Vidal quoting Franklin
Posted here Wednesday, February 11, 2004 at 3:32:55 PM 
From Gore Vidal's essential Inventing a Nation. I say essential because he tells the story in a wy that makes it interesting and human and motivated by real people, just as now..
quoting Franklin "America will, w happy country; and England, if she has at length gained wisdom, will have gained something more valuable, and more essential to her prosperity, than all she has lost; 1 be a great and respectable nation. Her great disease at present is the numerous and enormous salaries and emoluments of office. Avarice and ambition are strong passions and, separately, act with great force on the human mind; but when both are united, and may be gratified in the same object, their violence is almost irresistible, and they hurry men headlong into factions and contentions, destructive of all good government. As long, therefore, as these great emoluments subsist, your Parliament will be a stormy sea, and your public councils confounded by private interests. But it requires much public spirit and virtue to abolish them; more than perhaps can now be found in a nation so long corrupted. "
Thus Franklin, describing the England of 1783, nicely describes the United States of 2003, a once "great and happy country" being torn apart by avarice and ambition while our "public councils [are] confounded by private interests."
Note that we are talking about the same time as Napoleon is getting ready to take france out of the revolution and towards a bureucratic military state of interests.
George Washington's 1776 diary note on his new countrymen in general and the Continental Congress in particular is not promr patriots abound: venality, corruption, sh ends, abuse of trust, perversion of 1 to a private use, and speculations upon the rvade all interests."
The alternative would be a deep cocnern for the general good and freedom for all, and a recognition of the difficulties of governanace. We need to watch now for how *opposition to Bush* is a cover for class interests. Not a fully free concern for the common good.
********
|
|
