| Subject: | Re: [socialcredit] Fwd: Fw: triumph of the past | | Date: | Thursday, February 3, 2005 12:31:05 (-0800) | | From: | william_b_ryan <william_b_ryan @.....com>
|
| In reply to: | Message 526 (written by Joe Thomson) |
Here it is in plain text.
--- Joe Thomson <thomsonhiyu@shaw.ca> wrote:
> Whatever it was, it didn't trnsmit here, Bill. Just
> "--", and that's it.
>
> Joe
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "William B. Ryan" <w_b_ryan@yahoo.com>
> To: <socialcredit@elistas.com>
> Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2005 9:04 AM
> Subject: [socialcredit] Fwd: Fw: triumph of the past
>
>
> >
> > Note: forwarded message attached.
----------------------------------------
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Editor: Michael Lane, P.O. Box 29535, Columbus, OH
43229 USA 614-882-6111
Triumph of the Past is published monthly. The
e-edition is free on request to
triumphofthepast@aol.com. A plain-paper mailed
edition is available for the cost of postage: U.S.
$7.20 per year, Canada $10.20, Overseas $19.20. These
prices are in U.S. $, but we can accept a personal
check for the equivalent in ANY CURRENCY. (Call your
bank for current exchange rate or use an on-line
currency converter.) A list of back issues going back
to 1996 ($2 each) is available on request. For Lane
and Cooney books for sale, see below.
Triumph
OF THE PAST
Fish will not live where the water is too clear. But
if there is duckweed or something, the fish will hide
under its shadow and thrive. Thus, the people will
live in tranquility if certain matters are a bit
overlooked or left unheard. —Yamamoto, Hagakure
December 2004
The Milk of Human Kindness
By Dewi Hopkins, Poet, Bangor
What follows is an extract from Behold the Tears: One
Twentieth-Century and Three Victorian Novels by Dewi
Hopkins. The whole essay will be available in booklet
form in December 2005. For details, contact the
author, 15 Rhosfryn, Bangor LL57 2DL, United Kingdom.
So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that
are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such
as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on
the side of their oppressors there was power; but they
had no comforter.
–Ecclesiastes 4:1
Other [post-Victorian] novelists have given evocations
of poverty, trade unionism, and the dole but have not
(to my knowledge at least) tackled the question that
interests me [the root cause of poverty]; and the
responses suggested to poverty are variations of "work
harder," "tighten your belts," or "redistribute" by
violent compulsion if need be.
The most exceptional near miss comes in
the novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. This
was published in 1939, a date that most of us see as
highly significant.
All of my selected novelists are
considerable stylists. As you start to read The
Grapes of Wrath, you might feel that you have cause to
dispute this claim. Nearly all is simple, double, or
multiple sentences with ands and buts. In chapter 2,
where the story really gets going, we have this terse,
laconic style almost exclusively:
In the restaurant the truck driver paid his bill and
put his two nickels change in a slot machine. The
whirling cylinders gave him no score. "They fix 'em
so you can't win nothin', he said to the waitress.
And she replied: "Guy took the jackpot not two
hours ago. Thirty-eight he got. How soon you gonna
be back by?"
He held the screen door a little open. "Week
– ten days," he said. "Got to make a run to Tulsa,
an' I never get back soon as I think."
She said crossly: "Don't let the flies in.
Better go out or come in."
(It is not just because it is realistic dialogue:
look at the little connecting pieces, too.)
Incidentally, we learn later that the machines are
fixed quite simply. The owner just watches them and
has learned the sequence in which they pay out; so he
feeds them with coins when this is about to happen and
removes the jackpot: just a small, routine part of
the dishonesty by which life is lived. The language
and tone of the conversation are well conveyed in the
style of the writing. Like Mrs. Gaskell, Steinbeck
both reflects and respects the language of the people
he is writing about.
If we return to chapter 1, however, we find
something a little different:
To the red country and part of the grey country of
Oklahoma the last rains came gently, and they did not
cut the scarred earth. The ploughs crossed and
recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted
the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies along the
sides of the roads so that the grey country and the
dark red country began to disappear under a green
cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and
the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in
the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on
the growing corn day after day until a line of brown
spread along the edge of each green bayonet.
Here the still apparently simple prose has been
varied with a pattern of more complex sentences
(grammatically complex, that is, with main and
subordinate clauses) presenting a dignified picture of
nature and its action: as one of the dominant,
determining characters in the story; for the crops
will fail and the land turn to dust that rises in a
permanent, choking cloud.
Elsewhere we shall find something else again:
long (pages long) passages of speech not assigned to
particular speakers:
'F we can on'y get to California where the oranges
grow before this ol' jug [jalopy] blows up. 'F we
on'y can.
And the tires – two layers of fabric worn
through. On'y a four-ply wire. Might get a hundred
miles more outa her if we don't hit a rock an' blow
her. . . .
We got to get a tire, but, Jesus, they want a
lot for a ol' tire. They look a fella over. They know
he got to go on. They know he can't wait. And the
price goes up.
Take it or leave it. I ain't in business for
my health. I'm here a-sellin' tires. I ain't given
'em away. I can't help what happens to you. I got to
think what happens to me. . . .
Save that casin' to make boots.
It is not any particular exchange, but the sort
of thing that is said all along the road from Oklahoma
and neighboring states (but these people are all
contemptuously called "Okies") to California -- the
promised land that turns out to be a land of falsely
raised, illusory hope.
And then again more passages that might seem
(grammatically, that is, again) very simple:
The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell
is a great sorrow in the land. . . . Men who have
created new fruits in the world cannot create a system
whereby their fruits may be eaten.1 And the failure
hangs over the state like a great sorrow. . . . And
men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and
they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who
have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry,
needing the fruit -- and kerosene sprayed over the
golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
A strange mixture of elevated diction and grammatical
simplicity with (to the pedantic grammarian)
unnecessary ands -- even to start a paragraph. Some
readers may wonder why I mention technicalities of
grammar. It is because some American authors at this
time, notably Hemmingway and Steinbeck, aimed at a new
style of grammatical simplicity to replace the complex
grammar of classical English prose. In my view, the
way Steinbeck does this with such subtle variations is
something to be greatly admired.
In this particular passage we are forced to
realize that the style is biblical. It is the
language of prophesy. When we put all these
modulations of style into juxtaposition, what we find
we have is angry, poetic, prophetic epic. Into this
vast exodus of dispossessed farmers is woven the story
of the Joad family to represent the whole in
particular characters. Like so many others, once
independent, they have bought seed on bank loans after
persistent failure of their crops; the same failure is
repeated; their land becomes the banks'; and they have
to leave, making their way to California, where
employment has been offered in a mass distribution of
leaflets designed to bring far more hands than are
needed and so cause their labor to be pitifully cheap.
After an arduous journey in a broken-down and
resuscitated vehicle, in the course of which journey
little money becomes less money and finally no money,
while the family decreases in number, they find the
hope of work at decent wages is an illusion; the
unwilling host population is full of hatred for the
incomers; and at the end of it all the Joad family --
what has survived of it -- is fleeing on foot from the
seasonal flooding.
At this point it might be worth noting that none
of the four books in novel-form is a conventional
novel after all. What we have is tales, moralities,
something like fairy tale, melodrama, or even
pantomime, and in this last one an epic and tragic
work of prophesy. This remains true when we have
remarked the vivid narrative and bold characterization
in all of them; and there are many other similarities,
as well as the ones I mention in this essay. Like
Mrs. Gaskell's evocation of the condition of the
nineteenth-century Manchester poor, Steinbeck's
presentation of the miserable conditions of the
Oklahoma migrants is harrowingly realistic, and the
reader has to feel for these people who wanted nothing
but honest hard work. The pity is concentrated on the
Joads, but is wholly inadequate for the suffering of
the vast numbers of people like them. In Mrs.
Gaskell's book pigs were perceived as more valuable
than people: in Steinbeck's the comparison is with
horses. What makes Grapes of Wrath particularly
valuable, however, is that where Mrs. Gaskell claims
-- to some extent disingenuously -- not to understand
political economy, Steinbeck gives a clear account of
the mechanics of impoverishment.
In chapter 5 he shows an excellent understanding
of the ownership of land. The first owners (that is,
admittedly, after the Red Indians) from bad debts
become mortgagers and then tenants. The new corporate
owners in their turn become debtors to the bigger
banks and lose the power of independent action. The
ownership of the land becomes more and more remote
from the reality of the land:
If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the
owner-man said: The Bank -- or the company -- needs --
wants -- must have -- as through the Bank or the
Company were a monster, with thought and feeling,
which had ensnared them. These last would take no
responsibility for the banks or the companies2 because
they were men and slaves, while the banks were
machines and masters all at the same time. Some of
the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such
cold and powerful masters. The owner men sat in the
cars and explained. You know the land is poor.
You've scrabbed at it long enough, God knows.
The squatting tenant men nodded and wondered
and drew fingers in the dust,3 and yes, they know, God
knows. If the top would only stay on the soil, it
might not be so bad.4 . . .
Well, it's too late. . . . crops fail one day
and he has to borrow from the bank.
But -- you see, a bank or a company can't do
that, because those creatures don't breath air, don't
eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the
interest on money. If they don't get it they die the
way you die without air, without side-meat. It is a
sad thing but it is so. It is just so. . . .
Can't we just hang on? Maybe the next year
will be a good year. . . . Don't they make explosives
out of cotton? And uniforms? Get enough wars and
cotton'll hit the ceiling. Next year maybe?5
The tenant system won't work any more. One
man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or
fourteen families. Pay him a wage and take all the
crop. We have to do it. We don't like to do it. But
the monster's sick. Something's happened to the
monster.
Surely this is rather like the Enclosures in
England, where a secure peasantry was turned off the
land and drifted into the towns to find work as an
impoverished proletariat. (Note that the word, as in
ancient Rome, means the lowest class of propertyless
laborer.) In the same chapter a tenant, about to be
driven off his land, gives us a moving picture of what
it is to have property: "I built it with my own
hands. Straightened old nails to put the sheathing
on. Rafters are wired to the stringers with bailing
wire. It's mine. I built it." And he ponders:
"Funny thing how it is. If a man owns a little
property, that property is him, it's part of him, and
it's like him. If he owns property only so he can
walk on it and be sad when it isn't doing well, and
feel fine when the rain falls on it, that property is
him, and some way he's bigger because he owns it.
Even if he isn't successful he's big with his
property. That is so."
There we have the ideal of distributed property just
about as well expressed in the poor man's words as it
could be put in philosophical or technical exposition:
as is the case with his next musing, on the
concentration of property, and therefore of power, in
remote corporate hands:
"But let a man get property he doesn't see, or can't
get time to get his fingers in, or can't be there to
walk on it -- why, then the property is the man.6 He
can't do what he wants. The property is the man,
stronger than he is. And he is small, not big. Only
his possessions are big -- and he's the servant of his
property. That is so too."
The man working for the corporate owners
explains that violence will provide no defense for the
tenant, because the man who has given him his orders
"got his orders from the bank. The bank told him:
'Clear these people out or it's your job [lost]."
"Well, there's a president of the bank.
There's a board of directors. I'll fill up the
magazine [of my rifle] and go into the bank."
The driver said: "Fellow was telling me the
bank gets orders from the east. The orders were:
'Make the land show profit or we'll close you up'."
"But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I
don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man
who's starving me."
"I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot.
Maybe the thing isn't men at all. Maybe, like you
said, the property's doing it. Anyway, I told you my
orders."
It is remarkable that in this novel we have such
an effortless statement of the ideals of
Distributism/Social Credit and of the means by which
they are thwarted. The solution seems obvious: to
quote Douglas, "First defeat the money power." But
how defeat the faceless, implacable entity? To the
simple-minded tenant it seemed straightforward, as it
did to John Barton and his union associates -- find
someone to shoot -- but as Barton found, that is not
just evil but futile too. In the meantime millions
starve in a world of plenty. As the tenant had
noticed, the only prospect of temporary relief is war,
which will use up the unconsumed product (and
incidentally some of those millions of people): and
that outcome is imminent as Steinbeck writes.
If anything to compare with these novels is
being written now, it is not finding a publisher.
We can hardly help noticing that Steinbeck's
people -- like Mrs. Gaskell's -- have a language
heavily laced with religious vocabulary. Much of this
is habitual cussing, of course, but by no means all of
it; and reading attentively we see that there is a
real sense of religious awareness, certain points
expressed directly. For example, Casey, The Preacher,
expresses his conviction that men should live in
mutuality ("loving thy neighbor as thyself") when he
says:
"I got thinkin' how we was holy when we was one thing,
an' mankin' was holy when it was one thing. An' it
only got unholy when one mis'able little fella got the
bit in his teeth an' run off his own way, kickin' an'
draggin' an' fightin'. Fella like that bust the
holiness. But when they're all workin' together, not
one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of
harnessed to the whole shebang7 -- that's right,
that's holy."
Granma Joad supplies the responses to this
prophetic utterance with her Pu-raise Gawd!, Amen, and
Hallelujah. Casey presents himself as not a real --
or no longer a -- preacher but only a poor, baffled,
sinful man, but we are made to see him as a genuine
religious figure: first by his sacrifice of himself
for another; secondly by his words when he is brutally
murdered -- killed with a pick-handle -- "You don't
know what you're doing"; and third by something the
hunted Tom tells his Ma he remembers Casey once told
him (though he has not previously realized that he
even listened):
"Goes, 'Two are better than one, because they have a
reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one
will lif' up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone
when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him
up'. That's part of her."
"Go on," Ma said. "Go on, Tom."
"Jus' a little bit more. 'Again if two lie
together, then they have heart: but how can one be
warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall
withstand him, and a three-fold cord is not quickly
broken'."
"An' that's Scripture?"
"Casey said it was. Called it The Preacher."
It might also be called the Increment of Association;
the original principle behind trade unionism (too
often perverted into the coercive power of a
majority); or many other instances of collective or
associative strength used for good or corrupted to
evil. But Casey was certainly quoting from chapter 4
of Ecclesiastes, The Preacher.
So we can be in no doubt that Steinbeck meant
all the questions posed by his novel to be seen as
religious ones just as much as Mrs. Gaskell did --
and, of course, Dickens and Trollope -- and as to what
is to be done, again it is like Mrs. Gaskell. There
is some suggestion of trade union activism, but when
it comes to the bottom line (for Tom fades from the
story, and what he subsequently does is unknown), all
that is left is neighborly concern, mutuality, human
kindness. When Ma is shown a small kindness by the
clerk of the company store, she observes (as Mary
Barton found in Liverpool) that it is the poor that
help the poor. The same thing is found at many turns
in the story, and on the last page of the book is
presented in such extreme form that I suppose some
readers must find it distasteful.
A stranger starving to death in a barn above the
flood is suckled by the Joad daughter, Rose of Sharon,
whose baby was stillborn, illustrating that in a
wicked and suffering world all that is left to many
people is faith, mutuality (Ma has persuaded the young
woman that it will be good for her, too), and the milk
of human kindness.
Though not one of my four authors gives us the full
truth -- or the answer to my question -- taken
together they give us a pretty full and convincing
compilation of truths. The relation of people with
people should be one of mutuality, or interdependence,
known to some as Christian love or (to distinguish it
from other loves) Caritas, Charity. This mutuality
should extend not only between man and man, nation and
nation, but also to the material environment. In an
imperfect world, if the whole thing is not got right,
we should at least fall back upon this disinterested
love, Charity. Where there is poverty through natural
causes, it should be alleviated. Where it is caused
by a mere shortage of money, it should be supplied.
Banks are founded on nothing but belief. The poverty
of honest -- but not feckless -- people has
discoverable causes and is brought about by an
apparently implacable process, which should be halted
and replaced by a better system. My authors have all
seen through some of the mistakes and deceptions of
this world and glimpsed the possibility of something
better, which may or may not some day be brought into
being. Their very consideration of such questions
gives to their work a seriousness now lacking in
literature. It remains surprising, however, that none
of them (though there is a hint from Dickens) answers
directly the question, What is the cause of poverty,
i.e., of a chronic shortage of money? and (the same
question really) Where does the bank get its money?
It is a little more surprising that Steinbeck didn't
pursue this line of questioning to a conclusion, for
he had a brilliant and objective -- in fact, a
scientific -- mind.
I find the question not only asked but actually
answered in C. S. Lewis's fantasy That Hideous
Strength (about which I have written elsewhere). The
N.I.C.E. -- ostensibly a scientific research body, but
in reality the power behind the Government -- has no
problem with money because "It's we that make money"
-- out of nothing. Since I am myself much influenced
by the work of C. H. Douglas, it is natural that a
number of my readers are Social Crediters.8 It does
appear to me that they might do well to consider that
the vision underlying their movement might be regarded
as simply a version of the Kingdom of God, and perhaps
not to be outwardly achieved in this world in
historical time. This is a conclusion that I have
heard privately acknowledged in conversation by a
leading Social Crediter at the end of a long life. It
is entirely reasonable and may be seen, I think, as
the real point of my fourth choice of novelist:
individual acts of initiative taking the place of, not
just preparing the ground for, a bright new dawning.
Notes
1. In this passage Steinbeck gets very close to the
heart of human tragedy and folly. It seems
inconceivable that by system Steinbeck means anything
other than a way of relating finance to economy, that
is, to reality, in order to achieve proper
distribution of real goods, really in existence, to
real people really wanting them. (If no one wants
them, they should not have been produced.) If this
seems too predisposed an interpretation, it should be
understood -- what many people realize today -- that
when this book was being written, C. H. Douglas and
his work were well known to educated people all over
the world. The blanket of obscurity had not yet been
thrown over them.
2. Notice the varying use of capital letters: as the
passage goes on, the lack of them brings the financial
institutions down to size when they are regarded more
rationally.
3. Isn't there a religious allusion here?
4. So there is an element of inappropriate
agriculture here: the Indians their grandfathers had
displaced had not had this problem, and now lived
securely on reservations.
5. This was written in 1938. Had Steinbeck read
Douglas on the economics that leads to war?
6. Whereas with distributed property, the man is the
property: he is not only in control of it but at one
with it.
7. That is, not employer and employed but free people
cooperating.
8. This spelling is often questioned, but Social
Crediters commonly use it to identify themselves as
members of a movement, not as creditors.
LANE - COONEY BOOKS
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