From the Easy Chair

Models and Role Models or Heroes

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 36-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AS82

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AS82, Models and Role Models or Heroes from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 188, February 7, 1989.

Otto Scott and I are now going to discuss models, role models or heroes you could call them or the impact of setting standards in a society through teaching old and young about important figures who have had a powerful impact on man and society and who are to be emulated.

Before going into that, let me say that the word model is a peculiar word, a very important one. The meaning we are giving to it is that of some kind of person who sets a standard and reveals a standard in his life. However, it has another meaning. I recall a story of the foreigner who came here to do some graduate work and stayed on after marrying an American girl to teach here and in the early days when he didn’t know too many of the nuances of English, he was told by his wife that he was really a model husband. So he went to the dictionary to look up the word model and found that it meant a small imitation of the real thing. We are not talking about that kind of model.

Now when I was a boy there were many, many books that I read that dealt with great persons in the past, exciting books about heroes of various countries, about Christian leaders. I can recall, for example one of any number of books that I read of the same sort, one entitled Titus: A Soldier of the Cross about the Titus of the Bible. I can recall very vividly reading about William Wallace the Scottish leader and other like books on American figures, Christian figures of the past, the European leaders and so on.

All these were very important when I was young in giving one a standard, of giving one a kind of guideline as to how men had lived in terms of challenges, problems, great crises facing death and so on. This type of thing is now increasingly disappearing from our culture and from the lives of young people.

Otto, would you like to take off there on that fact or anything?

[Scott] Well, I don’t think it is disappearing so much as it is changing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The type of role model that is put up now is the revolutionary hero, the social... the socialist pioneer, the Che Guevarras, the Mrs. Webb, Eleanor Roosevelt, Althea Gibson, rock stars, pornographic movie actors and actresses, singers and so forth, figures from the world of entertainment, not figures from the world of science or industry, not the military. Military heroes have vanished.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, back in the years immediately after the war there was a terminology that came in that is now forgotten but has left is impact. One South American poet wrote a volume of poetry called Anti Poems. It was in total war against all traditional poetry. And the concept of the anti hero also came in so that the protagonist in novels came to be the anti hero. Instead of someone admirable, he was someone who was a human louse.

[Scott] Well, not so much a human louse, but a loser.

[Rushdoony] Or evil.

[Scott] Well, a... mainly a loser.

[Rushdoony] Very...

[Scott] I keep running into short stories in the New Yorker when I can force myself to read them and they never seem to get out of the kitchen or the garage. They are all tied up with minor domestic matters. And he and she said this and the cat did something else. Very tiny little microcosms of life.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Also this. There is no character development in the modern novel, only action. The same is true of films. Car chases, dramatic action and so on and no character development. In fact, there is a hostility to it. I read to you yesterday something from Plowshares which is a literary journal subsidized by the state of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Well, the introduction to a short story by one writer, Kathy Carr, has this to say and I quote, “Mattie, the sister-in-law in the story, was first designed as a portrait of a male relative, but changed gender as the writing progressed. Readers not privy to that kind of information might have assumed, as I would have, that if any character was first imagined as a male it would have been the wondering Claire. This detail is but a small indication of the clear eyed freshness that Kathy Carr brings to her original, but deeply convincing material.”

[Scott] Now after reading that how can you say there is no character development? I should think a changing gender is a considerable development.

[Rushdoony] Well, I defy you to read it and to be able to describe...

[Scott] Anybody...

[Rushdoony] ... any other characters.

[Scott] Government... government sponsored writing of fiction in the United States sounds so much like the writers’ union of the Soviet republic that it makes my teeth ache. I can’t imagine how anybody ever got the government to pay for a work of fiction. The National Endowment for the Arts ought to have its head examined.

[Rushdoony] Well, this is one of a number of periodicals all equally stupid that the National Endowment, federal funds make possible.

[Scott] What for?

[Rushdoony] Yes, a good question. But if they had a meaning such as we believe in, they would not get the subsidies.

[Scott] It is the... they wouldn’t subsidize the Christian writers.

[Rushdoony] Oh, no.

[Scott] To make a Christian poem, because that would be, what? Violating the First Amendment?

[Rushdoony] Yes. It is the anti hero, the anti poem, the anti traditional story....

[Scott] Well, the...

[Rushdoony] ... that appeals.

[Scott] The term anti hero really began, I think... I am not too sure about it, but I really think it began as the protagonist who was against tradition and against a traditional role of the hero, much as there was an argument some years back saying that men ought to be able to cry because it would help them to become more human. Now I haven’t cried since I was five years old and I can’t, although lots of sad things have happened to me in the course of my life. None of them have ever brought me to tears, because I just wasn’t raised to that sort of tradition.

[Rushdoony] Or didn’t like your Irish...

[Scott] It is not a... it is not part of the... not part of my psyche. I can feel sad, but I don’t weep. Now I am not saying that there is anything wrong with weeping. It is fine if.... if... if it gives relieve, that is all right. That is the other fellow’s business. But the whole business of behaving in a masculine manner has lost its definition in this country. The same thing is true, of course, of femininity.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Of what constitutes a woman. And I remember talking to, of all people, the commissioner of corrections in New York City who was a woman, a Jewish woman, very interesting. And one of her comments. This was about 20 years ago, was that American women were no longer taking care of men. They were no longer kind to men. And this was... it was a very interesting observation. I can’t think of her name off hand, but she was a politician, had worked with Al Smith when he was governor of New York and was commissioner of corrections and it was one of her last jobs. It was a very good job and very good commissioner.

Now she and I shared, of course, and you, too, a certain attitude. And I suppose we are much more creatures of our time and our generation than we ordinarily like to believe, because we grew up surrounded by certain yardsticks, certain road signs, certain totems, certain directions. And then if we live long enough we find ourselves in a new part of the map where the signs are all changed, the directions are different. This is what we are really confronted with, where a comedian working for Tom Lipscomb or one of the authors that Tom printed when he printed me with his early publishing company wrote a book about George Washington’s expense account.

Now I don’t...

[Rushdoony] A horrible book.

[Scott] Yes. I...

[Rushdoony] Dishonest.

[Scott] Yes. And I don’t think this comedian ever realized that George Washington was paid in continental dollars which were depreciating dollars. So that you had to have 15 or 20 times as many to recompense you for an earlier expenditure. He took this as the surface figures as an effort to prove that George Washington was a dishonest man.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now, of course, if I were to write a book about some other great statesman of another culture or country in these same times I would be considered prejudiced, but I guess writing a book against George Washington means that you are broad minded.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I read that book very carefully and, of course, from beginning to end he treated Washington with disrespect and contempt as a man who did nothing but pad his expense accounts and on the concluding page he had a vague reference to the fact that we really don’t know how much the continental dollars were worth.

Well, it wouldn’t have taken more than a slight amount of study on his part to find out that they were worthless.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And that Washington was losing money steadily. He took no pay. He only asked for expenses and was not really getting them. He was getting a lot of worthless paper.

[Scott] Yes. This is why the soldiers at Valley Forge were starving.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because they had worthless continental dollars while they Hessians had gold coins with which to buy their food from the farmers. That simple fact is never taught.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the fact that Washington, the wealthiest, one of the wealthiest men in the colonies put his fortune at risk is totally ignored. The things that are ignored in this area is very interesting. When you and I were in England together picked up one of the English papers and I saw a description in there of our Stars and Stripes which came from the coat of arms of the Washington family in Britain. It didn’t come from Barbara Fritchie at all.

[Rushdoony] Or... you mean Betsy Ross.

[Scott] Betsy Ross.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Yes, no. It didn’t. So but what Washington remains a vague figure in this century. In the 19th century he was held very high.

[Rushdoony] Yes and everything is done to try to show that he was really not a Christian. Nothing is said about the fact that he normally refused to receive visitors on Sundays and gave himself to prayer and some fasting or that he had a standing order as commander both in the French and Indian War and the War of Independence, that any man who took the Lord’s name in vain was to receive 40 lashes, because the American troops needed the Lord’s blessing, not his judgment.

[Scott] Well, now that was a city ordinance in the town ordinance all through the United States up to the 1840s. The gold rush broke the pattern. They came back from the gold rush blasphemous and from then on it became increasingly blasphemous. But up until then, blasphemy was an offense against the community and it was punishable by jail or by fine. And one of the things that really gets me is that the western movie is now portraying the Americans of the 19th century as rapists, as perverts, as thieves, as murderers, et cetera, when this was not the case. Our history is being trashed.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...by individuals who are out to do us in.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And there was an interesting thing written some time back by one man who was very knowledgeable on the history of the west and it was about High Noon, Gary Cooper in High Noon and how everyone deserted him. No one would stand against him, against the three killers who were coming back to get him. And he said that was a modern story applying to our time, because in that time every good man in the community would have been there with his gun.

[Scott] And a rope.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And he said we have falsified the history of the past by projecting our own immoral and cowardly perspectives on people of the last century.

[Scott] Well, it is very true. And if you look at the daguerreotypes of the faces of the last century, you will notice a difference in the face.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They look differently than the men of today.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] When we make a western movie today the actors do not look as they did a century or more ago. Their faces are too soft. Or else their faces are too lined and corrupt. They don’t have that clean rawboned look, that look that my grandfather McGivney had that I remember from my early childhood. He worked in the brick yards. They made brick. He worked very hard and there wasn’t any spare flesh on him.

[Rushdoony] Well, the west, as you use it in the films and on television is nothing like the real west. They talk about Dodge City and write about it and Abilene and Tombstone as though these were wild cities that continued wild indefinitely. They were rarely the wild cities depicted for more than a year, because by the end of that time the churches with the women and the businessmen had cleaned up the city and compelled the hoodlums to live,... or leave.

[Scott] And the clergy and the judge and the law. Even the law west of the Pecos, Judge Roy Beam that they make so much fun about was law. Men were hanged.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] For crime.

[Rushdoony] The only place where you had a continuing problem was in one or two places notably San Francisco where you had a court city and with the wealth you had the Sydney Ducks, a particularly vicious group coming in and Seattle for a time, both places as a jumping off point for the gold rush in Alaska. But those were the exception.

[Scott] You had the five corners in New York City where the Irish gangs kept the law out and so forth. It was dangerous to go in. It didn’t last too long.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] But going back to the heroes. Who were your heroes when you were a boy?

[Rushdoony] Well, they were some of the great figures of Scripture. They were George Washington. They were men like Wallace of Scotland. They were a number of the notable figures of history. And the number of books that were available then to boys was legion.

[Scott] I agree.

[Rushdoony] There was one writer, Henty.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Do you remember Henty?

[Scott] Oh, yes, oh very much, Captain Marriott.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Oh, sure.

[Rushdoony] His books were marvelous in that for a generation or more they had a profound effect on boys.

[Scott] Well, we had old English literature, if you recall.

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Scott] And... and the... the great heroes of... of the British Isles, Sir Walter Raleigh and the rest. And when I go by handful or used to go by and see a handful of adolescents crooning together on a corner today I know that their heroes are rock stars.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] What a difference. What a difference. We read about West Point.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We read about people who gave their lives for their country.

[Rushdoony] Well, I read and others that I went to school with. It was nothing exceptional, book after book by Sir Walter Scott, James Fennimore Cooper and a number of other writers. Of course, also Washington Irving.

[Scott] Yes. The... I like The Spy and the others. Well, we read the same books. You and I have gone through this.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And Dickens, of course.

[Scott] We read the same books and Dickens was interesting because he had villains and he had heroes.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the English are unique in this sense that they managed to keep their villains human even while being villainous.

[Rushdoony] In grade school I also read, in fact, we studied Shakespeare.

[Scott] Yes. I don't know whether they study Shakespeare anymore.

[Rushdoony] I doubt it.

[Scott] We studied, I remember The Merchant of Venice and several others.

[Rushdoony] I used to know long passages of Macbeth by heart and also Julius Caesar.

[Scott] Well, of course, that brings in Plutarch and the... in our time Churchill assumed heroic stature.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And yet I can think of very few other figures. There has been a steady diminution, a steady shrinkage...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] There is almost an argument now that there is no such thing as a hero, because the most modern biographies now delve into the sexual side of the subject. This is the only thing they have got to add. There is no new information otherwise. But that provides a salacious interest which then makes for a sale. And yet this is the one area that is nobody’s business except God’s.

There is a sort of a break down on this whole idea of privacy.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Also a lot of what they write if it is a great and noble figure, is conjecture.

[Scott] Well, it is an evil conjecture.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I remember reviewing a book on William Pitt the younger when I was reviewing books of the San Diego Union and the LA Times. And one of my acquaintances said, “I read your review of William Pitt the Younger and from what I can gather he had no sex life whatever.”

And I said, “Why do you care?”

[Rushdoony] Well, we live in an age when even the sex life of the earth were a myth subject to monographs.

[Scott] Apparently so. But it brings up the question of a hero. Now the popular heroes include criminals. Turpin who wrote The Highwayman of England, for instance.

[Rushdoony] Billy the Kidd.

[Scott] And Billy the Kidd here and Dillinger...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...was a hero to many when he was alive and Pretty Boy Floyd. The gangsters of the 30s...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...were portrayed in the films as heroes. I remember the William G. Robinson...

[Rushdoony] Oh, yes.

[Scott] ... {?} whatever his name was. I have forgotten now in little Caesar.

[Rushdoony] Well, one of the most popular films of the 30s was 42nd Street. And the theme song had a line it, “There side by side...” Well, something about where are the elite and the underworld meet. And that was glorified because it was something marvelous and democratic in that, the elite and the criminal element were meeting there in the night light of 42nd Street.

[Scott] Well, of course, then moved into something else. It moved into the ... in the post war period, the post World War II period it moved into the revolutionists as heroes.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Che Guevara, Castro.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Mao Tse Tung, Cho en Lai, Lenin, of course, for many long before that. And I suppose for some Danny Ortega and the Sandinistas.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Power at the end of a gun. Or the terrorist groups are heroes to the ones who send them out. The Arabs have their heroes in terms of the fighters against Israel and vice versa. The Stern gang and so forth are heroes to the Israelis.

So we have something else. We have the murderer as hero, because the essence of terror, terrorism, political terrorism in the modern sense is somebody who kills innocent and unarmed people.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And that is, of course, murder. Now the argument is that they are not heroes, of course, because the ones that are on the other side are not heroes.

[Rushdoony] Well...

[Scott] the... the ... the people in South Africa that are killing, tire burning and so forth are heroes to some, are being held aloft as heroes to the black community of the United States.

[Rushdoony] Well, life has become very cheap. The average child by the time he or she finishes school has witnessed on television an on the films thousands upon thousands of murders on the screen and has become calloused to the entire subject of murder. And they have rarely ever seen anything of men of greatness, of character, of faith to emulate.

[Scott] Well, it is interesting, because if you cannot see virtue triumphant, you don't believe in it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

Otto, that point you just made is very important. We are no longer giving our children or adults of that matter any picture of virtue triumphant or virtue as worth triumphing. And the implications of that for our culture are devastating.

[Scott] Well, virtue has been diminished to the single point of anti racism. That comprises all now that is called virtue. But there is a great deal more to virtue than that. There is the whole question of standing up, of being truthful, of being honest, of fulfilling one’s obligations, of protecting the weak, of defending people against injustice. The are all sorts of variations of virtue. Now virtue has become a matter of opinions...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] As we say it was before, to have the right opinions. But these opinions are very often moot. I remember a friend of mine in New York who asked me what is a good man. And I said I don’t know. What? He said a man who does good. I said how does he know? Because, you know, a lot of things that we do with the best of intentions don’t come out the way we intend. The best we can say is that we try to do what is right.

[Rushdoony] A few years ago an educator in New Jersey dealt with the subject of role models in education. And he referred to the book which throughout the 70s was very influential and used in high schools across the country, The Naked Ape.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And he said we have given our youth the worst possible role model. We have told them that they are a naked ape, essentially. And should we be surprised at the way they have acted? Of course, evolution has done that. It, in effect, denies the nature of man as a creation of God. It denies his destiny. It reduces him to a naked ape and therefore with that doctrine there is a progressive deterioration of the behavior of each generation.

[Scott] Well, the argument, of course is that we are creatures of instinct. There is a biological determinism, so to speak.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Darwin opened the gates of racism when he talked about the superiority of certain races in the struggle for existence. And yet the individuals who pride themselves on being anti racist also pride themselves on their worship of Darwin.

We have here, but if you don’t ever as a boy see fully grown men doing the right thing and winning, you don’t know what it is. I think of the children in the inner city whose role models are pimps and drug dealers and robbers and muggers.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Like the fellow in the pool hall who talks about a big score and doesn’t realize that is the man sitting in the bank who is making the money, the man who is sitting at the top of the corporation that he has struggled for many years to attain to who is making the money, that honestly not only pays, but it pays tremendous dividends. This is never said.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] We have movies now, The Pink Panther which is a very funny movie, of course, but there is no moral. If there is no moral there is no purpose and if there is no purpose, then you are at the mercy of the wind.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well if there is no purpose in the universe for these people, how can they have purpose in their novels, stories, poems, films or anything.

[Scott] Well, they are... seem to be writing for the idea of convincing you that this is hell. There is a cartoonist, you know, who is now drawing cartoons titled “Live in Hell.”

[Rushdoony] Oh, I haven’t seen that.

[Scott] Well, they are very funny. I just saw one of his larger panels recently and it has elder sister talking to younger sister saying, “You know absolutely nothing and I know everything.” And it goes on from there.

Now this is a complete switch.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In something like, I would say, two generations, maybe a generation and a half, our entire intellectual attention has been taken away from what is positive and what is beneficial to what is wrong, what is bad and what is destructive.

[Rushdoony] Well, one of the things that Darwinism did was to overthrow the old Christian concept of the ultimate harmony of all interests, because God created all things and all things are going to serve his purpose. In its place you had the struggle for survival, nature read in tooth and claw, the ultimate conflict of interests.

[Scott] That is right.

[Rushdoony] So...

[Scott] This is why... this is why Marx loved him so much.

[Rushdoony] Oh yes.

[Scott] The class... the class struggle has given a biological and a scientific seal of approval.

[Rushdoony] That is why he wrote to him and wanted to dedicate his next book to him, because, as he told Engels, we will triumph now because here is the biological basis for our theory.

Well, with this concept of the conflict of interests, one of the things it did to the family, a very devastating thing was to replace the idea of the family and the kin as a unity as a fraternity of love wit sibling rivalry.

[Scott] I like the language.

[Rushdoony] ... a modern concept. The idea that brothers and sisters or brothers and brothers, sisters and sisters are always going to be in conflict.

[Scott] Now I heard that discussed just the other day by Anne Merton who has been handling so many foster children so successfully and she said she had to attend a foster parents class and one of the questions arose was whether sibling rivalry was inevitable or not. And Anne said ugly behavior is ugly behavior under any term.

[Rushdoony] Well, they have educated a generation into this so that you actually find, as I have occasionally, people who are only going to have one child, because they are going to avoid the problem of sibling rivalry.

[Scott] That is the environmental.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...solution. You change the environment. You see, they don’t have any siblings.

[Rushdoony] Well, the old sense of family is gone with many people.

[Scott] Well it is very difficult to retain the family when the family is the objet of persecution by the state and most of the institutions of society. All that I could gather as a parent that remained to me was my obligations. I had not particular authority. But I had to pay the bills and I had to be responsible. Otherwise, speaking as a father, I had not authority particularly at all.

[Rushdoony] Well, I remember a few years ago and I have forgotten the name of the person, someone who was a very old fashioned rural person speaking about a relative and they were going to have to do something for this relative, and I said, “But you don’t like him and he is a stinker.”

And his response was, “But he is my cousin.”

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And I have a responsibility.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Now that is gone for the most part. It is not the common perspective any longer.

[Scott] Well, all right. We go back to he hero. Let’s go back to the hero. Very seldom do you read anything that is novels like Sorrow and Son, by Warren Deeping. Do you remember that?

[Rushdoony] Vaguely, yes.

[Scott] Well, it was an interesting novel, because Sorrow was an army officer whose wife left him at the end of World War I and he couldn’t find a job in civilian life commensurate with his background. So he went to work as a porter in a hotel carrying the luggage. And he remained, he finally worked himself up to head porter and he remained in that humble post for a number of years and he set his only son to medical school and just about the time that his son got through as a physician and was beginning to practice Sorrow died. That is the outline of the plot. But what it is, is a story of a good man who led a good life and who raised a good son. And I doubt if that sort of a story could make it again.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But it was a best seller in its day.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And in that era and before, even the non Christian still maintained something of character. He had a Christian background.

[Scott] Oh, yes.

[Rushdoony] And it showed.

[Scott] It was taken as for granted that this was a Christian {?}.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I recall I read a lot of H. G. Wells and H. G. Wells was a socialist and he was anti Christian and yet in the early pages of one of his novels he set the temper and it was with one sentence. And it was this. I have never forgotten it. Brave men do... brave men are men who do the things they are afraid to do.

Now that kind of perspective was once commonplace. Here was a man who was going to face all kinds of problems, all kinds of conflicts that were going to fill him with fear, but he was going to meet them. He was going to triumph in the face of them.

[Scott] He was going to rise to the challenge.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He was going to overcome the temptation. He was going to act as though he had faith. He wasn’t going to give way to his weaknesses and so forth in any area.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] And this, of course, is ... has always been the great theme of literature.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the great purpose of life. Every man’s life becomes evident, the purpose and meaning, the significance of every life becomes immediately apparent when he dies, the minute he dies, but not until then. And it is a very interesting thing, because I have had a number of friends die, as you have, and you suddenly become aware of what he was, who he was, what he did, what he stood for when he dies. And, of course, that is the time of judgment. Until he dies, what was it the Greek said? Count no man happy while he yet lives, because until he dies you don’t really know. There may be another challenge. There is always another challenge. The challenges never stop.

This is what I got out of my early days, early reading days and the hints that my father used to drop. He was a great man for giving you cues. He never gave you a lecture. He gave you a cue and if you carried that around and chewed on that for a while.

I don’t really know how young boys are growing into men today because when I was a boy and when you were a boy we had large areas of freedom in which we measured one another. We competed with one another. We learned from the other fellow what was the right and the wrong thing to do. Now that the children are no longer safe outside of the home, now that they can’t go anywhere on their own, yet they are monitored from morning till night by adults it seems to me that the parent is faced with a burden of what the world used to help teach.

[Rushdoony] Well, basic to good literature as well as to life over the generations, has been the fact that history, as well as stories, represent a conflict between good and evil.

[Scott] Always.

[Rushdoony] But what it has become in recent years is not the conflict between good and evil, but a conflict between freedom and unfreedom. You are going to throw off restraints. You are going to be yourself.

[Scott] No, I wouldn’t say that. I think what people are being taught now is that they cannot be themselves. They must be what they are supposed to be according to the ruling liberal ethos.

[Rushdoony] Well, in that sense being yourself in terms of the standard set by the ethos.

[Scott] Obey.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Right now it isn’t be yourself, it is obey. You have no right of selective association. You know, somebody told me they went in a store in Connecticut and there was a sign up in the store that said, “Discrimination is against the law.” And I said, “Well, yes.” But one of the definitions of discrimination is choice. Is choice against the law?

[Rushdoony] Increasingly, yes.

[Scott] Yes, it is. So we have something else. We don’t have freedom. Freedom is a word that I think has been dropped from the lexicon.

[Rushdoony] Only in the sense of freedom from morality, freedom from the past, freedom from Christianity.

[Scott] Well, ... well, you are free of Christianity. But, of course, you were always free of Christianity if you wanted to be. The Church never pursued you.

[Rushdoony] Well, they mean back by freedom that you are spared the sight of a crèche at Christmas, spared the hearing of carols, spared hearing church bells, because they are banned in some communities.

[Scott] Noise pollution.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Spared any number of things that might confront you with the faith.

[Scott] Well, of course, I suppose one of the things about the hero... now we have ethnic heroes at the expense of more traditional heroes.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Is this a form of racism?

[Rushdoony] It is, I believe. The fact that someone like Dr. George Washington Carver is forgotten now whereas not too many years ago there were books for children and adults about him.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And about all his remarkable contribution. But he was not interested in the civil rights revolution. He was effecting his own revolution. So Martin Luther King is now a hero.

[Scott] Well, his holiday is celebrated and Washington’s is not.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] Washington’s birthday is not celebrated today. We have president’s day, instead. But we have a separate day for Martin Luther King. So he has displaced George Washington as an American hero.

[Rushdoony] By act of Congress, not by popular demand.

[Scott] Well, of course, the matter was not put to a vote.

[Rushdoony] Well, there is no real enthusiasm. The media promotes it heavily every year. But I have never seen either on the part of the liberals or conservatives, of course, any real enthusiasm for Martin Luther King’s day.

[Scott] There is a sort of a flatness that is emerging here.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Something like the, you know, that it was one of the commissars in Russia who decided that the country could not live without a religion. And therefore he decided to make a religion out of Communism and a god out of Lenin. And he organized this around Lenin’s death, around Lenin’s tomb, around the mummy that they created of Lenin’s cadaver and then the banners going down the street on May Day and so forth carrying the great icons of the revolutionary gods and it lasted for quite a while. I don’t now how it is doing today, but they had almost around the clock pilgrimages to Lenin’s tomb.

[Rushdoony] Well, years ago, before World War II there were certain holidays that had community observances that were very important and you just felt that it was morally wrong not to turn out. And they were Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and, of course, the parades, the public observances, the religious activities on those days were considerable. And Arbor Day was another day when you thought about the future. In those days the planting of trees was a national thing on Arbor Day.

Well, today we talk a great deal about conservation, but it is talk. Arbor Day was a practical thing. So there have been dramatic changes. We have become an era where paper affirmations have replaced the living realties.

[Scott] Well, of course, if you do this, if you set up saw dust figures imposed upon the people which is what the French Revolution did. Do you remember? They set up a whole series of artificial state declared festivals.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The festival of he harvest and the festival of other things. They had very fancy poetic names culminating in the great festival to the supreme being headed by Robespierre. And, in fact, it was his last great public appearance. He had his clothes specially made for the purpose and everything else. And it was at that point that this crazy woman claimed that she had been impregnated by Robespierre at a distance because he was God and she was the new virgin Mary.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And everybody began to laugh. And the ridiculousness of the thing because she was a horrible old hag. And the ridiculousness of it began to shatter his great reputation.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Ridicule. They began to laugh.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, nobody is laughing here. But you know, we are seeing an awful lot of mock heroism and mock festivals. Now all of our holidays are on three day holidays. The calendar has been wiped out.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] The government has decided in its great wisdom that all holidays are going to run from Friday to... through Sunday.

[Rushdoony] What we need is more laughter at Washington and the state capitals, the politicians, because they are the gods of our society. I am glad to see some of it coming in. I told you about the bumper sticker I saw recently.

[Scott] What was that?

[Rushdoony] Which read, “Don’t steal. The government doesn’t like the competition.”

[Scott] Bumper sticker like graffiti are very, very... very pertinent, very revealing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

Well, I think what we are going to see in the days ahead is a return to an older and a more godly perspective, much more so than we have ever seen. We are seeing Christian men take a stand here and abroad.

I was startled and I won’t attempt to reproduce anything about the number of Christians who are dying for the faith every day somewhere around the world, a considerable number, Africa and Asia and elsewhere. And men going to prison in this country from time to time of their faith, because of their home schooling or their church or their Christian school. So this is godly heroism. It is a manifestation of a faith that will not buckle under threat of tyranny.

[Scott] Well, I can’t forget what McCauley said about the real faith. He said people who are a part of an unpopular movement have real faith. When that movement becomes popular, all sorts of frauds join.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Then, he said, it looses its essence. And I would say that to be a Christian in the United States today and to run the penalties that this implies, I have to smile really when I read about these individuals who say that they were discriminated against as children. I was raised in New York and I never saw ay of those discriminatory practices that I read about. None of my friends ever took part in such behavior or even expressed such attitudes, but I can say as a Christian later working in New York, I encountered discrimination...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... of the most brutal sort.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I know exactly what it tastes like and what it feels like to be on the receiving end and I do not like those who take a noble position while they are kicking me.

[Rushdoony] Ye. That is especially irritating, because these people are perhaps the most notable Pharisees of all history. They hold a position which is pure verbalism and which rules out of court anyone who dissents with them. They are the truth incarnate. And their position represents virtue.

Well, our time is nearing an end. Do you have a final statement, Otto, before we conclude?

[Scott] Well, I would say that since we started with heroism and role models, there is lots of heroes in the Christian side of the fence. And I think it would be a good thing for us to begin to honor and recognize those whom we admire of our faith.

[Rushdoony] Very well said. Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.