Note to TeaBaggers: Pauline MAIER said their deification of the 18th Century boys is crap
A couple of weeks ago I had a thread about things I wished TeaBaggers would (if they could) read. It was about the (im)migration waves of species, yes including humans, as opposed to artificial ("national"
lines.
Today BookTV ran an interview with historian/professor Pauline MAIER for her book, American Scripture: The Making of the Declaration of Independence. At the end, Brian LAMB asked her whether people today could create something like what the boys from the 18th Century did. She said that, oh-YES, ADAMS himself was disgusted in the 1820s when the mythologizing of the boys was gathering steam, that he said his generation was no more intelligent or special than any other. She said that the population and the number of educated were comparatively tiny back when and that by the 1820s when ADAMS was saying it there had been a couple of generations of emphasis on education because the premise of the revolution was that the governed be educated to be able to self-govern and the population was of course larger. So she said that those two things being exponentially even larger to draw on now and that (she didn’t name them: ) the TeaBaggers are being insulting to themselves and the rest of us to keep the boys of the 18th Century ("THE SACRED FOUNDERS" on so high a pedestal that nobody could approach them. ADAMS specifically rejected, using the religious terms, the CANONIZATION and the deification of the boys, specifically naming WASHINGTON.
She also said that PAINE would not be a good dinner guest for her table because he tried to take a lot of credit for himself, plus that his best seller had definitely recruited opinion into the revolution because he used simple language that less educated dudes could understand. Oh, and that she found a paragraph in John LOCKE that frere JEFFERSON lifted in its entirety. Oh, TEABAGGERS, can you HEAR?!
As for RYAN, he ALSO (besides Ayn RAND) lived on Social Security. His father died, so he was a Survivor. Reminds me of the local TeaBaggers who seem to cash in on Medicare for their medical companies but are vociferous “capitalists.” It’s like Poppy BUSH saying of his scamming 5 sons who raided Medicare (Jeb), savings & loans (Neill), and the rest: “My boys have a RIGHT TO MAKE A LIVING!” Jeb and his various Cuban partners picked up suitcases of cash on airplanes here and there.
