american-politics

The premise that America__ power and influence was rooted in its wealth was wrong to begin with. To the contrary, our strength comes from America__ magical stuff. It is something intangible, something invulnerable, something no measure of evil, no amount of violence or bloodshed can destroy.

The long-term effect of Hillary__ loss could be more beneficial to the future of America than one might think. For if Obama__ reign placed hope in the hearts of the young and instilled in them a belief that differences must be embraced then Hillary__ crushing defeat has awakened them to the harsh realities of a hopeful indifference and raised their voices in opposition of all those ideals that would not only darken their future but the future of the entire world.

My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference. What can I say to a man who asks that? All I can do is try to explain to him why he asks the question. You have looked at us for years as different from you that you may never see us really. You don__ understand because you think of us as second-class humans. We have been passive and accommodating through so many years of your insults and delays that you think the way things used to be is normal. When the good-natured, spiritual-singing boys and girls rise up against the white man and demand to be treated like he is, you are bewildered. All we want is what you want, no less and no more. (Chapter 13).

I'm not issuing some naïve plea for civility or bipartisanship here, or pretending that the opposing sides in this fight are intellectually equal. We have irreconcilable visions of the kind of country we want this to be: some of us would just like to live in Canada with better weather; others want something more like Iran with Jesus. My cruelest hope for the Tea Party is that one of their candidates wins the nomination for the presidency and they implode of their hubristic stupidity. But at least when I hear about them now, instead of reflexively picturing some braying ignoramus like Michele Bachmann, I try to remember that Matt [a friend of the Author's, ed] is out in that crowd somewhere, too. God agreed to spare Sodom if ten good men could be found within its walls (Abraham had to haggle him down from fifty). He ended up napalming those perverts anyway but the basic principle of sparing the sinner for the sake of the righteous, or the shithead for the sake of the basically okay, remains sound.

When libertarian sentiments take a populist form, it looks like this: a mix of anger, fear, anti-intellectualism, and fierce government hostility. Welcome to the Tea Party movement.

What we have here is a war__he war of matter and spirit. In the classical era, spirit was in harmony with matter. Matter used to condense spirit. What was unseen__he ghost of Hamlet__ father__as seen__n the conscience of the king. The spirit was trapped in the matter of theater. The theater made the unseen, seen. In the Romantic era, spirit overwhelms matter. The glass of champagne can__ contain the bubbles. But never in the history of humanity has spirit been at war with matter. And that is what we have today. The war of banks and religion. It__ what I wrote in Prayers of the Dawn, that in New York City, banks tower over cathedrals. Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion. When I came back to midtown a week after the attack__ mourned__ut not in a personal way__t was a cosmic mourning__omething that I could not specify because I didn__ know any of the dead. I felt grief without knowing its origin. Maybe it was the grief of being an immigrant and of not having roots. Not being able to participate in the whole affair as a family member but as a foreigner, as a stranger__stranged in myself and confused__ saw the windows of Bergdorf and Saks__hat a theater of the unexpected__y mother would have cried__here were only black curtains, black drapes__howing the mourning of the stores__o mannequins, just veils__lack veils. When the mannequins appeared again weeks later__one of them had blond hair. I don__ know if it was because of the mourning rituals or whether the mannequins were afraid to be blond__argets of terrorists. Even they didn__ want to look American. They were out of fashion after the Twin Towers fell. To the point, that even though I had just dyed my hair blond because I was writing Hamlet and Hamlet is blond, I went back to my coiffeur immediately and told him__ye my hair black. It was a matter of life and death, why look like an American. When naturally I look like an Arab and walk like an Egyptian.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher__ Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over...We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them-

... they only trusted the wisdom of people brighter and more worldly than themselves when it was expressed in the vocabulary and style of rural idiots. In his guise as Brazenydol, he had once had a contract with DARPA to teach a team of physicists the basic terminology of tractor pulls so that they could give an acceptable explanation of omniwavelength stealth to a Congressional committee that didn__ understand tractor pulls, either.

America isn't breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn't dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn't triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren't at each other's throats. They're living more interdependently than at any time in recent memory, because that turns out to be a good coping strategy in hard times. Our nation faces huge challenges, no doubt. So do the rest of the world's aging economic powers. If you had to pick a nation with the right stuff to ride out the coming demographic storm, you'd be crazy not to choose America, warts and all.

Every time I do an interview people ask similar questions, such as "What is the most significant story that you have revealed?" [_] There really is only one overarching point that all of these stories have revealed, and that is__nd I say this without the slightest bit of hyperbole or melodrama; it's not metaphorical and it's not figurative; it is literally true__hat the goal of the NSA and it's five eyes partners in the English speaking world__anada, New Zealand, Australia and especially the UK__s to eliminate privacy globally, to ensure that there could be no human communications that occur electronically, that evades their surveillance net; they want to make sure that all forms of human communications by telephone or by Internet, and all online activities are collected, monitored, stored and analyzed by that agency and by their allies.That means, to describe that is to describe a ubiquitous surveillance state; you don't need hyperbole to make that claim, and you do not need to believe me when I say that that's their goal. Document after document within the archive that Edward Snowden provided us declare that to be their goal. They are obsessed with searching out any small little premise of the planet where some form of communications might take place without they being able to invade it.

The great Bonaventure said that the wise must enhance conceptual clarity with the truth implicit in the actions of the simple....""Like the chapter of Perugia and the learned memories of Ubertino, which transform into theological decisions the summons of the simple to poverty." I said."Yes, but as you have seen, this happens too late, and when it happens, the truth of the simple has already been transformed into the truth of the powerful, more useful for the Emperor Louis than for a Friar of the Poor Life.

I think, therefore I am an individual... not a drone in a collective. I think, therefore I am... Libertarian.

I was once a statist, and then I researched The Holocaust. I am now a Libertarian.

I've always regarded it as a test of character to dislike the Kennedys. I don't really respect anyone who falls for Camelot.