One of those holidays that really confuses me is Guy Fawkes Day though it also reaffirms my faith in human nature -that people are always looking for any excuse to take a day off and have a party.
Guy Fawkes was a Catholic in a country that in the 1600's was deathly afraid of it's sizable Catholic minority. The Anglican Church was the state religion that broke away from Papal control almost for the sole purpose of getting King Henry the VIII a divorce in 1534. It was really a battle of who had more control over England, the King or the Pope in Rome. There were other political considerations too but when King Henry confiscated all the property of the Catholic Church in England and redistributed a lot of it to his friends and allies, that meant there would be no simple reconciliation short of war.
Spain lost its chance in 1588 to invade and conquer England in the name of the Pope. The new Protestant nobility felt it was under siege and saw any Catholic as a security risk -much the same way as many Americans thought about their Muslims neighbors after 9-11. Under Elizabeth I there were a number of heavy-handed attempts to convert or eliminate Catholicism in England. One law was the Recusancy Act of 1593, which meant if you did not go to your local Anglican Church every Sunday you would be fined and jailed.
The Recusancy Act was one reason why Guy Fawkes was part of the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt to blow up Parliament in 1604. Out of the 13 conspirators Guy Fawkes is the one we remember because he was captured on November 5th guarding several tons of gunpowder in the basement of the Parliament building. Parliament voted this day should be celebrated "for their deliverance" . As part of the legacy of the event, a century and a half later American political philosophers look at the Gunpowder Plot as an example of what happens when the state and religion interfere with each other.
Another legacy of Guy Fawkes is how people recycle historical images. The Occupy Movement has made the Guy Fawkes mask a ubiquitous symbol of resistance. Even the Tea Party in America has embraced the image of Guy Fawkes, though the Tea Party has pretty much the opposite agenda of the Occupy Movement.
Catholics in England did not have full citizenship until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. This reform didn't come out of altruistic sentimentality. In the early 1800's England was entering the industrial age full force and suffering a brain drain of talent; many Catholic mechanics, engineers and skilled laborers were leaving England for the much more religiously tolerant United States. These expatriates helped jump start the industrial revolution on the other side of the Atlantic.
It's funny how today is Guy Fawkes Day and tomorrow is Election Day in United States. Election Day is not exactly a holiday here, God forbid that workers should have a day off to vote. Even in nation wide Federal elections voting is controlled by the states. The rules for who can vote, how they vote and if they need to show a picture ID varies from state to state.
Voting is one most important acts a citizen can participate in. The principal of "one man, one vote" makes the poorest equal to the richest and it demonstrates that the power of
political consensus is greater than the force of dictatorship.
This presidential election is has been very negative and nasty. I have neighbors ready to start throwing punches at each other. The rhetoric is shrill and people get threatened for posting anything that questions either major party or the narrative they are trying to present. It's politics in action and as frayed as the tempers are right now things will return to normal.
But then again isn't that part of what elections are all about? People don't always make rational decisions with there heads. People vote based on a sense of affiliation and shared values. One of paradoxes of human behavior is how many people will vote against their own economic interests to elect a candidate that they can emotionally relate to.
In short whoever wins there will be plenty of sore losers questioning the legitimacy of the vote.
As a joke one friend has suggested making investments in guns and ammunition. He's not expecting an armed uprising -if anything like the election of 2008 nothing too much is likely to happen. But back in 2008 when Obama was elected a rumor went around that Obama planned to restrict gun rights and even confiscate guns from private citizens. Nothing was further from the truth but millions of gun owners stocked up on extra weapons and ammunition.
One example is a neighbor down the road from me. In 2008 he was very much against an Obama presidency. He felt the world was coming to an end and for him things were pretty bad. He had inherited his father's business, which was a sock factory that was going bankrupt. Wal-Mart had found a cheaper supplier in China and when I say cheaper I mean cheaper by lees than a couple of tenths of a cents per dozen socks delivered -the business is that cut throat. In the end my neighbor lost his house, sold most of his possessions but still scraped enough money to buy two AR-15's, two Chinese made AK-47's (the Chinese AK-47's are supposedly the easiest to illegally convert to full automatic) and two 9mm Glock pistols. For each gun he purchased 1,000 rounds. It's not rational but if Obama is elected to a second term there will a whole new wave of panic buying for an imaginary crisis.
So maybe I take a bit of advice from one of my favorite movies -Shaun of the Dead. Meet me down at the Winchester and I'm sure to ask you if you have a penny for the guy?
Update: So here it is three months later, no one could have imagined or foreseen the mass shooting in Sandy Hook Connecticut. The sale of guns and ammo have only accelerated. A survey last week had one in five respondents saying they believe Obama is a secret Muslim. I'm not sure what to make of that except it gives me a bad feeling the next four years will not be smooth, simple or easy.
Reports on last quarter's world economic growth looks bad enough to worry about an other recession.
Other than buying into the survivalists advice of purchasing canned goods and shotguns I am hearing that investments in agriculture and Africa are paying regular dividends. Money will continue to flow into the United States, keeping interest rates extremely low. If any of these trends should rapidly reverse the world economy could go into a tailspin.
The really big question is economic growth and income inequality in the United States. If the American middle class is allowed to further shrink it will effect the patterns of development in other economies. Conservatives are in total denial that the American middle class was built on New Deal socialism. The ultimate goal, as one economist said, is to create a system of "industrial feudalism" with a very small middle class and a vast pool of wage earning serfs. If such a thing happens in America then any other nation that competes on the world market will be pressured to follow along.
At a local political rally one speaker summed up the goals of neo-conservative economics -not just to end all entitlement programs in America but to stamp out socialism in Europe or anywhere else in the world. Anything that challenges free enterprise is an evil that needs to be destroyed.
Think about it -what was once the power of kings will be pasted on to employers. What scares me is a keg of gunpowder can be mistaken as a solution when it's really a symptom of an age old problem. Even when Cain and Able had all the world to share -the story still ended badly.
No comments:
Post a Comment