[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
What’s wrong with America? It’s a question that we answer every day as we peel back the agendas, the conspiracies and the destructive policies of those trying to destroy our country.
We do it because we love America. We speak loudly, boldly and fearlessly in the tradition of our founder, David Horowitz, who always told us to call things what they are in the starkest way. Exposing the Left, confronting it and fighting it to the last breath is and will always be our mission. But there are times when in the midst of that fight, we risk losing sight of the beauty of this nation that we are defending. And that is what Michael Finch’s A Time to Stand is for.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center is honored to present A Time to Stand because it reminds us not just what we are fighting against, but what we are fighting for, it is a celebration of the beauty of the land, its people and the heritage that we are upholding in this grand struggle.
Michael Finch, the longtime president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the organization responsible for Front Page Magazine and other important projects defending this country, kept us going through the years when we faced every possible attack, from the government, the media, radical activist groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and Big Tech censorship.
And he has done it without fanfare or tributes.
A Time to Stand is the revelation of why he did it and what kept him going through the many hard and challenging times faced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center and by our nation.
The subtitle of Finch’s book, ‘The Dire Hour to Defend American Beauty,’ pushes back at the notion that matters are too important now for us to take the time to think of the matter of beauty. It’s precisely because the crisis is so near, that the ugly destructive agendas of the Left are so blatantly clear, that we must rise to the occasion, take a stand and fight for what we love.
But to truly fight for it, we must also appreciate it.
One of the most corrosive problems on the right has been a tendency to reflexively imitate our enemies, to oppose whatever they support, fight whatever they are for, and thus to define ourselves by them. Tactically this may make sense, but spiritually it can hollow us out so that we remember how to fight, but we forget what it is we are fighting for beyond their ultimate defeat.
And that is where A Time to Stand comes in. Politics is all too often, rightly or wrongly, about grievances. Finch’s politics is rooted in love, but no less unyielding for that. Grievance politics all too often descend into pettiness, but Finch’s politics instead ascend to turn patriotism into poetry.
America in Finch’s writings is a land of spirit and spirits, the spirit of “folds of foothills to Rockies high, sprinkled down of rivers flow to great expanse of our endless inland lakes and seas of rising ice castles into the forest realm” and the spirit of its people who had fought from “Trenton, Ticonderoga to Sharpsburg and Cold Harbor”, who had given us the opportunity to “gaze at a Thomas Cole painting, listen to a Samuel Barber composition, walk along the wide Missouri River, get lost in the poems of Walt Whitman, study the life of George Washington, stand in the fields at Antietam” and “recite Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural.”
In this grand conflict between beauty and ugliness, we love our country because we stand for beauty and reject the ugliness that we can see in our major cities, that assails our border and our culture, and march under the flag of a great American tradition that has been covered up.
The essential Americanism that every generation once grew up with is on the verge of being lost snowed under by a hostile corporate ‘popular culture’ that seeks to radicalize the youth into despising the land of their birth, and banished by an educational system that even when it’s not pushing woke propaganda does very little to inform them of this once common culture.
A Time to Stand is a brave effort to keep it alive and to remind us of ‘why we fight’. And therefore what it is we are really fighting beyond election victories or social media squabbles.
To Michael Finch, the “tons of trash left on our beaches” are as much a symptom of the national moral crisis as are events in D.C. He sees the failure of the country in the homeless shanty towns and the promise of America in “the rolling hills and bluffs, the rivers and woods, the nestled burgs, the tall corn and wheat, dairy farms and hollows” of Wisconsin farmland.
When he urges Americans to rise to the defense of their homeland, “to defend ourselves”, Finch sees this not merely in terms of geopolitics but as being “the only relevant question” of “where has America’s pride gone when we don’t care enough for protecting Americans from violence being committed across an international border.”
Pride requires knowing what it is we take pride in. The woke left and woke right teach pride in divisive identity politics that are based on contempt for America. Ridiculing America’s virtues and its founding appears to be ‘revolutionary’ to radicals who want a Year Zero, a total destruction that will revert the nation to a Tabula Rasa, a blank slate with no past.
That is why Finch’s profound evocation of the beauty and splendor of our land, our culture and our way of life is so powerful. The quality of Finch’s patriotism, love for the country not just as an abstract, but grounded in the very ground, calling forth the poetry of the beauty of the land and its people, and rising to fight for what is disappearing before his eyes and our own,
When reading Finch’s deeply felt musings and calls to action, the lines that come to mind are from a song that might have been our anthem and that was once known simply as ‘America’.
“I love thy rocks and rills/thy woods and templed hills/my heart with rapture thrills/like that above.”
A Time to Stand is double exposure of memory, of the beloved country as it was and as it now is by a patriot who remains determined to fight for the America that he fixes in his lyrical writings as a renewing land, textured with the fresh green of a coming spring.
And as you read this book, you too will feel that promise of a new American spring.
Order ‘A Time to Stand‘ from the Front Page Magazine store: NOW!
