A Gringo in Rural Mexico: The Futility of Compromise

Saturday, 13 August 2011

The Futility of Compromise

Why compromise, in its truest form, is impossible during the discussion of these issues.

(1) It is none of the central government's business what the level or extent of a citizen's income is. Once yielding to the Crown's legitimacy in this matter the subject becomes a vassal to the Crown. To be absolutely in a condition of Liberty, no man, Prince or Pauper, should know or even be able to divine the amount of one's wealth, income, or expenditure.

(a) For the Crown to know these things, it raises immediately the spectre of the designing of methods to implement fairness of outcome. Fairness of outcome leads immediately to sloth and the sense of entitlement on the part of the slothful. The Laws of Nature demonstrated this clearly to the earliest of the English Colonials when the first settlements failed miserably while practicing the purest form of social democracy....communism.

(b) We are required as True Americans to practice that to which the Old Gringo refers as communitarianism...the opposite of communism. In communitarianism each person must provide for himself and aid those around him. Communitarianism is based upon the finest foundations of Judeo-Christianic dogma....love thy neighbour as thyself....In all things render to friend and traveller as you would wish to be rendered thereby....develop one's talents so that you can be measured by your good works and that they might glorify your Father in Heaven.....If four loaves are taken, bring back five. Communitarianism requires individual positive striving in the addressing of self-interest and fealty to obligations. It certainly overrides selfishness and avarice as human conditions or motives.

Communitarianism requires simply....take care of thee and thine; take care of those whose needs are few and transitory and to whom you might be able to truly aid (ie a barnraising); and then take care of those who are overwhelmed, are incapable, are infirmed, or who are beset.

Not the Crown, but the community. If there is an ill, it is at hand. Why send to London for attention of an ill in Nottingham? The Crown might assist with its standing Army and Navy. That would do well for engineering excercises for later combat and military manuever....training and service simultaneously during a catastrophe...earthquake, hurricane, etc. It is true that the greater the self-reliance, the greater the preparedness and prosperity of a people.

In a democratic-process republic, reasonable fear can be expressed that there can come a majority which will finally vote to take the bakery from the owners and turn that bakery over to the people whose hobby it is to eat. Those who have unimagineable wealth will more and more require that those who have some riches and prosperity pay the price of feeding those who will finally take possession of and then destroy the both the bakery and the Republic...along with the "trust fund wealthy" like the Kennedys and Rockefellers. Their guillotine is the street mob already put in place by their own hand, through the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society income transfer programs.

Read at all costs

One who knew well the Gulag

      This reasoning is a restatement of others more eloquent.   There are times when eloquence is drawn from the effort to speak or write thoughts in a precise manner.   De Tocqueville, Jefferson, Franklin, Adam Smith, Hayek, Solzenitzen and hundreds of other observers have made these observations over the years. These people feared that  those who felt guilty for having wealth would seek to improve our pleasant American chaos with a "rational" social construct that would be much more efficient in terms of providing for all the little people down below.    The howling of George Bernard Shaw is revered by these people while the wisdom of Rudyard Kipling is thoroughly scoffed.....    www.kipling.org.uk/poems_copybook.htm .   Click on to remind yourself of his brilliance at seeing through the diabolical intent of elitists.

       Nor should the super-wealthy, whose fortunes are immune from silly bothers like taxes and investment, be taxed by the crown, neither they nor those of middling and higher incomes drawn from their professions or sweats.   The imposition of taxes, normally proposed by the incomprehensibly wealthy, is designed to keep the hoi polloi out of the "very best" mansions and clubs.   Let them have their local country clubs and drive Lincolns....but they cannot be allowed to 'our precincts'.   Those of us who operate businesses and who have professions might resent the Kennedys and the Rockefellers and the like because of their hypocrisy, but we should not wish for their taxation nor our taxation of earnings, wealth, or effects.    Likewise we should not wish for the taxation of a poor man's legitimate income.   If we choose to make him uncomfortable in his poverty so as to impulse him to industry, then we should also maintain the compact that he should have the fruits of his labour.
       In short, we should all strive to be wealthy and well-to-do.   We should all avoid to the point of greatest pain to be wards of the Crown.   The Crown must not impede the building of wealth and property through taxation of income or property.

     (2)     There is no manner by which we can thrive by allowing madmen to point to the 'moulin de jour' and then have the power to order us to Quixotic attack at all costs.   "Hungry Children" "Sex Education" "Old People Eating Dogfood" "Inequitable Distribution of Wealth" In each case their presumption of crisis is based upon anecdote and their solution is grounded in madness.
    This debate is impossible any longer because any reasonable statement is immediately taken into surgery, reshaped, and then republished as living proof that the individual making the statement is clinically psychotic, and worse, a racist, and is worse yet a Southern white man who thinks that an eternal intelligent force might have had something to do with the formation of the Universe.     In short, we have delivered our fate, our souls, and our fortunes into the hands of the Crown and his jesters.
       We cannot speak because should someone suggest that the War Between the States was fought more over the gauges of railroad lines than the curse of slavery, he might well be arrested and taken to the nearest Queebler Quookie Factory.    But...it was.
        And then ....for instance.... We cannot say that there is no such founding statement in the Constitution, even as amended, that calls for the separation of Church and State.    A recent candidate for the United States Senate from Delaware declared same....that there is no such statement....and she was practically boo'd off the stage....howling laughter, booing, snickering...But, she was right.   The United States Constitution, in prohibiting the establishment of a Religion, was essentially assuring everyone that they would not have to support through government payments a nationwide network of Episcopal Churches.    This would have been particularly inconvenient because of the prayer in the Book of Common Prayer for the health and guidance of those in authority, starting with King George III.
    The Old Gringo's great-great-great-great grandfather was one of those who argued in the mid-1810s against the maintenance of the Congregationalist Church as the official Church of Connecticut.   That ancestor was a prominent Methodist minister and served as an elected official in that strange State of Meddlers....and remains such in these as well as in those days.   His arguments were made before the State Legislature as well as other public forums.
    The Olde Gringo borrows from the dreaded Wikipedia with the following:

Connecticut was originally founded by Congregationalists who split away from the Massachusetts colony between 1635 and 1636. The first settlers founded three towns on the Connecticut River in Windsor, Wethersfield, and Hartford. One of the main purposes of the Fundamental Orders was to formalize the relationship between these three towns. The core foundation of the Fundamental Orders incorporates the ingrained religious background of the colony’s founders. They called for “an orderly and decent government according to God” in attempts to pursue “The liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus.”^[2] Until 1818, the Congregational Church stood as the established church of the state. All Connecticut residents were required to attend church and/or pay taxes to support the Congregational faith. Anyone belonging to another Christian sect such as Baptist, Episcopal, or Quaker, had to provide documentation signed by a church officer indicating attendance and financial support of their separate church in order to avoid paying taxes to the Congregationalists.

     While we neither favour nor oppose the establishment of an official church for a consenting jurisdiction, we do oppose the official aetheism that is presently the policy of the Central Government and the popular culture.    The point here is only that the "well informed" of Delaware guffawed at the Republican candidate suggesting that the Constitution of the United States of America says nothing about "separation of Church and State".    The only mention is in the First Amendment which states that ".....Congrefs shall make no law respecting the establishment of a Religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.....".    Once again this was mainly an attempt to head off any attempt to "establish" as in England even to this day, the Anglican Church as the official church of state.     None of this is terribly important now, it diverges, in fact from the point.

     The point is the following:   "Living Document" jurists have steadily attacked religion and the Christian religion specifically over the years in order to break loose the Republic from its moorings and to allow it to seek a Perfect Heaven formed by the Hand of Man.    Lots of Luck....the next re-make of the French Revolution awaits us.
     This is why compromise is not now possible.   Bi-partisan solutions to the problems created by aetheist socialists cannot be had without making the problem worse.   Riots in Los Angeles? Maxine Waters puts an earmark on an irrelevant piece of legislation that sends 100 dollars per adult to every address in the census tract where the riots took place....as a form of reparation;   part of the justification being that some of the people could not go down to the welfare offices to update their information and obtain benefits due to the riots.
This is not a joke.
      Gun crimes?   Outlaw guns.   Illegitimate babies? Pay people who have them....it's not the baby's fault.   When the baby is bled dead in the street 14 years later with a bullet through his head....blame George Bush.    When 400 of the babies terrorize people leaving the Wisconsin State Fair, beating and destroying anyone and anything they can access....blame the Tea Party.
       Any solution to the grotesque and horrid problems this nation is facing at this time, formed by "bi-partisanship" will look similar to the animal designed by a committee....the platypus.   It will have about as much influence over those problems as that same animal.

I am Done.
El Gringo Viejo

Click to visit our little Adobe Hideaway…

This is our rustic, but very comfortable place, out in the rural area to the northwest of Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas…the State's Capital. From a bustling city of 400,000, we placed our domicile a bit more than 20 miles into the scenes of mountains, citrus groves, spring-fed creeks and rivers with crystal clear waters, and an abundance of bird species that make veteran birders shake their heads in wonder.

We are all but adjacent to the venerable Hacienda de Santa Engracia (about 500 yards away), which dates to the 1720s and has ancient structures still in use, very elegant, and mystical in many ways. It has operated as a guest hotel since the 1970s.

Our little place rests on three and a fraction acres, fronting on the Rio Corona, which is lined with over-1,000 year old cypress trees. The nearby Sierra del Cautivo…a major segment of the overall Sierra Madre Oriental that dominate most of eastern Mexico, lies to the west by about three miles. guards the many springs that maintain the almost perpetual flow from those heights (up to 12,000 fasl) while our place is situated right at 1,000 feet above sea level.

Give us a call, come by and visit…it is truly a different venture in the most positive sense. We can be reached by our email - privatouring@gmail.com - which is our preferred method of communicating.

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What is an OROG?

Once a person lands on our page, that individual becomes a member of the Order of Readers of the Old Gringo, (OROG). There are no dues or assessments to pay, no meetings, no requirements. We are not associated with the KKK, the WCTU, the French Masons, or the Global Warming Glacier

Protection Committee.

We do have a distant connection with the Knights of the Golden Circle and hold the maps to the internment sites of 34 tonnes of Confederate Gold, and 1,000 tonnes of Mexican Imperial Silver (bar and coinage) derived from the collapse of the Reign of Maximillian von Hapsburg, Emperor of Mexico (1863 - 1867). I think we can remember where we put it.

All kidding aside, we are acerbic, but we do not bite. We do believe in our antiquated philosophy, but we try to not impose our quirks and beliefs so far as to be disrespectful.

El Gringo Viejo

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Wise Words

Communism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Winston Churchill

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Be sure you are right, then go ahead.

I bark at no man's bid. I will never come and go, fetch and carry, at the whistle of the Great Man in the White House, no matter who he is.

I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done. But, if such was not to be, then you may all go to Hell, and I shall go to Texas!

David Crockett

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And on and on it goes. The more the Government gives away, the more it takes, and the less Americans do for themselves, until finally, like Europe, there is nobody left to do anything, and there is nobody left to pay for, the nothing that is not done.

And, yes, Virginia, there truly is a Santa Clause, and he and Mrs. Clause and their helpers care greatly for the good children of the Planet. So long as there is happiness, kindness, charity, generosity, and the Spirit of Fellowship, Santa Clause will be there, representing those noble things, and he will always move in a spiritual way so as to provoke humankind to goodness.

El Gringo Viejo

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“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Booker Tallaferro Washington

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It is impossible to make a poor man rich by making a rich man poor.

Abraham Lincoln

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El Gringo Viejo: a fair description

Life for El Gringo Viejo began on the Texas-Mexico frontier, near McAllen, Texas literally on a real, live farm. The farmer, as one might imagine, was his father, who had moved with his parents from Gwinner, Sargent County, North Dakota in 1915 - 1916 period, down to the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. (And yes, Virginia, that is the way Sargent County is spelled.)

His parents farmed in an area close to the new community named after its founder, called Ed Couch, in Hidalgo County of Texas. My grandfather is buried in the Weslaco Municipal Cemetery about 10 feet away from his friend, Ed Couch.

After studies, and a stint in the 1st Cavalry, 12th Regiment (mounted), Headquarters Squadron of the United States Army...riding warhorses back and forth along the Rio Grande from the late 1920s and early 1930s. He did not speak much about his service, but we determined that he apparently made rank of 1st Lieutenant.

El Gringo Viejo's Father established his farming and citrus grove-care operation just north of McAllen, Texas. Mother was a housewife and a professional woman....a learned, eloquent, well-read woman.

They were educated people, my father winding up as a Superintendent of a major school/facility of the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation in Austin, Texas after a twenty year career in education at the secondary level. He had degrees in History, Psychology, and Education Administration.

El Gringo Viejo is the last of three children, all males. Number one was Milton Birchard, Jr. who was born in 1936 and died in a vehicular incident in 1988. He was narcoleptic. He held a doctorate in geography from Louisiana State University and was head of the Department there for a good while.

Number two is Norman Francis, who was born during the WWII situation in 1942 and became an important Republican political engineer and fundraiser. He served as Executive Director of the Republican Party of Texas during the late 1960s and early 1970s and as Senator John G. Tower's immediate Executive Assistant. The Senator is the Godfather of Norman's first son.

Norman died at age 77 in Austin, Texas and I was one of four eulogists who was chosen to speak at his en memoriam at the Austin Club in downtown most Austin…within sight of the State Capitol.

It was a personal duty and very rewarding

in every way.

My arrival was in 1947, and I was destined to confound my parents and all those around me. Educated entirely in public schools in McAllen, skipping the third grade, and stumbling out of my high school in the upper 90% of a class of 606. I

attended and graduated from Southwest Texas State University (now named Texas State University, unfortunately), being one of the few conservatives to graduate out of the School of Sociology, although my treatment at the hands of my tormentor-professors was not so unpleasant in those days. Emphasis of studies were social demography, and Latin American Affairs with a concentration on Mexico's history and current political evolution, with a minors in History, Geography, and Political Science.

El Gringo Viejo is one of the old, unreconstructed high-church Episcopalians. Politically, he is very fundamentally conservative. He prefers Baseball to football, and considers that baseball with a designated hitter for the pitcher should be called "poofy-ball". Favourite major league team of all times? The Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s. It will never be the same again.
El Gringo Viejo's father was born to a Hudson Valley-type girl and a man who had lost two older brothers who served in the Pennsylvania 96th Regiment of Volunteer Infantry during the War Between the States.

The surnamed line (Newton) originated from East Anglia, not far from a place called Washington in northeastern England. They came into Boston Harbour, Massachusetts in 1642 (the 1st voyage of the Mayflower had overbooked), and settled there and in Maine as well as spreading out to Vermont, New York, and Pennsylvania, over the generations for the first 220 years.
Another batch of folks, mainly Anglo, settled in the middle Hudson Valley. There was another group of Celto-Teutonics types from Saxony and Prussia, establishing and settling along the Hudson River from around what is Catskill County northward to Duchess and Rennselaer Counties around a place named Red Hook. The main group came in during the early 1650s.

My mother's people were another English line of long-term Southern and Tennessee people, from the Eastern part of that State, who originally came in during the 1660s through Virginia and North Carolina, and finally into Eastern Tennessee, settling in and around a county to be named Franklin, and helping to establish the city of Winchester. Almost all of these people originated from southwestern England, near the frontier with Wales.

Only recently did we verify that she had many people involved in the service of the Confederacy. One died in northern Mississippi, another Captain Asa Grant, 2nd Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry, was severely wounded and succumbed to his wounds finally in 1869, and another hung around in an Ohio POW camp (Camp Chase) for about 13 months, while three others were either wounded or died in action, including David Limbaugh, Lieutenant, 42 Tennessee Infantry. Another five made it through relatively unscathed.

Almost all were, oddly enough, related to the great-grand uncles and gggg-grandfathers down to gg-grandfathers of Rush Limbaugh. The gggg-grandfather came into the Colonies in the early 1740s from a Prussia and Saxony background, and served in both civilian and military capacities to the Continental government and Army. He was the XO of a Militia Battalion of 3,000 Pennsylvania effectives. They honed their military readiness under the supervision of Gen. von Steuben and someone named Washington at some place called Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

A grandson of his, Isaac, settled in Tennessee after the War for Independence against King George III. So Rush and I share grandfathers, four generations deep on the American Continent.

It should be stated here that were I to be called to declare, my allegiance would still be with the Southern Cause, although I bear no rancor against those who feel the same about their instinct to maintain the Union. Oddly enough, both my mother (a Southerner) and my father (a true Yankee by blood) believed that we would have remained closer if we had separated, and each side gone the ways of their own yearning, but amicably.

The last of the English (El Gringo Viejo's) line came during the time between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. They left County Wicklow, where they had been involved, apparently, in that peculiar Anglo - Scots/Irish practice of making whiskey by the use of peat for fuel. They were also involved in the business of production and processing of various types of grains as well as the production of whiskey, gin, and beer. By their surnames one would know that, while coming out of Ireland, they were actually English, one with the surname of Christian and the wife, Webster. They had, in fact, married in Christ's Church Cathedral, Anglican, in downtown Dublin in 1796. They landed in New York, set up shop in the City among previously arrived relatives, and then in Albany. We have some record that this Christian who married the Webster had actually lived in the colonies, but travelled several times back and forth between the Spirits businesses in England and Ireland and the New World. They wound up as the generations progressed in and around Minneapolis (St. Anthony) & Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Racine, Wisconsin. My particular line went from New York to Alabama, then North Carolina, and then Wisconsin to join up with the rest of the extended family, finally in Minnesota, before the War Between the States.

The Time Line of entry of all lines of my children's blood ancestry on their mother's side in the New World begins in 1578, when Spaniards of mixed Hebraic and Iberian peoples, and others of ancestry from Portugal, Galicia, and southern Spain entered into what was to become Monclova and Saltillo, Coahuila. They are brought under the auspices of the Explorer, Conquistador, and Colonizer Jose Luis Carvajal y de la Cueva, with elements settling in Lampazos and Cerralvo (Nuevo Leon), in Palofox (Texas), and Revilla (Tamaulipas) on the Rio Bravo.
Also, the Count of the Sierra Gorda, Col. Jose de Escandon brought another group of mainly Spanish, Portuguese, and Azoreans in the early 175os, settling along the Rio Bravo (Grande), and then on the north (Texas) side, spreading up to what is now Yorktown, Texas (near and southeast of San Antonio de Bexar, more or less) before and during the Texas Republican period.

My children and theirs are qualified to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Sons of Liberty, The Sons of the Grand Army of the Union, The Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Daughters of the Confederacy. By my side they are 16th generation English Colonial - American and 6th generation Texian. By my wife's side, my children are 23rd generation northernmost New Spain, Texian, and American. Isolating Texas alone, my grandchildren are 15th generation Texian.

LIKE?

Cats, and then dogs.

Fishing, even a bit of bird watching, now and then.

Really good music..antique, old, 1950s and early 1960s rock and roll, classical - Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, both Strauses, and many others, African tribal sounds en chorus, Mexican bolero...mariachis when they play out-of-doors, some country and quite a bit of the old western (Sons of the Pioneers, the Texas Ploughboys, Marty Robbins "Gunfighter Ballads, for instance.), even some of my own piano works, bagpipes, Enya, marimba, Caribe.

The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess always seemed to me to have been, and remains, a true masterpiece of Americana.

Well maintained Firearms, smooth running small equipment, old autos that respond to repair and upkeep and keep going. Used to have BMWs and so forth, but being old helps tone things down a bit.

Antiques, and antiquities...Meso-American archeology...and religious history. Formal religious services among the Orthodox..as in Anglican, Roman, Orthodox and Conservative Jewish services and celebrations. Hard to find, now.

Overnight radio, rightwing talk radio until it becomes overly tedious and repetitive.

Weather and climate.

And strangely during the past few years,cooking. Not just barbequeing...but actually dishing up gourmet-type stuff...and gardening to a purpose.

We grow a lot of our own spices for our little bed and breakfast and we specialise in flowerng plants, bushes, and trees that attract bees and literally hundreds of species of common to extremely rare birds to our place.

Lifelong Republican, honourably discharged - United States Army (conscripted).

Now drifted into the position of favouring the amicable withdrawal of Texas from the American Union. My grandchildren are 15th generation Coahuila/Texas by my wife and 8th generation Texas by me and my will is to have them answer for the debt of Texas and not for the debts incurred by the National Socialists who have taken possession of the central government in Washington, D.C.

DISLIKES?
Any kind of socialism...bolshevik, national, marxist, social democratic, Trotskyite, progressive, ....and any kind of socialist.

The Ku Klux Klan and such types who figure that they have to hate somebody because of how he/she was born. They are just role players, resucitated by the Communist Party USA in the 1920s, whose members are fueled by a well deserved sense of inferiority.

And almost all social activism.

Almost all labour union officers and almost all labour unions. (There are some exceptions.)

Public assistance of any kind. All welfare and/or charity should and must be privately handled in order to avoid the trap wherein we have fallen, that being the multigenerational slide into the abyss of forlorn hopelessness that is government slavery and dependence. That slide is cheerfully supported by politicians who love to buy votes with other peoples' money.

Lotteries operated by governments.

Litter, filth, graffiti, gangs, and waiting in line for people using food stamps whil'st they argue with the cashier about how they "need" this or that to be covered...when they have three carts with 450 USD of snacks and things we cannot afford because we are in an 'upper income" category.

Church reformers who want to change my church instead of them going to another church and just leaving me alone.

Medications for boys who are over-active, and medications in general.

Lite beer, lite Coca Cola, fat-free, lo-cal, artificial sugars and sweeteners, anything marked "healthy" on food packages, sugar-free, margarine, and driving 23 miles to buy gasoline over there because it is 2 cents per gallon cheaper.

Any government programme designed to help anybody; 94% of the time the programme winds up morphing into some kind of monster. Then liberals and do-gooders will propose another programme, twice as costly, to cure the ills caused by the first cure-all.

Officiousness, and the term "non-profit", as if there is some kind of moral superiority in the failure to produce wealth.

Physical abuse of an animal, an extraterrestrial, a child, slave, woman, or anything like a tractor or power tool, firearm, sewing machine, or an auto, etc.
Loud and/or sharp noises, especially when such noises have no particular purpose.

Wasting anything, from paper towels to Clorox to cake and cookie batter...anything. And....waiting in a line.