@BillRM,
Quote:There was no real constitutional issues complex or otherwise that people had a right to peacefully protest the country involvement in World War One even those the courts turn their backs and did allowed citizens to be sentence to twenty years in prison for doing so.
And not only 20 years Bill. The treatment they received in prison, from people who were comfortably placed in the US, having evaded conscription by getting a job in an exempt occupation, so incensed Mr Frank Harris that he spent a great deal of his time campaigning against it. At some risk to himself.
You can read an account of it, if you don't mind facing descriptions of torture, in his autobiography, My Life and Loves. It is a wonderful book for many reasons. Every young man should read that book. And repeat the exercise in his 30s and again in his 50s. If he gets to 70 he has enough from that to consider giving it another go. By which time he can say that he has "read" it. And not before.
It's the same with movies. The really great ones can be enjoyed many times.
It's a bit like learning how to undress a lady. Practice makes perfect and a clumsy beginning can be transforned into an expertise if one is open to learning from experience. When no learning is taking place the clumsy beginning soon changes into the lady accepting that she has to undress herself. Which defeats the whole object of the exercise from a Christian point of view.
When that happens, as it sadly so often does, a piteous whining of mealy-mouthed platitudes about other people being misogynists, or literary arty-farties as the case maybe, is very soon set going and continues for as long as the refusal to learn from experience does.
Both being giveaway signs of a complete wanker. Or a hypnotised lady. I tempt people to produce those signifiers in order to orient myself on this site. I don't go on any others.
Literature is the toughest school it is possible to go to. And Mark Twain hadn't really bothered. So also undressing a lady to her satisfaction after a long series of such events. Undressing a lot of different ones, as Casanova and Don Juan did, doesn't require much beyond a third class graduation from high school.
Try Evelyn Waugh's autobiographical writings to see how tough real literary men are.