Read Across America Quotes

Primo Levi once said, “I write in order to rejoin the community of mankind.” Reading is a private act, but it joins us across continents and time.

Just as he did during the Slavery at Monticello tour, David did not mince words. "There’s a chapter in Notes on the State of Virginia,” he said to the five of us, standing in front of the east wing of Jefferson’s manor, “that has some of the most racist things you might ever read, written by anyone, anywhere, anytime, in it. So sometimes I stop and ask myself, 'If Gettysburg had gone the wrong way, would people be quoting the Declaration of Independence or Notes on the State of Virginia?' It’s the same guy writing.

France is to me the heroine in the romance of all the nations of all time. This feeling was born in me years ago when I read how her noble sons had defended America in its cradle. Today I am proud that I am one of the millions who will come to save our heroine from the clutches of the villain from across the Rhine.

When I read Jefferson’s disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is.

Secularism should not be equated with Stalinist dogmatism or with the bitter fruits of Western imperialism and runaway industrialisation. Yet it cannot shirk all responsibility for them, either. Secular movements and scientific institutions have mesmerised billions with promises to perfect humanity and to utilise the bounty of planet Earth for the benefit of our species. Such promises resulted not just in overcoming plagues and famines, but also in gulags and melting ice caps. You might well argue that this is all the fault of people misunderstanding and distorting the core secular ideals and the true facts of science. And you are absolutely right. But that is a common problem for all influential movements. For example, Christianity has been responsible for great crimes such as the Inquisition, the Crusades, the oppression of native cultures across the world, and the disempowerment of women. A Christian might take offence at this and retort that all these crimes resulted from a complete misunderstanding of Christianity. Jesus preached only love, and the Inquisition was based on a horrific distortion of his teachings. We can sympathise with this claim, but it would be a mistake to let Christianity off the hook so easily. Christians appalled by the Inquisition and by the Crusades cannot just wash their hands of these atrocities – they should rather ask themselves some very tough questions. How exactly did their ‘religion of love’ allow itself to be distorted in such a way, and not once, but numerous times? Protestants who try to blame it all on Catholic fanaticism are advised to read a book about the behaviour of Protestant colonists in Ireland or in North America. Similarly, Marxists should ask themselves what it was about the teachings of Marx that paved the way to the Gulag, scientists should consider how the scientific project lent itself so easily to destabilising the global ecosystem, and geneticists in particular should take warning from the way the Nazis hijacked Darwinian theories.

The first panel misquotes the preamble and conclusion of the Declaration of Independence, leaving out five words from within its selected excerpts. The architect requested the omissions so the text would fit better! Surely this memorable text should not be altered for so petty a reason. We know Jefferson would not approve, for whenever he sent correspondents a copy of the Declaration he took pains to show what the Continental Congress had added to his draft and what it had cut. The altered text reads,

Official state historical markers form a smaller population, and early in my research I determined to read all of them. Texas dissuaded me. The Lone Star state has more state historical markers—nearly twelve thousand—than the rest of the United States put together. To read and digest one marker per minute would require 200 hours—five full weeks in the Texas office. At the other end of the spectrum is Maine, whose assistant director of historic preservation flatly assured me, “Maine does not have historical markers along its highways.” Maine has markers and monuments, of course, not put up by a state agency, so the only way to read them is to drive every road in the state, keeping a sharp lookout.

While a life like Frederick Douglas’s is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglas. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave brakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglas. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country’s teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives, at the expense of millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told. “I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglas, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy. It illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, despite the most brutal circumstances, attain super-human heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, and the people who maintained it.

I remember reading once how some Stone Age Indians from the Brazilian rain forest with no knowledge or expectation of a world beyond the jungle were taken to Sao Paulo or Rio, and when they saw what it contained-the buildings, the cars, the passing airplanes-and how thoroughly at variance it was with their own simple lives, they wet themselves, lavishly and in unison. I believe I had some idea how they felt. It is such a strange contrast. When you’re on the AT, the forest is your universe, infinite and entire. It is all you experience day after day. Eventually it is about all you can imagine. You are aware, of course, that somewhere over the horizon there are mighty cities, busy factories, crowded freeways, but here in this part of the country, where woods drape the landscape for as far as the eye can see, the forest rules. Even the little towns like Franklin and Hiawassee and even Gatlinburg are just way stations scattered helpfully through the great cosmos of woods. But come off the trail, properly off, and drive somewhere, as we did now, and you realize how magnificently deluded you have been. Here, the mountains and woods were just backdrop-familiar, known, nearby, but no more consequential or noticed than the clouds that scudded across their ridgelines. Here the real business was up close and on top of you: gas stations, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, Dunkin Donuts, Blockbuster Videos, a ceaseless unfolding pageant of commercial hideousness.

The Bureaus of Prisons in states across America know this well; many of them project the number of prison beds they will need in the future based on third- or fourth-grade reading statistics.

If you’ve ever wondered what we’re missing by sitting at computers in cubicles all day, follow Jessica DuLong when she loses her desk job and embarks on this unlikely but fantastic voyage. Deeply original, riveting to read, and soul-bearingly honest, "My River Chronicles" is a surprisingly infectious romance about a young woman falling in love with a muscle-y old boat. As DuLong learns to navigate her way through a man’s world of tools and engines, and across the swirling currents of a temperamental river, her book also becomes a love letter to a nation. In tune with the challenges of our times, DuLong reminds us of the skills and dedication that built America, and inspires us to renew ourselves once again.

Why go away to America in a year when I could just as easily spend the rest of my four years away coming to readings like this and sit and talk as some were already doing right now? There was more to learn in this tiny crammed bookstore than in any of the mighty institutions across the Atlantic.

because it was from that experience that I learned a lesson which has stuck with me all through the years: you can learn from everybody. I didn’t just learn from reading every retail publication I could get my hands on, I probably learned the most from studying what John Dunham was doing across the street.

In my time in Washington, no battle has consumed more energy than stopping Obamacare. On the evening of September 24, 2013, it began with a prayer. In my tiny “hideaway” office wedged into a dome in the Capitol Building, Senator Mike Lee and I bowed our heads, read from the Book of Psalms, and asked for the Lord’s guidance. I then walked to the floor of the U.S. Senate and announced, “I intend to speak in support of defunding Obamacare until I am no longer able to stand.”* I opened by noting that “all across this country, Americans are suffering because of Obamacare.” And yet politicians in Washington were not listening to the concerns of their constituents. They weren’t hearing the people with jobs lost or the people forced into part-time work. They had no answers for the people losing their health insurance, or the people who are struggling. With good reason, men and women across America believe that politicians get elected, go to Washington, and stop listening to them. This is the most common thing you hear from the man on the street, from Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and Libertarians: You’re not listening to me.

Read. You should read Bukowski and Ferlinghetti, read Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and listen to Coltrane, Nina Simone, Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Son House, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Miles Davis, Lou Reed, Nick Drake, Bobbie Gentry, George Jones, Jimmy Reed, Odetta, Funkadelic, and Woody Guthrie. Drive across America. Ride trains. Fly to countries beyond your comfort zone. Try different things. Join hands across the water. Different foods. New tasks. Different menus and tastes. Talk with the guy who’s working in construction on your block, who’s working on the highway you’re traveling on. Speak with your neighbors. Get to know them. Practice civil disobedience. Try new resistance. Be part of the solution, not the problem. Don’t litter the earth, it’s the only one you have, learn to love her. Care for her. Learn another language. Trust your friends with kindness. You will need them one day. You will need earth one day. Do not fear death. There are worse things than death. Do not fear the reaper. Lie in the sunshine but from time to time let the neon light your way. ZZ Top, Jefferson Airplane, Spirit. Get a haircut. Dye your hair pink or blue. Do it for you. Wear eyeliner. Your eyes are the windows to your soul. Show them off. Wear a feather in your cap. Run around like the Mad Hatter. Perhaps he had the answer. Visit the desert. Go to the zoo. Go to a county fair. Ride the Ferris wheel. Ride a horse. Pet a pig. Ride a donkey. Protest against war. Put a peace symbol on your automobile. Drive a Volkswagen. Slow down for skateboarders. They might have the answers. Eat gingerbread men. Pray to the moon and the stars. God is out there somewhere. Don’t worry. You’ll find out where soon enough. Dance. Even if you don’t know how to dance. Read The Four Agreements. Read the Bible. Read the Bhagavad Gita. Join nothing. It won’t help. No games, no church, no religion, no yellow-brick road, no way to Oz. Wear beads. Watch a caterpillar in the sun.

Terrible as this is, there’s worse news. An article in the New York Times points out a statistic that should make our nation’s leaders tremble… suspension rates, kindergarten through high school, have nearly doubled from the early 1970s through 2006. Whatever is happening with our test scores, something else, something catastrophic, is going on in our schools. As countless teachers across America can testify, disruptive kids are hijacking our classrooms.

While a life like Frederick Douglas’s is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglas. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave brakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglas. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country’s teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives, at the expense of millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told. I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn’t simply escape like Douglas, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn’t they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy. It illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, despite the most brutal circumstances, attain super-human heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, and the people who maintained it.

He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life. This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn’t exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. The owner took her time unpacking the books she’d bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She’d never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.' The owner of the secondhand bookstore lowered the volume of the radio. She flipped to the back flap of the book to find out more about the author, but all it said was that Zvi Litvinoff had been born in Poland and moved to Chile in 1941, where he still lived today. There was no photograph. That day, in between helping customers, she finished the book. Before locking up the shop that evening, she placed it in the window, a little wistful about having to part with it. The next morning, the first rays of the rising sun fell across the cover of The History of Love. The first of many flies alighted on its jacket. Its mildewed pages began to dry out in the heat as the blue-gray Persian cat who lorded over the shop brushed past it to lay claim to a pool of sunlight. A few hours later, the first of many passersby gave it a cursory glance as they went by the window. The shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it. And that’s what happened. One afternoon a tall young man saw the book in the window. He came into the shop, picked it up, read a few pages, and brought it to the register. When he spoke to the owner, she couldn’t place his accent. She asked where he was from, curious about the person who was taking the book away. Israel, he told her, explaining that he’d recently finished his time in the army and was traveling around South America for a few months. The owner was about to put the book in a bag, but the young man said he didn’t need one, and slipped it into his backpack. The door chimes were still tinkling as she watched him disappear, his sandals slapping against the hot, bright street. That night, shirtless in his rented room, under a fan lazily pushing around the hot air, the young man opened the book and, in a flourish he had been fine-tuning for years, signed his name: David Singer. Filled with restlessness and longing, he began to read.

The graphic photographs of Emmett Till’s brutalized body after it was retrieved three days later, flashed across the screen,” says Baker. “I sprang off the couch and screamed ‘No!’ It was the immediate and universal anguish every mother feels at the sight of such cruelty to a child. My heart was broken wide open, and from that moment, I began reviewing how, decade by decade, I had unconsciously been consuming racism my whole life. I read and wrote and read and wrote. And that was the beginning of my journey.

Someone must have told me about the Missouri River at Bismarck, North Dakota, or I must have read about it. In either case, I hadn’t paid attention. I came on it in amazement. Here is where the map should fold. Here is the boundary between east and west. On the Bismarck side it is eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure west, with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops. The two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart.

Our society has come to adopt many of the draconian measures Orwell tried to warn us about. Cameras monitor citizens from nearly every street corner in the United Kingdom, and there are a steadily growing number of them mounted on traffic lights in America. The fact that Orwell’s 1984 remains a part of the required reading curriculum in many high schools across the country is laughably ironic. What is truly sad is how many readers acknowledge the brilliant foresight of Orwell yet fail to grasp how closely present-day America (and England) resemble Winston Smith’s Oceania.

Telegrams for the astronauts poured in by the thousands. One, however, stood out from the rest. It came not from a world leader or celebrity or other luminary, but from an anonymous stranger. It had traveled over whites-only lunch counters in the South, through jungles in Vietnam where young men fell, over the coffins of two of America’s great civil rights leaders. It had blown across the streets bloodied by protesters and police, past a segregationist presidential campaign, into radios playing songs of alienation and revolt. It had made its way through ten million American souls who didn’t have enough to eat, alongside generations that no longer trusted each other, into a White House where a no-longer-loved president slept. It read: THANKS. YOU SAVED 1968.

I begin this chapter with President Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Speech on January 11, 1989. President Reagan encouraged the rising generation to “let ’em know and nail ’em on it”—that is, to push back against teachers, professors, journalists, politicians, and others in the governing generation who manipulate and deceive them: An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties. But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs [protection]. So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, 4 years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, “We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.” Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven’t been teaching you what it means to be an American, let ’em know and nail ’em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.1

Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness, the way the news cycle was making her incapable of action, a beach somnolent whale. No one could put anything together, that was the whole problem. She had recently read an article that listed all the reasons why monarch butterflies were dying, before segueing proudly into an account of taking a plane across America so the writer could cheer herself up by seeing monarch butterflies. On the plane she complained about the air pollution of jet fuel and perfume, how it gave her allergies, but she didn't connect the casual habit of flying thousands of miles with the collapse of the butterflies. Kathy didn't blame her. The equations were too difficult, you knew intellectually, but you never really saw the consequences, since they tended to impact other poorer people in other poorer places. There is no away to throw things to didn't quite work as an axiom if you were a species that depended so stubbornly on the evidence of its own eyes.

Asheville Citizen-Times newspaper, which reported how a man – his name isn’t given – walked into a branch of Bank of America, picked up a deposit slip and wrote on it: This is a stickkup. Put all you muny in this bag. Then, like all polite robbers, he waited in a queue to hand the note to the teller. As he stood there, he started worrying that someone might have seen him write the note, and that the police could be called before he reached the window. Thinking quickly – or as quickly as he was able – he left the Bank of America and hurried across the street to a branch of the Wells Fargo Bank. There he again waited in a queue for a few minute, until it was his turn to see the teller. He handed her the note and she read it. Realising that he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, she told him that, unfortunately, she couldn’t accept the demand because it was written on rival bank’s stationary; he would either have to rewrite the note on a Wells Fargo slip, or go back to the Bank of America. ‘Looking somewhat defeated, the man left the Wells Fargo Bank,’ says the Citizen-Times. He was arrested a few minutes later – in the queue back over at the Bank of America.

The book jolted loose from her arm and fell to the ground. Opening her mouth to apologize to the man she'd bumped into, Rose turned around. And stopped. "A History of the New World," he read, straightening with the book in his hands. Eyes black as pitch regarded her. She'd never seen eyes like that before. The effect of their direct, level gaze was... unsettling. Beside her, Maggie gave a small gasp. "Thank you for retrieving my book, sir," she said, finding that her voice wanted to quaver and fighting against it. "May I have it back?" His head tilted a little to one side, a strand of coal black hair falling forward across his forehead. He was all in black, she realized, from his beaver hat to his gloves to the soles of his boots. Only a white shirt collar and simply tied white cravat leavened his stark appearance. No, not stark, she amended as he glanced down at the book again. Predatory. All six lean feet of him. "Do the Americas interest you?" he asked, his voice a low, cultured drawl that seemed to resonate down her spine. "Learning things interests me," she replied, and held out her hand. The corner of his mouth quirked, and he slowly placed the book into her fingers. "Well, then. I could teach you such things, Lady Rosamund," he murmured.

After that preacher told me to quit thinking, I began thinking harder. I did my research. Turns out, the memo he was trying to pass me—“A good Christian bases her faith on disapproving of gays and abortion”—started being issued only forty years ago. In the 1970s, a few rich, powerful, white, (outwardly) straight men got worried about losing their right to continue racially segregating their private Christian schools and maintaining their tax-exempt status. Those men began to feel their money and power being threatened by the civil rights movement. In order to regain control, they needed to identify an issue that would be emotional and galvanizing enough to unite and politically activate their evangelical followers for the first time. They decided to focus on abortion. Before then—a full six years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore. They wrote a new memo using freshly feigned outrage and rhetoric calling for “a holy war…to lead the nation back to the moral stance that made America great.” They sponsored a meeting of 15,000 pastors—called The Religious Roundtable—to train pastors on how to convince their congregations to vote for antichoice, antigay candidates. This is how they disseminated the memo down to evangelical ministers, who passed it down to pews across America. The memo read, To be aligned with Jesus, to have family values, to be moral, one must be against abortion and gay people and vote for the candidate that is antiabortion and antigay.

On the night of September 13, Bill O’Reilly had an exchange with Sam Husseini, a former spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, that characterized Fox’s position as it was developing. “Here’s what we’re going to do, and I’ll let you react to it,” O’Reilly said. “We’re going to take out this Osama bin Laden. Now, whether we go in with air power or whether we go in with a Delta force, he’s a dead man walking. He’s through. He should have been through long before this. He’s been wanted for eight years. Now, they’re going to go in and they’re going to get him. If the Taliban government of Afghanistan does not cooperate, then we will damage that government with air power, probably. All right? We will blast them, because …” Husseini told O’Reilly that innocent Afghans would be killed by a protracted air strike. “Doesn’t make any difference,” O’Reilly huffed. “Bill—” “They—it was an act of war.” “No, no. It does make a difference,” Husseini said. “I don’t want more civilians dead. We’ve had civilians dead in New York and now you’re saying maybe it’s okay to have civilians dead in Afghanistan.” “Mr. Husseini, this is war.” “Yeah, exactly. And in war you don’t kill civilians. You don’t kill women and children. Those are your words, Bill.” “Oh, stop it,” O’Reilly said. “You just made the most absurd statement in the world. That means we wouldn’t have bombed the Nazis or the Japanese. We wouldn’t have done any of that, because you don’t want somebody who has declared war on us to be punished. Come on.” “Who declared war on us?” “The terrorist states have declared war, Mr. Husseini!” “Get them. Get the terrorists,” Husseini said. “Cut his mic,” O’Reilly responded, waving his finger across the screen, the lower third of which was covered with Stars and Stripes graphics and a caption that read: “AMERICA UNITES.

I’ve put down half a pitcher of water by the time she comes to take my order. She fills another pitcher and sets it in front of me, standing with her pen in her hand, distracted, waiting for me to order. It’s early afternoon and well north of 100 degrees. Perusing the menu, I comment on the heat. “Man, it’s hot out there.” Setting her order pad down on the counter, crossing her arms, tapping the back of her pen against her lower lip, she looks out the window at my bike leaning there. Her eyes drift to mine with that look women can give men. You know the look, the one that says, “I’m wondering if you’re trying to act dumb, or if you really might be that dumb.” Not necessarily mean, just curious. I smile sheepishly beneath the pressure of the question behind her look. Every man reading these words knows exactly what I’m talking about here. You get the look, so you know you’ve said or done something really stupid, but you don’t have a clue what it is you’ve done or said that is so outrageously idiotic. Which just makes it worse. She sees all this wash across my face, and a small smile plays at the corners of her face. Still tapping the pen against her lower lip, she brings her elbows down to rest on the bar, leaning in a little closer to me, as if letting me in on her secret. “Honey, it’s June. It’s the hottest month in the Sonoran Desert.” Pausing, she looks again at my bicycle leaning against her window. “You’re riding a bicycle across the black asphalt in the hottest desert in the hottest month.” She pauses there, looking into my eyes, raising one eyebrow, letting me know a question is coming. “What, exactly, did you expect?” Hmmm. Good point. I might have heard those words whispered to me by the desert itself earlier today. “Right,” I say, closing the menu and handing it to her, keeping my eyes on hers. “I’ll take the burger.” We smile at each other as she takes the menu.

CAN WE TRUST ANYTHING THE NEW YORK TIMES SAYS ABOUT IMMIGRATION? In 2008, the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helu, saved the Times from bankruptcy. When that guy saves your company, you dance to his tune. So it’s worth mentioning that Slim’s fortune depends on tens of millions of Mexicans living in the United States, preferably illegally. That is, unless the Times is some bizarre exception to the normal pattern of corruption—which you can read about at this very minute in the Times. If a tobacco company owned Fox News, would we believe their reports on the dangers of smoking? (Guess what else Slim owns? A tobacco company!) The Times impugns David and Charles Koch for funneling “secret cash” into a “right-wing political zeppelin.”1 The Kochs’ funding of Americans for Prosperity is hardly “secret.” What most people think of as “secret cash” is more like Carlos Slim’s purchase of favorable editorial opinion in the Newspaper of Record. It would be fun to have a “Sugar Daddy–Off” with the New York Times: Whose Sugar Daddy Is More Loathsome? The Koch Brothers? The Olin Foundation? Monsanto? Halliburton? Every time, Carlos Slim would win by a landslide. Normally, Slim is the kind of businessman the Times—along with every other sentient human being—would find repugnant. Frequently listed as the richest man in the world, Slim acquired his fortune through a corrupt inside deal giving him a monopoly on telecommunications services in Mexico. But in order to make money from his monopoly, Slim needs lots of Mexicans living in the United States, sending money to their relatives back in Oaxaca. Otherwise, Mexicans couldn’t pay him—and they wouldn’t have much need for phone service, either—other than to call in ransom demands. Back in 2004—before the Times became Slim’s pimp—a Times article stated: “Clearly . . . the nation’s southern border is under siege.”2 But that was before Carlos Slim saved the Times from bankruptcy. Ten years later, with a border crisis even worse than in 2004, and Latin Americans pouring across the border, the Times indignantly demanded that Obama “go big” on immigration and give “millions of immigrants permission to stay.”3

Or, in your case, as wide. Wait. Did you just say Gandalf?” “He is the founder of our order, and the first of the Five Warlocks. He comes from afar across the Western Ocean, from Easter Island, or perhaps from Japan.” “No, I think he comes from the mind of a story writer. An old-fashioned Roman Catholic from the days just before First Space Age. Unless I am confusing him with the guy who wrote about Talking Animal Land? With the Cowardly Lion who gets killed by a Wicked White Witch? I never read the text, I watched the comic.” “Oh, you err so! The Witches, we have preserved this lore since the time of the Fall of the Giants, whom we overthrew and destroyed. The tale is this: C. S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke were led by the Indian Maiden Sacagawea to the Pacific Ocean and back, stealing the land from the Red Man and selling them blankets impregnated with smallpox. It was called the Lewis and Clarke Expedition. When they reached the Pacific, they set out in the Dawn Treader to find the sea route to India, where the sacred river Alph runs through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. They came to the Last Island, called Ramandu or Selidor, where the World Serpent guards the gateway to the Land of the Dead, and there they found Gandalf, returned alive from the underworld, and stripped of all his powers. He came again to mortal lands in North America to teach the Simon Families. The Chronicle is a symbolic retelling of their journey. It is one of our Holy Books.” “Your Holy Books were written for children by Englishmen.” “The gods wear many masks! If the Continuum chooses the lips of a White Man to be the lips through which the Continuum speaks, who are we to question? Tolkien was not Roman. He was of a race called the hobbits, Homo floresiensis, discovered on an isle in Indonesia, and he would have lived in happiness, had not the White Man killed him with DDT. So there were no Roman Catholics involved. May the Earth curse their memory forever! May they be forgotten forever!” “Hm. Earth is big. Maybe it can do both. You know about Rome? It perished in the Ecpyrosis, somewhat before your time.” “How could we not? The Pope in Rome created the Giants, whom the Witches rose up against and overthrew. Theirs was the masculine religion, aggressive, intolerant, and forbidding abortion. Ours is the feminine religion, peaceful and life-affirming and all-loving, and we offer the firstborn child to perish on our sacred fires. The First Coven was organized to destroy them like rats! When Rome was burned, we danced, and their one god was cast down and fled weeping on his pierced feet, and our many gods rose up. My ancestors hunted the Christians like stoats, and when we caught them, we burned them slowly, as they once did of us in Salem. What ill you do is returned to you tenfold!” “Hm. Are you willing to work with a Giant? I saw one in the pit, and saw the jumbo-sized coffin they pried him out from. What if he is a baptized Christian? Most of them were, since they were created by my pet pope and raised by nuns.” “All Christians must perish! Such is our code.” “Your code is miscoded.” “What of the Unforgettable Hate?” “Forget about it.

Just about every kid in America wished they could be Kyle Keeley. Especially when he zoomed across their TV screens as a flaming squirrel in a holiday commercial for Squirrel Squad Six, the hysterically crazy new Lemoncello video game. Kyle’s friends Akimi Hughes and Sierra Russell were also in that commercial. They thumbed controllers and tried to blast Kyle out of the sky. He dodged every rubber band, coconut custard pie, mud clod, and wadded-up sock ball they flung his way. It was awesome. In the commercial for Mr. Lemoncello’s See Ya, Wouldn’t Want to Be Ya board game, Kyle starred as the yellow pawn. His head became the bubble tip at the top of the playing piece. Kyle’s buddy Miguel Fernandez was the green pawn. Kyle and Miguel slid around the life-size game like hockey pucks. When Miguel landed on the same square as Kyle, that meant Kyle’s pawn had to be bumped back to the starting line. “See ya!” shouted Miguel. “Wouldn’t want to be ya!” Kyle was yanked up off the ground by a hidden cable and hurled backward, soaring above the board. It was also awesome. But Kyle’s absolute favorite starring role was in the commercial for Mr. Lemoncello’s You Seriously Can’t Say That game, where the object was to get your teammates to guess the word on your card without using any of the forbidden words listed on the same card. Akimi, Sierra, Miguel, and the perpetually perky Haley Daley sat on a circular couch and played the guessers. Kyle stood in front of them as the clue giver. “Salsa,” said Kyle. “Nachos!” said Akimi. A buzzer sounded. Akimi’s guess was wrong. Kyle tried again. “Horseradish sauce!” “Something nobody ever eats,” said Haley. Another buzzer. Kyle goofed up and said one of the forbidden words: “Ketchup!” SPLAT! Fifty gallons of syrupy, goopy tomato sauce slimed him from above. It oozed down his face and dribbled off his ears. Everybody laughed. So Kyle, who loved being the class clown almost as much as he loved playing (and winning) Mr. Lemoncello’s wacky games, went ahead and read the whole list of banned words as quickly as he could. “Mustard-mayonnaise-pickle-relish.” SQUOOSH! He was drenched by buckets of yellow glop, white sludge, and chunky green gunk. The slop slid along his sleeves, trickled into his pants, and puddled on the floor. His four friends busted a gut laughing at Kyle, who was soaked in more “condiments” (the word on his card) than a mile-

Opal Raines stood on a cliff high above the surf that beat into the rocks on Cape Point at the southmost tip of the African continent. In front of her was the Indian Ocean and the islands of the Far East; to her right the Southern Ocean, Antarctica, and the icy bottom of the earth; at her back the Atlantic and the Americas; and on her left the vast plains of Africa where she had sometimes lived, and where she had been worshiped by wild lions. She read again the notification that had come today from Switzerland: Dear Ms. Raines. This is to notify you that the sum of ten million dollars (US) was transferred today into your account at Credit Suisse by Stella Clair Rose. Opal tore the notice into small pieces, and watched them fly from her hand, blown by the African breeze out across the ocean water. Her laugh followed the pieces as they floated away, drifting out wherever the wind would take them, toward Indonesia, the Banda Sea, Papua New Guinea, the great expanse of the Pacific — all her world, the world of the statistical outlier merging time past, and time not yet come, with this moment. All as unpredictable as shadows, as ghosts. Sometime later, that laugh, floating on an eastbound wind, would reach the California coast and come to rest where it did once before — on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles where Heron White’s body landed after he crashed through a twelfth-floor window at the end of a hallway outside a dentist’s office one rainy day at noon.

On television and on the front pages of the major newspapers, Trump clearly seemed to be losing the election. Each new woman who came forward with charges of misbehavior became a focal point of coverage, coupled with Trump’s furious reaction, his ever darkening speeches, and the accompanying suggestion that they were dog whistles aimed at racists and anti-Semites. “Trump’s remarks,” one Washington Post story explained, summing up the media’s outlook, “were laced with the kind of global conspiracies and invective common in the writings of the alternative-right, white-nationalist activists who see him as their champion. Some critics also heard echoes of historical anti-Semitic slurs in Trump’s allegations that Clinton ‘meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty’ and that media and financial elites were part of a soulless cabal.” This outlook, which Clinton’s campaign shared, gave little consideration to the possibility that voters might be angry at large banks, international organizations, and media and financial elites for reasons other than their basest prejudices. This was the axis on which Bannon’s nationalist politics hinged: the belief that, as Marine Le Pen put it, “the dividing line is [no longer] between left and right but globalists and patriots.” Even as he lashed out at his accusers and threatened to jail Clinton, Trump’s late-campaign speeches put his own stamp on this idea. As he told one rally: “There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. From now on, it’s going to be ‘America first.’” Anyone steeped in Guénon’s Traditionalism would recognize the terrifying specter Trump conjured of marauding immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and the collapse of national sovereignty and identity as the descent of a Dark Age—the Kali Yuga. For the millions who were not familiar with it, Trump’s apocalyptic speeches came across as a particularly forceful expression of his conviction that he understood their deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo and could bring about a rapid renewal. Whether it was a result of Trump’s apocalyptic turn, disgust at the Clintons, or simply accuser fatigue—it was likely a combination of all three—the pattern of slippage in the wake of negative news was less pronounced in Trump’s internal surveys in mid-October. Overall, he still trailed. But the data were noisy. In some states (Indiana, New Hampshire, Arizona) his support eroded, but in others (Florida, Ohio, Michigan) it actually improved. When Trump held his own at the third and final debate on October 19, the numbers inched up further. The movement was clear enough that Nate Silver and other statistical mavens began to take note of it. “Is the Presidential Race Tightening?” he asked in the title of an October 26 article. Citing Trump’s rising favorability numbers among Republicans and red-state trend lines, he cautiously concluded that probably it was. By November 1, he had no doubt. “Yes, Donald Trump Has a Path to Victory” read the headline for his column that day, in which he

And now that mulch of dead imaginings beneath the feet of Temperance ladies, union-affiliated Vaudevillians and maimed men home from Europe has contaminated the groundwater of the upstart country's nightmares. Immigrants in their illimitable difference come to seem a separate species, taciturn and fish-eyed as though risen from the ocean waves that bore them in their transport, monstrous in their self-contained communities with bitter scents and indecipherable ululations, names, unsettlingly unpronounceable ensconced at isolated farms where beaten track is naught save idle rumour stagnant families nurse grievance, dreadful secrets and deformity in solitude; pools of declined humanity entirely unconnected to society by any tributary where ancestral prejudice or misconception may become the plaint of generations. Fabled and forbidden works of Arab alchemy are handed down across years cruel and volatile, trafficked between austere and colonial homes by charitable fellowships with ancient affectations or conveyed by fevered sea-captains, fugitive Huguenots or elderly hysterics formally accused of witchcraft. Young America, a sapling power grown suddenly so tall upon its diet of nickelodeons and motorcars, has sunk unwitting roots into an underworld of grotesque notions and archaic creeds, their feaful pull discernible below the weed-cracked sidewalk. Buried and forgotten, ominous philosophies await their day with hideous patience. Well! I think that's pretty darned good for a first attempt. A little over-wrought, perhaps, and I'm not sure about the style - I can't decide if its too modern of it's too old fashioned, but perhaps that's a good sign. Of course, I guess I'll have to introduce a plot and characters at some point, but I'll wrestle with that minor nuisance when I get to it. Perhaps I could contrive to have some hobo, maybe literally a hoe-boy or travelling itinerant farm labourer who's wandering from place to place around New England in the search for work; somebody who might reasonably become involved with all the various characters I'm hoping to investigate. Being a labourer, while it would lend a feasibility to any action or exertion that I wanted in the story, wouldn't mean that my protagonist was lacking in intelligence of education: this is often economically a far from certain country for a lot of people, and there's plenty of smart fellows - maybe even an aspiring writer like myself - who've found themselves leaving their homes and families to mooch around from farm to farm in hope of some hay-baling or fruit-picking that's unlikely to materialise. Perhaps a character like that, a rugged man who is sufficiently well read to justifiably allow me a few literary flourishes (and I can't help thinking that I'll probably end up casting some imagined variant of Tom Malone) would be the kind of of sympathetic hero and the kind of voice I'm looking for. Meanwhile I yawned a moment or two back, and while I'm not yet quite exhausted to the point where I can guarantee a deep and dreamless sleep, perhaps another six or seven vague ideas for stories might just do the soporific job.

He envied the Brian Smiths of America, who could hide inconspicuously in an SAT question or exist unnoticed across a nametag on a display desk in the office furniture section of IKEA without someone reading the name out loud as though it were a question.

A few years ago, I was at a coffee shop in Los Angeles sipping on an almond milk latte, scrolling through Twitter, when a group of white girls sat next to me. They were talking about their study abroad trip to Spain that summer. One of them said how important it was "in today's market" to speak Spanish. I put my headphones on and kept reading the news stories on my feed. I came across the story of Natalia Meneses and her three-year-old-daughter, who were harassed by another shopper at Walmart for speaking Spanish. The little girl saw some flower hair clips and said, "Mira, Mami!" This was a private moment between daughter and mother. An older white woman who overheard the conversation turned to Meneses and said, "You need to teach this kid to speak English, because this is America and kids need to learn English. If not, you need to get out of this country." Only when we have the audacity to use our mother tongue do racists worry about the future of the country, but for others it's an added skill to speak Spanish. For us it threatens our livelihoods, our families, our lives.

In the Spring of 1962, a white postal worker from Baltimore, William Moore, decided to use his ten-day vacation to showcase his passion for Civil Rights.  Moore planned a “Freedom Walk” from Chattanooga, Tennessee, across Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, where he would confront Governor Ross Barnett about the injustice of racial segregation.      Moore, who had a history of psychiatric illness, entered Alabama wearing signs that read MISSISSIPPI OR BUST, END SEGREGATION IN AMERICA, and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL MEN.  The much-publicized march ended tragically, when Moore's body was found on a roadside near Gadsen, Alabama—he had been shot to death.

FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: TIME FOR MORE TEA PARTIES! Strike them with terror, Lord; let the nations know they are only mortal. Psalm 9:20 Ronald Reagan promised to restore America as a shining city on a hill. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” our nation. He wanted to fundamentally change America—and alarm bells went off all across our nation, and patriotic folks rose up and found their voices. The great grassroots movement known as the Tea Party was born. The Tea Partiers have taken a lot of media flack. I guess you could say I know something about that too. But for all the media hubbub, all the Tea Partiers want is for America’s government to follow American law; they want a return to constitutional principles, inspired by biblical wisdom. Who can forget Benjamin Franklin’s eloquent request for prayer before each session of the Constitutional Convention? In part, it read: “I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing Proofs I see of this Truth, that God governs in the Affairs of Men. And if a Sparrow cannot fall to the Ground without His Notice, is it probable that an Empire can rise without His Aid?” At the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, a lady approached Benjamin Franklin with a question. Had a monarchy been born, or a republic? “A republic,” he told her, “if you can keep it.” This profound statement reflects the heart of the Tea Party. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Our Founding Fathers knew that battles are won with reliance on God. Meditate on Scripture daily. Pray for our nation and her leaders. Defend constitutionalists when you see them besmirched. We serve a faithful God who hears and answers prayer!

Moses, who was a Hebrew, led the Hebrew Israelites out of Egypt in the wilderness (read Exodus chapter 3 to the end of Exodus chapter 14). At this point once the children of Israel were in the wilderness they started to sin against the Most High. The children of Israel were enslaved by the Muslims and the white Europeans also. The European involvement in the slave trade to America lasted over 3 centuries. The Muslim (Arabs) slave trade lasted 14 centuries and still exists in some parts of the world. Two out of three Hebrew Israelites slaves brought to American was men used for agricultural work. Two out of three were women were enslaved and by the white Europeans and the Muslims for sexual exploitation, concubine, harems, and for military services. Slaves that were transported across the Atlantic about 95% went to Central and South America, Portuguese, French, and Spanish possession. The other 5% went to the United States and that 5% consented of the tribe of Judah who are the so called Negros and the tribe of Gad who are the North American Indians. During the Trans-Atlantic slave trade Europeans didn’t have to venture into the jungles of Africa to capture the Hebrew Israelites because they were already sold into slavery by the African chief or by the Muslim slave traders at the coast. The Trans-Atlantic slave trade had three guilt partners; the African Chief s, the Muslim Arabs and the white Europeans.

The dying mall has attracted some odd tenants, such as a satellite branch of the public library and an office of the State Attorney General's Child Predator Unit. As malls die across the country, we'll see many kinds of creative repurposing. Already, there are churches and casinos inside half-dead malls, so why not massage parlors, detox centers, transient hotels, haunted houses, prisons, petting zoos or putt-putt golf courses (covering the entire mall)? Leaving Santee, Chuck and I wandered into the food court, where only three of twelve restaurant slots were still occupied. On the back wall of this forlorn and silent space was a mural put up by Boscov, the mall's main tenant. Titled "B part of your community", it reads: KINDNESS COUNTS / PLANT A TREE / MAKE A DONATION / HELP A NEIGHBOR / VISIT THE ELDERLY / HOPE / ADOPT A PET / DRIVE A HYBRID / PICK UP THE TRASH / VOLUNTEER / CONSERVE ENERGY / RECYCLE / JOIN SOMETHING / PAINT A MURAL / HUG SOMEONE / SMILE / DRINK FILTERED WATER / GIVE YOUR TIME / USE SOLAR ENERGY / FEED THE HUNGRY / ORGANIZE A FUNDRAISER / CREATE AWARENESS / FIX A PLAYGROUND/ START A CLUB / BABYSIT These empty recommendations are about as effective as "Just Say No", I'm afraid. As the CIA pushed drugs, the first lady chirped, "Just say no!". And since everything in the culture, car, iPad, iPhone, television, internet, Facebook, Twitter and shopping mall, etc., is designed to remove you from your immediate surroundings, it will take more than cutesy suggestions on walls to rebuild communities. Also, the worse the neighborhoods or contexts, the more hopeful and positive the slogans. Starved of solutions, we shall eat slogans.

They could see the hills now; they were almost there—the long lift of the first pine ridge standing across half the horizon and beyond it a sense a feel of others, the mass of them seeming not so much to stand rush abruptly up out of the plateau as to hang suspended over it as his uncle had told him the Scottish highlands did except for this sharpness and color; that was two years ago, maybe three and his uncle had said, 'Which is why the people who chose by preference to live on them on little patches which wouldn't make eight bushels of corn or fifty pounds of lint cotton an acre even if they were not too steep for a mule to pull a plow across (but then they dont want to make the cotton anyway, only the corn and not too much of that because it really doesn't take a great deal of corn to run a still as big as one man and his sons want to fool with) are people named Gowrie and McCallum and Fraser and Ingrum that used to be Ingraham and Workitt that used to be Urquhart only the one that brought it to America and then Mississippi couldn’t spell it either, who love brawling and fear God and believe in Hell——' and it was as though his uncle had read his mind, holding the speedometer needle at fifty-five into the last mile of gravel (already the road was beginning to slant down toward the willow-and-cypress bottom of the Nine-Mile branch) speaking, that is volunteering to speak for the first time since they left town: 'Gowrie and Fraser and Workitt and Ingrum. And in the valleys along the rivers, the broad rich easy land where a man can raise something he can sell openly in daylight, the people named Littlejohn and Greenleaf and Armstead and Millingham and Bookwright——' and stopped, the car dropping on down the slope, increasing speed by its own weight; now he could see the bridge where Aleck Sander had waited for him in the dark and below which Highboy had smelled quicksand. 'We turn off just beyond it,' he said. 'I know,' his uncle said. '—And the ones named Sambo, they live in both, they elect both because they can stand either because they can stand anything.' The bridge was quite near now, the white railing of the entrance yawned rushing at them. 'Not all white people can endure slavery and apparently no man can stand freedom (Which incidentally—the premise that man really wants peace and freedom—is the trouble with our relations with Europe right now, whose people not only dont know what peace is but—except for Anglo Saxons—actively fear and distrust personal liberty; we are hoping without really any hope that our atom bomb will be enough to defend an idea as obsolete as Noah's Ark.); with one mutual instantaneous accord he forces his liberty into the hands of the first demagogue who rises into view: lacking that he himself destroys and obliterates it from his sight and ken and even remembrance with the frantic unanimity of a neighborhood stamping out a grass-fire. But the people named Sambo survived the one and who knows? they may even endure the other.

And now that mulch of dead imaginings beneath the feet of Temperance ladies, union-affiliated Vaudevillians and maimed men home from Europe has contaminated the groundwater of the upstart country's nightmares. Immigrants in their illimitable difference come to seem a separate species, taciturn and fish-eyed as though risen from the ocean waves that bore them in their transport, monstrous in their self-contained communities with bitter scents and indecipherable ululations, names, unsettlingly unpronounceable ensconced at isolated farms where beaten track is naught save idle rumour stagnant families nurse grievance, dreadful secrets and deformity in solitude; pools of declined humanity entirely unconnected to society by any tributary where ancestral prejudice or misconception may become the plaint of generations. Fabled and forbidden works of Arab alchemy are handed down across years cruel and volatile, trafficked between austere and colonial homes by charitable fellowships with ancient affectations or conveyed by fevered sea-captains, fugitive Huguenots or elderly hysterics formally accused of witchcraft. Young America, a sapling power grown suddenly so tall upon its diet of nickelodeons and motorcars, has sunk unwitting roots into an underworld of grotesque notions and archaic creeds, their feaful pull discernible below the weed-cracked sidewalk. Buried and forgotten, ominous philosophies await their day with hideous patience. Well! I think that's pretty darned good for a first attempt. A little over-wrought, perhaps, and I'm not sure about the style - I can't decide if its too modern of it's too old-fashioned, but perhaps that's a good sign. Of course, I guess I'll have to introduce a plot and characters at some point, but I'll wrestle with that minor nuisance when I get to it. Perhaps I could contrive to have some hobo, maybe literally a hoe-boy or travelling itinerant farm labourer who's wandering from place to place around New England in the search for work; somebody who might reasonably become involved with all the various characters I'm hoping to investigate. Being a labourer, while it would lend a feasibility to any action or exertion that I wanted in the story, wouldn't mean that my protagonist was lacking in intelligence or education: this is often economically a far from certain country for a lot of people, and there's plenty of smart fellows - maybe even an aspiring writer like myself - who've found themselves leaving their homes and families to mooch around from farm to farm in hope of some hay-baling or fruit-picking that's unlikely to materialise. Perhaps a character like that, a rugged man who is sufficiently well read to justifiably allow me a few literary flourishes (and I can't help thinking that I'll probably end up casting some imagined variant of Tom Malone) would be the kind of of sympathetic hero and the kind of voice I'm looking for. Meanwhile I yawned a moment or two back, and while I'm not yet quite exhausted to the point where I can guarantee a deep and dreamless sleep, perhaps another six or seven vague ideas for stories might just do the soporific job.

made Harvath want to suck-start his Glock. Lots of people were well-meaning, but they were lazy. They didn’t exert the basic duties of good citizenship. They believed anything and everything that flashed across their phone or computer screen. They believed that if they were in a group, or a feed, of like-minded people, all the information being pushed at them was true. They didn’t realize that the information spaces where you felt safest were where America’s enemies loved to seed their propaganda and disinformation. Harvath loved his fellow countrymen and women but loathed the ones who couldn’t be bothered to fact-check what they were reading and hearing. Being a responsible steward of the American republic meant doing the hard work of being truthfully informed.

Secretly, she fretted about her vanished children, lost to unknown stories in what was then a very distant elsewhere. She also had the sorrow all Kerry people have when they’re not in Kerry, but this she countered with copious letter-writing. Letters took several days to write, the lost art of composition then a tenet of civility, and sheets of blotting paper with traceries of script indicative of the hand-pressed, my-hand-to-your-hand nature of the thing. She’d write those letters until the day she died, her forefinger inked and with a permanent pen-welt. She had many correspondents. One was Aunt Nollaig, who went to America, and defeated the physics of space by writing ever smaller on the single page of the aerogramme, her character apparent the moment Doady ran the knife carefully along the dotted line and held to the light the script that with Ganga’s loupe would take days to fully decipher. Doady’s own missives went across the river and over the mountains and brought replies that were read over several times, then folded back into their envelopes and stored inside a foil-lined tea chest stamped CEYLON, where in ink, paper and penmanship a kind of inner Kerry endured, and could be visited easier than the real thing.

I watched these young people read to the audience parts of history that placed our country in context. I felt, in that moment, envious of them. Had I known when I was younger what some of these students were sharing, I felt as if I would have been liberated from a social and emotional paralysis that for so long I could not name--a paralysis that had arisen from never knowing enough of my own history to effectively identify the lies I was being told by others: lies about what slavery was and what it did to people; lies about what came after our supposed emancipation; lies about why our country looks the way it does today. I had grown up in a world that never tired of telling me and other Black children like me all of the things that were wrong with us, all of the things we needed to do better. But not enough people spoke about the reason so many Black children grow up in communities saturated with poverty and violence. Not enough people spoke about how these realities were the result of decisions made by people in power and had existed for generations before us.

Nya nodded. "So many people come here without an understanding of the primary cause of the Civil War. Some people think Jefferson wrote the Constitution. I mean there are just so many ways that our public education is failing people by just not giving them the context to understand that Monticello is a plantation, and that slavery was a system that created the economic prosperity that enabled our country to exist. That is not something most people understand. I don't really blame them, because they're not taught to engage that history, and most people are not out here reading all these books that are piled on my desk.

Throughout his life, Jefferson valued the company of cosmopolitan guests, the time to read and write and think, the elegance of fine architecture, the flavor of savory food, and the fragrance of the natural world—a life in which he could nurture his mind and satisfy his tastes. This life was only possible because of the enslaved men and women he held, sold, and separated; because of the people he allowed to be threatened, manipulated, flogged, assaulted, deceived, and terrorized. Jefferson's vacillation from moral repugnance to hollow justification reflects how he largely succumbed to that which he knew was indefensible.

John began the process of educating himself. “As I got into studying slavery, and I’ve read probably eleven hundred oral histories, [I thought,] Sooner or later I’m going to get to the one where the woman was not raped or the man was not almost beaten to death or branded or his finger cut off or his ear cut off for trying to run away. But I haven’t gotten there yet.” He added: “You get an eerie feeling ’cause it’s their words, more or less. And you feel as though someone is talking to you who never had a voice…and all of a sudden, you feel very strange. It’s not a feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling of ‘discovered ignorance.’ I don’t know how else to explain it. When you wonder, How could this have happened and I didn’t know about it? How could that happen?

On one of those nights in January 2014, we sat next to each other in Maria Vostra, happy and content, smoking nice greens, with one of my favorite movies playing on the large flat-screen TVs: Once Upon a Time in America. I took a picture of James Woods and Robert De Niro on the TV screen in Maria Vostra's cozy corner, which I loved to share with Martina. They were both wearing hats and suits, standing next to each other. Robert de Niro looked a bit like me and his character, Noodles, (who was a goy kid in the beginning of the movie, growing up with Jewish kids) on the picture, was as naive as I was. I just realized that James Woods—who plays an evil Jewish guy in the movie, acting like Noodles' friend all along, yet taking his money, his woman, taking away his life, and trying to kill him at one point—until the point that Noodles has to escape to save his life and his beloved ones—looks almost exactly like Adam would look like if he was a bit older. “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.” – William Shakespeare That sounds like an ancient spell or rather directions, instructions to me, the director instructing his actors, being one of the actors himself as well, an ancient spell, that William Shakespeare must have read it from a secret book or must have heard it somewhere. Casting characters for certain roles to act like this or like that as if they were the director’s custom made monsters. The extensions of his own will, desires and actions. The Reconquista was a centuries-long series of battles by Christian states to expel the Muslims (Moors), who had ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula since the 8th century. The Reconquista ended on January 2, 1492. The same year Columbus, whose statue stands atop a Corinthian custom-made column down the Port at the bottom of the Rambla, pointing with his finger toward the West, had discovered America on October 12, 1492. William Shakespeare was born in April 1564. He had access to knowledge that had been unavailable to white people for thousands of years. He must have formed a close relationship with someone of royal lineage, or used trick, who then permitted him to enter the secret library of the Anglican Church. “A character has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure what he/she’s supposed to be doing.” – Anthony Burgess Martina proudly shared with me her admiration for the Argentine author Julio Cortazar, who was renowned across South America. She quoted one of his famous lines, saying: “Vida es como una cebolla, hay que pelarla llorando,” which translates to “Life is like an onion, you have to peel it crying.” Martina shared with me her observation that the sky in Europe felt lower compared to America. She mentioned that the clouds appeared larger in America, giving a sense of a higher and more expansive sky, while in Europe, it felt like the sky had a lower and more limiting ceiling. “The skies are much higher in Argentina, Tomas, in all America. Here in Europe the sky is so low. In Argentina there are huge clouds and the sky is huge, Tomas.” – Martina Blaterare “It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.” – George Orwell, 1984

Though [Marco] Polo himself states frankly that he has never visited Japan -- and thus that what he has to say about it is second-hand and perhaps inaccurate -- the notion of the mysterious island kingdom of Cipango that he planted in European consciousness at the end of the thirteenth century was later one of several powerful influences that spurred Christopher Columbus forward in his crossings of the Atlantic at the end of the fifteenth century. This was so because Columbus -- underestimating the circumference of the earth and knowing nothing of the existence of the Americas or of the Pacific Ocean -- believed that he could reach Cipango, and thence the Chinese mainland beyond, by sailing directly westwards across the Atlantic from Europe. Columbus is also likely to have calculated that Cipango would be reached after only a relatively short journey towards the west -- for he had read Marco Polo, who describes Cipango, erroneously, as lying 'far out to sea' fully 1500 miles to the east of the Chinese mainland (the true distance is nowhere much more than 500 miles).

I realize I've forgotten how very simple a little straight-up love can be: 'I am the leg of you,' reads one line.

The team repeated the prerelease protocol with John and Judy, but this time, they held the pair in an acclimation pen for six months. They also built a fixed-position telemetry antenna receiver on a 110-foot-high fire tower on the island. This freed them from needing to use the jeep to tail the wolves, which Carley feared may have proved too intrusive. The fixed-position antenna held a ten-mile range. Carley attached a portable telemetry antenna to an eighteen-foot speed boat in case they needed to pursue the animals across the inlets or open water - a possibility that Margie had proven likely. As a joke, Carley also posed by John and Judy’s kennel box with a long sheet of paper, from which he read aloud while a colleague snapped photos. “Since the animals seem to understand more than they let on, we did another thing differently” the second time around, Carley quipped while showing the photo in a public presentation. “We read them The Plan.

In the late summer of 2010, I visit Nowak at his home in Falls Church, Virginia. He is soft-spoken, slightly built, and a little stooped with age. Nowak has a cerebral demeanor, and in a Louisiana accent that softens his r’s, he might tell you he was born in the “fawties.” We sit in his living room, which is decorated with tiny statues of forest animals. Every few minutes, he darts down the hall to his desk - above which hangs a famous photo of a black-phase red wolf from the Tensas River - to retrieve books, graphs, and papers for reference. More than a decade after his retirement, Nowak remains engrossed by discussions of red wolf origins. Deep in conversation about carnassial teeth, he dives to grab his wife’s shitzsu, Tommy, to show me what they look like, then he thinks better of it. (Tommy had eyed him warily.) He hands me a copy of his most recent publication, a 2002 paper from Southeastern Naturalist. “When I wrote this, I threw everything I had at the red wolf problem,” he says. “This was my best shot.” He thumps an extra copy onto the coffee table between us. After a very long pause, he gazes at it and adds: “I’m not sure I have anything left to offer.” This is hard to accept, considering everything he has invested in learning about the red wolf: few people have devoted more time to understanding red wolves than the man sitting across the coffee table from me, absentmindedly stroking his wife’s dog. Nowak grew up in New Orleans, and as an undergraduate at Tulane University in 1962, he became interested in endangered birds. While reading a book on the last ivory-billed woodpeckers in the swamps along the Tensas River, his eyes widened when he found references to wolves. “Wolves in Louisiana! My goodness, I thought wolves lived up on the tundra, in the north woods, going around chasing moose and people,” Nowak recalls. “I did not know a thing about them. But when I learned there were wolves in my home state, it got me excited.

The bet is that there's no such thing as original sin, a natural inclination in human nature leading to monstrous, barbarous, and uncivil behavior. Given the evidence of barbarity across the globe, one has to consider such a bet against remarkable odds, to say the least. Adrift from the Judeo-Christian ethical anchor, we seem more to be headed toward the Bermuda Triangle, ignoring the flotsam of other cultures who've ventured there before us: fascist German, communist Russia and China, the Middle East, pre-Christian India and Africa. When modern progressives are incapable of making the argument that the practice of sati in India, or the treatment of women in the Middle East, or the cannibalism of ancient Americans is evil – as seems to be increasingly the case (because given their philosophical foundations it must be the case) – the monsters have arrived. If

No, I'll mostly be watching you, anyway.’ His fingers traced patterns across the skin of my arm, raising goosebumps. ‘Will you cry?’ ‘Probably,’ I admitted, ‘if I'm paying attention.’ ‘I won't distract you then.’ But I felt his lips on my hair, and it was very distracting. The movie eventually captured my interest, thanks in large part to Marcel whispering Romeo's lines in my ear-his irresistible, velvet voice made the actor's voice sound week and coarse by comparison. And I did cry, to his amusement, when Juliet woke and found her new husband dead. ‘I'll admit, I do sort of envy him here, ‘Marcel said, drying the tears with a lock of my hair. ‘She's very pretty.’ He made a disgusted sound. ‘I don't envy him the girl-just the ease of the suicide,’ he clarified in a teasing tone. ‘You humans have it so easy! All you have to do is throw down one tiny vial of plant extracts…’ ‘What?’ I gasped. ‘It's something I had to think about once, and I knew from Chiaz's experience that it wouldn't be simple. I'm not even sure how many ways Chiaz tried to kill himself in the beginning… after he realized what he'd become…’ His voice, which had grown serious, turned light again. ‘And he's still in excellent health.’ I twisted around so that I could read his face. ‘What are you talking about?’ I demanded. ‘What do you mean, this something you had to think about once?’ ‘Last spring, when you were… nearly killed…’ He paused to take a deep breath, snuggling to return to his teasing tone. ‘Of course, I was trying to focus on finding you alive, but part of my mind was making contingency plans. As I said, it's not as easy for me as it is for a human.’ For one second, the memory of my last trip to Phoenix washed over my head and made me feel dizzy. I could see it all so clearly-the the blinding sun, the heat waves coming off the concrete as I ran with desperate haste to find the sadistic angel who wanted to torture me to death. James, waiting in the mirrored room with my mother as his hostage-or so I'd thought. I hadn't known it was all a ruse. Just as James hadn't known that Marcel was racing to save me; Marcel made it in time, but it had been a close one. Unthinkingly, my fingers traced the crescent-shaped scar on my hand that was always just a few degrees cooler than the rest of my skin. I shook my head as if I could shake away the bad memories and tried to grasp what Marcel meant. My stomach plunged uncomfortably. ‘Contingency plans?’ I repeated. ‘Well, I wasn't going to live without you.’ He rolled his eyes as if that fact were childishly obvious. ‘But I wasn't sure how to do it- I knew Emmah and Joh would never help… so I was thinking maybe I would go to Italy and do something to provoke the Ministry.’ I didn't want to believe he was serious, but his golden eyes were brooding, focused on something far away in the distance as he contemplated ways to end his own life. Abruptly, I was furious. ‘What is Vulture?’ I demanded. ‘The Ministry is a family,’ he explained, his eyes still remote. ‘A very old, very powerful family of our kind. They are the closest thing our world has to a royal family, I suppose. Chiaz lived with them briefly in his early years, in Italy, before he settled in America-do you remember the story?’ ‘Of course, I remember.

A red light stopped the Subaru at a three-pronged intersection where a McDonald’s sat opposite a KFC which sat across from a Taco Bell and waiting behind the Subaru on her way to a robbery Alabama watched as a monstrously fat woman marched out of the McDonald’s while guzzling from a box of fries and continued right on into the KFC and Alabama noticed now a billboard high above the KFC upon which a skinny blonde with perky tits wrapped in the Stars and Stripes stood on top of an aggressively masculine pickup truck like a white-trash Wonder Woman beside giant text which read “PICKUP A HOT CHICK IN THE NEW DODGE RAM” and for one revelatory moment that passed just as quick Alabama had never in her life felt so American.

Across the Americas and Asia, people told stories of hurricanes that destroyed homes and hospitals and took out government services, schools, and businesses. In the past, I had seen images of stranded polar bears and the disappearance of ancient glaciers, but these anecdotal stories from the front lines of climate change suddenly began to match the scientific findings I was reading with increasing concern. It seemed that Mother Earth was trying to tell us something—that depleting the earth’s resources at an ever-accelerating rate would ultimately lead to our own demise.

In 1925, an advertisement began appearing in newspapers and magazines across America. It depicted a slim woman with short hair standing on a diving board, clad in a one-piece bathing suit, looking pleased with her herself. But next to her, in shadow, stood her future self: dowdy and obese. “This Is You Five Years From Now!” read the caption. “When Tempted to Over-indulge, Reach for a Lucky Instead.” The ad, for Lucky Strike cigarettes, was made by American Tobacco, which was the first cigarette manufacturer to realize that obesity could be used as a marketing cudgel. Until then, smoking had been an overwhelmingly male pastime. But in looking to expand sales, the cigarette manufacturers began pitching tobacco to women as an appetite suppressant.

Even without Calvin in attendance, book clubs across America will become sudden houses of worship whenever someone reads aloud from this remarkable novel.

the weird fringes of antiquarianism, you’ll find people who claim that a Chinese admiral landed his fleet of ships on the East Coast of the United States in 1421; that Japanese fishermen “discovered” America in the 13th century; that wandering Buddhist monks floated to a place called “Fusang”—California, maybe!—in AD 499. And if you dive down into evolutionary anthropology, you’ll probably read about the Bering land bridge, crossed by ancient Asian migrants who trekked over from Siberia some 16,000 years ago and spread out all across what’s now America.

If I’m hearing you right,” the judge says, “what you’re outlining is a coup of sorts that will sweep across this country largely unnoticed until it is too late—until the American people have been decimated economically, intellectually, and spiritually. It comes together on a decision day that results in the emergence of a new America.” “Yes,” the Big Guy says. “And no one will read it as an inside job. It’s a new American dream.

I questioned whether one old woman determining her death was right. We treat death as unnatural in America because we believe we hold power over it, when in reality, it is as constant as laughter, and love, and reading the newspaper, and - every now and then - an old woman folds her periodical across her lap and decides today is her last day to read it.

As someone with dual citizenship in both the United States and France, I never expected to find myself in the middle of a credit card fraud situation, but that’s exactly what happened on January 25, 2025. I discovered that my credit card had been used for $6,700 worth of unauthorized purchases. The moment I realized what had happened, I felt a mix of shock and frustration. The charges were all unfamiliar, and I had no idea how someone had gotten access to my account. I immediately contacted Bank of America , hoping for a quick resolution. Unfortunately, I was told that the bank couldn’t assist me right away and that I would need to wait for an investigation, which could take several weeks. This was especially frustrating since the amount stolen was significant. I felt completely helpless, knowing I had to wait without knowing how long it would take to get my money back. Determined to act quickly, I searched for other options and came across Digital Tech Guard Recovery, a company that specializes in tracing fraudulent transactions and recovering stolen funds. After reading positive reviews and seeing their success in handling cases like mine, I decided to reach out. Their team responded quickly, and within no time, they began investigating the transactions. Digital Tech Guard Recovery worked fast, using advanced tracking methods to trace the fraudulent purchases back to a specific merchant. They had the expertise to follow the digital trail of the transactions and pinpoint where the funds had gone. Throughout the entire process, I was kept informed and updated regularly, which gave me peace of mind during a very stressful time. Thanks to Digital Tech Guard Recovery, I was able to recover my $6,700 much faster than I would have with the bank’s standard investigation process. They worked closely with legal teams and authorities in both the U.S. and France to ensure that the funds were recovered. The entire process took just a few weeks, which felt like a miracle compared to the bank's suggested timeline. In the end, I am incredibly grateful for Digital Tech Guard Recovery’s quick and professional response. They helped me recover my stolen funds and provided me with the support I needed during a challenging situation. If you ever find yourself in a similar predicament, I highly recommend their services they truly know how to get results when it matters most. WhatsApp: +1 (443) 859 - 2886  Email @ digitaltechguard.com Telegram: digitaltechguardrecovery.com  Website link: digitaltechguard.com

((FAQs-ReadMore®)) Does Air France operate in the US? Air France flies to 29 domestic destinations and 201 international destinations in 94 countries across Africa １ｘ８６６ｘ９０５ｘ４９７１, Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania as of September 2022.

((FAQs-ReadMore®)) Does Air France operate in the US? Air France flies to 29 domestic destinations and 201 international destinations in 94 countries across Africa １ｘ８６６ｘ９０５ｘ４９７１, Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania as of September 2022.