American elections languish run too long
cost too much offer too little and its officeseekers fool themselves into believing
their words and positions are pertinent only to those within the bubble or echooochamber
into which they speak
not to the rest of the World
not to the rest of the World
L. Frank Baums Wizard of Oz is
alive and well
or at least its blustering chattering head is
Faulkner as Orwell usually seem
to have something to share with me that befit the time and make commentary of the
ridicule Republican orgies heap on those who are not like them
this afternoon was Faulkners turn:
“. . . and as for
Lucas Beauchamp, Sambo, he’s a homogeneous man too, except that part of him
which is trying to escape not even into the best of the white race buy into the
second best -- the cheap shoddy dishonest music, the cheap
flash baseless overvalued money, the glittering edifice of publicity
foundationed on nothing like a card-house over an abyss which used to be our minor
National industry and is now our National amateur pastime -- all
the spurious uproar produced by men deliberately fostering and then getting
rich on our National passion for the mediocre: who will even accept the best
provided it is debased and befouled before being fed to us: who are the only
people on the earth who brag publicly of being second-rate, i.e. lowbrows. I
don’t mean Sambo. I mean the rest of him who has a better homogeneity than we
have and proved it by finding himself roots into the land where he had actually
to displace white men to put them down because he had patience even when he didn’t
have hope, the long view even when there was nothing to see at the end of it,
not even just the will but the desire to endure because he loved the old few
simple things which no one wanted to take from him: not an automobile nor
flash-clothes nor his picture in the paper but a little music (his own), a
hearth, not his child but any child , a god, a heaven which a man may avail
himself a little of at any time without having to wait to die, a little earth
for his own sweat to fall on among his own green shoots and plants. We --
he -- he and us
-- should confederate. Swap him
the rest of the economic and political and cultural privileges which are his
right, for the reversion of his capacity to wait and endure and survive. Then
we would prevail: together we would dominate the United States: we would
present a front not only impregnable but not even threatened by the mass of
people who no longer have anything in common save a frantic greed for money and
a basic fear of a failure of national character which they hide from one
another behind the loud lip[service to a flag.”
Intruder in the Dust pages 155 and 156
1641, Friday,
27 5. 16
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