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The Daily Dose/April 23, 2010
By Gaylon Kent
The Writer's Shack
Notes from around the Human Experience...
100 YEARS BACK: In a speech at the Sorbonne in Paris one hundred years ago today, former US President Theodore Roosevelt gave what has become known as his Man in the Arena speech.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
A Pretty Good Speech: Those who are acquainted only with that excerpt are missing out, as Roosevelt spoke about the concept of individual citizenship and some of his words are eerily prescient of his country a century later:
The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast stretches of fertile farm land; the stockaded clusters of log cabins change into towns…the men who wander all their lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for which they have prepared the way. The children…and then their children and their children and children's children, change and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant, self-centered, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings.
And We're Spending Four And A Half Hours A Day Watching Tee Vee. Fabulous: It's not difficult to see TR annoyed at 21st century America, where two-thirds of its citizens are overweight:
…in the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average women, does his or her duty…The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation.
We Really Are Doomed To Hell: And it isn't a complete stretch to think TR would not be pleased with our elected leaders. We've said this before: this country has not been led since Kennedy. Every other president could only be bothered to manage this country, preferring to pander to whomever best enhances their reelection chances:
Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.
Speaking Of Kennedy: We're not aware of any evidence that Kennedy was familiar with this speech when he gave a speech as president-elect where he mentioned that to whom much is given much is expected, a line TR used at the Sorbonne and which has it's origins in the Gospel of St. Luke anyway:
To you and your kind much has been given, and from you much should be expected.
Philosophy 101: Anyone in the market for a personal philosophy could do worse than this passage, which comes right before the Man in the Arena paragraph:
The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer…there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty……these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men…who seek…to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The role is easy...
Can't We All Just Get Along? TR gives a pretty good civics lesson too:
The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of pride he will see to it that others receive liberty which he thus claims as his own…Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position.
Strong Finshing Kick: TR's philosophy can be summed up by this passage, which actually comes from the middle of the speech:
There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.
Dry Technical Matter: The speech is not short, over 8,700 words, about 300 words longer than the longest presidential inaugural address - William Henry Harrison's in 1841 - and well longer than the average inaugural length of 2,650 words.
Coke Isn't It: Following a board meeting where everyone smoked crack, the Coca-Cola Company introduces New Coke on this date in 1985.
It is one of the great blunders in business history. Company executives began discussing bringing back the original formula the following month and three months later announced the old formula was returning.
Conspiracy Theory: It's hard to believe that Coca-Cola executives were unaware of the special, iconic place Coca-Cola held in American life and while we haven't spent a whole lot of timing thinking about this it is not unreasonable to believe this was nothing more than a marketing ploy designed to drum up trade. This also coincided with Coke switching from real sugar to high-fructose corn syrup, which it started using when the original formula was reintroduced.
In A Galaxy Far, Far Away: A gamma ray burst observed in the general direction of the constellation Leo is observed one year ago today. Based on a variety of factors we don't really understand, light from the gamma ray burst took about 13 billion (B) years to reach Earth, meaning the burst happened when the universe was, more or less, 630 million (M) years old, making it the oldest known object in the universe.
Thought For The Day: What, you haven't had enough inspirational quotes for today?
The trivia question will return! Honest!
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