Der Untergang des Abendlandes

Ah yes, I've got my plans for the Fourth of July weekend, and I presume you've got yours. My plans involve, among other things, sitting here in my big rambling old 130 year old house on a gravel road out in deep rural America, fortified with a hip flask of liquor, and hiding in modern air conditioning from a triple digit heat wave.

It was twelve years ago this week that I moved here from the city. Moved here, in part, to get away from the city and the Undergoing of the Eveninglands of failing ailing late-modern America. I was sensing, even as the 90s were drawing to a close, that the declining empire of the USA was playing itself out, and that the day was coming when I'd be better off in a corner of the land where people were still capable and self-sufficient and rooted in God and family and tradition, and mainly geographically well removed from any combustible urban areas.

The past few years it has become more and more evident that my wisdom at the time I moved here was prescient. We are now three years into a deep recession and house-of-cards financial sector with no end in sight, and the only question is whether we will limp along like this indefinitely for years to come, or whether things will head south-- way further south-- fairly suddenly, like a collapsing house of cards, some time not too many years down the road.

If so, I live in a remote and untraveled corner of rural America where people still live by the ancient verities, and they could pretty much feed themselves and heat their homes and defend themselves and keep the lights burning and the machines running all by their own native ingenuity if they had to. And I've become very much a part of the community since I moved here. We will survive. Even if the cities burn. Even if the Evening Lands Go Under. Even if it comes to that, we will do okay.

I return you now to your soporific Fourth of July celebrations already in progress.