Mamaw's Boy

And: Cheneys As Dems; Possums & Mouthfuls Of Briars; Wallace Stevens And Wonder

Bonnie Blanton Vance, J.D.’s Mamaw

Here we are on Election Day, and I find myself not thinking about politics, but about an old hillbilly lady, Bonnie Blanton Vance, whose grandson, J.D., is on the national ballot. Mrs. Vance raised her grandson; he called her “Mamaw.” From Hillbilly Elegy, we meet Mamaw when J.D. recalls her brother smoking pot around him:

I was twelve. I knew if Mamaw ever found out, she’d kill him. I feared this because, according to family lore, Mamaw had nearly killed a man. When she was around twelve, Mamaw walked outside to see two men loading the family’s cow—a prized possession in a world without running water—into the back of a truck. She ran inside, grabbed a rifle, and fired a few rounds. One of the men collapsed—the result of a shot to the leg—and the other jumped into the truck and squealed away. The would-be thief could barely crawl, so Mamaw approached him, raised the business end of her rifle to the man’s head, and prepared to finish the job. Luckily for him, Uncle Pet intervened. Mamaw’s first confirmed kill would have to wait for another day.

Even knowing what a pistol-packing lunatic Mamaw was, I find this story hard to believe. I polled members of my family, and about half had never heard the story. The part I believe is that she would have murdered the man if someone hadn’t stopped her. She loathed disloyalty, and there was no greater disloyalty than class betrayal. Each time someone stole a bike from our porch (three times, by my count), or broke into her car and took the loose change, or stole a delivery, she’d tell me, like a general giving his troops marching orders, “There is nothing lower than the poor stealing from the poor. It’s hard enough as it is. We sure as hell don’t need to make it even harder on each other.”

She raised J.D., whose father had abandoned him, and whose mother — her adult daughter — struggled with drug addiction. Mamaw was not a TV grandma; she was a tough old chain-smoking hillbilly. But she saw that boy through very hard times. He took her last name in honor of her.

Mamaw, a Blue Dog Democrat, died in 2005. When he was elected to the Senate in 2022, he said, “You’re not always going to agree with every vote that I take, and you’re not going to agree with every single amendment that I offer in the United States Senate, but I will never forget the woman who raised me.” 

And now, the troubled boy that Bonnie Vance gave a future might just be elected vice president of the United States today. Ain’t that America?

How The USA Has Changed

This cannot be topped, if you ask me:

This speaks to the column I wrote for The European Conservative this week, calling today’s vote “a clash of postliberalisms.” I touched on this in this space yesterday. More from the column:

The point here is that the United States is governed, in both public and private life, by an illiberal left-wing monoculture, joined by fellow travelers of the Right who are happy to be noble losers, as long as they can get their wars and, from time to time, tax cuts. And, of course, if they can avoid being called bigots too often by the media.

This is what I mean by a regime. Viktor Orbán figured this out long ago about the governing establishments of the West. He also figured out that there is nothing to be gained by hoping to appeal to their sense of liberal fairness, and old-fashioned norms of diversity. To these liberals, in Brussels and everywhere else, ‘diversity’ means ‘every place looks like we want it to look,’ and ‘democracy’ means ‘the people agree with Brussels.’ And he fights back, using the same tools these establishments use, even as they deny doing so.

Is it at times illiberal, or postliberal? Yes. But if the alternative is not liberalism vs. postliberalism, but their postliberalism vs. our postliberalism, the choice is rather clearer, isn’t it?

In this century, Washington has worked to advance its interests through helping fund and direct various so-called “color revolutions” in former Communist states. This is not to say that the revolutionaries had no cause, or were entirely a creation of the CIA. No, this is rather to say that they were not always spontaneously generated by domestic protesters, and that the U.S. has at the very least used NGOs and civil-society institutions to spark political change favorable to Washington. There’s a reason why the Obama U.S. Agency for International Development partnered with George Soros to translate the revolutionary manual Rules For Radicals, and publish it in Macedonia, to undermine that country’s conservative government.

Perhaps the most egregious example was the role senior US officials, such as GOP Sen. John McCain, and assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, who were both on the ground in Kiev during Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan uprising, which overthrew the elected government of Russian ally Viktor Yanukovych. The Russians released audio of an intercepted phone call between Nuland and the then-US Ambassador, discussing Washington’s picks for a post-Yanukovych government.

Again: whatever that is, it’s not liberalism. The American people, and European peoples, have been gaslighted by our elites, who have set up a public-private system that benefits them, and have demonized as racist, bigoted, authoritarian, or even fascist, anyone who challenges that system and its institutions. One of the reasons Elon Musk, who supports Trump, has become a hero to dissidents is that he is too rich and too powerful to cancel—and he tells the truth about the ruling regime, and its hatred of free speech.

Back in 2019, I published a blog post at TAC called “Trump The Katechon”. Following a long look at some things left-liberals were writing about Trump’s illiberalism, I challenged it, concluding:

My basic point … is this: Trump didn’t polarize our country. Our country was already polarized; Trump just exploits and exacerbates what’s already there.

In Christian theology, there’s a term from one of St. Paul’s letters, katechon. It means “one who withholds,” and is meant by St. Paul as an unspecified restraining force that holds back the advent of the Antichrist. The term has migrated into political usage, because it’s a politically useful term. In an entirely non-theological sense, I see Trump as a katechon. I do not believe that the political forces he holds back can be restrained for much longer, simply because they are growing in popularity. It is self-deceiving to think that any politician, even a charming Philosopher-King (which Trump is not), could turn back a vast cultural tide. The best small-o orthodox Christians and other cultural traditionalists can hope for is that our political leaders (in whose number I include federal judges) can hold back enough of it, for long enough, to give us an opportunity to build institutions and other structures that will allow us to ride out the deluge ahead. This is why I wrote The Benedict Option. If Christians like me vote for Trump in 2020, it is only because of his role as katechon in restraining what is far worse.

If political scientists and newspaper columnists really are so blind that they can’t see that the Left in this country is guilty of almost everything of which it accuses Trump, then they are blind to an extremely important part of the political story of our times. The Left is polarizing the American electorate along racial, cultural and economic lines, and exploiting the schisms — but analysts on the Left can’t see it, because inside their bubble, left-wing politics are normal. The fact is that liberal democratic norms are under attack from all sides. It’s not only a left-wing or a right-wing thing; it has a lot to do with global economic shifts, and cultural changes. I don’t dispute that illiberalism is on the rise, but I strongly dispute that the illiberalism is a right-wing thing only.

I sent that to a friend in the US this morning. She said, “You ought to post that today, because it’s more true now than it was in 2019.” Yep.

We Talk Real Funny Down Here

One of my favorite Substacks is the one written by Brandon Meeks, an Anglican in Arkansas. It is a celebration of Southernness. From his latest:

“What do you mean, ‘Where’ve you been? I just got back from the jailhouse. Had to pawn your mamma’s electric razor for some bail money. That damn brother of yours, Roy Dean went running across the high school football field naked as a jay bird, grinning like a possum with a mouthful of briars. John David Turner, fool that he is, knowed that all he had to do was give the boy two shots of Wild Turkey and one double-dog dare and Roy Dean would try to climb to the moon on a stack of paint cans if he told him he “bet he couldn’t.’” ~A Conversation somewhere in the South any Friday night in October.

Everybody knows that Southerners are “big talkers.” That isn’t to say that we are not also “doers.” Lord knows we get up to some God-awful doings from time to time, but we rarely do any of them without talking about them before, during, and after. There’s usually a reason, sometimes a plan, occasionally an excuse, but always a story. And in those stories there is usually some tasty morsel, some quotable line that would make another fella say, “I too might’ve bit a bull on the behind to see how hard he would kick if I thought that I could’ve said something as poetic as that about it!” 

Southern talkers are quotable because they are natural poets. I don’t necessarily mean the artsy-fartsy cape-and-beret kind (though there is usually at least one of those in every Southern town whose obituary usually ends with the words, “He never married,”), I mean that what is native to poetry comes readily to Southerners. If you boil it all the way down to the bone, poetry is the habit of seeing a thing and saying what it looks like in a way that fastens all the meat back onto the skeleton. It is the art of noticing, the science of describing. A poet is a master of metaphor and a scholar of similes.

So the Southerner, whose mother tongue is warm with color and thick with idioms, is weaned on poesis. He comes into the world making noise and he spends the rest of his life making something out of it. This is the ultimate meaning of poetry. To make things out of words. Sometimes a mess. Sometimes a living. Sometimes a world that we would all be thrilled to inhabit. 

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Wallace Stevens And Wonder

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

I sent to a friend last night a Wallace Stevens poem with the bizarre title “Homunculus et la Belle Etoile” (1923). Stevens is a difficult poet, but he is deep. This one is a meditation on whether or not abstract contemplation or direct experience is the more reliable route to encountering the true nature of things. The “Belle Etoile” (beautiful star) is Venus. A homunculus is a little man. Here is the poem:

 In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks
The young emerald, evening star,
Good light for drunkards, poets, widows,
And ladies soon to be married.

By this light the salty fishes
Arch in the sea like tree-branches,
Going in many directions
Up and down.

This light conducts
The thoughts of drunkards, the feelings
Of widows and trembling ladies,
The movements of fishes.

How pleasant an existence it is
That this emerald charms philosophers,
Until they become thoughtlessly willing
To bathe their hearts in later moonlight,

Knowing that they can bring back thought
In the night that is still to be silent,
Reflecting this thing and that,
Before they sleep!

It is better that, as scholars,
They should think hard in the dark cuffs
Of voluminous cloaks,
And shave their heads and bodies.

It might well be that their mistress
Is no gaunt fugitive phantom.
She might, after all, be a wanton,
Abundantly beautiful, eager,

Fecund,
From whose being by starlight, on sea-coast,
The innermost good of their seeking
Might come in the simplest of speech.

It is a good light, then, for those
That know the ultimate Plato,
Tranquillizing with this jewel
The torments of confusion.

It’s a poem, I think, about what Marshall McLuhan called “percept” and “concept”. A percept is the direct experience of a thing; a concept is the experience turned into a thought. As someone put it once, “A concept is a percept that has forgotten what it is.”

We have to have concepts to communicate, of course, but something is lost in the translation. Stevens is saying here that direct sensual experience is superior to the abstract speculation of philosophers, who, as Wordsworth put it, “murder to dissect.” Iain McGilchrist’s life’s work, it seems to me, is about calling us back from orienting ourselves to the world as if concept were the truest nature of things, and balancing that with percept. As light is both wave and particle, so too is experience both percept and concept. When you isolate the particle to study it, it ceases to be a wave. So it is with percepts and concepts.

I just finished an interview with a Christian broadcaster in the UK, talking about Living In Wonder. He asked me, as they all do, what re-enchantment is. I forget what I told him, but the next time I’m asked the question, I’m going to draw on this Stevens poem (though I won’t quote it; it’s strange verse), and explain, somehow, that I’m trying to move Christianity out of the realm of concept, and back towards percept. It has to be both, of course, but we in the West have come to experience the faith primarily as concept, and the deeds that logically follow from these concepts, and much less as the direct perception of God, in what we Orthodox call His “energies.”

In the Beauty chapter of Living In Wonder, I talk about how critically important Beauty is to re-enchantment, which is to say, re-orienting ourselves to the reality of God’s immanent presence in the world. Excerpt:

We are not going to argue ourselves back to enchantment, nor are we going to behave ourselves into true goodness. We need reason, and we need morality. But, above all, we need beauty.

This is the message of Dante’s three-volume poem The Divine Comedy, or Commedia. It is not only one of the greatest works of art ever made but also a sure guide to Christian re-enchantment—indeed, to repentance, conversion, and salvation itself—through beauty.

The poet wrote from a place of radical loss. He had been on top of the world in Florence, his native city, until political strife led to his permanent exile. He spent the rest of his days trying to make sense of what went wrong and how to make it right. The result was the Commedia, the story of how a man named Dante who is lost in the “dark wood” found his way out to restoration and ultimately back to God.

The poem is theologically and philosophically dense, but it isn’t theology or philosophy that draws the pilgrim Dante to God. It is the encounter with beauty—the beauty of Beatrice, the woman the poet loved in real life, who died young. In the poem, God sends Beatrice from heaven to lead the lost Dante to salvation, knowing that it is only the light of her beloved face that can penetrate his gloom. Making the way for Beatrice’s appearance in Dante’s life is Virgil, the classical poet, whose goodness was the bait that first drew the lost and broken poet out of the forest of his despair.

In the Commedia, the pilgrim Dante undertakes a perilous voyage through the afterlife—down to the Inferno (hell), up the mountain of Purgatorio (purgatory), and finally through the realm of Paradiso (heaven)—until he encounters God himself. It is a voyage first of repentance, then of purification.

In his study on the figure of Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Charles Williams explains how she is the greatest figure in literature, revealing the “way of affirmation”—the path to unity with God through the recognition and celebration of the goodness in the world. In Dante’s poem, Beatrice is the bearer of God’s light. Through contemplating her beautiful image, the lost and broken poet learns to see through her to the everlasting God, who has saved her and desires to save Dante.

“The sight of Beatrice . . . filled him with the fire of charity and clothed him with humility,” wrote Williams, who was part of Lewis’s and Tolkien’s circle. “She is such that whoever stays to behold her becomes a noble thing or dies.”

For pilgrim Dante, her beauty is so powerful that it compels him to want to change his life, to become more virtuous. She is the bearer of charisma, of a spiritual gift conferred by Christ—and, as such, Dante wants to imitate her. He can withstand the intensity of her true smile only after he has become purified of his sinfulness and more filled with the strengthening light of Christ.

Remember that for Dante the poet, and all medieval Christians, the entire universe was enchanted, imbued with meaning and the presence of God. Our sinfulness and selfishness blinds us to the divine light within. If God’s light shines stronger in some places than in others, says Dante, that’s because some are more receptive of grace. Desire for beauty and truth, and for God, their source, pulls us along the path of conversion and theosis.

“Theosis” is the Orthodox word for ultimate union with God. All of life — the dying to Self so that we can live in Christ — is literal for us Orthodox, and is the entire point of the Christian life. What Wallace Stevens, an atheist (though it is said that he converted to Catholicism on his deathbed), is saying philosophically is what I’m trying to say theologically and spiritually.

Perhaps the greatest ever testimony about percept and concept came from St. Thomas Aquinas. On December 6, 1273, the saint, whose only rival as the greatest Christian intellect ever is St. Augustine, was celebrating mass when he had a mystical vision. We don’t know what precisely he beheld, but he said of it:

“I can do no more. The end of my labors has come. Such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw. Now I await the end of my life after that of my works.”

He put down his pen, leaving the Summa unfinished, and died within the year. The Summa is a peerless systematic conceptual explanation of Christianity. Yet compared to the percept of things divine, it was, said the saint, “so much straw.”

See y’all tomorrow. Come what may, we’re all going to still be here. The world will yet turn, and the flowers will be just as beautiful as they ever were.