Posted on 05/23/2013 12:51:23 PM PDT by DanMiller
John Steinbeck's 1942 novel The Moon is Down is about people of a small village occupied by Nazi forces somewhere in Northern Europe. They become sullen and their obedience is bought at an increasingly high price. Free people cannot remain conquered.
Re-reading The Moon is Down left me with nagging questions about the extent to which the People of the United States remain free. Those questions did not arise when I first read it, many years ago. It now seems obvious that we are less free than we once were; yet perhaps (one can at least hope that) there are still enough to make a difference by remembering freedom, remaining free and hence remaining beyond conquest. It has never been easy.
One of my favorite bloggers today posted an essay titled When Abuse of Power is Considered a Virtue. It asserts that liberals
see all conservatives as evil for daring to be against Big Government. Therefore, anything they do to fight that evil must be virtuous. Look at this quote of Kirsten Powers at USA Today, which I found at Questions and Observations:I prefer to call them libruls because the "liberals" of today encourage unthinking acceptance of authority rather than free, rational thought and action. They are far removed from the classical liberals of the past.“These scandals can’t possibly be blamed on liberalism because liberals are good, virtuous people. Therefore the Republicans who are claiming these scandals indicate flaws in big government are unfairly twisting the truth for political advantage. Big government is clearly wonderful when run by virtuous liberals.”
In The Moon is Down, the two surviving members of a twelve member village militia -- who had tried to stave off the Nazi invasion and occupation -- took advantage of a night when the moon was down to sail to England (stealing a boat belonging to the village's principal collaborator) and persuade England to air drop small packages of dynamite to augment the sullen resistance of the villagers. England did, and the disruption of the occupation became more effective -- not completely effective, but many of the Nazi officers and men were already becoming increasingly disenchanted with their tasks and the villagers' dislike of them; they longed increasingly for home. They became more disenchanted, and their longings for home increased further, when they executed the village doctor and its mayor, whom they had taken hostage shortly after the dynamite packages had been dropped, to compel good behavior by the villagers. The Nazis did not cherish freedom even though they had lost much of their own; perhaps their memories of freedom had faded. They assumed that villagers' compliance with their dictates would be obtained by ever increasing repression. It did not happen that way. The novel (published in 1942) does not tell us what finally happened, but the moon going down, the advantage taken of it and the consequences left room for optimism.
There are still some who disagree with modern "liberals" and I hope that there are still many. How much governmental interference -- with the ways in which we live our lives -- will be necessary for sufficient numbers to reach a point when moon finally goes down and when the sullen restiveness and eventually resistance become too great for Government to overcome? In Venezuela, extreme shortages of toilet paper -- piled upon shortages of nearly everything else -- may be a tipping point; maybe not.
For the past four months Venezuelans have had to struggle to find basic food staples. Toilet paper is the latest item to join the list of unobtainable goods – last week the government announced it was organising an emergency shipment to boost supplies – but it has heightened the sense of urgency and indignation felt by many.Shortages of toilet paper may seem a minor bother -- to those who can still buy it. The compulsions of ObamaCare may make a difference in the United States. Who knows; maybe some of the current ObamaScandals may."What am I supposed to substitute [toilet paper] with? It's hard to live without it," Aquino said. Like many people here, she will try to stock up. "I phoned my son and told him to come, but not everyone can walk out of their job and cross the city to stand in line for hours," she added.
The recent IRS scandals and DOJ secret seizures of phone records of reporters, and perhaps of a family member or two, seem to have irritated some even in the Legitimate Media to the point that they are, slowly and perhaps unhappily, reporting on them. Just as many of our "free citizens" took counsel from the Legitimate Media and helped to push our nation further toward Government of the Government, for the Government and by the Government, perhaps at least some of them may again take their counsel and say, "Hey! This has gone too far." Perhaps that sense may even seep down to what Jim Geraghty referred to in today's Morning Jolt as "the completely oblivious citizens" who follow no news at all. Possibly they won't understand what has "gone too far," but will at least agree that something has.
When pollsters ask the "how closely are you following [X story]?" question, I find myself thinking of Jimmy Kimmel's recurring feature when he gets people on the street to answer questions about news events that never occurred. (Admittedly, he's asking people on Hollywood Boulevard.) His staff found people with strong views about who won the First Lady Debate between Michelle Obama and Ann Romney, people who claimed to have witnessed an asteroid that didn't reach Earth yet, and people giving their opinion on Obama's decision to appoint Judge Judy to the Supreme Court. (All of those people are presumably eligible to vote.)To them, it still seems unimportant that big Government destroys freedom, a little bit at a time, until freedom eventually becomes but an ill-remembered relic of an unfortunate past when Government neither provided for all our needs (as it determines them to be) nor satisfied all our desires (as it decides they should be). Most likely, they do not recognize that it is happening. The mess in which the United States now find themselves may reach down to them, but the trick is somehow to lure them out of their cocoons in time to realize that it (whatever it may be) affects them, personally and adversely, and that it will increasingly do so unless they also insist that it cease.
Does anyone else still remember Kate Smith singing When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain? It was popular back in the 1930's and 1940's.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9fHZEmr5_w?feature=player_detailpage]
The moon will rise again, because it always does; even an almost omnipotent Government cannot prevent it. When it does rise again -- after having graciously disappeared from view as in The Moon is Down, might the sweet memories that return to us be of freedom, and the dreams they awaken in us be of its revival? Perhaps many of us might then play another of the Kate Smith favorites again, God Bless (not Damn) America. Perhaps we might even sing along and pledge, along with Miss Smith's ghost, "allegiance to a land that's free?" Not allegiance in the sense of a vassal to a lord, nor in the sense of a subject to Government, but in the sense of free men pledging to defend our own freedoms and those of our countrymen.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnQDW-NMaRs?feature=player_detailpage]
Those truly interested in freedom, what it means and what it demands of us might be well served by reading or re-reading The Moon is Down.
I was just telling a foreign co-worker how just over the last 50 years or so we have had many freedom surrounding land ownership taken away under the guise the EPA and eminent domain etc...
Every year we have less and less freedom and the public pushes its finger further and further up its nose.
No. The progression is unidirectional and a function of the expanding population and the temporal distance from the generation that made the Republic. There can be glitches and slowing but there will be no change in direction save we figure how to get off the planet to another. There are no more spaces on Earth sufficiently empty for misfits and malcontents who want to do their own things in their own ways to escapt to.
I will have to read this.
OTOH, I am listening to “The Gulag Archipelago” for the third or fourth time, and it sounds pretty darn relevant to me right now.
"The little book was smuggled into the occupied countries. It was copied, mimeographed, printed on hand presses in cellars, and I have seen a copy laboriously hand written on scrap paper and tied together with twine" ... "The Germans ... made it a capital crime to possess it, and sadly to my knowledge this sentence was carried out a number of times." ... "The book itself became a romantic, but true story. At most it gave support to the courage of many people in desperate circumstances, at the very least it gave evidence of our faith in them and their cause at a time when faith was a very precious commodity." ... "In years after, Steinbeck was decorated by the King of Norway for his contribution to the morale of the Norweigian underground."
To paraphrase lines from the remake of Red Dawn: “The occupiers don’t want to be here. To them this is a just a place. To us, it is our home.”
Many folks long to get their freedom back, those old enough to remember what was like 40 years ago but they don’t want to give up their government benefits either. It is up to my generation, the baby boomers to turn things around but we have to positively desire to give up Social Security and Medicare and all the rest as part of the surgery necessary to give this economy new life. If we could do that and eliminate 95% of the federal and UN inspired regulation of everything and the taxes on business we would go through a very hard couple of quarters but then we would come back to the top of the world and stay there very fast. The millenials for the most part don’t have any concept of freedom beyond free sex of all sorts and free medicine free sustenance. They have no tools to compare and contrast systems and schemes to be able to determine what will work and what will not. They learned no history and not much reading or anything else useful in school. That is a deficit the society cannot overcome.
It’s an interesting book.
I found a first edition 20 years ago for $5.00.
Still have it. It’s worth more than the entire Obama administration combined.
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