When Worlds Collide
By Nicola KarrasI’m re-reading God and Man at Yale for class. Buckley’s writing is as delightfully cranky as ever, and the book is simultaneously encouraging (we’ve come a long way, baby) and depressing (plus ça change…).
This time, though, I’m reading the footnotes, and that’s where I found it: just a passing reference, in one of his criticisms of an economics textbook, but there it was. A quotation from Rose Wilder Lane.
“It’s not that Rose Wilder, surely?” I asked myself (and my long-suffering roommate). That would be too strange a coincidence. It must be someone else — not Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter.
The Little House books were my favorites as a little girl, and I sometimes think with envy of building a little house with wooden pegs instead of nails, of Ma’s pretty butter mold with the strawberries on top, of making maple candy with syrup and snow (I could never get it to work). Somewhere I still have the bonnet I bought in De Smet.
Since the investment banks started failing, I’ve rediscovered my Little House fixation. In a worst-case scenario, it doesn’t sound like a bad way to live. It appeals to the localist, the libertarian, the anti-statist in me, and I’ve tried, half-joking, to sell my friends on it. (”Come on, one of your children going blind from scarlet fever isn’t that bad. They dug their own wells!”) How strange, suddenly, to find my political philosophy, my college, and my childhood running together.
But it isn’t a coincidence, and it is that Rose Wilder. She helped launch the libertarian movement in the late 1940s, wrote for the group that would become the Institute for Humane Studies, and the half-baked sequels about her life (Little House on Rocky Ridge, etc.) were penned by the Libertarian Party’s 1976 Presidential candidate.
I don’t know if Laura’s stories of determination, self-sufficiency, and independent community shaped Rose and me, or whether Rose’s help on the books influenced their message, but it explains so much. Babar made me love civilization and Laura made me love freedom. (Narnia, however, failed to make me a Christian.)
Tags: childhood, children's books, little house libertarianism
September 30th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
[…] Over at LadyBlog, through children’s books, I try. « But what would Sartre have thought of social networking? […]
September 30th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Oh, there’s still time. Narnian conversions have always been the ticking time bomb type…
September 30th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
I second Helen’s point.
Aslan loves you, Nicola.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:14 am
Narnia may not be the right Lewis work for a localist, libertarian, and anti-statist. Try “Mere Christianity” on for size. Even if it doesn’t convert you, it’ll have Things That Make You Go Hmmmm.
October 1st, 2008 at 6:53 am
Babar: movies, books, or both? I never read children’s books but allowed myself to watch TV and movies- I still have absurdly strong attachments to the two Babar films.
As for the Chronicles of Narnia, I think I read them when I was in 5th grade or so- adored them all, until about halfway through the last one, where I realized what he was trying to do and resented him immensely for it. I was too busy patting my 11 year old self on the back to have a conversion experience.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:49 am
There’s a book called The Ghost in the Little House that persuasively argues that Rose ghost wrote the Little House books.