Obama Speech Scandal: Text Believed to Be Lifted From Obscure Davy Crockett Frontier Translation of Plato

News just through on a suspected plagiarism scandal involving President Obama’s speech writer Jon Favreau. It appears that the inauguration speech for the 44th US president may have been partially lifted from a Davy Crockett translation of Plato’s The Republic, which the frontiersman wrote during the Texan revolution. The Crockett text, entitled ‘Open Season’, is a mixture of parochial translations and anecdotes, and includes the following passage which has been raised to our attention:

“This is the price and the promise of citizenship. The republic is our duty and our destiny, and for all the highest calling. No diversions from service and leadership will be tolerated.

Our songs and airs, then, will not need instruments of large compass capable of modulation into all the modes, and we shall not maintain craftsmen to make them, in particular the flute, which has the largest compass of all. That leaves the lyre and the cithara for use in the town; and in the country the herdsmen may have some sort of pipe.

For it was not for no reason that our fore fathers gathered in the blood covered snow, dressed in their beaver-skin underpants, roasting buffalo balls over a pit fire. It was to found this republic, which we are all now duty bound to uphold and make immensely powerful and rich at others expense. And do we not all remember their valor? With the darkening clouds of hell approaching, they gathered their servants and delivered this apocryphal line:

‘We’d better win this bloody war, otherwise we’re screwed’. 

And so they did. And you too can win your own battles with such hope and virtue. Just as our soldiers, running hands through the barley of foreign fields, their spears and arrows aimed at the throats of young maidens, negotiate their fulfillment and uphold our republic in all corners of this earth.

To the frontier my friends! Ride with hope in your saddle, harness the wind, the sun, the moon, and other celestial bodies, and make your destiny that of the gods.

Yes we can.”

Posted by Jonty Rhodes in Other | January 21, 2009 1:47PM |