The title for this blog is a phrase from John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy. In the book it referred to organized agitation to make the right of free speech real and available to all; for me, the phrase denotes the struggle to think, write, and act clearly. It’s so hard to express yourself and say exactly what you want to say, and in a way that the other person can’t possibly misunderstand — but it’s well worth the effort in the end. Thus this blog is a step in the fight for free speech — the struggle to say exactly what you mean, all of what you mean, and not just most of it.
That’s the ostensible purpose of these doings & goings-on. As I look at what I *actually* write about, I fear that you’ll come to see this as just another blog with unfocused thoughts on books and movies (kind of like a low-rent Mediaplay of the mind…ugh), and random smatterings of my day — ephemera that are here for a moment like a puff of breath, and then vanish. Hopefully that’s not the case and you see some of the value I see in these thoughts, but I have to face the fact that that might not be the case either. At any rate, there’s something gained in expressing them, in shaping them, in finding the right word or words (I am a collector of words), and that is also part of the fight for free speech.
(And coffee. There’s usually a lot about coffee.)
“Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.” ― John Adams
The Free Speech Fight 