Circumstances and ennui have conspired to cause an accumulation of dust on my keyboard and air of dullness at this site. My circumstances have not altered and my ennui remains miasmic, but I am disturbing some of that dust (perhaps even some of that dullness) to make clear I am still alive. The recent death of the Z-man reminds us that after many a summer dies the blogging swan, and this chastens us ugly ducklings of the blogosphere. With apologies to Robert Herrick
Write ye blogposts while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And thus same notion that beguiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
So here is a brief miscellany to signal life and promise more.
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Long-time commenter T. Morris informed me that the Z-man has gone, and that his great flood of words has consequently come to an end. I think those who followed the Z-man will agree that he came across as what Bruce Charlton called “a good bloke,” whether or not one agreed with his opinions. He was frequently guilty of autodidactic inaccuracies, but I cannot think of an occasion when he was guilty of menace, or malice, or minatory hate. I was consequently all the more appalled when my search for details of his demise turned up the loathsome doxing of the Z-man by two repulsive rodents at the S.P.L.C. I am a great fan of what Auberon Waugh called “the vituperative art,” but there is something vile—and I dare say unamertican—about a low-down smear.
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A post discussing the immigration loopholes in the “Big Beautiful Bill” quotes Secretary of Agriculture Rollins saying that, “this is about him [President Trump] backing the farmers, which he has always done.” None of the agribusiness moguls backed by President Trump are farmers in the traditional American (especially Southern) sense of that word. They are planters. And their farms would be called plantations in an honest world. There was always a small grey zone of agriculturalists it was hard to classify, but the basic distinction was that farmers got dirty and planters did not. Many farms had a hired man, and possibly more than a few at harvest time; but the brows of the farmer and his family were frequently wet with honest sweat, whether in hay mow, atop manure pile, or in field. A planter might work very hard, but he worked as a businessman and the daily activities of his pampered family were, more or less, genteel.
I suspect our splendid planters of today masquerade as humble “farmers” because Americans think farmers are sweet and planters are cruel. The brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe was a collecting clerk for a mercantile house in New Orleans, and he gave his impish sister the character of planter Legree in an anecdote from a collecting trip he took upriver. Speaking of one planter, brother Stowe said (no doubt with some degree of lurid embellishment):
“He actually made me feel of his fist, which was like a blacksmith’s hammer or a nodule of iron, telling me that it was ‘calloused with knocking down niggers.’ When I left the plantation I drew a long breath, and felt as if I had escaped from an ogre’s den.”*
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While checking a fact about former President and Union General Ulysses S. Grant, I was arrested by these sniveling lines in the Wikipedia article
“Due to the pseudohistorical and negationist mythology of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy spread by Confederate sympathizers around the turn of the 20th century, historical assessments and rankings of Grant’s presidency suffered considerably before they began recovering in the 21st century.”
The underlined words are hyperlinks in the Wikipedia article, each taking the reader deep into the black bowels of contemporary goodthought. Pseudohistory is of course historical writing that calls some modern myth into question with dangerous plausibility. Although Wikipedia tell us that pseudohistory ignores “valid sources that contradict it,” a more accurate description would be that “pseudohistory” includes valid sources that orthodox history ignores. “Negationism” is a minatory neologism by which insufficient enthusiasm for some oppressive modern myth is shamed.
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Today’s gospel reading in the lectionary afforded priests around the world their once-every-three-years opportunity to mangle the parable of the Good Samaritan, which all right-thinking Christians should know as the parable of the Bleeding Jew in the Ditch. The proper lesson so seldom drawn is by their fruits you will know them, so your neighbor is the man who is neighborly unto you!
*) Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly (London: H. G. Bohn, 1852), p. 474.