I yesterday watched Tucker Carlson’s interview of Kevin O’Leary, a tech tycoon previously unknown to me, as I no doubt remain to him.  The interview was centered on AI, a portentous topic about which I will say nothing more here.  At least not directly.  

O’Leary is all in on AI, ostensibly because it is, in his view, the key to victory in an existential struggle with China—a struggle that he says threatens, as so many things have over the years been said to threaten, “the American way of life.”  O’Leary, a Canadian born to a Lebanese mother, has decided ideas about “the American way of life,” as do most entrepreneurial immigrants who barged into America the week before last.

In one of yesterday’s posts, I ventured the opinion that “the religion of converts is very often like the patriotism of immigrants: vociferous but shallow, distinct but possessed of only one side.”  This opinion was not modified by my subsequent exposure to Kevin O’Leary, who exudes immigrant patriotism from every pore of his flesh.  And this is shallow and one-sided because the land he loves is nothing more than a land, or perhaps a space, that loves nothing so much as entrepreneurial immigrants.

Thomas Mozley’s memoir of the Oxford movement has been patiently waiting in my book queue, a long line of shuffling volumes that now stretches around the corner and down the block.  While waiting this morning for the mechanic’s verdict on my automobile, I gave Mozley’s memoir a glance.  Mozley was, I should explain, a principal in that movement and for many years one of John Henry Newman’s closest friends.   

Their friendship apparently ended when Newman swam the Tiber, at whose behest and with what anger I cannot say.

“Most tourists leave their own religion behind them, and amuse themselves by gazing at the externals of other religions.”  Thomas Mozley, Reminiscences Chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement (1882)*

It is a curious fact that overheard conversations in an exotic tongue sound more interesting than the banal imbecilities one overhears in a crowd of one’s own kind.  One knows as a matter of probability that the gabbling foreigners are just slandering a detested brother-in-law, boasting of a sordid seduction, or perhaps complaining about the infrequency of movement in their bowels—but the veil of unintelligibility causes one to feel the gabbling foreigners are deep souls exploring, like intrepid spelunkers, the very depths of life.

I must add that this is a transitory illusion because, like the sound of traffic, exotic gabble very quickly reduces to an irritant or background noise.

“The first plantation on the route was ‘Lowood,’ the former home of David G. Mills, deceased.  This fine sugar estate . . . after the death of Mr. Mills, passed into the hands of . . . Emmet Perry and sister.  They leased it to negroes and it grew up into almost a wilderness, dotted here and there with a negro cabin and a small piece of cultivated land.  Last year Mr. Baker purchased the entire plantation, 4000 acres, and, removing the free labor, stocked the farm with convicts . . . and had the wand of a magician been waved over the place no greater improvement could have been made.  The brush and briars over hundreds of acres have been cut down and the land, after its long rest, plowed up and now the old place is fast resuming its ante-bellum looks.” 

Galveston Daily News (April 13, 1896)*

One wonders if this is not the great cycle of history.  To begin there is slavery; when slavery is destroyed, sloth takes its place; and then sloth is expelled and the old order is restored by the hard but productive discipline of penal servitude.  

The Lowood Plantation was located one hundred and thirty miles south of where I now sit, near the mouth of the river from which the county in which I reside takes its name.  David G. Mills, who died in 1885, was the richest man in Texas in the years before the Civil War, and with his brother is said to have owned 1000 slaves.**  His fate was, however, of the sort made legendary in the novels of William Faulkner, for Mills’ net wealth dropped by more than ninety percent between 1860 and 1870, and he was bankrupt by 1874.