March 29, 2011 1655 words
Sparta, TN

Dear Miss Potter,

I know you have a married name, but I and the world know you as Beatrix Potter, writer of famous children’s tales, and so I write you in that character. I have not seen the movie about your life starring Rene Zellweger, so that will not muddy up my image of you, which is of a young woman who had the courage to write and self-publish an illustrated children’s tale, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. You also loved nature and the country side of the Lake District in England, which you spent much of your life and income trying to preserve from the ravages of industrialism.

I did not, however, know all this when I carried a tattered, much thumbed The Tale of Peter Rabbit home from the public library sometime in the 1940s. What a wonderful thing, a new book to read, ponder, and drowse over, with pictures that stirred my imagination. In those days children could do that—grow in heart and imagination by exploring tales that had no reason for being other than being good tales! I know now that unlike many of your counterparts in that time, you did not write lecturing, moralistic stories designed to shape little kids into priggish adults. If you lived now, I am sure you would be equally horrified to find that children’s literature today has been taken over by equally priggish adults intent on creating stories that inculcate political correctness. Publishers create iron grids of expectations, and the writers of children’s literature follow them slavishly to win prizes and the endorsements of politically correct magazines. Your stories, I might add, as well as the stories of Joel Chandler’s Uncle Remus, which you very much loved, would not pass editorial muster today. In fact, children are now denied the beauty and wisdom of those stories because they are “offensive” to some people, probably the same people who want to burn The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

How sad, and even, how predictable. Soaked in the political correctness of public school and the daily drumbeats of the ”media,” children today do not have the escape that old tales and fairy stories gave me—and great minds like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote compelling stories that continue to intrigue the minds of the young. You followed the poetics of Aristotle, and in a few broad brushstrokes created imitations of life that carry images that go straight into the heart.

Dear Miss Potter, it is about that very thing that I now write you. Over and over I read the The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and I have remembered it ever since. To set the stage for the image I want to focus on—the one that has stuck with me more than any other—let me recall the way you begin your story. The four little rabbits—Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter—live with their mother in a sand bank. Right away we learn that these child rabbits are fatherless and that they became fatherless when their father ventured into Mr. McGregor’s garden where, as the mother tells it, he had an “accident” and was “put into a pie by Mrs. McGregor.”

Mrs. McGregor does not linger on this grisly detail, which undoubtedly would be expunged by today’s super-sensitive theorists of child-raising. These are the facts as she tells them, though it is interesting that she calls it an “accident,” but nevertheless warns the young rabbits against going into that garden and getting into “mischief.”

Now all four rabbits heard the warning and three of them obeyed. Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail—the kind of horrible names one now sees on name cards at Walmart—are immediately good little bunnies who “went down the lane the gather blackberries.” When I read this now, two bells go off for me. In my perhaps jaded view, I immediately dislike these good little obedient bunnies. The other bell went off in Peter, “who was very naughty,” and who immediately “ran straightaway to Mr. McGregor’s garden and squeezed under the gate. “

Peter, who has a good solid Christian name and not a simpy Walmart name, immediately captured my sympathy as someone like me, who would do the stupid but naughty thing and risk punishment to pursue the momentary attraction of freedom and adventure. Most often in my childhood and youth, I did not follow the lure Peter follows, but it was always there, and I believe it is always there in most of us, eh? Freedom isn’t freedom unless we have the possibility of breaking the rules or trespassing the boundaries set for us. At the moment, I am not interested in pursuing the theological truths that lie behind this. Suffice to say, there would be no good stories if heroes and heroines did not often resemble Peter and his mad dash for the forbidden fruits and vegetables.

These soon pall since, as is very real also, Peter eats too much and becomes sick. Rounding the cucumber frame, he meets Mr. McGregor head on, who calls out, “stop thief.” Miss Potter, you portray Mr. McGregor as neither a bad man nor a rabbit-hater. He’s simply a farmer guarding his hard-earned produce. He is nemesis for Peter, but simply because that is the way things are: rabbits are thieves and gardeners are people much put upon and who defend themselves by every means possible. Peter, following his father’s footsteps, is about to meet some realities he had not figured on: i.e., the hardness of an unforgiving world that enjoys carrying rabbit’s feet on key chains and would be happy to bake him into a pie.

As a child reader, I am in complete identification with Peter: crying, lost, worried about his torn clothes, and terrified. To make matters worse he hides in a watering can and is soaking wet. McGregor gives up the chase but Peter is desperate, having no idea of which way to go. Like Dante at the beginning of the Divine Comedy, he finds himself alone and confused, unable to find the way. Dante is fortunate, however, in meeting his guide Virgil, while Peter has no such luck or grace at the moment.

Instead—and here, Miss Potter, is the point at which you most engaged my imagination—Peter is really lost and miserable. Looking all around, Peter cannot find a way. Who, as a child, has not found himself in such a bind? Some story writers would immediately introduce a miracle or happy happenstance, and Peter would be delivered, though he would most likely be lectured to for the benefit of every child that ever tried the boundaries set by his home and parents. O bad Peter!

An old mouse was running in and out over the stone doorstep, carrying peas and beans to her family in the wood. Peter asked her way to the gate, but she had such a large pea in her mouth that she could not answer. She only shook her head at him. Peter began to cry.

Miss Potter, this image of Peter made a profound impression on me when I was a child, an impression made deeper by the accompanying picture of a fat old mouse too busy with her own life to even respond to a question. As children we are always seeking answers to our questions and demands, but don’t always get them. But that does not explain the real depth of response I had to this brilliant image. That would simply be “interpretation,” and God be praised, young children’s imaginations are spared of that literary curse.

In appreciation of what you did in creating that image, what I can say is, simply, true! True right down to my imaginative toes! My life has since been filled with meeting mice with peas in their mouths, but I have had to learn that there is nothing malevolent in them as there was no malevolence in Mr. McGregor. Both were busy trying to feed their own families, and sometimes I, like Peter, am a nuisance to them.

Peter does have learn the hard way (and it is interesting in a later tale you showed Peter as the manager of his own garden!) but not by being beaten to death with easy moralisms. He learns directly from his experience that one has to be smart in other people’s gardens. Nor is Peter made immediately a good little bunny like his siblings. In The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, he is coaxed into another venture into McGregor’s garden by the guileless Benjamin (he’s the kid down the block who is always trying to talk you into something), but he is very wary and afraid this time. More, there is a very telling detail: when Benjamin assures Peter that there is no danger because the McGregors are not at home, and Mrs. McGregor went off wearing her best bonnet, “Peter said he hoped it would rain.”

That’s not a sadder but wiser Peter, but a Peter that is, well, capable of a bit of honest rancor. Peter had also gone along with his crony Benjamin because, for one thing, he thought his mother was about to give him another dose of chamomile tea. In the end, Peter is able to recover the clothes Mr. McGregor has used for a scarecrow and is forgiven by his mother despite the fact that he has again been naughty in getting those clothes back. No great moral final scenes, no nostrums!

No wonder, Miss Potter, that you have been hailed as a “modern” writer and classed with Ernest Hemingway. While not exactly an anti-hero, Peter is definitely “one of us,” in Joseph Conrad’s terms, a fellow we know because we know what it's like to be him, instead of those goody-goodies Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail. Let them eat their blackberries and milk and prattle about Peter’s misfortunes.

We Peters, we may be exhausted and unwell after a forbidden adventure, but we know a thing or two. As did you, Miss Potter.

Sincerely,
Ken Craven

Refuse

Note: the following is a reflective autobiographical essay, written as an example for my students in an English composition class at Nashville State Community College. It may be read in conjunction with the blog entries for October 4 and September 16, which were written for the same purpose. Together they form a window into my life as a child and young man.

Refuse

By Ken Craven

He dreaded going back home. But he was going.

“Back home,” a bite too big to swallow. Then he smelled the burning, as if he were buried neck deep in an ash heap, unable to move his arms. The smell of burning bituminous coal, especially in its cheaper grades and even cheaper relations—gob, tailings, sludge, slurry, and slag—was a memory path back into home, which was a place hard to focus. They had lived in several houses, all close to the railroad. All close to coal.

There was that day when a garbage truck blundering through the alley behind the coal pile where he was playing knocked over the heavy fence, pinning him between two beams. He lay there, his lungs heaving through tears, the bugs crawling over his eyelids, his face jammed against the coal dust and cinders. That was home too.

He held the wheel tight as his pickup rolled around the curves. He did not know if he could swallow home whole this time but he knew the roads he had chosen would take him deep into the unavoidable memories.

He could not recall asking many questions of his parents. It was more a constant hungry feeling of questions he did not know how to ask. Why is fire? If God is all power, what is the thunder of the steam locomotive? The trains that carry the tanks and cannons and soldiers and sailors east to Norfolk, what do they have to do with my uncle sweating with malaria in a hotel?

One night they stared out the window through the lace curtains his mother tried so desperately to keep white and ungrimed by the cinders from chuffing smokestacks. Sitting warm by the clanking radiator with her and his sister, he watched balls of fire burst upward from the burning Sunbeam Bread bakery on the north side, across the railroad yard, one at a time, like the shells of war.

“When will we go to Kentucky?” was the closest he could get to a real question.

“In the summer,” his mother would answer, but the answer made no sense, for summers here and there were different things, like smoke and flowers.

Now, driving up past the breaks of the Big Sandy, he could not recall that St. Augustine, the philosopher of memory, had much to say on the memory of smells. His “burning, burning, burning, to Carthage then I came” was the burning of lust, the destroyer of his soul. Somewhere ahead, in the very center of the coal kingdom, a small church in Spanish gothic style, was another of the centers of his soul. The two burnings somehow converged for him, the one having awakened as he, daily, inhaled the choking brown smoke of the hell that coal produced. And envisioned the fires of hell that the priest and nuns pictured as endless and sure punishments for mortal sins. The image the nuns enjoyed giving was a mountain of sand, one tiny grain of which was moved by a bird each day, and after a million years of this, hell would have just begun. But sand or slag, they were mountains in his nightmares, and when he was found sleep walking, he had to be waked from his counting.

The decision to turn came with the sudden force of a magnet. The quickest and best way from central Tennessee was north through Kentucky on the interstates, but at Lexington he suddenly turned east on the Mountain Parkway and drove grimly toward Pikeville. From there it would be a hundred miles on two-lane roads through one hollow after another until he entered the dark world of southern West Virginia. Dark, end of the world. He could think of it no other way. Even growing up on the streets of Bluefield, West Virginia, the railroad hub of the coal fields, the area south and west of the city was always black and harsh and evil. When he read the Lord of the Rings decades later, he already knew Mordor: it was southwest of Bluefield. The old wizard of Middle Earth came out the industrial wastes of his youth and the trenches of WW I knowing the twentieth century would be a story of refuse and refusals.

The road home would pass near Buffalo Creek, where a mountain of slag collapsed from sheer exhaustion in 1973, releasing a furious 30-ft-high wall of of slimy, oily sludge into a long hollow, and washing hundreds of homes and people into oblivion. On a return home that year, he came from technicolor Puerto Rico to meet a capitalist version of sin: the refuse dam created by neglect and denial. Refuse: refusal.

Once a year his parents would take him at eleven at night to the Norfolk & Western station to catch No. 3 to Cincinnati, a hundred or so miles west through the coal mining lands. A hundred tunnels. Towns black except for a few yellow street lights. Rattling bridges over the black waters of the Coal River. The red glow of thousands of coke ovens. And in the morning, from the great Union Station in Cincinnati, either the L&N or the Southern (The Southern Serves the South) into the bluegrass of Louisville or Danville, a bright, sunny world of green rivers and tobacco fields. Heaven.

The yellow GMC bus came down the street, early morning, when he was out to deliver papers on the east side. Where Boone turned into Wyoming, he could see them, miners in work hats with lights, their faces grimy. White eyes and teeth. Like black-face minstrels, like Silas Greene from New Orleans, whose train car came once a year to do shows.

“How come their faces are dirty in the morning?” “I guess they figure there’s no need to wash until Saturday,” his mother answered.

He wondered what their sheets looked like. When he collected for the paper at their houses, the insides smelled yellow and sour. He could imagine these miners entering the mine elevator, going down into the blackness of the earth. Across the valley, a Mallet engine was struggling up the grade, a hundred seventy-five ton cars in tow, westward bound. The question in his mind would not form into words. So he imagined shell bursts on the ridge on the north side. It was something to do, lob a newspaper, imagine a shell burst.

In Kentucky, everything was different: the sky, the hills, the smells. Nothing was jagged or grinding. Back then he would have been hard put to say the differences. In Bluefield there was always the sound of the trains, the billowing clouds of smoke from the smokestacks, the night glare of fireboxes, the chuff-chuffing of engines on the long-haul grades, the clanging of bells and shrieking of steam whistles, the endless banging of couplings, and always the gritty cinders hitting your eyes as you inhaled the smell of burning coal.

Sometime when he was four or five the whole family sometimes crouched in the living room by the Westinghouse radio. They called it a black out. They said Hitler had placed the railroad center of Bluefield on his bombing list. They listened to the news on the local radio station while they could still hear the switch engines on the tracks ding-dinging their small bells as they hustled cars into long lines, making up trains for east and west. Finally, after an age of waiting, the steam whistles blew on the rail yard and the lights were back on.

When you passed the church, you were supposed to cross yourself and if you wanted to, to “make a visit.” Inside it was dark but in the sanctuary the red lamp was always burning. The church was cold in the winter, sometimes you could see your breath. He was there in the Tabernacle, waiting for you. On All Souls Day if you prayed five Our Fathers and five Hail Mary’s and five Glory Be’s, a soul in purgatory could be released into heaven and the angels would sing. The pews were hard wood and your knees hurt in the November cold. He felt guilty for only staying a while. But the rustle of coats and coughing did not obscure the one thing: He was there if the sanctuary lamp burned, and He knew what was going on inside you. When he passed the church to deliver his newspapers, he knew the red lamp was lighted in the dark church. In the rail yard, you could sometimes see the fires burning hot and red in the locomotive fire boxes. At home, he crept out in the morning and lit the fire in the fireplace grate; first the newspaper and wood crackled, then the coal caught fire and smoked, then the red warm glow of heat reached the clothes, which he and his sister hung on chairs to heat before they dressed for Sacred Heart school where, in every room, the heart of Jesus burned in His chest.

When he drove into Bluefield from the southeast, passing Cinder Bottom where the whorehouses and honky tonks had served the coal fields for generations, he went right up to Giles Street. It was early morning and as usual the fogs rolled down into hollows or rose up in mists from the springs and creeks. The railroad was still there and still busy with long coal trains but the great Mallet locomotives were gone. In their place the dull, boring diesels throbbed without poetry or steam.

It’s a short, twisting street, a few city blocks long. Mostly railroad workers once lived here, brakeman and conductors, their houses neat with small gardens and grape arbors. Now it looked like an apocalyptic movie. The house where he had lived until he was eleven, a grand old three-story with attics and mysterious cellars, was mostly gutted, trash piled in the yard, abandoned car bodies half-buried in the ground. Farther up, a line of houses that appeared to have been bombed from the air. Crack dens, rat-infested apartments. When he got out and tried to walk the street to collect memories, a few homies jangled out, their bodies shaking and jiving, and shouted obscenities at him. “What you doing up here, honky? Get your ass out, now, white boy.” A few rocks and beer cans flew past his head. The lore he knew from his sister was that this was a lost zone, even the cops would only drive through once in a while. The yard where he had played and where his dad had built a large chicken coop to feed them during WW II was gone. The neighbors were gone. The streetcars were gone. Sanity was gone. There was only the dull, hopeless throbbing of the diesels and the hatefulness of the people who lived there.

He stopped at Sacred Heart Church which was, barely, still there. When he had been an altar boy, he had heard Bishop Swint preach one Sunday. Pointing to the columns and the soaring apse, he said “don’t ever let anyone change this church. This church is one of the most beautiful specimens of architecture in the diocese.” Did he know something in the early 1950s we didn’t know? After Father Burke, the parish had been afflicted with a series of priests who cared nothing for the Spanish gothic and less for the Church Universal. Like many other desecrators and wreckovators in the wake of Vatican II, they had thrown beautiful vestments and chalices and other sacred things into trash heaps. He was only able to enter because a few people were cleaning, talking at the top of their voices in a church that had always been hushed with reverence when he was growing up.

“Isn’t the Blessed Sacrament in the Tabernacle? The lamp is lit.”

A man with a vacuum cleaner laughed. “There’s no liturgy now. We’re cleaning.” What a joke. He knew there would be no silence during the “liturgy” either, for the happy-clappy moderns detested it as a medieval relic.

He made a quick tour. He already knew the story. The magnificent carved wood confessional had been turned into a bathroom, the ornate altar rail where he had knelt for Holy Communion was gone. Atrocious banners covered up what was left of art. What had threatened to be the worst had been averted when one of the priests was found to be unfaithful to his vow of chastity and had been moved to another parish. A flaming “charismatic,” he had desired to completely renovate the church by placing the altar in the center of the nave so that he could spin about on stiletto heels, communing with the faithful in all directions like a dervish. He had also removed the huge crucifix from the apse, though a few irate old-timers had restored it while he was out of town.

The bell tower was sealed off as condemned,the bell ropes he had seen lift old Joe the Sicilian janitor off the floor on Easter dangled uselessly amid cobwebs. A whole series of priests had confused the parishioners with theological cobwebs as much as they had garbled the liturgy and wrecked the architecture. The four panels on either side of the Tabernacle were still there, though, ignored and isolated: the angels held tablets reading “I have loved, O Lord/The Beauty of Thy House/And the Place/Where Thy Glory Dwelleth.”

There are many kinds of refuse, he reflected as he drove toward his sister’s decaying house. The industrial waste and the strip mines. The human waste he knew on the streets, the sick and wounded from the mines, the wounded from the church, the wounded lands. He thought also of his father, dead at 55 of acute emphysema. Like hundreds of thousands of miners, he had been viewed as expendable by the corporation he worked for.

Refuse. The story of the Appalachian highlands—but also the story of modern man. Soon, with abortion and infanticide at one end and euthanasia at the other, human beings would be unable to tell the difference between life and death. Heaps of fetuses and aged bodies for the crematoria.

He wanted to kneel in a real church and pray to Him, Lord, have mercy on us.

©Copyright 2010 R. Kenton Craven

Pilgrims on the Street

Why does it say Salt Rising Bread on the package if it is already risen? Why do they call it Cream of Wheat when there is no cream in it? Why is it spelled sal-mon and pronounced sammon? If it is Norfolk & Western and Baltimore & Ohio, why is it just Burlington Northern? Why is there no sand in a sandwich? And why do they call them green beans when the beans are white and just the little sleeves are green? Why is there a part of the Mass that sounds like “Minnie Mouse”? And why are there no fathers and mothers in Walt Disney cartoons, just uncles and aunts? Why are we Catholics and everybody else is a Protestant?

With these and a thousand other questions that sprouted in my brain by the second I tormented my parents in meal time discussions, which were often shut down by fiat. In this irritating behavior I was probably not unlike many bright young minds scheduled to become neurotics or criminals, but as I think back on those days, I marvel at what I did not marvel at. In the face of dozens of astounding realities, my mind tended to be stupefied with wonder. Those things were there, too large or too outrageous to even question. They were just there. And so was I, dumb flatfooted in front of them.

Come to think of it, that was the way it was with a lot of things. Things of one kind were there and questionable, things of another kind were in a separate world and perfectly consistent, beyond question, and absolute. Even though I could not be said to understand it, Transubstantiation was one of these, why nuns and priests were nuns and priests was another. They had been there since the beginning and were as immutable and absolute as the rock ridges on the mountains and the thunderous locomotives on the railroad. And as fearful.

Somehow the street things were beyond question too, though completely dissociated in my mind from the church things and the movie things and the railroad and mining things. The street was a world in which I lived with my dad, outside Church and somewhere in history where stories from McGuffey’s readers and newsreels and the Reader’s Digest and his life on the road and the rails mingled with the strange creatures we met on our daily walks through town. About these I did not ask why, I simply beheld.

They may as well have been fabulous creatures like the ones I occasionally met in juvenile versions of Bulfinch’s mythology. They were all humans, and that I did not question; I suppose I didn’t even raise that question. When we would see one of these creatures, I would look at my dad and he would look at me and grin and shake his head to indicate he was as puzzled as I, and we would pass on.

Take Wes. Wes was an aging, lumbering fellow whose hat looked as if it had been chewed up by dogs and his baggy clothes as if they had been wallowed in, though he always wore a tie. He rolled rather than walked, his bag of newspapers balanced on his left hip, his right hand always extended to offer passersby a copy of the Bluefield Daily Telegraph or the Sunset News. Well, not offer, exactly; he would thrust the paper into the reading space of each face he saw. Of particular importance to him were the photos on the front page which he would point to with his thumb and say, “purty pitcher, purty pitcher,” regardless of whether it was a picture of a lady or a train wreck. On the infrequent days when there was no photo, he was known to stomp into the editorial offices of the newspapers and demand to know how he was supposed to sell papers with no pitchers. He was said to have a large number of children in a ramshackle house in the west end of town.

Or the man who stood in front of Monkey Wards, as we called it. We never knew his name. His eyes were like tunnels of darkness and his face carried deep pock marks. The tattered sign he wore on a chain around his neck explained that he had been injured in a mine explosion and had received no compensation. He carried a tin cup in one hand and a cane in the other. I never saw him move from his place, but he was said to be picked up and deposited there daily by family “in a big fancy car,” some liked to say. He never moved except to shake his head each time someone walked near him, when he would say, always with the same pleading request, “please don’t do that, please don’t do that.”

Mr. Comer was another victim of the mines. He had lost both legs in a mine accident when a slate roof sheared them off and left him with a family to support. He had somehow built the cart in which he sat and had rigged it with a bicycle chain he could turn with his strong arm, moving it on the sidewalk each day from spot to spot where he sold newspapers, pencils, chewing gum, and so on. Also wearing a tie, Mr. Comer was a cheery man who loved to talk, and he usually had a cluster of folk around him throughout the day.

Though many boys like me also sold newspapers, neither he nor Wes ever complained that we were cutting into their businesses, which we were. There was a kind of code on the streets, a fellowship we might call it. Beyond that I would not try to say what spiritual bond kept us from the kind of greed and backstabbing that ran up and down our streets like cholera. When this disease showed itself in obvious or subtle ways, my dad (and my mom too) had a few words, “big shots . . . Republicans.” The good guys were miners, railroaders, working men, small shop owners, and the honest poor. We watched, and identified with, The Grapes of Wrath and Trail of the Lonesome Pine.

Howard, too, a blind man who became my friend, earned his living on the streets by begging in a dignified way. He had a few pencils in his cup, he said, to keep the cops from calling him a beggar, and he wore a suit and tie, always a white shirt with fraying collars, a Stetson hat, and he kept clean and trim from his tiny room in one of the cheap hotels that catered to the less classy railroad traffic. There stacks and stacks of 78 records circled his always-made bed, mostly jazz, but also the recordings for the blind sent him each month from Louisville. When he had lost his sight in an accident with a car battery as a boy, he had been sent to a school for the blind by the State, but, he complained, “they never taught me anything I could use to make a living.” So he stood on the street, running his business from eight to five, taking a lunch break at Tom’s or Jimmy’s or Harry’s restaurant, where I would sometimes sit and say, “peas at four o’clock, potatoes at ten, burger at six.” Back on the street he would hum or whistle jazz tunes, bob his head, and tap his cane. When it rained, he stood under awnings or theater marquees.

There were others on the street who could not even pretend to make a living. Some were crippled (a word we are no longer allowed to use) from various causes, some were harmless people who were later rounded up and sent to asylums to keep our city beautiful for tourists and customers. Yes, by those same respectable big shots and Republicans. Part of the “other America” as they were later called by Michael Harrington in a book that John F. Kennedy cited when he campaigned in West Virginia. In later days, it sometimes seemed to me that half the city consisted of this other America. Then, they were just the people on the street.

Two such people, extremely different from each other, were June and Glenn. Their only resemblance was that, according to the fancified experts, they were twelve-year-old minds in their twenty-something bodies. They lived on the street, occasionally being fetched up by their families, sometimes taken in by the Union Mission or the Salvation Army, sometimes (June especially) corralled by my mom for a “sanrich,” as June called them, and a rigorous cleansing.

My dad and I were attractive to them because we worked in the movie theaters, a glamorous world where there were not only movies but stage shows (Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Lash LaRue, the Three Stooges, even a production of Tobacco Road). And my dad and I handled the popcorn concession. In a room behind the stage, we popped endless kettles of popcorn which were stored and moved to rooms near the concession stands of two theaters. The popcorn came in fifty- or one-hundred pound bags, the coconut oil in fifty-gallon drums. The popped corn was stored in five-gallon cans and moved on a wooden cart. Unlike Tom Sawyer, we did not have to do anything to attract people who wanted to help. Glenn and June always knew they could make a quarter, bum some cigarettes, and eat as much popcorn as they wanted.

Back then street people had no label, and we did not deal much in labels in those days, at least not for the people my dad and I knew in our rambles. They were what could be called the walking wounded of our culture, the least of these as Jesus called them. There was Sy, who talked to no one but movie stars on the posters outside the theaters, chatting as with old friends and occasionally frowning and giving the villains what-for. And mute Edgar, whose business it was to clean the streets, picking up pieces of paper and cigarette butts and storing them all in cloth bundles he tied around his neck with string until, coming at you, he resembled a department store on the hoof. And Clarence, who had seen his father shoot himself with a shotgun and had from then on called himself Clark Gable and spoke only of the movies he had made and would soon make.

As I remember these people and the way I saw them then, I don’t think I am amiss in referring to them as “creatures,” for they were God’s creatures, and my way of knowing them must be something that I learned from my father. I don’t think I felt pity or compassion for any of them. Rarely, I believe, did we feel impelled to "help" them. More, I felt something less easy to characterize, beyond anything a sociologist could classify. In some distant way, they were fellow creatures on the way, and my regard for them was something like the fellowship of pilgrims. Thus, my education from my father, who then asked me one day as we walked home from the theaters, “do you think I could be a Catholic?” But that is another chapter.

Mole # 4

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE #4

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE # 4 FROM SUB-MENSCH DIRT-TOSSER MOULDYWARP

In which the Mole turns Distributist and reveals his darker purpose.

The Mole worketh within the bureaucracy, but not always. On Thursdays he flees the maze and hitchhikes to Cookeville, where he joins his fellows in the Chesterton Society of Middle Tennessee, a small but hardy band of fellows currently reading G. K. Chesterton’s An Outline of Sanity and attempting to plumb the meaning of GKC’s “Distributism” or Distributivism,” as it is sometimes called. We have tossed (note the mole tie-in!) the topic about for several years and lately have been trying to understand it in depth and ask the question, is it feasible? Or as some critics suggest, is it merely a romantic fantasy, of no application in the world of Wal-Mart and Obama socialism?

When Chesterton and Belloc first talked of Distributism almost a hundred years ago, England had already been wracked and transformed by the evils of modern industrialism, and the Servile State (as Belloc called it) already seemed to have won. To us moles, hammered by tractors and under siege from new poisons, traps, and incessant attacks by the new industrial farming, so it seemed. Besides, Karl Grundsow Marx, who holed up in the British Museum and wrote cloudy words that plunged millions into a new slavery, had determined that all was determined in history, so what’s the point of chattering about it like nutty squirrels?

At root, Distributism visualizes a society in which individuals possess spiritual and economic freedom through the ownership of private property, preferably land. Its vision is akin to Jeffersonian agrarianism, and that is why Chesterton and Belloc wrote for The American Review in the 1930’s, along with the Southern Agrarians. Down deep, this is a radical vision of what society ought to be, and we moles, relishers of roots and radishes and radicals, understand. We also know that radix malorum est cupiditas, for where real freedom exists for the right thing to be done, the freedom exists for the seven deadlies to flourish like weeds.

Critics of the Distributist vision complain that it is impractical, unrealistic, romantic, etc. In The Outline of Sanity, Chesterton takes those criticism head on. First, he says, there is a vast illusion in society that the freedom talked of by Distributists already exists in society and that it is threatened by Socialism and Capitalism. People really believe, he says, that private enterprise is really in our lives and in the society around us. People who speak this way—“those people are so blind and deaf to all the realities of their own daily existence.” “We have already accepted everything that anybody of intelligence ever disliked in socialism. . . .Capitalism has done all that Socialism threatened to do.”

Here, the Mole applauds his webby paws and chortles like a whistle pig. What did I tell you in the last missive? That bureaucracy works by expansion, that its genetic goal is to include more and more within its power, which is a blinding, controlling power, a bit like chemical fertilizer. Bluntly, the bureaucracy of the society in which you live now has already absorbed and enlisted you as “a servant of the State.” For such as person, “from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep again, his life is run in grooves made for him by other people, and often other people he will never even know. He lives in a house, that he did not make, that he does not want. He moves everywhere in ruts; he always goes up to his work on rails. He has forgotten what his fathers, the hunters and the pilgrims and the wandering minstrels meant, by finding their way to a place. He thinks in terms of wages, he has forgotten the real meaning of wealth. His highest ambition is concerned with getting this or that subordinate post in a business that is already a bureaucracy.”

That world exists, says GKC, and it is this world. Distributism is a philosophy that challenges it by insisting that a person should be more than a function of the State. So our first task is to rid ourselves of the enormous illusion that we are free and independent persons gaily living our lives outside the 9-to-5 grind. The grind is everywhere we are and we are slaves to it now. A mole already in a trap raving about Socialism encroaching on his freedom is a bit of a, well, fool?

So, a frustrated Chestertonian asked in our Cookeville enclave, what are we to do to re-establish the right proportions in the State? A fair question. If we are blind, how shall we see? And what things can we do? I will explore this question more in Missive # 5.

I think GKC is urging us, first, to take off our blinders and peep, at least like us moles, at the light above. We are already slaves of the State, and each day we become more and more unfree. Second, stop talking tommyrot about Socialism. We are already imprisoned by global Capitalism and its offspring, a socialist State created by regulations and governed by a bureaucracy. The question right now is, not IF we shall have a Socialist Healthcare system, but HOW MUCH MORE of one than we already have?

The relentless expansion of bureaucracy I talked about last time has included us in the most radical way: as diminishing persons. Not only unfree, but blind to what is happening to us. Here in the bureaucracy I burrow in at the moment, no one knows quite what I am and what I am for. I am asked to perform tasks that could be given to a sixth-grader. Performing such tasks is not the problem; I am happy to follow in the humble tracks of saints and servants. The problem is that we do not call things by their names and delude ourselves into believing that the purpose of a bureaucratic society is to help persons be free and fully human.

It is not. It is exactly the opposite. Any opossum or concentration camp prisoner could tell you that. Check the tatooed ID on your arm or cellphone..

Mole # 3

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE # 3

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE # 3 FROM SUB-MENSCH DIRT-TOSSER MOULDYWARP

The roots get all tangled down here. I’m used to that in unweeded gardens; fie upon them, as my friend Hamletish Mouldywarp mought say. What I mean is, things get crowded and it’s hard to see what’s what. The whole point of gardening and making good lawns is to keep things separate-like, and not all muddled up so they can fruit and flower as they might serve the needs of moles and men. Here at the Department of Human Resurfacing, the point is, if I can find a point in it, is to take the radicals and either strangle them or distort them beyond recognition.

As I said in # 2, my first job here was to learn how to be an un-mole by not asking any questions that start with why? Whenever I see an A that looks as if it might connect with a B, scotch that, strangle that, stuff it down a deadend hole right now before it leads somewhere. If a mole could scream so human ears could hear, my existence down here would sound like one long Dostoevskyan howl. Now, you may say, if it’s all that godawful, why do people want it? Why do they feed and fertilize it with unnatural chemicals to keep it going?

Take this, for instance: my co-worker Candace Mouldywarp, a cousin, slams down the phone the other day and says, “people get so nasty when they’re getting everything for free.” See, a good root system is meant to nourish things, not choke them to death. Here, in the Department of Human Refamishing, things appear to be what they aren’t, and when that happens, all is lost. Consider: in this and a thousand places like it, lies festoon the walls. Love that word, festoon, a string of flowers (yummy!), but these are all fake flowers, pictures of flowers and natural scenes with messages attached about DESTINY and SUCCESS and MOTIVATION and THE ESSENCE OF TODAY and such. Like the poison literary candies artificed by the Soviet Writers Union in Stalin’s (and Obama’s?) times, they are meant to lie, lie, lie.

The overwhelming message is that we are here to help you! Why if Great Grandfather Benedictus T (T for terrafirm) Mouldywarp could see these verbal atrocities tacked onto sentimental scenes, he would erupt above the surface and cry out plagues! Dig deeper and hide from the surface lies! We can smell lies, you know, we moles, they smell like strychnine laced with cyanide and sweetened with almondine syrup. Gophers go for them every time, but moles know better, and that is why I am here with these missives, dear readers, to sniff out the lies.

The fact is that the Human Refashioning workers are not here to help people but to process them. And the processors are eaten up by the process. End and means are muddled to the point that one worker exclaimed just the other day, “I don’t know what I’m doing!” Caution, love, we’re not supposed to know that. Verge on vertiginous truths such as that and you will be in danger of becoming human again.

Wait, wait, you cry. How can you confuse evil bureaucratic systems such as the GULAG and the Nazi concentration camps with the benign, beneficent human servicing agencies of our beloved system, which feed and clothe and employ people? The answer is that there is no confusion here, the confusion is structured into the system itself through two means: distancing and expansion. The law of love left by the Divine Yeshua is the opposite of a bureaucratic system which is designed to distance the deed from the doer. When I respond to a needy or beggar mole, I give to that fellow mole and I join him in a recognition of our total and mutual dependence on . . . well, you know Who I mean. Bureaucracy distances the hand and the gift more and more until I and love and gift and giver become root-jumbled. A lie: that the State is God and on him do the poor depend exclusively.

And expansion: the lesson of Communism and Hitler’s National Socialism is that the secret to mass murder is expanding the bureaucracy to include more and more people as murderers. The Hitler jugend and the Communist Young Pioneers both enlarged the state machine to include youth and children who were taught the lies and committed to telling them. When everyone is part of the bureaucracy, everyone is a slave and everyone becomes a liar. When denouncing your parents becomes a patriotic duty, then the State has become God. And from what I hear from the mole network, denouncing ones parents for racism, sexism, and non-political correctness has become daily fare (not tasty) for the educational bureaucracy.

You see, the rootlet of the great bureaucracy I work in is only a tiny offshoot of the main tree. Even the Congress itself is an offshoot. The main tree is the educational system, and to find out about that, I listen at night to the tales of fellow mole Woody Mouldywarp, named for a president who brought in the federal income tax and the concept that the people is a dumb mob to be led—sort of like landless peasants—which they were rapidly becoming. Woody works underground in the school system

Woody says that all you need to do to know the secret lies that power the culture is listen to the students and the teachers in the schools. Nearly every standard phrase they use is a betrayal of something good. Of course the chief nutrient fed to the roots is relativism, which appears in nearly everything they say. The ritual of relativism that teaches the students is conducted as follows: a controversial topic—say abortion—is introduced for discussion. All the students are invited to express their feelings and opinions. Arguments based on reason are immediately dismissed as “ideological” (Bill O’Reilly, former high school teacher, you learned your lesson so well!) The teacher carefully guides the class to the overwhelming conclusion: no-one has the answer, all opinions are equal in value, there is no truth, and school is a place where you are turned into a slave. “Don’t go there” is the new motto of anti-reason.

So as I shuffle the papers and do the intake forms, I ask clients (as they are called) to sign sway their rights, their views, their human inheritance, the last shreds of their southern culture, pretty much the way they sign away their right to farm rationally at the Department of Agriculture Office a block away. “What is to constitute good behavior? For that question obviously carries its own answer on its head. Steady, hearty allegiance to the policy of the government they serve will constitute good behavior.”—Woodrow Wilson

As a mole, I watch and wonder. In the 1930’s it was a matter of taking over farms. Now, in the Department of Human Re-organ-izing, it’s a matter of taking over souls.

Mole # 2

Underground Missive # 2

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE #2 FROM SUB-MENSCH DIRT-TOSSER MOULDYWARP

. . . take time to marvel at his adaptations. Most transfixing are his front paws -- large, powerful things with claws perfectly designed for digging. That's one shown at the left. After the mole's paws, the most interesting adaptations are those you don't see. For example, underground animals wouldn't want dirt clogging their ears, so mole ears, while present, aren't to be seen. And in the tunnels' perpetual darkness, of what use are eyes? Moles do have eyes, but they're tiny slits covered with thin skin. Moles also have nostrils, but they open sideways, not forward, so dirt doesn't plug them as the mole tunnels forward.

So reads some website or other. And I am sure by now you have done your own googling or yahooing and found that my name, i.e., Mouldywarp, is the ancient English name for the common mole. Also called a “dirt-tosser,” which is an apt description of what we burrowers do. We dig tunnels underground and are not particularly particular about what we do with the soil. We are perfectly suited to the task of burrowing into the bureaucracy. From our appearance, we look like useful drudges that can serve the purposes of a being that depends upon endless systems of tunnels, and that cannot see or hear much of what is going on inside the bowels of the bureaucrat beast.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! In fact, when we are not suspected of seeing and hearing and sniffing about, regarded merely as a dumb species, that is when we know the most of what is happening around us. How think thee we have survived nearly everywhere on the planet, friend, when gardeners and farmers spin out endless methods and theories for gassing us, trapping us, grinding us, choking us to death?

So let this be a warning, bureaucracies. There will always be moles. There will always be Solzhenitsyns and Sakharovs and outraged citizens using their wise claws and snouts to see what you really are and what you are really about in your GULAGS. Respect us, dear reader, remember that we are not the species killing our own young or undermining our own existence with debt and taxes.

Take, for instance, a minor moment in the office where I burrow about. I appear bored and stupid during a conference call of excruciating mindlessness when suddenly I hear this from a county supervisor of something or other: “It has come down from Obama [always here spoken with a tone of hushed reverence] that there will not be a single corner in the nation that is not served by free or cheap public transportation.” This stunning piece of news was followed by an announcement of opening new routes of public busses that will network across the state and even connect with Amtrak. Drivers are to be hired. Routes are to be GPS-ed. Computer programs will be “enhanced.”

Now I ask you, have you learned of this from any other source? A major policy slipping down through the bureaucratic system, unnoticed even by the Foxes of the earth. A fait accompli, no less. A tentacled extension of the fabled Stimulus monster. Ah, you see, there is much going on underground that only moles can detect. A shiver in the earth’s crust, a seismic quake, a tectonic shift. Something is going on: realities are coming into existence of which the country is not aware until it sees them already operating.

When no one is looking at work, I read and ponder the new edition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle, now uncensored and published in a new translation. If you want to know how bureaucracy worked in Soviet Russia, read this book. If you want to know how the same kind of bureaucracy is coming to this country, become a mole in the system Obama is creating. What you will learn is that what most people take as reality is being redefined daily. The Soviets did that so successfully for seventy years that the unwary simply no longer knew anything.

You object, and rightly so. The mole writing this works in a pleasant office with (mostly) pleasant people, mostly women. Like all bureaucrats they process endless stacks of paper, write down information, and file it in folders or computer programs. What could be sinister here? The secret is that in a bureaucratic universe nothing looks sinister: the maidens who filed index cards on the concentration camps looked sweet and talked of their weekends. On the surface it seems benign enough. But moles know that “on the surface” is a very incomplete picture of the garden. What is distinctive about bureaucracies—from ancient Sumeria on—is that they are non-teleological. The one question one never asks in here is “why?” If one (foolish as this writer) does, he meets with shrugged shoulders, sighs, uncomprehending stares, or censorious looks.

We will come back to this in Missive # 3. But permit me a digression. In my humble view, the two greatest writers of the twentieth century were Sigrid Undset and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. They are now mostly unknown and dismissed in the American university, passed over for third-world and minority-culture scribblers no mole would allow in the garden. In 2005, I talked about Solzhenitsyn for an hour in my Utopia/Dystopia class and then asked if any of the 35 students had ever heard of him. No. I returned to my office which I shared with other part-timers and expressed my astonishment, only to have four teachers, ranging in age from 25 to 55, say “who?”

Undset, a Catholic who opposed the Nazis with her life, and Solzhenitsyn, who opposed the Communists with his life, are both great writers whose works . . . well, no need for panegyrics. Read them yourself. In 1985 Solzhenitsyn was one of the most well-known people in the world. His works were read and taught from high school to graduate school and his life was well known. What happened? He was invited to give the commencement address at Harvard. In it he said, in a nutshell, that though the Communist world was intolerable, the West was no model to follow—corruption, moral decadence, homosexuality, pornography, hatred of religion. The next morning the New York Times and the Washington Post flushed Solzhenitsyn into the lowest sewers of history, and he became an unperson. No one taught him any longer—what are you, a fascist reactionary? One still finds his works at the Good Will, but not in the university.

Here, read his speech for yourself: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html


I’ll be back,

Mole Series # 1

Note: the following four entries are from the Mole series posted on my former truewest blog. The fifth mole piece was posted on May 20 (see list).

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE #1
Note: The following sad piece of cultural detritus washed up on my leaf-strewn lawn in the mouldy, mouldy month of October. Soaked through with tears and small rice beer, it was encircled by Chinese rubber bands, and apparently tossed onto my premises by unseasonably heavy rains occasioned, no doubt, by global seething.

UNDERGROUND MISSIVE #1 FROM SUB-MENSCH DIRT-TOSSER MOULDYWARP

By which title you are to understand, dear happenstance reader, that I am a mole of the burrowing, semi-blind kind, a group of which is called by common tradition a labor, which is an apt description of what we do: we labor blindly. Our particular clan, the Mouldywarps of Yorkshire, once migrated to White County, Tennessee, and there let that matter rest.

Here, fallen upon hard times, I labor in a bureaucracy of the State, for vole crumbs and roots. My great great something Grimm-Molus, Viscount, said it all: "We are obsessed by the idea of regulation, and our Masters of Requests refuse to understand that there is an infinity of things in a great state with which a government should not concern itself."

Not any more. As my cousin the philologist, Warpus Root-Searcher, informed me, a bureau is a French desk covered with baize (yum!), and a –cracy means power. A bureaucracy is a power desk that seeks to dominate everything through rules, and a bureaucrat, no matter how mild in appearance, is nothing put a power addict seeking to devour. Satan, my grandfather Luminous Mouldywarp declared, is the supreme bureaucrat (cf. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters).

These missives from a mole are meant to deepen and understand exactly what it means to live in a State dominated and constituted by bureaucracy. Max Weber, the supposedly great (but very important) founder of sociology, said several prophetic things about a society under bureaucracy. One, he lauded a supremely efficient system based on hierarchy and rules that would supplant the traditional hierarchies composed of highly individualized (and therefore unpliable) human beings; two, he realized that bureaucracies could become inefficient when they tried to deal with individual persons and cases, which tend to become troublesome, have elbows and other odd characteristics, and often rebel against those who are only trying to serve their greater good.

Though only a semi-blind mole, I was once able to stay behind after closing hours in the Smithsonian and view an extraordinary exhibit of 19th century photographs of West African chiefs. I was, simply, stunned, and at first I did not know why. Then it came to me as I stood staring at photo after photo of chieftains staring directly at the camera: these men know exactly who they are, without self-doubt or irony or insecurity. Take any lineup from modern times, prisoners or welfare seekers or employees or students, and one can immediately see the contrast. Right away there is the fear that “I don’t really stand in my own shoes, I am waiting for definition from the system which I inhabit or clues from the passing scene of opinion; in fact I am a walking hunger for identity and what I am about, what so many of us are all about, is that desperate hunger, that erasure of the fear that my entire life—if I dare to think of all that in one moment—might amount to nothing after all.”

I am sure that there are other lineups that would yield the same impression as those African chiefs: saints, for instance; and occasional persons in our world who do in fact have complete affirmation down to their toes. One sees them occasionally, even from down here in the grass and roots where true moles dwell. Even a mole can be secure in moleness, as can that wretched cat that comes hunting me. But even being hunted can be wholly authentic because the fear is real, not neurotic.

But now, dear reader of this desperate missive, I am, as the poet said, losing myself, piece by piece, or so I fear. What I try to hold onto just now is my very moleness, which I have brought from the garden and am trying to reprise in the bureaucratic office to which I am confined many hours a week.

More to come.