Throughout civilised human experience there have been empires that over-powered other peoples and exercised great power over parts of the world. Like all living things, empires rise, flourish, and decline to an end. There are no exceptions, including the Yankee Empire that flourished from the late 19th through the 20th century. Historians have observed the decline of empires and have suggested several signs. These include moral decadence; declining religion and culture; a corrupt elite who have no foresight and no connection with the people they exercise power over; the mixture of the original stock with swarming aliens; debt and taxation at unsustainable levels; a wealth-consuming over-extended military.

Remind you of anything?  

I recently watched a two hour documentary on Apache Helicopter pilots during the “surge” of the Iraq occupation. These were brave men who saw a lot of action. Two-thirds had Southern accents. Sad.


Trump talked a good game and many of us were desperate to hear the message that he gave. We were betrayed more blatantly than any other constituency in U.S. history. We should have paid more attention to his character and career.
​

He has become a dangerous clown. He tells the U.N. that he might obliterate one of its member countries. What could be more arrogant and inappropriate—the absolutely wrong place to do such a thing? Yankee bad manners.


The Republican mainstream for years did everything in its power to block and undermine Trump. Now that he really deserves opposition they are silent or supporting his bad actions. The Republicans are simply an election machine without any principles or goals. Most are on the Israeli payroll.


Have you noticed the number of foreign names that keep showing up in Congress—Mexican, Indian, Chinese, Persians, Sudanese, etc. As recently as the 1990s nobody could have imagined this. The Democrats are also mostly on the Israeli payroll, but these newly in power minorities are the only people who are actually opposing Trump’s destructive craziness. The Republicans will accuse them of being “socialists.” An old party theme that no longer has any relevance.


Subcontinental Indians seem to continue to proliferate in cities I am familiar with. They seem to have taken over IT, 7-11 type stores, and small hotels. I cannot spend a normal day without encountering several. You have probably seen the picture of an Indian horde at the University of Texas football game.
​

A good illustration of a dying America. So some are smart. Not necessarily so, but if they are, they are the top 1% of the top 1% of a huge population. It is criminal and inhumane for the U.S. to deprive poorer countries of its smartest citizens. Study Hinduism. Nothing could be more repulsive to a healthy Western consciousness.

“The Legend of Van Dorn” has recently been released. It takes a bit of history and weaves a romantic story, which must be mostly imaginary, around it.



Confederate Major General Earl Van Dorn (1820-1863) was a brave and able soldier who rendered valuable service to the Confederacy. Before the war he had been recognised for conspicuous bravery in the Mexican War and against the Comanches.


Van Dorn is said to have been a handsome blond and very attractive to women. It seems he made use of this with women, including married ones. In 1863 he was assassinated by a conspicuously wronged husband. The film makes Van Dorn’s affair with Mrs. Peters into a tearjerker love story which is probably more fiction than fact.


Keeping this always in mind, I somewhat appreciated watching the movie. Most of the creators and lead characters are Southern-born and not well-known. The accents are better than in most such movies. The battle scenes are somewhat more accurate than usual, I think. Gen. Bedford Forrest is well-played by David B. Meadows, from West Virginia and a former combat experienced Navy Seal.


A relaxed hour and a half with this might be pleasant, and certainly better than Hollywood’s usual degenerate trash. 

Of the new jobs created in the U.S. in 2025, it is estimated that 88% went to foreigners, only 12% to native Americans and these not the best jobs.


The Trump administration has made some impact on illegal immigration, though they seem to have slacked off lately. It is estimated that there are still 1.5 million illegals in the U.S. Every week, it seems, we still hear about an American being murdered by an undeported illegal already identified as a criminal. Observation suggests that in my area new Subcontinental Indians are still appearing all the time. Supposedly legal immigrants, obviously more affluent than the locals.


A new study indicates that only 2% of now living Americans have American lineage that goes as far back as the Revolution. This country has no relationship to the one made by our Founders. Americans are not a people but a collection of shoppers and sports fans. There is nothing to locate firmly any real patriotism. Love of country is expressed by military boasting and unjustified invasion of smaller countries. And garbage rhetoric about “diversity” which does not really exist in any positive way.


In the South I am sure we have better than 2%. I am not clear if the study has included black people or not. In fact, many of them have a much longer American lineage than most Yankees. Interesting that black “leaders” are not descendants of American slaves. Obama is a half-white African and the affirmative action General Powell is perhaps 3/4ths white and his family came from the West Indies. Clarence Thomas seems to be one of the few real American blacks in a high position.


A country with no real people can have no coherent policy, domestic or foreign. The elected Congress has become irrelevant to any important decisions, which is just the way they like it, especially Republicans. Bureaucrats, judges, and the media reconstruct society as they please. There is no Constitution when a President can by his own decision start an unnecessary war, invade and attempt to overthrow a foreign government on false pretenses for the benefit of a pet foreign power.


Have you noticed that people are regularly murdered and raped by individuals who have already been convicted of previous felonies? Who is letting these people loose?
I weep for Carolina. Lindsey Graham’s sister just won the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. She was heavily financed by the Las Vegas gamblers. There were few campaign ads promoting her qualifications (of which there are none). There was a hurricane of very malicious ads against her opponent. Even so, it seems to be a good sign that the more conservative regions did not vote for her.


Remember what happened to Thomas Massie. We are now in a position where Las Vegas Zionists can buy an election and eliminate any Representative who speaks out against Trump and the Deep State regime. Not something that can be called “a government of the people.” In the Massie primary younger people voted for him. The older people, the Cold War Reagan generation, were scared into voting for his unknown opponent.


The same thing happened in South Carolina. There is always a lag in mass understanding. The older people, with limited attention to public affairs, have not yet figured out that Trump has royally betrayed them and is not the President they voted for. Conservatism as resistance to change is a force against genuine rightwing reform since the system in existence to be preserved is an enemy of all the values of Western Civilisation.


Having destroyed his base and everything worthwhile in the Republican Party, Trump will soon face a Democratic Congressional majority. Doubtless they will impeach him, but probably for the wrong reasons. Will Vance be any better?


Meanwhile some Democrats are pushing “socialism.” The Republicans will try to frighten the people about the looming horrors of “socialism.” As usual with their positions, it is nonsense. Republicans have always been for socialism, except for the rich rather than the proletariat.


​This is your country.

Since I turned 85 I have been abusing my venerable status by inflicting boring recollections and advice on the dear readers of Reckonin’. Forgive me: I can’t help it. But maybe a long life has taught me a few things that some folks might find useful.


LESS IS MORE


In life and writing. We all instinctively want less quantity and more quality in our life, something nearly impossible to find in present society.


Quiet some of the time is a necessary element in living well. My grocery store plays bad canned music. In many offices the TV is on. Even if I turn my back I still have to hear the trivial opinions of celebrity nobodies and distorted news reports. Watching an old classic movie, I am interrupted by disgusting drug ads. In public places, including doctors’ offices and hospitals, I hear people talking loudly on their cellphones and against my will share in strangers’ autobiographies and opinions. Quiet family meals are getting scarce. Many Americans, especially Yankees, fear quietness.


Less is more is one of the hardest things for writers to learn. Writing is partly vanity and self-display, a way of showing off. (I plead guilty, Your Honour.) An intelligent person who really knows their stuff can write clearly and succinctly in conveying their knowledge—sometimes even with a little self-effacing lightness. Most professors and “experts” write with pretentious abstractions and jargon. They don’t know their stuff and are simply adopting fashionable theories.


IF IT AIN’T BROKE DON’T FIX IT


You are just asking for trouble. True, most things these days have planned obsolescence. Even so, many will continue to function OK. Don’t mess with them. If you have old appliances and cars cherish them. Alas, I did find recently that one of my fine working appliances was so old that a part could not be obtained and my car was so old that it could not be addressed in a small matter because it was not on the service peoples’ computer.


Many Americans seem to love clutter. When I see a professor with a badly cluttered office I know that this is someone who never has and never will do anything worthwhile. It is a kind of childish purposelessness.


DON'T DO TWO THINGS AT ONCE


You will usually mess up and show everyone what a disorganised fool you are.  No real craftsman ever does this.  It takes close attention to do anything right.
​

FRIENDS


Most of the people you meet in a long life are reasonably decent as long as it doesn’t require much of them. But they are shallow, self-centered, and present-centered. One of the greatest blessings of life is meeting truly good people. They are out there. Cherish them for a lifetime. A few such men and women have enriched my life. I know that their friendship will never fail and that we will fight together to the end for a shared goal.



You can accomplish anything if you don’t care who gets the credit. I have observed often that good and talented people create valuable new ideas and institutions. But there are always numerous opportunists, gifted in manipulation and pretense, who move in and take over the new creation for their own benefit rather than for the intended purpose. This type of personality is characteristic of politicians, especially Republican Congresspersons. They are superficial, opportunistic, and self-referential. They have no ideas or principles except serving their own prominence and profit by insincerely adopting whatever position, usually something meaningless created by ad men, that they calculate will keep them in power. The most successful are often psychopaths without humanity.

My memories of earlier times prompted by my 85th birthday seem to have gathered some interest, so I will add a few more.


In the 1950s we were greatly concerned about polio. Everybody knew someone who had been struck. We were familiar with the horror of “iron lungs.”


Nobody understood at first what caused it. Some thought it was carried by flies. I spent long periods on my grandmother’s porch exterminating flies. There sometimes is, rarely, progress in our downhill world. The vaccine came along and polio has almost disappeared, although I knew people who continued to suffer from the effects.


Also, during the 1950s we were obsessed by the Cold War. In school we were taught, stupidly, to get under our desks if there was a bomb attack. We expected that an attack was coming any time. At the same time we were relentlessly propagandized about what a great thing the United Nations is.


Some of my earliest memories revolve around World War II. With my grandmother I listened to the news every day. At about four years old, I picked up a small iron pipe as a rifle and went out to kill Japs or Germans.


All the uncles on both sides were overseas or at sea, as was my father. I remember clearly that I was alone with my grandmother when the telegram came that my Uncle Paul, the third of her five children, had been killed in Europe. I was too young to really understand but you don’t forget things like that.


Later wars did not attract so much attention, and now with a volunteer force, nobody cares at all.


I was in high school when I first learned there was such a thing as an automatic transmission. Every boy worth his salt learned on a stick shift. That’s what the clutch was for.


One summer I worked, incompetently, as a boy in a cotton mill, which was the biggest industry in our town. We turned out vast quantities of denim—worn by farmers and working men. We never dreamed that blue jeans would become a worldwide fashion item.


I mentioned previously that as an undergraduate, friends and I raucously watched “Lone Ranger” on our little TV before supper. We also fervently watched Jesse Helms editorials on the Tobacco Network from Raleigh. That probably explains a lot.


Of course, in those days, he was a Democrat like all good people. The Democrats had not yet driven us out or the Republicans, our blood enemies, cynically taken over the South, for which they never have and never will do anything. My State of Sam Ervin now sometimes votes Blue.


In my early days there were only a handful of Catholics and Jews in town. There was a big competition between Baptists and Methodists for market share. Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Lutherans kept to themselves. Now there are mosques and Buddhist places.


The only immigrant I knew was a lad who was a refugee from Latvian Communism. Everybody else, black and white, had American ancestors, including the numerous carpetbaggers.


In my day, North Carolina history was a required subject for the 8th grade. That must have long since disappeared or else changed to a source of shame rather than pride.


Now, my grandfather’s house is inhabited by people from Sierra Leone and my father’s house by Vietnamese. There are foreigners anywhere you go. Hospitals are staffed by Asians and even Jamaicans. Black “leaders” control the government and schools. There is no community and the basic values and continuity of civilisation are missing. Young white people are stateless refugees in their own country.
​

Nobody expects Presidents to keep their campaign promises. Since Nixon every single Republican Chief Executive has acted the opposite of what he promised. Democrats at least try and sometimes succeed in serving promises to their anti-American supporters as far as they can.


Republicans are not an opposition party. They are not even really a political party at all. They are an election machine - an organisation concerned with putting reliable mediocrities in office. Their election campaigns have nothing to do with ideas or principles. They take  - their stands on advertising slogans without any real content, made up after careful research by PR men.


The Republican Party operates by gathering voters offended by Democratic leftism while at the same time avoiding any “extremism” that might affect their “respectability.” That means never vigourously opposing anything. The only agenda that party has ever had, since Lincoln, is to protect Big Capital. When Big Capital was industry they supported tariffs at the expense of everybody else. Now that Big Capital is chiefly involved in financial manipulation they declaim for a “free trade” that does not exist.


When has a Republican party in Congress ever opposed a leftist initiative against Heritage Americans? They make moderate noises then after a few years adopt the leftist positions. It has happened over and over again. And we are told over and over again that we must support the Republicans as the “conservative” force. When have Republican majorities or even strong minorities in Congress ever fought to conserve anything?



Presidents never keep their campaign promises, but Trump has proved to be the most blatant liar ever and not even a plausible one. His war on Iran is not only criminal and stupid, it has shredded the last remnants of the Constitution which now has no meaning except in minor procedural matters. And forces are at work even in those matters - efforts to destroy the Electoral College.


Anyone who tells us we must restore the Constitution is either a fool or a fraud. You cannot revive a corpse.


Trump has crushed those who supported him and rewarded his enemies, who are still his enemies except when he obeys them. It is hard to think of any other such egregious betrayal in U.S. history. His lying and bullying has abandoned good faith and honest dealing and made diplomacy impossible in the future.


The only positive thing in all of this is that we have learned never to trust a New York gangster again, no matter how good he speaks.


Have you noted that the Republicans in Congress are almost unanimous in their support of Israeli war crimes. They are doing what they have always been doing. Nobody has told them to do different and they are too party-controlled and cowardly to respond to a changed situation. The only large number of No votes come from Democrats. Of course, their opposition to Zionist doings is in defense of foreigners, not America.


​It has been said that two things are certain in life—death and taxes. But it is starting to look like we are also going to have Lindsay Graham forever. I weep for South Carolina when I remember our last conservative Senator, Fritz Hollings, a Southern Democrat.

​Author's note: This article, published in Chonicles in 2012, is even truer today.​

Americans are a practical people. They don't want to hear your theory; they want to know what "works." This aversion to systematic thinking, "American pragmatism," has been celebrated as a virtue in a world cursed by ideology. And, by golly, this approach has "worked," and worked well, in some aspects of our national life.


​Another, less flattering, way to put it may be that Americans are a people of the Moment. The past is a void never thought of, and the future merely a dreamy land of wishful thinking for escapist leisure. The Now is omnipotent. That you may build a house or plant trees that will be enjoyed by your distant descendants and have real ancestors worthy of honorable memory are ideas long vanished from the American consciousness. An absence of systematic thinking might be a sign of immaturity.


The Founding Fathers of the United States recognized that a free society rested upon the ability to call rulers to account for their acts. But the vast federal apparatus now has a life of its own, essentially untouchable, irresponsible, and incapable of any change based upon long-term thinking rather than momentary pressure. Bankers create financial havoc and are "bailed out," because nobody in the vast panoply of federal power can think of any alternative to maintaining the status quo. The entire public consciousness turns automatically and exclusively to government subsidy as the remedy for financial crisis—the spending mostly booty to the malefactors who had caused the crisis, with the cost, as usual, shifted to future generations, who are not here now and so do not count.


George W. Bush lies in order to spend Americans' blood and treasure on a foolish, unjust, unnecessary, and illegal war, and there are no consequences. That was yesterday. After all, he was "our President" and a "nice, Christian man." And we all know that, since Americans invariably feel benevolent in what they do, it must be right and good. For the founders such an act would be the very definition of tyranny and treason. Today it remains not only unpunished but unrecognized.


What else but the Momentary We can explain why the majority has not been in the least bothered for years by presidential campaigns devoid of historical context, ideas, issues, principles, or any other rational content? The people have acquiesced without a murmur in the media's presentation of politics as a sports competition between the champion and the challenger - one leading the Red Team and the other the Blue Team. Never a glimmer of a notion that it has not always been this way or that it does not necessarily have to be so. I wonder what substantial percentage of the population actually think that the Democratic and Republican parties and their noisy conventions are authorized by the Constitution?


Actually, much of the framework we are accustomed to in our electoral process was neither mandated nor anticipated by the founders of the United States. Most of it is the product of later innovations, evilly motivated devices of party machines. These innovations could be easily altered, mostly by acts of the state legislatures, if there were a will to do it.


The We is not only Momentary but Imperial. It wants what it wants, and it wants it now. During an election campaign, pay attention to the words of the empty suits reporting for the media. You will see that they are incapable of reporting simple facts. They always convey how they feel about the facts. And how we are supposed to feel about them. Watch the interviews of the ordinary citizens. They feel that the government must solve their problems. No thought whatsoever enters into it - not of the welfare of the commonwealth, or the unintended consequences of actions, or even that the government is itself the cause of the problem to be solved (e.g., medical costs, corporate plunder, unemployment, inflation). Citizens who want to travel or enter a public building are subjected to slavish humiliation, because otherwise somebody's feelings might be hurt - that somebody having no claim on consideration. A regime of feelings cannot be a regime of law, because laws are fixed things. It must become a regime of edicts from rulers. The founders did not think that centralized tyranny and mass democracy were opposites. They recognized them as boon companions.


The imperial power of the Momentary We is demonstrated in many ways besides the lack of political and historical memory - for instance, in the widespread attitude toward capital punishment. Servants of the Imperial and Momentary We are only able to focus on how they feel about the suffering of the poor criminal who is still with us. The victim is long gone and therefore forgotten. Likewise, the woman troubled by pregnancy is right here, while the unborn child is unseen and therefore absent from the account. The illegal immigrant and his plight are before us and get our sympathy. A people of the Now cannot think about what perils the masses of immigrants might pose for the future, since the people of the Now are unconscious of any posterity. This does not reflect real charity or respect for others. The referent is always how we feel, and We will gang up mercilessly on the unfortunate who is also unfashionable. 


Of course, both justice and prudence are virtually impossible with such a mentality. Why else do people accept the edicts of judges who suddenly discover "rights" (e.g., homosexual "marriage") never before thought of in a thousand years of legal history? Congresspersons do more for the government bureaucrats around them in D.C. - because they are closer - than for us folks out here in Flyover Country. They no longer represent their constituents except in petty individual matters. Representative government does not exist because it requires the representation of something corporate, organic, and real.


For mankind, a sense of shame has always been the source of good behavior and social health. People might do wrong, but they knew they were doing wrong. The founders could not imagine a self-governing community that was not a morally governed community. What would they make of aspirants for office marching in a "gay pride" parade? Look closely at our politicians. Like increasing numbers of their constituents, they have no shame. Their words do not convey what they think but what they think it is to their advantage to say. They hardly know the difference.


The Imperial and Momentary We is immortalized in the most celebrated American document. Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address is strangely abstract. We are told that there was a great battle here, but the blood, sweat, tears, fear, rage, and dying of all those Yankee farm boys and millhands and immigrant cannon fodder never receives even a hint. The real emphasis is on the benefit to the living. In Lincoln's world, as Joseph Stromberg has written, men do not die for their freedom but for an abstraction of freedom (and also, as Mencken pointed out, to deny freedom to other men).


In this period of political contests and this era of instantaneous media it is easy to get caught up in the hoopla and lose track of reality. So here are a few things to keep in mind. What comes out of the mouths of politicians is not political discourse and certainly not democratic deliberation and decisionmaking. It is marketing. It has nothing to do with the realm of true and false, good and evil, or even workable and unworkable. It has to do with the realm of power-that is, the satisfaction of vanity, greed, and lust. The salesmen in most cases are people with less than normal honesty and good will. Politics is not the realm of doing good, and any good it may claim is accidental. Grow up.


It follows that it is pointless to accept as sincere or valid anything that politicians say. Their statements are meaningless, or worse, deceptions. What you see in the pictures on television is not reality but a show. The "reporters" who choose and interpret the pictures for you are not objective or especially insightful observers. The are unelected actors in the pursuit of power and are not possessed of any special knowledge. In fact, most are self-absorbed pseudointellectuals, people of the Imperial Now with no understanding of history, economics, diplomacy, or any other human affairs. Their minds are incapable even of noticing the things that are really significant.


Furthermore, both of the candidates presented for president by the two controlling parties are creatures of the Now, and they do not differ on any essential point. Both are surrounded by men who give only lip service to constitutional and democratic government and believe that there are no limits to the power of a president, who is permitted to do anything at any moment when he can pretend to be doing good. The Moment after the inauguration will be the same old Now.

I recently turned 85. I really did not expect to last this long. When I turned 70, I wrote a contemplative essay that attracted some attention. For 85, I mostly have only an old man’s boring reflections on how much has changed.


I was a teenager before I saw a television and a college student before I saw a pizza. The first television was on only two hours a day and there was only one station in town.


I can remember when bib overalls were the usual clothes of working men. And when mules and wagons could regularly be seen. And when a lot of city streets were not paved.


I can remember party-line telephones, and kerosene pumps, and a lot of tobacco-curing barns.


When I graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1963, it was still customary to give every graduate a Bible (King James).


When I was 10 or so, I could ride the bus (10 cents) downtown and spend the day reading comic books, watching movie serials (25 cents), and eating hot dogs with Nehi orange. Nobody dreamed that a child alone would be molested.


My maternal grandmother had 9 children and my paternal grandmother 5. Most couples I have known in recent years had 1 or 2 children and quite a few have none at all.


I can remember when my hometown boasted of our skyscraper-- 17 stories tall.


I can remember when BB gun fights between boys were commonplace.


Boys carried pocket knives to school and nobody thought anything of it.


No male carried an umbrella. To do so would have required a response to ridicule. The first time I saw it was in college and then only with fraternity boys.


When I first arrived at UNC, dormitories were 3 students to a room and there was one large bathroom for the entire floor. Having a phone never occurred to us. We did have a small TV where we could humourously watch “Lone Ranger” reruns before getting a full supper meal at the cafeteria for 35 cents.


I can remember when UNC-Greensboro was the Women’s College of NC. Of course, it was a weekend destination for UNC-Chapel Hill boys. Women students had to sign out and in and had to be back by 11 p.m. Nobody could imagine coed living quarters.


I saw the last college “panty raid”-- 1963. You probably don’t know what that is, but it was quite common in a certain period. Many students were veterans and did not welcome civilian discipline.


I remember many students cheering when the JFK assassination came on the radio. I also remember Walter Kronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” immediately announcing that Kennedy had been shot by “right wing extremists” in Dallas.


​When I gave up college teaching in 2006, undergraduate students could not do one-fourth of the work that they routinely did when I began in 1971. Of course, university presidents, a particularly bad bunch of con artists, were bragging that we were becoming ever more “excellent.”

The life of man is a dubious experiment. . . . Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux.  - Carl Jung


According to our experience and our human history, I know that everything essential and great could be born only from the fact that man had a homeland and was rooted in a tradition.  - Heidegger


Praise the Lord and pass the barbeque.  - Maurice Bessinger


We have no need, sirs, to be ashamed of our dead; let us see to it that they be not ashamed of us.  - Robert L. Dabney, 1868


The slave trade was routine in Africa before the Europeans arrived... The inculcation of guilt in Europeans has facilitated the masked invasion of their territories and the “great replacement” of their populations, something that has no precedent in the past.  - Dominique Venner


Without censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter have little chance of finding their way.  - Solzhenitsyn


Donald Trump has proved to be a Great Betrayer—one of the worst in history. We foolishly forgot our inherited wisdom that nothing good can come out of New York.  - Clyde Wilson


We have sung of the soldiers and sailors, but who shall hymn the politicians. - Herman Melville


​“It always makes me proud of my country to see all those fine young men in the U.S. Army.”  - Crooked Yankee banker in the classic film “Stagecoach.”
Hitler did not know that Russia had a winter.  - Churchill