Michigan – The Pull Of The Land

Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index

March 7, 2023March 7, 2023 Richard Barnes

In the mid 1980s I had the privilege of working with the Gideon’s organization. Every Saturday, rain snow or shine, a group of us would meet for breakfast in downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan, to review assignments and plan the upcoming weeks. Although our conversations covered just about everything under the sun, I’d often hear these men, all of whom were older than I, express gratitude for God, family, and country. In that order.

However, they were also realistic enough to gently tamp down my younger-man’s exuberance about America. In my naiveté I still believed that, if one would scratch beneath the surface across the country, one would tap into a vast reservoir of appreciation for our roots, both colonial and early republic. By that I meant, surely, the great majority of Americans understood that the truths we regard as “self-evident” are so because of the religious tradition undergirding our beliefs and our very lives and that to reject that heritage would lead to tyranny and ruin.

My colleagues would point to Scripture, which has plenty of examples of nations whose names now gather dust in forgotten manuscripts and unvisited libraries. Nations that knew the Triune God but did not honor him. The words of Daniel to Belshazzar come to mind. Even the nation of Israel was judged for her betrayal. Sadly, it is the nature of men and women to forget, to deny, to dishonor.

John Stuart Mill, the great relativistic thinker, assumed that Christian ethics are permanent and hence we can take them for granted. He provides yet another example proving that “great thinkers” are not often wise.

I recalled my friends from Kalamazoo when I read the 2022 Transparency International Corruptions Perceptions Index comments on Venezuela.

Venezuela’s foundations differed widely from colonial and early republic America. However, she did have a basis for understanding the source of her prosperity in the first half of the 20th Century, a time when she enjoyed high levels of economic freedom which produced an environment of numberless voluntary transactions and unprecedented years of well-being with high growth rates. In 1960, Venezuela’s per capita income, at 45% of the US per capita income, was the highest in South America while her growth rate was higher than even Germany’s.

Her great economic success fueled the transition to democracy in 1959. However, her democratically elected officials immediately began to curtail her economic freedoms in favor of Socialistic policies which eventually led to contractions and, by the end of the century, ushered in an authoritarian Socialist regime that, like a protean, angry octopus, has its tentacles in every nook and cranny of Venezuelan’s lives. By 2013, even the Carter Center, albeit belatedly, acknowledged the Venezuelan “elections” to be a sham (my word, not theirs; I don’t have to be diplomatic). By then the damage was done and the fix was in, and continues to be in, to this day.

Oh, but there’s more.

Transparency International’s 2022 report ranks Venezuela as the most corrupt country in the Americas. That’s “most corrupt”, as in more corrupt than Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Her rulers are reliably accused of leading massive drug cartels and having extensive ties to major international criminal organizations. Incredibly, illegal businesses account for 21% of Venezuela’s GDP. And her mining, especially gold and diamonds, are controlled by criminal groups who, with impunity, extort, enslave, prostitute, and murder the inhabitants, mostly defenseless indigenous peoples.

In other words, Socialists are grossly guilty of what they delight in accusing Capitalists and Christians (they purposefully interchange the two).

In my youth, I would often hear the older generation’s assurances that Venezuela would not go the way of Cuba or Allende’s Chile. That she understood very well that liberty created her prosperity. As for her dalliances with Socialistic policies since 1960, those were very limited and did were not slippery slopes. I wanted to believe such assurances, even though my own family history said otherwise. Cuba, where my father was born, was also an economic miracle which went the way of all flesh practically overnight. At the time I did not know enough to ask my elders what made Venezuela any different; what would keep her from doing likewise.

And I certainly was not aware of Venezuela’s deeply infiltrated military, in cahoots with Castro and determined to rule Venezuela in Communist fashion, tyranny and all.

Venezuela “understood” where her prosperity came from. However, she ditched it nonetheless.

The United States appears to be doing the same, with even less excuse.

Mourning the death of a child. In addition to the griefs which are the common lot of all, these peoples have been abused, murdered, displaced, and enslaved. Countless have fled to unknown destinies in Brazil.

Mother and children in Brazil after fleeing criminal attacks in Venezuela’s mining arc.

Plaza Colon in Caracas, Venezuela, circa 1950

Caracas boy, circa 1950

Permanent Things

September 30, 2022September 30, 2022 Richard Barnes

My career boot camp was Arthur Andersen, of which it was often said, “You can take the man out of Arthur Andersen but you cannot take Arthur Andersen out of the man.”

My wife and I lived the first 4-plus years of our marriage in Kalamazoo, Michigan. To borrow from the Andersen lore, You can take the family out of Kalamazoo, but you cannot take Kalamazoo out of the family. At least it is true for us, as I’ve noted in his blog over the years (I Remember, Lullaby, Evocation).

In 1984 I read in the local paper that Russell Kirk was going to deliver a lecture in town at Western Michigan University. Lillie and I arranged to attend, after which we chatted a while with the great man.

Dr. Kirk was a man of place. He was born in Michigan and died there in 1994 at age 75. He wrote about seeing aged men working mightily to uproot large stumps in their ground, knowing they were doing so for future generations. According to Kirk, this was a truly American motif for most of her history until the early 20th Century when the focus became more self-centered and less future oriented.

One of his definitions of what makes a good society came to my mind today as I contemplated my mother’s 92nd birthday:

“A society in which men and women are governed by belief in an enduring moral order, by a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions about justice and honor, will be a good society — whatever political machinery it may utilize; while a society in which men and women are morally adrift, ignorant of norms, and intent chiefly upon gratification of appetites, will be a bad society — no matter how many people vote and no matter how liberal its formal constitution may be.”

Elsewhere he wrote of the “Permanent Things” of which the above quote gives an idea.

My mother was born in the interior of Venezuela, in a small village called Upata. She tells of her horror of hearing the men killing a pig for roasting. No matter how far she ran, the squeals and shrieks could not be escaped. She was acquainted with poverty but always had something to eat and was humble enough to learn American as well as Latin rules of society from wonderful people in El Pao who took an instant liking to her.

Other than my father’s conversations with friends and family about the rapidly deteriorating situation in Cuba and the obvious connections between Communists there and the military in Venezuela (see for example, Nexus), our home was not characterized by political discourses and debates. It was more defined by the “Permanent Things” of which Dr. Kirk wrote so eloquently: faith, home, hearth, immediate and extended family, friends, and more.

And my mother was a most critical key to that scene.

In 1978, I was working in Puerto Rico with Arthur Andersen. I had not visited Venezuela since 1975 and was determined to do so before the year was out. I told my parents about my plans to travel to the country of my birth in December.

A few weeks later I stopped by home on my way to a conference in Chicago. My mother promptly handed me a small, black address book and asked me to sit with her, which I did. She then asked me to open the book and as I — incredulously — slowly flipped each page, crammed with names, phones, and addresses, she insisted that it was my duty to visit each person or family in the book. And if that were absolutely not possible, then to at the very least call each number.

I mildly protested, “But, Mami, I’ll only be there three weeks. These names are spread from Caracas to Upata and numberless places in between. There’s no way….”

“¡Querer es poder!” she exclaimed with finality (roughly translated, “To want is to do!”)

I was a bit dejected, thinking my plans of visiting exotic places I’d not had the chance to do while living in the country had gone up in smoke by all these visits that my mother had demanded I execute.

I made every single visit, except one who could not see me due to severe illness. But I did speak with them by phone (“I’m not surprised Mrs. M did not receive you; she was always a bit cold, but you did the right thing in asking to see them.”)

And it was among the most memorable trips ever, for it honored the Permanent Things.

Thank you, Mami. Thank you very much.

God’s grace to you always.

Visiting with the Berán family, December, 1978

My brother, Ronny, and I visit with our mother, circa 2012

I Remember

January 13, 2022January 13, 2022 Richard Barnes

A friend sent me a note this week which I’d like to share with you as encouragement as well as challenge. If you have children or grandchildren, do your best to inspire them to love God and country.

That is easier said than done, of course. But reminiscences like those of my friend are a good starting point.

He alludes to the “shacks around Caracas”. For more on that, see my series on “ranchitos” beginning here: Ranchitos I.

Here is his letter:

Dear Richard,

Thanks for the info about Venezuela. It’s sad to see a beautiful country taken down by evil men. The people are the ones who suffer. I remember all the shacks in the area around Caracas and that the city was noted as the pick pocket capital. I know I lost all the Upjohn travel money I had to a gang of pickpockets. It makes me worry about the US and the direction we are headed.

I remember life in Kalamazoo when I would walk to school and to church, about 6 city blocks; we had no car. We would see the little flags with the blue and gold stars in the homes of individuals with sons in the war. But I still remember Sundays as a day of rest: no lawn mowers, no sports, no car washing. But the sound of church bells announcing the start of church services. There were 3 large churches in our neighborhood, and we attended the farthest away. We walked there 3 times a Sunday, rain or shine, seeing all our friends on the way.

Now, no church bells; they may offend someone. It’s all about sports, baseball, golf, basketball, football, and only one church service on Sunday.

And political corruption.

Are we headed in the same direction?

God bless you and yours.

J.V.

Looking north on Burdick St., Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1950s

Looking east on Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1950s.

(Although I found photos of individual Kalamazoo churches in the 50s, I was unable to find any panoramic prints that showed at least several of them in one photo)

Evocation

October 8, 2019October 8, 2019 Richard Barnes

Frank Reaugh painted a life he loved but a life that was already gone by the time he memorialized it. He painted from sketches he had drawn as a young man. He loved the big skies, the eternal prairies, the longhorn cattle, and the cowhands. He lovingly recreated these as best he could in paintings which are evocative and, to me at least, deeply moving.

Charles Goodnight was a giant of a pioneer. Far more exciting than the Rock Hudson and James Dean characters in Giant, the 1956 smash movie hit about early 20th-century Texas. And, of course, Mr. Goodnight and his friend, Oliver Loving, the characters who were fictionalized in Larry McMurtry’s novel, Lonesome Dove, were not filthy-mouthed but were much more colorful than those depicted in the novel and subsequent smash TV mini-series. And, yes, it is true that Goodnight returned his friend’s body back to Texas for burial in Weatherford, as in the novel.

At the age of 9 he rode bareback behind his parents’ covered wagon. At 14 he was hunting with the Caddo Indians beyond the frontier. At 25, he scouted for the Texas Rangers in the war with the Comanches and Kiowas. He preserved the Buffalo; founded a college; encouraged the settlement of the plains, and “led a long fight for law and order.” He died in 1929.

Both men, and much more, are featured in the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, about a twenty-minute drive south of Amarillo. If you are in the area, you might check it out if you have an afternoon to spare.

My father was born twelve years before Mr. Goodnight passed away and, looking back, I realize I knew men who grew up during that generation. I recall sitting at the El Pao bar or in the pocket billiards area in the presence of men now long gone. One, Mr. Marley, a Texan, would tease me saying he had more hair than my father. Mr. Marley was completely bald (naturally, that is; it was an era when shaved heads were not “in”). That would trigger me in defense of my father (in an era when triggers were something on guns). Mr. Marley would howl with laughter, and I would complain to my father, who would also be laughing. I can still see him walking from the club to the bachelor quarters, wearing his ten-gallon hat, the only one in the camp with such accoutrement. Mr. Marley was not a young man, but his expertise was in setting up mining camps and that was in great demand in that era.

I can see men like Mr. Marley growing up in the presence of men like Mr. Goodnight. Men of great stamina, good humor, and sterling character.

And, like Frank Reaugh, I am blessed to have the ability to remember a life that is no longer, but that can be evoked and which has lessons for us today, I believe.

A childhood friend met me in Caracas about fifteen years ago and in catching up on our respective lives, I spoke about Texas and it’s heritage of independence. My friend laughed, “Texas is just like [the Venezuelan western state] Zulia!”

Of course! There are some similarities between Texas and the land of my birth. Both are rugged lands with stark beauty, tempting landscapes, and beguiling skies. And, like Texas, Venezuela is an enchanting land but if you are careless, if you take things for granted, if you treat it as a sandlot or a plaything, it can be fatal.

Up to that conversation, I had seen great similarities between Kalamazoo, Michigan, and El Pao, the place of my birth. The friendliness and easy hospitality of southwest Michigan still enchants me, even after thirty years, and allows for easy and favorable comparison to the mining town of my childhood, including the fact that I made lifelong friends in both places. And the ruggedness of Texas (which, by the way, also characterizes the Michigan Upper Peninsula) allows for easy and favorable comparison to the striking landscape of Venezuela.