printOur president (Barack Hussein Obama) and his predecessor (George Bush), ponces both, could learn a thing or two from Paul Revere, not least about industry, inventiveness, and the source of prosperity.
The success of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, in 1860, about “the story of ‘the midnight ride of Paul Revere,’ erased from popular [Palinist] memory not only other riders who had warned that General Thomas Gage was on his way, but also Revere’s extraordinary career as a gifted artist, brilliant entrepreneur and pioneering metallurgist.” (TLS June 17, 2011, p. 30.)
The excerpt is from The Times Literary Supplement review of Robert Martello’s MIDNIGHT RIDE, INDUSTRIAL DAWN: Paul Revere and the growth of American enterprise.
In chronicling the life of Revere, a craftsman and an extraordinary artist who became an industrialist and a tycoon, the author concludes that Revere was,
an example of Benjamin Franklin’s conclusion that men who invent “new Trades, Arts, or Manufactures, or new Improvements in Husbandry, may properly be called Fathers of their Nation”.
To listen to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews wax prolix about the object of his carnal excitement (Barack Obama), this president is the embodiment of American achievement. However, Obama, like his predecessor, was admitted to the country’s finest institutions based, in all likelihood, on a preferential system. BHO has only ever lived off the parasitical avails of the political process. George Bush, of course, was the recipient of opportunities and privileges rooted in his being born to one of America’s inherited dynasties.
There is a sliver of a free economy left (mostly in the computer industry which has been able to innovate a bit faster than Uncle Schmuely can regulate it!) and that is where some innovation resides. The founders were often successful leading men (sexist alert!) of their time who got involved part-time in government (which did not micromanage toilet bowl sizes and gay-vs-Christian agendas in schools back then). Ben Franklin was the Einstein/Gates/Bloomberg of his day and the Founders were educated in modern science and agriculture as well as being experts in the histories of Rome, Greece, England, etc.
“Listen my children, get on all fours, and I’ll tell you about old William Dawes” (he completed HIS ride!).
Not only are most politicians completely ignorant of history but they cannot even imagine that the US THRIVED 150 years without Social Security, 170 years without NATO, and nearly 200 years without Medicare, HUD, and OSHA!
Well it looks like George Macacawitz Allen is back to reclaim his VA Senate seat from the temporary usurper, James Webb, a Marine author (not a professional political hack) who found that 6 years in the Senatorial nuthouse was all that a semi-sane man could take.