G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
Generation Squeeb: Barack Obama's Reverend Wright controversy, and America's
squid-heart
By Matt Taibbi
Created Mar 26 2008 - 9:44am
The word "squeeb" is a crude mix of squid and dweeb, and by inventing it I
mean no disrespect to the squid, which in most respects is an excellent and
admirable animal. In the ocean there's almost nothing you'd rather be than a
squid, one of nature's most perfect predators - fast, resilient, ruthless,
more intelligent by leaps and bounds than your average fish, and able to
squeeze into impossibly tiny cracks. In the ocean, there is no hiding from a
squid, I tell you.
But on land, a squid is about as useless as it gets. It's a spineless,
squishy little hunk of seafood that wouldn't stand a chance in a cage match
with a baby squirrel. It has no heart, and its first instinct when trouble
comes is to hide in a cloud of its own excretions. This is why a squiddy
word like squeeb seems to me to be a good way to describe the American voter
during a presidential election season.
That's especially true now, during a "controversy" like this latest flap
over Barack Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright. This Wright business is a perfect
example of the American electorate at its squeeby worst - panicky, gutless,
acting more on reflex than thought, incapable of retaining information for
more than a few minutes at a time. It's also a great example of how the
presidential election process has become more about enforcing the attitudes
of a cultural orthodoxy than a system for choosing leaders. Through scandal
after idiotic scandal, the election process has become a painfully
prolonged, deeply irritating exercise in policing conventional wisdom,
through a variety of means keeping the public in a state of heightened, dumb
animal panic, and ultimately turning the election itself into a Darwinian
contest - survival of the Squeebiest.
As by now the entire country has heard, Barack Obama was forced to run the
media gauntlet this week after a series of videos shot across the internet,
showing his pastor doing his best Minister Farrakhan impersonation. Pastor
Wright's comments ranged from the idiotic (suggestions that AIDS in Africa
was spread by the U.S. government) to the even more idiotic (urging black
parishioners to sing "God Damn America" instead of "God Bless America") to
the not-entirely-without-validity (suggestions that 9/11 in some sense
represented a form of blowback for America's violent foreign policies, its
role as the world's chief purveyor of weapons, and so on) to the
absolutely-true-but-taboo (observations that the U.S. supported terrorism
against Palestinians and senselessly bombed Cambodia and Iraq).
Anyone who's ever listened to Farrakhan or any other angry black nationalist
is familiar with a lot of these ideas, which have been around forever and
aren't exactly controversial in certain circles. The same white America that
enjoys saccharine Ice Cube movies like Are We There Yet? and Barbershop
probably would puke in its minivan if it listened closely to
Farrakhan-inspired Cube tunes like "When Will They Shoot?," which talk about
Uncle Sam being "Hitler without an oven," with white America guilty of
"Burning up black skin," and bombing neighborhoods to "push the crack in." A
lot of this stuff is stupid as hell and totally paranoid - the much-regarded
theory that white scientists cooked up AIDS in order to keep Africa poor (as
if it needed help) rivals only the 9/11 Truth movement for sheer
stone-headed dumbness - but a lot of it is just angry America-sucks ranting
grounded in the unfortunately utterly factual record of American iniquity,
not much different from the kind of thing you'd read coming from Howard Zinn
or Noam Chomsky.
But whether or not any of Wright's "controversial" statements have any
validity at all is beside the point. The point is that a country that had
any balls at all - that was secure enough in its patriotic self-image to
stare vicious criticism right in the face and collectively decide for
itself, in a state of sober reflection, what part of it was bullshit and
what wasn't - such a country wouldn't do what it did in the case of the
Wright flap, which is to panic instantly, collectively leap off the ground
in terror like a bunch of silly bitches, and chase the criticism away in a
torch-bearing mob with its eyes averted without even bothering to talk about
what was actually said. Yet naturally this is what was done in this case;
the very first response of the entire national media apparatus was to
denounce Wright as a kind of living disease and shriekingly demand that
Obama do the same.
These controversial occasions, it should be said, are favorites of the
national punditry. They offer an opportunity for slothlike, couchbound
columnists everywhere to dress themselves up in white-hot outrage and to pen
long accusatory columns in a tone suggesting that all contentment and
happiness in their lives will henceforth be impossible until the offending
agent is fully and completely shunned by society. You get articles like the
one written by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe ("It's still a question of
Wright and Wrong," March 19) in which Jacoby noted that if his rabbi had
said such hateful things, his congregation would have risen as one and
ridden him out of town on a rail; expressing disappointment that this had
not happened at Obama's church full of appallingly approving black folk,
Jacoby then expressed sorrow that Obama, who delivered a
racial-reconciliation-themed speech this week echoing Martin Luther King (40
years after his death, mainstream America's current symbol of acceptable
protest), would not reject a pastor who drew his inspiration not from King
but seemingly from Malcolm X, James Cone and Louis Farrakhan (symbols of
unacceptable protest).
This "clanging double standard," Jacoby wrote, "raises questions" (these
milquetoast pundits never just say they think a guy sucks; they always say
his behavior "raises questions") about Obama's character and judgment, and
about his "fitness for the role of race-transcending healer." Now, me
personally, as a white guy, I have to admire Jacoby - I'm not sure I'd have
the balls to tell black America that it is permitted to criticize whitey in
the style of Martin Luther King but not in the style of Malcolm X. I mean,
no one sent my grandfather to be injected with syphillis at Tuskegee, or
strung up my great-uncle for smiling at a white girl, so no matter what I
actually think here, I'm keeping my mouth shut. But not Jacoby, and not the
bulk of the media apparatus. They have no problem telling anyone, at any
time, where the boundary lines of acceptable opinion are, and what the
penalties are for straying beyond them.
Of course, this is not the first time that this kind of thing took place in
this campaign; it's actually happened over and over again, with Farrakhan
himself (when an exasperated Obama was forced to "reject" and "denounce"
Farrakhan's rhetoric, as if mere "rejection" were not enough), with
Geraldine Ferraro (when Obama aides demanded that Hillary denounce the
ex-Veep hopeful for suggesting Obama was lucky to be a black candidate), and
with End-Times enthusiast/right-wing pastor John Hagee in San Antonio, from
whom John McCain was forced to make distancing statements. These sorts of
denunciations also continue involving figures not connected to the
candidates - the campaign by various women's groups to censure Chris
Matthews for his supposed sexist remarks is a good example, as is the
much-ballyhooed incident involving Don Imus, a landmark event in the history
of herd-panic and rank hypocrisy.
Now, no one is suggesting that there shouldn't be some reaction to genuinely
toxic ideas, or that all criticism of racist or unpatriotic comments is
unfounded. But what we're getting with all of these scandals isn't a sober
exchange of ideas but more of an ongoing attempt to instill in the public a
sort of permanent fear of uncomfortable ideas, and to reduce public
discourse to a kind of primitive biological mechanism, like the nervous
system of a squid or a shellfish, one that recoils reflexively from any
stimuli. And the campaign is where you really see this process at work
full-time. It's something I noticed while spending so much of the last year
(and, before, so much of the years 2003 and 2004) on the campaign trail
talking to prospective voters, listening to their complaints and their fears
and their (often fleeting) enthusiasms. During this time, I started to
notice a pattern, comprised of several elements.
The first is a truly remarkable tendency of seemingly intelligent people to
work themselves into genuine outrage over information they didn't even know
about twenty minutes ago, until they heard it on television, or coming out
of the mouths of a candidate.
A laid-off worker in Ohio will go to a Hillary Clinton speech, hear Hillary
talk about the dangers of electing a president without "experience," and
then five minutes after the speech he'll be shaking his fist at the ceiling
at the very idea of someone without "experience" even trying to run for
president. A teacher in New York will go to an Obama event looking curious
and happy, then come out furious at the politics of "the past," rambling
like it's been on his mind for years about how we need to "look to the
future" instead of staying stuck "where we are." A Republican turns on the
TV, hears some asshole like Michelle Malkin say the surge is working, then
turns around and with his arm draped around his wife gives you a long spiel
about how the surge is working and how those damned liberals don't want to
admit it.
Crucially, however, those same people never tell you the same story for more
than a few weeks. A few weeks later, their brains are a clean slate again,
and the next story they tell you is the one they heard even more recently on
TV. Now the outrage might be Barack Obama getting a free ride in the media
(your squeeb-citizen here might cite the SNL skit about Barack getting
offered a pillow by debate moderators), or John McCain not knowing al-Qaeda
is Sunni and therefore not an ally of Iran, or Hillary misspending campaign
money on luxury suites in Vegas. "That just shows she's not fit to manage
money," he'll say, solemnly.
The net effect of all of this is to make the electorate exquisitely
sensitive to constant prodding and poking by media stimuli, and what people
don't notice is that that prodding and poking is tirelessly moving them in
the same direction, toward a safe, inoffensive middle, away from anything
that smells controversial. The endless onslaught of tiny scandals trains the
electorate to be hyper-responsive to temporary, superficial outrages while
simultaneously chipping away at their long-term memories, their inclination
to look at the big picture, their ability to grasp subtleties of opinion and
policy.
So instead of talking about the fact that Barack Obama once introduced a
bill to give a tax break to a Japanese company whose lawyers donated fifty
grand to his Senate campaign, we're freaking out for five minutes about the
fact that Obama's pastor thinks America spread AIDS on purpose in Zambia.
And instead of talking about the fact that Hillary Clinton took $110,000
from a New York food company she later helped by introducing a bill to
remove import duties on tomatoes, we're ranting and raving about Gerry
Ferraro's paranoid ramblings about Obama's blackness. We can't keep our eyes
on the ball and really think about the serious endemic problems of our
system of government because we're too busy freaking out like a bunch of
cartoon characters over silly, meaningless bullshit. And then forgetting
about that same bullshit ten minutes later, so that we can freak out all
over again about something else later on.
That's just the way we are, and maybe it's time to wonder why that is. In
Russia they have a word, sovok, which described the craven, chickenshit
mindset that over the course of decades became hard-wired into the
increasingly silly brains of Soviet subjects. It's a hard word to define,
but once you get it - and all Russians get it - it's like riding a bicycle,
you've got it. Sovok is the word that described a society where for decades
silence and a thoughtful demeanor might be construed as evidence of a
dangerous dissidence lurking underneath; the sovok therefore protected
himself from suspicion by babbling meaningless nonsense at all times, so
that no one would accuse him of harboring smart ideas. A sovok talked tough,
and cheered Khruschev for banging a shoe at America, but at the same time a
sovok would have sold his own children for a pair of American jeans. The
sovok talked like a romantic and lavished women with compliments, but
preferred long fishing trips and nights spent in the garage tinkering with
his shitty car to actual sex. It's hard to explain, but over there, they
know what the word means. More than anything, sovok described a society that
spent seventy years in mortal terror of new ideas, and tended to drape
itself in a paper-thin patriotism whenever it felt threatened, and
worshipped mediocrities as a matter of course, elevating to positions of
responsibility only those who showed an utter absence not only of
objectionable qualities, but any qualities at all.
We're getting to be the same kind of people. We can't focus for more than
ten seconds on anything at all and we're constantly exercised about stupid
media-generated non-scandals, guilt-by-association raps, accidental dumb
utterances of various campaign aides and other nonsense - while at the same
time we have no energy at all left to wonder about the mass burgling of the
national budget for phony military contracts, the war, the billion dollars
or so in campaign contributions to be spent this year that will be buying a
small mountain of favors for the next four years. And we... ****, I don't
even know what I'm saying anymore. I'm just tired of this tone that's always
out there when these scandals break, like we can't ****ing stand the
existence of this Wright fellow for even a minute longer, not a minute
longer! - when we all know that come Monday, or Tuesday at the latest,
Jeremiah Wright will be forgotten and we'll be jumping en masse in a panic
away from the next media-offered shadow to fall across our bow. What a bunch
of turds we all are, seriously. God help us if we ever had to deal with a
real problem.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
squid-heart
By Matt Taibbi
Created Mar 26 2008 - 9:44am
The word "squeeb" is a crude mix of squid and dweeb, and by inventing it I
mean no disrespect to the squid, which in most respects is an excellent and
admirable animal. In the ocean there's almost nothing you'd rather be than a
squid, one of nature's most perfect predators - fast, resilient, ruthless,
more intelligent by leaps and bounds than your average fish, and able to
squeeze into impossibly tiny cracks. In the ocean, there is no hiding from a
squid, I tell you.
But on land, a squid is about as useless as it gets. It's a spineless,
squishy little hunk of seafood that wouldn't stand a chance in a cage match
with a baby squirrel. It has no heart, and its first instinct when trouble
comes is to hide in a cloud of its own excretions. This is why a squiddy
word like squeeb seems to me to be a good way to describe the American voter
during a presidential election season.
That's especially true now, during a "controversy" like this latest flap
over Barack Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright. This Wright business is a perfect
example of the American electorate at its squeeby worst - panicky, gutless,
acting more on reflex than thought, incapable of retaining information for
more than a few minutes at a time. It's also a great example of how the
presidential election process has become more about enforcing the attitudes
of a cultural orthodoxy than a system for choosing leaders. Through scandal
after idiotic scandal, the election process has become a painfully
prolonged, deeply irritating exercise in policing conventional wisdom,
through a variety of means keeping the public in a state of heightened, dumb
animal panic, and ultimately turning the election itself into a Darwinian
contest - survival of the Squeebiest.
As by now the entire country has heard, Barack Obama was forced to run the
media gauntlet this week after a series of videos shot across the internet,
showing his pastor doing his best Minister Farrakhan impersonation. Pastor
Wright's comments ranged from the idiotic (suggestions that AIDS in Africa
was spread by the U.S. government) to the even more idiotic (urging black
parishioners to sing "God Damn America" instead of "God Bless America") to
the not-entirely-without-validity (suggestions that 9/11 in some sense
represented a form of blowback for America's violent foreign policies, its
role as the world's chief purveyor of weapons, and so on) to the
absolutely-true-but-taboo (observations that the U.S. supported terrorism
against Palestinians and senselessly bombed Cambodia and Iraq).
Anyone who's ever listened to Farrakhan or any other angry black nationalist
is familiar with a lot of these ideas, which have been around forever and
aren't exactly controversial in certain circles. The same white America that
enjoys saccharine Ice Cube movies like Are We There Yet? and Barbershop
probably would puke in its minivan if it listened closely to
Farrakhan-inspired Cube tunes like "When Will They Shoot?," which talk about
Uncle Sam being "Hitler without an oven," with white America guilty of
"Burning up black skin," and bombing neighborhoods to "push the crack in." A
lot of this stuff is stupid as hell and totally paranoid - the much-regarded
theory that white scientists cooked up AIDS in order to keep Africa poor (as
if it needed help) rivals only the 9/11 Truth movement for sheer
stone-headed dumbness - but a lot of it is just angry America-sucks ranting
grounded in the unfortunately utterly factual record of American iniquity,
not much different from the kind of thing you'd read coming from Howard Zinn
or Noam Chomsky.
But whether or not any of Wright's "controversial" statements have any
validity at all is beside the point. The point is that a country that had
any balls at all - that was secure enough in its patriotic self-image to
stare vicious criticism right in the face and collectively decide for
itself, in a state of sober reflection, what part of it was bullshit and
what wasn't - such a country wouldn't do what it did in the case of the
Wright flap, which is to panic instantly, collectively leap off the ground
in terror like a bunch of silly bitches, and chase the criticism away in a
torch-bearing mob with its eyes averted without even bothering to talk about
what was actually said. Yet naturally this is what was done in this case;
the very first response of the entire national media apparatus was to
denounce Wright as a kind of living disease and shriekingly demand that
Obama do the same.
These controversial occasions, it should be said, are favorites of the
national punditry. They offer an opportunity for slothlike, couchbound
columnists everywhere to dress themselves up in white-hot outrage and to pen
long accusatory columns in a tone suggesting that all contentment and
happiness in their lives will henceforth be impossible until the offending
agent is fully and completely shunned by society. You get articles like the
one written by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe ("It's still a question of
Wright and Wrong," March 19) in which Jacoby noted that if his rabbi had
said such hateful things, his congregation would have risen as one and
ridden him out of town on a rail; expressing disappointment that this had
not happened at Obama's church full of appallingly approving black folk,
Jacoby then expressed sorrow that Obama, who delivered a
racial-reconciliation-themed speech this week echoing Martin Luther King (40
years after his death, mainstream America's current symbol of acceptable
protest), would not reject a pastor who drew his inspiration not from King
but seemingly from Malcolm X, James Cone and Louis Farrakhan (symbols of
unacceptable protest).
This "clanging double standard," Jacoby wrote, "raises questions" (these
milquetoast pundits never just say they think a guy sucks; they always say
his behavior "raises questions") about Obama's character and judgment, and
about his "fitness for the role of race-transcending healer." Now, me
personally, as a white guy, I have to admire Jacoby - I'm not sure I'd have
the balls to tell black America that it is permitted to criticize whitey in
the style of Martin Luther King but not in the style of Malcolm X. I mean,
no one sent my grandfather to be injected with syphillis at Tuskegee, or
strung up my great-uncle for smiling at a white girl, so no matter what I
actually think here, I'm keeping my mouth shut. But not Jacoby, and not the
bulk of the media apparatus. They have no problem telling anyone, at any
time, where the boundary lines of acceptable opinion are, and what the
penalties are for straying beyond them.
Of course, this is not the first time that this kind of thing took place in
this campaign; it's actually happened over and over again, with Farrakhan
himself (when an exasperated Obama was forced to "reject" and "denounce"
Farrakhan's rhetoric, as if mere "rejection" were not enough), with
Geraldine Ferraro (when Obama aides demanded that Hillary denounce the
ex-Veep hopeful for suggesting Obama was lucky to be a black candidate), and
with End-Times enthusiast/right-wing pastor John Hagee in San Antonio, from
whom John McCain was forced to make distancing statements. These sorts of
denunciations also continue involving figures not connected to the
candidates - the campaign by various women's groups to censure Chris
Matthews for his supposed sexist remarks is a good example, as is the
much-ballyhooed incident involving Don Imus, a landmark event in the history
of herd-panic and rank hypocrisy.
Now, no one is suggesting that there shouldn't be some reaction to genuinely
toxic ideas, or that all criticism of racist or unpatriotic comments is
unfounded. But what we're getting with all of these scandals isn't a sober
exchange of ideas but more of an ongoing attempt to instill in the public a
sort of permanent fear of uncomfortable ideas, and to reduce public
discourse to a kind of primitive biological mechanism, like the nervous
system of a squid or a shellfish, one that recoils reflexively from any
stimuli. And the campaign is where you really see this process at work
full-time. It's something I noticed while spending so much of the last year
(and, before, so much of the years 2003 and 2004) on the campaign trail
talking to prospective voters, listening to their complaints and their fears
and their (often fleeting) enthusiasms. During this time, I started to
notice a pattern, comprised of several elements.
The first is a truly remarkable tendency of seemingly intelligent people to
work themselves into genuine outrage over information they didn't even know
about twenty minutes ago, until they heard it on television, or coming out
of the mouths of a candidate.
A laid-off worker in Ohio will go to a Hillary Clinton speech, hear Hillary
talk about the dangers of electing a president without "experience," and
then five minutes after the speech he'll be shaking his fist at the ceiling
at the very idea of someone without "experience" even trying to run for
president. A teacher in New York will go to an Obama event looking curious
and happy, then come out furious at the politics of "the past," rambling
like it's been on his mind for years about how we need to "look to the
future" instead of staying stuck "where we are." A Republican turns on the
TV, hears some asshole like Michelle Malkin say the surge is working, then
turns around and with his arm draped around his wife gives you a long spiel
about how the surge is working and how those damned liberals don't want to
admit it.
Crucially, however, those same people never tell you the same story for more
than a few weeks. A few weeks later, their brains are a clean slate again,
and the next story they tell you is the one they heard even more recently on
TV. Now the outrage might be Barack Obama getting a free ride in the media
(your squeeb-citizen here might cite the SNL skit about Barack getting
offered a pillow by debate moderators), or John McCain not knowing al-Qaeda
is Sunni and therefore not an ally of Iran, or Hillary misspending campaign
money on luxury suites in Vegas. "That just shows she's not fit to manage
money," he'll say, solemnly.
The net effect of all of this is to make the electorate exquisitely
sensitive to constant prodding and poking by media stimuli, and what people
don't notice is that that prodding and poking is tirelessly moving them in
the same direction, toward a safe, inoffensive middle, away from anything
that smells controversial. The endless onslaught of tiny scandals trains the
electorate to be hyper-responsive to temporary, superficial outrages while
simultaneously chipping away at their long-term memories, their inclination
to look at the big picture, their ability to grasp subtleties of opinion and
policy.
So instead of talking about the fact that Barack Obama once introduced a
bill to give a tax break to a Japanese company whose lawyers donated fifty
grand to his Senate campaign, we're freaking out for five minutes about the
fact that Obama's pastor thinks America spread AIDS on purpose in Zambia.
And instead of talking about the fact that Hillary Clinton took $110,000
from a New York food company she later helped by introducing a bill to
remove import duties on tomatoes, we're ranting and raving about Gerry
Ferraro's paranoid ramblings about Obama's blackness. We can't keep our eyes
on the ball and really think about the serious endemic problems of our
system of government because we're too busy freaking out like a bunch of
cartoon characters over silly, meaningless bullshit. And then forgetting
about that same bullshit ten minutes later, so that we can freak out all
over again about something else later on.
That's just the way we are, and maybe it's time to wonder why that is. In
Russia they have a word, sovok, which described the craven, chickenshit
mindset that over the course of decades became hard-wired into the
increasingly silly brains of Soviet subjects. It's a hard word to define,
but once you get it - and all Russians get it - it's like riding a bicycle,
you've got it. Sovok is the word that described a society where for decades
silence and a thoughtful demeanor might be construed as evidence of a
dangerous dissidence lurking underneath; the sovok therefore protected
himself from suspicion by babbling meaningless nonsense at all times, so
that no one would accuse him of harboring smart ideas. A sovok talked tough,
and cheered Khruschev for banging a shoe at America, but at the same time a
sovok would have sold his own children for a pair of American jeans. The
sovok talked like a romantic and lavished women with compliments, but
preferred long fishing trips and nights spent in the garage tinkering with
his shitty car to actual sex. It's hard to explain, but over there, they
know what the word means. More than anything, sovok described a society that
spent seventy years in mortal terror of new ideas, and tended to drape
itself in a paper-thin patriotism whenever it felt threatened, and
worshipped mediocrities as a matter of course, elevating to positions of
responsibility only those who showed an utter absence not only of
objectionable qualities, but any qualities at all.
We're getting to be the same kind of people. We can't focus for more than
ten seconds on anything at all and we're constantly exercised about stupid
media-generated non-scandals, guilt-by-association raps, accidental dumb
utterances of various campaign aides and other nonsense - while at the same
time we have no energy at all left to wonder about the mass burgling of the
national budget for phony military contracts, the war, the billion dollars
or so in campaign contributions to be spent this year that will be buying a
small mountain of favors for the next four years. And we... ****, I don't
even know what I'm saying anymore. I'm just tired of this tone that's always
out there when these scandals break, like we can't ****ing stand the
existence of this Wright fellow for even a minute longer, not a minute
longer! - when we all know that come Monday, or Tuesday at the latest,
Jeremiah Wright will be forgotten and we'll be jumping en masse in a panic
away from the next media-offered shadow to fall across our bow. What a bunch
of turds we all are, seriously. God help us if we ever had to deal with a
real problem.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson