"independence"

Heaven be thanked for acres I possess
Though much is sterile clay and bluff and stone,
Land that I hope to hold for life's duress,
Land that by deed and in my heart I own…
And I am grateful for the hard-earned knowledge
That I know dirt and what to plant and when,
Experience I did not get in college
Nor from associates in a world of men.
I know that I can always fill my table
From this lean land and with these hands and this head
As long as I have strength, am well and able,
Let come what will; I have no fear or dread.
As long as I have land, seed, working tools,
And get a season not too wet nor dry
And have a team of well-fed kicking mules
I'm independent and I'll do or die…

––Jesse Stuart

•••

Those who know me will know my skepticism and criticism of agrarianism; however, I do love the non-agraianist agrarian poetry of Stuart. It is about direct relation to a home patch by a man who lived fully and did not patronize others who lived by chance or fault, less. Perhaps his Great Lakes Naval Training Station poems would be the better choice for this holiday––Stuart struggles with war and gives a patriotism of place as he prepares for it––but it is hard to isolate one part of those poems, and there is a limit to what I can type. Besides, I realize that Stuart is not particularly a "great", and my interest in him may tax those non-Kentuckians (and thus the overwhelming majority) in my audience. However, he is the author of this blog's title, and will regularly get respect for it.

•••

I love my country. I do now know if I love "America", but I love her peoples and her land. I love the high desert in Arizona and Bluegrass hills; Colorado mountains and Great Lakes shore. My academic study was in large part the bones of this country, and I love it more for knowing it.It is futile to condemn a fait accompli; so let us embrace American Independence and pray the better angels of that nature conquer.

•••

My wife & I have had, for very different reasons, unfortunate and taxing weeks. She is now home safe & sound, and I am mostly well again, but I would ask the prayers of those who read this: this coming week will be hard in a very different way. Our future depends on our steadfastness and God's grace (as always).

shouting matches

It is no particularly great insight that ideological labels have become mere shouting terms in our discourse, used mainly to rally the fellows and offend the barbarians. However, generally those making the observation assume that there really can and should be coherent ideological labels and––if they existed––they would be a good and healthy thing for the nation.

A recent comment thread on The Ochlophobist got me considering this assumption, however. In theory, the majority (and to my knowledge, all) of the participants in that go around are Orthodox Christians, or at least highly sympathetic to Orthodox Christianity. As such, there should be much closeness on knowledge of moral ends and images of healthy culture, etc. if not actual identity with a common set of aspirations. As such, the ideologies of Marxism or Liberalism in particular should hardly enter into the discussions, even if arguments appropriated from either lineage did, but rather diagnoses, hopes or even policies (on which there can be disagreement without the scepter of our ideological labels).

However, the tone of the Ochlophobist's discourse is latched on by some commentators, while others seek to use it as an opportunity to express agreement with one ideology, or statements to rally those who oppose the ideology they are against. While I certainly agree that "No people on earth are fit to practice socialism", I don't think any people on earth are fit to practice much of anything in the way of totalizing political ideologies, even those which claim to be non-totalizing based on their love of freedom as an abstract. (It is an often problematic accident of language that we have no one word to distinguish between the liberty of the Libertarian, and the liberty of St. Paul.) In any case, order naturally arises, and the trick is to have the natural aristocracy both in their place and humble about the powers they wield. Quotes such as the above, though, simply serve to rally proponents of one ideology while annoying the proponents of the other. I certainly have done (and will almost certainly do again) this myself, but coming from the background I do, I've never been able to make myself wholly immune to partisan fervor, and won't pretend otherwise.

or, yell, for that matter

"…it is easier to shout stop! than to do it." ––Treebeard

traditionalism in the royal family

And no, it's not the good kind.

This really shouldn't be shocking (it's been out for many years that he wishes to be known as "Defender of Faith"––note the lack of a definite article––if he is ever King), but it's remarkably tone-deaf, even if he was speaking to an Islamic student group.

Occasionally (usually from Greeks, sometimes Russians), I hear Orthodox mention that Prince Charles has a spiritual father and visits Mt. Athos. Usually, I just nod about it, but sometimes they voice some secret hope that Charles is crypto-Orthodox (no one ever remembers that his father apostatized and became CoE), and then I feel a need to gently deflate said hope, but usually without any need to refer to Guénon, who the Prince is almost certainly a follower of, at least in spirit if not in conscious fact. Prince Charles has a spiritual father, and dedicates mosques, and is CoE, and so on and so forth because he believes in all that pleasant 19th-20th c. rot about the spiritual core of most (or all) religions being the same and their participation in one, grand tradition. I suppose that believers in the perennial philosophy are less annoying than other types, and relatively harmless now that their more dangerous doctrines have been carried out to their logical extreme by more popular movements, but it still isn't Tradition.

g.k. chesterton's birthday

The Myth of Arthur

O learned man who never learned to learn,
Save to deduce, by timid steps and small,
From towering smoke that fire can never burn
And from tall tales that men were never tall.
Say, have you thought what manner of man it is
Of who men say "He could strike giants down"?
Or what strong memories over time's abyss
Bore up the pomp of Camelot and the crown.
And why one banner all the background fills,
Beyond the pageants of so many spears,
And by what witchery in the western hills
A throne stands empty for a thousand years.
Who hold, unheeding this immense impact,
Immortal story for a mortal sin;
Lest human fable touch historic fact,
Chase myths like moths, and fight them with a pin.
Take comfort; rest––there needs not this ado.
You shall not be a myth, I promise you.