Last Lines

“He used to be a big shot.”

The Roaring Twenties (1939)

"And at that moment, as if by a miracle, the sick no longer died, and the stifling shadow of the vampire vanished with the morning sun.”

Nosferatu, the Vampire (1922, German)

“That's what makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an' they die an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But we keep a-comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out. They can't lick us. And we'll go on forever, Pa... 'cause... we're the people.”

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

“We’ve all got our health, and as far as anything else is concerned, we still leave that up to you. Thank you.”

You Can’t Take it With You (1938)

Well, they’re saved from the blessings of civilization.”

“Yeah.”

“Doc? I’ll buy ya a drink.”

“Just one.”

Stagecoach (1939)

“This is the people’s war. It is our war. We are the fighters. Fight it, then. Fight it with all that is in us, and may God defend the right.”

Mrs. Miniver (1942)

"The old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose."

The Magnificent Seven (1960)

“All right, folks, you’ve seen enough. Move along, please. Come on, clear the sidewalk.”

Stella Dallas (1937)

“There's a lot to be said for making people laugh! Did you know that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan! Boy!”

Sullivan’s Travels (1941)

Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You

We all are stuck between God and the devil, and they both want us—one for joy, one for destruction. History and the movies reflect the ever–present spiritual struggle.

"Yes. Yes, I believe it. I believe it because I want to believe it. Gentlemen, I give you a toast. Here's my hope that Robert Conway will find his Shangri-La. Here's my hope that we all find our Shangri-La.”

Lost Horizon (1937)

That's All Folks!

Enthralled by the Ethic of Frontier Thought

Most people have heard of that epic tale of frontier darkness known as the Donner Party. But few people go beyond the sordid tales of cannibalism to study the role of likely the most important person in that gothic drama: The Standard Issue American Huckster, Lansford Hastings.

Hastings , an Ohio lawyer was the classic American Booster. In addition to being an early resident of Oregon, he had spent some time with that other blowhard of early empire and the California Bear Republic, Col. John C. Fremont. Hastings was constantly angling to create some new Pacific Republic with himself at the helm. Meeting a man of similar bent in Fremont, Hastings was much interested in the cavalry officer’s reconnoitering of the sere Great Basin.

The trapper Jedediah Smith was the rightful explorer of that glorious wasteland and Kit Carson was generally the real brains behind Fremont but nonetheless, Fremont was given the name “The Pathfinder”. Senator Thomas Hart Benton, his well-connected father-in-law was almost able to buy him the Presidency.

Hastings, charmed by his fellow blowhard in uniform, used the Colonel’s information to try and solicit more people to his quack schemes in California. He had never used the brutal route across the Wasatch Mountains and the interminable waste of the Bonneville salt flats himself but he met one emigrant group in Wyoming to try the route and left word for more to follow his lead. His group surprisingly made it but the ill-fated Donners were late enough to meet their doom in the Snowy Sierras after struggling across some of the most inhospitable landscape in the world.

The United States of America remains to this day a Frontier Nation.

Despite eradicating the Frontier over a hundred years ago, we still act and think like a Frontier Culture. While we still possessed the remnant luxury of waning frontier up until the 60’s it is now long-gone for all but Alaska and even there, it has transformed itself into caricature. Now, the ethos is a tarbaby that keeps on embroiling us in ever more ridiculous and debased behavior. From military expansionism and benighted crusades to waste and heedless extraction, we proudly hoist a flag up the pole at F Troop every chance we can get.

Being enthralled by the ethic of Frontier Thought, the nation produces Boosters and Hucksters like Hastings with prodigious regularity and there is no shortage of dreamers and schemers who are ready to attempt crossing unknown terrain on some idiotic notion of a sure thing, only to end up camping in the snow and eating one’s camp-mates instead of the more abundant mules because “they taste better”. To solidify the issue in farce, the Boosters themselves never suffer near so much for their idiocy as do the folks who listen to the blandishments and believe everything they are told .

This is why we can suffer through a Civil War, Depression and World Wars only to do our very best to recreate them and recast them as some kind of hale and hearty tribute to our Manifest Destiny on the one hand and our exceptionalism on the other. Shopping, Packaging, Entertainment and Marketing are our new “Frontier” and one assumes that while we may not gnaw on our fellow’s shank bone quite so directly as the ill-fated Donners, we are all cannibals nonetheless.

With all these “green shoots” a-popping, maybe we’re just vegan cannibals. …full of Hope and Rip-Roaring for Change. Flags snapping in the breeze over the sands of Babylon, mortgaged to the hilt with a Chinese culture that makes our history look like a momentary interlude, assigning Corporations all the legal protections of the individual but none of the responsibilities, we frontier on and somebody should wake up and inform the lead party that those Digger injuns they are pot-shotting across the playa aint Digger injuns, they’re the stragglers in their own party, going in circles in a hostile Great Basin of our own Determined Creation.

D.W. Sabin, commenter @ Front Porch Republic on

this post.

501

This World is not conclusion.

A Species stands beyond -

Invisible, as Music -

But positive, as Sound -

It beckons, and it baffles -

Philosophy, don't know -

And through a Riddle, at the last -

Sagacity, must go -

To guess it, puzzles scholars -

To gain it, Men have borne

Contempt of Generations

And Crucifixion, shown -

Faith slips - and laughs, and rallies -

Blushes, if any see -

Plucks at a twig of Evidence -

And asks a Vane, the way -

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit -

Strong Hallelujahs roll -

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul -

—Emily Dickinson

Brother Mobberly

“I was borned in a ridge-pocket,” he said. “I never seed the sun-ball withouten heisting my chin. My eyes were sot upon the hills from the beginning. Till I come on the Word in this good Book, I used to think a mountain was the standingest object in the sight o’ God. Hit says here they go skipping and hopping like sheep, a-rising and a-falling. These hills are jist dirt waves, washing through eternity. My brethren, they hain’t a valley so low but what hit’ll rise agin. They hain’t a hill standing so proud but hit’ll sink to the low ground o’sorrow. Oh, my children, where are we going on this mighty river of earth, a-borning, begetting, and a-dying – the living and the dead riding the waters? Where air it sweeping us?”

A vision of Man’s temporal and physical smallness, conveyed not by geological textbooks nor NASA photos nor French existentialists, but by a Bible-citing hillbilly who proclaims that titanic mountains go “a-rising and a-falling” as “dirt waves, washing through eternity.”

Source

Respectable Laziness

William Merritt Chase (1849–1916)

Idle Hours, ca. 1894

Oil on canvas

Amon Carter Museum, Ft. Worth, Texas

The Real Object of Man's Worship

There are doubtless many reasons for the degeneration of Christianity into churchiness, and the narrowing of the Gospel for all mankind into a set of approved beliefs; but the chief cause must be the worship of an inadequate god--a cramped and

regulated god who is a 'good churchman' according to the formulas of the worshipper. For actual behaviour infallibly betrays the real object of the man's worship.

All Christians,

whatever their Church, would of course instantly repudiate the idea that their god was a super-example of their own denomination, and it is not suggested that the worship is

conscious.

Nevertheless, beneath the conscious critical level of the mind it is perfectly possible for the Anglo-Catholic, for example, to conceive God as particularly pleased with

Anglo-Catholicism, doubtful about Evangelicalism, and frankly displeased by all forms of Nonconformity... The ultra-low Churchman on the other hand must admit, if he is honest, that the God whom he worships disapproves most strongly of vestments, incense, and candles on the altar.

The tragedy of

these examples--which could be reproduced ad nauseam any day of the week--is not difference of opinion, which will probably be with us till the Day of Judgment, but the outrageous folly and damnable sin of trying to regard God as the Party Leader of a

particular point of view.

~ J. B. Phillips (1906-1982), Your God is Too Small

The Defense Rests

American Thinker: "How to bend the curve down in healthcare costs"