Sunday, January 13, 2013

My resignation


... the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more. - Ernest Hemingway, In Another Country, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Scribner Classics) (Kindle Location 4604). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

 

I don’t remember many of the lectures from college but I recall a rather stuffy English professor, who I did not like very much, saying that Ernest Hemingway resigned from politics the way Frederic Henry resigned from the war (World War I) in A Farewell to Arms.

 

Today, I feel like resigning from all organized and socially accepted forms of human endeavor – wars, which are always about money; corporations, which institutionalize greed and aggression; politics, which promotes illusory solutions to unsolvable human problems; sports, which are marketed to sell beer and automobiles; churches, which are more important than religion.



And here from John D. MacDonald is a list of “dislikes” that since Peggy and I read this back in the mid-1970s probably did as much as anything else to build what I might laughingly call my philosophy of life: “... plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny.”

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