Decadent
An eyewitness named George Weld had his wits about him: “[It] was obvious that part of the difficulty of getting through this was going to be finding the language to describe it. Since then, not only has the poverty of our vocabulary for discussing what has happened to us been painful, but the lack of imagination so many of us have shown in thinking of ways to respond intellectually seems to me to be politically dangerous. A will to interrogate rhetoric and a suspicion of habits of thought are the only things that can give us some purchase on the situation.
“In peacetime, teaching the humanities has often been looked on as the pastime of the decadent or the hopelessly liberal. Now, that work — raising the level of public discourse by training people to think and speak better, and to stretch their critical and moral imaginations — looks essential, and I miss doing it and having it done to me.”
Categorised as: Not funny