LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

talking about, let me say that half a century ago an American professor
with a Spanish name went over to Japan and brought back the news and
some notes on a number of remarkable plays, said to have been kept
unchanged in their stage tradition for 4 or 5 centuries. Centuries. And
after a lapse of years W.B. Yeats said it was the form he had been
seeking all his life in an attempt to write drama that should be also high
poetry.
And in the play Kagekiyo we have, I think, the soul of Japan. As its
delicacy in Nishikigi, and its epos in Kagekiyo, which contains so far as
my very imperfect knowledge extends, the one truly Homeric passage in
such of their literature as Fenollosa brought back to us, or other of our
translators have come on.
That is the JAPAN we WANT. That is the Japan that could mean
something to us, and be in the high sense of some use to us. We have
most material things inside our own borders, though in a bull market for
means of murder we may want a little more tungsten etc. We do not need
Indian opium.
I don’t know about taking a plebiscite. Probably the bulk of the
population would not understand it, but given time to know what I am
driving at, I believe this proposal would come nearer the normal
American wish, a wish after all for the good life, than any of these
dinimiteros and earth hoggers have any idea of.
Is there any need for the whole earth to run mad because two-fifths have
gone beserk?
The American people WANT civilization. Get under their skin and even
that crack about the 5-cent cigar does NOT move the American deep. We
like a wisecrack some of us, including the high bracket writers aim to be
TOUGH, I say TOUGH and HOW when appearing in public. But in
private they lay it off.