1782 Alexander Hamilton

Chafing under the inadequate Articles of Confederation, Hamilton decried the fond hope and Utopian notion that America could do without taxes altogether: “It is of importance to unmask this delusion and open the eyes of the people to the truth. It is paying too great a tribute to the idol of popularity to flatter so injurious and so visionary an expectation.”

A little later, in a letter commiserating with Robert Morris over the ineptitude of an ineffectual Continental Congress, Hamilton wrote: “The inquiry constantly is what will please, not what will benefit the people. In such a government there can be nothing but temporary expediency, fickleness, and folly.”

(Source: Ron Chernow, "Alexander Hamilton")

Scientology

The Church of Scientology paid $8 million to air a commercial during yesterday's Superbowl.

Pretty impressive, actually. This celebrity-celebrated cult only seems to be growing, just as the world seems to be growing more mad.

(Source: ONTD)

Lo (1,5) Humbert Tries To Be Good

In chapter six, Humbert leaves his childhood behind him and he relates the quotidian days and struggles of his young manhood. He assures us that he tried to fight off his demons, he really did:

Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row.

That last clause must elicit a deep-seated chuckle; it kind of swallows up all that preceded it. The will to have his way was there, but one supposes that he still possessed from his Riviera days at the splendid Hotel Mirana a solid upper-class probity and an aversion for scandal and crime. It was only the fear of getting caught that held his hands back and kept his zipper zipped up.

Of course, it is presumably this innocence and awkwardness that helps to make Humbert an engaging character for the book-buying population, as well as for that chatty circle of literary critics, and this is what saves the novel and keeps it from sinking into the lost depths of the darkest and most unredeemable pornography. Humbert Humbert, at least at this point, is more funny than harmful - a Woody Allen-esque character of insecurity and wounded masculinity. And so the reader continues to follow Nabokov’s fascinating and winding trail, where the story will eventually grow more complicated and it becomes easy to get lost.

(Source: "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov)

Daily Fun

Red parrot by @Doug88888 on Flickr.

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