A Time to Stand: The Dire Hour to Defend American Beauty, Michael Finch’s newly released ode to the American experiment, highlights the power and grandeur of both America’s rugged landscapes and city streets, and of the historical figures and intellectual currents that have shaped our way of life.
Finch clearly but poetically lays out what is at stake in the fight against the leftist ethos that views America as a systematically racist, sexist, nation steeped in original sin: “American culture is rotting,” he states, adding that “The ‘uglification’ of American culture is so pervasive that it is almost impossible to imagine that something better, more beautiful and enduring had once existed. Or that we may be able to climb out of the cultural morass we find ourselves in.”
In the collection of his essays that follows, Finch shows the way forward in both of these immense but critical tasks. He reminds us of the beauty and culture that America has historically cultivated. More importantly, he highlights the steps we as a nation and people must take to restore this greatness that now seems so lost.
It is to Finch’s great credit that he does not stick to only one aspect of American beauty and greatness. His ambitions are much larger. As he states himself in the introduction to A Time to Stand, his essays cover topics ranging from “modern politics to history, culture and art, literature, and perhaps more than anything else, memory.”
Finch’s own memories of a lifetime lived in America serve to deeply immerse the reader in the singular surroundings and many facets of our nation’s grandeur. He describes pulling to the side of the highway in the Great Plains of the Southwest, feeling that one “can seemingly swim on the prairie grass all the way to Alberta” on “an endless sea for over a thousand miles.”
A visit to his boyhood home of Chicago evokes reflections on the endless bustle and havoc of the Windy City, where “Darkness descends, early winter sun fades, snow clouds converge, trains churning, chugging, outside snow blows and circles, wind whips, visibility naught, just a cloud of white.” We can feel the depth of emotion and memory that leads the author to end the essay with the simple refrain, “I miss you Chicago.”
As the book reaches its later acts, Finch delves more deeply into the moral rot that has corrupted America’s greatness and threatened its shining historical legacy.
In a chapter titled fittingly, “What Ails Us,” Finch highlights the government’s role in enabling many of our national ills, from the so-called race-wars to tent cities of the drug-addicted and mentally ill homeless that are now endemic in large metropolitan areas, to the upsurge in violence provoked by drug cartels on our southern border. “We have become the feckless empire, sending our men and women off to fight and die in far-off lands,” Finch writes, “all the while our country is invaded by drugs that are killing hundreds of thousands, by gangs, terrorists, child traffickers, as our country rots from the inside.”
Using his expansive knowledge of our nation’s history, Finch draws a historical parallel between our current border crisis and the situation faced by America during the aftermath of the War of 1812 when “only Spanish Florida remained out of American hands, the last European colony east of the Mississippi” and chaotic violence from that rogue region regularly spilled across the border to endanger American lives. Then-President James Monroe gave the order for General Andrew Jackson to chase the raiders and criminals threatening America back across the border, “pav[ing] the way for annexation and later statehood” of the territory that would become Florida.
Finch draws many lessons from this incident, but the most important one is that the protection of American lives must be our paramount national interest. “When foreign nationals with weapons cross a border and murder, destroy property, and kidnap Americans, that is an invasion,” he writes. “We have every right to defend ourselves; now, the only relevant question is where has America’s pride gone when we don’t care enough for protecting Americans from violence being committed across an international border.”
Finch is clear-eyed that the responsibility for fixing this mess lies not just with the government, but with the actions of ordinary Americans. “There is still a chance to change course, but the hour is late, we are running out of time,” he writes. “It can’t all be solved by the waving of a wand from Washington, D.C.”
While acknowledging the immensity and difficulty of the mission to restore America’s lost greatness, Finch gently shows the way forward. He urges all Americans to reject any vision of American history as “sullied like the haters of our great nation are doing today.”
“Gaze at a Thomas Cole painting, listen to a Samuel Barber composition, walk along the wide Missouri River, get lost in the poems of Walt Whitman…recite Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural,” he writes, “and don’t dare apologize for any of it.”
Directly addressing the supposed deficits in President Trump’s personal character, Finch boldly declares, “I could give a damn what Donald Trump says in private.” America’s past national heroes — men like Andrew Jackson, George Patton, Ulysses S. Grant, and Sam Houston — “were hardly saints,” he writes, yet still led our country to victory and greatness.
It is this pragmatic balance that we need to strike, Finch explains, to restore America to its former glory. Leftist ideologies like communism, socialism, and environmentalism are premised on the idea that we can achieve utopia, actually create heaven on earth. This failed idea is responsible for the deaths of untold millions across the last century. “After all, if you are fashioning a heaven on earth,” writes Finch, “what is the loss of any number of souls.”
America’s strength and endurance are due to the fact that our nation was created by the Founders with the full understanding of man’s flawed nature, of his lust for power and attraction to sin. The numerous checks and balances ordained by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment’s safeguard against a tyrannical government, make clear that the Founders were clear-sighted about the morals of ordinary mortals and how they can become corrupted.
In concluding his book, Finch leaves the reader with this understanding of the dangers of utopianism as his most important message. “We cannot save the world,” he writes, “indeed, all efforts to do so have resulted in destruction and misery and the death of millions.”
Instead, he urges us to realize that “as inheritors of Western civilization, we have been bequeathed the greatest and most wondrous gifts known to the history of mankind.”
“We need to cherish the culture and history of our great land,” Finch writes, “And to educate the next generations and not let this incredible history be forgotten.” Amen.
Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
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