A Journey in Reading - Meacham-Warren-James-Chesterton-Dylan

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Image result for bob dylan suckcess

Last month I finished The Soul of America by Jon Meacham. He had a very compelling quote/idea from a book by Robert Penn Warren called The Legacy of the Civil War where he argues that we can appropriately name the myths that come out of that time as The Great Alibi (the South) and the Treasury of Virtue (the North). Both impede us seeing reality and dealing directly with our current problems. 

So am halfway through Warren's book (its small) and I see this shocking/interesting reference to William James (perhaps the greatest American philosopher) "the bitch-goddess Success." Well I had to get out my phone and look that up. I found a site with the entire letter Jame's wrote to a novelist friend in 1906. Here is the quote in better context (and interesting today, listen to Bill Kristol on Recode Decode about the slippery slope of the Republicans):
When the ordinary American hears of them [ethical lapses of our leaders/system], instead of the idealist within him beginning to "see red" with the higher indignation, instead of the spirit of English history growing alive in his breast, he begins to pooh-pooh and minimize and tone down the thing, and breed excuses from his general fund of optimism and respect for expediency. "It's probably right enough," Scoundrelly, as you say," but understandable, "from the point of view of parties interested"--but understandable in onlooking citizens only as a symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That--with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success-is our national disease.
OUCH! But so part of the American story. But my journey doesn't end there. He concludes his letter by asking Wells if he remembers "the glorious remarks about success in Chesterton's Heretics?" So I had to pull that book off the shelf and figure out what he was referencing. 

Here is Chesterton on Success---"Every man, however wise, who begins by worshiping success, must end in mere mediocrity ... The worship of success is the only one out of all possible worships of which this is true, that its followers are foredoomed to become slaves and cowards."

And then that reminded me of Subteranian Homesick Blues and the video of Dylan dropping the placecards with all the words and seeing he spelled out suckcess. 

(Of course my journey didn't end there either, Warren had a crazy canny quote from LD Reddick that I had to find, but no time now). 



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