Oral Defense Quotes

Bullshit is everywhere.” (...) Then there’s the more pernicious bullshit… It comes in three flavors: Making bad things sound good… “Patriot Act.” Because “Are You Scared Enough to Let Me Look at All Your Phone Records Act” doesn’t sell… Number two: hiding bad things under mountains of bullshit. “Hey, a handful of billionaires can’t buy our elections, right?” “Of course not. They can only pour unlimited, anonymous cash into a 501( c)( 4) if 50 percent is devoted to ‘issue education’”… And finally, my favorite: the bullshit of infinite possibility… “We cannot take action on climate change until everyone in the world agrees gay marriage vaccines won’t cause our children to marry goats who are coming for our guns. Until then, I say we teach the controversy.” So I say to you, friends: The best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something. ~Jon Stewart

Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have aficion. He might simulate it or confuse it with excitement, but he could not really have it. When they saw that I had aficion, and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spirital examination with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent, there was this same embarassed putting the hand on the shoulder, or a "Buen hombre." But nearly always there was the actual touching. It seemed as though they wanted to touch you to make it certain.

We’d fought the living dead to a stalemate and, eventually, future generations might be able to reinhabit the planet with little or no physical danger. Yes, our defensive strategies had saved the human race, but what about the human spirit? The living dead had taken more from us than land and loved ones. They’d robbed us of our confidence as the planet’s dominant life-form. We were a shaken, broken species, driven to the edge of extinction and grateful only for a tomorrow with perhaps a little less suffering than today. Was this the legacy we would leave to our children, a level of anxiety and self-doubt not seen since our simian ancestors cowered in the tallest trees? What kind of world would they rebuild? Would they rebuild at all? Could they continue to progress, knowing that they had been powerless to reclaim their future? And what if that future saw another rise of the living dead? Would our descendants rise to meet them in battle, or simply crumple in meek surrender and accept what they believe to be their inevitable extinction? For this reason alone, we had to reclaim our planet. We had to prove to ourselves that we could do it, and leave that proof as this war’s greatest monument. The long, hard road back to humanity, or the regressive ennui of Earth’s once-proud primates. That was the choice, and it had to be made now.

How do you build peaks? You create a positive moment with elements of elevation, insight, pride, and/ or connection. We’ll explore those final three elements later, but for now, let’s focus on elevation. To elevate a moment, do three things: First, boost sensory appeal. Second, raise the stakes. Third, break the script. (Breaking the script means to violate expectations about an experience—the next chapter is devoted to the concept.) Moments of elevation need not have all three elements but most have at least two. Boosting sensory appeal is about “turning up the volume” on reality. Things look better or taste better or sound better or feel better than they usually do. Weddings have flowers and food and music and dancing. (And they need not be superexpensive—see the footnote for more.IV) The Popsicle Hotline offers sweet treats delivered on silver trays by white-gloved waiters. The Trial of Human Nature is conducted in a real courtroom. It’s amazing how many times people actually wear different clothes to peak events: graduation robes and wedding dresses and home-team colors. At Hillsdale High, the lawyers wore suits and the witnesses came in costume. A peak means something special is happening; it should look different. To raise the stakes is to add an element of productive pressure: a competition, a game, a performance, a deadline, a public commitment. Consider the pregame jitters at a basketball game, or the sweaty-hands thrill of taking the stage at Signing Day, or the pressure of the oral defense at Hillsdale High’s Senior Exhibition. Remember how the teacher Susan Bedford said that, in designing the Trial, she and Greg Jouriles were deliberately trying to “up the ante” for their students. They made their students conduct the Trial in front of a jury that included the principal and varsity quarterback. That’s pressure. One simple diagnostic to gauge whether you’ve transcended the ordinary is if people feel the need to pull out their cameras. If they take pictures, it must be a special occasion. (Not counting the selfie addict, who thinks his face is a special occasion.) Our instinct to capture a moment says: I want to remember this. That’s a moment of elevation.

Five years later, Albert Sabin published the results of an alternative polio vaccine he had used in an immunization campaign in Toluca, Mexico, a city of a hundred thousand people, where a polio outbreak was in progress. His was an oral vaccine, easier to administer than Salk’s injected one. It was also a live vaccine, containing weakened but intact poliovirus, and so it could produce not only immunity but also a mild contagious infection that would spread the immunity to others. In just four days, Sabin’s team managed to vaccinate more than 80 percent of the children under the age of eleven—26,000 children in all. It was a blitzkrieg assault. Within weeks, polio had disappeared from the city. This approach, Sabin argued, could be used to eliminate polio from entire countries, even the world. The only leader in the West who took him up on the idea was Fidel Castro. In 1962, Castro’s Committee for the Defense of the Revolution organized 82,366 local committees to carry out a succession of weeklong house-to-house national immunization campaigns using the Sabin vaccine. In 1963, only one case of polio occurred in Cuba.

Aubrey Davis, officer, Protective Service Unit, Defense Protective Service, Pentagon: The secretary came out the door and asked what was going on. I told him we were getting a report that an aircraft had hit the Mall side of the building. He looked at me and immediately went toward the Mall. I said, “Sir, do you understand, that’s the area of impact, the Mall.” He kept going, so I told Officer [Gilbert] Oldach to come on. I saw Mr. Kisling, Joe Wassel, and Kevin Brown sitting in the personnel security office, and I waved for them to come with us. Donald Rumsfeld: I went out to see what was amiss.

American officials estimated millions would be spent to develop internal security systems, and State Department officials expected the Cuban government to increase internal surveillance in an attempt to prevent further acts of terrorism. These systems, which restricted civil rights, became easy targets for critics. CIA officials admitted early on in the war of terrorism that the goal was not the military defeat of Fidel Castro, but to force the regime into applying increasingly stringent civil restrictions, with the resultant pressures on the Cuban public. This was outlined in a May 1961 agency report stating that the objective was to “plan, implement and sustain a program of covert actions designed to exploit the economic, political and psychological vulnerabilities of the Castro regime. It is neither expected nor argued that the successful execution of this covert program will in itself result in the overthrow of the Castro regime,” only to accelerate the “moral and physical disintegration of the Castro government.” The CIA acknowledged that in response to the terrorist acts the government would be “Stepping up internal security controls and defense capabilities.” It was not projected the acts of terror would directly result in Castro’s downfall (although that was a policy aim), but only to promote the sense of vulnerability among the population and compel the government into increasingly radical steps in order to ensure national security.18

The good mother must be able to provide affection and warmth as well as to control the child and provide physical nourishment. She must furnish security and satisfaction, and she is the person (agent) through which the child must learn to achieve successful socialization. In this sense the concept of love-food is a product-relationship variable referring to the psychonutritional exchange between the mother and her child. Anyone who has had the experience of working or coming into contact with schizophrenics has been impressed with the amount of preoccupation with food that these patients indicate. The classical Freudian position is, of course, that the schizophrenic has regressed to the oral phase of psychosexual development. Often they suspect that their food has been poisoned or tampered with. Many times there is considerable ritual concerning the partaking of meals.

The vast majority of the sources for this book are pulled from the oral history projects housed at seven institutions: The National September 11 Memorial & Museum (New York City), the 9/11 Tribute Museum (New York City), the Arlington County Public Library Oral History Project (Virginia), C-SPAN (Washington, D.C.), the Historical Office of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (The Pentagon, Virginia), the Flight 93 National Memorial (Shanksville, Pennsylvania), and the U.S. House of Representatives Historian’s Office (Washington, D.C.), as well as interviews and stories collected by myself.

The Seraphim spoke as one. Their voice thundered like the sound of many waters. “Elohim has taken his place in the divine council. In the midst of the gods, he holds judgment.” Everyone fell silent. This lawsuit would be different from all others because of the legal procedure to be employed. Normally, plaintiff and defendant would stand in the bar before the Judge and make their arguments, calling forth testimony and producing evidence upon which the Judge would rule. But since the Judge himself was being charged by the Accuser, there would be no need of additional testimony or cross examination. The Accuser would make the complaint, and Enoch would speak in defense of Yahweh Elohim. After presentation of all oral arguments, the Judge would make a righteous summary judgment. Special circumstances dictated special procedures.

Yes, our defensive strategies had saved the human race, but what about the human spirit?