Mccarthy Hearings Quotes

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.

Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear but only wildness of heart that springs from such longing...

It starts when you begin to overlook good manners. Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight...

Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change.

Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that don't.

In the morning they came up out of the ravine and took to the road again. He'd carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.

You can’t leave me,” he whispered thickly, fumbling blindly for her hand and taking it in his. “Can you hear me? You can’t. I won’t allow it. I need you.

He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus.

The man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin.

Ah, they said. Qué bueno. And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to hear men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted.

Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered his son of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more than his goods.He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.

and when he saw the kid standing there looking looking down at him he held out to him his bloodied hands as if in accusation and then clapped them to his ears and cried out what it seemed he himself would not hear, a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world.

I'm glad to hear you say that, Professor. Cause I aint sure either. I just get more amazed by the minute, that's all. How come you cant see yourself, honey? You plain as glass. I can see the wheels turnin in there. The gears. And I can se the light too. Good light. True light. Cant you see it?

The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness.

Suttree surfaced from these fevered deeps to hear a maudlin voice chant latin by his bedside, what medieval ghost come to usurp his fallen corporeality. An oiled thumball redolent of lime and sage pondered his shuttered lids. Miserere mei, Deus ... His ears anointed, his lips ... omnis maligna discordia ... Bechrismed with scented oils he lay boneless in a cold euphoria. Japheth when you left your father's house the birds had flown. You were not prepared for such weathers. You'd spoke too lightly of the winter in your father's heart. We saw you in the streets. Sad.

he..said..in the oratory to which he was prone that they had witnessed a thing against which time would not prevail. He meant a thing to be remembered, but the young apostate by the rail at his elbow had already begun to sicken at the slow seeping of life. He could see the shape of the skull through the old man's flesh. Hear sand in the glass. Lives running out like something foul, night-soil from a cesspipe, a measured dripping in the dark. The clock has run, the horse has run, and which has measured which?

I aint heard no voice, he said. When it stops, said Tobin, you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life. Is that right? Aye. The kid turned the leather in his lap. The expriest watched him. At night, said Tobin, when the horses are grazing and the company is asleep, who hears them grazing? Dont nobody hear them if they’re asleep. Aye. And if they cease their grazing who is it that wakes? Every man. Aye, said the expriest. Every man.

The skiff swung gently, drifting in the current. He undid his shirt to the waist and put one forearm to his eyes. He could hear the river talking softly beneath him, heavy old river with wrinkled face

I'm not backing down until you talk to me." "What?" I asked, cupping my hand to my ear. "I can't hear you over the flapping sound of my loose vagina." The corner of his mouth lifted, and he almost laughed. "Is that what that noise is?" he asked. "I thought it was the air conditioner.

They's lots of work in this world that aint never paid for. But the accounts gets balanced anyway. In the long run. A man that contracts for work and then dont pay for it, the world will reckon with him fore it's out. With the worker too. You live long enough and you'll see it. They's a ledger kept that the pages dont never get old nor crumbly nor the ink dont never fade. If it dont balance then they aint no right in this world and if they aint then where did I hear of it at? Where did you? Only way it wont is you start retribution on you own. You start retribution on you own you'll be on you own. That man up there ain goin to help you. Aint no use even to ask.

I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

I've seen all I want to see and I know all I want to know. I just look forward to death. He might hear you, Suttree said. I wisht he would, said the ragpicker. He glared out across the river with his redrimmed eyes at the town where dusk was settling in. As if death might be hiding in that quarter. No one wants to die. Shit, said the ragpicker. Here's one that's sick of livin. Would you give all you own? The ragman eyed him suspiciously but he did not smile. It wont be long, he said. An old man's days are hours. And what happens then? When? After you're dead. Dont nothin happen. You're dead. You told me once you believed in God. The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I'd like to see him for a minute if I could. What would you say to him? Well, I think I'd just tell him. I'd say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there's just one thing I'd like to know. And he'll say: What's that? And then I'm goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together. Suttree smiled. What do you think he'll say? The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I dont believe he can answer it, he said. I dont believe there is a answer.

He looked at the boy. You wont shoot, he said. That’s what you think. You aint got but two shells. Maybe just one. And they’ll hear the shot. Yes they will. But you wont. How do you figure that? Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They’ll just be soup.

Who can dream of God? This man did. In his dreams God was much occupied. Spoken to He did not answer. Called to did not hear. The man could see Him bent at his work. As if through a glass. Seated solely in the light of his own presence. Weaving the world. In his hands it flowed out of nothing and in his hands it vanished into nothing once again. Endlessly.

Jess?" "Yeah?" "Would you be okay with it if I fell in love with you?" My hear squeezed and I paused, my mouth a hairbreadth from his as I took in his words, as if I could breathe them into my mouth, my heart, my soul. "Yeah," I whispered. "I'd be very okay with it.

He waited for many years to hear from God what it was that was expected of him. What he was to do with this life. But God never said.

I want to have sex with you" he told her back. "Touch you until you squirm with pleasure." Laurel's head shot around. "What did you say?" Oh, shit. He had never actually verified how much or how little Laurel could hear.

The irrational simply changes its look and its fashions. We may no longer have literal witch hunts, but in the twentieth century, not so very long ago, we witnessed the show trials of Stalin, the McCarthy hearings in the U.S. Senate, and the mass persecutions during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Various cults are continually being generated, including cults of personality and the fetishizing of celebrities. Technology now inspires religious fervor. People have a desperate need to believe in something and they will find it anywhere. Polls have revealed that increasing numbers of people believe in ghosts, spirits, and angels, in the twenty-first century.

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.

The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Yell wake more than the dogs.

I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be? You aint nothin. You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered himself up entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his innermost heart, only that man can dance. Even a dumb animal can dance. The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the floodlamps. Bears that dance, bears that dont.

he was gibbering hysterically and when he saw the kid standing there looking down at him he held out to him his bloodied hands as if in accusation and then clapped them to his ears and cried out what it seemed he himself would not hear, a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world.

When you hear a sobbing child say it’s not fair you are always hearing the truth.

Nothing’s forever. It wasnt the sort of news that a cat likes to hear.

You think sometimes I dont listen. I think you listen. I’m not so sure what you hear.

I hope you aint fixin to make some terrible confession, he said. I might not want to hear it. Do you want to hear it? Yeah. Go ahead.

Who can dream of God? This man did. In his dreams God was much occupied. Spoken to He did not answer. Called to did not hear. The man could see Him bent at his work. As if through a glass. Seated solely in the light of his own presence. Weaving the world. In his hands it flowed out of nothing and in his hands it vanished into nothing once again. Endlessly. Endlessly.

The dying man sang with great clarity and intention and the riders setting forth upcountry may have ridden more slowly the longer to hear him for they were of just these qualities themselves.

A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They’re always more trouble than what they’re worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done. Where’d you hear that at? I dont know.

You’ve wore Rawlins completely out. I reckon you know that. You never know when you’ll be in need of them you’ve despised, said Blevins. Where the hell’d you hear that at? I dont know. I just decided to say it.

McCarthy himself said repeatedly to millions of Americans during the spring and summer of 1954, homosexuals represented a moral cancer that posed a security risk to the United States second only to the Communist Menace. “Better Dead Than Red”? Perhaps, but McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations wasn’t crazy about lavender, either; the specter of homosexuality was a frequent guest in the Senate’s hearing rooms.

You listen to me, he said. Dont you let em think they aint goin to have to. You hear me? I intend to make em kill me. I wont take nothin less. They either got to kill us or let us be. There aint no middle ground.

If you sincerely want to hear all about what is wrong with you and what you ought to do to rectify it all you need to do is let them inlaws on the place. You’ll get a complete rundown on the subject and I guarantee it. She

wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Yell wake more than the dogs.

The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.

Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair. Trees

All to the north the rain had dragged black tendrils down from the thunderclouds like tracings of lampblack fallen in a beaker and in the night they could hear the drum of rain miles away on the prairie. They ascended through a rocky pass and lightning shaped out the distant shivering mountains and lightning rang the stones about and tufts of blue fire clung to the horses like incandescent elementals that would not be driven off. Soft smelterlights advanced upon the metal of the harness, lights ran blue and liquid on the barrels of the guns. Mad jack-hares started and checked in the blue glare and high among those clanging crags jokin roehawks crouched in their feathers or cracked a yellow eye at the thunder underfoot.

He leaned forward and began to count off on the fingers of the hand that held the cigarette: She aint American. She aint a citizen. She dont speak english. She works in a whorehouse. No, hear me out. And last but not least—he sat holding his thumb—there's a son of a bitch owns her outright that I guarangoddamntee you will kill you graveyard dead if you mess with him. Son, aint there no girls on this side of the damn river? Not like her. Well I'll bet that's the truth if you ever told it.

He knew that those things we most desire to hold in our hearts are often taken from us while that which we would put away seems often by that very wish to become endowed with unsuspected powers of endurance. He knew how frail is the memory of loved ones. How we close our eyes and speak to them. How we long to hear their voices once again, and how those voices and those memories grow faint and faint until what was flesh and blood is no more than echo and shadow. In the end perhaps not even that.

He’s just a good all-around horse. He aint a finished horse but I think he’ll make a cow horse. I’m pleased to hear it. Of course your preference is for one that’ll bow up like a bandsaw and run head first into the barn wall. John Grady smiled. Horse of my dreams, he said. It aint exactly like that. How is it then? I don’t know. I think it’s just somethin you like. Or don’t like. You can add up all of a horse’s good points on a sheet of paper and it still wont tell you whether you’ll like the horse or not. What about if you add up all his bad ones? I don’t know. I’d say you’d probably done made up your mind at that point. You think there’s horses so spoiled you cant do nothin with em? Yes I do. But probably not as many as you might think. Maybe not. You think a horse can understand what a man says? You mean like words? I don’t know. Like can he understand what he says. John Grady looked out the window. Water was beaded on the glass. Two bats were hunting in the barnlight. No, he said. I think he can understand what you mean.

Neither Ginsberg nor Burroughs achieved the level of fame that Kerouac did in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This is partly because, of the three, Kerouac was the least counter-cultural, the least anti-American in sentiment and purpose. To the contrary, he had a deep love of America as land, as place — On The Road is basically a prose love poem to America — which naturally translated itself into conservative political leanings, albeit of a nonconventional sort. (He famously watched the McCarthy hearings while getting high on marijuana and cheering for McCarthy.)

In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, ‘The most significant thing in my life is that I’ve been extraordinarily lucky.’ And when you hear that you know you’re hearing the truth. It doesn’t diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.

He could hear the horse step in its hobbles and hear the grass rip softly in the horse's mouth and hear it breathing or the toss of its tail and he saw far to the south beyond the Hatchet Mountains the flare of lightning over Mexico and he knew that he would not be buried in this valley but in some distant place among strangers and he looked out to where the grass was running in the wind under cold starlight as if it were the earth itself hurtling headlong and he said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it. Not just the coming of war. Anything at all.

The boy stood up and got his broom and put it over his shoulder. He looked at his father. What are our long term goals? he said. What? Our long term goals. Where did you hear that? I dont know. No, where did you? You said it. When? A long time ago. What was the answer? I dont know. Well. I dont either. Come on. It’s getting dark.

Every word we speak is a vanity. Every breath taken that does not bless is an affront. Bear closely with me now. There is another who will hear what you never spoke. Stones themselves are made of air. What they have power to crush never lived. In the end we shall all of us be only what we have made of God. For nothing is real save his grace.

I want you to tell me who made you feel this way Aub and I’ll fucking kill him right now. I’ll leave here and hunt his ass down, so that you never have to feel this way again. I don’t want to hear about you running. You’re never leaving me. You’re mine, Ari is mine and I protect what’s mine. I’m looking for a place and I want you two with me. I love what Jenny’s family has done for you both, but you belong with me.

They walked on into the dark and they slept like dogs in the sand and had been sleeping so when something black flapped up out of the night ground and perched on Sproule's chest. Fine fingerbones stayed the leather wings with which it steadied as it walked upon him. A wrinkled pug face, small and vicious, bare lips crimped in a horrible smile and teeth pale blue in the starlight. It leaned to him. It crafted in his neck two narrow grooves and folding its wings over him it began to drink his blood. Not soft enough. He woke, put up a hand. He shrieked and the bloodbat flailed and sat back upon his chest and righted itself again and hissed and clicked its teeth. The kid was up and had seized a rock but the bat sprang away and vanished in the dark. Sproule was clawing at his neck and he was gibbering hysterically and when he saw the kid standing there looking down at him he held out to him his bloodied hands as if in accusation and then clapped them to his ears and cried out what it seemed he himself would not hear, a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world. But the kid only spat into the darkness of the space between them. I know your kind, he said. What's wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.

The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.

I dont make excuses for the way I think. Not no more. I talk to my daughter. She would be thirty now. That's all right. I dont care how that sounds. I like talkin to her. Call it superstitious or whatever you want. I know that over the years I have give her the heart I always wanted for myself and that's all right. That's why I listen to her. I know I'll always get the best from her. It dont get mixed up with my own ignorance or my own meanness. I know how that sounds and I guess I'd have to say that I dont care. I never even told my wife and we dont have a whole lot of secrets from one another. I dont think she'd say I'm crazy but some might. Ed Tom? Year, they had to swear out a lunacy warrant. I hear they're feeding him under the door. That's all right. I listen to what she says and what she says makes good sense. I wish she'd say more of it. I can use all that help I can get. Well, that's enough of that.

Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair. Trees and stones are not part of it.

That evening they crossed the Southern Pacific tracks just east of Pumpville Texas and made camp a half mile on the far side of the right of way. By the time they had the horses brushed and staked and a fire built it was dark. John Grady stood his saddle upright to the fire and walked out on the prairie and stood listening. He could see the Pumpville watertank against the purple sky. Beside it the horned moon. He could hear the horses cropping grass a hundred yards away. The prairie otherwise lay blue and silent all about.

Crossing the slide they entered the deep woods once more, the sun winnowed in tall fans among the spiring trunks, greengold and black verrniculated on the forest floor. With his cane the old man felled regiments of Indian Pipe, poked the green puffballs to see the smoke erupt in a poisonous verdant cloud. The woods were damp with the early morning and now and again he could hear the swish of a limb where a squirrel jumped and the beaded patter of waterdrops in the leaves. Twice they flushed mountain pheasants, Scout sidestepping nervously as they roared up out of the laurel.

It will be long before everyone is wiped out. People live in war time, they always have. There was terror down through history - and the men who saw the Spanish Armada sail over the rim of the world, who saw the Black death wipe out half of Europe, those men were frightened, terrified. But though they lived and died in fear, I am here; we have built again. And so I will belong to a dark age, and historians will say "We have few documents to show how the common people lived at this time. Records lead us to believe that a majority were killed. But there were glorious men." And school children will sigh and learn the names of Truman and Senator McCarthy. Oh, it is hard for me to reconcile myself to this. But maybe this is why I am a girl - - - so I can live more safely than the boys I have known and envied, so I can bear children, and instill in them the biting eating desire to learn and love life which I will never quite fulfill, because there isn't time, because there isn't time at all, but instead the quick desperate fear, the ticking clock, and the snow which comes too suddenly upon the summer. Sure, I'm dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, into my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself. Perhaps that would help, to synthesize my ideas into a philosophy for me, now, at the age of eighteen, but the clock ticks, ah yes, "At my back I hear, time's winged chariot hovering near." And I have too much conscience, too much habit to sit and stare at snow, thick now, and evenly white and muffling on the ground. God, I scream for time to let go, to write, to think. But no. I have to exercise my memory in little feats just so I can stay in this damn wonderful place which I love and hate with all my heart. And so the snow slows and swirls, and melts along the edges. The first snow isn't good for much. It makes a few people write poetry, a few wonder if the Christmas shopping is done, a few make reservations at the skiing lodge. It's a sentimental prelude to the real thing. It's picturesque & quaint.

He hiked up into the mountains. The season had gone before, some trees gone barren, none still green. He spent the night on a ledge above the river and all night he could hear the ghosts of lumber trains, a liquid clicking and long shunt and clatter and the jargon of old rusted trucks on rails long gone. The first few dawns half made him nauseous, he'd not seen one dead sober for so long. He sat in the cold gray light and watched, mummied up in his blanket. A small wind blew. A rack of clouds troweled across the east grew mauve and yellow and the sun came boring up. He was moved by the utter silence of it. He turned his back to the warmth. Yellow leaves were falling all through the forest and the river was filled with them, shuttling and winking, golden leaves that rushed like poured coins in the tailwater. A perishable currency, forever renewed. In an old grandfather time a ballad transpired here, some love gone wrong and a sabletressed girl drowned in an icegreen pool where she was found with her hair spreading like ink on the cold and cobbled river floor. Ebbing in her bindings, languorous as a sea dream. Looking up with eyes made huge by the water at the bellies of trout and the well of the rimpled world beyond.

Already it is twilight down in the Laredito. Bats fly forth from their roostings in courthouse and tower and circle the quarter. The air is full of the smell of burning charcoal. Children and dogs squat by the mud stoops and gamecocks flap and settle in the branches of the fruit trees. They go afoot, these comrades, down along a bare adobe wall. Band music carries dimly from the square. They pass a watercart in the street and they pass a hole in the wall where by the light of a small forgefire an old man beats out shapes of metal. They pass in a doorway a young girl whose beauty becomes the flowers about. They arrive at last before a wooden door. It is hinged into a larger door or gate and all must step over the foot-high sill where a thousand boots have scuffled away the wood, where fools in their hundreds have tripped or fallen or tottered drunkenly into the street. They pass along a ramada in a courtyard by an old grape arbor where small fowl nod in the dusk among the gnarled and barren vines and they enter a cantina where the lamps are lit and they cross stooping under a low beam to a bar and belly up one two three. There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down and order more. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another table who look the recruits over. The recruits stand sideways along the bar with their thumbs in their belts and watch the room. They talk among themselves of the expedition in loud voices and the old Mennonite shakes a rueful head and sips his drink and mutters. They'll stop you at the river, he says. The second corporal looks past his comrades. Are you talking to me? At the river. Be told. They'll jail you to a man. Who will? The United States Army. General Worth. They hell they will. Pray that they will. He looks at his comrades. He leans toward the Mennonite. What does that mean, old man? Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster armed ye'll not cross it back. Don't aim to cross it back. We goin to Sonora. What's it to you, old man? The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making into a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs. But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off down the bar muttering, and how else could it be? How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The fowls roosting among the grapevines had begun to stir and call. There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate.

It was a dream about children crying. When I woke up they were still crying. It just got farther away. I dont think that it had stopped. I just couldnt hear it anymore. I hadnt been around babies much. But I got to wondering why they cried all the time. I think they cry for different reasons. Dont they? They’re wet, or they’re hungry. I thought there had to be more to it. Animals might whimper if they’re hungry or cold. But they dont start screaming. It’s a bad idea. The more noise you make the more likely you are to be eaten. If you’ve no way to escape you keep silent. If birds couldnt fly they wouldnt sing. When you’re defenseless you keep your opinions to yourself.

We dont move through the days, Squire. They move through us. Until the last cruel crank of the ratchet. I’m not sure I see the distinction. It’s just that the passing of time is irrevocably the passing of you. And then nothing. I suppose it should be a comfort to understand that one cannot be dead forever where there’s no forever to be dead in. Well. I see your look. I know that you see me enfettered in some cognitive morass and I’m sure that you would contend it to be the ultimate solipsism to believe that the world ceases when you do. But I’ve no other way to look at it. It’s just that I’m not sure how it would change anything. I know. But I can hear the dice clattering as well as the next chap.

IN THE LONG RUN, however, Strauss’ strategy backfired; the transcript revealed the inquisitorial character of the hearing, and the corruption of justice during the McCarthy period. Within four years, the transcript would destroy the reputation and government career of Lewis Strauss. Ironically, publicity surrounding the trial and its verdict enhanced Oppenheimer’s fame both in America and abroad. Where once he was known only as the “father of the atomic bomb,” now he had become something even more alluring—a scientist martyred, like Galileo. Outraged and shocked by the decision, 282 Los Alamos scientists signed a letter to Strauss defending Oppenheimer. Around the country, more than 1,100 scientists and academics signed another petition protesting the decision.

Suttree felt a deep and chilling lassitude go by nape and shoulderblades. He slumped and crossed his wrists in his lap. He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus. His fingers clutched up wet handfuls from the bar, polished lozenges of slate, small cold and mascled granite teardrops. He let them fall through his fingers in a smooth clatter.

I got to wondering why [babies] cry all the time.... Animals might whimper if they are hungry or cold. But they don't start screaming. It's a bad idea. The more noise you make the more likely you are to be eaten. If you've no way to escape you keep silent. If birds couldnt fly they wouldnt sing. When you're defenseless you keep your mouth shut.... There were alway babies at the bus station and they were always crying. And these were not mild complaints. I couldn't understand how the least discomfort could take the form of agony. No other creature was so sensitive. The more I thought about it the clearer it became to me that what I was hearing was rage. And the most extraordinary thing was that no one seemed to find this extraordinary. ... The rage of children seemed inexplicable other than as a breach of some deep and innate covenant having to do with how the world should be and wasnt. How would a child know how the world should be? A child would have to be born so. ... At what age in a child's life does rage become sorrow?... I think I know why. The injustice over which they are so distraught is irremediable. And rage is only for what you believe can be fixed. At some point they get this.

In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he'd always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened an above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.

He shortened up the rope a couple of reaches and dragged the wolf through the bar ditch and stood by the fence and watched the truck come over the hill and approach in its attendant dust and clatter. The old man slowed and peered. The wolf was jerking and twisting and the boy stood behind her and held her with both hands. By the time the truck had pulled abreast of them he was lying on the ground with his legs scissored about her midriff and his arms around her neck. The old man stopped and sat the idling truck and leaned across and rolled down the window. What in the hell, he said. What in the hell. You reckon you could turn that thing off? the boy said. That's a damn wolf. Yessir it is. What in the hell. The truck's scarin her. Scarin her? Yessir. Boy what's wrong with you? That thing comes out of that riggin it'll eat you alive. Yessir. What are you doin with him? It's a she. It's a what? A she. It's a she. Hell fire, it dont make a damn he or she. What are you doin with it? Fixin to take it home. Home? Yessir. Whatever in the contumacious hell for? Can you not turn that thing off? It aint all that easy to start again. Well could I maybe get you to drive down there and catch my horse for me and bring him back. I'd tie her up but she gets all fuzzled up in the fencewire. What I'd liketo do is to try and save you the trouble of bein eat, the old man said. What are you takin it home for? It's kindly a long story. Well I'd sure like to hear it. The boy looked down the road where the horse stood grazing. He looked at the old man. Well, he said. My daddy wanted me to come and get him if I caught her but I didnt want to leave her cause they's been some vaqueros takin their dinner over yonder and I figured they'd probably shoot her so I just decided to take her on home with me. Have you always been crazy? I dont know. I never was much put to the test before today. How old are you? Sixteen. Sixteen. Yessir. Well you aint got the sense God give a goose. Did you know that? You may be right. How do you expect your horse to tolerate a bunch of nonsense such as this. If I can get him caught he wont have a whole lot of say about it. You plan on leadin that thing behind a horse? Yessir. How you expect to get her to do that? She aint got a whole lot of choice either.

You hear about people waiting too long to retire, then one of ’em gets sick. . .

brandy Alexanders and White Ladies and wanted to hear about a cocktail called the Clover Club that was one-third gin, one-third lemon juice, one-third grenadine, and the white of an egg.

What makes a contact useful for a job change, argued Granovetter, is neither the closeness of our relationship with them nor the power of his or her position. It is the likelihood that the person knows different people than we do and, therefore, bumps into different information. The acquaintances, neighbors, and coworkers who operate in the same spheres as we do can rarely tell us something we don’t already know because they hear about the same things we do. Of course, having an Ivy League, Oxbridge, or Grande École connection can dramatically improve one’s prospects for moving into certain closed circles. But even members of elite tribes need “weak ties” to connect to worlds outside their immediate experience. Yet most people, like Harris, wait until they have been stuck for quite some time before starting to look outside their core circle of friends and colleagues. Our close contacts don’t just blind us, they also bind us to our outdated identities. Reinventing involves trying on and testing a variety of possible selves. But our long-standing social networks may resist those identity experiments. Remember Gary McCarthy’s chagrin when he learned, three years out of college, that his family had already pegged him as a “finance person”? Without meaning to, friends and family pigeonhole us. Worse, they fear our changing.

The boy was terrified. He put his arm around him and held him. His body so thin. Dont be afraid, he said. If they find you you are going to have to do it. Do you understand? Shh. No crying. Do you hear me? You know how to do it. You put it in your mouth and point it up. Do it quick and hard. Do you understand? Stop crying. Do you understand?

Rouhani, was elected in 2013. Obama had set his sights on working out a deal with the mad mullahs as early as 2008. You mean he came into office to do the deal? Now you got the rest of the story. He was handpicked to do the deal. Where did this unknown ghost come from? This man, this administration, was handpicked by foreign powers that manipulated him into the presidency. Because of the liars in the media, he has been able to get away with virtual murder. The murder of the truth, the murder of our national security. I know many lives were, let us say, seriously challenged during the HUAC hearings of the McCarthy era, but I want to ask you something. Have you read the Venona papers? The Soviet-era secret correspondence that came out a little over two decades ago, which confirmed that almost everything that Joseph McCarthy had been saying about the news media and Hollywood was true? That there were communists who were openly subverting America? Can anyone tell me the name of someone whose life was actually ruined by HUAC who was not really working to subvert America, who was not really a communist or fellow traveler? I’d like to know whose life was ruined. I think it’s a myth that lives of innocent people were ruined. I know there were movies made, I remember The Front with Zero Mostel, in which he played an innocent actor who jumped out of a window because the House Un-American Activities Committee was after him. Hollywood has made many, many movies about the blacklist. We hear about the blacklist. But how many innocent people’s lives were actually ruined? The operative word here is innocent. I’d like to know their names.

Earlier that year, at the hundredth anniversary of his Harvard club, a member was talking about the spirit of Harvard College and saying how glad he was that the school had produced neither “a Joseph McCarthy or an Alger Hiss.” On hearing that coupling, Kennedy jumped from his chair. “How dare you compare the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” and left the room. As for his father, the very thought

* Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”? “The first people who come to mind are the real heroes of Task Unit Bruiser: Marc Lee, first SEAL killed in Iraq. Mike Monsoor, second SEAL killed in Iraq, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor after he jumped on a grenade to save three of our other teammates. And finally, Ryan Job, one of my guys [who was] gravely wounded in Iraq, blinded in both eyes, but who made it back to America, was medically retired from the Navy, but who died from complications after the 22nd surgery to repair his wounds. Those guys, those men, those heroes, they lived, and fought, and died like warriors.” * Most-gifted or recommended books? “I think there’s only one book that I’ve ever given and I’ve only given it to a couple people. That’s a book called About Face, by Colonel David H. Hackworth. The other book that I’ve read multiple times is Blood Meridian [by Cormac McCarthy].” * Favorite documentaries? “Restrepo, which I’m sure you’ve seen. [TF: This was co-produced and co-filmed by Sebastian Junger, the next profile.] There is also an hour-long program called ‘A Chance in Hell: The Battle for Ramadi.’” Quick Takes * You walk into a bar. What do you order from the bartender? “Water.” * What does your diet generally look like? “It generally looks like steak.” * What kind of music does Jocko listen to? Two samples: For workouts—Black Flag, My War, side B In general—White Buffalo

In 1951, 20-year-old [Jim]Jones [of Jonestown massacre fame] began attending gatherings of the Communist Party USA in Indianapolis. He became flustered with harassment during the McCarthy Hearings, particularly regarding an event that he attended with his mother focusing on Paul Robeson, after which she was harassed by the FBI in front of her co-workers for attending. He also became frustrated with the persecution of open and accused communists in the United States, especially during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Jones said he asked himself, "How can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church." Jones was surprised when a Methodist district superintendent helped him get a start in the church, even though he knew Jones to be a communist.

On July 7, Essie was subpoenaed to appear before the feared McCarthy Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations. Headed by Senator Joseph McCarthy, a right-wing Republican from Wisconsin, this so-called McCarthy Committee was spearheading the anticommunist witch hunt throughout the nation with its high-profile hearings.

After then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified in a congressional hearing that she spoke with the president by telephone at around 10 p.m. that evening (by which point she knew that Ambassador Stevens had been murdered), the president and his other subordinates changed their story, reporting that the president had spoken with Secretary Clinton but providing few details and acknowledging no other contacts with top administration officials who were futilely responding to the attack.

On October 4, the FISC held a standard follow-up hearing to discuss the government’s September 26 submission. NSD Chief Carlin was reportedly present at the proceeding, which was uneventful because the government, again, failed to disclose the compliance issues the NSA’s internal audits had begun uncovering ten months earlier. Carlin left the government eleven days later, replaced by his deputy, Mary McCord

Reading The Powers That Be, David Halberstam’s book about the relationship between political power and the media in America, she wondered how a woman could earn respect in the fiercely competitive, male-dominated world of journalism, noting that Halberstam did not cite a single female voice covering—much less participating in—Vietnam, the McCarthy hearings, Watergate, or any international crisis.

He exploited the privileges of power and prominence without regard to its responsibilities; to him politics was not about the substantive but the sensational. The country feared Communism, and McCarthy knew it, and he fed those fears with years of headlines and hearings. A master of false charges, of conspiracy-tinged rhetoric, and of calculated disrespect for conventional figures (from Truman and Eisenhower to Marshall), McCarthy could distract the public, play the press, and change the subject—all while keeping himself at center stage. Showcasing largely unfounded accusations of Communist subversion, McCarthyism was

At the hearing, the government confessed to various irregularities, most notably that it had for years been unlawfully gathering intelligence on Americans—specifically, using U.S. person identifiers to query the upstream database, in violation of the prohibition that had been in place since 2011.

The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that dont.

... when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.