Assurance America Quotes

And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself....A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us.

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth

On the plane leaving Africa, I had a vision of Mama Africa, a powerful and proud African woman carrying the abundant fruits of Africa in a basket. She accompanied me as I gazed down on the continent I was leaving. She would be with me in my new country, Mama Africa assured me, and I would forever be a child of Africa.

In distilled form, though, the explanations of both the right and the left have become mirror images of each other. They are stories of conspiracy, of America being hijacked by an evil cabal. Like all good conspiracy theories, both tales contain just enough truth to satisfy those predisposed to believe in them, without admitting any contradictions that might shake up those assumptions. Their purpose is not to persuade the other side but to keep their bases agitated and assured of the rightness of their respective causes - and lure just enough new adherents to beat the other side into submission.

I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back. -Tolstoy

Unless we are willing to accept our artists as they are, the answer to the question, "Who speaks for America today?" will have to be: the advertising agencies. They are entirely capable of showing us our unparalleled prosperity and our almost classless society, and no one has ever accused them of not being affirmative. Where the artist is still trusted, he will not be looked to for assurance. Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is , as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.

America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception. Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight. The real Trinity of Camelot was Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. Jack Kennedy was the mythological front man for a particularly juicy slice of our history. He called a slick line and wore a world-class haircut. He was Bill Clinton minus pervasive media scrutiny and a few rolls of flab. Jack got whacked at the optimum moment to assure his sainthood. Lies continue to swirl around his eternal flame. It's time to dislodge his urn and cast light on a few men who attended his ascent and facilitated his fall. They were rouge cops and shakedown artist. They were wiretappers and soldiers of fortune and faggot lounge entertainers. Had one second of their lives deviated off course, American History would not exist as we know it. It's time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define there time. Here's to them.

Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job—because all that one does in America is considered a "job"—with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led. In that respect, it is as particular an instance of a "calling" as one might point to. For years I've kept in mind, "Many are called but few are chosen." Even so "called," there were no assurances that one would be answered.

A jail within a jail. In those long hours, he struggled over Reverend King's equation. "Throw us in jail and we will love you ... But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win our freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory." No he could not make that leap to love. He understood neither the impulse of the proposition nor the will to execute it.

By their actions, the Founding Fathers made clear that their primary concern was religious freedom, not the advancement of a state religion. Individuals, not the government, would define religious faith and practice in the United States. Thus the Founders ensured that in no official sense would America be a Christian Republic. Ten years after the Constitutional Convention ended its work, the country assured the world that the United States was a secular state, and that its negotiations would adhere to the rule of law, not the dictates of the Christian faith. The assurances were contained in the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797 and were intended to allay the fears of the Muslim state by insisting that religion would not govern how the treaty was interpreted and enforced. John Adams and the Senate made clear that the pact was between two sovereign states, not between two religious powers.

We are not statistics. We are the people from whom you took this land by force and blood and lies. We are the people to whom you promised to pay, in recompense for all this vast continent you stole, some small pitiful pittance to assure at least our bare survival. And we are the people from whom you now snatch away even that pittance, abandoning us and your own honor without a qualm, even launching military attacks on our women and children and Elders, and targeting — illegally even by your own self-serving laws — those of us, our remaining warriors, who would dare to stand up and try to defend them. You practice crimes against humanity at the same time that you piously speak to the rest of the world of human rights! America, when will you live up to your own principles?

The end-game for statists is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: you're assuring yourself of the votes of both the welfare recipient and of the mammoth bureaucracy required to process his welfare.

Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.

from Democracy in America (1835) It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue prosperity and how they are ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it. Americans cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die, and yet are in such a rush to snatch any that come within their reach, as if expecting to stop living before they have relished them. They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose their grip as they hurry after some new delight.

Official state historical markers form a smaller population, and early in my research I determined to read all of them. Texas dissuaded me. The Lone Star state has more state historical markers—nearly twelve thousand—than the rest of the United States put together. To read and digest one marker per minute would require 200 hours—five full weeks in the Texas office. At the other end of the spectrum is Maine, whose assistant director of historic preservation flatly assured me, “Maine does not have historical markers along its highways.” Maine has markers and monuments, of course, not put up by a state agency, so the only way to read them is to drive every road in the state, keeping a sharp lookout.

Ever since I became an American, people have told me that America is about leaving your past behind. I’ve never understood that. You can no more leave behind your past than you can leave behind your skin. The compulsion to delve into the past, to speak for the dead, to recover their stories: that’s part of who Evan was, and why I loved him. Just the same, my grandfather is part of who I am, and what he did, he did in the name of my mother and me and my children. I am responsible for his sins, in the same way that I take pride in inheriting the tradition of a great people, a people who, in my grandfather’s time, committed great evil. In an extraordinary time, he faced extraordinary choices, and maybe some would say this means that we cannot judge him. But how can we really judge anyone except in the most extraordinary of circumstances? It’s easy to be civilized and display a patina of orderliness in calm times, but your true character only emerges in darkness and under great pressure: is it a diamond or merely a lump of the blackest coal? Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to his and my lasting shame. Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there’s nothing learned, nothing gained. It’s simple, but it’s cowardly. I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.

That is, " Harry said, " because the world has never seen - in initiative, imagination, courage, and steadfastness - anything like the American fighting man. Not the Germans, the non-Germans, the semi-German Viennese, the British, the Scots, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Danish, or the Nepalese. You may in the future condemn us for it. You may continue to think that we are savage, disproportionate, and uncivilized. But we saved you the last time. And it is we, I guarantee you, will will liberate Paris and drive into Berlin. We don't like it. We don't like fighting and dying. But ... when it comes time for that, we are facile princeps, and will always be. We were born for it. The terrain of the New World educated us in it. That in America every man is a king assures us of it.

These wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast, and until science disclosed the drama of where they come from and how they live. The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.

L'Avventura,' Dad said, 'has the sort of ellipsis ending most American audiences would rather undergo a root canal than be left with, not only because they loathe anything left to the imagination-we're talking about the country that invented spandex-but also because they are a confident, self-assured nation. They know Family. They know Right from Wrong. They know God-many of them attest to daily chats with the man. And the idea that none of us can truly know anything at all-not the lives of our friends or family, not even ourselves-is a thought they'd rather be shot in the arm with their own semi-automatic rifle than face head-on. Personally, I think there's something terrific about not knowing, relinquishing man's feeble attempt to control. When you throw up your hands, say, "Who knows?" you can get on with the sheer gift of being alive.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself. When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to chose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it. Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

At this meeting Ribbentrop also assured Ciano that Munich had revealed the strength of the isolationists in the U.S.A. “so that there is nothing to fear from America.”10 †

-- it's rapidly turning into an us versus them scenario. And it's all but assured that someone is going to fall into the mass graves that corporate America is digging.

In America, only opportunity is assured, not outcomes. Anyone who promises otherwise is acting contrary to the values upon which our Republic was founded.

a beard is the one thing a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.

A 2012 CNBC report ranked the fifty states by overall quality of life, and Vermont placed third. New Hampshire, the second-least-religious state, was first in quality of life, and Maine, the third-least-religious state, was fourth in quality of life. At the other end of the list were Alabama (third-most-religious state) ranked forty-seventh for quality of life, and Louisiana (fourth-most-religious state) ranked fiftieth for quality of life.8 A 2012 ranking of the most and least peaceful states in America showed the same pattern. States with the lowest violent crime are 1. Maine, 2. Vermont, and 3. New Hampshire, the three least-religious states in America. The most dangerous state in America, with the highest murder and incarceration rates, is also the fourth-most-religious state, Louisiana.9 Statistics and rankings do not prove that Christianity caused or exacerbates the challenges faced by the most religious states in America, of course. What is clear, however, is that Christianity has not solved its most serious problems, despite repeated assurances from Christians that it can and does.

I was told—by the same people who had long assured me of China’s interest in only a modest leadership role within an emerging multipolar world—that the Communist Party is realizing its long-term goal of restoring China to its “proper” place in the world. In effect, they were telling me that they had deceived me and the American government. With perhaps a hint of understated pride, they were revealing the most systematic, significant, and dangerous intelligence failure in American history. And because we have no idea the Marathon is even under way, America is losing.

I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means—except by getting off his back.

the Pilgrims didn’t have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English—Samoset only a little, but Squanto with total assurance (and some Spanish into the bargain).

Pleasure died forty years ago in America, perhaps further back, in a wave of carbon monoxide, gasoline, cigarettes for dames, the belief in everything and everybody, tolerance for the intolerable, the hatred of being alone in silence for more than twenty seconds, the assurance that immortality was Americans eating all-cow franks, with speeded-up peristalsis while talking to a crowd of fifteen trillion other same-bodies eating sandwiches, gassing cokes, peristalsing, and talking, while baseball-sound-movie-TV tomorrow's trots off track betting howled roared farted choked gagged exploded reentered atmo honked bawled deafened pawed puked croaked shouted repeated repeated REPEATED, especially SAY IT AGAIN LOUDER SAY IT AGAIN, stick that product in every God-damned American's mouth and make him say I BOUGHT IT, GOD I BOUGHT IT AND IT'S GREAT IT's HOLLYWOOD IT'S MY ARSE GOING UP AND DOWN AGAIN, IT'S USA, GOD, and if you can't get it in his mouth and make him SWEAR IT SWEAR IT USA, stick it in his anal sphincter (look it up in the dictionary, college graduates, on account of you didn't have time to learn it in the College of Your Choice).

And then there was the sad sign that a young woman working at a Tim Hortons in Lethbridge, Alberta, taped to the drive-through window in 2007. It read, “No Drunk Natives.” Accusations of racism erupted, Tim Hortons assured everyone that their coffee shops were not centres for bigotry, but what was most interesting was the public response. For as many people who called in to radio shows or wrote letters to the Lethbridge Herald to voice their outrage over the sign, there were almost as many who expressed their support for the sentiment. The young woman who posted the sign said it had just been a joke. Now, I’ll be the first to say that drunks are a problem. But I lived in Lethbridge for ten years, and I can tell you with as much neutrality as I can muster that there were many more White drunks stumbling out of the bars on Friday and Saturday nights than there were Native drunks. It’s just that in North America, White drunks tend to be invisible, whereas people of colour who drink to excess are not. Actually, White drunks are not just invisible, they can also be amusing. Remember how much fun it was to watch Dean Martin, Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, John Wayne, John Barrymore, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe play drunks on the screen and sometimes in real life? Or Jodie Marsh, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Tweedy, Britney Spears, and the late Anna Nicole Smith, just to mention a few from my daughter’s generation. And let’s not forget some of our politicians and persons of power who control the fates of nations: Winston Churchill, John A. Macdonald, Boris Yeltsin, George Bush, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Hard drinkers, every one. The somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks. They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they are driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the ex-premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star Lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others. More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.

By the way, there is nothing, absolutely nothing at all, that assures me that white America’s collective future will be any different than a miserable failure when it comes to facing the existential necessity of addressing and eradicating white racism.

On Chicken Parmesan: It was all downhill from there. Eventually, the boneless chicken breast replaced the chicken breast as America’s favorite tasteless meat product, and then boneless skinless chicken breast, and somewhere in between the birth of my ultimate nemesis: The Chicken Patty. How things went quite so far downhill that the patty found its way into ANY Italian food is beyond me, but I can assure you this dish isn’t what anyone back in Italy had in mind when they sent Vito through Ellis Island with an eggplant recipe.

The racial terrorism of lynching in many ways created the modern death penalty. America’s embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while assuring white southerners that black men would still pay the ultimate price.

p. 39 Rum, in fact, was the unspoken demon in most negotiations and failed treaties with the Delaware nation. That evil influence has been largely expunged from histories. Access to rum, or its prohibition, assured or canceled oaths and pacts no sooner than they were sworn.

It now feels like an odd assurance to have had to make, since the attack happened hundreds of miles away, but that day it seemed as if we all had to check on each other for injury, as if anyone we cared about might have been harmed that morning just by being in the same world where this had happened.

Being indebted is to be cautious, inhibited, and to never speak out of turn. It is to lead a life constrained by choices that are never your own. The man or woman who feels comfortable holding court at a dinner party will speak in long sentences, with heightened dramatic pauses, assured that no one will interject while they’re mid-thought, whereas I, who am grateful to be invited, speak quickly in clipped compressed bursts, so that I can get a word in before I’m interrupted. If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce.

Trouble is, George Washington is not my ancestor, private or public. He owned my ancestors, abused them as chattel and willed them to his wife, Martha, upon his death. I and mine need to know about George and Martha but, assuredly, we do not need to revere them. Indeed, psychically we cannot afford to revere them.

The right’s contention that we are a “Christian nation” that has fallen from pure origins and can achieve redemption by some kind of return to Christian values is based on wishful thinking, not convincing historical argument. Writing to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, President Washington assured his Jewish countrymen that America “gives…bigotry no sanction.” In a treaty with the Muslim nation of Tripoli initiated by Washington, completed by John Adams, and ratified by the Senate in 1797, the Founders declared that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion….

Victory is not assured. Victory may be in the portents, but it must be urged there by violence, by suffering, by martyrs, by blood. Victory is wrought by ingenuity, persistence, and sacrifice. Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right. She cannot know what shape that struggle will take. There are so many battles to be fought, so many fights on so many fronts -- in India, in China, in the Americas -- all linked together by the same drive to exploit that which is not white and English. She knows only that she will be in it at every unpredictable turn, will fight until her dying breath.

I HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It’s where I’m from, after all. There’s baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don’t obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective. Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas. When I checked in, the clerk needed to record my details, naturally enough, and asked for my home address. Our house doesn’t have a street number, just a name, and I have found in the past that that is more deviance than an American computer can sometimes cope with, so I gave our London address. The girl typed in the building number and street name, then said: “City?” I replied: “London.” “Can you spell that please?” I looked at her and saw that she wasn’t joking. “L-O-N-D-O-N,” I said. “Country?” “England.” “Can you spell that?” I spelled England. She typed for a moment and said: “The computer won’t accept England. Is that a real country?” I assured her it was. “Try Britain,” I suggested. I spelled that, too—twice (we got the wrong number of T’s the first time)—and the computer wouldn’t take that either. So I suggested Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK, and GB, but those were all rejected, too. I couldn’t think of anything else to suggest. “It’ll take France,” the girl said after a minute. “I beg your pardon?” “You can have ‘London, France.’ ” “Seriously?” She nodded. “Well, why not?” So she typed “London, France,” and the system was happy. I finished the check-in process and went with my bag and plastic room key to a bank of elevators a few paces away. When the elevator arrived, a young woman was in it already, which I thought a little strange because the elevator had come from one of the upper floors and now we were going back up there again. About five seconds into the ascent, she said to me in a suddenly alert tone: “Excuse me, was that the lobby back there?” “That big room with a check-in desk and revolving doors to the street? Why, yes, it was.” “Shoot,” she said and looked chagrined. Now I am not for a moment suggesting that these incidents typify Austin, Texas, or America generally or anything like that. But it did get me to thinking that our problems are more serious than I had supposed. When functioning adults can’t identify London, England, or a hotel lobby, I think it is time to be concerned. This is clearly a global problem and it’s spreading. I am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas.

was the result of government policies, carefully crafted in a thoughtful and bipartisan atmosphere, that assured America’s lead in building an information-age economy. The most influential person in this process, which may come as a surprise to those who know of his role only as a punch line to jokes, was Senator Al Gore Jr. of Tennessee.

As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere - education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations - Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.

There is a kinship, between the climate scientists and the epidemiologists and the scholars of authoritarian states. The people who research worst-case scenarios are stuck breaking bad news while protectors of profit margins and purveyors of institutionalist mythologies market false assurances. The later remain successful not in spite of evidence, but to spite the evidence.

Would the behavior of the United States during the war—in military action abroad, in treatment of minorities at home—be in keeping with a “people’s war”? Would the country’s wartime policies respect the rights of ordinary people everywhere to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? And would postwar America, in its policies at home and overseas, exemplify the values for which the war was supposed to have been fought? These questions deserve thought. At the time of World War II, the atmosphere was too dense with war fervor to permit them to be aired. For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks, but not its record in world affairs. It had opposed the Hatian revolution for independence from France at the start of the nineteenth century. It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had “opened” Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats. It had declared an Open Door Policy in China as a means of assuring that the United States would have opportunities equal to other imperial powers in exploiting China. It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years.

You have theoreticians who say, "The U.S. must stop the process of nuclear armament. We have enough already. Today America has enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other half of the world. Why should we need more than that?" Let the American nuclear specialists reason this way if they want, but for some reason the nuclear specialists of the Soviet Union—and the leaders of the Soviet Union—think differently.

In the gym, you don't have to say anything, you just have to work out and make studied eye contact (or not make eye contact at all) and someone will come up and talk to you eventually, if they like your triceps. Especially in America. Oh America. How do they bring you up like that? So forward, upbeat, and self-assured? I'm not really complaining. It's just that when you come talk to me, I'm a little bit scared.

VP Pence himself also assured me that the data and policies I expressed were correct; he had requested from me, and personally read, summaries of studies and documents on schools, risks to children, testing, and other issues. Given that the VP was in charge of the Task Force, shouldn’t the bottom-line advice emanating from it comport with the policies of the administration? But he would never speak with Dr. Birx at all.

America today is in danger of drifting from its best traditions. We have allowed false prophets of selfishness to obscure our vision. We have grown numb to a creeping cynicism about progress and public life. We crave human connection yet hide behind walls. We worship the money chase yet decry the toll it exacts on us. We allow the market to dominate our lives, relationships, yearnings and aspirations. We indulge in nostalgia and irony and addictive entertainment, then purge from our hearts any true idealism or passion, any notion that being American should mean something more than "everyday low prices" or "every man for himself." In the midst of this dislocation and disorientation, so many Americans today yearn for higher purpose, for calling--for some assurance that life matters. We wish to believe there is more to our days than is revealed on our screens. Make no mistake: this is a spiritual crisis.

America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception. Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight. The real Trinity of Camelot was Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. Jack Kennedy was the mythological front man for a particularly juicy slice of our history. He called a slick line and wore a world-class haircut. He was Bill Clinton minus pervasive media scrutiny and a few rolls of flab. Jack got whacked at the optimum moment to assure his sainthood. Lies continue to swirl around his eternal flame. It's time to dislodge his urn and cast light on a few men who attended his ascent and facilitated his fall. They were rouge cops and shakedown artists. They were wiretappers and soldiers of fortune and faggot lounge entertainers. Had one second of their lives deviated off course, American History would not exist as we know it. It's time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time. Here's to them.

Racism is a philosophy based on a contempt for life. It is the arrogant assertion that one race is the center of value and object of devotion, before which other races must kneel in submission. It is the absurd dogma that one race is responsible for all the progress of history and alone can assure the progress of the future. Racism is total estrangement. It separates not only bodies, but minds and spirits. Inevitably it descends to inflicting spiritual or physical homicide upon the out-group.

Sometime in the fifties I remember seeing On the Waterfront in the movies with Mary and thinking that I’m at least as bad as that Marlon Brando character and that some day I’d like to get in union work. The Teamsters gave me good job security at Food Fair. They could only fire you if they caught you stealing. Let me put it another way, they could only fire you if they caught you stealing and they could prove it. • chapter eight • Russell Bufalino In 1957 the mob came out of the closet. It came out unwillingly, but out it came. Before 1957 reasonable men could differ over whether an organized network of gangsters existed in America. For years FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had assured America that no such organization existed, and he deployed the FBI’s greatest resources to investigate suspected Communists. But as a result of the publicity foisted on the mob in 1957, even Hoover came on board. The organization was dubbed “La Cosa Nostra,” meaning “this thing of ours,” a term heard on government wiretaps. Ironically,

extension of a dialogue we’d been having over seventeen years already. Who were we? What mattered to us? What could we do? In the end, it boiled down to this: I said yes because I believed that Barack could be a great president. He was self-assured in ways that few people are. He had the intellect and discipline to do the job, the temperament to endure everything that would make it hard, and the rare degree of empathy that would keep him tuned carefully to the country’s needs. He was also surrounded by good, smart people who were ready to help. Who was I to stop him? How could I put my own needs, and even those of our girls, in front of the possibility that Barack could be the kind of president who helped make life better for millions of people? I said yes because I loved him and had faith in what he could do. I said yes, though I was at the same time harboring a painful thought, one I wasn’t ready to share: I supported him in campaigning, but I also felt certain he wouldn’t make it all the way. He spoke so often and so passionately of healing our country’s divisions, appealing to a set of higher ideals he believed were innate in most people. But I’d seen enough of the divisions to temper my own hopes. Barack was a black man in America, after all. I didn’t really think he could win.

Not only the yield size of Hood was classified; so was the fact that despite the Atomic Energy Commission’s assurance that it was not testing thermonuclear bombs, Hood was a thermonuclear bomb test. At seventy-four kilotons, it was six times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and remains in 2011 the largest bomb ever exploded over the continental United States. The flash from the Hood bomb was visible from Canada to Mexico and from eight hundred miles out at sea. “So powerful was the blast that it was felt and seen over most of the Western United States as it lighted up the pre-dawn darkness,” reported the United Press International. It took twenty-five minutes for the nuclear blast wave to reach Los Angeles, 350 miles to the west.

Thinking of Christ as nonblack in the twentieth century is as theologically impossible as thinking of him as non-Jewish in the first century. God's Word in Christ not only fulfills his purposes for man through his elected people, but also inaugurates a new age in which all oppressed people become his people. In America, that people is a black people. In order to remain faithful to his Word in Christ, his present manifestation must be the very essence of blackness. It is the job of the Church to become black with him and accept the shame that white society places on blacks. But the Church knows that what is shame to the world is holiness to God. Black is holy, that is, it is a symbol of God's presence in history on behalf of the oppressed man. Where there is black, there is oppression; but blacks can be assured that where there is blackness, there is Christ who has taken on blackness so that what is evil in men's eyes might become good. Therefore Christ is black because he is oppressed, and oppressed because he is black. And if the Church is to join Christ by following his opening, it too must go where suffering is and become black also. This is what the New Testament means by the service of reconciliation. It is not smoothing things over by ignoring the deep-seated racism in white society. It is freeing the racist of racism by making him confront blacks as men. Reconciliation has nothing to do with the “let's talk about it” attitude, or “it takes time” attitude. It merely says, “Look man, the revolution is on. Whose side are you on?

For many years there have been rumours of mind control experiments. in the United States. In the early 1970s, the first of the declassified information was obtained by author John Marks for his pioneering work, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate. Over time retired or disillusioned CIA agents and contract employees have broken the oath of secrecy to reveal small portions of their clandestine work. In addition, some research work subcontracted to university researchers has been found to have been underwritten and directed by the CIA. There were 'terminal experiments' in Canada's McGill University and less dramatic but equally wayward programmes at the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Rochester, the University of Michigan and numerous other institutions. Many times the money went through foundations that were fronts or the CIA. In most instances, only the lead researcher was aware who his or her real benefactor was, though the individual was not always told the ultimate use for the information being gleaned. In 1991, when the United States finally signed the 1964 Helsinki Accords that forbids such practices, any of the programmes overseen by the intelligence community involving children were to come to an end. However, a source recently conveyed to us that such programmes continue today under the auspices of the CIA's Office of Research and Development. The children in the original experiments are now adults. Some have been able to go to college or technical schools, get jobs. get married, start families and become part of mainstream America. Some have never healed. The original men and women who devised the early experimental programmes are, at this point, usually retired or deceased. The laboratory assistants, often graduate and postdoctoral students, have gone on to other programmes, other research. Undoubtedly many of them never knew the breadth of the work of which they had been part. They also probably did not know of the controlled violence utilised in some tests and preparations. Many of the 'handlers' assigned to reinforce the separation of ego states have gone into other pursuits. But some have remained or have keen replaced. Some of the 'lab rats' whom they kept in in a climate of readiness, responding to the psychological triggers that would assure their continued involvement in whatever project the leaders desired, no longer have this constant reinforcement. Some of the minds have gradually stopped suppression of their past experiences. So it is with Cheryl, and now her sister Lynn.

I needn’t have worried about our welcome. As soon as Diana spotted me, she cried out happily, “Mrs. Robertson, I’m so glad you’re here!” and gave me a huge, spontaneous hug. I assured her, “We wouldn’t have missed this for the world!” I was touched by her genuine warmth and by her evident surprise that we’d traveled so far to share in her triumph. She turned quickly to exclaim, “Oh Charles, look! it’s Patrick’s parents from America!” and formally introduced us to the Prince of Wales. Pat bowed and I curtsied and murmured “Your Royal Highness” just to be on the safe side. Prince Charles radiated tremendous charm and graciousness. His eyes twinkled as he smiled at us. His voice was deep, warm, and resonant, as he said, “How very nice of you to have traveled so far.” I loved his voice! He seemed genuinely pleased to meet us. I thought he was absolutely terrific. I was so excited for Diana, about to marry this perfect prince.

The German philosopher Hans Vaihinger, in his important but, in America, little-known book, The Philosophy of 'As If,' proposed that in addition to inductive and deductive thought, there exists an original thought form he calls "fictional thinking." Myth, religious allegory, metaphor, aphorisms, indeed, the world of legal fictions and analogy are examples of fictions we use every day in thinking. An ordinary road map is actually fiction, for nothing like the map exists. Yet we can move accurately, assuredly in the real world as a result of our reliance on the fictional representation of the map. An argument that depends upon "fictional thinking," as Vaihinger called it, is the most powerful of all arguments—the parables of Christ, the stories of tribal chieftains, the fairy tales and fables that are the very undergarments of our society. Jorge Luis Borges, who won the Nobel Prize for literature, Gabriel García Márquez, and Joseph Campbell have all made the same argument, that "fictional thinking" is the original form of human thought, that it harkens to our genes.

In all the countries of Europe, and in America, too, there now is something that abuses this name: a very narrow, imprisoned, chained type of spirits who want just about the opposite of what accords with our intentions and instincts—not to speak of the fact that regarding the new philosophers who are coming up they must assuredly be closed windows and bolted doors. They belong, briefly and sadly, among the levelers—these falsely so–called ‘free spirits’—being eloquent and prolifically scribbling slaves of the democratic taste and its ‘modern ideas’; they are all human beings without solitude, without their own solitude, clumsy good fellows whom one should not deny either courage or respectable decency—only they are unfree and ridiculously superficial, above all in their basic inclination to find in the forms of the old society as it has existed so far just about the cause of all human misery and failure—which is a way of standing truth happily upon her head! What they would like to strive for with all their powers is the universal green–pasture happiness of the herd, with security, lack of danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone; the two songs and doctrines which they repeat most often are ‘equality of rights’ and ‘sympathy for all that suffers’—and suffering itself they take for something that must be abolished. We opposite men, having opened our eyes and conscience to the question where and how the plant ‘man’ has so far grown most vigorously to a height—we think that this has happened every time under the opposite conditions, that to this end the dangerousness of his situation must first grown to the point of enormity, his power of invention and simulation (his ‘spirit’) had to develop under prolonged pressure and constraint into refinement and audacity, his life–will had to be enhanced into an unconditional power– will. We think that hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and devilry of every kind, that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents, serves the enhancement of the species ‘man’ as much as its opposite does.

The legal argument the ACLU used to support Engel and his fellow plaintiffs was that the Regents’ nondenominational prayer violated the Establishment Clause. The ACLU backed its argument not with a clause in the Constitution, but with a phrase taken from a private letter written by President Thomas Jefferson. In a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut on January 1, 1802, Jefferson wrote that the First Amendment, enacted on behalf of all the American people, “declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”7 Jefferson coined the metaphor of a wall of church-state separation to assure the Baptists in Connecticut that the government would never infringe on the free exercise of their religion. The ACLU stood Jefferson’s reassurance on its head, turning it into a rationale for suppressing the free exercise of religion. That phrase, “wall of separation between church and state,” became a bumper-sticker slogan for leftists and secularists who want to silence religious people and marginalize their beliefs.

In May 1981, Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, gathered his senior officers in a secret conclave to issue a startling announcement: America was planning to launch a nuclear first strike, and obliterate the Soviet Union. For more than twenty years, a nuclear war between East and West had been held at bay by the threat of mutually assured destruction, the promise that both sides would be annihilated in any such conflict, regardless of who started it. But by the end of the 1970s the West had begun to pull ahead in the nuclear arms race, and tense détente was giving way to a different sort of psychological confrontation, in which the Kremlin feared it could be destroyed and defeated by a preemptive nuclear attack. Early in 1981, the KGB carried out an analysis of the geopolitical situation, using a newly developed computer program, and concluded that “the correlation of world forces” was moving in favor of the West. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was proving costly, Cuba was draining Soviet funds, the CIA was launching aggressive covert action against the USSR, and the US was undergoing a major military buildup: the Soviet Union seemed to be losing the Cold War, and, like a boxer exhausted by long years of sparring, the Kremlin feared that a single, brutal sucker punch could end the contest. The KGB chief’s conviction that the USSR was vulnerable to a surprise nuclear attack probably had more to do with Andropov’s personal experience than rational geopolitical analysis. As Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, he had witnessed how quickly an apparently powerful regime might be toppled. He had played a key role in suppressing the Hungarian Uprising. A dozen years later, Andropov again urged “extreme measures” to put down the Prague Spring. The “Butcher of Budapest” was a firm believer in armed force and KGB repression. The head of the Romanian secret police described him as “the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist Party in governing the USSR.” The confident and bullish stance of the newly installed Reagan administration seemed to underscore the impending threat. And so, like every genuine paranoiac, Andropov set out to find the evidence to confirm his fears. Operation RYAN (an acronym for raketno-yadernoye napadeniye, Russian for “nuclear missile attack”) was the biggest peacetime Soviet intelligence operation ever launched.

It astounds me that the media is ignoring Noriega’s extensive ties into this country, from his education at the School of the Americas4 to his well known involvement with Bush and the CIA in the cocaine business. Can’t people see that this so-called War on Drugs is no more than the CIA eliminating their competition while they take over the industry worldwide?” I paused to reflect. “If people don’t wake up soon, we’ll have a drug lord running this country.” “We already do,” Billy said, unjamming his stapling machine. I laughed. “I’m referring to Bill Clinton. In 1984, I was at the Swiss Villa Amphitheater in Lampe Missouri5 where Bush and Clinton were talking about their New World Order. Bush was really pleased with how well Clinton’s Mena cocaine operation was funding the New World Order effort, and he assured Clinton he would be rewarded politically. In those days, the groundwork for NAFTA6 was established to open the border to ‘free trade of drugs to equalize our economies,’ and Clinton was right there in the midst of it all. It was already determined that Bush would be put in the office of President at the same time Salinas was put in as President of Mexico so they could usher in NAFTA.

For my part, the fate of the Jews, and the world’s indifference to it, frightened me very much. I could not but feel, in those sorrowful years, that this human indifference, concerning which I knew so much already, would be my portion on the day that the United States decided to murder its Negroes systematically instead of little by little and catch-as-catch-can. I was, of course, authoritatively assured that what had happened to the Jews in Germany could not happen to the Negroes in America, but I thought, bleakly, that the German Jews had probably believed similar counsellors, and, again, I could not share the white man’s vision of himself for the very good reason that white men in America do not behave toward black men the way they behave toward each other. When a white man faces a black man, especially if the black man is helpless, terrible things are revealed. I know. I have been carried into precinct basements often enough, and I have seen and heard and endured the secrets of desperate white men and women, which they knew were safe with me, because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.

I well believe, dear Mother, that it is somewhat painful for you that I have travelled so far away from you and was not even able to bid you farewell. Indeed, do not think as though I had no filial love for you or else I would not have accepted this call or at least would have asked for your advice. I could not possibly refuse the call, otherwise I would have been disobedient to the heavenly Father who has sufficiently assured me of His will. Time did not permit me to bid you farewell in person. I had to hurry with my dear colleague to my congregation that was already underway. . . . My congregation, to which the wonderful God has led me, is indeed still small but consists mainly of such people who already have suffered much for Christ's sake and therefore have their Christianity not in the mouth but in the heart and demonstrate it in deed. For that reason I not only have love for these upright people with my heart and with joy want to live and die with them in America, but they also love me more than I am worthy and would share their heart with me if they could. . . . [I]f the wind remains good, we will arrive with God's help in 5 or 6 weeks to the place and location for which we rather earnestly yearn because it is said to be a good, fruitful, and blessed land.

Back in Turkey, he used to be: ÖMER ÖZSİPAHİOĞLU. Here in America, he had become an OMAR OZSIPAHIOGLU. His dots were excluded for him to be better included. After all, Americans, just like everyone else, relished familiarity — in names they could pronounce, sounds they could resonate, even if they didn’t make much sense one way or the other. Yet, few nations could perhaps be as self-assured as the Americans in reprocessing the names and surnames of foreigners. When a Turk, for instance, realizes he has just mispronounced the name of an American in Turkey, he will be embarrassed and in all likelihood consider this his own mistake, or in any case, as something to do with himself. When an American realizes he has just mispronounced the name of a Turk in the United States, however, in all likelihood, it won’t be him but rather the name itself that will be held responsible for that mistake. As names adjust to a foreign country, something is always lost — be it a dot, a letter, or an accent. What happens to your name in another territory is similar to what happens to a voluminous pack of spinach when cooked —some new taste can be added to the main ingredient, but its size shrinks visibly. It is this cutback a foreigner learns first. The primary requirement of accommodation in a strange land is estrangement of the hitherto most familiar: your name.

Another way of expressing the history of religion is that faith has hijacked religious spirituality. The prophets and leaders of organized religions, consciously or not, have put spirituality in the service of groups defined by their creation myths. Awe-inspiring ceremonies and sacred rites and rituals and sacrifices are given the deity in return for worldly security and the promise of immortality. As part of the exchange the deity must also make correct moral decisions. Within the Christian faith, among most of the denominational tribes, God is obliged to be against one or more of the following: homosexuality, artificial contraception, female bishops, and evolution. The Founding Fathers of the United States understood the risk of tribal religious conflict very well. George Washington observed, “Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing and ought most to be deprecated.” James Madison agreed, noting the “torrents of blood” that result from religious competition. John Adams insisted that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” America has slipped a bit since then. It has become almost mandatory for political leaders to assure the electorate that they have a faith, even, as for the Mormonism of Mitt Romney, if it looks ridiculous to the great majority. Presidents often listen to the counsel of Christian advisers. The phrase “under God” was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and today no major political candidate would dare suggest it be removed.

Undoubtedly, my dear Dick. Just note the progress of events: consider the migrations of races, and you will arrive at the same conclusion assuredly. Asia was the first nurse of the world, was she not? For about four thousand years she travailed, she grew pregnant, she produced, and then, when stones began to cover the soil where the golden harvests sung by Homer had flourished, her children abandoned her exhausted and barren bosom. You next see them precipitating themselves upon young and vigorous Europe, which has nourished them for the last two thousand years. But already her fertility is beginning to die out; her productive powers are diminishing every day. Those new diseases that annually attack the products of the soil, those defective crops, those insufficient resources, are all signs of a vitality that is rapidly wearing out and of an approaching exhaustion. Thus, we already see the millions rushing to the luxuriant bosom of America, as a source of help, not inexhaustible indeed, but not yet exhausted. In its turn, that new continent will grow old; its virgin forests will fall before the axe of industry, and its soil will become weak through having too fully produced what had been demanded of it. Where two harvests bloomed every year, hardly one will be gathered from a soil completely drained of its strength. Then, Africa will be there to offer to new races the treasures that for centuries have been accumulating in her breast. Those climates now so fatal to strangers will be purified by cultivation and by drainage of the soil, and those scattered water supplies will be gathered into one common bed to form an artery of navigation. Then this country over which we are now passing, more fertile, richer, and fuller of vitality than the rest, will become some grand realm where more astonishing discoveries than steam and electricity will be brought to light.

One might pause here to wonder how it is that the United States claims to support democracy and freedom in the world when it so often backs dictators like the Shah and Somoza. As I tell my human rights class every year, the United States always supports democracy and freedom, except when it doesn’t, which is all the time…. As political analyst Stephen Gowans explains, the United States is simply not what it claims to be, and most likely never has been: The United States—which began as 13 former British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America pursuing a “manifest destiny” of continental expansion, (the inspiration for Nazi Germany’s lebensraum policy); which fought a war with Spain for colonies; which promulgated the Monroe Doctrine asserting a sphere of influence in the Americas; which stole Panama to create a canal; whose special operations forces project US power in 81 countries; whose generals control the militaries of the combined NATO members in Europe and the military forces of South Korea; whose military command stations one hundred thousand troops on the territories of former imperialist rivals, manifestly has an empire. And yet this reality is denied, as assuredly as is the reality that the United States, built on the genocide of Native Americans and the slave labor of Africans, overtly white supremacist until the mid-1960s, and covertly white supremacist since, is unequivocally not a beacon of Enlightenment values, unless liberalism is defined as equality and liberty assigned exclusively to white men who own productive property. Indeed, so antithetical is the United States to the liberal values of the equality of all peoples and nations, freedom from exploitation and oppression, and the absence of discrimination on the bases of class, race, and sex, that it’s difficult to apprehend in what sense the United States has ever been liberal or has in any way had a legitimate claim to being the repository of the values of the Enlightenment.2

I am assured that this is a true story. A man calls up his computer helpline complaining that the cupholder on his personal computer has snapped off, and he wants to know how to get it fixed. “Cupholder?” says the computer helpline person, puzzled. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m confused. Did you buy this cupholder at a computer show or receive it as a special promotion?” “No, it came as part of the standard equipment on my computer.” “But our computers don’t come with cupholders.” “Well, pardon me, friend, but they do,” says the man a little hotly. “I’m looking at mine right now. You push a button on the base of the unit and it slides right out.” The man, it transpired, had been using the CD drawer on his computer to hold his coffee cup. I bring this up here by way of introducing our topic this week: cupholders. Cupholders are taking over the world. It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of cupholders in automotive circles these days. The New York Times recently ran a long article in which it tested a dozen family cars. It rated each of them for ten important features, among them engine size, trunk space, handling, quality of suspension, and, yes, number of cupholders. A car dealer acquaintance of ours tells us that they are one of the first things people remark on, ask about, or play with when they come to look at a car. People buy cars on the basis of cupholders. Nearly all car advertisements note the number of cupholders prominently in the text. Some cars, like the newest model of the Dodge Caravan, come with as many as seventeen cupholders. The largest Caravan holds seven passengers. Now you don’t have to be a nuclear physicist, or even wide awake, to work out that that is 2.43 cupholders per passenger. Why, you may reasonably wonder, would each passenger in a vehicle need 2.43 cupholders? Good question. Americans, it is true, consume positively staggering volumes of fluids. One of our local gas stations, I am reliably informed, sells a flavored confection called a Slurpee in containers up to 60 ounces in size. But even if every member of the family had a Slurpee and a personal bottle of

Driscoll preached a sermon called “Sex: A Study of the Good Bits of Song of Solomon,” which he followed up with a sermon series and an e-book, Porn-again Christian (2008). For Driscoll, the “good bits” amounted to a veritable sex manual. Translating from the Hebrew, he discovered that the woman in the passage was asking for manual stimulation of her clitoris. He assured women that if they thought they were “being dirty,” chances are their husbands were pretty happy. He issued the pronouncement that “all men are breast men. . . . It’s biblical,” as was a wife performing oral sex on her husband. Hearing an “Amen” from the men in his audience, he urged the ladies present to serve their husbands, to “love them well,” with oral sex. He advised one woman to go home and perform oral sex on her husband in Jesus’ name to get him to come to church. Handing out religious tracts was one thing, but there was a better way to bring about Christian revival. 13 Driscoll reveled in his ability to shock people, but it was a series of anonymous blog posts on his church’s online discussion board that laid bare the extent of his misogyny. In 2006, inspired by Braveheart, Driscoll adopted the pseudonym “William Wallace II” to express his unfiltered views. “I love to fight. It’s good to fight. Fighting is what we used to do before we all became pussified,” before America became a “pussified nation.” In that vein, he offered a scathing critique of the earlier iteration of the evangelical men’s movement, of the “pussified James Dobson knock-off crying Promise Keeping homoerotic worship . . .” where men hugged and cried “like damn junior high girls watching Dawson’s Creek.” Real men should steer clear. 14 For Driscoll, the problem went all the way back to the biblical Adam, a man who plunged humanity headlong into “hell/ feminism” by listening to his wife, “who thought Satan was a good theologian.” Failing to exercise “his delegated authority as king of the planet,” Adam was cursed, and “every man since has been pussified.” The result was a nation of men raised “by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers who make sure that Johnny grows up to be a very nice woman who sits down to pee.” Women served certain purposes, and not others. In one of his more infamous missives, Driscoll talked of God creating women to serve as penis “homes” for lonely penises. When a woman posted on the church’s discussion board, his response was swift: “I . . . do not answer to women. So, your questions will be ignored.” 15

the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism had its own politics of inevitability: nature permits technology; technology brings social change; social change causes revolution; revolution enacts utopia. When this turned out not to be true, the European and American politicians of inevitability were triumphant. Europeans busied themselves completing the creation of the European Union in 1992. Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one. Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raised a millennial generation without history. The American politics of inevitability, like all such stories, resisted facts. The fates of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus after 1991 showed well enough that the fall of one system did not create a blank slate on which nature generated markets and markets generated rights. Iraq in 2003 might have confirmed this lesson, had the initiators of America’s illegal war reflected upon its disastrous consequences. The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future. The collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the politics of eternity. Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.

told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.

Here is my six step process for how we will first start with ISIS and then build an international force that will fight terrorism and corruption wherever it appears. “First, in dedication to Lieutenant Commander McKay, Operation Crapshoot commenced at six o’clock this morning. I’ve directed a handpicked team currently deployed in Iraq to coordinate a tenfold increase in aerial bombing and close air support. In addition to aerial support, fifteen civilian security companies, including delegations from our international allies, are flying special operations veterans into Iraq. Those forces will be tasked with finding and annihilating ISIS, wherever they walk, eat or sleep. I’ve been told that they can’t wait to get started. “Second, going forward, our military will be a major component in our battle against evil. Militaries need training. I’ve been assured by General McMillan and his staff that there is no better final training test than live combat. So without much more expenditure, we will do two things, train our troops of the future, and wipe out international threats. “Third, I have a message for our allies. If you need us, we will be there. If evil raises its ugly head, we will be with you, arm in arm, fighting for what is right. But that aid comes with a caveat. Our allies must be dedicated to the common global ideals of personal and religious freedom. Any supposed ally who ignores these terms will find themselves without impunity. A criminal is a criminal. A thief is a thief. Decide which side you’re on, because our side carries a big stick. “Fourth, to the religious leaders of the world, especially those of Islam, though we live with differing traditions, we are still one people on this Earth. What one person does always has the possibility of affecting others. If you want to be part of our community, it is time to do your part. Denounce the criminals who besmirch your faith. Tell your followers the true meaning of the Koran. Do not let the money and influence of hypocrites taint your religion or your people. We request that you do this now, respectfully, or face the scrutiny of America and our allies. “Fifth, starting today, an unprecedented coalition of three former American presidents, my predecessor included, will travel around the globe to strengthen our alliances. Much like our brave military leaders, we will lead from the front, go where we are needed. We will go toe to toe with any who would seek to undermine our good intentions, and who trample the freedoms of our citizens. In the coming days you will find out how great our resolve truly is. “Sixth, my staff is in the process of drafting a proposal for the members of the United Nations. The proposal will outline our recommendations for the formation of an international terrorism strike force along with an international tax that will fund ongoing anti-terrorism operations. Only the countries that contribute to this fund will be supported by the strike force. You pay to play.

Most assuredly that spirit of envious rivalry and depreciating criticism in which many English travellers have written, is greatly to be deprecated, no less than the tone of servile adulation which some writers have adopted; but our American neighbours must recollect that they provoked both the virulent spirit and the hostile caricature by the way in which some of their most popular writers of travels have led an ungenerous onslaught against our institutions and people, and the bitter tone in which their newspaper press, headed by the Tribune, indulges towards

was Himmler whom the Führer had entrusted with the Final Solution, their breathtaking plan to wipe the Jewish people from the face of the earth. It was Himmler who had the nerve to justify this plan, standing before his SS generals in October 1943 and assuring them that they had “the moral right to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us,” to pile up their “corpses side by side” in monuments to the Reich’s power.

It would mean a continuation of his relentless expansion of federal government power; more explosive increases in his crushing, multitrillion-dollar inter-generational debt; a weak foreign policy coupled with his evisceration of America’s military; and the likelihood that more Obama-appointed Supreme Court justices would assure a left-leaning majority on America’s top court for at least a generation.

Thus, it is not because the question of how the world came to be was a burning one that Genesis opens with the Creation. And the modality or method of creation is not even the main point of the Creation story. The Hebrew creation story was as much polemic as it was anything else. Its main point is not, “This is how the world came into existence,” but rather, “Our Jewish tribal God is sovereign over the whole world.” What would strike the ancients the most forcefully from the story was not the statement, “God made the world out of nothing,” but the statement, “Yahweh Elohim made the world”—and therefore the Hebrews who alone worship this God are assured of victory. In contemporary North America, where proponents of creation science square off against proponents of evolution in a kind of political mud wrestling, and where questions of exactly how the world came into existence dominate the discussion, it is easy to miss the main point of the Creation story. The question of the mechanics of how the world came into existence was not central, or even important. The question of which deity was sovereign was.

Sánchez-Parodi took a much harder line, however, on the demand that Cuba should modify its relations with the Soviet Union at the behest of the United States. “The Cubans had no intention of telling the U.S. how to regulate its relations with other nations, and could not permit that [the United States] try to regulate Cuba’s,” he argued. Nor would Cuba cease its efforts on Puerto Rico because “we believe that Puerto Rico has a need for independence and self-determination.” As to the rest of Latin America, he noted, Cuba would pledge its respect for nonintervention if the United States would acknowledge its own covert and overt intervention in the region. “For example, Chile and the Dominican Republic. We must have assurances that what has happened in the past will not happen again.”84

Damning documentation of LSD experimentation should not have been left in the hands of CIA Director Richard Helms. On January 31, 1973, one day before retiring from the CIA, Helms destroyed files on the fates of minds shattered over the previous ten years. Helms supported the mind-altering projects—Operation Chatter, Operation Bluebird/Artichoke, Operations Mknaomi, Mkultra and Mkdelta. By 1963, four years before Monterey Pop, the combined efforts of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, Army Intelligence and U.S. Chemical Corps launched covert operations that seemed necessary. U.S. agents were able to destroy any reputation by inducing hysteria or excessive emotional response, temporary or permanent insanity, encouraging suicide, erasing memory, inventing double or triple personalities inside one mind, prolonging lapses of memory, teaching racism and hatred against specific groups, causing subjects to obey instructions on the telephone or in person, hypnotically assuring that no memory remains of their assignments. The CIA has poison dart guns to kill from a distance, tranquilizers for pets so the household or neighborhood is not alerted by entry or exit. While pure LSD is typically 160 micrograms, the CIA issued 1,600 micrograms. Some of the LSD was administered to patients at Tulane University, who already had wired electrodes in their brain. Was insanity an occupational disease in the music industry? Or does this LSD, tested and described in Army documents, explain how a cultural happening that took place place in 1967-68 could be altered radically and halted?

Think for but a moment of what God has accomplished through his Christians in the United States. Christians have spent the last couple of hundred years going out as missionaries and bringing the gospel to the lost. There is no corner or place where the message has not been carried, and in some quarters it has been received with such great force that we now find those countries sending missionaries back to evangelize our country. It is well, when we criticize all the sins of the United States, that we also remember all those great Christians who gave their lives sharing the gospel.             But no matter how sugar-coated it is made, the United States stands as far from the gospel as it has in decades. What can be done for an old heart like ours? I do believe the one lesson to be taken from this great awakening is that we must come together in prayer. We must wait upon God, but we wait in expectation, knowing that he loves this people of this world more than we ever could. We have the assurance through the Word, that when we pray God listens, and when we pray for something that he has already commanded us to pray for—that he send more laborers into the harvest field—we may be confident of his answer. Let us look, then, to the harvest fields and see what God might turn our hands toward. How blessed is the God who uses such earthen vessels of clay to proclaim his majesty!

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The letter was given to Sharon by Bush to help Sharon justify his unilateral withdrawal of 9,480 Jewish residents and the Israeli Army from Gaza, as part of a ‘peace’ effort to create a new separate Palestinian state, as part of a future ‘two state solution’. Sharon relied on Bush’s letter. In the letter, Bush made four promises to Israel: 1.) The borders of the new Muslim state to be created would not encompass the entire West Bank (referring to Israel as “Judea” and “Samaria,” including Jerusalem), despite Muslim leaders demanding the complete withdrawal from the areas Israel captured when it was invaded in 1967; 2.) Jewish towns and villages in the West Bank would be incorporated into the borders of Israel; 3.) Muslims would have to forego their demand to be given the right to immigrate to Israel; and 4.) Israel’s existence as a Jewish state would be assured. Unfortunately, four years later, in 2008, the Bush administration abandoned these assurances made to Prime Minister Sharon in 2004. Secretary of State Rice told reporters in Israel on the occasion of Israel’s 60th Anniversary as a re-born State that the 2004 letter “talked about realities at that time. And there are realities for both sides…” In an interview in the Oval Office with David Horowitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post, President Bush had to be reminded of the letter by his National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, who said in briefings that “Israel has tried to overstate the importance of a rather vague letter.” (Jerusalem Post, May 14, 2008).

Apart from this critical letter, the Bush administration largely ignored Israel for most of his first seven years, discovering it as a final eighth year issue. Secretary of State Rice was a regular commuter to Israel, all the while “pushing” Israel to give up land to obtain a peace treaty. However, prior to the Bush assurances, which were so hastily withdrawn, Israel has for some appreciable length of time enjoyed the military protection umbrella of American support. The United States of America, on March 26, 1979, guaranteed Israel that if she were to be militarily invaded, America would militarily respond. Israel bargained for this American military commitment and treaty promise as a condition of the Camp David peace agreement with Yassar Arafat and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, brokered by then President Jimmy Carter. The President of the United States of America on that date signed a Memorandum of Agreement between the Governments of the United States of America and the State of Israel.

The commanding officer at Camp Upton in New York, General F. Franklin Bell, took it upon himself to quell an escalating dispute between a group of black soldiers and a regiment of white Southern servicemen who had attempted to remove the black soldiers from a recreational facility. General Bell dismissed all the soldiers except the Southern white officers. “Now, gentlemen,” he said to them, “I am not what you would call ‘a Negro lover.’ I have seen service in Texas and elsewhere in the South.” The fact was, however, that the Southern whites had “started this trouble. I don’t want any explanation. These colored men did not start it. It doesn’t matter how your men feel about these colored men. They are United States soldiers. They must and shall be treated as such. If you can’t take care of your men, I can take care of you.” If the Southerners instigated another racial incident, Bell assured them, “you will be tried, not by a Texas jury but by General Bell, and not one of you will leave this camp for overseas.”16 After Bell delivered this message to the white officers on his base, Camp Upton quickly developed what one contemporary historian called “the finest atmosphere surrounding Negro soldiers in America,” which was due primarily to “the high stand and impartial attitude taken by the late Gen. Franklin Bell, commander.

In short, a nation in covenant with God is assured peace, prosperity and power. In sharp contrast, look at what befalls the nation that abandons the covenant.

Mao assured Forman of the CCP’s democratic aspirations and its admiration of western values. “We are not striving for the social and political Communism of Soviet Russia,” he told him. “Rather, we prefer to think of what we are doing as something that Lincoln fought for in your Civil War: the liberation of slaves.

Mao further assured Forman that “we believe in and practice democracy,” in contrast with what Mao called the “one-party dictatorship as practiced by the Kuomintang today.

A long silence followed Dickinson’s address. Would no one answer? Finally, fubsy, garrulous John Adams rose. He spoke extemporaneously. There was no need for notes. He had made the same speech, more or less, for a year. Jefferson, perhaps used to a different style of oratory in Virginia, later said that Adams was “not graceful or elegant, nor remarkably fluent,” but others would speak of “the magic of his eloquence,” his “genuine eloquence,” his “resistless eloquence”; it was even said that his speech was “higher than all “eloquence.” Calm, assured, Adams nevertheless began by wishing aloud for the deftness of the great orators of antiquity. Proceeding in a tone that he later characterized as courteous, he reiterated the proindependence case, an argument every bit as familiar as the one that Dickinson had just presented. Separation would be beneficial to America. The new nation could chart its own course. Peace and prosperity would be the great rewards of independence. Unlike Dickinson’s remarks, resonating with a fear of the unknown, Adams’s muted address rang with palpable contempt for the present while exulting in the possibilities of the future.16

I also quickly came to appreciate the importance of watching what’s said around clients. When clients make unexpected requests for legal advice – as they often do – I learned that it was better to tell them I’d get back to them with an answer, and go away, research the question, and consult with a supervising attorney, rather than firing back an answer off-the-cuff. A friend of mine at another firm told me a story that illustrates the risks of saying too much. It seems an insurance company had engaged my friend’s California-based firm to help in defending against an environmental claim. This claim entailed reviewing huge volumes of documents in Arizona. So my friend’s firm sent teams of associates to Arizona, all expenses paid, on a weekly basis. Because the insurance company also sent its own lawyers and paralegals, as did other insurance companies who were also defendants in the lawsuit, the document review facility was often staffed with numerous attorneys and paralegals from different firms. Associates were instructed not to discuss the case with anyone unless they knew with whom they were speaking. After several months of document review, one associate from my friend’s firm abandoned his professionalism and discretion when he began describing to a young woman who had recently arrived at the facility what boondoggles the weekly trips were. He talked at length about the free airfare, expensive meals, the easy work, and the evening partying the trips involved. As fate would have it, the young woman was a paralegal working for the insurance company – the client who was paying for all of his “perks” – and she promptly informed her superiors about his comments. Not surprisingly, the associate was fired before the end of the month. My life as an associate would have been a lot easier if I had delegated work more freely. I’ve mentioned the stress associated with delegating work, but the flip side of that was appreciating the importance of asking others for help rather than doing everything myself. I found that by delegating to paralegals and other staff members some of my more tedious assignments, I was free to do more interesting work. I also wish I’d given myself greater latitude to make mistakes. As high achievers, law students often put enormous stress on themselves to be perfect, and I was no different. But as a new lawyer, I, of course, made mistakes; that’s the inevitable result of inexperience. Rather than expect perfection and be inevitably disappointed, I’d have been better off to let myself be tripped up by inexperience – and focus, instead, on reducing mistakes caused by carelessness. Finally, I tried to rely more on other associates within the firm for advice on assignments and office politics. When I learned to do this, I found that these insights gave me either the assurance that I was using the right approach, or guidance as to what the right approach might be. It didn’t take me long to realize that getting the “inside scoop” on firm politics was crucial to my own political survival. Once I figured this out, I made sure I not only exchanged information with other junior associates, but I also went out of my way to gather key insights from mid-level and senior associates, who typically knew more about the latest political maneuverings and happenings. Such information enabled me to better understand the various personal agendas directing work flow and office decisions and, in turn, to better position myself with respect to issues and cases circulating in the office.

Amman’s own file on the state sponsorship of al-Zarqawi’s terrorist activities during the lead-up to the Iraq War stood in marked contrast to what Powell had presented earlier. It wasn’t Baghdad America should have been looking at, the Jordanians said; it was Tehran. A high-level GID source told the Atlantic magazine in 2006: “We know Zarqawi better than he knows himself. And I can assure you that he never had any links to Saddam. Iran is quite a different matter. The Iranians have a policy: they want to control Iraq. And part of this policy has been to support Zarqawi, tactically but not strategically. . . .In the beginning they gave him automatic weapons, uniforms, military equipment, when he was with the army of Ansar al-Islam. Now they essentially just turn a blind eye to his activities, and to those of al-Qaeda generally. The Iranians see Iraq as a fight against the Americans, and overall, they’ll get rid of Zarqawi and all of his people once the Americans are out.

Ultimately, pay levels are not about merit or social value; they’re about power dynamics. They’re about how much value is placed on various types of work, by people with lots of money to spend. So, for instance, if patients in nursing homes each managed to crap a flawless ten-carat diamond once they reached the age of ninety, rest assured, elder care workers would be paid like investment bankers, solely for their ability to keep old people alive until it was time for the diamond harvest. But as it is, they are paid horribly, since rich people see more value in office buildings and yachts and derivatives than they do in the people who care for their own grandparents.

the research? “So many people, I did not know them all. They studied my work. They asked me questions. I told the ISI about it when I got home. A major like you, he was. You can check.” The major did not want to make more work for himself. And it was true, the story as it had been narrated and understood was all in the files. “Why did you go back to America?” he demanded, looking at a sheet of paper. “I was invited to present a paper at a conference that was cosponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It was a great honor for me, and for my university. You can ask them.” He held out his cell phone again, so that Major Nadeem could make a call to verify, but the major shook his head. They spent several more hours like this, going through the major episodes of Dr. Omar’s career. When they came to his most recent work on computer-security algorithms, Dr. Omar apologized that he could not talk about this work in any detail because it had been classified as “top secret” by the Pakistani military. The major found nothing of interest. Dr. Omar was very careful, then and always. The major asked him to sign a paper, and to report any suspicious contacts, and Dr. Omar assured him that he would. The Pakistani authorities never came after him again. That was three years before his world went white.   Omar al-Wazir had multiple binary identities, it could be said. He was a Pakistani but also, in some sense, a man tied to the West. He was a Pashtun from the raw tribal area of South Waziristan, but he was also a modern man. He was a secular scientist and also a Muslim, if not quite a believer. His loyalties might indeed have been confused before the events of nearly two years ago, but not now. Sometimes Dr. Omar grounded himself by recalling the spirit of his father, Haji Mohammed. He remembered the old man shaking his head when Omar took wobbly practice shots with an Enfield rifle, missing the target nearly every time. The look on the father’s face asked: How can this be my oldest son, this boy who cannot shoot? But Haji Mohammed had taught him the code of manhood, just the same. Omar had learned the

In other words, the speech is a failure, at least for its time. Such a speech could not stop the war. If any speech could have, it would have been a speech with mass appeal, with simple straight-forward unencumbered declarations assuring the South that the North had no designs on it, none at all. That speech, though, was not possible. Lincoln did have designs. So, to preserve his designs, he was obliged to write a speech that would make his case for the future, impress historians and intellectuals to come, but do little for the present. The bulk of the speech is a case against himself, against his declaration in 1846 that, Any people anywhere have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form one that suits them better.

Lincoln said it and he meant it. Though he denied the South’s right to secede, he assured it there was no need. He will protect the southern system of slavery. If the South, then, was honest in its claim that it was seceding over slavery, there was clearly no need for secession with Lincoln as president. Lincoln is no dunce so we can assume he actually knows there is more to secession than slavery. There is the 35-year struggle over tariffs, the struggle that started this secession crisis back in 1832. But Lincoln is a Whig, a Clayian Whig, who needs that tariff more than anything else to support his vision for the future. Rather than trying to argue southern claims away, like he argued away the right to secession, he chose to accept the claims at face value. He would give the South slavery. He always had been and always would be willing to compromise on that. But he would not give them free trade. Here he would never compromise.

white Christians hate Negros or not, but I know that we have a Christian church that is white and a Christian church which is black. I know that the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. . . . I don’t know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me . . . but I know I am not in their unions. I don’t know if the real estate lobby is against black people but I know that the real estate lobbyists keep me in the ghetto. I don’t know if the Board of Education hates Black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools that we have to go to. Now this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith risking . . . my life . . . on some idealism which you assure me exists in America which I have never seen.20

The particular combination of the explicit communication of high standards and the demonstrated assurance of the teacher's belief in the student's ability to succeed (as evidenced by the effort to provide detailed, constructive feedback) was a powerful intervention for Black students...it was an exceedingly effective way to generate the trust needed to motivate Black students to make their best effort.

… The Johnson administration was quick to assure labor that the immigration bill [abandoning a requirement that immigrants be skilled workers, which threatened American labor, to family reunification] would have no appreciable impact on employment. Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz told Congress that once the act became fully operative, the total number of immigrants entering the workforce every year “will be equal to about one tenth of 1 percent of the workforce.” Reassured, union leaders generally joined the call for expanded family reunification preferences.

We then saw this same administration, desperate to reverse its falling poll numbers, continue to stoke the embers of class warfare. There is no more anti-American, anti-democracy rhetoric than this. To turn neighbor against neighbor because of the size of one’s pocketbook is to plow the ground and sow it with the seeds of socialism. In America, only opportunity is assured, not outcomes. Anyone who promises otherwise is acting contrary to the values upon which our Republic was founded.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever, and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.