Final thoughts on 2021
Herewith is my final column of 2021. This year has been one heckuva ride, and one hard to capture in 650 words each week.
For the most part this past year, I’ve ignored current events of a political nature. This is because the national dialogue has been reduced to partisan whining, an activity beneath the talents and intellectual acuity of anyone who honestly attempts to string words together for a living.
We’ve met the new boss and he’s no different from the old boss despite the screeds of the quarter-educated appearing weekly in this fish wrap. We were promised many things to persuade us to throw in our lot with the new guy, and we were told a lot more that was simply not doable.
In the meantime we’re learning plenty (if we could only get it reported) about the chicanery surrounding the previous administration that began with a dirty campaign tactic deployed by his opponent’s camp.
But, hey, don’t take my word for it. Or Pete Townshend’s famous lyric, either. Or even the Temptations or Stevie Wonder, who both concisely nailed politics and politicians in “Ball of Confusion” and “You Haven’t Done Nothing,” respectively.
Or, for that matter, Alice Cooper’s “Elected.”
I was jaded against politics from an early age, dear readers.
Coincidentally, Townshend once occupied the Faber office previously used by one of the twentieth-century’s greatest authors and conservative thinkers.
“Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen/who do, some well, some ill, planning and guessing,/having their aims which turn in their hands in the pattern of time,” wrote T.S. Eliot in his verse play “Murder in the Cathedral.”
Perhaps Eliot’s words reveal the true reason I abjure from confronting politics in my small corner of printed-word real estate. There’s a reason, also, why Russell Kirk added Eliot to his list of great conservative thinkers in later editions of “The Conservative Mind.” In several previous editions, Kirk left off at George Santayana.
It’s a good thing Eliot eventually made the cut, because I can think of no one author who captured more the spirit of Kirk’s 10 conservative principles (readily available online at kirkcenter.org/ conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/).
Two aphorisms stand out, and they’re not even attributable to the eminently quotable Kirk. The first is from Irish statesman Edmund Burke: “The individual is foolish, but the species is wise.” Ain’t that the truth? Well … at least for the time being at least. We seemed to have turned a corner the past decade or so, and the species seems more and more to be mutating into some Mad Max scenario with the Kinks’ “Lola” as our date. “It’s a mixed-up, shook-up, muddled-up world.”
Weirdly enough, we’ve survived skirmishes, armed conflicts and World Wars only to wind up on the cusp of cultural apocalypse without a single shot being fired.
The second quote is from John Randolph of Roanoke, who wrote: “Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries.” To which Kirk added: “Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable longrun consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away.”
Kirk begins his 10 conservative principles with the following: “Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata.” It does, however, acknowledge the existence of an enduring moral order. A “society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society – no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be.”