Ten years ago, I started this blog with the intention of sharing personal reflections on the landscape, history, art, and current events surrounding the North American continent (important: inclusive of Mexico).  Life intervened here and there, and the blog largely took a vacation from 2015 onward.  I spent less time traveling, more time absorbed into the 9-5, and after 2017 I started looking back on what I had written and realized I was perhaps focused on the wrong subject matter.  In 2022, I find myself looking back at a decade of intellectual development and bearing witness to noticing how much my underlying bias went into my writing.  To our detriment, historical methodology is often ignored by armchair historians.  I can't really use the excuse that I don't know what this is, as I did pursue the liberal arts in my higher education, albeit in philosophy, theology, and art history rather than history proper.  All things considered, this is not an academic blog as much as a casual blog of reflection, but one also has to consider that history is a volatile subject these days.

My last blog entry was at the dawn of the Trump administration, a time where many governments and societies across the world were (and are) experiencing upheavals in historical memory and current understanding (to put it lightly!).  I stopped writing because my efforts would have been labelled as political, and as a foreign national living in the US, I didn't want to come across as an Ambassador Genet.  I have lived in this country now since 1994 and have paid taxes since 2000, so I figure I can probably say things about the amber waves of grain.

I come back to the blog to make a bold statement:

We are still fighting the English Civil War of 1642-1651.

The players in the conflict then were different enough from our contemporaries to not be able to draw direct comparisons to what sides fit in the picture today, but we definitely still have the dominant elements in play.  While there are no more Puritans (low-church Anglicans aside), we definitely have a booming Evangelical and Pentecostal population throughout the continent, largely in conservative populations in the United States but growing in both Canada and Mexico.  Like the Puritans, they are interested in making their voices heard in politics, and it must be said, interested in legislating their voices over the rest of the population.  On the other side, we no longer have a king or an established church, but we do have a political establishment that has largely been interested in law and order and societal stability, at least until recently.  

To elaborate further is going to take a lot of posts from here on out, especially as I find myself going back to school in terms of really trying to read up on the players in the conflict.  I decided to begin with prime excuse/cause number one, Archbishop William Laud.  While Parliament had many issues to bring them into conflict with the crown, the initial spark that ignited the fire was from Puritans upset about any slight inkling of Popery/Catholicism in the Church of England, to say nothing about King Charles being married to an outwardly devout Catholic, Henrietta Maria, who the state of Maryland is named after.  That factoid is just a reminder that while this is a blog about North America, our post-Columbian history is very much a trans-Atlantic story.  In any event, one could argue that we definitely have our Lauds out there today in the form of political figures interested in the sense of stability brought about by maintaining the Unitary State (power flows down from the top authority), in contrast to our Parliamentarians, those more interested in promoting Federalism (wherein power is shared between top and local authorities).  The lines blur quite a bit here and there, so we end this post with the caveat that our complicated time shares many features with that complicated time, while the particulars definitely vary.

Here's a short clip from the 1970 classic, Cromwell (featuring absolutely brilliant performances across the board), which features the main man getting riled up by some rather bland (from Catholic standards) altar adornments.  Wars of ideas often start from messing with small things.