Meanwhile, back at the fort proper, Nixon last January unveiled the White House police in Student Prince-like uniforms allegedly inspired by his impressions of European palace guards. He modified those uniforms but launched the President's Trumpeteers to beef up the introductory ceremonies featuring "Hail to the Chief." Last June he shook up the Cabinet, causing columnist William S. White to say: "... the President is... openly reducing the institutional prestige and status of the Cabinet and drawing into the White House proper... the largest palace guard in history." Time's cover story last June 8, "Nixon's Palace Guard," noted that the key figures around Nixon-Staff Chief Bob Haldeman, Domestic Affairs Aide John Ehrlichman, and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger -had variously acquired the nicknames: "the Berlin Wall," "all the King's Krauts," "the throne nursers," "the Praetorian Gaurd," and "the Germans."
Nixon sent Henry Cabot Lodge to renew semi-official contacts with the Vatican then visited the Vatican himself, eliciting the Associated Press statement: "Pope Paul VI and President Nixon apparently are forming strong working links between the Vatican and the White House. Their personal friendship also appears to be growing." In the October 6 New York Times, an article entitled, "The Pope and the President" is critical of both but, of greater interest, the official seals of both are prominently displayed side-by-side above the title.
There is talk of doing a television special Christmas Day linking Washington and Westminster Abbey with President Nixon and Queen Elizabeth taking part in a religious program. Press Secretary for President Johnson, George Reedy, has written a book, The Twilight of the Presidency, suggesting that we may need a King to relieve the burdens of the Presidency.
Who can say certainly that the soul of Western man is dead to government in the grand manner of Pope and King? Are the above-mentioned events "merely coincidental"? Or do we have here a natural and historic joining of the instinct for self-preservation with the urge toward that grand manner?
A UNION of church and state is prone to becoming a union of church and state with race. Religious belief draws biological lines more sharply than does the secular state. In America, the crises in church-and-state and black-and-white may each come to a head through coming together. "Nation-building" is the new and culminating black concept and commitment. Various roads are converging on the South as a black secessionist Afro-Islamic nation wrenched from a white Christian America.
The Black Muslims await Allah's destruction of the white devil but the Republic of New Africa and others are plunging into the revolutionary struggle. The first shoots of Afro-Islamic law are appearing in drafts of Black Laws and in emerging bleak courts. I have observed some of these beginnings from the inside and I estimate the potential to be comparable to the dreams of the early Zionists.
The Jews were to await the Messiah -but, without him, they seized their opportunity. I think that, as their revolutionary brothers succeed, the Muslims will seize theirs. It is only human.
If the Messiah is not with Israel, Israel is still something of a miracle. It is, for all of us, a fatefully substantial if not complete example of the union of church and state. In Israel and elsewhere, Jews are moving into deep trouble because of their special genius at being both particular and universal.
In America, insofar as student and black rebellions grow, Jews are in danger. Embattled America will probe sources. Marx, Franz Boas- Jewish prophet of egalitarian cultural anthropology (universalism kills anti-Semitism), Hoffman, Rubin, Dohrn, Rudd, Chomsky. Recent outcry against Brandeis University as radical nest. Jewish Defense League. Young Jews rediscovering Judaism and Jewishness. Racial inequality doctrine returning via Lorenz, Ardrey, others. Carleton Putnam thoughtfully exploring such matters in Race and Reason and Race and Reality.
In those books at least. I find Putnam neither anti-black nor anti-Semitic. He is concerned with preserving Anglo-American spirit and values: with self-preservation. If one concedes another the right to-self-preservation, I find it difficult not to concede to the other the right to define it. Non-interference with the rights of others is a vague, dreamy doctrine which is always breaking down and is, perhaps, unwise. Genocide upon the Indians may have been good and necessary for the blooming of a world-improving, necessary good in white America. Elijah Muhammad, Golda Meir, and Carleton Putnam may be "racists" yet rightly and justifiably so. It may be a failure of our spirit that we do not see as just all that necessarily accompanies evolving good. Bio-religious and religio-patriotic fervor are probably more life-giving than life-destroying, and leveling always produces new eminences.
Such thriving movements as Avn Rand's Objectivism or L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology impart a messianic spirit to the new Euro-and Anglo-American militancy. Reports of the death of the West may be premature. Read the book, Imperium, by Francis Parker Yockey and wonder if the greatest Western Empire is yet to come. In the grand manner. At any event, it certainly seems that the easeful, gentlemanly days of church-state separation are over.
(James T. Anderson is a composer specializing in the music of India.)
Copyright October 31, 1970