Christopher Browning Quotes

Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.”14

I had never before been a special fan of that great comedian Phyllis Diller, but she utterly won my heart this week by sending me an envelope that, when opened, contained a torn-off square of brown-bag paper of the kind suitable for latrine duty in an ill-run correctional facility. Duly unfurled, it carried a handwritten salutation reading as follows: Money's scarce Times are hard Here's your f****** Xmas card I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don't think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn't Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?

Tommy moved on. "Lash, your people have been oppressed for hundreds of years. It's time to strike back. Look, you don't have your MBA yet - they haven't completely juiced you of your usefulness yet. Would Martin Luther King back down from this challenge? Malcolm X? James Brown? Don't you have a dream? Don't you feel good, like you knew that you would, now?

I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.

Along with ideological indoctrination, a vital factor touched upon but not fully explored in Milgram’s experiments was conformity to the group. The battalion had orders to kill Jews, but each individual did not. Yet 80 to 90 percent of the men proceeded to kill, though almost all of them—at least initially—were horrified and disgusted by what they were doing. To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behavior, was simply beyond most of the men. It was easier for them to shoot.

Bauman argues that most people “slip” into the roles society provides them, and he is very critical of any implication that “faulty personalities” are the cause of human cruelty. For him the exception—the real “sleeper”—is the rare individual who has the capacity to resist authority and assert moral autonomy but who is seldom aware of this hidden strength until put to the test.

Perpetrators did not become fellow victims (as many of them later claimed to be) in the way some victims became accomplices of the perpetrators. The relationship between perpetrator and victim was not symmetrical. The range of choice each faced was totally different.

EAMES: Now, in the dream, I can impersonate Browning and suggest the concepts to Fischer's conscious mind... EAMES: (draws a diagram) Then we take Fischer down another level and his own subconscious feeds it right back to him. ARTHUR: (impressed) So he gives himself the idea. EAMES: Precisely. That's the only way to make it stick. It has to seem self-generated. ARTHUR: Eames, I'm impressed. EAMES: Your condescension, as always, is much appreciated, Arthur.

I must recognise that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader... What I do not accept, however, are the old clichés that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive. Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving.

What the conservatives conceived of as sufficient measures overlapped with what were for the Nazis scarcely the first steps.

You can’t teach the love of nature. It has to come from within, through serendipitous discovery of one’s own unmediated presence in the world.

ARTHUR: He's out. ARIADNE: Wait, Cobb-I'm lost. Whose subconscious are we going into? COBB: Fischer's. I told him it was Browning's so he'd come with us as part of our team. ARTHUR: (impressed) He's going to help us break into his own subconscious. COBB: That's the idea. He'll think that his security is Browning's and fight them to learn the truth about his father.

Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he'd replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right. More interesting was the related question: What if he'd kept that job?

The behavior of any human being is, of course, a very complex phenomenon, and the historian who attempts to "explain" it is indulging in a certain arrogance.

By fear a man appoints his master.

As the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 demonstrates, mass murder and routine had become one. Normality itself had become exceedingly abnormal.

(…) there was terror in the Berlin air – the terror felt by many people with good reason – and Christopher found himself affected by it. Perhaps he was also affected by his own fantasies. He had always posed a little to his friends in England as an embattled fighter against the Nazis and some of them had encouraged him jokingly to do so. “Don’t get killed before I come,” Edward Upward had written, “I’ll see you unless you’ve been shot by Hitler.” Now Christopher began to have mild hallucinations. He fancied that he heard heavy wagons drawing up before the house, in the middle of the night. He suddenly detected swastika patterns in the wallpaper. He convinced hinself that everything in his room, whatever its superficial color, was basically brown, Nazi brown.

One evening, at the time of the Six-Day War, I [Christopher Hitchens] had my wicked way with a lovely lady, who had earlier intimated that she did not perhaps find me entirely repulsive. We procured a decent room, as I remember, at the Cadogan Hotel. Perhaps a little flown with wine, I asked her to don a Martin Amis face mask which I had—with a combination of sticky tape, elastic bands, cardboard, and a much-treasured photograph—prepared earlier. The fair damsel was happy to oblige, and thus attired she permitted me to embark on the hugely agreeable pathway to libidinous fulfillment.

Major Trapp was never there. Instead he remained in Jozefow because he allegedly could not bear the sight. We men were upset about that and said we couldn't bear the sight either." Indeed, Trapp's distress was a secret to no one. At the marketplace one policeman remembered hearing Trapp say, "Oh God, why did I have to be given these orders," as he put his hand on his heart. Another policeman witnessed him at the schoolhouse. "Today, I can still see exactly before my eyes Major Trapp there in the room pacing back and forth with his hands behind his back. He said something like, 'Man, ... such jobs don't suit me. But orders are orders.' " Another man remembered vividly "how Trapp, finally alone in our room, sat on a stool and wept bitterly. The tears really flowed." Another also witnessed Trapp at his headquarters. "Major Trapp ran around excitedly and then suddenly stopped dead in front of me, stared and asked if I agreed with this. I looked him straight in the eye and said 'No, Herr Major!' He then began to run around again and wept like a child." The doctor's aide encountered Trapp weeping on the path from the marketplace to the forest and asked if he could help. "He answered me only to the effect that everything was very terrible." Concerning Jozefow, Trapp later confined to his driver, "If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth, then have mercy on us Germans.

Without anything being said, there were no women at our lunches. Not that we were talking pussy. Or not much. But it was a chaps thing. Seasoned observers all, we set the world, such as it was, to rights, offsetting our intellectual know-how with truly wondrous flights of fancy. It was at the time of the ruinous yet avoidable civil war in Angola, in which far too many people died, or, in our immortal parlance, became 'deadified.' It might have been anyone—actually, I [Christopher Hitchens] am sure it was our poet friend Craig Raine—who came up with the appalling yet unforgettable idea that there is a design flaw in the female form, and that the breasts and the buttocks really ought to be on the same side. For myself, I have oft been perplexed as to why our heads are where, in a truly just world, our penises really ought to be, and my arse is not located between my chin and my nose, allowing me mellifluously to talk out of it.

All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo Big Nate series by Lincoln Peirce The Black Cauldron (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Book Thief  by Markus Zusak Brian’s Hunt by Gary Paulsen Brian’s Winter by Gary Paulsen Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis The Call of the Wild by Jack London The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The Giver by Lois Lowry Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling Hatchet by Gary Paulsen The High King (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien Holes by Louis Sachar The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins I Am LeBron James by Grace Norwich I Am Stephen Curry by Jon Fishman Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell Johnny Tremain by Esther Hoskins Forbes Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson LeBron’s Dream Team: How Five Friends Made History by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger The Lightning Thief  (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) by Rick Riordan A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle Number the Stars by Lois Lowry The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton The River by Gary Paulsen The Sailor Dog by Margaret Wise Brown Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury Star Wars Expanded Universe novels (written by many authors) Star Wars series (written by many authors) The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann D. Wyss Tales from a Not-So-Graceful Ice Princess (Dork Diaries) by Rachel Renée Russell Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt Under the Blood-Red Sun by Graham Salisbury The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Rhunön went up to Saphira’s shoulder and tapped a scale with one of her blunt fingernails, twisting her head from side to side in an attempt to peer into the translucent pebble. “Good color. Not like those brown dragons, all muddy and dark.

Atomism was viciously persecuted as heresy throughout the early Christian era, and only one printed manuscript of De Rerum Naturum survived the flames. There are several translations; I have chosen the one translated by my fellow Devonian and Oxonian, W. Hannaford Brown. Brown’s own manuscript was almost destroyed during the Nazi bombardment of England in 1943: if a religious book had survived so many vicissitudes we can easily imagine what the faithful would say. But Lucretius teaches us to live without such piffle.

The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947); The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951); The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951); The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953); “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel (1978); “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” by Leszek Kołakowski (1978); The Uses of Adversity by Timothy Garton Ash (1989); The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt (1998); Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning (1992); and Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014).

Segmented, routinized, and depersonalized, the job of the bureaucrat or specialist—whether it involved confiscating property, scheduling trains, drafting legislation, sending telegrams, or compiling lists—could be performed without confronting the reality of mass murder.

Finally, I had held up examples of Goldhagen's inflammatory language and suggested that he had missed the essence of what Primo Levi once called the 'grey zone' of human affairs, described by the historian Christopher Browning as that foggy universe of mixed motives, conflicting emotions, personal priorities, reluctant choices, opportunism and accomodation, all wedded, when convenient, to self-deception and denial. I thought that by marshalling his research into an overly narrow narrative, painted without nuance in black and white, the author had missed the human complexity and the ordinariness of racism.

Some of the political and historical texts that inform the arguments made here are “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell (1946); The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947); The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951); The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951); The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953); “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel (1978); “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” by Leszek Kołakowski (1978); The Uses of Adversity by Timothy Garton Ash (1989); The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt (1998); Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning (1992); and Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014).

Some of the political and historical texts that inform the arguments made here are “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell (1946); The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947); The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951); The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951); The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953); “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel (1978); “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” by Leszek Kołakowski (1978); The Uses of Adversity by Timothy Garton Ash (1989); The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt (1998); Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning (1992); and Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014). Christians

When I have suggested to my colleagues that we must take seriously Eichmann's repeated testimony to the effect that he learned from Heydrich in the fall of 1941 of Hitler's order for the physical destruction of the Jews, I have met with either embarrassed silence or open skepticism. How can I be so gullible? Don't I know that Eichmann's testimony is a useless conglomeration of faulty memories on the one hand and calculated lies for legal defense and self-justification on the other? From it we can learn nothing of value about what actually happened during the war, only about Eichmann's state of mind after the war. These are documents that reveal how Eichmann wished to be remembered, not what he did. -- Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann, pages 4-5

Here we come full circle to the mutually intensifying effects of war and racism noted by John Dower, in conjunction with the insidious effects of constant propaganda and indoctrination. Pervasive racism and the resulting exclusion of the Jewish victims from any common ground with the perpetrators made it all the easier for the majority of the policemen to conform to the norms of their immediate community (the battalion) and their society at large (Nazi Germany). Here the years of anti-Semitic propaganda (and prior to the Nazi dictatorship, decades of shrill German nationalism) dovetailed with the polarizing effects of war. The dichotomy of racially superior Germans and racially inferior Jews, central to Nazi ideology, could easily merge with the image of a beleaguered Germany surrounded by warring enemies.

I WONDER IT HEAVEN GOT A GAY GHETTO Lorde know(s) cis-hets don`t like me Baldwin know(s) how white homos exoticize me I hope heaven got a gay ghetto Where my QPOC family don`t feel shame Don`t feel too brown or black Or femme or phat Don`t get shame for being free Don`t get lonely, don`t get sa(i)d You know, he`s gunna meet white jesus Shiet, he probably already got a picure with white jesus signed and framed on his wall Mother Mary // Virgin Mother // fucker

Sadly, not all veterans had equal access to an education, even under the GI Bill’s amendments. Although no provision prevented African American and female veterans from securing an education under the bill, these veterans returned to a nation that still endorsed segregated schools and largely believed a woman’s place was in the home. For African American veterans, educational opportunities were limited. In the words of historian Christopher P. Loss, “Legalized segregation denied most black veterans admission into the nation’s elite, overwhelmingly white universities, and insufficient capacity at the all-black schools they could attend failed to match black veterans’ demand.” The number of African American students at U.S. colleges and universities tripled between 1940 and 1950, but many prospective students were turned away because of their race. For those African Americans who did earn a degree under the GI Bill, employment discrimination prevented them from gaining positions commensurate with their education. Many African American college graduates were offered low-level jobs that they could have secured without any education. Almost a decade elapsed between V-J Day and the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down segregated schools. It would take another decade after Brown for the civil rights movement to fully develop and for public schools to make significant strides in integrating.

I [Christopher Hitchens] moved into Mart's sock—where you lived was your 'sock.' Your rug was your 'hair.' Your knee was still your knee: we couldn't think of another word for it. We called our penises our 'willie winkies' and our shared lavatory 'the bog.' There were a lot of brilliantly inventive word games of that kind. What if you changed 'heart' to 'dick' in any well-known song or phrase? Bury my dick at Wounded Knee. Dick-break Hotel. Don't go breaking my dick ... They may, in retrospect, seem infantile, but they built intellectual muscle and taught us all we knew about philosophy, psychology, and other -ologies too numerous (and humorous!) to mention. It was at the time of the wholly reprehensible bombing of Cambodia. These dazzling jests were part of the reason why, when Mart and I got together, nobody felt able to leave the room, or sock-toe. A glimpse, if you will, of another era, a time when Mr. Wilde had sparred so felicitously with Mr. Whistler across their effortlessly groaning table at the imperious Cafe Royal.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being might suit our moment. Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here is perhaps not a great work of art; Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is better. One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. If you or your friends or your children did not read it that way the first time, then it bears reading again. Some of the political and historical texts that inform the arguments made here are “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell (1946); The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947); The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951); The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951); The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953); “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel (1978); “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” by Leszek Kołakowski (1978); The Uses of Adversity by Timothy Garton Ash (1989); The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt (1998); Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning (1992); and Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014). Christians

What to read? Any good novel enlivens our ability to think about ambiguous situations and judge the intentions of others. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being might suit our moment. Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here is perhaps not a great work of art; Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is better. One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. If you or your friends or your children did not read it that way the first time, then it bears reading again. Some of the political and historical texts that inform the arguments made here are “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell (1946); The Language of the Third Reich by Victor Klemperer (1947); The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951); The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951); The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953); “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel (1978); “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” by Leszek Kołakowski (1978); The Uses of Adversity by Timothy Garton Ash (1989); The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt (1998); Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning (1992); and Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev (2014).

The prophet died in the year 632 of our own approximate calendar. The first account of his life was set down a full hundred and twenty years later by Ibn Ishaq, whose original was lost and can only be consulted through its reworked form, authored by Ibn Hisham, who died in 834. Adding to this hearsay and obscurity, there is no agreed-upon account of how the Prophet’s followers assembled the Koran, or of how his various sayings (some of them written down by secretaries) became codified. And this familiar problem is further complicated—even more than in the Christian case—by the matter of succession. Unlike Jesus, who apparently undertook to return to earth very soon and who (pace the absurd Dan Brown) left no known descendants, Muhammad was a general and a politician and—though unlike Alexander of Macedonia a prolific father—left no instruction as to who was to take up his mantle. Quarrels over the leadership began almost as soon as he died, and so Islam had its first major schism—between the Sunni and the Shia—before it had even established itself as a system. We need take no side in the schism, except to point out that one at least of the schools of interpretation must be quite mistaken. And the initial identification of Islam with an earthly caliphate, made up of disputatious contenders for the said mantle, marked it from the very beginning as man-made.

At the same time, however, the collective behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101 has deeply disturbing implications. There are many societies afflicted by traditions of racism and caught in the siege mentality of war or threat of war. Everywhere society conditions people to respect and defer to authority, and indeed could scarcely function otherwise. Everywhere people seek career advancement. In every modern society, the complexity of life and the resulting bureaucratization and specialization attenuate the sense of personal responsibility of those implementing official policy. Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?

What are they doing?” he whispered. The pinball machine’s scoreboard was full, the bank’s windows fogged. They were so involved- so cofaithed- that they didn’t know we were there. The VW’s face joined, “Are they hurting each other?” I took a breath. “There’s risk involved, because of what they can’t see. Plus the risk of trust. But no-they’re not hurting each other.” The bank whispered something in the pinball machine’s ear and the pinball machine giggled. “What are they saying to each other?” the VW said. “They’re expressing their faith, VW-sharing it.” Just then I heard a rustle, soft at first, then louder…Distracted by other things-the VW, the faith in the trees- I had forgotten to keep the mountain straight in my mind. I had let it go, and now it was changing, reversing itself, growing young: the leaves were turning from brown back to green… THIS was western Massachusetts-unpredictable; a changing moving bitch; a switcher of faces…how could I have many any progress here when mountains were mountains one moment and something else the next; when people were here one day and then GONE?

I see the good in you.” “Don’t harbor illusions about me. In marrying me, you’re going to have to make the best of a bad bargain. You don’t understand the situation you’re in.” “You’re right.” Beatrix arched in bliss as he massaged the muscles on either side of her spine. “Any woman would pity me, being in this situation.” “It’s one thing to spend an afternoon in bed with me,” Christopher said darkly. “It’s another to experience day-to-day life with a lunatic.” “I know all about living with lunatics. I’m a Hathaway.” Beatrix sighed in pleasure as his hands worked the tender places low on her back. Her body felt relaxed and tingly all over, her bruises and aches forgotten. Twisting to glance at him over her shoulder, she saw the austere lines of his face. She had an overwhelming urge to tease him, to make him play. “You missed a place,” she told him. “Where?” Levering herself upward, Beatrix turned and crawled to where Christopher knelt on the mattress. He had donned a velvet dressing robe, the front parting to reveal a tantalizing hint of sun-browned flesh. Linking her arms around his neck, she kissed him. “Inside,” she whispered. “That’s where I need soothing.” A reluctant smile lurked at the corners of his lips. “This balm is too strong for that.” “No it’s not. It feels lovely. Here, I’ll show you--” She pounced for the tin of balm and coated her fingertips with the stuff. The rich scent of clove oil spiced the air. “Just hold still--” “The devil I will.” His voice had thickened with amusement, and he reached for her wrist. Fleet as a ferret, Beatrix twisted to evade him. Rolling once, twice, she dove for the belt of his robe. “You put it all over me,” she accused, giggling. “Coward. Now it’s your turn.” “Not a chance.” He grabbed her, grappled with her, and she thrilled to the sound of his husky laugh. Somehow managing to clamber over him, she gasped at the feel of his aroused flesh. She wrestled with him until he flipped her over with ease, pinning her wrists. The robe had become loosened during their tussle, their naked flesh rubbing together. Sparkling silver eyes stared into blue. Already breathless with laughter, Beatrix became positively lightheaded as she saw the way he was looking at her. Lowering his head, he kissed and licked at her smile as if he could taste it.

Where is Albert?" "He'll be here momentarily. I asked our housekeeper to fetch him." Christopher blinked. "She's not afraid of him?" "Of Albert? Heavens, no, everyone adores him." The concept of someone, anyone, adoring his belligerent pet was difficult to grasp. Having expected to receive an inventory of all the damage Albert had caused, Christopher gave her a blank look. And then the housekeeper returned with an obedient and well-groomed dog trotting by her side. "Albert?" Christopher said. The dog looked at him, ears twitching. His whiskered face changed, eyes brightening with excitement. Without hesitating, Albert launched forward with a happy yelp. Christopher knelt on the floor, gathering up an armful of joyfully wriggling canine. Albert strained to lick him, and whimpered and dove against him repeatedly. Christopher was overwhelmed by feelings of kinship and relief. Grabbing the warm, compact body close, Christopher murmured his name and petted him roughly, and Albert whined and trembled. "I missed you, Albert. Good boy. There's my boy." Unable to help himself, Christopher pressed his face against the rough fur. He was undone by guilt, humbled by the fact that even though he had abandoned Albert for the summer, the dog showed nothing but eager welcome. "I was away too long," Christopher murmured, looking into the soulful brown eyes. "I won't leave you again." He dragged his gaze up to Beatrix's. "It was a mistake to leave him," he said gruffly. She was smiling at him. "Albert won't hold it against you. To err is human, to forgive, canine." To his disbelief, Christopher felt an answering smile tug at the corners of his lips. He continued to pet the dog, who was fit and sleek. "You've taken good care of him." "He's much better behaved than before," she said. "You can take him anywhere now." Rising to his feet, Christopher looked down at her. "Why did you do it?" he asked softly. "He's very much worth saving. Anyone could see that." The awareness between them became unbearably aware. Christopher's heart worked in hard, uneven beats. How pretty she was in the white dress. She radiated a healthy female physicality that was very different from the fashionable frailty of London women. He wondered what it would be like to bed her, if she would be as direct in her passions as she was in everything else.

Obviously you have no liking for Prudence," he began, "but if you-" "I've tried my best to like her. I thought if one peeled away the layers of artifice, one would find the real Prudence beneath. But there's nothing beneath. And I doubt there ever will be." "And you find Beatrix Hathaway superior to her?" "In every regard, except perhaps beauty." "There you have it wrong," he informed her. "Miss Hathaway is a beauty." Audrey's brows lifted. "Do you think so?" she asked idly, lifting the teacup to her lips. "It's obvious. Regardless of what I think of her character, Miss Hathaway is an exceptionally attractive woman." "Oh, I don't know..." Audrey devoted careful attention to her tea, adding a tiny lump of sugar. "She's rather tall." "She has the ideal height and form." "And brown hair is so common..." "It's not the usual shade of brown, it's as dark as sable. And those eyes..." "Blue," Audrey said with a dismissive wave. "The deepest, purest blue I've ever seen. No artist could capture-" Christopher broke off abruptly. "Never mind. I'm straying from the point.

And she knew that although she wasn't a great beauty, she had her own charms. More than one man had commented favorably on her dark brown hair and blue eyes. These moderate attractions, however, were nothing compared to Christopher Phelan's golden splendor. He was as fair as Lancelot. Gabriel. Perhaps Lucifer, if one believed that he had once been the most beautiful angel in heaven. Phelan was tall and silver eyed, his hair the color of dark winter wheat touched by the sun. His form was strong and soldierly, the shoulders straight and strong, the hips slim. Even as he moved with indolent grace, there was something undeniably potent about him, something selfishly predatory.

Look at the state of you. Get some of those wet clothes off and chuck them on the radiator.’ ‘Do you always boil a saucepan of sprouts for at least two hours?’ Bryant asked. ‘What?’ said May, thrown. ‘No.’ ‘Good, then you’re not my mother.’ He struggled out of his overcoat and found that his damp brown sweater had lengthened dramatically.

In a city like San Francisco, you can throw a rock out your front door and hit someone with a nice ass and pretty brown eyes. But to find someone you want to fall asleep with, someone you want to breathe and dream next to, is terribly rare.

In Jedwabne ordinary Poles slaughtered the Jews, very much as ordinary Germans from the Ordnungspolizei Batallion no. 101 did in Jozefow, as documented in Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men. They were men of all ages and of different professions; entire families on occasion, fathers and sons acting in concert; good citizens, one is tempted to say (if sarcasm were not out of place, given the hideousness of their deeds), who heeded the call of municipal authorities. And what the Jews saw, to their horror and, I dare say, incomprehension, were familiar faces. Not anonymous men in uniforms, cogs in a war machine, agents carrying out orders, but their own neighbors, who chose to kill and were engaged in a bloody pogrom - willing executioners.

Like much else, killing was something one could get used to.

No chance to step out was given to those who did not feel up to shooting; no one systematically excused those who were visibly too shaken to continue. Everyone assigned to the firing squads took his turn as ordered. Therefore, those who shoot did not have to live with the clear awareness that what they had done had been avoidable.

This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men. The reserve policemen faced choices, and most of them committed terrible deeds. But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.

pedagogies of the traditional school system that the needs of black and brown students become secondary to maintaining the status quo.

The student loan crisis in America is currently valued at $1.59 trillion and set to double by 2025. Education was once a government mandate, right? Now, as student debt rises, so do the seven-figure salaries of top university presidents.

War, a struggle between “our people” and “the enemy,” creates a polarized world in which “the enemy” is easily objectified and removed from the community of human obligation.

What, then, is one to conclude? Most of all, one comes away from the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 with great unease. This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men. The reserve policemen faced choices, and most of them committed terrible deeds. But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.

No one should have to feel grateful about walking out of a police interaction without further consequences. But non-white bodies feel that all the time.

of the church in the distance, for which Millet used the church of Chailly-en-Bière in the Île-de-France as a model. Moments before, they had been busy at work harvesting their modest potato field, as shown by the pathetically small basket at their feet. Though it fetched only a small sum at the Salon of 1860, the work became wildly popular in the 1870s and eventually would be one of the most widely replicated images of the nineteenth century. Originally purchased for one thousand francs, it fetched as much as half a million francs just thirty years later, as a result of a bidding war between the Louvre and the American Art Association. Fig. 47. Jean-François Millet, The Angelus, 1859 While some interpreted The Angelus as a religious work, as an expression of simple and humble piety, others saw it as a socialist statement, in which Millet was supposed to have paid homage to the growing worker movement in France. It is unlikely that Millet intended either; as he later said, the picture was inspired by a childhood memory in which “my grandmother, hearing the church bell ringing while we were working in the fields, always made us stop work to say the Angelus prayer for the poor departed.” Dalí was fascinated by the picture. Like Vincent van Gogh, he used it as inspiration for his own work, including a series of paintings in the early 1930s entitled The Architectural Angelus of Millet and Gala and the Angelus of Millet Preceding the Imminent Arrival of the Conical Anamorphoses. He explained his fascination with the Angelus in an essay entitled “The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus,” in which he revealed that “In June 1932 appears in my mind all of a sudden, without any recent recollection nor any conscious association that lends itself to an immediate explanation, the image of Millet’s L’Angelus.” It made a strong impression on him, he continues, because for him it is “the most enigmatic, the most dense, and the richest in unconscious thoughts ever to have existed.” Fig. 48. Salvador Dalí, Archaeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus, c. 1934 In fact, the painting did not strike Dalí as a rural image of devotion at all but as a source of great inner disquiet and a perfect example of what the paranoiac-critical process could discern that others didn’t. What he saw was a man “who stands hypnotized—and destroyed—by the mother. He seems to me to take on the attitude of the

Distancing, not frenzy and brutalization, is one of the keys to the behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101. War and negative racial stereotyping were two mutually reinforcing factors in this distancing.

Nazism was cruel because Nazis were cruel; and the Nazis were cruel because cruel people tended to become Nazis.

Only a minority of nonconformists managed to preserve a beleaguered sphere of moral autonomy that emboldened them to employ patterns of behavior and stratagems of evasion that kept them from becoming killers at all.

Author Marta Vannucci speculated that Demeter, with a different name, must have been a historical person who came to Attica in the seventh or sixth century BCE from the matriarchal cultures of southern India, carrying with her the secrets of hexaploid wheat, the grain from which bread is made. Vannucci’s article appeared in the Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, a journal so obscure that when I found it, I wondered if it might be a Borgesian fiction implanted deep in JSTOR by mischievous scholars.

To be a so-called barbarian, Scott argues with anarcho-libertarian flourish, was the only way to be truly free, living a life with no “labor” other than the natural activities of hunting, foraging, and making tools from the world around you. As a theory for freshly understanding the rest of human history, it’s intuitively compelling. Especially when you couple this reconsideration of the bargain with Demeter with the deeper understanding Scott provides of the powers we acquired through the gift from Prometheus. How our mastery of fire coupled with our relentless pursuit of surplus—in its elemental cereal form and all the actual and metaphoric forms we have been able to discover or imagine, from hordes of gold to storage lockers full of stuff and infinite digital vaults of virtual currency—has led us to the brink of an overheated climate that may bring our civilization to the point of collapse before this century is out.

As a parent, I appreciate the value of surplus—of having enough food to feed my family, even if a lean spell comes. As a species, the production and accumulation of more than you need is a masterful strategy for survival and advancement. But it has a design flaw. There can never be too much, especially in an age when most of the surplus we accumulate is in the forms of symbols like money, distantly tied to tangible commodity value, if at all, and largely immune to spoilage. The equilibrium that economists would have us believe this system always wants to return to never arrives, because the things the system values omit the value of all other life on the planet, except to the extent it can be converted to our use. This way of living creates systems of power designed to enslave us and the entire world on which we live. The system is founded, at its essence, on control over the reproduction of others: plants, animals, and even people, as our daily debates about reproductive rights show. The only life it really values is that of the people in control.

The planetary crisis we find ourselves in is a result of this system. The natural human instinct for survival, enabled by our technological gifts, has caused the greatest mass extinction of other species since the Cretaceous period and brought our own endangerment into the realm of the plausible. To really alter our path, we need to confront the design flaws of the Neolithic Revolution, evidenced by our addiction to growth and the accumulation of more surplus than we need. That’s not to suggest some twenty-first-century nomadology. Even the most imaginative science fiction writers would find it challenging to envision a human society that had developed without agriculture, without the bureaucratic systems it engendered to count the accumulated wealth—the original reason we developed mathematics and written language. But we know that the tiny bands of humans who managed to survive into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries outside that system were—and in a few cases, are—happier than us, even if they do not get to read novels, hear symphonies, or binge-watch a season of a television series after dinner. Walking in the edgelands of the twenty-first-century city, finding the wild nature they harbor, you can get glimpses of your own true nature as a creature that lives in and from the world, and maybe even a way to be a nomad without leaving your house. Finding such places is easier than you think. Finding your personal connection is harder.

In the morning mist, as I worked my way upstream, I watched three deer wade across the river ahead of me and quickly got out of my own head. The foliage was thick and green, in that moment before Texas summer becomes too hot to endure without immersing yourself in the water, and the air buzzed with insect and avian life. Canoeing, especially alone, has a meditative quality. I had to tune into the water, into the current, into the air. I felt and followed the flow of the elements around me, moving my body and the vessel that carried it through space, my form propelled by the paddle I stroked along the sides of the boat with learned grace, at the pace of the place, mostly silent. Not unlike the rudimentary meditation practices I had learned in high school from a visiting Zen priestess, I realize now, the activity had a way of emptying the mind of active thought. In zazen, the aim is no more mind than a dim mindfulness of the act of breathing. In a canoe, there’s a lot more going on, a way of moving through the natural environment that by its very essence leaves little room for distracted thought—an exorcism of the self that compels you to let the world around you into your consciousness. I literally had to feel my way using all my senses, opening my being up to everything it was interacting with. To do so without leaving the city, finding myself totally alone in a pocket of urban reality filled with bountifully diverse life, was absolutely transcendent.

The battalion and company commanders are especially to provide for the spiritual care of the men who participate in this action. The impressions of the day are to be blotted out through the holding of social events in the evenings. Furthermore the men are to be instructed continuously about the political necessity of the measures.13

You have taken a wrong view and made a grave mistake, and missed the whole purpose of your existence ... Judge yourself then and condemn yourself.

As with any detailed eyewitness testimonies after so many years, Eichmann’s various accounts differ from one another and are not free of puzzling contradictions with other evidence. -- The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004), page 363.

The various Eichmann testimonies are truly staggering in their total volume. But how, if at all, can they be used? Even more than most memoirs, the Eichmann testimonies, both before and after capture, are consciously calculated attempts at self-representation, self-justification, and legal defense. It must be said as emphatically perpetrator testimony as possible that, at the core of these testimonies, there are three monstrous falsehoods that are central to his whole enterprise. -- Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann, pages 8-9.

Clearly anyone who wants to dismiss Eichmann’s testimonies on the grounds of their demonstrated unreliability and shameless self-serving lies can easily do so, and many of my colleagues have done precisely this. But what if our default position is not to dismiss everything Eichmann said and wrote just because he was lying most of the time, but rather to ask what among this mass of lies might nonetheless be of help to the historian, given his unique vantage point and the sheer volume of his testimony? -- Collected Memories: Holocaust and Postwar Testimony, page 11

the testimonies of especially Höss and to some extent Eichmann are confused, contradictory, self-serving, and not credible." -- The Origins of the Final Solution, page 544

THE BEAUTY OF VALUE INVESTING is its logical simplicity. It is based on two principles: What’s it worth (intrinsic value), and don’t lose money (margin of safety).

Self-Compassion A moment of self-compassion can change your entire day. A string of such moments can change the course of your life. — CHRISTOPHER K. GERMER

Ego autem sum quasi vas inane,’ he began awkwardly, stuttering along the lines of meaningless prose like a small child. ‘Ego donavit corpus meum ad dominum meum in exercitu magno Cardinalis Balthazar De La Senza,’ he continued, quickly becoming surprisingly fluent despite his vaguely cockney tone. ‘Tempore domini Inquisitoris magni voluntatis esse, aequo animo et scissa animam meam a fundamentis et suspensi in abyssum quasi stercora, nihil prorsus in aeternum damnatus egisse,’ he went on, oblivious to something stirring in the small box behind him. Wisps of purple drifted from it like steam from a cooling kettle. ‘Ego Christophorus Baxtere accipe usitata res est, uti et magnis La Senza caput meum corium et nervorum et magnifici primum genus dentium,’ Baxter continued, strangely enjoying himself. Far away in another place, the bound and trapped Cardinal La Senza had begun to whisper the words in unison beneath the folds of his hooded cloak. Oblivious, Baxter was flying now, quite unaware of the sinister coaching he was receiving. ‘O magnum La Senza, cum venerit, et ad hoc bonum esse propter tempus, quia ego miser!’ Baxter read on. A coiling snake-like tendril of purple had fingered its way through the lock of the cabinet and was creeping menacingly towards its target. It advanced up Baxter’s legs, body and neck until finally, it crept imperceptibly into his ears. ‘Ego Christophorus Baxtere immolare volens alumnam cerebrum meum et animam, ut vos mos postulo ut enable uariat possessione tua ...’ Pleased beyond measure by what he had fondled and explored, La Senza went still. Content for now, he drew back his sensing vines and they fell away from Baxter, unnoticed. His jailors had seen nothing. La Senza now had the chance he’d been craving for centuries, so many lifetimes of plotting and scheming. He knew nothing of the young man he had inspected so intimately – frankly, he didn’t care. It was the body, oh his body, so young and fit; teeth clean like white mice, no trace of Popery, no hint of Lutheran, Baptist, Jew, Muslim or Buddhist within his empty soul, nothing to restrain or inhibit the Inquisitor’s foul purposes. La Senza knew that his escape was mere days away. Immobile, he marshalled dark reserves for the events to come. ‘Nunc me vacua est anima mea praeparata et redditur supersunt, La Senza venit, et possident me! Sincere vestrum, Christopher Baxter,’ finished Chris, with a flourish. ‘Bravo Mr Baxter,’ said Ascot McCauley, standing as he clapped enthusiastically. ‘Bravo!

That was readily apparent on occasions such as the night when one of the twins had accidentally stumbled over Beatrix’s cat Lucky, who had let out the particular earsplitting screech of an irritated feline. And then both the twins started squalling, while Catherine had rushed to soothe them. Christopher had nearly jumped out of his skin. The uproar had sent a shock through him, leaving him tense and trembling, and he had lowered his head and squeezed his eyes shut as he was transported in an instant to a battlefield beneath an exploding sky. A few deep breaths, and then he had become aware of Beatrix sitting beside him. She didn’t question him, only stayed quiet and near. And then Albert had come and put his chin on his knee, regarding him with somber brown eyes. “He understands,” Beatrix had said softly. Christopher reached out to pet the rough head, and Albert nuzzled into his hand, a tongue curling against his wrist. Yes, Albert understood. He had suffered beneath the same rain of shells and cannonfire, knew the feeling of a bullet tearing through his flesh. “We’re a pair, aren’t we, old fellow?” Christopher had murmured.

How many times, she reflected ruefully, she had sought to understand a wounded wild creature. But it was another matter entirely to penetrate the mystery of a human being. Reaching Christopher’s door, she knocked softly. When there came no response, she let herself inside. To her surprise, the room brimmed with daylight, the late August sun illuminating tiny floating dust motes by the window. The air smelled like liquor and smoke and bath soap. A portable bath occupied one corner of the room, sodden footprints tracking across the carpet. Christopher reclined on the unmade bed, half propped on a haphazard stack of pillows, a bottle of brandy clasped negligently in his fingers. His incurious gaze moved to Beatri and held, his eyes becoming alert. He was clad in a pair of fawn-colored trousers, only partially fastened, and…nothing more. His body was a long golden arc on the bed, lean and complexly muscled. Scars marred the sun-browned skin in places…there was a ragged triangular shape where a bayonet had pierced his shoulder, a liberal scattering of marks from shrapnel, a small circular depression on his side that must have been caused by a bullet. Slowly Christopher levered himself upward and placed the bottle on the bedside table. Half leaning on the edge of the mattress, his bare feet braced on the floor, he regarded Beatrix without expression. The locks of his hair were still damp, darkened to antique gold. How broad his shoulders were, their sturdy slopes flowing into the powerful lines of his arms. “Why are you here?” His voice sounded rusty from disuse. Somehow Beatrix managed to drag her mesmerized gaze away from the glinting fleece on his chest. “I came to return Albert,” she said. “He appeared at Ramsay House today. He says you’ve been neglecting him. And that you haven’t taken him on any walks lately.” “Has he? I had no idea he was so loose-tongued.

Pandora, come back here!” came a new voice--Beatrix Hathaway’s voice--and Christopher’s senses sparked in recognition. He twitched uneasily at the commotion, his reflexes urging him to take some kind of action, although he wasn’t yet certain what the bloody hell was going on. A large white goat came leaping and capering and twisting through the hallway. And then Beatrix Hathaway appeared, tearing around the corner. She skidded to a halt. “You might have tried to stop her,” she exclaimed. As she glanced up at Christopher, a scowl flitted across her face. “Oh. It’s you.” “Miss Hathaway--” he began. “Hold this.” Something warm and wriggling was thrust into his grasp, and Beatrix dashed off to pursue the goat. Dumbfounded, Christopher glanced at the creature in his hands. A baby goat, cream colored, with a brown head. He fumbled to keep from dropping the creature as he glanced at Beatrix’s retreating form and realized she was wearing breeches and boots. Christopher had seen women in every imaginable state of dress or undress. But he had never seen one wearing the clothes of a stablehand. “I must be having a dream,” he told the squirming kid absently. “A very odd dream about Beatrix Hathaway and goats…

You might have tried to stop her,” she exclaimed. As she glanced up at Christopher, a scowl flitted across her face. “Oh. It’s you.” “Miss Hathaway--” he began. “Hold this.” Something warm and wriggling was thrust into his grasp, and Beatrix dashed off to pursue the goat. Dumbfounded, Christopher glanced at the creature in his hands. A baby goat, cream colored, with a brown head. He fumbled to keep from dropping the creature as he glanced at Beatrix’s retreating form and realized she was wearing breeches and boots. Christopher had seen women in every imaginable state of dress or undress. But he had never seen one wearing the clothes of a stablehand. “I must be having a dream,” he told the squirming kid absently. “A very odd dream about Beatrix Hathaway and goats…” “I have her!” the masculine voice called out. “Beatrix, I told you the pen needed to be made taller.” “She didn’t leap over it,” came Beatrix’s protest, “she ate through it.” “Who let her into the house?” “No one. She butted one of the side doors open.” An inaudible conversation followed. As Christopher waited, a dark-haired boy of approximately four or five years of age made a breathless entrance through the front door. He was carrying a wooden sword and had tied a handkerchief around his head, which gave him the appearance of a miniature pirate. “Did they catch the goat?” he asked Christopher without preamble. “I believe so.” “Oh, thunderbolts. I missed all the fun.” The boy sighed. He looked up at Christopher. “Who are you?” “Captain Phelan. The child’s gaze sharpened with interest. “Where’s your uniform?” “I don’t wear it now that the war is over.” “Did you come to see my father?” “No, I…came to call on Miss Hathaway.” “Are you one of her suitors?” Christopher gave a decisive shake of his head. “You might be one,” the boy said wisely, “and just not know it yet.” Christopher felt a smile--his first genuine smile in a long time--pulling at his lips. “Does Miss Hathaway have many suitors?” “Oh, yes. But none of them want to marry her.” “Why is that, do you imagine?” “They don’t want to get shot,” the child said, shrugging. “Pardon?” Christopher’s brows lifted. “Before you marry, you have to get shot by an arrow and fall in love,” the boy explained. He paused thoughtfully. “But I don’t think the rest of it hurts as much as the beginning.” Christopher couldn’t prevent a grin. At that moment, Beatrix returned to the hallway, dragging the nanny goat on a rope lead. Beatrix looked at Christopher with an arrested expression. His smile faded, and he found himself staring into her blue-on-blue eyes. They were astonishingly direct and lucid…the eyes of a vagabond angel. One had the sense that no matter what she beheld of the sinful world, she would never be jaded. She reminded him that the things he had seen and done could not be polished away like tarnish from silver. Gradually her gaze lowered from his. “Rye,” she said, handing the lead to the boy. “Take Pandora to the barn, will you? And the baby goat as well.” Reaching out, she took the kid from Christopher’s arms. The touch of her hands against his shirtfront elicited an unnerving response, a pleasurable heaviness in his groin. “Yes, Auntie.” The boy left through the front door, somehow managing to retain possession of the goats and the wooden sword. Christopher stood facing Beatrix, trying not to gape. And failing utterly. She might as well have been standing there in her undergarments. In fact, that would have been preferable, because at least it wouldn’t have seemed so singularly erotic. He could see the feminine outline of her hips and thighs clad in the masculine garments. And she didn’t seem at all self-conscious. Confound her, what kind of woman was she?

Preacher was working on his second tray when he glanced up and saw that little blond head, peeking at him from the bottom of the stairs. “Hi,” Preacher said. “You sleep?” Christopher nodded. “Good,” he said. “Feel better?” Chris nodded again. Watching the boy’s face, Preacher slowly pushed a fresh-baked cookie across the counter with one finger until it was at the edge. It was a good minute before Chris took one step toward the cookie. Almost another full minute before his little hand touched it, but he didn’t take it. Just touched it, looking up at Preacher. “Go ahead. Tell me if it’s any good.” Chris slowly pulled the cookie off the counter and to his mouth, taking a very small, careful bite. “Good?” Preacher asked. And he nodded. So Preacher set him up a glass of milk right where the cookie had been. The boy nibbled that cookie in tiny bites; it took him so long to finish it that Preacher was pulling out the second cookie sheet and taking off the cookies before he was done. There was a stool on the other side of the counter near the milk and eventually Chris started trying to get up. But he had some stuffed toy in his grip and couldn’t make the climb, so Preacher went around and lifted him up. Then he went back to his side of the counter and pushed another cookie toward him. “Don’t pick it up yet,” Preacher said. “It’s kind of hot. Try the milk.” Preacher started rolling peanut butter dough into balls, placing them on the cookie sheet. “Who you got there?” he asked, nodding toward the stuffed toy. “Bear,” Christopher said. He reached his hand toward the cookie. Preacher said, “Make sure it’s not too hot for your mouth. So—his name’s just Bear?” Christopher nodded. “Seems like maybe he’s missing a leg, there.” Again the boy nodded. “Doesn’t hurt him, though.” “That’s a break. He ought to have one, anyway. I mean, it wouldn’t be the same as his own, but it would help him get by. When he has to go for a long walk.” The kid laughed. “He don’t walk. I walk.” “He doesn’t, huh? He should have one for looks, then.” He lifted one of his bushy black brows. “Think so?” Christopher lifted the small, worn brown bear. “Hmm,” he replied thoughtfully. He bit the cookie and immediately opened his mouth wide and let the sloppy mouthful fall onto the counter. For a second his look was stricken. Maybe terrified. “Hot, huh?” Preacher asked, not reacting. He reached behind him, ripped off a paper towel and whisked away the spit-out. “Might want to give it about one more minute. Have a drink of milk there. Cool down the mouth.” They communed in silence for a while—Preacher, Chris, the three-legged bear. When Preacher had all his little balls rolled, he began mashing them with his fork, perfect lines left, then right. “What’s that yer doing?” Christopher asked him. “Making cookies. First you mix the dough, then you roll the balls, then you smash them with the fork, nice and easy. Then they go in the oven.” He peered at Chris from underneath the heavy brows. “I bet you could do this part. If you were careful and went nice and slow.” “I could.” “You’d have to come around here, let me lift you up.” “’Kay,” he said, putting his bear on the counter, getting off his stool and coming to Preacher. Preacher lifted him up to sit on the edge of the counter. He helped him hold the fork and showed him how to press down. His first solo attempt was a little messy, so Preacher helped him again. Then he did it pretty well. Preacher let him finish the tray, then put it in the oven. “John?” the boy asked. “How many of them we gotta do?” Preacher smiled. “Tell you what, pardner. We’ll do as many as you want,” he said. Christopher smiled. “’Kay,” he said. *

She went down the stairs in her stocking feet. When she got to the bottom, she stopped suddenly. Chris was sitting up on the counter, John standing beside him. They were both rolling brown dough into small balls. She crossed her arms over her chest and watched. John had heard her come down and smiled at her. He gave Chris a nudge and inclined his head toward Paige, so Chris turned. “Mom,” he said. “We’re makin’ cookies.” “I see that,” she said. “John said Bear needs a leg—” “He’s been getting along fine—” “For looks,” Christopher said. Paige thought that Bear had been looking pretty awful for a long time now. But for the first time in too long, Christopher looked okay. *

A moment of self-compassion can change your entire day. A string of such moments can change the course of your life. — CHRISTOPHER K. GERMER3 Dr.

Obviously you have no liking for Prudence,” he began, “but if you--” “I’ve tried my best to like her. I thought if one peeled away the layers of artifice, one would find the real Prudence beneath. But there’s nothing beneath. And I doubt there ever will be.” “And you find Beatrix Hathaway superior to her?” “In every regard, except perhaps beauty.” “There you have it wrong,” he informed her. “Miss Hathaway is a beauty.” Audrey’s brows lifted. “Do you think so?” she asked idly, lifting the teacup to her lips. “It’s obvious. Regardless of what I think of her character, Miss Hathaway is an exceptionally attractive woman.” “Oh, I don’t know…” Audrey devoted careful attention to her tea, adding a tiny lump of sugar. “She’s rather tall.” “She has the ideal height and form.” “And brown hair is so common…” “It’s not the usual shade of brown, it’s as dark as sable. And those eyes…” “Blue,” Audrey said with a dismissive wave. “The deepest, purest blue I’ve ever seen. No artist could capture--” Christopher broke off abruptly. “Never mind. I’m straying from the point.” “What is your point?” Audrey asked sweetly. “That it is of no significance to me whether Miss Hathaway is a beauty or not. She’s peculiar, and so is her family, and I have no interest in any of them. By the same token, I don’t give a damn if Prudence Mercer is beautiful--I’m interested in the workings of her mind. Her lovely, original, absolutely compelling mind.” “I see. Beatrix’s mind is peculiar, and Prudence’s is original and compelling.” “Just so.” Audrey shook her head slowly. “There is something I want to tell you. But it’s going to become more obvious over time. And you wouldn’t believe it if I told you, or at least you wouldn’t want to believe it. This is one of those things that must be discovered for oneself.” “Audrey, what the devil are you talking about?” Folding her narrow arms across her chest, his sister-in-law contemplated him sternly. And yet a strange little smile kept tugging at the corners of her lips. “If you are at all a gentleman,” she finally said, “you will call on Beatrix tomorrow and apologize for hurting her feelings. Go during one of your walks with Albert--she’ll be glad to see him, if not you.

I was away too long,” Christopher murmured, looking into the soulful brown eyes. “I won’t leave you again.” He dragged his gaze up to Beatrix’s. “It was a mistake to leave him,” he said gruffly. She was smiling at him. “Albert won’t hold it against you. To err is human, to forgive, canine.” To his disbelief, Christopher felt an answering smile tug at the corners of his lips. He continued to pet the dog, who was fit and sleek. “You’ve taken good care of him.” “He’s much better behaved than before,” she said. “You can take him anywhere now.” Rising to his feet, Christopher looked down at her. “Why did you do it?” he asked softly. “He’s very much worth saving. Anyone could see that.” The awareness between them became unbearably acute. Christopher’s heart worked in hard, uneven beats. How pretty she was in the white dress. She radiated a healthy female physicality that was very different from the fashionable frailty of London women. He wondered what it would be like to bed her, if she would be as direct in her passions as she was in everything else.

I will not give away my hard-earned skills to a machine. It’s a bit like robbery with violence, for (machines are) not only intended to diminish my bank balance, but also to steal my power.” — John Brown

I WONDER IF HEAVEN GOT A GAY GHETTO Lorde know(s) cis-hets don`t like me Baldwin know(s) how white homos exoticize me I hope heaven got a gay ghetto Where my QPOC family don`t feel shame Don`t feel too brown or black Or femme or phat Don`t get shame for being free Don`t get lonely, don`t get sa(i)d You know, he`s gunna meet white jesus Shiet, he probably already got a picure with white jesus signed and framed on his wall Mother Mary // Virgin Mother // fucker

that they had to be “tough, determined, and ruthless.

ruthless.

For whatever we fear is our foe.

I must answer that no one wants to be thought a coward.

deemancipation

Sergeants are meant to wear red so the blood doesn’t show and discourage the troops.  You’re out of uniform.” “I changed into my brown pants,” Butler countered, snidely.

All the ways to break mind and body they had developed fighting people on the other side of the world, they now used on their own people, justifying it by saying their treason had forfeited their citizenship. Made them stateless aliens, without real rights.

Tania had the young lawyer’s idea that the rule of law restrained the exercise of executive power. But the truth she now understood was that law merely served power, like the devil’s butler. Sampling the hundreds of thousands of entries, she saw how they had lawyered the thing up to make it look legit, even as its arbitrary and political character was evident on its face. The standard for inclusion was low—reasonable suspicion. Of what, exactly, the law was no longer terribly worried about making clear. Suspicion of whatever qualities the people in charge of eliminating seditious threats during the twenty-plus-year state of emergency thought made it worth a tag.

Are you Christopher Lightwood? Ragnor asked, somewhat menacingly. Christophers wandering attention became focused on a tree. Hm? I think so. Ragnorglared down at Chrostopher's flyaway brown hair. James was beginning to be afraid he would erupt like a green volcano. Are you not certain, Mr.Lightwood? Did you perhaps have an unfortunate encounter when you were an infant? Hm? said Christopher. Ragnor's voice rose. Was the encounter between your infant head and a floor?

She was maybe fifty, mouse-brown hair, pretty once was my first thought, then I realized she was still pretty. I had just seen such ugly things that this cold loft with its naked brick and bare lightbulbs and a mattress on the floor with a pile of books for a nightstand was beautiful, and she was beautiful for making it that way and keeping it as nice as she could and for not having the heart to throw away the Gerber daisy wilting, already dropping petals from its place in the Coke bottle on the counter by the stove. And she was beautiful for wearing a raincoat with a sweater under it because that was all she had.

If the Sussexes had any residual misgivings about whether they wanted out, those doubts vanished when they viewed the Queen’s 2019 televised Christmas message. With their own eyes, they saw that they had been kicked to the margins of the monarchy. Her Majesty eloquently made the point in her speech by saying nothing. The subtext was all in the flotilla of carefully arranged family photographs positioned on her writing desk, a grouping that, in case anyone thinks is accidental, has been artfully changed every year since the monarch’s first televised seasonal message in 1957. The previous Christmas, a family portrait of Charles, Camilla, the five Cambridges, and Harry and Meghan was exhibited at Her Majesty’s elbow. But in December 2019, the Sussexes had evaporated, their image excised as skillfully as Stalin would have done to an apparatchik out of favor. According to author Christopher Andersen, the Queen told the director of the broadcast that all the displayed photographs were fine to remain in the shot except for one. Her Majesty pointed at a winsome portrait of Harry, Meghan, and baby Archie. “ That one,” said the Queen. “I suppose we don’t need that one.” And a happy Christmas to you too, Granny! William was said to have been appalled when he saw the Sussexes had been edited out. He knew his brother well enough to predict a Category 5 tantrum brewing.

White people love telling me that they aren’t as white as I might think they are. They love it. Like a badge of honor that says: “Beneath this skin is so much more. I’m like a tenth Middle Eastern.

I know that the work of decolonizing our minds from a white narrative that doesn’t make space and include the shades and shades and shades and shades of Black, white, Brown, and every color in between is a daily one. A constant one, because the reach of colonization is far, wide, and deep.

Assimilation or pretending, or whatever you wanna call it, it’s not a thing to condemn, the need to assimilate into another culture to avoid discrimination and achieve advancement is pretty universal for any outsider.

all the colors you could think of, black, white and brown, but the fire made everyone look like they were different shades of orange. There were dark orange folks sitting next to medium orange

This was a living, radiant being. A woman, she realized, but dressed in the smart clothes of a wealthy man, with a head of brown curls and eyes so startlingly blue Anya lost her breath.

She searched brown magic for any possible meaning besides juvenile scatology. Finding none, she closed her eyes and shook her head in disappointment. It wouldn’t be the last time.

Controlling the manner in which people interpret their world is one way to control behavior, Milgram argues. If they accept authority’s ideology, action follows logically and willingly. Hence “ideological justification is vital in obtaining willing obedience, for it permits the person to see his behavior as serving a desirable end.”29