Thoreau Still Causing Trouble?

THE ABSURD TIMES

 

 

 

Our posting on Thoreau certainly turned out to be polarizing.  I’m going to publish your comments below, in the order they reached me, but first a few words:  The first response is very amusing and I replied that Stupid Shit sent a friend request to Facebook, but I declined.  The second is written by someone with a great deal of knowledge in religious studies and helps to clarify a few points.  The last one, I think, misses the main point of Thoreau’s essay which is the need to take action based on principle.  Disagreement with his points in no way reflects on his abilities as a writer.

 

          There are some works by Thoreau that I find a bit tedious, such as the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, but they are still well written.  Cromwell is very misunderstood these days and always has been, but I’m not about to set the record straight here.  I’d suggest reading some of Milton’s prose works for that.

 

 

 

That was extremely refreshing. thank you.  when dealing with banal, whiny, self-centered, dramatic idiocy all day it is refreshing. and its also strange that i dont 'refresh' myself with this type of material more often when it is so readily available. but not so strange; you see i have figured out that Stupid Shit is a disease. and it is one in the powerful family of auto-immunes or melanomas. this is because even though you are no longer directly in contact with Stupid Shit, it has the power to follow you home, or wherever you go and limit your ability to refresh your mind with anything other than its own relatives: stupid messages, horrible television, bad music, etc. 

 

you see,  Stupid Shit will not tolerate you exposing your mind to anything other than like forms of Stupid Shit lest you become self-aware and no longer return to tolerate Stupid Shit directly. so it follows you. it wears you down to the point where you can only sluff yourself to the couch and flip on the flickering box of more Stupid Shit.

im afraid if i return myself to the days where i took a heavy stance regarding Stupid Shit and refused to tolerate it, that i would end up wandering some weird sea, perhaps joining somalian pirates or even just disappearing in mexico somewhere.

anyway just saying thanks for he article, both of them. i think i enjoyed your introduction more than the content of the introductee.

 

Wow, quite a bit of writing.  It amazed me how nobly and 'religiously' Thoreau depicted John Brown, it was inspired

and inspiring, but not with the unflavored objectivity of today's mandatory secular vocabulary.  

The Christ-like passionate simplicity of John Brown described by Thoreau was stunning, it hearkens back to our pre-industrial Christian

roots as a nation, before the Pharisees and Sadducees of our bourgeois capitalism became permanently ascendent.

Thoreau to me was a 'thinking saint', a holy man of great integrity and wisdom, able to delineate and express subtlety and depth with no

hint of compromise.

 

As usual, Thoreau was full of crap and had his facts wrong--understandable at the time since the smoke hadn't cleared entirely with Brown. Brown and his fanatical sons went house to house in Kansas territory demanding to know whether the occupants were pro-slavery or Abolitionists. If they were the former, they were killed mercilessly down to the children. That's the wrong way to deal with slavery at that time and the War Between the States was a disaster, albeit a necessary one. Brown took the law into his own hands, and Thoreau comparing him to Cromwell is disturbing and wrong-headed, like that of the slavers, in another way. 

That's where I was impressed with Tarantino's Djano Unchained: he posits that the violence solved nothing, a very intelligent view, and he's lambasting the Antebellum South at every turn in the movie. But when the Abolitionist-minded character shoots the plantation owner out of moral outrage, he makes it plain that this was wrong and senseless and would only cause more problems for Django in retrieving his wife. It takes place in 1858 for a reason. I think Thoreau was generally overrated as a writer and think and was mostly full of shit, as he illustrates ably here in his speech. That aside, blacks had to and still have to free themselves. No one can do that for you, that's not freedom or liberty, as the subsequent decades have shown. Blacks still aren't free in-the-main for this reason. Brown was wrong-headed in his approach. Arming blacks wasn't a bad idea, but again, he was going about it wrong.