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William R. Neil's avatar

I decided that maybe the setting and the tone of the "Flower of Scotland" fits the situation of an old tradition traduced by the decade by decade onslaught of the money economy to an extent that maybe we've never seen...although Fitzgerald in the Great Gatsby sketched out the feel of the 1920's pretty well didn't he "ole sport"? It's another way of getting at the complexities, and the ferocity of that chapter I quoted from seemingly forgotten in the great work of Hannah Arendt, her intensity against the relentless drive of the bourgeoisie of the late Victorian era in the spirit of Imperialism in the 1880's and 1890's. Maybe I didn't make it clear how tough she was: From page 144 in this stunning chapter entitled "Imperialism: The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie" (in the overseas ventures they were free from the laws and restrainst of the home countries of Britain, France, Germany and dare we say Leopold in Beligium? :

"In the Imperialistic epoch a philsophy of power became the philosophy of the elite, who quickly discoverd and were quite ready to admit that the thrist for power could be quenched only through destruction. This was the essential cause of their nihilism (esp. conspicuous in France at the turn, and in Germany in the twenties, of this century) which replaced the superstition of progress with the equally vugar superstittion of doom, and preached automatic annihilation with same enthusiasm that the fanatics of automatic progress had preached the irresistibility of economic laws. It had taken Hobbes, the great idolator of success, three centuries to succeed...Every man and every thought which does not serve and does not conform to the ultimate purpose of a machine whose only purpose is the generation and accumulatin of power is a dangerous nuisance."

I doubt that this passage or much of this chapter was every read aloud in the American college classrooms of the Cold War. And they probably couldnt be read today with the donors and Trustees launching the type of purges we have recently seen at Harvard and Wharton.

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bill wolfe's avatar

Bill - As a fellow old man former jock, I hear you.

But are you seriously paying $182 a month? Or was that a typo? Or annual?

Every year for the ECAC and NCAA hockey tournaments, to watch Cornell Big Red, I sign up for basic ESPN ($10 per month) and then cancel it after the Frozen Four. If I time it right, I get away with just one month.

I just checked and I can watch tomorrow's B-Ball final - get an ESPN account!

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William R. Neil's avatar

No Bill, fellow old man former jock, you heard me correctly; $182 per month which is why I advertised it so widely. No sports channels and a bare minimum of basic tv ones I listed. They signed a monopoly agreement with Frostburg city govt well before I got here. It's unbelievable. But so is the fact the Final Four was not for free at all...of course you could do a trial for five days at various places, but that's hardly the same thing as placing such an August heavily hyped for months "March Madness" out of the reach of so many...I don't watch so much basketball that I would sign up for one of the sports channels. Fox chan 5 did have NCAA Sat night b ball free on their main channel which is where I saw Purdue a couple of times, and UConn and St. John...Big ten and big east featured, no many others then it stopped before the NCAA began.

I did my own legal research today and its hopeless

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