Farewell Party Quotes

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.

One of the expedients of party to acquire influence, within particular districts, is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts.

She was bedridden falling a fall which broke her hip. X-rays showed that she had cancer of the colon which had already spreed. To my surprise I found her cheerful and free of pain, perhaps because of the small doses of morphine she was being given. She was surrounded by neighbours and friends who congregated at her bedside day and night. In this cosy, noisy, gregarious world of the "all-chinese" sickbed, so different from the stark, sterile solitude of the American hospital room, her life had assumed the astounding quality of a continuous farewell party.

A bead of cold sweat dangled on my fingertip before dripping onto the doorbell. What if I got electrocuted from my wet fingers? I would die literally inches from my first high school party. And everyone would be like, oh, poor thing was so nervous, what a tragedy. Death by sweat.

The townspeople thrived from these impermanent relationships, which were in their own way pure: the exchange of money for goods, a pleasant farewell, the assurance that neither party would see the other again. After all, what are most relationships in life but exactly this, though stretched flabbily over years and generations?

The only thing that makes me somewhat sceptical regarding human procreation is the unintelligent selection of parents. Some of the most unattractive individuals in the world feel they must multiply at all costs. They are apparently under the illusion that the burden of ugliness becomes lighter if it is shared with descendants.

Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn't) 'if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize”, Blumenthal recalls with horror the night that I 'gave' a farewell party for Martin Walker of the Guardian, and then didn't attend it because I wanted to be on television instead. This is easy: Martin had asked to use the fine lobby of my building for a farewell bash, and I'd set it up. People have quite often asked me to do that. My wife did the honors after Nightline told me that I’d have to come to New York if I wanted to abuse Mother Teresa and Princess Diana on the same show. Of all the people I know, Martin Walker and Sidney Blumenthal would have been the top two in recognizing that journalism and argument come first, and that there can be no hard feelings about it. How do I know this? Well, I have known Martin since Oxford. (He produced a book on Clinton, published in America as 'The President We Deserve'. He reprinted it in London, under the title, 'The President They Deserve'. I doffed my hat to that.) While Sidney—I can barely believe I am telling you this—once also solicited an invitation to hold his book party at my home. A few days later he called me back, to tell me that Martin Peretz, owner of the New Republic, had insisted on giving the party instead. I said, fine, no bones broken; no caterers ordered as yet. 'I don't think you quite get it,' he went on, after an honorable pause. 'That means you can't come to the party at all.' I knew that about my old foe Peretz: I didn't then know I knew it about Blumenthal. I also thought that it was just within the limit of the rules. I ask you to believe that I had buried this memory until this book came out, but also to believe that I won't be slandered and won't refrain—if motives or conduct are in question—from speculating about them in my turn.

Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

I do, and the now-familiar warmth of his lips steadies me. He tastes of salt and the wine we shared with the others at our small farewell party. Aladdin pulls away first and lifts one of my hands to his lips, kissing the delicate henna patterns on my skin, then turning my arm over to kiss the inside of my wrist. The ship’s crew makes themselves busy on the other side of the ship, giving us privacy. “You’re the most beautiful girl in the world,” Aladdin murmurs. “Have I ever told you that?” “Enough to make me wonder if your father was a parrot.

There was always a big party on the night before anyone left for the States. They called it an American wake, because the whole community stayed up to keep the emigrants company through their last night on the island, just as they would have bidden farewell to a soul beginning the long journey towards eternity. There was almost no chance that anyone present would ever see the departed again

He found something grisly in the inevitability of the pattern of each affair. The conventional parabola – sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness – was to him shameful and hypocritical. Even more he shunned the ‘mise-en-scène’ for each of these acts in the play – the meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the week-end by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the final angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.

Hamilton called political parties the “most fatal disease” of popular governments. In his farewell address, George Washington warned that “they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.

The Hardys led Mr. Worth up a side street. They stopped at a wide, steamy window bearing the lettering: CHARLIE’S CLAM HOUSE “I hear the food’s good,” Joe remarked, and the trio entered the restaurant. It was a typical waterfront eating place, with sawdust on the floor. The place was crowded with diners, despite the late hour. In one corner sat a group of well-dressed people who, like the Hardys, had just left a farewell party on board the liner. But most of the customers were rough-looking men of the waterfront district. The noise of lively conversations and the odor of frying fish filled the air. Frank, Joe, and Bart Worth seated themselves at a plain wooden table in the middle of the room. As soon as the waiter had taken a dinner order for Mr. Worth and sandwiches for the Hardys, the Southerner began his story.

Any soul who’d go to their own burial is in need of a therapeutic kick to the angsty ectoplasm of their pity-party ass.” Cora considered a funeral from the deceased’s point of view. The tears, the mourning, the sweetly dishonest words of praise making the best of a life and its ending. While you the guest-of-honor stood by, unable to partake in comfort and farewell, only giving embraces not felt, whispering words not heard. God, it’d be torment to surpass the flames of hell.

Washington’s Farewell Address consists of a series of warnings about the danger of disunion. The North and the South, the East and the West, ought not to consider their interests separate or competing, Washington urged: “your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty.” Parties, he warned, were the “worst enemy” of every government, agitating “the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,” kindling “the animosity of one part against another,” and even fomenting “riot and insurrection.

Washington's Farewell Address consists of a series of warnings about the danger of disunion. The North and the South, the East and the West, ought not to consider their interests separate or competing, Washington urged, "your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty." Parties, he warned, were the "worst enemy" of every government, agitating "the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms," kindling "the animosity of one part against another," and even fomenting "riot and insurrection". As to the size of the Republic, "Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it." The American experiment must go on. But it could only thrive if the citizens were supported by religion and morality, and if they were well educated. "Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge," he urged. "In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that the public opinion should be enlightened.

But the greatest danger could spring from the chaos of a dysfunctional democracy, compounded by relentless party warfare, which, Washington warned, would erode faith in the effectiveness of self-governance and open the door to a demagogue with authoritarian ambitions. 'The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Lilly was Rosa’s best friend. She had a brilliant career behind her. She had been what is the unattainable ambition of every little prostitute, a hotel woman. A hotel woman does not walk the streets—she lives in the hotel and makes her acquaintances there. Very few reach those heights—they have not enough clothes or enough money to be able to wait long for a suitor. True, Lily had only been in a provincial hotel; but in the course of the years she had saved almost four thousand marks. Now she meant to get married. Her future husband had a small plumbing business. He knew all about her but he did not mind. And he would not have to worry for the future; when one of these girls does marry, she is to be trusted. They know the rough-and-tumble and have had enough of it. Lilly was to be married on Monday. To-day Rosa was giving her a farewell coffee-party. They had all turned up to be with Lilly once more. Once married she would not be able to come here again.

If you look back in the 1930s, Leon Trotsky said that fascism was the inability of the socialist parties to come forth with an alternative,” Hudson said. “If the socialist parties and media don’t come forth with an alternative to this neofeudalism, you’re going to have a rollback to feudalism. But instead of the military taking over the land, as occurred with the Norman Conquest, you take over the land financially. Finance has become the new mode of warfare. “You can achieve the takeover of land and the takeover of companies by corporate raids,” he said. “The Wall Street vocabulary is one of conquest and wiping out. You’re having a replay in the financial sphere of what feudalism was in the military sphere.” The debauched ethics of all casino magnates, including Trump, define the dark, petulant heart of America. Our schools and libraries lack funding, our infrastructure is a wreck, drug addiction and suicide are an epidemic, and we flee toward the promise of magic, unchecked hedonism, and perpetual stimulation. There is a pathological need in America to escape the dreary and the depressing.

In addition, of course, they would be taken to a bath and in the bath vestibule they would be ordered to leave their leather coats, their Romanov sheepskin coats, their woolen sweaters, their suits of fine wool, their felt cloaks, their leather boots, their felt boots (for, after all, these were no illiterate peasants this time, but the Party elite—editors of newspapers, directors of trusts and factories, responsible officials in the provincial Party committees, professors of political economy, and, by the beginning of the thirties, all of them understood what good merchandise was). "And who is going to guard them?" the newcomers asked skeptically. "Oh, come on now, who needs your things?" The bath personnel acted offended. "Go on in and don't worry." And they did go in. And the exit was through a different door, and after passing through it, they received back cotton breeches, field shirts, camp quilted jackets without pockets, and pigskin shoes. (Oh, this was no small thing! This was farewell to your former life—to your titles, your positions, and your arrogance!) "Where are our things?" they cried. "Your things you left at home!" some chief or other bellowed at them. "In camp nothing belongs to you. Here in camp, we have communism! Forward march, leader!" And if it was "communism," then what was there for them to object to? That is what they had dedicated their lives to.

I: ... Rather, a most remarkable and strange fact has occurred: after the opposites had been united, quite unexpectedly and incomprehensibly nothing further happened. Everything remained in place, peacefully and yet completely motionless, and life turned into a complete standstill. Satan: Yes, you fools, you certainly have made a pretty mess of things. I: Well, your mockery is unnecessary. Our intentions were serious. Satan: Your seriousness leads us to suffer. The ordering of the beyond is shaken to its foundations. [...] I: ... So - just what do you advise? Satan: The best advice I can give you is: revoke your completely harmful innovation as soon as possible. I: What would be gained by that? We'd have to start from scratch again and would infallibly reach the same conclusion a second time. What one has grasped once, one cannot intentionally not know again and undo. Your counsel is no counsel. Satan: But could you exist without divisiveness and disunity? You have to get worked up about something, represent a party, overcome opposites, if you want to live. I: That does not help. We also see each other in the opposite. We have grown tired of this game. Satan: And so with life. I: It seems to me that it depends on what you call life. Your notion of life has to do with climbing up and tearing down, with assertion and doubt, with impatient dragging around, with hasty desire. You lack the absolute and its forbearing patience. Satan: Quite right. My life bubbles and foams and stirs up turbulent waves, it consists of seizing and throwing away, ardent wishing and restlessness. That is life, isn't it? I: But the absolute also lives. Satan: That is no life. It is a standstill or as good as a standstill, or rather: it lives interminably slowly and wastes thousands of years, just like the miserable condition that you have created. I: You enlighten me. You are personal life, but the apparent standstill is the forbearing life of eternity, the life of divinity! This time you have counselled me well. I will let you go. Farewell!

Two men were advancing towards the car along the cross track. One man carried a short wooden bench on his back, the other a big wooden object about the size of an upright piano. Richard hailed them, they greeted him with every sign of pleasure. Richard produced cigarettes and a cheerful party spirit seemed to be developing. Then Richard turned to her. “Fond of the cinema? Then you shall see a performance.” He spoke to the two men and they smiled with pleasure. They set up the bench and motioned to Victoria and Richard to sit on it. Then they set up the round contrivance on a stand of some kind. It had two eye-holes in it and as she looked at it, Victoria cried: “It’s like things on piers. What the butler saw.” “That’s it,” said Richard. “It’s a primitive form of same.” Victoria applied her eyes to the glass-fronted peephole, one man began slowly to turn a crank or handle, and the other began a monotonous kind of chant. “What is he saying?” Victoria asked. Richard translated as the singsong chant continued: “Draw near and prepare yourself for much wonder and delight. Prepare to behold the wonders of antiquity.” A crudely coloured picture of Negroes reaping wheat swam into Victoria’s gaze. “Fellahin in America,” announced Richard, translating. Then came: “The wife of the great Shah of the Western world,” and the Empress Eugénie simpered and fingered a long ringlet. A picture of the King’s Palace in Montenegro, another of the Great Exhibition. An odd and varied collection of pictures followed each other, all completely unrelated and sometimes announced in the strangest terms. The Prince Consort, Disraeli, Norwegian Fjords and Skaters in Switzerland completed this strange glimpse of olden far-off days. The showman ended his exposition with the following words: “And so we bring to you the wonders and marvels of antiquity in other lands and far-off places. Let your donation be generous to match the marvels you have seen, for all these things are true.” It was over. Victoria beamed with delight. “That really was marvellous!” she said. “I wouldn’t have believed it.” The proprietors of the travelling cinema were smiling proudly. Victoria got up from the bench and Richard who was sitting on the other end of it was thrown to the ground in a somewhat undignified posture. Victoria apologized but was not ill pleased. Richard rewarded the cinema men and with courteous farewells and expressions of concern for each other’s welfare, and invoking the blessing of God on each other, they parted company. Richard and Victoria got into the car again and the men trudged away into the desert. “Where are they going?” asked Victoria. “They travel all over the country. I met them first in Transjordan coming up the road from the Dead Sea to Amman. Actually they’re bound now for Kerbela, going of course by unfrequented routes so as to give shows in remote villages.” “Perhaps someone will give them a lift?

I set my elbows on the table, rested my chin on my clasped hands, and watched. Frank tipped his head, his question as clear as if he’d spoken. “What?” his gesture said. “Why are you looking at us like that?” I shrugged my answer, hoping the truth wasn’t apparent in my eyes. He picked up his coffee, washed down his eggs, and cleared his throat. “I thought we’d make a trip into Terrell today.” “All of us?” Ollie nearly shouted. “That’s right, honey. All of us.” Ollie’s head whipped in my direction. “Terrell, Rebekah.” Her wide eyes told me this was a pleasure she’d experienced before, one she longed for again. “How does that sound, Rebekah?” Frank’s words turned all eyes in my direction. “Think you can get us ready?” I laid down my fork, breakfast suddenly a rock in my stomach. Did he mean this as my farewell party? Maybe he’d tell the children that two weeks from today I’d board the train and ride back out of their lives. Frank grinned at me and pushed his plate away. I let out a long breath and managed an answering smile. “I’ll have us ready. Ollie will help.” “Me, too!” The boys’ words tangled with each other. Frank slapped his hands on his legs and stood. “I best get my chores done, then.

Today marks the last day of the calendar year. Many of us will celebrate this event with friends, food and partying. Some parishes offer an alternative way to commemorate the coming of the New Year: prayer in church before the Blessed Sacrament. Others of us will opt for sleep. However we celebrate, when the clock strikes midnight (unless we’re already in bed), we will bid farewell to 2014 and welcome in 2015. But before this year ends, let us take a few minutes today to thank God for the obvious blessings of 2014: our loved ones, our spiritual growth, the challenges we faced and worked through, the love we received and bestowed this past year. And let us entrust the painful and ambiguous events of 2014 to God’s love and mercy. Then let us ask God for the grace to live the coming year well, ready and eager to receive grace upon grace from our good God. God of all time, thank you for the graces of this past year and for the graces yet to come.

Once upon a time, there lived a man who had a terrible passion for baked beans. He loved them, but they always had an embarrassing and somewhat lively reaction on him. One day he met a girl and fell in love. When it was apparent that they would marry, he thought to himself 'She'll never go for me carrying on like that,' so he made the supreme sacrifice and gave up beans, and shortly after that they got married.      A few months later, on the way home from work, his car broke down and since they lived in the country, he called his wife and told her he would be late because he had to walk. On his way home, he passed a small cafe and the wonderful aroma of baked beans overwhelmed him. Since he still had several miles to walk he figured he could walk off any ill affects before he got home. So he went in and ordered, and before leaving had three extra-large helpings of baked beans. All the way home he farted. He 'putted' down one hill and 'putt-putted' up the next. By the time he arrived home he felt reasonably safe.      His wife met him at the door and seemed somewhat excited. She exclaimed, 'Darling, I have the most wonderful surprise for you for dinner tonight!' She put a blindfold on him, and led him to his chair at the head of the table and made him promise not to peek. At this point he was beginning to feel another one coming on. Just as she was about to remove the blindfold, the telephone rang. She again made him promise not to peek until she returned, and she went to answer the phone.       While she was gone, he seized the opportunity. He shifted his weight to one leg and let go. It was not only loud, but *ripe* as a rotten egg.        He had a hard time breathing, so he felt for his napkin and fanned the air about him. He had just started to feel better, when another urge came on. He raised his leg and 'rrriiiipppp!' It sounded like a diesel engine revving, and smelled worse. To keep from gagging, he tried fanning his arms a while, hoping the smell would dissipate. Things had just about returned to normal when he felt another urge coming. He shifted his weight to his other leg and let go. This was a real blue ribbon winner; the windows rattled, the dishes on the table shook and a minute later the flowers on the table were dead. While keeping an ear tuned in on the conversation in the hallway, and keeping his promise of staying blindfolded, he carried on like this for the next ten minutes, farting and fanning them each time with his napkin.      When he heard the 'phone farewells' (indicating the end of his loneliness and freedom) he neatly laid his napkin on his lap and folded his hands on top of it. Smiling contentedly, he was the picture of innocence when his wife walked in. Apologizing for taking so long, she asked if he had peeked at the dinner. After assuring her he had not, she removed the blindfold and yelled, 'Surprise!'      To his shock and horror, there were twelve dinner guests seated around the table for his surprise birthday party.

Some relationships have to end ugly. It's not the way we want it to be, but sometimes it's the way it has to be. Sometimes there is no possibility of a kind farewell. There is too much water under the bridge, or one or both parties are incapable of resolution, or it's just one of those woundmate connections that is riddled with unfriendly fire. Whatever it is, don't beat yourself up if an ending gets ugly. Don't pile more suffering onto the open wound. Difficult endings are part of life. They just are. Instead, focus your energies on learning what you need to learn so you can manifest something healthier the next time. Our lives don't improve when we expect perfection. They improve when we graduate from the School of Heart Knocks, one lesson after another... after another.

Debs came to the conclusion that no strike or labor movement could ultimately be successful as long as the government was controlled by the capitalist class. Any advances made by an organized working class would later be reversed by the capitalists when they regained absolute power, often by temporarily mollifying workers with reforms. Working men and women had to achieve political power, a goal of Britain’s Labour Party at the time, or they would forever be at the mercy of the bosses.

Politics would, in the late stages of capitalism, become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates of corporations.

Trump and today’s Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism.

At our last farewell party I promise I will kill the waiter

Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force. They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.

Societies in acute distress often form what anthropologists call “crisis cults,” which promise recovered grandeur and empowerment during times of collapse, anxiety, and disempowerment. A mythologized past will magically return. America will be great again. The old social hierarchies, opportunities, and rules will be resurrected. Prescribed rituals and behaviors, including acts of violence to cleanse the society of evil, will vanquish the malevolent forces that are blamed for the crisis. These crisis cults—they have arisen in most societies that faced destruction, from Easter Island to Native Americans at the time of the 1890 Ghost Dance—create hermetically sealed tribes informed by magical thinking. We are already far down this road. Our ruling elites are little more than Ice Age hunters in Brooks Brothers suits, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright told me, driving herds of woolly mammoths over cliffs to keep the party going without asking what will happen when the food source suddenly goes extinct. “The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge,” the philosopher John Gray wrote. “The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge—not even in the long run.

These believers, like all fascists, condemn the reality-based world as contaminated, decayed, and immoral. This world took their jobs. It destroyed their future. It ruined their communities. It doomed their children. It flooded their lives with alcohol, opioids, pornography, sexual abuse, jail sentences, domestic violence, deprivation, and despair. And then, from the depths of suicidal despair, they discovered that God has a plan for them. God will save them. God will intervene in their lives to promote and protect them. God has called them to carry out his holy mission in the world and to be rich, powerful, and happy. The rational, secular forces, those that speak in the language of fact and reason, are hated and feared, for they seek to pull believers back into “the culture of death” that nearly destroyed them. The magical belief system, as it was for impoverished German workers who flocked to the Nazi Party, is an emotional life raft. It is all that supports them. The only way to blunt this movement is to reintegrate these people into the economy, to give them economic stability through good wages and benefits, to restore their self-esteem.

Good morning to Karen’s fertile and barren friends. I thought I’d send over the plan for the completely unnecessary, mawkish, and expensive non-tradition borrowed from America that is our friend Karen’s baby shower. Karen thinks it’s always good to demand money and time from people to celebrate her own personal life choices and we felt you haven’t given her quite enough in recent history, what, with the $1500 pound hen do in Ibiza, wedding in Majorca with a strict dress code, and gift registry at Selfridges. (NB: ladies-- if you get a new job or buy or flat on your own, you get a card and that’s it! We want to make sure there’s no prprecedent set. We’re not made of money!!) The good news is, after Karen gives birth she won’t see any of her childless friends unless all they want to do is talk about her baby and nothing else. So you can treat this as her farewell party as well as her baby shower. And save those pennies for a couple of years, that is of course until she comes back to you when she’s stopped breast feeding and is bored out of her mind, demands you all go out to drink, dance, and take loads of drugs, then sends you an offish text the following week saying she can’t really have a night out like that again because “I’M A MOTHER NOW.

Vienna's reputation as a city of luxury, merrymaking and indulgence actually lies much further in the past, in the time of the Babenbergs at whose courts the Minnesinger were prestigious guests, similar to publicity-seeking pop stars of today. the half-censorious, half-envious comments of foreigners often reflect the ambivalence that so many have felt about a city that was both seductive and dangerous. Such was indeed how Grillparzer described the city he loved and hated in his "Farewell to Vienna"(1843) though he had more in mind than simply the temptations of the flesh. But if Vienna was insidiously threatening under its hedonistic surface for a Grillparzer, others have simply regarded it as cheerfully, even shamelessly, immoral. 'lhe humanist scholar Enea Silvio Piccolomini, private secretary to Friedrich III and subsequently elected Pope Pius II, expressed his astonishment at the sexual freedom of the Viennese in a letter to a fellow humanist in Basel written in 1450: "'lhe number of whores is very great, and wives seem disinclined to confine their affections to a single man; knights frequently visit the wives of burghers. 'lhe men put out some wine for them and leave the house. Many girls marry without the permission of their fathers and widows don't observe the year of mourning." 'the local equivalent of the Roman cicisbeo is an enduring feature of Viennese society, and the present author remembers a respectable middle-class intellectual (now dead) who habitually went on holiday with both wife and mistress in tow. Irregular liaisons are celebrated in a Viennese joke about two men who meet for the first time at a party. By way of conversation one says to the other: "You see those two attractive ladies chatting to each other over there? Well, the brunette is my wife and the blonde is my mistress." "that's funny," says his new friend; "I was just about to say the same thing, only the other way round." In Biedermeier Vienna (1815-48), menages d trois seem not to have been uncommon, since the gallant who became a friend of the family was officially known as the Hausfreund. 'the ambiguous status of such a Hausfreund features in a Wienerlied written in 1856 by the usually non-risque Johann Baptist Moser. It con-terns a certain Herr von Hecht, who is evidently a very good friend of the family of the narrator. 'lhe first six lines of the song innocently praise the latter's wife, who is so delightful and companionable that "his sky is always blue"; but the next six relate how she imported a "friend", Herr von Hecht, and did so "immediately after the wedding". This friend loves the children so much "they could be his own." And indeed, the younger one looks remarkably like Herr von Hecht, who has promised that the boy will inherit from him, "which can't be bad, eh?" the faux-naivete with which this apparently commonplace situation is described seems to have delighted Moser's public-the song was immensely popular then and is still sung today.

pot /po/ I. nm 1. (récipient, contenu) container; (en verre) jar; (en plastique) carton, tub; (en faïence, terre) pot; (pichet) jug • ~ de verre | glass jar • mettre qch en ~ | to put [sth] into jars [confiture, fruits]; to pot [plante] • plante en ~ | potted plant • ~ de marmelade | jar of marmalade • ~ de yaourt (en verre) jar of yoghurt; (en plastique) carton of yoghurt • acheter un ~ de peinture | to buy a tin of paint • garder les ~s de confiture | to save jam jars • réutiliser les ~s de peinture | to re-use the paint tins • il a fallu trois ~s de peinture | it took three tins of paint voir aussi: cuiller 2. (de chambre) pot; (de bébé) potty • aller sur le ~ (ponctuellement) to go on the potty • depuis un mois il va sur le ~ | he's been potty-trained for a month now 3. ○(boisson) drink • prendre un ~ | to have a drink 4. ○(réunion) do (familier) (GB), drinks party • ~ d'accueil/d'adieu | welcoming/farewell party 5. ○(chance) luck • elle n'a pas eu de ~ | she hasn't had much luck • avoir du ~ | to be lucky • avoir un coup de ~ | to have a stroke of luck • (par un) coup de ~, la porte était ouverte | as luck would have it, the door was open 6. (argent commun) kitty • ramasser le ~ | (Jeux) to win the kitty II. Idiomes 1. payer les pots cassés | to pick up the pieces 2. c'est le pot de terre contre le pot de fer | it's an unequal contest 3. ce sera à la fortune du pot | you'll have to take pot luck 4. découvrir le pot aux roses | to stumble on what's been going on 5. être sourd comme un pot○ | to be as deaf as a post 6. tourner autour du pot | to beat about the bush 7. payer plein pot○ | to pay full price 8. partir or démarrer plein pot○ | to be off ou go off like a shot (familier) pot catalytique catalytic converter pot de chambre chamber pot pot de colle (lit) pot of glue; (fig) informal leech pot à eau water jug (GB), pitcher (US) pot d'échappement (silencieux) silencer (GB), muffler (US); (système) exhaust

Some relationships have to end ugly. It's not the way we want it to be, but sometimes it's the way it has to be. Sometimes there is no possibility of a kind farewell. There is too much water under the bridge, or one or both parties are incapable of resolution, or it's just one of those woundmate connections that is riddled with unfriendly fire. Whatever it is, don't beat yourself up if an ending gets ugly. Don't pile more suffering onto the open wound. Difficult endings are part of life. They just are. Instead, focus your energies on learning what you need to learn so you can manifest something healthier the next time. Our lives don't improve when we expect perfection. They improve when we graduate from the School of Heart Knocks, one lesson after another... after another.

When you said goodbye earlier, I wish there had been something more. It's too sharp of a turn. Endings are jarring. It doesn’t make any sense. 'Goodbyes' are the oldest thieves around. Because they steal all the credit of a moment. All the good out of a conversation. The lasting impression of goodbyes makes it seem as if no party ever cared to begin with. You know?

Yet against all this background of mourning despair, Paris in the summer of 1939 seemed gilded by splendid receptions, dances, right-wing festivities. The prospect of war was an ever-present ghost at every party, but even so people refused to acknowldege the reality behind the fears. Each new crisis was like a splinter of glass that scratched, might even draw a drop of blood, but was not savage enough to wound badly. The madness in the air was a last-gasp attempt to enjoy ourselves while we could, a collective national need for illusions, by a patient with an incurable disease who knows that death will come at any moment.

The more familiar we are with the particular conditions that connect or disconnect us from presence, the easier it becomes to spot them in our lives. For example, I tend to lose presence when I’m rushing. This means that I’m more apt to make physical or relational blunders: I might drop something in the kitchen, forget my lunch, or even say something sharp. I learned a painful lesson about this a few years ago. I was at a farewell party for my girlfriend, Evan, who had just finished a year of service at a meditation retreat center. We had plans to drive north up the coast of California after the party, and I’d made an appointment to install a car radio for the trip. In that classic, romantic way, I wanted everything to be perfect. As our departure time approached, I grew more and more anxious about missing the appointment. With no sign of a formal send-off, I finally spoke up and said that we needed to leave soon. To avoid any awkwardness, Evan went along with my request, but she was in tears by the time we arrived at the auto shop. She was incensed at me for cutting short a meaningful experience and at herself for not speaking up. In my fixation to create “the perfect trip,” I’d missed the fact that she was already enjoying herself. I reflected a lot on that incident, how losing presence had unintended, painful consequences.

He/She Gets Angry When Questioned Where you were until now just riles him/her up like the Hulk. He/she hates being questioned about their whereabouts. Their stories won’t match, their tone and pitch will change paces and they will try to avoid talking about it altogether. He/She Stays Up Late A sudden shift in their bedtime routine indicates an affair. Cheating partners consider a partner’s sleeping time as the safest to text or message their new love interest. His/Her Stories Seem Inconsistent Sometimes they won’t say a word about where they were and sometimes they would give away too much. When asked if a friend was there with them too, they will not only confirm their presence but also tell you about all the other people who were there, including someone’s pets. Too much information is another sign that there is something fishy going on or else they won’t be this particular about it. There Is No Intimacy Not just physically, but you also find them emotionally distant from you. Even when they are with you, their mind doesn’t seem to be. They have also lost interest in sex and always make excuses like being tired, not in the mood, had chili beef in the office and feeling bloated, etc. They Never Put Their Phone Down If they seem to be stuck with their phone all the time and even taking it with them when taking the trash or going for a bath, it is a sure tell sign that there is something in that phone they don’t want you to know about. He/She Pays Attention to Himself/Herself It’s always appraisable that your spouse dresses up for you, but if they are suddenly worried about how they look naked or whether they should get a bikini wax or not, it’s probably an effort to look good for someone other than you. You Only Get One-Word Answers from Them You sense a barrier in your communications because they have resorted to a yes, no, or hmm at most. When partners lose interest in their spouses or are having an affair, they fear to communicate too much. They want to play it carefully and not say or do something that would get them caught. They Are Spending Too Much If all of a sudden you notice too many credit card bills and receipts in their pockets and yet you don’t receive any supposed gifts, then someone else is on the receiving end of them. When asked, they will always have an explanation over how they had to lend some money to a friend, how they had to pitch in the last minute for an office party for a guy’s farewell or how they had to pay a medical bill of some relative. He/He’s Doing Things They Hated Before Remember the time you asked them to go golfing with you and they flat out refused and joked about how it’s an old man’s sport? Look who is all polo shirts and hats now! If their interests have changed all of a sudden and they are doing stuff they hated, know something is up.

They Are Spending Too Much If all of a sudden you notice too many credit card bills and receipts in their pockets and yet you don’t receive any supposed gifts, then someone else is on the receiving end of them. When asked, they will always have an explanation over how they had to lend some money to a friend, how they had to pitch in the last minute for an office party for a guy’s farewell or how they had to pay a medical bill of some relative. He/He’s Doing Things They Hated Before Remember the time you asked them to go golfing with you and they flat out refused and joked about how it’s an old man’s sport? Look who is all polo shirts and hats now! If their interests have changed all of a sudden and they are doing stuff they hated, know something is up.

The ruling elites, terrified by the mobilization of the left in the 1960s, or by what the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called America’s “excess of democracy,”81 built counter-institutions to delegitimize and marginalize critics of corporate capitalism and imperialism. They bought the allegiances of the two main political parties by purging from its ranks New Deal Democrats and corporate and imperial critics. They imposed obedience to corporate capitalism and globalization within academia and the press. This campaign, laid out by Lewis Powell in his 1971 memorandum titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” was the blueprint for the creeping corporate coup d’état that today is complete.

The destruction of democratic institutions, places where the citizen has agency and a voice, is far graver than the ascendancy to the White House of the demagogue Trump. The coup destroyed our two-party system. It destroyed labor unions. It destroyed public education. It destroyed the judiciary. It destroyed the press. It destroyed academia. It destroyed consumer and environmental protection. It destroyed our industrial base. It destroyed communities and cities. And it destroyed the lives of tens of millions of Americans no longer able to find work that provides a living wage, cursed to live in chronic poverty or locked in cages in our monstrous system of mass incarceration. This coup also destroyed the credibility of liberal democracy. Self-identified liberals such as Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama mouthed the words of liberal democratic values while making war on these values in the service of corporate power. The revolt we see rippling across the country is a revolt not only against a corporate system that has betrayed workers, but also, for many, liberal democracy itself. This is very dangerous. It will allow the radical right to cement into place an Americanized fascism.

And Then It Was Less Bleak Because We Said So" Today there has been so much talk of things exploding into other things, so much that we all become curious, that we all run outside into the hot streets and hug. Romance is a grotto of eager stones anticipating light, or a girl whose teeth you can always see. With more sparkle and pop is the only way to live. Your confetti tongue explodes into acid jazz. Small typewriters that other people keep in their eyes click away at all our farewell parties. It is hard to pack for the rest of your life. Someone is always eating cold cucumber noodles. Someone will drop by later to help dismantle some furniture. A lot can go wrong if you sleep or think, but the trees go on waving their broken little hands.

Slavery is legal in prisons under the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”49 Prisoners are not covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act requiring workers to be paid the minimum wage. The highest hourly wage in prison rarely exceeds $2 and most prisoners earn less than a dollar an hour. In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas most prisoners are not paid for their work. Once you enter prison you become, in essence, a slave of the state.

Corporate investors, who have poured billions into the business of mass incarceration, expect long-term returns. And they will get them. It is their lobbyists who write the draconian laws that demand absurdly long sentences, deny paroles, determine immigrant detention laws, and impose minimum-sentence and Three-Strikes laws, which mandate life sentences after three felony convictions. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the country, earned $1.7 billion in revenues and collected $300 million in profits in 2013.50 CCA holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its facilities on any one day.51 Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services, provides food for six hundred correctional institutions across the United States.52 Goldman Sachs and other investors acquired it in 2007 for $8.3 billion.53 The three top for-profit prison corporations spent an estimated $45 million over a recent ten-year period for lobbying to keep the prison business flush.54 The resource center In the Public Interest documented in its report “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations” that private prison companies often sign state contracts that guarantee prison occupancy rates of 90 percent.55 If states fail to meet the quota they have to pay the corporations for the empty beds. CCA in 2011 gave $710,300 in political contributions to candidates for federal or state office, political parties, and so-called 527 groups (PACs and super PACs), the American Civil Liberties Union reported.56 The corporation also spent $1.07 million lobbying federal officials plus undisclosed sums to lobby state officials.57 The GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest for-profit prison management companies, donated $250,000 to Donald Trump in 2017.58 The United States, from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison population by about 700 percent, the ACLU reported.59 Private prisons account for nearly all newly built prisons.60 And nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit prisons, according to Detention Watch Network.61

We once had within our capitalist democracy liberal institutions—the press, labor unions, political third parties, civic and church groups, public broadcasting, well-funded public universities, and a liberal wing of the Democratic Party—that were capable of responding to outside pressure from movements. They did so imperfectly. They provided only enough reforms to save the capitalist system from widespread unrest or, with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s, from revolution. They never adequately addressed white supremacy and institutional racism, or the cruelty that is endemic to capitalism. But they had the ability to mitigate some of the suffering that plagued working men and women. There was never enough social mobility, but there was some.

A march held in Sacramento, California, in June 2016 by the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party to protest attacks at Trump rallies ended with a number of people stabbed.114 Police accused counter-protesters of initiating the violence.115 It is a short series of steps from bats and ax handles to knives to guns. The conflict will not end until followers of the alt-right and the anticapitalist left are given a living wage and a voice in how we are governed. Take away a person’s dignity, agency, and self-esteem and this is what you get. As political power devolves into a more naked form of corporate totalitarianism, as unemployment and underemployment expand, so will extremist groups. They will attract more sympathy and support as the wider population realizes, correctly, that Americans have been stripped of all ability to influence the decisions that affect their lives—lives that are getting steadily worse.

At a farewell party, his staff presented him with a gift: a beaten-up car seat—a nod to his Secret Service code name.

Partisans are the ones George Washington warned us of in his farewell address. They: put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

GW: 'Vigilant citizens are required to keep parties focused on serving the people rather than the unprincipled pursuit of power that divides in order to conquer