I’ll bet many of those old, white males were sexist, speciesist, racist, disadvantagedist and homophobic. Oh yeah? Well, so what? That was then, this is now. Grow up – it doesn’t help to have otherwise smart people focused on how awful white people or males or rich people are – it’s a waste of everybody's time and energy. Try this instead – attempt to relate to everyone by putting yourself – as hard as you can – in their shoes. If you do, the reward will be rich – the fact that you did it – the fact that you learned something.
And another thing Mr. & Ms. “identity politics” left-lib concerned citizen type. Are you really so dense as to be incapable of seeing nuance in this case? Or, are you just mouthing what your cult stud-elitist professor spit on you? Here’s a clue: extraordinary people who have done awful things to others can also have done amazing and inspiring things as well – life’s like that – there’s no map and no standard.
But, the herd wants a standard. Ok. So, like the lost Christian y’all have your closed-minded standards – you dump on Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken and the “dead white males.” Pathetic – and I’m supposed to be on your side – whatever that means anymore. Sadly, where I live – San Francisco – this sort of smallness is, to borrow from Hitch the Pitch, “above reproach and beneath contempt.”
So, anyway, here are words of wisdom almost as smart as stuff that Lacan and Jameson and Bloom and Derrida [sic] and Baudrillard and Paglia and… name as many of these putrid popinjays as you wish. That is what passes for a mind’s nourishment in America – doomed I tells ya, doomed. Oh well, they could be staring at words on a page ghostwritten by someone other than Dr. Phil, Bill O’Reilly or Michael Savage nee Weiner – that would be worse.
Please read this; don’t just look at it. Please listen to the echo; don’t just hear it.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
"When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary."
"O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the Old World is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive and prepare in time an asylum for mankind."
~ Thomas Paine (1737–1809) from Common Sense
Oh how it hurts to see the shoe on the other foot…
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the thanks and love of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial and article as Freedom should not be highly rated."
"Panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered."
"Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them."
"We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in."
"It is the object only of war that makes it honorable. And if there was ever a just war since the world began, it is this in which America is now engaged."
[Today, the war is again: at home]
~ Thomas Paine writing in the suggestively entitled The American Crisis
"War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupported circumstances… that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to raise taxes."
~ from Thomas Paine's typically brilliantly entitled Prospects on the Rubicon
"My country is the world and my religion is to do good."
"A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice."
~ Paine's Rights of Man
"Good-bye proud world! I am going home Thou art not my friend and I'm not thine"
"Give all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good fame, Plans, credit and the Muse, Nothing refuse."
~ Two of Emerson's poems
"Character is higher than intellect."
"In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended."
"This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."
"I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into today, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat."
"If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the hug world will come round to him."
~ Emerson writing in The American Scholar
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul simply has nothing to do."
"Imitation is suicide."
"To be great is to be misunderstood."
"Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist."
"An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man."
"Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will."
"I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching."
"For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?"
"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself."
~ Emerson's Self Reliance
"Every sweet hath its sour; every evil it's good."
"All mankind love a lover."
"Thou art to me a delicious torment."
"A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him [rather more, her] I may think aloud."
"A friend may be reckoned a masterpiece of nature."
"The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one."
"Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right."
"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."
"Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing."
"Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them."
"The less government we have, the better – the fewer laws, and the less confided power."
"Every man is wanted and no man is wanted much."
"The reward of a thing well done is to have done it."
~ Selections from Emerson's Essays
"Men are what their mothers made them."
"The world is his, who has money to go over it."
"Art is a jealous mistress."
"Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend."
~ from Emerson's Conduct of Life
"Hitch your wagon to a star."
"The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops – no, but the kind of man the country turns out."
[The key reason Amnesiac America is in such trouble.]
"We boil at different degrees."
"We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count."
~ Emerson's Society & Solitude
"To live without duties is obscene."
[Is there anybody out there?]
"Genius has not taste for the weaving sand."
"This world that we live in is but thickened light."
~ from Emerson's Lectures & Biographical Sketches
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
~ Eleanor Roosevelt from This is My Story (1937)
"The liberal, emphasizing the civil and property rights of the individual, insists that the individual must remain so supreme as to make the state his servant."
~ Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, one of two Senators (Ernest Gruening of Alaska was the other hero) who opposed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, writing in the once respectable New Republic. (1946)
"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, u2018I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along… You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
~ Eleanor Roosevelt form You Learn by Living (1960)
"Some look at the world and think u2018why?' Others look at the world and think u2018why not?'
~ Robert Kennedy, not too long before he was murdered
This piece is dedicated to the battered wife otherwise known as the Democratic Party.
April 18, 2005
Stephen Bender [send him mail] is a writer based in San Francisco. You can find more of his work at his website.
