Beissel, Henry – “A New Nest of Eagles”

In a letter dated June 11, 1823, Jefferson, comparing the United States with the “nations of eternal war” in Europe, wrote:

Almost fifty years before he wrote the letter I quoted, Jefferson proclaimed that “all men are by nature equally free and independent” (1776), and he spelled out the enjoyment of life, liberty, property, happiness, and safety as their inalienable birthrights. These were the ideals embodied in the Constitution of the United States: they fired the imagination of her citizenry, and their pursuit was to create a garden of Eden and a city of God, one after the other, in the New World. But the dream has turned into a nightmare. Everywhere the idiot grins of she-males and cheesecake, bought, packaged, and sold on Madison Avenue in a desperate attempt to feign and insinuate happiness where fear and emptiness prevail! One third of this wealthiest nation on earth lives in substandard conditions, millions of them in actual poverty. For most of the others, the enjoyment of property means a lifetime of anxiety and economic slavery. For them, the problem is equality – an even more severe problem than poverty in a country where one per cent of the population owns one third of the nation’s wealth. Education, political rights, health, justice mean one thing to the rich, another to the poor, and yet another to the Negro. Inequality rules American society. What remains of liberty is manipulated into meaninglessness by a deliberately dishonest system of mass communications media and an army of unscrupulous behavioural scientists, market researchers, PR men, and advertisers – all in the service of the maximization of profits for a few and the corrosion of individual choice and character for the multitude.

Abroad too, liberty is synonymous with acceptance of the American tin-pan alley of life. Dissent is either bought or bludgeoned into silence. All over the world American money and American troops are used to prop up dictatorships and to suppress and eradicate national liberation movements.

How is it that a nation which (just in case my polemical discourse should promote smugness at home) has demonstrated and still demonstrates a finer moral fiber, a greater vitality and courage that we have in Canada should surrender to dehumanization, corruption, and violence? The United States has produced great poets and painters, writers, musicians, scientists, thinkers – the best in the New World: how is it that the worst have come to prevail? Why, after less than 200 years, is the reality of American society such a grotesque perversion, such a ghastly parody of its own ideals?

There is no simple or single answer to any of these questions. It is precisely the simple-minded rationalism of the eighteenth century with its romantic optimism and its shallow utopianism about the nature of man and the world that has contributed substantially to America’s present dilemma. We don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, and it is simply not true that history is synonymous with progress and enlightenment. It is simply not true that men are good and equal and that enlightenment will, as a matter of course, temper their selfishness and bring about paradise.

Considering the immense natural wealth of America and the circumstances of its settlement, it is not surprising that happiness should have come to mean material success. Nor, considering its pragmatic, utilitarian origins and the rigid moralism of puritanism, is it surprising that the political system should have come to approve and promote commercialism. Enter the goddess of Usura whose fairy tale forests are a telltale jungle where the fittest that survive are the most cunning and unscrupulous. She rules men by greed and vulgarizes and brutalizes all. Radix malorum est cupiditas – America is beginning to taste the bitterness of this. Justice is bought, professional integrity sold; trust is mortgaged, truth auctioned off. Corruption is ubiquitous: in the police force, in government, in labour unions, in the party machinery, in business, in the news media. Bribery, extortion, price-fixing, embezzlement – anything from elementary cheating to murder goes. The new ethic is “crime doesn’t pay,” which means that everything that pays is not a crime and of course that which is not a crime is ethical. The war in Vietnam pays – millions or perhaps billions to a few, a little bit to everybody. And so even mass murder becomes ethical. In such a climate of dishonesty and violence, crime syndicates can operate openly and profitably. The current wave of riots and increasingly aggressive demonstrations is, ironically, an extension of this violence even though it is a radical protest against the perversion and corruption that produced it. Rapidly the social order of the United States is degenerating into anarchy.

Whatever allowance has to be made for the inadequacy of all analogies, the parallels between Rome (the final phase of classical culture) and America (the final phase of European culture) are uncanny. Spengler shows that Rome was cerebral, irreligious, factual, journalistic, analytical, technological, hedonistic, cosmopolitan. So is America. Rome was preoccupied with size and quantity and performed colossal construction feats (roads and buildings). The same is true of America. It was the Emperor Vespasian who championed the American profit ethic when he justified to critics his tax on public urinals: pecunia non olet – “money does not smell.” Rome was an imperialistic nation; the whole classical world came to fear the beak and claws of the eagles from Capitol Hill. We have a new nest of eagles now on a new Capitol Hill, and the world trembles. Internally corrupt and externally overextended, Rome’s empire crumbled, beginning at the faraway perimeters. Is Vietnam the turning point for the U.S.?