“What do you think an education is?” he continued.
“Going to college, taking some courses and getting a degree, I guess,” I responded, suspecting this was not the right answer.
“No, that's just credentialing. It may help you get a job, but it won't help you, yourself, much beyond that. Do you know what the word ‘education’ means?”
I allowed as I hadn't thought about that much.
“It's from the Latin ex, for 'out' or 'beyond,' plus ducare, to lead. An education leads you out beyond where you were, in terms of your understanding of life, the universe, and everything. Did Bowdoin do that for you?”
Well, not really, I guessed. But I wasn't sure this was leading me where I wanted to go, either. “Jim said I should see you because you would help me understand why I got fired for doing what I thought was right. Would a real education help me understand that?,” I asked.
“Yes, and perhaps a few more things besides,” answered Professor Sanft. “There was a fellow named Socrates, some years back, who had a similar experience. Ever hear of him?”
I had, and I remembered something about drinking some bad hemlock wine or some such, but beyond that it was hazy.
“You're in the same situation as most of the students who come to me here,” he said. “You know where you are in space but not in time. You don't know where you came from. You live in Western civilization, but you don't know what it is. You don't know that this civilization had a beginning and went through some rather remarkable times before getting to where we are today.”
“Without the songs and stories of the West, our West , we are impoverished,” he continued. “Weightless and drifting, we do not know where we are in history. We are what the Germans call mere Luftmenschen–in a free translation, airheads.”
The mention of history perked me up. Ever since I was about eight years old, I'd read a lot of military history. I learned to read not so much in school as by falling in love with C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels, which followed a British naval officer in his career from midshipman through admiral, in the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. They were fiction, but rooted in fact. I didn't realize it until much later, but they were also a great introduction to military decision-making.
“In the Marine Corps,” I said, “I saw that people who hadn't read much military history could only follow processes, which they learned by rote. They could not understand the situation they were in. They had no context.”
“That's an insight most Dartmouth students don't have,” said the professor. “And it is what I'm talking about, on a larger scale. Just as your fellow Marines could not understand a military situation, so you can't understand your situation in the war for our culture. Literally, you can't see your place—situ—in it.”
“Jim said I was a casualty in the culture war. I always thought wars were fought by guys with uniforms and guns. I'm not quite sure what this ‘culture war’ is all about,” I said.
“Sadly, this great culture of ours, Western culture, is under attack,” the professor replied. “The universities today are active and conscious agents in its destruction. Indeed, they have generated theories as to why Western culture should be destroyed. Of course, they aren't alone. The most powerful single force in America now is the entertainment industry, and it is also an agent of cultural destruction. Many of the politicians play the game too. The usual code-words are racism, sexism, and homophobia. When you hear them, you're hearing the worms gnawing at the foundation.”
I'd been told my high crime was “sexism,”so that clicked, and Col. Ryan was certainly a politician. It sounded as if there were a new battlefield I needed to understand. “So where do I start?,” I asked.
“By studying our culture – what it is, where it came from, what its great ideas and values are and why we hold them to be great,” Professor Sanft answered. “In other words, with an education.” He'd brought me back to where we'd started, though now I grasped what he meant.
“That doesn't mean going back to college,” he continued. “You can do it on your own. In fact, to a large degree, you have to do it on your own now, even if you are a college student. That's why we have this institute, and why I'm here. And I can give you a small present that will get you started.” He handed me a copy of a book: Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe. “Another Darmouth professor, Jeffery Hart, wrote this a few years ago. Think of it as a road map, though I've heard it's dangerous to give those to infantry officers,” Professor Sanft said.
“Thanks, I think,” I replied. Actually, we grunts did get lost a lot, we just tried to keep it a trade secret.
“It tells you what to read, what commentaries are best, and offers a few comments of its own,” Professor Sanft said. “The books don't cost much, a tiny fraction of a year's tuition at Dartmouth, but they'll do for you what Dartmouth no longer does. They will make you an educated man of the West.”
“Will this give me the gouge on why I'm now a civilian?” I asked.
“Yes,” answered Professor Sanft. “But something a bit more specific might also be helpful. Go to TraditionalRight.com. You'll find a video documentary history there about the Frankfurt School.”
“Is that McDonald's Hamburger University?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” the professor replied. “The Frankfurt School's products are ever harder to digest. It created the cultural Marxism you know as Political Correctness. Cultural Marxism is what killed you, and the video is a good introduction to it. It will help you know your enemy.”
I thanked Professor Sanft that day, though not nearly as much as I’ve thanked him since. I went to the Dartmouth Bookstore and stocked up. Maine would give me time for reading.
When we look back on our lives, incidents that seemed small at the time may take on great importance. That half-hour with Professor Gottfried Sanft changed my life. Most of my years since that day in Hanover have been spent fighting for Western culture, then rebuilding it, piece by piece, once the fighting part was done.
Thanks to Professor Sanft, this was one infantryman who wasn't lost.
Chapter Three
One nice thing about Maine is that you can go home again. We Rumfords had been doing it for a couple hundred years. The men of our family, and sometimes the women too, would head out on their great adventure—crewing on a clipper bound for China, settling Oregon, converting the heathen (Uncle Bert got eaten in the Congo), going to war—but those as survived usually came back home again, to Hartland and its surrounding farms.
Whether they returned as successes or failures made little difference. As I'd heard a chaplain say, in his day Jesus Christ was accounted a spectacular failure, so failure wasn't something for Christians to worry much about. We had enough in our family to show we didn't. I was just the most recent.
I wanted time alone to read, think and simply live. I moved into what we called “the old place,” a shingle Cape Cod up on one of Maine's few hills. The view down over the fields and ponds somehow helped the thinking part, especially in the evening as the water reflected the Western sky, orange and crimson, fading to black.
No one had lived in the old place since my grandparents died, but we kept it because it had always been ours. It had no electricity, and the well worked with a bucket on a windlass; by modern standards I guess it wasn't a fit habitation. That suited me fine. I was tired of everything modern. I wanted a world with, as Tolkien put it, less noise and more green.
I'd put some money by during my time in the Corps, enough to cover me for some months anyway; the garden and deer in season (or, if need be, out of season) would keep me from starving. The whole country was overrun with deer, more than when white men first came to North America, because there were so many restrictions on guns and hunting. In some places they had become pests; we literally could not defend ourselves from our own food.
Once I got settled, I found the video history of political correctness on TraditionalRight.com. That was a real eye-opener! “Cultural M
arxism” wasn't just a name for this stuff. That is what it actually was, Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms, in an effort that started not in the 1960s, but just after World War I. We had been guarding the front door against the Marxists of the old Soviet Union, while the cultural Marxists had snuck in the back. Their goals from the beginning were destruction of Western culture and the Christian religion, and they had made plenty of progress toward both, ruining our country in the process. If every American watched this video, I thought, Political Correctness would be in real trouble.
Next, I took up Professor Sanft's books, “that golden chain of masterpieces which link together in single tradition the more permanent experiences of the race,” as one philosopher put it. Homer and Plato, Aristotle and Aristophanes, Virgil and Dante, and Shakespeare and the greatest literary work of all time, the Bible, which was once banned from American schools, which shows as well as anything what America had become.
I had some trouble getting going—Plato isn't light reading—but I found my way in through my life-long study, war, beginning with the Anabasisof Xenophon. What a story! Ten thousand Greeks, cut off and surrounded in the middle of their ancient enemy, the Persian Empire, have to hack and march their way back out again–and they made it home. It was as exciting as anything Rommel or “Panzer” Meyer or any other modern commander wrote.
From Xenophon, and Herodotus and Thucydides and Caesar and Tacitus and all the rest, military and not (I did finally make it through Plato, too), I learned three things. Maybe they were basic, even simple. I'm not a great philosopher. But they were important enough to shape the rest of my life.
The first was that these ancient Greeks and Romans and Hebrews and more modern Florentines and Frenchmen and Englishmen both were us and made us. They had the same thoughts you and I have, more or less, but they had them for the first time, at least the first time in recorded history. Do you want a thoroughly modern send-up of Feminism in all its silliness? Then read Aristophanes's Lysistrata–it's only 2500 years old. For a chaser, recall the line of 17th century English poet and priest John Donne: “Hope not for mind in woman; at their best, they are but mummy possessed.” Pick any subject you want, except science, and these folks were there before us, thousands of years before us in some cases, with the same observations, thoughts and comments we offer today. We are their children.
That led to my second lesson: nothing is new. The only person since the 18th century to have a new idea was Nietzsche, and he was mad. Even science was well along the road we still follow by the time Napoleon was trying to conquer Europe.
Back in the old USA, newness—novelty—was what everyone wanted. Ironically, that too was old, but early 21st century Americans were so cut off from their past they didn't know it, or much else, beyond how to operate the TV remote and their cell phone.
You see, sometime around the middle of the 18th century, we men of the West struck Faust's bargain with the Devil. We could do anything, have anything, say anything, with one exception. We could not tarry, we could not rest, we could not get it right and then keep it that way. Always we must have something new: that was the bargain, and ultimately the reason we pulled our house down around us.
Satan, like God, has a sense of humor. His joke on us was that most of the stuff we thought was new, wasn't. Especially the errors, blunders, and heresies; they had all been tried, and failed, and understood as mistakes long, long before. But we had lost our past, so we didn't know. We were too busy passing around information with our computers to study any history. So it was all new to us, and we had to make the same mistakes over again. The price was high.
The third lesson, and the one that shaped the rest of my life, was that these thoughts and lessons and concepts and morals that make up our Western culture—for that is what these books contain—were worth fighting for. As Pat Buchanan said, they were true, they were ours, and they were good. They had given us, when we still paid attention to them, the freest and most prosperous societies man has ever known.
They were all bought at a price. Christ died on a cross. The Spartans still lie at Thermopylae. Socrates served Athens as a soldier before he drank its hemlock, also obedient to its laws. Cicero spoke on duty and died at the hands of the Roman government. Saints' dies natales, their birthdays, were the days they died to this world. Every truth we hold and are held by is written in blood, and sweat and tears and cold hours scribbling in lonely garrets with not enough to eat. None of it came cheap–none of it.
We Victorians, those of my generation anyway, know that fighting for the truth is not a metaphor. We killed for it and we died for it. By the 21st century, that was the only way to save it, weapon in hand. That, too, is nothing new, just another lesson we had forgotten and had to learn all over again.
Chapter Four
My next battle started around the dinner table on Christmas Day, 2016, and I'm not talking about the fight for the last piece of Aunt Sabra's blueberry pie.
It began when cousin John asked me what I thought I was going to do in the way of earning a living. Hartland wasn't exactly a boom town, and hadn't been for a good hundred years. I said I was thinking of farming. That, along with sailing or soldiering, was what we Rumfords usually ended up doing, and like most Marines I'd seen enough of boats to last me a while.
“What you gonna faam?” John asked, the flat, nasal “a” instead of “r” suggesting he hadn't been outside Maine much.
“Waal,” I said, talking Down East myself, “I thought I might try soybeans.”
“Don't see them much up heah.”
“Didn't see wine up heah either ‘til Wyly put in his vineyard. I gather his wine is selling pretty well now,” I said.
“I'll tell you why you don't see soybeans up here or on many other family farms,” said Uncle Fred. “It's oil from soybeans that makes money, and the Federal government makes it just about impossible to transport soybean oil or any other vegetable oil unless you're a big corporation. Under Federal regulations, vegetable oil is treated the same as oil from petroleum when it comes to shipment. You've got to get a hugely expensive Certificate of Financial Responsibility to cover any possible oil spill. You'll never get the capital to get started.”
“But vegetable oil and petroleum are completely different. That doesn't make any sense,” I replied.
“I didn't say it made sense, I just said that's what Washington demands. It makes no sense at all. Spilled vegetable oil is no big problem. It's biodegradable. But the Federal government mandates a spill be cleaned up the same way for both, even though that's unnecessary. You need to scoop up any petroleum product if it spills, especially into water. But if you just let vegetable oil disperse, bacteria will eat it up. Anyway, the government doesn't care that we lose hundreds of millions of dollars each year in vegetable oil that isn't produced or exported. The bottom line is, as a small farmer, you can't do it.”
Great, I thought. First politics gets me thrown out of the Marine Corps, now it's trying to keep me from farming. “Okay, I'll grow potatoes. We certainly grow enough of those here in Maine,” I said.
“Only land up at the Old Place that'll grow potatoes is the bottom land. Government won't let you do that neither,” said cousin John.
This was starting to get old. “What do you mean the government won't let me grow down there? That's the best land on the place. The rest is just rock,” I replied.
“It's the EPA, the so-called Environmental Protection Agency,” answered Uncle Fred. “They declared all that ground a protected wetland a couple years ago. It's yours, or ours, but it might as well be on the moon for all the good it does us. We can't touch it.”
Protected wetland? Hell, I didn't plan to grow potatoes in the ponds. “That's our property. We've owned it since Andrew Jackson was President. And most of it's dry. How can they tell us we can't farm it?” I asked, betraying how much those of us in the military got out of touch at times.
That got the whole table smiling the thin smile that passes f
or a good laugh among New Englanders. “Property rights don't mean squat any more,” said Uncle Earl, who was the town lawyer. “The government just tells you what to do or what not to do and dares you to fight them. They have thousands of lawyers, all paid by your tax money, and they can tie you up in court for years. You got a few hundred thousand extra dollars you'd like to spend on legal fees?”
I didn't, nor did anyone else, I gathered. “So we're helpless, is what you're saying?” I asked.
“Pretty much, unless you've got a lot of money for lawyers or to buy some politicians and get them in on your side,” said Earl. “It doesn't even matter if the law is with you, because you can't afford the fight and they can. If they lose, it means nothing to them; they still get their paychecks from the government. If you lose, you're finished, and even if you win, you're usually finished because the legal fight has left you bankrupt. What it comes down to is that we're not a free country any more.”
“What King George III was doing to us in 1776 wasn't a hill of beans compared to this,” I said. “We didn't take it then. Why are we taking it now?”
At that point, the women turned the conversation to how Ma's stuffing was the best they'd ever had. It always was.
Early next year, that year being 2017, I stopped in at Hartland's one industry, the tannery. My old high school buddy Jim Ebbitt was the personnel department there, and this matter of earning an income was beginning to press a bit on my mind. But I knew the tannery always had some kind of opening, and after my years in the infantry I didn't mind getting my hands dirty. They didn't call us “earth pigs“ for nothing.
Jim was glad to see me, but he couldn't give me any good news. “Sorry,” he said, “but like every American company, we're having to cut jobs, not add 'em. The problem is this free trade business. What it means is that American workers are up against those in places like Mexico, Haiti, and now all of central and south America, since they expanded NAFTA into AFTA and took in the whole hemisphere. Labor costs now get averaged across national boundaries; it pulls their wages up and pushes wages here down. Of course, we don't actually cut wages, but with inflation rising, we don't need to. We just keep wages steady and cut the number of jobs. Maybe that will keep this plant in business. Then again, maybe it won't. In any event, it means if I had a job to offer you, and I don't, you'd quickly find yourself getting poorer, not richer, if you took it.”
Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War Page 2