Lovecraft on the mid-term election

I said I'd not say much about tomorrow's exercise in representative democracy (plus a bunch of dumb-ass ballot measures) but I was amused and delighted by the following, a quotation from the letters of H.P. Lovecraft (thanks to writer Mark W. Tiedemann for putting it in a Facebook update):

"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."

-- Letter to C.L. Moore, August 1936 quoted in H.P. Lovecraft, a Life by S.T. Joshi, p. 574

Don't anyone even think about bothering to inform me by way of comments that Lovecraft also held a lot of other views with which I would disagree. I know he was a racist and anti-Semite, but so was nearly every other WASPy person in New England in the early twentieth century, and few WASPs seriously questioned the innate racial superiority of WASPs in those days, so HPL was in no way outside the mainstream of his society and time period in that regard, whatever we may think of it now. I know all that already. But what I dig about the above passage is how it remains such an appropriate assessment of the modern GOP even coming from such a different time. Things really have not changed that much. Indeed, if HPL returned from the dead now and assessed the current nature of the Republicans, he'd probably be even more disgusted. The alliance between the GOP and the religious loons happened decades after HPL's time, and I wonder if he would have imagined that such nuttiness could survive so far into the future. After all, while he had strong views on issues of the day, he also held that human affairs are important only the human scale and that really, on the scale of the universe, we don't matter at all. I suspect that he would find the prevalence of religious fundamentalism and its close alliance with kooky political regimes in the 21st century to be quite disgusting. And he'd probably say something very much like his words from 75 years ago.

Apropos of nothing, the image below is one I snagged in a random Google search. These rather attractive turn-of- the-20th-century youths are evidently HPL's high school class. But I can't say with certainty which, if any, of them are the man himself, though one in particular looks like him (he supposedly skipped school a lot and may have missed picture day). I like how their uniforms say "HOPE."