Irish Work Quotes

-BDB on the board- Knitter's Anonimous May 8, 2006 Rhage (in his bedroom posting in V's room on the board) Hi, my name is V. ("Hi, V") I've been knitting for 125 years now. (*gasping noises*) It's begun to impact my personal relationships: my brothers think I'm a nancy. It's begun to affect my health: I'm getting a callus on my forefinger and I find bits of yarn in all my pockets and I'm starting to smell like wool. I can't concentrate at work: I keep picturing all these lessers in Irish sweaters and thick socks. (*sounds of sympathy*) I've come seeking a community of people who, like me, are trying not to knit. Can you help me? (*We're with you*) Thank you (*takes out hand-knitted hankie in pink*) (*sniffles*) ("We embrace you, V") Vishous (in the pit): Oh hell no...you did not just put that up. And nice spelling in the title. Man...you just have to roll up on me, don't you. I got four words for you, my brother. Rhage: Four words? Okay...lemme see... Rhage, you're so sexy. hmmm.... Rhage, you're SO smart. No wait! Rhage, you're SO right! That's it, isn't it...g'head. You can tell me. Vishous: First one starts with a "P" Use your head for the other three. Bastard. Rhage: P? Hmm... Please pass the yarn Vishous: Payback is a bitch! Rhage: Ohhhhhhhhhhhh I'm so scuuuuuurred. Can you whip me up a blanket to hide under?

He used his large shoulders and movements to impose his dominance over others as he strutted around but his facial expressions were a giveaway to people like Maeve who was born into a gritty group of native born fighting Irish. While many saw him as a man who worked his way up to power and influence and attained success that others fail to achieve, she saw him as a sham. He didn’t acquire loyalty by goodwill, but by corruption, fear, and loathing.

I was beginning to understand how the Irish mentality worked. The more foolish, illogical or surreal one's actions were perceived t be (and mine surely fell into one of these categories), the wider the arms of hospitality were opened in salutation.

But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative.

In the secular trinity of Irish-American values, loyalty and humor are father and son. Self-deprecation is the spirit that works in mysterious ways ...

They founded a society based not upon currency and commodities but on the elementary notion that if you failed to raise enough to eat, you would go hungry.

May there always be work for your hands to do. May your purse always hold a coin or two. May the sun always shine on your windowpane. May a rainbow be certain to follow each rain. Irish blessing

To anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them the land they live on is like their mother. It's the only thing that lasts, that's worth working for, for fighting for...

How can a person, or a class, be free when its means of life are in the grasp of another? How can the working class be free when the sole chance of existence of its individual members depends on their ability to make profit for others?

My dad's filthy rich, and even though we're Irish Catholic I'm an only child. I've got more money than you do so I'll work for free. No charge. A free law clerk for three weeks. I'll do all the research, typing, answering the phone. I'll even carry your briefcase and make the coffee. I was afraid you'd want to be a a law partner. No I'm a woman, and I'm in the South. I know my place.

Jonathan Swift (November 30, 1667 – October 19, 1745) was an Irish cleric, satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for Whigs then for Tories), and poet, famous for works like Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, The Drapier's Letters, The Battle of the Books, and A Tale of a Tub. Swift is probably the foremost prose satirist in the English language, although he is less well known for his poetry. Swift published all of his works under pseudonyms — such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M.B. Drapier — or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of 2 styles of satire; the Horatian and Juvenalian styles. Source: Wikipedia

No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says 'bloody,' unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is -----. No doubt in time -----, like 'bloody,' will find its way into the drawing room and replaced by some other word.

What are you going to name him?” I asked her. Adrian followed my lead. „Adrian Sinclair has a nice ring to it,“ he said. Olive’s eyes, full of fear, watched the window and door, but her lips curled into another smile at the joke. “Declan.” “Nice Irish name,” I said. “It would work,” Adrian conceded. „Declan Adrian Sinclair.“ „Declan Neil,“ she corrected.

Davy’s work in Bristol came under attack by conservative politicians, including the famous Irish MP Edmund Burke, who accused the gas experiments of promoting not only atheism but the French Revolution.

There were first editions of Lang’s Red, Blue and Green Fairy Books, an incredibly old binding of the works of the Brothers Grimm and a nice imprint of WB Yeats’ Irish Fairy and Folk Tales among others.

Charlotte poured a stiff Irish coffee for herself, wanting both stimulation and sedation. It didn’t work, in fact it backfired, making her antsy but confused. An anti-Irish coffee, must be an English coffee.

Benny was not there to welcome me. He had been left at a good place to learn a trade, and for several months every thing worked well. He was liked by the master, and was a favorite with his fellow-apprentices; but one day they accidentally discovered a fact they had never before suspected—that he was colored! This at once transformed him into a different being. Some of the apprentices were Americans, others American-born Irish; and it was offensive to their dignity to have a “nigger” among them, after they had been told that he was a “nigger.” They began by treating him with silent scorn, and finding that he returned the same, they resorted to insults and abuse. He was too spirited a boy to stand that, and he went off.

There has always been racism. But it developed as a leading principle of thought and perception in the context of colonialism. That’s understandable. When you have your boot on someone’s neck, you have to justify it. The justification has to be their depravity. It’s very striking to see this in the case of people who aren’t very different from one another. Take a look at the British conquest of Ireland, the earliest of the Western colonial conquests. It was described in the same terms as the conquest of Africa. The Irish were a different race. They weren’t human. They weren’t like us. We had to crush and destroy them.

And I think that when once he had learned the art of arranging his words as he stood upon his legs, and had so mastered his voice as to have obtained the ear of the House, the work of his life was not difficult.

Jim Rosato was recently married, to a Greek nurse. Rosato was half Irish and half Italian, and there was a pool on at the 1st as to which of the two would arrive at work wearing the other's skin as a hat within the year.

In praise of mu husband's hair A woman is alone in labor, for it is an unfortunate fact that there is nobody who can have the baby for you. However, this account would be inadequate if I did not speak to the scent of my husband's hair. Besides the cut flowers he sacrifices his lunches to afford, the purchase of bags of licorice, the plumping of pillows, steaming of fish, searching out of chic maternity dresses, taking over of work, listening to complaints and simply worrying, there was my husband's hair. His hair has always amazed stylists in beauty salons. At his every first appointment they gather their colleagues around Michael's head. He owns glossy and springy hair, of an animal vitality and resilience that seems to me so like his personality. The Black Irish on Michael's mother's side of the family have changeable hair--his great-grandmother's hair went from black to gold in old age. Michael's went from golden-brown of childhood to a deepening chestnut that gleams Modoc black from his father under certain lights. When pushing each baby I throw my arm over Michael and lean my full weight. When the desperate part is over, the effort, I turn my face into the hair above his ear. It is as though I am entering a small and temporary refuge. How much I want to be little and unnecessary, to stay there, to leave my struggling body at the entrance. Leaves on a tree all winter that now, in your hand, crushed, give off a dry, true odor. The brass underside of a door knocker in your fingers and its faint metallic polish. Fresh potter's clay hardening on the wrist of a child. The slow blackening of Lent, timeless and lighted with hunger. All of these things enter into my mind when drawing into my entire face the scent of my husband's hair. When I am most alone and drowning and I think I cannot go on, it is breathing into his hair that draws me to the surface and restores my small courage.

Along with the concept of American Dream runs the notion that every man and woman is entitled to an opinion and to one vote, no matter how ridiculous that opinion might be or how uninformed the vote. It could be that the Borderer Presbyterian tradition of "stand up and say your rightful piece" contributed to the American notion that our gut-level but uninformed opinions are some sort of unvarnished foundational political truths. I have been told that this is because we redneck working-class Scots Irish suffer from what psychiatrists call "no insight".Consequently, we will never agree with anyone outside our zone of ignorance because our belligerent Borderer pride insists on the right to be dangerously wrong about everything while telling those who are more educated to "bite my ass!

As I worked I continued to be a bit terrified in the back of my mind that it would be awful in the end, a big mishmash of nothing in particular, and there I would be, having wasted a whole week of my life destroying things I wanted to keep. But I should have trusted the long history of women who've come before me making rag rugs from everything that wasn't nailed down because it wasn't like that at all. Instead it was like a big, incredible tapestry that just happened to--if you could decipher it--tell a million little stories from my life. I could look at it and see my old lace slip and the girls' party dresses and my high school rainbow tie-dyes, the Irish kilt and the Halloween clown pants and so many, many other things. It was all in there somewhere. I felt like the miller's daughter in the fairy tale, the one who stays up all night spinning straw into gold. But who needs yellow metal, anyway? The was way better.

To say that one goes on holiday is to speak the language of the working class, for whom the time off appears merry and playful; but to say one goes on vacation is to speak the language of the ruling class. Vacation comes from the same root as vacant and reflects what the owner sees when he looks around the floor—a vacancy where John 'should' 'be'. (I suspect that the owner probably thinks some negative thoughts about the Labor Unions and the 'damned Liberal' Government that force him to pay John even when John 'is vacant.') I leave it as a puzzle for the reader: Do the Irish and English speak Working Class in this case because they have had several socialist governments, or have the had several socialist governments because they learned to speak the language of the Working Class? And: has the U.S., alone among industrial nations, never had a socialist government because it speaks the Ruling Class language, or does it speak the Ruling Class language because it has never had a socialist government?

The man could stop her heart, then send it into full gallop. Just a look at him. They’d been married more than two years, she thought. Shouldn’t that ease off? Where was that in the Marriage Rules? But a man who looked like Roarke broke every rule. That absurdly beautiful face set off with the wild blue eyes of some Irish god, and the perfect poet’s mouth. The black hair, silkier than Summerset’s tone, tied back in work mode. The tall, lean length of him all in black—no tie or suit coat, the sleeves of his shirt rolled to the elbow. So he’d been home, and working, for some time. Yeah, the look of him broke the rules, stopped the heart. But it was that instant, just that instant when those amazing blue eyes met hers that sent it into the gallop. In them lived love. Just that simple, just that extraordinary.

Before the Sex Pistols, music was so bloody serious, all run by university graduates. It was all head music devoid of any real intellectualism. There was no deep though in it, merely images pertaining to something mystical, too stupid and absolutely devoid of reality. How on earth were we supposed to relate to that music when we lived in council flats? We had no money, no job, no nothing. So the Pistols projected that anger, that rock-bottom working-class hate.

When I was young I lived in several different countries. This is before the EU and at a time when America only chased the Irish vote, not the English. We HAD to find work because there were no welfare state options open to us in those countries. And do you know what? We went out and found work. We had no choice

Capitalism has come, not only to serve Britain's purpose by keeping the people divided, but, by setting worker against worker, it has profited by exploiting both. It works on religious prejudices. It represents to the Protestant workman any attempt by the Catholic workman to get improved conditions as the cloak for some insidious political game.

Jaysus, woman,” he sighs. “Ye clean up your fecking mouth before I do it for you. You want to work for me ye better start acting like a lady.” “I am a goddamn lady.” I grin.

     May you have the hindsight to know where you’ve been, the foresight to know where you are going, and the insight to know when you have gone too far. ~ Irish Saying

The three things Aristotle couldn’t understand: the work of the bees, the coming and going of the tide, and the mind of a woman. —Irish Triad

There’s a saying about how the Irish ship captain located all the rocks in the harbor—using the bottom of his boat. Whatever works, right? Remember

What was so tough, you had to get all worked up over them? He didn’t get it. You just did your job, you were faithful to your wife, you stuck by your friends. That was it.

I write poetry not for publication but merely to kill time. Airplanes are a good place to write poetry and then throw it away. My collected works are mostly on the vomit bags of Lufthansa.

over the chatter of the busy London pub. The Irish theme bar was heaving with twenty- and thirty-somethings – mostly city workers celebrating the end of the working week and the beginning of a long

As a young man, he was already rather pompous and full of himself, concerned with what he would write and with his early (and, later, perennial) hatred of Ireland and the Irish. When he had still written only a few poems, he asked his brother Stanislaus: “Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of daily life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own…for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.” When he was older his comparisons may have been less eucharistic and more modest, but he was always convinced of the extreme importance of his work, even before it existed.

My name is Linda Symcox—and I’m a lie-oholic. I came to Hollywood to work as an actress, but soon found out that I couldn’t get a decent audition, let alone a job. It seems I didn’t stand out enough.

Calvin sits up, jerking his guitar to stand on one thigh. “Mr. Okai.” He swallows. “I didn’t realize you were standing there.” “My niece tells me your name is Calvin.” Calvin looks between the two of us, working this out. Robert, with his smooth dark skin and meticulously short hair. Me: pale and freckled with a chaotic, weedy bun on top of my head. Robert reaches out a hand, and Calvin immediately takes it, standing. “Yes. Calvin McLoughlin.” This makes my uncle laugh, and the boom of it eases the line of Calvin’s shoulders. “That’s a pretty Irish name for someone with such a good tan.” “My mam is Greek,” he explains, and then looks back and forth between me and Robert again, as if asking a question of his own. Robert tilts his head to me, releasing Calvin’s hand and saying in turn, “I married her uncle.” Calvin smiles, quietly saying, “Ah.

Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition—their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.

In 1911, the poet Morris Rosenfeld wrote the song “Where I Rest,” at a time when it was the immigrant Italians, Irish, Poles, and Jews who were exploited in the worst jobs, worked to death or burned to death in sweatshops.[*] It always brings me to tears, provides one metaphor for the lives of the unlucky:[19] Where I Rest Look not for me in nature’s greenery You will not find me there, I fear. Where lives are wasted by machinery That is where I rest, my dear. Look not for me where birds are singing Enchanting songs find not my ear. For in my slavery, chains a-ringing Is the music I do hear. Not where the streams of life are flowing I draw not from these fountains clear. But where we reap what greed is sowing Hungry teeth and falling tears. But if your heart does love me truly Join it with mine and hold me near. Then will this world of toil and cruelty Die in birth of Eden here.[*] It is the events of one second before to a million years before that determine whether your life and loves unfold next to bubbling streams or machines choking you with sooty smoke. Whether at graduation ceremonies you wear the cap and gown or bag the garbage. Whether the thing you are viewed as deserving is a long life of fulfillment or a long prison sentence. There is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered.[*] You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same.

It was after midnight by a mile when I slid off the bar stool at O’Malley’s and began to walk home. O’Malley’s is an old Irish pub and though I wasn’t Irish, nor did I drink like a lot of other newspaper reporters I knew, I stopped by for a Coke nearly every evening. I liked listening to other reporters — and cops, who also frequented O’Malley’s — shoot the breeze and relate old stories that hadn’t been completely true the first time they’d been told. O’Malley’s was just somewhere to go which made every guy sipping a beer or doing shots feel a little less alone in a city like Los Angeles. Some of them still had wives, but you could tell they were lonely. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been hanging around a bar at that hour; they’d have been finding solace in soft flesh and perfume. Maybe their wives would have been finding some solace too, and more of them would have stayed married. Most of those guys, cops and reporters alike, were working on their second or third marriage. I didn’t think they were working hard enough, but maybe that was because I didn’t have anyone to go home to.

You think if you worked for an Irish builder it would be better? Try it—go work for Shanley, you’ll see what a lovely fellow he is. And the Italians, would they be better, you think? Steinheim shoots his mouth off—the Italians shoot guns.” “And Longy Zwillman doesn’t shoot guns?

Why can't people see the everyday overlaps of our lives? Difficult work situations and queer shame. The newfound deliciousness of frozen yogurt. Navigating the uncannily similar experiences of Irish Catholic guilt and brown diasporic guilt. Instead, it's only the contrasts that people see.

Then he placed his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the street alone, giving the silent roaring rage inside him time to ease down and out, and after several long minutes he once again became who he was, a solitary middle-aged man in the August of life looking for a few more Aprils, an aging bachelor in a floppy suit standing on a tired, worn Brooklyn street in the shadow of a giant housing project built by a Jewish reformer named Robert Moses who forgot he was a reformer, building projects like this all over, which destroyed neighborhoods, chasing out the working Italians, Irish, and Jews, gutting all the pretty things from them, displacing them with Negroes and Spanish and other desperate souls clambering to climb into the attic of New York life, hoping that the bedroom and kitchen below would open up so they could drop in, and at minimum join the club that to them included this man, an overweight bachelor in an ill-fitting suit, watching a shiny car roaring away, the car driven by a handsome young man who was pretty and drove away as if he were barreling into a bright future, while the dowdy heavyset man watched him jealously, believing the man so pretty and handsome had places to go and women to meet and things to do, and the older heavyset man standing behind eating his fumes on a sorry, dreary, crowded old Brooklyn street of storefronts and tired brownstones had nothing left but the fumes of the pretty sports car in his face.

We are none of us born into Eden,” Doc said reasonably. “World’s plenty evil when we get here. Question is, what’s the best way to play a bad hand? Abolitionists thought that all they had to do to right an ancient wrong was set the slaves free.” He looked at Morg. “Trouble was, they didn’t have a plan in the world for what came next. Cut ‘em loose. That was the plan. Let ‘em eat cake, I guess.” He was muttering now, eyes on the bridge. “Four years of war. Hundreds of thousands of casualties...All so black folks in the South could be treated as bad as millworkers in the North! Pay as little as you can. Work ‘em ‘til they’re too old or sick or hurt to do the job. Then cut ‘em loose! Hire a starvin’ Irish replacement! That’s abolitionist freedom for you ...Heartless bastards ... ‘Free the slaves’ sounds good until you start wonderin’ how Chainey and Wilson would make a livin’ when they were already so old they couldn’t do a lick of work. What was a little child like Sophie Walton supposed to do? No kin who’d care for her ...” He looked up. “I doubt the abolitionists anticipated the Ku Klux Klan either, but here it is, makin’ life worse than ever for black folks.

The man was a Black Irish terror, no matter he paid well and worked harder than any title Holderman had run across. Devlin St. Just, newly created first Earl of Rosecroft, was a flat, screaming terror. Gossip, even in York, was that the French had run for the hills when St. Just had led the charge. “Well,

Colm Herron’s The Wake (And What Jeremiah Did Next) — a nod to the nickname for James Joyce’s final bewildering novel Finnegans Wake — is yet another exciting Irish comic work, packed with psychosexual and historicocritical detail, by the critically acclaimed, constantly inventive and forward thinking Derry author.

I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another. Trees, birds, drizzle — it’s a nice kind of interlude. Then I work again, later afternoon, for two or three hours. Back into book time, which is transparent — you don’t know it’s passing. No snack food or coffee. No cigarettes — I stopped smoking a long time ago. The space is clear, the house is quiet. A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. Looking out the window, reading random entries in the dictionary. To break the spell I look at a photograph of Borges, a great picture sent to me by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín. The face of Borges against a dark background — Borges fierce, blind, his nostrils gaping, his skin stretched taut, his mouth amazingly vivid; his mouth looks painted; he’s like a shaman painted for visions, and the whole face has a kind of steely rapture. I’ve read Borges of course, although not nearly all of it, and I don’t know anything about the way he worked — but the photograph shows us a writer who did not waste time at the window or anywhere else. So I’ve tried to make him my guide out of lethargy and drift, into the otherworld of magic, art, and divination.

The bartender is Irish. Jumped a student visa about ten years ago but nothing for him to worry about. The cook, though, is Mexican. Some poor bastard at ten dollars an hour—and probably has to wash the dishes, too. La Migra take notice of his immigration status—they catch sight of his bowl cut on the way home to Queens and he’ll have a problem. He looks different than the Irish and the Canadians—and he’s got Lou Dobbs calling specifically for his head every night on the radio. (You notice, by the way, that you never hear Dobbs wringing his hands over our border to the North. Maybe the “white” in Great White North makes that particular “alien superhighway” more palatable.) The cook at the Irish bar, meanwhile, has the added difficulty of predators waiting by the subway exit for him (and any other Mexican cooks or dishwashers) when he comes home on Friday payday. He’s invariably cashed his check at a check-cashing store; he’s relatively small—and is unlikely to call the cops. The perfect victim. The guy serving my drinks, on the other hand, as most English-speaking illegal aliens, has been smartly gaming the system for years, a time-honored process everybody at the INS is fully familiar with: a couple of continuing education classes now and again (while working off the books) to get those student visas. Extensions. A work visa. A “farm” visa. Weekend across the border and repeat. Articulate, well-connected friends—the type of guys who own, for instance, lots of Irish bars—who can write letters of support lauding your invaluable and “specialized” skills, unavailable from homegrown bartenders. And nobody’s looking anyway. But I digress…

LADY TEAZLE. O to be sure she has herself the oddest countenance that ever was seen— ’tis a collection of Features from all the different Countries of the globe. SIR BENJAMIN. So she has indeed — an Irish Front —— CRABTREE. Caledonian Locks —— SIR BENJAMIN. Dutch Nose —— CRABTREE. Austrian Lips —— SIR BENJAMIN. Complexion of a Spaniard —— CRABTREE. And Teeth a la Chinoise —— SIR BENJAMIN. In short, her Face resembles a table d’hote at Spa — where no two guests are of a nation —— CRABTREE. Or a Congress at the close of a general War — wherein all the members even to her eyes appear to have a different interest and her Nose and Chin are the only Parties likely to join issue.

Yesterday you were riding on my shoulders," he murmured. "The house was full of noise. Clomping up and down the steps,doors slamming. Scattered toys. I don't know how many times I stepped on one of those damned little cars of Brady's/" Turning back, he ran a hand over her hair. "I miss that.I miss all of you." "Daddy." In one fluid movement she rose and slid her arms around him. "It's the way it's supposed to work. Three of you off at college, Brendon moving around to get a handle on the busines of things.It's what he wants. And you, building your own.But..I miss the crowd of you." "I promise to slam the door the very first chance I get." "That might help." "Sentimental softie.I love that about you." "Lucky for me.

I don't suppose you'd be interested in working part-time at the school?" Adelai turned her head,met Keeley's eyes in the mirror above the bureau. "Are you offering me a job?" "It sounds awfully strange when you put it that way, but yes. But don't do it because you feel obliged. Only if you think you'd have the time or the inclination." Adelia spun around, her face brilliant. "What the devil's taken you so long? I'll start tomorrow." "Really? You really want to?" "I've been dying to.Oh, it's taken every bit of my willpower not to come down there every day until you just got so used to me being around you didn't realize I was working there. This is exciting!" She rushed over to give Keeley a hug. "I can't wait to tell your father." Keeping her arms tight around her daughter, Adelia did a quick dance. "I'm a groom again.

There is an ethnic component lurking in the background of my story. In our race-conscious society, our vocabulary often extends no further than the color of someone's skin - black people, Asians, white privilege. Sometimes these broad categories are useful. But to understand my story, you have to delve into the details.I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty's the family tradition. Their ancestors were day laborers in the southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and mill workers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family.

What starts the process, really, are the laughs and snubs and slights you get when you are a kid. Sometimes, it's because you're poor or Irish or Jewish or Catholic or ugly or simply that you are skinny. But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.... But once you learn that you've got to work harder than everybody else, it becomes a way of life as you move out of the alley and on your way. In your own mind you have nothing to lose, so you take plenty of chances and if you do your homework many of them pay off. It is then that you understand, for the first time, that you have the advantage because your competitors can't risk what they have already. It's a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can't stop playing the game the way you've always played it because it is a part of you and you need it as much as you can do an arm or a leg. So you are lean and mean and resourceful and you continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance.

It’s like these mostly Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics who worked construction, on the docks, and in the police and fire departments never existed, were never part of the scene. In modern San Francisco’s self-conception, there were the Native Americans who had the land stolen out from under them—then fast-forward to the hippies, the gays, the hipsters, the techies, and the oligarchs. American California isn’t merely gone; it never was.

Turn around." "I beg your pardon." Brian merely stepped around her, laid his hands on the nape of her neck. Her already stiff shoulders jerked in protest. "Relax.I'm not after grabbing you in a fit of passion when any member of your family might come along.I'd like to put in at least one day on the job before I get the boot." As he spoke he was kneading, pressing, running those strong fingers over the knots. He hated seeing anything in pain. "Blow out a breath," he ordered when she stood rigis as stone. "Come on, maverneen, don't be so hardheaded. Blow out a nice long breath for me." Out of curiosity she obeyed and tried not to think how marvelous his hands felt on her skin. "Now another." His voice had gone to croon, lulling her.As he worked, murmured, her eyes fluttered close. Her muscles loosened, the knots untied. The threatening throbbing in her head faded away. She all but slid into a trance. She arched against his hands, just a little. Moaned in pleasure.Just a little. He kept his hands firm, professional, even as he imaged skiming them down over her, slipping them under that soft white blouse. He wanted to touch his lips to her nape, just where his thumb was pressing.To taste her there. And that,he knew, would end things before they'd begun.Wanting a woman was natural. Taking one, where the taking held such risks,was suicide.

Parallel to the idea of the US Constitution as covenant, politicians, journalists, teachers, and even professional historians chant like a mantra that the United States is a “nation of immigrants.” From its beginning, the United States has welcomed—indeed, often solicited, even bribed—immigrants to repopulate conquered territories “cleansed” of their Indigenous inhabitants. From the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants were recruited to work mines, raze forests, construct canals and railroads, and labor in sweatshops, factories, and commercial farm fields. In the late twentieth century, technical and medical workers were recruited. The requirements for their formal citizenship were simple: adhere to the sacred covenant through taking the Citizenship Oath, pledging loyalty to the flag, and regarding those outside the covenant as enemies or potential enemies of the exceptional country that has adopted them, often after they escaped hunger, war, or repression, which in turn were often caused by US militarism or economic sanctions. Yet no matter how much immigrants might strive to prove themselves to be as hardworking and patriotic as descendants of the original settlers, and despite the rhetoric of E pluribus unum, they are suspect. The old stock against which they are judged inferior includes not only those who fought in the fifteen-year war for independence from Britain but also, and perhaps more important, those who fought and shed (Indian) blood, before and after independence, in order to acquire the land. These are the descendants of English Pilgrims, Scots, Scots-Irish, and Huguenot French—Calvinists all—who took the land bequeathed to them in the sacred covenant that predated the creation of the independent United States. These were the settlers who fought their way over the Appalachians into the fertile Ohio Valley region, and it is they who claimed blood sacrifice for their country. Immigrants, to be accepted, must prove their fidelity to the covenant and what it stands for.

Eddie: Why do police lieutenants wear belts? The lights in the Barony coach began to flicker. An odd thing was happening to the walls, as well; they began to fade in and out of true, lunging toward transparency, perhaps, and then opaquing again. Seeing this phenomenon even out of the corner of his eye made Eddie feel a bit whoopsie. Eddie: Blaine? Answer. Roland: (agreeably) Answer. Answer, or I declare the contest at an end and hold you to your promise. Blaine: TO...TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS? (repeating as a statement) TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS. A RIDDLE BASED UPON THE EXAGGERATED SIMPLICITY OF-- Eddie: Right. Good one, Blaine, but never mind trying to kill time--it won't work. Next-- Blaine: I INSIST YOU STOP ASKING THESE SILLY-- Eddie: Then stop the mono. If you're that upset, stop right here, and I will. Blaine: NO. Eddie: Okay, then, on we go. What's Irish and stays out in back of the house, even in the rain? Blaine: (clicking his tongue deafeningly and gratingly; a long pause) PADDY O'FURNITURE.

That's your panacea, isn't it?" she cried. "Oh, you're just an old hypocrite, too. Thousands of scowling priests keeping the degenerate Italians and illiterate Irish repentant with gabble-gabble about the sixth and ninth commandments. It's just all cloaks, sentiment and spiritual rouge and panaceas. I'll tell you there is no God, not even a definite abstract goodness; so it's all got to be worked out for the individual by the individual here in high white foreheads like mine, and you're too much the prig to admit it.

Ireland has in it a quality which caused it (in the most ascetic age of Christianity) to be called the “Land of Saints”; and which still might give it a claim to be called the Land of Virgins. An Irish Catholic priest once said to me, “There is in our people a fear of the passions which is older even than Christianity.” Everyone who has read Shaw’s play upon Ireland will remember the thing in the horror of the Irish girl at being kissed in the public streets. But anyone who knows Shaw’s work will recognize it in Shaw himself. There exists by accident an early and beardless portrait of him which really suggests in the severity and purity of its lines some of the early ascetic pictures of the beardless Christ. However he may shout profanities or seek to shatter the shrines, there is always something about him which suggests that in a sweeter and more solid civilisation he would have been a great saint. He would have been a saint of a sternly ascetic, perhaps of a sternly negative type. But he has this strange note of the saint in him: that he is literally unworldly.

All the other passions were in me before; but they were idle and aimless—mere childish greedinesses and cruelties, curiosities and fancies, habits and superstitions, grotesque and ridiculous to the mature intelligence. When they suddenly began to shine like newly lit flames it was by no light of their own, but by the radiance of the dawning moral passion. That passion dignified them, gave them conscience and meaning, found them a mob of appetites and organized them into an army of purposes and principles. My soul was born of that passion. ANN.

The histories of Irish, Jewish, Chinese and Japanese immigrants in America are classic examples of this process—and of their achievements being verbally air-brushed out of history by simply calling them “privilege.” Even middle-class blacks today have likewise been characterized by some as “privileged,”20 even though their ancestors arrived as slaves. Achievements are a threat to a social vision and a political agenda based on that vision, and so are often kept off the hypothesis-testing agenda by adherents of that vision. Redefining words is a key part of that process. Worse yet, children who are currently being raised with the kinds of values, discipline and work habits that are likely to make them valuable contributors to society, and a source of pride to themselves and to those who raised them, are called “privileged,” and are taught in schools to feel guilty when other children are being raised with values, behavior and habits that are likely to leave them few options as adults, other than to live at the expense of other people, whether via the welfare state or through a life of crime, or both.

Somewhere, I heard the phrase, ‘When money talks, no one checks the grammar.’ That’s what all this was about—money, money, and more money. For money, girls sacrificed their own lives; for money, they risked sexually transmitted diseases; for money, they were willing to step beyond their convictions. For money, the agency treated us like trash thrown on the street; for money, they were willing to risk our health, safety, and everything else, and for money, they had a few select girls they treated decently. It was never about people, morals, or decency.

Our English tongue, which hath been the most harsh, uneven, and broken language of the world, part Dutch, part Irish, Saxon, Scotch, Welsh, and indeed a gallimaufry of many, but perfect in none, is now by this secondary means of playing, continually refined, every writer striving in himself to add a new flourish unto it; so that in process, from the most rude and unpolished tongue, it is grown to a most perfect and composed language, and many excellent works and elaborate poems writ in the same, that many nations grow enamored of our tongue (before despised).

Seamus tossed down two of his cards. “Hell. I’d train her if Tristan asked me. Wouldn’t mind seeing that pretty face every day.” I studied my cards, pretending not to hear him. “Maybe I should offer to work with her,” he said. “Free you up so you can get back to doing what you love.” My jaw tightened. “You go kill things, and I’ll show the lass some Irish moves. Win-win situation for both of us, right?” The cards in my hand began to buckle. “Ha!” Seamus gave Niall a victorious grin. “Pay up, bro.” Niall’s mouth turned down. “You don’t even like that album.” “I said it wasn’t my favorite one, but you know I like all of Johnny Cash’s stuff.” “Since when?” I stared at the two brothers with a mix of irritation and confusion. “What are you two going on about?” Chris asked. Seamus looked at me with a smug expression. “I told Niall you had it bad for the lass. He said she was too young and sweet to interest you. We made a friendly wager, which he just lost.” “You don’t have proof he’s into her,” Niall argued. “He just might not want your ugly mug around her.” Seamus snorted. “You do realize we’re identical twins.” “I’m still better looking.

We are none of us born into Eden,” Doc said reasonably. “World’s plenty evil when we get here. Question is, what’s the best way to play a bad hand? Abolitionists thought that all they had to do to right an ancient wrong was set the slaves free.” He looked at Morg. “Trouble was, they didn’t have a plan in the world for what came next. Cut ‘em loose. That was the plan. Let ‘em eat cake, I guess.” He was muttering now, eyes on the bridge. “Four years of war. Hundreds of thousands of casualties...All so black folks in the South could be treated as bad as millworkers in the North! Pay as little as you can. Work ‘em ‘til they’re too old or sick or hurt to do the job. Then cut ‘em loose! Hire a starvin’ Irish replacement! That’s abolitionist freedom for you ...Heartless bastards ... ‘Free the slaves’ sounds good until you start wondering’ how Chainey and Wilson would make a livin’ when they were already so old they couldn’t do a lick of work. What was a little child like Sophie Walton supposed to do? No kin who’d vare for her ...” He looked up. “I doubt the abolitionists anticipated the Lu Klux Klan either, but here it is, makin’ life worse than ever for black folks.

every Friday night he would set up a desk in the Tight Manhole, an Irish bar where the mine workers drank and sang songs of misery. The oil company paid him to report on all the charitable and civic-minded projects they had in the works as well as hard-hitting news stories happening in Haggleworth. Because of his honest face and gifted speaking voice, men and women would come in from all the other bars in Haggleworth—the Dirty Chute, the Mine Shaft, the Rear End, the Suspect Opening, the Black Orifice, the Poop Chute, too many to list here—all to listen to The Shell Oil Burgundy Hour.

The point, Gracie, is that some of the Irish are like that, locked in indecision, swinging from one possibility to another. And for people like that, sometimes the most dangerous thing is when they accidentally make a big decision. When they do take that step, it’s because someone pushed them, or because they tripped.” I see now, from the look on her face, that Gracie is getting it. “You think I’m like that? I’m like the man who can’t get himself to work?” “You need to make something of your life before life makes something of you.” Gracie just stares at me. When I look back, I realize

I'faith, 'tis an Occasion of no small Satisfaction to commence this Enquiry into the Romances & Fiction of the English--& their antick Neighbors, the Irish & the Scotch--free at last from the Tyranny of scurvy Translators--& to reacquaint myself with the earliest Works that engender'd my Love for the Novel. O Swift, O Fielding, O Sterne, I hail thee after too long an Absence, keen to revel once more in your rare Inventions and pricking Raillery, along with those of your less-fam'd Countrymen. Prithee look kindly on these Efforts of yr humble Servant to blazon your Glories to the gaping Pucklick.

His hands came to her wrists, squeezed reflexively, before he got quickly to his feet. "You're mixing things up." Panic arrowed straight into his heart. "I told you sex complicates things." "Yes,you did.And of course since you're the only man I've been with, how could I knew the difference between sex and love? Then again, that doesn't take into account that I'm a smart and self-aware woman, and I know the reason you're the only man I've been with is that you're the only man I've loved.Brian..." She stepped toward him, humor flashing into her eyes when he stepped back. "I've made up my mind.You know how stubborn I am." "I train your father's horses." "So what? My mother groomed them." "That's a different matter." "Why? Oh, because she's a woman.How foolish of me not to realize we can't possibly love each other, build a life with each other.Now if you owned Royal Meadows and I worked here, then it would be all right." "Stop making me sound ridiculous." "I can't." She spread her hands. "You are ridiculous.I love you anyway. Really, I tried to approach it sensibly.I like doing things in a structured order that makes a beeline for the goal.But..." She shrugged, smiled. "It just doesn't want to work that way with you.I look at you and my heart,well, it just insists on taking over.I love you so much,Brian. Can't you tell me? Can't you look at me and tell me?" He skimmed his fingertips over the bruise high on her temple. He wanted to tend to it, to her. "If I did there'd be no going back." "Coward." She watched the heat flash into his eyes,and thought how lovely it was to know him so well. "You won't push me into a corner." Now she laughed. "Watch me," she invited and proceeded to back him up against the steps. "I've figured a lot of things out today,Brian.You're scared of me-of what you feel for me. You were the one always pulling back when we were in public, shifting aside when I'd reach for you.It hurt me." The idea quite simply appalled him. "I never meant to hurt you." "No,you couldn't.How could I help but fall for you? A hard head and a soft heart.It's irresistable. Still, it did hurt. But I thought it was just the snob in you.I didn't realize it was nerves." "I'm not a snob, or a coward." "Put your arms around me.Kiss me. Tell me." "Damn it." he grabbed her shoulders, then simply held on, unable to push her back or draw her in. "It was the first time I saw you, the first instant. You walked in the room and my heart stopped. Like it had been struck by lightning.I was fine until you walked into the room." Her knees wanted to buckle.Hard head, soft heart, and here, suddenly, a staggering sweep of romance. "Why didn't you tell me? Why did you make me wait?" "I thought I'd get over it." "Get over it?" Her brow arched up. "Like a head cold?" "Maybe." He set her aside, paced away to stare out at the hills. Keeley closed her eyes, let the breeze ruffle her hair, cool her cheeks. When the calm descended, she opened her eyes and smiled. "A good strong head cold's tough to shake off.

In my anger, I begin to sense some project that might answer the nurse's query. Perhaps I'd always known what it was all for. Perhaps I'd stumbled upon my true work. Perhaps the years I'd spent sifting the scattered pieces of this jigsaw were not in vain; perhaps they were a preparation. Perhaps I could honour Eibhlín Dubh's life by building a truer image of her days, gathering every fact we hold to create a kaleidoscope, a spill of distinct moments, fractured but vivid. Once this thought comes to me, my heart grows quick. I could donate my days to finding hers, I tell myself, I could do that, and I will.

I lived in New York City back in the 1980s, which is when the Bordertown series was created. New York was a different place then -- dirtier, edgier, more dangerous, but also in some ways more exciting. The downtown music scene was exploding -- punk and folk music were everywhere -- and it wasn't as expensive to live there then, so a lot of young artists, musicians, writers, etc. etc. were all living and doing crazy things in scruffy neighborhoods like the East Village. I was a Fantasy Editor for a publishing company back then -- but in those days, "fantasy" to most people meant "imaginary world" books, like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. A number of the younger writers in the field, however, wanted to create a branch of fantasy that was rooted in contemporary, urban North America, rather than medieval or pastoral Europe. I'd already been working with some of these folks (Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, etc.), who were writing novels that would become the foundations for the current Urban Fantasy field. At the time, these kinds of stories were considered so strange and different, it was actually hard to get them into print. When I was asked by a publishing company to create a shared-world anthology for Young Adult readers, I wanted to create an Urban Fantasy setting that was something like a magical version of New York...but I didn't want it to actually be New York. I want it to be any city and every city -- a place that anyone from anywhere could go to or relate to. The idea of placing it on the border of Elfland came from the fact that I'd just re-read a fantasy classic called The King of Elfland's Daughter by the Irish writer Lord Dunsany. I love stories that take place on the borderlands between two different worlds...and so I borrowed this concept, but adapted it to a modern, punky, urban setting. I drew upon elements of the various cities I knew best -- New York, Boston, London, Dublin, maybe even a little of Mexico City, where I'd been for a little while as a teen -- and scrambled them up and turned them into Bordertown. There actually IS a Mad River in southern Ohio (where I went to college) and I always thought that was a great name, so I imported it to Bordertown. As for the water being red, that came from the river of blood in the Scottish folk ballad "Thomas the Rhymer," which Thomas must cross to get into Elfland. [speaking about the Borderland series she "founded" and how she came up with the setting. Link to source; Q&A with Holly, Ellen & Terri!]

I have something I’m working on,” Towne revealed. “A love story.” “Go on.” “It’s called Chinatown.” “Keep going.” “That’s all I have.” Towne elaborated as best he could. He told Evans about the water, about the detective who falls in love with the daughter of an eminent criminal, “and I have Nicholson. He wants to do it.” “Sounds perfect for Irish”—Evans’s nickname for Nicholson—“It’s set in Chinatown?” “No. Chinatown is a state of mind.” “A love state of mind?” “The detective’s fucked-up state of mind.” Evans was lost. “I see.” “But the love story is Chinatown too.” “But it’s not set in Chinatown?” “No. Chinatown’s a feeling.

There was nothing wrong with being able to handle things herself. Nothing wrong with wanting to.And she did appreciate Brian's help. And she didn't need caffeine. "I like caffeine," she grumbled. "I enjoy it, and that's entirely different from needing it.Entirely.I could give it up anytime I wanted, and I'd barely miss it." Annoyed,she snagged the soft drink she'd left on a shelf and guzzled. All right,so maybe she would miss it. But only beause she liked the taste. It wasn't like a craving or an addiction or... She couldn't say why Brian popped into her head just then.She was certain if he'd seen her staring in a kind of horror at a soft drink bottle, he'd have been amused.It was debatable what his reaction would be if he'd realized she wasn't actually seeing the bottle, but his face. No,that wasn't a need, either, she thought quickly. She did not need Brian Donnelly. It was attraction.Affection-a cautious kind of affection.He was a man who interested her, and whom she admired in many ways. But it wasn't as if she needed... "Oh God." It had to be overreaction, she decided, and set the bottle aside as carefully as she would have a container of nitro. What she was going through was something as simple as overromanticizing an affair. That would be natural enough, she told herself, particularly sice this was her first. She didn't want to be in love with him. She began wielding the pitchfork vigorously now, as if to sweat out a fever.She didn't choose to be in love with him. That was even more important.When her hands trembled she ignored them and worked harder still. By the time her mother joined her, Keeley had herself under control enough to casually ask Adelia to work in the office while she exervised Sam. Keeley Grant had never run from a problem in her life,and she wasn't about to start now.She saddled her mount,then rode off to clear her head before she dealt with the problem at hand.

The average Christian is not supposed to know that Jesus’ home town of Nazareth did not actually exist, or that key places mentioned in the Bible did not physically exist in the so-called “Holy Land.” He is not meant to know that scholars have had greater success matching Biblical events and places with events and places in Britain rather than in Palestine. It is a point of contention whether the settlement of Nazareth existed at all during Jesus' lifetime. It does not appear on contemporary maps, neither in any books, documents, chronicles or military records of the period, whether of Roman or Jewish compilation. The Jewish Encyclopedia identifies that Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament, neither in the works of Josephus, nor in the Hebrew Talmud – Laurence Gardner (The Grail Enigma) As far back as 1640, the German traveller Korte, after a complete topographical examination of the present Jerusalem, decided that it failed to coincide in any way with the city described by Josephus and the Scriptures. Claims that the tombs of patriarchs Ab’Ram, Isaac, and Jacob are buried under a mosque in Hebron possess no shred of evidence. The rock-cut sepulchres in the valleys of Jehoshaphat and Hinnom are of Roman period with late Greek inscriptions, and there exists nothing in groups of ruins at Petra, Sebaste, Baalbec, Palmyra or Damascus, or among the stone cities of the Haran, that are pre-Roman. Nothing in Jerusalem itself can be related to the Jews – Comyns Beaumont (Britain: Key to World’s History) The Jerusalem of modern times is not the city of the Scriptures. Mt. Calvary, now nearly in the centre of the city, was without walls at the time of the Crucifixion, and the greater part of Mt. Zion, which is not without, was within the ancient city. The holy places are for the most part the fanciful dreams of monkish enthusiasts to increase the veneration of the pilgrims – Rev. J. P. Lawson (quoted in Beaumont’s Britain: Key to World’s History)

Why do we like being Irish? Partly because It gives us a hold on the sentimental English As members of a world that never was, Baptised with fairy water; And partly because Ireland is small enough To be still thought of with a family feeling, And because the waves are rough That split her from a more commercial culture; And because one feels that here at least one can Do local work which is not at the world's mercy And that on this tiny stage with luck a man Might see the end of one particular action. It is self-deception of course; There is no immunity in this island either; A cart that is drawn by somebody else's horse And carrying goods to somebody else's market. The bombs in the turnip sack, the sniper from the roof, Griffith, Connolly, Collins, where have they brought us? Ourselves alone! Let the round tower stand aloof In a world of bursting mortar! Let the school-children fumble their sums In a half-dead language; Let the censor be busy on the books; pull down the Georgian slums; Let the games be played in Gaelic. Let them grow beet-sugar; let them build A factory in every hamlet; Let them pigeon-hole the souls of the killed Into sheep and goats, patriots and traitors. And the North, where I was a boy, Is still the North, veneered with the grime of Glasgow, Thousands of men whom nobody will employ Standing at the corners, coughing.

There were a lot of botched kills throughout the eastern part of Kentucky when the work fell outside his control. Six or seven years ago, a man from Perry County was shot point blank in the head and left for dead in the middle of downtown. Problem was, the bullet had traveled between the man's scalp and his skull halfway across his head and exited the same way it had entered on the other side. The whole thing had left him with only fingernail-sized contusions on both sides of his head. He identified the guy who shot him and saw him arrested and convicted of attempted murder. Now, it's true that a situation like that was a rare one, but part of doing a job right was minimizing the chance for something to go wrong.

A common misconception is that rewilding seeks to return land to an idealised previous ecological state. In reality it would never be possible to go back in time to some arbitrarily chosen baseline - and it would be arbitrary, because healthy living systems are always changing naturally over time, even if that's often difficult for us to perceive. The real objective is not to go back to the past, but forward: to complex, vibrant ecosystems that actually work by themselves, and are therefore more resilient in the face of climate breakdown and other shocks coming down the line. As has been said before, the aim of rewilding isn't to turn the ecological clock back in time, but to allow it to actually start ticking again.

When I stepped into the trailer, I froze. The head of wardrobe was a guy—a very good-looking guy with ash blond hair, hazel eyes, and a body on him that would make my trainer proud. There was no way I was going to let this guy see any of my flaws. Of course, maybe I wouldn’t be dealing with him. Over the last two weeks, all of my wardrobe fittings had been with a woman. “Where’s Jackie?” I asked, hoping she was still assigned to me. “Oh, honey, that girl quit to go work on a Leonardo DiCaprio movie.” He threw his hip out as he flipped his hand in the air. “But can you blame her? Leo is way too hot to turn down. I’m Steve,” he said, putting his hand over his chest. “And I promise I’ll take much better care of you than Jackie.

I’ve always been amused by your inability to hold your liquor,” Cam remarked. “A Rom your size should be able to drink a quarter barrel to the pitching. But now to discover that you’re half-Irish as well … it’s inexcusable, phral. We’ll have to work on your drinking skills.” “We’re not going to tell this to anyone,” Kev told him grimly. “About the fact that we’re brothers?” Cam seemed to enjoy Kev’s visible wince. “It’s not so bad, being half gadjo,” he told Kev kindly, and snickered at his expression. “It certainly explains why both of us have found a stopping place, while most Roma choose to wander forever. It’s the Irish in us that—” “Not … one … word,” Kev said. “Not even to the family.” Cam sobered a little. “I don’t keep secrets from my wife.” “Not even for her safety?

Needless to say, this fragile experiment began by taking for granted the ugly conquest of Amerindians and Mexicans, the exclusion of women, the subordination of European working-class men and the closeting of homosexuals. These realities made many of the words of the revolutionary Declaration of Independence ring a bit hollow. yet the enslavement of Africans -- over 20 percent of the population -- served as the linchpin of American democracy; that is, the much-heralded stability and continuity of American democracy was predicated upon black oppression and degradation. Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white -- they would be only Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and others engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity.

[Scarlett] knew how to smile so that her dimples leaped, how to walk pigeon-toed so that her wide hoop skirts swayed entrancingly, how to look up into a man's face and then drop her eyes and bat the lids rapidly so that she seemed a-tremble with gentle emotion. Most of all she learned how to conceal from men a sharp intelligence beneath a face as sweet and bland as a baby's. Ellen, by soft admonition, . . . labored to inculcate in her the qualities that would make her truly desirable as a wife. "You must be more gentle, dear, more sedate," Ellen told her daughter. "You must not interrupt gentlemen when they are speaking, even if you do think you know more about matters than they do. Gentlemen do not like forward girls." [Ellen] taught her all that a gentlewoman should know, but she learned only the outward signs of gentility. The inner grace from which these signs should spring, she never learned nor did she see any reason for learning it. Appearances were enough, for the appearances of ladyhood won her popularity and that was all she wanted. . . . At sixteen, thanks to Mammy and Ellen, she looked sweet, charming and giddy, but she was, in reality, self-silled, vain and obstinate. She had the easily stirred passions of her Irish father and nothing except the thinnest veneer of her mother's unselfish and forbearing nature. . . It was not that these two loving mentors deplored Scarlett's high spirits, vivacity and charm. These were traits of which Southern women were proud. It was Gerald's headstrong and impetuous nature in her that gave them concern, and they sometimes feared they would not be able to conceal her damaging qualities until she had made a good match. But Scarlett intended to marry-and marry Ashley-and she was willing to appear demure, pliable and scatterbrained, if those were the qualities that attracted men. Just why men should be this way, she did not know. She only knew that such methods worked. It never interested her enough to try to think out the reason for it, for she knew nothing of the inner workings of any human being's mind, not even her own. She knew only that if she did or said thus-and-so, men would unerringly respond with the complementary thus-and-so. It was like a mathematical formula and no more difficult . . . If she knew little about men's minds, she knew even less about the minds of women, for they interested her less. She had never had a girl friend, and she never felt any lack on that account. To her, all women, including her two sisters, were natural enemies in pursuit of the same prey-man.

QUOTES & SAYINGS OF RYAN MORAN- THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL MAN Favorite Sayings of Ryan Moran: The World's Most Powerful Man “Sometimes the withholding of a small part of the truth is not only wise, but prudent.” “There is one principle that bars all other principles, and that is contempt prior to investigation.” (Ryan was fond of paraphrasing Herbert Spencer) “What do you mean?”, “How do you know?”, “So what?” “I don’t need much, just one meal a day, a pack of cigarettes and a roof over my head.” “Well…, we must have different data bases, mustn’t we?” “This guy is more squirrely than a shithouse rat” The CIA—you know, the ‘Catholic Irish Alcoholics’ “That dumb fuck.” “Oye! A Jew and an Irishman—what a team!” “Okay, everybody, up and to the right ten thousand feet,” ( If things in general were not going well. Refers to his jet flying days) “Is that what you want to do?.....Are you sure?" “Curiosity is self serving,” “If you don’t know where you’re going, you will end up somewhere else.” “So…, what are you thinking?” “I can do anything that I want, as long as I have the desire and I am willing to pay the price.” (His working definition of honesty) “Well, what did you learn tonight?” “Don’t let your emotions get the best of you, and don’t get too far out into your future.” “If you meet someone in the middle of the desert and he asks you where the next water hole is, you had better tell him the truth. If you don’t, then the next time you meet, he will kill you.” “Damn it!” “And remember to watch your mirrors!” (Refers to the fact someone may be following us in the car) “A person either gets humble or gets humiliated.” “That’s right.” “Oye, Sheldon, a Jew and an Irishman—talk about guilt and suffering!” “Pigs grow fat, but hogs get slaughtered.” “A friend is someone who is coming in, when everyone else is going out.

At school, my religious-education teacher expressly forbade us to write "Xmas." It was regarded as a foul blasphemy. How would I like it if people used an anonymous X in place of my name? However, it would seem that the word "Xmas" is not blasphemous after all. In the original Greek, "Christ" was written "Xristos," but the X isn't the Roman "ecks"; The Cassell Dictionary of Word Histories explains that it is the Greek letter "chi" (pronounced with a k to rhyme with "eye"--k'eye). The x is simply a stand-in for "the first letter of Greek Khristos--Christ." Indeed, the Chi-Rho (CH-r--the first two syllables of "Christ") illumination can be seen in the ancient Irish manuscript of the Gospels, The Book of Kells, which is housed at Trinity College in Dublin. This work dates back to the ninth century. Of course, strictly speaking, Xmas" should still be pronounced "Christmas" because it's an abbreviation, not an alternative word.

Swaggering in the coffee-houses and ruffling it in the streets were the men who had sailed with Frobisher and Drake and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Hawkins, and Sir Richard Granville; had perhaps witnessed the heroic death of Sir Philip Sidney, at Zutphen; had served with Raleigh in Anjou, Picardy, Languedoc, in the Netherlands, in the Irish civil war; had taken part in the dispersion of the Spanish Armada, and in the bombardment of Cadiz; had filled their cups to the union of Scotland with England; had suffered shipwreck on the Barbary Coast, or had, by the fortune of war, felt the grip of the Spanish Inquisition; who could tell tales of the marvels seen in new-found America and the Indies, and, perhaps, like Captain John Smith, could mingle stories of the naive simplicity of the natives beyond the Atlantic, with charming narratives of the wars in Hungary, the beauties of the seraglio of the Grand Turk, and the barbaric pomp of the Khan of Tartary.

The Four Courts Irish pub was where we held all our memorials. It had a unique place in my heart because a bunch of assassins had tried to kill me inside the place a long time ago. Bryce wasn’t read into our program, but he believed in what we did, even if he didn’t know what that was. We’d shown up one day toasting a fallen soldier, and then we’d kept showing up, until he’d pulled me aside one afternoon. He’d seen us keeping to ourselves, knowing we didn’t want to be disturbed, and had told me if we wanted privacy the next time, the bar was ours. He’d never asked any questions, and being located so close to the CIA, I’m sure he thought that was where we worked, and I didn’t disabuse him of the notion. All I knew was that when I showed up, he shut down the bar. He flipped the sign on the door to closed and said, “I’ll be serving the drinks.” “I appreciate that. I really do.” I’d initially tried to pay to rent the place, but he was having none of it. He didn’t even let us pay for our drinks.

I still feel a pang every time I look at her,’ I admitted. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ he said enthusiastically. ‘A pang! A quickness in the heart.’ ‘Love,’ I said drily. ‘We’re lucky, you and I,’ he said, smiling. ‘It’s friendship, it’s love, and it’s still something more. It’s what the Irish call anmchara, a soul friend. Who else do you want to talk to at the day’s end? I love the evenings when we can just sit and talk and the sun goes down and moths come in to the candles.’ ‘And we talk of children,’ I said, and wished I had not, ‘and of servants’ quarrels, and whether the cross-​eyed kitchen slave is pregnant again, and we wonder who broke the pothook, and whether the thatch needs repair or whether it will last another year, and we try to work out what to do about the old dog that can’t walk any more, and what excuse Cadell will conjure up for not paying his rent again, and we discuss whether the flax has steeped enough, and if we should rub butterwort on the cows’ udders to improve their yield. That’s what we talk of.

grin. “If I’m going to lay down a fortune for the privilege of experiencing your quivering virgin flesh, I think it goes without saying that I expect to do it without a barrier.” I sat back, clenching my teeth so hard that my head started to ache. My gaze was held fast by the challenge in his ebony eyes. He might have been the most gorgeous creature I’d ever laid my eyes on, but he was also an asshat. He tilted his head at me, puzzled. “Why is that a problem? If we are both cleared by a physician—” I unclenched my jaw just long enough to reply. “Recent medical clearance is not sufficient for me. I’d require celibacy for at least the previous six months, so—” “Then there isn’t a problem.” I highly doubted that. I opened my mouth to call him a liar when Heath leaned forward and put his hand on the table in front of me. Drake’s lawyer cleared his throat, throwing a bland look at me and turning to Drake. “We can work all these details out later in mediation. Mr. Drake does have a plane to catch later today.” Drake’s eyes darted to Heath and back to me. I could tell he was trying to gauge our relationship. It wasn’t the first time a person had looked at the two of us in that unsure, questioning way. Heath was not obviously gay in any way. He wasn’t “fabulous” or flamboyant. He was very masculine in his behavior and mannerisms, so he rarely set off people’s gaydar. My gaze turned back to Drake, drawn to him like a flame pulled into a hot, dry wind. I resented the heat on my cheeks. I was not a habitual blusher. Hardly ever, actually. But this man was bringing my Irish up, as my mother liked to say. And what was worse, the more annoyed I grew with him, the more amused he seemed to be. Drake flicked a glance at Heath and then his lawyer. “Gentlemen, could you excuse us for a moment? You’re free to wait just outside the door.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he glanced at me. “If, of course, that is okay with the lady?” My face flamed hotter and I folded my hands on my lap. “Fine,” I said, wondering if the thirty-something New Yorker was still interested in the

Brian,really." Keeley continued to mix the blister for the knee spavin. "You've had a really long day. I can handle this." "Sure you can.You can handle this, morons like Tarmack, washed-up jockeys and everything else that comes along before breakfast.Nobody's saying different." Since the statement wasn't delivered in what could be mistaken for a complimentary tone, Keeley turned to frown at him. "What's wrong with you?" "There's not a bloody thing wrong with me.But you could use some work.Do you have to do everything yourself, every flaming step and stage of it? Can't you just take help when help's offered and shut the hell up?" She did shut the hell up, for ten shocked seconds. "I simply assumed that you'd be tired after your trip." "I'll let you know when I'm tired." "The gelding here doesn't seem to be the only one with something nasty in his system." "Well,it's you in my system, princess, and it feels a bit nasty at the moment." Hurt came first, a quick short-armed jab. Pride sprang in to defend. "I'll be happy to purge you, just like I'll purge this horse tomorrow." "If I thought it would work," he muttered, "I'd purge myself.

Hannity & Colmes was another management challenge. Despite its bipartisan billing, the show was a vehicle for Sean Hannity’s right-wing politics. An Irish Catholic from Long Island, Hannity came of age as two revolutions, Reagan conservatism and right-wing talk radio, sent the country on a new course. He harbored dreams of becoming the next Bob Grant, the caustic New York City radio commentator who provided an outlet for incendiary views on blacks, Hispanics, and gays. Radio personalities like Grant, Hannity said, “taught me early on that a passionate argument could make a difference.” In his twenties, Hannity drifted. He tried college three times but dropped out. By the late 1980s, he was living in southern California working as a house painter. In his spare time, he called in to KCSB, the UC Santa Barbara college station, to inveigh against liberals and to defend the actions of his hero Colonel Oliver North in the Iran-Contra affair. His combative commentaries impressed the station management. Though he was not a student, Hannity was soon given an hour-long morning call-in show, which he titled The Pursuit of Happiness, a reference to Reagan’s 1986 Independence Day speech.

Where do I see and recognize God’s presence? Where do I see the imprint of God’s hand? God is present in the oncology ward where I work. Patients arrive for treatment, tired and apprehensive. They are newly vulnerable, and their expensively acquired market skills are gone for now. Yet their eyes fill with tentative hope of the beginning of healing. This is a different place to any they have known. With the help of a caring staff, they learn to relax in the presence of their fellow patients. They remove wigs, hairpieces, and jewelry and expose poor, hurting bodies. For the time they are here, they allow themselves simply to be who they are. As the medicine enters their bodies, the feelings of trust, hope, and love are tangible all around. No marketplace here—simply pure and humble dependence on God, on science, and on the loving kindness of others. The trappings of the commercial world are no help when people are at their most vulnerable. The patients need not camouflage their poverty in the ways of the world. But they can trust—simply trust—that in the oncology ward they are in our Father’s house. There they are welcomed simply as they are. There they are in the hands of good people, escorts of healing and grace, whom God has sent to them. It is all right to be poor here.

To Gobineau, as he stated in his dedication of the work to the King of Hanover, the key to history and civilization was race. “The racial question dominates all the other problems of history… the inequality of races suffices to explain the whole unfolding of the destiny of peoples.” There were three principal races, white, yellow and black, and the white was the superior. “History,” he contended, “shows that all civilization flows from the white race, that no civilization can exist without the co-operation of this race.” The jewel of the white race was the Aryan, “this illustrious human family, the noblest among the white race,” whose origins he traced back to Central Asia. Unfortunately, Gobineau says, the contemporary Aryan suffered from intermixture with inferior races, as one could see in the southern Europe of his time. However, in the northwest, above a line running roughly along the Seine and east to Switzerland, the Aryans, though far from simon-pure, still survived as a superior race. This took in some of the French, all of the English and the Irish, the people of the Low Countries and the Rhine and Hanover, and the Scandinavians. Gobineau seemingly excluded the bulk of the Germans, who lived to the east and southeast of his line—a fact which the Nazis glossed over when they embraced his teachings.

The essentialist notion of “bad blood” is one of several biological metaphors inspired by a fear of the revenge of the cradle. People anticipate that if they leave even a few of a defeated enemy alive, the remnants will multiply and cause trouble down the line. Human cognition often works by analogy, and the concept of an irksome collection of procreating beings repeatedly calls to mind the concept of vermin.105 Perpetrators of genocide the world over keep rediscovering the same metaphors to the point of cliché. Despised people are rats, snakes, maggots, lice, flies, parasites, cockroaches, or (in parts of the world where they are pests) monkeys, baboons, and dogs.106 “Kill the nits and you will have no lice,” wrote an English commander in Ireland in 1641, justifying an order to kill thousands of Irish Catholics.107 “A nit would make a louse,” recalled a Californian settler leader in 1856 before slaying 240 Yuki in revenge for their killing of a horse.108 “Nits make lice,” said Colonel John Chivington before the Sand Creek Massacre, which killed hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1864.109 Cankers, cancers, bacilli, and viruses are other insidious biological agents that lend themselves as figures of speech in the poetics of genocide. When it came to the Jews, Hitler mixed his metaphors, but they were always biological: Jews were viruses; Jews were bloodsucking parasites; Jews were a mongrel race; Jews had poisonous blood.110

He got out a tube and since she’d yet to put the sweater on, squeezed ointment onto his fingers and began to gently rub it on her abraded skin. She recognized the scent. “That’s for horses.” “So?” She laughed and let him fuss. “Does this make me your mare now?” “No, you’re too young and delicate of bone for that. You’re still a filly.” “Are you going to train me, Donnelly?” “Oh, you’re out of my league, Miss Grant.” He glanced up, cocked a brow when he saw her grinning at him. “And what amuses you?” “You can’t help it can you? You have to tend.” “I put the marks on you,” he muttered as he smoothed on the ointment. “It follows I should see to them.” She lifted a hand to toy with the ends of his damp, gold-tipped hair. “I like being seen to by a man with a tough mind and a soft heart.” That soft heart sighed a little, ached a little. But he spoke lightly. “It’s no hardship running my fingers over skin like yours.” With his eyes on hers, he used the pad of his thumb to spread ointment over the gentle swell of her breast. “Particularly since you don’t seem to have a qualm about standing here half naked and letting me.” “Should I blush and flutter?” “You’re not the fluttering sort. I like that about you.” Satisified, he capped the tube, then tugged the sweater over her head himself. “But I can’t have such a fine piece of God’s work catching a chill. There you are.” He lifted her hair out of the neck. “You don’t have a hair dryer.” “There’s air everywhere in here.” She laughed and dragged her fingers through her damp curls. “It’ll have to do.

Er, hello, Chewie," he said politely. "Woof," the dog said back. "Chewie is a Newfoundland," Beka explained. "They're great water dogs. They swim better than we do, and even have webbed feet. They're often used for water rescue, and the breed started out as working dogs for fishermen." "Uh-huh... Chewie - I guess you named him for Chewbacca in Star Wars. I can see why; they're both gigantic and furry." Beka giggled. "I never thought of that. Actually, Chewie is short for Chudo-Yudo. Also, he chews on stuff a lot, so it seemed fitting." "Chudo what?" Marcus said. The dog made a snuffling sound that might have been canine laughter. "Chudo-Yudo," Beka repeated. "He's a character out of Russian fairy tales, the dragon that guards the Water of Life and Death. You never heard of him?" Marcus shook his head. "My father used to tell the occasional Irish folk tale when I was a kid, but I'm not familiar with Russian ones at all. Sorry." "Oh, don't be," she said cheerfully. "Most of them were pretty gory, and they hardly ever had happy endings." "Right." Marcus looked at the dog, who gazed alertly back with big brown eyes, as if trying to figure out if the former Marine was edible or not. "So, you named him after a mythical dragon from a depressing Russian story. Does anyone get eaten in that story, just out of curiosity?" Chewie sank down onto the floor with a put-upon sigh, and Beka shook her head at Marcus. "Don't be ridiculous. Of course people got eaten. But don't worry. Chewie hasn't taken a bite out of anyone in years. He's very mellow for a dragon.

It’s all right, I got off the ship okay. I’m alive,” he said again. But his voice sounded different now. “I said I’m alive, Camille. Open your eyes and look at me.” Camille’s heart shriveled as her eyelids fluttered open and she saw the ceiling of Monty’s shack. “Camille?” Oscar leaned over her, his calloused hand on her cheek. “Thank God. You’ve been delirious for nearly an hour.” Tears slipped down her cheeks as the truth stung her with renewed vigor. Her father wasn’t alive. He was truly gone. It had been nothing but a hallucination. “Why are you crying? Does something hurt?” Oscar asked, lightly prodding her arms and then checking her head. She was lying on a cot in front of the blazing stove, blankets covering her. They were scratchy and too heavy. She tried to push them away. “No.” Oscar blocked her arms. “Don’t do that.” “Why?” she asked, her throat dry and sore. Oscar looked apprehensive as he tucked the blankets tightly around her arms and neck. “Your clothes were soaked. You were shivering and flush with fever.” “Had to take ‘em off, love,” Ira said, coming to the foot of the cot. “You gave us quite a scare. That lump on the back of your head worked you over something nasty.” Camille stared at Ira, then Oscar. The crushed hope of her father being alive withered under the heat of embarrassment. “You…you removed my dress?” she whispered. Oscar backed away from her, as if he’d just slid his hand over an open flame. “No, no, I didn’t.” She looked to Ira. “Much as I’d been honored, the Irish bastard wouldn’t hear of it. Quite the prude.” Frustrated and head still piercing with pain, Camille felt the blood rush to her cheeks. “Well, then, who?” “Nothin’ I ain’t seen before, woman,” Monty grumbled from his seat at the table as he sprinkled tobacco into a pipe. Camille gasped and pressed her lips together. She caught sight of her dress hanging on a rack by the fire.

I see a direct connection between the Fuenta Magna Bowl and Ogma, I believe the former is an authentic yet misplaced artifact that has its origins in the Middle East as the Irish/Celtic mythology as well. Ogma -being the god/originator of speech and language- carries the syllable of 'Og' in his name (according to a renowned authority on Irish Mythology, James Swagger) which signals some process of initiation through which other members could join into this culture. His family connections were confused (according to, The Dictionary Of Mythology) but it is said that he was the brother of Dagda and Lugh; and Dagda owned a magical cauldron known as Undry, which was always full and used to satisfy his enormous appetite. The [Tales depict Dagda as a figure of immense power, armed with a magic club to kill nine men with one blow]. This symbolism shows another remarkable link, however, to ancient Egypt with the Nine Bows representing its enemies. With Richard Cassaro's work, we now know the significance of the Godself icon which we see on the Fuenta Magna Bowl; and yet my observation and surprise here lies in the fact that the Godself icon could simply refer to Dagda being a figure of immense power, but what is more astounding is when I found that the Latin word caldaria (whence 'cauldron' was taken) means a 'cooking pot'. This is indeed amazing, but that's not all! This Latin word has its etymological roots in the Semitic languages, where the Old Babylonian word 'kid' meaning 'to cut/soften/dissolve' got preserved into Arabic with the same meaning as well and even a new word got derived therefrom: 'kidr'; which literally means a 'cooking pot'. It also happens to refer to one of God's names (in Islam) with the meaning of: Almighty. Moreover, the word 'Undry' could be looked at as if it were composed of two syllables: Un and Dry, with 'Un' signaling a continuous action in present and 'Dry' meaning 'to generate' and 'pour out' in the Semitic language.

With the motto “do what you will,” Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau’s Alector, Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, López de Úbeda’s Justina, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Béroalde de Verville’s Fantastic Tales, Sorel’s Francion, Burton’s Anatomy, Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Amory’s John Buncle, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the novels of Diderot and maybe Voltaire (a late convert), Smollett’s Adventures of an Atom, Hoffmann’s Tomcat Murr, Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Southey’s Doctor, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Rolfe’s ornate novels, Bely’s Petersburg, Joyce’s Ulysses, Witkiewicz’s Polish jokes, Flann O’Brien’s Irish farces, Philip Wylie’s Finnley Wren, Patchen’s tender novels, Burroughs’s and Kerouac’s mad ones, Nabokov’s later works, Schmidt’s fiction, the novels of Durrell, Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), Gaddis and Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Brossard’s later works, the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism (Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palinuro of Mexico), the fabulous creations of those gay Cubans Severo Sarduy and Reinaldo Arenas, Markson’s Springer’s Progress, Mano’s Take Five, Ríos’s Larva and otros libros, the novels of Paul West, Tom Robbins, Stanley Elkin, Alexander Theroux, W. M. Spackman, Alasdair Gray, Gaétan Soucy, and Rikki Ducornet (“Lady Rabelais,” as one critic called her), Mark Leyner’s hyperbolic novels, the writings of Magiser Gass, Greer Gilman’s folkloric fictions and Roger Boylan’s Celtic comedies, Vollmann’s voluminous volumes, Wallace’s brainy fictions, Siegel’s Love in a Dead Language, Danielewski’s novels, Jackson’s Half Life, Field’s Ululu, De La Pava’s Naked Singularity, and James McCourt’s ongoing Mawrdew Czgowchwz saga. (p. 331)

MY PROCESS I got bullied quite a bit as a kid, so I learned how to take a punch and how to put up a good fight. God used that. I am not afraid of spiritual “violence” or of facing spiritual fights. My Dad was drafted during Vietnam and I grew up an Army brat, moving around frequently. God used that. I am very spiritually mobile, adaptable, and flexible. My parents used to hand me a Bible and make me go look up what I did wrong. God used that, as well. I knew the Word before I knew the Lord, so studying Scripture is not intimidating to me. I was admitted into a learning enrichment program in junior high. They taught me critical thinking skills, logic, and Greek Mythology. God used that, too. In seventh grade I was in school band and choir. God used that. At 14, before I even got saved, a youth pastor at my parents’ church taught me to play guitar. God used that. My best buddies in school were a druggie, a Jewish kid, and an Irish soccer player. God used that. I broke my back my senior year and had to take theatre instead of wrestling. God used that. I used to sleep on the couch outside of the Dean’s office between classes. God used that. My parents sent me to a Christian college for a semester in hopes of getting me saved. God used that. I majored in art, advertising, astronomy, pre-med, and finally English. God used all of that. I made a woman I loved get an abortion. God used (and redeemed) that. I got my teaching certification. I got plugged into a group of sincere Christian young adults. I took courses for ministry credentials. I worked as an autism therapist. I taught emotionally disabled kids. And God used each of those things. I married a pastor’s daughter. God really used that. Are you getting the picture? San Antonio led me to Houston, Houston led me to El Paso, El Paso led me to Fort Leonard Wood, Fort Leonard Wood led me back to San Antonio, which led me to Austin, then to Kentucky, then to Belton, then to Maryland, to Pennsylvania, to Dallas, to Alabama, which led me to Fort Worth. With thousands of smaller journeys in between. The reason that I am able to do the things that I do today is because of the process that God walked me through yesterday. Our lives are cumulative. No day stands alone. Each builds upon the foundation of the last—just like a stairway, each layer bringing us closer to Him. God uses each experience, each lesson, each relationship, even our traumas and tragedies as steps in the process of becoming the people He made us to be. They are steps in the process of achieving the destinies that He has encoded into the weave of each of our lives. We are journeymen, finding the way home. What is the value of the journey? If the journey makes us who we are, then the journey is priceless.

ONE of the evil results of the political subjection of one people by another is that it tends to make the subject nation unnecessarily and excessively conscious of its past. Its achievements in the old great days of freedom are remembered, counted over and exaggerated by a generation of slaves, anxious to convince the world and themselves that they are as good as their masters. Slaves cannot talk of their present greatness, because it does not exist; and prophetic visions of the future are necessarily vague and unsatisfying. There remains the past. Out of the scattered and isolated facts of history it is possible to build up Utopias and Cloud Cuckoo Lands as variously fantastic as the New Jerusalems of prophecy. It is to the past — the gorgeous imaginary past of those whose present is inglorious, sordid, and humiliating — it is to the delightful founded-on-fact romances of history that subject peoples invariably turn. Thus, the savage and hairy chieftains of Ireland became in due course “the Great Kings of Leinster,” “the mighty Emperors of Meath.” Through centuries of slavery the Serbs remembered and idealised the heroes of Kossovo. And for the oppressed Poles, the mediaeval Polish empire was much more powerful, splendid, and polite than the Roman. The English have never been an oppressed nationality; they are in consequence most healthily unaware of their history. They live wholly in the much more interesting worlds of the present — in the worlds of politics and science, of business and industry. So fully, indeed, do they live in the present, that they have compelled the Indians, like the Irish at the other end of the world, to turn to the past. In the course of the last thirty or forty years a huge pseudo-historical literature has sprung up in India, the melancholy product of a subject people’s inferiority complex. Industrious and intelligent men have wasted their time and their abilities in trying to prove that the ancient Hindus were superior to every other people in every activity of life. Thus, each time the West has announced a new scientific discovery, misguided scholars have ransacked Sanskrit literature to find a phrase that might be interpreted as a Hindu anticipation of it. A sentence of a dozen words, obscure even to the most accomplished Sanskrit scholars, is triumphantly quoted to prove that the ancient Hindus were familiar with the chemical constitution of water. Another, no less brief, is held up as the proof that they anticipated Pasteur in the discovery of the microbic origin of disease. A passage from the mythological poem of the Mahabharata proves that they had invented the Zeppelin. Remarkable people, these old Hindus. They knew everything that we know or, indeed, are likely to discover, at any rate until India is a free country; but they were unfortunately too modest to state the fact baldly and in so many words. A little more clarity on their part, a little less reticence, and India would now be centuries ahead of her Western rivals. But they preferred to be oracular and telegraphically brief. It is only after the upstart West has repeated their discoveries that the modern Indian commentator upon their works can interpret their dark sayings as anticipations. On contemporary Indian scholars the pastime of discovering and creating these anticipations never seems to pall. Such are the melancholy and futile occupations of intelligent men who have the misfortune to belong to a subject race. Free men would never dream of wasting their time and wit upon such vanities. From those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have.