Readings: This Is Rich

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This afternoon I finished reading G. K. Chesterton's novel, The Man Who Was Thursday. As a mini-review, I must say that I do not find the book to be nearly as clever or entertaining as hardcore Chesterton groupies declare it to be; but at least this time I did finish it.

While damning it with that very faint praise, I will nonethless share a couple of excerpts gleaned from this reading, each of which I find to contain a large grain of truth.

The first is spoken by one of the "detectives," Ratcliffe, to the central protagonist, Syme:

"Mere mobs!" repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. "So you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than any one else in there being some decent Government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. [p.190]

"The poor man really has a stake in the country." You can take that to the bank (if you still trust the banks.) One might want to consider this speech in the light of the anti-government agitation being conducted 24/7 by the current breed of conservatives/fascists/lackies-of-the-rich.

The second excerpt is short, to the point, and spoken by Syme himself:

When duty and religion are really destroyed, it will be by the rich. [p.210]

Clearly, conservatism was an altogether different beast in turn-of-the-century England than it is in turn-of-the-new-century America.
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Readings: Black Swan Rising

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Last night, for the first time in a long time, I took from the shelf The Gary Snyder Reader. In a prose piece about a trip to Australia, Snyder relates the following anecdote, spoken by one of his traveling companions, John Stokes, during a discussion of the disappearance of a baby from a public campground which had been big news the year before:

Stokes then reports what [poet] Robert Bly said at a talk in Adelaide. Bly was commenting on the thirteen young women who all mysteriously disappeared from a picnic at Hanging Rock in the 1890s. No one found out what happened to any of them. Bly says, “You want to know what happened to the girls at Hanging Rock? Because you Australians won’t give the aborigines their land back, your women are going to disappear. What happens then? They turn into black swans and the black swans turn into B52s. How do I know? Because that’s what happened in America.” Very useful commentary, Mr. Bly.

Indeed. I can make use of that by relating it to this quote from G.K. Chesterton’s novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, which I am also currently reading:

Like any man, [Syme] was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.

Neither, one suspects, was Crazy Horse. Pray for Virginia Dare.

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