War Of The Buttons Quotes

I didn't mean to push your psycho button.

I guess that’s the problem when you really get to know someone. You learn all their triggers and emotional buttons, and unfortunately, in times of war, you press them.

A real man doesn’t lie about how he feels. He tells the world he loves someone and dares his enemies to hurt the woman he adores. A brave man has holes in his armor but goes to war anyway. A fierce man isn’t afraid to love someone even though he knows there’s an ending down the road. That’s what it means to be a real man.

In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on and uninhabited planet.

Attention, Sector 45,” I say, the words rough and loud and mottled in my ear. “The supreme commander of The Reestablishment is dead. The capital has surrendered. The war is over.” I’m shaking so hard now, my finger slipping on the button as I try to hold it down. “I repeat, the supreme commander of The Reestablishment is dead. The capital has surrendered. The war is over.

Now we're in the middle of a three-sided vampire war. Which would be an awesome video game, but I'm really not interested in playing for real. I like my reset buttons.

Mother, whose heart hung humble as a button the bright splendid shroud of your son, Do not weep. War is kind.

If we were given one word of information in our entire history, how we'd treasure it! how we'd pore over ever syllable, divining it's meaning, arguing its importance; how we'd examine it and wring every lesson we could from it. Yet today we have trillions of words, tidal waves of information and the smallest detail of every action our government and businesses take is easily available to us at the touch of a button. And yet...we ignore it, and learn nothing from it. One day we'll die of voluntary ignorance

So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.

US government button specifications run to twenty-two pages. This fact on its own yields a sense of what it is like to design garments for the Army.

If we can use an H-bomb--and as you said it's no checker game; it's real, it's war and nobody is fooling around--isn't it sort of ridiculous to go crawling around in the weeds, throwing knives and maybe getting yourself killed . . . and even losing the war . . . when you've got a real weapon you can use to win? What's the point in a whole lot of men risking their lives with obsolete weapons when one professor type can do so much more just by pushing a button?' Zim didn't answer at once, which wasn't like him at all. Then he said softly, 'Are you happy in the Infantry, Hendrick? You can resign, you know.' Hendrick muttered something; Zim said, 'Speak up!' I'm not itching to resign, sir. I'm going to sweat out my term.' I see. Well, the question you asked is one that a sergeant isn't really qualified to answer . . . and one that you shouldn't ask me. You're supposed to know the answer before you join up. Or you should. Did your school have a course in History and Moral Philosophy?' What? Sure--yes, sir.' Then you've heard the answer. But I'll give you my own--unofficial--views on it. If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cuts its head off?' Why . . . no, sir!' Of course not. You'd paddle it. There can be circumstances when it's just as foolish to hit an enemy with an H-Bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an ax. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing . . . but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how--or why--he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people--"older and wiser heads," as they say--supply the control. Which is as it should be. That's the best answer I can give you. If it doesn't satisfy you, I'll get you a chit to go talk to the regimental commander. If he can't convince you--then go home and be a civilian! Because in that case you will certainly never make a soldier.

I saw a banner hanging next to city hall in downtown Philadelphia that read, "Kill them all, and let God sort them out." A bumper sticker read, "God will judge evildoers; we just have to get them to him." I saw a T-shirt on a soldier that said, "US Air Force... we don't die; we just go to hell to regroup." Others were less dramatic- red, white, and blue billboards saying, "God bless our troops." "God Bless America" became a marketing strategy. One store hung an ad in their window that said, "God bless America--$1 burgers." Patriotism was everywhere, including in our altars and church buildings. In the aftermath of September 11th, most Christian bookstores had a section with books on the event, calendars, devotionals, buttons, all decorated in the colors of America, draped in stars and stripes, and sprinkled with golden eagles. This burst of nationalism reveals the deep longing we all have for community, a natural thirst for intimacy... September 11th shattered the self-sufficient, autonomous individual, and we saw a country of broken fragile people who longed for community- for people to cry with, be angry with, to suffer with. People did not want to be alone in their sorrow, rage, and fear. But what happened after September 11th broke my heart. Conservative Christians rallies around the drums of war. Liberal Christian took to the streets. The cross was smothered by the flag and trampled under the feet of angry protesters. The church community was lost, so the many hungry seekers found community in the civic religion of American patriotism. People were hurting and crying out for healing, for salvation in the best sense of the word, as in the salve with which you dress a wound. A people longing for a savior placed their faith in the fragile hands of human logic and military strength, which have always let us down. They have always fallen short of the glory of God. ...The tragedy of the church's reaction to September 11th is not that we rallied around the families in New York and D.C. but that our love simply reflected the borders and allegiances of the world. We mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each Iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We got farther and farther from Jesus' vision, which extends beyond our rational love and the boundaries we have established. There is no doubt that we must mourn those lives on September 11th. We must mourn the lives of the soldiers. But with the same passion and outrage, we must mourn the lives of every Iraqi who is lost. They are just as precious, no more, no less. In our rebirth, every life lost in Iraq is just as tragic as a life lost in New York or D.C. And the lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like six September 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.

In nuclear war, except for the evil forces, no one is a winner. Science and humanity become the villains. Everyone knows that, but the gamblers want to play their cards. Beware of the nuclear gamblers.

That night a bomb exploded in the Corleone Family mall in Long Beach, thrown from a car that pulled up to the chain, then roared away. That night also two button men of the Corleone Family were killed as they peaceably ate their dinner in a small Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. The Five Families War of 1946 had begun.

Whether it is an accident, terrorism or irresponsible push of a nuke button, we all know, the result is devastating. How to prevent nuclear explosions on earth? This is the most crucial political, moral, social, technical and spiritual question of our time.

In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.

They program you to have no emotion – like if somebody sitting next to you gets killed you just have to carry on doing your job and shut up,‘ Steve Annabell, a British veteran of the Falkan War … ‘When you leave the service, when you come back from a situation like that, there’s no button they can press to switch your emotions back on. So you walk around like a zombie. They don’t deprogram you. If you become a problem they just sweep you under the carpet.

He turned up the car radio and punched buttons until he found something loud and thumpingly exultant, some piece of jolly stupidity from AC/DC.

When you complain and your mind starts groping for the eject button, you are not bringing your best self to the task, which means you are actually prolonging the pain.

Rumors are like clouds. Sometimes they bring rain. Sometimes they don't. But there are always clouds.

I stared at the paper. I said, “This isn’t reading. This is drawing.” “Writing,” she corrected. “It’s like buttons and hems. You’ve got to learn those before you can sew on the machine. You’ve got to know your letters before you can read.” I supposed so, but it was boring. When I said so she got up again and wrote something along the bottom of the paper. “What’s that?” I asked. “‘Ada is a curmudgeon,’” she replied. “Ada is a curmudgeon,” I copied at the end of my alphabet. It pleased me. After

The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.

Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn. The trouble with learning the backgrounds is that you end up wanting to deck somebody, possibly Bettina Cook and the horse she rode in on. (Not happening. Her dad being head of the football boosters and major donor.) Once upon a time we had our honest living that was God and country. Then the world turns and there’s no God anymore, no country, but it’s still in your blood that coal is God’s gift and you want to believe. Because otherwise it was one more scam in the fuck-train that’s railroaded over these mountains since George Washington rode in and set his crew to cutting down our trees. Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There’s no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.

Unfortunately, however, weapons of mass destruction tend to attract maniacs: men - it's almost always men - who want to jab the red button and yell "Take that, you heathen infidel bastards!" and sit in their revolving chairs in underground lead-lined bunkers or caves, watching on their monitors World War III or the Final Jihad or whatever.

In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet. Book One THE RISE OF ADOLF HITLER

We were trained in the army for ten weeks and in this time more profoundly influenced than by ten years at school. We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer. At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognised that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill. We became soldiers with eagerness and enthusiasm, but they have done everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided postman should have more authority over us than had formerly our parents, our teachers, and the whole gamut of culture from Plato to Goethe.

Holden considered ordering her to button up her helmet, then shrugged. She was old enough to decide for herself the relative risks and rewards of eating during a battle.

Careers increasingly come with a reboot button, and companies that realize this early possess a competitive talent advantage

Also reporters kept asking Ferraro if a woman could be “tough enough” to “push the button,” meaning declare a war, though they didn’t ask male candidates if they could be wise enough not to.

It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you’ve killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it’s ordinary murder.

The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point, Resistance knows we're about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it's got.

The Government finally decided To wage the war all-out. Defeat is Un-American. And they took to the air, Their women beside them in bouffant hairdos putting nail-polish on the gunship cannon-buttons. And they never came down for they found, the ground is Pro-Communist. And dirty. And the insects side with the Viet Cong.

There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts--obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts.

I spent a few more minutes puzzling over the timeline before turning my attention to the notebook’s first page, which contained a pencil drawing of an old-school coin-operated arcade game—one I didn’t recognize. Its control panel featured a single joystick and one unlabeled white button, and its cabinet was entirely black, with no side art or other markings anywhere on it, save for the game’s strange title, which was printed in all capital green letters across its jet black marquee: POLYBIUS. Below his drawing of the game, my father had made the following notations: No copyright or manufacturer info anywhere on game cabinet. Reportedly only seen for 1–2 weeks in July 1981 at MGP. Gameplay was similar to Tempest. Vector graphics. Ten levels? Higher levels caused players to have seizures, hallucinations, and nightmares. In some cases, subject committed murder and/or suicide. “Men in Black” would download scores from the game each night. Possible early military prototype created to train gamers for war? Created by same covert op behind Bradley Trainer?

In public discourse, the challenge is not to stifle robust debate, but rather to make sure that it is real debate. The first obligation for Christians is to listen carefully to opponents and if they are not willing to do so, then Christians should simply be silent. To engage in a war of words is to engage in a symbolic violence that is fundamentally at odds with the gospel. And too often, on such hot button issues as poverty, abortion, race relations, and homosexuality, the poor, children, minorities, and gays are used as weapons in ideological warfare. This too is an expression of instrumentalization.16

Some make bombs for domination, Some make bombs for survival. Either way someone pushes a button, Innocents wind up dead as collateral.

Would you let a madman push your button.

Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon. In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.

When you’re climbing a mountain or involved in any other difficult task, the only way to free yourself from the struggle is to finish it. So why bitch about it when it gets hard? Why hope it will end soon when you know it will end eventually? When you complain and your mind starts groping for the eject button, you are not bringing your best self to the task, which means you are actually prolonging the pain.

He could feel the Great Iron War coming to an end now, but he no longer had his finger on the button. The curtains of the world were about to close, and the play of life would soon be over. There would be no applause.

In effect, terrorists now have the power to ignite war. They almost have their finger on the nuclear button. They almost have the status of heads of state. And that has enhanced the effectiveness and romance of terrorism. The US government's response to September 11 has actually privileged terrorism. It has given it a huge impetus, and made it look like terrorism is the only effective way to be heard. Over the years, every kind of nonviolent resistance movement has been crushed, ignored, kicked aside. But if you're a terrorist, you have a great chance of being negotiated with, of being on TV, of getting all the attention you couldn't have dreamt of earlier.

We got lots of secrets, Will. You Apollo guys can't have all the fun. Our campers have been excavating the tunnel system under Cabin Nine for almost a century. We still haven't found the end. Anyway, Leo, if you don't mind sleeping in a dead man's bed, it's yours-Jake Suddenly Leo didn't feel like kicking back. He sat up, careful not to touch any of the buttons. The counselor who died-this was his bed-Leo Yeah. Charles Beckendorf-Jake Leo imagined saw blades coming through the mattress, or maybe a grenade sewn inside the pillows. He didn't, like, die IN this bed, did he-Leo No. In the Titan War, last summer-Jake The Titan War, which has NOTHING to do with this very fine bed-Leo "The Titans," Will said, like Leo was an idiot. The big powerful guys that ruled the world before the gods. They tried to make a comeback last summer. Their leader, Kronos, built a new palace on top of Mount Tam in California. Their armies came to New York and almost destoyed Mount Olympus. A lot of demigods died trying to stop them-Will I'm guessing this wasn't on the news-Leo It seemed like a fair question, but Will shook his head in disbelief. You didn't hear about Mount St. Helens erupting, or the freak storms across the country, or that building collapsing in St Louis-Will Leo shrugged. Last summer, he'd been on the run from another foster home. Then a truancy officer caught him in New Mexico, and the court sentenced him to the nearest correction facility-the Wilderness School. Guess I was busy-Leo Doesn't matter. You were lucky to miss it. The thing is, Beckendorf was one of the first casualties, and ever since then-Jake Your cabin's been cursed-Leo

I once read that during the Civil War women of the south would soak these cloth buttons in perfume and then sew them into the collars of their men’s shirts. That way the scent was a constant reminder of their loved ones waiting for them at home.

It was Colonel Parkman who upped stakes, crossed the border, and named our town, thus perversely commemorating a battle in which he'd lost. (Though perhaps that's not so unusual: many people take a curatorial interest in their own scars.) He's shown astride his horse, waving a sword and about to gallop into the nearby petunia bed: a craggy man with seasoned eyes and pointed beard, every sculptor's idea of every cavalry leader. No one knows what Colonel Parkman really looked like, since he left no pictorial evidence of himself and the statue wasn't erected until 1885, but he looks like this now. Such is the tyranny of Art. On the left-hand side of the lawn, also with a petunia bed, is an equally mythic figure: the Weary Soldier, his three top shirt buttons undone, his neck bowed as if for the headman's axe, his uniform rumpled, his helmet askew, leaning on his malfunctioning Ross rifle. Forever young, forever exhausted, he tops the War Memorial, his skin burning green in the sun, pigeon droppings running down his face like tears.

As he catches my eye he beams at me, his dark face bright with affection. Anyone can see it who cares to look at him, he is hopelessly indiscreet. He puts his hand to his heart as if swearing fidelity to me. I look to left and right, thank God no-one is looking, they are all getting on their horses and George the duke is shouting for the guard. Recklessly, Richard stands there, his hand on his heart, looking at me as if he wants the world to know that he loves me. He loves me. I shake my head as if reproving him, and I look down at my hands on the reins. I look up again and he is still fixing his gaze on me, his hand still on his heart. I know I should look away, I know I should pretend to feel nothing but disdain – this is how the ladies in the troubadour poems behave. But I am a girl, and I am lonely and alone, and this is a handsome young man who has asked how he may serve me and now stands before me with his hand on his heart and his eyes laughing at me. One of the guard stumbled while mounting his horse and his horse shied, knocking the nearby horseman. Everyone is looking that way, and the king puts his arm around his wife. I snatch off my glove and, in one swift gesture, I throw it towards Richard. He catches it out of the air and tucks it in the breast of his jacket. Nobody has seen it. Nobody knows. The guardsman steadies his horse, mounts it, nods his apology to his captain, and the royal family turn and wave to us. Richard looks at me, buttoning the front of his jacket, and smiles at me warmly, assuredly. He has my glove, my favour.

The torpedo launch console has big square plastic buttons—Flood Tube, Open Shuttle, Ready to Fire—that flash red or green, like something Q would have built into James Bond’s Aston Martin. The missile compartment has similarly retro-looking panels of buttons. They provided the setup for one of the more quotable things Murray said to me—a line that, were fewer precautions in place, could have joined “Houston, we’ve had a problem” or “Watch this” in the pantheon of understated taglines for calamity: “I wouldn’t lean on that.

George W. Bush spoke to the camera, his face so decisively earnest that it was clear he was lying, his button eyes lit up with amateurish subterfuge. Only truly great men can be adept at shameless lying, Joshua thought. This dude was straining to the point of snapping.

The man went to the controls, looking up at me, flaring his nostrils to my actions. His voice was like a voice under water. “We’ll see what becomes of your rebellious nature when you lose your memories, Rei Lin.” He punched a few buttons and turned the knob on the wall to the right.

The one thought Conan had on the spot about the half hour at 11:35 was that it would likely exacerbate the problem he already had with Leno. 'So at least now, Jay does his show, but there's the break of the news, and that's kind of the reset button,' Conan said to Gaspin and Graboff. 'At 11:35 Jay's going to come out and do twenty jokes. And then what's he going to do?' When they replied that it seemed likely he would have only one guest, Conan said, 'OK. And then I come out and do what?' The NBC guys didn't really have an answer for that other than what Conan had already been doing: his own monologue. That this now seemed like a late-night pileup - three shows with monologues lined up end to end - was the implication no one had really addressed. Finally Conan did have something he really wanted to say, something that had almost burned a hole in his chest. 'What does Jay have on you?' Conan asked, his voice still low, his tone still even. 'What does this guy have on you people? What the hell is it about Jay?

Once upon a time," said the Kiritsugu, "there were people who dropped a U-235 fission bomb, on a place called Hiroshima. They killed perhaps seventy thousand people, and ended a war. And if the good and decent officer who pressed that button had needed to walk up to a man, a woman, a child, and slit their throats one at a time, he would have broken long before he killed seventy thousand people." Someone made a choking noise, as if trying to cough out something that had suddenly lodged deep in their throat. "But pressing a button is different," the Kiritsugu said. "You don't see the results, then. Stabbing someone with a knife has an impact on you. The first time, anyway. Shooting someone with a gun is easier. Being a few meters further away makes a surprising difference. Only needing to pull a trigger changes it a lot. As for pressing a button on a spaceship - that's the easiest of all. Then the part about 'fifteen billion' just gets flushed away. And more importantly - you think it was the right thing to do. The noble, the moral, the honorable thing to do. For the safety of your tribe. You're proud of it -

It was this philosophy that had Harvey taking the hovercraft Sagan had stolen, mounting it, and, after a few moments to glean the fundamentals of navigating it, rocketing on it toward the door of the Obin mess hall. As Harvey approached, the door to the mess hall opened inward; some Obin heading to duty after dinner. Harvey grinned a mad grin, gunned the hovercraft, and then braked it just enough (he hoped) to jam that fucking alien right back into the room. It worked perfectly. The Obin had enough time for a surprised squawk before the hovercraft’s gun struck it square in the chest, punching backward like it was a toy on a string, hurling down nearly the entire length of the hall. The other Obin in the room looked up while Harvey’s victim pinwheeled to the ground, then turned their multiple eyes toward the doorway, Harvey, and the hovercraft with its big gun poking right into the room. “Hello, boys!” Harvey said in a big, booming voice. “The 2nd Platoon sends its regards!” And with that, he jammed down the “fire” button on the gun and set to work. Things got messy real fast after that. It was just fucking beautiful. Harvey loved his job.

Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors. Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. - Amir War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.

With a Western Kansas contingent was another musician, seemingly from a small town. He carried a mandolin. He wore a green hat and green clothes which had pearl buttons on them wherever they could be put — cuffs, lapels, pocket flaps. In his tie was a small gold vanity pin which looked as if a fluffy-haired 16-year-old girl in a white dress had placed it there the night before the lad had started away for the wars.

You will never be able to push a button and kill people. You will not avoid the horrors. War must be so terrible that people will do almost anything to avoid it. It must be the last resort and in this case, it is, but that decision can only be made by the ones with the most to lose, not someone sitting safely in an underground facility, watching it on the monitors." Free Trader 4 - Battle for the Amazon, by Craig Martelle

The Clone Wars were yet another thing to be upset about. Everything about that conflict had been a lie. The Separatists had been this big enemy, and yet when the Empire was declared they’d melted away as if at the push of a button. The big corporations had staged the whole thing, Skelly was sure. Wars sold more ships, more weapons, and more medical devices. And in the Clone Wars, even the soldiers on both sides were manufactured goods.

And now we realize what is expected—the Americans want to exchange. It is apparent that they have not long been in the war; they are still collecting souvenirs, shoulder straps, badges, belt buckles, decorations, uniform buttons. In exchange we stock ourselves with soap, cigarettes, chocolate and tinned meat. They even want us to take a handful of money for our dog—but we draw the line there; let them offer what they will, the dog stays with us.

I’ve known men who fought in wars to liberate the Jews from Hitler. I’ve known men who sewed their own buttons on their clothes. I’ve known men who talked with a lisp and wore paisley shirts, and men who could chop down trees, and run heavy equipment. Other men were more comfortable in a suit and tie, with soft hands, and a penchant for math, or words. Some men are adventurers, others prefer comic books. Masculinity has never just been one thing.

But isn't it clear that bliss and envy are the numerator and denominator of that fraction known as happiness? And what sense would there be in all the numberless victims of the 200 Years War if there still remained in our life some cause for envy? But some cause did remain, because noses remained, the button noses and classical noses mentioned in that conversation on our walk, and because there are some whose love many people want, and others whose love nobody wants.

We got lots of secrets, Will. You Apollo guys can't have all the fun. Our campers have been excavating the tunnel system under Cabin Nine for almost a century. We still haven't found the end. Anyway, Leo, if you don't mind sleeping in a dead man's bed, it's yours-Jake Suddenly Leo didn't feel like kicking back. He sat u, careful not to touch any of the buttons. The counselor who died-this was his bed-Leo Yeah. Charles Beckendorf-Jake Leo imagined saw blades coming through the mattress, or maybe a grenade sewn inside the pillows. He didn't, like, die IN this bed, did he-Leo No. In the Titan War, last summer-Jake The Titan War, which has NOTHING to do with this very fine bed-Leo "The Titans," Will said, like Leo was an idiot. The big powerful guys that ruled the world before the gods. They tried to make a comeback last summer. Their leader, Kronos, built a new palace on top of Mount Tam in California. Their armies came to New York and almost destoyed Mount Olympus. A lot of demigods died trying to stop them-Will I'm guessing this wasn't on the news-Leo It seemed like a fair question, but Will shook his head in disbelief. You didn't hear about Mount St. Helens erupting, or the freak storms across the country, or that building collapsing in St Louis-Will Leo shrugged. Last summer, he'd been on the run from another foster home. Then a truancy officer caught him in New Mexico, and the court sentenced him to the nearest correction facility-the Wilderness School. Guess I was busy-Leo Doesn't matter. You were lucky to miss it. The thing is, Beckendorf was one of the first casualties, and ever since then-Jake Your cabin's been cursed-Leo

The poor starve. The rich ask, Why are you hungry? If you were just like me, you wouldn't be hungry. They have their portraits done. Let history remember the rich. Let their houses stand. The castles to visit. The videos of celebrities giving tours of their multimillion-dollar homes for Architectural Digest while wearing pins in honor of war-torn countries that are really to say, I would give none of this up for them. Wait. Wait. Wait to see which pale man has the most eager fingers. Who presses the button first? Who presses it next, in retaliation? Boom! Nuclear annihilation!

Once I made weapons carved from stone, I tied the weight to a wooden handle, a club to break the bones of my enemy. Then I became wiser... and sharpened the stone to a point and then fastened it to a stick; my arrow. I bent wood and hitched string to it; my bow. I kill my enemy with skill Then I became wiser... and made weapons forged from steel and took care to sharpen the blade of my sword. I kill my enemy with a stroke. Then I became wiser... and made the rifle that would, by exploding gunpowder, shoot balls of lead faster than the eye could see. I kill my enemy with but the pull of a trigger. Then I became wiser... and I built flying machine that could transport bombs to drop over the homes of my enemy. I kill my enemy from the sky. Then I became wiser... and created the drone, now I can guide a plane by remote control from one country and kill my enemy in another. I am a proficient killer Then I became wiser...  and I found a way to split the atom and found the power of God hidden within. I kill the ground, scorch the sky, pollute the wind and kill my enemy with the push of a button. Then I became wiser... And I found that there is nothing more foolish than a "Wise Man of War

There,” she said, smiling, her eyes soft and warm. “It’s perfect. Ada. You’re beautiful.” She was lying. She was lying, and I couldn’t bear it. I heard Mam’s voice shrieking in my head. “You ugly piece of rubbish! Filth and trash! No one wants you, with that ugly foot!” My hands started to shake. Rubbish. Filth. Trash. I could wear Maggie’s discards, or plain clothes from the shops, but not this, not this beautiful dress. I could listen to Susan say she never wanted children all day long. I couldn’t bear to hear her call me beautiful. “What’s the matter?” Susan asked, perplexed. “It’s a Christmas present. I made it for you. Bottle green velvet, just like I said.” Bottle green velvet. “I can’t wear this,” I said. I pulled at the bodice, fumbling for the buttons. “I can’t wear it. I can’t.” “Ada.” Susan grabbed my hands. She pulled me to the sofa and set me down hard beside her, still restraining me. “Ada. What would you say to Jamie, if I gave him something nice and he said he couldn’t have it? Think. What would you say?” Tears were running down my face now. I started to panic. I fought Susan’s grasp. “I’m not Jamie!” I said. “I’m different, I’ve got the ugly foot, I’m—” My throat closed over the word rubbish.

I’m not entirely sure what these are all for but I think the top one that looks like a stick figure is to notify people that you’ve found the Blair Witch, and I think the next one means “Poop won’t go down. Use your foot.” I assume the orange button on the far left is for starting a war, and then there are two for washing your boobs for some reason, and then one about levitating on a fountain, and I think the last one is for ordering bacon? Frankly, I was too afraid to try out all of the buttons because just sitting on it triggered something that made it break out into song. It was unsettling. Like, a pooping lullaby.

It was the old colonial policy of divide and rule. This was his conclusion. He believed that it all began with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and that since then the British had been encouraging hatred and enmity between the two sides. He wrote that ever since the Jews were granted the Balfour Declaration the colonizer has been active in fostering the spirit of enmity and hatred between Jews and Arabs and in creating obstacles in the way of any resolution whether by war or peace. Woe unto whoever is inspired to work on any of the complicated issues. If he should dare to exhibit any initiative he is considered a dangerous suspect and his name is added to the list of enemies. The colonizer then presses the button which signals his barking dogs to attack the man and destroy him.

I thought about putting some tobacco dip in his casket. It had been a big part of his life. But since he’d decided to give up dipping a few weeks before…tobacco was out. There was a part of me that wanted the mortician to arrange his fingers so he was flipping people the bird. Chris would have loved that. And many of the people who knew him would have roared at the joke--it was very Chris, a last practical joke. But I’m sure some of the older family members wouldn’t have seen the humor. Discretion won out. Still, I couldn’t send him off without some sort of off-color humor. Profanity and pranking were just too Chris to be ignored. So I went into this closet and found a gag T-shirt, the one that read, DO I LOOK LIKE A @#$#$!@ PEOPLE PERSON? He wore that to his grave under his plaid button-down shirt, a silent last guffaw.

Blood and Roses was a trading game, along the lines of Monopoly. The Blood side played with human atrocities for the counters, atrocities on a large scale: individual rapes and murders didn’t count, there had to have been a large number of people wiped out. Massacres, genocides, that sort of thing. The Roses side played with human achievements. Artworks, scientific breakthroughs, stellar works of architecture, helpful inventions. Monuments to the soul’s magnificence, they were called in the game. There were sidebar buttons, so that if you didn’t know what Crime and Punishment was, or the Theory of Relativity, or the Trail of Tears, or Madame Bovary, or the Hundred Years’ War, or The Flight into Egypt, you could double-click and get an illustrated rundown, in two choices: R for children, PON for Profanity, Obscenity, and Nudity. That was the thing about history, said Crake: it had lots of all three. You

BACKYARD GARDEN SALAD In wartime, patriotic families cultivated “Victory Gardens” to promote self-sufficiency and help the war effort. 4 cups mixed greens 1/4 cup fresh sprigs of dill 1/4 cup fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves 4 large basil leaves, rolled up and thinly sliced crosswise 1 large lemon, halved 1/4 cup fruity olive oil pinch of salt fresh ground black pepper to taste 1 cup toasted walnuts 3/4 cup crumbled feta cheese 1 cup fresh edible flowers; choose from bachelor’s buttons, borage, calendulas, carnations, herb flowers (basil, chives, rosemary, thyme), nasturtiums, violas, including pansies and Johnny-jump-ups, stock Toss salad greens and herbs in a large bowl. Squeeze lemon juice (without the seeds) over the greens and season with olive oil, salt and pepper. Toss again. Add walnuts and feta and toss well. Divide salad and pansies among four serving plates and serve. (Source: Adapted from California Bountiful)

Saturday and Sunday nights the long gray car would be parked among Fords and Chevrolets, as if it had littered or spawned on the gravel quay beside the club. Inside, the five-man Negro band pumped jazz—Button Up Your Overcoat and I’ll Get By and That’s My Weakness Now, interspersed with numbers that had been living before and would be living after: San and Tiger Rag and High Society—while the planters and bankers, the doctors and lawyers, the cotton men and merchants made a show of accompanying each other’s wives through the intricacies of the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Barney Google, or else backed off and watched one of the women take a solo break, improvising, bobbing and weaving, wetting her thumbs and rolling her eyes, ritualistic, clinging desperately to the tail end of the jazz age—so desperately, so frantically indeed, that a person looking back upon that time might almost believe they had foreseen the depression and Roosevelt and another war and were dancing thus, Cassandra-like, in a frenzy of despair. Jeff

Oh ho, the private eyeball! Poor, prosaic, wretched eyeball. Alas, alack, woe and whoa! Harder and faster they chain him to the stone of stereotype—more and more he cannot earn his daily bread without conforming to the curious standards so stringently set out for him. Once upon a time he had to talk from out of the side of stiff-lipped mouth in accents clipped and surly, and there was the bleak but sheer necessity of constant sexual acrobatics with each and every lady who entered within earshot of the case, no matter how casually. And if by chance the case were not a “caper,” it was no damned case at all. There was the day he had to punch all people in the belly with the natural follow-through of one perfect, accurate, and final punch to the chin (for some reason called the button, as you may recall), but that was before the advent of judo. After judo (after World War II, that is), our hero merely had to straighten his palm and smite the nape of his vis-à-vis, who would immediately fall prone or supine but obligingly comatose.

I didn’t want a fancy engagement ring or a gaudy wedding band; for me, a plain wedding ring was a perfect symbol. I like simple, especially in a wedding ring: it reminds you that love is about love, nothing else--not money, not appearances, not showing off. But it seemed almost impossible to convince anyone of that. Including Chris. He kept asking me what I wanted, and wouldn’t take “simple” for an answer. Then my mother got into the act. My grandmother had left her a diamond from a ring that she had had. Mom suggested that I use it as the centerpiece of an engagement ring. I told her thanks, but no thanks. “I don’t care whether you wear it as an engagement ring or a belly button ring,” she insisted after we went around a bit. “But I’m sending it.” She did. It was lovely. Chris and I ended up taking it to a local jewelry store. We found a wonderful setting we both loved and had the jeweler set the diamond in it. We got our wedding rings the same day, adding an engraving on the inside. “All of me,” Chris wrote on mine. “My love, my life,” I said on his.

In the nineteen sixties and early seventies students wore buttons and headbands demanding equal rights for women, blacks, Native Americans and all oppressed minorities, an end to the war in Vietnam, the salvation of the rain forests and the planet in general. [...] College students boycotted class, taught in, rioted everywhere, dodged the draft, fled to Canada or Scandinavia. High school students came to school fresh from images of war on television news, men blown to bits in rice paddies, helicopters hovering, tentative soldiers of the Viet Cong blasted out of their tunnels, their hands behind their heads, lucky for the moment they weren’t blasted back in again, images of anger back home, marches, demonstrations, hell no we won’t go, sit-ins, teachins, students falling before the guns of the National Guard, blacks recoiling from Bull Connor’s dogs, burn baby burn, black is beautiful, trust no one over thirty, I have a dream and, at the end of it all, your President is not a crook. [...]Mechanics and plumbers had to fight while college students shook indignant fists, fornicated in the fields of Woodstock and sat in.

I press buttons with letters on them, just as my tongue presses the palate of my mouth as my diaphragm rises and I have told you something by the sound of my voice, I tell you something now, and you hear me, as we both engage with a device rooted in external reality- a computer screen, or the fluorescent face of a silicon phone- and you cannot tell me that Mind and this device through which we Know the things and engage with things and express things of the nature which the Mind is crafted by and through- are separate. Tell me you are not already integrated with this device you hold in your hands. Now this- this nexus- will be the stage where the battles of yore, which were fought upon dirt and in the sand and in lush, wild forests with sticks and spears and gunpowder, will now meet and address each other by name, and where they will wreak change with their fury as war is waged for territory of a different kind. And because of this, congratulations- you will be the stage, you will be the weapon, you will stand in the crossfire of wars that are not your own, as men always have through history and time, and “war” will be a different kind of thing. And, staying true to another law of humankind, like bronze, like iron, like steel, the same things that forge our tools will also craft our weapons.

It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

The evening was a string of miserable minutes strung together in tiny clusters. Three minutes for a man shot through the shoulder; Ellis put first a finger in the entry wound and then another in the exit and when his fingers touched, he decided the man was only lightly injured and didn’t need a surgeon. Three minutes to set a broken wrist and splint it with a strip of cowhide and a piece of wood from a sycamore tree. Two minutes to tourniquet a leg, then extract a piece of wire deep in the meat of it. A minute to peek under a pink, saturated bandage several inches below a slender belly button; he saw thin, red water leaking from a hole and smelled urine, knew the ball had breached the bladder. It would either heal or it wouldn’t, but nothing to do about it so he set the soul aside, a case not to be operated upon. He turned a man’s head looking for the source of a trickle of blood and had ten terrible minutes trying to stop torrential bleeding from under his clavicle; frantic moments during which he could get neither a finger nor a clamp around the pulsating source. All bleeding stops eventually though, and the case did not violate the rule. He took two minutes to settle his own breathing, then four minutes sewing a torn scalp, and half a minute saying a prayer over a fat, cigar-shaped dead man. After awhile, he had the impression he wasn’t seeing men, but parts—an exploded chest, a blood swolled thigh, a busted jaw with its teeth spat to the wind or swallowed. It was more than a man could take and a lot less than there was to be seen.

But what should he wear? I thought about having him laid to rest in his uniform. But the truth is he hated wearing it. He really needed to be dressed in something he was comfortable in. And that wasn’t going to be in a suit, either: he hated being in a jacket and tie even more than in a uniform. Tie? Ha! I got a pair of his best pressed jeans. They had a nice crease in the pants leg, just like he liked. I found one of his plaid button-down shirts, another favorite. Kryptek, which produces tactical gear and apparel and was one of Chris’s favorite companies, had presented him with a big silver belt buckle that he loved. It was very cowboy, and in that way very much who Chris was. “You think I can pull this off?” he’d asked, showing me how it looked right after he got it. “Hell, yeah,” I told him. I made sure that was with him as well. But if there was any item of clothing that really touched deep into Chris’s soul, it was his cowboy boots. They were a reminder of who he was when he was young, and they were part of who he’d been since getting out of the military. He had a really nice pair of new boots that had been custom made. He hadn’t had a chance to wear them much, and I couldn’t decide whether to bury him in those or another pair that were well worn and very comfortable. I asked the funeral director for his opinion. “We usually don’t do shoes,” he said. It can be very difficult to get them onto the body. “But if it’s important to you, we can do it.” I thought about it. Was the idea of burying them with Chris irrational? The symbolism seemed important. But that could work the other way, too--they would surely be important to Bubba someday. Maybe I should save them for him. In the end, I decided to set them near Chris’s casket when his body was on view, then collect them later for our son. But Chris had the last word. Through a miscommunication--or maybe something else--they were put in the casket when he was laid to rest. So obviously that was the way it should have been.

As the rhetoric and power structures of old dissolve, from monarchy to capitalism to the space between a vocalized phrase and its indefinable mental inclination, this urge becomes heightened. And eventually, this conflict absorbs and finds its home within that foundation from whence it is borne, and from where its impact will fractal into every other component of power and being; the place where this dysphoria and this exchange occurs, now that we have unloosed the stop from our pressured throats, of the place it occurs, of the place it will be fought, of the place where it matters most- the mind. Because Mind as we know it and matter itself are no longer so perceptually separate. You are reading these words right now, but how? The voice is no longer an element confined in expression to the physical body. I press buttons with letters on them, just as my tongue presses the palate of my mouth as my diaphragm rises and I have told you something by the sound of my voice, I tell you something now, and you hear me, as we both engage with a device rooted in external reality- a computer screen, or the fluorescent face of a silicon phone- and you cannot tell me that Mind and this device through which we Know the things and engage with things and express things of the nature which the Mind is crafted by and through- are separate. Tell me you are not already integrated with this device you hold in your hands. Now this- this nexus- will be the stage where the battles of yore, which were fought upon dirt and in the sand and in lush, wild forests with sticks and spears and gunpowder, will now meet and address each other by name, and where they will wreak change with their fury as war is waged for territory of a different kind. And because of this, congratulations- you will be the stage, you will be the weapon, you will stand in the crossfire of wars that are not your own, as men always have through history and time, and “war” will be a different kind of thing. And, staying true to another law of humankind, like bronze, like iron, like steel, the same things that forge our tools will also craft our weapons. We don’t need nukes. We have the internet.

At this most crucial time in the course of evolution we are all faced with the appalling fact that we may, at any moment, destroy our precious material lives and our wonderful little earth through advanced technological means. With the advance of civilization has developed the ghastly power to destroy all of humanity at the push of a button. We are now on the verge of destroying ourselves utterly from the face of the earth! We have become mere slaves to subhuman types of destructive thinking and action! We are out of control in every direction! More than any other time on earth we are all faced with the potential dangers of political anarchy and ruin, and we are all exposed to the terrific possibility of a Third World War, more hideous than any other war in the history of our planet. What we do at this most crucial time will determine the destinies of humanity for many generations, even centuries, to come.

Sometimes when I observe contemporary U.S. culture, with its hard fronts and nasty culture wars, I have a strange sense that I’ve seen something like it before—in the Communist and semitotalitarian state in which I grew up. The issues and positions are very different, but the spirit is strangely familiar. In all public discussion, there was a party line that people had to toe; if you diverged, you were deemed disloyal and suspected of betraying the cause. I sense a similar spirit today among both progressives and conservatives in the United States when it comes to many hot-button issues, including Islam.

The world can seem very chaotic these days. Humankind is constantly changing, and evolving. Advances in science have made it possible to travel thousands of miles in a matter of hours. We can keep in touch with people we care about and even with the world at large with the push of a button. Many of the diseases that plagued humankind for centuries have been wiped out. Yet there is still poverty. There is still famine. There is still disease. There is still war. There is still injustice.

What was it with women and pushing men’s buttons? I get that a woman wants to look attractive. News flash: you already do. We see it. But apparently to women, owning their own beauty isn’t enough. They arm all the weapons in their arsenal to gain the attention of every Y chromosome within a ten-mile radius. Why do they go to all the trouble? Validation. Meanwhile, biology dictates survival of the fittest; battles ensue, wars are fought, and somewhere amid all the carnage, a victor emerges to claim his female. All because said female just wanted to go out and feel pretty that night.

Three billion of the people on the planet – approximately half – are destitute. They live in shocking poverty. There are 10 million children dying of easily preventable causes every year - things like starvation, thirst, cholera. Billions of people lack any form of health care. Billions of people lack access to basics like clean water, adequate food and safe housing. Environmentally, we are raping the planet in hundreds of ways. A mass extinction event is looming on the horizon, yet we appear unmotivated to do anything at all to prevent it. Humans are constantly at war, constantly killing one another somewhere in the world. Crime seems rampant. In the United states, over two million citizens are incarcerated. We have thousands of nuclear warheads, enough to kill all of humanity many times over, all loaded into rockets that we can launch at a moment's notice simply by pushing a few buttons. We have spent trillions of dollars building and stockpiling conventional weapons designed to kill fellow humans in a thousand different ways. We can shoot them, bomb them, grenade them, poison them, burn them, etc. Humans often seem intent on bringing misery to other humans: terrorism, dictatorships, warlords, slavery, torture, unjust imprisonment, sweatshops, corruption, murder, mayhem, crime, etc. can be found all over the planet. The concentration of wealth is extreme and seems unstoppable, so a very small percentage of the planet's population owns half of the planet's wealth, while billions of others have nothing. In many cases and at many different levels we seem unable to control ourselves or to stop ourselves even when we know we are wrong.

These times of war and ruin will pass, and by love, you will be renewed and all terrible things shall be undone. Do you hear me, Fin Button?” Jeannot pushed the hair from her face and though shaking yet, Fin nodded. “In the name of God I drew you from the water, and in his name shall you be delivered home.

Where is he?” I say. I have been waiting for hours to ask that question. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was chasing Tobias through Dauntless headquarters. No matter how fast I ran he was always just far enough ahead of me that I watched him disappear around corners, catching sight of a sleeve or the heel of a shoe. Jeanine gives me a puzzled look. But she is not puzzled. She is playing with me. “Tobias,” I say anyway. My hands shake, but not from fear this time--from anger. “Where is he? What are you doing to him?” “I see no reason to provide that information,” says Jeanine. “And since you are all out of leverage, I see no way for you to give me a reason, unless you would like to change the terms of our agreement.” I want to scream at her that of course, of course I would rather know about Tobias than about my Divergence, but I don’t. I can’t make hasty decisions. She will do what she intends to do to Tobias whether I know about it or not. It is more important that I fully understand what is happening to me. I breathe in through my nose, and out through my nose. I shake my hands. I sit down in the chair. “Interesting,” she says. “Aren’t you supposed to be running a faction and planning a war?” I say. “What are you doing here, running tests on a sixteen-year-old girl?” “You choose different ways of referring to yourself depending on what is convenient,” she says, leaning back in her chair. “Sometimes you insist that you are not a little girl, and sometimes you insist that you are. What I am curious to know is: How do you really view yourself? As one or the other? As both? As neither?” I make my voice flat and factual, like hers. “I see no reason to provide that information.” I hear a faint snort. Peter is covering his mouth. Jeanine glares at him, and his laughter effortlessly transforms into a coughing fit. “Mockery is childish, Beatrice,” she says. “It does not become you.” “Mockery is childish, Beatrice,” I repeat in my best imitation of her voice. “It does not become you.” “The serum,” Jeanine says, eyeing Peter. He steps forward and fumbles with a black box on the desk, taking out a syringe with a needle already attached to it. Peter starts toward me, and I hold out my hand. “Allow me,” I say. He looks at Jeanine for permission, and she says, “All right, then.” He hands me the syringe and I shove the needle into the side of my neck, pressing down on the plunger. Jeanine jabs one of the buttons with her finger, and everything goes dark.

By the end of my first year at the university (1938-39), the history of art professor organized a trip for his students to be sightseeing in Turkey, Greece and Egypt. We were supposed to study especially the Hadjia Sophia Mosque in Istanbul, the pyramids in Egypt and the many architectural sights in Greece. The trip was supposed to take place in September, 1939. I had registered for the student trip abroad, in the company of friendly colleagues. As a preparation for the boat crossings, I had a tailor make for me a rain jacket, with a woolen buttoned-in lining. We were supposed to travel by boat from Constan ta, a Black Sea port in Romania. That trip never materialized since World War II broke out on September 1, 1939. The only good that came of these preparations was the jacket, which did me great duty during the war years.

gotten a good look at her face. But they didn’t recognize her as Stark’s cohort. They must not have been big on reading blogs or watching the news. Deirdre took the camera. “Sure. Where’s the button?” He quickly showed her how to operate it, and Deirdre stepped back to get both of them in the frame. The camera had a telephoto lens. She aimed it at the top of the building, zooming in so that she could look at the skeletal upper levels, where they were preparing to moor a visiting dirigible. With such fantastic zoom, she could see that there were OPA guards in black suits waiting to receive the airship.

While, according to the Bible, human history began with an act of disobedience—Adam and Eve—while, according to Greek myth, civilization began with Prometheus’ act of disobedience, it is not unlikely that human history will be terminated by an act of obedience, by the obedience to authorities who themselves are obedient to archaic fetishes of “State sovereignty,” “national honor,” “military victory,” and who will give the orders to push the fatal buttons to those who are obedient to them and to their fetishes.

Resistance knows we’re about to beat it and it hits the panic button. It hits with everything it’s got.

While, according to the Bible, human history began with an act of disobedience—Adam and Eve—while, according to Greek myth, civilization began with Prometheus’ act of disobedience, it is not unlikely that human history will be terminated by an act of obedience, by the obedience to authorities who themselves are obedient to archaic fetishes of “State sovereignty,” “national honor,” “military victory,” and who will give the orders to push the fatal button.

When I was a new minister, I knew next to nothing about church power structures and politics. As a journalist in war zones, I’d seen terrible conflict, but that in no way prepared me for the hot button issues in a church, such as who sponsors the book sale or who gets the seminar room on Tuesday nights. Loving tolerance, I discovered, only went so far. Luckily, I met Sparlo Plessant at a ministers’ retreat and he agreed to mentor me. He taught me to be more pragmatic and strategic, to take disagreements less personally. And how to spot problems before they took hold.

The key facts—that the president can order nuclear war on his own authority, that US weapons can be used first, that US weapons are on hair-trigger alert and ready for use, that weapons are susceptible to cyberattack, and that we have hundreds of vulnerable land-based missiles—all increase the danger of catastrophe by accident.

Even when you power down your smartphone, Hyperreality never switches off. You are surrounded by it. If someone created a button to make every screen on earth go black permanently, would you press it? Would you want to bring back reality?

By the end of the cold war, the prospect of nuclear winter had clouded every corner of our pop culture and psychology - a pervasive nightmare that the human experiment might be brought to an end by two jousting sets of proud, rivalrist tacticians. Just a few sets of twitchy hands hovering over the planet's self-destruct buttons. The threat of climate change is more dramatic still, and ultimately more democratic, with responsibility shared by each of us even as we shiver in fear of it. And yet we have processed that threat only in parts, typically not concretely or explicitly, displacing certain anxieties and inventing others, choosing to ignore the bleakest features of our possible future and letting our political fatalism and technological faith blur as though we've gone cross-eyed into a remarkably familiar consumer fantasy: that someone else will fix the problem for us - at no cost. Those more panicked are often hardly less complacent, living instead through climate fatalism as though it were climate optimism. Over the last few years, as the planet's own environmental rhythms seem to grow more fatalistic, skeptics have found themselves arguing not that climate change isn't happening, since extreme weather has made that undeniable, but that it's causes are unclear. Suggesting that the changes we are seeing are the result of natural cycles rather than human activities and interventions. It is a very strange argument. If the planet is warming at a terrifying pace and on a horrifying scale it should transparently concern us more, rather than less, that the warming is beyond our control, possibly even our comprehension. That we know global warming is our doing should be a comfort, not a cause for despair, however incomprehensibly large and complicated we find the processes that have brought it into being. That we know we are, ourselves, responsible for all it's punishing effects should be empowering, and not just perversely. Global warming is after all a human invention and the flip-side of our real time guilt is that we remain in command. No matter how out of control the climate system seems; with it's roiling typhones, unprecedented famines and heat waves, refugee crises and climate conflicts; we are all it's authors and still writing. Some, like our oil companies and their political patrons are more prolific authors than others. But the burden of responsibility is too great to be shouldered by a few however comforting it is to think all that is needed is for a few villians to fall. Each of us imposes some suffering on our future selves every time we flip on a light switch, buy a plane ticket, or fail to vote. Now we all share the responsibility to write the next act.

According to opinion polls, we’re expected to believe that there’s a national consensus on the issue. It’s official now. Everybody loves the bomb. (Therefore the bomb is good.) Is it possible for a man who cannot write his own name to understand even the basic, elementary facts about the nature of nuclear weapons? Has anybody told him that nuclear war has nothing at all to do with his received notions of war? Nothing to do with honor, nothing to do with pride? Has anybody bothered to explain to him about thermal blasts, radioactive fallout, and the nuclear winter? Are there even words in his language to describe the concepts of enriched uranium, fissile material, and critical mass? Or has his language itself become obsolete? Is he trapped in a time capsule, watching the world pass him by, unable to understand or communicate with it because his language never took into account the horrors that the human race would dream up? Who the hell conducted those opinion polls? Who the hell is the prime minister to decide whose finger will be on the nuclear button that could turn everything we love—our earth, our skies, our mountains, our plains, our rivers, our cities and villages—to ash in an instant? Who the hell is he to reassure us that there will be no accidents? How does he know? Why should we trust him? What has he ever done to make us trust him? What have any of them ever done to make us trust them?

The couldn't-care-less boys, the chaps who imagined that now that the war was over there was no need for further effort, the soldiers that slopped past officers without saluting, the Very Important Persons who talked eloquent tripe with their lips and dissembled in their fatty hearts, the morons and the knaves who played for the present rather than the future, the cacklers at parties and the delighters in horses' legs, they weren't trying to try because they thought that nobody else was trying to try either. It was, of course, a contagion from which the world had always suffered, but it was much more dangerous now than in the time of Charles the Second, when boys of nineteen had not been able to destroy cathedrals by pressing buttons.

Yes,” she agreed. “This is unsurprising, as it was devised by a stuck-up bunch of prim, overly polished buttons.

The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point, Resistance knows we’re about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it’s got.

All the words in the world are made up of just twenty-six letters,” she said. “There’s a big and a little version of each.” She wrote the letters out on the paper, and named them all. Then she went through them again. Then she told me to copy them onto another piece of paper, and then she went back to her chair. I stared at the paper. I said, “This isn’t reading. This is drawing.” “Writing,” she corrected. “It’s like buttons and hems. You’ve got to learn those before you can sew on the machine. You’ve got to know your letters before you can read.” I supposed so, but it was boring. When I said so she got up again and wrote something along the bottom of the paper. “What’s that?” I asked. “‘Ada is a curmudgeon,’” she replied. “Ada is a curmudgeon,” I copied at the end of my alphabet. It pleased me.

I was often frightened, forever dirty and exhausted, but I believed in our purpose too. In time I forgot where it had arisen from—my master’s distress over Aramis’s death, the conversation on Christmas Eve, the priest’s lost brothers and the vows my master had made—and began to believe that war was necessary, important—noble even. Why else would people kill each other with such decency and skill? Why else would soldiers wear uniforms, buttons gleaming, shoes polished like shellac? Battles of course grew jagged and messy, but the lead-up, the deployment, the training, the sacred hierarchy of command was impressive. Only orchestras of musicians, I would discover, had the same admirable ability to tie many humans together in a single purpose.

This small combination of atoms, one nitrogen and two oxygens, NO2, attached at the right position, has vastly increased our ability to wage war, changed the fate of nations, and literally allowed us to move mountains.

We may think of people who lived during the Victorian era and the decades after as staid, prudish, buttoned up, and intolerant, but Lee wore her feminism—and, during World War I, her pacifism—on her sleeve. In fact, she literally used her wardrobe to show how she felt about Victorian conventions.