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Say What?

Gordon Gecco never said, "Greed is good," although even if he had, it would have been a coy euphemism for the corporate raider mentality he exhibited in Wall Street. Also, "Play it again, Sam"? Once was quite enough for Ingrid Bergman, who left out the "again" on celluloid — posterity ad libbed it — probably because her stopover in Rick's Cafe marked a long time since unoccupied France, when she'd last heard "As Time Goes By."

Unfortunately left out of the misquoted and misattributed famous lines of history which are paraded, with no small enthusiasm, in this Louis Menand New Yorker review is the following: "A land without a people for a people without a land." Who said that?

Theodore Herzl might have, but not before Lord Shaftesbury did. A half-buried gem in Michael Oren's brilliant new history of American involvement in the Middle East — Faith, Power, and Fantasy — the original source of this imperiled slogan should be made the common knowledge of every schoolboy, especially John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.

Shaftesbury was an early 19th century "restorationist," or Gentile proto-Zionist, who believed that Israel was owed to the Jews because they were God's chosen people and thus the rightful station agents of the Biblically designated arrival depot of the messiah. Another forgotten restorationist was an evangelical Christian named George Bush, a professor of Hebrew at New York University, author of a tract entitled, The Valley of Vision: or, The Dry Bones of Israel Revived, and also, predictably, the forebear of the the two U.S. presidents who bear his name.

Sometimes a clever aphorism or throwaway remark that is of doubtful but famous provenance is also immune to factual verification. For instance, we're still not sure if Oscar Wilde said, on his deathbed, "Either those curtains go or I do," but it hardly matters because we can so easily imagine him saying it.

Ditto the supposed orator of this stirring charge to war in 1940:

We are a solid and united nation which would rather go down to ruin than admit the domination of the Nazis… If the enemy does try to invade this country we will fight him in the air and on the sea; we will fight him on the beaches with every weapon we have. He may manage here and there to make a breakthrough: if he does we will fight him on every road, in every village, and in every house, until he or we are utterly destroyed.

You can almost see the jowls quivering in Tory defiance, which would have been a rather impressive feat indeed for Neville Chamberlain, to whom the above broadcast on British radio belongs.

Churchill's other famous day-late-but-right-on-the-money construction involves a certain metallic fabric descending on Eastern Europe and the inaugural instance of the Cold War. And yet…

"You have done well to make up your mind – this was the last minute – the iron curtain of history is just coming down.”

Who said that? It was Nikolai Bukharin, egghead Bolshevik theorist, Right Oppositionist and erstwhile ally of Stalin, in 1926 — a full twenty years before Churchill's famous pronouncement from the platform at Fulton, Missouri — telling the party-expelled Zinoviev and Kamanev that they'd capitulated just in time, renouncing their allegiance to Trotsky's ultra-left campaign at exactly the last moment it'd have been possible to do so.

Bukharin was doubly wrong: he himself was later shot for his alliance with Stalin, just as Zinoviev and Kamenev were for their lack of one.

Here we see the deadly fusion of famous phrases with famous last words.

The New Yorker: PRINTABLES

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