A Letter from the Provinces

(T. Audrey Wittsend, Correspondent for the C-of-C-C Newsletter)

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The C-of-C-C Newsletter Extended-Quote-Of-The-Day:

“It is, perhaps, in keeping with the spirit of the French Revolution that we have found it necessary to decapitate Mr. Juan Vázquez de Mella’s fine observations on ‘subsidiarity’ in order to accommodate the demands of space.

Subsidiarity, properly conceived, entails a judicious distribution of authority across a multitude of institutions, thereby offering a more tenable defence of persons and principles than any monolithic constitution has managed in our own era.

The Church has withered into irrelevance. The family, once the nucleus of society, now barely subsists. Bowling leagues have passed into memory; the American Legion and fraternal orders totter on the brink. Even the Little League, that modest engine of communal spirit, finds itself starved of players. (Its ancestral seat, Williamsport, has suffered a lamentable decline into criminality, brought on by the influx of rehabilitation centres and the expedient relocation of indigent populations under the aegis of bureaucratic economy.)

The military, once the stern custodian of national purpose, has become a sprawling social laboratory equipped with munitions. Marriage is dissolving apace, accompanied by the decay of those courtships and conventions that once gave it substance. The university — that ancient seat of free inquiry — has surrendered to dogma. Our politicians, having been ‘Epsteined,’ now serve under the shadow of their own disgrace.

Thus it is that the promise of individualism has been fully realized. Our erstwhile communities have fragmented into a sullen archipelago of grievance and self-interest, each enclave jealously guarding its isolation.

We stand alone. Freedom has been achieved — but it is a freedom that serves, in the end, only the rapacious.”

— T. Audrey Wittsend (British matron, independent scholar, and member of the European NOUVELLE VAGUE ZWISCHENSCHAFT [NVZ])