Word: ploughman
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...Still, the feted Edinburgh society of the time couldn't get enough. Novelist Henry Mackenzie called him "the heaven-taught ploughman". And how the ladies fell for the rough romantic with the wicked turn of phrase. "There is no doubt about it, he was a ladies man," says Wilson. "He was gifted in every respect." Burns fathered at least a dozen legitimate and illegitimate children in his 37 years...
...same time, this cultivated natural aristocrat became the founder most trusting of ordinary people. All human beings, he said, rich and poor, white and black, had "implanted in [their] breasts" a "moral instinct" and a sympathetic "love of others." "State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor," said Jefferson; the ploughman will decide it as well, and often better, "because he has not been led astray by artificial rules." This idea lay behind Jefferson's belief in the natural harmony of society and his advocacy of minimal government. Government, especially monarchical government, was the source of evil...
Alex and I are drinking in a bar in Little Australia, a section of Taipei near the Ambassador Hotel where Australian businessmen go to drink, carouse, hire prostitutes. The bars have names like Victoria Pub. The Ploughman, the Waltzing Matilda. Alex, who is New York Chinese, looks around us at the beaming, red faces of drunken Australians and observes that there is nothing in the whole goddamn place that's written in Chinese. We decide we have to do something very Taiwanese the next day. We take a bus to White Sand Bay, one of two sandy beaches...
...Icarus and Daedalus flew, "the ploughman stopped his work to gaze, and the shepherd leaned on his staff and watched them, astonished at the sight, and thinking they were gods who could thus cleave...
...same tome he called Mussolini an "OPPORTUNIST who is RIGHT," an "AWARE INTELLIGENCE," who was introducing "a new LANGUAGE in the debates in the chamber." He was according to Pound, a statesman of "deep 'concern' or will for the welfare of Italy," right down to "the last ploughman and the last girl in the oliveyards...." It seems that Pound wasn't aware of the irony, that the new language was, had been, totalitarianism, and the "sincere concern" was with the imprisonment of anarchists and other "dissidents" at that time, and would eventually extend to the internment and elimination of Jews...