People don't talk this way...............

 

...............(or think this way) anymore:

Among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years--a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions all I dare aver is that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected. All I dare hope is that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which mislead me, and its consequences be judged by my country with some share of the partiality in which they originated.

-George Washington, from his first inaugural speech

We just don't talk like this anymore.....

 

     I cannot appease my melancholly commiseration for our Armies in this furious snow storm in any way so well as by studying your Letter of Oct. 28.

     We are now explicitly agreed, in one important point, vizt.  That "there is a natural Aristocracy among men; the grounds of which are Virtue and Talents."

     You very justly indulge a little merriment upon this solemn subject of Aristocracy.  I often laugh at it too, for there is nothing in this laughable world more ridiculous that the management of it by almost all of the nations of the Earth.  But while We smile, Mankind have reason to say to Us, as the froggs said to the Boys, What is Sport to you is Wounds and death to Us.  When I consider the weakness, the folly, the Pride, the Vanity, the Selfishness, the Artifice, the low craft and meaning cunning, the want of Principle, the Avarice the unbounded Ambition, the unfeeling Cruelty of a majority of those (in all Nations) who are allowed an aristocratical influence; and on the other hand,  the Stupidity with which the more numerous multitude, not only become their Dupes, but even love to be Taken in by their Tricks:  I feel a stronger disposition to weep at their destiny, that to laugh at their folly.

- John Adams, from a letter to Thomas Jefferson, November 15, 1813

While certainly not an early...................

 

.............adapter to Chat GPT, I have been entertaining myself with it lately.  The assignment given was: "Write a 1000 word essay, in the style of William F. Buckley, Jr., about Donald Trump and Tariffs." 

     Much fun resulted.  Here are a few paragraphs:

 I am, as the reader may know, no neophyte in the realm of economic dialectics. I have, with considerable constancy, allied myself with the venerable edifice of classical liberal economics—an edifice first sketched by Smith and polished by the manicured hands of Hayek and Friedman. It is from the lofty watchtower of this ideological architecture that I peer, somewhat dyspeptically, at the resurgent specter of protectionism, not as it was once preached by wool-coated McKinleyites or argued by ink-smudged populists, but as it is now theatrically brandished by one Donald J. Trump.

God, I miss Buckley's use of the language.  Nobody talks like this anymore.

Mr. Trump, whom one cannot ignore however strenuously one might try, has made a veritable catechism of tariffs. With the fervor of a man who has discovered a new form of ancient fire, he has resuscitated the dusty implements of economic nationalism and presented them to the American polity with all the solemnity of a patriarch offering stone tablets. One would think he had conjured the tariff ex nihilo, so untroubled is he by precedent or nuance.

Not an expert on the subject myself, but I think Chat GPT misses the extent that Trump uses the threat of tariffs as a cudgel to bring the "art of the deal" into play.

Here we arrive at the crux of the matter, and I must tread delicately, lest I be accused of ivory tower disdain. It is true that many Americans have been ill-served by the globalization of the last three decades. Factories have closed, communities have suffered, and a certain elite consensus has too often ignored the cultural and economic dislocation wrought by untrammeled free trade. But the solution to this malaise is not to embrace the economic equivalent of bloodletting. . . .

Let us, therefore, speak with clarity: trade, like liberty, is messy. It does not guarantee equal outcomes, nor does it always flatter our national pride. But it is, on the whole, a generator of wealth, innovation, and peace. To embrace it is not to surrender sovereignty but to recognize that prosperity is not a zero-sum game.

without effort.................

 

To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.

-attributed to Bertrand Russell

While checking in with.............

...........................friend Greg at Sippican Cottage, this beauty was found:

Everyone in Hollywood takes themselves very, very seriously at this point, but I think the movies as a true art form is in the rear-view mirror. Exactly how many comic book movies can you watch? But for a while, with everyone pulling in the same direction, Hollywood produced some astonishing stuff. And there’s really no way to listen to Ned Beatty’s speech in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network and come away with anything less than astonishment. 

 Some people nail it. And nail it to the church door, too. 

 Which led me to find Beatty's monologue. Enjoy.

 

The script is here:

Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.
Beale: But why me?
Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

A radical notion........................

.................................. face-to-face.

On moral questions......................

     There has never been any question before the American public, whether political or economic, religious or military, which did not resolve itself, soon or late, into a moral question.  Even so dull a row as that over the currency produced its vast crop of saints and succubi, of martyrs and Pontius Pilates, of crimes, heathenries and crowns of thorns.  Nor has there ever been any surcease of that spiritual eagerness which lay at the bottom of the original Puritan's moral obsession; the American has remained, from the very beginning, a man genuinely interested in the eternal mysteries, and fearful of missing their correct solution. 

-H. L. Mencken, from his July 19, 1916 column in the Baltimore Evening Sun

People don't talk like this much anymore.....

 I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.

-Theodore Roosevelt, as he concludes this speech

Making a magnificent structure fit for use..........

 Powerful and ingenious minds, taking as postulates that the powers expressly granted to the government of the Union are to be contracted by construction into the narrowest possible compass and that the original powers of the States are retained if any possible construction will retain them may, by a course of well digested but refined and metaphysical reasoning founded on these premises, explain away the Constitution of our country and leave it a magnificent structure indeed to look at, but totally unfit for use. They may so entangle and perplex the understanding as to obscure principles which were before thought quite plain, and induce doubts where, if the mind were to pursue its own course, none would be perceived. In such a case, it is peculiarly necessary to recur to safe and fundamental principles to sustain those principles, and when sustained, to make them the tests of the arguments to be examined.

-Chief Justice John Marshall, as he concludes the majority opinion in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)

You don't come across writing like this every day

  I have a friend blessed with an intellect as keen as a drill, who, though he takes an interest in aesthetics, has never during a life of almost forty years been guilty of an aesthetic emotion. So, having no faculty for distinguishing a work of art from a handsaw, he is apt to rear up a pyramid of irrefragable argument on the hypothesis that a handsaw is a work of art. This defect robs his perspicuous and subtle reasoning of much of its value; for it has ever been a maxim that faultless logic can win but little credit for conclusions that are based on premises notoriously false. Every cloud, however, has its silver lining, and this insensibility, though unlucky in that it makes my friend incapable of choosing a sound basis for his argument, mercifully blinds him to the absurdity of his conclusions while leaving him in full enjoyment of his masterly dialectic.

-Clive Bell, from his little book, Art, found here

This is likely not a compliment.......

"His upper lip is Nixonizing."

-as extracted from the end of the fifth paragraph of this post

Checking in with Steinmetz..............

"There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions."

"In this country all a man need to do is to attain a little eminence and immediately he begins to talk. Usually his eminence is financial, and the greater this eminence the more he talks and the further his voice reaches. I don't blame the rich people for talking; many of them don’t know what else to do with themselves. The fault is with these who listen. If no one would listen no harm would he done. But the American people are willing to listen to any one who has attained prominence. The main fact is that we've heard a man's name a great many times; that makes us ready to accept whatever he says. … We listen to the one who talks the most and loudest."

-Charles Proteus Steinmetz, 1865-1923

Deeper clearer pools of thought..............

A new architectural language is being brokenly, variously, and often falsely spoken by youths with perspicacity and some breadth of view, but with too little depth of knowledge that can only come from continued experience.  Unfortunately, academic training and current criticism have no penetration to this inner world.  The old academic order is bulging with its own important impotence.   Society is cracking under the strain of a sterility education imposes far beyond capacity;  exaggerated capitalism has left all this as academic heritage to its own youth.  General cultural sterility, the cause of the unrest of this uncreative moment that now stalls the world, might be saved and fructified by this ideal of an organic architecture, led from shallow troubled muddy water into deeper clearer pools of thought.  Life needs this deeper fresher pools into which youth may plunge to come out refreshed.

-Frank Lloyd Wright,  The Natural House

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