Category Archives: Acadians

The Mental Ferment for Men (and Women) who Might Foment an American Revolution: Part Four

In the previous three parts of this posting I have, in very brief form, showed that our system of governance is neither so honest about many of its basic principles, so true to its heritage nor  so worthy in its administration that a revolution is out of the question.  In general there is a rule that if one is going to go a distance in political action which is beyond the norm and involves risk then it is actually less risky to undertake greater changes than are absolutely necessary (without going too far) because a society that does so will have to risk fewer constitutional transformations and is more likely to live long and prosper than is one which must go back twice as  often to those borderlands of “the state of nature” where constitutional changes are created. So I propose the elements of this fourth section as reasonable and perhaps in a certain sense necessary but not as minimalist unavoidable necessities. These are changes which cannot be undertaken lightly. The new regime I have laid out for our consideration reasserts a more affirmative social structure which would enable many social problems to be addressed more directly and comprehensively than in our current society. It is a white supremacist constitution obviously but it also redistribute wealth in the form of public lands transfer from States, counties, municipalities and the federal government to non white constitutional jurisdictions. Further, these lands would also be comprised disproportionately of lands seized in tax  and other actions –thus while not all lands in the new Jurisdictions would be owned by the new Juris dictions much of the land in many of them would be. Some would be restricted in use but much would be available for sale into the private sector and lease. In addition while I favor cutting off programs to elevate these racial groups into the middle class within the states, cutting off the cost of integrating schools (without allowing public schools to be de jure 100% segregated either), cutting off the cost of imprisoning the unemployed and hopeless masses caused in part by many of our social polices I would create a single simple rule. Half of one percent of all revenues of any State government would go to aid programs for the needy in all of its neighboring non-State  Constitutional Jurisdictions and one and a half percent of all state revenues will be divided among the capital improvement programs of all neighboring non-State Constitutional Jurisdictions. The Federal Government would also be obliged to fulfill ten percent of all its contracts from non-State Jurisdictions. In addition to this there would be the horse-trading aspects of the legislative and electoral process and the access to the military among other forces to promote greater racial equality. However, There would also be a countervailing system of set-asides to accentuate the social structure. There would be some few named high offices only available to State citizens, a citizen of a Possession could not rise above the rank of Colonel in the US military and no citizen of a Territory could rise above the rank of a two star general. The residents of Colored Districts in States could not stand for election to any statewide elected office and State Citizens of the North East Asian Districts of a State could not succeed another such citizen as governor or chief magistrate nor serve more than two total terms nor could they hold more than one US Senate Seat from any state for more than one year.  These things are controversial, But they are nothing compared to where I am headed in this part of this posting.  I am so far pressed by what I view as extreme circumstance to urge these changes. The writing and declaring of these goals and opinions is more likely to do irrevocable harm to me and to what little reputation and fortune I may still have than they are to result in the achievement of the objectives described.  

So in the first three parts I suggested the creation of Censors and Electors for Life, the expansion and transformation of the Congress of the United States and the redrawing of the map to include Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and the US Virgin Islands as well as creating fourteen new Territories and seventeen new Possessions. Those are radical changes to which I added the Major Compacts and Minor Compacts with their governments and new zones on the map as well. Much more ambitious change than is ever proposed by anyone serious.  A working out of the details of the Governments of the Major Compacts begins to push us into the changes that really go against the flow of events in our Union for a very long time. The Major Compacts should be governed by an Executive and Judical Board (and of which I will only mention here that these Boards will have equally voting seats and only a few members and that the Elector for Life of the Compact will be one of those seated) to which we shall return and a Compact Legislature which we have already begun to discuss. Compact Legislatures would be formed by A Council of Nobles in the Upper Chamber and a Compact Assembly in the Lower Chamber. Half the seats of the Lower Chamber will be filled from the Roll of Kindreds for the Compact but the means of filling those seats shall be diverse including both wide and limited elections, random selection among all Family Associations, ex-officio seats in the Roll’s Administration, rotation among family associations and seats auctioned off to qualified family associations. The other half of the seats in the lower chamber will be appointed by the legislatures of all member Constitutional Jurisdictions in the Compact.  The Upper Chamber should be a Council of Nobles divided more or less into three blocks composing 25% of the seats each and two blocks composing 12.5% of the seats each. The three larger blocks would be the Ordinary Nobility, the Nobility of the Sword and the Nobility of the Robe.  The two smaller blocks would be the Nobility of the Chamber and the Nobility of the Games.  All seats would vote equally and each Major Compact would in its charter state with clarity the manner in which each block seats it members but all those entitled to sit in a block are to be subject to a process of changing ratios — in other words the number of Nobles of a type may change but the number of seats will be constant. No more seats will be added unless added to all blocks according to their proportion and approved by the entire legislature. Leave the Ordinary Nobility aside for now except to say  a portion of these seats will go to Chiefs of the Name certified by the Roll of Kindreds and to other familial leaders of similar rank so certified. The Nobility of the Sword will be all general officers and retired general officers in the militaries of the member Constitutional Jurisdictions in the Compact and all those of the Rank of Colonel or higher in the US military.  Nobility of the Robe will be made up of high-ranking academics, clerics and judiciary officials as described in the Charter of each Compact. The Nobility of the Chamber will be made up of the Governors or other chief political executives and their immediate inferiors as well as leader of the legislative chambers of all Jurisdictions and any and all US Senators, Tribunes and Censors from member Jurisdictions of the Compact. The Nobility of the Games will be made up of the Olympic Medalists from the Compact as well as other who have been elected or selected from among lists of other types of competitive champions. Despite the name this would not only includes athletics and Games but other competitions as well.  Later in this posting I will return to a special function of this chamber alone.     

Now I have gotten to the final part of my four-part posting on the American Revolution.  If the revolutionary changes described up until this point were carried out in the context of an American Revolution that would create a much stronger and more just country than we have today. Such changes are vastly out of sync with what is discussed and proposed in Washington and in most of the United States of America as political options.  However, I think that I general our Founding Fathers  and the responsible leaders among the Revolutionary leaders thought that in time our republic ought to evolve into an Empire but that it should do so in a good and free way (they never equated freedom and democracy). I assert (AND YES I AM ABSOLUTELY SERIOUS ABOUT THE GENERAL THRUST OF THIS ALTHOUGH IN LIFE AND WRITING I AM SOMETIMES KNOWN FOR SARCASM) that the next large constitutional transformation of this society ought to be into an empire. I propose that this reconstitutionalized country should have two official names “The United States of America” and “The Federal American Empire of the United States”.

Eventually my proposal for a transition from Republicanism to Royalism will have to have a separate post on “American Royalism” or “Fulfilling Plans of Empire” that are not part of this blog post in four parts with deals with new revolutionary change in and of itself.  The mere basics can be mentioned here but all of the votes I propose would still exist, the federalism would still exist, the Censors and Electors for Life would exist as described. The Electors for Life would now elect the Emperor as well if we went all the way to royalism. Yes, an elected Emperor could be fully royal. The Holy Roman Emperor was elected, the Pope ( who is a Royal Monarch of an odd kind) is elected, the Kings of England before the Norman Conquest were elected, The King of Poland in recent centuries was elected,  Numerous Royal Chiefs and High Kings of Scotland and Ireland have been elected. There is also this dirty little secret which doubtless the United Kingdom would feel the need to deny if this were an official US document — QUEEN ELIZABETH’S FATHER AND PRINCE PHILIP’S GRANDFATHER WERE BOTH ELECTED KINGS. Thus if Charles become King of England then he will have a grandfather and a great-grandfather who were elected kings of different countries.  However this system would be like the Holy Roman Empire and Poland and the Pope and ancient England in that the elections would be regular and a matter of course not exception.

There would be a change in the title of the Executive elected every four  years and some of his powers and duties would be reduced but mostly the Emperor would fill a different role. Emperor would have a fulsome executive power over a central governance outside the Constitutional Jurisdictions and the Federal government per se. Even this government would have two broad types of land in its sway. First, the District of Columbia and the Federation of Compact Zones  would be  in the Direct Imperial Government category along with a substantial one time grant of lands currently owned by the Federal Government and administered by the federal Land Management bureaucracy.  This would consist of several components all governed under the same and independent body of law and procedure. However, this law and  procedure would acknowledge yet another subdivision of  the lands involved there would be the Fiefdoms made up of lands bought or granted from the Federal governments and State Governments and organized as estates of various kinds.  There would be a seventy-five yard band of Royal Fiat Zone around the land borders of every Territory and ten percent of its coastal boundaries that would be added to the lands taken from the States where these are created from State Lands. The  same basic rule would apply to the Possessions except that these would be one hundred and fifty yards wide. These interior bands would occur along with another set of lands.   In addition to these  buffers between constituencies  there would be a cession  of bands of five hundred yards to Royal Fiat Zones along all land borders between the United States and Mexico as well as between the United States and Canada. There would also be a cession of the same band width for ninety percent of each State’s riverine borders and fifty percent of each state’s Great Lakes borders with these countries and where the States retained coastal lands they would grant a very extensive Continuity Right of Way for infrastructure projects. There would only be a small base granted on Texas’s  southern Gulf Coast some where near the end of its land border  with Mexico.  For those living outside of either the Direct Imperial Government lands or the Royal Fiat Zone the Emperor would not rule or govern very much but rather he would reign and be Head of State while operating a few bureaucracies and a serving as Judiciary of Last Resort for the Federal system.    He would appoint the Special Vice President  for each Major Compact who would preside over the Executive and Judicial Board of each Compact.  Each Executive and Judicial Board would be composed of the Speaker of each chamber of the Compact Legislature, the Elector for Life for the Compact and the Commander of the Compact’s Cavalry Honor Guard. There is a lot which will be left out of this post about a royalist regime but one thing that must be addressed for such a post as this to be in any way genuine as a serious piece of revolutionary literature which is what I intend it to be. To do this  I need to discuss the royalist tradition which is relevant in America and tied to America. 

In the empirically unlikely event that the United States converts to a royalist system within a short time the Monarch if they are to be in any very good sense a Monarch and in any very good sense both royal and royalist will have a lot to do in terms of creating and restoring, both renewing and establishing royal and royalist culture. Hawaii can certainly still be restored to a royalist culture it can both influence a new regime and it can be influenced to conform to the New regime. Using the Councils of Nobles which I have mentioned the ideal Ordinary Nobility would be a mix of new titles and some renewed from worthy preserver of such color of right to those titles  as French, English, Spanish and other powers have left in good families of committed Americans upon our shores.  However, while I am constrained by space and unable to really do a decent job of presenting these ideas I am going to suggest that there is a royal line, tradition and apparatus which has pre-eminent claim to an American Empire for many reasons and that is the Arcadian — Acadian royal line.

This line is almost entirely unknown for a variety of reasons. There is a great deal to take in and almost no chance to weave it in coherently in this post. Yet it is imperative that we try to do so.      

the first really key point is that the real roots of the American Revolution occurred in a larger colonial context.  I am going to recommend a book that does not declare ( as I do here and now) that the Acadian expulsion (loosely described in Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline)  were a principal cause of and stimulus to the American revolution.  But it does show the connections of this event to the revolutionary ferment in a broad contest. In this regard I recommend Leach’s book.  http://www.amazon.com/Roots-Conflict-Colonial-Americans-1677-1763/dp/0807842583#noop 

Secondly, I want to show that the destruction of Acadie was a large and significant act. That it had everything to do with creating a British profile and character the Americans could distrust and that in their early history the Acadians had both elements the Americans were eager to restore to their experience of the British Constitution and also the chivalric and aristocratic values which I argue that we need to restore today. In which regard there is a recent book by John Mack Faragher:  http://www.amazon.com/Great-Noble-Scheme-Expulsion-Acadians/dp/0393051358  to understand the British view of how great and wealthy a land the Acadians had created and how eager they were to have its wealth for themselves.  The Acadian experience is deeply tioed to the American experience as a whole.

Two men whom I know (one much better than the other and neither all that well) have also written books that are relevant to this theme and discussion Carl A. Brasseaux has written The Founding of the New Acadia and Acadian to Cajun.  Meanwhile Warren Perrin has handled the appeal for the Apology from the Queen of England and Scotland and has discussed this journey and its partial success in the book Acadian Redemption. Le Grand Derangement or the Great Upheaval brought Acadians to all parts of the Thirteen Colonies before they were settled in Louisiana successfully in 1765 by the King Joseph Broussard Dit Beausoleil. During their scattering they did not get on well with the general population and there times were sad and bad mostly. But that does not mean that they did not have a powerful influence in turning the minds of their fellow North American Colonists against the English Government.  Even if it had only been the example of their suffering they would be the most likely true proximate cause of the Revolutionary ferment in America. But in fact we know they had vast network of communications and logistics with which they reassembled small groups of survivors from many parts of the world to found the New Acadia in South Louisiana. Res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself and although they have been cheated of that recognition and sought to conceal it just as they have been cheated and concealing of many other things  the American Revolution is profoundly tied to and rooted in the Acadian experience and expulsion. It can also play a role in the new American Revolution if it comes.

 In the Acadian Constitution is the resource for a royalist Empire that is truly American the Kings of the Acadians are not directly mentioned as such in any of these books but the Basileus Arkadion (or Arkadios) is elected from those most eligible in a complex line of succession. Tests of merit, election and heredity are all required. The Arcadian Bouletherion would have to be fully and openly re-established but it has in its ancient history been hybridized. They would supply the majority of electors but the US Electors for Life and other Peer Electors could also vote. Thus Americans as a whole would always have some voice in their Sovereign’s selection without doing violence to his tradition which would be very difficult to achieve anywhere else from existing options. The Keys to the Line of the Basileus Arkadios have always been known to very few as have the remnant of Acadian government in the Ethnos Arkadios (or Arcadian Tribe translated fully into English). These elements of Comites, Ridelles, Courires, Loups Garous, Gran Famille and Prince Chef de Gran Famille are very seldom mentioned by anyone. They are almost ignored in the public works of the Acadian Renaissance in recent decades. Nonetheless the Acadian royalist system might still be saved to come to America’s aid should it desire a royalist system. There is no European descended culture more North American than the Acadian and Cajun culture.  The Acadian system would also have some of the advantages of cost from both systems. In a royalist system the cost is contained if it works properly because a few facilities and people are paid  a lot for their role and this is not done away with so that over time one build up great capital with limited expense in royal hands. Ina republican system costs are contained over time if it works well because standards are lower for all the executive accoutrements. In Acadian lines since 1604 no great fortune has ever been in Kingly hands ( nor for hundreds of years before by the terms of European Royalty) and Arcadian and Spartan royals were often austere in the mists of time’s long past. This has not usually been so much deliberates it has been part  of the historic reality. Nonetheless, compared to other precedents one could bring to a truly Imperial USA this set of traditions has  the most apparent low price tag.

The Titles of the Emperor would include “Emperor, Supreme President and Extraordinary Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America”. Among the perquisites of the Emperor he would have the White House as his Imperial residence. Some duties of the current Presidency would go to him but many would remain in the hands of an official to be titled “First and Executive Vice President, ordinary Commander-in-Chief and High Imperial Political Minister” of the United States of America”. This person would become a Censor on retirement by right, would have a Deputy First Vice President elected on his ticket and doing many of the same things in the same ways as the current Vice President. The First and Executive Vice President  would reside in the Naval Observatory and would have a country residence as well provided by his office.    The Emperor should be part of a royal house and an imperial house but should be elected by a conclave and this conclave would include all of the ninety-four Electors for Life already described as well as an entirely random selection of a standard size Grand Jury of US citizens and Forty Peer Electors not guaranteed to be part of the Elections of the eight-year President. These Peer Electors would be seated in the Electoral College should the eight-year President not be elected on the second ballot.  They would vote for three more ballots before the Presidency would pass to the House of Representatives. The Peer Electors would include the long secret Princely Chiefs of the Acadians — The Prince Boulet, The Prince Theriot, The Prince Broussard, The Prince Mouton and The Prince Leblanc as well as some more tenuous titles new to the Regime in the form they would take but tied to the Acadians. They would include the King or Queen of Hawaii but they would largely include scions of old families with claims who were selected for this special honor partly because given their claims they had agreed to conform to the Acadian three-part succession system of heredity trials of merit and election. They would also include some key leader of religious, academic and at least one Masonic organization who have played a large role in the Republican era and have the qualities to pass things on with a title over generations. 

This essay is open to thousands of instances of many kinds  attack and has little chance of success if not attacked. Yet it is my heartfelt opinion that its four parts provide the best map of a way forward. I also believe doing nothing is always making a very big set of big and small choices that can be costly.

The Mental Ferment for Men (and Women) who Might Foment an American Revolution: Part Three

We really are facing a dangerous period of opportunity.  Could there be an American Revolution? If so how could it play out and what might its outcome be? I think that we have reached a point where more than few crises will slip out of control unless they are addressed in the relatively near future.  For me as an individual person the idea of seeking and pushing a particular form of constitutional transformation is well justified.  There is enough desperation in my circumstances and history to make me unquiet for a long period of time.

But Revolution is a strong prescription. There are varied levels of the dreaded opportunity our founding fathers called the “State of Nature”.  Remember they did not seek to overthrow the British government or dissolve their own colonies. They simply sought to exclude the British from the governance of the United States and to transform the quasi-state colonies into states. The Constitution they drafted allowed not only for amendments but also for a constitutional convention which would allow for the most low risk possible way to pass through a grave crisis. This would be sort of skirting along the borders of the dreaded state of nature. I think a serious and honest scholar of the period would have to conclude they would have hoped we would achieve many forms of political development we have avoided before undertaking many things we have undertaken. Now we reach the part of this essay which is the most risky and dangerous for the writer. In describing a proposed revolution one should be able to describe some set of relatively large and even shocking changes desired and possible under the new regime which are not possible under this regime. So, either in this section I will discuss what my ideal new America  would be like in terms of almost all its map and in terms of the Congress of the United States and the Electoral College.

I.  The Map and Congress: First Level of Revolutionary Change

However, I will get to those larger and more distinct looking changes much later than this sentence or paragraph.  I will start with those that most closely flow from my last comment. I will focus on the map and Congress. The new House of Representatives  should be made up of 800 seats and representatives exactly. The number of people in a district in a State would be constitutionally set at the variable A (apportionment number). The non states would have 53 seats not apportioned by population: The District of Columbia would have three such seats, a federation of all lands not in Constitutional Jurisdictions (which is what States, Territories and Possessions would be called together) would have two seats. The allotted State legislature representatives of all the Colored Districts in the States would hold an electoral conference every two years and select three of their own members to serve in the House of Representatives and have authority to expedite an election to fill their State legislative Seats. In addition each of the 14 Territories would have two seats serving the Territory as a whole regardless of population and its apportioned seats. Each  of the 17 Possessions would have one seat representing the Possession as a whole and its apportioned seats. Then all military bases of the United States militaries would be made into districts electing representatives. Military people would have two votes in this way– they would keep their home constitutional jurisdiction vote and gain additional representation in the Congress and Electoral College through their base-district votes. Each Territory district which is apportioned by population would serve 1.5 A people, each Possession district apportioned by population would serve   2 A people and each military jurisdiction.There would be 747 seats apportioned by the new council of Censors — as with the States now none ould include parts of more than one Constitutional Jurisdiction.

B. The United States Senate

After the Addition of the State of Puerto Rico there would be no new States added without a Constitutional amendment. There would also be the one additional Senator for each State elected by the State Legislature and serving a longer term.  That would bring the total number of US Senators to 153. These Senators would serve for all purposes of Law, Procedure, Equity and Normal Business. They would be the only ones allowed to vote when the Senate considered such matters. However, there would be a number of additional members  of high office and some elected by the Censors and Tribunes to serve in a Senatorial Constitutional  Assembly entitled to vote on the amendments to the Constitution. The current Congress of the United States numbers a bit under 550 and the new Congress would number a bit under 1000. This would be more in line with our revolutionary heritage. 

C. The New Constitutional Jurisdictions

The cost in lands would not fall on all States equally to create the new  Constitutional Jurisdictions and the Federal Government would be required to provide some lands of its own to the process.

Territories:

1.The Territoryof the Federated Aboriginal American Nations of the North Eastern States

2.The Territoryof the Federated Aboriginal American Nations of the South Eastern States

3.The Territory of the Federated Aboriginal American Nations of the South Western States

4.The Territory of the Federated Aboriginal American Nations of the North Western States.

5.The Territory of the Kingdom of Hawaii

6.The Territory of American Samoa

7.The Territory of Guam

8.The Territory of the Aleut, Inuit and Eskimo Peoples of Alaska

9.The Territory of Creoles of Color of Louisiana

10.The Territory of the Creoles of Color of Puerto Rico

11.The Territoryof the Creoles of Color of the US Virgin Islands

12.The Federated Territory of the Mestizos of the Western Half of Spanish Borderlands

13.The Federated Territory of the Mestizos Eastern Half of the Spanish Borderlands

14. The Small Federal Territory of  token Micronesian, Filipino Other American Imperial Communities

Thus 28 not-by-population districts in the House.   

Possessions:

1.The Negro and African-American Possession in South Carolina

2.The Negro and African American Possession in Mississippi

3.The Negro and African American Possession in Florida

4.The Negro and African American Possession in Alabama

5.The Negro and African American Possession in Georgia

6.The Negro and African American Possession in Louisiana

7.The Negro and African American Possession in Texas

8.The Negro and African American Possession in Virginia

9.The Negro and African American Possession in Arkansas

10.The Negro and African American Possession in Tennessee

11.The Negro and African American Possession in North Carolina

12.The Negro and African American Possession in the US Virgin Islands

13.The Negro and African American Possession in Puerto Rico

14.The Negro and African American Possession of Federated Districts in Kentucky, Maryland and Oklahoma

15.The Negro and African American Possession of Federated Districts in the Union States of 1864

16.The Negro and African American Possession of Federated Districts of the Pacific States and Territories

17.The Negro and African American Possession of Federated States of the Greater South West

Thus 17 not-by-population districts in the House.

D. The Compact Zones

Each constitutional Jurisdiction shall yield a small zone of land to the direct governance of every compact it belongs to — no Compact Zone will be larger than four square miles and shall vary by the size of the Constitutional Jurisdiction.  There shall be major Compacts and minor compacts. Generally, the Major Compacts will receive larger zones.

The Major Compacts:

1.The Thirteen Colonies Compact

2.The Original Constitution Compact

3.The Compact of the Louisiana Purchase

4.The Compact of the Hartford Convention

5.The Compact of the Spanish Borderlands

6.The Compact of the Confederate States of America

7.The Compact of the Union States of the Civil War

8. The Compact of All Jurisdictions West of the Mississippi

9.The Compact of All Jurisdictions East of the Mississippi

10.The Compact of All States

11.The Compact of All Territories

12.The Compact of All Possessions 

Each Major Compact will receive a rebate of half of one percent of all federal taxes collected in every member jurisdiction as well as a half of one percent of all revenues raised by each jurisdiction. The Major Compacts shall also elect an elector for life who will sit and vote with other electors for the President and be seated in the Compact Council. The Compact Councils shall reserve most of the seats in their lower chamber for those elected from the Compact’s Roll of Kindreds. Every family association must belong to at least two Rolls of Kindreds and should contribute one percent of all its revenues to each Roll of Kindreds it belongs to up to four percent. After that if it elects to belong to more it shall simply divide four percent of its revenues equally among all Rolls. The Upper Chamber will be a Council of Nobles.  The Compacts will have the right to petition both the US Congress and their member legislatures. They shall each maintain a cavalry Honor Guard.

The Minor Compacts

The Minor Compacts will be institutions authorized and chartered by the United States Government to co-ordinate a basic set of long lasting concerns. Like the Major Compacts they will have independent constitutional funding but their governance will just be a set of uniquely chartered institutions not fully part of the federal grand plan for the society. I will not attempt to list them all but will give a few examples: the Compact of Louisiana, The Compact of Hawaii  and The Compact of Puerto Rico.

II. The Electoral College: Second Level of Revolutionary Change

A. The Election of the Chief Executive 

Every four years as today a person would be elected to many of the duties and roles of the current President of the United States. Each Jurisdiction would elect as many electors as it has members of its total Congressional caucus as today.   However, there would also be eighty-two Electors for life from the eighty-two Constitutional Jurisdictions and twelve  Electors for life from the Major Compacts.  These would be of less importance than ninety four new electors added to our five hundred because of the expansion of Congress and thus popularly chosen electors. The Electors for Life shall form a council with the only real direct oversight power over the Censors in drawing up the electoral districts. They shall meet to certify these districts on year before each Presidential Election. No one shall be declared President until the full electoral college shall have voted. Popular electors shall be bound as robots on the first vote but free to change their vote if there is no majority in the Electoral College on the First Ballot.

B. Other Elections

Should there be more than a single National Election ( today we have only the single Presidential and Vice Presidential ticket) then in these new elections the Electors for life would also participate as a primary organ of those elections.

In Part Four of this posting I will discuss the most radical outcomes of the proposed American Revolution. Outcomes more likely to be off-putting than any discussed so far in this essay.

See You Later Alligator, After a While Bobby Charles…

I attended the funeral of Bobby Charles, who was Robert Charles Guidry to legal record and Bobby Charles Guidry to his community.  Wednesday afternoon at three o’clock in the afternoon in a fairly full church the Roman Catholic “Mass of Christian Burial” was celebrated for Bobby Charles. St. Mary Magdalen Church in Abbeville, Louisiana has just been renovated and it looks great. Bobby Charles was a big deal around here but not in a splashy way.   He was a big deal in a lot of the world without ever achieving that mega star status held by so many in Los Angeles, California and New York. Here is a link to a summary of his reputation in the United Kingdom, Wikipedia is really pretty solid on this as on most things  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Charles  …

Bobby Charles died last week. When I used to give friends and associates from around the world  a tour of the area with a bit of a historical and current events background I often mentioned Bobby Charles the Swamp Pop Pioneer who wrote “See Ya Later Alligator” and had it covered by Bill Haley and the Comets. He wrote “Walking to New Orleans” and Fats Domino made that a hit. Before his funeral some musician friends played a lesser known and more spiritual song he wrote called “I Believe in Angels”. The church was full of musicians, writers, artists and craftsfolk but mostly people from Louisiana or at least the Gulf Coast. Many of them were like him people who have had moments of national and international fame but in the context of a long regional career of not such bright footlights and modest crowds.

My mother and I sat together. She went to high school with Bobby Charles and I worked with his son Bobby Jr. for about fourteen hours a day in making the movie “The Blob” in a square just near the church from which he was remembered and his ashes blessed to be buried. We got to know each other pretty well but have not seen each other since that January and February of 1988     despite both living a good number of those years in the same close-knit Acadiana area. I did not find my old pal at the funeral but later saw him on local television.

In a small place like this our artists seem so irreplaceable. That is because they are. Bye Bobby Charles!

Thanksgiving Thursday Round-up…

1.Monday I had Sarah, Kevin, Anika and Soren as well as my nephew Eli (Mary’s son)  over for a large thankful dinner. I really enjoyed it.

2. Mom, Dad, Alyse, Joseph, Brooke, Simon and many others are celebrating the Family Missions Company Thanksgiving down in General Cepeda, Coahuila, Mexico.

3. Sarah, Kevin, Anika and Soren are down in Pensacola, Florida with Kevin’s family who are reuniting with a son of Kevin’s brother whom they never knew before recently.

4. I went by my maternal grandfather’s house and my maternal aunt Rachel’s houses yesterday for a Thanksgiving Day related visit.

5. Yesterday’s post on this blog gives some ideas and thought about the history of this holiday.

6. I sent out 41 e-cards for the holiday yesterday and my first response was from my dear niece Alyse.

7. Some notes about the holiday:

i. Most Roman Catholic missalettes have a mass for Thanksgiving Day in the missa of readings, antiphons and themes on the datel even though it is not quite an utterly official holiday in this Council of Bishops domain but it has often been proposed and much of the basic work has been done. It is complicated.

ii.The Thanksgiving Day Macy’s Parade, Advertising for Black Friday sales, two NFL football games on TV, and the National Dog Show (not the Westminster) are traditions to many people.

iii. The menu at Plymouth is the general inspiration for many regional, familial and personal repertoires from which individual meals are drawn. In my experience this is what the repertoire in the Acadian region of Louisiana more or less:

Turkey (with cranberry sauce), ham, rice dressing,  corn bread dressing, potato salad, some kind of congealed or frozen or fruit salad (or several), vegetable casserole, yam or sweet potato casserole covered with marshmallows,  pecan pie and pumpkin pie. Not all tables have all these things and many tables will have an additional set of family specialties but these are the core.

 iv.People pray for the members of the Armed Forces and often listen to some Christmas music on this day at some point. 

 8. I hope to be eating Thanksgiving Dinner with my Dad’s family who are gathered in force.

9. I will try to reach my other family members by phone.

10. For a good number of my non-American friends I am the main reminder they have that there is a Thanksgiving Day.  

Have a Happy Thanksgiving Day!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope that all reading this will have the kind and level of Thanksgiving Day which seems appropriate and right for them. Not all of ye few, ye proud, ye brave– ye readers are Americans.  I am reprinting a Facebook Note from last year on the Thanksgiving  Holiday here. I hope you enjoy it as part of your season.

This morning in the very early hours  I sent out 40 e-cards to comemorate the holiday and Monday night I had Sarah, Alyse, Anika, Soren and my nephew Eli who is my sister Mary’s son over for a large dinner where we returned thanks and were in fellowship. Tomorrow I am scheduled to be with my Dad’s mother and his siblings and their families. So this is a pretty full Thanksgiving compared to last year but the parts of  the note which are not about my specific plans are largely accurate. So here is the note:

Getting Personal: A few thoughts about my life and Thanksgiving.

 Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 8:46am 
This is kind of a Thanksgiving note but it is not really heartwarming or cheerful. I also hope it is readable on occasions after Thanksgiving. Perhaps if you are pretty sure you will not have a great Thanksgiving it would not be a bad note to read. If you are on the borderline call an old friend, watch football, offer to help someone clean up the dishes or whatever BUT don’t read this note. America has always had some serious problems and for whatever reason those problems have always weighed upon me. They are not the only things weighing on me andnever have been. However, this year is a year in which those problems weigh very heavily. I see the election of Barack Obama as kind of an anti-Thanksgiving event.

Thanksgiving comes from the most optimistic and positive part of America and its best historic moments. There have bee a lot of good times and moments of glory in America and in a real way Thanksgiving ties us to all of those times. “The pilgrims prepare a feast and invite those who lived in America before them to join the feast. These Aboriginal Americans called Indians join them and there is a period of peace and collaboration.” That’s the basic story. There were days of Thanksgiving, of Repentance, of Intercession and other such spiritual exercises in the Plymouth Brethren community. Unlike the Anglicans of James Town or my own Acadian forebears (who were mostly Catholic) these feasts were not scheduled to fall on holidays that were the same each year and regular ritual was avoided. If the Acadians had been the dominant culture on the continent in every way there might be a Jour des Bonnes Temps. There was in Acadie a society of recognized knights and non-aristocrats called “Le Orde des Bonnes Temps”. This Order of Good times would fund a priest or missionary to have a mass or service when they came through and would support community celebration of holidays. They did invite MiqMacs to their feasts on occasion. However, even with some charitable and religious functions of their own the order had a principal purpose. That was to be a kind of buying cooperative to ensure that the best possible meats and wines and pastries would always be for sale in the young colony. They did that by throwing several feasts each year that were as extravagant as they could make them. These Catholics, like the Spanish Catholics who celebrated the first Texas Thanksgiving in 1521, did have Thanksgiving Days on occasion. Christians of all communions did this to recognize occasions when something good happened especially in the dangerous new colonies of America.

The Order Of Good Times has an interesting and not unimportant story. Theirs is a better episode than many others in our continent’s history but certainly not better as a foundation than the one the Plymouth Brethren gave us. However, since this sect avoided holidays in the traditional sense our government had to revive the custom and the practice somewhat artificially later in our history. But it is still the child of Plymouth. Some silly modern scholars have called the 1621 holiday attended by Squanto and dozens of other Indians secular compared to a religious Calvinist feast on 1623 that was whites only. That is absurd, the two feasts are simply unrelated occasions. Both thanked God but one did it in an inclusive way and the other was the same people acting in the more narrow inside baseball way that they acted when assembled as a Christian sect. By the way this 1621 Feast is the only instance where Native Americans is a good term for Indigenous or Aboriginal Americans in common speech. Native means born there and most pilgrims were not while all Indians were in this instance.

Thanksgiving is a very American holiday and a holiday related to many personal and family memories and associations. I am able to remember a few Thanksgiving Days when I barely observed the day. However, I have never been in the United States on those days. I have also not at all aware that I ever did less to make a day of it. Three years I won a turkey for Thanksgiving and one year I won two turkeys.This year I did not enter any contests. But I think that there is a sort of perfect storm of long and short-term trends which have taken almost all the energy I had for Thanksgiving. NONETHELESS, I WISH ANYONE READING THIS EARLY OR LATE A VERY HAPPY THANKSGIVING.

It has taken me a while to get this note out. This will be the longest period of time between two notes since I got on to Facebook. That is largely because of personal concerns and post-election fatigue and depression. In this note have decided to step back from my philosophizing and conjecturing about the country and civilization and to discuss my own life. It is an odd time to do so but there it goes. I do odd things…

The stuff about the country in this note has to do either with what day it is or with how the country affects me directly. So I am thinking about another of the many fathers of the Thanksgiving Holiday. To some degree it was proclaimed by Abraham Lincoln after the extremely bloody Battle of Gettysburg. Even if one believes that Gettysburg was a great and important moment of good (my own feelings are ambiguous but I am more of a Confederate sympathizer than a Lincoln fan — that much is sure) this was the darkest pattern to help make the Thanksgiving tradition. Even if you just count Yankee dead it was a bloodbath which would not have rated such a holiday under any other President we have had up to now. I don’t know about the new alleged Illinois man.

The United States before the Civil War always commanded the plural form of verbs. These days however I write that the US has been in crisis rather than that the US have been in crisis much of my life.
We are not entirely lost but we are not entirely saved either. What we have got going is a suicidal narrative and process. Fortunately, however, this is still competing with a number of productive and life-giving narratives and processes. My own life has been lived out in the context of the tensions and conflicts of this country at this time. Many Europeans and a handful of Northeast Asians like to think that there has never been much of a life of Thought in the United States of America. Many Americans agree with them. However, that is not true. There are different forms of intellectual life and America excelled in a few of them. What America has offered far more often than Europeans like to admit is a life in which especially Greek, Jewish and Roman thought was vitally connected to intervening thinkers and the life of the day. We have however an America where almost nobody thinks reading Greek, Latin or Hebrew should be a requisite for even a doctoral degree. In fact not even in a doctoral degree related to the humanities is such a skill normally required. Many times in the past any American intellectual aspired to at least a faltering mastery of one or more of these tongues. Our newly elected President was Editor of Harvard Law Review. However, what real connection did he have to the grand body of knowledge which alone justifies having anything like Harvard.

The Thanksgiving we remember is the one at Plymouth but its history as a national holiday has more to do with the bloodiest killing of Americans we have ever seen. The battle of Gettysburg saw the flower of Northern and Southern young men die in agony. However, the Union under Lincoln set up a Thanksgiving day to celebrate victory in this fratricide and the nearly inevitable loss of the Confederate cause. That is only on of several days of Thanksgiving however, even Washington had at least one. However it is Plymouth’s that we really honor. If Colin Powell, Jessie Jackson Jr. or Clarence Thomas had been elected as our first Black president they would have been in tune with the part of America that does not just lie down in surrender before the endless waves of new blood and people. Instead of this story of struggle and people-building in the great sweep of American history culminating in the highest prize we have another “only in America story” that shows how weak we have always been in America.
We are also strong but not having a common religion, recognition of the exceptional in our politics or the constant success of newcomers does not make us strong. Rather those are actually part of the cost of being who we are. It is a cost worth paying when the Plymouth Thanksgiving is being lived out. When old and new come together and God is honored in a kind of secular way and there is both hard work and excitement.
If literally anyone can become President then I am afraid that we really don’t have a country. For me that moment arrived with Barack Obama. l think I had almost reached the end of my ability to stand where this country has been for so long but this is total insanity in my view. Foreign rulers or near foreigners in other countries can be healthy. If they have deeply established religious institutions, aristocracies and nativist privileges then a foreign dynasty or lazy and benevolent occupation can be energizing. Usually it is a bad thing but often enough it is a good thing. America is not that kind of country, it has always been a minimalist official society. Now we are way below the minimum. For me the end has come, it just hasn’t set in yet. Barack’s background cuts out the tiny connective tissue of a country with too little connective tissue.

When I think of America today and of my life in it I think that it has been a slow and inevitable process that so many American streams of real thinking have dried up entirely. I am entirely sincere in saying the following: Feminism has both produced some of the worst thinking in the country and has had an enormously healthy effect in clarifying ideas, enlivening intellectual communities, opening debate and integrating ideas into life. That mix of good and bad is rather common among booming intellectual movements. Feminism certainly formed an important part of my intellectual journey and landscape.

There have been times when I was resentful of and resistant to feminism. However, there are also times when I have been involved in supporting feminist causes. I feel that the individualist — statist tension of much of modern feminism is ver typical of the recent United States of America. However, while I dislike that very much in American feminism I actually think it is less pronounced than in more male dominated discourses of American thought. Having groups of distant relatives, family and guests gathering in different religions on a Day set aside to thank God is also an antidote to the poison of seeing only individuals and governments. American women still carry most of the load of making Thanksgiving work.
I was married to a feminist. However, like most feminists (and this more true than of many male dominated movements) she was inconsistent. Women tend to drop ideas that are not working. They tend to compromise and find circuitous routes around conflicts when they don’t think they can win. My ex-wife was like many other women in that regard. In recent years I seem to live out the lyrics of the Lenny Kravitz(sp?) song “American Woman” However, I don’t feel that there are many reasons related to feminism that explain this isolation.

My isolation seems to be related to many things both about me and my society. I just joined Politico. Com, it has been interesting and people dialog with me about my comments. In setting up my profile there I had chosen to keep my personal information only for friends and to make my blog public. So far ( I have only been on two days or so as I write this) I had scores of people who visit my profile and did not issue friends requests or view my blog. Therefore, these visitors basically just looked at my screen name and the title of the blog entries. Somehow this ability to get lots of people interested enough to make one click but universally sure that two clicks would be too many must mean something big. How exactly does one do that? As I write this I have tried to get my personal information in a bit better order and have decided to open up my personal info to the public. I will see how that works out.

There have been very few times in my life when I was sustainably happy for more than a few days. There have been few periods when I did not generally avoid rather than seek out the company of most people I could associate with in my life. I think that trends are still moving in that direction for me. However, on short-term occasions like Thanksgiving Day I have had many happy times. When my love life was really good I was usually very happy for a while but those times were not that frequent. When I won something honorable with a big payoff I was often happy. There have also been sometimes when I experienced religious consolation that made me happy. There were also other times but they did not add up to very large percentages of my life. I am the kind of person who will always care about the political and social order.

I still live to make a future and as though I may live another forty years or more. However, it seems to me that we are really moving past the edge of any worldview that doesn’t approach what I would call hellishness. There is little else that I can say except that I am glad to be alone most or all of this Thanksgiving Day. In my own way I have always loved America very much but I think a lot of that love is dying. Dying in me and I feel no shame in saying that publicly. So far me this year a sad and quiet Thanksgiving Day seems about right.

End of Facebook Note–

I am enjoying a happier frame of mind (not much)  than last year and do have many things on my mind to be thankful for in my life. I am heading into townto visit some people in a Thanksgiving way and we will see how that goes before tomorrow. Then hopefully a pleasant dinner with extended family.

America after the Fort Hood Shooting: Real Change?

I think that in the context of the economic crisis of recent months, the huge undocumented population, the high level of the  corruption in the current regimes and the lack of leadership as many people see these things. My question is, “If we were to somehow move towards radical change what changes should we consider?’ I think that the Confederate and the Revolutionary periods are both important founts of inspiration for many discontented people. However, I suppose I want to broaden the dialog to include some influences which are the least likely to be seriously considered. I want to address the royalist tradition.  
I am drawn to including this Facebook  Note for a variety of reasons. I am drawn to it because of my feeble attempts to promote the recognition of heroism on the part of Kimberly Munson.  I am drawn to the subject because one of the networks had a  presentation of the Prince and Me trilogy of movies.   Further, I have been commenting on the relationship of the UK and other members to the European Union and the way that shapes other complex and diverse relationships across the planet ands the future of all things human.  The note I am including in this blog post is about royalism and royalty.
In the Facebook context it was posted after many other posts that did a better job of leading up to the message and measure of this note because those posts had more to say about the royalty of Jesus and about both ancient Arcadian and modern Acadian royalty than I have posted so far on this WordPress blog. But this is a time in my life when I am not as concerned with a perfectly coherent presentation as I have been at times in the past.  So I am including this post without all due preparation of ye few, ye brave, ye readers of my little blog. Another reason I may be writing this post now is that the New Orleans Saints have just won their eighth game in a row and they hold up the banner of the Fleur de Lis which has been a symbol of all French Royalty, of Bourbon Royalty and of the Acadian Royal Line as well. So read ahead if you wish, My Facebook Note. 
 Tuesday, May 19, 2009 at 9:02pm |
My brother graduated on May 17, 2009. He was my last sibling who could earn a degree ( I have a different brother who is mentally handicapped and cannot earn any college degree ). John Paul graduated. Next month he will marry the young woman he loves. We took a picture of John Paul, myself, my mother, my brother Joseph, my sister Mary and her husband Chris who all graduated from (USL) UL-L. I was the first, then Mom, then Mary & Chris close in time, then Joseph and then John Paul. My sister Sarah and took the picture. She and I each have a degree from LSU, she got her bachelors there and I got my masters degree there. I think of all the young people pouring out into the economy. According to a huge variety of people who claim to know something we are in an economic crisis. I think that more and more people are acknowledging that we also have long-term economic problems related to wasting the earth. This year’s university and college graduates in America nad many other countries have done what they could to get where they are and did not choose the time of their birth. They hope for the best and yet perhaps are entering one of the worst job markets to exist in a very, very long time.

What a challenge that is for all of them. I also listened to Barack Obama’s speech at the Notre Dame Commencement. I listened to it on delayed broadcast on one of the C-SPAN networks, C-SPAN 2 I think. It was a good speech if I had not already hardened into an adversarial position and point of view towards President Obama then I think it would have gotten him substantial good will from me. However, it at least did not do anything to increase ill-will or hostility on my part. He seemed to offer the kind of olive branch to pro-lifers which actually has some value when it comes from a president. The abolition of the conscience clause by the FOCA bill had it been passed would have morally justified civil war and revolution ( that would not have happened but it would have been morally justified). Obama said words which if he were not lawyer and politician speaking in public would fairly be taken as an assurance not to abolish the clause which allows health care workers not to perform abortions for reasons of conscience and pro-life institutions not to provide them as one of their scheduled services. Whatever happens in the future in itself it seemed a speech aimed at not providing occasion and justification for new hates and new rage.

Since I do not feel compelled to use this Facebook Note in venting new and justified hateful criticism against President Obama I will use it to discuss briefly an economic point of view which is a fundamental attack on the idea that the Market and the State itself are the only arbiters of economic life and exchange. I am going to explain true and pure royalism as it defines its ideals of that ideology’s most vital institutions — the Court and the House. Explaining them I will not get to the advocacy of a specific plan to make them real. In this case I am reminded of what many capitalist leaders quoted from a financial sage when Russia began to move into post Soviet reality. The rather articulate money man expressed his view of the problem this way “It is easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium”. But of course fish populations can produce several soups and soup once consumed is simply shit and used up energy. The capitalist world is also dead from a royalist point of view. But it is also possible to resurrect it just as the post-Soviet money man was trying to resurrect capitalism. A king or royal sovereign need not and usually does not in any meaningful way own everything in the realm. Discussing the property of a royal sovereign is too much for this note but I will merely insist that it is a complex subject admitting of much variety from realm to realm. However in a very non capitalist way the King or royal sovereign does dominate the economic life of the court and less so but still the royal house. It is remarkable how maintaining a court tends to increase a variety of forms of economic flow and exchange. It is amazing how it tends to strengthen family fortunes and family small businesses. It is amazing how cheap even the finer courts are when one considers competing ways of maintaining a national symbol and making a global impression. It is amazing how they can appeal to the Few and the Many.

I personally should state clearly that I perceive my own economic failures as and lacks as being more massive than I can easily describe or believe sometimes. Yet despite that I am willing to write about economics for a variety of reasons. I think I have spent a lot of effort because evolution requires more energy than entropy.

The time we live in is a time of economics. It is an age of economics. The last twenty years perhaps have seen a resurgence of other issues and ways of being. However, capitalism, communism, socialism, National Socialism, most of fascism and other American political oddities like “Silverism” and “Free Soilism” are defined and define themselves mostly in economic terms. In the Philippines the Federation of Free Farmers, The Grange in the USA, the Priest-Worker Movement in France, the (original not the current) Green Revolution and a variety of population related movements have had broad social agendas like the macroeconomic systems listed above. But they viewed the road to social transformation was and is seen in economic terms by most in such groups. Writing of roads is especially evocative for me today because I live out in the country and the significant highway between my home and my hometown is currently closed while they work on the small bridge nearby. So I am taking a much longer route real country back roads. It costs me quite a bit in time and money. However, it is not philosophically troubling for me to endorse the idea that people and governments should repair and maintain bridges. I just have to put up with any inconveniences that are necessary for that to occur in a reasonable way and with reasonable dispatch.

So in a similar way we all can develop enough civic virtue to accept some of those activities which we see as necessary in an economy even when there is a present inconvenience to us. When the relationship between selfishness and civic virtue is such that people no longer accept the necessary real and metaphorical bridge repairs in their economy then a society is doomed to some very bad and relatively immediate trouble. That is perhaps a difficult to evaluate but very certain social litmus test.

I think that for me there is always a range of demands for which long-term investment, plain old gambling and paying off old debts is appropriate. However, there is always a balance with one’s own immediate needs and the immediate needs of one’s dependents. Society must recognize that individuals and families are well positioned to perceive their needs and to meet them. Society must also see that family and individual interests are very important because a starving, poorly housed, uneducated and ill transported mass of individuals and families form a weak and pathetic society. Such people may have great moral capital after losing a just war or after some unforeseeable catastrophe but one cannot applaud the continuance such a state of affairs from many morally viable point of view. The great strength of some economic systems we have abandoned is that they maintained certain foci of continuous economic stimulus through good times and bad. Enduring spark plugs and repair shops existed not affected much by quarterly earnings.

One of my great interests in life is ancient Greek political science. This science is based on the idea of the role and characters of the One, the Few and the Many. In a very much less significant way they also studied the role of the All and the None. These would be basic components of society. I want to discuss these components and their functions a bit in economic terms in this Facebook Note. The One or monarch had the role in the ideal state of preserving those parts of the economy which were most needed and useful to the Few for the Few and likewise what was useful for the Many for the Many. There were tides and changing balances but not as frequent catastrophe as in an unmixed democracy.

Monarchy and royalism are two different things but they are somewhat related things. In popular culture in America a king is most understood as a man with a pointy metal hat who lives with his queen in a big house with guards and has something to do with a country. No understanding much deeper than that can be taken for granted. I want to lay out in this Note a realistic view of what royalism at its very center is meant to be like and what its economic costs and benefits might be. I want to discuss and analyze the court and royal house from an institutional point of view.

One thing about the” Few” is that while the word translates to about the same thing as “a minority” the implications are distinct and the associate ideas are different. Yet on the other hand there are certain facts about being an identifiable group that is a minority which cannot be changed regardless of how society develops or interprets power. In a perfectly Royalist USA there would be some black and more nonblack African-American Titled Aristocrats but more who were from the white majority and higher ranks abounding in a few ethnicities with none excluded. These titled persons, high-ranking courtiers and military officers as well as US Senators would be the Few. They would have some preserved rights and would be in a different position than either ethnic or political minorities in our current political and economic system.

The Royal Court and House is a powerful economic institution which I wish to discuss in some detail from a historic point of view. In my most recent note I mentioned or repeated the idea or claim that the King of the Arcadians is the First and Father of all Earthly Kings. While that may be difficult to believe, since I do believe it is logical for me to speak and write on the basis of that belief. So here are some thoughts about the nature, origins and function of Royal Houses and Courts. There is also the issue of the monarchy as we have discussed it above in the passages on the political science of the ancient Greeks. The royal courts and houses are and are meant to be a special place in which a portion of the few and the many are joined to and made to clearly orbit around the one when that one has assumed a royal character. That character in turn is tied to family and house of a royal character.

It should surprise nobody who is actually thinking that there is what the Motion Picture Association of America would classify as an R rated or NC-17 rated quality to the royal establishment in its own rights and own ideals because there is a real sense in which the royal court and house function best as the juncture of human capacity for the forbidden with the ideals honored by the realm which produce the prohibitions. A perfect King of Sweden even today would at least find the idea of drinking a toast from his enemy’s skull lined with gold to make a cup interesting. This would be a part of his heritage which would add richness to his celebration of the Eucharist, his toasting on state occasions and his conflict with his foes wether he does the cup thing or not. If he is great souled enough to be a great king then he can be such a man and in context make life less obscene and not more so than it would have been. With sexual morality this is even more the case.

In its ancient essence the royal family and house joins into one thing a number of traits, qualities and institutions which are not likely to exist otherwise. This is really one of the great purposes of a royal house. The way I see this and would encourage my readers to see it is that in terms of royal houses and courts there is a rather narrow range of ideals which are the ideals of the Royalist tradition. These are not the exact ideals of Christianity or any other official or popular religion. They are not the ideals of any particular nation or economic system. They are the ideals that are intrinsic to royal monarchies on Earth. As the royal house and royal court is adapted to any particular set of ideals specific to a religion country, time and people then the institution undergoes a transformation which is similar to a market process. Investments, sales and purchases are made in which values and rights are transformed into a state in which the institution can exist and thrive. But for the start of this part of our discussion let us consider what the values or disparate elements are in their pure form:
1. Executive and Judical policy and Politics especially.
2. Family name, brand and tradition.
3. Religion and Especially sense of Duty to the Most High
4. Monument Preservation
5. War and a special role for old, wounded and crippled warriors
6. Hunting and wildlife management
7. High Marriage
8. Polygamy
9. Prostitution
10. Licensed and Localized Deviance.
11. Gardening
12. Ethnic Traditionalism
13. Internationalism and Diplomacy
14. Production of Royal children, support of families and Dynastic Ambition.

1. The legislative functions in the royalist ideal will come from a variety of processes which involve principally three sources. First, tradition and Constitutional law as one thing possible to modify but in a category deserving respect. Second the will of the Many in the legislative process. Thi.rd the will of the Few in the legislative process. The One who is royal should have some limited legislative prerogatives but should be the clearly defined last resort in the Judiciary and supreme authority in the Executive. Royal protocol is meant to make all these portions of the system work well together. around all the tables and hearths where likely future kings are growing up these political processes should be in the air, in at least occasional conversation, notes and schedules. These influences form the future monarch. Succession politics are especially important. However, if we get to that discussion at all then we will touch on it under part 14.

2.Genealogies, family histories, coats of arms, parties, rolls of guests and invitees are all part of the experience of royal family. They train all the royals to see property in title as a major portion of any property they can have or aspire to and form a context for the rest of their lives together.

3. “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter by the grace of the Lord”, the Lord’s Anointed, King or Queen by the Grace of God and other phrases and titles can abound. It is possible on the fallen and confused earth for a pantheist or polytheist in the fullest sense to be a legitimate monarch and royal sovereign. However, it is an imperfection in the claim. Even if the realm is pantheist or polytheist the royal monarch is meant to represent the Most High sovereign whom the Hebrew Psalms call the “Great King over all the Gods” — in both worship and study the royal house should be a place where the honor and claims of the ultimate King are recognized and honored. An atheist king is really a Tyrant although he may benefit himself and his realm by drawing on what element s he can of the royalist tradition into his tyranny.

4. In a royalist society when a great building or place is in danger of becoming a ruin it is presumed that it becomes the property of or falls to the use of the royal house and court. The royal house and court also are preservers of monuments which are not architectural or spatial. The King and Queen especially should have a variety of roles in awarding honors, keeping an archive and overseeing but not merely creating lesser lines of succession. Military honors and monuments, religious ones, industrial and agricultural honors and the records associated with all of this have a special relationship to the court.

5. In many cases the king should be a very skilled and accomplished warrior who has some notable physical limitation. He should gather around himself those injured and limited in past wars who are still able to do some fighting and can still understand much about the nature of war.

6. “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter by the grace of the Lord” is a phrase that describes the ideal king and many of his retainers. Hunting provides an excuse to preserve wild lands in quantity which is a vital role of royals. It should allow royals to help bring in food without competing with as many workers as with most occupations in their kingdoms. Hunting provides occasion for the practice of warlike skills and the rearing of princelings and others who will have some basic warrior skills outside of military formalities.

7. The ideal royal monarch is a male a king. However, in the ideal royalist civilization there will always be a small minority of female monarchs who are Queens, Princesses or other such in their own right and hold their own sway over their realms with their husbands as consorts. One of the reasons for these few exceptions is to strengthen the status of those relatively many High Wives of Kings who are Queens by Marriage. These Queens must know that when times are bad their roles will contract relative to the King’s powers and court. But the ideal and norm should always be:
I. The Queen has her own chambers and court within a court which is composed of two parts. The inner one of women only and the outer one of men and women.
II. At least some titles and holdings which are hers separate from her husband.
III. A guard which is of high quality and composed of warriors loyal to her directly.
IV. An allowance which is just hers and is fixed from the royal treasury.
V. She is the King’s senior most adviser and courtier and sits beside him on the highest occasions of state.
VI. Her highest honors and greatest protocol obligations go in a particular order. The King,the Queen Mother – mother of the King, her oldest Son who is heir to the king, the highest ranking members of her maiden family. Within her inner court this is the one aspect where her protocol is not that of the family or realm at large.
VII. Ideally the King should have no mistress or other lovers for the first two or three years of his marriage to the Queen. He should provide for earlier mistresses a suitable position but not be intimate with them during that time.

8. Polygamy is basically essential to maintaining a royalist system. It can be restricted and minimized but that is not a good thing for the royalist monarchy it is simply possible. All marriages other than the High marriage ought to be overseen by a wife who is not the queen but is of high rank. The harem will always have ritual tributes and protocol acknowledgements of both the Queen Mother and the Queen. Ideally, these women will have specified legislative and diplomatic responsibilities and portfolios which are not negligible. They should have their own places but also a space for them and their women guests only and there they should entertain the Queen and Queen Mother separately on scheduled occasions. A small harem of less than ten women can struggle along with little institutional organization. The large harem is fully an institution of vast importance performing many roles that cannot be well described in this note.

9. Prostitution interfaces with the royal house and family in a range of ways and at a range of levels. It is vital that many of the other elements in this composite be quite strong in order for this not to overcome and destroy all the rest and the sum and whole of all. However, prostitution is strongly connected to the idea and practice of royalty as an institution. Among the elements that function to keep royal prostitution working as it must are the following.
I. Relatively easy forgiveness for almost any sexual past offenses or injuries sustained by royal women. However, it is forgiveness because the penalties which go all the way to death are still possible.
A special note is that the ideal queen and king will have been exclusive and affectionate lovers for a few years after marriage and they will retain some sexual congress thereafter. thus the firstborn will be the king’s biological son. But in ancient times and the ideal there is no heir apparent and as the king turns to his mistresses the queen will spend time with the most accomplished and stylish men in the realm and elsewhere. There should be a lot more dreaming than doing but it is absurd to think that queen is really and truly expected never to have sex with any of them.
II. Royal immunities and a king who really will kill men who turn palaces into brothels. Only that will work well.
III. Polygamy in which the mistresses or plural wives of the king generally have no sexual relations with any other men during the years when they are really active with the king.
IV. Women of varied degrees including courtesans who are open and well-regulated prostitutes.
V. Non-prostitution of almost all newlyweds and both class and ethnic endogamy which allow a maintenance of blood filiation by multiple lines within the royal community despite new bloodlines unacknowledged.
VI.By most traditions and all non-murderous ones both merit and election as well as birth must enter into the succession of the highest royal titles.

10. The court and the royal house are places where others who are not average or normal per se can earn a place of freedom and some peace by offsetting usefulness and excellence. This is also a very important function of the royal court or house. Sex is also an issue here. In the ideal royal court there are all the sexual types I have already mentioned but there are also places and roles for the truly temporarily, permanently and sporadically celibate people. Officers and soldiers from genteel families have the opportunity to move to court and have their wives function as extraordinary mistresses or harem members of the king or princes with children being reared as their own. Women who are unacceptable as acknowledged mistresses or plural wives can marry homosexual men who are willing to assist in discretion and family duties. These and some monastic and semi monastic types who are discreet homosexuals rather than true celibates can form part of a community within a community that engages in homosexual relations at their own risk and with understanding of their unique roles and limits at court. There should be acknowledgement that homosexuality goes on but not open relationships between particular men. On the other hand the court is the ideal place for the mistress of high-ranking clerics in any religious tradition to keep their mistresses. For reasons that are hard to explain here a Catholic monarch would have supreme policy reasons to reward a heterosexual bishop who had been a devoted celibate pastor with a fine mistress and a house to keep her in near court. All children are taught that a husband and wife belong to each other sexually and are the parents of the wife’s children. That is in fact the truth and the language evolves over time.  Religious and ethnic minorities and diplomats are also expected to be able to live at court within a different set of rules and tolerances.

11.Gardening is very important at court and in royal families.  ideally a good amount of food is grown by royals retainers and domestics not working ver hard at it but working with the help of a few professional gardeners. This food helps with feasts in the good times, charity and survival in the bad times.  Exotic herbs, narcotic and alcoholic plants of very high quality should ideally be produced, refined and both sold and provided to guests at court. Princes and princesses should do a little labor in the garden because it is run by the family and their work can be consistent with their personalities not geared to drudgery. An ideal king would prune plats are something a few hours each month and actually enjoy it.
Preservation of rare plants and birds, herbal medicine, flowers for interior decoration and green spaces for sport and recreation ought all to exist as part of the master plan of gardening.

12. Because of some leisure and the availability of people to assist them in various ways the royal courts and houses should be able do agreat deal to honor and preserve various ethnic traditions of the realm. They will especially honor their own but they will also find the proper ways to acknowledge those of ethnicities larger and smaller than their own.

13. Internationalism and diplomacy ought to be part of the air of court. Map rooms, gifts from foreign royals and teachers and some marriages should reinforce the presence of diplomats and the foreign service. People having lived at court should have absorbed a certain amount of education in diplomacy and international affairs.

14. It is in this total context that succession and the production of heirs for the preservation of dynasties is to be best understood. There is no way to estimate the total value to a political system of maintaining a royal house and court when it is all that it should be.

My sister Sarah celebrated her birthday on May 18. She has that sort of royalist sensibility that pervades all she does though as for as I know she has never been political about it in the way that I am and have long been. But in Mexico and America I have often seen her do things that help sustain the royalist heritage in North America. Her baptismal name Sarah Anthea can be translated from Hebrew and Greek as “Princess of Flowers” and I often called her that when she was small. I like the fact that she is descended from Joseph Broussard, Severin Leblanc and that the line of the Basileus Arkadios is evident in her. She is 33 and I hope she lives long and prospers as we move from this Star Trek year towards the future. I wonder what her economic potential might be in an aquarium instead of fish soup.

Most of the royal sovereigns left in the world are in Europe. While all of them have some qualities of the ideal court I describe above none of them are exact duplicates of it. None of them are really very close to it. That is not all that surprising. But Spain, the United Kingdom, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands Monaco and few other places seem to be struggling along in Modern Europe with some version of the royalist ideal. Because I basically have a royalist point of view I tend to see possible royalist solutions to American problems. I see things royalism and royalist institutions could possibly contribute to ongoing problems of race, class, labor, religion and growth. I do not think we will see those solutions applied in my lifetime but it is not technically and formally impossible. So while I am not planning any violent demonstrations nor suggesting that American Royalism will become politically viable I am suggesting that it is not the same kind of impossibility as burning water in your lawnmower tomorrow.

Happy Halloween

Halloween is “All Hallows Even’ ” contracted. In other words it is the evening before All Hallows Day. All Hallows, means All Holies and then the actually used term of All Saints means the same. The Holiday for some families means dressing up like cowboys or princesses. But the real story of the holiday is one of a tug-of-war. Christians in Europe beyond the Mediterranean celebrated their beliefs and practices regarding the dead at the time pagan Europeans had the feast of Sawain. Sawain was a time in Druidic and related beliefs when the year moved from light to darkness  and the dead came to greet and feast with everyone but especially those who might die in or before the coming winter. Christians very much changed the holiday but some bits of local custom were always preserved. There were some of the ancient practices that clung to the holidays on All Saints which focused on all those in Heaven and All Souls which focused on all those in purgatory.  Then in the way that Catholic Christian cultures find ways to leave nothing out the old practices flocked to the day before and so you had Hell, Heaven and Purgatory observed in many places in an unofficial tridium.
 
Protestantism and secularism reached heights in America that stripped away all the observance of Heaven and Purgatory and so we were left with just hell on Halloween. That seemed a bit too devilish and pagan and so Halloween was largely tamed and made comical and safe where small children were involved.
 
In my family we seek as varied members to deal with all this complexity in a variety of ways. Halloween practices, HolyWeen Parties with children costumed as Saints, traditional Acadian and Mexican care for cemetary sites and many other things make up my memories. However, confusion and change are not usually better as regards holidays. In a perfect world holiday change is subtle and slow. So this has been the story of a complex family struggling and sometimes failing to make the best of a complex set of holidays. My sister Sarah and her group are not here but she always did one of the best and usually the best costuming for Holyween Saints parties for a while and led her sisters to a good place in that regard. I am not sure where Mary is who also did well in several years and Susanna is in Texas   
 
S7301270
The picture above is a pumpkin lantern carved to honor All Saints and All Souls Days at Susanna’s house. They have their own abundant pumpkin patch for autumn foods and customs. 
 
 
 
MichaelVPumpkins

My nephew Michael Carving Pumpkins, just before scooping

S7301260

Thomas with an alternative pumpkin lantern matching his shirt

 
The boys and all of them enjoy a full and happy interaction with the family in their interpretation of this American ritual.  All of this is part of the struggle to do the best they can and that means having as much fun as possible in a positive way. 
Pumpkin Lanterns

My Sister Susanna and her husband Michael' family have lanterns honoring All Saints and All Souls

Whatever you do ye brave, ye proud, ye few, ye readers == Have a Happy Halloween, All Saints and All Souls Day, in your own best way.

Cecil B. Gremillion’s Birthday

This week has four holidays for me. Today is my maternal grandfather’s birthday. Tomorrow is Halloween. The next day is All Saints Day. The day after that is All Soul’s Day. This is a set of which I have observed various members with differing intensity over the years. Each has been different but each has been an important part of a small mini-season as it were.

Cecil%20and%20Bev%20modified[1]

Today is my maternal grandfather’s birthday. His name is Cecil Bruce Gremillion.  His wife died on my most recent birthday June 15,2009. My grandmothers name was Beverlee Hollier Gremillion. They were married for over 65 years and together a bit before that both engaged and  courting. Together they went through World War II, built a home and reared a family. They went in to hospice care together. My grandmother died almost immediately and my grandfather whom almost anyone would have thought was the sicker one has lingered to make this birthday and for all I know may make another.

Kisinoaks Logo Darker

Advertising the bed and breakfast in their home

The story of my grandfather’s life is surely a mixed one and I have sort of a darker view of life and the world than most people who blog. However, he was a man doing things and being with his family.  He and my grandmother did stay together a very long time and today he can look back on those days.
He was named an Economic Ambassador of Louisiana, a Commodore of a nearby Tarpon Fishing Rodeo, President of a local savings and loan, President of a local development and investment company and now he is confined to either a bed or a wheelchair and I doubt he ever feels well. Life has stages and many of them are very tough going. I hope that it is not to religious or philosophical for some who may read this to say that I hope his journey through this pain is somehow deepening and enriching to him. No life is simple but my grandfather always had a religious perspective and an interest in the inner life — which he balanced with a worldly pursuit of wealth and pleasure. He was a fairly complicated man and I am sure he still is. 
 
The picture below has been rotated and saved and edited ad nauseam and I cannot get a copy of it to show up the right way. Maybe one day I will try again with more success and edit the old post. I have about ten good copies. In this original sideways copy my grandmother is a real ghostly image next to my grandfather with the ghost on the other side. So maybe all the glitches and the outcome are apt for the season. 
Kisinoaks blsng

Blessing Kisinoaks after moving and while renovating it.

HAPPY  BIRTHDAY POPS! 

Autumn in Acadiana

Around Abbeville Anglo-Acadian Americans as appellation for autumn say fall.

Unless there are reasons not to say things for cued content or audience.

There is gumbo, TV baseball and football.  We hunt and play or watch ball.

Untill November it is too early for the apt application of “fall” present tense.

Mostly  life looks like summer although  so much nicer to most us for the cool.

Not like summer where comfort comes from the AC or, better yet, the pool.

 

I love this time of year in average terms though storms can make it nearly hell.

Now Yankee Autumn in Acadiana‘s tale was a worse time yet for what they tell. 

 

Abbeville, Breaux Bridge, New Iberia and Ville Platte will no Vermont rival.

Colored leaves beyond the imagination of most folks exist in that state.

Around here we get the generous chicken tree to call out fall’s arrival.

Dour grow our perennial oaks and hold shabby green out even late.

In conifers too we have more poverty of leaf than color’s carnivals.

As among these greens, greys and browns we look we see bursts of blaze.

Now we see more game and fowl amid the wildlands less lush maze.

Autumn in Acadiana is our autumn and acceptably summer lulls.

My Thoughts about Homecoming Twenty Years after Graduation

 

I am planning to buy a ticket to my alma mater’s homecoming football game more or less as soon as I get finished with my blog post.  I will be buyuing it with my mother’s credit card. I sometimes do this and pay her back with cash but in this case she is giving it to me as a gift. I feel a sense of obligation to be there and I have often been to Homecoming games over the years. But I have not gotten an invitation to anything except those sent out to all University students and have not had the resources to  initiate much organization although I did start a Facebook group for my classmates nobody joined it. Nonetheless, it discharged another sense of obligation. I do love my school and watching football. However, I certainly am not proud or happy to be going alone and in many other ways in the situation I am currently in at this time.

The bulk of this post is a Facebook note I wrote a while back. I had a really miserable time copying it in here (a process which is often very easy). That means I had more of a chance to correct spelling, mechanical and minor factual errors than usual because I spent longer reworking it. However, I know from experience that there may be a gross error of continuity from pasting parts together and have lots of irritating glitches. I hope not. If you read it and wish to comment I will try to address errors and questions.

    

 

Approaching 20 years since my Bachelor’s Degree
Sunday, March 22, 2009 at 10:58pm
I graduated from the University of Southwestern Louisiana in May of 1989 with a degree in English and the honor of a latin phrase after the designation of a bachelors degree. There have been many days since mid May of 1989. Each of them was a bit different from the others. Suddenly I am coming up on 20 years. Sooner or later it had to happen. Actually it had to happen exactly 20 years after I graduated unless I died. It was always likely to make me feel that my life was not exactly where I had hoped it would be. Twenty years ago was a rather high mark in my life. But not a perfect time at all.

In the years since then there have been opportunities to do things that I had not done. Perhaps I resemble some huge portion of the human species in that I would define the last twenty years as having been much better and much worse than I would have predicted. However as a generalization I would describe my last twenty years as being profoundly different from any plan I could have made or discussed in those days. First of all the most important person in my life in those days was Michelle Denise Broussard Summers and I have not seen or spoken with her since about 1995. We had gotten married in December of 1987 while still in college. I graduated in May of 1989 and she graduated in December of 1989.

I think both that we always had our problems and that when I graduated our best years were still ahead of us. But the time of my graduation was a more difficult time than most of our time together up to that point. In those days I still had high hopes for many things that no longer draw forth that response from me. What Michelle’s hopes were becomes less clear to me with each passing day and month and year. I do know that we were very much together at that time. Her support meant a great deal to me. On the day of the Blue Key reception for the Outstanding Graduate award for their colleges and were nominated for the overall award only one person had no guests for company — I was that nominee. I did win the award however. That of course makes the approach of the 20th year anniversary even more ominous somehow. It is harder to measure up to expectations announced in those days. Of course, no matter what I had that happy summer when I had been so honored and before a life I would often categorize as horrible reverted more to the norm and became fairly horrible again. In the years since there have been lots of good and bad times. I have ended up with more self-respect than I would have ever imagined possible and very little else in many ways. Yet also blessed to have lots of people in my life and memory who have meant something to me. The journey has had its surprising joys. Instead of only following a chronology  only I wanted  to kind of set this up as journey story — because it is.

Mary graduates from UL L as I did. A young mom who does not make time for Facebook yet.

Watching one brother Joseph and one sister Mary graduate with higher Latin honors than I earned from my college alma mater has been a joy and a blessing. It has been a joy to see another sister Sarah graduate with a perfect GPA from Louisiana State University where I got my masters degree. It has been a joy to have my middle sister Susanna graduate with honors from the Franciscan University of Steubenville where I won one of two Sophomore Class Awards (one for men and one for women) in 1985. I look forward to having my youngest brother graduate from UL-L which is my renamed alma mater this May. My handicapped brother Simon received his certificate of Academic completion of merit from Abbeville High School when I was working for the school board in which they are located and which administers them. All of those were joyous milestones. But Michelle was not around for any of those events. After my Bachelor’s ceremonies, hers and my Master of Arts Degree graduation we were not to be together much longer.

Michelle and I lived in Abbeville, Lafayette, Kenner, New Orleans and Baton Rouge  all in Louisiana when we were married. We traveled to Mexico but otherwise never left the country together. We did make trips to Arizona, Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee,  and Illinois. But all though we were not absolute cave-dwellers we traveled less together than has been typical of my life. In this post I have included pictures of places I have been since. I had many pictures of Michelle and I together and would put some up but they have been among the many casualties of my trips and dislocations. I do not have access to a single image of her and I together or of her as I type this.

The picture below is of the Shandong Institute of Business and Technology in Yantai. The SDIBT  was the China Coal College a few years before I was there.Set on the Shandong Peninsula where Confucius and Mencius began Classical Chinese scholarship the Campus overlooked the glorious Yellow Sea.
These are some of my students and advisees graduating two years after I left.
Front page of an article I wrote about my journey to China and time there. The top photograph is of English Corner which was largely organized and facilitated by Lu Ting ting who is on my Friends List although her name appears in characters I cannot reproduce.

However, China is not the only place that I have been. There were journeys to Micronesia, Mexico (on numerous occasions) as well as to Nova Scotia/ Acadie. All these trips were since my divorce . Each of these journeys has added to the long route across and just above the surface of this planet which I have had other distinct good things and times. My trip to China ranks near the top of these life enhancing events one recalls at a time like this. I have posted the link to the university level institution where I taught.

The theme of of travel in my story is rather huge and important. It can be minimized and still seem drawn out in my life. Prior to graduation the Philippines, Europe, Colombia, Mexico, Tonga, Samoa and New Zealand were among the places that I had visited long enough to feel that I had lived there.  It bears repeating yet again that extensivetravel has been a very large part of my education and personal development both before and after my undergraduate studies.

 Soren, Alyse and Anika in Zacatecas, Mexico in the center of town.
Alyse in the mines which were the source of wealth for Zacatecas as a Spanish Colonial City and in the precolumbian days as well.
 
I have also been a bit below the surface of the planet a few times. Mammoth Caves is one of my favorite US National parks and I have enjoyed visiting mines like those in the beautiful Mexican city of Zacatecas. Michelle was not a great outdoors woman and now I seldom participate in the outdoors in Louisiana which were such a huge part of my life before because I have had a lot of bad experiences and am not very happy here in any way but Michelle and I once camped at Mammoth Caves in a very happy exception to the rule of our time together. 

What I know is that my life has been a journey in a very literal sense. When I graduated from UL I went to work that summer for the law Firm of Mangham, Hardy, Rolfs and Abadie in the offices near the top of the First National Bank Tower in downtown Lafayette. It was as close as I have ever come to feeling like my life was on a smooth and established track and not a trek through dangerous places. I was headed off to Tulane Law School in the fall. A lot of people in my life who have always behaved badly toward me when they were around chose not to that summer. I had been on television and in the newspapers a great deal when I won the Outstanding Graduate award and it seemed like I would be given some space to do things one step at a time in a way that I have never really known at any other time.

My time at Tulane Law School that first run was one of the worst times of my life. That is from my point of view saying a great deal. We lived next to a family who were in charge of our floor in student housing and screamed and roared many hours every day. Michelle never found any job of significance which wrecked our financial plan, I got hit in a horrible traffic situation and got the ticket, I was chronically sick, we had several family crises. Someone who owed me a substantial amount of money skipped out on payment and it was an informal exchange without legal recourse. Those patterns were established early on and then there were a lot of other bad things. Michelle told me she was pregnant fifteen minutes before my first moot court competition and that she was not (either never was or had lost the pregnancy) just in the middle of my real examination preparation. Then my relationships already included a lot of people who were the opposite of supportive. Despite being a harsh, grim and critical man my grandfather Frank W. Summers I came across as a major source of counsel, social and financial support. He and I had been close of years and this put a strain on our rebuilding relationship but it was a time when he really shone in several ways. When Michelle and I left Tulane after a semester and a bit then in almost every way the life I had sought to graduate into was  dead. The journey since then has been an entirely different journey.

When I left Tulane we engaged in that activity my associates in life often refer to as “licking one’s wounds”. That took a few weeks. Then I was working in seafood sales and brokering as I had done many times before including even during my time at Tulane Law. I went down with the owner and chief sales manager of the privately held company that was my employer on a buying trip to Merida. This was typical of a lot of things about my seafood crowd. The owner paid for four tickets, four registration packages, four hotel and food packages and in me provided one of the two or three best interpreters on the trip. However, the trip was supposed to be a sales trip sponsored by the US Department of Commerce and we were there buying. While that exact event was unique it somehow encapsulates all of my considerable experiences in the fishmongering world. While there Lieutenant Governor Paul Hardy presented me with the honor of Honorary Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana. He gave me a very large and beautiful certificate that I was proud to display as I was to mention the honor on my resume.

When I got back I set up those purchases and set up a series of chain and institutional sales for catfish and catfish products of sizes which were not in the main stream of demand and commerce. That was about all I did before quitting my job and going to work for St. Thomas More High School. I knew it would annoy him but I left my employer with a proposal for changes needed in the company. From a distance over the years I watched many of them take place. (Since I wrote this note however the company has closed because it imported much Mexican labor after the ties established on this trip and has had trouble gettibg the paperwork in order in recent years according to one of the former owners).

My story must return to the subject of St. Thomas More High School.  My Mom had helped me hear about and get an interview for the job at STM and I took Sarah to school there as I commuted to work. Michelle soon found a job in Lafayette in a career field she would follow in for a good while. I added a part-time job as youth minister at St. Mary’s Parish and then we moved from Mom and Dad’s neighborhood in a rental house to an apartment in Lafayette. Mom and Dad soon moved to house only a few miles away. My sister Susanna was registered to go with Sarah to STM the next year. However, by that time I would be a Board of Regents Fellow at Louisiana State University. Michelle had a good job in Baton Rouge with the same company she had worked for in Lafayette and I had the fellowship money and some other sporadic income. We were pretty happy and pretty successful as far as living in a rental townhouse can be considered successful in America. We had two new vehicles we had bought new and although I was getting really fat for the first time since early adolescence we were more in love and happy than at any time since just after our wedding. So if Law school was really brutally bad then graduate school was pretty good. I was tired and stressed but not as alienated as I have often been. It was a time for maintenance and restorations. Then two things did happen when I was in Grad school at LSU that had a big impact on my life between the two of them. One was that my half-brother Paul Nicolas Jordan came into my life. The other was that my grandfather Frank W. Summers I died. These things and earning my Masters really defined those years.

Paul came into my life as a huge surprise since I had been assured of his impossibility. I had devoted a huge portion of whatever positive focus of energy there had been in my life to being the oldest sibling of seven and an older brother. I had become involved in a whole web of transgenerational things on all sides of the family to pass them on to another generation. When Paul came many of relatives who have always perhaps been happy to make me uncomfortable liked to point out that he was both older and my sibling. All the ways this was done I will not get into here. It so happened that my grandfather Summers was not related to Paul by blood, marriage or memory and was busy dying. I had worked for him, lived with him when in from the Franciscan University of Steubenville, bore his name, had discussed genealogies, family traditions and acts and orders of chivalry. He had brought me into some secret and other semi-secret groups and other groups with tasks that were not entirely clear to me and I had tried to humor him even when it was tough. So at this time we drew closer together. His mind, body and poise were all failing but they all were a noble ruin. Old men I had never met came and began to ask me questions about him and some of our activities and talks together. Many of those men I never saw again.

I undertook a research task or two in Acadiana at the time to deal with these odd meetings and with my dying grandfather. I had often been angry with and resentful of “PauPau” as I called him.When he did die I had seen him dying only a day before and the pain was raw and shocked me in its intensity. There were reasons for that which I will not go into here but the biggest reason was personal loss. I was the only primary pall-bearer with streaming tears and shaking sobs as we gave that last shove of his coffin into the elevated stone mini mausoleum where his remains rest. Typical of he and my grandmother there was a space beside him with her name on it and four other spaces for some (but not any dead) who might need a resting place in our extended family. My grandmother was there and many others and my wife. But I felt a loneliness I had not known before, it may not have been my loneliest moment but it was a very lonely one. I pulled through that semester, took my general examinations and went through commencement. I thought I might go to LSU Law school but I would work in large scale food sales again before returning to Tulane Law School. My marriage was almost suddenly falling apart in real earnest.

During the year I worked we still had some good times but by the summer before Law school we were seldom together as I worked in a law office in Lafayette and she lived in Baton Rouge. Then we moved into a town house in Kenner where we last lived together. This time at Tulane things were smoother in some ways but smoothly bad. My first time at Tulane I had organized a petition and a protest along with other woes and distractions and I am quite certain some faculty there still had it in for me. My relationship with my nuclear family was strained, I missed my grandfather, he had promised me several keepsakes when he died all unsolicited by me and I got none of them just as had happened before when his mother died. My marriage was for the first time cold. It is unacceptable to talk about sex between married couples but our sex life had always been very good by all standards that can be quantified or verified. Now it was not. We were sentimental about splitting. We seldom discussed it and when we did it was usually over a nice dinner calmly. We knew it was coming and I began to seek treatment for depression. We both sort of moved from not quite newlyweds to forty years of marriage in our frank awareness of the opposite sex. It was clear that we would not be happy together and we had tried Marriage Encounter, made Engaged Encounter before exchanging vows and read books as well as making a couples retreat. We had no kids or prospects of having kids soon. I had some concerns my grandfather had entrusted me with that we could never really discuss. My relationship with her parents got pretty bad and hers with mine was not good. None of this was all that obvious or even serious in a certain sense.

I am adding this paragraph for no particular reason to the original note in my Facebook page.  I was never sexually involved with anyone while married to Michelle. That is an absolute fact and in addition I did not pursue things that came up as that marriage ended. However, it is dishonest ( by my high standards of candor) to leave out the fact that I did meet a woman at Tulane the second time who made a big impression on me and she seemed to feel something too. We have never seen eachother since then and I really did stay with a miserable and hopeless marriage instead of a new and compelling relationship. I am not even the tiniest bit ashamed of her, my behavior, or of Michelle and I being old fuddy-duddies who tried to play things by the book.  

Suddenly I was out of law school, legally separated and living with my parents in a two storey thatched building overlooking Micronesia’s Truk Lagoon as the GIs knew it on the Island of Weno in the country of Chuuk. Another point of no return had been crossed. Another re-invention of a life and a future. Among the markers of that transition I had a truly horrific sunburn that almost defied description. I have been hospitalized twice for sunburn and none of those burns were in the same category as this. I think I could easily have died except that a clinic there sold my mother a few hundred dollars of Silvadene cream for a few dollars. The agonizing physical pain and baseball size blisters were oddly soothing to my shredded soul. I healed and snorkeled again as I had that first burning day. I ate Eggs Benedict overlooking the gorgeous lagoon, spent time with my brothers and sisters and found a job teaching at the local community college which I never undertook because I left before school started. I heard rumours that made me think a reconciliation might be possible and decided to come home and try. However, I have never seen Michelle since the day we were separated. I have never spoken to her on the phone or seen a convincing video of her. Except for third person testimony I have no reason to believe that she is not dead. I now reached a place in life where I was not to cut my hair or shave for about three and a half years.

When I was in graduate school at LSU I published one book review in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television as well as two note length letters to the editor — on in Time and one in Newsweek. I did a lot of writing during my marriage but what was most notable was how little publishing I did. I wrote novels, plays, short stories, book length rough drafts on international law, rocketry, ethnicity and theology. This was in addition to countless papers, exam essays, lesson plans at Saint Thomas More, tutoring materials and half of the  catechetical materials Michelle and I used together to teach our faith in two dioceses and sales materials as well. But now, in the wandering in the desert phase of my life (involving very few deserts) I began to fill composition books titled as journals. With hair down to my waist almost and long journals to write Mom got me a chance to work out every day almost at Olympus health club in Nunez which is a small community with a  gymnasium (in the old sense), a steak house, a gas station and a lot of houses and fields. I got into pretty good shape while not losing weight. In my journals I was able to deal with the absolute and enormous wrongness of nearly everything in the world of humanity from my point of view. It was amazingly soothing to say what was wrong and what might be done about it even though it would not change anything. In many ways life was more hellish than it had been in my worst nightmares but I could at least express that thought in an environment not entirely toxic. I might fell that I was living a nightmare but at least I could say so in peace. I do find the world to be a kind of nightmare made real as much as I find it to be anything else.

I acquired some land from my father after a few years and began a very small business. I did a wide variety of odd jobs and my parents donated mortgage payments on the land to me this was our symbiosis. When they were paid off it was about the year 2000. I also had started a small business subsidized by payment made for driving a few people back and forth from jails and hospitals and other government agencies. My little business was distributing books, cards, prints, jewelry and prints produced in Acadiana or by artists connected with Acadian in a surprisingly large number of the United States, countries and cities. But my income was not nearly (not even approaching nearly) enough to live on.In the year 2000 I returned to the Catholic sacraments after having been a regular mass goer who never received communion, I cut my hair and shaved my beard, I took out a $10,000 signature loan on the land and I applied for and got a substitute teaching job starting in the fall in the Vermilion Parish School board system. Most of this happened in May of 2000. Then I went up to New Haven Connecticut for my sister’s birthday and my brother in laws graduation from Yale Divinity School. I had a wonderful visit with Sarah, Jason, Alyse and Anika as well as others gathering there. However, I did sense before I left that there were serious problems still in their marriage which had been evident last time I had seen them. Some of these and other tensions spilled over into the latter part of a great visit. However, for me this would be a blessed renewal of a closeness with Sarah and her children which would be a large comfort of the following years and had always been there largely. I stopped in at EWTN headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama and at the home of the relative who owned the adjoining piece of land and lived in Virginia. Both these stops and a stop in New Orleans were on the route of my round trip Amtrak ticket and were a mix of business and pleasure.

For three following years I devoted myself to family affairs, kept my little intellectual properties distribution business going, built fences and acquired tenants for all the land while maintaining the mortgage. I also did a great deal of substitute teaching sometimes a week and a half for each week or even more after storms like Hurricane Lilli closed down facilities and caused schedules to be consolidated.

I also began to write again publishing sports pieces at the Daily Advertiser, sports and feature stories in the Abbeville Meridional and features and a column in the Bonnes Nouvelles (Vermilion). Meanwhile, I continued researching, filling composition books and writing a great deal on topics related to my first big efforts in doing my own thing when I left Tulane. About the end of that time a lady I liked ( and might still like) a whole lot and I really pronounced the death of a long term on again and off again relationship.

Towards the end of that period I considered and sort of attempted to return to graduate school in a different discipline. Then I traveled around to see my sister now living in Mexico and to look for a job. I also had applied for a teaching job in China. As it turned out I did teach there in 2004 and into 2005. It was a very powerful experience that deserves more space than I have here so I will skim over it. Having graded dozens of term papers, directed numerous student workshop dramas and advised hundreds of students I returned here because of paperwork problems. I saw many terrible problems in China and faced many but they did not oppress my spirit in the way that the woes of my homeland and of my life in this land have oppressed it.

I got back in time to settle in and then took a job caring for my brother Simon Peter in a home health agency. This went on as I also volunteered during hurricane Katrina but ended with hurricane Rita. I left badly injured to in California and to look for a job. When that failed I spent a very nice few months with Sarah, her children and the missionary team in Mexico. It was on that trip that we took the pictures in Zacatecas which I have included here. My last paycheck, an anonymous gift and some FEMA money went far in Mexico. They would have gone farther if I had not spent so much in California.

I got back healthy for Christmas and have not really been gainfully employed since then but have lived here at Big Woods. Nor is that the extreme underemployment the only lack in my life. But I have gone on with my life each day doing a variety of things. When I think back on the last twenty years since my graduation there are many events not mentioned in this note. Many blessings and joys as well as many horrors and woes. While I have used the skills and knowledge I gained in the university studies I completed twenty years ago many times this is not a career that sounds like a career.

Now I am coming up on twenty years since graduation. I feel very much the absence of many things. I have no legal marriage certainly, no net worth, no significant US credit or income profile or ownership of a car. My views of many institutions is very dark and my interpersonal relationships are perhaps possessed of some of the worst qualities of the modern and some of the worst qualities of the ancient. Yet there is some good in them as well. I have been to pretty many of my alma mater’s homecoming games but not to any organized class reunions. Despite advanced credits and generally good grades I had distractions and preoccupations which prevented me from graduating in four year and that lessened my ties to the people I actually graduated with although not my ties to the school. Now I wonder what the twenty year mark will bring.I doubt I could some these years up to my satisfaction in a single line or a one paragraph program entry. Yet I do note the occasion and find that it commands my attention. I am aware that twenty years as an alumnus only comes once and there is no guarantee that the multiples will come at all. So I look towards May’s anniversary and October’s homecoming week with a varied mix of emotions. Life does not delay so we can explain it well.

END OF FACEBOOK POST

Now, those who really know this blog will know that I correspond with some influential and privileged people and believe in leadership. However, there is a tone of resentment and profound unhappiness with the status quo that is hard to miss in much of what I write and say. First, I would remind people that although the Baron of Louth and I (for example) may correspond it does not mean we are really living in the same circle. Second, this tension (which some see as a contradiction)  has been a part of me almost all my life. In an age where people who are unhappy with Bishops join a church with no bishops I choose to complain (when I have reason to) about the episcopacy. While I could have found a way to leave many ties of my youth behind I tend to stay and raise a little hell about the things I dislike.  Those who know me best no that my self-concept is very distinct. I am far from perfect but not at all inclined to give up all that I am for some lie about equality and sameness which is not even understood by its advocates. So this is my thinking about this twenty year milestone.