As Halloween is the antithesis of All Saints’ Day (November 1), kindly allow me to beat John Zmirak to the punch-bowl and reverse his custom (or “motsuc sih esrever”) of supplying booze recipes at the end of each of his delightful Holy Feast Day articles. Tonight is an occasion to celebrate Edgar Allen Poe, the secular patron saint of American Gothic Horror, and when we’re talking about Poe, the drinks should come first:

CELEBRATE LIKE POE:

1. Gulp a double shot of the cheapest rotgut available.

2. Fall down because your body can’t handle it.

3. Suffer posthumous defamation by an envious hack journalist.

Well, all right, there is some evidence that Poe sporadically had more than just two drinks. What is less well known is that he had very low tolerance for alcohol and usually drank less in a year than the likes of Taki or I do in a week. Poe’s posthumous reputation for chronic drunkenness and for other reprobate habits, and for a disagreeable temperament with possible sadistic or Satanic inclinations, originated in a smear-job obituary by one Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a frustrated envious hack who was a forerunner of today’s Christopher Hitchens. Consider, if you will, how a talentless vulture like Hitchens has to some extent successfully – and profitably – defamed the discarnate spirits of Mother Theresa, Pope John Paul the Great, and all three persons of the Holy Trinity, and then you’ll understand Griswold’s defamation of a beautiful soul like Poe.

Allow me, then, to introduce you to “My Own Private Idol, Poe”. (He would have appreciated that pun on a ridiculous Homintern movie’s title.) Several American cities have claimed him as their own, due to his peripatetic poverty – he lived, at various times, in Richmond, New York, and Baltimore – but he spent his most productive years (1838- 1844) in my own home town, America’s most Gothic city: Philadelphia,.

“What’s so Gothic about Philadelphia,” you ask? Alas, not so much as there used to be, now that the formerly oh so peculiar, so quietly eccentric Philadelphia has fallen prey to the general flattening out of American culture, including the preternatural flattening of accent into Californianised, palatalized pabulum.

But it was not always so. The typical Anglo-American Philadelphia gentleman of 1840 (and almost all of them were Anglo, then) spoke a kind of English and deported himself with manners similar to those of gentlemen of antebellum Maryland or Tidewater Virginia. Some vestiges of those old voices and manners survived in the semirural counties adjacent to Philadelphia, including parts of my native Montgomery County, as late as my childhood in the 1970s. But suburban “development” and the cultural viruses of Hollywood and TV have finally extinguished most of those remnants.

Poe’s gentle, chivalrous Virginian manners and words would have made him almost indistinguishable from his Philadelphian neighbours, and as a Virginian he shared another peculiar patrimony with them: He was, for the most part, a pre-modern man, whose mind and spiritual inclinations were informed more by the late Middle Ages than by modernity.

What’s that, you say? Philadelphia, the birthplace of America’s Enlightenment-Age Constitution, the city of the original publicity hound Ben Franklin – was that old Philadelphia a transplanted remnant of Medievalism?

For the most part, yes it was. Throughout Philadelphia’s history there has been a duality in its soul, between the conflicting dreams of the romantic, melancholy aristocratic Quaker William Penn – who in his own way personified American Chivalry – and those of Ben Franklin, the callow, populist progenitor of “America the Abstraction.” Or should I say “the Advertisement”: Franklin affected a “pioneer” furskin cap in Paris, which he’d never donned in America. Franklin was the first American publicity hound.

But the Quakerism of William Penn – the father of Philadelphia’s soul – was one of the last gasps of Medievalism, of the late Gothic Age, transplanted to America. The romantic, aristocratic, humble Quaker William Penn was in his own way an early-modern English analogue of St. Francis of Assisi—just as Ben Franklin was an intelligent 18^th century version of Rupert Murdoch.

Into antebellum Philadelphia, the offspring of a shotgun marriage between mechanistic, populist modernity and romantic medieval chivalry, Poe settled during his most productive years. And in that city, behind the thin veneer of Quaker reserve, the externally humble and internally voluptuous small redbrick townhouses of respectable Philadelphians were inhabited by many wild eccentrics and their covert friends and admirers – like the mad young Gothic-horror writer George Lippard and his absinthe-addicted friend Henry Hirst, a lawyer-cum-poet who spent more time collecting birds’ nests than trying cases. These two friends of Poe would inspire themselves to write horror stories by lying awake all night in unlit, abandoned buildings, or dancing on rooftops shouting “WOE UNTO SODOM” at the Quakers below. It’s not recorded how many of those respectable Philadelphians practiced sodomy, but we do know that a fair number were slave-traders. In any case, a lynch mob drove Lippard out of town for his nocturnal jeremiads.

Such were the bosom buddies of Edgar Allen Poe: drunken, drug-abusing romantics who spoke their minds and were scapegoated for it. Their persecutors were the progenitors of today’s “country club Republicans.” While the tinder of the American Civil War was being lit—to be fanned by the bellows of Bostonian Yankee hypocrisy—Poe and his honest, albeit dissolute, friends had been striving to examine, and to diagnose, the darker angels of America’s, and of Man’s, nature. And their reward, within their lifetimes, was poverty and obscurity.

But Poe in fact, was by no means so dissolute as his gifted friends. Poe’s principal crime as the worst crime anyone can commit in America: Having no money, and being unwilling to whore his talents for it.

He had soft, gentle hands, and a Virginian gentleman’s voice intoning the reassurance of spiritual constancy – so he has been described in letters and other memoria by those who met him in person, especially the many ladies whom he charmed without specific intention. Take another look at his face. Those eyes are not the eyes of Satanic malice, but of melancholic longing for the Divine – the very quality without which the American spirit transforms itself into its Satanic aspect.

Over 160 years ago, Poe understood the dark underbelly of America – and of Man – in a way we need to be reminded of today. See his “Words With A Mummy” in which he satirises the American illusion of “progress”— in 1845! And his poem, “El Dorado,” a reminder that there is no Utopia except in Hell.

And please don’t ignore Poe’s talent for comedy! He had a wicked (or I would say, “divine”) sense of humour. My favourite is his surreal extravaganza, “The Angel of the Odd.” It’s all the more proof of Poe’s inspired sense of humour, that the funniest character he ever created – the Angel of the Odd – was a German robot, who is all the more funny BECAUSE he has no sense of humour! Pure genius – seventy years before 1914, mind you. Poe was a Germanophile, and his loving caricature of Germans was all the more hilarious for that.

Before we close, let me tell you a secret I know about Poe. When I was a boy, in 1975, Poe’s house in Philadelphia (at around 6^th and Spring Garden) was owned privately, by a lovely old lady who made it a private museum, furnished just as it had been in Poe’s time. She knew more about Poe than any Ph.D. of today. Alas, some 20 years ago, the federal government took possession (demonically, I would say) of Poe’s house, and under federal law a “national historic site” can have nothing in it which cannot be identified as “original”—and so Poe’s house has been stripped, and all that remains of it are the walls and floors. Bloody stupid Feds. But I can tell you two secrets about Poe’s Philadelphia house, and I learned them from the old lady who owned it and hosted me there in 1975:

1. As you enter the house, you’ll turn left, and then in the first room you enter, you’ll face another doorway. Just to the right of that doorway, around four feet above the floor, you will see a rough inscription carved into the wall: “DEATH TO THE”….

Poe wrote that. He carved it into the wall on one of his bad nights. I have pointed it out to the Federal National Park Service, but they refuse to put a plaque over it, because of Federal law. But now you know where to find it. And what did Poe mean by “Death to the?” I take it as a Halloween gift from him, for us to fill in the blank – or even better, just to leave it blank.

2. In the room just beyond that one, look to your left and you will see a door with an old, oval-shaped doorknob. The lady who owned the house in 1975 told me, “That doorknob is the only one that goes back to Poe’s time. His hand touched it. Now, Vincent Price often visits here, and he always rubs that same doorknob so that some of Poe’s genius will touch him.” And she asked me, “What do you want to be?” I said, “I want to be a writer.” Then she beamed, and she said, “Well, Honey, just rub that doorknob!”

Poe’s cause of death seems fitting somehow: In Baltimore, some party hacks got him drunk and took him to vote in myriad polling places until he collapsed. Poe was killed by a lethal combination of democracy and booze.

Now I have my reservations about democracy, if not about booze. Myself, I’m now four years older than Poe was when he died –so I’ll outlive Poe, though I surely won’t outwrite him. But then maybe that’s an unsought for blessing, because in America, isn’t genuine literary talent – or unpopular intellectual honesty – a temporal curse?

The American cult of publicity and popularity was instrumental in Poe’s poverty, obscurity and posthumous defamation. Maybe, among American writers, Poe is a kind of patron saint – a martyred one after all – ruined in his lifetime and for some years after by the publicity hounds of Hell, who hated him for contemplating sin in a country which believes itself to be sinless.

So, on this Halloween, on the eve of All Saints’ Day, let’s remember all those who, like Poe, have been equated in popular imagination with evil only because, like Poe, they discomfited others by naming Evil for what it is. They, and all obscure and forgotten and unknown saints—and other merely decent sinners who name evil for what it is—are anathema to the Publicity Hounds of Hell.

In Beijing I had a friend and confidante, an academic who was a Communist Party member, and a Buddhist. In the capital city of what is arguably the most brainwashed and intellectually and morally barbarised country in the industrialised world, she was one of the tiny handful of marginally independent-minded and authentically inquisitive Mainland Chinese I have ever met. She was an admirer of the Indian mystic poet, Tagore, and through her conversations with me had begun to consider some possible parallels between the Buddhist and Christian cardinal virtues of compassion and belief in a transcendent Truth beyond the rusted, fettering claims of economic determinism. But our communications ended abruptly when she sent me an email entirely out of character, in which she recited Communist Party talking points about “religion” which were easily identifiable as words not her own. In paraphrase, she said:

1. Contrary to what I believed – misinformed as I was about China, by hostile Western forces and their propaganda – China not only has full freedom of religion, but even requires its scholars to take
“religion classes”, to understand all major world religions;
2. China was exploited by Foreigners who were aided and abetted by Christian missionaries;
3. Chairman Mao “made some mistakes”, but at least he was Chinese, and it’s better for China to be afflicted by a Chinese tyrant than by Foreigners, regardless of the extent or quality or effects of the affliction;
4. The Communist Party is right to assert absolute control over all Christian churches, so that
Foreigners will never again use Christianity as a surreptitious means of weakening and exploiting China;
5. “I am not a Buddhist.”

In other words, my correspondent had been subjected to “re-education” by the Communist Party, and ordered to “correct her thoughts.” The Party had been monitoring her (as they monitor the words and thoughts of all Party Members), and could not tolerate or countenance her ungoodthinkful thoughts.  Consequently, the Party emptied her of herself and filled her with itself, and now she loves Big Brother, or at least professes to do so in any monitored email exchanges with Foreigners.

But what does she really believe? In Communist China, the answer is complicated in a way very unlike the American way of confusing professed beliefs with actual beliefs, often complicated further by discord between what we actually believe and what we think we believe. In a recent letter from an American friend of mine, he asked me, “are the Chinese split-minded vertically, unlike Americans who are split-minded horizontally?” By “split-minded” he meant holding two irreconcilable beliefs while wilfully refusing to think about the discord, as Americans tend to do in their conscious minds (eg, consider how many professed Catholics advocated the war in Iraq against the Pope’s advice); he was speculating that perhaps the Chinese vertical split is not between conscious thinking and the “unconscious”, but rather between consciousness and conscience.

This question stumped me for the longest time, until I replied, “The Chinese are not split-minded. Rather, their minds are like sheets of fungible thin paper upon which something is written one day and discarded and forgotten the next. Chinese minds and memories are fungible.” Why fungible? Because, for the most part, for over 2,000 years China has been alien to what the great humanist physicist Jacob Bronowski called the “habit of truth”, a habit exclusively of Western origin. But “habit” is the operative word; love of truth is written by the Holy Spirit on the hearts of all men, or so Christians say, and so say many Jews such as Bronowski was. China has simply never been a land where love of truth—as opposed to subscription to politically empowered lies—has become a national habit, or even been acknowledged as desirable.

Yet there have been heroic individual exceptions to this rule throughout China’s 2,200 year existence as a centralized and essentially theocratic state – China’s theocracy being one of apotheosized living despots such as Chairman Mao and his original prototype and self-proclaimed role model, Qin Shi Huang Di, the First Emperor (reigned 221 BC – 210 BC). One such exception and exemplar was the Han Dynasty historian, Sima Qian (145-90 BC), the Emperor’s official court historian – all Chinese histories being “official” to this day. Sima Qian was sui generis among Chinese historians in his attempt to revise China’s written history in a way that would not merely serve the political purposes of the moment, but actually reveal and lead to better understanding of the truth for its own sake; in this aspect, he was a kindred spirit to Thucydides. Among his tasks was to relate and to criticize the first “Cultural Revolution” of the First Emperor, the orgy of book burnings and wholesale destruction of China’s culture and its independent scholars, from which China was just beginning to recover during Sima’s lifetime; you could call it another era of China’s “opening” and liberalization, albeit a strictly monitored and circumscribed one, similar to China’s painstakingly cautious and still despotically inconsistent gestures of reform today. Still, half a loaf is better than none, and today’s China occasionally produces starvation rations of reform, better than the total moral and intellectual (not to mention literal) famines enforced by the First Emperor and Mao.

Here is Sima Qian on the First Emperor: “ The First Emperor trusted his own judgment, never consulting others, and hence his errors went uncorrected. The Second Emperor carried on in the same manner, never reforming, compounding his misfortune through violence and cruelty…. At that time the world was not without men of deep insight and an understanding of change. The reason they did not dare exert their loyalty and correct the errors of the ruler was that Qin’s customs forbade the mentioning of inauspicious matters. Before their words of loyal advice were even out of their mouths, they would have been condemned to execution. This insured that the men of the empire would incline their ears to listen, stand in an attitude of solemn attention, but clamp their mouths shut and never speak out.”

Alas, this rule of the First Emperor has been China’s mode for over 2,000 years, and the likes of Sima Qian have been the exceptions. But there is yet another exception to this rule: The attitudes and words the Chinese present to Foreigners have generally tended to differ from what they say among themselves, including what they are permitted to say among themselves either privately or in public. Within strictly circumscribed limits, for the sake of maintaining China’s “face” among Foreigners, the Chinese are allowed occasional license to mouth some words in front of Foreigners which otherwise are not acceptable topics for discussion among Chinese. One such Western dupe, a “useful idiot” in the tradition of Lincoln Steffens—who said of his visit to Stalin’s Russia, “I have seen the future, and it works”—is a Cato Institute “analyst” named Daniel Ikenson, who recently visited China and wandered into one of its Potemkin Village shows, “English Corner” at Renmin University in Beijing, and then reported his findings in a stomach-churning article in National Review.

Ikenson wrote: “Renmin University, also known as the People’s University of China, has an enrollment of almost 19,000 and is one of China’s most respected schools. It was founded in 1950 by the Communist party.” 

Correct. Personally I know Renmin University all too well. I worked there from 2002 to 2003. It is indeed the Communist Party’s own special university, as Ikenson says: “The children of many Chinese officials were educated there, and three generations of Chinese leaders, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin, have paid special attention to the school’s development. So I was especially surprised by what I learned.” But I’m surprised by what Ikenson didn’t learn, or was unwilling to think about. Renmin University (or “RenDa”) is one of the training grounds for the Communist Party elite, and for the most part it’s a propaganda factory in which any and all dissent from the Party Line is quashed prophylactically, nipped in the bud before the slightest germination. “For the most part,” but not entirely; as the Communist Party is somewhat more heterodox and full of internal ideological disputes mostly unwitnessed by Foreigners, there are in fact a considerable number of high-ranking Communist Party members who sincerely yearn for authentic liberalization and — in the long term —some kind of rule of law and liberal democracy in China. One of them remains a personal friend of mine, a true Chinese knight, a true scholar and gentleman who understands what chivalry and honour mean. Mind you, such men and women are not “legion”in the Chinese Communist Party, but their numbers are considerable and they are the “leaven in the bread.”

However, these were not the people Ikenson spoke with when he ventured into the Potemkin Village showpiece of “English Corner”, as he describes: “It was about 8 P.M. on a Friday when I ventured onto Renmin’s campus. In a courtyard near the school’s east gate, I discovered some 200 students who were exchanging views about history, economics, politics, and culture. It was U.S. history, economics, politics, and culture that they were discussing — and they were speaking ENGLISH.” (emphasis in the original.)

Well, yes, they were speaking English. Not because they have any great love or respect for Anglophone culture or for the ideals of Western civilization, but because they regard English as a utilitarian “business tool” with which to make more money. The vast majority of Chinese regard the English language with contempt, as a mere business tool. (That is, by the way, exactly why most of them speak and write English wretchedly.) And RenDa’s “English Corner” is not unique to RenDa; it is a standard, nationwide institution at all Chinese universities, great and small, and its purpose is nothing more or less than to be a venue in which Chinese students can “practice their English” in tightly monitored and controlled ways. But interest in, or admiration of, Anglophone or Western civilization has virtually nothing to do with their purposes.

Ikenson continues: “I had stumbled upon “English Corner,” Renmin’s version of Speakers’ Corner, that eminent temple of free speech in London’s Hyde Park.” No, Mr Ikenson, it’s nothing like Hyde Park. In Hyde Park you won’t be arrested for displaying a picture of the Dalai Lama, or for disseminating photographs of the Tienanmen Square Massacre.
He goes on: “Then someone suggested that I give Lincoln’s address. The crowd roared in agreement. Embarrassed, I admitted that I hadn’t committed it to memory. “No problem,” said a student, as he handed me a printed version. “We would really like to hear a famous American address given by a native English speaker.”

They said this because they wanted to emulate your “native speaker” pronunciation of English, not your political heritage.Ikenson goes on: “ I ignored the possibility that I could be arrested for subversion, and climbed the soapbox. Again, the crowd joined me in reciting Lincoln’s final line.” But as an American visitor, and as a member of the CATO institute, the possibility of Ikenson’s being “arrested for subversion” was more remote than being struck by lightning. Furthermore, the students didn’t care about, or believe in, Lincoln’s final line; they just wanted to hear how it is pronounced tonally by a “native speaker.” Mr Ikenson played the role of a dancing monkey, and didn’t have a clue.

Ikenson continues his dance his print: “China is changing, and there may be no better symbol of that change than Renmin University — the alma mater of China’s Communist party where, today, students quote Lincoln and contemplate Jefferson.” No, Mr Ikenson, they’re not “contemplating” Lincoln and Jefferson — or at least 99 percent of the cynical and opportunistic youths YOU met were not. They were contemplating your pronunciation as a “native speaker” of English, while holding you and your country’s political heritage (at best) in contempt at best, or with hatred.

And worst of all, the Chinese hold in contempt all Foreigners who willfully become conned by China’s superficial showpieces.The Chinese—among whom I count several true friends, several true enemies and many neutrals with whom I will continue to engage in the spirit of “Realpolitik”— are not stupid. Foolish, yes, but not stupid, and they can see through moral cowardice as easily as through crystal; thousands of years of suffering under the reigns and rules of moral cowards has trained them to do so. On the other hand, generally speaking, even the most cynical – and sometimes, especially the most cynical – of Chinese have always understood the practical wisdom of treating with authentic respect, and negotiating in good faith with, Foreigners who truly have the courage of their convictions.

And Pope Benedict XVI is one. He, and his recent letter to all Catholics in China, are models of effective, realistic diplomacy from which all Western states and diplomats can and should learn.
In his recent letter, Pope Benedict asserted his authority over all Chinese Catholics, including over those who – for reasons of political and personal pressure, including threats to their family members and their infant children’s welfare – are not yet able to attend any Catholic Church which acknowledges allegiance to the Vatican. To this day, any and all Catholic Churches in China which acknowledge the authority of the Pope are outlawed. The Cardinal Kung Foundation – dedicated to the memory of the Chinese Catholic martyr, Ignatius Cardinal Kung (1901-2000) – is one of the best sources of information about the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of the Roman Catholic Church in China.

For the past 50 years or so, many Chinese Catholics have been pressured to worship and receive the sacraments in the official “Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.” This group’s priests all are authentically anointed through apostolic succession, and their sacraments are valid, yet they remain under the thumb of the Communist Party, and to some extent their ministries are compromised by this subjection.

However, the number of Chinese Christians in churches approved and unapproved has been increasing exponentially. Pope Benedict’s ingenious response to this situation has been a kind of Kung Fu move: At once, as he refuses to concede any ground whatsoever to the enemies of the Church, he also avoids attacking them directly. His letter to all Chinese Catholics, including those who practice in the schismatic “patriotic” church authorized by the Communist Party, is a brilliant piece of verbal martial art:  He does not attack the enemy, but rather holds his ground in a flexible way, patiently waiting for the enemy to exhaust itself. I cannot and should not dissect his entire letter here; our readers can enjoy reading it for themselves; but here is one of his crucial passages:

“Finally, there are certain Bishops – a very small number of them – who have been ordained without the Pontifical mandate and who have not asked for or have not yet obtained, the necessary legitimation. According to the doctrine of the Catholic Church, they are to be considered illegitimate, but validly ordained, as long as it is certain that they have received ordination from validly ordained Bishops and that the Catholic rite of episcopal ordination has been respected. Therefore, although not in communion with the Pope, they exercise their ministry validly in the administration of the sacraments, even if they do so illegitimately.”

In other words, Pope Benedict has seized the initiative from his enemies, the Chinese Communists who have assailed the Church, and without surrendering any iota of the Church’s truths, he has in effect said, “ALL Catholics in China belong to the Church of Christ, and not to the Chinese Communist Party.”

So speaks a man who represents the “habit of truth.” Like a traditional Chinese martial artist, Pope Benedict has avoided – and allowed all Chinese Catholics to avoid – the assaults of the Communist Party. Yet he has conceded absolutely nothing to the enemy, who will inevitably exhaust themselves as all purveyors of lies do.

And here endeth the lesson, not only for the Catholics among our readers, but for all men of goodwill who, according to their own lights, hope for the people of China to come out of the darkness – or rather, to come out of it once again, as there have been some times in China’s 2,200 year history when China was a very enlightened civilization indeed, as the late Pope John Paul the Great understood. Hence John Paul’s passionate desire to visit China before he died – thwarted, perhaps as part of a Divine Plan, just as Moses was not allowed to go into the Holy Land. Pope John Paul understood the immeasurable potential of the great and ancient civilization of China to become a new, powerful locus of the war of the Church against the World. The superstitiously materialist doctrines of those who preach that “free markets” will inevitably give rise to liberty in China, have borne no fruit to this day, contrary to the fantasies of the likes of Ikenson and his ilk. As long as we men of the West – the heirs and (even if now half-hearted or apostate) representatives of Christendom and of our parent religion, Judaism – as long as we represent our civilization to the Chinese as one of cynical, opportunistic materialism, the Chinese will just laugh in our faces, take and exploit our technology and then laugh harder—even as they weep inwardly for having seen their spiritual aspirations (held by all Sons of Adam) betrayed. By us.

But I know another China. I know a China – and I have some Chinese friends – who know how to weep for the best reasons. They, our Chinese brothers and sisters, have been spiritual orphans for all too long, long-sufferers under usurping spiritual stepfathers, of whom Chairman Mao was merely the latest incarnation. In my experience, no other race on Earth are so prone to weep – for sincere, personal reasons – as are the Chinese. In this sense, they are not so cynical after all, and Pope John Paul was right to perceive in the long-suffering people of China that they are a people who are potentially very close indeed to the Holy Spirit, as Christ said of His friend Nicodemus.

But my, our, Chinese friends will continue to weep, indefinitely, unless and until we men of the West engage with them with a courageous “habit of truth” instead of superstitious faith in economics.

John Ball is a legal scholar who recently left China after living there for almost a decade. Image courtesy of Asian Christian Art.

What fresh Hell is this? A mere seven years after Boris Yeltsin’s Pink Elephants were dispossessed of Russia’s nuclear football and something approximating political and economic stability began to reign in Russia, now Vladimir Putin the most intelligent, liberal and reliable head of state Russia has seen since Tsar Alexander II, with the possible exception of Gorbachev—has come under the cross-hairs of the Trotskyite Neocon War Party. Meanwhile the unctuous skinhead kleptocrat Boris Berezovksy has heeded his own hubristic hallucinations and openly called for the violent overthrow of the elected government of Russia. How did it come to this? How did America lose the Cold War to the heirs of Marx and Trotsky?

For a partial answer, look to America’s now degenerate Puritan heritage and its superstitious faith in material progress, and its paradoxical contempt for the primacy of spirit and mind over matter—precisely identical with the superstitions of Karl Marx.

The Puritans were the Bolsheviks of 17th century England,” I once suggested to a class of young Russians. The Puritans committed regicide, launched a civil war, established a military dictatorship,destroyed the better part of the nation’s religious artwork, confused material progress with an inexorable historical plan, and—most un-English and un-Russian vice of all—had precious little sense of humour.

Now, a declaration of personal bias: As a native of old Pennsylvania—the Quaker colony whose gentle aristocratic founder, William Penn, barely escaped being waylaid on the high seas, seized as a hereticand sold into Caribbean slavery by Puritan Cotton Mather of Massachusetts—I am antipathetic to Puritanism and its revolutionary Neocon permutations.

That said, let us see what all of our compatriot Americans of Judeo-Christian origins share in common, in the Old Testament: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither bread yet to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill, buttime and chance happeneth to them all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:11)

Those words may or may not be reconcilable with the various claims of our several Christian and Jewish creeds. But they are utterly inconsistent with the secular doctrines of “The Market” (an inaccurate term for America’s bureaucratic economy) which are advanced by so many ostensible Bible-Believers, not to mention millions of other lukewarm believers and unbelievers. The Market favours persons of skill and understanding, does it not? And “time and chance” do not inhibitmaterial progress. “There is nothing new under the sun,” Ecclesiastes says; yet there is a “New Economy” (or whatever new brummagen jingle Thomas Friedman will coin in his next book), and a Providential one at that.

Our confused intellectual and spiritual condition would be so much clearer if we just came out and said we worship the Golden Calf. And this is not a trite polemic against materialism; it is discrimination between material conditions and the will of God or of History. A practical materialist would use the gold (sparingly and with careful regard for posterity), not obey it, not say, “The Market (or Dialectical Materialism, or the Golden Calf) is the Lord of History.”

Back to Russia: When I first landed in Moscow in August 1998, on the very day that the Ruble was devalued and Russia thrown into financial and political turmoil, I met another American lawyer, who, like me, had just arrived to teach law at a Russian university in the heady days of the Yeltsin years when many Russians still trusted Americans’ apparent intentions to assist Russia on the road to civil liberty and a rule of law. Like me, he was relatively young. Unlike me, he shaved his head, while I wore my hair rather long. We both called ourselves “conservatives,” but conserving what?

Continuity is as strong as change, and in the eeriest way, our encounter was between the direct heirs of the Roundheads and long-haired Royalists of the English Civil War, and between their American offshoots. He told me that he and I were “Minsters of the Gospel” inRussia, and my High Church inclinations recoiled in horror from that Cromwellian idea. The American Republic as such has no Gospel; to say nothing of how such a “mission” would sit with the Third Rome, Orthodox Moscow, upon which this chap had flung himself as a self-appointed missionary, to represent American thought to Russian students who still knew almost nothing about us.

By “Minister of the Gospel,” he meant the Market Gospel. By his own account he was not a Christian. He said, rather, that Alan Greenspan (then Chairman of the Federal Reserve) should be a “candidate forcloning,” and his rhetoric was devoted mostly to quasi-spiritual eulogies to Markets, which would liberate Russia. By now we all know the Neocon doctrine, almost not worth repeating, that what we blithely call “free markets” deterministically give rise to political and spiritual liberty. But that’s a lie, contrary to all the evidence of history, and contrary to the Gospel too.

The interesting thing about this fellow, I thought, was the discord between his skinned head (a common American fashion of the past decade or so) and his corrupted resemblance to Fitzgerald’s character, Jay Gatsby. His faith in material progress, his account of his humble origins and ambitious ascent from them, his affectations of “professional” manners which were transparently thin, were all like Gatsby, whom F. Scott Fitzgerald created to personify the American dream, its compromised nobility, and its tragic limitations. But Gatsby was a voluptuary, and a generous one, to some extent a lover of the material good life for its own sake; I cannot imagine Gatsby with a skinned head. Gatsby dreamed like an aspiring Cavalier; this other fellow dreamed and behaved like a Puritan, whose perfect Human specimen was not the beautiful –- if shallow—Daisy Buchanan, but ugly old Alan Greenspan.

How did the American Dream come to this, and to the effective loss of the proper end of the Cold War, which ought to have been an enduring fraternal accord and mutual defense between the natural civilisational allies of Christendom, Russia and America and Europe? The story of how Gatsby skinned his head – how Americans came to reverse the proper order of matter and mind, money and ideas, and came to resembleMarxists in the process—is perhaps centuries old, and involves entwined currents of thought too complex to disentangle. But whatever the complex etiology of this American disease, one of its most disastrous effects today is a poisoned relationship with the Russians, who—as they are among the most intelligent and perspicacious peoples in the world—have very sensibly recoiled from any further depredations upon their land and treasure by intellectually confused and spiritually dessicated American interlopers such as the Skinhead Gatsby. As Pat Buchanan has recently asked, “Does Putin Not Have A Point?”

Do not blame the Russians, then, for reacting against what they—and worse, we—have mistaken for American thought, and for being tempted to recoil inward into old Muscovite isolationism from what they perceive as the “unspiritual” West. It is our failure as much astheirs; willy-nilly, we are joined at the hip. Andrei Sakharov wrote aspiringly about a possible “convergence” between the best values of capitalist and socialist nations. But dreaming his best dreams, he neglected to warn us that folly can also converge, and usually does.

Post-Communist Russia has traded with the West and received plenty of “information” from the West –BAD information, from persons like our Skinhead Gatsby and billionaire adventurers and bureaucratic NGOs. But it does not have our Liberty Bell, and precious few Americans have had sufficiently fertile imaginations to understand how the Bell poses a riddle which, if perceived rightly, offers an elegantly simple answer to the disastrous conditions and confusions of post-cold-war Russia and America. The Bell resides in my home city of Philadelphia, and is inscribed, “Proclaim Liberty throughout the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof.”

Ah, but here comes the riddle: The Bell is cracked, and so, as an instrumental machine, it does not function, except in the minds of all boys such as I once was, who see it and dream old dreams, from a broken, cast-metal messenger, whose melted-down worth is almost nothing. The books of Moses also mention the Golden Calf, and how the nation was better off for melting it. John Ball taught International Law in Russia from 1998 to 2000.

“I want to ask you for forgiveness, because many of our hopes have not come true, because what we thought would be easy turned out to be painfully difficult. I ask you to forgive me for not fulfilling some hopes of those people who believed that we would be able to jump from the gray, stagnating, totalitarian past into a bright, rich and civilized future in one go. I myself believed in this. But it could not be done in one fell swoop. In some respects I was too naive.”   To read the whole speech, click here:

And spare a prayer for the repose of Yeltsin’s soul, and Russia’s future.