About me, you can find virtually an entire autobiography found in the essays of my life, travels and observations at this site, VassarBushmills.com. Most are linked to the themes this site considers survival-enhancing in Nature: How Things Work, Natural Law, American Exceptionalism and Stories. (The essays run back to 2011.) Henceforward, newer pieces will appear at “How Things Work”.
I don’t have opinions so much as I have observations, most of which are connected.
Although I would have liked to generate a little more income, as that is still the best measure for success, I declare, the post-modern chase-for-fame-game was a bridge too far for me after having spent close to 35 years of my adult life without a secure income in order to learn how-things-are-designed-to-work-in-nature (Natural Law) from around the world.
I view almost everything from the bottom up…so in the broader scope of history, I view the American design as being the best in all of mankind’s design history, (name one better) in the process violating almost all the rules of how civilized societies are supposed to turn out when designed from the top-down. There must be some powerful reasons why Man continues to work off the same stale, failed recipes as if he’s finally found the right fine-tuning formula. Those you should learn by heart, for they are all dagger tips aimed straight at America. To date, all have failed, most attempts never having got past a few generations, 60-70 years, each collapsing in their own time, and by their own natural weaknesses, and in accordance with the same natural laws, before the whole cycle had to be started all over again.
For those of you who read, you’ll find it interesting that most of the ingredients of this top-down failure is listed in the Bible, all very personal before they become institutionalized. They are commonly known as the “seven deadly vices”; pride, greed, lust, wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth, first listed together by Pope Gregory around 600 A.D. These were compiled against a list of the seven opposites: faith, hope, charity, justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude…and it’s true, if you compare such struggles in Nature, you can usually identify the competing vice and virtue, while also noting that one set is more aggressive than the other.
Since in Nature 80% or so of people always prefer a peaceful existence, getting along with their neighbors, working to keep a roof over their heads, the family fed, it’s that other 20% who are addicted to those “deadly” symptoms (urges) and which create most of the hubbub; chaos and pain the world has known for 5000 years.
Mankind has been suffering this pain all this time, but we never knew anything about it because no one actually chronicled it. Or was able to, Or even cared to. I keep a book on my shelf written by Adolf Erman, a German Egytologist, Life in Ancient Egypt, written in the late 1800s. Erman is one of the few natural historians who will tell you what he does not know what life was really like for 80%-90% of the people in Egypt. In Egypt there were several dynasties, 30, covering close to 3000 years ending with the rise of Alexander the Great. But as to “life in Egypt”, Erman admitted it was difficult to tell the difference between workers and slaves, not just the laborers building the pyramids, but the men who herded the cattle, the average farm family. He doesn’t talk about what life was like around the house, the clothes they wore, the way they fixed their eggs, because the ancient Egyptians left no record of it.
Why? Because “How the 80% lived” wasn’t noteworthy.
Think about that. Life in Ancient Egypt only addressed itself to what we would call today the “government class”; royals, priests, generals, for they received most mention in the hieroglyphics unearthed there. The structures built then were monuments built for that class only.
The World’s Oldest Profession?
And it has been more or less the same in all of history. I keep Erman’s book around just to remind me that maybe it was historians, not prostitutes, who are the world’s oldest profession, for the only reason they were created was to leave an indelible mark about the histories of their masters. It would be in the 1500’s before the ruling classes found any profit in being able to read. And it was still largely that way well into the 18th Century, when the United States was designed and created by a bevy of common men and women who saw human history and the common man in a totally different way. And most had learned to read because of the Bible, and the Reformation, still in process.
Studying and writing history began anew and in my life I’ve pulled a few histories off the shelf and added to my permanent library. I’m sure you’re familiar with Larry Schweikart, (co-authored with Michael Allen) of A Patriot’s History of the United States, and provides a catalogue of no-names who became names simply because this vision of history changed because of “the people” who were creating it. I have other students of history on my list, Barbara Tuchman, Bernard De Voto, Mark Twain, F A Hayek, all of whom saw history evolving from the bottom-up.
I’ve chronicled the chase for personal greed all through history, but whudda thunk that a naked chase for personal recognition could potentially do so much in such a short period of time, and reaching for a point where it is almost irreversible as we have seen one after another “movement” attempt to bring this hideous creation of personal liberty to a close.
But today we are approaching that crossroads, for today I’m sitting here today seeing smart people, half my age and less, comparing the virtues and weaknesses of national socialism (aka fascism) with international socialism (aka communism). And still none of those “highly-schooled” people (a partial trope created by a friend), or very wealthy people, or both, can tell me the difference between the two as they pertain to regular citizens.
Now this is a pitch for money, but not very much. My first wife and I divorced in 1989. She was the only child of a millionaire textile manufacturer, who did not like his daughter marrying a hillbilly, law school or no. So my sons will do well. We’ve remained good friends. She told me she couldn’t stand the idea of always being alone while I was off gallivanting around Asia and later, the Soviet empire, trying to export old-style 1950s American manufacturing business acumen, in order to head off the armies of Gordon Gekko’s our business schools were pumping out by the late 80s.
I thought I could show small manufacturers in Asia how they could complete with Chinese labor rates…keynote, they keep two sets of books. (They were cheating their own bosses in Peking.)
That was not the same oligarch-in-process arrangement I confronted in the USSR, and I found the ability to work with real risk-takers in the Balkans more encouraging…on their side. It was the Gordon Gekko-types on our sides, and usually hired me, who used a different business model that was from after my time in college, that were most interested in investing there in the early 2000’s. They weren’t looking for partners as much as patsies. In the end, I’d run my Diogenes lamp dry in Ohio, so moved my operation to the VA-DC area in 2001, just before 911.
This is why I think my having chosen a kind of poverty is a Good Thing, for neither money nor status has been part of any end game for me. I’d just like to be a part of systems being put into place that will work. I can still pay my overhead, so no one can say I needed Eric Erikson’s, or Jonah Goldberg’s imprimatur, both the age of my sons, or an army of some even younger really very smart, but sadly nakedly ambitious Millennials and Gen Z’ers, who wouldn’t even know how to process information given to them by a shop-keeper in Sofia, a bank clerk in Kharkov, a concrete manufacturer in Macedonia, a factory manager who mass produced dolls in Semonov, or a sidewalk book dealer in Machida, near Tokyo, a stripper in Itaewon, central Seoul, or a school principal in the central jungles of Luzon. No empathy.
They just wouldn’t know where all the pieces fit in Nature. Apparently the things I know, and the observations I’ve made, are doing no one any good as I hold steady under 1500 followers on Twitter. So I need a boost to just get the message out.
I have at least four 4 books written on these subjects; “The Famous Common People I have Known” series, the 2015 book Donald Trump and the Common Man, which is available in PDF format, (and I’ll copy and send via email to anyone with a $25 or more donation). I’d like to add more recent chapters from the Trump years in the White House, (2017-2022) and being older than he is, and in a peculiar sort of a way, more “experienced” in understanding in how DLT made that connection with the average American population the way he did, I think I can better explain this mutual love affair the public has with Donald Trump, and he with them.
I’ve also been fortunate to have a couple of essays included in David Poff’s Unwashed Philosophy: A User’s Guide for Our Imperfect Union (available at Amazon.com). It’s a complete book, and well worth reading. It connects God’s original Plan to America and highlights why our mission isn’t even halfway complete.
Thanks
