Studies in Political Philosophy

Hell and Politics

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: Hell and Politics

Genre: Speech

Track: 04

Dictation Name: RR124B4

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we thank thee for the blessings of the week past, for thy daily providential care. We thank thee, our God, that as we face all the problems and difficulties of life, we have the blessed assurance of thy presence and thy protecting care. Make us ever mindful, our Father, of our duty to obey thee, to serve thee, to magnify thy holy name and to enjoy thee forever. In Jesus name. Amen.

Let us turn to the second epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians. “Paul, and Silvanus, and Timotheus, unto the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace unto you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. We are bound to thank God always for you, brethren, as it is meet, because that your faith groweth exceedingly, and the charity of every one of you all toward each other aboundeth; so that we ourselves glory in you in the churches of God for your patience and faith in all your persecutions and tribulations that ye endure: which is a manifest token of the righteous judgment of God, that ye may be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which ye also suffer: seeing it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you; and to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power; when he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be admired in all them that believe (because our testimony among you was believed) in that day.

Wherefore also we pray always for you, that our God would count you worthy of this calling, and fulfil all the good pleasure of his goodness, and the work of faith with power: that the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in you, and ye in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Sometimes the richness of the language of scripture conceals its meaning from us. Paul is comforting the saints of Thessalonica who were being persecuted, and one means whereby he comforts these saints is by reminding them of the judgment of God which is certain, and the certainty of hell. Hell, then, is given as a comforting doctrine to the saints.

Let us analyze therefore, the doctrine of hell, and its meaning in scripture, but before we deal with the biblical doctrine of hell, let us analyze the kind of hell that is being promised as here and now by various persons. The first thing that comes to mind, of course, is atomic warfare, and a few years ago when a summary statement was made of the present situation at that time of atomic warfare, it was summarized in this fashion, “In theory, the 100 megaton bomb is a staggering conception. It is a dirty bomb. Its hydrogen core, surrounded by a jacket of natural uranium to increase deliberately the amount of {?}. The chilling equations of nuclear physics can be applied to calculate its destructive force. It would dig a crater nine miles across, and known down a brick house nineteen miles from ground zero. Third degree burns would be produced on all unprotected people within a radius of fifty miles. Grass, trees, and frame houses would be ignited sixty miles away. The fall-out would persist for years over the northern hemisphere. The 2-5 megaton ICBM warheads now in the stockpiles of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union are already city busters. With traditional military conservatism, both sides have adopted the overkill philosophy. Bomb material has been produced to build an estimated 80,000 weapons, enough one scientists has grimly observed, to take off the top inch of soil in both countries.“ This data is five years old. More recently, General Rothchild in his book, Tomorrow’s Weapons, has said that these weapons are a little old fashioned and obsolete. The newer weapons are far more thorough and far more deadly.

Thus, man believes that he has reached the point where he can destroy the earth. What is his mood in the face of this? Friday, I was reading in J.B. Priestley’s Literature and Western Man, and one passage in particular startled me, because Priestley, in discussing the novelist, Thomas Wolfe, author of You Can’t Go Home Again, cites a passage from Wolfe as expressing faith and hope, and I read it over again and I realized this is far from anything I consider faith and hope, because this is what the passage said, “Man was born to live, to suffer, and to die,” and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end, but we must, dear {?} deny it all the way.” In other words, our destiny is death. There is no hope, but what is our hope? We’re going to live as though death doesn’t exist and ruin doesn’t exist and we’ll deny it all the way. This kind of self-delusion is called hope, but thanks be to God we are spared either from the military or the mental horror that the modern world presents us, because there is a hell, because there is the justice of God, and because there is a hell and because there is the justice of God, man can never turn this world, God’s creation, into hell. God created the world good. He is redeeming it and will recreate it, and those who oppose his task of re-creation, those who, through their wickedness seek to destroy the earth will only end up in God’s cosmic dung heap, hell.

Before we analyze the doctrine of hell, let us examine the word, hell. What does it mean? There are two words in the Bible which are used to describe hell, or rather four words, but basically two, each of them having a Greek and a Hebrew form. The first word, which is also translated as hell in the Greek, is Hades, and in the Hebrew, Sheol. Now, Hades, or Sheol does not refer to what we think of when we say hell, even though it is often so translated because we have no other word in the English. Hades, or Sheol, has reference to the place of departed spirits. It refers, therefore, to both heaven and hell, to either one or both of the places of departed spirits, and when in the Apostles Creed, in the original Greek, it read that our Lord descended into Hades, translated into English, he descended into Hell, it did not mean by Hades what we mean by hell, because, of course, our Lord said to the thief on the cross, “This day thou shalt be with me in paradise.” Today. So, our Lord, at his death, declared he should be in paradise. Now, paradise is included within the term Hades, or Sheol. It refers to the world of the departed.

This then, is the first word which is translated as hell, but it is not what we mean normally by the word hell today. The second word is Gehenna, or Hinnom. The Gehenna, or Hinnom, in the Old Testament and in New Testament times as well, had reference to a particular valley, a place, and it was a place of human sacrifice in the days of the Canaanites. In particular, it was the locale for the sacrifice of children. We read repeatedly in the Old Testament about children who were passed through the fire unto Moloch. That is, were sacrificed to Moloch. This was done at Hinnom. The place was a place therefore, of horror to all believing Israelites, and therefore, in process of time, they made it, because it was an undesirable place, the dung heap for Jerusalem.

Thus, at Gehenna, or Hinnom, there was always fires burning, consuming the rubbish and the trash, and there was always worms working their way through the piles of garbage, so it was a place of continual fire and of corruption, and as a result, the word that came to mean the place of evil spirits was borrowed from the Valley of Hinnom or Gehenna, because hell was seen, properly as the dung heap of the universe, and the imagery of hell is drawn from the Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, where “there worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.” It is a place therefore, where the rubbish of the universe is perpetually burned and subject to corruption. This immediately gives us an idea of what hell is like.

First of all, hell is where life is wasted. It is the dung heap of the universe, a place of corruption and of burning in the sense that man is perpetually consumed by his own total frustration, by his own gnawing terror. Hell is a place in the universe, and it is also a condition.

Second, hell is not only where life is wasted. Hell is where life has no meaningful relationship to others, nothing has any true relationship to anything else in hell. All is chaos, waste, and unrelated. When we walk into a house and into a room, we see everything there related to everything else. The furniture, the carpets, the pictures on the wall, everything is there in terms of a relationship to everything else, and everything together in its relationship to the use of the man who owns the home, but in a wastebasket, there is no relationship of anything to anything else. In a dung heap, there is no relationship, no connection between objects that are next to one another. They are without any meaningful relationship because they are on a dung heap, and they are there because they have lost the capacity to be related to anything, meaningfully, and for anything truly to be related to anything else, it must be related first of all to God, and then in God to all things.

Many people today live in the suburbs of hell. They do not want any meaningful relationship to anything else. Some years ago, I was pastor in a community predominantly made up of retired people, and most of these people, sooner or later, found that they were living in hell. They had come to that community, a very lovely and attractive one geographically, in many cases, to evade responsibility. They did not want to be near their children or grandchildren. They did not want to be involved. Most of them would not join any church or attend any church because they did not want to get involved. Most of them steered clear of getting too well acquainted with any people in the community because they did not want to get involved, with the net result that they very quickly found themselves in hell, in an isolation of their own making, and a meaningless life.

One of the greatest actresses of all history was a woman who was described as a tragic figure, perpetually filled with grief and misery, often characterized as the tragic actress of her generation. I realized recently why that woman’s life was so much of a living hell. I read recently that she once admitted that she had played the part of Ophelia in Hamlet at least 100 times before she ever learned how the play ended. All she was interested in was her self and her own role, her own part, and as soon as Ophelia was dead and she was off the stage, she was not interested in what went on, on the stage, or to read a word of Shakespeare’s play beyond her part, but simply sat in her dressing room waiting for the curtain calls at the end of the play. Her absorption with herself was that total. Was it any wonder that her life was a living hell?

Wednesday after midnight, I flew home from the San Francisco Airport where I had been to speak at a college, and a woman sat next to me and talked steadily all the way, although I tried to keep my nose into a magazine but it was futile, and she told me more about herself than I could possibly ever be interested in, but I did perk up my ears as she expounded her philosophy. It was very simply. She said, “Do you know that an orchid, once it’s bruised never heals? And she said, “Our hearts are the same way. Once they’re hurt or bruised they never heal, and so the way to live is never to allow anyone or anything to hurt you, never to get involved so that you can get hurt,” and I would say she has lived by it, to enhance her total absorption with herself. That woman is living in the suburbs of hell. In hell, all is chaos, waste, and unrelated. Every person in hell is totally alone, because he has not the capacity to relate himself to God and therefore, to anyone else. There is no community in hell.

Third, hell is separation from God, and this is the beginning of hell, wherever there is any separation from God. Hell is not the doctrine that God abandons men. It is the doctrine that men abandon God. C.S. Lewis described hell very ably when he said, “Heaven is the habitation of those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done.’ Hell is the habitation of those to whom God says, ‘Thy will be done.’”

Fourth, hell means that there is a fundamental and irrevocable difference between right and wrong. Every attempt to weaken the doctrine of hell is an attempt to introduce the doctrine of co-existence. It is a way of saying that good and evil are ultimate, equally, that evil is just as wonderful a thing as good and we should tolerate both, and today we hear a great deal about tolerance and love. They are simply other words for the doctrine of co-existence. For a doctrine that denies the validity of justice, and says that evil has every right to triumph because it is equally valid. It is equally on a par with good, and as a result, wherever you have hell dropping out of a church, you have co-existence with evil being preached. You have the new morality. You have every kind of doctrine justifying evil and parading as love and tolerance, but these doctrines of love and tolerance, or co-existence have a hatred of justice and of God, and they are simply ways of saying, “Grant us equal rights to live with you so that we may then destroy you and deny your right to live.”

A century ago, Emory Stores{?} observes when hell drops out of religion, justice drops out of politics. To deny hell is to assert the triumph of wrong, and it is to deny salvation. If there is no hell it means there is no judgment and there is no damnation, because there is nothing to be saved from, and so the denial of hell is the vindication of evil, but hell is a witness to the fact that a God of justice is on the throne. When people say they cannot believe in hell, they are saying whether they realize it or not, that they refuse to believe that justice has any right to exist. They are saying that evil has a right to go its own way and to triumph, and to destroy good, because this is the purpose of evil, but Paul said to the Thessalonians as they were under persecution, This is your comfort. God will deliver you and he will yield vengeance, for the eighth verse reading, “taking vengeance,” according to the marginal reading can also be rendered “yielding vengeance.” He will yield vengeance to them. He will give them what their being demands, and he will destroy them and deliver us and this is our comfort, and our assurance.

Hell, thus, as we have seen, is a world of total brute factuality, a world in which everything is unrelated to everything else because it is a rubbish pile, a dung heap of the universe. Conversely, hell being the world of total brute factuality and unrelated objects, heaven is the world of total meaning in God, where everything, because it is totally related to God, is totally meaningful and totally related to everything else.

Now, to destroy man, you must simply isolate man from God and then man from man. Isolate man from all meaning, save man’s own self-created existential meaning, and there is no easier way to shatter men, to break them down and to reduce their life to meaninglessness. Dostoevsky, in his account of his imprisonment in Siberia, The House of the Dead, calls attention to the effect of work on people. Although prisoners would grumble at it, there was no problem in working if you were building a fort, or a public building, or something of the sort, because it was meaningful work, but the easiest way to destroy prisoners was simply to give them meaningless work, to tell them, “Here is a pile of boulders. Move it over there. When you finish, move it back over here. When you finish, move it back there.” Endlessly, meaningless work, and it was this that had the most shattering, devastating effect on men, because it reduced their life and their energy to total meaninglessness. It took away any purpose, and the easiest way to break men is to work progressively through their education and through press, radio, and television to destroy their religious faith, to destroy the family, to destroy a sense of community, and do you know that it is illegal in the Soviet Union to give charity to anyone? This puts meaning in the relationship between man and man, and they cannot have it. They work to break down every meaningful relationship between man and man.

Recently, someone who had been in the Soviet Union and returned remarked that the thing that was most startling to him when he walked the streets of Moscow, was that no one talked. Not a sound. If anyone spoke to anyone else on the streets of Moscow, they were foreigners. There was no relationship left. It had been broken so that not only has charity been removed as a dimension, but communication, and this it what the total state works to create, to destroy God and to destroy meaning between man and man, to reduce man to total hell, and then to offer itself as heaven, and say, “We will now provide meaning for your life through the total state. We will be God. We have separate you from God and we have separated you from men, and now we as God, will re-make your life and give you meaning in every area,” but it doesn’t work, and God’s reality remains, and the total state is simply a pre-state of hell, and it is under God’s judgment, and in the face of every attempt by man to create hell on earth so that he can create his own heaven, the total state.

God’s declaration to his saints is that those that trouble you shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power, and the meek shall inherit the earth and delight themselves in the abundance of peace. God did not create the world that evil men might triumph in it. God created it for his own purpose and to show forth the riches of his grace and the glories of his kingdom, and therefore, the destiny of this earth is not to fall into the hands of ungodly men, not to fall into the hands of the Satanism of the total state, but to show forth the grace and the glory of God, and to fulfill his purposes. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. The meek shall inherit the earth, and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto thee that thou hast called us to be thy blessed meek, that thou hast destined us not for bondage but for victory, that thou hast established and ordained a hell to signify the certainty of thy justice, has called us to be citizens of the kingdom of heaven, and hast declared that we shall inherit the earth, and hast given us such great promises, spiritually and materially, in Jesus Christ our Lord and savior. Confirm us, therefore, in our most holy faith, and make us strong therein that we might stand fast in the liberty wherewith we have been freed, and that we may not be again entangled in the yoke of bondage. In Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions at this time? Yes?

[Audience] {?} and one of the {?} but anyway {?} used the word {?}

[Rushdoony] It can be, but it’s a more limited meaning. The word “blessed” does convey, very definitely, the meaning of happy, but it doesn’t convey the connotation of holy, sanctified, so that it is one side of the meaning of blessed, a very important side, but it limits the word too much, and so while it can be so translated, it does limit the original. I believe, therefore, it is best to remain with the older translations which give it as “blessed are the meek.” Yes?

[Audience] Would you comment on bondage {?} in the order depicted in hell, or it must have been {?}

[Rushdoony] No, Dante’s Inferno, I hate to get started on this, but in my book, The One and the Many, I shall have a long chapter on Dante. Dante is one of the most subversive men in the history of Western literature. He was a thorough-going statist. He does, in The Divine Comedy, very definitely say the best form of economic order was communism. He was very hostile to the church and wanted the triumph of the Empire over the church, and he believed that there should be a one world order, of a communistic sort. Now, this was Dante who is presented to us as one of the great religious figures of history, and he was very definitely hostile to the faith, and it was a good thing that his books were on the index for so many centuries, and they should remain there. Yes?

[Audience] {?} Ayn Rand {?}

[Rushdoony] Ayn Rand very definitely leads us in this kind of direction. A very good observation, because Ayn Rand, while she is healthy in her reaction against this sentimental doctrine of love, of the liberals, has simply said the affirmation of sheer egoism is the answer, and by reducing man to himself she hopes she is going to establish some kind of meaningful relationship between people, and all she’s going to do is to create hell her own way. Yes?

[Audience] In reference to Ayn Rand, she’s a militant {?} atheist.

[Rushdoony] Yes, very definitely.

[Audience] {?} and her book?

[Rushdoony] Yes, she very definitely hates Christianity. Yes?

[Audience] I’m diverting slightly, but do you feel that in the Renaissance, when so much that we now judge as beautiful and at that time was judged beautiful, was created, does that indicate that the general population had a stronger faith in God, in the fact that they could create that beauty, rather than what we do now, which is not really beautiful?

[Rushdoony] The Renaissance was an age of humanism and statism, and fantastic cruelty, and you find that the Renaissance, of course, was basically an anti-Christian movement. Its hatred of Christianity was tremendous and it treated the faith with contempt. It also believed in statism, so that you had, for example, in Italy where the Renaissance began, that whole area which previously had been living in relative peace and prosperity, becoming an area of the most vicious and degenerate tyrants, and the tyranny was fearful. The cruelty, the torture, the horror, almost beyond belief, and most of our textbooks today and even more clearly some of our research volumes avoid the truth about the Renaissance. They depict the medieval period in black colors and falsify it. Then they come to the Renaissance when some of the greatest horrors ever perpetrated in all of history were perpetrated, when killing was a refined art, and torture was routine, and they pass over all this glibly, and except for a few figures, they scarcely give you any awareness of the extent of the depravity of that era. It was a thoroughly anti-Christian era, and what our textbooks don’t indicate is this: that the Reformation was, first of all, a reaction against the Renaissance and the counter-Reformation was also, first of all, a reaction against the Renaissance and a housecleaning on it, so that they were both anti-Renaissance, or anti-humanist movements, as well as dealing with the theological issues, one with another. The Renaissance humanism, however, returned as the Enlightenment, and is again in power, but we have not seen horrors in our day to compare with what was routine at the time of the Renaissance, and it is glorified consistently.

Moreover, in glorifying it, they overrate some of it. No question, some of the artists were very great, but I think you can find equally great artists in the preceding and succeeding periods, and we are not told a great deal about the perversions and depravities of some of the leading figures in the art of the Renaissance. It was a thoroughly degenerate era. Yes?

[Audience] In {?} I don’t know, but {?} in talking to people about {?} mentioned King James Version {?} of the Bible and {?}

[Rushdoony] No, there are no lost books of the Bible. These are apocryphal books. Obviously not canonical. They are books that were forgeries. They represent nothing of any validity, so these so-called lost books, and there is a, you can buy a volume, are just so much nonsense. You have then, also, the apocryphal books. The apocryphal books are Jewish writings between the Old and New Testament period, which are not canonical, but some of them, notably the first book of Maccabeus, have interesting and important historical information, and Ecclesiasticus, or the Book of Ben Sirach has some very interesting material reflecting the thinking of Jews in that intertestimental period, but we have the Bible, and we have it in its authentic text, and all such talk is aimed at destroying the authority of scripture and is not valid.

Moreover, you find a lot about the various manuscripts. The Masseretic text is the authentic text. It is the text of, in the Hebrew in which it was originally written. It is thoroughly dependable. So that, again, you have a great deal of nonsense written in this area about the text, but the Masseretic text has been vindicated over and over and over again. Yes?

[Audience] I heard {?} and what not, that Moses’ Ethiopian wife, was she a black woman?

[Rushdoony] No, because first of all, the Ethiopians, although they do represent a great deal of mixing today, are not an African people, and at that time, which was, of course, several thousand years ago, they didn’t have that element of mixture that they have acquired since. Ethiopia, in the ancient world, was an advanced country with quite a bit of culture. It was a Christian culture in the early centuries, and quite advanced for some time, a center of a great deal of learning, and it drifted into heresy in the fourth and fifth centuries, and began after that its decline, and today, the church there is just a relic of superstition, and the people have, for over a thousand years, lived far more poorly than their ancestors did, and in greater ignorance. The clergy themselves are ignorant in a way that would have staggered the clergy in the early centuries in Ethiopia, but the Ethiopians even today look down upon the African peoples. There are three groups of people in Ethiopia: the Ethiopians, the Arabic peoples, and the Negroid, and the Negroid are very heavily discriminated against by the other two. Yes?

[Audience] I was reading a short article alluding to what they call the common man, and I was wondering where this comes from, saying the common man would suggest further along that there will be a common denominator among the common man. What does this smack of, I was just wondering?

[Rushdoony] This idea of the common man comes into the modern era as a result of the Enlightenment, and of Rousseau, and a belief in democracy. If you believe in democracy, then you are going to say that law comes not from God but from the people, because democracy means, demos, people or mob, rule. Therefore, the people are important because out of them the law has to come, so you exalt the people, but the people cannot rule. Somebody has to rule. So the person who rules, rules in the name of the people. Now, according to Rousseau, there is the common will of all the people, but the people don’t always know what they really want, and what they’re destined to want. So you have the general will, that which truly represents what the people have in their minds, and this the rulers can embody and capture and represent.

So that today, in the name of democracy in terms of this faith, people in Washington and Sacramento are working to take away local school boards, local self-government, any kind of sometimes right for you to determine things for yourself, because, they say, a majority vote is not necessarily a democratic consensus. You don’t know in your heart what you really want, but we, the experts, can tell you what, in your heart, you truly want, because we know you better than you know yourself, and so what you truly want is what we say you want, and this is the democratic consensus. This is why, if you go to a conference of many of these liberal groups, you break up into sections, and you determine what it is you want to work out a consensus from section to section and come together, and then present it here. Well, before you begin to deliberate, they already know what the democratic consensus is going to be. So, the section leader will tell you exactly, or guide you into the proper channels of thought, and report to the group exactly what the democratic consensus is, so the machinery is to inform you of what you ought to think in order to be in tune with the democratic consensus.

Now, the common man, therefore, is exalter in name, but he is like the king of England. He has the name of king. He reigns ostensibly, but he does not rule. He must not rule. That would be the worst possible thing.

[Audience] You know, when you had said that God will destroy the evil on the earth, now I don’t know how this will come out, but in voting, with this election coming up, I know there are many of us that are very concerned with it, with the candidates, do you vote for the lesser of the evils to hasten our destruction, or do we, as we always do, ask God to guide us in our voting, to help us to make the right decision, or do we just stay away from the polls when there are no candidates worth voting for, when you know what they represent and what they’re going to do.

[Rushdoony] That’s a big question. Now, I would say, and it’s a good one, a very good one, we have to move in terms of this realization: in this world we don’t always have our choice between good and evil. Sometimes it’s only between better and worse, and sometimes it’s between the lesser of two evils. As a result, we have to, sometimes, and we should vote, vote in terms of that hard realization that we’re not getting anybody that’s too good. In fact, if anyone were really what we, as Christians, want, he couldn’t even be a candidate today, because there isn’t the character in the people. So sometimes we have to face the realization. We vote for the lesser of two evils. On the other hand, sometimes we have to be practical and vote strategically. Perhaps, sometimes, if we vote for the lesser of two evils, we might make it harder to get rid of that evil.

For example, if you vote for a certain man, say a senator who represents ostensibly republicanism, but actually represents the opposition better, it’s harder to get him out when he’s your man than if you had someone from the opposition who might be a little worse and you could get out. So you have to weigh it in each case prayerfully, and that’s about all you can do.

[Audience] But in other words, you do, I know we should vote, this is true, so we go ahead and do it and we’re cutting our throats is what we’re doing.

[Rushdoony] No, we’re not necessarily doing that, because the scripture does tell us this: That God makes all things work together for good to them that love him, to them that are the called according to his purpose. So that God makes even our mistakes work together for good. So that we vote to the best of our knowledge and to the best of our understanding of what our conscience requires us, and we leave the results to God. We do our duty and the results are in God’s hands. Yes?

[Audience] The candidates are kind of like, I was talking to a neighbor of ours {?} public school in my district, that reading groups, they have average, and they have better, and they have best. There is no lowest, it’s kind of like candidates. Worse, worser, and worst

[Audience] That’s pretty good average for the lowest.

[Rushdoony] Yes, Malcolm?

[Audience] {?} very shocking the other day. One of the little neighbor girls, walking across my lawn, {?} a button, must have been 2” in diameter, {?} paying attention to it at first, and then I looked {?} If I wasn’t sitting down, I’d have fallen down. {?}it’s a downward {?}. I looked at her and I said, “Where’d you get that button?” She said, “Oh, I got it down there at the liquor store.”

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is almost up, but since we’ve been talking about a grim subject, hell, I thought I’d end it on a little lighter note. I picked up a magazine the other day, a sample copy of which was sent me, and I encountered something which I think might end things on a slightly lighter note. It’s from a book of letters that Fred Allen wrote, and this one he wrote on June 8, 1932, in considerable indignation to the State of New York Insurance Department to complain about the treatment he’d received on an insurance policy.

“Dear Sir, the solaceness of corporations is something to stun you. I am myself a victim, and instead of being a man of wealth and honor to the community I am now a relic of humanity just from the hands of a surgeon who made an honest effort to restore me to the form in which I grew to manhood’s estate. Let me review my case. I carry accident insurance policy in the _________ Indemnity Company, by terms of which the company agreed to pay me $25 a week (this was 1932), during such time as I was prevented from working because of an accident. I went around last Sunday morning to a new house that is being built for me. I climbed the stairs, or rather the ladder where the stairs will be when the house is finished, and on the top floor I found a pile of bricks which were not needed there. Feeling industrious, I decided to remove the bricks. In the elevator shaft there was a rope and a pulley, and on one end of the rope was a barrel. I pulled the barrel up to the top, and after walking down the ladder, I then fastened the rope firmly at the bottom of the shaft. Then I climbed the ladder again and filled the barrel with bricks. Down the ladder I climbed again by force, mind you, and untied the rope to let the barrel down. The barrel was heavier than I was, and before I had time to study over the proposition as a thoughtful man, I was going up the shaft with my speed increasing at every floor. I thought of letting go of the rope, but before I had decided to do so, I was so high that it seemed more dangerous to let go than hold on. So, I held on. Halfway up the elevator shaft, I met the barrel of bricks coming down. The encounter was brief and spirited. I got the worst of it, but it continued of my way toward the rope. That is, most of me went on, but must of my epidermis clung to the barrel and returned to earth. Then I struck the roof the same time the barrel struck the cellar. The shock knocked the breath out of me and the bottom out of the barrel, and then I was heavier than the empty barrel, and I started down while the barrel started up. We went and met in the middle of our journey, and the barrel uppercut me, pounded my solar flexes, {?} my shins, bruised my body, and skinned my face. When we became untangled, I resumed my downward journey, and the barrel went higher. I was soon at the bottom. I stopped so suddenly that I lost my presence of mind and let go of the rope. This released the barrel, which was at the top of the elevator, and it fell five floors and landed squarely on top of me and landed hard, too.

“Now, here is where the heartlessness of the _________________ Indemnity Company comes in. I sustained five accidents in two minutes. One on my way up the shaft when I met the barrel of bricks, the second when I met the roof, the third when I was descending and I met the empty barrel, the fourth when I struck the barrel, and the fifth when the barrel struck me, but the insurance man says it was one accident, not five, and instead of receiving payment for injuries at the rate of five times twenty-five, I only got one $25 payment. I therefore enclose my policy and ask that you cancel the same, as I have made up my mind that henceforth, I am not to be skinned by either barrel or/and any insurance company. Yours sincerely and regretfully, Fred Allen.”

With that, I think we can stand dismissed.

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