A One-Page Epitome of Cultural Development

A Hegelian Trialogue Between a Tongan King, a Senatorial Veteran of the Indian Wars, and a Chestertonian Catholic Convert

1. “If money were made of iron and could be converted into knives, axes and chisels, there would be some sense in placing a value on it; but as it is, I see none. If a man has more yams than he wants, let him exchange some of them away for pork… Certainly money is much handier and more convenient, but then, as it will not spoil by being kept, people will store it up instead of sharing it out as a chief ought to do, and thus become selfish.… I understand now very well what it is that makes the Papalangi [non-Polynesians] so selfish – it is this money!”

-- Comment of Fīnau Fangupō [ʻUlukālala II], hereditary chief of Vava’u, ca 1808 CE, as reported by his English friend William Mariner. (J, Martin, Tonga Islands: William Mariner’s Account: An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean, with an Original Grammar and Vocabulary of Their Language [Vava’u: Vava’u Press, 1981])

2. “The head chief told us that there was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not own a dollar. It built its own capitol, and it built its schools and its hospitals. Yet the defect of the system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go because they own their land in common … there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbour’s. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilisation. Til this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress.”

-- Senator Henry Dawes (author of the Dawes Act of 1887), 1885, speaking of the Muscogee [Creek] Nation)

3. “An economy built on massive lending and spending cannot be sustained. But the reason it cannot be sustained is not merely economic, it is moral. It regards material wealth as the ultimate goal, and people as merely a commodity to achieve that goal. It is selfish and therefore self-destructive.”

-- Dale Ahlquist, “The Basis of Civilization,” Distributist Review, 2011

There was a period in the 1970sand 1980s when all my my live interviews with e,g, Pacifica radio stations KPFA and KPFK would be predictably broken off. The same was true of important phone calls, such as the event described in my poem “Bob Silvers and the Deep State” (Dreamcraft, 2023), when Silvers

called back one last brief time

to suggest I should write with Gore Vidal

about the Kennedy assassination

until Gore’s four phone calls to me

were all (as I could have predicted)

broken off in mid-sentence

which led to Vidal’s understandably killing the project,

The most dramatic interference by far is that referred to, clumsily, in my essay in Asia Pacific Journal/ Japan Focus, September 15, 2022, https://apjjf.org/2022/16/Scott. I will not say more here because my emails on this specific topic, if described more clearly, are to this day likely not to arrive.

For this reason, I must ask you to acknowledge receipt of this email, ASAP please.

And please understand that, for the same reason, I trust strangers will understand why I will have nothing more to say to them in response to your question. I am grateful to the deep forces in and outside this nation for the fact that, if I learn to be sufficiently discreet, I may be allowed to write my poetry in peace.

This IS why I continUously portray America, despite all I have written about it, as still, by far, the most open, tolerant, and forgiving of the world’s major powers.

All power corrupts. But some major powers are less corrupted than others. I may be more attacked, for these last three exculpatory paragraphs, than for anything else in this email.

https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/32227-jfk-assassination-researchers-have-you-ever-been-spied-on-wiretapped-or-harassed-by-the-american-government-in-your-years-of-jfk-research/page/2/#findComment-602114]“

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