I
came across H.P. Lovecraft's opinion of Republicans recently, in a letter
he wrote in 1936. He gets it just about right, I think:
"Republicans . . . a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen
and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their
emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial
ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness an condoning artificial
hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally
in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and
attitudes based on the bygone agricultural handicraft world, and revel
in . . . mendacious assumptions . . . utterly contrary to fact and
without the slightest foundation in human experience."
He finishes up the rant with:
"Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."
Guys don't get much more interesting than old H.P. He never graduated high school but he turned himself into a very educated fellow. Science, philosophy, literature, the man was erudite. Maybe with a touch of the monomania though, he knew what he liked and he studied it.
And he wrote about it. Almost everything he ever wrote concerned the unknown spaces beyond ordinary reality, or at least the dimly perceived corners of the universe itself.
I think that he got the Republicans just about right. They were just as bitchy in the 1930's as then are now. You know, the New Deal is the end of freedom and property rights in America; Roosevelt is an agent of the Soviet Union. What a bunch of Johnny-One-Notes! Nothing new under the sun!
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