Carl Wells Books

The news is not always bad. Here is some good news: people in California are moving closer to a potential secession from the U.S. and A.

An article entitled “CalExit” by Brion McClanahan, appearing at LewRockwell.com for July 27, 2017, gives us the encouraging details. The California Attorney General has given the “green light” for the collection of signatures with the goal of a “secession ballot initiative” to be ready for the 2018 general election.

Of course the secession of California, in the near future, is still a long shot. A recent poll shows that only about 32% of Californians favor secession. But that is up significantly from just three years ago, when secession was favored by only 20%. They are moving in the right direction.

Of course the right direction is really the left direction. Most of the pro-secession sentiment in California comes from the left. For the left, secession is immoral and illegal–until it isn’t. If people with a rightward bent want to secede, it is supposedly because we are “neo-Confederates” yearning for the return of slavery. When the left want to secede, it is because they are too virtuous to put up with deplorables. Well, guys, whatever. We are just proud of you that you are thinking about seceding.

The irony, of course, is delicious. God is sometimes called the Supreme Ironist. This might be one example of how He moves history in the direction He wants, meanwhile having a giggle at our expense as He does so.

The movement toward the break-up of the United States should have happened because Christians were reading the Bible, taking it seriously, and beginning to realize that covenantalism was God’s will for the world–that is, each nation making a covenant with the god of its choice, and receiving the consequences good or bad. But it didn’t happen that way. Christians are drifting along with everyone else. So instead of thoughtful Christians acting in a highly thoughtful manner, and thus thoughtfully moving the nation to a peaceful break-up good for all concerned, we have been thoughtfully contemplating our navel. The enemies of God are the ones beginning to realize that two cannot walk together, unless they are agreed. (Amos 3:3) Good for them.

Children at tea are messy (E. F. Benson). History is like children at tea–messy. The break-up of the United States will not be as clean as we would like. Hopefully violence and starvation and loss of personal savings will be avoided, but maybe they won’t be avoided.

Moreover, all our problems will not be fixed by secession. Our problems are not caused by “them.” Our problems, at bottom, are caused by “us”–by evangelical Christians. The pietist, antinomian (anti-God’s law) Christian church is the source of all our problems. I wrote a book on the topic–The Christian Betrayal of the United States–but it is probably fair to say that my fifteen books, my few current blog posts, and however many books I publish in the future, can all be more or less summed up in one sentence, or even one phrase. Until the Bible-believing Christian church wants to get serious about applying what the Bible teaches, we are going to go on causing enormous problems for ourselves and for the people who live next door to us, and for foreigners as well. It’s us.

As a nation, as a Christian people, as a non-Christian people, we won’t change until circumstances force us to change. We are bankrupt, but that won’t get us to change. We have to have the consequences of bankruptcy, before we will consider change. If consequences come, then we will consider change. Or, at least a few of us will cast around for a better way. It doesn’t have to be all of us. It just needs to be a significant minority of people in the church. That minority will help Christians as a whole and people as a whole move toward a more realistic, better world. At least such is my hope. It is only a hope, not a guaranteed occurrence.

Mr. McClanahan suggests that states like Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire all may be ripe, in the “not so distant future,” for secession, as California increasingly is. All seven are basically left-leaning, again like California. The only one of them I have even visited briefly, is California. But I would love to visit all of them, especially Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. All eight states seem to have a lot to offer in terms of natural beauty. (They are not as beautiful as Indiana, of course, but they are doing the best they can under the circumstances.)

Maybe, after many secessions, the rest of us can visit California and its leftish cousins. We will respect your laws, and spend our tourist dollars to your advantage. We will take our yahoo attitudes home with us, leaving you to work out your salvation in fear and trembling, as we also will do in Flyover Country (Philippians 2:12). Divided, we will not be as powerful to do as much evil in the world.

If the North had had the practical wisdom to let the South secede, many disasters could have been avoided. We are at another potential turning point in history–secession once again rears its beautiful head. Will the rest of us foolishly try to keep the U. S. and A. together? I hope not. California, Abram (Abraham) speaks for us. So I hope, anyway. At least he speaks for me.

‘So Abram said to Lot, “Please let there be no strife between you and me, nor between my herdsmen and your herdsmen, for we are brothers. Is not the whole land before you? Please separate from me; if to the left, then I will go to the right; or if to the right, then I will go to the left.”‘ (Genesis 13:8-9)

Maybe this time we will have learned what we should have understood in 1861, but didn’t. California, we are brothers. You have gone to the left, so we will try to go to the right, if we can figure out what the right is. We probably won’t figure it out very quickly, but that’s our responsibility, not yours. Good-bye and Godspeed.

Last week I discussed Understood Betsy, the superb children’s book published a hundred years ago by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958). I said the book seemed almost to be written for our time. Betsy was raised, for her first nine years of her life, by Aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances. Both adults wanted good for Betsy. Aunt Frances was the one chiefly involved in raising Betsy. But Aunt Frances was a “helicopter parent,” before helicopter parents had been given a term of their own. In fact before helicopters had been invented. The Putneys–the three adults with whom Betsy was sent to live at age nine–were definitely not helicopter parents.

Wikipedia tells us that “A helicopter parent . . . is a parent who pays extremely close attention to a child’s or children’s experiences and problems, particularly at educational institutions. Helicopter parents are so named because, like helicopters, they hover overhead, overseeing their child’s life.” (The ellipsis is mine.)

It seems good that a parent should pay extremely close attention to a child’s education and experiences! It seems to me that it really is good. But when paying close attention to a child’s progress becomes hovering over a child so that the child doesn’t learn to be self-reliant, the child’s road to maturity can be slowed–or stopped. We want children to grow up and to become mature adults, people who understand the difference between good and evil, and who choose good.

But what we have in the United States right now is many young people of college age who are called “snowflakes”–people who melt at the hint of opposition to their wishes. They constantly whine about micro-aggressions, and they need safe places to retreat to from us deplorables who do not share their views as to how the world is put together.

This should not be a problem with Christian parents and children. But it is. Ten or twelve years ago I was talking to a principal of a Christian school. This intelligent woman informed me that some of the parents of the children in her school were helicopter parents. Some of the parents had even begun to realize what they were. (One can hope this self-knowledge sparked reform, but such optimism is probably not warranted.) Think about it. These were Christian parents. Unlike most Christians, they had had enough sense to realize that they needed to get their children out of public schools. They had bellied up to the bar with their own money, to get their children a Christian education. And yet they did not have the sanctified common sense to stop hovering over their children.

Aunt Frances was not a monster or a villain. She loved Elizabeth Ann. But the Putneys loved Elizabeth Ann also. Their love was just as deep, although it might not have been as demonstrative. It might have been deeper. What is certain is that it was wiser. They helped Elizabeth Ann develop into a brave, resourceful girl who we sense will eventually become a brave, resourceful woman. At least, they were doing their best to help her grow up. Betsy would not end up a snowflake, whining about micro-aggressions. She would become a productive adult.

Both Aunt Frances and the Putneys loved Elizabeth Ann. One form of love was practical, one was not. So we discover that love has a content–for better or for worse. Just “loving” is not enough. We need to love with Christian sanctified biblical common sense. We need to love in a way which the Bible teaches. Which apparently is not all that easy a way to love–or a lot more Christians would be doing it. Being regenerated and converted is wonderful. But after that we have to learn to live more and more in ways that move in the general direction of biblical wisdom. It ain’t easy. But if we don’t, we end up as helicopter parents, and our children perhaps end up as snowflakes. All of which hampers our ability to help our own family and our neighbors and friends and enemies–and our Christian civilization.

There are plenty of humorous passages in Understood Betsy. One comes early on (p. 3) with Aunt Harriet describing the barbarian Putneys. (The ellipses are Aunt Harriet’s.)

‘They were related only by marriage to her, and she had her own opinion of them as a stiff-necked, cold-hearted, undemonstrative, and hard set of New Englanders. “I boarded near them one summer when you were a baby, Frances, and I shall never forget the way they treated some children visiting there! . . . Oh, no, I don’t mean they abused them or beat them . . . but such lack of sympathy, such a starving of the child-heart. . . No, I shall never forget it! The children had chores to do . . . as though they had been hired men!”‘

The horror, as Joseph Conrad might say: chores to do for children!

Along with the humorous passages are many which are moving. So much is at stake here! A child, being raised to be a snowflake, suddenly begins to grow up emotionally, helped to do so by the very people whom Aunt Harriet and Aunt Frances consider cold and hard. It is profoundly moving to see Betsy learn and grow emotionally. Perhaps that is part of the reason Understood Betsy will probably appeal to many adults as well as to children. We, as adults rather than children, have a better understanding of what is at stake. We know how much bad parenting there is in the world, and how children are devastated as a result. So, when we see Betsy edging in the right direction under practical and loving adult supervision, we are moved. This is a book adults can appreciate as much or more than children. Maybe that was why, when I kept hearing about snowflakes and their ridiculous behavior, some instinct told me I needed to reread Understood Betsy for the first time in decades. I’m really glad I did. It is a fine book–a book for both children and adults.

You done good, Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Rest in peace.

Understood Betsy is a children’s book written by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958). It was first published a hundred years ago, in 1917. It has had a measure of fame for a long time, and is probably still hanging in there as a book that reading children are likely to read. Which, if they do, they are making a good decision and won’t regret it, because it really is quite a good book. I think both children and adults will be entertained by it, and all of us can learn from it as we are entertained. The book seems almost to be written for our time–although that is probably true because it is written for all time, and our time is part of all time.

Elizabeth Ann, age nine, is an orphan being raised by old Great-aunt Harriet and middle-aged Aunt Frances somewhere in the Midwest. Elizabeth Ann is a pale, delicate, frightened child, given to many tears. Fortunately Aunt Frances “understands” Elizabeth Ann. She consoles her and worries about her, and walks her to and from school. But complications in the lives of all three people arise. Aunt Harriet’s cough is something very serious, and the doctor makes clear that it would be best for all that Elizabeth Ann live somewhere else as Aunt Frances nurses Aunt Harriet.

Elizabeth Ann is shipped off to the Putney cousins in Vermont–long considered the barbarian branch of the family by Aunt Harriet, Aunt Frances, and of course automatically Betsy had caught the same idea. “You can imagine, perhaps, the terror of Elizabeth Ann as the train carried her along toward Vermont and the horrible Putney Farm!” (p. 20) She arrives, and Great-uncle Henry is there with the wagon to greet her without great demonstration.

On the way home, Uncle Henry asks her to take the reins of the horses for a while, as he does some figuring. With a “yelp”–having successfully suppressed a potential scream of terror–Elizabeth Ann does indeed take the reins. Her success is not overwhelming. She lets the horses veer off the road into a shallow ditch, and, “perspiration starting out on her forehead,” finally gets them back on the road. She has to figure out how to remember which was her right hand.

‘And then suddenly something inside Elizabeth Ann’s head stirred and moved. It came to her, like a clap, that she needn’t know which was right or left. If she just pulled the way she wanted them to go–the horses would never know whether is was the right or the left rein!

‘It is possible that what stirred inside her head at that moment was her brain, waking up. She was nine years old, and she was in the third-A grade at school, but that was the first time she had ever had a whole thought of her very own. At home, Aunt Frances had always known exactly what she was doing, and had helped her over the hard places before she even knew they were there; and at school her teachers had been carefully trained to think faster than the scholars. Somebody had always been explaining things to Elizabeth Ann so carefully that she had never found out a single thing for herself before. This was a very small discovery, but it was her own. Elizabeth Ann was as excited about it as a mother bird over the first egg that hatches.

‘She forgot how afraid she was of Uncle Henry, and poured out to him her discovery. “It’s not right or left that matters!” she ended triumphantly; “it’s which way you want to go!” Uncle Henry looked at her attentively as she talked, eyeing her sidewise over the top of one spectacle glass. When she finished–“Well, now, that’s so,” he admitted, and returned to his ‘rithmetic.

‘It was a short remark, shorter than any Elizabeth Ann had ever heard before. Aunt Frances and her teachers always explained matters at length. But it had a weighty, satisfying ring to it. The little girl felt the importance of having her statement recognized. She turned back to her driving.’ (pp. 25-27)

We are not told, but we can guess that Uncle Henry sensed Elizabeth Ann’s need to do something unusual–drive a team of horses all by herself–and wisely exercised benign neglect in letting her work through the problems.

Along with old Uncle Henry, the Putney household consists of fat old Aunt Abigail (Henry’s wife) and their adult daughter Cousin Ann. All three are good people. Ann is a natural leader and Elizabeth Ann (soon also to be called Betsy) finds herself often asking herself, in the various challenges her new life brings her, “What would Cousin Ann do?”

Near the end of the book Betsy is accidentally left stranded at the county fair (through the carelessness of a different family). It is Betsy’s tenth birthday, and to make her situation even worse, she is responsible for her six year old friend Molly. It is the worst birthday one could imagine! But through exercising great courage and resourcefulness, she earns enough money to pay the fair for the eight-mile trainride home. After which only a two-mile walk will remain. But Uncle Henry is there with the wagon before they have to walk all the way home. When the story of her adventures is recounted, all the adults are proud of her. The ellipsis is Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s. ‘Cousin Ann opened the floodgates wide and burst out, “I think I never heard of a child’s doing a smarter, grittier thing . . . and I don’t care if she does hear me say so!”‘ (pp. 181-182; the latter phrase is in italics in the text–with the word hear spelled here; I have taken the liberty of correcting the text) Betsy “wondered if any little girl had ever had such a beautiful birthday.” (p. 182)

The Putneys, far from being the barbarians Elizabeth Ann expected, love her and she loves them. They have taken in Molly, whose mother is too sick to take care of her. There is a beloved dog, Shep. There are kittens and other animals. There is farm work, and accomplishment. Betsy is part of a family–a family as families are meant to be. The last sentence of the book reads:

“That room was full to the brim of something beautiful, and Betsy knew what it was. Its name was Happiness.” (p. 211)

Dorothy Canfield Fisher spent much of her adult life in Vermont. That she loved and respected her home is evident from Understood Betsy. She was a woman of wide-ranging interests and abilities. She wrote about 40 books, evenly split between fiction and non-fiction. She was a wife, and mother of two children. Her Wikipedia article lists almost countless accomplishments. She spoke five languages fluently.

Was she a “one-hit wonder”? Understood Betsy is her only book which has garnered enduring fame. Well, better to be a one-hit wonder than to be a no-hit wonder. But the possibility exists that she wrote other good books. She seems to have been a woman of sparkling intelligence, good humor, and considerable insight into human nature. My guess is that she might very well be a writer worth pursuing further.

Any day now, Christians are going to start reading books and trying to revive Christian civilization by exercising our minds (Matthew 22:37). Reading books is a tough job, but someone has to do it. Frankly, we have a lot of excellent fun ahead of us. Reading books by almost-forgotten-but-potentially-valuable writers like Dorothy Canfield Fisher is going to be excellent fun. We put in a little time, reap the benefits, and report to our family and friends–report honestly the good and the not-so-good and the downright bad. We know Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote one superb book. Maybe she wrote many more. PLEASE don’t make us read dozens of potentially good books by her and by other possibly good authors. Don’t throw us into that briar patch!

The U. S. and A. (to quote Li’l Abner’s version of our name) was 241 years old on Tuesday. This is a good time to take stock of the state of the republic, and see how we’re doing.

I’ll start with a few really good things to report, and then look at the darker side. First, some good things.

1/The free market still exists, to a certain large extent, despite the attacks by the socialists. We can still earn a decent living, if we are willing to work and also willing to budget sensibly. (Two big ifs.)

2/The Christian homeschooling movement and the Christian private school movement continue to grow steadily.

3/Modern dentistry is greatly improved. This fact applies to more than just the U.S., of course, but we need to count our blessings.

4/A person can still write or express unusual opinions, without fear of the government authorities coming to take him away in the night. I have said a lot of very unpleasant things about the U.S. government, and have published them. If I had been a Russian citizen living in the Soviet Union, I would not have dared to criticize the state so openly. If I had spoken openly while living in the Soviet Union, I would have vacationed in scenic Siberia at the expense of the state. With certain work requirements mixed in. (That is, if I had not been executed.) Read about it in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.

5/We have access to lots of book and movies, at relatively low expense.

Those are some good things about our situation in the United States right now. Of course there are others, but I just wanted to hit some high points.

Now lets consider some of the less promising aspects of our situation in the U.S. in 2017.

1/We have killed 57,000,000 unborn children in slightly over a generation since Roe v. Wade (1973). If God exists, this means His covenantal revenge may still be coming. We may be receiving part of the revenge right now, but a lot more may be coming.

2/Increasingly, homosexuality is accepted as just another lifestyle choice. “Without God, all things are permitted,” as Fyodor Dostoyevsky warned us.

3/As a nation state, we continue to intervene abroad in all kinds of places. We initiate wars. We bomb Muslim wedding parties, and call it collateral damage rather than murder. We have killed tens of thousands of people, have crippled tens of thousands more, have largely destroyed the safety of Christians in Muslim countries, have driven tens of thousands of people out of their homes. Our interventions cost not only foreign lives, but also cost many deaths and cripplings among our own young soldiers. They are young, and foolish to be involved in such nonsense, but older and cooler heads did not protect these young and foolish ones.

4/We have done a lot of torturing, and when we have not tortured in the U.S., we have often farmed out our torture to foreign allies.

5/We have a dishonesty currency. The Federal Reserve, since 1913/14, has caused the value of our dollar to drop by about 95% or perhaps even slightly more. We have no gold or silver standard. We add dollars to our money supply via waving a magic wand, thus reducing the value of the money we earned. Inflation steadily eats away the value of our savings.

6/As a country, we are bankrupt. Go to the U.S. debt clock, for a daily update on what we owe. I went a few minutes ago, and we owed 19.964 trillion dollars–a sum impossible to pay back. As a person, your share of the debt is $61,364.00. If you are a taxpayer, you owe $165,969.00. (You must truly be living large!) The deficits each year now run in the range of one trillion dollars.

7/The enemies of God, goodness, and truth have captured most of the reins of power in politics, the news media, the education system, and entertainment. We are largely under their control, and to a large extent we have given up our minds to them.

8/The republic died a violent death in 1861. It has not existed since then. We are an empire. Pretending otherwise is childish. Moreover, the people running our empire are evil fools. They do not have our best interests in mind.

9/The evil fools running our empire continue to import Muslims and other third world people. Most of us do not want those people in here. What we want has nothing to do with it–what the evil fools want is what counts. Democracy is largely a fraud.

10/The welfare state is destroying countless millions of people. People quite able to earn their own living are encouraged to be parasites on the productive. While this hurts the productive people enormously, the parasites are destroyed psychologically. We all have a need to earn our own way. When we become parasites, we lose touch with much of who we are meant to be as human beings.

11/The epidemic of illegitimate births is causing countless millions of people to be raised in dicey family situations. The long-term damage to our nation is enormous.

12/I have saved the worst point for last. The liberal church is a caricature of biblical Christianity. But the liberal church is not our biggest spiritual problem. Our biggest spiritual problem is the Bible-believing church. It is compromised, thieving, and an idolator of the U.S. We are not told the complete truth we need to hear. If not even the true, Bible-believing church can be trusted to tell us the full truth and challenge us toward godliness, we can’t be too shocked that the rest of our nation is on a suicidal path. Have you ever heard a sermon challenging Christian involvement in public education, our support of preemptive wars, our shrugging at torture, our ready acceptance of Social Security and Medicare handouts, or a sermon on any other rubber-meets-the-road issue on which we need rebuke as a Christian people? I didn’t think so. God’s church is the source of all the eleven problems listed above. Let me repeat that. God’s church is the source of all the eleven problems listed above. We have not set the example, we have not lived a vibrant brand of Christianity which took every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5), we have not loved with biblical love. To us much was given, and therefore much was required of us (Luke 12:48). We preferred to drift with the times.

That concludes my brief summary of the state of our nation in 2017. On the bright side, the forces of evil are so powerful, that the U.S. may break up into smaller pieces soon. That will be good, in the long run. The country is too big. If/when the break-up comes, there may be a chance for certain portions of the country to start over, based on a more sound foundation. Who knows, there may even be portions where biblical Christianity is the foundation. Maybe not. But we can take consolation that no evil empire in world history has gone on indefinitely. Neither will we. Either we will reform (unlikely) or we will end. After the end, life will still go on. Maybe a few Christians will want to honor God in some of the nations that get built on this continent after the U.S. disappears. Or not. We’ll have to wait and see what happens.

Happy 241st birthday, U. S. and A.!