The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
July 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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