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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (48034)	5/16/1999 4:00:00 PM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 67261

from CHAPTER I. SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 1 The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance, or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it. No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all. To find the real ground for the very differing estimate which serious people will set upon culture, we must find some motive for culture in the terms of which may lie a real ambiguity; and such a motive the word curiosity gives us. 2 I have before now pointed out that we English do not, like the foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense. With us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense. A liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying activity. In the Quarterly Review, some little time ago, was an estimate of the celebrated French critic, M. Sainte-Beuve, and a very inadequate estimate it in my judgment was. And its inadequacy consisted chiefly in this: that in our English way it left out of sight the double sense really involved in the word curiosity, thinking enough was said to stamp M. Sainte-Beuve with blame if it was said that he was impelled in his operations as a critic by curiosity, and omitting either to perceive that M. Sainte-Beuve himself, and many other people with him, would consider that this was praiseworthy and not blameworthy, or to point out why it ought really to be accounted worthy of blame and not of praise. For as there is a curiosity about intellectual matters which is futile, and merely a disease, so there is certainly a curiosity,--a desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are,--which is, in an intelligent being, natural and laudable. Nay, and the very desire to see things as they are, implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not often attained without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite of the blind and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean to blame when we blame curiosity. Montesquieu says:--'The first motive which ought to impel us to study is the desire to augment the excellence of our nature, and to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent.' This is the true ground to assign for the genuine scientific passion, however manifested, and for culture, viewed simply as a fruit of this passion; and it is a worthy ground, even though we let the term curiosity stand to describe it. 3 But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it,--motives eminently such as are called social,--come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarly of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good. As, in the first view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu's words: 'To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!' so, in the second view of it, there is no better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: 'To make reason and the will of God prevail!'

To: Neocon who wrote (48034)	5/16/1999 4:25:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Whatever, Leopold. Do you have some indication anybody is reading any of your regurgitations?

To: Neocon who wrote (48034)	5/17/1999 10:30:00 AM
From: lorrie coey	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Yes, and: A Vulture at a crack party, [see Anarchy] (1882) by Amanda Matthew-Arnold -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- INTRODUCing one of his speeches a short time ago, that fine whiner and famous Liberatarian-Conservative, Mr. NottooBright, took occasion to have a fling at the friends and preachers-hey, what's a few more crack-babies? I mean, he had a smattering of dead babies in his magic bag, along with two dictionaries...one Greek and one Latin. He went on to remark, in a strain with which modern speakers and writers have attributed to ED...[Goddess bless BobDoles Left Hand] rendering us very familiar with how the poor thing is,...well, how little it is...what good can it do the world, and how absurd it is for its possessors to stop with the Viaggravation! Set it in a windowbox, or stowe it, if you like! And the other day a younger crack-baby Liberal...one of a school whose mission it is to ring in The New World Order and System, contaminated his body with baby laxitive, which caused the fatal-fumble...earlier nihilists merely flailed. A member of the University of Oxford, and a very clever writer, Mr. Frederic Harridong, developed, with his methodology and systematic albeit stringent manner of his school, the thesis which Mr. NottooBright had pounded in... 'Perhaps the very silliest cant of the day,' said Mr.Frederic Harridong, 'is the cant about culture. Culture is an undesirable quality... in a critic of new books, and sits well on a possessor of belles lettres; but as applied to politics, it means simply a turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action. The "man" in politics is one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry and want of good length, no man is his equal. No ass is too real, no rear-end is too unpractical for him. But the active exercise of politics requires a tight-end, common lubricant, sympathy for the devil, in Goddess we trust, resolution and enthusiasm, qualities which all Women will have as they casually root up, [lest they damage the delicacy of his cranial nerve] the critical olfactories prior to the drug abuse. Perhaps they are the only class of responsible beings in the community who cannot with safety be entrusted with crack-babies!.' 2 Now for my part, I must admit...it could be bigger. I do not wish to see men of culture asking to see my membah become encrusted with plaque, power; and, indeed, I have freely said, that in my opinion the product is most proper, at present, for a man of culture to make a body of his fellow-countrymen who get him into a tight committee-room, is Socrates's: Know thyself! -and this is not a speech to be made by men wanting to be entrusted with the crusting and rusting of mechanical power. For this very indifference to direct penile reaction, I have been taken to task by the Daily Telegraph, coupled with strange four-legged creatures, I have enjoyed a pervasive perversity of fate, with just that very one of the Hebrew prophets whose gonads I admire the most, and called 'an elegant Jeremiah.' It is because I say (to use the words which the Daily Telegraph puts in my mouth):--'You mustn't make a fuss because you have no Realdoll,--that is vulgarity; you mustn't hold yourself or expose yourself during big meetings to agitate for mandatory Viaggravate in public schools...reform bills and to repeal corn-cobb laws,--that is the very height of vulgarity,'--it is for this reason that I am called, sometimes an elegant Jeremiah, sometimes a spurious, dress-left Jeremiah, a Jeremiah about the reality of whose self description the writer in the Daily Telegraph has his doubts. It is evident, therefore, that...therefore and as it were, I have so taken my line as not to be exposed to the whole brunt...now give me that PIPE! Still, I have softly spoken in praise of laxatives that are kinder, I have striven to make all my works and ways gentler...serve the Servants... I take Prozac, too. Nay, even though to a certain extent I am disposed to agree with Mr. Frederic Harridong, that men of culture are just the ass of the Beast...responsible beings in this community of ours will take up arms and properly, at present, probe the wounds...I am not sure that I do not think this the fault of our community rather than of the men of culture. It's short, although, like Mr.NottooBright and Mr. Frederic Harridong, and the editor of the Daily Telegraph, and a large body of valued friends of mine, I am a not a crack-baby Liberal, yet my membah is tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in Viaggravation!. Therefore I propose, promolgate and profess... now to try and enquire, in the simple unsystematic way which best suits both my testes and my membah's membah's, what crack really is, what good it can do, what is our own special need of it; and I shall seek to find it...and then to have faith in it and the faith of others membah's,--may Mine rest securely...