“WHAT IF THE WHITE HOUSE WAS LIKE THE PRAIRIE”
you guys i’m sending drunk-style messages and i’m not even drunk
which begs the question: why am i not drunk? it’s 5:45 and i’ve got tomorrow off. what a waste of sobriety.
if anyone was curious as to why i was reading the wikipedia article on canada-united states relations, it was because of minor shots fired in this conversation
EVERYONE
WHAT IF THE WHITE HOUSE HAD TO BE BURNED DOWN BY CANADIANS EVERY FEW YEARS SO IT COULD GROW BACK STRONGER AND HEALTHIER
WOULDN’T THAT BE SO WEIRD
‘I doubt whether even our public edifices—our capitols, state-houses, court-houses, city-hall, and churches,—ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and reform the institutions which they symbolize.’ (Holgrave in The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne.)
David Lowenthal’s book The past is a foreign country has some fascinating stuff on how many of the founding generation of the United States strongly rejected the idea that the past should have any influence over the future and thought that every generation should junk everything the previous one had done and start again. Jefferson wrote that the constitution and all other statutes should expire automatically every nineteen years. Which, as Lowenthal explores, created the paradox of later generations admiring and heroizing ‘founding fathers’ who deeply objected to the idea of admiring and heroizing ‘founding fathers’.
So Canada could quite reasonably argue that periodically demolishing the White House is a valuable contribution to the American dream.
(via nuditea)
