The Muse of Hate: Vulcan’s Forge

Alabama

It is another bright summer day in the Sunny South.

Philosopher King is working overtime to cover “the debt ceiling crisis” unfolding in Washington and Wall Street. He is furiously analyzing information and trying to make sense of what is happening to his country and its long term implications for his Christian brothers and sisters in the State of Alabama.

And then in a split second … zap.

Philosopher King has been struck by lightning for the second time in his adult life. He has been physically crippled by some strange mysterious force.

“Vulcan,” his eyes light up.

I’m sure that “Vulcan” has spoken to me. There is not a doubt in my mind that “Vulcan” has given me the answer that I have been searching for all these years.

Philosopher King spends a few days pondering the meaning of “Vulcan’s message.” There are various people on the internet who are cackling to themselves that Philosopher King has “bipolar syndrome,” but their theories intuitively don’t seem to make any “sense” (or even cents as in the material wealth that people get paid to write opinion columns) to his own mind.

After dispensing with that theory, Philosopher King realizes that he must travel to Birmingham to have a conversation with Vulcan, as it is bad taste and manners to refuse to answer when God dispatches one of his messengers to your humble home.

It is time to climb Red Mountain to have a conversation with Vulcan.

Philosopher King begins to open his mouth, but before he can formulate the right words, Vulcan responds …

“It is about time you showed up. I have been calling you to my mountain city for many years.

I have used my hammer for more than a decade to forge your mind into gold, which contains so many good and useful ideas, and to turn your golden mind into my instrument of wrath.

I had to communicate with you on the frequency of reason, observation, blood, soil, and conscience, my son. You have finally come from the cotton fields to the Mount Olympus of Dixie.

I am but a messenger, a symbol of fire and metalworking, who was worshiped by the Greeks and the Romans. I had given them the technical power to defeat their various barbarian enemies.

Are you ready to receive the gift of fire from the gods?

My Forge has been destroyed by Washington politicians and Wall Street financiers. It is the U.S. dollar and the Yankee profit motive that has ruined my industrial city and your cotton plantation.

They would have us buy our steel from China. My Forge lies beneath me in ruins. This city with its housing projects, with its barbaric African population, with its university hospital has become unworthy of the Roman god of fire.

Will you help me rebuild My Forge? In exchange, I will assist you in your mission to raise the Confederate States of America from the dead, and to vanquish the Union Army on the field of History.

The only reason Wall Street, Hollywood, and Washington exercise so much narrative and symbolic power over the American South is because the people have misplaced their faith in secular institutions when the real object of faith is God.

Let us rebuild the furnace of the Confederacy with our own money, our own minds, our own backs, our own spirit, and our own myths, songs, and stories … at our own Southern pace.

I told you the Army of Northern Virginia would triumph in the end.

National Anthem:

I wish I was in the land of cotton,
Old times there are not forgotten;
Look away! Look away! Look away, Dixie’s Land!
In Dixie’s Land where I was born in,
Early on one frosty morning,
Look away! Look away! Look away, Dixie’s Land!