It comes as no surprise that a thinker (or perhaps I should say a feeler) such as Mrs. Woolf, with her emotional and intellectual dishonesty, should collapse all relevant moral distinctions, a technique vital to all schools of resentment. Time and again we find her misappropriating the connotation of one thing and attaching it to another, by insinuating a false analogy: that since both the British policeman and the Nazi stormtrooper wore a uniform, the British policeman was a brute. It is one of the chief characteristics of modern rhetoric, designed not so much to find truth as (in the words of former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam) to "maintain your rage."
Saturday, July 15, 2006
The Rage of Virginia Woolf
Theodore Dalrymple, a now-retired prison psychiatrist has a chapter in his recent book Our Culture, What's Left Of It entitled "The Rage of Virginia Woolf. A quote from that essay seems appropriate in view of our cultural discussions in the psychosphere.
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Don't be so mean to the donkeys. They were the sagest, sanest group I'd met in the mideast. In the Balkans, too. I mean the four-legged, hee-haw Eeyore kind of course. The two-legged ones are an insult to all donkeyhood. Bastids. "The king's ears are really...donkey's ears!"
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