Wordie: Prosie: The Crisis: Comments

Comment by chained_bear, about 1 year ago

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:53:55 +0000

Yes, I asked John about it on the bugs page. Glad it isn't just me!

Comment by reesetee, about 1 year ago

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:46:33 +0000

Not to break the mood here, but is anyone else seeing this page as oddly formatted?

Comment by chained_bear, about 1 year ago

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:13:47 +0000

I tried to edit my comment to add this one, but I got an error, so I'll post another:

To me, Paine is the embodiment of the saying "the pen is mightier than the sword."

Comment by chained_bear, about 1 year ago

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:12:07 +0000

And if it has that power 200-some years later... The thing is, at the time he wrote/published this piece, it was really looking like the rebellion would end very soon. The Continental Army was on its last legs--this was just before Washington's great gamble in attacking the Hessians at Trenton, itself a very bold, unexpected move from a commander who'd spent eight or nine months being repeatedly defeated and chased across the country with an ever-shrinking group of men that hardly qualified as an army. The mighty Declaration of Independence that we revere and quote and that has resonated around the world would have been a footnote in a British history book.

And here's this guy--this middle-aged, English-born guy, who's (to use a modern phrase) "embedded" with this loser army traipsing across New Jersey... and at the darkest possible moment, he comes out with this text. And this text, in the opinion of several very good historians, combined with Washington's daring victories at Trenton and then Princeton, quite literally turned the tide of the American war effort. Enlistments went up. Locals in New Jersey (then called the Jersies, East and West) and Pennsylvania formed guerrilla bands that harassed the British and Hessians everywhere they went and kept them from finding any fodder for their horses--any at all--and started pushing them back toward New York.

This unbelievable writing, so stridently, purposefully forceful in revealing a shining future... It blows my mind.

Of course, this wasn't the only hat trick Paine had--he'd already convinced everyone about independence with Common Sense earlier in the year--an arguably much more difficult task.

Comment by uselessness, about 1 year ago

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:33:38 +0000

Yes. Yes, and yes. Thank you for posting this. I chilled.

Comment by chained_bear, about 1 year ago

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:01:10 +0000

The first paragraph never fails to give me chills, no matter how many times I read it.

Comment by npydyuan, about 1 year ago

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:01:24 +0000

I had the thankless task last year of trying to get a roomful of rowdy/bored/apathetic/confused/brilliant/asleep eleventh graders interested in this piece.

Don't know if I succeeded at all, but it sure did get me interested again.

It's so freakin creepy/awesome how themes from all times in history remain so essential to the present.

Comment by reesetee, about 1 year ago

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:07:28 +0000

This is great. Thanks for posting it here. One forgets how powerful it is.

Comment by chained_bear, about 1 year ago

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 02:12:50 +0000

I love this sentence in particular: "The heart that feels not now is dead; the blood of his children will curse his cowardice, who shrinks back at a time when a little might have saved the whole, and made them happy."

I also love that the term at this time for the "states unborn" and "accents yet unknown" in Shakespeare's parlance was "posterity." As in, "What will our posterity think of us?" or "Our posterity will rue the day."