Considering this morning’s political landscape, particularly the election of Rand Paul (at least my adopted state of West Virginia elected a Democrat, which I wasn’t confident would happen), I am reminded of what H.P. Lovecraft had to say about Republicans in 1936.

The following quote is taken from S. T. Joshi’s Lovecraft biography A Dreamer and a Visionary, and was brought up recently on an email loop in which I take part:

“As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”

Replace the word “Republican” with “Tea Partier” and you get a sense of how I’m feeling today …