The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Redux Rendezvous IV

16 June 2010

Volume 12, Issue 24

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A few years ago while looking for a place to develop The Creation Leadership Center, my travels took me to the small hamlet of Loomis, Washington. Loomis sits in a long riff valley next to the eastern slope of the Cascade Mountains and west of the Okanogan River. Today the place consists of a general store, a few houses, a small church, and at the time of my visit a second hand store. In the back room of that store in the used book section I found a small saddle stitched booklet that caught my eye. The title of the pamphlet was: “A comparison of two primitive apples from two continents” authored by one Vladimir Sekerfreevich.

From the description of the author on the back cover I found out that Dr. Sekerfreevich was a professional botanist and geneticist from the Soviet Union, who had defected in 1929 and purchased a small orchard on the shores of Palmer Lake a few miles north of Loomis. At the time Palmer Lake was an area of prime orchards, but today being off the beaten track from the Okanogan Valley its contribution is diminished.

According to the owner of the thrift store, Sekerfreevich was essentially a hermit, who lost is family somehow related to a Stalin purge, but still was well liked in the community and help generously the other orchardists improve their orchards. So I gave the thrift store owner a dollar and purchased the booklet, probably the only one still in existence, took it home and promptly put it away, only to discover it recently while looking for something else.

In his little book Sekerfreevich said that when coming to America he was able to bring a small tin of apple seeds from the research center where he worked in central Russia. When he purchased his orchard he planted the seeds and grew them to the point where they began to produce fruit. Because of the difference in climate some of the seeds didn’t produce any fruit, but one particular tree looked very promising, so he grafted it to other rootstocks and rooted some of the canes. As a play on words he called these apples by the common name Russian Red.

Searching an expanded area around his home, on an abandoned homestead up in the Similkameen Valley near the Canadian border, he found a very unusual apple seedling quite different than any he knew back in Russia, or those that grew from his imported seeds, or any that grew in the commercial orchards in the Okanogan Valley. Like what he did with his Russian seeds, Dr. Sekerfreevich, grafted and rooted canes from this variety, defining the variety as Liberty Bell.

The rest of the book is filled with all sorts of technical data that he collected from about 25 years of experiments on his apple cultivars, but at the end of the pamphlet he summarizes that research quite succinctly in the following narratives:

Collectiva maximus: (Russian Red) Easily established, requires heavy fertilization to fruit, has a maximum life span of 70 years, roots excrete a toxin that makes the ground barren for generations, fruit is pleasant to look at and has initially a sweet flavor, but has long term effects on humans by addicting them to the reality of serfdom as life’s highest calling.

Independenceus arduous: (Liberty Bell) Difficult to establish, once established requires little care, can live for centuries, roots fix nitrogen from the air much like legumes, but also converts other minerals into plant available nutrients, together making the whole orchard more productive, the fruit looks unremarkable, but the fruit has long term effects on humans making them hardworking, generous, and seems to produce lasting happiness even in arid conditions.

Hopefully by now you realize that the good Dr. Vladimir Sekerfreevich is a fictitious character, as was his research, but the analogy that our human enterprise culture mimics or models natural creation is not. Yet instead of sending would be business majors to intern in an orchard or in a forestry camp, they are isolated in urban brick buildings where they are indoctrinated into the belief, that life is so simple and mundane that we can manipulate the real world just because we are so very smart. For example, we can create a happy and prosperous world by all working together and obeying the leaders of the Animal Farm.

Human beings are not animals in the evolutionary sense. We were all created by God in his image, each with a unique and distinct eternal personality. Any human imposed grouping that forces us to look at each other differently, such as race, thereby limits the human potential of others stated in that archaic term, sin.

Henry David Thoreau in his essay “Walking” introduced the term “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World.” That was made famous however through the nature world of the turned off Calvinist, John Muir. So today we have some framed nature lithograph, reproduced on archival acid free paper, with those calligraphic words included in the appropriate spot, and say we are environmentally conscious, or in the twenty-first century “green.” My poster by the way is decoupage on a piece of particleboard and dates from my Army tour in Germany during the Vietnam era.

But instead of walking for miles and miles, for days on end, along woodland trails as did Thoreau, we do our tickle the bears thing, arising early Saturday morning, drive our Subaru to the trailhead, basically running from there to nowhere and back, so that we can return to the city to go to the quaint natural foods restaurant for dinner.

In Monday’s “The Summer of Progressive Ferment,” we mentioned pioneering species in regards to the intellectual Marxist revolutionaries that Glenn Beck hopes will not take over the country. These people really are however, just like those seeds that Dr. Sekerfreevich brought with him when he emigrated from the Soviet Union. The reason they can now find soil in which to germinate is over the last century the United States has slowly destroyed the natural diversity of human enterprise, and transformed the country into a series of monoculture fields, the bigger the better.

As yields from those fields slowly decreased, instead of changing our enterprise model to one more sustainable, we just added more and more water in the form of leveraged monetary liquidity. Under Ayn Rand’s Objectivist disciple, Alan Greenspan we were told and truly believed that laissez faire liquidity was all that was needed to continue that Social Darwinist prosperity forever. Alan was smart enough to bail out before the rust (like a natural fungi) destroyed the crop and left George W. Bush to harvest all the blame.

To make matters worse, we replaced this Harvard MBA, (who through his National Guard duty protected our southern border from invading hordes of Vietnamese insurgents), with a Harvard lawyer who had no experience in anything except Chicago community organizing politics, liberation theology, with a failed Marxist father and an anthropologist mother who taught him how to appear to be part of any culture but a member of none, the ability to speak eloquently off a teleprompter, and develop a great and ongoing campaign staff.

So since the Bush era, instead of returning to even some dumbed downed and enlightened version of free enterprise, we have codified too big to fail, and followed a more simplified European model of a social democracy, created out of the chaos of WW II. What the Obama administration has attempted to do is to rebuild this humanly created enterprise culture of pioneer monoculture species, including government, by adding more liquidity. In the process we are really doing a remarkable job of changing the fungi rust – into cancer. Where is the wisdom of F. A. Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” when we need it?

In the history of modern human governance, the only tried and true method of converting pioneer species to a more diverse enterprise infrastructure is to raise marginal tax rates, the higher the better. This creates a commodity known as flight money in which tax payers, especially wealthy tax payers, get involved in all sorts of investment schemes.

The paradigm behind this tax avoidance reasoning is, “If the government is going to take my money anyway, I might as well try something that might somehow, one day turn into something worthwhile. There is really very little that the government does well, so what have I got to lose.” Can’t you just hear Bill O’Reilly offering wisdom like that?

Keeping with O’Reilly jargon, “The lunatic liberal fringe says that this it my duty to pay all the taxes the government imposes, because the government can do it better. I say bull! I give a lot of money to worthwhile charities that really help the folks.”

“From the right you hear all this blarney that if you cut taxes everything will return to normal prosperity, but most of the money goes into the pockets of Wall Street fat cats and greedy speculators.”

What Bill or no one else seems to recognize is just how much everything we do is eschewed towards one form of Social Darwinism or the other. Social Darwinism is a religion that says we humans can create a just society by our own efforts.

Since the administration of Ronald Reagan and the long tenure of Alan Greenspan at the Fed, the table has been tilted strongly toward Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and laissez faire capitalism, which received its most strident kick in the behind, under the presidency of Bill Clinton.

Now under Barack Obama overnight that table has flipped rapidly to what we call the liberal left, and everyone is saying like Chicken Little, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling.” Well the President is right he didn’t create the mess, but all he is trying to do is to fix the broken-down with the dilapidated.

There is an old saying, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.” That begs a serious question, “Does someone, somewhere, know the right path?” For the last century in America we have tried one Social Darwinist concept or the other, but never have we had enough wealth or gumption to have one or the other side win.

That all changed when the cosmos decided we could do it all with debt. If a little leveraged debt is a good thing, more leveraged debt will be better. Then we can lump all the individual debt together and call it a security. And then it gets really-really exciting, we can use some of the money we made selling the securities to buy some insurance on the whole deal. We could call them credit default swaps, and if we do enough of those swaps fast enough with a bunch of stupid morons, we have created the perpetual money making machine.

So now the world is broke and we not only don’t know the way forward, anyone who might have had an idea of how this all really works is dead. We are at the crossroad, where it all comes down to the reality that we have to have some faith in someone, if it isn’t Barak Obama, it has to be someone else, or we have to have faith in God.

The United States of America was founded on faith in God. Every one of those Founders either had a unique faith in God, or knew someone who did. Virtually those who had that Godly faith, lived by it to the point they understood that others didn’t share all the details of that faith, so on the essentials they were inflexible, on the nonessentials they sought harmony, and those who didn’t believe at all were endowed by God with that right also.

Thus far in the fourth chapter of this series we have yet to mention one way to understand the way forward is the Redux Rendezvous. I realize they are just words, but they refer to a time in which varied immigrants to these shores really were creating wealth, just about everywhere. Perhaps too many of us have gotten lazy. Lazy is many times of symptom of affluence, as is the desire for personal peace as well.

I remember the first time I heard the story about the ham and egg breakfast, where the pig was committed and the chicken only involved. The problem is that most people are highly involved with their lives to the point they have no time for anything else. This means not only do our commitments suffer; we have lost the foundation on which any commitment needs to be built.

In the church sense, that commitment needs to be the gospel of Jesus Christ, his propitiatory sacrifice on the cross for the sins of humanity and his resurrection from the dead as the hope of eternity. However that is the function of the church not civil governance. The majority of the early immigrants to these shores came because of that linkage of church and state in their country of origin. They wanted to worship God freely without government or political interference.

In the culture and the community, the focus must be upon the individual. That individual is not either a production machine, a consumption machine, or some morphed hybrid of the two. A government that tries to stimulate wealth creation through collective action is bound to fail; it is a natural law. The government needs to get out of the way, so that individuals can follow the path of their own destiny. What that means: uniform standards of governmental conduct, providing a sound stable limited debt money supply, reducing bureaucratic compost, and tax policy that allows the market to determine winners and losers, not tax breaks and credits that favor those who have, over those who have not, and especially over those who are attempting to have more.

In our context this week, we need to allow people to plant apple orchards of Liberty Bells (Independenceus arduous). Big corporations can adapt and flourish, go the way of the pioneer species they represent, or move to barren ground left behind after years of Russian Red (Collectiva maximus) apple production.

After watching the President’s speech last evening on the Gulf oil spill and much of the following commentary I have decided to spend next Monday’s column on America’s energy policy, or lack thereof. So for some insights you will not read anywhere else, check the website for an article preliminarily entitled: The Chaos of American Energy