“Wake up.”
Why don’t Americans protest, why aren’t Americans out in the streets, even over the J6 prisoners for example, when the Canadian truckers and farmers across Europe have descended upon capital cities and blocked roads for vital causes, with their trucks and tractors? Why do they seem to have guts and care about their countries, and we do not?
Maybe because people with a heritage of monarchy paradoxically know that they and their government are not one. We conflate our American identity with federal government power, because “we the People” rule. The flag represents both, which begins not to make sense.
And yet, flame-throwing blogger Ann at barnhardt.biz, who retells her business history and then says this convinced her “it is impossible to function in the now-overthrown [circa 2011] United States of America,” also isn’t making complete sense. When she, or you or I, pick up the phone to call 9-1-1, the guys sent to our rescue, all loaded with miraculous equipment, are going to be wearing the Stars and Stripes patch on their shoulders. Also the water is still clean and the garbage is still picked up. “Why do they bother?” I asked a friend on that subject the other day. “Maybe they’re bribing us with that, so we’ll keep quiet about everything else.”
Other thoughts:
Our avenue of political dissent is an eighteenth-century voting cycle, allowing us a a voice once every two years. Revolution moves faster than that. Besides, what about married couples “canceling each other out” when they vote for opposing candidates? A married lady told me that with a shrug, years ago, explaining why she and her husband did not vote. I asked a numbers guy if that made sense, since numbers can sometimes trip you up. He said “that’s no reason not to vote, but mathematically, yes, they cancel each other out.”
But then all voters must cancel each other out, except the cohort left over as it were at the summit of a numerical pyramid. Why not vote by lottery?
I think I can hear the retort. “What, do you want some king telling you what to do?” No, but I could prefer a king with all his courtiers whoring in his palace, and leaving me alone. Under a representative republic I have “representatives” who abruptly retire upon re-election, to be replaced by their party’s appointee. Granted she has to run for re-election herself, and soon. But it is also the nature of the representative beast that my representatives must be always up and doing. Laws, laws, laws. It seems the end result must be tyranny.
Our avenue of economic dissent, tax revolt, is also closed. Ann righteously stopped paying her taxes and so lost her house. But we all don’t have that courage. Plus more taxes are already pulled from us, from every single transaction of life, to pay for the invading army at the southern border for example, without any possibility of our withholding them. The only way to perhaps deny our masters a bit of the money they seize, would be to curtail as much of our own economic life as we can. (Which Ann certainly did.) However, this is the proverbial drop in the bucket — we are weak, we like excuses — and this unfairly punishes any neighbor-entrepreneurs. Which is especially a problem if we are trying to live locally, with “subsidiarity” as the Church advises.
I had a thought while at the Latin Mass a while ago. Standing in my pew I gazed at the St. Edmund Campion Missal in the rack of the pew ahead of me. St. Edmund Campion. Tortured to death for what I was doing now, such a simple thing. Attending the “old” Mass, the Mass of the Ages. Who hated or hates the Mass? Henry VIII. Luther. The French revolutionaries. Our own Founding Fathers did not hate it, necessarily, but they founded the Republic absolutely cut off from it, from the Church, from any bowing of the head to Christ in or through government or public affairs ever again. This was Liberty. To be exported everywhere.
Liberty has brought with it unprecedented wealth — we are grateful, but — is it a great bribe? Liberty also makes for citizens eternally distracted by the fantasy of shaping power. We can perhaps shape it some of the time but to think of it always, and forget Christ, the Mass, is to live in fantasy.
I had a thought. It’s all just one revolution, isn’t it. What does it mean to “wake up”? To say the Apostles’ Creed, to start with.
Below, St. Edmund Campion.
If you search for “images” of him, you also get Titian’s beautiful Portrait of a Young Englishman, more recently called Portrait of a Man with Blue-green eyes. I was privileged to see this in person years ago, when it traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago on loan from Florence’s Pitti Palace. It would be nice if this were Campion, but since Titian painted it when the future martyr was a toddler, we will have to accept the brave and gruesome reality above.
Pluot 