ECONOMICS AND THE MASTER RACE

In reference to the tax on “unrecognized gains,” and the question of who would decide the taxable margin: 

As with all such schemes, it pits one group, or collective, against another. In this case, it’s everyone the masters deem rich (which sure as hell will NOT include any of the masters!) against everyone else. We are to be identified and  cataloged in our collectives, hence the term, “Collectivism.” There are no individuals; there are only members of groups. Quite Hegelian, in point of fact.

The theory is that the character of every person living is unalterably determined by the collective from whence they sprang, and all humans are similarly defined and delimited.  With one exception. 

If all humans are so flawed, how could we ever decide into which collectives they should be pigeonholed? Who could be relied on to make such determination? Must not there be a group that is immune to collective determinism? A group that is above, or beyond, or outside the seething mass into which the rest of humanity
is cast? 

Yes, there is such a group. I believe the term for it would be, “The Master Race.” Wasn’t there something about that in one of those European outfits in the 1930’s and  -40’s?

 

Wess Rodgers – rebsarge.comcast.net – Albuquerque

TO COMPROMISE WITH SLAVERY

There’s a lot of talk about how parties have polarized America. I submit that, in the present case, at least, it is the American people who have polarized the parties. The incessant hammering in social media is a factor, but in reality, the candidates are so far apart, so opposite in VERY important ways, that we, the people are naturally drawn to the candidates who represent our most deeply-held values, and there’s not a thing wrong with that.

(Can you imagine anything more bloody, dirt clod stupid than to deliberately support a candidate who promised to destroy what you value most?)

To any question there are multiple answers, and it is entirely right that people seek the right answers, and support candidates who sustain those answers. Thus, it is not the parties, or even the issues that have divided us. It is our own values, our own views of the nature of life and the world, and the moral standards to which we are deeply committed that have divided us.  The fact is that people are taking stands for things in which they believe – stands which they should have taken years ago, but chose instead to take the easy, non-confrontational path.

Well, there are no more such paths open to us. “Easy roads lead to hard places,” and the roads Americans have chosen through apathy, ambivalence, ignorance, or downright moral cowardice have led us to this hard place. And if we don’t cowboy up and handle this the way it needs to be handled, the next stop on this road will be a very hard place indeed.

Oh, and now I hear the anguished wails of, “We must learn to compromise!  It’s the only way we can live together!”  And to those who so wail, I say, “Road apples.”  Compromise, by definition (in an old, pre-PC, pre-Orwellian dictionary) means  that one party yields a bit on one point, and the other yields a bit on another.  Each party concedes to something they don’t like or want.  If the topic is what to have for dinner, or which movie to watch, yielding to the other person in the name of domestic tranquility and the delights subsumed therein make a compromise imminently reasonable.

But if it is a moral principle, compromise is lethal.  If someone says, “We should have totally unregulated access to state-funded abortion,” where does one find a point on which to yield?  “Totally?” “Unregulated?”  “State-funded?” And the same applies when someone says, “All abortion is murder, and we must forbid it under any circumstances, whatsoever.”  I believe that, in such cases, there is no compromise possible for either party that does not amount to putting our souls on E-bay.

A moral principle is an idea or a belief concerning the judgment of right and wrong.  Now, because we inherited choice from Father Adam – not sin, but choice – people choose all sorts of things as their moral standards.  Once chosen, those moral standards mark our paths through life.  One’s moral standard determines how one will live in all regards.  The choice of a moral standard is the most metaphysically important decision one will ever make.  How, then might one compromise on a moral principle without doing dreadful damage to one’s life?

Everyone has a natural right and obligation to choose their own moral standard, but no one can escape the consequences, for good or evil, of that decision.  And the decision to compromise on that standard is nothing less than the decision to abandon that standard and accept one thrust upon us by someone else – someone who has naught but contempt for our original standard.  Otherwise, why would they demand we abandon it?

Have you noticed that people who are winning never demand compromise? Americans (and most of the rest of the world, I’m afraid) have made a moral imperative of compromise.  Only a selfish brute or worse would refuse to compromise.  “Oh, sure, you’re all high and mighty, but what about the little guy?  Are you too good to compromise with him?”  “So what if your precious moral standard goes in the dumpster fire that we’ve made of society?  Only a monster would deny the natural, intrinsic obligation to give up what you believe to be most precious to anyone who demands it of you.”

Don’t believe it?  What the bloody hell do you call all the whooping and barking about “White privilege”?  What do you call the increasingly strident, threatening howls for socialism, communism, or some other anti-life, statist system in America?  What do you call the increasingly hateful and threatening invective hurled at those who choose to not get vaccinated for COVID-19?

So what does this have to do with the course of America in 2021?  Everything.

Because Americans have been gulled and swindled into compromising on their principles to avoid conflict and confrontation by philosophy professors, actors, cartoonists, and every other half-baked jackass who has an audience.  Say some guy wants to cut off your legs.  Compromise says each of you must yield something.  Okay, what are you going to yield?  What is he going to yield?  Is he going to claim the moral high ground by saying, “Okay.  I’ll only take your left leg?”  Because you have accepted the moral imperative of comprise, you are obligated to agree.  After all, he was the first to give up something he wanted.

But here’s the money shot:  by taking the easy way of compromise with evil in order to avoid conflict, you have found yourself at the place where conflict is inescapable because now the sorry SOB has come back and demanded the other leg, anyway!  And worse than that, we’ve sold our very souls and lost the courage of our convictions that has always empowered men and women to stand up and bust evil in the nose.  By accepting, one bite and a time, the moral standards of evil, we have become the evil we have feared.

The American people have not only allowed, they have forced the nation into this situation.  For 40 years I and a few others have been warning of the dangers of compromising with our destroyers, and we have been ridiculed, castigated, shunned, and despised.   I take no pleasure in saying, “I tried to tell you,” because my own children and others whom I love dearly are going to suffer.

There’s no more room for compromise, my countrymen – not if we wish to salvage the tatters of our honor and our very souls.  There are no more easy ways.  The destroyers have very nearly closed their fingers on our throats, and if we try to compromise again, we’re doomed, and generations of our children will spit when they say our names, and cry to the Heavens, “How could they have done this to us?”

This quote from Winston Churchill is uncompromisingly relevant to us:  “Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

You have every right to take the coward’s way out – to roll over on your back like a cur dog and pee on your belly to avoid unpleasantness or conflict.  But try to remember that what you give up today, your children will never even know.

I shall close with this well-seasoned quote from my dear Mother:  “Compromise is like mixing shit with ice cream.  It doesn’t help the shit, and it ruins the ice cream.”

THE MORAL AUTHORITY OF CAPITALISM

Here’s a question I haven’t heard anyone ask in a very long time, which is odd considering the subject is much in the news and on the minds of many.  “What is capitalism”  Everybody talks about it, and most try to compare it to some other system, but nobody is actually defining the terms of the discussion. Well, that’s enough of that nonsense.

If you look in 15 different dictionaries, especially on-line dictionaries, you’ll find 15 different definitions, all of them flawed, if not in the definition, itself, but in the examples they give of the word used in a sentence.  It is almost always defined as some sort of quasi-fascist thing, with people getting rich and the government controlling their interests.  Baloney.  But before we can get into capitalism, we have to clear up a few more terms, and, no, these aren’t professor-approved definitions, but I’ll put the epistemology and logic of them up against any other source.

“Logic” – whether intellectual logic or electronic logic, is the art of non-contradictory identification.  In electronics, we use a truth table to map all the possible combinations of the variables, and no two may be identical.  That’s how your computer works.  Every character has an electronic signature that is absolutely unique.  So must it be with intellectual logic.  Otherwise, language gets incredibly cumbersome because if a given word has multiple meanings, we must stop every time we use it to make sure our listeners are thinking the same thing we are.  (English is famous for that sort of thing, which is why the death of the technical writing profession has wreaked such havoc.)

So we must decide, at the outset, precisely what we mean with every word we use.  That doesn’t mean we can’t use the words for something else in a different conversation, but to knowingly or carelessly switch from one definition to another in the middle of a discussion, without announcing it, is dishonest to the point of being despicable.

Therefore, in this discussion, when I say, “Ownership,” it subsumes the concept of control, and not merely of legal title.  You may have a house in your name, but if you don’t control it, you don’t own it.  Indeed, whomever controls it is the actual owner.  One encounters this contradiction very often in discussions of National Socialism, or Nazism, in which someone will say, “The Nazis believed in capitalism because you could own a house.”  Yeah, your name might be on the title, but you had to have the Party’s permission to do anything in or with it.  They could move you out of it and quarter troops there, and off to Dachau with you if you objected.  (That was actually in the Weimar Constitution.  Not Dachau, but the other.)

So when I say, “private ownership [control] of goods and services, and the means of production and distribution.,” we are forced, by the corruption of the English language, to define almost every word.

“Private” means citizens – private citizens, to be precise – and specifically excludes any – any – governing or governmental entity, including gangs and unions.

“Goods” means actual, real stuff, generally referred to in economic texts as “real wealth,” or “real property.”  It’s an incredibly broad term, ranging from apples to zeppelins and back again.

“The means of production and distribution” means factories, the machines in them, the land they sit on, the raw materials that flow into them, and the manufactured goods that flow from them.  It includes the trucks, tires, fuel, and every other item involved in the manufacture and movement of goods and services.

Here’s another one you won’t hear every day:  “Statism.”  Statism is an economic or social order in which some governing (not necessarily government, but governing) entity owns and controls everything.  Socialism, Communism, Nazism, Fascism, Progressivism, Bolshevism, modern liberalism, and even, nay especially, anarchy – are all statist models.  They are statist because the individual private citizen does not control his goods or his life.  Indeed, the only difference between all of these systems, at an operational, day-to-day level, is whose hand is holding the leash around the neck of the individual.  Again, professors have devoted extraordinary amounts of time and energy into obfuscating this very simple fact:  You are free, or you aren’t, and if you aren’t, it doesn’t make two cents’ difference who you call “Mas’sa.”

See how impossibly convoluted and complicated this gets?  That’s because for generations, we’ve allowed professors to control our language, and if they’d kept it clear and simple, they’d be out of jobs.  The good news is that we only have to go through this nonsense once; then it’s done.

So by this definition of capitalism:  “…private ownership [control] of goods and services, and the means of production and distribution..,” we exclude any control over any part of the real wealth or the currency in the economy.  And you’re right:  “pure capitalism” has never really existed except as an abstraction, but that doesn’t invalidate it, for we find that, the nearer an economy gets to the pure stuff, the more productive, wealthy, and successful that economy is.  When an economy is all those things, everyone in it benefits.  Everyone.  The poorest of America’s poor are the envy of much of the world, partly because of the staggering amount of stuff that is available to even the poorest, but mostly because even the poorest may aspire to better lives.  Until America rewrote the book, the rich and the powerful were the same.  Only the advent of liberty, and its economic manifestation, capitalism, created a class of rich whose wealth did not spring from political power.

I can hear the howling and wailing now:  “But under capitalism, only money matters.”  Spoken like true Keynesians.   “Money” stands for goods, or wealth.  Without stuff, money don’t mean squat.  If there were no goods, what would you spend your money on, anyway?  Keynesians don’t get that.  (Look up John Maynard Keynes. Bloody idiot.)  In fact, however, they are nearer the truth than they’d ever dream or admit.  If only money matters, and everyone has the same color money, who gives a rip about race?  A Black man’s money is the same as a Latino’s money is the same as an Asian’s money is the same as an old White guy’s money.  If a person wants to get rich, why should he care from whom he gets his money?

[Cue the wailing] but he can just steal it!  Capitalism is not anarchy!  It can only exist in an orderly, law-centered society!  “Ownership” means control, right?  So if someone can take your property from you, do you control it?  No.  The forceful seizure of property by anyone, private citizen or bureaucrat, is anti-capitalistic!  If the government protects a thief, whether an individual, a gang, or a corporation, the government has interfered with the control of the property involved, and that society is no longer a capitalist society!  The only way the “Robber Barons” could have existed was under the protection of the government, through its monopoly on the use of force, to make sure nobody cut into their pie.  (The astute student of American history will be saying, “Gotcha, Rodgers!  Robber Barons existed only as characters in the progressive mythology as an enemy upon which the anger of the masses might be focused.”  Said student is correct, of course, but getting most folks to swallow capitalism as a force of morality is all the challenge this little piece can handle. Personally, I like Cicero’s version:  “An ungoverned population will invariably choose as its leader some bold and unscrupulous individual who gains the favor of the masses by promising them the property of others.”)

So if we define capitalism as ownership, and ownership as control, we see that theft, coercion, extortion, and abusive monopolies are not part of the deal.  To the extent that those things exist in an economy, it is a mixed economy, at best. We accept dilutions of our capitalistic system as a matter of course – taxation, for starters – but that does not invalidate the concept of capitalism!  Indeed, the standard by which all taxes must be judged is their infringement on the private ownership [control] of goods and services, and the means of production and distribution.  Are there bad taxes?  Oh, my word!  Yes!  Do we need to work at changing the tax code of the United States?  Ditto.  Do we need to chuck capitalism, altogether and go with some form of statism?

No way in hell.  For if the great weakness of capitalism is the motivation to accrue wealth, what is the motivation of statism?  If, in a legitimate, orderly, law-centered society, someone wants to get rich, he must engage in the voluntary exchange of goods for money.  He can’t force anyone to do business with him, and no one can force him to do business with them.  He, alone, sets the price on his goods, and he, alone will prosper or go broke if he sets that price to high or too low.  He cannot, by force or fraud, prevent anyone from competing with him, as his only guarantee of turning a profit is to give his trading partners the best product for their money.  Geeze:  giving people a good deal for their money.   How evil is that!   (There is, in fact, the Biblical principle of free agency, with which capitalism is the only system to agree to any extent, whatsoever.)

In any statist model, this free, voluntary exchange of goods and money is not possible.  It is not possible because the very heart and soul of all statism is the conviction that some people are morally superior to others, and deserve, by some variation on divine dispensation, to control others and force them to do what is “right and best” for others.   The statist rails, “If people were left to their own devices, they might do things, of which we do not approve, with their property!  In other words, the entire, shabby, putrid core of all statism is the idea that some individuals have an inborn – usually racial or cultural – moral authority to decide from whom the property will be taken, and to whom it will be given. Oh, and the statists, you may jolly well be assured, will take their cut off the top!

Statists, no matter what academic Baloney Sauce euphemism might be used, are not against the accumulation of truly massive wealth.  They are just against anyone they don’t like having it – and there’s nobody they like better than themselves!  They aren’t against the ownership of guns; they are just against anyone but them being armed, because, sure as the world, some Redneck or Deplorable is liable to disagree with their supremely moral, kind, charitable schemes for seizure and redistribution of wealth.

So, no, we don’t want to scrap the capitalistic model, because it is the only model that is even remotely compatible with the existence of Homo Homo Sapiens as a free, rational, individual being.  Capitalism is not only a system of surpassing moral authority; it is the only system that may claim any moral standing, at all.  Everything else is slavery, starvation, and murder, not only of the human body, but of the human spirit.

Wess Rodgers – Rebsarge.wordpress.com – Albuquerque

US AND GLASS – A PARABLE

This little parable, or allegory, or metaphor that occurred to me a few years ago:

When we are young, we are often like newly-broken glass that’s washing about in the stones of a riverbed.

We are beautiful, brilliant, flashing, our light laughing with the sparkling water.

But after the years have tumbled us around and washed us far down the river, our exquisite brilliance has been dulled, by uncountable, often bruising encounters with the hard things in life, into a soft, matte, pastel surface that retains our original color and approximate shape.

All that dazzle and flash is now muted, softer, opaque rather than transparent.

And like the well-worn, long-washed glass, we are much safer to handle – soft-edged and smooth, no less lovely, but more pleasant to be near.

Wess Rodgers – rebsarge.wordpress.com – Albuquerque

THE NEXT BOX KITE TO HELL

One of the most transformative things I’ve ever done was the 30 years I served in The Gray (Yes, capitalized) as a reeanctor of the life and trials of Johnny Reb. Many believe reenacting to be a bunch of immature men playing at guns, or, as my wife at the time said, “It’s stupid. Just march and shoot, march and shoot.” But I submit that the power to push a man’s consciousness – even in a dream, and 20 years after he last put his brogans on the shelf – down roads like this, in this kind of detail,  is a power to be acknowledged, at the least, and partaken of if one has the will and is very, very careful, for it can take a man – a man awake, even – to times and places and situations from which he may never be able to retrieve all the scattered little bits and scraps and busted caps and torn cartridge papers of his soul. Perhaps it is a form of residual trauma; I don’t know. But I welcome it whenever it shows up, and always leave the string out for it.

Deo Vindici, Johnny.

——————————————————————————————————————

I was in a gray shell jacket with First Sergeant stripes, in battle gear without a blanket.  I was hurrying to join my company before we moved out, and was passing a row of pickup trucks along the road on my left, with a large encampment of wedge tents on the other side of the road.  I was hailed by a man in a well-worn cadet gray uniform and the insignia of a general.  He said he was General Law, and he had a message for me to carry to some woman. He was writing a message, using the hood of a bright red Dodge pickup for a desk.  As I waited for him to finish the message, he asked if I knew how to operate that rifle, and I answered, “Yes, Sir.”  He seemed amused at my manner or my appearance, and asked if I could brush my tooth – singular.   I said, “Yes, Sir, I can, if I have enough light.”  That amused him and the other officers, apparently his staff.  He told me to tell Mrs. Something or Other that a Mister So and So was at the gate and wished to see her.

The camp was in a field, on a rise above a cluster of modern buildings, like a college or something.  The scene cut to me standing before this woman’s desk.  She was a very attractive brunette in modern business dress.  (In retrospect, she reminded me of Hayley Atwell, the English doll who played Agent Carter, though no supers were in evidence, other than a regiment of Rebel Infantry.) I bowed and told her Gen. Law had sent me to tell her the fellow was at the gate, desiring to see her.  She looked up from the huge mass of papers she was working on and said, “The gentleman is not allowed on military bases.”

“Very well, Ma’am.  For my own information for the future, is that general, for all civilians, or for this man, in particular?”

“Oh, it’s for this man, in particular.  Definitely.”

“Yes, Ma’am.  Should I give him your contact information, get his for you, or tell him to take the next box kite to hell?”

She smiled a thin smile with narrowed eyes and said, “The box kite sounds about right.”

I saluted and took off.  The scene cut to me trying to get back up into the field of the camp.  I had to climb a steep hill, covered with very wet grass and mud.  I was almost to the top, but having trouble getting over the rim.  Two boys, about 11 or 12 were there, and one of them, a husky, Mexican-looking kid, offered his hand and pulled me over.  There was a short conversation which I don’t remember.

Next, I was at the tent of the Officer of the Day, by the gate.  I saw a rather disreputable man, who was dressed in a rumpled, dirty, poorly-fitting, white suit right out of the props department of some B-grade studio, and knew he was the guy waiting to see Agent Carter.  I told him about the box kite, but don’t remember his reaction.  I turned to the OD, who was much amused by the box kite remark, and reminded him that he had promised to write me a pass for my captain before I’d undertaken the errand for Gen. Law.  (I don’t remember that conversation in the dream.  Apparently, the editors skipped over it.)  He gave me the pass and I took off.

I walked up behind a regiment of infantry in line, but at rest in place.  A youngish captain, also in a well-worn uniform, greeted me.  I saluted, he returned my salute, and I handed him my pass, which he read.  I said, “Sergeant [name’s a blank now] reporting from courier duty for General Law, as previously arranged.”

He looked me up and down and said, “Apparently you are my First Sergeant.”

“Yes, Sir.  That is my understanding.” (Actually, that was news to me, but I didn’t let it slip.)

“Where are you from, Sergeant?”

“Texas, by way of New Mexico, Sir.”  Another quick, appraising glance up and down.  I’m standing at attention with my rifle, which didn’t seem to be Annie, at shoulder arms. (Sorry, Dear. I didn’t write this stupid thing.)

“Have you seen action?”

A classic, Hollywood-style kaleidoscope of memories flashed through my head.  I recognized Glorieta Pass, 1^st Manassas,  Wilson’s Creek, Gettysburg, The Wilderness, The Muleshoe, Lexington, Cumberland Church, Sayler’s Creek, Mansfield, Pleasant Hill, Perryville, and something else.  (Oh, it was Westport, which is odd because that wasn’t much of a battle for us.)  “Yes, Sir, some.”

“What is your philosophy of managing an infantry battle?”

I looked the company over from right to left and back.  They were a pretty squared-away lot, and I felt a very solid attachment to them, though it was evident I didn’t know them.  “To ram this gray sonofabitch right up their asses and set it off, Sir”

The captain smiled and said, “We’ll get along.  Take your place and tell Sergeant Such and Such he is relieved as First Sergeant, and to take his usual post as Second Sergeant.”

I saluted and woke up, coming wide awake almost instantly, filled with the anxious tension I always feel before a fight, and could no more have stayed in bed than I could have flown.  I got up, got dressed immediately (in modern clothing, not uniform) and wrote this down.

It is unusual for me to remember dreams, especially in this kind of detail.  It almost seems like I wasn’t asleep, at all, but was instead just fantasizing, but the crack about brushing my tooth, the box kite, and managing the infantry fight are totally new and foreign to me.  I’m quite sure I’ve never heard or said anything like that, at all.  Even so, they were very nice pieces of first-person, and actually in character for me as First Sergeant Colvin.  It’s almost an hour since I awoke, and I still feel a bit out-of-time with 2020, like a cam that’s bottoming out a bit too soon.  I ought to be smelling woodsmoke and hearing the duds a’chunkin’ in camp. 

(Kipling:  “You can hear the duds a’chunkin’ from Rangoon to Mandalay,” or Boyington’s version, “You can hear the duds a’chunkin’ from Rabaul to Lunga quay.”  Now what in hell brought THAT to mind in this context?)  

Ohhh, this could be an interesting day

Wess Rodgers – Rebsarge.wordpress.com – Albuquerque, NM

TALES FROM A REBEL SERGEANT

We once had a young fellow in Co. C, 4th Texas Mounted Volunteers named Mike. Mike was about 15 when he joined us, and had an attention span that could be measured in milliseconds. POOF! He was a bright kid, outgoing and friendly, but he didn’t have sense to pound sand down a rathole because he couldn’t concentrate on it that long. Mike’s first major event with us was the 130th Anniversary of the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, outside Springfield, Missouri. There were probably 6-7,000 troops there, about evenly mixed between North and South, so it was a pretty good event. The 4th had about a dozen men, and they put a few unattached individuals with us to fill out the company. I was the company First Sergeant.

Mike was off the hook, literally. I thought about putting hobbles and a halter on him, just to keep him in the right grid square. We arrived early in the day and participated in some battalion drill and sutler-ratting, and by “Taps,” Mike was out. The rest of us were sitting around the fire in the company of a jug, a few feet from Mike’s tent, when we heard him talking in his sleep. There was some jabbering, and then, clear as day, “Wow! I’m a big baby! Twelve pounds!” Imagine, if you will, something like that, coming from a kid like Mike, in the middle of a bunch of jaded old soldiers. It was remarkable. The howling hysteria outside his tent didn’t wake him up, but the next morning, he was told of his new nickname: “Twelve-pounder.” As much as we enjoyed it, I’m not certain he understood what had happened.

The next day, Mike’s corporal and I stayed on him like a coat of paint, trying to keep him focused. Something that makes me nuts is when men throw their gear on the ground where it can be walked on. If a man throws company gear on the ground, that’s really bad news. We had about a 3-gallon steel bucket with a lid that we used for camp water. At one point, I saw Mike messing with the camp water can, and when he was finished, he left the lid lying on the ground. By this time, the new had worn off Private Mike, and he was getting to be a nuisance. I yelled at him to put the lid back on the water can. He whirled around, grabbed the lid, and slapped it on the can, without noticing all the dirt and crud on the bottom of the lid. He started to take off and I called him back. “Mike, you just dumped a bunch of crap off the lid into the camp water. Now we’ll have to dump the water and refill the can.” I lifted off the lid and was surprised to see much more stuff floating than had fallen off the lid.

“What’s all this?” I asked Mike. In all innocence, and with a puppyish, sincere wish to do right, he said, “It’s shit, First Sergeant.”

I didn’t understand. “What do you mean by shit?”

He still didn’t sense the danger he was in. “I went to the outhouse – I mean, to the sinks – and didn’t get my suspenders out of the way and I got shit on them. I washed them in this bucket.”

I never had a chance to stop the explosion, and poor Mike was beyond thunderstruck. His eyes bugged out like a tromped-on frog as I hit my stride. To be honest, I don’t remember much of what I said. Like a good Southern evangelist, I was swept away in The Spirit, and my voice, I’m afraid, rose to a level above what one would expect in normal conversation. Knowing me, there were probably a number of references to various farm animals and the mysteries of carnal knowledge of them. There may have been something about his ancestry going back to Cain. There was almost certainly several verses dealing with the relative intellect of different vegetables, legumes, and Rebel privates named Mike, and it was all delivered at a volume that insured the entire Confederate infantry camp felt they had front row seats.

When I finally returned to this mortal realm, my face was about four inches from Mike’s, and we were several yards from where we’d started. I think I told him to have his corporal show him how to sanitize the water bucket and bring it back full. When I turned around, about 30 or 40 men were staring at me, wide-eyed. I straightened my jacket and hitched up my waist belt, and went back to whatever I’d been doing.

Later that night, a couple of men from a company three streets down came by and congratulated me on the most amazing, earth-shaking butt-chewing they’d ever witnessed. The battalion commander came by and cautioned me about being too hard on the men and alienating new members, since, as he pointed out, every man there was a volunteer.

A year or two later, at another event (maybe Perryville, Ky) we were swapping stories around the campfire, and a man told about an Olympic chewing-out he’d heard at Wilson’s Creek. I let him go on until certain he had expressed all the praise and awe of which he was capable before identifying myself. I thought for a moment he was going to genuflect.

As for Mike, for the next two days of the event, he was as squared-away as any soldier in the company. He didn’t seem cowed or offended, but took it perfectly in stride. As far as I know, he never shat on his suspenders again. I ran into him at Honest John’s Root Beer Stand at the 135th anniversary event at Gettysburg. He had just gotten out of the Navy, where he’d served as a corpsman. He was still as enthusiastic and irrepressible, but not nearly as much an idiot as he had been the day we brought religion to so many at Wilson’s Creek. I’m sure the Navy, with some gentle guidance from his Marines, had brought him along.

Another story about Mike. He was the battalion drummer at Wilson’s Creek. Now, understand that the “Little Drummer Boy” is almost entirely a myth. There were a few very young drummers, but for the most part the drummers were the best, steadiest soldiers in the unit. They had to be because the unit’s effectiveness in battle depended on their staying in formation and in step, which depended largely on the drummer.

During part of the fight for Bloody Ridge, Mike got shot. He fell by his drum and the battalion moved on without him. Now, a Civil War infantry drum is not like modern drums. It’s about 18″ tall and almost that in diameter. The top of it is made of rawhide laced tight with ropes, but the bottom of the drum is open . Mike fell with the open end of his drum a few inches from his head.

Shortly after we’d advanced on the Yanks, leaving our poor, dead drummer there on the slope, a battery of artillery unlimbered about 50 yards away. Every time one of the big guns fired, the concussion would slam into the head of that drum, which functioned like a person’s tympanic membrane. Considerably amplified, the shock wave exited the open bottom of the drum, and just about knocked poor Mike rolling. When I saw him afterward he was still a little twitchy, and his eyeballs were still bouncing like peas in a whistle.

You’ll never learn stuff like that from a history book.

Wess Rodgers – rebsarge.wordpress.com – Albuquerque

FREEDOM VS. THE ALTERNATIVE

Perhaps the oldest conflict in human existence is between the principles of individual freedom, or “agency,” and of tyranny.  I shall attempt to address this conflict in the briefest terms, short of saying, “Tyranny sucks” and letting it go at that. Extra credit for identifying the random literary references.

DEFINITIONS, with which you may disagree, but this is the way I use these terms.  Your mileage may vary.

“Individual” – one, solitary human being, separate and distinct from all others.

“Society” – A group of individual human beings, associated by geography, culture, beliefs, race, etc.  There is no such existential entity as “society.” There are only individuals hanging out together.

“Freedom” – The state in which every individual is allowed to guide his course through life, based on his value judgments and decisions.  Note the use of “every.” There can be no such thing as the freedom to enslave.

“Individualism” – That body of political and moral thought which holds “freedom” to be an attribute of the individual human being, rather than of some amorphous collective, such as “Society,” “Them,” or “Us.”

“Capitalism” – The economic and political structure in which property is held privately, by individuals, and is traded by them with other individuals on the basis of a freely agreed-upon exchange of labor or of other property.

“Tyranny” – The state in which individuals are NOT allowed to guide their own courses, but are forcibly controlled by someone else.  It doesn’t matter who.  The case is binary.

“Collectivism” – That body of political and moral thought which classifies individuals as parts of some group, or collective.  Thus, racism, sexism, and all the other –isms that group individuals by superficial or even abstract traits are all collectivism.

“Statism” – That body of anti-individualist political and moral thought which holds that the hand on Mankind’s leash should be the state, or the government, whether such power be vested in an individual tyrant or a committee.

“Principle” – A natural law that is eternal and universal, obedience to which is optional, and which carries a penalty for disobedience that is not optional, but in some cases may be passed on to innocent parties.  There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.  Somebody must pay.

“Him/He/His” – In grudging acknowledgement of the brain damage inflicted by professors upon so many, I claim the privilege of the archaic usage in which, when gender is unspecified, the masculine form is assumed to apply to all humans.  If speaking specifically of the masculine gender, the word, “male” will be used.  There was a time when people could comprehend this simple abstraction, but…

I shall lead off with a Scriptural perspective.  If you reject such, read on; I’ve been there, too.

The Forbidden Fruit that tempted our first parents in the Garden was from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Mortality is a probationary period for us, by means of which Heavenly Father gives us every opportunity to prove ourselves worthy of the incomprehensible rewards He has planned for us afterward.  The core of our probation is whether we will obey His Commandments, and have faith in Him and in Jesus Christ, but in order for this test to have any meaning, at all, we must be free to choose our course.  If we are forcibly compelled to do right, there can be no learning, no growth, and no progression from The Natural Man toward one worthy of the Presence of God.

This is Principle One:  Without agency, there can be no discussion of right or wrong, moral or immoral, wickedness or righteousness, or even good or bad.

Those who advocate for any form of statism always cite Mankind’s greed and capacity for cruelty, and claim that, “If only individuals weren’t free to make their own decisions, some omniscient, benevolent other individual[s], often “Society”, could guide the collective toward a kinder, gentler existence.”  They hold that the profit motive leads inexorably to abuse, whereas, if Mankind were compelled by threat of deadly force to do “what is right,” life would be all peaches and cream.

This is Principle Two:  The end result, or ultimate expression of any law is the threat of deadly force. Without it, the law would be a suggestion or a “guideline.” If one persists in disobeying a law in the face of all “encouragement” to obey, sooner or later someone will poke a gun in his ribs and make him an offer he can’t refuse.

So here is the crucial question:  If all people are driven to abuse, from what group, or collective, ought we to draw our masters?  If Joe Blow is a bully in his role as a citizen, is there some transfiguring ritual that will turn him into an Omniscient, Benevolent, Dictator (OBD, for short) the moment he gains power?  I don’t see it happening.  Statists love to say, “The problem with capitalism is that when applied to the human race, it devolves into abuse and bullying because all capitalists are human beings.”

This is Principle Three:  All of Mankind comes from the same gene pool. If all people are driven to abuse others, then, by the axiom of identity (A=A) all people are driven to abuse others. 

Okay.  So what are all statists if not people?  Whether the term used is “Socialist,” “Communist,” “Fascist,” “Nazi,” “Progressive,” “Modern liberal,” “Bolshevik,” “Rousseauan,” or any other euphemism, are we not bound to select our OBD from the human race?  Is there a group, or a collective, be it racial, national, ethnic, or any other distinction, that is uniquely suited to governing the rest of us?  It must be so if there are individuals who are exempt from the classification of all people, and by the statists’ own formulation, we must identify this group and beg them to fasten our leashes about our throats and drive us at gunpoint toward a kinder, gentler existence.

Now, hold on a minute.  Might there be a word or a phrase to describe this group of natural-born, congenitally-disposed rulers?  Hmmm.   How about…

                             “THE MASTER RACE?”

Sure, it’s been tried before, but they didn’t do it right because they didn’t apply it to the whole world; there were too many people not brought to heel by the OBD’s. Consider the Jews, who just refused to get on board.  And the Ukrainians.  And the Gypsies.  And the homosexuals.  And, in the case of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the educated class.  And perhaps the Deplorables?  The Fundamentalists of any faith?  The Latter-Day Saints?  The NRA members?  The Blacks?  The Muslims?  The Overseas Chinese?  (An old friend who crewed on a steamship in the South China Sea told me, “If God created such a thing as a congenital capitalist, it was the Chinaman.”)  (And just to throw a little more on the table, who shall select our masters, and by what process, or authority, or special cognition?  And if these “electors” have authority over the Master Race, isn’t that sort of a contradiction in terms, leading to an infinite regression?)

This is Principle Four : Statism always fails because it is anti-life – antithetical to the fundamentals that make human beings human beings, and the Statists always have to have a scapegoat in the form of non-conformists who are just too bloody stupid to see the truth.

What about the matter of motivation? Statists hold that individualism, expressed as capitalism, is driven by the motive to make a profit, and I’ll go along with that.  What follows assumes we are talking about a free society, or “a government of laws and not of men,” in which individuals are free to act in their own behalf, according to their own agency.

If, then, all people are free, by definition no man can force another to do anything other than to leave him alone.  So if the capitalist is bound by that same law, how can he turn a profit?  He must provide his neighbors with something they want or can use, at a price they can afford, which must be greater than the cost to him. (Milo Minderbinder to the contrary, you can’t buy eggs for a dollar a dozen on Sardinia and sell them for .90 cents a dozen on Corsica and make up the difference in volume.)

More important, he must rely on their willingness to trade with him of their own free will, because everybody is free. The instant force or coercion is introduced, whether by the capitalist or the government, all bets are off, and it matters not whether the force is directed at the capitalist or his neighbors; the equation is fatally corrupted.  So the capitalist is motivated, in the end, to provide his customers with something they feel will make their lives better, and to respect their agency.  No altruism or self-sacrifice is required.  He can’t charge too much, because if he tries, his customers will tell him to go jump in the lake and some sharp character will take his market from him.  The same happens if he tries to pass off an inferior product.  The freedom of all participants to decide and act accordingly is at the core of “the capitalist proposition.”

But what about the motivation of the statist master?  What will drive him to assure that all are treated with equal benevolence and condescension?  Pure good will and the milk of human kindness?  The “better angels of his nature?”  The aforementioned congenital disposition to govern fairly?  Oh, and from whence will he gain his own sustenance?  Being the master over so many will preclude any real productive labor by him, so he must skim a bit off the top.  Fortunately for the rest of us pedestrian slobs, his essential nature as an OBD will prevent him from getting filthy rich off our work.  Right?  I mean, it says so right here on the label.

So which would you rather trust:  a man’s natural drive to make himself and his heirs a better life within the constructs of a lawful economy?  Or the divine nature of a member of the Master Race?

AND NOW THE OTHER PERSPECTIVE

I promised to go into the non-Scriptural perspective, so here you go.  (I was a fire-breathing, proselyting atheist for almost 20 years, so I do have a bit of cred in this.)

First, the definitions and principles listed above also stand for this portion.  If one holds to the model of evolution, or, as Darwin phrased it, “Origin of Species,” one cannot reasonably exclude the development of the human intellect from that of the human body.  Nor, I believe, can one deny the fact that human beings exist solely as individuals, even if they join or are classified as members of various collectives.  Therefore, if man exists as a physical individual, his rational faculty is also an individual attribute, functioning according to its true nature, consisting of the sensory apparatus, which informs him of his surroundings, his perceptual apparatus, which allows him to group things by similarities or differences, and his conceptual apparatus, which allows him to build mental constructs beyond the limitations of his perceptions.

Thus, his senses show him a small, feathered object.  His perceptual consciousness says, “Bird,” and his conceptual consciousness says, “Chow.”  What he does about that is up to him.  Indeed, his survival depends on his decision, and without survival there can be no further evolution, so we can see how man’s rational faculties are at the core of his existence as man, rather than as some other being.

So what if he made the decision to eat that bird, but his neighbor said, “No, you shan’t eat Speckled Jim?”  No matter how flawless his mental process, if he were not allowed to act on the results of that process, all would be for naught.  Thus the freedom to think and the freedom to act are mutually crucial to Mankind’s very existence – the definitive expression of pro-life orientation. Whether one speaks of “evolution” or “transformation,” the intellectual development of the individual human being is axiomatic.

Does it really matter if his consumption of the bird were halted by his neighbor, or by a group of his neighbors, or by those slobs down the hill?  Not a bit. Either he was free to act on his decision or he was not.  And we’re right back to where we were because truth is truth, no matter the source or the path by which it is derived.

Wess Rodgers – Rebsarge.wordpress.com – Albuquerque

SYMBOLS, IDEAS, AND MORAL AGENCY

Looks like it’s time to drag this one to the top of the bin again.

When I wrote this, in 2015, I was referring to the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. Today, though – 4 July, 2021 – it applies to the Stars and Stripes, as well. Next week, it will apply to some other flag or symbol, and another after that, until there is nothing left of Human culture but the putrefied offal of misbegotten philosophies.

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The meaning of a symbol is not in the symbol, but in the minds of those who see it. If a flag speaks to you of honor, courage, devotion, sacrifice, and so many other virtues, those meanings are in your mind. On the other hand, if a flag speaks to you of hate, prejudice, violence, and genocide, that meaning, too, is in your mind.

To ban a symbol because some people see evil in it is to put those people’s emotions above and superior to the emotions of those who see it as the opposite. Such a ban essentially says, “These people over here are who this country is about, and those people over there are no longer welcome here,” not because of the behavior of either group, but because of the way they view an inanimate symbol.

It is, in every literal respect, a ban on a way of thinking, rather than on behavior or actions. The left has emphasized outlawing certain ideas, and even emotions, whether they were acted upon or not. The American left has become a force of thought police, the enemies of that which makes mankind mankind – that which makes us created in the image of Our Father, not in appearance, but in knowledge of good and evil.

Virtue is possible only when men can choose how to act, for there can be neither vice nor virtue in compulsion. Since choice is a mechanism of the mind – of our ideas and what we think – the left’s effort to banish certain thoughts is an explicit attack on that which makes us human, and which makes virtue possible.

Wess Rodgers – rebsarge.wordpress.com – Albuquerque, NM