Today’s Republican right are practitioners of the Humpty Dumpty approach to communication: “I said it very loud and clear. I went and shouted in his ear.” Like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty, they also believe that they can make reality, as Humpty makes words, mean whatever they want it to mean.
Tag Archives: Lewis Carroll
Rightwing Rewrites Reality
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Alice through the Looking Glass, politics, Rasselas, Republican Party, Samuel Johnson, Tea Party Comments closed
Tweedledum, Tweedledee, and Medi(s)care
I, however, find all the posturing over Medicare depressing. When the Democrats respond with their own scare tactics, they just become Tweedledee to the Republicans’ Tweedledum.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Tweedledum and Tweedledee", "Walrus and the Carpenter", Alice through the Looking Glass, Medicare, politics Comments closed
Believing 6 Impossibilities before Breakfast
Slate Magazine recently had a Jacob Weisberg column that invoked Alice through the Looking Glass in talking about the current Republican Party. Lewis Carroll’s Alice books seem indeed to be works for our times.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Alice in Wonderland, Alice through the Looking Glass, politics Comments closed
It’s Been a Mad Tea Party
Tuesday’s election gave us a chance to assess the effectiveness of the American Tea Party movement, which has fascinated not only the American media but people around the globe. For liberals like me, at times Tea Partiers have seemed to resemble less the American colonialists dumping tea into the Boston Harbor and more Lewis Carroll’s […]
Subversive Nonsense Poetry
Mother Goose I was highly critical of Stanley Fish last week for attacking those who are “instrumental” about the humanities. My claim that the classics can change your life attributes an instrumental dimension to literature. But when I look at how certain parents have tried to foist preachy moralistic tales on their children, I find […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "How Doth the Busy Crocodile", "You Are Old Father William", Childhood, Morality, Mother Goose Comments closed
Prancing Poetry and a Child’s Imagination
Last week I gave a list of my favorite children’s books when I was young. My father, who is a poet along with being a French professor, read us poetry as well as fiction (each night, one story or chapter and one poem for each of my three brothers and me), so I thought I’d […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged A. A. Milne, Alfred E. Noyes, Alice in Wonderland, Cat in the Hat, Cautionary Tales for Children, children's poetry, Dr. Seuss, Edward Lear, Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog, Goden Treasury of Poetry, Gunga Din, Highwayman, Hilaire Belloc, James Whitcomb Riley, Little Orphant Annie, Louis Untemeyer, Mother Goose, Nonsense Verse, Now that I'm Six, Oliver Goldsmith, Rudyard Kipling, Song of Sherwood, The Listeners Tales for Children, The Raggedy Man, Walter De La Mare, When We Were Very Young Comments closed
