----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2002 8:56 PM Subject: Re: Ayn wept
>
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
> > Carl Remick quoted Joe Conason:
> >
> > > Maybe someday we'll see a revival of the
> > >kind of conservatism that once valued social solidarity along with
> > >enterprise, and demanded responsibility as the price of privilege.
> >
>
> Carl, I'm not sure what "conservatism" you are speaking of. Since most
> of the poets and novelists I studied over the years were conservatives,
> I'm fairly well acquainted with several conservative traditions. May I
> say that all of them I know of were red in tooth and claw. They were
> most responsible for (a) maintaining order and (b) making those over
> whom they maintained order at least claim they loved it.
>
> Read Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst." A really beautiful poem, in which he
> claims (lying through his teeth, though he may have believed his own
> lie)--
>
> An though thy walls be of the countrey stone,
> They'are rear'd with no mans ruine, no mans grone,
> There's none, that dwell about them, wish them downe;
> But all come in, the farmer, and the clowne,
> And no one empty-handed, to salute
> Thy lord, and lady, though they have no sute.
>
> To appreciate this representative of responsibility and valuing of
> social solidarity you need to be acquainted with the terror and
> repression visited on the English rural population during the 16th
> century.
>
> Once in a while a representative of this responsible conservatism let's
> the truth sneak out in a terrifying line or two:
>
> Mean while declining from the Noon of Day,
> The Sun obliquely shoots his burning Ray;
> The hungry judges soon the the Sentence sign,
> And Wretches hang that Jury-men may Dine. . . .
> (Rape of the Lock III, 19-22)
>
> The combination of "hanging" with "dining" takes us to the London
> slaughterhouses where carcasses were hanging. (In 1714 Londoners of all
> classes would have been more intimately familiar than we are with the
> processes that brought beef to their tables.)
>
> This whole myth of the responsible conservative flows from primarily
> 18th century sources. You might also read Raymond Williams, _The Country
> and the City_. Or, it occurs to me, you can get the (unpleasant) flavor
> of it all by reading Agatha Christie mysteries. In the 19th & 20th
> centuries that "responsible conservatism" gets entangled with some
> really nasty (but oh so genteel) racism. Read Dorothy Sayers. She is
> just as unpleasant as Christie but writes a hell of a lot better.
>
> Carrol
>
>