LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

They will not be tomorrow’s Hemingways, or even today’s Clark
Gables. They will be just shelved, left on the cupboard floor, this way
inglorious and ungloried, back numbers before they are dated. Like neo-
Georgians who read Mr. Eliot 15 or 26 years late, and tried to cut little
nitches in his umbrageous cathedral, mouse holes in his choir stall.
And after a hundred broadcasts it is STILL hard to know where to begin.
There is so MUCH that the United States does not know. This war is
[the] fruit of such vast incomprehensions, such tangled ignorance, so
many strains of unknowing.
I am held up, enraged, by the delay needed to change a typing ribbon, so
much is there that OUGHT to be put into the young American head.
Don’t know which, what to put down, can’t write two scripts at once.
NECESSARY facts, ideas, come in pell-mell. I try to get too much into
ten minutes. Condensed form O.K. in book, saves eyesight, reader can
turn back, can look at a summary. Mebbe if I had more sense of form,
legal training, God knows what, could get the matter across the Atlantic,
or the bally old channel. Art, economics, pathology. You need to know
MORE about all of ’em. Need to GIT out of this war, need to stay out of,
or prevent the next one, need to change the stinkin’ old system.
ROT in art, art as pathology, university delays. How come class war?
What is it the professors don’t know? Got to choose between two or four
subjects or I will git nothing over in any one talk. Very well. I will start
on: How come. Two bits of ignorance that have recently been rubbed
into me by a mob or congress of professorial persons. NO … let’s start
on something that HAS been discussed IN America for twenty years, 30
years, Doctor looks at literature. All this quite silly talk about the
diseased mind back of modern painting.
It bored me like hell. It was mostly poor stuff. BUT the fault lay in its
limitation AS criticism, not in the main worry that caused half educated