Tag Archives: race

Crises in America and Just Needing to Drop by

I am not having an uncomplicated time in my own life. In general I think that there is a lot going on that cannot easily be set aside. Yet I am also a citizen of my own country, time and world. In the last number of ours we have seen the most deadly shooting at an historically Black Church since the founding of the United States. Both the President of the United States and the preacher chosen by the community to speak about such matters  during this crisis have chosen to discuss gun violence and gun control as the central lesson to be learned from this tragedy.   This  targeted church has long had a voice which is religious as well as a voice that is political, social and cultural.

The political character of the church was demonstrated in the fact that one of the pastors was an elected legislator who was also killed in this attack.  Clementa C.  Pickney  was a figure on the local, regional and national political scene. I think that it may be more useful to consider this as an act of political terrorism than either as an act of gun violence or even as a hate crime.

Can we really separate this story from the violent racial politics of the moment in Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago and elsewhere? What is the point of looking beyond the connections to race, media and politics as the likely principal factors behind this tragedy.

It is true that we know little about the shooter. However, that does not mean that we have to imagine him living in a vacuum.  The issues here are real and they are widespread and influential in the world in which American lives are lived.

I know that it takes time and experience to even address these crises effectively. I am aware that many people struggle to be engaged with these issues. Not only race but region can be a factor in understanding America’s junction of race politics and violence.  I recently made an acquaintance who will be facing those regional issues as he set out to cover news in Louisiana.

In the meantime we all have many other issues to deal with. Politics and life present us with many challenges. We must realize as we work out our political destinies that the right balance of realism and idealism of racial consciousness and inclusiveness is not easy to find. False solutions will not be effective only those based on reality.

Some legislators in the APCF

Some legislators in the APCF

 

Acadiana Press Club Forum Legislative Budget Review

 

other legislators at the APCF

other legislators at the APCF

It is not as though our lives stop and we can react only to these issues. But they do affect us all in different ways.

We all have issues which shape lives, society and race relations in America and around the world but race, violence and politics form a powerful nexus even when we would like to focus on other issues for a while.

Congratulating Louisiana State Senator Fred Mills on reforming Marijuana law...

Congratulating Louisiana State Senator Fred Mills on reforming Marijuana law…

Fred Mills Sponsor of Marijuana reform laws

I am myself preoccupied with illness, a death of a dear friend, a novel being neglected, many personal obligations and I am happy about Louisiana State Senator Fred Mills and others changing some of Louisiana’s Marijuana laws. But I have to set those things aside to discuss race, [politics and violence. Gun control and gun rights are less important right noe than race, politics and violence.

Dying Young in America: Contrasts in Black and White

I am going to discuss Thanksgiving in this blog post. I  wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving here and will do so again. But unfortunately this is not a post about the joys, pleasures and warmth of the season.   Sadly it panders the personal to the political. Because I feel obligated to engage the issues of my time and place.

A Christmas turkey opened like the one ready for Thanksgiving here and now.

A Christmas turkey opened like the one ready for Thanksgiving here and now.

There is a lot being said about race in America right now.  I am adding to it a few ideas that may give shape to larger and smaller discussions of race in this blog. To do this I am sacrificing a chance to blog on Thanksgiving topics solely. I am discussing the death of a relative outside an obituary context. But I feel that I want to give some general ideas of what I have always thought about race before dealing with recent events out of context or not responding as some visit racial posts I have put up in the past.

The Civil Rights movement has shaped much of my life experience. I am fifty years old.

The Civil Rights movement has shaped much of my life experience. I am fifty years old.

I am out not doing as much as I should to get ready for Thanksgiving probably. That includes the fact that this post is not as thanksgiving oriented as it ought to be in an ideal world. I did find some holiday spirit yesterday as I made an effort to be in the right spirit and also to rush through the Thanksgiving shopping I am doing to help my mother this year.  I enjoyed the three years when I brought a turkey twice and a ham once. It made me feel less bleak in the holidays. I also enjoyed the company and the leftovers. It is always a challenge to blend dishes as I recall back from the years when I won turkeys for Thanksgiving and hams for Christmas at the big house from the Meridional football prediction contests and or combined with vendor canvassing contests by the same newspaper. I think of those years and the three years I bought the family smoke turkeys to add to Thanksgiving.. I will plan to attend on my own wheels and schedule but let Mom’s goods represent the kitchen I used in those years. I will try to pick up a few drinks. I will probably only be there not so very long and am trying to control how much I eat this season and have no separate leftovers to store so mostly a seat is what I will require. I of course look forward to the visit I also remember cleaning up after the big meals and know that is a gift to all of those who attend which goes past the limited time I will be there and so I am appreciative of that as well. I do remember a couple of pretty sad Thanksgiving Days spent by myself. Likewise some  shared with friends, relatives and near strangers in odd groupings.

A dinner over a holiday other than the principal dinner at the home my grandparents owned on 1812 Palmer Avenue in New Orleans -- my uncle Will and I

A dinner over a holiday other than the principal dinner at the home my grandparents owned on 1812 Palmer Avenue in New Orleans — my uncle Will and I with Dad on the right edge

Thanksgiving Dinner is of course a big deal and a special occasion. It is great of my sister to host this event this year. The details change from year to year but I am glad to see the family keeping things going and her role is appreciated. This season I intend to do less of everything than usual and see how things work day to day but I hope to enjoy what I am able to do. But the holidays are special and sacred. This year mine are crowded with distractions.

I spent Sunday and Monday marking the passing of Jerrel “Bubba” Hancock who died Thursday, November 20, 2014. . This was a very traumatic time and the loss of such a young life was stinging. I was off Facebook for a while and lost a few FB friends  from my list with whom I mostly communicated by Facebook and the lest of those who left included the widow of my Uncle Will and her children. I just discovered when my mother asked me to identify a picture of the person who had been killed in an oilfield explosion  that Jarel “Bubba” Hancock was killed offshore. Kayler and Jennifer’s father was Will’s friend and after he died Will and Brenda eventually  got married and reared them together. Kayler’s husband came to some of our family gatherings as a couple and then a family. When I got the new  I was more stunned than I probably had a right to be… Bubba was only 24 and aside from his widow Kayler Roy Hancock leaves two children Lane Ross Hancock and Lexi Linn Hancock. He was a really great presence to be around. My condolences were first extended to Brenda Summers, Bubba’s sister Shalacy Griffin by name and  to all of his family and friends who may be on my Facebook account.  Here I would extend my condolences to the whole family including his father, Clarence Hancock;  his mother, Sue Clark; grandfather, Jerrel Dean Hancock; three sisters, Shalacy Griffin and her husband Heath, Courtney Duhon and her husband Keith, and Brittney Lopez and her husband Joshua; nieces, Emile Duhon, Emma Pommier, Journey Lopez; nephews, Cade Touchet, Jett Lopez, Ryker Griffin; nephew/godchild, Jax Lopez; aunt, Joyce Clark Cuevas; mother-in-law, Brenda Summers; and sister-in-law, Jennifer Pommier and her husband Jeremy.  There is so much tragedy in the story. I did contact Brenda on Facebook and called and then went to meet the mourners at  Vincent’s funeral home in Abbeville which handled the arrangements. In a life taken offshore or in an oil and gas related accident or incident people here recognize that this is a dangerous industry which also supports our local economy. Much as with whalers in history’s whaling communities, seamen in ports and miners in mining communities we note the deaths of those who fall in this line of duty as having a communal element just a little removed from a military or first responder funeral. May Bubba rest in peace.  He was gathered to his kinfolk who include his grandmother, Wilda M. Clark; great grandmother, Ella Pontiff Suire; grandfather, John Clark; uncle, John Clark, Jr.; and father-in-law, William C. Summers, My uncle. The funeral services were held Monday, November 24, 2014 at a 10:00 a.m. with a Mass of Christian Burial at St. Mary Magdalen Catholic Church   and   Reverend Bill Melancon officiated the services and there were  many mourners and some well sung hymns. I do not pretend to know what everyone was thinking or felt although I did here some people talking.

View of Bubba's funeral from near the church entrance looking at the altar.

View of Bubba’s funeral from near the church entrance looking at the altar.

He was laid to rest at St. Paul Cemetery after the Mass but I did not attend the actual burial.  No doubt there will be questions about any negligence that may have cost Bubba his life but this was not a time when such questions were foremost.  People gathered to honor his life, console his bereaved and  note his passing.

Funeral cortege arrives at church which will carry the remains out to burial a bit more than an hour later.

Funeral cortege arrives at church which will carry the remains out to burial a bit more than an hour later.

However, Monday night the news came out that a grand jury did not indict Darren Wilson the officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. This incident of the issuing of a no true bill caused or occasioned a violent response across the city and disruptive protests across the nation.  This is Thanksgiving week and I normally post about holidays near the holidays as you can see here, here and here. In addition, I also  devote myself to supporting the Holidays in a variety of ways.  But this year is different.  I am in the midst of some holiday preparations but they are a scaled down version of some years. I am I supposed somewhat distracted from the season by many concerns of many kinds. Happy Thanksgiving to all Americans regardless of race, ethnicity or circumstance.  I have had a bit of a bump in views and visits on this blog and I am pretty sure that such an increase had more to do with the events surrounding the Ferguson riots and the shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson than it has had to do with the Holiday. Perhaps some people are looking for answers outside the political mainstream more than usual. The Holiday deserves a great deal of a post but this is not such a post. This is not even a heartwarming family post if one takes out the fact that it occurs when one might post about Thanksgiving. This is a post about America, family and community but not nearly enough about the kinds of shared feeling between colonists and aboriginal Americans which has a place on our calendar for shared and celebrated memories. The stuff about the country in this note is not about that Plymouth Thanksgiving but perhaps is related to another root of the Thanksgiving Day holiday. I have blogged about Acadian, Texan and other roots of Thanksgiving besides the Plymouth Holiday. I have also mentioned the Lincoln roots. Those seem most suitable today. So I am thinking about another of the many fathers of the Thanksgiving Holiday. To some degree it was proclaimed by Abraham Lincoln after the extremely bloody Battle of Gettysburg. Even if one believes that Gettysburg was a great and important moment of good (my own feelings are ambiguous but I am more of a Confederate sympathizer than a Lincoln fan — that much is sure) this was the darkest pattern to help make the Thanksgiving tradition. Even if you just count Yankee dead it was a bloodbath which would not have rated such a holiday under any other President we have had up to now. I don’t see the current somewhat Illinois man proclaiming such a holiday in such circumstances either. This holiday too will come after quite a bit of tumult although nothing compared to the scale of Gettysburg.

Gettysburg settled upon our country many parts of a new consensus . . .

Gettysburg settled upon our country many parts of a new consensus . . .

In this blog I have certainly addressed racial issues.  For many years I  sought to avoid addressing this so publicly and clinically as I now do quite regularly. There are many reasons for that one is that race is used to confuse issues as often as to clarify them.  There is a black man around here who is suing to see why the police shot his son and that man and his substantial body of supporters have behaved nothing like the mobs of radicals or would-be radicals and others around Ferguson and the shooting of Michael Brown. However, I do believe that we are in a racial crisis in America. I believe any number of very bad outcomes are more likely than those outcomes I would consider to good. The Ferguson riots are not isolated from a bigger picture in my view. Other instances of racial problems I have discussed can be found here, here and here. We must acknowledge those things that cause us anxiety and I am anxious about the state of racial politics in this society, the recent events associated with Michael Brown and Darren Wilson  only illustrate more alarming tensions and trends.  While it is mostly in writing I confront that anxiety here by stating what I believe to be the truth. Nonetheless, there is some long history of my life which has also been devoted to dealing with racial questions. This is a relatively risky and thankless thing to do in living acts or in writing in this blog or elsewhere but I undertake to do it because it is necessary for the other objectives of the blog. I am not defining and discussing race here in the context of every possible perspective, system of priorities or historical antecedent. I am primarily writing about race as it relates to the constitutional history of this country and the  transformation of America advocate which has occurred in my lifetime and the different transformation advocated  in this blog. That does not mean that I do not believe that the things I argue, advocate and suggest here are objectively true and valid.  It only means  that these positions and ideas would not be equally relevant to  all other circumstances and positions. I have decided to address issues of race race in my life and writing and have done so for a while.When I say that this is risky I mean that it is conceivable thatI will suffer some terrible outcome for publishing this. Such a thing is not at all impossible. But I feel the need to state my position as clearly as I can. I think that it is a serious matter. Besides Bubba’s tragic death I also think of the terrible incident involving Austin Rivault and his companions shot by Seth Fontenot. You can read more about this incident here. While this is a terrible situation nothing like the Ferguson, Missouri response is contemplated on any side of the issue.

Austin at a faith Camp reunion a few years before he was shot.

Austin at a faith Camp reunion a few years before he was shot.

Let me say that these ideas do not come out of the blue. They come out of  a tradition informed by American experience, Acadian experience, Louisiana experience, French experience, Greek and Hellenic experience and many other traditions that join to form the experience and tradition which I represent.  They are informed by a life time of travels and studies and dialogs with people of varied cultures and races around the world.  These ideas are also informed by reading and examination of any of a number of scientific surveys, treatises and postulated models for human development and behavior.  They are based on the long devotion to the study of Scripture and Church doctrine but not in the sense that I am postulating them as the authoritative Christian position. In fact, they are heavily controverted within all parts of the Christian Community. The people rioting in and with Ferguson also have a context. They see the Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring and popular culture from rap songs to movies like the Hunger Games and Insurgent in their minds. I share their awareness of tumult and  their sense of the need for change. Here then are  Twelve Principles of Racial Politics that should be understood to apply to all of my thoughts and assertions within this blog and within all of the political  models and programs I outline for application in the larger world: First Summers Racial Politics Principle:

  1. Race does exist but it is one of the more relatively fluid, complex and continuously self-transforming  categories and groupings that define humanity, the human community and the distinctions between people.
race is one part of understanding human diversity it is not the only part.

race is one part of understanding human diversity it is not the only part.

Second Summers Racial Politics Principle:

  1. As an existing quality or property of a person racial well-being was intended to be protected by the founding fathers as part of that intangible form of property that the Declaration describes as “the Pursuit of Happiness” which should not be understood solely in individual terms. The founders also intended their documents to apply in a different way to “their posterity” than to all of humanity without distinction. No understanding of America which does not embrace these realities is adequate fo charting the course of America.
We have a responsibility to understand the words we use to shape our live and society. This is a picture of the Declarators committee.

We have a responsibility to understand the words we use to shape our live and society. This is a picture of the Declarators committee.

Third Summers Racial Politics Principle:

  1. In the republican Union and in what I believe to be our proper destiny as a Federal American Empire of the United States all persons should start off on a path to hold the basic rights to vote, enter into contracts, hold property, bear arms and marry regardless of their race.
Liberty must evolve but not be abandoned.

Liberty must evolve but not be abandoned.

  1. Many of the ideas of human dignity coming from a spiritual perspective can be asserted and explained even to a materialist atheist. I believe materialist atheism is not such a great thing but we need to govern race in America and many things almost at this level because of the diverse ways in which our spiritual perspectives express more beautifully a basic truth in ways which are not as compatible as they become less basic. But all share in the holy heritage of humanity’s special place in God’s order in my theology.
My friends, brothers in Christ and fellow music makers in New Zealand.

My friends, brothers in Christ and fellow music makers in New Zealand.

Fifth Summers Racial Political Principle:

  1. The State, constitutional authority and Union may assert classifications of race when a strong interest compels them to do so and then they must limit such findings to individuals upon whom they are passing judgments. The basic body qualified to declare race is the family and they should do so. The fact that family has almost no legal existence or stature in America is an evil that should be remedied and does not vitiate this principle.
The Current Queen of England and Scotland's United Kingdom with Eisenhower

I don’t think any two constitutional changes are the same. The British Monarchy is not our target here.

Sixth Summers Racial Political Principle:

  1. Families should belong to weak and loose but not powerless and non-existent associations of ethnicity which have their own racial policies published and define race within their own context. Acadians, True Yankees, New York Jews, Louisiana Italian-Americans are examples that   come to mind. These should have some legal standing. This is also a legal principle that should apply elsewhere and usually does so that the ethnic quality is seen as part of  legal right.

Seventh Summers Racial Politics Principle:

  1. Whatever the races that make up the human race may be they all have some cluster  of advantages and disadvantages that generally obtain. None is inferior in every way nor superior in every way to the others. However, they can be discussed in terms of inferiority and superiority which are meaningful.

Eighth Summers Racial Politics Principle:

  1. It is fairly clear that there are two largely fair-skinned races which have shown more capacity for many thing which are  vital to survival of large populations in complex and varied circumstances  and to the progress of civilizations. One of these is the complex and somewhat hodgepodge collection of  white  and near white peoples developing in a complex history over Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and along tendrils into Westernmost and Central Asia. The other is the race more homogenous in every way but also a complex web of mostly near white and some pure white races centered in North Asia  and the great Chinese plains. Many other races are an admixture of these races and other races their racial position must be recognized as intermediate. Black Africans developed some highly successful groups but in general were low in population, free-exploration and  civilized arts. Slavery and their expansion into mixed race groups was a means of progress and stability that existed far outside the Triangular Atlantic trade.

Ninth Summers Racial Political Principle:

  1. It is the nature of  a true civilization to create a common and public thing in which the best are able to achieve greater rewards and to be recognized as superior but are also tied to the needs not only of a theoretical whole but to benefits for all sections of society. America should be a white supremacist society in which many principles as important and more important than racial distinction are upheld to assure opportunity and decent humane autonomy to all persons and groups which participate supportively in our civilization. Among the nonracial principles to be upheld are: Federalism, Subsidiarity, Conservation, Progress, General Welfare, Common Defense, Decent Respect for the Opinions of Mankind, Due Process of Law, Family autonomy and I am proposing Royalism. I will not  define these principles here.

Tenth Summers Racial Political Principle:

  1. We must honor America’s specific racial reality. In our case we ought to exhibit due respect for senior ethnic groups within races and do a good job of ordering such things. We also must  give official recognition to the Western over the Oriental in this land as a matter of history .   We must give special protection and recognition to the American Aboriginal peoples as having both rights that flow from who they are but also from seniority. Nonetheless “Western White” settlers are our predominant leadership race. We must recognize also the uniquely complex and multiply referenced status of Creoles of Color in three principal communities: Louisiana, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands we must allow them to help define published ways of integrating those mixed race African-Americans they wish to receive who wish to enter  those communities.

Eleventh Summers Racial Politics Principle:

  1. We must find ways for things to be made equal where that is appropriate, separate and near equal and stratified where appropriate. We must develop a racial consciousness and laws which are predictable, fair and reflect reality. Once this is established then some of the members of society have to be willing to kill and die for it or it will not endure.

While I did post this just before Thanksgiving Day and I have been preoccupied with politics, policy, chores and other matters — I did celebrate Thanksgiving Day properly with family and the grand dinner required.  I add that part of the post last and can say that I enjoyed it thoroughly if in some degree of moderation.

Thanksgiving Dinner 2014 -- a single backlit shot to serve for a whole set of images and memories...

Thanksgiving Dinner 2014 — a single backlit shot to serve for a whole set of images and memories…

 

The APS Cheating Scandal and American Culture

As those who read me often will know, I have been a teacher in numerous contexts as well as being a person who has taken many standardized tests. I have also advised people I cared about who take standardized tests. Let me assure you that people provide skinnies and acquire early copies of master forms and provide for special conditions for pretty girls who can use their favors to influence the right people, for stellar athletes who cannot make the grade after extensive tutorials and for the relations of rich donors to universities and prep schools. Teacher’s pets can sometimes be rewarded with hints that are unfair to others. That kind of impurity which is not so shocking but offends a sense of the sportsmanship that goes with standardized testing regimes is rampant enough to offend but not pervasive or normal in most testing regimes around the world. Beyond all of this in our own country margins are attached to scores to provide affirmative action for racial minorities, for women, for veterans and for the disabled before making decisions that will apply the scores. In addition to all of this intimidation, cheating lies and abuse occur in all sort of places around the world. If that is the case then does the APS scandal matter? Does it matter that Beverly Hall and others in the Atlanta Public School System presided over wholesale distortions in public school testing? Yes I think it matters. I think also that this kind of wholesale lying and cheating is occurring in many school districts around the country.
I myself have mixed feelings and a mix of things to say about standardized testing itself. I also believe high schools should have more diverse educational outcomes leading to apprenticeships, tech schools and work programs for a good portion of seniors who will still graduate and take some classes in the main school. Likewise they should offer advanced college prep and individual classes. I also think a military track should exist in each school. In other words I think the public school system is broken. I think it must change or we will pay an ever higher price. Given all this dysfunction does wholesale cheating such as erasure parties, broken seals, coaching during tests and false reporting matter? Yes, it assuredly matters. We currently see the worst element combining in the worst ways. This is a result our society demands. Ms. Hall and other are fulfilling an American fantasy about our society. I will not have time to fully explore that fantasy in this note – but I have done so elsewhere to a greater degree.
This little essay of the type I often write will be about Beverly Hall and the thirty or so other school officials indicted in the investigation of cheating in the Atlanta Public School System. This is especially important because Ms. Hall has been honored as National School System Superintendent of the Year and has been a symbol for many of the direction in which our American educational culture ought to be moving. I am going to look at this scandal in order to see a few other things in American life and culture more clearly as well. Like many of my Notes and Posts this one has a central theme and also some other themes woven into the writing about the topic. Also like many of my other notes and posts this topic comes from the current news. The most important news story may be the escalation in tensions in the Korean Peninsula, the new strain of bird flu or for some it may have to do with college basketball. However, for this note’s own purposes we will suppose that this school scandal is as important and may be more important than any other story.
This Facebook Note which is also a Blog Post comes at a very difficult time in my own life. Despite the memories of many times of far more visible trauma and crisis than this is in some ways I am writing this note at a time when it would be easy to think that all of my energy ought to be going to my own senses of loss and sadness. Perhaps this is the darkest time I have ever experienced in some ways. However, It is not about my personal life but about larger social issues. However, the school scandal story is dear and near to my heart… What is striking about this wholesale and institutional fraud which is both alleged and supported by evidence is that it shows the totality of failure in regards to the matching of the machinery of calculating the standing of our citizens with the realities of our society. This failure will play out in very broad implications beyond the serious corruptions of the system of public education in this country. The implications are that we do not currently have a correct view of our society as we face a large number of crises in our nation and in the world. We must consider the significance of this scandal in the context of those challenges.
Later on below these words I will return to the issue of race and the significance of these events being first uncovered beneath the Georgia flag. In this struggle by the State of Georgia and other authorities to deal with these issues the colors which were the confederate battle flag has waved above this instance of endless and widespread nonviolent black supremacy. The flag has often been attacked in Georgia but the falsification of all standards to promote the relative position of the Black race in our society has been fostered by all our learned and moral opinions. I have elsewhere proposed a new model constitution and I feel that the recent events have justified my sense of where the United States of America truly stand as regards its knowledge of its own status in the world.
My proposals in the constitution are moderate in nature and my convictions continue to be the same although there are some great struggles to be had in our future I would not use the horror of our situation as an excuse to fight for the kinds of racial extremism which such corruption as we have seen here can often encourage. The wholesale war on the survival of what was best in Southern culture has been ongoing as a political operation of the Federal Power of the United States for all of the last 150 years. It has simply changed in its distortions over the last few decades. However, there is still some vestige of an American sense of sportsmanship which can somewhere be offended by the total degradation of all standards which is normal in so much of our society. Let us not also doubt that Madoff was a cheater, Nixon was a cheater and people of many races, tongues and ethnicities throughout the world are today and always have been cheaters. We face the reality that if anything is to be determined by something other than cheating then real provisions must be made to assure that cheating will not occur. Where this serious effort is not made to prevent cheating then cheaters are exalted and extolled at the real expense of those who do try to do the right thing.
I have long been weary and discouraged in many ways myself and see the great weaknesses of our society stacking up and growing ever more numerous. I wonder what chance there really is for us to find our way to a better future. Cheating is not a simple matter. I do not think a purely passive or hidebound populace is to be desired. Given the assumptions, laws and rhetoric of our times the actions of Beverly Hall and others seem reasonable enough. Efforts to correct these abuses cannot really succeed without greater changes accompanying them. I have in my model constitution laid out one possible path for such change.
We have not as a society correctly calculated the consequences of rhetoric and policy extolling equality, demonizing racial distinction and white supremacy of any kind, simplifying the mechanisms of stopping fraud at many points. We do not understand the exigencies of any kind of meritocratic institutions on which we must rely. Today as we think back on the Independence Day anniversaries of 150 years since the greatest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere was drawn out at Gettysburg and the horror of the Vicksburg siege ended in the failed Confederacy we must recognize the change which Gettysburg assured has been a complicated kind of change bringing both good and evil to Georgia and the South. We must also consider that process launched in and for our nation. The occupation of the South and the repression of its state institutions by the federal government has never ended and has not abated. The morals of it have never been fairly examined. But before focusing on race let me examine some other implications of all this horrific mess.
The creation of a destructive class of vicious and entitled black abusers has been empowered and supported against the society and culture of these states and all of the union. There are many African Americans who would participate in a more positive system drawing on a diverse set of roots of progress. But these people are overwhelmed in the stream of a fantasized racial exact equality in our land. The Black Republicanism which many in the South and the Northern Opposition sought to stop in the War Between the States has reached its fruit and full flower in many places across our society. This racial element is very significant in all of this although one must applaud the black officers of the court who are involved in the prosecution and the black teachers and administrators who lost their jobs in droves opposing the total adulteration of scholastic integrity. There story is not much being told yet and may not be told. It is a story which ought to inspire us to give to the United Negro College Fund and to see in institutions like Grambling and Southern University in my own state. There is in such racially conscious institutions a different ethic than the wholesale cultural terrorism that the US Supreme Court has imposed upon the Union of the States. We are not likely to see such an outpouring of generosity to the UNCF by “Southron” whites of the old school. It is more probable we will see hopeless resentment or racially charged righteous anger. However, many things must be done to make a society or a heritage and the Georgia flag is witness to a complex situation in so very many ways. This is truly a time for a broad and well informed effort.

Why I Dare to Advocate Radical Change…

As I start to get back into the swing of this blog and some of its long-term themes I am forced to consider and address those who might ask why I should dare to advocate radical social change.

Well, because young people in the United States seem confused about some of the meaning and consequences of their sexual-social choices.

1. http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/article/health_statistics_teen_sexuality_std_pregnancy

Because married filiation is under stress as is the American family structure and there is a real race to the bottom because only marriage is a recognized domestic regime. Society is destroying basic human community.

2. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/unmarry.htm

Because, entirely unregulated sexual and domestic slavery is widespread in the united States and the world. 

3.http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ovc/ncvrw/2005/pg5l.html

4.http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-10-06/news/17316911_1_trafficking-victims-human-trafficking-new-owners

Because, after huge amounts of social change at gunpoint the black community in America is really in a downward spiral in many ways. The great project of this country in my generation is suicide.

5.http://www.blackangelnetwork.org/stats

Because, we have destroyed communities in favor of society and society is doing an increasingly poor job of holding things together. Corporations and governments are not able to care for all this dislocated people well.

6.http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

Because our absurd idea of national morality focuses largely on the total prohibition of recreational drugs and prostitution and it is quite possible to argue that this is not only hypocritical but also misguided.

7.http://www.fleshandstone.net/press_releases/1812.html

8. http://www.liberator.net/articles/prostitution.html

So this is why my royalist American program for radical change is something I continue for as long as I can stay here. I do think that things are disastrous in many areas of society besides coastal policy. I favor radical change because I think we are radically off-track.

Monarchy and Royalist Culture in America: Past, Present and Future/ Part 3.3

This is a very long post.  Part of it was published early by mistake and it will still be tweaked but it does complete my trilogy of posts on a subject I think is relevant and important enough for all this effort. This Post will carry forth the outline from Part 2.1 of this same title using numbers so that they fall into place with the other after this introductory section which is not numbered. For anyone this would have to be an odd exercise writing out a long description of a new regime in this way.  Yet having begun it is fairly rational to continue until it seems that one is nearly or entirely finished with the project. So this post will attempt to discuss in a somewhat helpful way the lifestyle, peopling and style of several key groups, communities and institutions in the proposed new regime.

In the strugggle to maintain this very large republic and its many programs and commitments it seems almost inconceivable to take any time and energy away from that sustained struggle in order to invest any of it into changing the form of government from a republican to a royalist form. It seems even more unlikely that a person seeking to advocate such changes would be doing so from the point of view mostly of seeking good, useful and measured change in the country and society as a whole. Therefore, I feel some obligation to lay out my plans and reasons for them in such a way that it is at least possible that many could understand them and appreciate them.

What then would Court and the Imperial House be like? What ought we to hope that they would be like? How would they function in a reconstitutionalized America?

The model I propose of the Imperial House is more ambitious than modest. It is more extensive than circumscribed. It would require more effort and resources to chabge in and of itself than several other royal possibilities, but it is part of the overall reality of a court that is well positioned to respond to the realties of this society at this time.

C. Culture, Structure and Being of the Imperial House and Household.

The Emperor and the Empress were defined in their own sections in the last post.  There is a very real sense in which, ” These two and no others are the point of all this!” But it is just as true that to the very degree and in the very way in which they are important the Emperor and Empress are important for presiding over and leading not just the formal society of the whole reconstitutionalized United States of America and/or Federal American Empire of the United States but also by presiding over smaller and better defined parts of the whole society. So the Emperor and Empress could not function properly without the House and Household and would in many ways be crippled without their healthy existence and so this posting is attempting to give some special recognition to and description of this entity without by any means exhausting the subject. I return to my point that I am aware that this is a great deal of work for me and some for you which is not likely to have much practical purpose or significance. 

1. In Functional and Spatial Terms

I am going to describe the hypothetical  Imperial House and Household in two sections which have rather long and I think accurate names but if you wish you could think of this section as describing the House and Household as a thing. You could think of the second section as describing the House and Household as human beings.  

a. Role in Politics, Governance and Diplomacy

The Imperial House and Household will be doing things very differently than they have been done and will do things that have not been done in America. it would be one of the challenges facing such a regime to be seen as largely a legitimate part of the governing and directing part of the society. For that would surely be its principal purpose.

i. The GRIHHA

Aside from the Imperial Services outlined in the previous post the Grand Royal and Imperial House and Household Assembly has a complicated social  and political structure based on Internal Estates, Orders and Ministries. Each of these is represented in the GRIHHA. The exact manner of their representation being described in the Supreme Charter of the Direct Imperial Government and the Rules of the GRIHHA. Here I will merely list those seated in the GRIHHA all of whom are also part of the life and work of the Unity of Houses.

* Unity Seats include a three year rotation of one third by yearly terms of Acadian Peer Electors and Louisiana Peer Electors. They also include the Vassal Mistresses of Ceremonies in each other court and  the Majordomo di Palazzo for each of the Royal Households. The Unity Seats also include the highest ranking consort from the harem who is under the covenant of each of the Acadian and the Louisiana Titles. Further, the Chaplains, Court Historians and Court Physicians of  each of the royal Titles will be seated in this section.  The Commanders of both the Garde de Roi  and the  Φάλαγγα των Κενταύρων του βασιλιά will be in these seats. The Unity Seats will be one of the three Inner Sections with most of the executive and administrative role.

**The Family Seats these are certain members of the legitimate Imperial Family, the Heirs and the Family Fiefdom. This is the second Inner Section.

*** The Ministerial Seats  consist of the heads of all Imperial Services, the Mistress of Ceremonies, the Most Favored Consorts, The Harem Delegate, the Imperial Majordomo di Palazzo, Imperial Court Physician, Imperial Court Historian Liaison-in Chief to the Direct Imperial Government, Imperial Jester, Imperial Court Musician, Imperial Court Architect, Representative of the Emperor’s Sons and Representative of the Emperor’s Daughters.

**** The Outer Seats include seats for all  those classed as High Ranking members of the Rolls of the Houses and Households, a Rotation of three one year terms for the Middle Ranks of the Rolls, and twenty representatives elected by the Lower Ranks. Anyone seated in an inner section loses their seat in this section.

ii. The Emperor’s Reign as Central Focus 

The main drive of sheduling, planning and budgeting in the Imperial House and Household would be supporting the work and role of governance of the Emperor himself. All things would be structured to support that central function. That includes space and the ordering of family life which will be briefly discussed in this post.

b.The White House, Imperial Fiefdoms and Palaces

One of the differences between the Republic and the Imperial system propsed here is that the facilities in the District of Coloumbia would be greatly in need of change. there would have to be large improvements to the Naval Observatory for it to become the home of the First Executive Vice President.  There would also need to be third major residence for the Deputy Executive Vice President. This official would also become the Grand Ward Chief for one of four Grand Wards in the District of Columbia. That Distrcit will be the smallest and will consist almost entirely of office buildings and residences used by the Federal Ecexcutive Vice Presidency. This will give the Deputy Vice President a more tangible role as well as a seat in the Direct Imperial Governments’  Government  Assembly which he can occupy or delegate to others. 

The White House itself would be rather cramped as an Imperial Palace even with just a small space alotted for ministries and services because of the size of an Imperial House compared to a presidential family. So therefore it would have to be seen as the hub and focus of a larger network of homes, properties and facilities. While  on the one hand Washington DC already has many assets to make it a compelling capital and on ther hand as a federal system our society will never create a perfect super capital in ideals and all the bad things that go with such   an attempt in practice. The Imperial Court would greatly indrease the cultural assets available to the District of Columbia.  This is true even though Louisiana will regain much of the prominence it had prior to the War Between the States. We will still be a hyper multipolar society but if we do this then the pole of Washington and the pole of Louisiana will both gain a great deal. However, that can be in the context of overall growth and development.

To quote myself in a Facebook note I wrote on Western Civilization, “If Greece is utlimately our culture andJesus is ultimately our conscience then what is missing. Neither Jesus nor Greece gave us a capital. Rome is the Capital of Western Civilization. That is actually Rome’s greatest achievement in my view. It is not insignificant. In Rome our center hold in some way none of us really understand but for reasons that fill libraries as well. Only in the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven in Beijing China have I found anything which approaches the feel of Rome. They are very different. Rome is more our cutlural capital even now when we are hardly existing as a unity than Beijing is China’s cultural capital.” Both our revolutionary Founding Fathers and this revolution would seek to emulate much of what was best in Rome. A large part of it would be an effort to have a great and effective capital city.
c. Larger Spheres of Activity

The Ministry of Protocol and the House military forces would be the groups most prominently involved in preparing for the House and its members to interact effectively and proerly with the larger sphere of places, groups and individuals with which they must be involved. That includes the preparation of rooms and the organization of space as well as working with the Peer-Electors in creating suitable spaces for entertaining the Emperor and Empress at regular intervals on the premises of their fiefdoms.  

2. The Imperial House as a Set of Relationships Between People 

One thing which would be open about the transition to the Royalist Empire is that there would be a focus of  activity in the Court. The Court is not so clearly defined as any particular palace, assembly or group. The court would have many aspects and manifestations. However, it would have dangers and advantages distinctly its own which would be recognized by its members and sovereigns. Its influence would be greatly limited compared to some historic courts because of Sovereignty shared with the Constitutional Jurisdictions in federalism and the government shared with the  First Esecutive Vice President. Nonetheless it would not try to limit such influence as did acrue to it. Rather, Influence would be seen as amost preferred way to exercise its role in government. 

 a.  The Imperial House and its structure related to the issues of sexuality and also of women within that sexual context. 

i. The Empress

The Empress has a great deal of autonomy and dignity built into her role and this role involes both copulating with the Emperor and bearing him children. This is potentially a powerful influence which will help to shape relations between the sexes, attitudes toward women and sexuality within the realm.

ii. Other Imperial Consorts

The size and diverisity and constitution of an Arcadian Royal Harem of the Imperial scale would depend on many factors. However,  ideal is that it be large. These women are wives and would be spoken of as such in Court but would be recognized in every way as in a seprate legal and social status from the Empress. Only the in-between Mistress of Ceremonies can bear an Heir for example in the ordinary course of things. Joseph Broussard when he was being prosecuted and attempts were made by the British to discredit him was found to have fathered a son out of wedlock with an Acadian woman, it is known that prominent Acadians in the ?Acadie /Nova Scotia region often had Miq Mac mistresses. Louisiana had a large social and cultural regime powered in no small part by the tradition of Acadian leaders keeping Creole of Color and Houma Indian Mistresses as well as (more discreetly) white mistresses in regularized relationships that could be called junior marriages. The institution is essential to the life of the House thus conceieved and ought not to be hidden or apologized for. Religious problems are the most difficult but the truth is that in all long term successful Christian royal regimes the king is usually a polygamous man.  However, in this world and ytime such athing would have to be mandatory and constitutional for many reasons.

I do not have a relationship with Britney Spears. I am fairly sure no Acadian or other role is deepy involved with her but I chose these three pictures of Ms. Spears.She ispossibly a very stuanch republican. Many female celebrities face tragic fates in the course of things when a late plural marriage to a Kng or Prince could be mutually beneficial. A king with a harem (as Versailles included I assure you and earlier kings more honestly) can sometimes attract a variety of women who have a hard time making a regular marriage work but who have a lot of sexual and persoanlity assets which work better in a royal plural marriage. Whatever the details the pictures here tell a story of their won in the context of other publicly known facts. If one chose to one could see American celebrity culture as another sign of the need that exists for a royalist shift.   

iii. Sexual Philosophy specific to this particular House and this particular Regime

 Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 6:28pm 
In one of Leon Tolstoy’s fantasticaly long and eloquent novels a smart young woman uncomfortable with her own sexual appeal says to another character, who is I believe a very self-assured Russian Prince, who has a discussion simialr to the one in my favoritr novelist of sexual love Jane Austen. Or so I think for I have not checked my sources but sort of remeber the scene in both sets of romances.   “Why do people have balls? Wouldn’t it be much more sensible if people simply spent the evening in conversation?” To which the Prince (or prominent English aristocrat) , who is an acomplished social dancer, replies “Infinitely more sensible and infinitely less like a ball.” A society that lives only in words and conversations does not live at all. Women and the way they appear to men is not primarily a subject to be debated. It is primarily the greatest engine and most pertinent mystery of human personality and society.

Tolstoy was a Christian, a dabbling Freemason, a bit of a socialist and an apologetic royalist. There have been many other humans of great intellect with deities like Pan, Aphrodite, Venus and a hundred others who were much more explicit in declaring the enormous importance of sex and the sexual recognition of women. When the founding fathers discussed the work of building the United States several key leaders including Jefferson wrote that the work of Population was one deserving time attention and resources. The American revolution was largely fought to allow the people of the United State a few centuries to breed and and build families and hope that over that time a better set of technologies would emerge to deal with high population density. Sex, family, courtship, childbirth, marraige and the like are of enormous importance to any sane public policy. All of these things especialy involve women as women.”

I am leaving out chunks and paragraphs here that add to the argument but my whole note is available on this blog.  You can read it any time if you wish. Here is some of my main points about the nature of women.

“First, human females are truly shockingly extraordinary. They are not only very different from men they are different from other female earthlings. Women distinguish our species so enormously that it is simply inevitable magic. The combination of human extreme bipedalism (walking on two feet) and the shape of chidlbearing hips combine with prominent breasts to create a figure which is very extreme sexual dsiplay compared to men’s beards and very little else is so specifically developed as sexual flesh. This is somewhat different from our nearest biological relatives the apes. It is very distinct from the myriad examples of ducks, deer, chickens, lions, turkeys and other well known species where the male expresses the physical “come hither” material in the sexual dialog. In most species there is either no sexual dimorphism meaning there is asexual morphism — meaning males and females look mostly alike OR the male wears the plumage.

Having shown a major difference we are only geeting started. A heathy adult female can have coitus on any day at any period of that day. Most females are penetrable (in species like large animals which penterate) only infrquently and are fertile only on these realtively rare occasions. Healthy adult human females are fertile and infertile every month when they are not pregnant or lactating to supply a dependent nursing heavily. The variations between fertile and infertile periods within the month are not common to the whole species nor linked closely to the weather but vary from woman to woman. Further, there is very little physical difference between fertile and infertile women so that estrus is largely hidden. This is also a very limiting set of sexual characteristics which human famles share with few if any other females on Earth if taken as a whole.

To add another level of complexity to the totality of the factors in the paragraph above the human female fertility cycle matches the length of one of the most obvious cycles on earth that of the moon but is not tied to its periodicity. It generaly runs according to the woman’s own biology but does tie in and sychronize to some degree with women she lives with and is somewhat (but very subtly and eraticaly) related to sexual stimulus from men especialy in very young women.

Additional to all the other differences there is the difference between the baby delivered by a woman and an adult human. That difference is called the “degree of neotony”. Almost no creature has a greater degree of neotony and when one combines this degree of neotony with the degree of involvement and care a young human will generaly accept and seek from its mother this creates a greaer demand and matched capacity for mothering per individual human than almost any other earthly species.

These are actually only a few of the reasons why women are objectively one of the most fascinating and compelling subjects to which one could apply the human mind. I actually believe that one of the greatest windows for insight into the state of well-being, progress and potential of any society is to look at women as women within that society.

Here is a woman functioning in Acadian or Germano-Acadian home ‘s kitchen and living room where she plays a vital role in social and economic development in the family and community. The painting is in turn painted by another woman, my great-great-grandmother Regina Oubre Hollier. Dhe is drawing from childhood memories for the composition.”
Leaving out some comments about sex in our time I come to what I see as especially relevant here. Part of what taking sex seriously means.
“In a royalist or aristocratic high republican or a number of other regimes the family has a stature which can tie together the privacy of sex, affection and home with the qualities of a public institution.The modern era has largely abandoned this whole vast set of institutions and patterns which tie these huge parts of the world together.

The point of all this is not that women should have no meaning or existence outside of their role as sexual coun terparts to men and mothers to children. However, the point is to show thattheir is almost limitless capacity for development and discussion in that aspect both of women and of the idea of women. To know woman one must first renounce that kind of asexual androgyny which has had a great deal of credence and influence in the world of my lifetime. Men and women are profooundly different and that difference is vital, useful and profoundly energizing in a decent and healthy society.

There are many layers of sexual exchange and perception between men and women. The Bible is one of the sources for wisom and the perception of ages regarding the relations of men and women. In the iconic story of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis in the Bible Adam is the first man and his words upon seeing the first woman are memorable. As Genesis 2: 22b-25 states:
” When he brought her to the man the man said.
“This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;
This one shall be called “woman” for out of “her man” this one has bee taken.”
That is why a man leaves his mother an father and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.
The man and his wife were naked but they felt no shame.”

The extreme intimacy of the passage is in comparison to the anmials with whom Adam cannot marry or form an intimate partnership. But it remains a very intimate passage. There is almost nothing that has been mor under sustained attack for millenia than this excited, intimate and personal recognition by man of his mate in women. Real moral science ia very demading and elegant pursuit and thus is more often abandoned than pursued. However, real moral science must always take a careful measure of relations between the sexes.

I think it deserves to be said in this context that I believe in a moral struggle as a desirable thing. I find that those who are not struggling have usually settled for something bad. One of the powerful shaping forces of humanity as it is remains the strong belief that anything related to the relational structure of humanity must either be very ancient, fixed and setled or else a really blank slate upon which any given generation can write or draw whatever it wants. For me I think that the entire mystery and meaning of humanity is something quite different. Humans have numerous intrinsic qualities that cannot really be changed much in any generation. Yet one may face the future with confidence when aware of these strictures of the past and present. A generation and an individual can compose any vast number of varied tunes using these notes given by nature. By preserving and fully working the great musical tradition one can even enhance the range and delicacy of notes available to future generations of musicians. Sexuality and the role of women is one of the great musical worlds in which the human race can operate. It is an area where we all practice some form of art whether or not we even acknowledge it.

What evolution, the idea of original sin, reincarnation, eugenics and quite a few other theories about the proper living out of humanity have in common is the idea that we pass on something different to the future based on our actions. Humans may not agree on what the mechanism for passing things on is, nor what ought to be passed on, nor how that which is passed on relates to present behavior. But in many different ways and at many different levels of intensity we remind ourselves and are reminded by those we put in charge of our most serious thinking that we are changing the present of future generations by how we live out our own present here and now.

This is a rather serious business and humans are able to make rather substantial changes in the population in relatively short periods of time. One of the most notable struggles of human race is our struggle to define and make ourselves as a species. That our greatest project is ourselves is a perspective which gives great importance to waman’s involvement in the human adventure. One of the characterisitics of the modern era is that we expect the totality of sexual relations to be easily defined. Consider that terms like: harem, concubine, paramour, mistress, courtesan, sister-wife, rival, Abbess, novice, midwife, maid, lady-in-waiting, placement, princess, Queen, Official Mistress and countless others once denoted roles which were available to women in many cases simultaneously and which in huge numbers of places have all disappeared down to the last one. I write here not so much to change the world but more as any defeated soldier may write when he decides that before his life ends he wants to make really clear how badly he views this new order and the triumph of what he fought against. So for me I see layer upon layer of both personal defeat and the coming to an end of much of what makes the human species human. It goes back to my recurring theme thayt life has mostly been a nightmare.

One thing about sex and womanhood being very near the core of the human moral struggle is that the issues related to womanhood and sexuality are subject to the same regional and epochal variations as are other part of the human moral drama. From my point of view I may say that all humans are severely confused and diseased in their understanding of these things. However, I would not say that they or we all suffer from the same delusion or disease. We may all be in error but we are in distinct errors across the species. A loose translation of the Bible called the Catholic Living Bible translates a passage as follows:
Luke 11: 45-47a
“Sir,” said an expert in religious law who was standing there, ” you insult my profession, too, in what you just said.”
“Yes,” said Jesus, “the same horrors await you! For you crush men beneath impossible religious demands that you yourselves would never think of trying to keep. Woe to you!””

Sex is an area where evil intentions , evil plans and hate often come dressed up as morality. One of the greatest problems humanity faces is the problem of overcoming the advantages acrued by evil in human affairs once evil is recognized as a real thing. I think that for me sex is an aspect of the human condition which accentuates hoew badly flawed our species is and yet, at the same time, is the point of glory at which we can most resemble the species we were once meant to be.”

Leaving out more discussion of current events that helped the argument I resume with my argument itself. I think it is relevant in many ways..

“I do not believe that the story at the begining of the book of Genesis was written by Moses after visiting the origins of the human species in a time machine. I do not believe the writer had a Ph. D. in biology. I do not believe it is a book coded from another book which was largely a straight first hand bio-history of its time — that is what I believe about the Gospels. I am even willing to say that he early stories are myths which is a word that atheistic relativistic scholars love to use for them. However, I do think that they are true stories written to pass on ancient coded trruths and insights which come from miraculousy ancient parts of the human story. Why is so much in the Bible coded?

That is a question for a long an important note on another occasion. In this note we will examine a bit more of Adam and Eve. There are three phases of the sexual relationship betwwen the two. in very general terms I mean for one could argue for a dozen phases.

The first is the phase in Genesis 2: 22-25b which I have already quoted this is the relationship between Man and Woman which God intended as unique to the human species. This really reflected the Image of an ultimate divine nature. The qualities of that relationship are intimacy, passion, empathy, excitement sex, good bodily self-image and fertitlity. It sounds tiring to those of us with enough mileage but otherwise one who can think can see the logic and goodness of it.

To preserve this humanity needed God’s friendship and to avoid eating the fruit of the knowleddge of Good and Evil. The writer here is using code for cannibalism. Yes, that again. The passage says that iti is a tree in the middle of the garden of course humans are in the middle of their own world always. That on the day one eats it humans will die and again if humans are eaten then the human eaten will die. It brings knowledge of Good and Evil and we actually have a lot of data across many centuries and cultures to show that eating human flesh is a passage which brings cunning, insioght and moral guilt into human minds in a unique way whether the society endorses or forbids cannibalism.

The last set of relations is the abusive marrasige and the loss of God’s friendship which define behavior which is in the survivable margin for humans as we currently are. These last two phases of the story are descibed in Genesis Chapter three. We all are still living in the last phase at best from the story’s own point of view.

It goes far beyond my capacity in time and space in tis note to show instances of cultures where men have driven their lands into desert and ruin to make sure that women were sastarving and dispossessed and fit into one of three (to them) acceptable catgories hyper-breeding terrified slaves, spies or religiously deluded cattle reared as food. rthis of course has always included the need to kill and maim some large number of men who cannot overcome (or heroicaly resist overcoming) their lover for mothers, sisters, and female lovers. Some of the time homosexuals have led this misogynistic elte.

Life is often hell and human society often a sewer which exceeds my capcity to espress and usually it involves building things on one of two principles men hating women or women hating children. Often this is dressed up as religion or ideology but it is really about that. This engine allows the most foul and wothless kinds of people to amss almost all available power and resources. It has happened occasionaly since time imemorial.

The sexualy intense path of paradise requires lots of restriction and guidance in the real world. It always has unless you believe we may have had an unfallen Eden somewhere in the pre-historic past. But it is the path which produces real joy and love, wealth, pressure for progress and other necessities. I presume that almost everyone alive today is someone iI would consider fundamantally insane. But I do not take such a dim view of insanity as some do. Homosexuality is a condition of some sons of women which is in my view tolerable when those who are homosexual know it is alimiting thing and have the humility to see it as a speciai status with some rewards and some disease like qualities requiring a routine of self -care, or when they publicly acnkowledge it as a kind of loss in bio-sweepstakes in which they make the best out of a less than first place postion. But when they think as Mr. Hilton does they are evil men encouraging other evil men in a way which opens on to an ininite pool of evil.

Women are tied to certain kinds of inferiority too. the way a man is supposed to feel superior is in the act of achieving coital satisfaction. Unthinkably in allowing the killer and crusher in him to feel fed by her sufferings in pregnancy and child birth and then letting the good and protective part of him make it up to her in other ways. Women are supposed to have a capacity for maistakes as a class which is no the same in men. If women stopped getting pregnant and being a little optimistic about it when everything was bleak and horrible there would never be a brighter tomorrow. What is wrong is that there have for hundreds of centuries been people racing to the bottom giving women less and less of their share for breeding expenses as it were. There is a lot more I could say on this subject. Men have also been maimed and crippled by women in many ways and that is also part of the drama.”

I leave out an ending statement challenging  gynecologists and the Catholic Church to learn to make eachother better not worse. But basiacally this is the argument and the essay. That is my note on what the sexual values are  that might come into play. There is a lot that is in it and a lot that is not.

 iii. Other Sexual Relations and Practices

The Court is not just any place. There is an element of sexual freedom afforded by a Court Physician with a staff, strict rules of propriety and ones own police force which are distinct from the realities elsewhere. If this regime were launched it would be expected that the Court would allow some sexual realities in Court that it seeks to vigorously restrict in the realm. That does not mean there is no enforcement of a sexual code in fact the failure to enforce one is one of the greatest causes for the destruction of  any Court worth having. 

b.The Imperial House and issues of military and martial culture:

Another cultural area is the realtions between the House and Household and the military. This will not always be smooth but the military belonging to the House and the other forces in the reconstitutionalized America will shape the experience of life and community at court. The Court and this new regime will also help the military establishment which curretnly exists to revitalize and improve ties and relations with the society as a whole. Part of this American Revolution would be various ritual and formal tied between the Court and the service academies.  In the midst of all  this one can see how certain ancient traditions within the Acadian culture regarding the Christian faith dominant in our land could be relevant to this renewal of military culture especially as it is studied. In line with that I produce an essay I wrote on Face book over a year ago. 

  • Our Military Will be Brought into a Central Cultural Nexus

     

” Monday, April 6, 2009 at 11:28am 
Many of my fellow Americans are bearing arms in the service of their country in Afghanistan and Iraq.These are the countries in which the US is more or less officially engaged in a war. We have a large number of people, mostly young men who wear uniforms, follow schedules, bear weapons, drill, fight and kill as well as dying and being wounded in those two distant lands.

Perhaps they know Jesus as the Prince of Peace. I certainly know and honor Christ as the holder of that Title. Many of them are certainly Christians and it is to the Christians who serve in the US military that I primarily address this note. I think war should be avoided whenever it is right and possible to do so. Jesus said “I came that you might have life and have it abundantly”, can it be acceptable to Christian families to have their sons, daughters, wives and husbands far away causing pain and injury to other people?

Smaller numbers of Americans are bearing arms in service of the country which has renewed my passport in Korea, Germany, Japan, Cuba, and on ships and planes around the world. In addition there are farflung bases on quasi-American soil or a least not state soil. Tiny detachments hold a position for our interests in American Samoa and larger ones in Guam. There are bases in very powerful and not so powerful countries with whom we have had historic ties — these range from the United Kingdom to the Federated States of Micronesia. Then we have a fleet of nuclear powered and nuclear armed submarines prowling the oceanic depths. This is an impressive amount of coverage for a nation’s military. I actually find the role of the miitary as an institution very interesting. However it is also true that I am interested in the way our toops are mentally affected by their service. I wish all American military service personnel well as military service personnel. That is a simple postion for me to take. As long as I carry an American passport, have credits with the Social Security Agency and vote in our elections in Louisiana as it now and foreseeably exists — then the USA is the country I support as mine and the very important role of the military in that national team is one I have to root for in their role. Some people in uniform are also brave, honest, decent and patriotic. I like those qualities. However, I do not cheer on our folks in uniform because I think they all have these qualities. Rather, I think otherwise.”

I will leave out some of my favorite stuff from this note that I am quoting and reproducing here. However, although I ahave accepted that this may be the longest post in my life I am trying to keep it a little shorter than it might be. I resume:

“I think that Christianity is entirely relevant to the discussion of war and arms in the United States. I think that Easter week especially is a relevant time to join the two discussions. It may prove to be a very thankless task indeed. I think of my countrymen and women who are coming from the aging congregations of urban Catholic Cathedral parishes, small rural Catholic chapels, incense filled Orthodox churches in ethnic neighborhoods, hardshell Baptist churches on red dirt roads near old sawmills and bait shops, Mega Churches with Protestant preacching and modern audio-visual equipment and the average sized Catholic churches filled with families. I think of young men of 17, 18, 20, 24, 25 and 27 heading off to boot camps, training, transports and war. I think of the secular ideas which guide so much of the military structure and the whispers and influences of men as diverse as George Washington, Hitler, Clausewitz, Mohammed, Mao Zhe Dong, Napoleon, Ghengis Khan, Horatio Nelson, Andrew Jackson and Patton who may influence their thoughts about war. I have nothing against their learning from, and studying either the good men or the bad. However, I am driven against all sane reasoning to put down a few of my own thoughts about Jesus Christ and the Christians view of war and military service.

Jesus’s Apostles had nicknames, given names or nommes de guerr that included: the Rock, Sons of Thunder, the Zealot ( a member of a known military and anti-Roman organization) and were accustomed to life threatening situations. Crucifixion and stoning were among their regular subjects of conversation. Jesus also spoke propheticaly of the coming siege of Jerusalem. Is this post of engaged observation all their Savior has to offer those who serve in the military and honor his name?'”

I related the note to my own life. We will skip that here:

 “Jesus said ” Do you think I have come to bring peace to the Earth? I assure you that I have not come to bring peace but fire and a sword”. Is a sense of social revolution or social consciousness all these young people can bring into the upheaval of armed conflict from the one who is their model of perfection?

My grandfathers both served in the US military. I have a rather complex and rather large warrior heritage. It extends in varied directions. My mother’s father Cecil Bruce Germillion served as a bombadeer instructor in the Army Air Corp. My paternal grandfather served as an officer in the US Navy. He said he commanded a golrified private yacht in the Gulf of Mexico early in the war. Later he was part of the large fleet of vessels headed towrd the invasion of Japan’s home islands when the atomic bomb ended the war. He used to say that although he saw some action in the Pacific his real anxiety was just as great in the Gulf. He said only once but with great passion that while in the Pacific he was well armed and supported in the Gulf he and his next subordinate (perhaps an Ex. O. or a Chief I do not recall) sometimes referred to the yacht secretly as the “USS Sitting Duck” which had to do with his evaluation of the vessel’s capacity to take on a wolfpack of German submarines in full out combat.

When Jesus was criticized for failing to keep some laws of the Sabbath by gleaning grain on that day he defended his behavior by sighting the example of King David who ate the Show bread because David was a king and he and his men were under the duress of warfare. Is Jesus’s example merely that of seeing his ministry in the pattern of military operations in his familial and national history?

I am a child of the sixties. I lived in New york and London in the 1960s and had relatives who were on elite college campuses during the heyday of the Peace Movement and the movement known as the Hippies. I never really felt that wearing black hats made some people bad and wearing white ones made other people good. I do not have the space and presume of the reader’s time enough to really cover the personal aspect fully. I am not a trusting blind supporter of the military or its policies. I would not describe myself that way at all. I am not ashamed of my own lack of courage or experience with conflict or danger. I would not describe myself that way at all.

So I wonder what I might say to those spending Holy Week and Easter in the forward zone or any other zone of the US military. First, I would say that Jesus did have you in his heart as he prayed for you that night in the Garden of Gethsemane becuase you are one of those who has believed. That is a great comfort in many ways. But it is also true that is evidence that God holds you to a personal standard. A Christian cannot believe that our personal lives and consciences disappear entirely into the duties and rights of a military force or a country. God will still hold you accountable for all that you do and become while you are in the services. God will not expect you to behave as if you were not a soldier, sailor, marine or airman but he still sees your heart and weighs your deeds. Of course when Jesus taught us to pray “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” he no doubt included martial trespasses in the economy of God’s mercy. God’s mercy is certainly a very big part of what we celebrate on Holy Week and Easter.

On Palm Sunday we remember Jesus, the Son of David entering the City of David. We remember that the crowds were shouting “Hosana, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” Jesus had many who supported him his claims and his ministry.He did not shy away from leadership, rank or office and he was very open and brave.

So far everything I have written in this note is something I can live with and not regret. But now I am going to start the part that I already regret before having written it. In a sense all war is wrong and even military service. I say that as one who believes that in the Holy center of the Universes around the throne of God the angels wear and use weapons and are organized in armies. But ideally and perfectly there would be no war or planning for war. So I am writing this to an audience I want to encourage who at the same time I do not hesitate to say should ideally be doing something else. I look out at the world and the church today and feel that I too must do something immoral and which will stink in my conscience for a long time. I feel that I must reveal the some of secrets of a society which has done great good and kept its secrets since the time of Jesus. I do not see Knightly orders, Popes,their Catholic Majesties of Spain or anyone else standing between me and this day. So I write what is precious to me hoping I am not violating Jesus’s injunction not to throw pearls before swine.

The secrets of our ancient order which I am going to reveal are hidden in the gospels themselves. Are there things hidden in the Gospels? It is a reasonable question.

“The disciples approached him (Jesus) and said, ” Why do you speak to them in parables?”
He said to them in reply, “Because knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven has been granted to you but to them it has not been granted, To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not even what he has will be taken away. That is why I speak to them in parables, because they “look but do not see and hear but do not isten or understand”.” Matthew 13:10-13 New American Bible.

Jesus was, among all the other things he was, a warrior. He did not do many of the things that leaders who inspire others have done. He did not besiege or sack cities like Mohammed or his own namesake Joshua. He did not burn down the temples of idols like these same men. He did not rejoice in blood and mayhem like Ghengis Khan or the Viking Pagans. Your savior was a warrior who took his joy in weddings, Passover feasts, the Eucharist he was founding, flowers, birds and children. He did not take his joy in the sufferings of others. Our age is very different from the spirit of that secret warrior Jesus but nonetheless in following the warrior’s path you are not straying from the path of Jesus’s own experience.

Josephus either implies or states that during the siege of Jerusalem the Jews turned to cannibalism and ate one another. People eating other people is a huge and undiscussed part of human history and experience. It is one of the most important struggles of human history. Many societies have been proudly and openly cannibalistic. Many people in the world in 2009 are cannibals. Rome was a place where public law and morals condemned cannibalism. It was a place where officials would have been ashamed to admit to having dealings with merchants trafficking in human flesh. I know to my own satisfaction that here were non Jews eating and butchering Jews at that siege. By mentioning cannibalism at all, even blaming it on the Jews, Josephus put his own life at risk. In Rome there were a group of unofficial but sophisticated pirates who participated in the war machine by buying slaves on the cheap after battles and sieges as well as capturing all they could in the invaded country. They killed these people, often with torture and sport and then made sausage or pies out of them mixing the human flesh with pork.They made a very good profit on this in part because they worked the people as slaves before reducing them to food and extorted knowledge about the new lands fallen before the Roman banner. For this purpose they located large herds of swine near the lands to be destroyed in advance. They were wealthy, powerful, cunning, well armed, possessed of assasins corps and called themselves demons. They had a handful of key agents throughout every Roman Imperial governnment. They were an order older than Rome itself and not entirely Roman. There were at least tens of thousands of men at arms at their command both in the Empire and in non Roman lands. These were the enemies Jesus fought with 12 Apostles, 72 zealous highly trained disciples divided into groups of six for each Apostle. Then he had 38 reserve guards. All were also trained in charitable ministry and his preaching this was not a made up addition later on and yet with 133 part-timers(the ten not enumerated are my last nod towards a disappearing tradition) and the women officials and crowds who supported them Jesus opposed one of the most fierce and powerful forces ever to have existed.

The events of Jesus’s war are chronicled in specific events:
Event One:
Matthew 8:22-27 / Mark 4: 35-41
Jesus calms the storm at Sea

Event Two:
Matthew 8:28-34 / Mark 5:1-20
Jesus crosses the sea of Galilee
Demons are confronted
a herd of swine are destroyed
captive freed
Jesus leaves the region with the ones remaining very upset

Event Three:
Matthew 14: 13-21 / Mark 6;34-44
Jesus feeds 5000 people mysteriously
the disciples are instructed to collect all the fragments

Event Four:
Matthew 14:22-33 / Mark 6:45-52
Jesus is seen walking on the water with Peter.

Event Five:
Mark 8:1-10
Jesus feeds 4000 people. Mark makes it clear that these were multiple events.

Event Six:
Matthew 16: 21-23 / Mark 8: 31-33
Jesus begins to predict the Passion and Crucifixion in Jerusalem as inevitably the end of his life.

Jesus and his elite units used to wait for the worst storms on the Sea of Galilee. They crossed the sea in those storms under his fearless leadership. They opened the early pens located by the demons there in anticipation of the Roman destruction of the Jews and they liberated the prisoners. They then drove the pigs from the demons herds into the sea. Jesus was a carpenter and he located wooden buthcering sites at hudden spots in the out in the lake. The crews would remove nets filled with rocks and the rafts would float to the surface. Then his crew would attach inflated pig skins and pig bladders to increase bouyancy. On these non freeboard platforms they would slaughter the pigs and butcher them into boneless slabs of fish shaped meats. They would dump the entrails, guts, bones and heads in the lake. Knowledge of these dumps enbaled him to instruct fisherman as to where to put down their nets to get a great catch. Then they would cover the platforms with nets filled with rocks and arrive at shore near guarded ovens. Reusing fish bones frm each feeding and buying distressed fish from other fishermen with knowledge of where great catches could be found they would take a breading and adhere two pork steaks to the fish skeletons. They mixed these porkfish with regular bread and fish and fed thousands repeatedly. This also attracted donations from those who wanted to contribute something and these resources funded a large ministry of healing and teaching. Jesus constantly taught that eating unclean food (such as pork) did not make someone imoral. Once Peter and Jesus were seen using these platforms it was inevitable that Jesus would be killed. He chose to make this happen in a very specific public way in Jerusalem and create pressures on the demons.

After cleansing the Temple, Jesus managed to give on last speech to a huge crowd before being arrested and killed. He said two things at once. To his disciples he said that he was the living water and if they recognized him and believed in him then he would flow out of their hearts and meet their needs for courage and peace of soul. To the handful of demon spies the same words literaly were: if you recognize me from the stormy waters, I am the water that made your guards thirst no more and living water (blood) flow from their chest.

Jesus was not a great general, he had no palaces, published glories,nor vast armies and suffered more than he made his enemies suffer. He spent time healing, forgiving and seeking peace, he was humble and meek at many times (not always meek and almost never mild) but he was a warrior. In terms only of skill and bravery he was as he was at everyhting– arguably the best there has ever been. Yes, I mean that seriously. Your churches and mine may in the end condemn me for what I write and I think his contribution to war is lost in the mists of time. But your Savior has not left you as orphans in this world of war. There are no simple answers, no excuses, no bloodlust but the Prince of Peace was a man of war and you need not doubt him as you celebrate his legacy in an armed camp.”

c.The connection of the Imperial House and the royal traditions within our history.

There are images and portrayals of royalty and royalism thoughout  much of our society and such episodes in our history. There are also numerous royalist regimes. Not all of our relations and anlses of things would get easier and better. But it seems that America can afford a royalist regime, needs one and so to me it seems the results will be mostly beneficial.  

The King of Hawaii greeting Captain Cook

 

 Joining history and popular culture with a publi9cly established royalty would meet real needs that people have. Needs that keep expressing themselves whether or not anyone pays attention.

Kimberly Williams with two girls in th movie the Princess Diaries

 

d. Believing in and Understanding  a Legitimate American Royal Monarchy starting with the Keys of the Line.

While I have not named the five Princes des Grand Familles or the potential Emperor who is operating as a Basileus Arkadios in secret or in some places as what is called a “Wide Open Secret”  there is a great deal that could be learned and understood simply by a solid reading of the best and better books and articles on Acadian history and the Cajun Renaissance going on from about 1960 to the present.  It is a good bet that these six men and others will have a great deal in common with the people described in the most accurate books and articles.  It is also likely that they will have been formed by experiences and cultural influences which the books and articles  decribe. I want to give some idea of who the Basileus Arkadios could be by saying who some of the previous ones have been. This revelation as it were is  called the “keys of the line” or “Les Cles des Nommes des Rois”. If this regime is established it will be the first open reign of a Basileus Arkadios in a long time. However it is acceptable to publish the keys of line of kings stopping short of th living king.

   i. Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil was the third Broussard to hold the title he held it from Acadie in what is now Nova Scotia to the Part of Louisiana that is now Acadiana. Every Basileus was a Broussard until Governor Mouton. Joseph Broussard was both my ancestor and the ancestor of my ex-wife.

ii.Governor Mouton was the only Basileus in the New World to abdicate except to start an interregnum a bit early when cleary dying. He abdicated in favor of General Mouton who died of wounds received in the War Between the States while still a fairly young man. Neither of these two Mouton Kings is my ancestor.

iii.Severin   Leblanc was elected King and the Leblancs were elevated from the highest ranking High Chiefly Clan to the Lowest Princely Clan. In other words they were neighbors in protocol rank and his family’s relative ranking did not change. The line above him was moved below him.  Every king from him to Dudley Leblanc was a Leblanc. I am descended  from Severin but not from Dudley. However, one of Dudley’s daughters was reared by my grandfather Chief Justice Frank W. Summers’s brother Clay and his wife. Dudley was the last king named Leblanc in the line.

This would be a good place to search through this blogs pages and posts if one is really interested. I am not entirely sure what is on this site myself but on my Facebook  profile I have a great deal more information available. Among the thousand books listed on one of the applications there as books I have read there are many books on the subjects related to the line of Acadians and their experience although not written specificaly about the topic of the secret royal line. In addition, I have relevant notes there which do not appear here.   But I do want to try to make clearer the significance of Greek heritage to those who may not have thought much about it.

I want to quote from another part of the same essay where I got my own words about the importance of Rome’s having created a  Capital City for Western Civilization. 

  • “” I suppose that prior to really discussing Western Civilization one ought to define the terms “Western” and “Civilization”. That is certainly how Socrates would have gone about it and he is certainly one of the major fountains of whatever Western Civilization turns out to be. However, there is no group of people here to stand in for the young Athenian aristocrats I would speak with if I were him. Socrates is a major literary figure but was not a writer. His talent was for leading discussions. From his example of course we get the term Socratic method. The socratic method whether written of in upper or lower case letters is still the principal technique in American law schools. I of course attended one such twice.

I have a fondness for Western Civilization. It strikes me as a thing worth learning about and keeping in perspective as one of the biggest and best things humans have done. However, it also strikes me as a flawed thing with many acts of wrongdoing which can be laid at its door. I also think that more than any other people the Chinese have reason to be a little paranoid as to why we have developed such an obsession with the study of Western Civilization under just that exact title. This note will not only deal with Western Civilization.

I think that all of human greatness is a subject and a reality far broader than Western Civilization. In fact I find that Humanity is far more rich and complex a topic than Civilization iself. Civilization is a mode of being ewhich is not an unmitigated good in fact. Civilization is many things but it is always a gamble there is a great deal of gambling in the structure of a real and honest civilization.Civilization causes us to all give up many things we want and could want more. Civilization causes us to feel a need for and consume things we might not otherwise consume.These dissaciations are very costly and there must be off-setting good results to justify them. Many patterns of life are determined by the civilization itself or its large corporate and collective organs. A vital and basicaly good civilization has an element of institutional preservationism, an element of planning some structured sharing. Civilizations without those things soon cease to deserve the designation. These are elements combined with a structure of optimism and gambling that is essential to the civilized stance and point of view.

Those civilizations which do not have an element of gambling in their structure have much greater evil making things go and are in fact not really civilations they are to real civilations what the modern writers following Stoker’s fictional vampire Dracula is to an average human. They keep up the appearances of life but without many of its most vital processes. Dracula is all about death and in the sun he is ashes byt he claims to be immortal and does go in a sort of life for a very long time.

Unless a society is renewed continuously and in a way which is authentic then there is no way it can remain a real civilization indefinitely. I am fully certain that many civilzations are almost entirely dead before the force which actually destroys them appears on site.I have had a feeling much of my life that the civilization into which I was born had huge problems in its inner resources and workings. I have often felt that my life was really a profound hell in many ways. I still often feel that way.

I have written a lot about Jesus in these notes. I have also dealt a great deal with other forms and leaders who were Jews, as he was. Jews have played a large role in Western civiliaztion but (though oddly Jew has come to mean someone who does not follow Jesus and is sure about it ) Jesus is their greatest flowering out into the world and is one of the very tiny number of people bron before 1500 who truly envisaged his legacy as bringing something to all peoples and cultures of which he knew or did not know during his lifetime. He was an outgrowth of Jewishness and its highest expression in that regard. We may turn to this subject again in this note. But to sum up the Jewish thing is too much about just Jews on the one hand and about all humans on the other hand to be the direct foundation and centerpiece of Western Civilization. If one wants to make a silly and ethnocentric error which is the least incorrect then this would be it,”Western Civilization is spelled -G-R-E-E-K”. If one wants to speak of Eastern Civilzation one should know lots about Japan, India and the Eastern part of Arab tradition. But if one wants to make the ethnocentric silly error which is least incorrect then it would be, “Eastern Civilization is spelled -C-H-I-N-A”. Greece and China aren’t even close to the whole story but nonetheless one could never exhaust either of their contributions to Western and Eastern Civilization respectively. They are of course very different countries.

I am proud to say that I speak truly deplorably horrid Greek and surpass it with almost superhuman butchering and botching of Madarin Chinese. I think when one speaks these languages as badly as I do there is a sort of automatic respect which is born within one. I do not write at length in either of these languages. I do write badly at length in quite a few languages. However not in AEllada or Putong Hua.

I think that reading Homer, Plato and Aristotle are essential to being well educated in the lore of Western Civilization I certainly openly advocate such readings. I have occasion to teach a few young boys whatever I wished for a few months full time on several different occasions and I have always set up a schedule of a number of subjects rotating through each week. Typicaly there have been five or so of these subjects but usually on has been the Bible and another has been what I call the Classics which always starts with Homer, Plato and Aristotle and not necessarily in chronological order.

Much like the Bible, Greek thought has been co-opted and sometimes hi-jacked by a variety of people with agendae which were intensely important to them and which were formed largely by reactions to the points of view held and expressed by other people trying to control the discussion of these same writers and ideas. However, the Greek world is truly very vast and very diverse.The Greece of Lykos the Wolf-man king of Arcadia and of Alexander the great are very clearly connected but are vastly different from one another. The Greek civilization of Septuagint and the Ptolemy dynasty are profoundly different again.

I could read and teach only Greek ideas and culture all my life and only that and scarcely mak a good start. However, Homer, Plato and Aristotle are the things I have repeatedly chosen to teach when offered choices. They bring a person into the experience of the great Greek phenomenon of experience.

The New Testament is also written in Greek of course. it is drawn from sources written in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic but all of those ancient books are lost and the texts closest to the best of them are the Gospels in Koine Greek. Christianity is certainly vital to the history of Western Civilization. But Christianity has universal obligations. A good Pope must be especilly loyal to the city of Rome and also have a love for Jerusalem. However, a good Pope must also have some real space in his heart for the good of Beijing, Delhi and Lesotho not only the people who live there but even the pre-Christian cultures that flourished there. To be Vicar of Christ and not a great scandal is to be the vicar of the one who sent the Good News to the ends of the Earth.

The pre- latin people and other Italians, the Celts, The non Hellenic Egyptians, The Ethiopians, the Germans and the Norse each have a substantial history with Greater Greece that predates their own written history outside of Greek history. All of these groups who made a substantial contribution to Western Civilization from the inside were at least a bit Hellenized before they emerged as there own sort of thing. On could describe modern Western Civilization as that cultural system which emerged from:
1.The Hellenization of Ancient Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
2.The Romanization of the Hellenic World.
3.The Christianization of the Roman Empire.
4. The Barbarization of the Christian Roman Empire.
5. The Fashioning of Christendom from the Teuton lands and the crumbling Empire’s pieces.
6.The survival and change of Christendom under the assault of Islam and the Norse raids and settlements.
7. The Renaissance process of remaking Christendom mostly with ancient Hellenic ideas.

The many important things that have happened in Western Civilization since about 1600 AD depend on all of these foundational transformations are react intensely to them. These 4000 years from 2400 BC to 1600 made Western Civilization a definite and real thing which still remains identifiable. Things have gotten better and worse since 1600 in all kinds of ways but much has stayed the same. I do think however that we are in a place where we could lose all that is left of this civilization.

I think that Western Civilization is in serious trouble. Things have gotten bad in ways sufficiently broad and mysterious tro be difficult to detect analyze or appreciate. However, our civilization will have to play some very fine poker or lose it all in my view. I am doing what I am currently able to get done to address that crisis but it certainly is not nearly enough. I know that for me society has always been flunking and yet I see the trend as downward towards worse and worse performacn on the scales I am using to measure with in these matters.”

  • Many people have mattered but none have mattered more than the hellenic peoples in the development of modern Western Civilization.  The Acadians and there royalty provide a vital link top that great source of culture and achievement for America and that link would be secured in the new Empire. 
  • e. Understanding the Acadian Royal Tradition and the people and structure of the Imperial House as Community and Family 

    One truth that will be obvious if it is considered is that any House moving into this role from America would be moving from relative darkness to relative light in many ways. 

    i. What we look like around here 

    Remeber I am descended from many of the local kings and so regardless of anything else looking at my family can give you an idea of what the House might look like. More or less, you can see some of our feature if you try.  

    My father frank Wynerth Summers II catching a fish offshore in his younger years.

     

    My young father fishing captures his basic looks and some of our relatives attitudes about many things too. He was and is an outdoorsman and many Acadians are that way. In taking my nieces and nephew to ride an elephant they also are building a spirit of adventure and a bond with nature. 

    This is me in the reddish shirt taking my two nieces and a nephew to ride an elephant

     

     My ex-wife was a Broussard by birth. She could have become a Basilissa under our rules by marrying man who was or could become a Basileus. This is us relaxing at Sea Island Georgia’s Cloisters hotel.  

    My ex-wife Michelle Denise Broussard Summers

     

    I am a white Anglo-Acadian. Some people are whie and almost pure Acadian others are white Germano-Acadians. It is not to hard if you grow up learning the many fine and also the large distinctions.

    Loraina and Sally (W.G-r. & L.T-t) my student assistants at a tecnical university in China

    I call them Loraina and Sally sometimes. Student Assistants in China.These young ladies were dear friends, assistants and quite attractive. Chinese can hold na outer title and a contract with an Acadian noble in our tradition but not be Basilissa. Nobody half Negro can be a full member of the Tribe when it is duly constituted but can vote and keep some hereditary rights in a differnt waywith other races children of mixed race fall into complicated rules but are more or less members of the tribe.  Perhaps someone who was a fourth Chinese and three Fourths Acadian could be a Basileus but it has not happened.

    Because of the lack of official status for so long we have lost the capacity to make our system fully work.  However,we have our racial protocols and if the new regime were established they would restore themselves in all their complexity. I return to quote again from the same note or essay which I myself wrote and used to illustrate my ideas on the Capital City and on the importance of the Greek heritage of the Arcadians-Acadians. The Ethnos Arkadios is multi racial in the broadest sense of what the Ethnos Arkadios is but its fabric and essence and continuity is a community of white people. People of other races can play important roles and relations can get complex but the white racial identity is near the center of things.

    I discussed the issue of race in the same note on Western Civilization in which I discussed Greece and trhe importance of a capital city. I retrun to quoting that note now: 

    “One quality of Western Civilization is what some friends of mine and I used to call “the unbearable whiteness of being” that was a pun because of a movie called The Unbearable Lightness of Being. White Racism, White Supremacy, White Identity Preference and Snow on All Mountains are actually all distinct politico-social views of whiteness in the history of Western Civilization. There at least two and a half people left alive who can rationaly discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each position and the differences each has with each other position.” later I went on to discuss how this works with the dumbing down of other discussions besides race.

    I discussed in very harsh terms my opinion that Geramny and Austria cannot ever be fully rehabilitated as part of Western Civilization and the World Community until they devote great and known resources to building ups a great Israel. I regar those countries as very second class.

    I discuss this:

    “Having said this do I think the Hapsburg’s empire for so long was one of humanity’s great achievements?
    YES, I do.

    Do I think Charlemagne was deserving to be called at least a Father of Europe?
    Yes, I do.

    Do I think that Goethe, Saint Boniface, Meister Eckhart, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven made stellar contributions to Western Civilization?
    Yes, I do.

    Do I think the Germanic English despite murderous scandals, silliness and stealing credit from other Celtic Brits or socio-morally solvent?
    Yes, not rich but solvent.

    Do I think that the right wing Teuton chauvinistic Austrian Patriot Prince Meternich was a collosus in modern times and a fine Christian?
    Yes I do.

    So how can I justify my point view? Well, if for ten generations one has mixed feeling about hardworking neighbors of moderate talent who have gotten rich partly through hard-work and thrift then one says they are rich. But if one sees two generations sell all the furniture for drugs, burn down the house, beat and chain their daughters as naked prostitutes and paper the town in hot checks then one is entitled to give them a distinct credit rating than before. Money in this metaphor stands for morality. The neighbors stand for Germany and Austria. I refuse, knowing I offend some fine Germans on this list of friends to say I regard those countries as legitimate or their people as having face in Western Civilzation. They are the very, very poor relations of the family for at least as long as I am likely to live. The whites of the South are known for prejudice and holding a dim view of their neighbors both justly and unjustly. I know there are music groups and artists and others who call themselves ” niggers” without offense and I think policing language is doable but very tricky work. But I assure you that on occasion I have used all the contempt any white southerner ever put in any word into my greetings of Germans and Austrians.

    How they can show their faces in the world and do nothing to deserve it as a country makes me sick. These countries are not alone among the guilty but they disgust me.”

    I said that in my view Western Civilization was mostly dead before World War II. Enslaving the many low ranking Nazis and bring them abroad and also settling in German Americans and other German colonials not infected as the elite would have been a better approach.  I also suggested the sales of the property of elite companies and people would have gone half to other restoration of Germany and Austria as client states and half to build a new Israel. Tet I admit the Jews had been corrupted by their history and the Germans had some grievances ( without going into detail): 

    “I do think Germans had some grievances and there are real problems they needed to address and some of them involved a great people dispossessed of their homeland long ago and not by Germans. However, the behavior of the Third Reich is the essence of obscenity The stench of it still clogs up the breathing passages of the world. I can’t take seriously our international system founded on so little punishment of such great offenses. Jews, Poles, Russians and intellectuals have rivers of blood calling for vengeance. We are not a church and I don’t much want to hear about of absurd plattitudes.”

    I contrast the Third Reich’s view with the ancient Greek struggle to understand race. Then I jumped to the Nordic link to the Third Reich which tempers German and Austrian guilt although it remains vast : 

    “So we can tell from a document discussing the fact that Socrates was indeed a white man what race meant in ancient Greece. It continues to men about the same thing to me now. Christianity tempers my views perhaps. The issue of Greece brings us to the Nordic peoples. Western Civilization has tow very distinct historic poles. The diffusion throughout the world has been important but now we are living in what is ultimately a world civilization. When for millenia Western Civilization really was autonomous it had a North Pole which was Scandinavia and a South Pole which was Ethiopia — culturally speaking. Stockholm is founded on a set of rhythyms and patterns that really do not flow from Greece. Ethiopia is also. However, whether they know it or not both have long been inextricably in the orbit of the Hellenic and post-Hellenic world. This is the very real orbit and rim of of culture that delineated the edges of Western Civilization when Eastern Civilization and this civilization had not really merged to create a world civilization.

    I would like to spend more time writing about Ethipoia than I am going to spend. I would like to explore African, Arab and Greek confluence. I would like to talk of ancient mixed race peoples and of the Shebaitic House of Solomon’s role in Judaism and Christianity. However, I will not get to that in any detail in this note. A great deal has been thought and written about how black these people were or were not. But I will turn instead to some of the the whitest people anywhere. I will instead speak of the Norse.

    Hitler divided the Germanic people into Alpine, Nordic, Jewish-influenced and miscellaneous racial types. The ideal he was trying to move towards was the Nordic type. No group takes its hereditary appearance as seriously as the Norse and I have no doubt some of the really evil minds that will never appear in history’s account but which shaped the Third Reich were Norsemen. I truly do believe thatthey are the most geneticaly distinct people in the world all in all. In many ways they resemble the true Mongols of the East but they are also very different. The Scandinavian countries are Norway, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland for people and groups who call it Sutherland. The Scandinavians have almost always been a great race and occasionaly a mighty civilization. They have seldom been a good people all in all and never been a great civilization.

    Scandinavians have visited every part of the world and burnt the records of their travels they reshaped the culture of Ireland, Sicily and Russia. There has never been an historic China or Japan that did not have Scandinavian pirates somewhere in the background. Scandinavians traded in maps and technology in very significant ways and helped many people break out of technological impasses with the help of technology taken from neighbors. The ninth and tenth centuries AD are known as the eras of their journeys. However I am aware of another tradition. Outside of history and archaeology there are tales with the ring of truth of widespread war between Acadians that went on for almost a thousand years. In Acadian lore Scandinavians come from a people in Westernmost China who were isolated and very advanced who traveled for completely unimaginable reasons to rejoin their ancient and primitive related tribes who were almost a forgotten myth and lived in the frozen North. In the travel they passed through ancient Arcadia as slaves, refugees, pirates, princes and wizards for a few generations. It was this reunion which really marks the start of Scandinavian culture. I do not think that Scandinavians share any belief in this tale but it is what I believe.”

    Despite some rather critical remarks the New regime would have on Peer in the Ten of the High Imperial Nobility who would be Chief of at least part of the Scandinavian Settlers of Minnesota and Wisconsin.  In addition One of the  Twenty Peer- Electors of the Kingdom of Louisiana and also another member of the Ten will be  Herzog der Flussesbanken, Chef des Communites de Cote des Alleman. However if you wish to know our views on Acadian appearance you must first know Classical and Arcadian Greek statuary, Byzantine Royal Mosaic portraits. Then for the more Hebrew side of the ideal look at Byzantine images of Jesus Christ. For the darker Central Asian idea of our ideal see the Pompeiian image of Alexander the Great in the vast battle mosaic. This is to skew towards the Norse, Celtic and Germanic marriages in France. But we have no interest in leaving our heritage of physical appearance entirely behind at its Greek roots.  

    Beyond all this I turned to the Celts in my note on Western Civilization. The Celts and the Hebrews are two groups tied to both Acadian and American roots and who are well represented and well challenged under the proposed new regime. Here’s a bit about the Celts:

    “Without discussing the Celts of Vercingetorix’s brave fall, the letter to the Galatians, Brian Boru’s victory over Scandinavian kings and the beauty of their art how can one discuss this civilization. Ancient Greece was largely defined by trade with Celts and war with Persia. However neither St. Columba nor the Irish Republican army will make it into this note. The Celts were a high and splendid Barbarism which Rome broke because unlike the Greeks they made provinces in preference to colonies. Greeks learned to make provinces when Alexander conquered the Persian Empire. But they never really loved to do this. Colonies, Polises and Kingdoms stirred the Greek Soul. Only in the Eastern Roman Empire did Greeks learn to love the system of Empires and provinces. So the Greeks warred with Celts but they always lived together and enriched eachother. The Greek’s resented and opposed Roman influence but could adjust to it more easily than the Celts. That is why one thinks of Ireland and Wales when one says Celts although the culture extended from the British Isles to Turkey”. 

    I am not going blind into the idea of acknowledging the complexity and difficulty of making America authentic. It would be easier to govern if America had only developed into a less complex nation of a hundred million less diverse people. That is the truth. But if we accept the struggle implicit in what we truly are it can assuredly make us great. I have to stop somewhere and I think I will stop here because it is time to stop. I had meant to cover some of the darker problems of the House as it would emerge from the  shadows to full public life. However,  I will do that in a distinct context and at a later date I think.

     

     

    The Mental Ferment for Men (and Women) who Might Foment an American Revolution: Part Two

    The question that supersedes and eclipses all other questions in this kind of discussion is whether or not it is really possible that the United States of America will enter a period of constitutional transformation. That sort of change which falls into the largest definition of the word “revolution”. Then (and I admit that there may be revolution at all any time soon) one can come to the question of whether or not such a change will be occasioned by the relatively sane, patriotic and productive citizens of which the Tea party is one major grouping or whether change will come from forces which are more destructive, opportunistic and perhaps more largely foreign as well. Hunger and the threat of  large-scale killing of citizens by the government are the most common reasons history shows us for people to seek to change their government. It may be that we need change but is there much chance of making real change. I think there is a less than fifty percent chance. However, Americans have a sense of creeping tyranny and a desire to react to it that is real. This is also rooted in their history.  “Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” Thomas Jefferson — even republican democracies in form can be tyrannical. That is both true and a truth which the Founders believed. Jefferson was the most democratic in philosophy of the first rank of Founding Fathers and he certainly had a distrust for democracy and did not ever use it as a synonym for good government as we often see being done today. 

    In this four part posting I am exploring what an American Revolution might mean.  I am looking at what it could come out of and where it might bring us.  Here, in this post I focus more on our Revolutionary Heritage. By the fourth part I should be more focused on the Revolutionary future. 

    Other founders such as Adams were much more openly critical of the whole espousing of Democracy as an ideal and they did not believe that they had intended to create a democracy nor that such had been the result of there efforts. Adams was on the committee which assisted Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence  and approved it before submitting it to Congress. Yet he did  not hesitate to declare. “Democracy… while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” John Adams There are many elements besides democracy which are supposed to be operating in our country’s governance and conventual. We are a country founded on getting these mechanics right under an accepted and specific constitution which provides the ground rules and lines of operation for the “game” which is government and indirectly culture and society.  There is no way that people can all be persuaded to understand the same questions as being priorities nor to come up with an understanding that the same answers are always right and especially not right for all.  Naive optimism is how our enemies have described our nation’s political philosophy but it is not fair even to our most idealistic founder: “An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.” Thomas Jefferson. There is more than conflict resolution here that is intended. Federalism itself allows some conflicts not to be resolved and states to live under different laws while all still are participating in the great American society with its greater resources and grand purposes.  Far from Term Limits for everyone I believe that in a new constitutional order we should have three US Senators for each State. Let popular elections choose two as has become habitual but let a third one be elected by the state legislatures (as in the original constitution) but let this one officer be subject to certain qualifications tests (not too onerous) and be elected for a longer term. Let former Presidents, retired General Officers and the US and retired  Justices of the US Supreme Court serve on a small per diem and their pensions as Censors. Let them control the Census now taken by the Commerce Department and also create districts and apportion seats for Congress. Let them serve independently and for life. Let them also hold some power over the organs for ethics in the federal government.  Radical as this may seem there is evidence the founders thought we should get to this eventually. This Council of Censors would restore the nondemocratic elements which have wasted away and left us in chaos as we see all power in the hands of popular majorities.  That is very un-American. We have a more complex society now and it should be under a more complex government not a less complex one. 

     Nor was this constitution designed to consider all  starting positions as equal. It was not crafted so that all ideas and  ways of life could start on exactly the same footing.  Few were more in touch with the founding of the country that is the USA than John Adams and he did not hesitate to write about what was to be favored. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams.  Nor was Adams merely concerned with any kind of piety. He could not have been more certain in his own mind of the pre-eminence of Judaeo- Christian values and cultural traditions in forming the national fabric. “The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. ” John Adams. Remember that the racial and ethnic implications are coming out clearly from one of the Declarers select committee. Some lands from the State and the federal government should be surrendered both to compact and a central government with small needs and specialized missions but a larger part (totalling as much as two or more percent of all lands) should be put into a “pot” together with Guam, American Samoa, part of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands as well as all Indian Reservations to create a series of really viable Territories and Possessions which are represented in the House of Representatives and not in the US Senate.   Part of Puerto Rico should be admitted as our final state and part as one of these new Territories, these two jurisdictions will have a compact. The relationship will be repeated in Hawaii and Alaska where close relations between distinct jurisdictions will be the norm. This will new order need to include a substantial Kingdom of Hawaii, Negro Possessions in the Southern States (as well as Creole of Color territories in some places) and two Mestizo territories in old settlements of the Spanish Borderlands Compact. These ethnic groups would have lands and governments to use and elect,  they would have seats in the House and could have simple tribunes with limited vetoes and subpoenas in the Senate. Some funds and contracts would be reserved for their development in the new constitution. Poverty and prison programs would be replaced with innovation in many states. Schools would improve and the State universities would reserve a small percentage of their seats for the best qualified of their neighbors. However, most  jurisdictions would service their own peoples needs and employ their own police and teachers. This would not be for all colored people as under Jim Crow but jurisdictions favoring specific raci0-ethnic groups with districts and rights for their own minorities. Real racial purity laws per se would be forbidden federally everywhere. The family associations would define the reace of there members for most purposes and the acts to deny racial identitry would be limited in effect and require due process.  But America would not pretend to racial indifference any more. In the States there would be  both colored districts where those not  related to nearby districts would elect parties to the state legislature and have some kind of municipal governance but also be less than equal in many rights of the state citizen while protected as US Citizen. Northeast Asian Communities such as Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Sino-Filipino peoples would be  assured equal representation for drawn minority majority districts in all states where they have a traditional population.  In addition they would participate as full state citizens. Likewise Filipinos and Micronesians would be given special federal assistance in settling here because of the ties of their countries to ours.  Family associations would work with these new laws and jurisdictions. But there would be an end to varied forms of racial madness in this country. All future immigrants would have to be admitted by both the United States and a lesser Jurisdiction State or otherwise.  Each jurisdiction should elect one elector for life who will sit with the popular election electors for the President and also have other legislative roles. Such a person would be able to hold multiple offices.

    Likewise, America has never been founded on any principle that allowed for weakness as a national ideal.  “If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War. ” George Washington.  War, I would argue is not merely murder. Modern societies do not always fight wars quite frequently they just murder people. War involves, discipline, declarations, chains of command and a known return address  ( to at least some degree) for the violence. I have often been critical of the US military but it is still the military founded by that tall Virginian quoted above. It is still one of the institutions that works in our society.   The people have a right and a need for militias, hunting clubs and I think in a society like ours they need more differentiated groups along the lines of orders of chivalry where the most privileged speak a more refined language of violence. America is in danger of losing all that it is in this simple regard.  “Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples’ liberty’s teeth.” George Washington.  On this and some other issues I will focus my third and last portion of this posting. 

    We must also have a society where the federal and state governments are openly concerned with the moral development of these constituent armed groups and their members. No value neutral governance is possible part of our culture of defense and security. “Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.” George Washington. My last portion will also relate to this moral aspect of governance.

    So, next time expect to see me discuss morals, arms and how to effect real change as well as other issues relevant to this subject not yet addressed. So far you can see that for me revolution is a word I take seriously.

    The Mental Ferment for Men (and Women) who Might Foment an American Revolution: Part One

    In the United States today well over ten percent and something less than a quarter of likely voters currently identify themselves when asked about party membership as members of the Tea (or TEA, i.e. “Taxed Enough Already”) Party.  These people include some decently high number of folks who are willing to speak about an American Revolution such as the one we had two hundred years ago. There are tours going across the country as the Tea Party Express. There are rallies, conventions and town hall meetings. While many discount the potential of this movement in this country they represent the largest and most potent movement of their kind in a long time. I am doing a four part posting on the potential American Revolution as it might be abd as I would like to see it.

    Revolutionary Iconography is part of the TEA Party experience...

    There are not two constitutional transitions or transformations which are or ought to be about the same things.  Whatever the greivances and causes may be which are to lead to a real set of basic changes they should both honor the heritage of  the eighteenth century and recognize the differences between the current situation and the situation that confronted the revolutionary generation, the strivers for American Independence and the founding fathers framing the Constitution.  I do not think many of hthink the British Monarchy is on the top of our target list as foes of our development now whereas that is how things ended up in those days.  America will have and does have it troubles with the UK but that is a relationship worth trying to improve at this point. The same analysis would have been entirely defeatist in the first revolution.
    The Current Queen of England and Scotland's United Kingdom with Eisenhower

    I don't think any two constitutional changes are the same. The British Monarchy is not our target here.

     There are  in addition to these people I think of Americans like my old college buddy Andy who ran for governor of a state other than mine in 2008 as a Libertarian. His principal slogan was “reboot the government”  I believe.  Andy is of course a computer guy — one of the real ones.  Glen Beck is featuring a regular segment in his show called “Refounding America”.  Mr. Beck’s show is really quite popular and successfull. Of course President Obama himself was elected on the slogan of  “Change You Can Believe In!” There is the fact that Massachussettes elected its first Republican Senator in a very long time. It might be the case that America is ready to look at real change as a possibility.  It is always at least  a little scary when a large and powerful country reaches the point where real change is perceived as necessary. That is even more true when the geopolitical order and social order of the times is such as ours is today.   Sometimes it is very scary indeed.

    I am also aware of the huge crowds of Hispanics who not so long ago marched in the streets protesting imigration policy and the sense of persecution growing among Mexican Americans as they perceive the policies of the United States.   If one factors in our vast national debt, huge production of waste, decaying infrastructure,  rates of incaceration, porous borders, fiscal crises in so many places and many other woes it seems clear that we are in a place of real crisis and that some sort of revolutionary transformation may well be necessary.  I think that this change will have to come from other places than what is the mainstream of our current social order or else it will only make things much worse.

    Above all there cannot simply be a struggle between shrinking government  and more entitlements of all residents to all kinds of government services. America is soul-sick and not on a path that can lead to the places America needs to reach to have a real chance of socio-political survival and the level of progress needed to support the survival of its people over the moderately long term. With a society such as hours there is a bloating and softening of the social fabric before the really big shocks to the state and the national structure take place.

    I thin that America has begun to take notice of its social decay in movies like “The Blind Side” and “Precious, Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire” which have attracted an audience and will be discussed at the Academy Awards tomorrow night. It is possible  for America top address many of its problems while still honoring its traditions and not tearing itself apart. But the time to act keeps running out and the chances of choosing the path we need to choose is not a very likely chance.

    What will not work is the color blind, impersonal, nondiscriminating, cowardly and crime-loving concept of justice which our courts have imposed on the nation and the States over the last several decades. I believe that relatively radical action very soon can produce a real chance of justice.  This reconstitution of America should create family associations with many privileges asssured by law. Such  associations will take over some of the responsibilities of a federal budget with greater austerity measures than have been seen for a long time. These associations will also support autonomy and wellbeing for women who want to support and build the strong families that make society strong.  There shall also be a transfer of lands into new jurisdictions and a reworking of the system of apportionment and representation. We can stop pretending that Guam and American Samoa and Puerto Rico have representative governance when they don’t. We can stop pretending that millions of ilegal aliens are not both unfairly treated and a grave threat to this society. They need not be our enemies for us to make that admission.  We also need to create compacts between groups of States and other jurisdictions which are similar to the the Tennessee Valley Authority in some ways but are larger and are able to do more to promote regional welfare and interests. Then there some facts about military reservations and the District of Columbia which need to be addressed. We will need to rework the Congress and redraw the map a little bit. That will include a viable and vital constitutional future for existing American Indian nations.   All of this will be made much harder by years and ecades of pushing a destructive and poisoonous obsession with calculator democracy in its simplest form on to a world that has often suffered from it. The military in the US is not perfect but it is one of our greatest assets. We have to find more of a constitutional role for this social institution in our socio-political regime. WE HAVE TO ADDRESS MANY VERY SERIOUS PROBLEMS.

    Right now we still have resources to deal with these problems. That will not always be the case. Soon there will be no chance to solve them. Part Two of this posting will deal withhow we have to try to understand our constitutional and revolutionary heritage more clearly and effectively. Part Three of this posting (should I get to it) will discuss how we might make those changes which can at least address all of our major problems and preserve the best of our revolutionary heritage.

    The Era of Something I am sure

    Recently two people I knew rather well at the University of Southwestern Louisiana which is now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who had remained there teaching and doing other things that faculty at a university will do. Their names are Patricia Rickels and Bradley Pollock.  Neither one were very close friends but both were friends. Both had an investment in education and the intellectual life. Patricia Rickels was a long time director of the Honors Program at the university where I received my bachelor’s degree. In that program I had a good number of my friends and where I began to date, court and become engaged to my ex-wife. Dr. Rickels and I also had in common that we each got a Master of Arts Degree from LSU although at very different times. She was married to another professor  who was notable for many things but one of them was that he was severely physicaly challenged for much of his teaching career. Dr. Milton Rickels had died a while back. She was a complex person but among her many qualities one of the most defining was a commitment to the Civil Rights Movement.

    That brings us to Bradley Pollock. Bradley and Dr. Pat both wore African items of dress or African themed clothes on occasion. I had not kept in close touch with either of them but there was a time when Brad and I and my ex-wife got together for pizza casualy enough. I was in class with a woman I believe was his sister and while on the college newspaper one of his brothers (or possibly a first cousin) was a source. He was a person one could tell had a fair amount of the genetic backgound of the negro races of Africa ( not all Africans do) but also that he was much more than half white by percentage. In Louisiana that made him part of a very complex  and nuanced drama of identity and he and I had read some of the same books and had the honesty to talk about these things and to be honest about the fact that neither one of us could get into full disclosure and total honesty. His funeral will be held at the Imani Temple and I would not have known that would be the case even if  he had died back when we were closer friends and did not know it until after his death.  He also took the drama of race relations and racial history in the United States quite seriously.

    I think that they both must have had a lot of things to say and suggest about the election of Barak Obama that I did not hear or have to respond to because we had fallen out of touch. I wonder if it would still have been possible for us to communicate in an honest and open way and to be cordial. Possibly our development as three active minds had been largely  a development that made us more and more different. Perhaps most of all it was a time which distinguished me from them. But honestly I am too out of touch to be sure.

    I have been by the university and I still see a pretty good mix of people of almost every human skin tone both sexes and several cultures from many countries interacting productively.  That is what I remeber it was like then. Dr. Rickels retired from a beautiful building dedicated to the Honors Program which had housed the student newspaper The Vermilion when I worked on it and which was my grandfather’s dorm when he went there. I  like a lot of what I see at my old alma mater. But I can’t help feeling that some of the old racial roadmaps that never worked perfectly or less relevant than ever now. I wonder where those who may succeed Bradley in History and Rickels in her many post will be trying to go in the future.

     I am convinced that the transfer of wealth, position and opportunity to the most privileged black people and other African Americans has not been done in a way that was all that just or so very socialy productive. No that we are in the Age of Obama I am more sure than ever that much of the energy, rhetoric and thought of the more recent Civil Rights Movement has been bad.  I think that we are very much lost in so many ways that there is almost no hope of getting found. Under Jim Crow Segregation there were almost no places where leaders of the Black and White Communities could gather to hold a conference to disagree about the problems faced by the country as a whole. There was no African-American Tribune in the legislatures of the states where only whites were seated. There was little soft power, little attempt at justice and little thought involved in the system. Now we have violent communities of African Americans who live out gangsta rap or think they are on a holy Jihad when the bring violence and destruction to the cities and White neighborhoods and institutions.  We also have a President whose father was a Black Kenyan imigrant from Africa. I think it needs to be said that am easily displeased. No country on the planet is doing supremely well in my view.  Humanity and its journey are largely   tragic.

    But as I watch and note the passing of these old friends I wonder where I am going to be standing. I do not think that I am going to be finding the solutions to any of the problems Brad and I used to dsicuss in those kinds of discussions. I am aware that the places I would like to see us go are not on the likely travel plans. I value neghborhood associations, extended family rights, ethnic and regional history grants  and lots of other instruments of policy. It is not that Brad and Dr. Pat opposed such things it is just that just like corporate America and the Ivy League schools they tended to analyze a set of solutions and plan a set of solutions that did not take these things much into account.

    I  am not belittling the legacy of either of these people because both of them were builders and teachers who did many things and worked hard to make sense of things. They were responsible and not strident. I liked the interaction of diverse people at the school with which they were associated. But I am blurring over this chance to remember them personaly with asking a question about schools, the academy and scholarship. Is there going to be a change in the role or interpretation or priority the racial agenda that has dominated so much of pedagogy in the recent decades. Is there going to be change in the discussion of what our society should be progressing towards?