Dick Cheney, Meet Bernard DeVoto:

What do you think Dick Cheney's other favorite Bernard DeVoto quote is? In his speech at the Republican Convention last night, Cheney quoted Devoto, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and scholar, when Cheney said, "Bernard DeVoto once wrote that when America was created, the stars must have danced in the sky." Of course, DeVoto was an intensely committed conservationist who once opined that the National Parks should be closed to all people, with the Army posted around them, until the government was willing to fully fund their preservation, so maybe he would have been a bit displeased with the Bush/Cheney desire to drill for oil in the Alaska wildlife reserve.



But, still, really, and all, do you think Cheney, who raved about the Patriot Act last night, would agree with DeVoto when he wrote, in his 1949 essay "Due Notice To the FBI," a response to the House Un-American Activities Committee, "I like a country where it's nobody's damned business what magazines anyone reads, what he thinks, whom he has cocktails with. I like a country where we do not have to stuff the chimney against listening ears and where what we say does not go into the FBI files along with a note from S-17 that I may have another wife in California. I like a country where no college-trained flatfeet collect memoranda about us and ask judicial protection for them, a country where when someone makes statements about us to officials he can be held to account. We had that kind of country only a little while ago and I'm for getting it back."



Or do you think Cheney, with the Christian faithful cheering him on as he spoke at his pulpit-like podium, would appreciate this 1937 DeVoto quote: "I was brought up in a religion which taught me that man was imperfect but might expect God's mercy–but I was surrounded by a revealed religion founded by a prophet of God, composed of people on their way to perfection, and possessed of an everlasting gospel. I early acquired a notion that all gospels were false and all my experience since then has confirmed it . . . I distrust absolutes. Rather, I long ago passed from distrust of them to opposition. And with them let me include prophecy, simplification, generalization, abstract logic, and especially the habit of mind which consults theory first and experience only afterward." Do you think Cheney would honor a man who insists on independent thought and the ability to learn from experience (better known in Republican dogma as a "flip-flop")? Do you think the conventioneers, who seem to be able to make no distinction between the past and the present, would love the poetry of DeVoto that Cheney invoked and hate the writer? Let's hand them out copies of Mark Twain's Letters From the Earth, a vicious attack on religion that was edited together by Bernard DeVoto. Yeah, give all the delegates a copy and see what they think.



(More on Cheney and Zell Miller coming soon.)