Saturday, March 28, 2020
The Harding exception
When I get too depressed about the Parkinson inevitability of expanding tyranny, I try to remind myself that there are exceptions, such as Harding. There are leaders who have the guts and insight to restrain or break Deepstate.
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I got curious whether Harding made any references to the Spanish Flu pandemic. I didn't even have to google it specifically. I was just searching for '1920 campaign speeches', and this was the first item.
From the transcript:
My countrymen, there isn't anything the matter with the world's civilization except that humanity is viewing it through a vision impaired in a cataclysmal war. Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational. Sometimes there have been draughts upon the dangerous cup of barbarity. Men have wandered far from safe paths, but the human procession still marches in the right direction. Here in the United States we feel the reflex, rather than the hurting wound itself but we still think straight; and we mean to act straight; we mean to hold firmly to all that was ours when war involved us and seek the higher attainments which are the only compensations that so supreme a tragedy may give mankind. America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality. It's one thing to battle successfully against the world's domination by a military autocracy because the infinite God never intended such a program; but it's quite another thing to revise human nature and suspend the fundamental laws of life and all of life's requirements. The world needs to be reminded that all human ills are not curable by legislation, and that quantity of statutory enactments and excess of government offer no substitute for quality of citizenship. The problems of maintained civilization are not to be solved by a transfer of responsibility from citizenship to government and no eminent page in history was ever drafted to the standards of mediocrity. Nor, no government worthy of the name which is directed by influence on the one hand or moved by intimidation on the other. My best judgement of America's need is to steady down, to get squarely on our feet, to make sure of the right path. Let's get out of the fevered delirium of war with the hallucination that all the money in the world is to be made in the madness of war and the wildness of its aftermath. Let us stop to consider that tranquility at home is more precious than peace abroad and that both our good fortune and our eminence are dependent on the normal forward stride of all the American people. We want to go on, secure and unafraid, holding fast to the American inheritance, and confident of the supreme American fulfillment.Jesus. It's all there. Everything we need to hear and know. Every word and sentence is a perfect answer and perfect rebuke to everything we're doing now. It's all there, expressed in dramatic and evocative language. [Fussy footnote: I first posted this item with a bunch of other stuff about Harding, then happened to find the speech. I removed the other stuff to focus on the magnificent speech itself.]
Labels: Equipoise, infinite GOOD, Parkinson
¶ 8:21 AM
