Posted on 06/14/2015 10:13:15 AM PDT by jazusamo
To a certain extent the American dream -- the notion that working hard in a land with few barriers to advancement makes it possible for each of us to achieve success -- carries with it an element of self-invention.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald noted of the title character in The Great Gatsby:
His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people -- his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God -- a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that -- and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.
Pretending to be something one is not for social and other advantage is fairly common. We have now, for example, a president who duped the elite opinion makers into thinking he was a genius, though there’s never been evidence of that, and he refuses to ever release his academic records. In that regard he was following in the footsteps of others like Adlai Stevenson, whom the smart set regarded as brilliant compared to his opponent Dwight D. Eisenhower. Hidden from the public by Dean Erwin Griswold was the fact that Adlai had actually flunked out of Harvard Law School which, had it been known, would have made clear that Eisenhower, the successful Allied commander, was the more capable leader.
Today, we are faced with an even more ridiculous and spreading series of self-inventions.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
When the Army adopted the slogan “Be all that you can be” a few years ago, I don’t think they intended it to mean “Be everyone you ever wanted to be.”
Yep, though I doubt they had any idea at the time it sadly turned out to be most prescient.
It’s a tough year to be teaching Biology.
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