Moby-Dick (“single best guide to Mr. Bush’s presidency”) and the Aeneid (the Greeks “suffered a grievous intelligence failure”) are classics that a New York Times columnist offers as metaphors for George W. Bush’s Iraq policy.
With Nicholas D. Kristoff‘s two choices excluded, 400 Times readers followed up with the Bible, Anabasis, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam and 1984.
I invite TeleBlog readers—both critics and supporters of the Bush policy, regardless of whether or not they’re in the States, just so they identify their countries—to express their own book-based analogies in the comment box if they’d like.
Literature as part of the language of politics
Meanwhile here’s another message that comes through. Great literature, old and modern, remains part of the language of politics among the U.S. elite—a concept applicable elsewhere, too. When schools drive out the classics, they penalize young people outside the elite and widen class barriers. Widespread deployment of e-books, a TeleRead approach and repeal of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act would be ways to narrow barriers. One special glory of public domain literature on the Net is that it not only helps students and teachers in formal school settings but also the self-taught—or, since the process of education is ongoing, the self-teaching.
Detail: The New York Times items linked here are only for paying subscribers. I wonder what the results of the poll would have been with Times readers at large included.
Related: The Classics in the Slums, which shows that yes, there can be interest—outside the elite—in serious literature. You needn’t be a scholarly preppy or a professional academic; I’m neither, just a recreational reader.
