Maggie's Farm

Oh, I don't want to leave the unlettered Luther (What hopes the parents had when giving that name and what tragic result!) twisting slowly in the wind without a url to hang on...

http://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html will take him to Mark Twain's Corn-pone Opinions where he can observe that although Mark Twain may not have always been right, he clearly batted 400 to Luther's 110. Another essay on politics that might seem far-fetched at the beginning but comes round right in the end.

I first came upon this during a summer when I read the entire 36 volumes of Twain's collected works. I'd encourage all to do the same. After all, he did write the great American novel, even if he didn't like it himself at the end.

I'm not going to help Meta with everything since life is short and lunch is long, but just a few from the top.

As humans, we prefer that our "things" define us. It is always easier to explain ourselves through things than to explain ourselves outright. If mistakes are made, well, "Things didn't work out."

Seems pretty clear to me. The well-known human habit of seeking to place blame anywhere but on the self. See: "My dog ate my homework."

“Standing up happened before the ancestors of who we are were what they were.

This is pretty basic anthropology/evolution where the ability to stand is presumed to have evolved on the veldt since it gave the animal who accomplished it "a higher ground" from which to spot potential food and also predators. You can see a lot of primates going from four feet to two in most any zoo. They don't do it to stretch their legs.

Standing up was, in that time long before the dream time, the most revolutionary idea life had had since the eye.”

Again, basic anthropology/evolution theory. From seeing to "I see you first." Whether for fight or flight, this is a distinct survival advantage. The anthropologist Donald Johanson had a bit to say about this in his famous book "Lucy, the Beginnings of Humankind." He had a little bit more to say in a subsequent book that I ghost wrote for him about 15 years ago. That one had pictures so you could see what he was talking about. But it is not hard to imagine if you have an imagination.

"The dream time" is an homage to "Australian Aboriginal mythology, The Dreaming or Altjeringa (also called the Dreamtime) is a sacred 'once upon a time' [1] time out of time in which ancestral Totemic Spirit Beings formed The Creation." Not necessary, true, but it adds a good bass note in for those that are erudite enough to catch it.

“"America" -- by which I do not mean the United States but that greater embodiment of the two most powerful ideas of History, "Christianity & Freedom" -- is to those who stand against it, within and without these states, a terrifying presence. It terrifies them because it is, as once we sang it, "a terrible swift sword."

This, to anyone who actually has a deep grasp of history, keys off of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. The reference at the end is to the greatest of American War hymns, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." It's a song of strange origins which, if you read the actual journal of Julia Ward Howe, which I have, seems to have been given/transmitted pretty much whole to her in the early hours of the morning. She wrote it down upon awaking from a dream in the dark without a light. Poets often speak of this feeling of "transference."

"America" should terrify tyrants of all creeds. "America" means the finish on Earth, once and for all, of all that is not free. Not soon, and perhaps not for some time to come, but in the end the American idea, if not America itself, will prove to be as unstoppable as man standing up on his hind legs.”

Again, this passage hooks back to the standing up metaphor/citation above and connects to the power of an idea. Here the idea is, as I have taken pains to delineate, not America as a series of states and lands with a common border, but a much broader and deeper enacting of a spiritual belief system which is not wedded to or containable within borders. You can find this summed up in a very concise and highly readable document that we call "The Gettysburg Address."

And that's as much exegesis as I feel like doing right now.

I would suggest the commenter (Meta is it?) spend more time reading more deeply and less time with the copy and paste tool.

As for those who seem to have trouble with the concept and uses of metaphor, well, once high school and college have failed in tandem there is little that can be done.

As to my, shall we say, strange habits of punctuation, after editing some 250 books and several thousand magazine articles, I became bored with the strictures and these days I tend to use punctuation as a kind of rhetorical notation. I won't go into the theory of "rhetorical shape" in poetics/myoddprose. You can see the clearest most concise example of it in the last lines of Hart Crane's The Bridge, and I refer you to that last couplet.

And that's all I have the time or inclination for at present. I hope you'll see that not everything in the piece is without intent. "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant...."

I do, however, thank Roger for his kind words. I am deeply grateful for them.