Ron White Quotes

I believe when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade...and try to find someone whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.

I had the right to remain silent... but I didn't have the ability.

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Then find someone who's life is givin' them vodka and have a party!

You can't fix stupid!

Ron, you know full well Harry and I were brought up by Muggles!” said Hermione. “We didn’t hear stories like that when we were little, we heard ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ and ‘Cinderella’ —” “What’s that, an illness?” asked Ron.

Ron, you're making it snow," said Hermione patiently, grabbing his wrist and redirecting his wand away from the ceiling from which, sure enough, large white flakes had started to fall. Lavender Brown, Harry noticed, glared at Hermione from a neighboring table through very red eyes, and Hermione immediately let go of Ron's arm. "Oh yeah," said Ron, looking down at his shoulders in vague surprise." Sorry...looks like we've all got horrible dandruff now...." He brushed some of the fake snow off Hermione's shoulder. Lavender burst into tears. Ron looked immensely guilty and turned his back on her. "We split up," he told Harry out of the corner of his mouth. "Last night. When she saw me coming out of the dormitory with Hermione. Obviously she couldn't see you, so she thought it had just been the two of us." "ah," said Harry. "Well - you don't mind it's over, do you?" "No," Ron admitted. "It was pretty bad while she was yelling, but at least I didn't have to finish it." "Coward," said Hermione, though she looked amused. "Well, it was a bad night for romance all around. Ginny and Dean split up too, Harry." Harry thought there was a rather knowing look in her eye as she told him that, but she could no possibly know that his insides were suddenly dancing the conga.

I believe that if life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade... And try to find somebody whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.

If one black man, aided by a bevy of good, decent, dedicated, open-, and liberal-minded whites and Jews can succeed in prevailing over a group of white racists by making them look like the ignorant fools they truly are, then imagine what a nation of like-minded individuals can accomplish.

Barbara was actually Jeff Foxworthy's interior designer when we first met. So, not only was Jeff responsible for my success in my career, he also introduced me to the woman who I'm going to spend the rest of my life with, which, I think, makes us even.

I heard that when white folks go fishin they do somethin called 'catch and release.' Catch and release? I nodded solemnly, suddenly nervous and curious at the same time. 'That really bothers me', Denver went on. 'I just can't figure it out. 'Cause when colored folks go fishin, we really proud of what we catch, and we take it and show it off to everybody that'll look. Then we eat what we catch...in other words, we use it to SUSTAIN us. So it really bothers me that white folks would go to all the trouble to catch a fish, when when they done caught it, just throw it back in the water.' He paused again, and the silence between us stretched a full minute. Then: 'Did you hear what I said?' I nodded, afraid to speak, afraid to offend. Denver looked away, searching the blue autumn sky, then locked onto me again with that drill-bit start. 'So, Mr. Ron, it occurred to me: If you is fishin for a friend you just gon' catch and release, then I ain't got no desire to be your friend.' I returned Denver's gaze with what I hoped was a receptive expression and hung on. Suddenly his eyes gentled and he spoke more softly than before: 'But if you is lookin for a REAL friend, then I'll be one. Forever.

They call me Tater Salad

We have hearing aids in order to fix our ears. We have lasik surgery in order to fix our eyes. People ... you can't fix stupid!

Nothing alarmed the white South more than black power at the polls, which was why most terror was directed there.

As comedian Ron White said about hurricanes, “It’s not that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind is blowing.

I didn't want to be DRUNK. IN. PUBLIC. I wanted to be drunk in a BAR. I was THROWN. into. public.

I will rip your balls off and sauté them in garlic butter with basil and ground pepper. I will then add a garnish of shaved orange peels and a side of fresh-cut sliced beets misted with lemon juice. I will beautifully plate it and enjoy a glass of white wine with it while dressed in a tuxedo. It will be a Michelin three-star meal and you will not be invited to join me!

A brown trout sips one off the surface. Beneath the trout, mica-flecked sand gleams white. Come fall the female's caudal fin will nudge the grains to make a nest, the eggs spilling like pearls into a purse.

White, is not a race, it is a color, European, is not a race, it is a place named after the goddess Europa. Caucasian, is not a race, it is a place and mountain range. Gentile, is not a race, it is a biblical name that was given to describe Aryans as non-Jews. Aryan is the biological correct name of our race! Aryan is who we are by blood and the genetic source of our being and beginning. All the numerous names, German, French, Irish, Scotch, Polish, Italian, Norwegian and on and on are simply the many tribal names of the Aryan people.

Ron, you know full well Harry and I were brought up by Muggles!” said Hermione. “We didn’t hear stories like that when we were little, we heard ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ and ‘Cinderella’ —” “What’s that, an illness?” asked Ron.

I will say it again," said Dumbledore as the phoenix rose into the air and resettled itself upon the perch beside the door. "You have shown bravery beyond anything I could have expected of you tonight. Harry. You have shown bravery equal to those who died fighting Voldemort at the height of his powers. You have shouldered a grown wizard's burden and found yourself equal to it - and you have now given us all we have a right to expect. You will come with me to the hospital wing. I do not want you returning to the dormitory tonight. A Sleeping Potion, and some peace . . . Sirius, would you like to stay with him?" Sirius nodded and stood up. He transformed back into the great black dog and walked with Harry and Dumbledore out of the office, accompanying them down a flight of stairs to the hospital wing. When Dumbledore pushed open the door. Harry saw Mrs. Weasley, Bill, Ron, and Hermione grouped around a harassed-looking Madam Pomfrey. They appeared to be demanding to know where Harry was and what had happened to him. All of them whipped around as Harry, Dumbledore, and the black dog entered, and Mrs. Weasley let out a kind of muffled scream. "Harry! Oh Harry!" She started to hurry toward him, but Dumbledore moved between them. "Molly," he said, holding up a hand, "please listen to me for a moment. Harry has been through a terrible ordeal tonight. He has just had to relive it for me.What he needs now is sleep, and peace, and quiet. If he would like you all to stay with him," he added, looking around at Ron, Hermione, and Bill too, "you may do so. But I do not want you questioning him until he is ready to answer, and certainly not this evening." Mrs. Weasley nodded. She was very white. She rounded on Ron, Hermione, and Bill as though they were being noisy, and hissed, "Did you hear? He needs quiet!

I'm [Paul O'Neill] an old guy, and I'm rich. And there's nothing they can do to hurt me.

There is no cure for stupid.

I can fix a lot of things; but, I can't fix stupid.

We have plenty of matches in our house We keep them on hand always Currently our favourite brand Is Ohio Blue Tip Though we used to prefer Diamond Brand That was before we discovered Ohio Blue Tip matches They are excellently packaged Sturdy little boxes With dark and light blue and white labels With words lettered In the shape of a megaphone As if to say even louder to the world Here is the most beautiful match in the world It’s one-and-a-half-inch soft pine stem Capped by a grainy dark purple head So sober and furious and stubbornly ready To burst into flame Lighting, perhaps the cigarette of the woman you love For the first time And it was never really the same after that All this will we give you That is what you gave me I become the cigarette and you the match Or I the match and you the cigarette Blazing with kisses that smoulder towards heaven.

There's something ironic about a man like Ron Finley—who plants gardens in spaces white supremacy created to nutritionally and intellectually starve minorities—being celebrated by the mainstream white news media. The goal of guerrilla gardening isn't to make black folks look more peaceful and benevolent; it's to engage in a new type of fight in which we are taking care of ourselves in an era that's actively trying to poison and kill us. It's an act of survival. It's great that people like Ron and other urban farmers are engaging with DIY, grassroots activism to fight back. However, we need to watch how we frame their stories and most importantly, we need to watch out for who is framing these stories.

While other founding fathers were reared in tidy New England villages or cosseted on baronial Virginia estates, Hamilton grew up in a tropical hellhole of dissipated whites and fractious slaves, all framed by a backdrop of luxuriant natural beauty.

Few First Ladies—and the name wasn’t yet commonly used—have so reveled in the White House or developed such a proprietary feeling about it. “Eight happy years I spent there—so happy!” Julia would reminisce. “It still seems as much like home to me as the old farm in Missouri, White Haven.

Few things in cultural programming in the mass media are quite as disturbing as watching Charlie Rose leaning forward, craning out over his table, peering deeply, on the very precipice of an incisive question sure to reveal a real Idea, a slim, almost excited smile starting to form on his lips as he imagines the dawning joy of the intellectual life revealed for himself and his audience, and we move with the camera, oh-so-sincerely, to his guest and see that all this expectation and anticipation is addressed to . . . Lance Armstrong. Or Ron “Opie” Howard. Or Gary Shandling…..

Once Reconstruction collapsed, it left southern blacks for eighty years at the mercy of Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics designed to segregate them from whites and deny them the vote. Black sharecroppers would be degraded to the level of debt-ridden serfs, bound to their former plantation owners. After 1877, the black community in the South steadily lost ground until a rigid apartheid separated the races completely, a terrible state of affairs that would not be fixed until the rise of the civil rights movement after World War II.

Slaveholding states wondered how their human property would be counted for congressional-apportionment purposes. Northern states finally agreed that five slaves would be counted as equivalent to three free whites, the infamous “federal ratio” that survived for another eighty years. The formula richly rewarded the southern states, artificially inflating their House seats and electoral votes and helping to explain why four of the first five presidents hailed from Virginia. This gross inequity was to play no small part in the eventual triumph of Jeffersonian Republicans over Hamiltonian Federalists.

Harry, open up!” He had shouted out, he knew it. He got up and unbolted the door; Hermione toppled inside at once, regained her balance, and looked around suspiciously. Ron was right behind her, looking unnerved as he pointed his wand into the corners of the chilly bathroom. “What were you doing?” asked Hermione sternly. “What d’you think I was doing?” asked Harry with feeble bravado. “You were yelling your head off!” said Ron. “Oh yeah…I must’ve dozed off or--” “Harry, please don’t insult our intelligence,” said Hermione, taking deep breaths. “We know your scar hurt downstairs, and you’re white as a sheet.

What pretty much guaranteed that Johnson would side with white supremacists was his benighted view of black people. No American president has ever held such openly racist views. “This is a country for white men,” he declared unashamedly, “and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.

In early June, Grant traveled to St. Louis, where he had gained possession of White Haven and an additional 280 acres from the Dent family. It was another strange, dreamlike transformation of his life from his dreary years there in the 1850s. Now he was master of the plantation he had first visited fresh out of West Point, and Colonel Dent, having suffered a crippling stroke, depended upon him and Julia. Grant planned to spend several weeks there yearly, planting strawberries and other fruits and breeding blooded horses. To banish any lingering remnants of slavery, he had his steward, William Elrod, demolish a dozen slave cabins.

Thomas Nast published an election cartoon entitled “Victory!” that showed Grant mounted on a white horse, waving a flag bedecked with the words “Union” and “Equal Rights,” as he thrust his sword into the throat of Horatio Seymour, who sat astride a black horse with the initials “K.K.K.” branded ominously on its flank.

The white nationalist, nativist politics that we see today were first imagined and applied by David Duke during the heyday of his Grand Wizardshop, and the time of my undercover Klan investigation. This hatred is never gone away, but has been reinvigorated in the dark corners of the internet, Twitter trolls, alt-right publications, and a nativist president in Trump. The Republican Party of the 19th century, being the party of Lincoln, was the opposition to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist domination insofar as America's newly freed Black slaves were concerned; it is my belief that the Republican Party of the 21st century finds a symbiotic connection to white nationalist groups like the Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads, militias, and alt-right white supremacist thinking. Evidence of this began in the Lyndon Johnson administration with the departure of Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) to the Republican Party in protest of his civil rights agenda. The Republicans began a spiral slide to the far right that embrace all things abhorrent to nonwhites. David Duke twice ran for public office in Louisiana as a Democrat and lost. When he switched his affiliation to Republican, because he was closer in ideology and racial thinking to the GOP than to the Democrats, and ran again for the Louisiana House of Representatives, the conservative voters in his district rewarded him with a victory. In each case his position on the issues remain the same; white supremacist/ethno-nationalist endorsement of a race-centered rhetoric and nativist populism. What change were the voters. Democrats rejected Duke politics while Republicans embraced him.

The president was running out of room to maneuver as the country backed away from further federal interference in the South. The outcry over Louisiana began to ring down the final curtain on Reconstruction. Southern whites increasingly substituted the word “Redemption”—a restoration of white rule—for the hated term “Reconstruction.

She knows her life is on the line but, believe it or not, she's never been so excited! Her husband's a serial killer, and her bodice is wet with tears, but there's a chance her brothers will show up like winning lottery numbers. Which does she want more - her hair wound in the maniac's hands and her white white throat bared, or the sound of boots on marble stairs?

It’s them!” screamed Hermione. Tonks landed in a long skid that sent earth and pebbles everywhere. “Remus!” Tonks cried as she staggered off the broom into Lupin’s arms. His face was set and white: He seemed unable to speak. Ron tripped dazedly toward Harry and Hermione. “You’re okay,” he mumbled, before Hermione flew at him and hugged him tightly. “I thought--I thought--” “’M all right,” said Ron, patting her on the back. “’M fine.” “Ron was great,” said Tonks warmly, relinquishing her hold on Lupin. “Wonderful. Stunned one of the Death Eaters, straight to the head, and when you’re aiming at a moving target from a flying broom--” “You did?” said Hermione, gazing up at Ron with her arms still around his neck. “Always the tone of surprise,” he said a little grumpily, breaking free.

To hear a truth, we must first suspect that our present truth might not be. Like Alice’s White Queen, who often believed six impossible things before breakfast, I believed many things in my life, considering them to be true at any given time but suspecting that they might not be, until I met Jesus Christ. When we encounter The Truth, we know it and can only accept or reject it. Denial is not an option.

Depression goes through stages, but if left unchecked and not treated, this elevator ride will eventually go all the way to the bottom floor. And finally you find yourself bereft of choices, unable to figure out a way up or out, and pretty soon one overarching impulse begins winning the battle for your mind: “Kill yourself.” And once you get over the shock of those words in your head, the horror of it, it begins to start sounding appealing, even possessing a strange resolve, logic. In fact, it’s the only thing you have left that is logical. It becomes the only road to relief. As if just the planning of it provides the first solace you’ve felt that you can remember. And you become comfortable with it. You begin to plan it and contemplate the details of how best to do it, as if you were planning travel arrangements for a vacation. You just have to get out. O-U-T. You see the white space behind the letter O? You just want to crawl through that O and be out of this inescapable hurt that is this thing they call clinical depression. “How am I going to do this?” becomes the only tape playing. And if you are really, really, really depressed and you’re really there, you’re gonna find a way. I found a way. I had a way. And I did it. I made sure Opal was out of the house and on a business trip. My planning took a few weeks. I knew exactly how I was going to do it: I didn’t want to make too much of a mess. There was gonna be no blood, no drama. There was just going to be, “Now you see me, now you don’t.” That’s what it was going to be. So I did it. And it was over. Or so I thought. About twenty-four hours later I woke up. I was groggy; zoned out to the point at which I couldn’t put a sentence together for the next couple of days. But I was semifunctional, and as these drugs and shit that I took began to wear off slowly but surely, I realized, “Okay, I fucked up. I didn’t make it.” I thought I did all the right stuff, left no room for error, but something happened. And this perfect, flawless plan was thwarted. As if some force rebuked me and said, “Not yet. You’re not going anywhere.” The only reason I could have made it, after the amount of pills and alcohol and shit I took, was that somebody or something decided it wasn’t my time. It certainly wasn’t me making that call. It was something external. And when you’re infused with the presence of this positive external force, which is so much greater than all of your efforts to the contrary, that’s about as empowering a moment as you can have in your life. These days we have a plethora of drugs one can take to ameliorate the intensity of this lack of hope, lack of direction, lack of choice. So fuck it and don’t be embarrassed or feel like you can handle it yourself, because lemme tell ya something: you can’t. Get fuckin’ help. The negative demon is strong, and you may not be as fortunate as I was. My brother wasn’t. For me, despair eventually gave way to resolve, and resolve gave way to hope, and hope gave way to “Holy shit. I feel better than I’ve ever felt right now.” Having actually gone right up to the white light, looked right at it, and some force in the universe turned me around, I found, with apologies to Mr. Dylan, my direction home. I felt more alive than I’ve ever felt. I’m not exaggerating when I say for the next six months I felt like Superman. Like I’m gonna fucking go through walls. That’s how strong I felt. I had this positive force in me. I was saved. I was protected. I was like the only guy who survived and walked away from a major plane crash. I was here to do something big. What started as the darkest moment in my life became this surge of focus, direction, energy, and empowerment.

Many observers were disturbed by all the uniformed men striding the White House corridors. In a broad-brush indictment, Charles Sumner disapproved of the way the White House “assumed the character of military head-quarters. To the dishonor of the civil service and in total disregard of precedent, the President surrounded himself with officers of the army, and substituted military forms for those of civil life.

So, Ryan, back to my Economy model. In motor-vehicle parlance, she's the cloth-seats and plastic-steering-wheel version. But she gets you from A to B. This model comes only in white. My sister-in-law's a lovely black woman from Jamaica and she said to me, she said, Ron! Don't you dare do an Economy black woman. And I love women, I do, and I thought, yeah, show respect. Also, Bridget would knock the shit out of me.

By the end of Grant’s second term, white Democrats, through the “redeemer” movement, had reclaimed control of every southern state, winning in peacetime much of the power lost in combat. They promulgated a view of the Civil War as a righteous cause that had nothing to do with slavery but only states’ rights—to which an incredulous James Longstreet once replied, “I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery.

Love Poem We have plenty of matches in our house We keep them on hand always Currently our favourite brand Is Ohio Blue Tip Though we used to prefer Diamond Brand That was before we discovered Ohio Blue Tip matches They are excellently packaged Sturdy little boxes With dark and light blue and white labels With words lettered In the shape of a megaphone As if to say even louder to the world Here is the most beautiful match in the world It’s one-and-a-half-inch soft pine stem Capped by a grainy dark purple head So sober and furious and stubbornly ready To burst into flame Lighting, perhaps the cigarette of the woman you love For the first time And it was never really the same after thatAll this will we give you That is what you gave me I become the cigarette and you the match Or I the match and you the cigarette Blazing with kisses that smoulder towards heaven.

The tunnel was large and sci-fi white and it led down into the palace under the street level. Rockman was a little wary but ready for any action, however, the other gladiators seemed at ease, so Rockman allowed himself to ease by five-percent. He was still eighty-five percent danger and ten-percent resolve. He had formerly been eighty-five percent danger and fifteen-percent resolve, but he took away a bit of resolve. He was still very much the same level of dangerous.

As in past years, the self-absorbed Jesse Root Grant and equally self-absorbed Colonel Dent continued to find each other insufferable and Grant took refuge in his old strategy of passive detachment. With Colonel Dent monopolizing the White House, Jesse stayed at an inexpensive hotel when he visited Washington. The two men took turns insulting each other, pretending the other was a doddering old fool. “You should take better care of that old gentleman, Julia,” Dent would say of Jesse Grant. “He is feeble and deaf as a post, and yet you permit him to wander all over Washington alone. It is not safe; he should never be allowed out without an attendant.”18 To insult Jesse, Colonel Dent would pop out of his armchair whenever Jesse entered the room. “Accept my chair, Mr. Grant,” he would say with elaborate courtesy, as if humoring a senile old man. Stiffly indignant, Jesse would reply in a stage whisper to a grandson, “I hope I shall not live to become as

RON: I just gotta finish my thesis. MUTHA WIT: What's a thesis? RON: It's a long paper I gotta write. MUTHA WIT: Then what you do after you don write it? RON: Then I gotta show it to a bunch of white folks. MUTHA WIT: Then what? RON: Hopefully I can get paid like one of them white folks. MUTHA WIT: Then what? RON: Then nutin. What you mean then what? Then I'm done. I git a job. I live, become fabulously rich and mildly famous. MUTHA WIT: Then what? RON: Then I drop dead I guess I don't know.

bolstered southern power by scrapping the rule that had once counted an African American as only three-fifths of a person for electoral purposes. Despite suppressing the vote of blacks, white southerners could now count them fully for election purposes, giving the “solid South” forty extra votes in the Electoral College and disproportionate influence in American politics. “They keep those votes, but disfranchise the negroes. That is one of the gravest mistakes in the policy of reconstruction.

wasn’t a minor statement: the victorious Union general of the Civil War was saying that terror tactics perpetrated by southern whites had nullified the outcome of the rebellion. All those hundreds of thousands dead, the millions maimed and wounded, the mourning of widows and orphans—all that suffering, all that tumult, on some level, had been for naught. Slavery had been abolished, but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks, and that counted as a national shame.

When a congressional committee reported in February on the Mississippi bloodshed, it concluded that the nation had arrived at a crossroads and “must either restrain by force these violent demonstrations by the bold, fierce spirits of the whites” or tell newly enfranchised black citizens, “we have made you men and citizens . . . now work out your own salvation as others have done.”70 It had become flagrantly obvious that no common ground existed between the white and black communities in the South, no middle position that allowed for compromise.

Many today insist that music is amoral, that there is nothing innately good or bad about music itself. They say it is neutral, and only its use determines whether it is good or evil. To a degree this is true, but in a very real way music ceases to be neutral the moment those little black-and-white notes begin to be woven together to produce a certain combinations of sounds that result in the message or world-view that the composer of the music wants to get across. The music itself becomes a statement, even when words are not attached to its message.

We need to stop expecting Eurocentric veganism to correct systemic racism. We need to let the oppressed folks articulate their own movements using their own voices. The self-proclaimed leaders need to stop trying to find their next Martin Luther King Jr. to manipulate black folks into being calm and “civilized” since what Ron and other guerrilla gardeners are doing has nothing to do with being peaceful and everything to do with survival and protest. Black folks who are vegan are a threat to white supremacy, not a subset of the depoliticized white-vegan movement.

A southerner by choice, Akerman found it sobering to verify the depth of Klan penetration in the region, which “revealed a perversion of moral sentiment among the Southern whites which bodes ill to that part of the country for this generation.”97 On a single day in November, 250 people in one South Carolina county confessed affiliation with the group. As Akerman expressed the matter with deep feeling: “I doubt whether from the beginning of the world until now, a community, nominally civilized, has been so fully under the domination of systematic and organized depravity.”98

When deep summer comes and the dog star raises with the morning sun, the land can scab up and a man watch his spring crop wrinkle brown like something on fire. It's the season snakes go blind. Their eyeballs coat over like pearls and they get mean. A rattlesnake allows no warning and a milk snake that would have cut the dust to the tall grass in June quiles up and strikes at anything that steps its way. It's a time when foxes and dogs go mad. They'll come shackling toward you, their lips snarly and chins white with slobber. You'll raise your gun and they'll come on like they just want to get it done with.

The building was small, painted white with dark green trim with the Atlantic behind it. The ocean was gray and harsh, whitecaps breaking upon dark sands while a cold, northern wind battered at the dunes and seagrass. William smiled at the dark clouds. Behind them, the sun had begun its slow descent, and soon William would be alone with the ocean and his thoughts. Closing the truck’s door, he walked around to the side, reached into the bed and pulled out his sea-bag. He threw it over his shoulder and walked up to the house. He bent down and moved aside a loose paving stone to find the key to the house, as Jeremy’s mother had said.

Leaving Forever My son can look me level in the eyes now, and does, hard, when I tell him he cannot watch chainsaw murders at the midnight movie, that he must bend his mind to Biology, under this roof, in the clear light of a Tensor lamp. Outside, his friends throb with horsepower under the moon. He stands close, milk sour on his breath, gauging the heat of my conviction, eye-whites pink from his new contacts. He can see me better than before. And I can see myself in those insolent eyes, mostly head in the pupil's curve, closed in by the contours of his unwrinkled flesh. At the window he waves a thin arm and his buddies squall away in a glare of tail lights. I reach out my arm to his shoulder, but he shrugs free and shows me my father's narrow eyes, the trembling hand at my throat, the hard wall at the back of my skull, the raised fist framed in the bedroom window I had climbed through at three A.M. "If you hit me I'll leave forever," I said. But everything was fine in a few days, fine. "I would have come back," I said, "false teeth and all." Now, twice a year after the long drive, in the yellow light of the front porch, I breathe in my father's whiskey, ask for a shot, and see myself distorted in his thick glasses, the two of us grinning, as he holds me with both hands at arm's length.

On Easter Sunday, Nash led a mob of several hundred whites, armed with rifles and a small cannon, who opened fire on the courthouse, setting it ablaze. Even though its black defenders ran up a white flag of surrender, begging for mercy, the mob butchered dozens of them. Black families were afraid to claim the many corpses that thickly littered the ground. When Longstreet sent Colonel T. W. DeKlyne to Colfax, the latter found heaps of dead black bodies being scavenged by dogs and buzzards. “We were unable to find the body of a single white man,” he reported. Many blacks “were shot in the back at the head and neck . . . almost all had from three to a dozen wounds.

The feud between Sherman and Stanton exposed a deep fissure that would shortly divide the country over Reconstruction. With the war ending, Sherman’s old fondness for the South became more apparent. His views on slavery had remained strictly reactionary. When teaching in Louisiana before the war, he had written, “I would not if I could abolish or modify slavery . . . Negroes in the great numbers that exist here must of necessity be slaves.” He also wrote: “Niggers won’t work unless they are owned, and white servants are not to be found in this parish.” Now he was flabbergasted that Stanton gave serious consideration to granting blacks the right to vote. In many ways, Sherman wanted to re-create the status quo ante

With snow-white hair and a massive forehead, Bismarck, in military uniform, welcomed Grant with both hands extended. Turning on the charm, he expressed surprise that Grant was only seven years his junior. “That shows the value of a military life,” he remarked, “for here you have the frame of a young man, while I feel like an old one.”70 Grant was entranced by the flow of wit that emanated from the worldly Bismarck with his imposing physique, beautiful manners, ready laugh, and penetrating insights. As they sat in his study, smoking cigars, with the window thrown open to a gorgeous park, the conversation turned to the varied exercises in nation building in which both men had so strenuously engaged. Bismarck commiserated

The campaign’s most chilling feature was the huge wave of murder and arson orchestrated by the Ku Klux Klan against black and white Republicans in the South. As state conventions drafted new constitutions that endowed blacks with the franchise, the white South acted to stamp out that voting power through brute force. Nathan Bedford Forrest boasted that the Klan had recruited forty thousand men in Tennessee alone, half a million across the South. This bloodthirsty backlash grew out of simple arithmetic: in South Carolina and Mississippi, blacks made up a majority of the electorate, while in other southern states, the substantial black populace, joined with white Republicans, appeared set to prevail during Reconstruction.

On February 7, President Johnson met at the White House with five black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, who came to lobby for a civil rights bill. The black leaders were treated in a tasteless, abusive manner. After they shook hands with the president, their spokesman, George T. Downing, said they hoped he would support voting rights for blacks, which elicited a bizarre, rambling monologue from Johnson. He admitted to having owned slaves, but boasted of never having sold one, as if that would somehow ingratiate him with his visitors. He presented himself as a kindly master who had been “their slave instead of their being mine.” To promote civil rights, Johnson went on, would “result in the extermination of one [race] or the other.

eight thousand Republicans crammed into Crosby’s Opera House for a veritable coronation of Ulysses S. Grant. To play on wartime memories, General John “Black Jack” Logan was designated to place his name in nomination. His speech was followed by a well-staged extravaganza: hats and handkerchiefs fluttered, rounds of applause rippled across the house, and a pigeon, dyed red, white, and blue, flapped through the cavernous space. As a huge ovation for his son gathered strength, Jesse Grant stood before the speaker’s platform in “mute astonishment,” said a reporter.8 Then a curtain rose to reveal huge images drawn by Thomas Nast of the Goddess of Liberty, juxtaposed with Grant. To no one’s surprise, Grant won by acclamation on the first ballot.

Something Rich and Strange She takes a step and the water rises higher on her knees. Four more steps, she tells herself. Just four more and I'll turn back. She takes another step and the bottom is no longer there and she is being shoved downstream and she does not panic because she has passed the Red Cross courses. The water shallows and her face breaks the surface and she breathes deep. She tries to turn her body so she won' t hit her head on a rock and for the first time she's afraid and she's suddenly back underwater and hears the rush of water against her ears. She tries to hold her breath but her knee smashes against a boulder and she gasps in pain and water pours into her mouth. Then for a few moments the water pools and slows. She rises coughing up water, gasping air, her feet dragging the bottom like an anchor trying to snag waterlogged wood or rock jut and as the current quickens again she sees her family running along the shore and she knows they are shouting her name though she cannot hear them and as the current turns her she hears the falls and knows there is nothing that will keep from it as the current quickens and quickens and another rock smashes against her knee but she hardly feels it as she snatches another breath and she feels the river fall and she falls with it as water whitens around her and she falls deep into the whiteness and she rises her head scrapes against a rock ceiling and the water holds her there and she tells herself don't breathe but the need rises inside her beginning in the upper stomach then up through her chest and throat and as that need reaches her mouth her mouth and nose open and the lungs explode in pain and then the pain is gone as bright colors shatter around her like glass shards, and she remembers her sixth-grade science class, the gurgle of the aquarium at the back of the room, the smell of chalk dust that morning the teacher held a prism out the window so it might fill with color, and she has a final, beautiful thought - that she is now inside that prism and knows something even the teacher does not know, that the prism's colors are voices, voices that swirl around her head like a crown, and at that moment her arms and legs she did not even know were flailing cease and she becomes part of the river.

it would have been better never to have made a sacrifice of blood and treasure to save the Union than to have the democratic party come in power now and sacrifice by the ballot what the bayonet seemed to have accomplished.” Grant had striven to protect the black community, met regularly with black leaders, and given them unprecedented White House access, making global abolitionism an explicit aim of American foreign policy. In his annual message of December 1871, he applauded emancipation efforts in Brazil, deplored ongoing bondage in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and asked Congress for legislation to forbid Americans from “holding, owning, or dealing in slaves, or being interested in slave property in foreign lands”—a practice that hadn’t ceased with emancipation at home. Black leaders echoed Grant’s view that the merger

OMG, I think I’ve become a feminist. I mean, I’ve always been in favor of women voting and being paid the same as men for doing the same job. But then, the other day on the train, I didn’t get up and give a woman my seat. I thought about it. But then I thought it might insult her, might imply that I considered her weaker than a senior citizen, maybe even inferior in some way. But that’s not what prompted me to fire up my laptop. I was brushing my teeth this morning and thinking about romance. People do that when they get older, I suppose. Romance is one area where men and women are still different—unisex lavatories and fashions notwithstanding. And here’s the difference: a romantic woman envisions a knight on a white horse; a romantic man envisions a dragon in a dark cave. Think about it next time you brush your teeth.

In his final months, Grant showed exceptional kindness to Terrell, furnishing him with a glowing recommendation letter for use after his death so he could find employment as a War Department messenger. Terrell’s son Robert had just graduated cum laude from Harvard. While he was there, Grant had provided him with a beautiful letter to obtain summer work in the Boston Custom House: “My special interest in him is from the fact that his father—a most estimable man—is my butler, beside I should feel an interest in any young man, white or colored, who had the courage and ability to graduate himself at Harvard without other pecuniary aid than what he could earn.”91 Robert Terrell was to befriend Booker T. Washington and become the first black municipal judge in Washington. Harrison Terrell had unusual opportunities to observe Grant’s drinking habits.

Historians have been quick to pounce on the blind spots in Grant’s report. Less noticed is that he almost immediately recanted what he wrote. As early as January 12, 1866, Carl Schurz informed his wife that “Grant feels very bad about his thoughtless move and has openly expressed regret for what he has done.”102 When Schurz encountered Grant at a soldiers’ reunion in December 1868, Grant was still more regretful, admitting that on his southern tour “I traveled as the general-in-chief and people who came to see me tried to appear to the best advantage. But I have since come to the conclusion that you were right and I was wrong.”103 Here Grant echoed a famous line Abraham Lincoln had written to him, showing he was a big enough man to confess frankly to past error. In the future, he wouldn’t pull his punches about black-white relations in the South

By the end of 1865, so-called Black Codes began to forge a new caste system in the South, a segregated world where freed slaves worked as indentured servants, subject to arrest if they left jobs before their annual contracts expired. It was a cruel new form of bondage, establishing the foundations of the Jim Crow system that later ruled southern race relations. In South Carolina, blacks were confined by law to their plantations, forced to work from sunup to sundown. In Florida, blacks who showed “disrespect” to their bosses or rode in public conveyances reserved for whites could be whipped and pilloried. In Mississippi, it became a criminal offense for blacks to hunt or fish, heightening their dependence upon white employers. Thus, within six months of the end of the Civil War, there arose a broadly based retreat from many of the ideals that had motivated the northern war effort, reestablishing the status quo ante and white supremacy in the old Confederacy.

Excuse me, are you wanting ze bouillabaisse?" It was the girl from Beauxbatons who had laughed during Dumbledore's speech. She had finally removed her muffler. A long sheet of silvery-blonde hair fell almost to her waist. She had large, deep blue eyes, and very white, even teeth. Ron went purple. He stared up at her, opened his mouth to reply, but nothing came out except a faint gurgling noise. "Yeah, have it," said Harry, pushing the dish toward the girl. "You 'ave finished wiz it?" "Yeah," Ron said breathlessly. "Yeah, it was excellent." The girl picked up the dish and carried it carefully off to the Ravenclaw table. Ron was still goggling at the girl as though he had never seen one before. Harry started to laugh. The sound seemed to jog Ron back to his senses. "She's a veela!" he said hoarsely to Harry. "Of course she isn't!" said Hermione tartly. "I don't see anyone else gaping at her like an idiot!" But she wasn't entirely right about that. As the girl crossed the Hall, many boys' heads turned, and some of them had become temporarily speechless, just like Ron.

According to Gallup polls and sociologists, one of the greatest scandals of our day is that “evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered and sexually immoral as the world in general.”3 The statistics are devastating: Church members divorce their spouses as often as their secular neighbors. Church members beat their wives as often as their neighbors. Church members’ giving patterns indicate they are almost as materialistic as non-Christians. White evangelicals are the most likely people to object to neighbors of another race. Of the “higher-commitment” evangelicals, a rapidly growing number of young people think cohabitation is acceptable prior to marriage.4 Ron Sider, in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, summarizes the level of our compartmentalization: “Whether the issue is marriage and sexuality or money and care for the poor, evangelicals today are living scandalously unbiblical lives. . . . The data suggest that in many crucial areas evangelicals are not living any differently from their unbelieving neighbors.”5

IN ADDITION TO having become a distinctly Christian party, the GOP is more than ever America’s self-consciously white party. The nationalization of its Southern Strategy from the 1960s worked partly because it rode demographic change. In 1960, 90 percent of Americans were white and non-Hispanic. Only a few states had white populations of less than 70 percent—specifically Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama. Today the white majority in the whole country is down nearly to 60 percent; in other words, America’s racial makeup is now more “Southern” than the Deep South’s was in the 1960s. For a while, the party’s leaders were careful to clear their deck of explicit racism. It was reasonable, wasn’t it, to be concerned about violent crime spiraling upward from the 1960s through the ’80s? We don’t want social welfare programs to encourage cultures of poverty and dependency, do we? Although the dog-whistled resentment of new policies disfavoring or seeming to disfavor white people became more audible, Republican leaders publicly stuck to not-entirely-unreasonable arguments: affirmative action is an imperfect solution; too much multiculturalism might Balkanize America; we shouldn’t let immigrants pour into the U.S. helter-skelter. But in this century, more Republican leaders started cozying up to the ugliest fantasists, unapologetic racists. When Congressman Ron Paul ran for the 2008 GOP nomination, he appeared repeatedly with the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who was just coining the term “alt-right” for his movement. Senator Rand Paul employed as an aide and wrote a book with a former leader of the League of the South, an organization devoted to a twenty-first-century do-over of Confederate secession. After we elected a black president, more regular whistles joined the kind only dogs can hear. Even thoughtful Ross Douthat, one of the Times’s conservative columnists, admitted to a weakness for the Old South fantasy. During the debate about governments displaying Confederate symbols after nine black people were shot dead by a white supremacist in Charleston, he discussed “the temptation…to regard the Confederate States of America as the political and historical champion of all…attractive Southern distinctives….Even a secession-hating Yankee like myself has felt, at certain moments the pull of that idea, the lure of that fantasy.

The White Liners didn’t bother with any such pretense of civility or restraint. On October 7, John Milton Brown, the sheriff of Coahoma County, reported a “perfect state of terror” had seized his jurisdiction. “I have been driven from my county by an armed force. I am utterly powerless to enforce law or to restore order.” Disheartened by Grant’s refusal to rush troops to Mississippi, Ames sat brooding and besieged in the governor’s mansion in Jackson. He concluded that Reconstruction was a dead letter, white supremacists in his state having engineered a coup d’état. “Yes, a revolution has taken place—by force of arms—and a race are disfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery,” he lamented to his wife. Sarcastically referring to Grant’s and Pierrepont’s words, he wrote, “The political death of the Negro will forever release the nation . . . from such ‘political outbreaks.’ You may think I exaggerate. Time will show you how accurate my statements are.” To head off threatened impeachment, he decided to resign after the election. His darkly prophetic letter previewed the nearly century-long Jim Crow system that would cast blacks back into a state of involuntary servitude to southern whites.

To Harry James Potter,’” he read, and Harry’s insides contracted with a sudden excitement, “‘I leave the Snitch he caught in his first Quidditch match at Hogwarts, as a reminder of the rewards of perseverance and skill.’” As Scrimgeour pulled out the tiny, walnut-sized golden ball, its silver wings fluttered rather feebly, and Harry could not help feeling a definite sense of anticlimax. “Why did Dumbledore leave you this Snitch?” asked Scrimgeour. “No idea,” said Harry. “For the reasons you just read out, I supposed . . . to remind me what you can get if you . . . persevere and whatever it was.” “You think this a mere symbolic keepsake, then?” “I suppose so,” said Harry. “What else could it be?” “I’m asking the questions,” said Scrimgeour, shifting his chair a little closer to the sofa. Dusk was really falling outside now; the marquee beyond the windows towered ghostly white over the hedge. “I notice that your birthday cake is in the shape of a Snitch,” Scrimgeour said to Harry. “Why is that?” Hermione laughed derisively. “Oh, it can’t be a reference to the fact Harry’s a great Seeker, that’s way too obvious,” she said. “There must be a secret message from Dumbledore hidden in the icing!” “I don’t think there’s anything hidden in the icing,” said Scrimgeour, “but a Snitch would be a very good hiding place for a small object. You know why, I’m sure?” Harry shrugged. Hermione, however, answered: Harry thought that answering questions correctly was such a deeply ingrained habit she could not suppress the urge. “Because Snitches have flesh memories,” she said. “What?” said Harry and Ron together; both considered Hermione’s Quidditch knowledge negligible. “Correct,” said Scrimgeour. “A Snitch is not touched by bare skin before it is released, not even by the maker, who wears gloves. It carries an enchantment by which it can identify the first human to lay hands upon it, in case of a disputed capture. This Snitch”—he held up the tiny golden ball—“will remember your touch, Potter. It occurs to me that Dumbledore, who had prodigious magical skill, whatever his other faults, might have enchanted this Snitch so that it will open only for you.” Harry’s heart was beating rather fast. He was sure that Scrimgeour was right. How could he avoid taking the Snitch with his bare hand in front of the Minister? “You don’t say anything,” said Scrimgeour. “Perhaps you already know what the Snitch contains?” “No,” said Harry, still wondering how he could appear to touch the Snitch without really doing so. If only he knew Legilimency, really knew it, and could read Hermione’s mind; he could practically hear her brain whirring beside him. “Take it,” said Scrimgeour quietly. Harry met the Minister’s yellow eyes and knew he had no option but to obey. He held out his hand, and Scrimgeour leaned forward again and placed the Snitch, slowly and deliberately, into Harry’s palm. Nothing happened. As Harry’s fingers closed around the Snitch, its tired wings fluttered and were still. Scrimgeour, Ron, and Hermione continued to gaze avidly at the now partially concealed ball, as if still hoping it might transform in some way. “That was dramatic,” said Harry coolly. Both Ron and Hermione laughed. “That’s all, then, is it?” asked Hermione, making to prise herself off the sofa. “Not quite,” said Scrimgeour, who looked bad-tempered now. “Dumbledore left you a second bequest, Potter.” “What is it?” asked Harry, excitement rekindling. Scrimgeour did not bother to read from the will this time. “The sword of Godric Gryffindor,” he said. Hermione and Ron both stiffened. Harry looked around for a sign of the ruby-encrusted hilt, but Scrimgeour did not pull the sword from the leather pouch, which in any case looked much too small to contain it.

According to Gallup polls and sociologists, one of the greatest scandals of our day is that “evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered and sexually immoral as the world in general.”3 The statistics are devastating: Church members divorce their spouses as often as their secular neighbors. Church members beat their wives as often as their neighbors. Church members’ giving patterns indicate they are almost as materialistic as non-Christians. White evangelicals are the most likely people to object to neighbors of another race. Of the “higher-commitment” evangelicals, a rapidly growing number of young people think cohabitation is acceptable prior to marriage.4 Ron Sider, in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, summarizes the level of our compartmentalization: “Whether the issue is marriage and sexuality or money and care for the poor, evangelicals today are living scandalously unbiblical lives. . . . The data suggest that in many crucial areas evangelicals are not living any differently from their unbelieving neighbors.”5 But you don’t need a lot of statistics to know how true this is. Just ask Angela, a new member of our congregation whose question to me also explained why she had dropped out of church for five years: “Why is it that so many Christians make such lousy human beings?

Grant’s personal tragedy was simultaneously an American tragedy. Tormented by his decision, steeped in a meditative mood, Grant reflected on the deep changes wrought in northern Republican circles. He predicted to John Roy Lynch that the northern retreat from Reconstruction would lead to Democrats recapturing power in the South as well as “future mischief of a very serious nature . . . It requires no prophet to foresee that the national government will soon be at a great disadvantage and that the results of the war of the rebellion will have been in a large measure lost . . . What you have just passed through in the state of Mississippi is only the beginning of what is sure to follow. I do not wish to create unnecessary alarm, nor to be looked upon as a prophet of evil, but it is impossible for me to close my eyes in the face of things that are as plain to me as the noonday sun.”105 This wasn’t a minor statement: the victorious Union general of the Civil War was saying that terror tactics perpetrated by southern whites had nullified the outcome of the rebellion. All those hundreds of thousands dead, the millions maimed and wounded, the mourning of widows and orphans—all that suffering, all that tumult, on some level, had been for naught. Slavery had been abolished, but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks, and that counted as a national shame.

I've spent time with a lot of very busy people: business leaders, prominent journalists, multiple presidents. Despite the unusually high demands on their schedules, something they all have in common is that they carve out time for reading, and for consuming information that may not seem to have anything to do with their jobs. When President Obama released summer reading lists or his top book recommendations for the year, a chorus of 'yeah, right' could occasionally be heard from certain corners of the internet, where skeptics who doubted he had time to read contemporary literature liked to hang out. But President Obama read all those books, and many more. Taking time after a long day to sit down and read some Chinese science fiction, a novel by Jesmyn Ward, or even one of Ron Chernow's biographies was an escape, but it also oxygenated Obama's brain. There may not have been a specific moment when he consciously connected the dots between a novel he read two years earlier and the issue at hand, but moving beyond your own experience is an important part of developing the kind of perspective that helps with decision-making. It's also how the most effective people connect. Developing broad general knowledge gives you the flexibility to adapt to your audience on the fly, as well as the ability to naturally relate to diverse groups. And besides, have you ever recommended a book to someone who ended up really loving it? It's a unique way of understanding someone better, and that kind of communication goes both ways.

to think “my fangs”) had been poisonous? They passed Mrs. Norris, who turned her lamplike eyes upon them and hissed faintly, but Professor McGonagall said, “Shoo!” Mrs. Norris slunk away into the shadows, and in a few minutes they had reached the stone gargoyle guarding the entrance to Dumbledore’s office. “Fizzing Whizbee,” said Professor McGonagall. The gargoyle sprang to life and leapt aside; the wall behind it split in two to reveal a stone staircase that was moving continuously upward like a spiral escalator. The three of them stepped onto the moving stairs; the wall closed behind them with a thud, and they were moving upward in tight circles until they reached the highly polished oak door with the brass knocker shaped like a griffin. Though it was now well past midnight, there were voices coming from inside the room, a positive babble of them. It sounded as though Dumbledore was entertaining at least a dozen people. Professor McGonagall rapped three times with the griffin knocker, and the voices ceased abruptly as though someone had switched them all off. The door opened of its own accord and Professor McGonagall led Harry and Ron inside. The room was in half darkness; the strange silver instruments standing on tables were silent and still rather than whirring and emitting puffs of smoke as they usually did. The portraits of old headmasters and headmistresses covering the walls were all snoozing in their frames. Behind the door, a magnificent red-and-gold bird the size of a swan dozed on its perch with its head under its wing. “Oh, it’s you, Professor McGonagall . . . and . . . ah.” Dumbledore was sitting in a high-backed chair behind his desk; he leaned forward into the pool of candlelight illuminating the papers laid out before him. He was wearing a magnificently embroidered purple-and-gold dressing gown over a snowy-white nightshirt

The phone rang. It was a familiar voice. It was Alan Greenspan. Paul O'Neill had tried to stay in touch with people who had served under Gerald Ford, and he'd been reasonably conscientious about it. Alan Greenspan was the exception. In his case, the effort was constant and purposeful. When Greenspan was the chairman of Ford's Council of Economic Advisers, and O'Neill was number two at OMB, they had become a kind of team. Never social so much. They never talked about families or outside interests. It was all about ideas: Medicare financing or block grants - a concept that O'Neill basically invented to balance federal power and local autonomy - or what was really happening in the economy. It became clear that they thought well together. President Ford used to have them talk about various issues while he listened. After a while, each knew how the other's mind worked, the way married couples do. In the past fifteen years, they'd made a point of meeting every few months. It could be in New York, or Washington, or Pittsburgh. They talked about everything, just as always. Greenspan, O'Neill told a friend, "doesn't have many people who don't want something from him, who will talk straight to him. So that's what we do together - straight talk." O'Neill felt some straight talk coming in. "Paul, I'll be blunt. We really need you down here," Greenspan said. "There is a real chance to make lasting changes. We could be a team at the key moment, to do the things we've always talked about." The jocular tone was gone. This was a serious discussion. They digressed into some things they'd "always talked about," especially reforming Medicare and Social Security. For Paul and Alan, the possibility of such bold reinventions bordered on fantasy, but fantasy made real. "We have an extraordinary opportunity," Alan said. Paul noticed that he seemed oddly anxious. "Paul, your presence will be an enormous asset in the creation of sensible policy." Sensible policy. This was akin to prayer from Greenspan. O'Neill, not expecting such conviction from his old friend, said little. After a while, he just thanked Alan. He said he always respected his counsel. He said he was thinking hard about it, and he'd call as soon as he decided what to do. The receiver returned to its cradle. He thought about Greenspan. They were young men together in the capital. Alan stayed, became the most noteworthy Federal Reserve Bank chairman in modern history and, arguably the most powerful public official of the past two decades. O'Neill left, led a corporate army, made a fortune, and learned lessons - about how to think and act, about the importance of outcomes - that you can't ever learn in a government. But, he supposed, he'd missed some things. There were always trade-offs. Talking to Alan reminded him of that. Alan and his wife, Andrea Mitchell, White House correspondent for NBC news, lived a fine life. They weren't wealthy like Paul and Nancy. But Alan led a life of highest purpose, a life guided by inquiry. Paul O'Neill picked up the telephone receiver, punched the keypad. "It's me," he said, always his opening. He started going into the details of his trip to New York from Washington, but he's not much of a phone talker - Nancy knew that - and the small talk trailed off. "I think I'm going to have to do this." She was quiet. "You know what I think," she said. She knew him too well, maybe. How bullheaded he can be, once he decides what's right. How he had loved these last few years as a sovereign, his own man. How badly he was suited to politics, as it was being played. And then there was that other problem: she'd almost always been right about what was best for him. "Whatever, Paul. I'm behind you. If you don't do this, I guess you'll always regret it." But it was clearly about what he wanted, what he needed. Paul thanked her. Though somehow a thank-you didn't seem appropriate. And then he realized she was crying.

The Syrian civil war was raging at this time. When we faced the press in the prime minister’s residence, Obama was asked point-blank about reports that the Syrian government had possibly used chemical weapons against opponents of Assad’s regime a day earlier. “Is this a red line for you?” a journalist asked. “I have made clear that the use of chemical weapons is a game changer,”1 he said, a reaffirmed threat heard round the world. He had first drawn a red line on this issue a few months earlier in a White House statement. Would he make good on it if it were proven that chemical weapons were actually used in Syria? Time would tell. And it did. Five months later, Assad’s forces carried out a horrific chemical attack that killed 1,500 civilians. Obama called it “the worst chemical weapons attack of the twenty-first century.”2 The entire world was shocked by the footage of little children suffocating to death. All eyes were on Obama. He was scheduled to make a dramatic announcement. Minutes before going on-air, he called me. “Bibi,” he said, “I’ve decided to take action but I need to go to Congress first.” I was astonished. American law did not require such an appeal. Syria was not about to go to war with the United States but Congress was unlikely to approve military action anyway. I hid my disappointment and rebounded with an idea that Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz had raised earlier with Ron Dermer and me in the event that Obama wouldn’t attack. The Russian military was in Syria to shore up the Assad regime and protect Russian assets in Syria, such as the strategic Russian naval base in Latakia. That was a fact we could do little to change. But Putin shared with us and the United States a desire to prevent chemical weapons from falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists who posed a threat to Russia, too. “Why don’t you get the Russians with your approval to take out the chemical stockpiles from Syria?” I suggested to the president. “We would back that decision.” This is in fact what transpired in the coming months, though some materials for chemical weapons were still left in Syria. Yet, despite these positive results, the lingering effect of Obama’s last-minute turn to Congress was the impression that red lines can be crossed with impunity and that Obama would not employ America’s massive airpower even when the situation warranted it. I should have expected this. The second important and telling exchange between Obama and me during his visit to Israel happened in private, and gave me a heads-up on how he viewed the use of American power. The day after the intimate dinner at the prime minister’s residence we met at a King David Hotel suite overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem.

The fifty-five delegates representing twelve states—the renegade Rhode Island boycotted the convention—scarcely constituted a cross section of America. They were white, educated males and mostly affluent property owners.

Love Poem We have plenty of matches in our house We keep them on hand always Currently our favourite brand Is Ohio Blue Tip Though we used to prefer Diamond Brand That was before we discovered Ohio Blue Tip matches They are excellently packaged Sturdy little boxes With dark and light blue and white labels With words lettered In the shape of a megaphone As if to say even louder to the world Here is the most beautiful match in the world It’s one-and-a-half-inch soft pine stem Capped by a grainy dark purple head So sober and furious and stubbornly ready To burst into flame Lighting, perhaps the cigarette of the woman you love For the first time And it was never really the same after that All this will we give you That is what you gave me I become the cigarette and you the match Or I the match and you the cigarette Blazing with kisses that smoulder towards heaven

There are so many people more concerned with how a relationship makes them look, rather than their own personal well-being. They hide the truth, many times behind a pretty white picket fence. Appearances are their very first priority, so they hang on to the relationship despite the abuse.

rings

Who were these solons rhapsodized by Benjamin Franklin as “the most august and respectable assembly he was ever in in his life”? The fifty-five delegates representing twelve states—the renegade Rhode Island boycotted the convention—scarcely constituted a cross section of America. They were white, educated males and mostly affluent property owners. A majority were lawyers and hence sensitive to precedent. Princeton graduates (nine) trumped Yale (four) and Harvard (three) by a goodly margin. They averaged forty-two years of age, meaning that Hamilton, thirty-two, and Madison, thirty-six, were relatively young. As a foreign-born delegate, Hamilton wasn’t alone,

Beyond, he could glimpse high, tumescent hills of unnaturally perfect smoothness, each crowned with an ivory-coloured column of stone. Between the hills ran valleys dense with pallid vegetation. Bank upon bank of cloud hung frozen in a still, pale sky. Though his vantage point commanded great distance, some curious distortion of perspective rendered everything - near and far - equally sharp to the eye. And nowhere could he see a shadow. It was as if he had stepped over the border of a wonderful and subtly disturbing illustration in some long-forgotten, childhood book. The land lay before him like a vast and awful glyph, waiting to be read, and he knew at once that he must go on, just a little further, or regret it all the days of his life. "The White Road

In the days of his health and strength, Owen would have confidently refuted this picture of hopelessness, but he was tired and ill. His room now remained unheated most of the time and he was racked with coughs and ominous chest pains. In the long, miserable hours when sleep would not come, he found his eyes turning to that mouldy stain upon the wall, and he began to harbour dark thoughts. What was all this talk of the soul anyway? It could not be weighed or measured; die surgeon never discovered it. In any case it could not grant insight into stock market prices, could create no visible wealth. Indeed, there were brilliant people with titles like 'professor', people whose name trailed endless letters, who even after the most rigorous deliberations, most elegant applications of logic, doubted that such a thing as the soul existed at all. And after all, was not The City full of Smugsbys who possessed no discernible soul, yet lived after their fashion? The Great Mystery was nothing to them. They did not seek the Great Answer; they were not aware that there had ever been a Great Question! What business had he, a starving wretch, in seeking to nurture through his writings an invisible, odourless, weightless abstraction of dubious commercial value, when the very process merely drew attention away from the 'real' business of getting on? "The White Road

But these were dreams - and very ambitious dreams - of the future. For the present, he wrote what he could and set about the pleasurable task of revealing his talents to the world. To his mild surprise, the world remained singularly unimpressed. 'You have some excellent material here/ wrote one publisher, 'but our reader feels the presentation to be a little laborious, and consequently we do not... etc...' Well, that was pretty much the story. Winter drew on; Owen eked out his remaining money on food and fuel, then learnt a little about hunger and cold. One publisher took the trouble to send a list of reading, so that he might submit the kind of book they required, and he sought out the titles at the local library. He read with growing interest, and soon saw where he had gone wrong. The field seemed to be held by a group of writers whose terse, taut style suggested the breathless delivery of some vital message, the gist of which seemed to be that man had a mean destiny and that all was for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. Owen was by this time so impoverished that he might have sought to share their generous publishing rights and big sales, but for the fact that he could not master the trick of seeing the Universe as a meaningless mistake, or the Human race as sick and soulless automata. He could have joined another, minor school, who wove elegant references to myth and faery-tale into their novels. He was, after all, seeking to do the same. But to his amazement he found that they did so, not with the intention of suggesting that the apparently commonplace might be wonderful, but that the apparently wonderful was, after all, merely commonplace. On a superficial reading they appeared to embody the ancient traditions in their works, but Owen, who could not get the knack of superficial reading, discerned that they were merely holding up a highly polished mirror to such subjects from a safe distance, producing as a result a diminished reflection, a perfect pigmy reversal of all that myth, legend and even homely folktales intended. While the ancient writers offered a simple, sometimes crude, or even ridiculous surface, beneath which the reader might discover unguessed levels of meaning, the work of the modern myth-mongers presented a clever, intricate and finely crafted surface, beneath which lay - nothing at all. And how could it have been otherwise, when true devotion to the Eternal Mysteries found no place in their hearts? There was no bedrock of belief. So he went his own outmoded way, as the days grew colder and the cupboard became bare. He was not aware that his circumstances affected his state of mind, but an objective eye might then have discovered in his work - in the sombre pages of The Night Before Winter, for instance - a distinctly darker thread. "The White Road

There was a dreadful logic here - so obvious he had overlooked it. The real need was for a different kind of book altogether, a book for the times. Very well then, he would explore that infernal map, transcribe its morbid cartography; record the tale of a realm that was at once a city and Hell and himself. In this way Owen Maddock turned his back on the light and sought out the oracles that lurk in darkness. A feverish energy possessed him. He laboured as never before upon his given work. Now he would strive to be obscure, to lead his readers by crooked paths, baffle them with indecipherable mysteries. There would no delicacy of style, only 'thunder at midnight'. Little by little there rose up before his inner eye a new vision to replace that of the White Road that had led him nowhere: a Kingdom of Darkness, a crepuscular domain of monstrous cults that chanted, to the tolling of iron bells and the beating of brazen gongs, unpronounceable demonic litanies. He must familiarise himself with every aspect of this world, its endless roll-calls of Hell, the spells by which the doors of the pit might be opened. He must cast in awful detail the laws by which tortures were administered. He would write for days in a frenzy, his mind ranging on raven's wings through skies black as pitch. "The White Road

He was walking one wet night through a desolate region of the City. A wagon trundled by, drenching his legs with a fine spray. He turned aside, and a maze of dingy streets opened before him. The sky between the slanting rooftops hung black as a slab of jet. Then a waning moon rode clear of the storm clouds. He had penetrated an old commercial sector of the City where winding lanes lay lampless, flanked by dilapidated warehouses. Every window was boarded up or shattered; too many doorways opened onto musty darkness. With every turn of the black road the same scene lay revealed: row upon row of grey, sagging eaves; scarred and battered gates; rusting fences; sickle moons in every shallow remnant of the rain. He seemed to be shedding the present with every step, moving backwards through time. It seemed that he was acting out some part prearranged, utterly without will. "The White Road

As Councilman Ron Rice Jr. had said in 2010, soon after the Zuckerberg gift was announced, Newark suffered from “extreme xenophobia,” particularly toward white outsiders who sought to change the city’s direction.

It was all very pleasant and balmy, supremely beautiful and languid, if you were white, were rich, and turned a blind eye to the black population expiring in the canebrakes.

William Engberg sat in his truck and finished his cigarette. He exhaled and then he stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and pulled the key out of the ignition.  He got out of his truck, stuffed his keys in a back pocket and looked at the house before him. The building was small, painted white with dark green trim with the Atlantic behind it.  The ocean was gray and harsh, whitecaps breaking upon dark sands while a cold, northern wind battered at the dunes and seagrass. William smiled at the dark clouds.  Behind them, the sun had begun its slow descent, and soon William would be alone with the ocean and his thoughts.  Closing the truck’s door, he walked around to the side, reached into the bed and pulled out his sea-bag. 

if a white man kills a black, he cannot be tried for his life for the murder. . . . If a negro strikes a white man, he is punished with the loss of his hand and, if he should draw blood, with death.

[Dr. Henton] reindorced a lesson my pops tried to teach me with his hands: NEVER EVER EVER back down if you're right. If you have evaluated all the perspectives, gone around the round table, and come back around with the same opinion, then walk right up to the offending party and tell'em why you mad. I realized that as wild as I'd been up to that point, I still curbed my opinion ever so slightly because I was surrounded by conservative white people at Rollins. (202) You can't idolize and emulate forever. At some point, you gotta cut the cord and go for dolo. I thought of Locke and his idea of tubula rasa. I realized that I needed to build arguments, philosophies, and a style grounded in my era and experiences. ....I remember she called me a shotgun: "You have all this energy and it's unruly, but like a shotgun, you need the barrel to direct the buckshot just enough." (203) That was it for me. I wanted power, I wanted respect, and I never ever ever anyone to tell me about my face again. (208) ...money, power, and respect drive the world. (211) People were so competitive and saw every job someone else got as a job that they lost. I didn't agree and always told people what Cam'ron said: "Can't get paid in a earth this big? You worthless kid!" (212)

He applauded a belated decision to evacuate Garfield from the White House in early September and bring him by train to Long Branch. “During the months of August and September the White House is one of the most unhealthy places in the world,” Grant told the press. “He should have been taken from there long ago.

Jews have grown so obsessed with Israel that the overt and covert signals of anti-Semitism beamed from the interior of the Trump campaign appeared to be disregarded by people like Adelson and Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot co-founder and Republican mega-donor who seemed wowed by candidate Trump’s solemn promise to immediately move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and to back Likud’s expansive settlement policy on the West Bank. Never mind that both moves were purely symbolic: Netanyahu was going to do what he was going to do regardless of Washington’s feckless policies or the location of its ambassador. What mattered was Israel, pure and simple. It was something of a comeuppance when President Trump immediately backed off his promise of an embassy move, swiftly sent a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu scolding him on settlements, and promised a new push for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. But beyond leaked word that Adelson was really, really, really angry, no apologies or mea culpas were forthcoming from American Jewry. Trump did make Israel a stop on his first trip abroad—the earliest visit to the Jewish state by any American president. But before his arrival, his White House made no comment on the two Israeli-American journalists who were denied visas to follow the president into Saudi Arabia, where he happily danced with swords and his commerce secretary boasted that there had been no protestors. Once he had landed in Jerusalem, Trump did note that he “just got back from the Middle East,” a moment memorialized by Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, covering his face with his hand in frustration or amazement. Trump scheduled all of fifteen minutes for a stop at Yad Vashem, Israel’s revered Holocaust memorial and museum, and in his brief remarks there—from 1:27 to 1:34 p.m.—he managed both to extol the Jewish people and let slip his cherished stereotypes: “Through persecution, oppression, death, and destruction, the Jewish people have persevered. They have thrived. They’ve become so successful in so many places.” Ever solicitous, Netanyahu thanked the president, who “in so few words said so much.” No one took note of the irony that the Holocaust survivor who greeted Trump, Margot Herschenbaum, had been rescued in 1939 by the Kindertransport, which had whisked her out of Germany and had saved thousands of other Jewish children. Refugees like Herschenbaum had been denied entry to the United States during World War II, just as Trump has steadfastly denied the entry of Syrian children fleeing war and death in their own country.

The little man in black had stopped speaking at last and resumed his seat. Harry waited for somebody else to get to their feet; he expected speeches, probably from the Minister, but nobody moved. Then several people screamed. Bright, white flames had erupted around Dumbledore’s body and the table upon which it lay: Higher and higher they rose, obscuring the body. White smoke spiraled into the air and made strange shapes: Harry thought, for one heart-stopping moment, that he saw a phoenix fly joyfully into the blue, but next second the fire had vanished. In its place was a white marble tomb, encasing Dumbledore’s body and the table on which he had rested. There were a few more cries of shock as a shower of arrows soared through the air, but they fell far short of the crowd. It was, Harry knew, the centaurs’ tribute: He saw them turn tail and disappear back into the cool trees. Likewise, the merpeople sank slowly back into the green water and were lost from view. Harry looked at Ginny, Ron, and Hermione: Ron’s face was screwed up as though the sunlight were blinding him. Hermione’s face was glazed with tears, but Ginny was no longer crying. She met Harry’s gaze with the same hard, blazing look that he had seen when she had hugged him after winning the Quidditch Cup in his absence, and he knew that at that moment they understood each other perfectly, and that when he told her what he was going to do now, she would not say, “Be careful,” or “Don’t do it,” but accept his decision, because she would not have expected

highest mortality rate of any in the hospital. And why not? Clay thought morosely. We’re the worst off. The ones with the gravest of injuries. With Ruth deciding who she wanted to kill. When Clay awoke on a Sunday morning, he had a new neighbor on E Ward. The man was old. Older than any man Clay could remember seeing. For several minutes, Clay stared at him. The man had a beard, snow white for the most part, although it looked as though chewing tobacco had stained the edges of his mustachios. His hair was equally as white, and nearly as long. The pale locks framed a face seemingly crafted from thin paper-mache. Each cheekbone was highlighted, the eyes sunk deep in their sockets. Thick, wiry eyebrows, accentuated the valleys and grooves

Make up your mind that everything you speak will be the truth. Not one single white lie. It’s addicting, this freedom that you’ll feel. The feeling you’ve released a burden, that’s weighed heavy, and periodically held you down your whole life.

white! Total overload! The hangar sounds