Recent events in U. S. politics and governance leave me feeling too defeated to write or speak or rant. So, I’ll let Henry Adams do it for me. Adams is writing about the period from the Gilded Age into the 1890s.
Henry Adams (1838-1918)
“We are here plunged in politics funnier than words can express. Very great issues are involved . . . . But the amusing thing is that no one talks about real interests. By common consent they agree to let these alone. We are afraid to discuss them. Instead of this the press is engaged in a most amusing dispute whether Mr. Cleveland had an illegitimate child and did or did not live with more than one mistress.” [just substitute Tiger Woods for Grover Cleveland]
“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” [The Republican Right]
“Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.” [All of the current Congress]
“Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.” [lobbyists for corporations]
“The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.” [all television network news, including PBS]
“It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.” [Barack Obama?]
Reform in America is now a cause with such a remote chance of success as to make it unworthy of further discussion or consideration. We must drive for reforms elsewhere in the world, and hope that the best Americans will eventually be able to join necessary world-wide causes.
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