Friday, October 21, 2011

Occupy american distributism with foreign writers

I just did a search at the Distributist Review for Huey Long and for Fr. Charles E. Coughlin and received "No results".

And so just for the interest of it, I tried instead Chesterton or Belloc and recieved pages ad infinitum.

Why is that?

Now I can understand some discrepancy because it is easier to reference Chesterton or Belloc than it would be the radio programs of Fr. Coughlin, but for his name to not ever even be mentioned not even once? Fr. Coughlin is the preeminent american mass media superstar priest ever, (more influential than even Bishop Fulton J Sheen), and he was an adamant distributist who spoke regularly on economic issues, and he receives not even one smidgen of a mention?

Or what of Huey Long who almost changed the face of America to a distributist nation, and not one mention?

Most likely Fr. Coughlin and Huey Long were written-out of distributist history because their views and reputations are not congruent with the modern Catholic intellectual class sensibilities.

But not even one mention, or one line of text?

Further, if Fr. Coughlin and Huey Long were literally written-out of distributist history because of their affront to modern sensibilities, why is it that Chesterton and Belloc get off scot-free since they too affront modern sensibilities on the same issue?

Seriously, on the face of it, Chesterton's praise of the expulsion of the Jews from England on anti-capitalist grounds is more of an affront to those same said sensibilities than any comment Fr. Coughlin made.

[as an aside : I also did a search for Fr. Leonard Feeney and received "No results". But my search results for the pervert Eric Gill did come up with a number of hits. So what does that say?]

Both Huey Long and Fr. Couglin make the current distributist advocates and the occupy wall street crowd look like pikers in comparison. Huey Long and Fr. Coughlin didn't just give a lecture here or there, or make a street level disturbance with a few placards, they made a difference moving millions of people and transforming state economy. But not even one mention of either man in the preeminent american journal on distributism?

Pages of Mondragon, but not one mention of Huey Long who did his best to transform Louisianan into Mondragon. And it's not as if the distributists shy away from state intervention to get their way, quite the opposite, they want the state to enforce distributism, so that can't be the reason, but yet not one single line of text on Huey Long.

Not even Huey Long's :
"There is no rule so sure as the same mill which grinds out fortunes above a certain size, grinds out paupers at the bottom."
A line far better than I have read any distributist cite, or pen himself, when writing on the obscene wages now paid to corporate CEO's who plunder their own companies for stock market profits.

What got me thinking about this was all the gushing by distributists like new mothers over "Occupy Wall Street" as if it was the dawning of a new age, as if America had not previously walked this path before. Where the only citation by distributists of past example of american distributism are homesteading farmers. As if somehow farm families isolated from their neighbors by vast tracts of land is natural or desirable, let alone not being practical.

Fr. Coughlin and Huey Long give us a road map to follow because they attempted to implement practical reform which fits the actual environment we live in today. Whereas the distributists today are enthusiastic over the prospect of city micro farms built on the ruins of factories and the ruins of lives of those who lived in those cities.

Fr. Coughlin and Huey Long attempted to change what we currently have, where as today the solutions are revolution and longing anticipation for destruction of civilization so that a new utopia can be built on the ruins.

Fr. Coughlin and Huey Long were civilized men who knew poverty and did not wish it on anyone because they knew who suffered most when civilization collapses, whereas today distributists sit in comfort wishing others to suffer the long march to the promised distributed productive land they enthusiastically anticipate.

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