worse, treated like depredations of Nazi fanatics.

Like most established conservative media organizations, thefederalist.com appears to be part of what Paul Gottfried calls “ConInc.,” that is, the stagnated national conservative bureaucracy, centered in Washington DC, dominated by Neoconservatives, and more concerned about not rocking the boat too much so as not to be attacked by the frenzied Left as “racist” or protecting “white supremacy”—or perhaps being taken off the A-List of invitees to posh DC social events and soirees.

Perhaps the worst thing is to be a traditional or paleo- conservative type, most especially a representative of Southern traditionalism like the late Mel Bradford (who was unceremoniously dropped from National Review and whose nomination to head the National Endowment for the Humanities was torpedoed by the Neoconservatives) or Dr. Clyde Wilson (the world’s greatest authority on John C. Calhoun).

Now, whether hurled at us every night by Fox News, like bilge spewed from a broken drainage pipe, or screaming at us from the scurrilous pens of a Victor David Hanson, Rich Lowry, or Brian Kilmeade, our new icons to whom we must pay obsequious homage are Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and Frederick Douglass. I would argue strenuously that none of these personalities was a real conservative; indeed, I would suggest that they were revolutionaries who assisted in corrupting our original Constitution. An older generation of conservatives—a Russell Kirk, a Stephen Tonsor, a Peter Stanlis—understood this.

Gordon’s essay  of Memorial Day shows up in thefederalist.com’s daily assortment of essays where she is eager to present what she asserts is the “correct” interpretation of what battles like Antietam (AKA “Sharpsburg”) and Gettysburg were all about, what they mean. They “seared into the nation’s consciousness the immense human sacrifice her people were offering on the altars of union and universal freedom. Make no mistake, these Union soldiers died ‘to make men free’.” And then quoting from the ballad, “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” she ends with a flourish: “The people of the Union in the 1860s knew well what Antietam stood for”: to free the slaves.

That proposition is false and demonstrates Gordon’s basic ignorance of both American history and Lincoln’s enunciated war goals. From the very beginning of the war he saw the conflict as a battle over the interpretation of the Constitution and states’ rights. He stated this forthrightly to Horace Greeley, of The New York Tribune, on August 22, 1862, only a few months before the “Emancipation Proclamation”:

“If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union” 

As is abundantly clear from the press of the period, a large majority of Northerners would not have supported a “war to free the slaves.”  Lincoln knew that. The “Emancipation Proclamation” of January 1, 1863 only extended to states of the Confederacy not controlled by Federal arms. Thus, where it was intended to apply it could not free not a single slave, but it did not apply to the several Border slave states where it could have freed the slaves. It was, as Lincoln indirectly confirms, a propaganda measure, intended to buoy up sagging support for the war both internationally and among more abolition-minded citizens.

In more recent times especially the Neoconservatives and followers of academic Harry Jaffa have latched onto Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” (November 19, 1863), attempting essentially to amend by sleight-of-hand our understanding of the original Constitution and inserting a clause from the Declaration of Independence, via Lincoln, to the effect that “(f)our score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In other words, 1776 was the real founding of the United States and that five little words define us, our history, and our goals as a people. It was a radical assertion greeted even at the time by many in the Northern press as “a perversion of history so flagrant that the extended charity cannot regard it as otherwise than willful.” It remains so today.

Leslie Gordon apparently accepts this fraudulent view of history. Ironically, in so doing, she like other Neocons who assert equality as America’s founding principle, places herself over with the progressivist vision of the country. For they also maintain that egalitarianism is the American “proposition,” the difference being that while establishment conservatives like Gordon believe we have substantially achieved the desired equality uttered in poetic terms in 1776 by what is basically a propaganda document stating American grievances against King George and the reasons for separation, the progressive Left sees equality as an always elusive goal, requiring continual government action to insure what is called “equity.”

The words recently written by David P. Goldman about such “conservatism” ring ever so true: “their ideology is a sort of right-wing Marxism,” with an origin philosophically in the not-so-distant past on the Trotskyite Left. And a movement based on what is essentially the same foundation as its supposed opposition is hobbled and fatally flawed from the beginning. It will always succumb to the greater logic and conviction of its progressivist enemies who will always out-promise and out-argue its votaries. 

Such a movement has little room for defenders of a Lee or Calhoun and those who rejected the idea of a “proposition nation” and understood that the United States was not founded on an idea, but on the concrete reality of families who brought their traditions and beliefs with them to a new land, created a new country, and made it their own.