The Forgotten Founding Father

I don’t know that I can say that I’ve always been interested in languages, but ever since I served a mission in Russia for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and learned Russian, I’ve had an interest in languages.  I took German in junior and high school, but never made any real progress.  In high school, when they started teaching us about accusative and dative cases, my brain lost it.  I remember doing a homework assignment dealing with those and asking my native German-speaking grandmother and my German-speaking father for help and still just having brain cramps.  Learning Russian was also very difficult, but I was able to overcome my problem with cases, and it’s been fun to attempt to keep some of these language skills from earlier in my life up since then.  Learning foreign languages like German and Russian also helped me understand things like English grammar and the etymology of English words a little better.  As a really young kid, I remember a copy of the Merriam-Webster dictionary on our shelf and sometimes asking my mom why we never read “the big, red book.”

The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture by Joshua Kendall (ISBN: 978-0425-24545-3) tells about how that “big, red book” came to be thanks to another person who was very interested in words and language.  The book chronicles Webster’s life from boyhood to death, taking a very detailed look at the parts of his life that led to his creation of the famous dictionary, part of Webster’s desire to make America its own unique country.  Somewhat unusual for his day, Webster went to college even though he came from a farmer’s family.  He then pursued a career tied to literature.  He wrote extensively, including many essays, letters, and pamphlets in support of American independence and then in support of a federal republic.  While his writings are not as well known today as those of others like Hamilton, at the time, there were many leading Americans who believed Webster’s efforts were essential parts of swaying public opinion.  Webster initially made his name by publishing a speller, a book that helped schoolchildren learn to read and write.  This book provided him with a foundational income throughout his life.  He also worked as a lawyer, editor, and publisher.  What he realized he loved doing, though, was more similar to the speller: compiling, organizing, and ordering information.  This led to his interest in dictionaries.  He found flaws in extant dictionaries and decided to improve on them by publishing his own.  One motivation he had for this was that he believed a uniquely American language would help create and uphold a uniquely American culture, one that was needed to help the nascent nation maintain its distance from its former imperial overlords and move forward.  While his ideas on government changed over the course of his life, his belief in America did not.  The dictionary took much more time and money than he thought it would, but it was eventually published and created a new standard as well as codifying much of what was then a unique American language with new words expressing the new ideas embodied by the new nation.

Overall, I enjoyed reading the book and found it interesting and informational.  Reading of the American Founding and those who played integral roles in those events is always interesting.  I found some of the discussion of early American literature and the academic scene to be less intriguing, but understand that it helped set the stage for Webster’s work and may be a necessary part of telling his story.  It seemed the author wanted to diagnose Webster with some kind of mental disorder (OCD, autism, etc.), but never really came out and said it, just approached it tangentially.  That constant repetition of that theme was a little distracting.  The dictionary itself is only the last quarter of the book, so there’s a lot of other material to get through, but I thought the case for Webster’s role in America becoming its own entity, separate from Great Britain, was made convincingly.  Those interested in the Revolution and the Founding, not just nerdy linguistic things will find the book of interest.

 

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License and is copyrighted © MMXXI John Pruess.

The Great Reset

[We w]ill at once walk out from a session, meeting, lecture, play,

or film as soon as [we hear] the speaker utter a lie, ideological

drivel, or shameless propaganda.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There was once a guy in a small southern Utah town who made the news all over the place because he put up a sign in his front yard that declared his property a UN-free zone.  Lots of people made fun of him, wondering what impact the UN could possibly have on a guy with a few acres of land in the sticks in southern Utah.  Given that the UN operates some programs that provide medical aid and food to those in need or preserve cultural heritage sights, albeit in a bureaucratic and inefficient way, alongside some of truly inefficient things they do in the general assembly, at the time, I had no real opinion either way, but always felt the guy probably understood things better than I did.  A decade or so later, with the international community firmly entrenched in the big-government control movement and its many tentacles creeping farther and farther into our everyday lives, it seems the guy who wanted to keep the UN (and other global elites) out of his back yard was on to something.

The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of 21st-century Fascism by Glenn Beck with Justin Haskins (ISBN:  978-1-63763-059-4) provides an overview of just what the Great Reset is.  Beck and Haskins view it as an attempt by elites on the global stage to take over and subsequently control people politically and economically.  They note that this is a plan that has been in the works for much longer than just since the coronavirus happened in 2020, although that served as a crisis that could be used to further many of the goals of those pushing for the Great Reset (Leftists around the world, not just Joe Biden as the title might lead one to believe).  Other things that have served as a way for Klaus Schwab, George Soros, and others to further their agenda include environmentalism and the rise of national debts and inflation, which many Leftists want to combat by employing something called “modern monetary theory,” which states that national debt doesn’t really matter, only inflation does, since governments have the ability print the money they need (taxation is used to control (read: punish) people or organizations, not necessarily to raise revenue).  Another economic tool of those pushing the Great Reset, which is a politically loaded term these days, although one that the book includes in direct quotations from the horses’ mouths, is environmental, social, governance (ESG), a system that the elite wants to use to evaluate business and individuals the way in essentially the same way credit scores are used, just without so much worry about credit and more worry about those more political factors.  The system was designed to counteract the Right’s call for business to self-regulate and not have the government involved.  With ESG involved, big investment firms can buy shares in a company and then demand that the company adhere to ESG standards, thereby causing, ostensibly, business to drive the ESG agenda and not government.  Beck and Haskins finish the book with some policy prescriptions, almost all of which are calls to action on a local level in most cases: support small businesses, be politically active on the local level, don’t live lies in our personal lives.

The book was an interesting read.  It was written a in 2022, but is especially relevant given the rise of ESG and organizations like the World Economic Forum (WEF), which push the Great Reset.  The history of the Great Reset, relevant quotations from those pushing it, not just spouting off about it (all extensively noted in endnotes), and solid explanations of just what these terms refer to and how they apply to the common man, make the book worth a read.  I am not a huge fan of the book’s subtitle, although I understand it given that many of the Great Reset players have ties to Biden.  Beck does note that the Great Reset is not necessarily a partisan issue as there are culprits normally associated with the American Right, too.  However, he focuses on those tied in some way to Joe Biden and the U.S. Democratic machine.  I think that section could’ve been a little better.  Some readers may not appreciate some of the humor in some of the sections.  I was kind of on the fence about some of it — it was all appropriate; I just usually appreciate a more serious tone, but I think regular Beck listeners will get it and appreciate it.  In the end, I thought the actions the authors suggested we take were all very solid.  They were all things that people can do.  I found the extensive quotations from Russian dissident Solzhenitsyn to be powerful, especially the one asking us to not live a lie.

 

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License and is copyrighted © MMXXI John Pruess.