ONT Re: The Clear Rhetoric of Democracy
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| The expression "the engineer of human souls"
| is held, by many political indoctrinators,
| to be Stalin's definition of the writer:
| as an engineer constructs a machine,
| so must a writer construct the mind
| of the New Man.
|
| Josef Skvorecky,
|'The Engineer of Human Souls',
| Translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson,
| Totem Press, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada, 1985.
But that's just Men.
HC = Howard Callaway
JA = Jon Awbrey
JA: | 2. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
| Who will tidy up our rhetoric?
| Who will arbiter this clarity?
HC: I suppose that those who prefer clarity, in the ways I indicated,
will select their associations in accordance with this attitude.
In any case, I do hope that our college students are still being
taught the sort of clear and concise rhetoric which I was taught.
I guess our teachers do it basically, thought after some point,
we all become teachers of what we try to practice.
I'm a little less worried about the Mr. & Mrs. Gradgrind's of the world
than I am about "the engineers of human souls", and those for whom they
are only the subcontractors, but you are right, maybe it's all the same
in the end and we should dig nearer to the source, their early training.
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/hardtimes/terms/char_14.html
Or maybe not.
Jon Awbrey
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