On The Idea of America - July 4th

Whiskey & Gunpowder by Gary Gibson July 1, 2011 Geneva, Florida, U.S.A.

The Fourth of July is upon us again and a couple hundred million people in the middle latitudes of the North American continent are going to celebrate the birth of the United States. Most of them assume that this means they'll also be celebrating being American, but that's not necessarily so.

The United States is a political thing, one heir to the typical failings of politics, and the almost imperceptibly slow decay of republican virtue into nanny statism and imperial hubris.

America, however, is something different. It is not the same thing as the United States that seek to overlay it and to smother it. America is an idea that precedes the U.S. and, we like to believe, both transcends the nation-state and will outlive it.

As Thomas Paine says:

"Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise."

The new version of The Idea Of America: What It Was and How It Was Lost collects in one volume the greatest essays about what America means. It is something undeniably anarchist, resolutely independent and demanding of personal liberty no matter the cost in inconvenience and even in the face of mortal danger.

As stated before America precedes the U.S., but from the founding of the political version of the nation, a dozen generations have sequentially sacrificed more liberty, more of the uniquely American independence for perceived expedience, convenience and security.

"The desire for material ease long ago vanquished the spirit of '76," writes American Anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre.

The Idea Of America co-editor Bill Bonner adds, "People in the land of the free and the home of the brave will go along with almost anything. They are perfectly willing to give up almost every trace of freedom as long as they have security and economic comfort."

I don't know many books that can hook the reader so powerfully just with the introduction, but that is exactly what The Idea of America does.

Co-editors Bill Bonner and Pierre Lemieux start out strong. I was actually worried that there would be no way for the book to deliver on the promise offered by such a strong start. I needn't have worried. I mean, really how could you go wrong with Murray Rothbard, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, and other such luminaries?

Lemieux's introduction begins the book with a tour of American history that smartly highlights how the forces of liberty have vied with those of state intervention. The book then continues with selections from Murray Rothbard, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and Lord Acton. An entire section is devoted to selections from Alexis de Tocqueville. The rest of the book features Jefferson, Franklin, Thoreau, Mencken. This new edition also has selections from Emma Lazarus and Rose Wilder Lane. The book is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to choice quotes.

Take for example this one from Alexis de Tocqueville defining the totalitarian nanny state, devoid of outright despotism, but destructive nonetheless. From his essay on democratic despotism:

"...[T]he species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it.

"Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

"...After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

"...I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people."

Then there's Benjamin Franklin's "To Those Who Would Remove To America", as classic a description of the essence of the true American. Franklin asks of any man would start fresh in America:

"...[W]hat can he do? If he has any useful art, he is welcome; and if he exercises it and behaves well, he will be respected by all that know him; but a mere man of quality, who on that account wants to live upon the public, by some office or salary, will be despised and disregarded. The husbandman is in honor there, and even the mechanic, because their employments are useful."

Franklin also provides a lesson in capitalism, finding a need and filling it and of the economics of early America, what sort of person and skills would flourish in the new country.

In the next essay, the equally inimitable H.L. Mencken puts it so: "All our cities are full of aristocrats whose grandfathers were day laborers, and clerks whose grandfathers were aristocrats."

Ralph Waldo Emerson adds:

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."

"Consider what is happening in public finance," Bill Bonner asks of the reader in parting.

"An individual might say, 'This country must stop spending so much money.' But he will not want to give up his own public benefits-his Social Security, his Medicaid, all his government checks. He has no reason to give up his benefits, because it wouldn't make a dent in the problem. It is as if the whole nation had a single credit card. It does not make any sense for a single individual to take himself off the Social Security rolls. Thus, mass institutions have no way to correct their own courses; they must continue down the path to ruin."

It seems like a lost cause. As if things must simply run their course. As if the idea of America must decline and die like everything else.

There's an undeniable tragedy to this Fourth of July. The decay has become too advanced for anyone not in denial to ignore: The foreign entanglements, the innumerable tendrils of state intervention, the advancement of the police state...

As we mark the birth of the Republic this year it has never been easier to think about its death. It's no random republishing that brings this new edition of The Idea of America to us now.

I am going to give away the ending, but I think it's worth it...

Bill Bonner paraphrases Ghandi when he concludes, "America is a very good idea. Somebody ought to try it."

Who can argue with that? This book will certainly make you want to try.

Regards,

Gary Gibson
Managing editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

On The Idea of America appears on Whiskey & Gunpowder.

P.S. We now have the new version of The Idea of America: What It Was and How It Was Lost in stock!


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The Gospel of "Saint" Ambrose, part two from "The Devil's Dictionary"

Whiskey & Gunpowder by Jim Amrhein July 20, 2011 Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.

For now we direct your attention to the second installment of Jim Amrhein's review of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary. Read on below...

BIRTH, n. The first and direst of all disasters.
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

In the first installment of this two-part series, I entertained you - quite fittingly, I thought, for its 100th anniversary - with the acerbic hilarity of some of the more state-skewering entries from Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary...

To me, many of these "definitions" are actually closer to being truly definitive of their corresponding terms than anything you'd find in an actual dictionary.

For instance, the latest version of the online dictionary I use most often defines "cynic" principally as:

Cynic (noun): A person who believes that people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for honorable or unselfish reasons...

However, to my way of thinking, this "objective" definition falls far short of the clinical (or cynical) reality.

Evidence abounds in government, the markets, medicine, the courts, religion, the media, sports, education, marriage, friendships, and everywhere else of rampant selfishness. By and large, people really are motivated by self-interest - it's central to our survival, bred into our very DNA.

Through the lens of the real, Bierce's definition of "cynic" is the more accurate one:

CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be...

That's because his definition (which includes himself as a prototypical example) speaks not to whether people are selfish or not - but to how a society wholly comprised of selfish people regard those who point out their hypocrisy...

According to Bierce, a cynic is one who's held in contempt by society (a blackguard) for seeing it as it really is: A corrupt place ruled by the self-interested.

Like I said, dead-nuts accurate under a thin veil of humor...

Just like his Devil's Dictionary take on other institutions fundamental to a "civilized" society. Things like schooling:

ACADEME, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.

ACADEMY, n. [from ACADEME] A modern school where football is taught.

EDUCATION, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

LEARNING, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.

And medicine - a deserving target if there ever was one...

FORGETFULNESS, n. A gift of God bestowed upon doctors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.

GOUT, n. A physician's name for the rheumatism of a rich patient.

MEDICINE, n. A stone flung down the Bowery to kill a dog in Broadway.

PHYSICIAN, n. One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well.

PRESCRIPTION, n. A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.

Let's not forget morality and religion - those sacred cows few ever deign to joust with in print...

CLERGYMAN, n. A man who undertakes the management of our spiritual affairs as a method of bettering his temporal ones.

FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

IMPIETY, n. Your irreverence toward my deity.

INFIDEL, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.

MORAL, adj. Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.

PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

RELIGION, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

RESPONSIBILITY, n. A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor.

SCRIPTURES, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

(I suppose now is the time to add the disclaimer: The views of this column are not necessarily the views of Whiskey & Gunpowder, its publishers, contributors, etc. Although some - like Bierce's thoughts on money, commerce and business - no doubt are, to one degree or another...)

COMMERCE, n. A kind of transaction in which A plunders from B the goods of C, and for compensation B picks the pocket of D of money belonging to E.

CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

FINANCE, n. The art or science of managing revenues and resources for the best advantage of the manager.

(Are you paying attention, Goldman-Sachs?)

IMPUNITY, n. Wealth.

INSURANCE, n. An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

LABOR, n. One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.

PIRACY, n. Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it.

RICH, adj. Holding in trust and subject to an accounting the property of the indolent, the incompetent, the unthrifty, the envious and the luckless.

WALL STREET, n. A symbol for sin for every devil to rebuke.

Some of Bierce's most hilariously devilish "definitions" apply to that hallowed ground, the law...

LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.

(Because like almost any of the lawyers in Congress can tell you, one must know the law if one is to break it to his own benefit.)

LITIGANT, n. A person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bones.

TRIAL, n. A formal inquiry designed to prove and put upon record the blameless characters of judges, advocates and jurors.

RETALIATION, n. The natural rock upon which is reared the Temple of Law.

But for all of his venom loosed on society's institutions in The Devil's Dictionary, Bierce saves some of the most potent for everyday life and relationships. I won't list any of them here, but they're pricelessly vicious and undeniably true...

If you're a fan of the ugly truth and timeless, sardonic wit, you simply must pick up a copy of The Devil's Dictionary for yourself - and for each of your like-minded friends. I'm fortunate enough to have the 2004 edition illustrated by the one-of-a-kind Ralph Steadman (of Hunter S. Thompson fame), but there are others out there.

However, by now you must be wondering why anyone would want to subject himself to the miserable, "nothing matters" vision of Ambrose Bierce anyway...

There's a very good reason, and it's this: If more of us were sharp-eyed, acid-tongued, outspoken cynics instead of rose-colored-glasses-wearing, social media addicted Kool-Aid gulpers, America might not be as screwed as she is right now.

The incredible hubris and hypocrisy in our government got that way over the last 200 years because we bought into the vaunted notion that they were doing what they did "for the people"...
Instead of for themselves - which is human nature, like it or not.

We let things like debt spending, entitlements, welfare programs, lax border security, and endless regulation get the better of our wallets, property, and rights because we believed it when our leaders told us they were "doing it all for us"...While they feathered their own nests and saddled America's children with the bill.

In other words, if more of us had been cynics like Ambrose Bierce - and as such, more keenly able to spot the egregious self-interest of those we've elected - we could have done more to stop the damage they've done to our republic.

Bierce himself single-handedly defeated one of the most shamelessly corrupt bills ever put before Congress, in fact. It was 1896 when advocates for numerous railroad giants slipped a bill in front of Congress without public notice or hearings...

The nature of that bill: An exemption on repayment of tens of millions of dollars borrowed from the U.S. government for the construction of the transcontinental railway. Dispatched by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, Bierce traveled to Washington, investigated the deal, and penned a series of such scathing editorials on the subject that the plot was exposed and the bill roundly defeated.

We forget, we Americans, what power we wield. Not just with our pens - but with our dollars, our votes, our choices, and our passion.

And the reason we forget is that we're all hopeless deceived, distracted, deluded, or doped-up to be able to clearly see when others are acting egregiously in their own self-interest in dire conflict with our own...

Ambrose Bierce and his Devil's Dictionary remind us of the need to be more cynical for the sake of our own survival - and he does it better than anyone else can, or ever has. And the price he paid for it in life was surely one of loneliness. From the Dictionary:

FRIENDLESS, adj. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.

I, for one, salute Ambrose Bierce as friend, wherever he is. His disappearance at age 71 remains a mystery.

My only hope is that however he went, it was doing something for himself - in his own interest - rather than in trying to add to the incredible service he rendered to this nation and the world with the simple, cynical truth.

Very Truly Yours,

Jim Amrhein

P.S. Thanks again, Whiskey-ers, for the chance to spend some time and share some thoughts with you all once again. I hope you've enjoyed my fond look back at one of history's greatest polemicists. And I look forward to keeping you abreast of the exciting goings-on at Agora Financial's "Fight or Flight" Wealth Symposium in Vancouver, the last week of July. Talk to you then... J.A.