Dave Read

By Dave Read, July 29, 2023 – With USC poised to award its highest academic degree to someone* whose research concerns “menstruation in contemporary poetry,” I feel confident in my judgment that USC is ignorant of poetry’s crucial role in the American war of liberation.

If my judgment is wrong, however, and that storied institution does know the value of poetry, then the judgment must be replaced by a prognosis that institutional madness has set in there. Maybe it’s just too hot and sunny in southern California?

Does the fact that the doctoral candidate limits the field of research to contemporary poetry imply that poets such as Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath can be overlooked, or does it tell us that bodily functions are being nudged toward the limelight, for the delight and edification of the poetry audience?

Perhaps it will be this newly-minted professor’s mission to isolate a space for the proper consideration of “menstruation in contemporary poetry?” Please, can anyone tell me how to put dibs on the PH.D that equity, diversity, and inclusion would demand be set aside for “priapism in colonial poetry,” to name just one potentially related field?

How did we get to such an anti-intellectual place, where equity is valued over equality, where diversity and inclusion are valued over the traditional color-blindness of the goddess Justice and her sister Lady Liberty? Who says the time has come to forget the Civil Rights struggle’s goal of integration? Word on campus is that we need to embrace the far more sinister segregation that traps us in solitary silos of personal identification?

Two huundred fifty years later, only the poetry of Common Sense and The Declaration of Independence remain. The faulty logic and the historical inaccuracies employed by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson have long since been deconstructed into a million pieces in every political science classroom in the world. And every time, the Red Coats lose again!

But, it wouldn’t matter even if William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift had been there to produce rebuttals to America’s foundational literature. Once its poetry had seeped from the rational into the emotional part of their minds, American colonists were crazy enough to think they’d be able to defeat, with farm implements and hunting rifles, the most awful weapon of mass destruction history had ever seen – the British Empire, which otherwise did very good work to laicize much of higher ed!

*Rachel Neve-Midbar

By Dave Read, July 17, 2023 – The un-representative, un-elected leaders of American society, including, but not limited to, Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk, amount to a perfect imitation of King George and the parliamentarians who long ago flooded Boston with men in Red Coats. The king’s mercenaries were ordered to take up residence wherever convenient and to keep an eye on the colonists, especially those upset by the ways and means kings keep iron grips on their kingdoms.

Today’s make-believe kings have flooded, not only Boston, but much of the world with secret recording devices, sold fraudulently as “smart speakers,” but which are used to train A.I. and to inform marketing departments and intelligence agencies what people talk about when they don’t think they are being recorded, much less eavesdropped on.

Whenever someone stops you on the street, or comes to you at home or school or work, and tells you they have come to assist you, if you aren’t alarmed, then you aren’t armed with an adequate understanding of human nature and how tyranny operates.

Although King George forced us to use them, the American War of Independence wasn’t won by the people with the best arms, it was won by the people with the best ideas and the ability to translate them into the spiritual pandemic that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men still haven’t found a cure for.

“…don’t steal, don’t lift…”

The sooner we remove fraud from the American marketplace, the sooner Americans will be restored to the degree of personal liberty they enjoyed at the end of the second world war, and which they have ceded bit by bit, digital byte by virtual bite ever since we lost faith in ourselves.

We squandered our well-deserved peace dividend when we began to act as if a free people would ever fall for the sales pitch of tyranny. Today, the only people afraid of communism/socialism are the geniuses of the Republican party, and elements of the other party who let them get away with it. No matter how dark the place one party has sunk to, the other is nearly as afraid of the sunshine of open, honest governance.

How soon after his death did we forget the brilliant admonition of President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” We allowed the academic-military-industrial complex, built for the prosecution of one war, to transition itself into the faceless tyrant that today has its own Red Coats stationed or hidden in every country on earth.

Our accidental slide into machine-aided tyranny will continue, and we won’t resume the way of life this nation was founded upon, unless we re-dedicate ourselves to Common Sense.

Go ahead and read the pamphlet, if you’d like; Gen. Washington ordered 25,000 copies and also had it read aloud to his soldiers, since many were barely literate. But, you already know where and how common sense must be applied: don’t vote for a liar or a thief, don’t vote for anybody who would cheat a customer, contractor, agency, or spouse.

Dave Read

By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, June 2023 – The vast sea of American literature springs from the Colonial literature that underwent a fundamental transformation during the interregnum of 1763-1775, as it became apparent that Americans would never reconcile themselves to the authority of the British monarch and parliament. Whatever fealty for England there was at the outset of the Colonial era was worn thin by the French and Indian War, then vaporized by the Stamp Act. It’s quick repeal is the poster child for the adage “Too Little, Too Late.”

Whatever else describes the motley colonial population, it had a general awareness that America was the start of something new, while England and Europe were ancient things, animated by ancient concepts and regimes. New England, New York, New Hampshire, Newport, New Haven – welcome to the new world.

Even cursory research into the origins of American literature pays handsome rewards almost immediately. And, right from the get-go, the twin themes of nature and her human partner are evident, in the earliest American prose and poetry. Rather than locate themselves somewhere along an ancient literary continuum, the first American writers wrote as if they were discovering a new world!

These excerpts show the first American writers to be cheerful and big-hearted; they are content to go all-in on ordinary things, which devotion elevates and sanctifies them. In his Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence writes: “Franklin is the real practical prototype of the American, Crevecoeur is the emotional… Crevecoeur’s Letters are written in a spirit of touching simplicity, almost better than Chateaubriand. You’d think neither of them ever would know how many beans make five.”

From Letters of an American Farmer, by Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur

As if to demonstrate how near poetry is to the best prose, here is Philip Freneau’s, poem To A Honey Bee. In his benchmark, two volume Literary History of the American Revolution, Moses Coit Tyler wrote of Philip Freneau, “…a true man of genius, the one poet of unquestionable originality granted to America prior to the nineteenth century.”