ONE WAY TO REVERSE AMERICA'S COLLAPSE Dr. Eugene Narrett, Ph.D The contrived collapse of America’s economy and financial markets is not the focus of this essay although it is a subset of the collapse that is the essay’s key topic: the collapse of traditional gender roles and goals as reflected in major areas of social decay, -- ruined education, de-population, paganizing of sexual mores; disruption of the workplace by the terror of blackmail and pettiness so that it becomes a fashion runway of envious games; infantilized politics and punitive gigantism in a Nanny-State. It is possible to reverse this collapse of the most basic model of human relations and its attendant areas of decay. Those most able and obligated to bring healing are those who inadvertently or gladly brought it about: American women. To do this they will have to reject and persist in resisting the siren song of the media, the emoluments of the courts and foundations and what now are engrained habits and attitudes that go back at least to the 1920s. These domineering and arrogant attitudes that have distant antecedents in the “Queen of Beauty” core of medieval chivalry and tournaments and the ancient goddess worship this pageantry carried forward are deeply rooted in a perversion of the Creator’s plan for human abundance and the logic of creation. At this point of our culture’s decline this reversal may be an impossible quest but it is necessary if one wants to retain the goodness of the world as a possibility within reach and it includes actions that individual people and families can take that would have an immediate impact for the good on basic institutions that form or deform attitudes and behavior. The renovating revolution is in principle simple; but because it starts with a change of mind and attitudes, habits of gesture, expression and familiar deeds, -- and a surrender of power and the accoutrements of the kinds of power our era exalts -- it is a challenge greater than the bursting of any purported ‘glass ceiling’ a goal dishonest in formulation and not suited to true love. Women have leapt or let themselves be led into a cage of mirrors by the enticement of extraordinary powers. To escape this cage of cruel and sterile selfhood, women need to respect their husbands, accept their role as helpmate of their husband and support his authority including instructing them how to vote (or not to vote as the husband may decide) and to reject recourse to seductive “women’s groups” and their affiliated lawyers and the courts whose postmodern divorce regimen has destroyed the status of husband, father and man, re-created goddess worship (as may be seen in any glossy magazine, even those pitched to men) along with legions of marred youth. “No-fault” divorce statutes, among the most dishonest and destructive aspects of modern “progress” should be repealed and the right to divorce returned to husbands alone, if you want marriage to survive and gender relations to have any health to them. What could induce human beings to surrender “rights” with backing by color of law and mass-modeled mores that have been thrust upon them? Economic collapse and loneliness may open a fissure through which humanity might grow. Perhaps the understanding that the devil’s bargain of feminism has been and is destroying them and anything they hold dear, from their own self-centered happiness to their ability to have loving and supportive human relationships instead of fealty to a State monster that bows down to them, in the short term in order to destroy their men and children and the responsibilities that make them human, -- and that support their freedom, the genuine freedom befitting a woman, which arises out of service to her husband and family which will love and cherish her. “Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine in the inner chambers of your home” states one of many psalms that deals with the blessing of children, “like olive shoots surrounding your table” “like arrows in the hand of a mighty warrior, happy is the man who fills his quiver with them.” The greatest blessing of the Creator is to “transform a barren wife into a glad mother of children” (128, 127, 112, etc). Blessing pertains to birth the greatest sages teach, commenting on the clear message of the blessings to “increase and be fruitful, fill the earth and subdue it” stipulated in the first chapter of Scriptures.[1] Anne Bradstreet, the first American poet, a wise, insightful and, as her poems to her husband, children and grandchildren show, a woman of great love, devotion, courage and faith wrote that she had deep grief, wept and prayed that the Creator did not enable her to conceive for what she felt as a painfully long time after her marriage…four years, not until she was twenty-one years old! She had eight children or, as modern, feminist editors put it, “she risked death by childbirth eight times.” Imagine that! Given that most women have, eagerly, since earliest times sought children and that this has never carried less risk than in the modern West, feminists perhaps are great cowards and well as bullies. But Bradstreet was from a culture of health, one imbued with Scripture not Malthusian or Darwinist dogma; didn’t have any abortions, she loved her husband; she loved being a woman, not an imitation-man who hated men. Clearly modern Malthusians and their useful idiots would like to bury her example. They much prefer the antinomian, socially radical Anne Hutchinson, a witch promoting the “inner light” which in our day has crystallized into a slogan, “no woman is illegal” and the shibboleth that sex roles are artificial and transferable by surgery and imagination, like clothing a matter of whim and wealth. No wonder this culture is beset by “monsters of the id,” that it is “consumed with bewildering terrors” (psalm 73); the Terror of the French Revolution, the eruption of the novel of “Gothic” Terror as a major literary genre, and the paean of modern feminism, “the Vindication of the Rights of Women” burst upon the West early in the 1790s. As the “full day” of the seventh millennium of human history rose, the first fruits of great and terrible transformations showed themselves. We live with or, rather, die from their fruits. Already in the dawn of that day, Abigail Adams grated on her husband John in letters demanding full legal rights for women: “we are determined to instigate a rebellion” she declared, echoing the women of Athens in Lysistrata. John Adams’ reply was only too apt: men’s legal privileges were essential, he wrote, “we dare not exert our power [in the home] in its full latitude…in practice, you know, we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters. To give up on this would subject us completely to the despotism of the petticoat.”[2] Thus did the subterranean deference and goddess worship of chivalry and ancient paganism, diffused through the antinomian charisma of the “inner light” and worship of the Queen of heaven threaten gender relations the very year of the Declaration of Independence; it was a dark undercurrent of rebellion and collapse; amid a revolution to establish accountability it threatened the most essential human duties: Pandora’s box was opened. Let Bradstreet speak for herself: in the prologue to her poem, “A Dialogue between Old England and New” she notes the pagan Greek penchant for imagining female divinities, appealing to them and investing them with inspirational powers (the Muses, for example) “But this weak knot” of ostensible divinity and its devotees, she observes, women themselves “will soon untie; the Greeks did nought but play the fools and lie.”[3] Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are; They still know it but as in so many areas, our culture denies the most obvious facts of our lives in order to impose its lies as new truths, the better to de-populate and beggar the world. “Men still excel” in those few instances they are allowed to work, the list dwindling to professional athletes and top bankers. To speak of small matters, perhaps you have noticed the rash of knee injuries requiring surgery and braces that high school and College Amazons suffer from their intensive, Title IX mandated “play” of soccer, lacrosse, etc. It is part of what your health insurance covers; of greater import, it contributes to the confusion of gender roles and physical nature that are subsets of the gender war kindled by the Malthusians and developing naturally from the portions of goddess worship embedded in the West’s composite culture. Recreation is nice but competitive attitudes that should not be fostered in women and that their bodies cannot support are part of the destruction of a culture of abundance. Instead of deference and love we have tyranny, terrors and many forms of ruin. The original marriage service states the mutual duties of the couple toward each other in ways that supports what is best and suppresses what is potentially damaging in each. The woman shall “love, honor and obey” her husband as if he is a minister of state. The man shall love and cherish his wife as his dearest possession. Do not woman understand the habit of having possessions and being possessed? Rather than “to have and to hold” the entire apparatus of modern “economy” inflames their desire “to have” and directs it toward SUV’s, telecom and “beauty” products. With the laws and prejudice of the collapsing postmodern State at their backs, the world of work brings out what is worst in women, and women in the workforce not only has been a major factor in destroying the family and encouraging female contempt for men but in destroying the seriousness and easy-going professionalism that once was a rule not an exception until quotas, targets and preferences transferred the gender wars into the workplace. Nor is it good that women flounce or march around in male drag: that is an abomination and sure sign of a society lost in paganism, in a social order disempowered by magic and perversion, by fantasies of unnatural transformation, by unproductive fantasies and sex. Every time an elected or appointed harlot mouths the slogan, “our brave men and women in uniform” they reiterate the last rites for America. Next to the 13th Amendment, the 19th, giving women the right to vote (1920) was the most pervasively destructive alteration of our basic law; it was the enabler of the latent authoritarian power of the 13th because it began the legal process of destroying the families and, indeed, the identity of the people that would otherwise buffer the growth of an imperial State feeding on taxes. As the growing cult of victim-defined pc “thought crimes” and affiliated syndromes has shown, the unisex dogma is intrinsic to the terror and rhapsodic madness of the last generation so aptly reflected in its degrading mass “entertainments.” Raw democracy, like fire, is a terrible thing, the cloak of tyranny and perennial destruction of the bonds whose unloosing no society can survive. The renunciation of female “equality” or “equity” is a facet of self-government; it is like asking the nation to return to the spirit that the Founders rightly termed essential for the experiment of a Republic of limited governmental powers to succeed. To whatever extent women can choose self-government and to be governed, to once again choose the reciprocal duties articulated with beautiful wisdom by Cordelia[4] to love, honor and obey father and husband, they with their men must educate their children themselves or find able educators, schooled in their discipline to educate them; these teachers will be men, if one wants society to thrive. School marms may find happiness in Amazonia. The public school system of programming, conditioning and “psychological counseling” already has destroyed this nation by destroying the ability and inclination to think as much as by its burial of the actual matter of the subjects it pretends, or used to pretend to teach. Women must play a great role in reversing this, by self-government and withdrawal. The public school system not only has been pernicious in degrading education with “relativism” and multiculturalism: from the first (c.1840) it has been the province of women, teaching as its basic content that women are in charge and must be obeyed. Any society that instructs the education of its young to women puts a noose around its neck; the women will soon enough pull the trap as has been shown. At this late stage in our culture of terror, public “schools” are sites of detention, violence, control and stupefaction that lay the basis for indoctrination into “global citizenship” and Statist – fascist attitudes, intolerance and conformity in “Higher Education.” What once was derided as Main Street “Babbitry” has entered a coercive and deracinated stage. To conclude this discussion of specific measures to restore a collapsing culture one should add rejection of Television for this is the corrupting eye and mouth of a State built on programming and control, on teaching bad manners and superficial, self-absorbed rebellion as fad after fad dazzles the spectators. Rejecting TV also liberates from a primary means used by those who own the networks, in tandem with their sponsors to teach unnatural and “glamorous” identities to citizens who have devolved into “consumers” only to become ripe for consumption themselves, their money and their lives which gladdens the eco-maniacs and Malthusians that support them. For seventeen centuries it has become ‘pious’ dogma to despise “the law” for the new dispensations of “freedom” and “love” purchased by verbal assent and conducing neither to freedom or love but their contraries. There is wisdom in the original instruction manual to emphasize negative commandments just as it was for the Constitution to emphasize what the government could not do; because people, like governments filled with people who are filled with appetites have many more ways of transgressing at their own and each other’s expense than they do of choosing the simple path of life abundant. If we are to have a humane future it would be well to look to the past; to reject toxins sometimes is the most positive and life-affirming act a person can take. Could it be put more clearly? American women need to repent, to cease self-adoration and return to obey, love and most honor their men and families. A redemptive miracle made from a change of heart and secession from the Empire. Footnotes: 1. “Blessing pertains to birth” wrote the Teacher, Moshe son of Nachman (“Nachmanides”), commenting on Genesis 17:16 in light of Genesis 1:22, 27-8 © 2009 Eugene Narrett - All Rights Reserved Eugene Narrett received his BA, MA and PhD from Columbia University in NYC. His writings on American politics and culture and on the Middle East and geopolitics have been widely published. These include four books, the most recent being WW III: the War on the Jews and the Rise of the World Security State (2007) which examines the historical roots and purposes of the war on terror as a late stage in the undoing of the West. His previous book, Israel and the Endtimes (2006) lays the basis for these questions. Dr. Narrett has appeared on scores of radio programs, both major networks like WABC, Radio America, Eagle Forum Radio and Westwood Communications, as well as regional and local stations. He has been honored for his essays on art and literature and on behalf of the pro-life movement. Since receiving his doctorate in 1978, Dr. Narrett has been teaching literature and art and creating interdisciplinary courses in the Humanities. He lectures on a variety of topics relating to western civilization, geopolitics and the multi-faceted war on the family that is a striking feature of the postmodern west. See his web site, www.israelendtimes.com for information on booking a lecture and for contact information. Website: IsraelEndTimes.com
March 19, 2009
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Men have precedency and still excel;
It is but vain, unjustly to wage war;
Men can do best, and women know it well…
2. John and Abigail Adams, correspondence, 2 March – May 07, 1776. These demands occupied Abigail as the minutemen were assembling, dying and fighting at Lexington and Concord.
3. Bradstreet here, in 1650 is articulating a Puritan precept that the great poet, statesmen and essayist on social questions, John Milton reiterated many times in his greatest work,Paradise Lost (1673), that the Greek myths about gods and goddesses are lies. “From morn to noon, from noon to dewy even he fell, a summer’s day; and with the setting sun, dropped from the zenith like a falling star on Lemnos, the Aegean isle. Thus they relate, erring,” Milton writes, describing the story of how an enraged Zeus hurled momma’s boy Hephaestus out of Olympus
4. King Lear 1.1.95-106: “Good my lord, you have begot me, bred me, loved me; I return those duties as are right fit, obey you, love you, and most honor you. Why have my sisters husbands if they say they love you all? When I shall take wed, surely that man who takes my pledge shall carry half my love with him, half my care and duty” aside from the half reserved for her father. Shakespeare (1564-1618) was the end of the beginning of the West; Milton, who made an epic character of the Creator, marked the beginning of the end. Hobbes and Machiavelli already had expressed the Statism and manipulation that a despair of human goodness and free will seemed to require. There remained only the means to pursue the global imperium that both Edom and Ishmael have as their goal.
Thursday, 19 March 2009
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