"When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion"
About this Quote
Armed with facts and still “merry,” McGinley strolls into debate like someone who still believes in the social contract - and then immediately asks Providence for body armor. The wit is doing double duty: it flatters the reasonable reader while admitting, with a wince, how little reason rules the room. “The fool as adversary” isn’t just wrong; he’s structurally unreachable, sealed inside a private fiefdom where “mind” is “a kingdom” and logic has no jurisdiction. That metaphor lands because it frames irrationality as sovereignty: you can’t argue your way into someone else’s country if they don’t recognize your passport.
The rhyme and meter matter. The jaunty sing-song (“come / merry”) sets up an almost nursery-rhyme cadence, then turns it into a cautionary prayer. That tonal pivot is the trapdoor: you start smiling and end up recognizing the exhaustion of persuasion. The sharper sting is in the final couplet, where McGinley maps a whole epistemic inversion: the fool labels your “conviction” as “prejudice” while laundering his “prejudice” into “opinion.” It’s not ignorance; it’s a rhetorical power move, a way of claiming neutrality while smuggling in certainty.
Contextually, McGinley wrote in a mid-century America that prized “common sense” and polite discourse while simmering with ideological polarization (from the Cold War to domestic culture battles). The poem reads now like a pre-internet diagnosis of bad-faith argument: facts aren’t defeated, they’re reclassified. The prayer isn’t for victory; it’s for surviving the encounter without being dragged into the fool’s kingdom.
The rhyme and meter matter. The jaunty sing-song (“come / merry”) sets up an almost nursery-rhyme cadence, then turns it into a cautionary prayer. That tonal pivot is the trapdoor: you start smiling and end up recognizing the exhaustion of persuasion. The sharper sting is in the final couplet, where McGinley maps a whole epistemic inversion: the fool labels your “conviction” as “prejudice” while laundering his “prejudice” into “opinion.” It’s not ignorance; it’s a rhetorical power move, a way of claiming neutrality while smuggling in certainty.
Contextually, McGinley wrote in a mid-century America that prized “common sense” and polite discourse while simmering with ideological polarization (from the Cold War to domestic culture battles). The poem reads now like a pre-internet diagnosis of bad-faith argument: facts aren’t defeated, they’re reclassified. The prayer isn’t for victory; it’s for surviving the encounter without being dragged into the fool’s kingdom.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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