I keep seeing right-wingers -- Glenn Beck is the best but not the only example -- genuflecting before the images of what they take to have been the founding fathers, and the other day on my favorite discussion group, a poster from a far-off, antique land asked if Americans worship the ff's.Well, of course we worship them. Actually, not them but images of them.
If you're trying to appeal to the rightward leaning you always want to have pictures of guys wearing knee britches and tricorn hats in anything you mail to them or have up on TV, along with at least one picture of the Constitution.
As for the founding fathers themselves, they're all dead, of course. So the closest approach we can make to them is by reading honest history books, of which there are plenty, but I don't know how many people actually read them, compared to the number who just look at the pictures.
My favorite ff, the one I feel closest to, is John Adams, I guess 'cause he lived in Boston and was a Unitarian. I used to go to his church when I was back there, and they've still got what's left of old John in the basement, along with the remains John Q, his son, and their wives. I liked JQ too, but he was not a founder.
Mostly I think a lot Americans think they worship the founders and the constitution, but really they don't. They just worship the images of those things in their heads, which makes them unconscious idolaters. And that's especially true if the images in people's heads correspond not at all with the real thing, living or dead.
Robert Anton Wilson, where have you been all my life?
3 comments:
The lamentable nature of language is marked by the tendency of both luck and skill luck in word choice to determine the quality of social interaction.
Joe--
This Wikipedia article on the form of English called "E-prime" might interest you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
You'd be surprised to know...dismayed to know? that most conservatives...actually do know their history...the real history...as opposed to today's revisionist watered down muck. My ancestors were burning tea in Greenwich, and setting the marsh on fire to create a smoke screen so that the British commander Simcoe (not a nice guy to my estimation) could not stop Anthony Wayne from getting food supplies to the starving forces at Valley Forge. Simcoe for good measure massacred men and boys before he left town anyway. So you see...the liberals do not know at all who the "Tea Party" is. They have stayed too long in their liberal academic world...sipping lattes and believing fairy stories for sure about their countrymen...congratulating themselves ala Chris Mathews for how smart and tolerant they think they are...all the while imagining conservatives are ignorant racist mongrels..because their favorite socialist professor told them so.
When in fact conservatives, teach their kids to work hard, sleep on floors to pay their bills, not to mention all of the taxes that support both the institutions that have become liberal coffee clatches, and the disfunctional parts of society who are promised 'more' if you vote for the Democrats...while they raise decent families and give to the poor. No... not through a giant feckless wasteful self important and over reaching government...but by their own hand. Lest you think that is not true...Mitt Romney gave 14 million dollars to charity, the same year that sitting Senator Joe Biden gave 375 bucks.
Just wanted to add some balance to your conversation. Am sure you will not mind at all.
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