“I of my own knowledge…”

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

9:30 AM.

Mr. Lincoln, a proud day. We owe it as much to you as to anyone.

You owe it to yourselves. The angels of your better nature — as I said in my first inaugural address.

It is America becoming ever more the symbol of the world, isn’t it? That’s how I see it, anyway.

A symbol, yes — but perhaps more than a symbol. Perhaps you might say in truth and not in metaphor that is a magical miniature, still, as it was to a lesser extent in my time and as it may become to an even larger extent in times beyond yours. It is the form into which energies may be concentrated and hardened into reality.

In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway near the end has this dialogue between Brett and Jake:
“You know it makes me feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.”
“Yes.”
“It’s sort of what we have instead of God.”
“Some people have God,” I said. “Quite a lot.”
“He never worked out very well with me.”
In that dialogue - particularly in Brett’s first two sentences - is the key to everything that went smash in Western civilization.

I talked about it with what I take to be Ernest Hemingway as he exists on the other side in an altered-state communication on Sunday, June 10, 2007, which follows.

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For those who came in late - this is another in a series of conversations I have with people who have passed over to the other side. I have found that at least seemingly we can connect with anyone we have a reason to connect with. I call it The Cosmic Internet. The process has been described by some as Active Imagination, which is not the same thing as fantasy. I suggest that you read this not trying to decide whether it is Hemingway speaking, or my idea of Hemingway, or whatever. Instead, feel whether the material resonates, in and of itself. Truth is great, and will prevail, but you have to be open to the possibility before it can do so. This particular interaction took place on June 14, 2007.

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I found this article, which was forwarded to me by a friend, to be most interesting in light of what Joseph Smallwood had to say (in Chasing Smallwood) about the causes of the Civil War.

SOUTH’S PRO-WAR HISTORY MAJOR FACTOR IN IRAQ WAR
By Sherwood Ross

The South is far more inclined to war than the rest of America and its politicians played a major role involving the U.S. in Iraq, a noted legal authority says.

“We’d better find some way of ending the solidly-conservative-to-reactionary-bloc- power of the South or it will cause us disaster again in the future,” writes Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

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This was my column for September in The Meta Arts, an online magazine, which is to be found at http://www.themetaarts.com/pages/frankdemarco.html

“The Evangelization Of The World In This Generation”

I got involved in one of those arguments. You know the kind, where the two sides start from so far apart, believing “facts” that are diametrically opposite, that there is no real way to come to agreement. What’s more, she was a friend of a friend, and I wanted to be careful not to let an argument become a heated dispute.

But the “facts” she was quoting with such certainty were just not so. Missionaries, she said, were merely agents of imperialism, using their religion as a weapon to destroy native institutions. Like so many people – political liberals, mostly — she assumed that religious institutions are automatically corrupt, that missionaries are automatically bigots, and that efforts to convert natives of other cultures were mere manifestations of racism.

But in this she, as most people in our generation, was the victim of ignorance fostered by leftist ideology and propagated by lack of historical memory. For instance, she had never heard of the slogan “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” and when I quoted it, had no idea what it meant or why it was adopted.

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