From the Easy Chair

Fashion vs Reality

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 42-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AV88

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AV88, Fashion vs Reality from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 204, September 25, 1989.

Otto Scott and I are now going to discuss the subject of fashions versus reality. We could call the term fashions also fads, things that are superficial in a society as against the hard realities. The fact is today, of course, that the superficialities govern most people. It is to just youth. If you look around, you will find that our teenagers and our college youth are largely governed by fads, by superficialities, to by the basic trends of a society. In fact, the trends are usually obscured because they are reality.

To illustrate, today the most important single fact in the United States is that from 1968 to 1988, in 20 years the number of born again Christians have increased from about 40 million to 91 million. But you would never know from picking up a newspaper or listening to television that there is very powerful trend, that there is a re Christianization of our society. So we have a culture in which fashions govern, not reality.

Now I am going to read something to tell you why this kind of thing is happening. It is H. L Nieburg’s, N I E B U R G, Culture Storm: Politics and the Ritual Order, published in 1973.

Now this is what this scholar has to say. I quote. “All truth has a provisional and political basis. There is no absolute sense in which one theory is more or less true than another. Something is true because people are disposed to act as though it were. A truth is only absolute among believers who share the same values and who deem the truth so obvious as to be beyond challenge.

“When scientists discover theories, they are, in fact, inventing them. For in the words of Simon Kuznets, ‘The order which they bring into the structure of the universe is of their own contriving even though the test lies in an agreement between theoretical conclusions and operational data mirroring the real world.’”

And then Nieburg concludes this passage, “Reality and truth are the product of social invention, fantasy and ritual.”

[Scott] One wonders if... wouldn’t you like to be able to ask him if he thought he was alive?

[Rushdoony] Well, there might be a good question there whether or not he is.

[Scott] Well, mentally he is... he is in a dream world.

[Rushdoony] Yes. But that is basic to the modern outlook. He is describing what any number of books tell us, what our high school children and grade school children are taught and values clarifications courses. Reality is something of your own making, as values are.

[Scott] Well, a fantasy world.

[Rushdoony] A fantasy world. So they have... we have a fantasy culture.

[Scott] Well, we have something else. We... I will have to bring the matter down closer to what I can comprehend. A writer like that is somebody that I admire you for being able to read him. I ... I simply could not do it. And I was reading recently from a set called “Social England.” And it really... it is put together by a compendium of writers beginning around 1894 or so and these are classic historians because religion is part of the description of the life of society that they provide. And there is a point here on the reigns of Elizabeth, James and Charles where, as you know, Puritanism became distinctly unfashionable. So the Puritans became target of lampoons and cartoons and satires and plays and songs and everything else, the theater, Ben Johnson and the others dumped on them, to use the modern idiom. And the Puritans did not, by the way, attack the court which was voluptuous under an elegant but an unrealistic...

[Rushdoony] And homosexual under James.

[Scott] ...and... and depraved under James and stupid and extravagant under Charles. Well, the Puritans didn’t attack the court. They left the courtiers to go their own way. But their abstention from fashion made them conspicuous.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And as time passed, they became more and more unfashionable. When every color was permitted men to wear except black they decided on black. When everyone else was wearing a rough, they decided on a soft lace collar and so forth. When hair was long they cut theirs short. That is how they were called round heads. And as the ridicule continued, tell us that even the drunks in the tavern which spew their dislike of the Puritans. He said that silence as it continued became an increasingly ominous indication of the civil war to come.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now that is so close to your parallel in... in an expanding Christian community that is so unfashionable that it its very existence isn’t even mentioned.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And you think of that and you think of the silence of this committee, of this community, this emerging community, this... this widening community. You and I have often criticized it for being silent. But there is another aspect of that silence. There is a significance to silence. In an argument when a man falls silence it is a... it is a bad sign. It doesn’t mean he has been overcome. It doesn’t mean he has been convinced. When he stops arguing verbally, the silence is a prelude to a stiff punch to the nose or worse. And there have been a lot of imposed silences in the United States under the rubric of what is unfashionable and what is fashionable.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, this author makes a very interesting point. He is brilliant, completely wrong headed, but brilliant. And let me read this sentence. “Andy Warhol creates pop art by focusing all the attention and reverence due to the sacred on the most banal and familiar objects,” unquote.

In other words, as he says, the new reality is created by smashing at what people believe is true reality. What we Christians believe, although he avoids the real confrontation by saying, “Christianity believes in absolutes. It believes that God made the world and everything is real and there is a day of reckoning and that the wages of sin are always death.” No. What he calls attention to is that these people who have created this culture storm, as he calls it, are lashing out precisely against what we believe is sacred and holy and good and true so they take as Andy Warhol did to make a soup can and paint it.

[Scott] Well, this is what the faggots call camp.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They... they replaced art with camp.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And it is really a form of artistic satire.

[Rushdoony] Well, he goes on to say that this is why things are happening as they are and he... it is not that he is against them happening. But he said the students of the 60s had to carry their things each time one step forward so it meant that they had to urinate and defecate in public. They had to use four letter words, nudism, public fornications and much more, because they had to smash the old reality to create the new.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But they didn’t create the new. The interesting thing about this is that everything collapsed around them. They created nothing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because the weapon they chose was destructive and not creative.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now what have they created? Andy Warhol... you know, I have a... I had a friend, an acquaintance, really, an artist in New York who told me that he was given a commission to set up a booth for some Midwesterner’s manufacturing. I don’t know what sort of a convention. We had big conventions in New York, as you know. And this all came about because I was at his place and he said, “Would you like to hear the music that I put together for this particular exhibit?”

And I said, “Sure.”

Well, he turned it on for a few minutes and I said, “Turn it off. I can’t stand it. It is terrible, awful.” It was an insult to the... to the ear. And he laughed. He thought it was very funny. And said... I said, “Well, what is it?”

He said, well, this is some music that he took that he played backwards. And, of course, it was full of dissonances and everything else. And he said they were so cowardly, these people who hired him that they wouldn’t say it was lousy. So they let him go ahead and play it.

I said, “Well, that is... that is pretty funny.” But of course, I said, “I will never see them again and you will never... you will only have the memory of their money the next year.” So I said, “It is an expensive joke for you, because everyone that they will ever come close to they will tell, ‘Stay away from that fellow, he is poison.’”

And this is what happened to all those people.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, Nieburg says that at every point it has been necessary to go one step further and to assault the old reality. For example, and I will quote, again, “The weathermen who conducted a destructive three hour binge of window breakage in Chicago described their arrest as a continuation of fascist repression of dissent.”

[Scott] I hate the fact that you are reading this to me. I would much rather have the man here.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And then what you... you place me in a position to answering arguments with a fellow who is absent, because these are incomplete statements.

[Rushdoony] Granted, but I brought this because we are discussing fashions, fads as against reality.

[Scott] Well, now the fashion...

[Rushdoony] And I thought that this book would fit exactly what is happening around us.

[Scott] Yes, but it doesn’t go far enough, because the only people that were sucked into this fashion were the idiots in the media.

[Rushdoony] Of course.

[Scott] And in the colleges.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the kind of idiots who believe whatever they read or whatever they are told by what they consider the fashion setters. Ninety percent of the people of the United States wouldn’t shoot these kids, wouldn’t waste a bullet on them. In fact, we would have to take something from the lexicon of the Chinese Communists who charged the families for the cost of the bullet. Now that is contempt. They have a... they planted contempt in this country. They... the fashion is a false fashion.

[Rushdoony] Of course.

[Scott] A real fashion is closer to sports.

[Rushdoony] Yes, but this explains the rationale of so much that is going on. There is another thing he says that having warred against religion—although he isn’t honest enough to say that—what is the sacred now? It is the fine arts.

[Scott] Oh, the faggots are sacred.

[Rushdoony] Of course. But it is anyone who calls himself a representative of the new culture. He has a new idea, a painting, a dancing, a singing, a composing. It may be pure garbage but the point is because it is, it is the sacred. It is a total war with everything that we represent. So we have now a new definition of the sacred and the profane. Everything that we have regarded as sacred is now profane.

[Scott] I think you give them too much credit. I really do. I really do. It is not widespread. It is not true. The newspapers may convince you, but that is not the case.

[Rushdoony] Well, Otto, I agree with you, but I have got to say they control television. They control Hollywood. They control...

[Scott] Just as... just as the court sponsored the theater in the time of the Puritans and even the taverns and the music and Cambridge and Oxford, the whole establishment.

[Rushdoony] They are controlling the whole establishment now.

[Scott] But they have created an illusion. They created an illusion. In the end they were all swept away.

[Rushdoony] Yes. But think of the disaster and the horrors it created and it is... could lead to now. You see, what it does is...

[Scott] Well, that is what I am saying is that we are in the middle of it.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I couldn’t agree more. Meanwhile we are anathema.

[Scott] To whom?

[Rushdoony] We are intolerable.

[Scott] To people whom we don’t give a damn about.

[Rushdoony] Except that they block us from the mass of people. They control the money, the trusts, the foundations that have the money to give away.

[Scott] I wouldn’t... you know, the silence of going back to that thing again.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Most of the art that I see now in most places I go to when I travel is representational and to abstract. The Andy Warhol diaries are very interesting. I didn’t read them. I haven’t got that much patience.

[Rushdoony] Nor I. {?}

[Scott] But Anne... Anne... Anne browsed through them and would give me excerpts from them and to my... I didn’t realize that the art dealers of New York City, the galleries of New York city are part of the homosexual network.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And that in order to get in there the students, the painter had to go along with all of that. And they have a... a coterie, you might say, that go in and buy these things. But they... the great increase in art has been representational art. The biggest productions in the theater recently have been Andrew Lloyd Weber who is bringing back opera in another form, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and so forth. The sports, I would think, actually presents a more interesting fashion because it has... sports, of course, have certain value. There is... there is a meritocracy at work. There is a plot at work. There is a beginning, a middle and an end. It comes to a clear cut conclusion. Somebody wins. Somebody uses. There is certain skill involved and it doesn’t matter what your color or your ethnic background. It is all based upon the application of a skill.

I think we have gone crazy on the sports question. I mean they... they are building these great arenas all over the country is carrying us into the Roman thing where people are escaping from life in spectator sports.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I think the horrible examples that you have been inflicting on me here is greatly exaggerated.

[Rushdoony] Well, Otto, perhaps. Certainly the media does exaggerate the importance of this kind of thing. On the other hand they have the millions and write out the checks for Chalcedon, for you, for everyone on the staff. And I know where we stand with the public. Not very high. So we have a crisis. The reality is here. We are doing the Lord’s work. And most of the United States doesn’t give a damn about the Lord’s work. They are good people, good with quotes. I am not going to get involved, but don’t you try to involve me in these things and don’t wake me up out of my slumber.

[Scott] But you said earlier the number of Christians has doubled.

[Rushdoony] Yes. We are increasingly becoming stronger. A lot of these are weak, but we are going to gain. But meanwhile this is a real problem. The culture we face is a culture of fads, fashions, of making the worst things in life the holiest.

[Scott] Well, they can’t make it the holiest, obviously. And fashion... nothing wears out quicker than fashion. Fashionable writers, fashionable almost everything become obsolete before they mature. They are like tropical growths. They rot in the ground before they ripen. The ... it is almost impossible to keep track of the various ephemeral fads that come and go in the United States like swallowing goldfish at one time. Whatever they are piling into telephone booths and other, dying their hair green, wearing punk rock clothes, watching horror movies, all this juvenilia. The fact is, though, that it seems to me that the sort of thing you have been describing or that the author described is getting increasingly frantic in that the audience for it outside of the media is getting smaller.

Now we are, I think, heading through the application of the environmental craze. Now there is a fashion. Environmentalism is a fashion right now and it is a fashion that has engulfed the legislators and engulfed the government. The bureaucrats think it is wonderful because it is expanding their power. But it is a fashion which is probably going to carry us into the deepest depression we have yet seen, because it attacks productivity at its core. Now that is a dangerous fashion. Lots and lots of people are going to lose these nice homes before we are through and you know and I know from our own life experience that when adversity actually arrives suddenly people rediscover God.

[Rushdoony] Very, very true. But...

[Scott] In the meantime, of course, it is a real pain to watch all this nonsense going on.

[Rushdoony] The fashions change. The fads replace one another. But the hunger for them continues even thought the particular one is replaced. I saw figures when I was on my trip recently in one of the periodicals I picked up on what entertainers and rock and roll people are making. They are making so much now that they make Dan Rather with his four million a year look as though he is on poverty roll.

[Scott] That is true. I mean, I ... I saw some of these figures myself where they are amassing hundreds of millions of dollars. Michael Jackson, the gloved one, somebody referred to him. He has a marvel of modern surgery, I must say, collecting enormous amounts of money. And, of course, the money itself... look at the... look at the economy. Look at the financial world that we live in today. If we had a system of architecture and engineering in which the basic units of measurement fluctuated every day, it would be awfully difficult to build. But we have a dollar that changes its value every day. You pick up the Wall Street Journal every day to see the quotation on the dollar.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It... it goes up and down. This is the basic unit of our economy. So obviously we are living in an anarchistic financial structure.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] A structure which can’t... cannot possibly survive.

[Rushdoony] No. It cannot survive. But until it crumbles we see these fads, these fashions dominating our society in an appalling way.

[Scott] Well, this is what occurred in the Renaissance. I was very interested to read that before the Renaissance there were no fashion in clothing. In the Middle Ages men wore whatever they chose or whatever seemed practical. There was no fashion in the modern sense. Fashion came in with the Renaissance in Florence where suddenly it became the proper thing to wear certain clothes and an improper thing to not to.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So that, you know, we have to change our suits before we can wear them out because suddenly the cuts are changed and if you try to wear your 20 year old suit, as I occasionally try to do, it... Anne says it doesn’t look quite right.

[Rushdoony] You can get into it?

[Scott] Oh, yes, I can get into it.

[Rushdoony] Good.

[Scott] Temporarily.

[Rushdoony] Well, I told Dorothy on my recent trip that in this one major airport I walked out there coming from a mountain area where fashions and fads don’t exist really, not to the same extent, at least. And here were women, well dressed, obviously well to do, walking around with hairdos that you could only describe as, well, working them over with an egg beater would improve them. And I looked at them and I wondered, how can any woman in her right mind go around looking like that? They were obviously proud of themselves.

[Scott] Well, it is true. They... our women seem to turn together in unison practically into certain kinds of hairdos. I remember at one point in World War II they all began to look like poodles. They all had long curly hair and lots of it.

[Rushdoony] Well, there was a horrible beehives now, a little after that.

[Scott] Well, that was... oh, yes, Great honey comb thing spun.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Like a spun candy on a stick stuff. And I remember that was one of the beehive women who made fun of George Bush at the Democratic Convention. Remember? The Texas woman with the great beehive hairdo. All I... he... he... he couldn’t remember her name either in a later speech. He referred to her as the woman in the beehive.

Those... that sort of thing doesn’t really upset me as much as the more serious fashions, the fashion of… of breaking down the real ideas. And this is, of course, what started you. The fashion of mocking religion. That is a very bad fashion.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And every time that people have indulged in it in the past, it has led to unbelievable violence.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You have to really be historically ignorant not to realize that that is a very dangerous area. And yet people in the United States, the media and many of our leaders have forgotten that the power of religion is enormous. In our previous tape, you know, you said we are on aristocracy. There was an aristocracy here in the beginning of this country. The Washington family goes all the way back to the Magna Charta in England.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And... and they were very well to do. Colonel Washington was a ... a Puritan who had to leave because of religious reasons. His great, great grandfather George Washington, an illustrious family, the stars and stripes came from their family crest.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It didn’t come from Betsy Ross. Our first... our founding generation, you might say, was quite illustrious.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But then through the power of propaganda we began to talk about the country of the common man. It was always a country of the uncommon man actually. But our pride through the generations since then has been given successive beatings by individuals who have come here who for some reason or another become very suffuse with hatred for those they found here already. It was a very strange thing.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, that is a very important point and we will return to it in a moment.

You mentioned George Washington. The aristocracy we did have was unlike the aristocracy of Europe or any aristocracy today, because it was governed by a thoroughly Christian perspective. It was in 1931, 32, in the winter of that year that I recall hearing this Virginian who was here in California at the time discuss something that I thought was very important. He talked to some of us about Washington and Lincoln, contrasting them. And he said something happened once when Washington was at some place or other for a meeting and he said, “I don’t know whether it is in the books about him or not,” but he said, “In our part of Virginia this story was told about him that there was someone who came who was a commoner from the back woods and when they were eating and the soup was served, this man picked up his soup bowl and started to drink out of it and the other men started to snicker. And Washington went on talking to the man and picked up his bowl and started to drink out of it.” And he said Lincoln would never have done that. He would have laughed. But he said that is the kind of man Washington was.

He said, “In my part of the country they still remember that story about him.”

[Scott] That is a very interesting story.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Very, very interesting. And he was a man of character and it was the aristocracy of character that Puritanism created. And that was what we had and, of course, Jefferson himself picked that up and developed it and said that what the United States needed was an aristocracy that came up out of the talent, the intelligence, the abilities, the character of man.

[Scott] A natural aristocracy.

[Rushdoony] An natural aristocracy.

[Scott] And that, of course, I agree with.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And I remember having a conversation when I was 21 with some other young men about the same age and we compared our situation in the United States with that of fellows our age in Europe and we felt very sorry for them, because we said, after all, they have a dossier from the time they first go to school through all through every teacher’s comments, all the way through, then their grades, then their jobs and then what the employer thinks and so forth and they can never escape.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Whereas we, we are free to move from one end of the country to the there to try this or try that or try the other thing and there were no résumés in those days. You would simply go in and apply and if they thought, you know, if you said you thought you could do it they would try you out and if you didn’t do it, they wouldn’t keep you and if you could they did.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But now we are in the European situation.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now it is total. At... at the oil company that I was in, they didn't even interview people that didn't have a degree. They wouldn’t even allow them to be interviewed. Imagine all the talent they cut out.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, to get back to that Washington story, our subject is fashion...

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] ...versus reality.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] And the men around the table there with Washington were being governed by the polite and worthwhile fashions of eating at the table, but Washington was governed by reality. He recognized the caliber of that man. Here was a back woodsman with very little in the way of social graces, but a man with whom he could go a long ways because he knew the character of the man. Now that is living with reality. But today, by and large, the exterior, the externals, the fashion side of a person, the appearance is what governs most people, not the reality.

[Scott] Well, this is the reason I brought up that example, the first {?} certificate of gentility in the American style. The certificate is more important than the individual. That is a fashion.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Our fashion is a mandarin fashion. Then we have certain fashions and ideas of benevolence, of what we should do for the poor. Now in all these millions upon millions of welfare men, welfare women, welfare families. How much training do they receive to make them personally responsible and able to earn a living? So far as I know, none, or relatively none.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because it is better to develop an underclass than it is to allow them to move up. That is the reality.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well...

[Scott] There are lots of ways that fashion interferes with reality, though. That is one.

[Rushdoony] Well, you did refer to the reality earlier when you spoke of the fact that judgment was coming on all these fashions and the people who belong to that world.

[Scott] Well, we will say... we have such a thing as a lost generation. They do exist.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Through the exigencies of war and depression there are a great many dreams that were destroyed in the 30s because of the Depression, plans that never came to fruition and men who were at critical periods of their career who were too old after that to pick up the same momentum and the same opportunity. That is the sort of thing which is confronting these people who have forgotten reality here. And it is interesting, because there is a depression in Colorado. There is another depression in Nevada, Arizona and Texas.

There is a softening of the economy in Massachusetts. Peggy Philips told me that Dukakis is the most hated man in Massachusetts history. She said every house up there seems to have a for sale sign on it. And, she said, the legislature of Massachusetts was arguing about their impossible economic situation up to the eve of the democratic convention and they pasted something together so that they could say it would be all right. And the newspapers never once exposed that fraud.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] During that whole campaign and right now they are sitting on the results of the Dukakis administration. So we are at the mercy, as you said, of a media that projects a fashionable fantasy upon the nation which involves individuals. I mean, you... I am sure you have looked at People magazine which has no people in it.

[Rushdoony] Yes, there was a copy in my seat on the plane yesterday so I thumbed through it and I couldn’t tell you a single thing about it or what was in it.

[Scott] Unspeakable types appear there. That, I suppose, is fashion. But fashion and ideas is much worse.

[Rushdoony] Ah, yes. Fashions in ideas are most dangerous. Fashions in hairdos and dress and what not...

[Scott] That is rather...

[Rushdoony] ... are very ephemeral.

[Scott] That is minor.

[Rushdoony] But fashions in ideas are deadly in their consequences.

[Scott] Well, I listened to, you know, try to listen on occasion to TV news. You have I... I have... I have watched it. The average three items and the rest is ads, sports and weather, three items.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now that is a fashion.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the fact is that in Scripture the family is the basic institution in society. You would never know it to go through school because you have nothing that indicates the importance of the family. To read the press and all you would think the family was the menace and must be regulated. And listening to comedians occasionally when I have been traveling and get to my room late in the evening, I find that so much of the humor today is a hostility towards the family.

We don’t have comedians of the old style whose humor was kindly. Now it will be a venomous attack on mothers and fathers, on the family. I do remember one thing in that I believe it was in that people magazine I looked at. It was by ... what is her name? Rosanne Barr?

[Scott] I don’t know.

[Rushdoony] Isn’t that the name of this woman who is a comedian? Expressing her anger at her parents. And using bad language to describe what she thought of their sound moral advice. Now that is so common now.

[Scott] Well, that is the restoration theater.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And the theater before the restoration, the theater before Cromwell. The... this is... every one of these indications have in the past led to great debacles, without exception.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So history as a laboratory of human behavior I which certain actions get certain reactions is interesting in that sense. There is always a difference in the idiom. They don’t repeat precisely because, of course, the costume is different, the fashion and speech is different, but the basic arguments are always the same.

[Rushdoony] Yes. You mentioned the theater before. In the time of James I Ben Jonson was giving himself to the production of masks for the court and Indigo Jones was using his artistic talents for production. If you read those masks now it is only an exercise in self discipline that gets you through it, because they are basically unreadable.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] They were a spectacle mainly. The remarks were full of allusions through all kids of fantastic figures and persons to members of the court, so it was a spectacle that flattered people.

[Scott] Well, it was like listening to high school jargon today. Unless you go to the high school, unless you know the people, you wouldn’t be... you can’t follow it, very... very limited.

[Rushdoony] Yes. There was no connection between the masks and reality.

[Scott] None whatever. And the same thing was true in the Renaissance. And the same thing was true before the French Revolution.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And what we are talking about is the people who danced on the edge of the crater.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] There is an earthquake coming and only the blind cannot see it.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] This government is supported by illusions, great stately illusions. And in many ways the American society has almost outstripped its ability to reason. Even the language, language in public discourse, let’s say, the language on television of the debates, the language of the after dinner speaker is so stilted that it will put you to sleep.

[Rushdoony] That is for sure.

[Scott] The other day or the other event I heard Senator Wallop of Wyoming push the prepared speech to one side. He has just joined the senate armed services committee. He listened to Admiral Crowe, the former chief of staff whom we said is a Soviet apologist. He reviewed the enormous leap forward of Soviet armaments around the world. They are turning out a nuclear submarine every seven weeks. They have their submarines on all our coasts. They have all their satellites armed in space. And one of my scientific friends is fond of telling me that we are ahead scientifically in space, which is like saying our laboratory is ahead of their gunship. And he introduced into this talk—it was a relatively short talk—he said, “What do we need in the United States? We need honesty. We need honest speaking.” He said, “The men in Washington that I know will not be honest with the people and they blamed the people.” He said, “They are blaming you, because they say that you would not support them if they became honest.” And in the meantime he said, “There is not an honest report being given to the people of the nature of our peril, the nature of our situation, in effect, the nature of reality.”

He was breaking with political fashion in that speech.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... and that he had everyone spellbound, spellbound.

I can’t say that they are going to do anything, because, you know, you have held people and I have held people and they come up and they tell us how wonderful it was and nothing every happens.

[Rushdoony] Yes. You tell them they are going to hell and they say, “I enjoyed that.”

[Scott] It is weird.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But when you do hear a... a real speech it leaves an indelible impression.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We have the fashion in this country of not speaking of not leveling, not leveling. I mean how often have you heard somebody say you are an idiot? I don’t want to hear anything more from you.

[Rushdoony] Well, we are a people who will be compelled to face reality because God never lets people escape it.

[Scott] Oh, the punishment fits the crime. Now...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Gilbert and Sullivan knew what they were talking about, didn’t they?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That was a different period.

[Rushdoony] And Sullivan was a Christian.

[Scott] Yes, indeed he was.

[Rushdoony] A very strong Christian, author of Onward Christian Soldiers and many other hymns.

[Scott] Well, the fashion took over literature and it has destroyed literature. Since writers could not... no longer really portray American society as it really is, less to defend, they turned to fantasy. So you have a whole stream of novels restricted to the kitchen you might say, domestic novels, which, if you place proletariat novels. And you have novels portraying individuals behaving as no one ever behaved in a world that never existed.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Recently I read some book reviews. I don't read the reviews of novels, ordinarily, because I have given up reading them. And I was amazed at the plot synopses. They are... they are... they have created a world of fantasy which they call reality.

[Scott] It is totally ... and they even have now ... I used to pick up books—and so did you, I am sure—and without looking at the sex of the author. I have read novels. I read mysteries and so forth and it never occurred to me that books would ever be issued for one sex as such.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because that destroys the whole idea of... of a common literature.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And what has happened to American Literature is that, in effect, it doesn't exist. There is a fraud out there, but real books, no. Real literature in a classic 19th century sense no longer exist.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] And more... less and less people read.

[Rushdoony] And less and less are able to read, unfortunately.

[Scott] The same thing, because if you are able to, you can’t resist doing it. But if you are not able to—and, of course, the resistance becomes almost automatic.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And how... how...what... what do the young people sing when they try to sing? What lyrics? There aren’t any songs.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] ... in the... in the classic sense. The only songs are the old songs. And Irving Berlin died at 101 the other day and the people are still singing and playing his songs.

[Rushdoony] Yes and it is interesting that he quit writing because he said he could no longer fit into this age.

[Scott] Is that what he said?

[Rushdoony] Yes. He withdrew totally because he said, “I can’t understand these people. I can’t understand what they call music.”

[Scott] Well, there is no lyrics.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] You know that Anne Thurston Brooke, one of her foster children from the habit of listening to rock by forcing him to write down the lyrics. Well, he had to listen for several days and kept playing the record or the tape over and over and he finally wrote down the lyrics and hasn’t listened since. He was horrified himself at what they were actually saying.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But these aren’t songs I the ordinary sense of the word.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] I mean they begin with a pulse beat, you know.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Timed to your pulse. And then they gradually get heavier and heavier.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They build up to a tempo, but the words are grotesque, satanic.

[Rushdoony] Yes. They are designed by the beat to break down the connection between mind and emotions, to create only a visceral reaction.

[Scott] Oh, you might as well have tom-toms and a fire.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And, in fat, there is violence at the rock festivals. People hit people.

[Rushdoony] It is routine.

[Scott] ... are killed.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It sets up a sadistic impulses.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Well, that is fashion.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, our time is growing short. Do you want to take a couple of minutes to sum up something about fashion versus reality?

[Scott] No fashion has ever lasted. When fashion turns against the people, the people rebel. That is where we are.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And I would like to add this that there can be no sense of reality without a belief in God and men have departed from reality into the world of fashions and the ephemeral by abandoning a biblical faith. If you do not have a biblical faith you are going to want the ephemeral.

Existentialism, of course, is a philosophy which is the logical conclusion of man’s original sin, to be as God, to determine his own good and evil, his own law, to make his own reality. And what we see I the world of fashions around us now is a determination of reality, an attempt to determine it.

If I may take a little longer, I read something recently on fashions and the fact that a dress that is out of style suddenly looks ugly whereas it was once desirable. A hairdo that is out of style becomes very ugly suddenly, because it is no longer the reality to them of what is in with people so that reality to them in the world of fashions and fads is an illusion. It is what other people think is dominant. And it is the view of man, not God’s perspective.

Castiglione in The Courtier said the important thing about the courtier was that his audience should always be important to people. he should never be brave when there was no one around, in other words. In battle, if the commanding officer or the prince could see him, then should grandstand.

And John White in writing about the Renaissance cavalier said that the issue was basically who are you performing in front of, God or men? And that is the issue in fads versus reality because if you perform in the eyes of men you say their ideas are the reality. If you perform, live your life in the sight of God you know God is the reality.

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.