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Call me old school, old as "Member since February 2009", but the business of fanning has been taken to totally absurd lengths. Posters fan each other for a single banal post and there are people running about with hundreds of fans but with little to say. I've been fanned by people, who obviously are unfamiliar with my commenting history, for a single comment, who then revoke my fan status when they see another single post they do not like. This is not day trading, nor is it high school. Check those posters whom I have fanned: either I have had unusually meaningful exchanges with them on several threads, or I have admired their consistent and well spoken support for positions with which I agree. I am always gratified to find myself supported by someone whose output I have admired, especially when they do not do so casually. All else is dross and I'd be grateful to be left out of it.
It's easier to stay out than get out.
Mark Twain
We refused to be what you wanted us to be.
We are what we are; that's the way it's going to be.
Bob Marley
I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melo-dramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the litterateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable....The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater....The great cities reek with respectable and non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money- making is our magician's serpent, remaining today sole master of the field. The best class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress'd speculators and vulgarians....I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in certain highly deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and aesthetic results. In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander's, beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annex'd Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endow'd with a vast and more and more thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.
Walt Whitman "Democratic Vistas"
