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Feb. 26, 2025 - The David Knight Show
07:25
Heartbreaking Fall of a Godly Village: A Tale for Our Time
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it was um won a lot of uh academy awards when they were actually looking at merit more than anything in the early days the early parts of the academy award Certainly not today.
I mean, you don't even get considered.
It's impossible for you to be nominated if you don't have some LGBT or whatever.
You don't have any trainees, you're not going to get...
Even nominated for anything.
But, you know, back then it got, I think it was ten nominations or whatever.
It won Best Picture.
It beat out Citizen Kane, beat out Sergeant York in some pretty tough competition.
It was a great film.
And I've thought about it for the last several days because it was, it begins with a nostalgic look back at this man's childhood and the country, the town that he had grown up in and how it had completely changed.
And you see that in the process of the movie.
You see a lost culture.
You see a lost family.
And yet, as he begins it, he talks about the fact that even though it no longer exists and the people that were around him in his childhood no longer exist, they still live in his memory.
I am packing my belongings in the shawl my mother used to wear when she went to the market, and I am going from my valley.
This time, I shall never return.
I am leaving behind me my fifty years of memory.
Memory.
Strange that the mind will forget so much of what only this moment is past, and yet hold clear and bright the memory of what happened years ago, of men and women long since dead.
Yet who shall say what is real and what is not?
Can I believe my friends all gone, when their voices are still a glory in my ears?
No, and I will stand to say no and no again, for they remain a living truth within my mind.
There is no fence nor hedge round time that is gone.
You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember.
So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today, and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy.
Green it was and possessed of the plenty of the earth.
In all Wales there was none so beautiful.
Everything I ever learnt as a small boy came from my father, and I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless.
The simple lessons he taught me are as sharp and clear in my mind as if I had heard them only yesterday.
Yeah, you know, as we look at that, afterwards, after I saw that, I looked it up, and the entire population of Wales was only about 800,000 people at that time.
About the middle of the 1800s, when it's roughly set.
It's actually set towards the later part of the Victorian era.
But still, only about 800,000 people.
And you look at the music, especially, of the people they have in it.
The coal miners are singing as they...
Come and go from work, and that's a big part of the Welsh culture.
When Karen and I went to the UK for our honeymoon, we spent, we had, I guess it was about six weeks, because it was between the time I graduated and the time my job was starting.
And we didn't have any money, but we had lots of time.
I said, you know, probably never have this kind of time anymore.
So we just went there and we bummed it.
Did a lot of free stuff and everything.
Well, one of the things that we did, and I think it was free at the time, we went through Wales, we went through this, Folk Museum that they had.
I don't know if they call it that.
I can't remember what the name it was.
I should have looked it up before the program.
But what they had done, it was very interesting, and they had, as certain things had been bulldozed and taken away, They moved them to this area.
So it might be like a small mill that was by a river, and they would move it brick by brick and stone by stone, whatever they needed to do.
Instead of just destroying it, they would move it to this place and collect it.
And it was really amazing to see all that stuff in one place.
And you walk from one building to the other.
We were there in the middle of January, and it was unbelievably cold, and there were no tourists except for us.
And there was one guy who was a caretaker.
And he was surprised to see us there.
But he found out we were from America.
Oh, I love America.
And so, you know, we're going along and he's telling us about Wales.
And, you know, we talked a little bit about what we're doing.
I mean, at the time, you know, we were a very young married couple.
He was an older guy.
One of the best memories that we had.
And I look at that.
And I think about how things have changed.
We have seen amazing change.
And not for the better, quite frankly.
Amazing change in our lifetime, haven't we?
In all of our countries.
Especially in a country like that.
And I looked up to see where that village was.
Of course, the guy who wrote the story presented it as a biographical thing that he lived in that village.
But they found out later he did not actually live in that village.
But he did spend a great deal of time.
Interviewing people who had lived in that village.
And they said that just a couple of years ago, the BBC or the British government, not much difference between the two of them, but somebody did a survey, I think it was the BBC, and of all the cities that had 1,500 or more people in them, And that particular town was the least religious of any town in all the United Kingdom.
And I thought about that because that is at the heart of what this family, this culture, this little town was all about.
God and family was at the center of it.
And it's kind of a metaphor for what has happened to our entire world, isn't it?
Western civilization.
We have kicked God out.
We've lost our culture.
We've lost our families.
And it's now become an idiocracy everywhere you look.
A depraved, degenerate idiocracy everywhere that you look.
I thought it was an amazing, amazing example of what we see happening everywhere.
Well, we're going to take a break, and we're going to be right back.
I want to...
I think I've got several people here who have left tips, and I want to thank Anthony, who is matching the tips today.
And we're going to come right back, and we'll thank some of those people by name.
That's right, boys and girls.
There's a post-election sale on silver and gold.
Trump euphoria has caused a dip in silver and gold.
And it's time to buy some medals with fiat dollars before they come to their sense.
Go to davidknight.gold to get in touch with the wise wolf himself, Tony Arterburn.
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