I tuned in to hear Kamala Harris ‘ elated concession speech on Wednesday afternoon, just like many Americans. Although I had lower expectations for what she would say, Harris ‘ gracious admission to a man she had just warned of being an incipient fascist was very jarring to watch.
Yeah, I thought the speech was fairly innocent and forgettable up until the very end, when she rallyed the audience for something akin to a rousing conclusion.
There’s an notion a writer when called a regulation of story, true of every society across the years. The saying goes that the actors just appear to be visible when it is black enough. I’m aware that many people believe we’re in a dark period, but I’m hoping that wo n’t be so for the good of us all. But here’s the point, America, if it is, let us fill the sky with the lighting of a beautiful, beautiful billion of celebrities.
While the rest of the conversation was tasteful pablum, this was just bad writing that first caused me to pause. This stands out as being particularly terrible even by today’s speechwriting standards. Why is the “law of story” a reference to the stars? And man, I hope” the illumination of a beautiful, beautiful billion of celebrities” was n’t the actual wording of the conversation, because that’s not even linguistic. I wonder if she actually wrote it, because it was so terrible.
However, the proponent of the alleged offer from a “historian” was one of the major issues that bothered me. An old friend of mine soon inquired as to whether this was a misattribution of a well-known quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr. when I expressed my frustration over this section on X. In his popular” I’ve been to the mountain” talk, MLK did say something about precisely:” But I know, apparently, that only when it is dark much can you see the stars”.
Why not just state MLK if the first black woman to run for president wanted to quote him? Additionally, MLK is a lot of things, but I’ve never heard him called a “historian” — to speak to him that way would only actually be confusing, especially to an audience of honest Democrats, at Howard University no less, who are likely very comfortable with well-known MLK sayings.
Of course, a lot of MLK’s better known lines did n’t necessarily originate with him. MLK did n’t exactly attribute these lines the way he should have, but he did n’t hide the fact he was borrowing, either. And it’s pretty well known that MLK was fond of quoting Charles Beard, a well-known writer in the first 20th century.
Because Beard has mostly disappeared into darkness and the links to this largely still exist in old publications and academic documents, it’s difficult to provide much framework for this. However, Charles Beard is known for his numerous aphorisms, which he called the” Four Laws of Political Science.”
- The factories of the angels grind quietly, but they grind exceeding great.
- The gods are going to kill second, making them jealous.
- The stars can be seen when it gets black much.
- The plant that the bird robs is fertilized by the bee.
Not simply “laws of history”, but near much. Case closed, best? Well, no. Although I’ve spent some time refining this, I must give L0m3z record for pointing out that Thomas Carlyle, a British historian, is the author.
Carlyle’s initial estimate was less precise:” The immortal stars shine over again, as soon as it is black enough”. Regardless, according to the website Quote Investigator, in a published paper Beard himself attributed his own take on the aphorism directly to Carlyle:” In conclusion we may say, with Carlyle,  , when it grows dark enough we can see stars”.
Why does this matter? If you look around, you’ll find out that Carlyle was notorious as the illiberal “prophet of fascism” for the majority of the 20th century. Oh and then there’s this:
Hitler sought solace in the literature he most admired in his final years as he was defeated and confined to his bunker by only loyalists. According to many biographers, the following scene took place. Hitler turned to Goebbels, his trusted assistant, and asked for a final reading. Before he passed away, he reportedly listened to Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great.
To be fair to Carlyle, like many other well-known intellectuals, he was much more sophisticated and nuanced than his critics claimed. Although many people argue incongruously that the former leads to the latter, he is probably better known as the originator of the “great man of history” theory than his alleged fascism. His reputation has somewhat improved since the middle of the 20th century, when he was more hated, but he’s the kind of person woken academics have almost no respect for. ( And that’s without even considering his racially-oriented views of the 19th century. )
Anyway, the long and short of it is that, while Kamala Harris was graciously conceding her electoral loss to a man she had insincerely warned was dangerous fascist, she tried to soothe her supporter’s souls by, however inadvertently, quoting one of Hitler’s favorite historians. Absolute perfection.
