A Quora Question. My answer:
There is a story, a joke in some ways, an allegory in others, that dates way back. In it, a British Lord travels to the Frontier West, America in the 1800’s. His horse throws a shoe on the trail, so at the first little frontier town he comes to, he finds a blacksmith’s shop to have the shoe replaced. As he rides up, he sees a large, sweaty, filthy man hammering on a piece of red-hot iron. The Lord sits on his horse, waiting to be served, but the blacksmith doesn’t pay him any attention and continues to work his iron. Finally, the Lord, outraged to have been ignored this way by an obvious servant, dismounts, approaches the ‘smith, and taps the man on the shoulder with his riding crop.
“You, man!” he barks, “Who is your Master! I wish to have a word with him!”
The blacksmith turns, looks at the Englishman, spits a stream of tobacco juice on the point of the Lord’s boot and says,
“That sumbitch ain’t been born.”
We are born with anti-authoritarianism in our blood. Only training takes it out of us. American culture is pretty much void of said training. So as a friend once put it, “Where the hell do you get off thinking you can tell me I can’t own a gun? I don’t care if every other gun owner on the planet went out and murdered somebody last night, I didn’t. So piss off.”
I remember this from before.
I have always been a voracious reader, more so now that I have retired. Nearly everything I see or hear in current media reminds me of something I read in the past, whether a Barbara Tuchman book, one of R. Emmet Tyrell’s essays, or a historical fiction book. (An excellent series about a self-made knight in the 14th century meshes well with “A Distant Mirror” and I’ve recently become enamored with British naval fiction of the period of the Seven Years War through the aftermath of Napoleon’s final exile.)
My memory works like a domino cascade. Under normal conditions, there is the banal activity of setting dominoes in place, no particular action. But when something knocks over a trigger piece, connections are made. Sometimes just a few random facts related to the trigger, sometimes insights and connections I had not considered before.
It’s a wonderful feeling.