I too Dos Passos

Last week it was the birthday of Jesus and Earl Scruggs, but today it's even better: John Dos Passos is One Hundred and Ten Years old.

When one thinks of the waning days of an indisputable literary giant, one doesn't usually imagine blowing out a single metonymic candle on top of a bran muffin in the white-linoleum cafeteria of a subsidized retirement home in Pocatello, but I imagine that's exactly what old JDP would have done today, if he had not enjoyed the good fortune to die some years ago.

Hell, if only he had felt more warmly about FDR -- and not quite so warmly about Barry Goldwater -- days like this would be a goddamned orgy of feasting for those of us unrepentent strollers down the lanes of the Literary Left. Instead, his memory is alone with an unpublished academic caretaker and a Depends undergarment that desperately wants emptying.

But you did turn on us, John. Perhaps you were right to distrust FDR, whose real goal was to save the rich by spreading them out a wee bit. But in the space of half a lifetime, you went from Big Bill Hayward to Big Bill Buckley, Jr., and lots of your readers will never forgive you.

But I do. And the Swill hereby raises a glass to John Dos Passos, a man who may not have been able to foresee the coming of neoconservatism, but who certainly could wield a pen like a motherfucker, and for a good number of years had more guts than the whole goddamn lot of us.

you suddenly falter ashamed flush red break out in sweat why not tell these men stamping in the wind that we stand on a quicksand? that doubt is the whetstone of understanding is too hard hurts instead of urging picket John D. Rockefeller the bastard if the cops knock your blocks off it's all for the advancement of the human race while I go home after a drink and a hot meal and read (with some difficulty in the Loeb Library trot) the epigrams of Martial and ponder the course of history and what leverage might pry the owners loose from power and bring back (I too Walt Whitman) our storybook democracy
- John Dos Passos, The Big Money

I too Dos, I too.