The passage this jerk misquotes is from Faulkner's brief address of 12/10/1950 in Stockholm accepting the Nobel Prize for literature. And it's actually one of the most famous sentences in the English language and in all of Scripture. (I count Faulkner's work as Scripture.) In those days it was still common to use "man" as the generic for humanity, which is how he used it in that speech. "There are no longer problems of the spirit," he said. "There is only the question: When will I be blown up?" Elaborating on that antiwar and anti-militarist theme, he said:
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he along among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.How does the hack Matthews quote this? At around 0:28, he turns this great humanist, antiwar declaration into cheap American jingoism, saying, "And, of course, we always treat things here with hope, our uniquely American hope that we can actually make things better, that we can make the greatest of countries not only survive but, as William Faulkner once said, prevail." (my emphasis)
Gag.Me.With.A.Shovel.
For this, he should be put in a small cell and forced to listen to tapes of Hillary Clinton 24/7 for a full month.
Tags: chris matthews, william faulkner
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