Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er with him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentrated all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down,
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.
--Sir Walter Scott
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Power working behind the scenes used to be so much more subtle. The pancake make-up was barely lifted from the president's increasingly ...
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7 comments:
Was my last comment offensive in some way?
Did you ask about AmCon? I deleted that by accident, sorry. I haven't read the magazine in forever. Looks as boring as Saturday night in Salt Lake City from here. Much respect for Ron Unz, but life is too short to read most of those guys.
What's going on over there? Have they figured out how to revive the Republican Party in traditionalist guise yet? They ducking the immigration issue while talking about localism? Futility in action is so very sad.
I read the articles you wrote for them years ago. Good stuff.
"What's going on over there?"
Preening over their moral superiority to mainstream conservatives. Almost nothing but.
"Have they figured out how to revive the Republican Party in traditionalist guise yet?"
They seem to hate the GOP more than anything else. Gay marriage is seen as a big plus. Also, it seems like speaking ill of the Democrats and Holy Obama is taboo over there. I used to love Daniel Larison, but these days it seems like he's lost his mind and is manically obsessed with foreign policy.
"They ducking the immigration issue while talking about localism?"
You know it. None of them said anything after amnesty passed the Senate. I can't believe I once liked Larison.
On the contrary, I have to concede they gave me a terrific opportunity and I flaked. If I criticize them it's because I think they're kind of like the Mormons, too decent for their own good.
And that Ron Unz article on the real discrimination at Harvard was monumental. If the worse thing you can say about someone is that they're irrelevant, well you have to ask if it isn't the society's fault it ignores them.
Great poem.
I was reading about some Italian academic who uses Big Data techniques to measure traditional literary criticism questions. He said that his data shows that the two most influential English-language novelists ever were Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott.
I inherited a huge stack of books from an older friend, middle-brow relics from the early post-war period, the "Classics Club" and "Treasury of" (Great Speeches, American Literature, etc) series; from when there was still this earnest, WASPy effort at ennobling the common man with exposure to the great works (a forgotten impulse that went through a period of post-sixties ridicule and is now forgotten).
I found my way to Scott's epic poem when I came across the excerpt above in one of my favorites "A Treasury of the Familiar". It's a fascinating look at what was considered "familiar" circa 1949, and chock-full of discoveries like this. Also a great measure of the fading of literacy in the post-television age.
I recognized that great poem immediately, purely because it was quoted in "Groundhog Day", lol.
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