>"The mind-numbing carrion of hope"--I was going to give Sale some
>points for a neat turn of phrase, but on closer inspection...
>y'know, even his metaphors don't stand up to analysis.
Sale's phrase is merely a pale shadow of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) & twists its meaning to boot:
***** Carrion Comfort
Original Text: The Later Poetic Manuscripts of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Facsimile, ed. Norman H. MacKenzie (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1991): 281, 283. PR 4803 H44A6 1991 Robarts Library First Publication Date: 1918....
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist -- slack they may be -- these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoíd thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer. Cheer whóm though? The héro whose héaven-handling flúng me, fóot tród Me? or mé that fóught him? O whích one? is it eách one? That níght, that yéar Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
Composition Date: ca. 1884-85.
<http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/hopkins12.html> *****
>I'm worried that his book will give the intellectual coup de grace
>to the Luddites, dooming them as mere purveyors of romantic-pastoral
>despair, rather than as an historically understandable strand of the
>(yes, Sale) *continuing* struggle of working people to control the
>means of production.
Not very likely, unfortunately, since Sale's _Nation_ article on Unabomber didn't become the coup de grace.
***** Unabomber's Secret Treatise
Is There Method In His Madness?
By Kirkpatrick Sale
The central point the Unabomber is trying to make--that "the industrial-technological system" in which we live is a social, psychological and environmental "disaster for the human race"--is absolutely crucial for the American public to understand and ought to be on the forefront of the nation's political agenda.
I say this, of course, as a partisan. The Unabomber stands in a long line of anti-technology critics where I myself have stood, and his general arguments against industrial society and its consequences are quite similar to those I have recently put forth in a book on the people who might be said to have begun this tradition, the Luddites. Along with a number of people today who might be called neo-Luddites--Jerry Mander, Chellis Glendinning, Jeremy Rifkin, Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, Dave Foreman, Langdon Winner, Stephanie Mills and John Zerzan among them--the Unabomber and I share a great many views about the pernicious effect of the Industrial Revolution, the evils of modern technologies, the stifling effect of mass society, the vast extent of suffering in a machine-dominated world and the inevitability of social and environmental catastrophe if the industrial system goes on unchecked....
[Read the rest at <http://home.nc.rr.com/rwgarrison/kirksale.htm>.] *****
Yoshie