The Pond Overfloweth
Rich men, responsibility, and Flannery O'Connor's lesson for Canadian parliament
New readers, welcome to the pond.
If you’re just tuning in, this monthly mashup is where D.T. Adams and I report back from yet another scouting mission. But instead of maps of the enemy, (sometimes that’s exactly what I bring back…) we relay findings and musings, along with books, movies, music, and theology morsels. As you’ve probably noticed, unshy conservative-Christian takes on the national scene are also on the menu.
In short, and as opposed to my longer essay on books and ideas (last month was ‘Watership Down’ by Richard Adams), this here’s the grab bag.
So read on, enjoy, and if you’re so inclined, give us a shout on social media, Substack notes, or Twitter / X / what-have-you-ask-the-lawyers.
Or leave a comment.
The crocodiles loooooove comments.
In the Memetime…
When I said ‘off to the races’ I think I meant ‘off to the recreation room.’
For all the young guns out there, here’s a few more on that theme:
Social Geography
From M.E Rothwell’s Cosmographia, East Germany’s Moscow-approved map of West Berlin. Talk about burying facts in literal white space.
Or if you’re over the Korean peninsula, swap perspectives and make that blackout space.
Not memes so much as warnings.
And On that Timely Note…
In the unlikely event that This Needs Saying (more likely here in Los Angeles County, where being that first lemming off the cliff is a kind of calling card):
I wish I were exaggerating, what with the communist maps and all. But everything I’ve read, learned, studied, and seen / heard / absorbed with my own senses tells me I’m not. Granted—and not to ignore the high, if hard to define number of actual Covid-comorbidity deaths—a mass graveyard of businesses, downtowns, families and relationships, and seasons of school, sports, churchgoing, and seeing loved ones pass is not a mass grave of people.
But don’t tell me those two categories aren’t distant cousins at the least.
What I’m saying is that if you really care about the people around you, take caution of course. But when the next thing happens don’t comply with it. Clearly, we’re not out of the woods yet. For the sake of country, faith, freedoms, and the social fabric that imperfectly threads it all together, please hold the line.
Last time was a dress rehearsal.
Next time might be game point.
Oh, Canada…
On the Canadian Parliament getting so fired up about Zelensky’s Ukraine that they applauded SS veteran Yuroslav Hunka… can we help ourselves? When a Jack this outrageous comes up from the deck, what else is there to do but slap it?
To his credit, (and in contrast to Justin Trudeau’s adolescent fumbling—as if he had any dignity left after calling truckers who protested his vaccine mandate Nazis and freezing opponent’s bank accounts) the parliament speaker who singled out a Ukrainian national who fought Russia as part of Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS has since resigned.
While there’s comfort in watching someone finally own a mistake like this, I have to wonder—how does one get to be speaker, prime minister, or public relations staffer of a developed country without knowing that Eastern Theater veterans who fought the big bad Soviet Union were on the side of the Wehrmacht?
At the very least—and without knowing the whole story of a ninety-year old veteran who, I imagine, probably did not commit atrocities personally and lived a normal, upstanding civilian life after surviving hell on Earth—how does one not catch something like this before it happens?
If this isn’t the time to plug the History Channel’s World War Two from Space as a visual aid—Canadian parliament, you’re welcome—I don’t know when is.
For the record, I’m not faulting Canada, nor the United States for arming Ukraine when Russia first invaded in February of 2022. As we now know, helping a country fend off an invasion and writing blank checks for a meat-grinder offensive with a nuclear power over contested territory after Kiev did not fall are different strategies per se.
But without saying any more on that, one lesson from Canadian parliament stands out: hating a conveniently buffoonish enemy is no saving virtue. Plus, bringing said hatred to a lowest common denominator (four legs good, Russia baa-aa-aa-aad) leaves little space for shrewd judgement. Or for history, the forgetting of which is a real tragedy.
When some nine million young Russians died fighting Hitler’s army, do we say with a straight face that we were always at war with Eastasia? I got the sense that Trudeau, if he hadn’t gotten caught, would keep on saying it.
Finally, the Canadian parliament’s ‘Hunka Affair’ may be yet another sign of competence failure among governing institutions across the board. We’re well into the diversity and identity era, where things like competence and a working knowledge of history are but two qualifying factors in, you might say, a very rich tapestry.
Not saying circumstances don’t warrant change. Or in rare cases, side switching. Not saying Putin is some misunderstood saint or that Russian journalists who oppose him don’t have a funny habit of disappearing. But woe to us if we lose our bearings, if we swap out history and its tragic lessons for quick-fix ideology.
I could say more on the consequences of forgetting our past… but I’ll leave that to Flannery O’Connor.
‘A Late Encounter With the Enemy’
To top this off, here’s Flannery O’Connor with a short story about the exact incident that roiled Canada’s pro-Ukraine parliament.
Kind of.
Though not entirely to a T (O’Connor was a believing Catholic, not an oracle after all), the story’s cast and setup bear an uncanny resemblance to what happened. Both the event and the story hinge on a grizzled, husk of a war veteran, mistaken for someone else for blind, self-serving reasons—and absolutely loving the attention.
For dialect, premise, and the mental point-of-view of it’s characters, O’Connor’s stories is a gem—and almost unbearably funny.
Hundred-and-four year old Civil War veteran George Poker Sash is paraded around at Southern parades as a uniformed “General.” Remembering nothing except his career as a figure in a wax museum (more or less), he eats up the attention.
“But the General had not finished. He stood immovable in the exact center of the spotlight, his neck thrust forward, his mouth slightly open, and his voracious grey eyes drinking in the glare and the applause. He elbowed his granddaughter roughly away. ‘How do I keep so young,’ he screeched, ‘I kiss all the pretty guls!”1
From dialect to mental, emotional point-of-view O’Connor’s at her very best—and almost unbearably funny.
She also shows us the shallow dread just beneath the General’s spotlight addiction. Having no memory of the real war, his family, or the week before, the attention is his opiate. When children reach out to touch the General’s polished saber, he hisses and bats them away. Not knowing where he is half the time, he snores, grumbles, and hurls ‘goddamn hell’ behind the scenes.
Meanwhile, the General’s granddaughter is no foil; she literally dreams of using the General as a prop in her own pageant—a college graduation that’s taken her a decade of mature adulthood to reach. But when she has her nephew wheel him onstage for said graduation and the speaker’s words combine with the heat to prod the General’s foggy memory, O’Connor kicks things into high dramatic gear.
From the General’s captive point of view, the climax is an unbearable lesson—an almost suffocating one for both him and Canada’s too-real, forgetful leaders.
"Another black robe had taken the place of the first one and was talking now and he heard his name mentioned again but they were not talking about him, they were still talking about history.
‘If we forget out past,’ the speaker was saying ‘we won’t remember our future and it will be as well as for we won’t have one.’
The General heard some of the words gradually. He had forgotten history and he didn’t intend to remember it again. He had forgotten the names and face of his wife and children, and he had forgotten the names of places and the places themselves and what happened to them.
He heard the words, Chickamauga, Shiloh, Johnston, Lee2 and he knew he was inspiring all these words that meant nothing to him. He wondered if he had been a general at Chickamauga or at Lee. Then he tried to see himself and the horse mounted in the middle of a float full of beautiful girls, being driven slowly through downtown Atlanta. Instead, the old words began to stir in his head as if they were trying to wrench themselves out of place and come to life.”3
At the risk of spoiling a delightful, thematically provoking story, I won’t summarize how the General’s Late Encounter with history, memory, and the truth of what he’s become plays out.
But if you know O’Connor, you know it’s explosive, comical, and to say the least, instructive.
From Genesis to the Resurrection to the particulars of the Civil War and World War II, remembering where we came from is a safeguard against ourselves. For Americans and ancient Israel alike, shame on us and peril if we forget.
If you’ve been elected to Canadian parliament, by the way, better take notes—there’s a quiz coming later.
With that, D.T. Adams on responsibility, vis a vis ‘Rich Men North of Richmond.’
The (Real) Economic Crisis: Responsibility
by D.T. Adams
As the explosion of Oliver Anthony’s song, Rich Men North of Richmond, has made clear, many Americans feel that their money and time aren’t worth much to anyone. They work hard, only to be paid low wages that are then taxed exorbitantly. The question on the hearts of many in America seems to be, “How are people supposed to make progress in America when they’re pushed to spend all of their time working merely to pay the bills?”
It’s a good question. When I showed my wife the aforementioned song, her first comment was, “Wow, he seems kind of bitter.” While subsequent videos have proven Anthony’s lack of bitterness, he does indeed, strike a bitter note. There’s more that could be said about the song or the reaction to it, but I want to turn your attention to something Anthony only mentions in passing but that is actually a lot closer to the central issue than some realize.
Anthony mentions “young men putting themselves six feet in the ground,” which is at the heart of the issue. These young men to whom he refers are trying to take responsibility, yet, when they try to stand up and be responsible, they’re hit with tax burdens from the government (self-employment tax) and mockery from the culture (it’d be easier if you got a “normal” job).
The crisis Anthony points to, rather than an economic one, is a crisis of responsibility.4 Anthony notices that the issue is a two-edged one: on the one hand, you have people milking welfare and, on the other, you have the government trying to take total control.
This crisis of responsibility involves misplaced responsibility more than anything else. It’s not the government’s responsibility to see that I’m thinking publicly approved thoughts. It’s not their responsibility, though it may seem contradictory to what I’ve already said, to ensure that I am paid well enough to enjoy true leisure. It is their responsibility, though, to stay out of the way of people trying to live responsible and moral lives. So far, this has proved an insurmountable challenge for them.
This call for personal responsibility is not meant to echo the “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps” message that’s sometimes thrown around, especially by previous generations. Help should be given and received by individuals in local communities; in fact, this is part of taking responsibility back from the federal government. Helping the people right in front of you is one way that you can take responsibility, and family members, even extended family members, can be a huge help to each other in hard economic times like these.
So what’s left for people like me and people like you to do? I propose that we begin taking responsibility for ourselves, our families, and our communities again. For far too long we’ve let the federal and state governments take responsibility for things that they have no business getting involved in.
Will it be more difficult?
Absolutely.
Will it be better?
I can’t guarantee that. But I know that our chances for building a great future for our children and grandchildren will increase if we take responsibility for what we can. After all, you and I know the needs of our communities immeasurably better than some rich men sitting in an office north of Richmond.
Coming Up Next
Some familiar terrain if you’ve been reading along this year.
Having finished W. Somerset Maugham’s ‘Of Human Bondage,’ a classic, modern coming-of-age novel, I’m coming back for more. On the topics of faith, atheism, modern literature, and learning from life choices, I’ll have a few footnotes.
At least that’s the plan.
Until then, happy fall and happy reading.
O’Connor, Flannery. ‘Collected Works’ (256)
Part of O’Connor’s characterization of the General’s mental state is his confusing General Lee for a battle. But of course, you knew that.
O’Connor, Flannery, ‘Collected Works.’ (260)
The term, “Crisis of Responsibility," was coined by David Bahnsen, who wrote a book by that name.