Thackeray in Tampa

Lately I've been enjoying Robin Bates' blog, Better Living Through Beowulf, in which he interprets modern events through the prism of classic literature. In his most recent post, he examines the Republican Party's mythical belief that all business owners are entirely self-made, with no government help (the dishonest and already-tired "We Built It" mantra), with relevant passages from Thackeray's Vanity Fair, including this one:

To account for your own hard-heartedness and ingratitude in such a case, you are bound to prove the other party’s crime. It is not that you are selfish, brutal, and angry at the failure of a speculation—no, no—it is that your partner has led you into it by the basest treachery and with the most sinister motives. From a mere sense of consistency, a persecutor is bound to show that the fallen man is a villain—otherwise he, the persecutor, is a wretch himself.

Although those passages leave me with absolutely zero interest in ever reading Vanity Fair, I still find Bates' discussion to be quite interesting.