Good Morning, America!
A work in progress by Tom Todaro, Copyright, Lone Wolf Creative, Inc. Click for a larger, more embarassing, image.
Massachusetts
I was just thinking about Ralph Waldo Emerson and his essay, “Self-Reliance.” It’s one of those gems you pick up in history or English classes that seems to follow you around for the rest of your life.
We hear so much bullshit about “Massachusetts liberals” these days. Emerson came from nine straight generations of ministers. In Concord, Massachusetts, at the beginning of the revolutionary war, his grandfather was a cheerleader for the farmers who fired the shot heard around the world (chalk one up for Bush and other cheerleaders!). Emerson even spent a winter in Florida for his health.* That should get The Senator from Mass. some key votes.
Emerson wrote:
“We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity.”
And:
“The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun.”
(I just heard, on the news, you’ll soon be able to talk on your cell phone throughout your entire transcontinental flight. Cue the chatter! solitude banned, forevermore!)
“Self-Reliance” makes a case for the responsibility of individuals in building good societies. Ralph Waldo Emerson was at a pole quite opposite from a society that would embrace and encourage the slacker, you know, like the “Massachusetts liberal.”
“Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists for him.”
http://www.rwe.org/works/Essays-1st_Series_02_Self-Reliance.htm
If John Kerry must be painted as a member of the “elite,” a Brahmin, he could as well be painted as a Transcendentalist, like Emerson or Henry David Thoreau; hardly shabby founding thinkers of our democracy.
W-YA! has had everything handed to him--an oil-drilling business (dried up), a baseball team (traded Sousa!), Texas (Texas!), the presidency of the United States, and a brain in Karl Rove. Now who is “elite?”
Finally, and well worth repeating if my verbatim cells are working well, Emerson said, "The more he spoke of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."
For you O Democracy
By Walt Whitman
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and
along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.
At one of the most important moments in literature, and in American history, the publication of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1855, Emerson was stoked. He “ . . . wrote enthusiastically to its author: ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start.”*
(with regrets for this blog engine's technical inability to produce the line breaks and especially the indentations as the poet intended)
*The Literature of the United States, Book One, Scott, Foresman and Company, 1966, 1969
This spin is getting really wobbly
“If you underestimate the threat of a nuclear mistake by a tyrant . . . “ Dr. Condoleza Rice visiting with Wolfe Blitzer yesterday . . . She was saying it was better to err on the side of safety and create the most incredible blunderbuss of international action in world history than to play it cool.
There goes that smoking gun again, covering the U.S. Midwest with a mushroom cloud.
I only have a minor in poly-sci, so it must take a PhD to figure out that the best way to go about stamping out a nuclear threat is to start at the bottom, pick the worst intelligence, hell--make it up, and work your way to the top until you find the real culprit! in North Korea, for example, or Iran. Hell, my friend from Bombay said if you’re looking for terrorists running their fingers over the nuclear trigger just go to Pakistan. “You could probably find Osama Bin Laden having tea, watching CNN with President Pervez Musharraf.”
My friend, who has lived in the U.S. a long time, also told me he just doesn’t get how anywhere close to half of the country would vote for Bush after the travesty in Iraq. Talk to India. Talk to the cultures of Pakistan, Iran, Jordan, any country over there, and yes Iraq. Tell them to trust you to come in and set up a new system for them to follow; “trust us, you’ll like it.”
The best outcome of all this might be written this way: The neoconservative doctrine found its laboratory and tried out their twisted experiment in global domination and it just did not work. We will never try that again. How about this . . . ?
