Author: J. Arthur Bloom

J. Arthur Bloom is the blog's editor, opinion editor of the Daily Caller, and an occasional contributor to the Umlaut. He was formerly associate editor of the American Conservative and a music reviewer at Tiny Mix Tapes, and graduated from William and Mary in 2011. He lives in Washington, DC, and can be found, far too often, on Twitter.

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Farmers and exit

From Anasazi America by David E. Stuart, who is a much better archaeologist than a political or economic thinker:

If ever there was archaeological evidence for the short-term power but ultimate futility of psychological denial and social myopia, it can be found in the late-eleventh-century great houses of Chaco Canyon.

Parts of Chacoan society were already in deep trouble after A.D. 1050 as health and living conditions progressively eroded in the southern districts’ open farming communities. The small farmers in the south had first created reliable surpluses to be stored in the great houses. Ultimately, it was the increasingly terrible living conditions of those farmers, the people who grew the corn, that had made Chacoan society so fatally vulnerable. They simply got too little back from their efforts to carry on.

We should worry about this. Did you know that in 1998 there were 300,000 fewer farmers in the United States than there were in 1979? Did you know that 94 percent of American farms are still small, family farms, but family farmers receive only 41 percent of all farm income? Our farmers are walking away, too. Why? They aren’t getting enough to carry on, either. Is urban America any more aware of this than were the village elites in Chaco’s great houses? Many of us are not.

Still, the great-house dwellers didn’t merely sit on their hands. As some farms failed, they used farm labor to expand roads, rituals, and great houses. this prehistoric version of a Keynesian growth model apparently alleviated enough of the stresses and strains to sustain growth through the 1070s. Then came the waning rainfall of the 1080s, followed by drought in the 1090s.

Circumstances in the farming communities worsened quickly and dramatically with this drought; the very survival of many was at stake. The great-house elites at Chaco Canyon apparently responded with even more roads, rituals, and great houses. This was actually a period of great-house and road infrastructure “in-fill,” both in and near established open communities. In a few years, the rains returned. This could not help but powerfully reinforce the elites’ now well-established, formulaic response to problems.

But roads, rituals, and great houses simply did not do enough for the hungry farmers who produced corn and pottery. As the eleventh century drew to a close, even though the rains had come again, they walked away, further eroding the surpluses that had fueled the system. Imagine it: the elites must have believed the situation was saved, even as more farmers gave up in despair. Inexplicably, they never “exported” the modest irrigation system that had caught and diverted midsummer runoff from the mesa tops at Chaco Canyon and made local fields more productive. Instead, once again the elites responded with the sacred formula — more roads, more rituals, more great houses.

Nonetheless, by the 1100s the roads, like the West Virginia turnpike — a “make-work” project that was the butt of jokes some 40 years ago — began to go “nowhere.” Other roads (like the one to Salmon) were never completed, and though some great houses were clearly built to move some of the elites out of an increasingly tense and impoverished core area, others were just erected in the middle of nowhere at the end of a new road, then never continuously used. This is all rather like the wave of unneeded savings-and-loan towers so scandalously built in America by deregulated bankers in the 1980s and ultimately paid for by the taxpayers.

The unbelievable explosion in kivas about A.D. 1100 points to a ritual life that had stopped nurturing open communities and had grown increasingly demanding and obsessive. We can see this phenomenon at work in American society today in what the news magazines have termed our “culture wars.” In our modern version of this behavior, a narrow sector of society designates itself the “chosen one” and attempts to regulate the values, morals, even politics of the rest. The explanation for every problem that besets us — recessions, crime, drug trafficking, teen pregnancies, and many more — becomes our nation’s declining moral values and secularization. In the end, this type of behavior blames the victim: one is poor in America because one is morally and ethically defective. No matter what you, the reader, think about such behavior — whether you embrace it or reject it — either way, it feeds no babies, makes no young mother strong, and sends no child to school. The same was true of the Chacoan elites’ rituals: however base or pure their motives at the time, ritual alone did not feed the babies or create new food-producing enterprises to sustain farming families over the longer haul. Failure to address this problem destroyed Chacoan society.

I also find it ironic that the greatest Chacoan building projects were, like many of the CCC and WPA projects of our own Great Depression, the desperate economic reactions of a frightened and fragile society. In fact, most such projects support displaced people only in the short-term, rather than address the production and distribution of basic necessities. Nonetheless, these projects, like ours, tend to be viewed as grand achievements, reflecting the pinnacles of power. We are as myopic as they were, because such projects are often proof of a hollow shell. In Chacoan times, that hollow shell may have hidden the misery and hopelessness of the small farmers just as our make-work projects of the 1930s did. The great houses may even now hide those facts from the many tourists who visit Chaco Canyon and go away as impressed as Lieutenant Simpson was in 1849. But grandiosity cannot hide the essential facts from the field archaeologists who have excavated countless small houses in the last 25 years.

At the bitter end of the Chacoan era, many elites remained in their great houses, probably trying to hold onto the past, rather like Scarlett O’Hara trying to hold onto Tara in Gone with the Wind. But the farmers who had brought in the corn harvests were long departed, like the black slaves who had supported Tara before the civil war. Chacoan society collapsed, the farming pillar of its once great productivity shattered. The beleaguered Chacoan farmers had buried their babies one last time. Then they abandoned Chaco Canyon and most of its outlying great houses. …

At least the Chacoans had an excuse: they had never in 8,000 years dealt with a society so large, so complex, or so fragile. Their greatest invention was not the roads, the great houses, or the rituals. It was the expansive, open farming communities that had once traded with one another. But in spite of its ecological elegance, that invention died because the society’s obsessive, formulaic response — roads, rituals, and great houses — was of no practical use to the farmers after the drought of 1090. The Chacoans simply could no longer keep their farmers on the land — a labor problem of defining moment.

We moderns have seen some of these same things and the United States, and we have read history. Most of our forebears washed up on these shores after similar failures in other lands. Most of us are the direct descendants of people who once walked away from societies that could not or would not sustain them. We do know how it works. But have we yet learned the lesson?

[Chapter 7]

The far-flung trade network that had characterized the Chaco phenomenon for more than a century vanished quickly. As infant mortality and abandonments destroyed their open communities, farmers stopped making pottery to trade. The vast expanses of the Four Corners were no longer connected to a functioning economic machine.

Those elites who hung on in a half dozen of the more stable great houses after A.D. 1130 lost all access to nearly all the signature trade goods that had marked their status. More importantly, they lost access to the surpluses of corn, dried meat, and other foods that had once made them taller and their babies three times more likely to survive than a farmer’s child.

Archaeologists refer to a number of these late great houses as “scion” communities because they are believed to have been founded when groups of elites left the earlier great houses in the Chacoan core and attempted to carry on in new places. They were smaller, lacked great kivas, and were located in arable spots on the margins of the San Juan basin. Lacking great kivas, the scion communities provide us with superb evidence that Chaco’s ritual and its regional economy were interdependent. Apparently, the disintegration of Chaco’s regional trade network equaled no great kivas in the 1120s to 1140s. Meanwhile, as some Chacoans clung to a pathetic facsimile of their old order, surviving farmers were busy laying the foundations of a new one.

The first farmers to walk away from the Chacoan world benefited the most. They returned to places of ancestral Basketmaker and Pueblo I hamlets in the uplands even before violence overtook the Chacoan core in the 1100s. A return to the uplands was utterly logical.

Related:

Jake Bacharach on Game of Thrones: “Now, as we enter the fourth season, the overwhelming question is: how do these people eat?”

Matt Lewis, “Why conservatives see rural America as the ‘real’ America”

Gracy Olmstead, “Place ≠ Pastoral”

Rod Dreher, “The South as Eternal Scapegoat”

Bill Kauffman: “What Rural America is For”

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The Washington Post’s mandate of heaven

It can be very interesting to track what sort of religious people the media finds useful or worthy of promoting. In the midst of the Episcopal Church’s crack-up, the Daily Beast gave a weekly column to gay bishop and Center for American Progress fellow Gene Robinson, who has used his column space to harangue the Archbishop of Canterbury for not going fast enough on gay marriage.

The converse, of a conservative Anglican cleric being given a column to warn that the Episcopal Church’s radicalism, for which it stands alone (breaking the moratorium on the ordination of gay clergy time and time again, suing dissenters for everything down to their choir robes, etc), is causing such a rift that other parts of the Anglican Communion are sending missionary bishops to America to undermine it, is utterly unthinkable.

Sally Quinn, “On Faith” correspondent for the Washington Post, is a fairly good proxy for what fashionable people think about religion. Her Easter/Passover column is an absolute horror, insulting to any Jew or Christian of sincere faith. “All that matters is the sense of community that Easter and Passover rituals inspire,” reads the subhead. Sort of the spiritual-but-not-religious version of “government is just the name for the things we choose to do together.”

To Quinn, remembering the deliverance of the Jewish people, or the resurrection of the King of the Universe, are of secondary importance to the sociality rituals facilitate, which is a perspective you’d expect from someone who’s been covering elite culture for decades. She treats religion like hors d’oeurves at a Georgetown cocktail party, complete with a nod to the secular-seders trend, an acknowledgment that her equanimity between Judaism and Christianity has “nothing to do with” something so trivial as belief, and the reassurance, just in case you were wondering, that “I have been an atheist most of my life, although I don’t consider myself one now.”

That elite opinion holds religion to be merely a vessel into which we can pour all sorts of emotions and social goals should fill us with the fear of God, because our ruling class has far more ambitious designs than “inspiring community,” and He is not mocked.

Consider the religious views of right-leaning opinion columnists at the Post:

Marc Thiessen, who defended waterboarding based on the teachings of the Magisterium, is Catholic
Charles Krauthammer is areligious
Michael Gerson is one of those breakaway Anglicans
George Will says he’s a “none”
Robert Kagan is Jewish
Jennifer Rubin is Jewish

Notice that every religious person is a neocon, and the more sober voices are the less religious ones. It’s almost as if they’d like to convey the impression that American hegemony is an article of faith.

Now, watching neocons interpret history can be almost as amusing as reading their interpretations of poetry. Consider this bit from one of Jennifer Rubin’s — who functions at the Washington Post as the tattletale to the slightly less hawkish editorial board — dozens of attacks on Rand Paul, which David Harsanyi called “amazingly dishonest“:

A foreign policy expert at a center-left think tank puts it simply, saying Paul sounds like the “unreconstructed Taft-Lindbergh-Buchanan wing of party, ”referring to isolationist Republican Sen. Robert Taft, America Firster Charles Lindbergh and Pat Buchanan (who has opined that WWII need not have been fought).

Good heavens, the Taft-Lindbergh-Buchanan wing?! It’s truly strange that ‘Rand Paul comes from a wing of the party with a long history,’ is an insight Rubin finds worthy of granting anonymity to a liberal foreign policy analyst for. She means it to sound scary, because she adheres to a tendentious historiography in which Buchanan is a fascist, Lindbergh supported those proto-brownshirts in America First, and Taft was a Nazi symp. It’s as if Rubin gets her history from Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America.

Paul’s great transgression is his belief that there are some evils in the world that aren’t worth filling body bags with young Americans to eradicate, which is why he refuses to rule out containment of Iran. Rubin says this means that “he listens to no competent adviser.”

But we already know that the only competent advisors are Rubin’s friends. After Sarah Palin parted ways in 2011 with neoconservative foreign policy advisors Michael Goldfarb and Randy Scheunemann, Rubin wrote that, “Her about-face in foreign policy tells us a couple of things. First, her views then and perhaps now don’t spring from a well-grounded understanding of foreign policy but from briefing cards.”

Earlier that year, the Emergency Committee for Israel, of which Goldfarb is an advisor and which is registered to the same address as he and Scheunemann’s lobbying shop, paid for Rubin to go to Israel to attend a conference. Her criticisms take on a rather different cast in that light: ‘Sarah Palin is stupid because she’s not listening to the people who gave me a vacation to Israel anymore.’

Now, let’s have a look at who Rubin turned to to correct Paul’s mild World War II revisionism:

As for the allegation about Germany, [David] Adesnik expresses incredulity, “Sen. Paul’s comments on Germany are so eccentric that it’s hard to be sure what he’s even talking about. He refers to a U.S. blockade on Germany after World War One ‘which may have encouraged some of their anger.’ There is extensive debate about whether German resentment of the Versailles Treaty helped bring Hitler to power. …

David is a gentleman, he’s written a few things for me, and is far more intellectually honest than many in his camp. But this is rather strategically understated, and I get the feeling he knows that. There really isn’t “extensive debate,” at least among people worth reading. Peter Viereck’s Metapolitics (1941) and Freda Utley’s The High Cost of Vengeance (1948) are both great resources from the period, which simply take it as a given that post-Versailles grievances contributed to the rise of national socialism. I’ll leave the Pearl Harbor stuff alone because that’s a considerably knottier matter.

These sorts of insinuations, selective sourcing, and historiographical policing are typical of neoconservative journalism, in part because the ideology is fragile and on the defensive. Why else would ECI need to spend six figures bashing one of the handful of pro-peace Republican congressmen? If a half-dozen reporters stopped quoting maybe two dozen politicians and experts, the neocon echo chamber would effectively cease to exist. It’s a Potemkin movement.

Paul’s comments about Dick Cheney’s alleged war profiteering set off reliably bellicose columnists Rich Lowry and Bret Stephens, with Stephens sarcastically writing that the party should nominate him and be duly chastised, and Lowry saying his foreign policy sounds like it came out of a dorm room.

The facts are that Cheney, a strong proponent of privatizing military services, received a severance package from Halliburton worth tens of millions of dollars, mostly in stock options, when he joined the presidential ticket. He sold most of those, but some remained in 2003 when the Congressional Research Service looked into it. At the time, Halliburton had a number of contracts in Iraq. Whether that’s significant enough to impugn the Vice President’s decision-making, it’s hard to say, but if we were talking about a solar farm receiving a DOE loan guarantee, it undoubtedly would be. His warning last month against the “strain of isolationism” in the GOP, is something like Tom Steyer talking about why the Keystone pipeline must be stopped. Paul may not have been right about the cui bono of the second Iraq invasion and its subsequent occupation, but the general problem is one that Lowry and Stephens have never addressed, which makes me think they don’t think it exists.

I like to pick on Lowry (who started off as a researcher for Krauthammer) because we’re both Arlingtonians, though he went to Yorktown then UVA — a sure path to perpetual adolescence — and I went to H-B Woodlawn then William and Mary. We probably shoulder-tapped for beer at the same 7-11s. But he’s been in New York for years, and missed out on the post-9/11 defense contracting boom. That’s the most charitable reason I can think of for why he dismisses military cronyism as Alex Jones-ian nonsense but seems very concerned about other types.

Watching this transformation occur has made me much more of a get-the-hell-off-my-lawn Republican than an invade-the-world, invite-the-world type. As bureaucracies exist, first and foremost, to acquire and justify resources, so too do the diplomatic and defense contracting establishments depend on proving how useful they are — that’s just how incentives work. It seems to me that an awareness of this sort of creep is somewhere close to the heart of what it means to be conservative. You probably wouldn’t get that impression reading the Washington Post, but given their readership, who could blame them?

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Of time bandits and the river

Joel Achenbach didn’t want to come back from his Iberian vacation:

Time used to be something we used to our advantage. … We revered our elders and put them at the zenith of our culture. The sun rose and the sun set, and the stars wheeled across the heavens at night in a clockwork universe. We could feel the seasons in our bones. We were masters of time. Then someone invented a sundial, and it’s been all downhill ever since.

Everyone I know is too busy and too rushed. If we ever do feel completely serene, centered and at peace with the world we know, that’s a harbinger of certain doom. It’s not simply that we have too much to do, it’s that we are expected to produce at an extraordinary pace. … Your “spare time” has become a slush fund for those who wish to extract from you ever more units of production.

He goes on to quote an older, rather luddite-ish column of his about the “paradox” of technology making us more productive. It’s the sort of complaint that Thomas Piketty dismisses as the “caprices of technology” in the new book Achenbach’s peers can’t stop raving about.

It’s a common misconception but in general, libertarians’ answer to the accusation (yes that’s what it is) of rising inequality is ‘bring it on, it’s not like anybody’s living in a Victorian rookery anymore,’ not ‘no it isn’t.’ Or eat more beans. And they’re right, to a point. Whether technological progress keeps pace with capital accumulation is the least of our worries.

To my ear, Achenbach’s complaint is the sound of the bourgeois newspaperman realizing that his profession — and his country — is slipping away from him, and that time is just a town in Illinois.

One could go on about Marshall McLuhan, Burroughs’ word virus, and Jacques Attali — or the odd pedagogical techniques of the former CCRU — but Thomas Wolfe said it better anyway:

‘Summer has come and gone, has come and gone. And now –?’ But they will say no more, they will have no more to say; they will wait listening, silent and brooding as the frost, to time, strange ticking time, dark time that haunts us with the briefness of our days. They will think of men long dead, of men now buried in the earth, of frost and silence long ago, of a forgotten face and moment of lost time, and they will think of things they have no words to utter.

“And in the night, in the dark, in the living sleeping silence of the towns, the million streets, they will hear the thunder of the fast express, the whistles of great ships upon the river.

“What will they say then? What will they say?”

Only the darkness moved about him as he lay there thinking, feeling in the darkness: a door creaked softly in the house.

“October is the season for returning: the bowels of youth are yearning with lost love. Their mouths are dry and bitter with desire: their hearts are torn with the thorns of spring. For lovely April, cruel and flowerful, will tear them with sharp joy and wordless lust. Spring has no language but a cry; but crueller than April is the asp of time.

So happy spring, and if you’re into sharp joy and wordless lust, you have a week. The bit above is from Of Time and the River, book three, Telemachus, in which the young man returns from Harvard to find his father dead.

Reading the Odyssey growing up the character after whom the book is named was one I’d always identified with. I had naval officers for parents, and the sense that the only wars worth fighting had already been fought. We even lived in Ithaca for a while.

Anyway, we’ll never know how or if the Homeric character ruled, since what we know of the Telegony is extremely limited. But he made peace with the man who killed his father, his half-brother, and they went on to marry each other’s mothers.

Despite the undeniable sense that we live in a city of Buck Mulligans, I’ve always thought the character was a decent representation of some of Washington’s pathologies as well. Telemachus got his licks in slaughtering his mother’s suitors; politicians expropriate and transfer for The Cause, an NGO globocrat might dig a well in Africa. The most representative person in the swamp we call home is not a corrupt politician, but the unpaid intern who thinks “you haven’t really lived unless you’ve traveled” and is moved by The Perks of Being a Wallflower. We are strong, naive, dependent on our patrimony, and not fighting the real battle. Imagine Odysseus in the Joseph Brodsky poem spoken by Donald Rumsfeld to a young Republican national security analyst, and you’ll get a sense of what I mean.

These are all fine people, of course, they know not what they do. After all, “violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies.” And Solzhenitsyn is fine, but Emily Dickinson, on our own river, is better:

If pride shall be in Paradise
I never can decide;
Of their imperial conduct,
No person testified.

Average ages of Capitol Hill staffers continue to drop, while the administrative state, America’s true sovereign, harasses political opponents and claims the authority to kill citizens without meaningful judicial oversight. Politics is something inconsequential people do while daddy’s off fighting wars.

If that’s too pessimistic a picture for you, try Reagan’s tribute to the eponymous martyr on for size. At the National Prayer Breakfast 1984:

[A]s the games began, he made his way down through the crowd and climbed over the wall and dropped to the floor of the arena. Suddenly the crowds saw this scrawny little figure making his way out to the gladiators and saying, over and over again, “In the name of Christ, stop.” And they thought it was part of the entertainment, and at first they were amused. But then, when they realized it wasn’t, they grew belligerent and angry. And as he was pleading with the gladiators, “In the name of Christ, stop,” one of them plunged his sword into his body. And as he fell to the sand of the arena in death, his last words were, “In the name of Christ, stop.”

And suddenly, a strange thing happened. The gladiators stood looking at this tiny form lying in the sand. A silence fell over the Colosseum. And then, someplace up in the upper tiers, an individual made his way to an exit and left, and others began to follow. And in the dead silence, everyone left the Colosseum. That was the last battle to the death between gladiators in the Roman Colosseum. Never again did anyone kill or did men kill each other for the entertainment of the crowd.

Assume for a moment that Frank Zappa is right, and government is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex, then this is quite the rich little tale as well.

For the time being, the crowd is as bloodthirsty as ever, and as journalists are quick to point out, no shortage of targets for their satisfaction. Yet the unease of the progressive pundit class over Brendan Eich’s purging was palpable — Andrew Sullivan came out swinging, and Bill Maher even used the phrase “gay mafia.” John Aravosis, while pointing out that the bastard deserved it because he also donated to the “anti-everything bigot” Pat Buchanan (and Ron Paul), seems to think he may find himself in the Colosseum someday:

[T]he problem isn’t just limited to [Suey] Park.  Anyone who works in progressive politics is familiar with the never-ending (and of-late growing) Twitter mobs accusing them of being racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, biphobic, transphobic, ableist, and my personal favorite from just last year: that I apparently hate all animals, especially cats…

Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius.

Two of the best conservative writers working today have built careers on the premise that it’s possible to go home, to reject the preening Internet puritans and build a life of meaningful connection; Rod Dreher and Bill Kauffman. It’s a vision that holds a lot of appeal, but for a person who grew up in the loving arms of the U.S. Navy before settling in DC, strikes me as rather unrealistic. The desolating lesson of Wolfe and Homer is there’s no going back (and not just them either). “‘Past orientation’ is an impressively defensible value,” Nick Land says, “Retro-directed action, in contrast, is sheer error.” “Home also I cannot go,” as Joyce put it.

But we live in an age when it’s not easy to tell what’s past orientation and what’s “retro-directed action.” Narendra Modi or the Benedict Option seem to qualify as both. A Marxist would probably say — and in fact has said — charter cities are the latter. (This piece was my attempt to deal with the problem.)

What seems clear is the creeping fear that the “mobs” of Aravosis’ nightmares are after “no less a work than the overthrowing of Creation itself” will continue to grow:

Just in case you missed it, the line from Benson before he’s turned into a dog is “We can make beans into peas!” So far Cowen has only been pepper-sprayed for his legume-related lack of vision, but clearly we’re dealing with unstable people here, and his status in the Koch-funded impediment to Democracy makes him a target. We already know inter-species transformation cannot be ruled out.

But I’ve gone on too long already. Welcome to the new blog. I dedicate it to the “bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.” Expect it to be about this digressive.