“Let us wear on our sleeves the crepe of mourning for a civilization that had the promise of joy.”

I long ago read the following passage from Alan Drury’s great political novel, The Promise of Joy:

So it was going forward as he had planned it, intervention on his terms, where and in such manner as he thought would be successful. The event was indeed in the hands of God. And supposing it would succeed, as he believed likely, what then for his frightened country and the shaken world?

He knew the answer.

Infinite pains, infinite patience, infinite struggle and strain. Infinite labor that would have to go on for years, decades, possibly generations before it could be said that a truly stable peace had finally been achieved.

And that, perhaps, was the key to it: the unceasing struggle, the fugitive joy, the recurrent pain, the endless, mostly heartbreaking endeavor.

“Let us,” Lafe Smith had said, quoting on a dark and dismal night, “wear upon our sleeves the crepe of mourning for a civilization that held the promise of joy.”

The promise of joy.

Not the easy certainty. Not the painless assurance. Not the comfortable guarantee.

Just – the promise.

That, perhaps, was all that the American experiment, all that any experiment in human governance that sprang from essentially decent motives, could hold out – the promise of joy. A promise always elusive, always fleeting, never quite captured, never quite achieved, here today, gone tomorrow, back again the next day – if you kept working and struggling and, above all, if you never gave up. If you hung on and kept trying, all of you, unto the last generation.

If his successors – for successors he still believed there would be – were strong, were determined, never lost sight of the essential goodness of the American experiment and the essential goodness of all other sincere and well-meaning peoples wherever they might reside on troubled Earth – then just possibly, somewhere far beyond his lifetime and maybe far beyong many other subsequent lifetimes, the promise of joy might sometime – somehow – someday – be kept for his country and all mankind.

But more likely that was all it was, or could ever be: a promise.

A promise forever worth the seeking – but only a promise.

All ye of faint heart and wavering will who seek the certainty of joy, he told them quietly in his mind, forget it.

It does not exist.

— Allen Drury, The Promise of Joy

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For decades I have actively sought in vain for the source of that quotation within a quotation: “Let us wear upon our sleeves the crepe of mourning for a civilization that held the promise of joy.” Less than an hour ago, thanks to Google Books, I found both the answer and the source.

Drury, you see, had not only failed to attribute the quotation Lafe Smith cites, but he had misquoted his source, and all of my searches to date have been thwarted by one mis-quoted word (and the fact that Google Books didn’t exist for most of the past two decades).

The actual quotation, in context, is as follows, from Causes and Battles of the Colossal War in Europe written by Charles Maxwell in 1914, four years before the end of “the Colossal War:”

“At least, then, let us not get drunk. At least, then, let us not sing boastful songs. Honor may call us to fight; self-preservation may force us into the slaughterhouse; but let us wear on our sleeves the crepe of mourning for a civilization that had the promise of joy, and strike our enemy without a hiccough or a curse. Never again shall we know what is now perishing. And we shall want all our strength for tomorrow.”

A “civilization that had the promise of joy,” not one which held it. Lafe’s thoughts might have been a bit different had he gotten the quotation right, and being an extremely powerful politician, other thoughts might have led to other decisions and other decisions to other outcomes. It seems utterly trivial, really: one misquoted word in a multi-novel series with dozens of characters and world-shaking events happening continuously. A simple mis-spoken word in the heat of national politics seems a matter of supreme insignificance. Sometimes, however, such seeming “trivialities” can reveal to us whole vistas of information which we had not had before.Consider, for instance, a recent (and ignored by the American “news” media, of course!) faux pas of Mitt Romney, the current golden boy of the Republican primaries. That much of his gold came from his Daddy’s shady dealings and repeated bids for the White House is neither here nor there — it is the man himself who I want you to scrutinize in the light of my decades-long quest to find the correct answer to a puzzle.

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What follows is a verbatim transcription of CNN Newsnight, anchored by Aaron Brown, which aired February 22, 2005 – 22:00 ET:

BROWN: Thursday right now must seem like a long way away.

Now a story that lives where the political and the personal collide with the medically or scientifically possible, a story that forces some fairly painful questions.

What would you do for someone you love? What would you refuse to do, or refuse to permit, in spite of what might happen to someone you love?

Hard enough to answer when you’re a parent or a spouse or a friend, harder still when you’re the governor.

Here’s CNN’s Jason Carroll.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JASON CARROLL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In these tiny cells lies a major controversy. Researchers see them as a possible path to medical progress, an answer for diseases that today cannot be cured.

The governor from Massachusetts sees it another way.

GOV. MITT ROMNEY (R), MASSACHUSETTS: I have this vision of an Orwellian laboratory.

CARROLL: At issue, embryonic stem cells, cells that can grow to become other cells — skin cells, nerve cells, or these, heart cells.

But extracting them destroy the embryo, and that is something Governor Romney says he will not allow.

ROMNEY: Creating new life for purposes of experimentation and for research is something that I think Americans recoil at, and recognize that’s a new boundary we’re just not willing to cross.

CARROLL: Romney is one of the few governors nationwide speaking out on the issue. His position isn’t just political. In 1998, his wife, Ann, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Scientists say embryonic stem cells could help people like her.

ROMNEY: She and I, my wife and I, care very deeply about finding the cure for her disease, and the cure for diseases of millions of other people in our country. But we don’t believe for a minute that you have to cross ethical boundaries to find the cures for diseases. But she and I agree that you don’t create new life to help cure our issues.

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Gentle Reader, let me point out the two dates in the above transcript: “1998” and “2005.” Why are they worth noting? Because George Orwell never wrote a word about raising children in laboratories; he never wrote a word about embryonic research, he never wrote anything even vaguely reminiscent of what Governor Romney was discussing! Nevertheless, he would have us believe that at least seven years of soul-searching and discussions with his seriously ill wife went into his opposition to the effort to allow stem-cell research at Harvard University. And, apparently, not once in those seven years did Governor Mitt Romney, or his wife, or his speech-writers, ever look up the meaning of the word “Orwellian.” Seventy years ago Aldous Huxley, scion of a family famed for scientists and authors since the days of Charles Darwin, wrote a novel (still in print) about government laboratories modifying embryos; his dystopian novel was called Brave New World (which is, by the way, a quotation from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest since I’m parsing quotations today), and Huxley’s book is on the required reading list of most American high schools — which means that either Governor Romney, or his wife, or his speechwriter ought to have read it at some point in their lives; obviously they have not, since Romney continues to mis-use the word “Orwellian.”

“Orwellian” is a perfectly good word, an adjective describing the writings of George Orwell, another English writer whose books are still in print and on most high school reading lists. The two most “Orwellian” of Orwell’s books are Animal Farm, in which a revolt of animals on a farm leads to a complete dictatorship by the farm’s pigs, who have no qualms about selling off their fellow revolutionary animals to slaughterhouses and pocketing the profits. It’s grim stuff. But the most “Orwellian” of Orwell’s books is Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984).

Twice filmed, no motion picture can truly convey the grinding poverty, the horrors of life, the never-ending war, the continuous domestic spying, and the vicious and ultimately murderous political repression of “Air Strip One,” as England is called, being nothing more than a staging ground for its American partner in the vast, globe-straddling empire which is “Oceania.” 1984 describes “telescreens,” televisions which watch their viewers and report their observations to the power elite, rather like TiVo reports everything you watch to anyone willing to pay for the information (but freely provided to the government, of course, under the USA-PATRIOT Act). In 1984 telescreens can never broadcast anything except what the government produces. (Have a “V-chip” in that new TV of yours? If you don’t, don’t worry: the ones you’ll have to buy when the government ends NTSC television broadcasting in the United States and requires everyone to use “high definition” — whether they want it or not — will definitely have V-chips in them — the law requires it.) Don’t have a V-chip now? Don’t feel left out: the government can now pre-empt your local television and radio stations anytime they choose to broadcast an “Amber alert” about a missing child (which they never seem to do around here unless some pretty little White child goes missing).

The government controls all media in Oceania. Fortunately, we don’t have that here. Instead, eight companies own nearly every television and radio station in the United States, and by fiat of the Federal Communications Commission just two weeks ago, despite the complaints of tens of thousands of Americans and many members of Congress, those same eight companies are now free to buy every newspaper in every city in which they own a radio or TV station, giving them a nearly-complete monopoly on all “news” in the entire country. Fortunately, those companies are “privately” owned, and the fact that the cousin of the Governor of Texas was in charge of the news division of one of those companies and suddenly announced that his cousin was now the President-elect when every exit poll had pointed to Vice-President Al Gore as the winner in the Florida Presidential vote in 2000 (and hence the whole election) is purely a coincidence.

Political power in Oceania is maintained with a steel fist and a hobnailed boot, constantly stomping on the faces of its own citizens, as one of their torturers tells Winston Smith (excuse me: “6079 Smith W” — people in Oceania don’t have names as much as they have numbers, not unlike our own Social Security numbers, originally restricted by law to a designation for our Federal “pension” taxes, but which are now tied to our bank accounts, our school records, our loan applications, our draft registration forms, and in two years, to our drivers licenses, as well, without which the Oceanic … er … the American government will forbid us to travel abroad, even with a valid passport).

Daily “hate” sessions are mandatory in Oceania, which is at war with Eurasia (it has always been at war with Eurasia, except for the times when it was at war with East Asia, but even remembering such an inconvenient fact is a crime in Oceania, and all crimes carry the penalty of torture and death). Fortunately, we have nothing like that in the USA. Sure, the eight companies which own most of our radio and television stations did go on for almost a year about how how Saddam Hussein had been involved in “9-11,” and how he had “weapons of mass destruction,” a “fact” which Secretary of State General Colin Powell “proved” to the United Nations (but not until the UN’s tapestry of Pablo Picasso’s painting of the bombing of the little civilian village of Guernica by the Nazis had been covered with draperies so that no one watching on television would even know that it was there and draw conclusions from it “contrary to the interests of the United States”). And, by the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress, George W. Bush said that Saddam Hussein had “terrist ties!” What Hussein’s neckwear had to do with “weapons of mass destruction” has always eluded me, but I suppose I must chalk that up to my lack of “solid intelligence,” “intelligence” like the speculative college term paper whose cover page had been cut off and then the rest submitted to Tony Blair as “proof” that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium in Africa. We had to go to war with Saddam Hussein, and anyone who said otherwise was a terrorist sympathizer and borderline “enemy combatant.”

Okay, sure, Saddam turned out to be on Osama bin Laden’s list of people whom Allah had told him must be assassinated, and yeah, sure, Saddam Hussein had forbidden any member of his government from negotiating in any way with al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and yeah, the only “weapons of mass destruction” found were about a dozen old artillery shells dating back to the Iraq-Iran War twenty years previously which a Polish detachment found while clearing away some old debris, and yeah, Iraq not only didn’t have poison gas factories, it wasn’t even able to produce enough chemicals to manufacture medicine for its own population, and, sure, the Iraqi Air Force was completely destroyed within two days, but by God, George W. Bush told us that we had to “shock and awe” those Iraqi terrorists, and didn’t the eight companies which own our television stations give us cool, video-game style footage every day of this “bunker” or that “bunker” being blown to Hell by million-dollar missiles? Yeah, sure, most of those “bunkers” were farmhouses, or schools, or hospitals, and almost all of those “troop transports” machine-gunned and bombed from the air were busses packed with civilian refugees, and, yeah, the British Medical Association has estimated that American and British bombing had killed 200,000 Iraqi civilians in the first six months of the war, but by God, George W. Bush told us Saddam Hussein had “terrist ties!” Yeah, sure, the American government regularly tortures “enemy combatants” who are never called “prisoners of war” because the United States is a High Contracting Party to the Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Prisoners of War, and if any US government official authorized the torture of a prisoner of war it would be a war crime and carry a potential death sentence, but doesn’t Jack Bauer shoot innocent women in the kneecap and place poison gas cannisters in shopping malls? He works for the same network as President Bush’s cousin, so it must be okay to treat these “enemy combatants” and “terrorist sympathizers” (and occasionally some “collateral damage”) like dirt and stomp on their faces with hob-nailed boots so that they never forget that here in Oceania we have always been at war with Iraq, and we will always be at war with Iraq.

THAT, Governor Romney is what “Orwellian” means, and if you, knowing the word, are so fucking stupid or so fucking evil that you continue to support George W. Bush’s war against the people of Iraq (Saddam Hussein’s been dead for more than a year, remember, so the war is only against the Iraqi people now), then you have no business even thinking about becoming President of the United States of America. But you ARE stupid, Governor Romney, as the fact that you can’t tell the difference between “Orwellian” and “Huxleyan” after seven years of discussions amply proves. To give you your due, devil that you are, it is, of course, entirely possible that your “Orwellian” comment was written by a speech writer, but the fact that you would hire someone so fucking stupid as to be unable to tell the difference between two books which are require reading for teenagers all across America shows that you are completely incapable of selecting competent staffers, and would be a disaster as President. The fact that, more than two years after you made your idiotic comment, you haven’t bothered to correct yourself, and still use the word “Orwellian,” shows a degree of willful ignorance which, were this country the theocracy you would like it to be, would be deemed pure heresy and get you burned at the stake. In any even, Governor Romney, you are clearly too stupid and too ignorant (and possibly too damned evil) for you to be making medical decisions which could save the lives or reduce the pain and suffering of millions of Americans. In a word, “6079 Romney M,” you’re a swine. And a stupid one, at that!

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I can explain some of my anger which I expressed above by my frustration at the deaths of three famous men in the past week (“they always go in threes,” don’t ya know?). First, Sir Edmund Hillary died at a ripe age, having lived a long and full life in which he had climbed the highest mountain in the world, traveled far and wide, and done so much unstinting humanitarian work that he was regarded as nearly god-like in Nepal, where he did his most famous work. A few days later, 25 year-old actor Brad Renfro died in Los Angeles. Yesterday, 28 year-old actor Heath Ledger died in New York.

Renfro had vaulted to stardom at the age of 14, as the title character in the motion picture The Client. He smoked cigarettes in The Client, despite being underage. He was allowed to develop an addictive personality. By the time he was 18 he had a police record for drug violations, even as he continued to make movies (many of them for some of those eight companies which not only own all television stations in the United States, but almost all movie studios as well). Apparently, no one from any of those eight companies thought that the teenage star who was bringing in millions of dollars for them needed any counseling or a stay in a drug rehab facility (“What? Get this kid off drugs at our expense? Hell, as long as he’s an addict he’ll work for next to nothing!”). Renfro died alone, an alcoholic, at the age of twenty-five.

Heath Ledger first came to America in the Gods-awful Shaun Cassidy TV series “Roar,” which I predicted would face early cancellation unless Ledger himself became a popular star in the United States, which seemed likely. “Roar” was canceled, but Ledger, as predicted, became a popular American star. 10 Things I Hate About You had him revamping Shakespeare, dancing and singing his way up absurdly steep high school bleachers, and straight into the hearts of American fans. He became “Sir William Thatcher” (among other names) in A Knight’s Tale, “Ennis Del Mar” in Brokeback Mountain, “Casanova” in Casanova, and, a few months hence, we were to see him as “The Joker” in The Dark Knight, the latest Batman movie. Ledger died naked and alone in his Manhattan home, with only some pill bottles for company.

Renfro and Ledger aren’t the only teen idols and young actors who have died in tragic circumstances in recent years. In 2000 twenty-four year old Christopher Pettiet was found dead in his apartment, the victim of an apparent “accidental” drug overdose; he had an audition for a new role scheduled for that afternoon.

A few months after Pettiet’s “accidental” death, Justin Pierce, star of Kids and with a fresh recurring role on “Malcolm in the Middle,” hanged himself in his Las Vegas hotel room. He, too was only twenty-five.

Perhaps even more tragic was the death of Jonathan Brandis, teen idol turned adult actor. Although he worked regularly, none of his roles in his twenties allowed him to live up to the great expectations which people had had of him since he was a mere six-years old, on “One Life to Live,” a show with a strangely prophetic title. Star of Neverending Story II, Ladybugs, Sidekicks, and Stephen King’s “It”, Jonathan had appeared opposite some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, but the peak of his fame came when he played teenage genius Lucas Wolenczak in 57 episodes of “Seaquest: DSV,” opposite Roy Scheider, he even wrote one episode of the show. After “Seaquest” work continued to come in for him, but it was no longer as the co-star opposite Hollywood A-listers. He apparently believed that he was fading into obscurity, although he kept getting roles. In 2003 he made his directorial debut with a short Civil War film entitled The Slainesville Boys. Then, at age 27, he hanged himself, for reasons still unknown, or at least never made public.

Why recap these horror stories of dead young men who seemed to have the world at their fingertips? Because their deaths anger me, and in my anger I find motivation.

Consider Edmund Hillary. He risked death time and time again to accomplish his goals, and he did accomplish them. Decades ago I set myself the goal of finding the source of that cool quote from Alan Drury, and today I did. There was no risk involved in the search, but there was diligence and a determination to find the answer by looking every place I could think of, and then going back and checking and re-checking in case I missed anything. When I finally found the solution, I took my disappointment at discovering that the fruitlessness of my search had been caused by a simple misquotation to raise my voice in opposition to a cold-souled villain who abuses the language with far less innocence than Drury surely did, and in a manner which Drury thoroughly understood and which he attacked again and again in his Advise and Consent series, of which The Promise of Joy constitutes one of the two possible alternative endings he presented.

GET ANGRY, PEOPLE! If you think you have no purpose in life; if you think life’s dealt you a bad hand and a raw deal; if your early childhood promise has turned into a crappy adult life with no prospects of improvement; if your rent’s going up or your house is being foreclosed upon; if your girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse ain’t givin’ you the lovin’ you think you deserve; if you’re pissed at underwriting a never-ending war while our own country goes to Hell in a handbasket, DON’T JUST TAKE THE EASY WAY OUT WITH BOOZE AND DRUGS OR SUICIDE, DO SOMETHING POSITIVE! SAY SOMETHING! Fight back against what makes your life or the lives of your loved ones miserable and try to improve things.

“DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT. … RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT!”

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