In February, (2023), Congressional member Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a “National Divorce.” Actually, one has been evolving for several years now.
The first thing to consider about “national divorces” is that they’re almost never mutually arrived at. What divides them are separate views of just about everything, defined by those seven Deadly Sins and seven Cardinal Virtues. In almost all cases, each side believes they are the ones who cling to the virtues.
In the end, as events move inexorably toward that divorce, it’s Natural Law that tallies the weight (and wages) of Sin and Virtue, and declares a winner. Even the most cursory read of one-sentence epigrams on Twitter today, or most every political essay available in print since the beginning of the 20th Century, would prove that this is so. No Wilsonian, Rooseveltian, Johnsonian proclamation, and down the line through Clinton, Obama and Biden today, was ever laid before the American people without first having been bathed in Grandma’s favorite oven-bake.
Let that sink in.
History goes on to confirm for us that the realities of sin are separated by rank or other irreconcilable differences based on a very deep human belief that some people are entitled to rule by their rank, wealth, and a host of other attributes that justifies their minding other people’s business and otherwise controlling them, and in these modern times, without their even knowing it. If there is a national pandemic in America today, it is this singular belief that some children (yes, real children under the age of accountability…Biblically, that’s 13), can stomp around in tantrum fashion, break things, trespass, curse aloud, and even steal things, without carrying away so much as a burning behind.
It would amaze you the lessons you can teach, then pass on, generation after generation, sometimes requiring little more than a minute.
If you know even the least amount of human history, you will know that the annoying minders of other peoples business were always the more powerful, and were also the very few who were always giving orders, while those who did what they were told were the very many.
Human history bears this out.
And so it was for centuries, trailing back to the ancients, whose territories were under the rule of royals and their family in sizes based on how much territory they could protect and control.
From the ancient Egyptians (2600 BC) all the way up to the American and French Revolutions, 1782-1794 AD, over 4000 years, an overruling royal class system pretty much ran the world. There were dozens of them, all defined by how much territory they could capture and hold onto then pass on. They changed hands regularly, and were defined at the top by a ruling class of a very small number, less than 10%, followed by a management class, including a military class.
We also know that of all the histories that have been unearthed and translated, from Egypt to the Christian era, nothing was ever recorded about the lives of the “lower” 75% who actually tilled the ground, fished the rivers, mined the ores and erected the monuments. They never mattered.
It even took nearly 1600 years for Christianity to distance itself from royal privileges, even as the Church did manage to baptize believers and secure their places on the heavenly ladder. But it did not open doors for their betterment on earth. There were still those kings to rule over them. Then came the Crusades, beginning in 1095 until 1291, followed by the Great (Bubonic) Plague of 1348, which would kill 20 million in Europe, over a third of its population. (And no one ever knew what caused it, or how to treat it.)
And everything changed, especially the value of labor and the authority of royals in the eyes of the common folk, including the role the Church would play in the lives of the people, for in another century the Reformation would split their Church all over Europe.
It was largely from England and Scotland that the original settlers formed the American colonies in the 1600s. But not all were religion-based. But they all were literate, and quite middle class. What they were not skilled in was clearing hundred’s of acres, and building cabins, and providing for their meals by trapping, hunting and fishing. Or making nice with local native aborigines. OJT.
You know the rest of the story, for what they did was establish themselves, up and down the Atlantic coast, into communities and colonies, securing their legal station with the folks back in England…for several generations. Just look up the original 13 colonies by name. They each have a history, and those are taught (or were when I was a kid) to grade schoolers. Even Kansas children are taught about their original settlers.
You more or less know about the American Revolution, but probably much less about the French Revolution, which arose just as our American revolt ended with the formation of our new Nation.
In brief, the American and French Revolutions went in two entirely different directions, lending itself to my favorite Mark Twain slur; “It is French”. (Feel free to use it, for it is still appropriate today, when addressing smug arrogance and insipidity.)
You know quite a bit about our first American national divorce, in 1776-1787, but in all likelihood have never given much thought to other parts of the world; how the French divorce first evolved, or the German, or even Filipino, or Japanese. I lived in Japan for three years during their first generation after World War II and have always believed they were by far the better democratic success story than their German allies.
I’ve often written about that moment, in a roomful of university professors in Kharkov, Ukraine who cried when I toast to the guest of honor on his birthday. But it was also a celebration for Ukraine’s liberation from the USSR just announced that month. I read for them Jefferson’s Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. I would love to be able to inquire today how all that worked out for them, but from correspondences in Ukraine in the 1990s from student translators, apparently their giddy dreams of a new freedom did not work out too well, although they did finally have unrestricted access to Western pop music.
But Jefferson didn’t just just state the “natural law” portion of Liberty, which caused those third generation sons and daughters of Marxist atheists to go all weepy; he went onto for several more paragraphs to then enumerate the crimes against mankind the royals in England had actually laid upon the people of the Colonies.
I encourage you to read the “rest” of the Declaration of Independence for you will find its bill of particulars against the Crown was remarkably similar to our own lists of grievances against our government today. And it will make keeping a copy of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” readily accessible on your bookshelf, dog-eared and underlined, all the more important an insight as to how things work among free people in 1776.
You see, in the How-Things-Work department, Paine wrote “Common Sense”, and the vast majority of people read it (an easy read for working class folks), then they, through various means, let their delegates in Philadelphia know they wanted to put an end to the Political Boss and taxation scam being carried out by their English landlords. The delegates then turned to Jefferson to write that Declaration of Independence.
The rest they say is “history”, for it put together an army out of various colonial militias, “on the run” so to speak, then it took the generalship of George Washington over 5 years of avoiding head-on engagements with the British main forces, so he could finally train and build up his army, with the help of militias from the back country, so as to entrap the English at Yorktown in 1781. (I’m certainly glad Gen Washington didn’t have to put up with any second-guessing from PINO’s (Patriots-in-name-only).
Just like that, it was over. In 1782 that “national divorce” was decreed by a court that didn’t even exist in 1776.
Thomas Jefferson is my “Natural Law” guardian of the Constitution even though he was in France as ambassador, while the Constitution was being written, but in a letter to John Adams’ son-in-law he wrote the famous lines, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” You’ve no doubt heard this statement before, but I’m providing its context here, a spectacle in our own lifetimes we’ve seen played out dozens of times in America.
“It is French”—the lesson.
Having witnessed this from a distance, and having assisted the Americans militarily (England was a natural enemy to France, not philosophical) France had its own revolution that began in 1788, the year after our Constitution had been ratified.
I’m linking here a Timeline of the French Revolution, provided by none other than Wikipedia, the approved producer of revised left-wing History and Philosophy, so you will be able to know who and what are approved by the modern Left today. In 1788 the French General Assembly was run by grown-ups, and royalists, then, because of royal excesses, the royalists were replaced by revolutionaries and riots, followed by a succession of political clubs associated, after the Bastille had been stormed in 1789. The royals were imprisoned and finally executed, and a succession of those clubs took over government, each sending boatloads of French men and women to meet Lady Razor until they were themselves made to climb those steps, and the process then repeated.
Today I read “memoirs” of the days of Donald Trump as president, 2017-2021, as if it were a lifetime ago. The French Revolution began in 1788, worked its way up to a “revolution” in 1789, with riots and storming of Bastille, then a takeover of the General Assembly by the “clubs”, each club being removed after excessive “teat-fittery” to then be replaced by new leaders and club. “Wash, rinse, and repeat”. During most of the 1790s, it was a repetition of Napoleon Bonaparte coming to the rescue of the frat boys and girls in Paris, until finally, he ended it by declaring himself “supreme leader” of France in 1799, his principal qualification that he was a grown-up.
The Lesson: The destruction that was France was from the distemper of spoiled, bitchy entitled children of the French middle class, and only a heavy military hand could fix it.
Thomas Jefferson and the Founders had blazed a different path, and at no time in the 245 years of our existence had we ever allowed such a “revolution” in our country, although it’s clear one party had dreamt of it for over a century.
And in the words of Mark Twain; “That dream is French.”
