Write and Bleed

"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master." With that said he added :-), "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Government according to Fitzgerald's character Anthony Patch

A partial paragraph from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 novel THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED, Book One, Chapter 2 - Portrait of a Siren, when Anthony Patch contemplates his unproductive as well boring state of affairs then imagines possible endeavors to disparaging conclusions...

"He tried to imagine himself in Congress rooting around in the litter of that incredible pigsty with the narrow and porcine brows he saw pictured sometimes in the rotogravure sections of the Sunday newspapers, those glorified proletarians babbling blandly to the nation the ideas of high school seniors! Little men with copy-book ambitions who by mediocrity had thought to emerge from mediocrity into the lustreless and unromantic heaven of a government by the people---and the best, the shrewd men at the top, egotistic and cynical, were content to lead this choir of white ties and wire collar-buttons in a discordant and amazing hymn, compounded of a vague confusion between wealth as a reward of virtue and wealth as a proof of vice, and continued cheers for God, the Constitution and the Rocky Mountains!"

Though the novel's story-line commences in 1913, I rather doubt Mr Fitzgerald had in mind nor understood the ill ramifications of three congressional passages still plaguing this country presently; 16th and 17th Amendments as well the Federal Reserve Act. For nowhere mentioned were these issues among the characters' many conversations on pop-culture or current concerns of the 1910s. I would assume, like most artists/writers of the time (as it is today), he mindlessly supported trendy ideas seen as "progressive" with no thought to the unavoidable causality.

With that said, Fitzgerald's use of language is brilliant, regardless of intent (if any). So while taking a bit of liberty here, superimposing my intent for a brief moment, I may have written a similar critique of government, less skillfully of course. :-)

Note:
A 1919 photograph of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre, later married the following year.