Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Our Recessional Culture

 From Tom Piatak at Chronicles:

This journey from Camelot to COVID was the result of many wrong turns. When it began, the foundation of American life had already started to rot, but the rot was largely hidden and resisted by still-powerful beliefs rooted in traditional ideas of duty and self-sacrifice. Today, though, the rot is unmistakable. The termites have been busy indeed since the 1960s, as one American institution after another was captured by the devotees of the New Left, and as more and more Americans came to accept fatuous promises of “liberation,” running the gamut from “if it feels good, do it” to “greed is good.”

As we Americans grope for solutions to the myriad problems we face, we would do well to recall the words of a wise Englishman writing at his nation’s zenith.  Rudyard Kipling, asked to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, wrote a poem of admonition, not celebration. In “Recessional,” Kipling warned his countrymen that they risked going the way of “Nineveh and Tyre” if they forgot the religious basis of their civilization: “God of our fathers, known of old/Lord of our far-flung battle-line,/Beneath whose awful Hand we hold/Dominion over palm and pine—/Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,/Lest we forget—lest we forget!” (Read more.)

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