The common man

The usual way to remove inferior races from public spaces is to price them out. Municipal and regional governments are the guiding hand, through their planning departments. The “gentrification” process is done overtly through tight by-laws, licencing, and commercial regulation, all arranged on the Clintonian principle of “pay to play.” This makes the respectable zones too expensive for the lesser breeds, and assists in the development of their underclass-consciousness.

On the other side, more subtly at first, it is done by such as public housing projects, which remove the poor to a greater distance from respectable neighbourhoods, and confine them in camps, where their criminality and poor table manners can be offensive only to themselves. They become, by increments, wards of the state — and may be easily manipulated to provide voting blocks for the “progressive” parties, on whom they now depend for their rent, food stamps, and modest cash doles.

Compulsory attendance in state schools seals the bargain, by which the young of the underclass species are indoctrinated and trained to know their place in the social and political order. They can see that they are victims of “discrimination”; their resentments can be shaped in the interest of the governing liberal elites, and directed instead at people who have no idea what they are yammering and rioting about.

Who do not see that the poor have been “unpersoned.” And that, having little to lose, they are now playing the unpersonable part.

The superior races principally benefit from this system of apartheid, in which the unwashed are kept out of view, except through the selective camera angles of the media voyeurs. Without this isolation, the liberals’ smugness would be hard to maintain, and their commitment to various hygienic and environmental causes would suffer. They, for their part, are taught in their much better appointed government schools that the welfare-state redistribution of income exists to promote “equality”; when in fact it exists to promote the division of society into manageable cells, walled both visibly and invisibly to prevent the respective inmates from mixing and meeting. Now, even if they see, they cannot smell each other.

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Years ago (about seventeen of them), when I was embedded as a journalist in Washington, DC (for the Clinton impeachment stake-out), I was curious to observe the psychology of “white liberals” in their most native home town. Having contacts in Georgetown, and access by journalistic credentials to the upscale, I could gawp at close range; yet I also wished to maintain some aloofness. (A journalist, to my eccentric mind, should neither fear nor favour the elect.)

I have always preferred to stay in fairly cheap, “local” hotels, and insisted upon it in this case, notwithstanding my media bosses kept assuring me that I need not be such a “cheap date.” (Newspapers still had money then.) The hotel I chose was the Harrington. For many months it was my base. I prefer such places because they are full of what I shall call, obnoxiously, “real people” — guests paying their own bills, as opposed to those on government or corporate expense accounts, accustomed to various luxuries, in social isolation.

Staying there put me in touch, instead, with the lower middle classes, constantly arriving from the “flyover” country. These were the ultimate Washington outsiders: mostly young, worker-bee types from states like Missouri, Nebraska, non-Chicago Illinois — with children in tow — visiting their national capital on money they had saved, to show the kids a heritage, in which they took a naïve and often beautiful pride. They had no prejudices, which I could discern; they were themselves aloof from Washington expectations. I noticed that their children were better behaved than either the spoilt, or the depraved of the city; that they were, in the main, respectful and orderly, and often wide-eyed. Too, especially on Sunday mornings, I noticed that all these people were Christian, of one flavour or another. They came from an America that is a “time capsule” to the urban and urbane.

I mention them because I am trying to avoid the notion that there are only two classes. My point is about a complex system of apartheid imposed through social engineering, and for which the worker-bees of the outback pose a constantly diminishing threat; for America is ever more urbanized. It was not anyway in their repertoire to make demands, to express group “rights.” These people were apolitical, “normal”: I loved their ease and their laughter, their comfort in their own skins (some dark, some light).

Too, I should make clear I use the word “race” in the old cultural sense, quite distinct from “colour.” (Like this gentleman, here.) There are white and brown and other-coloured underclasses, and the monied white disdain for “white trash” is what makes their unspoken views on the other colours sustainable to themselves. They take their caste privileges as a part of nature; their claim to liberality goes with their station.

They imagine the “white trash” are uniquely “racist.” Yet they are far from colour-blind themselves, and I was several times struck by warnings from nice liberal people not to venture east of an imaginary boundary in DC, to where I might be, as a white man, in danger for my life. It was like being told not to enter the cages of wild zoo animals; or if compelled to do so, to wear the prophylactic, painted, “I’m tolerant” white-liberal smile, and avoid any movement that might trigger an attack. (Whereas, when I went east without the uptight, condescending smile, I was received quite warmly.)

Nor would I wish to be sociological; for statistical sociology is the tool of the social engineers, for whom men come in sets with numbers. What interests me is instead the apartheid policy at the heart of the welfare state: the policy of arranging its supporters into a patchwork of “gated communities,” so that each may be insulated from troubling contact with the others, and the political “sales messages” can be tailored to the “demographics,” one set at a time.

Micromanagement requires filing of this sort. A term such as “the common man” is instinctively taken as a reference to a certain class of people. The specific group depends on the context: each to be handled in a particular way.

Whereas, the basic scheme of Christianity is to see through race, colour, stratification — to look upon all as sinners, yet each as made in the image of God. The “common” in the common man is what we have in common, not what distinguishes us from the members of another human class. It embraces all causes, whether lost or found.

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Lately, I have been mightily irritated by the politically-correct campaign to permanently banish the old Confederate flag, and all music associated with the Southern cause, or any symbol that it once existed, before it was comprehensively defeated a century-and-a-half ago. Memorials of Robert E. Lee are being treated as memorials of Adolf Q. Hitler.

It strikes me that even under the old lamentable cotton-plantation slave system of the South, people mixed and got to smell one another — rich and poor, black and white, genteel and grotesque. That, the most forgotten slogan of the Dixie Land was her war cry: “Down with the Eagle, and up with the Cross!” That, it is the Cross of Saint Andrew astride the old Confederate flag that is most galling to the hyper-secular, liberal mind. That, the greatest triumph of the Union propaganda was to tar all those flag-bearers in the way our contemporary media demean all dissenters from the current party line as “racists,” “sexists,” “phobes,” and nothing more. That, the principal crime of the South was to stand by the wording of the U.S. Constitution, and from the beginning, to get in the way of a grand national scheme for social engineering, which triumphed with Lincoln (though hardly a liberal by the standards of today). That, in the Southern view, the eagle swooped down on them, with claws.

Something similar is now happening in the division of “Red States” and “Blue”: in an America from which the Christian conception of the “common man” is being systematically expunged. All who resist the categories to which they have been assigned are instinctively rebelling; “victim” and “oppressor” alike. This is what “common men” will do, when tarred and pressed, often without fully understanding why they rebel. They remember, however obliquely, whose sons and daughters they are. That, no matter how low in social station, they are Christ’s, and not the segregated chattels of some malicious and incompetent — and intentionally divisive — Washington Nanny.

The recovery of USA, and more largely, the recovery of Christendom, turns on the recovery of this conception of the “common man” — as Man, not as member of a client group. This has nought to do with “equality,” for it is none of a government’s business to help one group get even with another. Rather it is to serve man as man. This is a matter that goes deeper even than slavery, as Saint Paul explained. It is an unarguable, even mystical point. Where that conception survives, of the common in man, Christendom persists, and can potentially flourish.

Yes: that old Christendom, that Cross, which appeals to no class, no race, no colour, no nation, but to men of goodwill, wherever they may be found. It was the Land where I was born in, and I’ll took my stand.

(Roll the credits.)