[FRIAM] Revising the American Revolution

[uǝlƃ ☤>$]

I simply don't get this part of your post. If I replace "textualism" and "textualist" with "originalism" and "originalist", then it makes some sense. But the textualists are trying to keep the document *current*, right? It's the originalists who want the document to mean the same thing it meant when those vile white men wrote it. Have I swapped the terms?

I thought Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer were textualist, whereas Thomas, Alito, & Gorsuch were originalist. I'm not clear on Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.

Re: appreciating the produce of diseased minds -- I still think Lovecraft is the ideal case because, unlike disintegrated personalities like Jefferson and Washington, Lovecraft's art was a direct expression of his racism. Washington's and Jefferson's were very banal consequences of fractured, plectic, personalities ... much like everyone's. Lovecraft was well integrated ... almost a model of the Consistent Man.

And Lovecraft also disambiguates the question of charisma. It's not about charisma of the person so much as charisma of the *idea* ... the hype ... the fideistic commitment to a thing in spite of glaring evidence of its failure. One could argue that, because Lovecraft had a bunch of friends, his interpersonal charisma "bled out" into his mythology. No doubt having many different people contributing to the mythology helped solidify it and flesh it out. So maybe there's a thread from interpersonal charisma to idea-charisma. But I doubt it. He (similar to Poe, Jung, and Nietzsche) tapped into something, if not universal, very translatable.

On 10/23/21 11:09 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> What I love about this is that illuminates for me what is going on in our current debates over textualism.  The Textualists are trying to get us back to the pre-Civil War constitution which was dedicated to preserving the prerogatives of the privileged classes.
-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ