Radical Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things – Red Shelley – 1811

DESTRUCTION marks thee! o’er the blood-stain’d heath

Is faintly borne the stifled wail of death;

Millions to fight compell’d, to fight or die

In mangled heaps on War’s red altar lie.

The sternly wise, the mildly good, have sped

To the unfruitful mansions of the dead.

Whilst fell Ambition o’er the wasted plain

Triumphant guides his car—the ensanguin’d rein

Glory directs; fierce brooding o’er the scene,

With hatred glance, with dire unbending mien,

Fell Despotism sits by the red glare

Of Discord’s torch, kindling the flames of war.

Fortheethen does the Muse her sweetest lay

Pour ’mid the shrieks of war, ’mid dire dismay;

For thee does Fame’s obstrep’rous clarion rise,

Does Praise’s voice raise meanness to the skies.

Are we then sunk so deep in darkest gloom,

That selfish pride can virtue’s garb assume?

Does real greatness in false splendour live?

When narrow views the futile mind deceive,

When thirst of wealth, or frantic rage for fame,

Lights for awhile self-interest’s little flame,

When legal murders swell the lists of pride;

When glory’s views the titled idiot guide,

Then will oppression’s iron influence show

The great man’s comfort as the poor man’s woe.

Is’t not enough that splendour’s useless glare,

Real grandeur’s bane, must mock the poor man’s stare;

Is’t not enough that luxury’s varied power

Must cheat the rich parader’s irksome hour,

While what they want not, what they yet retain,

Adds tenfold grief, more anguished throbs of pain

To each unnumbered, unrecorded woe,

Which bids the bitterest tear of want to flow;

But that the comfort, which despotic sway

Has yet allowed, stern War must tear away.

Ye cold advisers of yet colder kings,

To whose fell breast no passion virtue brings,

Who scheme, regardless of the poor man’s pang,

Who coolly sharpen misery’s sharpest fang,

Yourselves secure. Your’s is the power to breathe

O’er all the world the infectious blast of death,

To snatch at fame, to reap red murder’s spoil,

Receive the injured with a courtier’s smile,

Make a tired nation bless the oppressor’s name,

And for injustice snatch the meed of fame.

Were fetters made for anguish, for despair?

Must starving wretches torment, misery bear?

Who, mad with grief, have snatched from grandeur’s store,

What grandeur’s hand had snatched from them before.

Yet shall the vices of the great pass on,

Vices as glaring as the noon-day sun,

Shall rank corruption pass unheeded by,

Shall flattery’s voice ascend the wearied sky;

And shall no patriot tear the veil away

Which hides these vices from the face of day?

Is public virtue dead?—is courage gone?

Bows its fair form at fell oppression’s throne?

Yes! it’s torn away—the crimes appear,

Expiring Freedom asks a parting tear,

A powerful hand unrolls the guilt-stain’d veil,

A powerful voice floats on the tainted gale,

Rising corruption’s error from beneath,

A shape of glory checks the course of death;

It spreads its shield o’er freedom’s prostrate form,

Its glance disperses envy’s gathering storm;

No trophied bust need tell thy sainted name,

No herald blazon to the world thy fame,

Nor scrolls essay an endless meed to give;

In grateful memory still thy deeds must live.

No sculptured marble shall be raised to thee,

The hearts of England will thy memoirs be.

To thee the Muse attunes no venal lyre,

No thirsts of gold the vocal lays inspire;

No interests plead, no fiery passions swell;

Whilst to thy praise she wakes her feeble shell,

She need not speak it, for the pen of fame

On every heart has written BURDETT’S name;

For thou art he, who dared in tumult’s hour,

Dauntless thy tide of eloquence to pour;

Who, fearless, stemmed stern Despotism’s course,

Who traced Oppression to its foulest source;

Who bade Ambition tremble on its throne—

How could I virtue name, how yet pass on

Thy name!—though fruitless thy divine essay,

Though vain thy war against fell power’s array,

Thou taintless emanation from the sky!

Thou purest spark of fires which never die!

Yet let me pause, yet turn aside to weep

Where virtue, genius, wit, with Franklin sleep;

To bend in mute affliction o’er the grave

Where lies the great, the virtuous, and the brave;

Still let us hope in Heaven (for Heaven there is)

That sainted spirit tastes ethereal bliss,

That sainted spirit the reward receives,

Which endless goodness to its votary gives.

Thine be the meed to purest virtue due—

Alas! the prospect closes to the view.

Visions of horror croud upon my sight,

They shed around their forms substantial night.

Oppressors’ venal minions! hence, avaunt!

Think not the soul of Patriotism to daunt;

Though hot with gore from India’s wasted plains,

Some Chief, in triumph, guides the tightened reins;

Though disembodied from this mortal coil,

Pitt lends to each smooth rogue a courtier’s smile;

Yet does not that severer frown withhold,

Which, though impervious to the power of gold,

Could daunt the injured wretch, could turn the poor

Unheard, unnoticed, from the statesman’s door

This is the spirit which can reckless tell

The fatal trump of useless war to swell;

Can bid Fame’s loudest voice awake his praise,

Can boldly snatch the honorary bays.

Gifts to reward a ruthless, murderous deed,

A crime for which some poorer rogue must bleed.

Is this then justice?—stretch thy powerful arm,

Patriot, dissolve the frightful charm,

Awake thy loudest thunder, dash the brand

Of stern Oppression from the Tyrant’s hand;

Let reason mount the Despot’s mouldering throne,

And bid an injured nation cease to moan.

Why then, since justice petty crimes can thrall,

Should not its power extend to each, to all?

If he who murders one to death is due,

Should not the great destroyer perish too?

The wretch beneath whose influence millions bleed?

And yet encomium is the villain’s meed.

His crime the smooth-tongued flatterers conquest name,

Loud in his praises swell the notes of Fame.

Oblivion marks the murdering poor man’s tomb,

Brood o’er his memory contempt and gloom;

His crimes are blazoned in deformed array,

His virtues sink, they fade for aye away.

Snatch then the sword from nerveless virtue’s hand,

Boldly grasp native jurisdiction’s brand;

For justice, poisoned at its source, must yield

The power to each its shivered sword to wield,

To dash oppression from the throne of vice,

To nip the buds of slavery as they rise.

Does jurisprudence slighter crimes restrain,

And seek their vices to controul in vain?

Kings are but men,[4] if thirst of meanest sway

Has not that title even snatched away.—

The fainting Indian, on his native plains,

Writhes to superior power’s unnumbered pains;

The Asian, in the blushing face of day,

His wife, his child, sees sternly torn away;

Yet dares not to revenge, while war’s dread roar

Floats, in long echoing, on the blood-stain’d shore.

In Europe too wild ruin rushes fast:

See! like a meteor on the midnight blast,

Or evil spirit brooding over gore,

Napoleon calm can war, can misery pour.

May curses blast thee; and in thee the breed

Which forces, which compels, a world to bleed;

May that destruction, which ’tis thine to spread,

Descend with ten-fold fury on thy head.

Oh! may the death, which marks thy fell career,

In thine own heart’s blood bathe the empoisoned spear;

May long remorse protract thy latest groan,

Then shall Oppression tremble on its throne.

Yet this alone were vain; Freedom requires

A torch more bright to light its fading fires;

Man must assert his native rights, must say

We take from Monarchs’ hand the granted sway;

Oppressive law no more shall power retain,

Peace, love, and concord, once shall rule again,

And heal the anguish of a suffering world;

Then, then shall things, which now confusedly hurled,

Seem Chaos, be resolved to order’s sway,

And errors night be turned to virtue’s day.—

Art Imitates Life – And Death – The Short Happy Life of Otto Gevaert – 1962

The year was 1962, and the whole world seemed to be gray scale or beige. Otto Gavaert left his family image business.

Otto Gevaert wanted to work in the Bohemian world of ‘art for art’s sake’ and the creator’s personal expression through his work. Otto Gevaert moved to an ‘artists colony’ on an island off the coast of Massachusetts during the summer months, and California in the winter. He loved the ocean.

In his spare time, during a fanciful moment, Otto Gavaert created a cartoon character that helped him earn a steady income. He used a different name to trade-mark and copyright the cartoon character ‘Zingy.’ Otto Gavaert wanted to keep his serious artistic works separated with the juvenile hi-jinks of a newspaper cartoon strip ten-year-old.

Today few remember Zingy or Otto Gavaert images. They are not in style as ‘today’s catch.’ The alienation of the early 1960’s artist seems long ago and far away. The world is not like that anymore.

US Radical Left Journalist Lincoln Steffens: Muckraker’s Progress – Book Review

By Kevin Baker (with a few edits)

• May 13, 2011

He knew everyone and he went ­everywhere. He was a confidant to presidents, a mentor to two of the most influential journalists in American history, a friend to industrialists, artists, ward heelers, Communists and bohemians. He claimed to have spent the rest of his life after college “unlearning” everything he had been taught. He saw through all pretenses, circumventions and lies — even the ones he told himself — until in the end he was hornswoggled by the biggest lie of all.

Lincoln Steffens isn’t much remembered today, though Peter Hartshorn’s absorbing biography, “I Have Seen the Future,” makes it clear why he should be. As one of the original “muckrakers,” Steffens wrote newspaper and magazine exposés that gave journalism a new purpose, a voice in American democracy beyond simply endorsing one party or another.

Born in 1866 to a rich businessman and his wife — one family home later became the California governor’s mansion — Steffens passed an idyllic childhood exploring the Sacramento countryside on his beloved pony. He gained an early education in the ways of the world, discovering that the horse races his father bet on were fixed to take advantage of the “suckers.” While he loved his father, he “did not care for suckers” — and determined never to be one.

After acquiring a degree (and a secret fiancée) at Berkeley — “It is possible to get an education at a university. It has been done; not often” — Steffens prevailed on his father to send him to Europe for three years of study in philosophy, ethics, art history and science. No idler, he read everything and studied at universities throughout Germany and France. But here, too, he was frustrated by his professors: “They could not agree upon what was knowledge, nor upon what was good and what evil, nor why.” Returning to America with a trunkful of English clothes, “a book-length essay on ethics,” a (secret) young wife and vague intentions of becoming a businessman, the 26-year-old Steffens was stunned to receive a letter from his father with a hundred dollars and an order “to stay in New York and hustle” until he learned the “practical side” of life.

It was the making of him. Hustling desperately, too proud to tell his family he was married, he landed a job as a reporter for The New York Evening Post, where he learned the workings of both Wall Street and the immigrant slums of the Lower East Side, and made friends with a vigorous young police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt. He learned to write and to invest, and within nine years was the managing editor of McClure’s, one of the most popular and prestigious magazines in the country.

He was, as usual, in the right place at the right time. Volatile Sam McClure was transforming his namesake publication into a journal that would rip the veil from American life, forcing readers to confront the corruption that had seeped into every seam of their democracy. The January 1903 issue alone featured an installment of Ida Tarbell’s groundbreaking history of the Standard Oil Company; Ray Stannard Baker’s reporting on a coal miners’ strike in Pennsylvania; and Steffens’s own exposé of political corruption in Minneapolis.

No one had ever done journalism like this before. McClure’s took on corporate monopolies and political machines, the awful conditions most Americans lived and worked in, the tainted food and water they ate and drank. The public devoured it, even while claiming to want more “positive” stories. (They didn’t. A book Steffens wrote solely about crusading reformers, “Upbuilders,” sold all of 684 copies in its first year.)

Steffens wanted to go beyond the simple idea “that political evils were due to bad men of some sort and curable by the substitution of good men.” Working constantly, traveling ceaselessly, he visited one city after another, trying to decipher how the whole system worked — why it was corrupt, as well as how. He brought to the job a penetrating intelligence, a great human sympathy and a knack for turning a phrase; whole books could be filled with his aphorisms: “I was never again mistaken for an honest man by a crook”; “You ask men in office to be honest, I ask them to serve the public”; “Nothing fails like success”; “You cannot commit rape a little.”

Above all, in those halcyon days before public relations experts, he possessed an astonishing ability to get anyone to open up to him, even his targets, whether the lumber baron Frederick Weyerhaeuser, the Tammany boss Richard Croker or the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who, according to Hartshorn, called Steffens “the most effective interviewer he had faced.” There was something irresistible about this slight, comical little man who Malcolm Cowley thought “looked like a cartoonist’s notion of a dapper French artist.”

He managed to remain friends with Roosevelt and then Woodrow Wilson even when he told them they were wrong — no small feat. His protégés included John Reed and Walter Lippmann; his friends, Jimmy Cagney and James Joyce. He seemed, always, to be in the middle of things: reveling with the younger bohemians at Mabel Dodge’s Village salon; hanging with the expats of the Lost Generation in France after World War I. When Hadley Richardson lost all of the manuscripts belonging to her husband, Ernest Hemingway, she had been rushing them down to Lausanne for Steffens’s perusal.

By then, in the 1930’s, he had come to regret his past. The muckrakers had achieved great things; Steffens’s investigations of Wall Street, for instance, helped lead to nothing less than the Federal Reserve System. But this was not enough. Steffens was dismayed by how little permanent good muckraking seemed to achieve, by how quickly reformers were swept out of office and reforms neglected once the latest scandal was past. He saw an answer, for a time, in Christianity — “The doctrine of Jesus is the most revolutionary propaganda that I have ever encountered” — though he lamented, “I never heard a Christian sermon preached in a church.” Further disillusioned by the continuing violence between labor and capital, by the slaughter of World War I and the ramshackle peace cobbled together at Versailles, he stepped up his old quest for certainty, for “facts of scientific value” that would solve all social questions.

He had his pick. “Scientific” politics were in stock between the wars. Steffens was captivated by Lenin, whom he interviewed briefly during the revolution. Steffens wrote an introduction to a January 1918 printing of a book by Soviet leader Trotsky. Steffens paraises Trotsky as an international working class revolutionary and not a nationalist or Russian revolutionary.

THE BOLSHEVIKI
AND
WORLD PEACE

BY LEON TROTZKY

INTRODUCTION BY LINCOLN STEFFENS

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40273/40273-h/40273-h.html

He became one of the first of that sad little band of Western intellectuals who fell head over heels for the Soviet Union. Unlike most of them, he did not deny the stories of atrocities leaking out of the workers’ paradise during the halcyon days of the Great Depression in the capitalist paradises. Even more chilling, he simply believed the Stalinists necessary to bring about the great changes to come. He never wavered from his infamous first impression of the U.S.S.R., “I have seen the future, and it works.” Instead, living comfortably on money he made from the stock market, he insisted that “nothing must jar our perfect loyalty to the party and its leaders,” and that “the notion of liberty . . . is false, a hangover from our Western tyranny.”

Such Olympian distancing revealed a cold streak in an otherwise warm nature, something also present in the emotionally sadistic way he treated women. One lover, searching for an apartment to share with Steffens, was shocked to encounter him doing the same — with another woman. “Am I a blankety-blank? I don’t know. But certainly I can do fierce things to those that love me,” he confessed to a friend. “I am really puzzled to understand myself.”

Revelations like that might have informed him that no system, scientific or otherwise, would change the essential nature of man. But like any sucker, Steffens could not let go of his delusions. He was just lucky that few were listening by then. Hartshorn judges that his blind support of the Communists, disgusting as it was, should not distract “from his significant influence on both the profession of journalism and the nature of government in America.” He’s right about that, and in support of this judgment he has produced a biography that is prodigiously researched, fantastically interesting and extremely well written. Steffens would have been pleased by how well Hartshorn has turned him inside out.

I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE

A Life of Lincoln Steffens

By Peter Hartshorn

Illustrated. 517 pp. Counterpoint. $30.

Kevin Baker is writing a social history of New York City baseball.A version of this article appears in print on May 15, 2011, Page 29 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Muckraker’s Progress. 

Lincoln Steffens: Muckraker’s Progress – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Start – The Jam – “It’s not important for you to know my name, or I to know yours, if we communicate for two minutes only it will be enough”

https://videopress.com/v/JIs4H1HM?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata

I was listening to a musicology clip review of pop music since 1888. I was thinking of parts of my life as the fifteen second clips of each song played with the year displayed. Some happy memories came back with songs I once loved, but haven’t thought of in years. Some songs made me sad.

But the song on the video above resonated exactly how I feel, right here, right now.

Start – The Jam – “It’s not important for you to know my name, or I to know yours, if we communicate for two minutes only it will be enough”

I have been posting a number of drawings as examples to draw, or even just look at and think about visually on a subreddit ‘thread’ I have on Reddit – r/HowToDraw101. I had been banned and restricted on other subreddits for innocuous pictures so I started my own subreddit so I could have a refuge to post to the world.

So I took a number of the black and white line drawings I had over the last day or so to use as a visual for the video and the song from the early 1980’s by the UK band The Jam.

The lyrics:

It’s not important for you to know my name
Nor I to know yours
If we communicate for two minutes only
It will be enough

For knowing that someone in this world
Feels as desperate as me
And what you give is what you get

It doesn’t matter if we never meet again
What we have said will always remain
If we get through for two minutes only
It will be a start

For knowing that someone in this life
Loves with a passion called hate
And what you give is what you get

If I never ever see you
If I never ever see you
If I never ever see you, again

If I never ever see you
If I never ever see you
If I never ever see you, again

And what you give is what you get
And what you give is what you get
And what you give is what you get

And what you give is what you get
And what you give is what you get
And what you give is what you get

Writer/s: PAUL JOHN WELLER
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

This is exactly what I seek by putting drawings and related material or articles on r/HowToDraw101, and also what I seek posting videos and drawings and blog posts and ….whatever online, on telephone poles, or in chalk on the sidewalk. It’s not important for you to know my name. My name is no where on this blog. It’s not important. Hopefully the ideas I share are important. Or, entertaining, or a pleasant diversion for the mundane parade of life. If we connect for two minutes only…. it will be a start!

I went out to skate in the cold on the slippery street under the crescent moon to the south…the sun is rising

A red glimmer came through the curtain in the kitchen window facing southeast. I pulled back the curtain and saw a glowing red horizon. I looked on my computer to see the night sky. On the screen I saw the sun near rising and a crescent moon to the south. I went to the front door and stepped gingerly out onto the porch with my inline skates on. The cars along the curb were glistening with moisture. I went down the front stairs backwards and holding onto the rail. The sidewalk had enough friction despite the dew.

I skated south on the street keeping low so I wouldn’t slip. High in the sky overhead was the crescent moon seeming to dazzling in the cold winter air. As I went to the corner I could see the glow of the dawn spreading out to the south / southeast. No sun yet. I could wait a few minutes, but I needed to move and skate to stay warm.

A neighbor’s car was warming in his driveway with the lights on with a little mist in front of them. I almost slipped on the slick street as I went to the corner to look down the hill hoping to see Venus. Nope. No goddess of Love for me this morning. I moved to the sidewalk to get better traction. I picked up a stone off the street as I crossed the curb and threw the rock into my front garden snow. How nice to move in the cold air on a dark morning with the Moon hanging over head.