An anonymous reader mentioned that Rep. Lynne DiSanto, currently fighting a primary battle against Ryan Smith to claim the GOP nomination for the District 35 Senate seat, recently misattributed a quote to Thomas Paine.
Really. DiSanto is really just repeating an error made by former Texas Governor Rick Perry in 2015:
“Thomas Paine wrote that ‘the duty of a patriot is to protect his country from his government,’” Perry said, drawing applause from the crowd during his Feb. 24 event at the Richmond Marriott.
…We wondered whether Perry had quoted Paine correctly. We turned to the National Thomas Paine Historical Association in New Rochelle, N.Y., which posts Paine’s major writings….
But many quotes have been mistakenly attributed to Paine, and the association also notes on its website what its hero did not write. Among them is a virtually identical phrase the former Texas governor attributed to Paine: “The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.”
Gary Berton, secretary of the association, told us, “I’ve read every word of Paine’s several times. It’s definitely not Paine.”
Berton, who has studied Paine’s writings for decades, said the phrase doesn’t even sound like a thought the founding father would convey. Paine was certainly critical of Britiain’s rule of the colonies and hoped society would one day become so advanced that it wouldn’t need government, Berton said.
“But in the meantime, he was for a strong central government with redistribution of wealth,” added Berton, who is also the coordinator of the Institute of Thomas Paine Studies at Iona College in New Rochelle [Sean Gorman, “Rick Perry Errs in Tying Patriotism Quote to Thomas Paine,” Politifact, 2015.03.09].
The quote may actually have come from 20th-century playwright Edward Abbey, who wrote in 1989, “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”
Abbey was a cynical anarchist whose 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang became a handbook for lefty environmentalist ecotagers. So is DiSanto really declaring herself a monkeywrenching tree-hugger? Lucky trees.
Rep. DiSanto has a history of misstating history online. Thanks goodness she was only teaching civics at East Middle School yesterday.
Ahhhh-haaaaa-haaaaaa. I love it.
It does sound like Edward Abbey, but it also sounds like something Edward Abbey would have, at some point in his writing career, falsely attributed to Thomas Paine, just to get people, like DiSanto, to think it wasn’t coming from him, and to think it was fine to quote. I’m not steeped enough in Abbey’s writings to know for sure, but I do know that Abbey had that sort of impish, post-modernist sense of borrowing from others and reworking it in his own way. If Paine didn’t say it, he should have.
One thing no one can know anymore is what anyone said for sure. The internet is full of lies, and things can be doctored and photoshopped. Anyone can make anything up and pass it off as truth. Trump makes it up as he goes along. It’s all fabricated, and people believe. Trump, DiSanto: fake, but the fake has become real. There are lots of South Dakotans who support our fake President, and many will vote for fake DiSanto.
Abbey was always, in the end, no matter how flawed his characters were, about what was real. It wasn’t to be found in human society. It was nature, and the experiences humans have in nature that was real.
Go hug that tree.
It’s getting to the point that a person cannot trust the unverified reposting of internet memes anymore. It’s almost as if a lot, a LOT, of what is on the internet isn’t even true. If I cannot trust the varsity of randomly posted internet messages, what can I trust?
I long for a day when politicians dig deep into political philosophy, struggle with the contradictions, find the nuances, and resolve a multifaceted framework — rather than hunting for the bumper sticker/fortune cookie nugget.
Here’s what I don’t get. DiSanto is the government. She took an oath and wears the badge. She wants to distract us away from that fact, maybe because she doesn’t get it.
When I became a a school board member, I found my role changed. Now I didn’t represent myself, my political ideology, my pet issues and my little coterie of allies. I represented all the people in the district. I realized there were lots of different people with different ideas about what was important and what I should do about them. No matter how much of an Edward Abbey or Thomas Paine I might have been or wanted to be, I realized that it wasn’t about me. It’s about the people who I represented. Mainly, it was about the students, who couldn’t even vote for me.
DiSanto would be wise to realize she is the government. Then it wouldn’t just be about her.