One nation, under god, indivisible - our State of Disunion

by **Gouda** » Sun Oct 01, 2006 4:43 pm

From our "root causes" series on what ails us. A short essay.  **** Atomic Theories of Society “one nation, under god, indivisible...” by Antoine Aardvark An atom was once what it was in the original Greek—something indivisible. Thus the atoms of Democritus and Lucretius are nothing like those of Rutherford and Bohr. Our modern atom is anything but atomic. The nation that split the atom also champions, rhetorically, the nuclear family. The state claiming to represent this nation has irradiated all families, nuclear or otherwise, with its decades of “tests.” The reader is advised not to eat venison or deer sausage from southern Indiana, as they have been rendered from deer who were irradiated from exposure to military waste from local military installations (most notoriously the Jefferson Proving Ground). The cartographically inclined (we are legion) will note that there are a great number of wildlife preserves and nature areas where once stood the arsenals of democracy: The Rocky Mountain National Wildlife Refuge, near Denver, is one that is particularly notorious, as it may have been among the world’s most toxic places. Closer to home is the former Joliet Army Ammunition Depot, now the Midewin Tallgrass Prairie. But, I digress. St. George, Utah is among the world’s most nuked places. Documentary films concerning the carcinogenic fates of its residents have run recently on World Link TV. Among major cities, Las Vegas ranks as the most nuked. While we here The Calumet Review consider Las Vegas to be about as awful a place as can be imagined anyway, the damage inflicted upon the visitor by blackjack or Wayne Newton is probably reversible, that from the lingering fallout from dozens of bombs is not. The Nevada Test Site was mere minutes from Sin City. I take leave to doubt how many of the hundreds of thousands who have moved there in recent decades are aware of the city’s clear and ever-present danger to their health and to that of their posterity. Consider that, while never suffering a direct hit after the order of Hiroshima, Las Vegas has nevertheless been downwind from sixty-five explosions of greater magnitude. Cancer clusters and birth defects, sterility for the lucky? Bet on that. Some years ago, over-optimistic liberal (in the popular sense) economists spoke and wrote of “dismantling the cold-war economy.” We certainly hope no one bet on that. A quick peek at the population tables from a WWII-era atlas and one of more recent vintage will tell the tale. Follow the money: where “defense contractors” are, look for population explosions. A few for instances: metro LA, the Bay Area, Houston, Wichita, Puget Sound, San Diego, Atlanta. Suburban Long Island, so that the northeast, and the friends of Al D'Amato don’t feel left out. What has this to do with the atomization of society, radiation, and the nuclear family? Plenty. A certain Dr. Gregory Holmes Singleton once told a colleague here at The Calumet Review that the nuclear family—mom, pop and the rounded-off two kids—was the single social institution of modern society that was supposed to bear the strain dispersed in traditional societies among kinship ties, village or neighborhood relationships and patron-client relationships, and that it was no wonder the nuclear family wasn’t holding up. The nuclear family might have kinship ties consisting of Sunday phone calls and Christmas packages, but these do not help raise the kids. The nuclear family is mobile---it can move to Bowling Green when Dad gets transferred, loosed from the mesh of friends, neighbors and relatives, it becomes a matrix of consumption. This loosing, this consumerism, which is supposed to fill the void left by the loosing and the rootlessness it engenders—this is the atomizing of society. Now, the historically minded can trace this process to the early days of the Republic and Industrial Revolution. The westward migrations which re-peopled America, the transportation and communications revolutions, Social Security [look for Mr. Thomas’ essays on this subject in upcoming issues—Ed.] and “the Cold War economy” all contributed thereto. Divorce was merely the logical next step—splitting and, often, recombining the “atom” that is the nuclear family. Consumerist passions, if such they can be called, keep the constituent individuals of a family apart—Dad on the golf course, Mom at the mall, Junior on his skateboard and Muffy at the mall, but elsewhere than Mom. Time was they came together to watch the Tube. Now, each of them has his and her own Tube. What they watch need not concern us here. What remains of society? Conservative “fusionist” Frank Meyer told the readers of National Review back in the 1960s that “society” was a reification, more a name than a reality. (See his book, The Conservative Mainstream, which haunts the shelves of the Lake County Public Library in Merrillville.) Margaret Thatcher would later declare that “there is no such thing as society,” except, of course, when it was convenient for her for there to be. (See Christopher Hitchens, “Society and its Enemies,” contained in his anthology For the Sake of Argument.) While this is perfectly acceptable as nominalist philosophy (albeit for beginners), we can accept “society” as a term of convenience by which means we intend to encompass the people and institutions of a given portion of the Earth’s surface, often in conjunction with a political entity, sometimes a linguistic or, more nebulously, a cultural entity. American society, Francophone society, Western society. A society may be highly organized into local, regional and national institutions, voluntary associations, corporations, churches or denominations, guilds, unions, mercantile or manufacturing organizations, hobbyists, lobbyists, watchdog groups, quilting bees, bowling leagues, etc. The basic institution of any society is the family, however constituted. For most of its history, our Republic has balanced the centripetal tendencies of a market economy with the creation and reinforcement of social ties which often transcend locality. Hence all the weird symbols at city limits telling the cognizant traveler that there are within said limits People Like Him—Lions, Kiwanis, Oddfellows or Daughters of the American Revolution. Since 1945, the centripetal forces seem to have been gaining the upper hand. This is our Atomic Theory of Society—fewer ties that bind, all the way down to the breakup or fission of the nuclear family. The tendency of American Evangelical Protestantism towards theological individualism, the various cults of greed and selfishness, of which Ayn Rand’s was probably among the least harmful, the abandonment of any pretense of a commitment to community, security and stability on the part of corporations—all these have contributed to our present state of disunion. Nothing can be said any longer to be indivisible. ***************************** --Mr. Aardvark, aka: J. Blum The Calumet Review vol. 1, no. 1, Winter, 2004 The Pierre Bayle Society, Hammond, Indiana

One nation, under god, indivisible - our State of Disunion

One nation, under god, indivisible - our State of Disunion

Who is online