OUR MORE PERFECT UNION

by Mark Hackard

At the end of November, Americans gather to celebrate the annual feast of Black Friday, a high holy day dedicated to the acquisition of various products cranked out by Chinese slave labor. 

On the eve of this festival, a time once known as "Thanksgiving", citizens will habitually watch football on television and engorge themselves unto nausea. Then, with nightfall and the ritual about to commence, it is time to hurry off to shopping malls and big-box department stores, veritable temples of consumption that can be found in practically every corner of the country. Here at the temple doors they form lines, crowd and wait impatiently until that moment of climax. Unfortunate employees draw back the gates to be immediately slammed by the ecstatically furious oncoming mob. Through the store the shoppers swarm like locusts, grasping at anything marked a "bargain", clawing at each other in desperation over the latest piece of electronics that supposedly renders meaning to existence. The news media is dutifully on hand to broadcast any deaths or incidences of violence, sacrifices in their own way, as well as imprint the frenzy into the public psyche.

Viewing footage of the Black Friday rite, we must conclude that it is one phenomenon among many uniting Americans of the most diverse ancestry into a common cause- the cult of Mammon. Look into the consumer throngs: here can be seen the uprooted children of Africa, Meso-Americans, Asians and the sad descendants of the Indo-Europeans. As editorial writers have informed us upon President Obama's re-election, the United States has entered "a new normal" of cultural and demographic transformation. The old holiday of Thanksgiving simply did not extract the necessary profits desired by the corporate-financial priesthood, and so it was re-formulated to fulfill their wishes. In the same way the U.S. population has been subjected to several decades of Cabalistic processing through every available means: psychological warfare waged by the media-entertainment complex, indoctrination in academia and so many of the churches, and waves of immigration from alien lands. Black Friday marks the perfection of mass man, the "individual" consumer wholly divorced from generations of his faith, ethnic heritage and family, a slave to debt, technology and base impulses.

"Where did America go wrong?" many will ask, searching out some terrible error from the recent past in the hope of applying a remedy. An observer might feel as if he has been sucked into an absurd alternate reality similar to the narratives of popular science fiction. In the second installment of the Back to the Future films, hero Marty McFly finds his hometown, the quaint Hill Valley, in a state of anarcho-tyranny under the control of idiot-villain Biff Tannen. Marty's antagonist managed to make himself a wealthy national icon through time travel and ruled his empire from the casino Biff's Pleasure Paradise. Today we recognize the Pleasure Paradise as our own society, as large swathes of the country resemble a crime-ridden theme park of strip malls featuring taxpayer-funded Goodwill centers, massage parlors, liquor stores and check-cashing outlets. Yet there is no readily convenient culprit to accuse, no Biff to confound in order to make things right again. The elites of Washington, Wall Street and Hollywood are villainous to the core, but their ascent was guaranteed by the very tenets of American civic religion.

Degeneration is America's destiny; no other outcome is possible when a polity embraces the toxic, nation-destroying ideals of liberty and equality. For this reason we must look past the accelerated implosion of the past decade, the entirety of the 1960s or the Federal Reserve Bank's incorporation in 1913. The United States was created as a rationalist republic and beacon for the progress of humanity, and its driving ethos has always been secular-pluralist.

The time has come to discard any lingering delusions relative to America's religious mission. All the florid entreaties to some generic Providence by the Deist-Masonic Founders were but rhetorical cover for man's grand experiment in self-transfiguration and the re-ordering of the world according to his supreme will. This is revolution par excellence, the usurpation of divine sovereignty in the name of "We the People", an amorphous and alienated mass useful in legitimizing oligarchic power. No less than the Declaration of Independence, that treasured document so matter-of-factly pronouncing all men created equal, was authored by an immeasurably proud intellect who wrote Christ's divinity out of the Gospels. Why, then, should there be any surprise that America's Gospel is the Book of Mammon? Our land is ordained "the last, best hope on earth", so that every nation may enjoy democracy, usury, pornography and abortion.

Behold our more perfect union! We witness humanism's final revelation: an engineered and entertained sub-humanity is to be governed by inhuman predators who fancy themselves gods. And throughout this chaos, many well-intentioned Americans continue to call for a restoration of the Constitution, the ultimate Enlightenment project, a bloodless abstraction held sacred and infallible. Never do they see how the operation of this artificial regime, administering "rights" and "liberties" held by autonomous self-creating wills, has led directly to the Babylonian nightmare we inhabit at present. This, too, shall perish from the earth: after the orgy there is no freedom, just entropy and death. A people committed to survival, especially survival in eternity, will hold liberal conceits like the social contract in contempt.

Even Locke's disciples, the revered Founders of the United States, would be shocked and horrified by today's America, yet it was they who laid its ideological cornerstone. Brilliant statesmen the calibre of John Adams knew well of the inevitable slide toward decadence and despotism in democracy, but they considered their republic of reason to be a sublime enterprise. The common-law traditions of the Anglo-Saxons were pressed into the service of an arrogant, disembodied rationalism that subverted what the human heart always held dear: loyalty to God, an organic notion of authority and solidarity with one's kin. Because of this the Constitution in its essence was a suicide pact. European man turned away from Christ the Savior and rejected his blessed patrimony to worship at the altar of reason, that prostitute to infernal passions. The 20th-century Serbian scholar and monk St. Justin Popovic apprehended what fate awaited a West glorying in its own apostasy:

In the world of man there is no even approximately equivalent value that could in any way replace the God-Man Christ. In all spheres of human life He is absolutely irreplaceable. All genuine values derive from Him and find completion in him. If human reason wishes to resolve any problem without Him or aside from Him, it will inevitably collapse into abysses of nihilism or the chaos of anarchism. And because in Western Europe the God-Man is supplanted by man, namely because of this European humanity dwells in chaos. Revolutions, anarchy, tyranny, massacres, cannibalism and murders serve as the only way out. That which is not built upon the God-Man is in itself destroyed. Full of the superman's proud spirit of megalomania, mined with a virulent element of self-proclaimed 'infallibility', the body of Europe must explode and disintegrate into dust and ash.

Daily the Black Mass of the triumphant moderns is celebrated in rebellion against God, and the world cannot but wish its own destruction. The murderous vanity of the Novus Ordo Seclorum will not go unpunished. And what shall become of the ruined West? According to the desires of the materialists, it would be cast into darkness and utterly forgotten. Yet hope still resides in the few men who conquer through prayer and repentance, combatants who will be sanctified in struggle. Salvation is attained not in any temporal kingdoms, but only in our Heavenly Fatherland.