Monday, September 26, 2011

Everything Old Is New Again

"As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience?

Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."


-- H.P. Lovecraft to C.L. Moore, August 1936

(h/t to driftglass, as always)

3 comments:

Lisa said...

Too true. Re. "a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world" --

I recently read how today's paleoeonservatives are akin to the revivalists of the 30's and 40's, embracing the rhetoric of the Rapture, etc. Though a dismal future, slaves always have found comfort in some future time when the dismalness has passed and the faithful will be rewarded.

Big Daddy said...

That is a brilliant find, penetrating analysis from an unlikely source. Too bad the unnameable one can't take care of Boehner, Beck, Cantor, et al.

FDChief said...

Lisa - And the "conservative" always insists that there was some wonderful past that held the solutions for modern ills...regardless of the actual verities of that past. Hence the same faction mooning over the "benefits" of slavery to black people...

BD - Especially since IMO they've already summited the Mountains of Madness...