"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Thursday, February 23, 2012

The Regular Son Weighs in on Patriotism



The Regular Son attends a Jesuit high school where they are doing a student-painted mural of great world leaders under the theme of "ism's."   You know, individualism, modernism, pacifism, idealism, etc.   He, along with some more sensible teachers, have already talked the organizers out of doing portraits of Hitler and Stalin for Nazism and Communism -- what were they thinking? -- and now he's trying (or rather, the Regular Guy is surreptitiously trying) to get the school to include "Patriotism" in the mural, with a portrait of Joshua Chamberlain.   Chamberlain, you will recall, was the colonel of the 20th Maine at Little Round Top who led a bayonet charge on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg that perhaps saved the battle, saved the war, and saved the nation.   He won the Congressional Medal of Honor.   (He was also an English and Theology professor at Bowdoin College in Maine.)

Anyway, this is a roundabout way of being able to post the Regular Son's pencil sketch of Joshua Chamberlain.    Chalk it up to being a proud father.

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