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The bed is pushed up against the wall. We are kneeling on the bed and gazing out the window at something called a “front yard.” Thanks to my dad’s leading men in combat in the Pacific Theater, and the GI Bill, we are able to have this front yard. I wasn’t confronting a slag heap, hundreds of feet high, that glowed blue day and night. I wasn’t choking on smoke and sulfur. My family has escaped Scranton’s coalmines. I have this yard that smells of grass. Better-off New Jerseyans would laugh at the postage-stamp tininess of our pride and joy. But this yard is sports field enough for the three smallest of us to play color tag. It is capacious enough to accommodate my peasant-born mother’s love of green and growing things. There is an azalea, a pink rose of Sharon, red roses, bergamot, lavender, and two Norway spruce.
I am young. How young? I don’t know, but I’m about the size where any adult could pick me up and sling me on to his shoulders and carry me around, and never mind the weight. My mother is young, too. This is the last day she’ll be young in my memories.
There are creatures scattered across the grass. “Sparrows,” my mother says. I am in breathless wonder. “Sparrow,” I repeat to myself, inside my head, not daring to speak aloud the word that unlocks the mystery of these creatures bobbing lightly. And then they lift, take flight, and disappear.
“In the beginning was the Word,” wrote Saint John. “And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” “All things were made by” this Word, and without this Word, “was not any thing made that was made.” According to the second chapter of Genesis, the very first thing a human being ever did was name all of God’s creation.
“Sparrows.” No longer remote, unknowable, mysteries. They had a name, and, presumably, like all named things, they had jobs and habits and likes and dislikes. I could discover all these because I had the magic of the word. You couldn’t say to someone, “Blurry brown things on lawn.” And even to say only that much you’d have to have words. With “sparrow,” in your toolkit, you could discover everything that was known about sparrows. And you could discover new things and share that knowledge with others.
Depending on criteria, that is, if you want to count birds that show up every couple of years or so or just the birds who regularly nest here, there are between seven-hundred-and-some and nine-hundred-and-some bird species to be found in North America. Here’s an amazing fact: the English language has outfitted every single one with a name. Not amazed by that? You should be. I’ve spoken a couple of languages, one an African language, Sango, and one an Asian one, Nepali, that can’t name every bird species in the lands where those languages are spoken. These languages can’t even name not just every individual species, they can’t even name every family. I tried to talk to educated, science-oriented Nepalis about birds, and I did have good dictionaries, but words for less common, less obvious birds were remote or non-existent. In these conversations, we hit upon no word at all, to differentiate, not just one species from another, but, in some cases, an entire family of birds from another. Sango can name only a fraction of bird species in the Central African Republic. To talk birds, you have to borrow many words from French, and even then, you’d have to resort to scientific nomenclature.
Americans who aren’t birdwatchers, like Central Africans and Nepalis, are impoverished by their own lack of vocabulary. Americans will call a turkey vulture an “eagle.” Vultures and eagles aren’t just different species, they are in different families. That’s an understandable mistake for someone who isn’t a birder to make; vultures and eagles are both big, dark, living things high up in the sky. I look up at that dark dash hundreds of feet above Paterson and note the dihedral posture of the wings and the bird teetering from side to side, and recognize a turkey vulture. On another day I see big, broad wings held in a horizontal posture and a bird that appears motionless in air and I recognize a bald eagle. Civilians will call a heron a “crane.” To me, that’s fingernails-on-blackboard. Herons are common birds that fly with bent necks; cranes are rare birds that fly with straight necks. Every child should know that! It makes me crazy when someone wants to get all Edgar Allen Poe and he calls a crow a “raven.” I think calling a crow a “raven” should be at least a misdemeanor.
The difference between one bird name and another may seem trivial to civilians, but these differences mean everything to conservation. There are about fifty-three species of warbler in North America. They are almost all small, colorful birds that feed on insects in high treetops. Every spring Garret Mountain in Paterson is populated by birders, rising before dawn, delaying work, traveling miles, and craning their necks for hours, trying to differentiate between a yellow warbler and a Wilson’s warbler.
Here’s why the difference matters. Each species works its own niche. Cerulean warblers’ scientific name encapsulates their great beauty and their eating habits that help to preserve the trees on which they feed. Setophaga cerulea means “heavenly-blue moth-eater.” Ceruleans prefer to feed and nest in “white oak, cucumber magnolia, bitternut hickory, and sugar maple.” They eat “flies, beetles, weevils, and caterpillars,” the very insects that feed on those particular trees. Cerulean warblers are endangered. The knowledge of what makes this warbler different from another warbler will help to preserve them. To protect these birds, you wouldn’t just plant any tree. You’d plant the trees they prefer.
The point is not that every American knows the names of nine hundred species and can differentiate them. The point is that if an American cares a lot about birds, and wants to watch them, discuss them with others, and, most importantly, protect them here in the Anthropocene epoch, when human choices determine which species survive and which disappear forever to extinction, English, unlike most of the world’s languages, provides the linguistic tools to further those loves and that life work. Think about how far an engineer could advance his plans if he and his colleagues were limited to communicating in a language that lacks the words “gear,” “lever,” “flange,” and “piston.” He could be the greatest engineer since Archimedes, but before he could erect another Wonder of the World, his first task would have to be coining words. Words are magic.
Some birds are named for their song. The grasshopper sparrow’s song is an insect-like buzz; thus he is the grasshopper sparrow. The bobolink is said to sing “bob o Lincoln.” Chickadees say “chick a dee dee dee.” Whippoorwills say “whip or will!” As for kiskadees, ils parlent Francais. “Kiskadee” sounds like the French “qu’est-ce-qu’il-dit,” or “What is he saying?”
Some names communicate more than one fact. The ruddy turnstone is ruddy colored and it turns stones over to find prey hiding beneath. The belted kingfisher feeds on fish. Her plumage includes a rusty “belt” across her middle. The yellow-bellied sapsucker has a yellow belly and it sucks sap.
The linguistic richness of bird nomenclature reveals much about development of the English language and also about human perception. The names go back centuries and sometimes millennia. How humans, centuries ago, named birds, tells us what these humans were looking at and thinking about, what humans were valuing and what humans were ignoring, and what humans were completely misunderstanding, to their own detriment.
Forty-six percent of the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language. Millions more speaks one as a second language. Six-thousand-five-hundred years ago, on Eastern European steppes, the cultural ancestors of these billions of living people spoke something called Proto-Indo-European. The sun never sets on speakers of descendant languages of Proto-Indo-European. China has a proud, ancient, and continuous culture, in many cases very different from the culture of the West. Even in China, though, an Indo-European language exercises influence. “It’s hard to exaggerate the role English has played in changing China’s social, cultural, economic and political landscape. English is almost synonymous with China’s reform and opening-up policies, which transformed an impoverished and hermetic nation into the world’s second-biggest economy,” the New York Times reported in 2021.
Some of the words we use for birds are ancient. These words, or their ancestors, have been spoken by human mouths for perhaps six thousand years. At some point one of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European took time out from herding sheep and cows, domesticating horses, capturing slaves, and smelting copper and tin to cast bronze, and noticed a small, drab bird that knows how to sing. Ever since, we have had the word for “thrush.” “Goose” is said to be the oldest bird name. There are “goose” cognates in Proto-Germanic, ancient Sanskrit, and in my last name, meaning “little goose.”
Some of the words we use for birds are like shards of pottery found in an archaeological dig. These words meant something in the past but that meaning has been discarded in the rush toward the future. We turn these artifacts over in our hands and struggle to fathom what they meant to our ancestors.
What, exactly, is a “bunting”? A “start”? A “chat”? An “indigo bunting,” clearly, is deep blue. A “snow bunting” is going to be white, of course. A “painted bunting” is multicolored. But what is a “bunting”? “Bunting” is of Medieval origin; it may come from the Welsh for “big-assed.” The twentieth-century produced Sir Mix-A-Lot, a rapper who confessed, “I like big butts.” The Middle Ages gave us a Welshman who looked at small, colorful songbirds and focused exclusively on their rumps when christening them “buntings.” Similarly, the wheatear is not a bird that listens to wheat. Rather, his name comes from “white arse.”
The redstart presents a similar dilemma. Clearly, the thing is red, but a red what is a “start”? “Start” goes back to Old English, when it meant “tail.” A yellow-breasted chat is, of course, yellow, but what is a “chat”? It’s a talkative bird, and it’s been called a “chat” since the 1690s. “Curlew” might come from an old French word for “running,” though, truth to tell, curlews are not the best runners; think only of the roadrunner, nemesis of Wile E. Coyote. Whimbrels may have been named for what humans hear as a “whimper,” for their plaintive call. The very simple one-syllable bird name, “jay,” as in blue jay, may go all the way back to the name Gaius, common in the Roman Empire. Orioles share with the word “ore” a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “gold.” Loons are supremely elegant birds; their exquisite black and white plumage puts the priciest red-carpet tuxedo to shame. But loons are almost completely aquatic; they can barely walk on land. Humans are terrestrial, so we judged the loon, not on its ability to dive two-hundred-fifty feet and stay underwater for five minutes. Rather, we uncharitably dubbed these master anglers “loon,” related to “lummox,” or “clumsy.”
And then there is the titmouse. Go ahead, make the predictable jokes. But please consider that “titmouse” has an interesting etymology. Take it all the way back to its Proto-Germanic roots, and you get two words meaning “small”: tit and mase. “Mase” became extinct, so speakers stopped saying “mase” and started saying “mouse,” a still living word. The titmouse is a tiny, or “small, small” bird. That’s how speakers of Old English, with a more limited vocabulary than ours, communicated the tiny size of the titmouse – through repetition of the words they had on hand: “small, small.” Old English had a vocabulary of only about 60,000 words. Today’s English has about a million words. We no longer have to repeat words for emphasis. The question is, though, how to pluralize titmouse? Purists insist on “titmouses”; more relaxed persons say “titmice.”
Not only does every North American bird have an English name; each one has a scientific name. These names often combine Latin and Greek. The first term is the genus, that is, the other living things to which the bird or other life form is most closely related. The second term is the species, the unique name for a unique life form. Humans are Homo sapiens from the Latin words for “man” and “wise.” We are related to extinct species like the Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus.
If you have ever lived anywhere in the contiguous United States, you have almost certainly heard a killdeer’s insistent call, “kill deer!” Their name, Charadrius vociferus, takes us all the way back to Ancient Greece, where a “kharadrios” was a bird that nested in river beds. Nowadays killdeer may nest on the flat rooftops of big box stores. These roofs often have gravel covers; the gravel mimics the gravel of a riverbed. “Vociferus,” the killdeer’s species name, from the Latin for “voice,” is a reference to the volume and frequency of their “kill deer!” call.
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a reading list and book club staple. Mockingbirds are real creatures and they really are amazing songsters who imitate the songs of every bird they hear. Thus their name is Mimus polyglottos, or multilingual mime. And then there is perhaps the most gorgeous scientific name of all, Aix sponsa, for the resplendent wood duck. Their scientific name translates to “waterfowl in wedding raiment.”
The yellow-breasted chat’s scientific name evokes human cognition as well as perception. Icteria virens is a reference to the chat’s coloration. “Icteria” is from the Greek, not just for the color yellow, but also for jaundice. In The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer describes a Hindu ceremony. A priest washes a jaundiced patient while three captive yellow birds are tied to the patient’s bed. The priest would verbally “banish” the yellow color, and illness of the patient into the bodies of the yellow birds.
Here’s one more bird name story, and after this I promise I’ll stop. The evening grosbeak is an eye-poppingly gorgeous bird, especially when seen against snow, and it often visits feeders in winter. Evening grosbeaks have a chrome yellow swoosh above their eyes, yellow breasts and back, black and white wings, and black tails. Their seed-crushing beaks are large, conical, and the color of ivory. Those beaks are so strong they can break open cherry pits that require 125 pounds of pressure. So “grosbeak” – from the French for “large beak” – makes sense. But how about the “evening” part of their name? Where did that come from?
The story begins on April 7, 1823, in what is now Michigan, when an Ojibwa lad shot a bird dead with a bow and arrow.
A year earlier, in 1822, Henry Schoolcraft began working as the U.S. Indian Agent in this boy’s area. Schoolcraft was one of those tireless, industrious polymaths of the founders’ generation who made America possible. He was an explorer, author, linguist, geographer, geologist, and ethnologist. In 1832, he would mount an expedition to the source of the Mississippi River. Of that expedition, Schoolcraft wrote, “Congress … passed an act for vaccinating the Indians. This … enabled me to take along a physician and surgeon … Dr. Douglass Houghton, of Fredonia, who, in the discharge of it, was prepared to take cognizance of the subjects of botany, geology, and mineralogy.” It wasn’t enough for Houghton to be a physician capable of vaccinating thousands of Indians against smallpox. Like so many in that era, Houghton also had to be a polymath, who would take note of plants and rocks.
In 1851, Schoolcraft would begin publishing a six-volume Indian Tribes of the United States. In 1823, during his work in Michigan, he married Jane Johnston, also known as Bamewawagezhikaquay, meaning, in the Ojibwa language, “Woman of the Sound that the stars make Rushing Through the Sky.” Schoolcraft and his wife published their literary works together. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft would come to be known as “the first Native American literary writer, the first known Indian woman writer, the first known Indian poet, the first known poet to write poems in a Native American language, and the first known American Indian to write out traditional Indian stories.”
Schoolcraft let it be known among the Indians that he wanted to study local flora and fauna. The young Ojibwa archer brought the dead bird to Schoolcraft. Schoolcraft sent the specimen to the naturalist William Cooper of the Lyceum of Natural History of New York. Schoolcraft called the bird by its Ojibwa name, “paushkundamo,” or “berry-breaker.”
While the Ojibwa did have a name for the evening grosbeak, it’s safe to assume that tribes to the east did not. Evening grosbeaks, previously a western species, only began to move east in the 1850s, possibly because settlers planted box elder trees. Settlers chose box elders because they grow quickly in newly settled areas and are drought and cold hardy. Evening grosbeaks like box elders because “the abundant seeds of the box elder persist on the tree through the winter, providing a stable food supply.”
Around the time that Schoolcraft sent the specimen to Cooper, Schoolcraft was visited by Major Joseph Delafield. Delafield was in Michigan establishing the border with Canada. Delafield was also a soldier, lawyer, diplomat, author, businessman, mineral collector, and map-maker. Listen, is it just me, or do you shrink when you read the biographies of America’s founding generation? They got so much done, without electricity, indoor plumbing, and only goose quills as pens! Delafield was born in 1790; one of his grandsons became president of the Bank of America and died in 1976 – a very long-lived legacy. Delafield and Schoolcraft shared notes about the paushkundamo. Delafield moved on to continue his border-establishing work.
One night, Delafield was camped in a “dense cedar swamp northwest of Lake Superior.” He saw more of the paushkundamo birds that Schoolcraft had introduced to him. The birds’ “mournful cry about the hour of my encamping [which was at sunset] attracted my attention … this bird dwells in such dark retreats, and leaves them at the approach of night.” He sent this observation to William Cooper, the New-York-City-based naturalist to whom Schoolcraft had previously sent the specimen collected by the Ojibwa boy. Cooper, attentive to Delafield’s notes, named the specimen “Fringilla vespertina,” or evening finch, which is a lovely name, but wrong.
Evening grosbeaks, contrary to Delafield, are not crepuscular; they are diurnal, that is, active during the day. Ornithologists have been noticing the incorrectness of Delafield’s observation for a long time. The name lingers, though.
This story encapsulates many aspects of science. A polymath hired as an “Indian Agent,” Henry Schoolcraft, is also a naturalist, and wants to catalog every life form he can. Native people bring him birds, plants, flowers, frogs; he records them all. He is in touch with others so committed. Observations are made; some are wrong. Future observers correct them.
This is one example of how nine hundred species of birds got their names, and how those names, images, and life stories came to be recorded in field guides for enthusiastic amateurs like me. One observer after another, some trained scientists, some dedicated amateurs, observed birds, talked about birds, and shared their specimens and their observations with others, hundreds of miles away. They created records. They invited feedback and correction. They housed collections and archives, open to others for study. What we call birds, what we know about birds, didn’t just appear out of thin air. It was produced through hard, disciplined, continuous, shared work.
Schoolcraft was described as a man of “insatiable curiosity.” Schoolcraft was a man; I’m a woman. He lived in the nineteenth century; I live in the twenty-first. But I, too, am intensely curious. In a lot of life, I have been punished for my “insatiable curiosity.” “You shouldn’t ask that; it’s not polite … You don’t want to know; it’s too upsetting … You can’t say that; it will ruffle feathers … Oh, I wish you’d just shut up.” In science, the insatiably curious, no matter their gender, age, or ethnicity, are brothers and sisters. You can ask questions. You can ruffle feathers. The process begins with names and naming.
To name something accurately is to perform a risky, courageous act. Courageous? Yes. Call a turkey vulture a “bald eagle” and birdwatchers will humiliate you so mercilessly you never repeat the error. Take the same process of accurately naming and perform it in relation to human society. Accurately naming includes some and excludes others. The word “woman” for example, applies to some humans, and not to others. Using the word “woman” accurately today may well get you fired from your job; may well get you death threats.
***
I first learned of the Woke assault on birdwatching back in 2014. “National Geographic Alleges that Birdwatching Is Racist,” was my first, and, I naively thought, my final attempt to address the hysteria. The accusations of racism have only grown since then.
Not just birdwatching is racist. In the 2021 article, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Camping,” Elizabeth Segran reports that “racism” and “colonialism” have made it impossible for non-whites to camp. “The Great Outdoors Was Made for White People,” reported The Nation, also in 2021. On June 18, 2023, Char Adams at NBC News alleged that black people who attempt to camp require protection from “Trump flags flying everywhere.” Those frightened by Trump flags have joined “The Outdoorsy Black Women” network, with fifteen chapters nationwide. Adams reports that her own family and friends dismiss camping as “white people stuff.”
Hiking is racist. “The Unbearable Whiteness of Hiking” was the headline of a 2016 Sierra Club article. “Decentering Whiteness in Hiking and Fostering Inclusivity Outdoors” appeared in January, 2023. “White People Like Hiking” was a peer-reviewed, 2016 article.
Kayaking is racist. “If you Paddle a Canoe, You Might Be Racist?” outdoors enthusiasts asked after Professor Misao Dean alleged that kayaking and canoeing are cultural appropriation. Hunting is racist. “Is Hunting Too White?” hunters asked in 2019. “Where Are All the Hunters of Color?” The Nature Conservancy asked in 2022. “Notes From an Angry Black Hunter: Guns, Genocide, and the Stolen Ground You ‘Own'” is a rant from a self-described “Angry Black Hunter” who is sick to death of America and Americans because “in the United States, the story of the land is written in the blood of native people and centuries of forced labor by kidnapped Africans.”
Fishing is racist. Angling Trade is “Reading the Water for Racism in Fishing,” according to a 2020 article. The organization entitled Brown Folks Fishing promoted the Angling for All Pledge. “White males” choose “racist” names for fish, scholars at the University of California, Davis, reported in 2021.
Environmentalism, the very effort to preserve the environment, is racist. The New Yorker exposed “Environmentalism’s Racist History” in 2015. “The Environmental Movement Is Very White; These Leaders Want to Change That,” National Geographic mourned in 2020.
Walking your dog is racist. “Every Dog Walk Is an Opportunity for Casual Racism,” Medium reported in 2020. “Being black in America means having an ‘Is This Racist’ algorithm running in the recesses of our minds. This process is carried out by the part of our brain that manages breathing and heartbeat,” wrote Shane Paul Neil, who relates dog walking to white supremacy. In Mother Jones’ 2020 piece “Let’s Make Dog Parks Less Racist,” black woman Jamilah King writes, ” I hate most dog parks: They’re so unbearably, unapologetically white … I started asking friends … if they went to dog parks. Two were Black, one was Puerto Rican. Every single person said they just didn’t feel comfortable. It was always too white.” And of course your dog is racist; black dog experts share their wisdom here.
If this is all just too much, and you just want to go out under the night sky and gaze up at the stars, just acknowledge that you are racist. The term “black hole” racializes astronomy, Cornell University teaches its students. Astrophysics is racist according to Professor Natalie Gosnell. Sky and Telescope did its part by voicing “unequivocal support for Black Lives Matter.” Because of the obvious racism inherent in stargazing, “It’s no secret that backyard astronomers are overwhelmingly white,” Sky and Telescope confessed.
If you in your white fragility are so overwhelmed by being forced to confront your inner systemic racist, and you just want to retreat to your home and focus on your garden – yes yes you know what I’m going to say, don’t you? GARDENING IS RACIST. “Weeding Out Horticulture’s Race Problem: Even in the Garden, There’s Bigotry to Be Found,” The Guardian revealed in 2020. Gardeners are “seemingly friendly and mild-mannered.” Only a naive fool would be taken in by that facade. In 2014, a gardeners’ radio show, “Gardeners’ Question Time,” was revealed to be “‘layered with, saturated with, racial meanings’ … gardening and its lexicon are vehicles for racism and nationalism … According to Dr. Ben Pitcher … the use of common gardening terms like ‘soil purity,’ ‘native species,’ and ‘non-native (or ‘invasive’) species’ encourages racist, xenophobic attitudes.” Garden plants are racist. Wisteria, a popular flowering vine, has been condemned as racist.
All of this may make you want to just not go outside at all. To just stay home. But be aware that the very concept of the home is racist. See here, here, here.
And of course birdwatching is racist. To remedy birdwatching’s white supremacy, names had to be expunged, and replaced with glorious, new, Woke names. Birds, you see, were named by or after white people. Zach Schwartz-Weinstein writes, “The ornithological practice of naming species after dead white people … is fundamentally an index of ornithology’s complicity with the history of European imperialism and settler colonialism.” “Inside the Movement to Abolish Colonialist Bird Names,” cheered Outside magazine in 2021. Stripping the names of birds would make racist birdwatching “inclusive,” reported National Public Radio in 2021: “To Make Birding Inclusive, Some Birds Will Need New Names Without Colonial Roots.”
The Woke erasers of history started with the McCown’s longspur. Back in 2021, in Front Page Magazine, I wrote that the McCown’s longspur, a small bird with a limited range “is named after John P. McCown, the man who first collected a specimen for scientific study. McCown was also a Confederate general, and, thus, his natural history work must be expunged. McCown also served in the 1858 Utah War against Mormons. No one has a problem with McCown fighting Mormons. In the Woke ethical economy, Mormons are expendable.
In fact, McCown was ‘indifferent to Confederate success.’ He wanted to retire from the military and ‘go home and plant potatoes.’ The Confederacy relieved McCown of one command, called him back, and then court-martialed him. In turn, McCown denounced the Confederacy as ‘a damned stinking cotton oligarchy … gotten up for the benefit of Isham G. Harris and Jefferson Davis and their damned corrupt cliques.’ Isham G. Harris was the Tennessee governor who dragged Tennessee into the Confederacy, against the wishes of the majority of the population, who voted to remain in the Union.”
John P. McCown was the camel’s nose under the tent. It was easy to write him off as evil because he was a “Confederate general,” and to memory-hole his condemnation of the Confederacy and his contributions to ornithology. The McCown’s longspur was low-hanging fruit. The bird breeds in the Great Plains of Canada, Montana, and Wyoming. It’s easy to change the name of a bird with whom few people have any emotional relationship. The Woke no doubt also want to change the name of the Northern Cardinal, a bright red bird named after the color of the vestments of the “princes of the church.” I can hear the Woke now. “This bird is named for two thousand years of Catholic oppression! We must rename it the ‘Bolshevik banner bird!'” They want to do that, but they know doing that now is too risky, so they began with an easy target.
George Orwell emphasized the importance of language to totalitarians. “The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” Language is used to redefine reality. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
Leftist totalitarians had begun raping language centuries before Orwell. The Terror wasn’t just about murdering tens of thousands of people. It was also about murdering language. There would be no more lundi, Monday. There would be “primidi.” There would be no more janvier, or January. There would be “Nivose.” Notre Dame de Paris became a “Temple de la Raison” or a “Temple of Reason.”
Those changing the name of the McCown’s longspur insist that their goal is to make birding’s future more inclusive. They are lying. Their goal is power. Milan Kundera, survivor of the Soviet Empire, wrote, “People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of interest to no one. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”
Now that John P. McCown’s historic contribution to ornithology has been erased, Woke’s war on birding is moving on to larger targets. The Woke are shoving down the memory hole John James Audubon himself. Audubon was a giant. He was a groundbreaking ornithologist. His contribution to the field cannot be overstated. Woke, like a parasitic wasp, has deposited its eggs into the body of the Audubon Society. Woke larvae are now eating the Audubon Society from the inside out. Accounts of the Audubon Society’s destruction by Woke can be read here, here, and here.
Woke doesn’t just demand the changing of bird names. It demands the compete erasure of the man whose name stands for ornithology, birdwatching, and environmental protection. Local chapters are dropping the name “Audubon.” The New York City and San Francisco branches have voted to memory-hole the name “Audubon.” It goes without saying that none of the Woke revisionists has ever contributed as much to birding, to science, to art, or to conservation as the man they wish they could un-person forever.
My ancestors gave our name, Slav, to the international word, “slave.” We were merchandise, in Muslim Spain, the Muslim Middle East, and North Africa. We were slave laborers, more recently, under the Nazis. In this country, American racist Madison Grant described us as slaves. Grant’s testimony to Congress facilitated the immigration acts that shut the door on my mother’s relatives trying to enter this country. Hitler called Madison Grant’s work his “bible.” Henry Fairfield Osborn claimed, in the pages of the New York Times, that Polish people of achievement were not Polish at all, but were racially superior “Nordics” who had gotten lost in Poland.
Grant and Osborn were two of the most important names in the sciences in the early twentieth century. Madison Grant helped to prevent the extinction of the buffalo and of the redwood tree. He helped to create the Bronx Zoo, an institution I cherish and where I once worked. Henry Fairfield Osborn was president of the Museum of Natural History for twenty-five years. Every New York City area kid, like me, who loves nature loves this museum.
Henry Schoolcraft, who collected the first evening grosbeak to be scientifically studied and classified, sounds like someone whose papers the Woke would approve. He married and promoted a prominent Native American author. He lead an expedition that inoculated thousands of Native Americans against smallpox. Think again. The Woke will bury Schoolcraft, too.
After Schoolcraft’s first wife died, he married Mary Howard. Mary Howard Schoolcraft, like Henry’s first wife, was a writer, but with a difference. Mary was a Southerner and an apologist for slavery. Clearly, Henry Schoolcraft was a flawed human being. Clearly, we must rename the evening grosbeak, just as we had to rename the McCown’s longspur.
I love and honor my Polish and Slovak slave, peasant, and serf ancestors. They bequeathed many invaluables to me, including my life. They could not give me birdwatching. To be a birdwatcher, I needed binoculars. Binoculars are the fruit of centuries of scientists, including Dutch, Italians, and Germans. I needed a field guide. American women with names like Parsons and Merriam pioneered field guides. Chester Albert Reed and Roger Tory Peterson developed the concept. I needed nature writing. Nature writing, like field guides, like binoculars, is largely the product of people of northwestern European descent, people like Gilbert White, William Bartram, Charles Darwin, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson. I needed preserved natural places. Again, the preservers of natural places in the US have largely been people of northwestern European descent.
Woke claims it erases history that is not “inclusive.” By Woke’s criteria, birding’s history is exclusive of me. I can’t think of a single Polish or Slovak peasant or immigrant who made a significant contribution to the invention of optics, or fieldguides, or the preservation of landscapes. Woke’s identity politics are wrong. This history is inclusive of me. Insatiably curious people; people who love nature; people dedicated to its preservation; people who call things by their true names: I am one with them. I don’t need Roger Tory Peterson to be renamed Roger Tory Peterson-ski to recognize him as my brother.
People of my ethnicity did contribute to birding for me. Through the GI Bill, my dad was able to buy a house with a lawn and a bird feeder. Unlike him, I didn’t grow up in “Skunk Hollow” outside Scranton, on top of a slag heap, sulfur filling my nose. My mother was a brilliant, bilingual woman who insisted on teaching me words. My brother gave me my first pair of binoculars. My older sister drove me to Great Swamp. I am so grateful.
Madison Grant, who described my immigrant ancestors as subhuman “sewage” fit to be “obliterated” incapable of civilization, who voiced the philosophical foundation for Hitler’s inhuman crimes, also preserved nature I cherish. I would not remove one jot or tittle from this history. Truth is higher than my grievances.
My ancestors were serfs, too busy with bare survival to name and vivify the life stories of nine hundred species of birds. People like John James Audubon, Henry Schoolcraft, and John P. McCown bequeathed birdwatching to me. They bequeathed words to me. They bequeathed images and life histories and thousands of years of human observations. The Woke, envious, spiteful, manipulative, petty destroyers, have given me nothing of value. I am eternally grateful to imperfect men.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
The only suitable riposte to the woke concludes with, “and the horse you rode in on.”
My wife and me have bird watched the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, but mostly places closer to home. I’ve seen a few bird watchers, and not many strike me a blue collar types. These bird name changes are probably being pushed by the East coast, elitist birdwatchers they own selfs. If they know something you don’t, than they are better people, and who could argue with that?
The Sate Bird of Oklahoma is the Scissortail Flycatcher the Sate Bird of Texas is the Northern Mockingbird both can be aggressive when their nesting
Is that a California bluebird in the upper left photo? Maybe all bluebirds look like that, from every state, I don’t know. I had some photos of one which came close to me on my phone which was stolen. It wasn’t afraid of me. The photos are probably on Google Cloud somewhere. They’re pretty little birds, and rare here in CA.
I walked past some sparrows sitting on a fence recently. Cute little fellows. They were inches away from me but didn’t fly off. Sometimes animals know when a person means them no harm. They just stared at me inquisitively. I kept walking.
Western Bluebird
The only reason the Audubon society didn’t change their name is money.
Crows and ravens do look very similar…….when they’re standing still. Crows strut and ravens waddle. And crows caw and ravens croak. And ravens have a thicker beak and neck ruff, although good luck spotting those. The first time I heard a raven croak, I thought, is that poor crow sick? That’s how stupid I was.
And crows and ravens hate each other. I’ve seen them try to kill each other. I once chased off two crows who were going to kill a wounded raven. I don’t like bullies.
There are two huge ravens who live next to Lick Observatory on Mt Diablo next to Santa Clara Valley. I call them Huginn and Muninn. I suspect they’re quite old in bird years.They perch on the biggest tree there.
I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, because you are an excellent essayist, but you really could use an editor.
Mr. Sefton, you brought this post to my attention, but I disagree. I enjoy long articles. This was beautiful and interesting.
I think long-form has its place in thoughtful understanding. It’s not for everyone but I don’t think the meme or the soundbite, while popular today, enhances understanding. This isn’t about creating a one-line zinger to entertain, it’s about getting people thinking, perspective, and understanding a viewpoint in the hope of making the connection that pushes for change. A Burma Shave sign doesn’t do the trick.
“(T),he insatiably curious, no matter what their gender, age or ethnicity..” Don’t you mean “their SEX, age or ethnicity?”
This situation is bad, even possibly fatal to us humans. Ignoring “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” appears to be among the canon of woke madness. (That is, if the idea of a canon weren’t too reasonable for most woke folks: I think they just prefer the sordid litany of their past errors.) Poe’s narrator in “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (1841) is only saved by understanding the huge and powerful natural phenomenon that was his predicament. If ones main interest in life is oneself, and choosing ones neo-pronouns, the larger vision outside the phone’s screen is likely missed.
Plus, bird watching is detrimental to the Club Scene. We have to get up too early in the morning.
As a decades long birdwatcher, I can say that I have only come across birdwatchers who are not Caucasian a handful of times. Most birdwatching is done in parks, nature preserves, or backyards. With the exception of backyards, birdwatching venues are open to the public, of any race or background. If POC or minorities are absent from birdwatching it is because they simply are NOT interested in watching birds. Period. Race has nothing to do with it, but curiosity and love of nature certainly do.
Back some years a go a pair of Osprey were hanging around a local pond they stayed few days before they left the pond also may attract Great Blue Herons and Ducks. The Green Heron used Bait the Snowy Egret will stir the surface of a pond with his beak and Crows can redeemer your face and will hold a Grudge against you if you mistreat them
A crow once held a grudge against me for years after I accidentally rousted her from her perch. She would give me dirty looks when she saw me and rouse the other crows against me. One time we had guests from England over and there were about a dozen crows in the trees above our house. What an uproar of crows 🙂
I remember one crow giving her a look like “What are we cawing at this guy for 🙂
Did you know they call a group of crows a “murder?” And a group of ravens is called an “unkindness” or “conspiracy.”
Extremely clever birds but contemptible, in my opinion. When I was a kid I had to clean up after them when they would spread the trash from our family cans all over the yard. The fuckers would perch on the roof and mock me.
You nature lovers are racist scum. Just ask the whale killing leftists.
‘Thrown To The Wind’ Documentary Exposes Government Destruction Of Marine Habitat
Some terrific stories about bird names, thank you, I love to watch the flocks of birds on the coastal estuary where I’m located for a few days, I don’t know the names of many of them but their beauty is undeniable.
One thing I remember from my youth is the saying “Birds of a feather stick together”
There’s a young herring gull hanging around my caravan (trailer) with a very broken wing, it comes for food several times a day and is looking longingly at me now.
Update, the gull turns his nose up at bread (or hers, it’s not trans) but gobbles up the cheddar cheese I give him.
I once took part in the saving of a great horned owl whose wing was broken. I had never been so close to one before and its grip upon my arm was shockingly STRONG. It was so beautiful, so big, so quiet, with intense other-wordly eyes. I was near Abilene at the time and shot a rabbit which it ate voraciously. Took it the next day to Wildlife Refuge & Rehabilitation. They mended the wing and called me some time later to report it had flown away on one of its exercises.
I hope you might be able to find something similar near you. The people who do that work are deeply good and meeting them is a privilege to me. Plus, your bird will likely live and you will earn your place in bird heaven!
You shot a rabbit and fed it to the owl? What, no compassion for the rabbit? I’m sure the rabbit’s life was as precious to the rabbit as the owl’s life was precious to the owl.
An altruist would have chopped her arm off and fed it to the owl.
Yes. Of course I shot a rabbit. Did you expect me to run it down?
You will never be a comedian. And guess what, the story has nothing to do with the dreaded altruism.
But I guess you have shoehorn your obsessions into everything. Do you dream about altruists?
Owls don’t eat Garden Burgers, Rosebud Shrikes Impale their meals Bee Eater s rub out the Venom in Bees and Loons have been know to stab a Goose from a Underwater attack and Falcons in Big Cities take out Pigeons
this is a terrific essay about a great horned owl attack, if you can get past the paywall.
“Something Attacked My Son While He Was Sledding in the Woods, But What?”
The Michael Peterson trial and the Owl Killed My Wife Theory! I saw it on Dateline!
LOL!
I saw a great horned owl in my backyard when I was a kid in Southern California. I was amazed but apparently they live in all 49 continental states and Canada. It was a cool looking bird. It just stared at me and flew off after a bit. It wasn’t scared at all.
Well, the gull has good taste!
Mo, maybe a wildlife rehab org would heal the herring gull. Just a thought. No pressure. Thank you for feeding the gull.
I sent a baby squirrel to a wildlife rehab org when I lived in Seattle. They took care of it. It didn’t want to leave me, though,. It actually screamed when they took it off, although it was better off with them. Squirrels can scream. My ex girlfriend was the person who told me that wildlife rehab orgs existed. I had no idea.
My estimation of her went up that day. I’d previously underestimated her.
I’ve heard squirrels bark (It’s more of a chatter), but I haven’t heard one scream. I had one come down the tree my deer stand was in once. He or she stopped upside down, head up at my eye level, about a foot away. I remained still and didn’t blink for 5 to 10 minutes (Vision starts doing weird things after a few minutes, especially with winter branches). Finally I blinked and it went tearing about 20 feet further up my tree, jumped to a neighboring tree, came back down to my level, climbed out on a branch to get closer, and started raising hell at me.
What a wonderful, beautiful essay you have written here. And no, you do not need an editor, as at least one commenter has suggested. Your essay is exactly the length is needs to be.
…exactly the length it needs to be.
Thank you for writing that. Your love of birds and nature is beautiful. I don’t usually read such long articles all the way to the end, but I couldn’t stop reading this one. So interesting!
Goska once again manages to be scholarly and moving at the same time.
Ignore commie racists. They are banal scum.
You can’t ignore commies, because they WILL come after you.
With commies, its always K or be K’d.
Thank you for sharing this with all of us!
“I look up at that dark dash hundreds of feet above Paterson and note the dihedral posture of the wings and the bird teetering from side to side, and recognize a turkey vulture.”
You notice things, and are interested in how things fit together in the world. I wish there was more of this today. Your comments about the compatibility of the English language with science and technology immediately caught my attention. When I worked in Far Eastern Russia in the late 1990’s, we always had a translator. Two, if we could afford it, or one really good one. This is because “technical Russian” has many, many more words than the ordinary Russian vernacular. And almost all of these technical words are borrowed from English or German, which were themselves originally Latin or Greek. For example, ‘electricity’ is электричество, or elektrichestvo, the transliteration. The Russian translator we had said that the number of borrowed technical words exceed the vernacular by a ten to one ratio. “The sun never sets on speakers of descendant languages of Proto-Indo-European” indeed.
“They got so much done, without electricity, indoor plumbing, and only goose quills as pens!” I think about this from time to time whenever I whine, or hear someone whine that R&D engineering is so hard. But now we are now in the Woke section of your essay, which is much sadder and un-interesting than the first section. It’s not because of you, it’s because of the reality of the Woke’s non-stop complaint fest about what’s wrong with the world, and how it would be better if we would just erase all of it and start over. It’s all about destruction, deconstruction, petty complaints and the Big Feelings ™ that are vomited fourth all over the rest of us by the Woke. In fact, I think you could easily substitute Woke with Vomit.
I don’t know for sure if I “got it,” but I’ll take a shot: God Through Binoculars. If you haven’t read it, you won’t get it, at least the way I did. It’s one of those books I am glad that I read. Thank you again.
Turkey buzzards are unmistakable. They have black primary feathers and white secondaries and tertiaries. They’re very beautiful in flight, in my opinion, but thy’re ugly as fuck up close, with those bald Biden heads of theirs.
It’s true that they are cracking down on bird watching and bird feeding.
I used to have a bird feeder in my backyard. It was a real chore to keep the squirrels off it. North Carolina, you know.
Yard birds are cute. Even the cardinals, which are quite aggressive. They terrorize the other little birds.
Great essay.
So happy to have purchased Daylily ‘Johnny Reb’, before it disappeared from the online sellers. Posted photos on Garden dot org. So far, no negative comments. Will post some more.
Now I’m going to create a Confederate garden.
I always say, double down on what these scumbags accuse us of. Never apologize, and ridicule the lowlifes every chance we get.
“Truth is higher than my grievances.”
With that sentence you have identified the road most of us choose to take. Participents in life not victims.
The Left hates words. All of them.
Danusha I love that you love words. All of them. I look forward to what you have to say. Your phrasing, your cadence. I enjoy you very much.
There is much to complain and whine about.
Like you I am grateful for all of the “flawed” men and women in my life that instilled the love of words in me.
In my life I find there is more to be grateful for than the latter.
Think of all the good that could have been using all that misdirected hate to the betterment of all people.
Something just winged by my window. I must go identify it….
Yes! The left hates words! They truly do. They shout words – short phrases and slurs but they hate language and must kill it mercilessly. I was wondering what happens to woke in romance language places. Then, I took an online introduction to a foreign language course. The young instructor said apologetically “This language is gendered. I am sorry if you have feelings about this.”
Thanks Cat! That made me think, these gendered languages go back thousands of years (and it was obvious to them that there was a gender difference). So now the left wants to uproot thousands of years of evolution of those languages?
Castilian Spanish is very poetic.
I don’t know about French though, although their food is great.
I don’t know what to say about this essay. I don’t have the words to describe my awe at the scholarly intelligence and compassion of both the contents of the essay and of the mind of its writer. I consider it to be a privilege to be allowed what is obviously a small entry into Danusha Goska’s spiritual and intellectual world. Ms. Goska, you are certainly a world-class teacher. Thank you, and thank you to Front Page Magazine for allowing her to share with us.
Man, that was a really nice compliment!
You didn’t motion the Old Squaw, renaimed the Long Tailed duck or the Jewfish renaimed Goliath Grouper. I still use the original names & won’t buy any book with politically correct names.
The Shrike or Butcherbird will impale its prey upon Thords and Barbwire Fences that would seem brutal to liberals but these Birds are not there for Seeds and Worms and the tremendous Damage some by Introduced mammals to some Islands not just cars but Goats and Deer which were all Introduced and plans to removed them are all ready underway in some areas and without these idiots from PETA getting Involved so far
“What we call birds, what we know about birds, didn’t just appear out of thin air. It was PRODUCED [emphasis added] through hard, disciplined, continuous, shared work.
Everything man needs to survive and flourish requires a process of PRODUCTION.
“Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival….
Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes—which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification—which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected, and made before….
Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced….
The root of production is man’s mind; the mind is an attribute of the individual and it does not work under orders, controls and compulsion, as centuries of stagnation have demonstrated. Progress cannot be planned by government, and it cannot be restricted or retarded; it can only be stopped, as every statist government has demonstrated.” – Ayn Rand
We have a Turkey in the Whitehouse that’s what
A Turkey Vulture. Parasites feeding on the dying body of a self-sacrificing America.
America is a Prometheus chained to a rock only by the morality of altruism and the sanction of the self-sacrificial victim that that Prometheus has become.
And the Turkey Vultures are eating him alive!
Mythical Bids like the Roc a Giant Bird big enough to carry of a elephant and where their all pissed off they will sink your ship with Boulders. Stymphalian Birds will shoot their feathers at a victim and will eat a people the Griffen has the Head, Wings and Claws of a Eagle and Body of a Lion the Hippogriff is part Eagle Part Horse and the Phoenix to witch the Capital of Arizona is named for is probably the most well known of the Mythical Birds Fawkes from Harry Potter was a Phoenix and the Thunderbird which was s aid to cause storms produced Lighting from its Eyes and Thunder from its Wings the Gillygaloo laid square Eggs that looked like Dice the Boobrie in Scotland and the Bare Fronted Hoodwink was a fake Bird using the head of a crow dody of a Duck and legs of a Plover and the oozlefinch
Ahhhhhhhh!!!!! The Turkey Vulture is eating me alive! Run away!! Run away!!!!!!!!
It is astonishing what a total doofus you are. What is completely predictable is the lack of play and response to all of your pointless, endless word salad spam. It’s getting to the point where you are getting beyond comprehension.
The article is about bird watching. BIRD WATCHING! Not your collection of moronic obsessions.
Most of the Birds I see around my Apartment are Sparrows, Starlings and Pigeons. But the Cornell Lab of Ornithology puts out one for kids Winged Heros for all Birdkind Something Kids have got to read
“Schoolcraft was described as a man of “insatiable curiosity.” Schoolcraft was a man; I’m a woman. He lived in the nineteenth century; I live in the twenty-first. But I, too, am intensely curious. In a lot of life, I have been punished for my “insatiable curiosity.” “You shouldn’t ask that; it’s not polite … You don’t want to know; it’s too upsetting … You can’t say that; it will ruffle feathers … Oh, I wish you’d just shut up.” In science, the insatiably curious, no matter their gender, age, or ethnicity, are brothers and sisters. You can ask questions. You can ruffle feathers. The process begins with names and naming.”
What was the essence of Original Sin? The desire for knowledge, disobedience of authority. Curiosity. The ego. The self. The human mind. Adam and Eve developed a curious ego, a self, a mind, of their own, and they disobeyed authority. God hated them for it and condemned them for it.
“Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their caves. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had lifted darkness off the earth. Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. He was considered a transgressor who ventured into forbidden territory. But thereafter, men could travel past any horizon. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had opened the roads of the world.
That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures—because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer—because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage.
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received—hatred.” – Howard Roark, “The Fountainhead”
“The Fountainhead courtroom speech by Howard Roark”
No one cares about possibly the worst movie the Coop ever starred in.
Only you can ruin the Labor Day Holiday……the communist’s paean to socialism in America. Right up there with Juneteenth.
Oh, I wish you’d just shut up.
I know you do! You’re a totalitarian itching to get at me. You got me banned from Pamela Geller’s site for a while. And you would love nothing more than to get me banned here at FPM.
You won’t stop Ayn Rand and her philosophy. It’s the only philosophy in existence that can rationally, logically, demonstrably by showing the facts of reality, defend freedom, liberty, the Rights of Man, individualism, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Objectivism defends the American way of life which is the personal pursuit of happiness, Christianity does NOT.
Neither Christianity or Judaism can do that, no religion can, because the focus of religion is not the pursuit of man’s happiness in this life and this world, but an escape from this world, a supernatural after-life.
Christianity does not celebrate man or this world. According to Christianity man is born an evil, depraved, creature by virtue of Original Sin and this life on earth is a punishment for Original Sin. According to Christianity the purpose of this life is not for man to pursue his personal happiness but to seek salvation for Original Sin through renunciation, self-denial, self-abnegation, self-sacrifice. And maybe when he dies God may or may not grant him the grace of entering his Kingdom.
Do you disagree with that definition of the essence of Christianity? Then you’re mistaken and it doesn’t matter because the serious, professional, theologians of Christianity like Tertullian, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and today’s serious theologians of Christianity like Pope Francis know full well what serious, orthodox, Christianity is really about.
Like I need a lecture from you about Christianity? The world’s foremost hater of Jews and Judaism, and Christians and Christianity.
You look at everything through the lens of your hatred of everything. If Rand and Objectivism weren’t already stopped in their tracks you wouldn’t be pushing it so desperately.
None but a few obsessives care about your religion.
“Thanks to my dad’s leading men in combat in the Pacific Theater, and the GI Bill, we are able to have this front yard.”
Thanks ultimately to businessmen, entrepreneurs, laborers — the producers. There have always been soldiers, armies, and conquerors. But not Capitalist Businessmen. It was not war or the American military or government that produced abundance and lowered prices to where every American could afford have afforded their own house but selfish businessmen seeking profit on a Free Market.
That today 99% of Americans have an almost submissive reverence for the police, first responders, soldiers, or politicians but indifference, contempt, or outright hatred of businessmen is a result of the socialist march through the institutions.
Life is should not be about calamity, suffering, war, and conquest but about peace, happiness, and prosperity and it’s the businessmen that make abundance and prosperity possible. The highest reverence, admiration, and THANK YOU, should be reserved for the American Free Market Creator — the BUSINESSMAN.
I remember when the lockdown was over and I saw my first Mack truck delivering food to the supermarket, I had to fight back tears. It wasn’t until that moment that I fully, viscerally, realized that it’s the PRODUCERS, the businessmen, that literally keep us alive.
And many of them are Christians and capitalists. Something you wouldn’t understand.
Christian Capitalists like John D. Rockefeller do pay lip service to Christianity but they are businessmen pursuing profit and happiness, in spite of, not because of, Christianity.
To the extent that a Christian takes Christianity seriously in its full context, to that extent he will renounce the personal pursuit of happiness and personal profit and gain.
The serious Christian isn’t John D. Rockefeller or Joel Osteen, it’s Kayla Mueller, Mother Teresa, and Saint Anthony of Egypt.
Who would Jesus call a better, more serious, more dedicated Christian, a Christian that took his message seriously? Rockefeller or Mother Teresa? Osteen or Kayla? Mother Teresa and Kayla Mueller.
The more serious the Christian is in his Christian belief and practice, the more renunciation of his personal pursuit of happiness on earth he will practice. The more he will be filled with self-doubt not self-confidence, self-disgust not pride, and contempt for, not joy and celebration, of this life on earth.
A Christian is someone who follows Christ. Christ cannot be a Christian because he cannot follow himself. And there were no Christians during Christ’s life.
Your hatred of Christianity makes you careless.
You have zero idea about how we are supposed to be or behave or how serious or not we are. It’s simply not your business. Stick to what you know, specifically your silly little religion of Objectivism
“Businessmen are the one group that distinguishes capitalism and the American way of life from the totalitarian statism that is swallowing the rest of the world. All the other social groups—workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers—exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars. Businessmen are the symbol of a free society—the symbol of America. If and when they perish, civilization will perish. But if you wish to fight for freedom, you must begin by fighting for its unrewarded, unrecognized, unacknowledged, yet best representatives—the American businessmen….
America’s industrial progress, in the short span of a century and a half, has acquired the character of a legend: it has never been equaled anywhere on earth, in any period of history. The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats….
The professional businessman is the field agent of the army whose lieutenant-commander-in-chief is the scientist. The businessman carries scientific discoveries from the laboratory of the inventor to industrial plants, and transforms them into material products that fill men’s physical needs and expand the comfort of men’s existence. By creating a mass market, he makes these products available to every income level of society. By using machines, he increases the productivity of human labor, thus raising labor’s economic rewards. By organizing human effort into productive enterprises, he creates employment for men of countless professions. He is the great liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries—and in which most of it still lives, in non-capitalist countries.” – Ayn Rand
THX, maybe start a substack or something. You have a lot to say. This is not always the place.
The moderators here don’t think to seem so, they approve my comments. Are you a moderator here at FPM? Perhaps you should be the moderator here then you could ban me because that’s what you and “Intrepid” really want.
I’s not my comments you don’t like but their content. If the content of my comments were to agree with what you believe you would fine with them.
Why don’t you just ignore my comments, not read them, skip over them? That would be an effective way for my comments not to bother you but that’s not good enough for you is it?
What you really want is for the FPM comment section to only contain comments that agree with your way of thinking.
You’ve insulted me enough times, just like Intrepid, to now be playing the polite, diplomat, don’t you think?
Most everyone’s comments get approved outright or after moderation. There is nothing special about you. What is most gratifying is that no one buys into your B.S.
It’s your comments, your high handed attitude, your self-centered presumption that you think you have something important to say, and your selfish desire to turn this comment board into the “THX Show.” with your longwinded terrible wall paper posts.
If your comments were a Broadway show you would close on opening night.
Don’t waste your breath. He stays here because this is the only comment board that will have him because he can’t be blocked. And he’s too much of a wimp to go to a site where he can be blocked.
Starting a substack would require effort. And he is way too precious to actually have to work at anything. beyond copying and pasting.
Killdeer play Injured which is a Habit most all Shorebirds will do the Jacana, Phalarope and Painted Snipe the Female is larger and more Colorful then the Male and he sits on the nest