The Cheap Trick of Whiteness

A half-truth, as John Lukacs is fond of saying, is more dangerous than a lie, because the element of truth in it, speaking to our hearts and minds, can mask the accompanying falsehood. We see this in the current embrace of multiculturalism, which propagates the dangerous lie that a civilized human society can exist—whether at the level of the family, the city, or the nation—without a unifying culture.  (That, and not the claim that all cultures are equally “valid” or valuable, or even that all other cultures are more to be admired than ours, is the greatest danger posed by multiculturalism.) Despite the evident falsity of this claim (history presents no example of a lasting society without a dominant, unifying culture), the ideology of multiculturalism has flourished in the United States not because it has been imposed by political and cultural institutions, such as public schools and universities (though it has), nor because the former elites of the once-dominant culture in this country have been ill prepared to defend that culture as a unifying force (though they have), but because of the element of truth that the proponents of multiculturalism use like a katana to slice through any resistance to their destructive agenda: Diversity, like unity, is a positive good.

We do not have to draw on parallels from agriculture about the dangers of large-scale monoculture, or from genetics about the dead end of restrictive gene pools, to recognize this truth. It is not simply boredom that leads us to seek out new friends and to sample different cuisines, to learn languages other than the one we were born into and to study the history of other civilizations, or even the far-flung corners of our own. Russell Kirk argued that diversity—true diversity, not multiculturalism masquerading under that name—is a conservative principle, because (like all other true conservative principles) it is a reflection of the good, the true, and the beautiful. The Christian God Himself is a diversity in unity.

The problem, as always, is one of balance. Unity is a positive good; diversity is a positive good; but either one, taken to the extreme, destroys the other. Variety (the saying goes) is the spice of life, and sometimes a dish can become unbalanced because too little salt has been added. Yet, as any good cook knows, it is easier to destroy a dish through an overabundance of spices. Multiculturalism, as practiced in the United States, isn’t a measured dose of garlic or cumin or harissa incorporated into a hearty beef stew; it’s a cup of MSG poured on top of a Big Mac. The initial dish is toxic enough without any help from the Orient’s secret salt.

If the half-truth of multiculturalism is that diversity is a positive good, the half-truth that some opponents of multiculturalism push beyond the limit is that unity is a positive good. When unity becomes the highest value, we end up not with, say, the vibrant yet diverse Christian civilization of Europe in the Middle Ages but with the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism and (as I discussed last month) the post-Christian hypermonotheism of Islam. And among the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism is found an obsession with race as a unifying principle, among both liberals who see “whiteness” as the root of all evil, and some of their opponents who increasingly see it as the sole source and foundation of everything worth preserving.

A.D. 2015 will long be remembered here in Rockford as the year when that great “white power” band Cheap Trick (“Mommy’s all white / Daddy’s all white / They just seem a little weird”) finally received the recognition that they deserve, with the announcement that they will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Bad puns aside, it is hard to imagine four men who are collectively more white than Rick Nielsen, Robin Zander, Tom Petersson, and Bun E. Carlos (Brad M. Carlson, who says that he chose his stage surname because “We sounded like a bunch of Swedes”).  Yet it is absurd to speak of Cheap Trick as a “white” band, even in the sense that it is legitimate to speak of their fellow 2016 inductees N.W.A. as a black one.  Cheap Trick’s music cannot be reduced to a product of their “genetic endowment,” or even to some generic “white culture.”  Nielsen, Zander, Petersson, and Carlos are men of a certain time and a certain place—the mid–20th to early 21st century Upper Midwest, and specifically Northern Illinois—and their music has its feeder roots here and now (and then), even if other roots run deeper. Their longevity is the result, in large part, of their continued connection to this place and to the people who make their home here. As my barber recently noted, Rockford has changed a lot since he was young, but if you’re trying to find out something about a fellow Rockfordian you’ve never met, chances are you know not just one but several people who have worked with him, eaten with him, had one too many drinks with him, or worshiped with him.

Too many use the terms patriotism and nationalism today as if they were interchangeable, but they mean radically different things, especially in the context of a nation spread across an entire continent. Patriotism not only implies a connection to a certain people but demands a mutual connection to a certain place. There may be reasons why it is hard for me, a native of West Michigan, to be a Rockford patriot even after 20 years of living here, but it is many orders of magnitude easier than being a generically American one. America is not a place; it is many places—thousands of towns and regions and 50 states, all within the bounds of a continental empire that even in its infancy was more political than cultural. (The cultural differences between the original states, and even within each state, are almost incomprehensible to those whose historical imaginations have been fed from infancy on a steady diet of Thanksgiving turkey.) This country has always had, by its very nature, an inherent diversity that nationalism at best glosses over and at worst, reflecting its roots in Enlightenment rationalism, seeks to destroy in favor of an artificial unity. The subtitle of this magazine notwithstanding, there can be no single, deep, and lasting “American culture,” but there have been and still are many American cultures, local and regional, and the stronger they are, the more likely it is that the country as a whole will manage to survive.

Fame, alas, is fleeting, and the music of Cheap Trick may not be remembered outside of Rockford a century from now, much less four centuries, but what is true of Nielsen and Zander, Petersson and Carlos is just as true of Bach and Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart. When the multiculturalists dismiss the latter as “Dead White European Males,” and some of their opponents respond by lumping them together as “White Western Christians,” both sides turn these great composers into abstractions, as if the works of each one were (absurdly) interchangeable with those of any of the others. Notre Dame de Paris, Hagia Sophia, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and Sagrada Família were all built by Christian men of varying shades of whiteness, but the individual beauty and majesty of each edifice arises from the differences between those men and their cultures as much as it does from their underlying unity. Those who look at these churches through a monochromatic lens will never experience their full beauty—much less the fullness of truth that each represents and was built to honor. That some of those people, in fact, celebrated the blasphemous suicide of Dominique Venner in Notre Dame de Paris in May 2013 speaks volumes about what they truly worship.

Ostensibly, one of the reasons Venner chose to commit his “eminently political” act in the sanctuary at Notre Dame was to awaken the people of Europe to the dangers of Islamic immigration—a real threat that he correctly understood might spell the death of Europe as we know it. But the nations of Europe have faced this threat before, and they did not repel it through individual or mass suicide. Jan Sobieski, Janos Hunyadi, and Giovanni da Capestrano were all Western white Christian men named John who fought Islam, but they did not do so on behalf of the abstractions of “Europe” or “the West,” much less of “whiteness.” Each fought for the truth incarnate in his native land and people, in “the ashes of his fathers / and the temples of his gods.”

Abstractions draw man away from reality and lead him to despair; a firm grounding in reality gives man hope—or at least something that he can fight for when the odds seem overwhelming. A man, history shows us, will fight for his wife and children; for his family and friends; for his home and native land. Given time, talent, and resources, he may build things that last for generations yet to come. He may go to his grave knowing that his name may be lost to the ages within a century or two, but his presence will still be felt.

If, however, he abjures all of this, cuts his ties to his native soil (and never puts down roots anywhere else), makes few lasting friendships, chooses not to marry (or, if he marries, refuses to have children), and devotes his life instead to battles that are so large they cannot be won on behalf of an abstraction spun out of centuries of mass delusion—then such a man has not fought the enemies of civilization; he has joined forces with them.       

First published in the February 2016 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Returning to Reality

And Jesus answering said unto them,
Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,
and to God the things that are God’s.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost . . .

On February 28, 2013, as Pope Benedict XVI was leaving office, the magician Penn Jillette was interviewed on CNN by Piers Morgan, a nominal Catholic. Morgan, a critic of Benedict, thought he would have a sympathetic ear in Jillette, an outspoken atheist, but the interview quickly took an amusing turn as Jillette began lecturing Morgan on the teachings of the Catholic Church, which Jillette got (mostly) right. Morgan pushed back, but in the process only revealed his own ignorance of why the Church teaches what She teaches. Jillette made short work of him, as would anyone even modestly versed in Catholic theology.

Catholic commentators, especially those who are politically conservative and thus despised Piers Morgan for other reasons, enjoyed a bit of Schadenfreude at Morgan’s expense. One obvious lesson—which many of the commentators drew—is that Catholics of Morgan’s generation (he is 48) were poorly catechized.  If an atheist can beat a reasonably intelligent Catholic not just in technique but in the substance of a debate over Catholic theology, something is wrong.

There were less obvious lessons to be learned. The first is that American Catholics are just as enamored of celebrities as Americans of other stripes are. Not a few of the Catholic commentariat jumped to the conclusion that Jillette was ripe for conversion. (Many of the same commentators had declared Christopher Hitchens another Augustine or Saint Paul in the making, and had not only hoped for—a good thing—but expected his deathbed conversion, no matter how often Hitchens assured them it would never come. Which it didn’t.) Just as Kourtney Kardashian was lauded as a pro-life hero back in 2009 when she revealed in an interview that she could not bring herself to abort her unborn child, conceived out of wedlock, so Jillette became, for a moment, the potential new face of the Catholic Church in America. And as prolifers had made excuses for Kardashian, when in that same interview she had made it clear that she thought it perfectly fine for other mothers to kill their unborn children even if she could not personally do so, Jillette’s admirers tried to explain away the actions of this militant atheist who has used his stage act and his television show, Bullsh-t!, to launch a series of nasty attacks on the Catholic Church, the Eucharist, and the priesthood.

Which brings us to a second, less obvious lesson: The Devil knows not only Latin but Christian theology. And he can use that knowledge in more than one way: to try to undermine the faith of those who are weak, by instilling doubts in their minds; but also to mislead others through a form of spiritual pride, by convincing them that saying the right thing is necessarily the same thing as believing the right thing. If the Devil can convince people that the Faith is simply a checklist of propositions to which we must give assent rather than a lived relationship with the Risen Christ from which those doctrines flow, his work is mostly done.

Faith is, among other things, the perfection of reason, but that does not mean that reason alone can lead us to faith. Penn Jillette may know all the right things to say, but Morgan, despite his dissent from Church teaching, has the benefit of baptism and membership in the Church, while Jillette not only rejects both for himself but has made it perfectly clear that he despises those who choose them for themselves (and even more so for their children). Jillette was not, as so many seemed to assume, urging Morgan on to deepen his faith (or even simply “keeping him honest”); he was ridiculing him for being less knowledgeable than a man who rejects Jesus Christ, and all His works, and all of His salvific promises.

Put this way, this all seems rather obvious; so why did so many miss what Jillette was up to? Part of the problem is that, in the United States, Christianity has all too often become a surface phenomenon. Doctrine has become a substitute for the substance of the Faith, rather than a catechetical tool that is meant to help us understand what we, as Christians, experience. To put it in stark terms: Which came first, the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ, or the dogmatic councils? As Harold O.J. Brown, the longtime religion editor for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, explained in his greatest work, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy From the Apostles to the Present, Christian doctrine developed from the lived experience of the Church, the Body of Christ, not the other way around. A credo is a distillation of what Christians believe because they know it to be true, rather than a list of propositions to which they give assent, and thus come to believe. The convert recites the Creed at his baptism not as a test of his orthodoxy but to affirm what he already knows, through his experience, to be true.

Many factors have contributed to the distortion of Christian doctrine from a distillation of the Christian experience into an abstraction, even an ideology. In the United States in the 20th century, a certain neo-Thomism played an important role, beginning in the Catholic Church but with its effects spilling out into other Christian denominations. Thomistic theology is not the problem; the problem, as Owen Barfield demonstrated in Saving the Appearances, comes when that theology is treated as an end in itself, and the experience that underlies it and which it encapsulates becomes attenuated or even lost. Recover that experience, and Christian doctrine takes on a new life that can deepen our faith; the works of Thomas become as fresh as if they were written yesterday. But without that experience, we become caricatures of Penn Jillette—functional atheists who, unlike Jillette, are convinced that we have the fullness of the Faith.

The problem, though, runs much deeper than modern neo-Thomism. It extends back to the beginning of the modern age and the rise of the modern state, as the realm of politics, previously limited, began to encroach upon more and more areas of everyday life.  And it has reached its apotheosis in 21st-century America, where even so-called conservatives no longer believe that there are no political solutions to cultural problems, but that all cultural problems are at base political and can only be solved through elections and legislation and court decisions.

In a society with a strong common culture, the encroachment of politics into more and more areas of human life may not initially seem to pose a problem. Indeed, to the extent that legislation, for instance, is seen as supporting what is good in human life against external threats to the common culture, such encroachment may even be welcomed. But as the common culture breaks down, the increased power of the state over culture becomes a battering ram that accelerates that destruction.

So, for instance, state laws against abortion before 1973 largely represented the common moral sense of the people. But Roe v. Wade, while imposed from the top down, did not come out of nowhere. The moral consensus on abortion had been eroding for decades, and it reflected a more advanced erosion within the Christian churches on contraception, which itself reflected a loss within those churches not simply of the Christian understanding of the sacredness of life but, more importantly, of the experience that gave life to that understanding.

Jump forward to today, and for any person under the age of 40 in the United States, abortion has always been a part of the fabric of his or her life, and the battle over abortion, while framed in moral terms, has always been a political one. Those who believe that abortion is wrong wish to see Roe v. Wade overturned and new laws passed banning abortion; those who think otherwise work hard to maintain a pro-Roe majority on the Supreme Court.

The latter are winning, and will keep winning, until the former recognize that the only way to win the battle is to reassert the primacy of culture over politics. To put it in explicitly Christian terms, in order to save the lives of unborn children, Christians must first set about saving the souls of their fathers and mothers. And that means not simply preaching to those mothers and fathers about the Christian moral tradition concerning the sacredness of human life but leading them to the salvific relationship with Christ that underlies and gives life to that tradition. Disconnected from that experience, especially in a society in which politics claims for itself the ultimate moral authority, the Christian moral tradition becomes ossified, at best, and at worst takes on the character of an ideology, both adversary to, and counterpart of, the ideology of individualistic liberalism.

The problem, as I have made clear, is nothing new, finding its roots in the rise of the modern world five centuries ago; and it was accurately diagnosed almost half a century ago by Josef Pieper, who also pointed toward its only possible solution in his short but indispensable work Tradition: Concept and Claim (translated from the German in 2008 by E. Christian Kopff and published that same year by ISI Books). Tradition, in both the secular usage and the capital-T of Christian Sacred Tradition, is not merely a collection of things worth preserving, as both political and religious “conservatives” today treat it, but the means by which the most important of all experiences is handed down. As Pieper writes,

There is really nothing praiseworthy in the mere fact that something which has been thought, said, or done “since forever” will continue to be thought, said, and done. The praise due the act of tradition only makes sense when what is preserved and will continue to be preserved through the generations is what is truly worth preserving. That is the point of young people’s doubting question. Why is it, they ask, that a duty has been violated, if we simply let what has been handed down rest on its laurels, so that we can say, think, and do something totally different? We can only hope that someone hears this radical question and gives an existentially believable and equally radical answer, “the” answer that goes to the heart of things: that among the many things that are more or less worth preserving and may have been accumulated as “tradition,” there is in the last analysis only one traditional good that it is absolutely necessary to preserve unchanged, namely the gift that is received and handed on in the sacred tradition. I say “necessary” because this tradition comes from a divine source; because each generation needs it for a truly human existence; because no people and no brilliant individual can replace it on their own or even add anything valid to it.

It should be obvious that Pieper is speaking here not of external forms, but of that which gave them life, and which may require those external forms to change over time so that what is truly worth preserving may continue to be passed on. This is the problem faced by modern conservatives, who primarily seek to defend what they respected and loved when they were young, rather than what is necessarily worth preserving. Pieper contrasts “Tradition (singular)” with these “traditions,” which may start out supporting a healthy culture but ultimately have the potential to do more harm than good:

Genuine consciousness of tradition makes one positively free and independent in the face of conservatisms, which worry obsessively about the cultivation of the “traditions.” Certainly, a “cultivation of tradition” that attaches itself to a historically accidental external image of what has been handed down becomes a positive hindrance to a real transmission of what is truly worth conserving, which perhaps can occur only under changed historical forms. It is possible to imagine a real transmission of what is in the last analysis worth handing down, which a dogmatic conservatism could not even recognize.

This is the problem faced also by the Church, and here I speak broadly, and not just of the Catholic Church of which I am a member. Even under the best of circumstances, in a healthy culture in which the structures of society and of politics are not antagonistic toward the Christian Faith, the Church must be a countercultural institution.  That is the only way in which She can be certain to be able to hand down the ultimate Truth of the Faith, and not let it become obscured or deformed by an “historically accidental external image” that may have arisen from that Truth but has since become abstracted from it.

We are always in danger of turning the traditions of Christianity—the rituals and doctrines, the moral teachings and institutions—into ends in themselves, rather than means to the true end, “the gift that is received and handed on.” Or rather, we should use the Gift (singular), Who gave Himself to save our souls, and Who continues, in every age until the end of time, to give man what he needs “for a truly human existence.”

American conservatives of a certain generation summed up the insight of a different German philosopher in the catchphrase “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!” And yet, while warning against the dangers of trying to bring about heaven on earth, they themselves, through their obsession with elections and legislation, did much to subjugate culture to politics and to make Christian moral teaching a means to a political end, rather than a means of transmitting the Truth of the Faith. The fruit of their efforts can be seen today in the lost battles of the Culture War, and in entire generations that have sought salvation not in the sacraments of Christian churches but in the squabbles of “the public square.”

All is not lost, however, so long as “the gift that is received and handed on” continues to be received and handed on. But the locus of that transmission—that “Tradition (singular)”—has never been the polling place, but the Church, which guards that gift.

When we get that straight—when we recognize once again that the duty we owe to God is to pass on the Good News to our fellow man—only then shall we begin the process of returning to reality, revitalizing our culture, and putting politics back in its proper, limited space.

First published in the December 2013 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Christ and History

In theory, it seems like a good idea.  The corpus of historian John Lukacs’s work is so rich and has grown so large that those who have just discovered it may be uncertain where to start.  His magnum opusHistorical Consciousness, alone has gone through three editions, all of which are worth reading as separate works.  Combine that with the regrettable condition that some of his more accessible works—Outgrowing Democracy and The Passing of the Modern Age, for instance—are out of print (and used copies are very hard to find), and the need for a compact introduction to Lukacs’s thought seems obvious.  Unfortunately, for all of its virtues, At the End of an Age is not that book.

Lukacs would be the first to admit—or, rather, insist—that theory and reality do not always mesh.  Ideas develop in an historical context, but they are also shaped by the actions of men as much as (indeed, perhaps more so than) they shape those actions.  As Lukacs is fond of saying, writing of the half-truths of historian E.H. Carr’s analysis, “the important question is ‘What is Carr driving at?’ and not ‘What is the make of this Carr?’”  But that is precisely why, in order to understand an historian’s work, it is essential to have some knowledge of the historian.  Lukacs is correct when he writes that

The recognition that different persons see the past (and also the present) differently, and that thus every historian is different, does not mean that because he is the product of his past he cannot do otherwise.

To claim that would be to deny free will.  But to understand the choices that an historian makes—and, more importantly, his purposes (not his motives, which are deterministic) in making them—we cannot view his work as something separate from—abstracted from—his life.

A case in point: The Passing of the Modern Age, a thin, prophetic volume that is still among my favorite of Lukacs’s works, is, as Lukacs describes it in Confessions of an Original Sinner, “a summation of the devolution of institutions and standards at the end of our age.”  I read it first in 1990, before reading Confessions, and it profoundly influenced the choices I made as I began my graduate studies that year.  Still, I approached The Passing of the Modern Age somewhat differently when I reread it a year or two later, having read Confessions in the meantime.  Knowing that The Passing of the Modern Age was published on November 15, 1970, the day that Lukacs’s first wife died, and recognizing the extent to which her passing was bound up in his thought with “the devolution of institutions and standards at the end of our age,” helps reveal additional nuances and complexities in the work and, of course, in the underlying thoughts that the text expresses.  Similarly, knowing that the structure of the volume is shaped by a hierarchy of historical factors, “applicable, by and large, to the history of modern nations,” that Lukacs had sketched out in Historical Consciousness, and being familiar with that hierarchy from reading the latter work, is bound to influence the reader’s appreciation of The Passing of the Modern Age.  None of that distracts from the reader’s free will or his ability to apply (and develop, and distort) Lukacs’s ideas as he sees fit.  However, just as our appreciation of a novel changes as we grow older (and, indeed, the novel’s meaning for us changes as well), so, too, our understanding of an historian’s work changes as, broadly, we change and, particularly, as our understanding of the historian’s purposes change.

Which brings us back to At the End of an Age.  This really is two books, roughly divided into the first two chapters (“At the End of an Age” and “The Presence of Historical Thinking”) and the last two chapters (“An Illustration” and “At the Center of the Universe”), with the middle chapter (“The Question of Scientific Knowledge”) acting as a bridge.  In the first “book,” Lukacs provides a sketch of the evolution of his own thought and presents a condensation of themes developed in Historical Consciousness and elsewhere.  The reader familiar with Lukacs’s work is likely to find these chapters somewhat repetitive.  Lukacs revisits many examples from previous works (such as the remarks about E.H. Carr quoted above), often even employing very similar phrasing.  All of that would be understandable (and longtime readers could skip ahead) if these chapters provided a quick introduction for those unfamiliar with Lukacs’s thought.  For that purpose, however, these chapters are somewhat too distilled.  The new reader is likely to be left (incorrectly) with a sense of superficiality.  At best, he may be hungry for a more detailed treatment, but then he is quickly thrust into the second “book,” which (it seems to me) can be read most profitably only after having digested Historical Consciousness, because the illustration provided in Chapter Four, and the final philosophical ruminations about man’s position at the center of the universe in Chapter Five, are really an extension of the final chapter, “History and Physics,” of that earlier work.

Here, longtime readers of Lukacs will find what they have been thirsting for, as Lukacs’s continued investigations over the last 30 years have broken new ground.  He has taken the scientific theories of theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg and woven them together with his own expansion of linguist Owen Barfield’s insights into the increasing intrusion of man’s consciousness into the material world.  The result is an advance in how we think about thinking itself.  And that advance is not merely historical or philosophical but religious.  While Lukacs is not exactly one to wear his Christianity on his sleeve, the Christian implications of his work (and Barfield’s before him, particularly the latter’s Saving the Appearances) are obvious.  As I have argued elsewhere, the development of historical consciousness itself is inextricably bound up with the Incarnation of Christ, the meeting of Divine and human, the point at which the Timeless intersects His timebound Creation.  “And now—especially, but perhaps not exclusively for Christians—I must argue,” Lukacs writes,

for the recognition of our central situation not only in space but also in time. In sum, that the coming of Christ to this earth may have been? no, that it was, the central event of the universe; that the greatest, the most consequential event in the entire universe has occurred here, on this earth.

That God became a man and walked this earth demonstrates the centrality of history to man’s nature—and it should give pause to post-Christian “Christians” (whether evangelical, fundamentalist, mainline Protestant, or even neo-Thomist) whose vision of Christ has degenerated into an ahistorical set of platitudes and “universal” principles.  As Lukacs writes,

All of us have known many non-Christians who have acted in Christian ways, thus being animae naturaliter cristianae; and we also know many sincerely believing Christians whose expressions may show alarmingly non-Christian thoughts in their minds. . . . [W]hat we think we believe is not always what we really believe. Our thinking—our ideas—will necessarily have their consequences. Some of our beliefs ought to.

By becoming a man, Christ redeemed history; in our post-Christian age, perhaps history—for some, at least—can redeem man, by leading him back to Christ.  That may not have John Lukacs’s purpose in writing At the End of an Age; it might, however, be one result.

[At the End of an Age, by John Lukacs (New Haven: Yale University Press) 230 pp., $22.95]

First published in the August 2003 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Chaos and Community

I tune the radio to WLS, and the insistent voice of Tony Brown breaks me out of my trance. It’s Saturday, December 9, the day after a bitterly divided Florida Supreme Court stretched (and possibly broke) Florida law in order to allow a statewide recount of undervotes in the presidential election. My family and I are driving back to Rockford from Chicago’s Midway Airport, just hours before an equally divided U.S. Supreme Court will stop the recount in an activist decision more reminiscent of Earl Warren's reign as chief justice than William Rehnquist’s.

“The state of Florida is in chaos! Absolute chaos!” claims Brown, and his caller agrees: “I just saw a headline that reads, ‘Anarchy Reigns in Florida.’” That’s funny; we’ve just returned from a week in Orlando—or rather, Walt Disney World, that Never-Never-Land that bears about as much resemblance to Orlando as Washington, D.C., does to the rest of the country. I can’t say that I saw any anarchy or chaos; in fact, everything seemed perfectly scripted, right down to the airplanes and buses—which always arrived and departed on time—and the restaurants, which may have charged an arm and a leg but served their meals promptly and courteously. If this be chaos, let us make the most of it.

As Rockford draws closer, I’m hoping a bit of that Florida anarchy has rubbed off on my adopted hometown. When we left, our own recount was under way; with any luck, it created enough chaos that our streets have been properly plowed, which would be the first time in the six winters we’ve lived here.

Our contested election is for the 13th District seat on the Winnebago County Board. That may not seem nearly as exciting as the presidential recount, but it made a splash here in Rockford. As in the “important” election, the margin of victory was very small (45 votes), and the loser has asked for a hand recount because the counting machines appear to have classified some actual votes as undervotes. With Al Gore’s loss, the Democrats have effectively been frozen out of the presidency and both houses of Congress, but there’s a fair amount at stake here, too: If the election is reversed, one party will control three quarters of the seats on the county board, allowing it to impose its will even on issues where a supermajority is required. At the very least, that would mean local campaign contributors won’t have to spread their money around.

Our recount, however, has come at the request of William Peterson, the Republican incumbent who lost to Democratic challenger James Peterson. As you might expect, when the roles are reversed, the rhetoric is, too. The Democratic executive director of the Rockford Board of Elections, Nancy Strain, has told the local Gannett paper (LGP) that “Hand counts are never as accurate as the machines.” After a discovery recount of five of the 19 precincts in the district, she dismissed concerns that the number of ballots in two precincts didn’t match the reported totals. “There were a few ballots missing,” she said, “but that's because they’re in another box.”

Meanwhile, David Brown, the attorney for the Republican Peterson, sounds oddly like Gore attorney David Boies. “What we’re concerned about is the high number of undervotes and illegible votes that maybe weren’t picked up by the machines . . . What we want to make sure is that the will of the voter is followed,” he told the LCP. That wouldn’t mean counting chads—hanging, pregnant, or dimpled: Rockford has adopted a new optical-scanning system which combines the efficiency of a machine count with a much more secure paper trail than that left by our old punch-card system.

I know David Brown; he’s a good attorney and an even better man, and if he believes there are grounds for a hand recount, he’s probably right. I suspect, though, that there are any number of people in Florida who would say the same about Judge Charles Burton in Palm Beach County or his counterpart in Broward County. And that, in the end, is the point. If we truly want equal protection under the law, we’re not going to get it from black-robed state or federal justices relying on a skewed interpretation of an illegally passed constitutional amendment. True equal protection comes from living in a community where we may not know everyone, but we know someone who knows someone who does. David Brown undoubtedly wants to win this contest for his client, but he also has a stake in Rockford and Winnebago County. Both his life in this community and his character—formed in large part by that life—place limits on how far he will go.

That’s the reason why almost all states leave most of the details of elections—including federal ones—up to counties or local municipalities. The problem comes when outsiders—politicians, lawyers, even judges—view our communities merely as resources to be mined for votes. Does Al Gore or David Boies or the Florida Supreme Court really care about making sure that “all the voters are heard” in West Palm Beach? Of course not, but Charles Burton probably does, if only because they are the people among whom he lives and works. Who’s more likely to have the interests of the residents of Winnebago County Board District 13 at heart, David Brown or some hired gun from state or national Republican headquarters? There's no doubt in my mind.

The radio signal is breaking up as another caller tells Tony Brown that too few people realize that God reigns, not men. Brown heartily agrees, saying that he assumes this means the caller isn’t too concerned which man becomes president. Oh, no, the caller replies. “Its important that Bush win because of the Supreme Court. Without liberal activist judges, there would be no abortions in this country.”

I sigh as we exit I-90 onto the unplowed streets of Rockford. Chaos or no, it’s good to be home.

First published in the February 2001 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.