The very qualities that make humans
admirable – courage, drive, energy, charisma – make our world vulnerable. The
word that best describes that constellation of qualities is “moxie.” It seems
emblematic to me. The word is derived from a commercial product (Moxie soda),
invented by Augustin Thompson from Union, Maine; it was first sold as a patent
medicine in 1876 in Lowell, Massachusetts, which by the middle of the 19th
century had the country’s largest industrial complex, the Massachusetts Mills;
in 1884 Thompson took advantage of the sugar craze and reformulated Moxie as a
soft drink and thereupon gained it great popularity, presumably among the
down-trodden immigrants of the industrial revolution; its advertising (“Moxie
Man”) was powerful enough to bring a new word into the language; like so many
local things it succumbed to the power of a multinational, in this case
Coca-Cola. And now its popularity is limited to New England, mostly in Maine , which trades in
icons and lost causes and illusions. And so the word seems to me to describe
both the people of Maine
and the dangers that surround us.
Excerpted from Saving
Maine: A Personal Gazetteer
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