The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
January 1, 2024
ENTROPY
and RENAISSANCE in the BALANCE!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
What is the architecture of a national decline? History proffers
diverse, dizzying panoplies of destinies... whole civilizations like the Celtic
or Native American swiftly and brutally exterminated by military conquest or,
perhaps, plague… famine… vulcanism? Quarrelsome principalities... like the Greek
city-states, exhausted by fraternal or civil war, absorbed by Macedonia under
Philip and Alexander which (as that movie tells us) was one of them
flash-in-the-pan empires, undone by unworthy royal progeny! (Perhaps a murder of Andrews!)
Them Mongol Khans were another, so was
Charlemagne – though he did have the sense to partition his holdings and so
avoid the sort of familial infighting that, to give one example, has made Sunni
and Shiite Islam the unholy mess it is today.
Then, there are famous
instances of self-destruction... Afghanistan's arrogant Taliban mullahs and
ISIS in Iraq, Sadamned and Muammar dragged out of their
holes and terminated; Osama, sleepin’ with the fishies. Napoleon (whose folly of winter invasion of Russia was repeated, to
the world's relief, by Adolf Hitler). The Clinton/Bush regimes! Richard Nixon. Our former President, a bewildered would-be
King of the World on the bow of a Titanic misadventure, bookended by a salt and
pepper dynasty of duh … wallowing in self-pity, dithering in the face of
disease – yet still plotting restoration, like one of those 16th and
17th century inbred Europotentates. And waiting in the wings as America
juices up for 2024 – the mindless hordes striving to succeed them!
Finally come the few
rare examples of mature civilizations whose epochs of consolidation and content
are succeeded by a lengthy process of internal dissolution, though often not
without occasional intervals of revival; each, however, weaker than the last.
Rome is the
paramount example, but there are many others... once one knows where to look
for them. Dynastic declines and rebirths
in China and in Egypt, the fiery genesis and ultimate fizzle, over less than a century,
of Soviet Communism, twisted into anti-Communist neo-fascism. Even, it may be
said, the British Empire... though London abides, still, and is a pleasant
place, like Amsterdam and Venice; like Samarkand, Babylon (if not Baghdad), Tenochtitlán (if not for the smog and the grime and the crime). All remain presences in this modern
world, yet overrun with ghosts... ghosts who will speak to us, caution us, if
we will but listen.
To scientists, such
slow decline is known as "entropy"... that term first encountered in
Mister Newton’s Second
Law of Thermodynamics, representing the tendency of all states of matter (and,
as I contend, extra-material entities like nations, cultures and systems of
belief) to disintegrate, sooner or later, unless kept to course by the
application of a stern and visible… yet judicious… guiding hand.
Today, I believe, the
United States of America stands at that crossroads wherein its institutions... its
political bodies and economic foundations, its churches, schools and military...
stand at grave risk of irreversible decline, unless some strong hand steadies
their increasingly random orbital peregrinations, reversing a gradually-ascendant
national slovenliness in our works, our culture, our economy, our ambitions and
our faith.
Healthy societies thrive
because rules are justly prepared and promulgated, understood by all, and
followed (except for those few outliers that are known, hunted down and punished
as criminals). Most people work to
earn their daily bread... over them loom elites, as dictate and allocate
national resources and, of most importance, earn their privileges by providing
that proper balance of liberty and security that is veritable poison to
entropy. It's the way of this world... indeed, it may be argued that every government
(even those proud Swiss and Swedes and other soldiers of the United Nations'
so-called "peacekeeping" occupation of America's cities) is built
upon ancient systems of extortion. Pay off the local warlord and he'll provide
protection from those other guys there, over the hill. He might even make the
trains run on time! So we come to call those societies in which the majority…
too stupid, meek or beaten down, too satiated with crumbs from their masters'
table to object to the undertaker's profit or occasional late train (or
Southwest airplane)… civilizations.
That paramount Roman
example of entropic civilization, devolved, over the course of several centuries,
to a miasma of disgruntled slaves, cruel and indolent masters outsourcing the
necessities of empirical survival to barbarians within the gates and heedless
of those other, opportunistic barbarian mercenaries beyond the frontier. When
its Senate grew unable to finance the bread and circuses that kept increasingly
impoverished nativist citizens distracted and its Legions
became a den of foreign-born conspirators, realization dawned upon the rest of
the Western world that the accumulated wealth of centuries awaited
plundering. An indifferent capital was finally vandalized by Vandals, sacked by
Saxons, gobbled up by Goths and the Roman adventure was snuffed out like...
well... a Roman candle.
Over the past
several decades, it sometimes seems America has chosen this Roman path to
eventual ruin... skipping along, as it were, in sneakers sewn not by Americans,
but by children in the gulags of Beijing or the favelas of Sao Paolo to
piped-in music fashioned from the creeping chitterings
of robots. And now Don Jones... the
average working American (as opposed
to the parasitic Dow Joneses) is at
risk of being offered the electoral choice of weakness or insanity at the
Presidential level... and even worse, down ballot!
When entropy is
forcefully countered, however, the consequence is Renaissance. This is no mere nostalgia
for hazy, golden pasts... real or imagined. Those wise men of Italy who gave us
the word were, by no means, devoid of flaws or selfish aims... but they
exercised discrimination. The Medicis and Borgias, not to mention
the occasional daVinci, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, even, plucked what was
useful from the Greek and Roman flowerings, discarded what was not and so, in
their time (and for a time), made a
brave and principled stand against entropy. Ferdinand and Isabella did the same
for Spain, Peter and Catherine in Russia, Gandhi and Juarez and Mandela later
and elsewhere. I could name Washington and Jefferson and Franklin among the
founders of American Renaissance… if now reviled as tyrants, libertines and slaveholders...
Lincoln, of course, the Roosevelts and, behind these, the millions beneath who,
with mind and breath and muscle, steered our nation away from such shoals as,
time and again, threatened to shipwreck the American promise, leaving only
debris, adrift on the entropic tide.
A calico cat-fearing
former Attorney General and prospective Presidential candidate exercised the
privilege of deriding these now, as "phantoms of lost liberty"... spitting upon their stand, and their sacrifices... and now our Congress of
magpies and Malefi-cants disdaining duty to obsess upon
investigating and taking revenge upon their rivals, so…
Consequently, having
myself taken the extraordinary step of resigning both position and membership
in a fraternity of party whose antecedents are some of these same great (and
other not-so-great) men, I have determined to combine with others to form the
Coalition for a New Consensus, a privately-funded association of and for
persons of independent thought and patriotic sentiments. The cynics will say that I have written these
words because I seek public notoriety, even higher office. On this occasion, like the broken clock that
tells the correct time twice daily, the cynics are probably right!
I welcome your attention
and pray that readers who find, in these humble paragraphs, some resonance of
truth and, further, of necessity, endeavor to join this Coalition as chapters
are opened in your various communities. Let us follow the example of that
humble Catfish sweeping America's riverbottoms, removing from its environment
such decaying toxins and pollutants that, otherwise, would eventually overwhelm
and eventually suffocate all semblance of marine life.
It is not so much to
the detriment of a culture that a few men (or women) do evil; rather, it is that
the greater majority do nothing.
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