Dysmey Post > Essays > Politics > Follies of the United States
It was a slow development in the beliefs of the American people. From the end of the Civil War to the start of the Great Depression, long-term economic prosperity, good growing climate, and the fruits of industry and invention brought a complacency in the hearts of the citizenry. The philosophical, artistic and theological poisons of Europe were resisted, though half-heartedly. Victory in World War I over Germany, a major (but not a global) European power, instilled an arrogant belief that America is the lord of the world. The new found social freedoms of the 1920's, with resistence to the foolish anti-alcohol laws embedded in the Constitution, began the transformation.
With the revolt against the legalistic culture of the churches, the American people rejected basic Christian beliefs falsely associated with it. In throwing out the stale bathwater of American churchianity, Americans threw out the baby Jesus as well. The people started to listen to such charlatans as John Dewey, William Kirkpatrick, Henry Fosdick and Norman Vincent Peale. European theology from the Anglo-German seminaries had saturated the schools of traditional Protestantism; and the first of the modern schisms in America began.
The effects of all these slowly took root during the wide border of time from the 1920's through World War II. During this border period the first post-Christian generation (that of my parents) was born and raised. After their generation left the battlefields of western Europe and the Pacific Ocean, they settled down and started families, engendering the Boomers
, the second post-Christian generation.
At this point the original United States, having passed across the border, breathed its last. Taking its place is a new American culture where the pull of Judeo-Christian belief weakens; where the old basis of law and custom crumbles as the Constitution is pulled about like clay by the continuous constitutional convention
of the Supreme Court; and where the Big Groups — the U.S. Government, the multi-division commercial corporations, the labor unions (at first), the universities, the charitable foundations, and the political lobbying and pressure groups — largely replace Congressional representative government, already diluted by a burgeoning population.
I use a certain case of the Supreme Court as a convenient cutoff point between the original and current United States. The Supreme Court decision of Everson v. Board of Education of 1947 gave the modern definition of the separation of church and state
. Although the Court retconned their decision back to some letter written by Thomas Jefferson, the concepts behind the decision are purely European, filtered through decades of American law school teaching. This decision, in turn, has been used to ban every public expression of religious faith — in schools, in public buildings and parks, even in large commercial corporations. The Rutherford Institute was founded in 1982 to fight back against the effects of Everson, to preserve those remaining religious liberties from the original United States against their destruction by a hostile legal system.
Another result of the change from the original United States and the current one is a permanent division in the American people. We are now divided into at least two groups: A small elite and an everyone-else citizenry.
The elites, those who run our government, corporations, universities and foundations, and even the higher levels of traditional Protestantism, are a class educated, largely Europophile (or at least Anglophile) class, overly enarmored of the social and psychological sciences; mostly leftist, statist and selfist; amoral, anti-Christian or at least non-Christian, and covertly anti-Jewish despite a large number of Jews in their ranks. The so-called counterculture
of the 1960's came from their ranks. The various movements and cults under the name New Age
and New Consciousness
gets its support from them, and lend to them their vocabulary.
The rest of the American people are the burghers (public and private), proles and subproles, products of public schools and (if able) colleges. They are largely ill-educated, with neither moral center nor spiritual root, susceptible to advertising, and driven by fads and fashions. They are divided and ill at ease and, given the mental limits imposed by their education, not knowing why. As Homer-Simpsonesque consumers, they are driven to spend, made to think that saving
involves coupons, and putting away no money for themselves, even during times of low inflation. As Simpsonesque, they cannot distinguish between free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer; the few that do are disillusioned that the land of the free
is not all that free.
They are frustrated with their Presidents, a parade of losers and fools either obvious to all (Ford, Carter, Clinton, Bush the Elder and the Younger) or revealed to be so after their mythos dissolves with time (Kennedy, Johnson, and now Obama). They are just as bitter with their congressmen (if they can remember their names), state governors, and the federal and state bureaucracies in general — mostly because of the taxes they have to pay to support what they do not know.
I could write up more about this, but it is enough to explain my attitude to our current state.
Bush the Younger, his back-room string-puller Dick Cheney, and their incompetent minions, have been spending the country into deep debt all through the 2000's to pay for tax cuts to their best corporate buds, and for wars in the Middle East and against Terror
(which I assume they really mean Islam). Nobody among the non-elites complained, because the spending was financed, not with their taxes, but with borrowing from Europe, China and Japan.
Then Obama was elected into office. He got the job mostly because even the non-elites had had enough of the follies of Bush the Younger and son chauve eminence, more of which was promised to us by that Rockefeller-liberal zombie from Arizona, who should have chosen — but did not choose — Victoria Clarke as his running mate. It would have been at least consistent with his own statist beliefs.
Anyway, the election of some guy born to a family of subproles from the back of beyond (Hawaii), who cut his teeth on the rusty barbed wire of Chicago politics, had some weird galvantic effect on other subproles in the other back-of-beyonds (mostly Texas) — on bitter, ignorant people who refuse to accept that the original United States is truely dead, that there is no longer an America
to restore or to be given back — or on bitter, not-so-ignorant people who admit that, yeah, it is dead, but we can, by legal or political or military alchemy, bring it back from the dust of history … somehow … before it is too late!
It does not help Obama, that the days of cheap borrowing from East Asia and Europe (which helped Bush the Younger when nothing else did) are pretty much finished. Now Obama will now have to pay for his guns and margarine by raising taxes … from everybody! Even on your unemployment checks!
It is these three factors — ignorance of American history, the advent of higher taxes and the lack of employment — that are fueling the vocal and often nasty hostility of the proles and subproles towards Obama and his party minions. These are the reason that the Democrats have lost governorships and congressional seats, even the one held by the late Edward Kennedy. It is also what is reviving domestic militant groups — dormant during Bush/Cheney — with strange concepts of American governance based on interpretations of the Constitution as false as those from a Harvard Law School graduate. Except that the graduate has the backing of the State.
The Tea Party is bad enough. The Teabaggers (yeah, I am using that word) should have appeared when Bush the Younger was in office, stripping us of our freedoms in the name of security while spending away the future of America's children and grandchildren on his senseless wars. But no: They had to appear after, and only after, a black man was elected President, who then presented a health-care bill with the likelihood of raising their taxes. This smacks not only of racism but hypocrisy. No More
, indeed!
Finally, there is this absurd attempt to freak out state governors with letters demanding their removal lest they be forced out. And if they don't leave, what? The group who sent the letters seems to believe that the original United States can be restored as if by the alchemical actions of a select few — a new elite! As if the current elite wasn't bad enough!
A nation exists from the common culture of its inhabitants, and its state by the common consent of its citizens. If American culture is not that of the original United States (and it is not), and its State is not that of the original United States (as it is merely nominally), then no de jure grand juries
or other group instruments that do nothing to change the culture, the beliefs or behaviors of the current American people will ever bring it back. Ever.
There is another thing to think about.
From one man [God] made every human nation to dwell on the whole face of the Earth, fixing pre-appointed times and boundaries where they may live.
— Acts of the Apostles, 17.26
It is implied from this sentence, from Paul of Tarsus' speech to the Athenians, that a nation exists because God makes that nation exist. God determines when a nation forms, where it is located, how long it lasts, whether it is weak or strong, rich or poor, free or autocratic, isolated or spreading by armies and by colonies. And, sadly, God decides when that nation ceases to exist and whether it has had any influence on other nations of the Earth.
It is true that the original United States is as close to a Christian country as any other country could possibly be. But it was never close enough: Slavery and its contempt of labor; abuse of wealth and its influence; undercurrents of the occult and such among its fruits as Spiritualism and Mormonism; Transcendentalism, New Thought, Theosophy and other precursors of the New Age; and, finally, a legalistic 'churchianity' that amounted to an American civil religion that could not survive the flood of the New from Europe. For 'few walk the narrow path and find the tight gate that leads to life' and 'many are called, but few are chosen' are just as true for the original United States as for any other nation, including ours. And, although the few were a benign pull on American culture, bringing the gospel to our forefathers and building them schools and colleges and hospitals and refuges for the orphan and the poor — in the end, they could not pull the rest of the American people on their spiritual coattails forever.
As some point God had chosen to bring the original United States to a close, when it became clear that its people had rejected His Son.
However, just because it is likely too late for the current United States, it does not mean it is too late for you, personally. One way or another, you will outlive the United States. A million years hence, you may even forget it was ever there. And, it is your well-being and your welfare that God cares about most. A nation, a gang, a family, a race — they are just tools through which God works His will in the world. And He would rather you be His child, not His tool, as the rest of humanity has (whether it knows it or not) chosen to be. God offers you His free gift, that will save you and reconcile you to Him.
The choice is yours. Accept the death of His Son on your behalf. Accept His death for God's forgiveness of all the evil that you do through the whole of your life. If you do, He will give you His Holy Spirit, who will help you to live a life pleasing to Him. Then, when it is time to leave both Earth and Time behind, you will be with Him and all your siblings in His Son, all of you one in a body that makes nations of the Earth look random and inchaote.
God and His Son — your true loyalty lies with them.