Say what??????? It's been a while, but that's not exactly what I remember from my history studies. I think you're right about the present. But, what's not to like?
Hey, I'm just remembering Huck's old Dad. He was always spitting something out about the "gum'int." That old drunk was reincarnated as Rush. Still, I think they're both right about the gum'int.
Do any of the people on this list know about Joyce Cary. I suppose somebody's gonna think I'm being insulting: I mean, y'al are admittedly the best read people I've come across in a long time. But, I don't know if he's off the charts these days, or what. Anyway, "The Horse's Mouth" is just about the funniest book I ever read. It's got descriptions of English life in the 30s that should be really interesting to people interested in that period. Alec Guiness made the movie, and it's a great movie. And, to the people who've been talking art on this list, I'd like to say that, as far as I'm concerned, "The Horse's Mouth" says it all.
Anyway, one of my favorite passages is about government, and I thought maybe some of you might enjoy it. Please let me know if this is rude to take up bandwidth this way. It's only a few paragraphs. ********* ...And I said to Nosy, "To accuse government of being selfish, cruel, blind, deaf and dumb, is simply stupid; because what else can you expect. What is a government, Nosy? It's a committee of committees and a committee hasn't even got trousers. It's only got a typist, and she's thinking of her young man and next Saturday afternoon at the pictures. If you gave a government imagination, it wouldn't know where to put it. It would pass it on to the cat or leave it out for the charwoman to be taken away with the tea leaves. The only good government," I said, "is a bad one in the hell of a fright; yes, what you want to do with government is to put a bomb under it every ten minutes and blow its whiskers off - I mean its subcommittees. And it doesn't matter if a few of its legs and arms go too, and it gets blown out of the window. Not that I've personally got a bad opinion of governments, as governments. A government is a government, that's all. You don't expect it to have the virtues of a gorilla because it doesn't belong to the same class. It's not a higher anthropoid. It has too many legs and hands. But if you blow off some of the old limbs, well, imagine. There you have a piece of government lying in the middle of Whitehall, and it says to itself, "This is most unustual. I distinctly heard a bang. I must inquire at once - yes, immediately - I must appoint a commission." So then it opens its eyes and looks at the crowd and says, "My God, what has happened, what are these creatures?" And the people say, "We're the people, you're the government, hurry up and do something for us." And the government says, "I'll have a committee on it at once." And the people say, "You haven't got any committees - they're all dead - you're the government." And the government says, "Haven't I got a secretary?" And the people shout, "No, we've just chopped her up with a rusty axe." "Or an office boy?" "No, we've pushed him down a drain."
"But I can't be a government all by myself."
"Yes you are, and you've got to do something."
"But one man cant' be a government, it isn't democratic."
"Yes it is," the people say. "We've sent for another bomb. But you've got ten minutes still, so you'd better do something."
"So then the government looks round and thinks. It uses its imagination because it hasn't got any committees and because it hasn't got a secretary. It gets an idea all by itself, and it says, "Jimini Christie, look at all these people. Look at their trousers and their gamps. What squalor. It seems that they aren't in the government." And then it makes a law that everyone is to get a steel-stick umbrella and a trouser-press free. And all the old clubmen who used to be in government say, it's impossible, it can't be done. The people won't stand it. But it is done, it is possible, and the people not only stand it, they ask for trousers as well, to put in the presses. And then the old clubmen themselves ask for new trousers and take it all as a matter of course. And then the bomb comes and the people blow that government into cottage pie and start again with committees. For the people is just as big a danger as the government. I mean, if you let it get on your mind. Because there's more of it. More and worse and bigger and emptier and stupider. One man is a living soul, but two men are an indiarubber milking machine for a beer engine, and three men are noses off and four men are in asylum for cretins and five men are a committee and twenty-five are a meeting, and after that you get to the mummy house at the British Museum, and the Sovereign People and Common Humanity and the Average and the Public and the Majority and the Life Force and Statistics and the Economic Man brainless, eyeless, wicked spawn of the universal toad sitting in the black bloody ditch of eternal night and croaking for its mate which is the specter of Hell. - Joyce Cary ********************** Quincy