He would give
stemwinding speeches on the House floor against the Fed.
When I went to my childhood home in South Carolina for the holidays last year, a visiting Nigerian priest celebrated Christmas Mass at my own family's parish, surprising his passive audience with an upbeat,
stemwinding, almost evangelical homily on God's glory.
"To take a hand in the government of society and to talk about it is [an American's] most important business and, so to say, the only pleasure he knows." Indeed, with banners and bunting and brass bands playing, with
stemwinding soapbox speeches - and with barrels of corn whiskey and hard cider freely flowing - Americans rightfully celebrated the uniqueness of their democratic institutions.
Northampton's ancestral kvetch, Solomon Stoddard, set the tone for this screming beneath the sky well back in the eighteenth century, when, as the narratormentor to the reader doing "Order and Flux" reports, the dentist/ theologian and deliverer of some
stemwinding Great-awakening jeremiads in the years 1711-17 "foretold the world's cold and imminent end, characterizing that end as a kind of grim entropic stasis already harbinged by, among other portents: poor nutrition and its attendant moral and dental decay; the increasing infertility of modern woman; the rise of the novel; the Great Awakening itself" (OFN 94).