So I spent a few days in Newport, R.I. this summer. I have done this for the last nearly forty years because my Mom’s whole side of the family is comprised of Newporters. It is a wonderful and beautiful place, but since I have done the tourist stuff innumerable times, every time I have gone there in the last ten years, we have simply just gone to the beach. You sit on the beach, and get some sun. You hope you get hot enough to go into the frigid Atlantic for a shock to the system. No doubt, when I was young as a kid I spent my time in the water until I turned blue. Now I must get red hot, and then take dip in the cold. It’s kind of a reverse Sweden from hot to cold. No hot tubs and ice baths, but beach bakes and frigid water. It is exhilarating in its own a way.

The point I wanted to make was that many (at least seven by my count) attractive young women thought Fifty Shades of Grey was appropriate beach reading. As I walked down the beach I saw several women intently focused on the sexual situations presented in that novel. I could make some sort of smart sociological or psychological observation here, but not having read the novel, I will restrain myself. I just thought it odd that so many women were reading the same novel, and this novel was considered to be in the popular press pornographic. What would be the case if I were found leafing through Hustler magazine while I baked on the beach? I suspect it wouldn’t be as acceptable.

Regardless, on the beaches of Newport things have always run hot and cold. Hot on the sand at First, Second or Gooseberry beach, while cold in the water. So must I read soft porn, in order that I be cold later with the one I love? I don’t think so. It is a strange dichotomy.

Not having read it, I don’t understand the fascination with Fifty Shades of Grey. Is it a novel about an unsatisfied and burned women? This I get. Isn’t much of literature about this, and not only literature written by men—such as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening or in part Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God? Of course Flaubert’s Madame Bovary could be mentioned too. But this mood doesn’t make good reading of itself. Or does it? Should I read Fifty Shades of Grey or is it simply another Jacqueline Susann? And isn’t Anne Rice better than Fifty Shades of Grey? I say this without reading it, but then I got my pornographic fix from reading the Marquis de Sade. And of course I already know the answer to these rhetorical questions.

Perhaps Carl is right, and we should all return to reading Jane Austen. But sitting in the hot summer sun on a Newport beach, I need to get into that bracing Atlantic water.

BTW—on the beach, I was unerotically reading Jay Cost’s excellent new book on the Democratic party, Spoiled Rotten. It is an excellent book, but it doesn’t provide the Look of Love. Nonetheless, while I read, the sun was hot! Luckily the ocean was nearby. The hot and cold on the beach could keep me spoiled.

With Sirius XM radio you can hear the darndest things on a four hour drive from Dallas to Houston, like the same live Obama speech told both in Ohio and later at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

After telling the same jokes—including a shout out from Bo the First Dog—the President goes into a routine about how he and his family never wished to be rich. Rather, they only wanted the same thing that the hard working Americans in the audience wanted for themselves. Apparently there was an age old social contract whereby those who worked hard and played by the rules would be rewarded with economic and medical security. Unfortunately, over the last decade, two wars and a profligate prior president, led to tax cuts for the rich which has led us to the situation of 8.2% unemployment. The President, who came from a background that never wanted such prestige and power as he currently possesses, will be there to continue the fight against the enemies from the past who wish to take America to the failed “theories” of the past. If those enemies happen to be Americans too, well then that’s just a wash.

Don’t worry, the President is fighting against a “theory,” but he has a better “theory.” His “theory” is all about the home, school, and health loans that apparently made him what he is today. However, the fact that he is President of the United States is just an accident. If the past policies made him President, then it is only a lacunae in the general problems of the American system that can be fixed through good social legislation.

After all, President Obama’s family was just like yours, not wishing to be rich (not that there is anything wrong with that), but only wishing to play by the rules. If the President happens to be President, then that is just a tribute to the justice of America—but the justice of America is still inadequate until YOU too have the same opportunities as him.

And apparently there are enemies. According to the President he is fighting for a movement that doesn’t work from the top down, but from the “middle class” up (sorry lower class!). President Obama understands the presidency as an office of war against enemies of this middle class, of which he generously includes himself. He needs to be re-elected to continue this fight.

The rest of the President’s speech told us about the Golden Gate Bridge, the moon landing, and the internet. According to the President, America is a place where anything can happen, and his “theory” will make it happen. He just needs more time for his “theory” to become actual.

We would be stupid not to follow him.

1. While sitting at JFK waiting for a plane, I realized that Carl, Peter, and Pete were on to something in their discussion of deferential, minimalist judicial activism.

2. All day I kept thinking of the Art. I provision requiring all bills for the raising of revenue to originate in the House. On the drive from Newport, RI to JFK I kept turning over in my mind clever rephrases of the text.

As the Roberts decision seems to be judicial tax writing, it was good to see that the dissenting justices were thinking the same thing. I came across this blog post.

3. Regarding Carl’s post on rock movies, I think Phantom of the Paradise has everything he is speaking of in one movie. It ought to be number one.

I have more to say about all this, but I must board a plane. Gotta go!

I want to say no, but Uncle John was there where you wanted to him to be and no one else was. I was twelve years old and he was on his own trip. Uncle John grew his own marijuana, and his parents took it as something he was willing to do.

In fact, when my grandmother brought a tree doctor to save a diseased immense oak on the property,  the tree doctor said, “Mrs. Curran, there is marijuana growing on this property,” and she was smart enough to play dumb and call it umbrella plant. There was no marijuana here. Her concern was to save the greeat oak, and so was the tree doctor at that time. And that was as far as it went, there was no marijuana there.

I will defend Uncle John in his horticulture to the death, despite his shallow marijuana growth as something serious. It was never serious, and this growth was twenty years ago anyway. It is a boring point, but I remember the good times with my particular relatives.

For instance, I remember taking a trip many years ago with Uncle John–a trip I took a trip with him on a raft with paddles through the Newport, RI anchored rich harbor, but we didn’t give a damn. We–me and Uncle John–made it through the Newport harbor to Felix de Weldon’s pier. We got to Felix de Weldon’s pier and we dived and jumped. And jumped again. It was green water, deep for good diving is my memory.

Galveston, TX and Newport, RI have much in common. Two islands with huge tourism and history that locals think you outsiders better not f**k with.

In song I like the Del Fuegos “I Still Want You.”

I like this tune too.

There has been much hype surrounding Ridley Scott’s movie Prometheus released today. An alleged prequel to the sci-fi/horror/thriller classic Alien (1979), the director Scott was always hesitant to speak of it in such prequel terms, and instead spoke of it in larger and vaguer terms—and indeed he was right.

The movie more resembles Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in terms of theme than it does the original Alien. Apparently Scott has bigger fish to fry in this film. In its attempt to ask big questions such as whence and whither humankind, Prometheus presents an action/monster suspense movie in the place of Kubrick’s classic, but such deep questions remain to the end in the character of Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace).

As a meditation on human origins as somehow alien, Prometheus most closely compares to Brian De Palma’s much maligned Mission to Mars, but in comparison to that movie the “engineers” in Prometheus have no care for mere human life or for life on the planet earth as a whole. In fact *SPOILER ALERT* the super-human engineers are super-powerful beings who are downright malevolent toward the existence of humankind, and in fact bent on its destruction (even though they share the same DNA). For instance, one of the several manifestations of this evil monstrosity literally resembles images of H.P. Lovecraft’s Chthulu.

Unlike 2001 or Mission to Mars, Prometheus is less contemplative in its cinematic method and intent. It is more about human characters doing whatever it takes under extreme circumstances to stay alive in terms of “action film” techniques. However, for one individual character it is also about continuing to seek after the truth. Apparently, reading ancient hieroglyphs and cave paintings in the here and now tell us more about the truth of the alienated human being than any day to day feeling of ennui while ordering a latte at Starbucks.

Like 2001, and not like Mission to Mars, Prometheus has no element of parody in its depiction of human grandiosity. It is more like the speech of human greatness in Sophocles’ Antigone than it is like the whole of Aristophanes, except this human greatness is up against a malevolence of untold proportions. Perhaps it is nemesis.

Nonetheless, with the help of robotic technology—in the form of an android named David played by Michael Fassbender— our heroine Dr. Shaw has the capacity to find an answer to the deep questions of whence and whither. David is an android with artificial intelligence that can be educated with both knowledge and character in mimicry of the best of human learning (here the movie channels sci-fi notions found in Star Trek and Star Wars, as well as in HAL 9000). The movie leaves that quest open for a franchise of never ending sequels as Dr. Shaw and David move on to find the deeper origins of the importance of an individual human life.

David the android is programmed to acquire a kind of human judgment through indirect experience—for instance his education surreptitiously (?) models itself on Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence in David Lean’s classic Lawrence of Arabia. Perhaps Ridley Scott is making a point that movies like Lawrence of Arabia teach human excellence in its complexity better than his own movies do—even a classic like Alien. Or perhaps we watching this movie are no different than androids like David?

Dr. Elizabeth Shaw has faith. She wears a cross on a necklace—a virtual talisman which is taken from her at one point—at which point, by the way, the movie almost resembles a sci-fi version of Rosemary’s Baby. This movie is surely about a post-Christian world where you can “believe” in science or non-science and it does not matter. However, the movie presents something more than a Kuhnian paradigm shift—because “300 years” of Darwinism (sic) is allegedly overturned through new empirical evidence on a new planet. That is to say, the movie presents modern science and ancient myth on equal terms.

In contrast to these larger than life themes, Elizabeth and her fellow scientist Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) demonstrate a personal love for each other. In fact, in one scene Charlie tells Elizabeth that no-one is more important than she. But *SPOILER ALERT* Charlie dies. This basically mirrors the scene in Mission to Mars between the characters played by Tim Robbins and Connie Nelson, whereby the death of one leads to a void whereby the other is willing to act in a heroic and self-sacrificial manner.

Elizabeth’s cross necklace represents something, but the Christian story is at best implied. Nonetheless, the whole movie intends to show the ultimate insignificance of human beings no matter how much they may demonstrate individual heroic virtue. Perhaps the undying love between Elizabeth and Charlie sustains the search.

So this thought on the significance of individual heroism making a difference leads me to a quick review of For Greater Glory. Unlike Prometheus, For Greater Glory is all about the importance of individuals in history. It has, not incorrectly, been compared to Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. It is well acted and filmed, and it is important for Americans to learn of the Cristero War. It has some moving moments—in particular, the story of the young boy who leaves his family to fight and die for “Viva Cristo Rey.” I’m just not sure that this particular movie is the best way to learn of these events in Mexico.

Much has been made of this movie in relation to questions of religious liberty and the current HHS mandate on Catholic institutions regarding the provision of contraception. This is seriously overstated. President Obama is far from President Calles. Mexico—after the Revolution and Cristero War—had (and has) a much different understanding of “church and state” relations as laicite/laiciudad than does the U.S. with its Puritan separatist foundations.

Still, For Greater Glory is an entertaining movie. I remember being in Huitla, Oaxaca and placing my forefinger in the bullet holes of the church doors. It was a powerful experience to know that many died in defense of such Catholicism, and that it still exists there as a memorial of those times.

BTW, to come full circle, Peter O’Toole plays a martyred priest in For Greater Glory.

Update: I should say that Stephanie Zacharek was ahead of me in some of the Prometheus/Mission to Mars parallels, but that said, her points were not quite my own.

Since Carl mentioned James Poulos’ band Black Hi-Lighter below, I thought I’d post this video which has been making the rounds (or if it has not made the rounds, it should). It is an excellent (little rehearsed/bar band) performance of David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” James does a good Jagger slash Bowie slash Iggy Pop, with a backup up band which I think has a few members from Black Hi-Lighter in it.

Apparently, several bands got together one night in one club and performed the entirety of Bowie’s Ziggy album.

If this sounds self indulgent (which it need not necessarily be), consider that I just paid money to see the Flaming Lips perform the entirety of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. I would think James’ cohort offers the better value for your buck, but the Flaming Lips as Pink Floyd were pretty damn good too.

It didn’t hurt that for my dollar to see the Flaming Lips, Morris Day & the Time, Snoop Dogg, and Willie Nelson were also on the bill. Also, Los Skarnales played–a truly excellent Houston based Tex-Mex/ska band. There were other bands such as Two Door Cinema Club, the Avett Brothers, Erykah Badu, the Descendents, Starf***r, and others that I missed while standing in line to go to the bathroom. Or else I was too bored to listen and watch. After all, it was 95 degrees with equal humidity in the hot Texas sun. Nothing against these bands, but I’d rather be bored in the shade.

After the concert I felt like Danny Glover’s character in Lethal Weapon–”I’m gettin’ too old for this…”

UPDATE: I guess I was the only person who knew the hand signals for the Time’s

C-O-O-L. On the of best days, even while I teach the Federalist Papers, I find myself mimicking this COOL posture in class. Lord, help me.

Pete speaks of Romney’s toughness–a toughness learned through a Senate challenge to a Kennedy in Massachusetts in 1994. Repeat: A challenge to a Kennedy in Massachusetts. I’m not so sure the current election is easily analogized to 1994, even if it is meant only as a mere developmental phase of Romney’s training upon which to display his toughness on the national political stage.

Back then, Romney’s “misdemeanors” in the LDS church or at Bain couldn’t beat Teddy’s undisclosed (or undiscussed) literal childhood “felony” record. This says it all–or at least much–about Massachusetts.

To their credit, the media refs threw the flag on the Kennedy’s anti-Mormon religious bigotry, but it resulted in what seemed to be a blown call for a mere five yards backwards while the Kennedy’s were in the “red zone.” Apparently all was fair after the rules of church and state relationships were rhetorically set in Houston circa 1960. After all, hadn’t the Kennedy’s had been kept on their knees through decades of a soft form of anti-Catholic religious bigotry in the Irish Catholic Boston of James Michael Curley and its surrounds? Making millions, gaining the post at the Court of St. James, and attending Harvard were surely not options for this scrappy lot.

Nonetheless, the Kennedy clan and their devotees of the 1990s relented to the called media foul, and they took a new tack off the cape on their mythological yacht of political hopes and dreams. Henceforth they only righteously spoke of issues at the end of Teddy’s indignant pointed finger, i.e., they spoke to issues salient to most Massachusetts voters. As he spoke of business growth and technocratic fifty-nine point plans, Romney couldn’t differentiate himself saliently from such salience, so he eventually lost the election.

Romney has learned his lesson this time and will now only speak of the salient issues on his own terms—issues like Obamacare and Solyndra. Romney will let Trump speak birtherism while he stays on message and continues to speak competently to the issues.

No doubt, the stakes are different this time—it’s not Massachusetts, which needed the death of Kennedy to break the fixation of the Kennedy mystique in Scott Brown (plus a really bad Democratic candidate in Martha Coakley–and later, let’s hope, in Indian princess Elizabeth Warren) as much as Cuba needs the death of Fidel to break its own idée fixe. In some cases, popular piety trumps salient issues. So perhaps one needs a trump in Trump after all? But this won’t work.

To mix sports metaphors, with a media-umpire in the batter’s box calling balls and strikes for Obama, I don’t think Romney can rely on such journalistic professionalism and responsibility as was found in 1994. Back then, it was Massachusetts and Teddy Kennedy—the media could afford to play fair. Not so much this time around nationwide—the stakes are too high, but at least Romney will have Fox and the WSJ. In such an situation, salient issues will sail right by each other like ships in the night (cringe).

Also, Obama is no Kennedy, and the USA is no Massachusetts. So, as Pete says, Romney might as well “hang tough” (as one Boston boy band put it) and focus on the salient issues, and hope that a certain piety outside Massachusetts leans in his favor nonetheless. Unfortunately, Romney is about as tough as Marky Mark, and I’m sure Marky Mark is pulling for Obama anyway. Perhaps, Romney ought to channel the Beach Boys instead for any “good vibrations” amongst the electorate.

If anything, the Obama mystique—such as it was in 2008—has surely worn off after 3 ½ years of holding office.

If not, Romney always has Trump out there—but that is more like relying on a designated hitter instead of a two point conversion, to extend the lame metaphor.

All of this makes Romney sound like a loser come November. It is surely disturbing to me when the case for Romney makes me think of boy bands.

Since I feel cold, and in the spirit of Carl’s recent posts, let me link to a bracing Norwegian ice bath sung by one of his beach bands–Beach House.

Early voting started a couple of days ago in Texas, and it sure makes it easy to vote for a primary election dated for May 29. Given that I will be in Rome visiting relatives on that date, it is nice to know that I can still vote early in Texas. Should I say, “Only in America?”

Not to be too proud, but I voted in the Republican primary. Ten years ago—and surely 20 years ago—I would have voted in the Democratic primary, in that all the local elections were decided in the Democratic primary. Things have changed on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

I was disappointed that Santorum bailed from his presidential bid—and it looks as if Paul has bailed too—before the Texas (let alone Pennsylvania) primary. As recent as 2008, the Texas Democratic primary mattered when it was between Hillary and Barack. But back then, the primary was held in mid-March. It is in late May because of the dispute over the redrawing of newly added Congressional districts.

In the 2008 primary the nation learned about the “Texas Two-Step” that the parties have established between counting popular votes and counting delegates to the state party convention at local precinct meetings. For all of its populism, Texas demands committed populism, i.e., if you really care, you need to go to the precinct meeting. I’m sure the local Paulistas will make the most of this.

Texas also has an open primary, so who knows who voted for which candidate in which party back in 2008. There was no such luck this time on the Republican or Democratic side.

No doubt, all the presidential names were on the ballot. I saw Michele Bachmann’s name, and I was tempted to pull the lever in her direction just to spoil the ballot, but one vote doesn’t count, even in a spoiled ballot, and especially in a losing cause.

In Texas we have partisan elections for all state designated positions. This year a lot of constables, sheriffs, and judges—judges on the district and appellate level—were open for election. Of course, state House and Senate, Congressional House and Senate, and the Presidency were all on the ballot too.

But who can honestly keep up with all this stuff? In Texas, the appellate judges generally have no challengers in the primary election, but on the district level there were several candidates. District courts deal with important criminal (felony) and important civil (high property value) cases—but who can really vote on this in an informed manner? It asks too much.

Texas comes under criticism for its popular election of judges—from the local JP to the Court of Criminal Appeals and Supreme Court. An independent judiciary, it seems, is best kept under wraps by elective office for limited terms. This political populism is good locally, and it makes one appreciate the idea of federalism vis a vis the supreme law of the land. Not to be in favor of centralization, but I wonder about the sound judgment of elected judges as much as I wonder about the US Supreme Court in its appointment for good behavior. This raises questions about the appropriate role of auxiliary precautions such as separation of powers on the partly federal–partly national general level, and popular self government on the state and local level.

For good or ill, it seems that state and local government have lost their vitality and importance in terms of small “r” republicanism. State and local government have become as administrative as anything else.

That said, if you vote in the Texas Republican primary you can vote in the typical terms of national rhetoric for this or that self-proclaimed conservative Republican—they all say they are conservative and who am I to doubt? Principles matter, but they all say the same thing. Whether it is sheriff or judge or state legislator, I suppose I vote like most others do, i.e., in terms of personal connections. My dad was a friend with that guy, that woman is married to my doctor, I taught Government to that girl’s father, etc., etc. Let’s hope he or she who is personally upstanding  also knows stuff, and knows it well. This is, of course, typical of “face-to-face” local politics in America.

So anyway, I voted today.

Our Samuel Goldman is now writing at The American Conservative’s State of the Union blog. Asking whether or not there can be a “decent” American Right for the 21st century–one which is suitable to this democratic age–he provides a link to Postmodern Conservative.

Mirroring some questions that Michael Walzer, in 2002, had for the Left after what he then deemed to be a successful military venture in Afghanistan–questions Walzer had regarding knee-jerk criticisms of the war as being beholden to the discredited ideologies of “rag-tag Marxism” and “blaming America first”–Sam likewise wonders if the Right has the resources to offer a similar analysis of contemporary conservatism.

In his post, Sam suggests that the critics of the Afghan war were in some way prescient regarding the failed policies of the last decade.

He even brings up the idea of American exceptionalism–

Can there be a decent Right?

The wisdom and justice of particular alliances or operations is not the issue. Rather, it is the ideology of “American exceptionalism” according to which all that the United States does is good, and all the good that is done has its source in the United States. From the French Revolution through the Cold War, conservatives resisted the delusion that any nation, class, or individual is the unique representative and judge of the human race. That is the principle on which a decent Right depends.

On the blog, Sam promises to explore what a decent Right would look like in foreign policy, economics, and culture. It sounds good, but after reading Ceaser’s excellent analysis of the idea of exceptionalism, I’m less inclined to find an adequate explanation of our problems in resistance to that particular “delusion.”

So I might as well say why I find Robert Penn Warren’s account of the “agrarian” critique of modern society to be superior to Wendell Berry’s. In his novels and poetry Warren presents ambivalence—a real tension and conundrum—over against Berry’s easy condemnation of greed. For Warren, it is neither rural community (“stickers”) nor big city ambition (“boomers”)—as Berry puts it following Wallace Stegner in his Jefferson Lecture—that is at the heart of the trouble of the American soul. Rather, there is a tension between the two.

For Berry, American history has been defined by the greed of the “boomers.” To be sure, Berry says we’re all—boomer, sticker or otherwise—complicit in this greed, but Warren’s poetry is far more ambivalent about terms like greed, and therefore far more questioning in his “agrarianism” than Berry’s literalism of the land. Warren is not a John the Baptist Berry condemning greed.

According to Berry, if only we all grew up in such conditions of a Jeffersonian freehold whereby stewardship of the land was a reality to make for republicanism then we would all be okay. For all of Berry’s wisdom, this is simply utopianism. He keeps talking about land, land, land, but only those as contingently blessed as his own inheritance actually have land to speak of as their own. Warren places these questions in contemporary terms. We don’t own freeholds nowadays, and we find ourselves living already insignificantly in industrial (nowadays post-industrial) capitalism. But we must make a case for our own impoverishment nonetheless.

Warren knows both sides of the equation—proud rural farming and proud urban bourgeois sophistication. Rather than blindly defending the land, Warren was willing to admit that wealth may be more than land. Berry agrees, but one wonders if he would ever admit that his own partisan thumos in defense of the land has not itself become a commodity to be sold on a market for urban types who feel alienated from their own small town and rural backgrounds. Warren understands that world and understands that which can easily be commodified in the character of Jerry Calhoun in At Heavens Gate, Berry on the other hand presents himself as a naïf (albeit a profitable naïf).

As Marx says—of which Berry-ism is derivative—our free human productive power is historically determined by the concentrated wealth of ownership and control of the mode of production by the few over the independent producer. Like Bo Duke, a person to be vilified in Berry’s account of making one’s own, Berry seems to think that we can have an economy whereby income and expenditures are related to work, effort and ability. If only he had read his Aristotle, he would know that money making easily becomes a rule over against wealth in terms of productivity. Aristotle and Berry both warn against this dangerous monetary abstraction, but there is nothing new to this insight, and while Berry speaks truthfully about economy as oikonomike, he assumes that piety alone will prevent economic aggrandizement from becoming simple money making.

In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon became sickened by a city of pigs. and therefore he sought more. Berry, like Adeimantus, has more in common with the Zapotec resistance to conquest in Mexico, and a spirited defense of one’s own. But, unfortunately for Berry, there is no history like the Zapoteca’s have to rely upon in the USA. Unless one points to English or Teutonic past, Berry can at best point to the 19th century or John Cougar Mellencamp. I suppose he could rely on John Niehardt’s Black Elk Speaks, but Berry doesn’t wish to speak of what Warren (borrowing from Indian lore) calls the “dark and bloody ground” of Indian wars and slaughter.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to defend what Berry defends too, insofar as he is critical of quantatative measures of all elements of human life. But this is a loser’s proposition in the USA. The Puritan city on the hill, the Declaration’s natural law, and the Federalist’s “new science of politics,” make one’s own foundations as one of innovation, and such innovation needs the latest of data driven information. There is a way to defend the founding from such rank positivism, but it is difficult to defend it in terms of Berry-like conservatism in a society with a history like our own. The “Straussians”–whether east coast or west coast–are better in this regard.

Even if I favor Berry-ism, it seems to be too fantastic.

Berry speaks of land. Well give me some land to work on. As Locke pointed out, land is scarce, and that is why you invent money. Sorry Mr. Berry if I seek to make my way through money. I don’t own land like you do. Should I be your serf based upon your humanistic values? If we speak of land as land, I might follow the Carl Sandburg—

“Get off my estate”
“What for?”
“Because it’s mine”
“Where did you get it?”
“From my father.”
“Where he get it?”
“From his Father”
“And where did he get it?”
“He fought for it.”
“Well, I’ll fight you for it.”

Berry might as well quote Gibbon or Montesquieu on the failures of the Roman empire. But he has a concept of the human being as limited. However, he won’t mention God, but he will mention the land. This indicates Berry’s naturalism and near pantheism.

Give me a break for all of this. Why should I take this guy seriously? He mentions Allen Tate, but then misses the whole point about human beings not being gods and not being beasts as well. It seems that Berry can’t take the negative and think the corollary that there may be a God and that humans are not beasts.

Meanwhile the rest of us must make truck with our talents, and these talents may point beyond what our forefathers said were limits. I wonder of these Washingtonians–deracinated from any productive skill or from any true local community–who applaud Wendell Berry in his near Gandhian, or at least Thoreauvian remarks of limits, place and simplicity.

This is an insult to the best that Wendell Berry has done. But then again Port William is no Yoknapatawpha.

No doubt, Mr. Berry is right about the data driven prowess of those who look at the land and humans as standing reserve. But apart from summer camp or weekends hunting, most Americans are far removed from the whole truth of what Berry says. We’re—or should I say I’m—not so far removed from cotton farming (industrial as it was), or hunting for deer or duck.

Berry says important things, but Warren spoke to people living in the “industrial” and “modern” world that was personal as such, and didn’t make some ideological stance against what may have been the result.

In old age, Warren wrote deep/silly poems with Eliotic tiles like “Cocktail Party” which had such embarrassing stanzas and order like–

Beyond the haze of alcohol and syntax and
Flung gage of the girl’s glance, and personal ambition,
You catch some eye-gleam, sense a faint
Stir, as of a beast in shadow. It may be Truth.