Quotes That Catch My Fancy
By Paul J Cella Posted in 17th Amendment | Archived | campaign — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Pejman has highlighted a characteristically excellent Andrew Ferguson essay — an essay, again characteristically, that is at once very funny and very serious. Ferguson’s target this time is the unutterable madness at back of the presidential campaign system, how it drives out normalcy and favors the monomaniac and egotist, thereby oppressing the Republic with the curious monomania of narcissists and confidence men who may actually believe the yarns they spin.
There is a better way. It used to be our way:
He entered New Hampshire politics as an advocate of religious toleration. For a while he toyed with the idea of medicine, but decided, after some reading, that too little was known to justify an honest man’s taking up doctoring as a profession. Already elected justice of the peace by his fellow townsmen, he went into a country attorney’s office to study law. He applied the same hard common sense to the law that he did to religion. He was successful as a lawyer, and in state politics, and became a man of some means, raising a family of five children in his plain white weatherboarded farmhouse. In 1802 the New Hampshire legislature elected him to the United States Senate.
— John Dos Passos, The Shackles of Power, 1966.