What Is a National Consciousness?

Henry James in his critical study of Hawthorne in 1879 (my textual break) on the “American mind” before and after the Civil War. When this event occurred, he was therefore proportionately horrified and depressed by it; it cut from beneath his feet the familiar ground which had long felt so firm, substituting a heaving and quaking medium in which his spirit found no rest. Such…

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Breaching the Sound

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The Money Virtue As American Rational Religion

The most virtuous and honest character in Dickens’ Hard Times, Stephen Blackpool, often confronts the confusion, ambiguity, paradox, and unfairness of “interests” with an aggrieved and exasperated cry that “it’s all such a muddle.”  Even his virtuous acts of self-protection are disallowed by law, but the law is one that restricts the impoverished while it permits the wealthy to “buy” a legal remedy.  This “money…

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Clausewitz On the Modern Condition

So, don’t ask me why, but I fell into Clausewitz this morning.  From the Ubiquipedia: Carl von Clausewitz was a Prussian soldier and military theorist who stressed the moral (in modern terms, “psychological”) and political aspects of war. His most notable work, Vom Kriege (On War), was unfinished at his death (1831). This has been called a “product of the Enlightenment” as Clausewitz eschewed “the…

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The Child of the Marketplace Metaphor

Since the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, organized in covenants as a joint stock company, imagined themselves a mystic brotherhood reborn in the body of Christ, American history has progressed under the sway of two, conflicting vocabularies. One, the language of exterior, marketplace relations, takes the contract as its master symbol. The other, the language of interior religious and psychological experience, centers around regeneration. The first…

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Public Potluck Picnic Perfection

There is real humanity in the potluck picnic.  Or rather, a humanity that is real: personal, physical, unmediated. Yesterday, after our annual, end-of-the-year elementary public school music program, the families of students in the the mixed-age (K-6) classroom (which our children have attended for the past three years) gathered for the annual picnic. The school is two blocks away from a large beautiful public park…

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In the City of Corporate Love and Beyond: The Boston Consulting Group, Gates, and the Filthy Rich

When the Michelle Rhee/Betsy Devos-endorsed Pennsylvania governor, Tom Corbett, slashed $1.1 billion in educational funding over the last two years, he was merely continuing the disaster capitalism agenda against Philadelphia schools which began in 1998, when Act 46 passed.  As retaliation against Philadelphia Public Schools’ superintendent David Hornbeck for threatening to close down the entire district if the state did not provide adequate funding, Act…

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Empty Wonder Born On A Beach

I hope you’ll indulge me.  Below are three “versions” of Chapter 14 of Moby Dick.  The first is “after” Ronald Johnson’s, Paradise Lost (radi os), and so I try to excise the text to “leave” a poem behind.  The next section offers the poem in a conventional form, and the last section is the full chapter with highlighted excision so you can “see” what I…

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Born of Whale Oil and Witches

[T]his remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness, a receptacle for Lions, Wolves, Bears, Foxes, Rockoones, Bags, Bevers, Otters, and all kind of wild creatures, a place never afforded the Natives better than the flesh of a few wild creatures and parch’t Indian corn incht out with Chesnuts and bitter Acorns, now through the mercy of Christ become a second England for ferilness in so short…

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