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The genus McCasoway, like many extractions of the American pedigree, was originally rendered from a fusion of Old-World precursors, churned for centuries in a crucible of hunger, hardship, and hopelessness. The primordial impulse propping that genesis instantly blossomed upon achievement of America’s welcoming vastness. The ancient confinements could no longer hold within this cheerful new aperture. It was here that the centuries of yearning finally uncoiled. Yet at first this was an unkind neighborhood. The squalor endured before was simply substituted by the roughness of this place. Yet this did not impede us. Indeed we thrived because of the natural conditioning toward frugality already in us, instilled by the privations of the old continent. Once here, we promptly adapted and reshaped these faculties to fit our new environment. And as previously, these practical habits were then conveyed from parents to their children, from generation to generation, with the necessary constancy that enabled survival in an intolerant land. Having always been a part of our substance, this innate predilection for economy was considered perhaps as indivisible as any human quantity ever could be. Indivisible that is, until it abruptly collided with the last four-tenths of the twentieth century. That was when all the sacrifice, discovery, ingenuity, productivity, charity, and idealism of the American algorithm finally matured. Suddenly our primitive thrift was discarded for modern utopian largess. After all, this was the true promise of America – that there would come a day when the natural shackles of an unfair universe would be overcome by the human mind and as a free People we would pursue happiness in a setting where it existed in fantastic surplus. This was the revolutionary promise that eventually became The Promised Land. It was a land that had existed in our dreams and myths for 20,000 years. We searched the entire world until we learned that such a thing did not exist in nature. So we built it ourselves. And for the last fifty years it has been our home. Revolutions, like all other objects in the universe, have structure. They are not simply uniform and homogeneous phenomena. In the case of our revolution, stated simply, there was a time before, a transitional period during, and a time after. Most people living through any one or all of these phases probably were not even aware that the game was afoot. Some might assert that we are still in the middle phase even now. But should this be so, perhaps it is equally arguable that we are closer to the end than to the beginning. Physics tells us that for each fundamental force, there is a particle that serves as its carrier. Electrical force for example, is carried by the electron. Gravitational force is said to be conveyed by the graviton. When what we perceive as the force of gravity is at play, minuscule gravitons are actually romping about, completely oblivious to the fact that their infinitesimal articulations are governing the motions of people, automobiles, and galaxies. Einstein taught us that the fantastic cumulative paths of these particles, and many others, scorching through the cold universe at the speed of light, ultimately weave together to form the fabric of space and time. The particle carrying the fundamental force of civilization is the human being. The cumulative behavioral paths of people weave together forming the social fabric and also defining the patterns of that object we call culture. The look of these patterns may exhibit superficial changes with time. But the underlying material supporting the patterns remains the same, except in the case of revolutions. It is only then that the textile itself may be affected, going perhaps say, from a coarse burlap to a fine linen, or unfortunately, sometimes the other way. In America there was a broad transitional period between the replacement of primitive frugality with modern largess. This is because much of the population still possessed the intrinsic programming of the old ways. These people were alive during the Great Depression and before. Their thrifty habits were not developed out of some strain of esoteric environmental altruism, but out of necessity. They remembered being hungry and vowed to never be so again. Wise management of resources was an important deterrent to hunger. And these habits were imprinted with a profound religious resolve. To the immediate family of Daniel McCasoway, waste was tantamount to sin. In no one was this property more pronounced than Sagittarius Capulet McCasoway, the older brother of Daniel’s father. For example, like all other members of the McCasoway clan, Uncle Cap, as he was known, believed that it was acceptable to own a dog, even a non-working dog as a companion or pet. As children back on the farm, the McCasoway brothers had many dogs. However, when it came to feeding dogs, it was strictly no-nonsense. That is, dogs had to subsist on whatever precious few scraps came from the family dinner table, and the trimmings from butchered game and farm animals. Should the cumulative weight of these resources be insufficient to meet their nutritional needs, then their native powers had to provide the difference. Ideally, this supplementary fare consisted of captured rats, mice, and moles that were generally plentiful around the farm and immediate environs, or an occasional rabbit or woodchuck. At no time did anything resembling the notion of store-bought dog food ever exist even in the wildest dreams of a McCasoway. To them such a proposition would have been so vile, hateful, and blasphemous that entertaining it, even in a theoretical sense, would surely have invited eternal damnation to any soul corrupt enough to do so. |