(TFT) What's a game?

["Jay Carlisle" <selfinflicted_wounds@boardermail.com>]

Wonderful quote I'd like to share

http://www.charlespierce.net/

"Used to be that my grandmother told me stories. They weren't her stories, exactly. They were stories that she had heard from her parents, and grandparents, and her uncles and aunts on the family farm in Lixnaw, in north Kerry. They had all heard them from the shanachie, the itinerant storytellers who functioned not merely as entertainment, but also as the communal memory. A shanachie had to be good at the job, as it was the stories that got him fed and housed for the night. At any rate, it seemed like a good job to me.

That's where it started for me -- the notion that telling the tribe its stories so that the tribe might be better for it was a valuable and honorable profession....In fact, if you read back through our own history as an independent people, you discover that the role of the shanachie is not far from the heart of what Mr. Madison and the rest of the assembled had in mind -- that a people free to be told its stories by those free to tell them is a people that will remain free. It's also why the colonial British used to arrest the shanachie wherever they found one. It's why the sheriffs used to bust the old bluesmen for "vagrancy." Of course they were vagrants -- that was their job. Their stories were vagrants, too, but nobody caught them. The stories are still free."

Charles P. Pierce
American Stories
BookSense.com



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