In the old days, Brownwood wasn’t even “blue collar.” It was “dirt collar.” Most of the people downtown at any given time, if they weren’t operating a shop of some sort, were here in wagons or trailers or trucks from out on the frontier. You came to town to get supplies and have things repaired. Maybe you got some news, too. This was still true (Brownwood being ‘dirt collar’) right up until tens of thousands of soldiers and soon-to-be soldiers invaded the town when Camp Bowie opened in late 1940, and even a little before that when 15,000 workmen came to town to build the camp.

Once upon a time, you would pass a blacksmith shop on almost every block. That started to change in the middle 1920s, but before that there were a lot of blacksmiths. People today think of a blacksmith as someone who made weapons in the dark ages or the renaissance, or as friendly giants pounding horseshoes on Little House on the Prairie. But the blacksmiths were the people who kept the world ticking during the age of metal (which lasted a very long time.) This was before we started just throwing things away when they broke. Before the war, many of the blacksmith shops had become automobile repair shops, but some of them still did blacksmithing work.

Imagine, then, the PING! of hammers hitting glowing metal was a sound you’d have heard everywhere downtown back in the day. People don’t always imagine what that would have been like, or what it meant.

The phrase “strike while the iron is hot” is used (or misused) today to mean “to make the most use of an advantage while one is able to do so,” or “to move quickly while an opportunity remains open to act.” While this definition explains a part of the full meaning of the phrase, it leaves out its substance.

The phrase is taken from the blacksmith’s art and actually refers to the act of bending or forming iron into the shape one desires by the effective direction of hammer blows. The great Puritan theologian John Owen said,

“he that would fashion iron into the image and likeness which he hath fancied must strike while it is hot, — when the adventitious efficacy of the fire it hath admitted makes it pliable to that whereunto, in its own nature, it is most opposite.”

Do you get that? Do you sense a lesson coming?

In order to form iron into something useful to the smith or the client, the whole mass is plunged into the fire so that the molecular structure becomes so agitated that, by the application of brute force, the material can be formed into something completely “other” than what it was. (To the dummies out there, I’m talking about politics and the news.)

Here is where I have to leave the metaphor because I am not a blacksmith and can take it no further. But it is interesting to note that it is the fire of contention and strife that makes the body (politic) pliable to that whereunto, in its own nature, it is most opposite. The mass man is, by his nature, pliable. But he is never so pliable as when he is artificially incited by the news. When he has imbibed the fire of fallacious reasoning and presuppositional errors that preclude cool and reasoned thinking.

When the iron of the mass man pours into the streets, agitated by the flames of rhetoric and error, he is most pliable to whatever smith whose manipulations have sent the mass man into his agitated state. The iron has received the fire into its bosom, and inflamed by extremism, is softened to the point that it will be easily re-formed by hammer blows.

I’ll make it easier… Strife, turmoil, discomfort, hardship, rage, division, agitation, inflation – these things are not unhappy historical accidents. They are tools used to move the mass. The mob feels the heat of the fire, becomes pliable, and begs for the hammer blows. Look around you. This is what happens when a nation forgets that there ought to be unbending rules, inalienable rights, dogmatic morals, and transcendent principles that are not subject to change by the mob. The tyranny of the 51% ought not to change or threaten fundamental liberties and standards. But the people who run things want absolute democracy – that is, mob rule. Because they control the hammer and the fires. Our Constitution and founding documents, and the principles that molded them, were designed to protect us from the caprices and whims of the 51%.

When such a state of fiery antagonism, personified in the unthinking mob, reaches its peak. Expect the hammer. Someone is making something of the mass man. Experience would tell us what if we cared to study history.

Those boys training out at Camp Bowie were being prepared for a war that hadn’t been declared yet. But it was coming. The first ones arrived in Brownwood in December of 1940 for one year of training. Before the year was over, there was war. Some (more cynical) people would say that the puppet masters of the world needed and wanted the war and that they had been planning on it and stoking the fires for some time to make sure it happened. Agitation was taking place throughout the 1930s.

Anyway, some things never change. Maybe together we can walk through that historical time and learn some things that will help us

It is interesting to note that the Biblical command to “love thy neighbor” would fix a lot of this. That is to say, I have no closer neighbor than my kin, my children, and the generations that will come from them. We owe them and love them by keeping faith with them. That circle works outward to my actual neighbors. Billionaire technocrats who own the news and control the intelligence agencies (and thus – what happens in the world) do not love me or my neighbors.

A man came into the bar the other day and asked me “What do you think Brownwood needs?” A little historical perspective, some time travel wisdom from a long-haired bartender, and to love thy neighbor. That would do it.

***

Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.