Re: NP -The Foul Reign of Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’

[jochen stremmel]

They reckon ill who leave me out; when me they fly, I am the wings.

2011/12/6 Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>:
> I read the article. Seems silly to think that either the excesses of American monuments to self interest, or the courage and inspiration to challenge its monstrous inequities   can be attributed to Emerson.  His age  was rife with intellectual  libertarians and other creative and iconoclastic thinking. I've never liked or been particularly wowed by anything he wrote, and influence on Nietche doesn't impress me either.  I think theNY Times writer is reacting more to his English teacher's presumptuous idiocy in teaching an English class how to make a fortune with Other People's Money than to his Emersonian fig leaf for such nonsense.  Emerson would have disappeared for all practical purposes without 11th grade American Lit classes, which is mostly as currently configured, from my experience who taught it for a few years, a lousy way to build excitement and pleasure around the trove of American writing. I don't know; maybe he would be big in Europe.
> On Dec 5, 2011, at 9:36 AM, David Morris wrote:
>
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/magazine/riff-ralph-waldo-emerson.html?_r=1
>>
>> The excessive love of individual liberty that debases our national
>> politics? It found its original poet in Ralph Waldo. The plague of
>> devices that keep us staring into the shallow puddle of our dopamine
>> reactions, caressing our touch screens for another fix of our own
>> importance? That’s right: it all started with Emerson’s
>> “Self-Reliance.” Our fetish for the authentically homespun and the
>> American affliction of ignoring volumes of evidence in favor of the
>> flashes that meet the eye, the hunches that seize the gut? It’s
>> Emerson again, skulking through Harvard Yard in his cravat and greasy
>> undertaker’s waistcoat, while in his mind he’s trailing silken robes
>> fit for Zoroaster and levitating on the grass.
>