Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3154

Typed transcription by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath at Waterford, Virginia

July 10, 1954

CONCERNING THE MORNING NEWS

Your cousin Irvan says politics is the least inte­resting of all.

                            “Does he say that from                                    experience, or theoretical?”

From both, I expect. He says listening to those international negotiations tires him out.

It’s wearisome to be threshing old straw when there’s new grain to be had. If you’re interested in a cock fight you naturally give it your close attention. But the issue involved has no long term. It’s temporary and superficial. The only far-reaching issue of politics is just who shall sit in the driver’s seat of ultimate world slavery. The divine alternative to slavery — creative freedom — involves no political aspect or element at all.

Don’t infer that we shouldn’t ever listen to the news, for in all its welter there are sparks and flashes of the life which is manifesting itself creatively in the social evolution, flashes that if haply we seek we may find.

I’ve thought quite a lot lately how TIME and NEWS­WEEK and the weekly news magazines publish on their front pages so much of these political inconsequentialities. ..just as the blows are consequential to the immediate issue but without any creative or long term relevancy.