Posted on 03/25/2002 7:50:47 AM PST by Texaggie79
The longing for the rescue by "the man on a horse" is often the lament of those sickened by the excesses of the left. In France, it lead to Napoleon. In South America, after the original "man on a horse", Bolivar, it has almost been institutionalized.
We have a much tougher heritage to go through -- self-government. I know its messy. Bismark told us that watching Law being made was like watching the production of sausage. Only the finished product was paletable. So it is with all the hard work necessary.
Read of the suffering of the signers of the Declaration. See what hard work can be done. Buck up young hero, at any time a Republic can be redeemed.
Russell Kirk was well aware of that shaken faith in our culture from which you speak. He had a series of lectures on it and a careful analysis of where we really stood. All this while we were still mired in Clinton. Let's see what he said:
It is often impossible, in these political inquiries, to find any proportion between the apparent causes we may assign, and their known operation. We are therefore obliged to deliver up that operation to mere chance; or, more piously (perhaps more rationally), to the occasional interposition and the irresistible hand of the Great Disposer. We have seen states of considerable duration, for which ages have remained nearly as they have begun, and could hardly be said to ebb or flow. The meridian of some has been most splendid. Others, and they the greatest number, have fluctuated, and experienced at different periods of their existence a great variety of fortune. At the very moment when some of them seem plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and disaster, they have begun a new course, and opened a new reckoning, and even in the depths of their calamity, and on the very ruins of their country, have laid the foundations of a towering and durable greatness. All this happened without any apparent previous change in the general circumstances which had brought on their distress. The death of a man at a critical juncture, his retreat, have brought innumerable calamities on a whole nation. A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature.
In those two sentences, Burke may refer to the reverses of Pericles, to the death of the Constable of Bourbon and other startling historical instances of a country's fate hanging upon a single life. His common soldier is Arnold of Winkelreid, who flung himself upon the Austrian lances at Sempach; his child is Hannibal, taking at the age of twelve his oath to make undying war upon Rome; his girl at the inn is Joan of Arc. Providence, chance, or strong wills, Burke declares, abruptly may alter the whole apparent direction of "that armed ghost, the meaning of history" (Gabriel Marcel's phrase).
Even such as you and I, my friends, if we are resolute enough and sufficiently imaginative, may alter the present course of events. God, we have been told, helps those who help themselves. In the face of increasing tribulations, sometimes conservatives and liberals are making common cause in the defense of America's culture. Both Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and your servant have written books in repudiation of multiculturalism. Once more, say not the struggle naught availeth. A great number of the American people already have taken alarm at the drift of policy and morality in this land. Reactions may be salutary: as the poet Roy Campbell used to say, a human body that cannot react is a corpse; and so it is with society. Up the reactionaries against decadence!
Permit me, in conclusion, to quote a heartening passage from a book, Our Present Discontents, published in 1919, a year in some respects like the year 1992. The author was William Ralph Inge, then Dean of St. Paul's in London, commonly described by journalists as "the Gloomy Dean." The passage I offer you, however, is one of hope:
There may be in progress a store of beneficent forces which we cannot see, There are ages of sowing and ages of reaping; the brilliant epochs may be those in which spiritual wealth is squandered; the epochs of apparent decline may be those in which the race is recuperating after an exhausting effort. To all appearances, man still has a great part of his long lease before him, and there is no reason to suppose that the future will be less productive of moral and spiritual triumphs than the past. The source of all good is like an inexhaustible river; the Creator pours forth new treasures of goodness, truth, and beauty for all who will love them and take them, "Nothing that truly is can ever perish," as Plotinus says; whatever has value in God's sight is for evermore. Our half-real world is the factory of souls in which we are tried as in a furnace. We are not to set our hopes upon it, but learn such wisdom as it can teach us while we pass through it.America has overcome the ideological culture of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. In the decade of this victory, are Americans to forswear the beneficent culture that they have inherited? For a civilization to arise and flower, centuries are required; but the indifference or the hostility of a single generation may suffice to work that civilization's ruin. We must confront the folk whom Arnold Toynbee called "the internal proletariat" as contrasted with the "external proletariat" from alien lands. Otherwise we may end, all of us, as fellow-proletarians, culturally deprived, in a nation that will permit no one to rise above mediocrity
Like Mugabe fixed Zimbabwe? Like Marcos fixed The Philippines?
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