Carey Rowland's blog

What Mr. Lincoln said

. . .at Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania:

. . .we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate--we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. 

It is better for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

President Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

The Swan Song of J. Al DasCapital

For some it's a good thing; for others a bad,

   to be like the capitalist, or provoke socialist rad.

Back in the day, Rockefeller and Carnegie forged the enterprise deal;

   JPMorgan and Ford cranked up  capitalist zeal.

But then in '29 the machine broke down; all hell broke loose.

   It was a train wreck for sure, from engine to caboose.

Smart as he was,  Hoover was thought clueless in '32,

   so they brought in Roosevelt to set up a new deal crew.

The gov from New York saved us, so they say,

   with a big shot of socialism,  making work for payday.

 

Now these days, since the meltdown of '08,

   we've the same situation, but reverse, on our plate:

Big Spender Barack's in the driver's seat; he's catchin' the flack,

   while Money-movin' Mitt says its time to get back

to those good ole days when investors and innovators were calling the shots,

   before all these Keynesian Krugmanites got the hots

for quantitative easing, and stimulus, and priming the pump;

   'cause they give us a ride, but we don't get over the hump.

 

Now out here on Main Street where the grassroots grow,

   in the shops and garages where the mom and pops know,

we whip up the long tails; we push pins in the bubbles;

    we wink at the black swans and laugh at the troubles. 

Class warfare's just a phrase in some socialist goad, 

    inequality  just a pothole, a mere bump in the road.

No flash-tradin' froth, no credit default fizz,

    we just work with what can be, and we deal with what is.

 If the day ever comes when the gov regulates us beyond reason,

    or corporations have all the wealth tied up for the season,

we'll just stick out our necks and  we'll sing our swan song,

    cuz life in the free market goes on and goes on. 

Glass half-Full

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chai Ling's Heart for Freedom

Chai Ling has written a great book, A Heart for Freedom, (Tyndale) about her revolutionary life. I'm reading it now on Kindle.

http://www.amazon.com/Heart-Freedom-Remarkable-Dissident-Daughters/dp/1414362463 

About a quarter of the way through her autobiographical account, she gets into those historically dramatic days that preceded the Tiananmen Square uprising of April-June, 1989. She gives an accounting of her role as a major communicator in that movement.

Chai Ling's husband at that time was Feng Congde, a fellow-student at Peking University, and a forceful, very gifted leader within the protest movement.    

In last two week of April, 1989, Feng had been intensely occupied with organizing a democratizing event at the Xinhua gate on Chang'an Avenue, the north end of Tiananmen Square. (This is so interesting to me, because I have visited Tiananmen and the adjoining Forbidden City.) On the night of a protest event,  police had dispersed the dissidents from the Xinhua gate, but the young students went on to strategize for what was to come in the next few days. (These events later stretched into weeks, and eventually culminated on June 4 when military troops shut down the Tiananmen uprising.) 

In those early stages, however, Chai Ling writes that one night,  her husband Feng did not come home, so she went looking for him; Ling found her revolutionary mate in a room with his comrades as they planned a coordinated response to the repressive police action at Xinhua gate.

Upon finding Feng that night, she set up a desk outside the dormitory room that had become the organizational locus for students who were laying plans; the alert Ling began to function as a liaison between the core group and other students who wanted to get involved.

As the movement gathered energy and participants, 60,000 students from 48 colleges and universities in Beijing joined with a student strike. This was the inception of the larger massive protest that happened during May at Tiananmen Square. Feng Congde's leadership was a seminal component in the student leaders' dorm-room meetings that had preceded these events. What really focused the students' intensifying zeal, however, was the  April 22 funeral of Party leader Hu Yaobang, whose inclination toward reform had endeared him to many young Chinese.

Hu's memorial event, April 22, 1989,  was a mournful, highly-charged event. On the day of Hu Yaobang's funeral, thousands of people gathered at the west side of Tiananmen, and upon the steps of the Great Hall of the People, in anticipation of the Party's commemoration of him. But a long wait for the many thousands gathered there became a potential flash point for mob ire when the CCP leaders dispatched Hu's hearse through a back route, ostensibly to minimize the deceased reformer's legacy to the restless "People."

The scene was about to turn violent. As Chai Ling writes, the core of Peking University (called Beida in the book) students quickly organized a strategy to prevent violence and imminent bloodshed. At that point, Ling jumped upon a wall and shouted out a desire to communicate with the leaders who were inside the Hall. This bold move on her part immediately propelled her into a critical negotiating role at that point in time. Someone handed her a megaphone, and her decisive act as stand-in-the-gap peacemaker between angry students and Party luminaries  became Tiananmen history.

Although Ling's role in the Tiananmen uprising of 1989 was played mostly in Tiananmen Square itself--that is, the outside space--she must have later communicated with a highly placed official person who had been inside the Great Hall of the People on that day of Hu's funeral. For she gives an account, in her book, of a certain moment in time--a quite momentous moment--when Premier Deng Xiaoping looked out a window and had a view, for the first time, of the massive gathering of young people out in the Square.

Chai Ling wrote: 

Another old Party cadre who had fought with Deng alongside Mao Zedong in the early days of the revolution walked over to Deng and stood next to him, pounding the floor with his cane.

 'They call us dictators,' he declared in a loud voice (to Deng) broken with age. 'They call you the Emperor.' 

That moment determined the fate of the student movement and all that followed. Deng would not tolerate anyone who called him a dictator.

Apparently, in the race of men, even reformist capitalist-road visionaries such as Deng Xiaoping have their intolerantly repressive aspects, as the world later witnessed on June 4, 1989.

Since that time, Chai Ling has come to follow a different leader--one whose whose revolutionary work pertains to the Spirit, rather than the dictatorships of this world. More about that later.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

 

Couch potatoes, or real food?

Most Americans will not do the hard physical labor required to harvest our nation's crops. 

But in these days politicians, thinking that they're doing us all a favor, want to meddle with immigration laws that effectively kick out the migrant workers who perform that hard work. 

But most of us Americans are just not up to the task. Workers just will not do what many of our grandparents did  back in the day to get all that food out of the fields, into the supply chain, and into the pantries and bellies of consumers.

Here's what has happened in Georgia in the last year or so, after the legislature went trying to meddle with the sensitive dynamics of supply/demand in agricultural labor markets.

In a conversation with Neal Conan of Talk of the Nation last Monday 4/30/12, Dick Minor, partner of Minor Produce, Andersonville Ga., and President of Georgia Fruit and Vegetable  Growers Association, said this: 

". . . that just anybody can come do this job is also a misnomer. We consider these people skilled workers because they are pretty much professional harvesters, and they're even skilled to particular crops.

So people harvesting watermelons may not be able to pick peaches, and people picking blueberries may not be able to pick peppers. So certain crews that work in certain crops, and they do that year-round, as you know it's very tough work. It's very tough conditions - long hours. You've got to be in really good physical shape. You've got to know the process of harvesting crops."

When Neal Conan asked Mr. Minor about using parolees to do the work, the President of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Associations said:

"It hasn't worked out. I was actually one of the test farms that we did that on, and we tried to make it work. It runs into the same problem of using any other domestic workforce: They're just not skilled in the technique to harvest the crop, nor are they physically able to do that work.

I mean, you have to imagine being in 100-degree days for 10 hours, and, you know, very physically demanding work, stooping down, running, lifting. You've got to be, sort of, trained, almost like an athlete. You've got to be trained to be able to do it, and we offered open employment to them all summer long, and we had just a constant turnstile of people coming and going.

And nobody was excited about doing it. A lot of them did it for several days, but none of them lasted."

The net effect of the legislature's misguided micromanagement of labor markets cost the state of Georgia, in Mr. Minor's estimation, lost revenuers of $140 million, which, when the "multiplier" effect of that money is factored in, amounts to about $390 million.

This happened because 40%  of workers needed to harvest  Georgia's crops in the last year were not there to do the work. The accustomed agricultural pickers did not show up because they were not hired because of  bad law, or the workes were afraid of the consequences of showing up and risking deportation.

But American couch potatoes wouldn't get out in the fields and gather all those watermelons and peaches and whatnot.

In this country, we've traded real potatoes for couch potatoes. This is largely the result of our leisurely lifestyle, and obsession with entertainments, and government welfare that robs workers of incentives to prosper, and just plain old-fashioned laziness.

Americans don' know how to work any more. Its no wonder that the corporations sitting on all that funny Federal money are unwilling to take a chance and grant us more employment.

CR, with new novel, Smoke,  in progress

 

Time for Soul-searching

America needs to find something else to do besides argue and complain. Each man, each woman has a destiny to fulfill. 

Get hooked up with some person or organization with which you can at least partially agree; get your hands, your feet, your mind busy, to solve the problems that confound you now.

Act on behalf of those whom you love-- those for whom you are responsible; assist those who are responsible for you.

If you are in a mess, Big Brother is not going to get you out of it. The government may toss a few greenbacks and food stamps your way, but ultimately you are responsible for your own life.

You go-getters out there--no corporation will fill your destiny. If you want to become an integral link in a corporate structure, remember: its all about what you can do for the company, not what the company can do for you. You do your job right and the good stuff will come after many days.

Get busy. Look around you. Find something in your vicinity that needs doing, and do it, whether that makes you underpaid, underemployed, or seemingly underutilized. There's a lot of work that needs to be done out there in getting this country turned around from our present dead-end of overinstitutionalism and overgovernmentalization. We need to restructure from the ground up. And I do mean the ground literally. This could involve growing some vegetables or something like that.

If you're at a loss as to how to find some direction, take some time for a little soul-searching. That's what I did a few decades ago, and I was never the same afterward. I wrote a song about it: Like Moses, like Martin Luther King, I took a walk up the mountain.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

 

 

The Malaise? again?

The question of whether the news is good or the news is bad--

 whether America is in decline or not, 

  whether anything can be done about it or not, 

   whether we are citizens or are we just consumers,

    whether the government must needs be the initiator 

     of of all our rehabilitative and wealth-generating strategies, 

      or whether the corporate powerhouses that be are bound 

       to lead us out of this withering prosperity that so easily distends us, 

        or whether by some miracle the people shall rise up 

         by yon legendary bootstraps and from within themselves 

          and through their own God-given and/or earth-extracted resources 

           take on the responsibilities and burdens of their own freedoms and 

            well-being (let us not call it welfare),

             whether we shall or whether we will not--

that is the question.                      My vote is: go for it.

 

Glass half-Full

 

The Conspiracy thing

Ok so I met this guy who's convinced that this whole big mess is a conspiracy, most especially the 911 thing. And he had me convinced for a few milliseconds that maybe he's onto something, what with mysterious fluctuations in airline stock prices the day before the towers went down, and that its all oil but I knew that anyway and that cheney knew what was going on and it was all a big plan because you know the govment is out to get us and to get us all constricted into a police state, and now we are in a police state and that explains a lot and theres plenty of proof on the internet that it wasn't passenger planes that did the damage on 911, that it was missiles that hit the pentagon and that there were some asbestos problems in the towers that nobody wanted to fix because it would be too expensive and so the conspiracy arranged to have the towers destroyed and that there is no record in history of a steel structure going down without being calculatedly imploded and that the #7 building was imploded because of incriminating evidence that needed to be disposed of so as not to implicate the mayor and there was a puff of smoke at the grassy knoll and so forth and none of this is really new but you know what? it doesn't worry me because Jesus said:

"You will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end." Mt 24.

So in a way I already knew about this because we can see and sort of feel that there's something rotten in danmark or somewhere or maybe everywhere you go on earth and we know this because Paul said:

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places." Eph 6.

So it is not new and this conspiracy thing is really very old and there's nothing new under the sun because its pretty obvious that humans are fairly well messed up maybe even rotten to the core and actually ridden through like bullet holes with depravity which is the old term for the sin nature before sin became in the popular way of thinking just an old freudian repression instead of the undeniable reality that it really is which is plain to see if you look around among the rubble and detritus of our civilization's underpinnings and yes I have discovered this sin nature in my very own damn self but Jesus saved me, back in 1978. That doesn't release me from any responsibility to try and do right in this life, but it does release me from the burdens of trying to correct everybody else's messes, or even try to figure it all out and protest, a la quintessential existential dilemma.

And so maybe you're a marxist and you think that I'm imbibing the opiate of the people by accepting religion and Jesus and so forth but hey its a free country or at least it used to be but I'm free no matter how you slice the rumor mill because Jesus has set me free now put that in your pipe and smoke it. Or maybe you're a fascist and you think my religion is irrelevant and based on old mythologies and legends and is therefore no defense against your will to power. We shall see, you damned bully. 

Well there is no denying there is some bad shit going down in this world and maybe there's very little we can do about it because we're all tied down to just makin a livin', doin' the 9 to 5 if were lucky enough to still have a job, and we know they're cooking the unemployment numbers so as to manipulate us and its probably closer to 20% if you include all the people who would still like to be employed but the statisticians think they've given up. (Don't ever give up.) and like I said before what else is new?, and so forth, cuz we don't any of us have time to correct all the bad stuff. But its not your fault anyway. Just take care of your own bad self and do what you need to do. Remember Jesus said:

"…but whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks! For it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to that man through whom the stumbling block comes."

So if you are a conspiracy buff you would do better just to put your faith in Jesus instead of trying to figure out all the bad stuff in this world. And if you are one of the Conspirators, then you better get right with God before its too late, and end your wicked ways.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress.

 

Dr. King and me

In my sixty years, I remember no fellow-American whose courage and true patriotism surpasses that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  I grew up in Mississippi and Louisiana, two states of the deep south, where the legacy of Dr. King's work--his love of mankind, his tireless work for freedom, and his ultimate sacrifice--made its most enduring impact.

In the constant struggle for human justice in this nation and in our world, he was a vigilant prophet and laborer. As a fallen soldier in that cause, Dr. King was one of those whom Lincoln had presciently memorialized at Gettysburg a hundred years prior, with this assessment: he paid the "last full measure of devotion," by giving his life so that others could live free from slavery and oppression.

I will never forget the effect of his prophetic life on me and the generation I grew up with. The people of our United States should not forget. 

In 1978, the year that I joined the ranks of Christian faith, a faith that Dr. King openly proclaimed and by which he was forever inspired, I wrote this song about him and Moses, after climbing Mt. Pisgah near my home in North Carolina. Perhaps you will be inspired by this great legacy, as I was: 

Mountaintop

 

a little Czech wisdom

"The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him."

                                                      Jan Patocka, spoken to Vaclav Havel, both of whom were spokesmen for 

                                                      Charter '77, in Czechoslovakia

Glass half-Full

a little Vaclav Havel family history

  Almost 23 years ago, Vaclav Havel led the people of Czechoslovakia in a revolution that ousted four decades of Soviet communist rule. Early in his life, Vaclav had been a dissident playwright; When the Soviet was rejected in 1989, he became, despite persecution and imprisonment,  President of liberated Czechoslovakia, and in 1993 President of the Czech Republic.

Vaclav Havel died a few weeks ago, on Dec. 18. 

Vaclev had come from a good family. His grandfather, Vacslav Havel, had held a venerable role as a civic leader in Prague during the the first decade of the 20th century.  A notable component of Vacslav's (with an "s" in the middle) legacy, and the legacy of his family, was a grandiose Prague landmark, called the Lucerna Palace, the construction of which was begun in 1907. 

Consider this historical account of what happened to the Havel family's creatively constructed heritage,  before and after a communist government nationalized it in 1949.

From page 37 of Eda Kriseova's biography of Vaclav Havel:

http://www.amazon.com/Vaclav-Havel-Authorized-Eda-Kriseova/dp/0312103174

"Vacslav Havel, Vaclav's grandfather, built Prague's Lucerna Palace, an arts and entertainment center that was on a par with that of any great European city. It was his life's work. He loved Prague and wanted to do something that would promote Prague from an Austro-Hungarian provincial town to a great city…

"…and from time to time, he consulted his wife, Emilie. In his memoirs, Vaclav's father writes: 'When his (Vacslav's) project was finished, he showed my mother his suggestion for the facade on Vodickova Street. As soon as she saw it, she exclaimed that it was like a great big lucerna, or lantern. May father jumped at her remark, saying: That's a good name for the whole building, Lucerna, It is a Czech word that even a foreigner could pronounce well.' "

"During the first stage of development from 1907 to 1908, they built the building on Vodickova Street and its courtyard wing. Grandfather Havel built Lucerna in three stages at his own expense with the help of bonds and mortgages. He and his wife, Emilie, guaranteed the repayment of the loans with all their property as collateral." 

Continuing, from page 38 of Eda Kriseova's biography of Vaclav Havel:

"The ambitious concept of a single enterprise for entertainment, haute cuisine, and culture was crowned by the construction and inauguration of the Great Hall in 1920. The hall was submerged three stories below ground; above it stood a seven-story building. It was the largest underground concert hall in Prague. For the construction of the hall, Vacslav Havel innovated the use of steel-reinforced concrete for the pillars and ceilings, designed and engineered by Stanislav Bechyne, later a member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. The construction was a worldwide rarity.

"…after the war (World War II), the Communists nationalized the Lucerna Palace."

But 18 years before World War II, When Vacslav had died in 1921, ownership of the Lucerna had passed to his son Vaclav (senior, father of the late President Vaclav), from whose possession it was later taken when the communists took over in 1949. From page 84 of Kriseova's biography of Vaclav Havel:

"According to Vaclav's father's memoirs, 1952 was the family's most difficult year. Mr Havel had to leave the Lucerna. It had not belonged to him for three years, but they had allowed him to work there. He worked well and his employers liked him. The final parting was hard for him, because he was attached to the business by countless emotional ties, by his family tradition, by his whole life."

Something tells me that this is not the way things should happen. A family was robbed of its legacy by a communist government. The government later allowed the former owner to work as an employee.

If you care to know more about this Lucerna Palace of Prague and the Havel family who built and managed it until it was taken from them, then look it up, or google it. My point here is that there have been times in human history when the hard-earned legacy of an enterprising family was absconded by a redistributive totalitarian government. Among the many forms of injustice in history, this misappropriation is one of them. It happens  when a meddlesome State steals property from the so-called bourgoisie (merchant class), or when a statist government, for purposes of leveling income inequality, occupies the assets of "the rich."

Here in America, we value and constitutionally protect the rights of individual citizens and families to own private property and manage it as they deem necessary. Let's keep it that way.

Glass half-Full