Ive never quite understood why people who call themselves conservatives are not more interested in conserving things. Neighborhoods for instance. Refusing to allow a new highway through the middle of town or a new Wal-Mart on the corner is commonly branded anti-growth" by many on the Rightand so it is. The thorough conservative does not want certain things to grow in certain ways. He wants Mom and Pop to keep owning their family restaurant he wants the local clientele to continue to be able to walk there he wants children who grew up playing in the park to come home from college and find the old oak tree behind the baseball diamond a little broader and thicker. He wants the carillons of the Lutheran Church to keep pealing sleepily every evening at six. He wants children to keep walking home from school and he wants the schools teachers to keep considering themselves second parents to their charges. He wants textbooks to survive the Internet and he wants the humane purposive message of those books to survive as well. He wants Main Street decked with Christmas lights from end to end during Decemberand he wants a manger scene before City Hall.
There are those in this life I have discovered who would sell every crack in the sidewalk and every stone cross in the cemetery putting it all under high-rise office buildings and layered bypasses if only enough of the haul would find its way into their pockets. And there are those who would die to defend the sound of an autumn breeze through the fallen leaves along a village sidewalk. Unfortunately some battles are not waged through the ready and willing sacrifice of ones breath. Their casualties are soulsand these are claimed not as victims of an aggressor but as down-payments for material prosperity and by the Dark Prince who bankrolls the winners". One wakes up one fine day and sees a wrecking ball down the street: too late now for muskets and pitchforks.
I saw Austin destroyed in this manner when I was a boy. Ironically the tsunami that ripped my grandparents neighborhood apart was not stirred by J.P. Lucifer & Son Realty the classic big business villain in all Hollywood save the idyll" romances but by the irrepressible deluge of northeasterners looking for fairer weather to set up graduate departments smoke pot and sleep around. They liked the citys ambling pace of lifeso they proceeded to throttle it with their numbers and refine it with their imported tastes. They waved aside the protests of crude Texas rednecks who didnt deserve such blessings despite having largely created them. (After all these locals had all been segregationists just a few years earlier.) They made everything over the carpetbaggers in their own image... or tried to. They seemed surprised when more Boston sprawl resulted and they were sure that the Texas hayseeds must be to blame. They colonized the place as they dreamed up new college degree programs confronting the evils of American colonization.
But wasnt that just progress? How could a Milton Friedman have found fault with all the capital brought into town by the invaders"? Think of all the new jobs! How could Rush Limbaugh evenour beloved Middle American homeyfind anything here to criticize? On the contrary I rather think Rush would hear in my lament the whining of a tree-hugger. What sense does it make to stand in the way of progressof economic growthfor the sake of a few dead leaves? Liberals Rush often proclaims are the true flat-earthers.
Paleo-conservatives like me would respond that the human hunger for wealth is never satisfied; that the human need of peace and predictability being beyond price is priced at nothing on any given day at the Stock Exchange; and that he who acquires more in possessions often grows poorer in self-knowledge. I shall not presume to speak for Pope Francis: I have not bothered to parse the supreme pontiffs recent pronouncementsand they do seem disappointingly to call for a wider distribution of material wealth rather than a reduced attention to it. I shall simply put it this way. A conservative" who rates the state of the soul as less than primary (let alone nugatory) holds an invalid claim to that title. He is an ideological squatter.
Anyone patient enough to read my weekly scribbles knows that I promised to append to my last posting an explanation of why gay marriage does indeed affect all who are concerned about preserving healthy communities and transmitting spiritual values to their children. I havent forgotten my promise. Indeed everything I have just written is to the point. By this I do not mean anything so facile as that when Austin exploded it became much more gay"... though for that matter the equation is true. Big cities are less personal than small ones: people engage in more varieties of risqu behavior. Big cities have less conventional values than small ones: their populace is more diverse and lately arrived. Big cities offer more sexual adventures: theyre full of young people mapping out a career path for whom other commitments are dead weight. For that reason big cities are also less family-friendly: their essential instability favors the footloose and instantly adaptable not the rooted and tied-down.
In a way the true conservative is the inveterate enemy of big cities. Monuments to insatiable capitalism they breed expansion without design competition without rules arrogance without limit crime without solution poverty without exit and children without parents. To an Arcadian every big city is Sodom and Gomorrah. I am an Arcadian and to me the transplanted Yankees who appropriated my childhood village all carry the infection of the Sodomite.
The word village" has been sullied for the indefinite future by one whose lubricious keyboard and writhing mouth would argue that hell is heaven... but let me explain the life of the village. People know each other. (In Hillarys village only the government knows you.) People watch out for one anothers children. (In Hillarys village the government is your childs nanny and yours too.) Homes stay in the same family for generations. (In Hillarys village the government creates jobs" and residents move singly or en masse as directed.) Certain behaviorsblasting obscene music out of amplifiers wearing shorts down around the knees ringing and tattooing the entire visible epidermisare locally recognized as just not done". (In Hillarys village all such things are permittedonly the tastes of the mainstream are absolutely proscribed.) The ethos of daily life in general results from an elective affinity: that is a free choice on the part of residents to play by the same unwritten rules. (In Hillarys village all rules are writtenhundreds of thousands of themby elite experts who are presumed to know vastly more and be distinctly better than the rest of us.)
It may be that such a thing as a gay village" can exist. It never has... but the future will soon show us how viable the gay colonies of the West Coast are as durable communities. The more conventional sort of settlement however cannot tolerate the overt embrace of gay marriage. Simply imagine the life of a child in such a place. I shall dismiss the possibility merely for the sake of the more abstract argument I seek that gay men prey on children. Lets say that they dont. I myself was propositioned by a man one afternoon when as a slender adolescent I was jogging around an elementary school: the fellow lived right across from the playground. But lets call him a statistical anomaly.
What does Mommy say when little Jimmy asks over supper Why do Mr. Bob and Mr. Vince hold hands when theyre out walking?" Does she say that they love each other? Fine. Then Jimmy asks Daddy dont you and Uncle Carl love each other? How come you never hold hands?" So Mommy explains (after Daddy leaves the table) that Bob and Vince love each other the way she and Daddy love each other. Naturally Jimmy next asks Then why dont they have kids?" Mommy laughs (or scowls) and explains (without explaining) that Jimmys biology teacher will provide that answer when the school decides its time.
And of course the biology teacher will indeed explain sexprobably as she passes out condoms to her second-graders. Yet this wont really answer Jimmys question at all. Revealing that Vince doesnt have a vagina doesnt explain the strange attractions of his anus to Bob. It doesnt to me anywaynot in any biological sense which is the only politically permissible senseand I doubt that it will to Jimmy either.
I sometimes wonder what happened to the man who propositioned me. At least he was under cover" hiding behind the facade of a wife and kids. I wouldnt necessarily want anything to happen to him as long as he stayed in hidingand I at least was old enough to say no" politely. I have no reason to believe that he ever targeted the children on the elementary schools playground. Or that he didnt.
And that you see is the point. Gone the trust in your neighbors. Gone the willingness to let your kids play in the public park. Gone the evening walks to the corner drugstore with your all-noticing little tykes. Not that you fear for the safety of your children so muchnot their physical safety; but with how many questions will they return that you cant answer at a childs level; and left unanswered how deeply will these questions nestle in a childish imagination and in what improbable and dangerous corners? Gone the village. Gone for good. Soon people start to sell up and one fine morning youll awaken to a wrecking ball.
We all know that conventional neighborhoods can also be suffocating bigoted intrusive and stultifying. They mount their own little crucifixions every yearand not at Easter in front of City Hall. If we could all live by reason alone in Cosmopolis we wouldnt need to hope for heaven. But CosmopolisHillarys villageis Utopia on the drawing board and Inferno in concrete. Here on earth were stuck with infancy childhood maturation agingand with greed lust fear envy... were mired in insurmountable fallibility. The best plan is and has always been to seek novelty and difference from a firm basis in the pasts tried-and-true habits. To the conservative it is not tradition which must keep proving its worth in the jungles lawless power struggle but creativity which must demonstrate its depth by accommodating the tastes of the past.
Ive never quite understood why people who call themselves conservatives are not more interested in conserving things. Neighborhoods for instance. Refusing to allow a new highway through the middle of town or a new Wal-Mart on the corner is commonly branded anti-growth" by many on the Rightand so it is. The thorough conservative does not want certain things to grow in certain ways. He wants Mom and Pop to keep owning their family restaurant he wants the local clientele to continue to be able to walk there he wants children who grew up playing in the park to come home from college and find the old oak tree behind the baseball diamond a little broader and thicker. He wants the carillons of the Lutheran Church to keep pealing sleepily every evening at six. He wants children to keep walking home from school and he wants the schools teachers to keep considering themselves second parents to their charges. He wants textbooks to survive the Internet and he wants the humane purposive message of those books to survive as well. He wants Main Street decked with Christmas lights from end to end during Decemberand he wants a manger scene before City Hall.
There are those in this life I have discovered who would sell every crack in the sidewalk and every stone cross in the cemetery putting it all under high-rise office buildings and layered bypasses if only enough of the haul would find its way into their pockets. And there are those who would die to defend the sound of an autumn breeze through the fallen leaves along a village sidewalk. Unfortunately some battles are not waged through the ready and willing sacrifice of ones breath. Their casualties are soulsand these are claimed not as victims of an aggressor but as down-payments for material prosperity and by the Dark Prince who bankrolls the winners". One wakes up one fine day and sees a wrecking ball down the street: too late now for muskets and pitchforks.
I saw Austin destroyed in this manner when I was a boy. Ironically the tsunami that ripped my grandparents neighborhood apart was not stirred by J.P. Lucifer & Son Realty the classic big business villain in all Hollywood save the idyll" romances but by the irrepressible deluge of northeasterners looking for fairer weather to set up graduate departments smoke pot and sleep around. They liked the citys ambling pace of lifeso they proceeded to throttle it with their numbers and refine it with their imported tastes. They waved aside the protests of crude Texas rednecks who didnt deserve such blessings despite having largely created them. (After all these locals had all been segregationists just a few years earlier.) They made everything over the carpetbaggers in their own image... or tried to. They seemed surprised when more Boston sprawl resulted and they were sure that the Texas hayseeds must be to blame. They colonized the place as they dreamed up new college degree programs confronting the evils of American colonization.
But wasnt that just progress? How could a Milton Friedman have found fault with all the capital brought into town by the invaders"? Think of all the new jobs! How could Rush Limbaugh evenour beloved Middle American homeyfind anything here to criticize? On the contrary I rather think Rush would hear in my lament the whining of a tree-hugger. What sense does it make to stand in the way of progressof economic growthfor the sake of a few dead leaves? Liberals Rush often proclaims are the true flat-earthers.
Paleo-conservatives like me would respond that the human hunger for wealth is never satisfied; that the human need of peace and predictability being beyond price is priced at nothing on any given day at the Stock Exchange; and that he who acquires more in possessions often grows poorer in self-knowledge. I shall not presume to speak for Pope Francis: I have not bothered to parse the supreme pontiffs recent pronouncementsand they do seem disappointingly to call for a wider distribution of material wealth rather than a reduced attention to it. I shall simply put it this way. A conservative" who rates the state of the soul as less than primary (let alone nugatory) holds an invalid claim to that title. He is an ideological squatter.
Anyone patient enough to read my weekly scribbles knows that I promised to append to my last posting an explanation of why gay marriage does indeed affect all who are concerned about preserving healthy communities and transmitting spiritual values to their children. I havent forgotten my promise. Indeed everything I have just written is to the point. By this I do not mean anything so facile as that when Austin exploded it became much more gay"... though for that matter the equation is true. Big cities are less personal than small ones: people engage in more varieties of risqu behavior. Big cities have less conventional values than small ones: their populace is more diverse and lately arrived. Big cities offer more sexual adventures: theyre full of young people mapping out a career path for whom other commitments are dead weight. For that reason big cities are also less family-friendly: their essential instability favors the footloose and instantly adaptable not the rooted and tied-down.
In a way the true conservative is the inveterate enemy of big cities. Monuments to insatiable capitalism they breed expansion without design competition without rules arrogance without limit crime without solution poverty without exit and children without parents. To an Arcadian every big city is Sodom and Gomorrah. I am an Arcadian and to me the transplanted Yankees who appropriated my childhood village all carry the infection of the Sodomite.
The word village" has been sullied for the indefinite future by one whose lubricious keyboard and writhing mouth would argue that hell is heaven... but let me explain the life of the village. People know each other. (In Hillarys village only the government knows you.) People watch out for one anothers children. (In Hillarys village the government is your childs nanny and yours too.) Homes stay in the same family for generations. (In Hillarys village the government creates jobs" and residents move singly or en masse as directed.) Certain behaviorsblasting obscene music out of amplifiers wearing shorts down around the knees ringing and tattooing the entire visible epidermisare locally recognized as just not done". (In Hillarys village all such things are permittedonly the tastes of the mainstream are absolutely proscribed.) The ethos of daily life in general results from an elective affinity: that is a free choice on the part of residents to play by the same unwritten rules. (In Hillarys village all rules are writtenhundreds of thousands of themby elite experts who are presumed to know vastly more and be distinctly better than the rest of us.)
It may be that such a thing as a gay village" can exist. It never has... but the future will soon show us how viable the gay colonies of the West Coast are as durable communities. The more conventional sort of settlement however cannot tolerate the overt embrace of gay marriage. Simply imagine the life of a child in such a place. I shall dismiss the possibility merely for the sake of the more abstract argument I seek that gay men prey on children. Lets say that they dont. I myself was propositioned by a man one afternoon when as a slender adolescent I was jogging around an elementary school: the fellow lived right across from the playground. But lets call him a statistical anomaly.
What does Mommy say when little Jimmy asks over supper Why do Mr. Bob and Mr. Vince hold hands when theyre out walking?" Does she say that they love each other? Fine. Then Jimmy asks Daddy dont you and Uncle Carl love each other? How come you never hold hands?" So Mommy explains (after Daddy leaves the table) that Bob and Vince love each other the way she and Daddy love each other. Naturally Jimmy next asks Then why dont they have kids?" Mommy laughs (or scowls) and explains (without explaining) that Jimmys biology teacher will provide that answer when the school decides its time.
And of course the biology teacher will indeed explain sexprobably as she passes out condoms to her second-graders. Yet this wont really answer Jimmys question at all. Revealing that Vince doesnt have a vagina doesnt explain the strange attractions of his anus to Bob. It doesnt to me anywaynot in any biological sense which is the only politically permissible senseand I doubt that it will to Jimmy either.
I sometimes wonder what happened to the man who propositioned me. At least he was under cover" hiding behind the facade of a wife and kids. I wouldnt necessarily want anything to happen to him as long as he stayed in hidingand I at least was old enough to say no" politely. I have no reason to believe that he ever targeted the children on the elementary schools playground. Or that he didnt.
And that you see is the point. Gone the trust in your neighbors. Gone the willingness to let your kids play in the public park. Gone the evening walks to the corner drugstore with your all-noticing little tykes. Not that you fear for the safety of your children so muchnot their physical safety; but with how many questions will they return that you cant answer at a childs level; and left unanswered how deeply will these questions nestle in a childish imagination and in what improbable and dangerous corners? Gone the village. Gone for good. Soon people start to sell up and one fine morning youll awaken to a wrecking ball.
We all know that conventional neighborhoods can also be suffocating bigoted intrusive and stultifying. They mount their own little crucifixions every yearand not at Easter in front of City Hall. If we could all live by reason alone in Cosmopolis we wouldnt need to hope for heaven. But CosmopolisHillarys villageis Utopia on the drawing board and Inferno in concrete. Here on earth were stuck with infancy childhood maturation agingand with greed lust fear envy... were mired in insurmountable fallibility. The best plan is and has always been to seek novelty and difference from a firm basis in the pasts tried-and-true habits. To the conservative it is not tradition which must keep proving its worth in the jungles lawless power struggle but creativity which must demonstrate its depth by accommodating the tastes of the past.