Catching up on the John Adams mini-series I was reminded of Jefferson's quote:
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
I can't stop laughing; can you even imagine how apeshit the press would go if someone said this today? Hannity having a stroke on the air "he called our troops shit!! I can't believe it - those greatest of Americans, and he's calling them shit!!! Literally, shit!!!" O'Reilly yelling that the folks want his head for calling the troops shit, Lou Dobbs hollering that if we don't do something soon we'll have Mexican shit all over. Michael Savage screaming at the Texans to gather their guns and start shooting at dude for insulting the troops. Everyone else screaming that now that they've been called doo doo, the troops are laying in the desert crying, curled up like babies. "It's the language, really," someone will say, "instead of manure, maybe if he had said 'fertilizer' or 'litter material'..." thereby setting up the endless "boy, he stepped into it this time!" lines. Awesome. Sigh.
ps - anybody else get a kick out of the way that between the recap from the previous episode and the current one's opening scene, all of which are somber, serious world-changing scenes filled with ominous, heavy music, all of a sudden they show the PLAY TONE logo? Bascially two scenes of great debates on whether to side with France and England in war that could break the new nation, and in between we get a goofy reminder of "That Thing You Do!", by Erie PA's own scrappy moptops, The Wonders.
6 comments:
How 'bout this... "the fruit of the tree of liberty is sweetened by the blood of patriots and tyrants"?
Nah, I'm going with the manure.
was that supposed to be a conversation between Jefferson and his slave woman, i mean, his lover and the mother of his children?
so manure is to the tree, what a rousing bloody war is for the 'good cause'. i don't think so. poop.
According to CNN News (January 31, 1996), the first suspect in the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh, was wearing a T-shirt carrying those same words at the time he was arrested while driving away from Oklahoma City. The CNN correspondent, Susan Candiotti, put a question about the T-shirt to McVeigh's lawyer, Stephen Jones. Jones replied: "Well, if Thomas Jefferson said it, I don't think it would be incriminating at all."
Jefferson actually used the phrase in justification of Shays's Rebellion and continued in this histrionic vein to defend the worst excesses of the French Recolution ("Rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated").
Good president, but as far as rhetoric, he was bit of a ponce.
a gonce, even
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