Politics of Hell
Born today: Michael Keaton,
star of “The Dream Team“
Regarding my claim in the note below that Michael Dukakis lied about an ancient Greek pledge, thereby incurring the wrath of the Gods…
A Google search for “Athenian pledge” yields four sites, only two of which are relevant. One is a site in which U. S. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY, Harvard ’71) parrots Dukakis, and one is from the final home of William S. Burroughs — Lawrence, Kansas:
“I ran across this printed paragraph in a supplement to the Journal-World dated, Wednesday, Dec. 8, 1965. The cover, “City of Lawrence, Kansas — Progress Report”, at the top of the inside page has this:
“City of Heritage. We will never bring disgrace to this city, by any act of dishonesty or cowardice, nor ever desert our comrades; we will fight for the ideals and sacred things of the city, both alone and with many; we will revere and obey the city laws, and do our best to incite a like respect and reverence to others; we will strive unceasingly to quicken the public’s sense of civic duty; that thus in all these ways, we may transmit this city, greater, better, and more beautiful that it was transmitted to us.”
“The Athenian Pledge”
The link above on Burroughs (Harvard ’36) is to a site subtitled “Secret Agent in Hell.” Perhaps he now haunts his old alma mater…
The excellent 1933 Harvard novel Great Circle, by Conrad Aiken, has in its opening paragraph the following:
By all means accept the invitation to hell, should it come. It will not take you far — from Cambridge to hell is only a step; or at most a hop, skip, and jump. But now you are evading — you are dodging the issue…. after all, Cambridge is hell enough.
Postscript of 12:55 a.m. September 10:
For a current (9/9/02) Harvard student’s view of Hell, see the description of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle at