"... over whiskey on 'Sugarfoot,' died on April 21 in Manhasset, N.Y., on the North Shore of Long Island. He was 94.... Mr. Hutchins’s character, Tom Brewster, was the sugarfoot in question: an Eastern law student seeking his fortune as a sheriff who sidles up to the saloon bar to order a sarsaparilla (Wild West root beer) 'with a dash of cherry.' He abhors violence, tries to stop women from throwing themselves at him and lovingly gives up his share of drinking water for his horse. Mr. Hutchins played the role for comedy, following up a villain’s insult with a dramatic pause, only to critique the man for not being 'sociable.'... [H]e was likely to end a fight not with a killing but rather a comment like, 'All right now, how about that apology?'... [Hutchins said] the best advice he had received about comic performance was to act as if you were doing something no less severe than 'Hamlet.' "In order to make people laugh, you have to act seriously,' he said. 'Chaplin was just as sad as he was funny. Buster Keaton never smiled.'"
Here's a snippet that shows the beginning of the second episode, "Reluctant Hero." I like how our law student character is reading what looks like a casebook as he rides his horse into town:
Watch the whole first episode — the pilot — here. Look for Dennis Hopper as Billy the Kid and Slim Pickens as Shorty.
And here's a clip from an episode of "Bronco" where Will Hutchins — as the Sugarfoot character — has a conversation with Theodore Roosevelt!
"... on April 25.
Eric Zhu, the company’s 17-year-old co-founder, said the inaugural event would pit samples taken from two healthy young university students against each other on a racetrack 20cm (8in) long and modelled on the female reproductive system.... 'We want to turn health into competition,' Zhu said. 'Sperm is surprising as a biomarker. The healthier you are, the faster sperm moves.'... A live video feed, magnified 40 times to display the 0.05mm spermatozoa, will track the samples’ progress....The event will be run over three races in front of a crowd of 4,000 spectators, and feature play-by-play commentary, instant replays and leaderboards, according to Zhu.
With the sperm expected to swim at a speed of 5mm per minute, each race will take something like 40 minutes. There are 3 races... and room for 4,000 spectators. Interesting concept, and congratulations to the teenagers for getting $1.5 million and an article in the London Times, but I think success here depends on the quality of the play-by-play commentators.
For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "What is the key to doing good play-by-play commentary for a long race, say 40 minutes?"
"Everyone else... they’re all just obstacles that stand in his way. Chalamet’s Dylan is aloof, peevish and, frankly, kind of a jerk. Nearly everyone in his orbit suffers accordingly. The closer they try to get, the more Dylan vaporizes and wafts away. But this doesn’t happen because of fame or riches or drugs, like it would in most music biopics. It happens because of who Dylan is. He just doesn’t care. He lives his life and writes his music and manages his career like a man who knows everyone around him is trying to write a biopic about him."
I wonder if Will Leitch is related to Donovan (Leitch). Just an idle thought. It's hard to see how it would matter. Anyway, are you planning to watch this movie? Bob Dylan recommended the movie. I blogged about that 13 days ago, here. He also recommended the book the movie is based on — "Dylan Goes Electric" (commission earned) — saying, "After you’ve seen the movie read the book." But the movie doesn't premiere until Christmas, so I went and read the book out of order. I do some of the things Bob tells me to do. Some of them. Not all of them.
Here's something from the book that I happened to highlight:
Good impressions. Who was that "eggo" Trump kept talking about, the cast-member playing Vivek Ramaswamy? That was Ego Nwodim (a woman).
I thought that was a very well-written cold open. The Trump impersonator, James Austin Johnson, is so good they must worry he's going to cause the audience to kind of love Trump. We haven't faced such a risk since Charlie Chaplin impersonated Hitler.
Here's an article about Johnson, from last summer, in the Chicago Sun-Times. Johnson is opposed to Trump's political positions, but realized that, to do a successful impersonation, he needed to like something about Trump:
The headline doesn't mention that he first said "no," then seems to have thought better of it and came back to change his answer. If anything was "off the cuff," it was the "no." Coming back to say, strongly, "I think he is a war criminal" does not deserve to be called "off the cuff." "Off the cuff" seems like an effort after the fact to minimize the statement.
Squirreled away near the bottom of the WaPo article:
That's from an excerpt from the Philip Roth biography we've been talking about, the one the publisher has been withholding because of allegations about the biographer. I've been reading about this book — have read several articles — and blogged it more than once. This morning, my readings brought me around to the subject of Claire Bloom, and I got to the point of blogging the quote above before I realized what I was reading was the writing of the accused man, the biographer — Blake Bailey. Strange!
Claire Bloom and Philip Roth sound like an awful pair. I don't know if I want to read about them. I considered buying Claire Bloom's memoir, "Leaving a Doll's House," but it's not available on Kindle. I'll keep her at a distance, as the star of one of my all-time favorite movies, "Limelight."
As for Philip Roth, it seems better to encounter him through his novels, and in fact, I'm reading one of his novels, "The Human Stain." When I blogged about the biography yesterday, I ran into a quote from that book, and it was fine enough to send me to Amazon to download the text and the audio.
Here, I highlighted one quote so far. It's all one sentence:
My point is that by moving here I had altered deliberately my relationship to the sexual caterwaul, and not because the exhortations or, for that matter, my erections had been effectively weakened by time, but because I couldn’t meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience—or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism—to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.
Sure, you can diagram it. I'll start: point | is....
ADDED: The OED defines "caterwaul" as "The cry of the cat at rutting time. Also transferred. Any similar sound." It could be modernized into "catwail," but it's an old word, first seen in English in this sentence: "If the cattes skyn be slyk and gay, forth she wil, er eny day be dawet, To schewe hir skyn, and goon a caterwrawet." That's Chaucer. Circa 1386.
FROM THE EMAIL: Nancy sends this, from a NYT article on Leaving a Dollhouse:
''He's tense; she's tense,'' Gore Vidal said from his home in Ravello, Italy. ''Each is neurotic. They were together 17 years; it couldn't have been all that bad.'' Like most of the couple's friends, Mr. Vidal is trying to distance himself from the memoir. ''It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces,'' he said. ''And their civil wars.''
It's a podcast. You can subscribe at all the usual podcast places, including iTunes (by clicking here).
Topics: Melanie jokes, Lady Gaga throws beer, Marathon mind will do, Joe the stalking horse, fluffy wedding photos ape the West, Trump’s devilish plan, Anonymous is anonymous, woman’s way of knowing, Ben Franklin’s rising sun, Scotland’s intrafamily spies, Biden reveals his bunglers, and Meade talks and talks to phonebank women.
AND: Here's the Chaplin "wrench scene" I talk about — the buttons compared to Melania's buttons first appear at 1:35... but good lord, how can I predict you'll be that impatient? These 2 1/2 minutes are perhaps the greatest sequence of comedy ever filmed:
Carl Adolf von Sydow was born on April 10, 1929, in Lund, in southern Sweden.... He was said to have adopted the name Max from the star performer in a flea circus he saw while serving in the Swedish Quartermaster Corps....
For all his connection to the land of his birth and of Bergman, Sweden became distant to Mr. von Sydow.... "I have nowhere really to call home... I feel I have lost my Swedish roots. It’s funny because I’ve been working in so many places that now I feel at home in many locations. But Sweden is the only place I feel less and less at home."
Did he really name himself after a flea?! From a 2012 interview (in The Guardian):
Is it true he named himself after a flea? "Ha ha ha!" booms Von Sydow, his laugh filling the room. "Yes! Ha ha ha! During my military service, I performed a sketch in which I played a flea called Max. So when critics kept misspelling my name, I decided to change it and thought, 'Ah! Max!'"
Ah, so it was not an actual flea "in a flea circus he saw," as the New York Times put it. He himself was in a show playing a character that happened to be a flea.
A flea circus is a show on a tiny stage that has real fleas performing (or tiny imitation fleas):
The first records of flea performances were from watchmakers who were demonstrating their metalworking skills. In 1578, Mark Scaliot produced a lock and chain that were attached to a flea. The first recorded flea circus dates back to the early 1820s, when an Italian impresario called Louis Bertolotto advertised an “extraordinary exhibition of industrious fleas” on Regent Street, London. Some flea circuses persisted in very small venues in the United States as late as the 1960s....
Here's Charlie Chaplin with his flea circus in one of my all-time favorite movies — "Limelight" (which I'll put up as a meditation on death alongside "The Seventh Seal," so please make that your double feature):
"But even if it appears to have no effect on the other person, loving transforms and frees the person who loves. It allows one to set down the exhausting weight of hatred, anger and disappointment. It is a proactive act. It means taking control of the situation. The reaction of President Trump and his supporters to love is inconsequential. By loving them—whether they accept, or reject, or mock the sentiment—the president’s opponents can move toward an agenda that they set, hopefully one that seeks to unite and serve all Americans. The Dalai Lama says that '[w]orld peace can only be based on inner peace. If we ask what destroys our inner peace, it’s not weapons and external threats, but our own inner flaws like anger. This is one of the reasons why love and compassion are important, because they strengthen us. This is a source of hope.' I write all this with significant trepidation. Several people have counseled me against publishing this, saying it is too risky in this unpredictable environment. As a result, I have sat on it for several months after completing it. I also recognize that my situation is very different from that of many others who have suffered under the president much more than I have. I was not at Charlottesville, I am not Muslim and I have not been separated from my children at the border. But I did hold a high-ranking position at the FBI—an organization that I love—and I have seen colleagues mistreated. And the president of the United States has made negative public comments about both the bureau and me. Notwithstanding all that, I am refusing to choose hate as a response. I am choosing love, even if I don’t fully understand what I mean by that right now. I am choosing that path because I think that is what is best for America."
Sandmann is smiling, but it's not a natural, happy smile, because — as he wrote in his statement — he was anxious and trying to express that he "was not going to become angry, intimidated or be provoked into a larger confrontation." So that's just about exactly the the position of Gary Cooper's interlocutor. Cooper ("The Virginian") says, "If you want to call me that, smile." And Walter Huston ("Trampas") smiles non-naturally and anxiously, as he says, "With a gun against my belly, I always smile."
When I think of a person who is smiling when he is not in a condition of relaxed happiness, I think of the beautiful Charlie Chaplin song "Smile" — sung with unearthly warmth by Nat King Cole:
Smile, though your heart is aching
Smile, even though it's breaking
When there are clouds in the sky
You'll get by...
“Eternity?” said Frankie Lee
With a voice as cold as ice
“That’s right,” said Judas Priest, “Eternity
Though you might call it ‘Paradise’”
“I don’t call it anything”
Said Frankie Lee with a smile
“All right,” said Judas Priest
“I’ll see you after a while”
I like this list, by Scott Tobias (at New York Magazine). This is one of my favorite types of movies, I've seen 12 of them, and 4 of my all-time favorite movies are on the list: "Touching the Void" (#17),"Aguirre the Wrath of God" (#9), "Grizzly Man" (#8), and "The Gold Rush" (#1).
Of the ones I have not seen, I added 4 to my Amazon Prime watchlist. (And I'm not saying that to get you to use Amazon, but if you do decide to use Amazon, I'd appreciate your going in through The Althouse Portal.)
"... which is an apt characterization of Kim Jong Un’s domestic political situation. But I don’t expect denizens of The View to get this," writes Glenn Reynolds after a "View" co-host, Sarah Haines, characterizes "Rocket Man" as a "phallic reference to masculine dominance." Watch the video at the link to catch the comic inflections and to experience the byplay with the other Viewsters.
Haines is taking the position that Trump's calling Kim Jong Un "Rocket Man" was "a smart move," because "If you think of Putin and you think of Kim Jong Un and you think of Donald Trump they love these phallic references to masculine dominance." That is, these men don't just enjoy talking about their phallus, they experience power as a phallic, making them vulnerable to taunts that call their masculinity into play.
It's really a very obvious observation of a sort that I've heard all my life. In "The Number of the Beast" (1980), Robert A. Heinlein wrote:
"No, she's absolutely right," said Zeb, patting the enormous pistol at his hip. "This is a penis substitute. After all, if I could kill at a range of thirty meters with my penis, I wouldn't need to carry this thing around, now would I?"
Guns, cannons, swords, daggers... they're all penises.
After all, most of them are vaguely phallic (any object longer than it is wide = phallic), they penetrate human flesh, and killing people is a sign of virility. In the case of guns, they even "ejaculate" bullets, while swords tend to have a suggestive shape, guard positions where the hilt is held crotch height, and thrusting attacks. Even better if they are combined (bayonets on guns are the simplest applications of this, as well as any syringe-like weapon).
Glenn's taunt, aimed at the "View" women is "EVER SINCE TRUMP APPEARED, LATENT PHALLOPHOBIA HAS BECOME BLATANT PHALLOPHOBIA." If a nuclear weapon is the phallic symbol, the fear is justified and not a phobia. I don't think anyone has an exaggerated, unrealistic fear of a nuclear weapon because of its resemblance to a phallus. And it is realistic to think about how sexuality affects political and military decisionmaking. The women on "The View" handle the subject in a very fast-moving, light-hearted way, but it's a serious topic, and I think that Donald Trump has chosen to boldly display masculinity and to flaunt his superior masculine weaponry to intimidate Kim Jong Un. In this context, "Rocket Man" does translate — psychologically — into mocking Kim Jong Un for having a small penis. To point that out is not phobia, but straightforward analysis of Trump rhetoric and psychology in foreign relations.
Remember how we laughed at Kim Jong Un when his rockets failed:
Of course, it's phallic. It's phallophobia not to see the phallus aimed straight at your face.
Or does Glenn Reynolds expect us to believe that Trump wanted us to simply fill in the line with "burning out his fuse up there alone." Now, it's certainly true that — at least here in America — we associate Kim Jong Un with loneliness...
... and, sure, let's give Trump credit for needling Kim about his pathetic loneliness as well as his small penis — it's a taunt, and taunts can be multidimensional — but the line "burning out his fuse up there alone" has always been hard to hear. I listened to the song a hundred times without understanding the line, which eventually I read or... I don't know... heard William Shatner enunciate the hell out of...
Key phrase: I'm not the man they think I am at home....
That's self-doubt about masculinity. If we can imagine Kim Jong Un thinking through Bernie Taupin's lyrics, the "they" is the North Korean people, brainwashed to believe in Kim's greatness. But if he's Rocket Man, that's not enough. He knows he's not that man at all.
I want to sincerely apologize for the events that took place this past weekend. Although unintentional, there is no excuse for the pain that was caused to members of our community. I want to thank my friends in the NPHC for their candid and constructive conversations that we have continued to have. I have much to learn and look forward to doing such and encourage all members of our university community to do the same. We must all keep in mind how our actions affect those around us differently.
Swanson says he has "much to learn" and, really, don't we all have an infinite amount to learn? Anything you do might be misunderstood by someone else, perhaps by someone who deserves empathy and perhaps by someone with powerful allies who will ruin your life if you don't anticipate how they will interpret something you say or do or even how people who hate you will claim to have interpreted something that really didn't confuse them at all.
And what about all the students who go to college for an education and get taught that their emotional stirrings — their fears about what something might mean — warrant attention and respect? Their misinterpretations count as real in the world that other people — including the once-privileged frat boy — must anticipate and guard against. Does that feel good enough or will it get old and, ultimately, just as insulting as the kind of old-fashioned expressions of racism of which the banana peel in the tree might have been reminiscent?
ADDED: The "orb" is a globe, and I've already compared Trump to Chaplin in "The Great Dictator." Back in January, when this photograph was installed at the Smithsonian...
I said, "Nice picture. Especially because the apple represents the geographic place Trump dominated, it makes me think of Chaplin tossing the globe around in 'The Great Dictator'":
The editors at USA Today — which I got to via Instapundit — make a good point, while protecting their credibility within mainstream media with staunch anti-Trumpism, e.g., "Campus protesters are right that President Trump's America-first nationalism is a grave threat to many Americans. But unfettered First Amendment rights are the answer to the threat, not its cause."
But come on... "they played a roll..." If the editors of a newspaper are going to purport to instruct the plebes on what they ought to believe, they ought to take care at every moment that they are — in the most fundamental sense — editors.
I've also seen actors play 2 roles, e.g., Patty Duke playing Patty and her cousin Cathy on the old "Patty Duke Show." I've even seen actors play 3 roles. Indeed, I've seen Peter Sellers play 3 roles twice. He was Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and Dr. Strangelove in "Dr. Strangelove," and Grand Duchess Gloriana XII, Prime Minister Count Rupert Mountjoy, and Tully Bascombe in "The Mouse That Roared." He also played 3 roles in "The Prisoner of Zenda" — Rudolf IV, Rudolf V, and Syd Frewin — but I haven't seen that. And I've also not seen "Soft Beds, Hard Battles" (AKA "Undercovers Heroes"), which takes the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen. In that one, he played 6 roles — Général Latour, Major Robinson, Herr Schroeder, Prince Kyoto, The President, and Adolf Hitler.
Speaking of cake and free speech, what about cake makers who won't write what customers want on their cake? I'm seeing this story — about ShopRite's refusal to put a 3-year-old child's name on a birthday cake. The father said: "There's a new president and he says it's time for a change; well, then it's time for a change. They need to accept a name. A name's a name." The year was 2008, the new President was Barack Obama, and the 3-year old was Adolf Hitler Campbell.
UPDATE: USA Today has corrected the roll/role mixup, and Instapundit has corrected it on his post as well.
IN THE COMMENTS: I get very involved in the question whether Chaplin — in the scene Depp paid homage to — used rolls or potatoes. I would have used the Chaplin clip if I'd thought Chaplin used rolls, but I'd always seen them as potatoes. This is me in the comments:
1. "'Depp's "roll" playing is a rip from (or homage to) Chaplin's doing the same thing in THE GOLD RUSH' [wrote Robert Cook]"/Yes, I know, but I couldn't use Chaplin here, because Chaplin used potatoes."
2. "Here's Chaplin with the potatoes. Of course, it's better than what Depp did, but Depp was good as a guy who tried to be like Chaplin. Or am I wrong? Is Chaplin using dinner rolls? Now, I have to look it up. I think Depp's use of rolls has caused people to see Chaplin as using rolls. I think it was potatoes!"
4. "In the Chaplin scene, the woman on the right clearly has a potato on her plate. Is that causing me to perceive Chaplin as spearing potatoes on his forks when in fact he's got dinner rolls? But why would they pose the potato on the woman's plate like that if not to orient the viewer to understand what the relevant items are?"
5. "Or am I wrong about that being a potato on the woman's plate. It looks like a split-open baked potato, but on further viewing, I'm willing to believe it's one of those dinner rolls that are baked after cutting a slit across the top."
6. "Okay, this convinces me that those were rolls, not potatoes. Also, Chaplin wasn't first. He got it from Fatty Arbuckle. (Video at the link.)"
That made me look up "prat." It's English slang, going back to the 1500s, meaning "a buttock." Later, it came to mean both buttocks, i.e., a "bottom." (Source: OED.)
"Why, she's getting groggy on her pins, and if you don't pipe rumbo, she'll go prat over nut." That's from 1846.
By 1955, it was slang for "An idiot, a fool; an ineffectual or contemptible person." Joe Orton used it in 1964 in "Entertaining Mr Sloane": "Go on, you superannuated old prat!"
I must say that before looking it up, I pictured it as a fish. I was thinking: sprat.
ADDED: This planted it in my head that Brits insult each other with fish:
IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula said: "I'm surprised Althouse din't also link o this Monty Python fish skit:"
The answer (to quell your surprise (I'm always alarmed at what surprises people around here)) is that — although I've had the DVD on my shelf for years — I've never gotten very far into "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life." There's only so much of this sort of foolery I can take in one sitting. A half hour is best for comedy. In the early days of movies, that was well understood. For example, this half hour of Chaplin from 1918:
"This photograph has led many lives, nearly disappearing into obscurity. In 1989, Trump posed for [Michael] O'Brien, who was on assignment for a Fortune magazine story on American billionaires. From the beginning, O'Brien knew he wanted to place Trump against a backdrop of a bright blue sky and cotton ball clouds, a sky he says was inspired by the surrealist painter Rene Magritte. The apple was a last-minute addition, he told NPR. 'On the day of the shoot I thought, "It needs some type of action, something unexpected but telling." Bingo! A big red apple popped into my head ... It was sort of subconscious the apple. It was sparked by a color scheme, and I later realized it was symbolic of New York.'... [A]bout a year later, Random House asked O'Brien for the rights to use the image for the cover of Trump's autobiography Trump: Surviving at the Top. Over 20 years after that, the image was acquired by the museum. Today the portrait hangs under wall text that reads ' 2017 Inauguration, Donald J. Trump.'" Reports NPR.
Nice picture. Especially because the apple represents the geographic place Trump dominated, it makes me think of Chaplin tossing the globe around in "The Great Dictator":
But O'Brien says he was inspired by Magritte:
That's the one with the apple, but the sky is not bright blue with cotton-ball clouds. That seems to point to this famous Magritte image:
Perhaps O'Brien conflated the images. Question which of the 2 relates more to Trump. Trump doesn't seem to get obscured by things in front of his face, so I think the second image is more relevant. The surrealism is the nighttime on the ground while it is daylight in the sky. These are dark days, it seems, to many of us as we short-sightedly observe our immediate surroundings. But perhaps it is Morning in America, and those with their head hung down cannot see it.
Writes Meade in the comments to the previous post about Hillary's new "love" theme, which is assumed to be a response to the perception that Trump represents hate. Is it true that "no one associates Hillary with love"? I was trying to think of her talking about love, and then Meade asserted that it's Trump who's always talking about love, which makes me think of how Trump often talks about how much people love him (as in "The Hispanics love me!").
Stanley Renshon is a sweater-wearing Freudian psychoanalyst who has made a sideline through the years of painstaking psychobiographies of American presidents.... He has read all the [Trump] interviews....
“I think he actually, believe it or not, he has a need to be liked,” says Renshon. “He’ll use the phrase ‘he likes me’ or ‘they like me.’ When somebody uses that phrase often, you have to give credit to the idea that that’s something important to them, their need to be liked."
Renshon rejects the idea that Trump is a narcissist:
“He appears to be a real American nationalist with an observable, if bombastic, love of his country... Obviously a love of country is inconsistent with real narcissism, where there is no room for love of anybody or anything but yourself.... I think he genuinely feels like the country is going to hell, and I think he genuinely feels he can do something about it."
There's that word "love." Love of country. But do you associate Trump with love? You can say "love" a lot....
Now that we’ve defined that love and devotion and family isn’t driven by gender alone, why should it be limited to just two individuals? The most natural advance next for marriage lies in legalized polygamy . . .
Legal marriage isn't just about love, it's an economic arrangement. Having the state authorize your union is not the same thing as having your friends and neighbors approve of you and your religious leaders bless you. It affects taxes and employee benefits -- huge amounts of money. A gay person with a pension and a health insurance plan is incapable of extending those benefits to his (or her) partner. He (or she) can't file a joint tax return. That's not fair. A polygamous marriage, however, puts a group of persons in a position to claim more economic benefits than the traditional heterosexual couple. That doesn't appeal to our sense of fairness.
The law doesn't assess how much two people love each other. Two persons of opposite sexes can marry for all sorts of reasons. If there were a device that could look into their souls and measure their love, we wouldn't accept the outrageous invasion of privacy it would take for the government to use it. Excluding gay couples from marrying does generate the complaint that society does not sufficiently respect homosexual love, and by harping on this point, proponents of gay marriage activate their opponents who think that's a good thing.
But it's not all about love and who respects what. It's also about economics. And in that dimension, it's easy to distinguish polygamy.
The problem I see today is that the Supreme Court stressed love, not economics. And the political spin coming off the case is #LoveWins. I would have decided the case based on equal protection and left love out of it. Constitutional law limits what government can do to people. Government has no positive obligation to boost egos or bestow dignity. But government chose to use the status of marriage as a basis for many of its actions in the realm of things that properly belong to government (like taxing and spending). At that point, equality is required.
But the Court didn't take that route. It said something about Equal Protection that no one — as far as I've seen — can even understand. I'm going to reread the majority opinion, and I'll get back to you, but it's plain to everyone who reads the opinion in any depth that it rested on ideas about substantive due process. These ideas were not clearly expressed. There was a lot of windy verbiage that I want to parse. But the public's consciousness is off and running without any careful parsing from me or anybody else. It's flying under the flag #LoveWins. It's love, love, love, love, love.
We're not on the economics slope. We're on the love slope. That's more slippery. Who knows where that might go? And who knows why the majority chose (what we're perceiving as) the love concept? Maybe economics didn't seem to have the heft to justify unsettling old beliefs. Maybe the Court wanted emotions to soar, wanted to spark contagious empathy, and government taxing and spending seems too grubby to pull us away from the traditional meaning of marriage. Profundity could only be traded for profundity. That's not how I would have done it. I would have stressed that we are only talking about the limits on government, what government can do to individuals.
"Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Students! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!"
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