For those who want to know this is from Lincoln’s second inaugural.

That rhetorical style died with Lewis H. Lapham

Chills

I feel like someone would get clowned on for talking like this now.

Very few people ever did.

EVERY DROP OF BLOOD DRAWN WITH THE LASH SHALL BE PAID BY ANOTHER DRAWN WITH THE SWORD

sorry it just is always spiritually in full caps for me

cannot BELIEVE that motherfuckers pretend like the pull quote of that speech is "with malice towards none, with charity for all"

youtu.be/CXIrnU7Y_RU?... Today we find ourselves in the opposite position, waiting for the Old World, in God’s good time, to step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the new

While Lincoln was Lincoln and he was an omega-level brain, I really do think the television was bad for our brains and bad for society. I mean, I watch it and like it, to be clear. I also like Sour Patch Kids but can admit they too are bad.

One time @lawsomepup.bsky.social and I took a long walk by the Hudson after hanging out at our favorite gay bar and recited this, The New Colossus and Let America Be America Again to each other.

I think I can do the second inaugural mostly from memory

But to be fair to contemporary Americans, Lincoln is literally the best political speaker in English ever.

He knew how to be extremely straightforward and plain, and to let ornament be just ornament - a pleasing frame for meaning, not in place of meaning.

But can you do it with the vowels how Lincoln pronounced them -- for example, "charity" as "cheerity"?

I can’t do it from all, I tried it and lol, not even close. Youth is wasted on the young.

I learned a poem as part of a Romantic poets course at uni -- the first three stanzas of Percy Shelley's "Epipsychidion" -- because it was either that or write a paper on the poem, and I wanted to see if I could do it. I can still recite those stanzas from memory.

I used to have “My Last Duchess” down and I can still do lines but the whole is lost.

I've still got a lot of things down, and if I had to pick I think my favorite to do is probably Dulce Et Decorum Est: not a particularly impressive feat of memorization, but what a poem.

Or maybe in my less dramatic moods (but equally unimpressive in terms of memory) This Be The Verse

Let me rephrase that I learned it so as to give a recitation of it from memory for the course. I also know, and can still recite, Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 from memory, although that one I had learned for fun, a few years prior.

(Just pulled it out of the ol' mental rolodex; yup, can still do it. :-D)

Also eternally greatful for @katebeaton.bsky.social for introducing me to the final words on patriotism by Connelly.

Where's Let America Be America Again from?

Langston Hughes, for my money one of the true great pieces of political poetry in any language.

Sadly.

This speech sounds even better if you read it in a yoda voice

Lincoln did not fuck around Someone pointed out how in Gettysburg he echoes a thought in increasingly creaky and pre-latinate English—“we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground,” like he’s reaching right through the Bible to get something across

Super depressing that an anime series can churn out "In every time, in every place the deeds of man remain the same" but the best our leaders can do now is... not even near that

Hell nobody talks like *this* anymore either. youtu.be/Zp008uKHlvc?...

Fuck it post your cool speeches and monologues that you like. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmys...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZDc...

pin 📌

www.youtube.com/watch?v=q89M...

www.marxists.org/archive/conn...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8lL...

youtu.be/zuGp-0G1p4M?...

Hello Thom, I hope you are well. I'm Kholoud from Gaza. I have two daughters. We survive thanks to your help, I'm still alive. The war is back and prices have gone up. Please help my children.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuGA...

“For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.” youtu.be/0fkKnfk4k40?...

I've thought of this speech at least once a week since November 2016

This is the single greatest paragraph in American presidential history.

hey now. I do, it's just I bitch a lot. so much so that I took to encapsulating it in deranged rants so it wouldn't btngh

If you write like this in university, it will have "passive voice" scribbled all over it in red

Nobody talks like this any more either.

Same speech. (FDR campaign speech at Madison Square Garden, Oct 31 1936)

Because back in the day the only book anyone had was the King James Bible