RECKONIN'
  • Features
    • Book Bench
    • Charlottesville
    • COVID Commentary
    • Dixie These Days
    • Links
    • Magnolia Muse
    • Matters of Faith
    • Movie Room
    • Southern History
    • Writing Contest 2022
  • Contributors
    • Full List
    • Mark Atkins
    • Al Benson
    • Carolina Contrarian
    • Enoch Cade
    • Boyd Cathey
    • Dissident Mama
    • Ted Ehmann
    • Walt Garlington
    • Gail Jarvis
    • Gene Kizer, Jr.
    • Neil Kumar
    • Perrin Lovett
    • Ilana Mercer
    • Tom Riley
    • H.V. Traywick, Jr.
    • Clyde Wilson
  • Contact
  • Features
    • Book Bench
    • Charlottesville
    • COVID Commentary
    • Dixie These Days
    • Links
    • Magnolia Muse
    • Matters of Faith
    • Movie Room
    • Southern History
    • Writing Contest 2022
  • Contributors
    • Full List
    • Mark Atkins
    • Al Benson
    • Carolina Contrarian
    • Enoch Cade
    • Boyd Cathey
    • Dissident Mama
    • Ted Ehmann
    • Walt Garlington
    • Gail Jarvis
    • Gene Kizer, Jr.
    • Neil Kumar
    • Perrin Lovett
    • Ilana Mercer
    • Tom Riley
    • H.V. Traywick, Jr.
    • Clyde Wilson
  • Contact

Mark Atkins

Carnivorous Sheep: The New American Peasant

7/20/2021

2 Comments

 
Picture
​There is a class in this country that I call the Carnivorous Sheep. By his nature as a Sheep, his power does not reside within himself but rather rests in the hands that can both feed and protect him, a class that we can call the Wolves. What makes him carnivorous is that through no power of his own he has the right to vote, and, driven by his appetites, via this vote, he eagerly seeks to consume that which others have produced. Once fed, via this same vote, in all other matters he gladly supports the Wolves that feed him.

The Carnivorous Sheep has no inner voice or guiding light that compels him to deny himself or do for others, at least not at his own expense. He does not feel guilt or shame. He has no sense of history or tradition that restrains or elevates him. His great vices are gluttony, sloth, and envy, but also pride, for he delights in being told by the Wolves that he is beautiful and powerful and, on the other hand, cannot bear having his vices pointed out. He is the sheep in wolf’s clothing, and for the Carnivorous Sheep the illusion is the same as reality.

I despise the Carnivorous Sheep, not for his weakness, because that often cannot be helped. I despise him for his ignorance, arrogance, and selfishness that make him a tool of the Wolves who are, with malicious intent, unraveling the fabric of our culture and poking holes in our ship of state.

I say this to the Carnivorous Sheep. By all means continue to feed for as long as you can. But make no mistake, you are the new American peasant, weakness is nothing to boast of, and your vote will not satiate the appetite of the Wolves. If they ever manage to bleed to death the producers that you feed on, they’ll come for you next, because like you, they will be fed at all costs.

But this remains the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave until we, the free and the brave, are all dead or we have allowed our descendants to become like you. Until then, ‘This land is our land, this land is not your land.’ So boast not of the country into which you were born and on which you feed. Stay seated during the anthem. Furl your American flag. For you, the 4th of July is just another day, because for you to act like a patriot is cultural appropriation. You dont get to have your cake and eat it too.
This piece was previously published on MCAtkins.com on July 4, 2021.
2 Comments

Roll up the red carpet Southern Man!

7/1/2021

4 Comments

 
Picture

All peoples everywhere have mannerisms, traditions, habits, and customs that will cause an outsider to form a stereotype, and this includes Southerners. We are particularly well known for being friendly, and, having seen some of the world myself, I think we deserve this praise. It is one of our great cultural legacies.  

I am 54 and I give thanks today to the one true God for bringing me to the light of day amongst those that I consider my people. I am thankful to those generations now dead and gone whose kindness, good manners, wit, and back slapping laughter so formed me when I stood a yard off the ground. I am equally grateful for their backbone and their disinclination to be told what to do.

The Southern man will be led, but he will not be driven.


​Folks, if someone moves to my corner of Dixie with values antithetical to those of my great-grandparents, I may not have the right to stop him, but I don't have to welcome him with open arms either.


Since WWII and the 1970’s in particular, large numbers of outsiders have moved to the South who have no roots here. Any native Southerner over thirty who is reading this can think of at least a dozen such outsiders who have made the South better. They are God-fearing American patriots who pull their own weight who came here for opportunity, a lower cost of living, or milder weather but who admire or even love the South and whose children are or will be Southern through and through.

But there is another type that has come and is coming still. He is the Neo-Carpetbagger. He is coming not just in search of a little Americana or Mayberry, but comes to tilt the scale away from tradition and towards American-Socialism. He brings with him not just his furniture, money, and talents, but also those Progressive ideas that have made his own home city or state unliveable, though he does not see the connexion, and if he did he wouldn’t care.

Folks, this is our county. It is strewn with overgrown graveyards full of stone titles to our land. Let us find some of the backbone and fight of our ancestors and defend our way of life and the best of our traditions against all comers, including those with American passports.

Let us always remain friendly and well-mannered. But to those outsiders who applaud the coup last November and would turn us blue as they have Nashville and other great Southern cities, it’s time to roll up the red carpet, raise the drawbridge, and tell ’em to go elsewhere.
This piece was previously published on MCAtkins.com on June 28, 2021.
4 Comments

Why the Left is Intent on Erasing the Past

6/13/2021

3 Comments

 
Picture

​It bears repeating (and I am painting with a wide brush here) that the religion of Progressivism despises the past and tradition. The past because it was imperfect and tradition because it carries the imperfect past into the future. Progressives after all are utopians at heart and mean to create heaven on earth. You know, since there is no actual heaven.

I think this is at the root of why Progressivism spends so much energy on controlling what we remember and believe about the past and as a consequence, why they are so determined to eradicate its physical symbols.

Its war on all things Confederate will of course come to mind, but after 2020 we see that Mr Bojangles, Aunt Jemima, and Uncle Ben have got to go as well, to say nothing of tyrants like Washington, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt.

If monuments and syrup bottles cannot be spared, architecture certainly cannot be either since as a reminder of both the space and time in which it was erected its shelf life can be extremely long depending on the materials used. Consider the pyramids of Egypt which continue to evoke…errr, well, what? My point is, they will remain safe until such time as whatever ideas they evoke run contrary to whatever future Progressivism is imagining.

Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm remain must-reads for Conservatives because they speak so simply and clearly on Progressivism’s core value of human reform via controlling memory, but also because they were written so long ago that we now have the immensely valuable benefit of hindsight that show them to be prophetic.

Progressivism rejects human nature and believes that if man can simply be made to forget, he will be a white canvas upon which to paint something new and better. To be rebuilt and made into a better mousetrap… I mean man… I mean androgynous human… I mean androgynoid.

Thus all reminders of the past must go.
3 Comments

A Great Awakening on the Right

5/23/2021

3 Comments

 
Picture
Several posts ago I posited that the second most consequential result of the coup in 2020 will be the great awakening of the Right. A friend of mine asked me where I saw the signs of this. This is a good question and I’ve been stewing on it. In a nutshell, I view what is happening on the Right as a rising tide or a river basin that has been poorly dammed, overfilled, and badly managed for too long. Something has to give.

In hindsight, 2020 will be placed by historians in the same category as years like 1968, 1941, 1860-1865, and 1776. There was what came before and then what came after. It will be a break in the timeline. The events of 2020 were so remarkable that they cannot but produce a reaction, and that reaction must come from the Right in direct and proportional opposition to the initiatives of the Left that made 2020 what it was. For every action there must be an equal reaction, right?

The dismay, anger, or even fury of the Right must manifest itself in some way.
​
While we Conservatives hardly agree as to what we mean by the term, Conservatism has been growing since the 1960’s at least. It is increasingly articulate and was powerful enough to create a titan like Rush Limbaugh and then put an odd-duck like Trump in the Oval Office against massive institutional resistance in 2016, and only by wholesale fraud was he defeated in 2020.

In my view Conservatives today are vastly more conservative than they were yesterday because we have 50 years of hindsight. And I believe that the hardcore Right is growing and getting harder, and it is the hardcore of any movement that guides and propels it.

So I think signs of the awakening of the Right are everywhere. They are as numerous and visible as the little bubbles on the side of a pot of water set to boil, my little blog here being but one of those tiny bubbles.

I believe that the water will in fact begin to boil. Whether or not it boils over is anyone’s guess.
This piece was originally published at MCAtkins.com on May 10, 2021.
3 Comments

Human Nature Does Not Change

4/15/2021

2 Comments

 
Picture

​It has been famously said that there is nothing new under the sun. It was true thousands of years ago, and if the intervening years are any indication of the future, it will be true thousands of years from now. It is also true that there are certainly new things under the sun, such as alphabetisation, paper, optical lenses, the printing press and the list could go on and on and on, but obviously new inventions could not have been what the ancient writer meant because man had already been developing new ways of doing things since Eve developed multi-tasking and sometime later someone invented the wheel.

No, we understand what he meant. There is nothing new because man’s nature does not change, and all that is of man is born of this nature. Human nature, as a rule, is a topic that popular media carefully avoids today, but the Common Man understands it or easily will when it is pointed out. No, there are no new emotions to be felt. There is nothing new that compels man to this or that. There will be no new history in which past paradigms or precedents cannot be seen. History will continue to be made and no new state of affairs will be permanent.

The Radical Left stole the election in 2020 and we are heart-broken because we see cherished institutions and ideas being savaged, much like a great battleship lost in flame and smoke because its escorts turned their guns on it. But it’s a battleship. The crew can recover, extinguish the fires, and the smoke will clear. It can then blast the treacherous escorts out of the water.

The Left has been winning the war for a long time, but it is war that it cannot win here in America any more than it did in the former Soviet Union or any more than it can be said to have won in Cuba or Venezuela. This is true if for no other reason than that Progressivism, with its rejection of human nature, is inherently destructive and will destroy itself eventually. In a nutshell all that we on the Right have to do is NOT bend the knee and raise up our wee bairns so that they will not either, and who then in their turn will raise up their wee bairns so that they will not either… etc.

However, if we want to speed the pendulum of history along, in the meantime we need to fight, fight, fight!
2 Comments

Southerners Are Nice People

3/27/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture

Years ago I went to the Co-op in Cottage Grove, Tennessee, to fill up. A grain truck was already at the pump so I pulled up behind it and waited. The driver was sitting in the cab. I kept waiting. He kept sitting. I was getting aggravated.

What I did not do was honk, or gesticulate my displeasure, or give him the finger from my open window. Such rudeness would have been vastly worse than his rudeness, so I did what I believe the vast majority of Southerners would have done. Nothing. I was not in a rage, rather just put out at this rude man before me who just sat there rather than either filling up his tank or pulling ahead so I could fill mine.

Eventually, he finally pulled forward. I did the same and stood by my truck while it filled. I then noticed that the man had parked his rig and was walking across the yard straight at me. When he arrived he apologised for making me wait. His truck wouldn’t start.

He did so because he, as a Southerner, did not want to be thought of as being rude.

I did what I believe the vast majority of Southerners would have done. I told him as good-naturedly as you please, ‘Oh! No problem!’ And I meant it. It was now no problem. Any angst that I felt had vanished because he was in fact not being rude and showed me respect by acknowledging the inconvenience that he had caused.

​I have seen enough of the world to greatly value what I believe to be one of our people’s greatest qualities, namely, the regard that we have for and the kindness that we show to each other.
This piece was previously published on Look Away on March 24, 2021.
0 Comments

Metamorphosis: How the Right now perceives the Left

3/4/2021

1 Comment

 
Picture
We Americans have always assumed a few things about other Americans, at least since that great unifying moment after our victory in WWII. We assumed that we all agree that this is the Home of the Brave, Land of the Free, and that In God We Trust. We all believed in The American Dream, the Rule of Law, majority rule, and that we are the greatest nation ever just ’cause. 

Thinkers, pundits, and prophets have warned us for just as long that this is in fact not the case and warned us of the great threat of the American Left to our view of America. But when we defeated the Soviet Union back in the late eighties we imagined that any existential threat from the Left had indeed passed. Good times ahead. 

But after 2020 the Common Man now understands that maybe 20% of Americans not only envision a different America, but actively loathe the America that he grew up loving and believing in. And that maybe another 30% are Carnivorous Sheep, indifferent and willing to give up anything, including a legitimate democracy, in exchange for Bread and/or Circuses.
 

Living with this new Radical Left is akin to living in an ancestral home with a brother gone insane who is determined to drive you from the house or, failing that, to burn it to the ground. He’s your brother and you thought he loved you, but every time you turn around you see smoke coming from beneath a door. You rush to put out the fires but he is getting bolder and smarter. There is smoke damage throughout, and there are few rooms remaining where the charring has not climbed the walls or embraced the furniture.
 

And now you hear him in the basement. Laughing and talking to himself. Banging around. And what’s that smell. Dammit! Is that diesel?
 

If you wont permit him to remodel as he sees fit, he’ll be glad to rebuild from scratch.
 

The Radical American Left can hardly lose. What we on the Right have to decide is whether or not we are going to do what must be done to save our home.
 
This was previously published at MCAtkins.com on March 1, 2021.
1 Comment

The Split personality of Old New England

2/17/2021

4 Comments

 
Picture

At all times around the world there is the Common Man. He is the archetype of his people. The Common Man by his nature is historically illiterate or almost so. He knows the myths of his people and the tenets of his religion and any basic history that permeates his culture. For him to function as a member in good standing that is all he really needs to know. If he delves too deeply, he will cease to be the Common Man. 

It is noteworthy today, and a source of fodder for comedians, just how little the American Common Man knows about his own past or anyone else's past for that matter. This ignorance is an intentional result of a Progressive movement that has aggressively captured all forms of media and education and sought to erase and/or rewrite memory.

Memory directs the present and propels us into the future, and Progressivism means to control the future. We are, after all, but blank canvases, and if we can just be whitewashed, we can be written on anew. 

The future is why the work of the historian is so vitally important and why we who would resist the new world that Progressivism would create must force the Common Man to see basic truths about the history of the world in which he lives. The history that would circumscribe our future. 

So painting with the widest possible brush let's look at the two oldest and most dominate roots of American history. America was born of two principal seeds, Jamestown and Plymouth Rock in 1607 and 1620 respectively. They grew, and by 1865 Plymouth Rock had defeated Jamestown militarily and economically in a cataclysmic struggle that reshaped our young republic. Since then America has been dominated politically and culturally by the split personality of Old New England, its political manifestation today in 2021 being the Democratic and Republican Parties, the former representing New England's old religiosity and the latter its industriousness. 

Looking at it cynically, on the one side is the religious bigot, self-righteous, intolerant, and toxically evangelical worshipping the Progressive trinity Freedom, Equality, and Individuality. On the other side is the money-grubbing industrialist motivated by profit; capitalism his moral code. 

Food for thought.
This post was originally published at MCAtkins.com on Feb 10, 2021.
4 Comments

Facebook the Enemy and Partisan Warfare

1/30/2021

2 Comments

 
Picture

​We the People on the Right; We, the great Conservative Mob; We, the brave in the Home of the Brave; we… are now ‘woke.’ The Wolves and carnivorous Sheep of the Left have executed a coup and we are not going to stand for it. After 50 years of Leftist revolution we are at last replacing our gloves with brass knuckles.

But today is akin to the 8th of December 1941. We are still in shock and remain uncertain as to how we are going to fight back. We are aware that the Enemy has us in an institutional headlock across the board. Unified action is impossible and there are no solid punches to land.

But circumstances never remain the same and the Right has fantastic reserves of power. Leaders will emerge. Strategies will be developed. And we the grunts of the Right are ready to follow, bloody, and be bloodied. Good times ahead.

In the meantime like Russian partisans in the fall of 1941 we must do whatever we can.

I wish to propose a target. A bit of low hanging fruit. A supply train to be ambushed. It will require unsung sacrifice.

Can we agree that Facebook is one of the great legions of the Left’s army? It is too powerful to kill but that does not mean that we should not try to wound it.

I propose that collectively we cease to use it for any means other than fighting Progressivism or for bread and butter activities.

That means not posting pictures for Grandma or messaging friends.

Instead, for social purposes, we bite the bullet and join the migration to other friendly platforms that are still in the early stages of development. This will be a significant sacrifice for those of you that are deep into Facebook but if walking away is akin to putting down your crack pipe, well, you may have a problem.

I have never used Facebook for social purposes but my wife has extensively for years so through her I understand the nature of the sacrifice. But if we cannot make this sacrifice now, in the light of 2020, what will we do when the day comes that we have to make a sacrifice indeed?
This post was previously published on Look Away, MCAtkins.com on January 19, 2021.
2 Comments
Forward>>

    Author

    Mark Atkins has six wee bairns who are all seventh-generation Henry County, Tennessee, and all from the same doe. It is the people of Henry County that he most wants to reach but writes to Southerners generally. He is without credentials but rather dares to speak by the same authority as the little boy who cried 'The king has no clothes!' His core belief and starting point is that like everything, we humans have a nature, it is not so hard to understand, and to pretend that it is other than it is, is to jump off a cliff. Which is what we Americans have in fact done.

    He is the author of Women in Combat; Feminism Goes to War which has made a splash equivalent to that of a lone seagull's feather landing upon the Pacific Ocean.  ​

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021

Proudly powered by Weebly