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Sunday, January 1, 2017

CFL Light Bulbs, The Ebola Virus And Conservatives' Unrelenting Fear Of "The Imperfect"

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Compendium Of Best Pax Posts On "Too Pure Principles" And The Collapse Of Conservatism

"Dog Whistle Politics": Coded Language And The Rise Of Racially Scornful Political Rhetoric


Dirty Trickster Lee Atwater: The GOP SOB At The Heart Of Republican Barbarism (Hidden Mic)

Alan: CFL light bulbs (the spiral ones) "came on the market" about 15 years ago.

Because they contained minute amounts of mercury (as do all fluorescent bulbs), conservatives cranked up the noise machine, representing CFLs as The Fifth Horseman Of The Apocalypse. 

Whenever "conservatives" locate an imperfection that contradicts their precious perfectionsim, they isolate that imperfection from the overall imperfection of the world, making it the fulcrum of a necessary moral "choice" between "Godly Salvation" and "Eternal Damnation." 

It's what they do. 

It's who they are.
Compact Fluorescent Lamp

Now, after a successful run in which the nation's energy expenditure for "lighting" was cut by 70% -- and no one was harmed by trace mercury -- CFLs have lost their competitive edge to LEDs and so the production of CFLs was phased out in 2016.

In two decades CFLs have gone from existential cause celebre to "Eh... Who cares?"

The hysterical disposition of American conservatives -- particularly in their Tea Party (and other fundamentalist) manifestations -- is perhaps the most striking characteristic of contemporary American politics.

Yet this newly-normalized hysteria goes unmentioned as if "the individuals trees" that trigger conservative hysteria are so YUGE they make it impossible to see the forest. 

Since 9/11, self-terrorization has been The National Pastime. 

Other examples of conservatism's frozen posture of cowering freakout (whether a perceived menace is real or not) include Ebola (there is now a 100% effective vaccine); Putin's seizure of Ukraine (notably Putin is Trump's pal and 37% of Republicans think Vlad is a good guy); and the Central American children who briefly flooded across the Tex-Mex border. 

When was the last time anybody even thought about those kids? Maybe it was the last time you hought about CFLs as the crucial public health threat... that no longer is.
Compendium Of Best Pax Posts About The Relationship Between Trump And Putin

"Remember Ebola? The Flood Of Central American Immigrant Children flooding into Texas? Benghazi? Ukraine? ISIS?"

For additional insight, check out the following links.
Faulty Risk Assessment And The Epidemic Spread Of Self-Terrorization

"Do Republicans Do Anything But Piss, Moan, Whine, Bitch?
"Are Republicans Insane?" Best Pax Posts

"There are two ways of lying, as there are two ways of deceiving customers. If the scale registers 15 ounces, you can say: 'It's a pound.' Your lie will remain relative to an invariable measure of the true. If customers check it, they can see that they are being robbed, and you know by how much you are robbing them: a truth remains as a judge between you. But if the demon induces you to tamper with the scale itself, it is the criterion of the true which is denatured, there is no longer any possible control. And little by little you will forget that you are cheating."    


"Conservatives" --- and, in the wake of pussy grabber's election, please remind me "what" conservatives are conserving --- recall the ancient practice of virgin sacrifice. 
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In order to placate "the gods" for the offenses we humans commit, conservatives proceed from one "perfect hero" to another (Rubio, Cruz, Carson, Christie, Perry, Santorum, Huckabee) and -- sound the trumpets! -- Donald J. Trump.

"Are Republicans Insane?" Best Pax Posts

The question -- "Are Republicans Insane?" -- has no validity for Republicans.

To them, it doesn't matter.

Here's why...

Republican presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, the living American who has served longest as a White House senior staff adviser, observed: “The Republican philosophy might be summarized thus: To hell with principle; what matters is power, and that we have it, and that they do not.” “Where the Right Went Wrong" 
And so Republicans normalize dirty tricks, no longer concerning themselves with Truth so long as lying-and-cheating secure power.

Democrats are actually interested in truth (although, admittedly, not always and everywhere). 

Notably, perfectionism is pathognomic of the GOP's central pathology. 

"Is Perfectionism A Curse? Paul Ryan Tells The Truth"

Despite their shortcomings, liberals are interested in truth because, generally speaking, sound epistemology helps devise sound policy. 

If you do not want sea levels rising 2 meters - displacing a billion human beings by 2100 - you have to consider the chemical equation which reveals, as a matter of incontrovertible fact, that burning a gallon of gasoline releases 19.6 pounds of gas, creating a "blanket" of ever-heavier atmospheric CO2 that warms the planet according to scientific principles set forth by Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius in 1896. (Conservatives can deny science, but not one in a million shuns high-tech medical intervention when "a spot" shows up on X-ray.)

Global Warming's Greenhouse Effect First Posited By Swedish Physicist in 1896
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-relationship-between-fossil-fuels.html
Democrats cheat... but not enough to normalize cheating nor rupture with the rubrics of Truth writ large.
For Democrats, lying and cheating is an intermittent indulgence; for Republicans it is their modus operandi. 

"Dog Whistle Politics": Coded Language And The Rise Of Racially Scornful Political Rhetoric

Dirty Trickster Lee Atwater: The GOP SOB At The Heart Of Republican Barbarism (Hidden Mic)

The Daily Show Interviews Republican Official Who Spills Beans On Deliberate Voter Suppression 
Masquerading As Prevention Of Voter Fraud


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Like the knotty problem of "disproving the existence of God" (or the non-existence of anything else for that matter), it is more fruitful to abandon the quest to prove "who tells the Truth" -- elusive critter that Truth is -- and instead focus which people (particularly in their collective institutional lives) are more dedicated to fabricating falsehood.

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Isaac Asimov Explains Trump's Victory
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/12/isaac-asimov-explains-trumps-victory.html

 PolitiFact Finds That Only 1% Of The Things Donald Trump Says Are Entirely True
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/08/politifact-finds-that-only-1-of-things.html

Against this backdrop of routine Truth-mangling, it is compensatory for "conservatives" to continually scan the horizon for the next "impeccable hero," a practice that smacks of serial "virgin sacrifice" in which first one and then another "savior" reveals his (or her) clay feet. In this process of ongoing disillusionment (and subsequent rush to sacrifice "the next virgin") it never occurs to conservatives - not even Christian conservatives - to consider Yeshua's own view of the matter: "I do not want sacrifice. I want mercy."

James' Epistle: "Judgment Without Mercy Will Be Shown To Anyone Who Has Not Shown Mercy"

Revealingly, it is mercy-compassion-forgiveness that "conservatives" singularly lack - particularly "Christian" "conservatives."

The Thinking Housewife Almost Never Mentions Mercy, Love, Compassion Or Forgiveness

All 3 Abrahamic Religions Should Be As Ashamed Of Themselves As They Are Now Self-Certain

Are Highly Religious People Less Compassionate?

Conservative Christians Delight In The Punishment And Pain Of Others

Abrahamic Religions Must Deal With Their Own Bronze Age Atavism And Not Just Window Dress

Conservatives, particularly "Christian" "conservatives," do not understand -- indeed their belief system prevents them from conceiving -- that "the medium IS the message" ... whereas The Message Itself routinely devolves to ideological saber-rattling.

It does not matter how much one professes the supremacy of Love if one doesn't actually love. (In Christian terms, this gulf between doctrine and practice may constitute "the unforgiveable sin.")

In the end, mistaking the formulary message for the reality to which the message "points," exempts conservatives from doing anything so long as they "profess Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior" (or the Catholic equivalent of attesting to The Infallible Magisterium of the Church) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

 With every salvific formula now in place, it is no longer necessary to actually live like Jesus.

 Instead -- and paradoxically -- the stage is set for "religious" devolution into self-righteous cruelty.
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And as soon as an individual is locked-and-loaded behind his salvific confession of faith, proclaiming "Jesus is my Lord and Savior," it is only a hop, skip and jump to Pascal's observation:

Americans, Especially Catholics, Approve Of Inquisitorial Torture
Best Pax Posts On Torture

If it is "in the nature of God" to inflict torment, then the devotees of any such punitive God not only "can" but "must" "make themselves in His image" by imitating His infliction of torment. 

 Then -- as human psychology always plays out - worshippers of a tormenting God cannot do unto others what they don't also do unto ourselves. 

 They become like the God they worship and -- although they might debate which "side" of God to embody -- "the cruel" or "the kind" -- anyone inclined to authoritarian absolutism tends to reserve kindness for members of his own family-church-tribe; in a word, favoring those who are already "saved," while projecting Godly torment onto those who are outside the family-church-tribe, visiting torment (either directly or through surrogates) on those who are "damned."

The Thinking Housewife: "We Can Be Pretty Sure That Many Good People Are Roasting In Hell"

In the end, it is conservatives' fear of "The Bad Guy," "The Boogie Man," "Satan" that impels them to establish fear-of-evil as their non-negotiable cornerstone.

And so they believe that radical submission to The Letter Of The Law guarantees salvation, the loss of which is The Worst Possible Thing for "The Fearful."

Conservatives Scare More Easily Than Liberals
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/07/conservatives-scare-more-easily-than.html

Scare The Sheep 
And They Will Applaud Military-Industrial Profiteering

Since conservatives are unusually fearful of "not being saved" (unless they are "very good boys and girls") they seek convincing doses of "salvation assurance" by believing themselves virtuous to the extent that they are fearful.

In the process, they lose ALL understanding of John's core insight that "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." 1 John 4:18.

By misunderstanding John, "conservative" "Christians" become Christian in name only and, not infrequently, their topsy turvy adherence to punitive, law-driven Christianity renders them unwitting enemies of The Nazarene.

Nor will conservative Christans contemplate their opposition to the actual "red letter" teaching of Jesus because then they realize that salvation is only rooted in fearless love and sacrificing that fear is The One Thing they cannot do because fear is now central to their spirit-and-psyche and the conversion to fearless love would require the death of the only identity they consider righteous.

The Gospels With The Words Of Jesus In Red

Everything Jesus And The Apostles Had To Say About "The Rich" And "The Poor"

Jesus Walks Back Comments On Poor

Yeshua Excoriates Fellow Pharisees: "The Woe Passages"

"Twelve Steps For The Recovering Pharisee (Like Me)" By John Fischer
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/07/12-steps-for-recovering-pharisee-like.html

"Love Your Enemies. Do Good To Those Who Hate You," Luke 6: 27-42

"Do You Know What You're Doing To Me?" Jesus of Nazareth

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/12/do-you-know-what-youre-doing-to-me.html

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Psychological Projection

The Evangelical Persecution Complex (Projection's Finest Hour?)

Psychological Projection Indicts "The Good Christians," Not The People They Indict

Pope Francis On Fundamentalism: The Horror Of Turning God Into Ideological Pretext

Often, Stinginess And Cruelty Are Christianity's Paradoxical Effects

It Is Important To Know These Things So Religion Doesn't Do You More Harm Than Good

What Too Many Christians Get Wrong

All 3 Abrahamic Religions Should Be As Ashamed Of Themselves As They Are Now Self-Certain

Are Highly Religious People Less Compassionate?

Conservative Christians Delight In The Punishment And Pain Of Others

Abrahamic Religions Must Deal With Their Own Bronze Age Atavism And Not Just Window Dress

"Just A Little Nicer," A Superb Installment Of TED Radio Hour On The Topic Of Compassion

University Chaplain Fired For Preaching Compassion Over "American Sniper" Violence




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On this third day of Christmas, 2016, I join my voice with the angel we heard "on high," announcing the dawn of New Light in a weary world, making clear with the same command -- "Fear Not!" is the only prerequisite -- The One and Only Prerequisite -- for basking in that Light.

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Fear Not!

By falling prey to fear, you are -- in effect -- "damned..." which is to say your life will be subject to the worst possible consequence, Fear Itself.

Without fear, you become a child of God and, as St. Paul said, you will become "like God" - so completely fearless that there is no room at the inn where fear is an incessant haunting.
Last but not least, I want to delve into conservatives' bottom-line hatred of liberals.

As "baby killers," are already damned. Or, if one doesn't cotton to Christian doctrine, baby-killing liberals are damnable. 

 Loving, compassionate, forgiving people that they pretend to be, "Christian" "conservatives" are giddy that abortion provides non-stop justification for damning liberals to The Unquenchable Lake Of Fire.

During my half century as an adult (and as a student of Comparative Religion), I have studied abortion and, in recent years, it has become clear that the falling U.S. abortion rate would soon dip lower than the abortion rate prior to Roe v. Wade, and over the past year that transition from higher-to-lower abortion rate has become a reality.

 Not only in the United States but even more so in Europe abortion rates are much lower -- a third to a half as frequent -- as in countries where abortion is illegal.

 As a practical matter, those who oppose abortion participate in cultures where abortion is significantly higher than in cultures where abortion is legal and available.

 It is paradoxically true that the illegalization of abortion results in "a mountain of aborted fetuses" whereas the legalization of abortion results in "a hill of aborted fetuses.

 To learn more about abortion and how abortion opponents foster cultures where abortion is much more common than in cultures here abortion is permitted, I recommend the following post:

Abortion, Donald Trump, Conservative Christians And Marley's Chains

***

(Alan: The following segment is corresponence with a physician friend who asked me what I thought of "fact-checker," especially those whose funding/salary comes liberal sources. It is, I believe, synergistic with the thrust of this post.)

As a practical matter, it is always risky to have partisans finance fact-checkers. 

That said, during the 2016 campaign many of my fellow leftists were highly critical of the Clinton family fortune, as well as Hillary's long-time pussy-footing with Wall Street; her absurd claim that she and Bill were "broke" when they left the White House and, perhaps worst of all, her approval of The War Powers Act. (Was their even one conservative who identified Trump's fortune as a warning light for plutocracy?)

Hillary's utterly pragmatic position on The War Powers Act --- as I believe was true and as Time Magazine reported from "the rumor mill" --- caused her to advise Kerry to vote "Yes!" on War Powers 'if he wanted to have a political future.' 

Such pragmatism begs a whole range of inter-related questions about "what" politicians MUST "say and do" in order to "stay in the running" for The Oval Office, The Supreme Court, Cabinet positions, legislative seats, and -- correlatively -- "what" they cannot say... without getting their genitals roasted.

You, Stoltze, I (and many of our friends) would make better White House counsellors than the sons-o-bitches who actually advise presidents. 

Bannon is only the most egregious example of Satanism in high places.

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The very "checkeredness" of your life, and David's life and my life have resulted in the widely-and-deeply informed "judgment matrix" that would make us good counsellors.

However, this same "checkeredness" is also The Reason why we are disqualified at the get-go, not to mention High Officialdom's desire for yes-men and well-groomed sycophants. 

BTW... I recently proposed that every "high office" have "someone" on the payroll whose "checkered"-but-diversely-well-informed-experience would otherwise disqualify them. It is painfully easy to overlook but any one of us could have alerted The Designated Authorities that invading Vietnam and Iraq were at least counterproductive and probably suicidal. 

Of course it doesn't take a genius to realize that, almost always the best military policy is created from the viewpoint that "I am already against the next war."
  
The trouble is that you, Stoltze and I are not lickspittle team players - at least not in the sense that teamwork requires the frame-of-mind described by Henry Miller (who was born on this day in 1891): "One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one."

We also must take into account the following political rubric about the non-negotiable need to demonize other human beings whether or not they are demonic - and keeping in mind that they are very rarely the demons politicians must say they are in order to brown-nose his Base:

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Almost always, "life is grey."

American politics -- based on our "winner-take-all" two-party system -- is Black and White.

And so Manichaeism pollutes politics just as it has always polluted Christianity.  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism

Abrazos

Alan 


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Trump Says "No Computer Is Safe": The Hinge Between Fascism And Freedom

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Alan: People who believe in freedom know that nothing is ever completely safe.

Fascists, on the other hand, pretend to believe that reality can be made totally safe when absolute safety is, by nature, beyond reach.

Furthermore, the quest to make reality safer than "God intended" is the essence of fascism's appeal.

Freedom and risk are inseparable.

Fascists read that statement-of-fact and rankle.

Trump Says "No Computer Is Safe"
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"15 Warning Signs Of Impending Tyranny," Robert Reich

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15 Warning Signs Of Impending Tyranny


What are the 15 warning signs of impending tyranny? As tyrants take control of democracies, they typically:
1. Exaggerate their mandate to govern -- claiming, for example, that they won an election by a landslide even after losing the popular vote.
2. Repeatedly claim massive voter fraud in the absence of any evidence, in order to restrict voting in subsequent elections.
3. Publicly criticize anyone who criticizes them, labeling them “enemies.”
4. Turn the public against journalists or media outlets that criticize them, calling them “deceitful” and “scum.”
5. Hold few if any press conferences, preferring to communicate with the public directly through mass rallies and unfiltered statements.
6. Tell the public big lies, causing them to doubt the truth and believe fictions that support the tyrants' goals.
7. Blame economic stresses on immigrants or racial or religious minorities, and foment public bias and even violence against them.
8. Attribute acts of domestic violence to “enemies within,” and use such events as excuses to beef up internal security and limit civil liberties.
9. Threaten mass deportations, registries of religious minorities, and the banning of refugees.
10. Seek to eliminate or reduce the influence of competing centers of power, such as trade unions and opposition parties.
11. Appoint family members to high positions of authority.
12. Surround themselves with their own personal security force rather than a security detail accountable to the public.
13. Put generals and other military commanders into top civilian posts.
14. Make personal alliances with foreign dictators.
15. Draw no distinction between personal property and public property, profiteering from their public office.

Compilation Of Pax Posts On Similarities Between Hitler And Trump
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/05/compilation-of-pax-post-on-similarities.html

A Shared Passion For Whiteness And Cleanliness

"Citing Trump's "Fascism" And "Tyranny," Mormon Tabernacle Chorister Resigns," Time Magazine


"Kremlin Names Trump Employee Of The Month

Compilation Of Pax Posts On Similarities Between Hitler And Trump
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/05/compilation-of-pax-post-on-similarities.html






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Ignorance And Tyranny: Do Online Petitions Have Any Impact On Trump?

Caro Giovanni,

Happy New Year to you and yours!

I do not know what good it does to sign online petitions but this one does have the virtue of strengthening our resolve to oppose a monstrous sociopath. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/07/is-donald-trump-sociopath-taking-his.html

Follow the Money!

Here are some more "solidarity enhancers." (The Mormon Tabernacle Chorister is my choice for 2017's Person Of The Year.)

Citing Trump's "Fascism" And "Tyranny," Mormon Tabernacle Chorister Resigns

Time Magazine
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/12/time-magazine-citing-trumps-fascism-and.html

"Kremlin Names Trump Employee Of The Month
The Borowitz Report
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-borowitz-report-kremlin-names-trump.html

Love

Alan
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jim Sanfilipo
Date: Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 11:24 AM
Subject: I just signed this petition -- will you?
To: Alan Archibald <alanarchibaldo@gmail.com>
I just took action to tell Congress to investigate Trump's potential corruption and foreign entanglements, and I think you should too: https://act.credoaction.com/sign/trump_cummings_corruption_2?sp_ref=256192904.4.177232.e.0.2&referring_akid=.11260903.2PyAvp&source=mailto_sp



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John Steinbeck On Good And Evil; Hope And The Necessary Contradictions Of Human Nature

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A New Year’s Perspective: John Steinbeck on Good and Evil, the Necessary Contradictions of the Human Nature, and Our Grounds for Lucid Hope

There are events in our personal lives and our collective history that seem categorically irredeemable, moments in which the grounds for gratefulness and hope have sunk so far below the sea level of sorrow that we have ceased to believe they exist. But we have within us the consecrating capacity to rise above those moments and behold the bigger picture in all of its complexity, complementarity, and temporal sweep, and to find in what we see not illusory consolation but the truest comfort there is: that of perspective.

John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) embodies this difficult, transcendent willingness in an extraordinary letter to his friend Pascal Covici — who would soon become his literary fairy godfather of sorts — penned on the first day of 1941, as World War II was raging and engulfing humanity in unbearable darkness. Found in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (public library) — which also gave us the beloved writer on the difficult art of the friend breakup, his comical account of a dog-induced “computer crash” decades before computers, and his timeless advice on falling in love — the letter stands as a timeless testament to the consolatory power of rehabilitating nuance, making room for fertile contradiction, and taking a wider perspective.
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Steinbeck writes on January 1, 1941:
Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded.
But Steinbeck, who devoted his life to defending the disenfranchised and celebrating the highest potentiality of the human spirit, refuses to succumb to what Rebecca Solnit has so aptly termed the “despair, defeatism, cynicism[,] amnesia and assumptions” to which we reflexively resort in maladaptive self-defense against overwhelming evil. Instead, fifteen centuries after Plato’s brilliant charioteer metaphor for good and evil, Steinbeck quickly adds a perceptive note on the indelible duality of human nature and the cyclical character of the civilizational continuity we call history:
Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked [the influential microbiologist] Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like.
Steinbeck’s point is subtle enough to be mistaken for moral relativism, but is in fact quite the opposite — he suggests that our human foibles don’t negate our goodness or our desire for betterment but, rather, provide both the fuel for it and the yardstick by which we measure our moral progress.

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Alan: "The Winter Of Our Discontent" is among my favorite 20 books.

It's a "down home" domestic tale in which the people in a small town -- including a clerk at the local grocery store -- take on full-spectrum humanity. 

Seared into memory from my first reading is the narrator's description of an overhead military jet as "a spindle of malice." 
The Winter Of Our Discontent
The Atlantic Review
July, 1961

"The Winter Of Our Discontent"
a movie starring Donald Sutherland, Terri Garr and Emmy-nominee, Tuesday Weld

He wrests out this inevitable interplay of order and chaos the mortal flaw of the Nazi regime and the grounds for hope toward surviving the atrocity of WWII, which, lest we forget, much of the world feared was unsurvivable in toto:
It is interesting to watch the German efficiency, which, from the logic of the machine is efficient but which (I suspect) from the mechanics of the human species is suicidal. Certainly man thrives best (or has at least) in a state of semi-anarchy. Then he has been strong, inventive, reliant, moving. But cage him with rules, feed him and make him healthy and I think he will die as surely as a caged wolf dies. I should not be surprised to see a cared for, thought for, planned for nation disintegrate, while a ragged, hungry, lustful nation survived. Surely no great all-encompassing plan has ever succeeded.
Mercifully, Steinbeck was right — the Nazis’ grim world domination plan ultimately failed, humanity as a whole survived these unforgivable crimes against it (though we continually fail to sufficiently reflect upon them), and we commenced another revolution around the cycle of construction and destruction, creating great art and writing great literature and making great scientific discoveries, all the while carrying our parallel capacities for good and evil along for the ride, as we are bound to always do.

So when we witness evil punctuate the line of our moral and humanitarian progress, as we periodically do, may we remember, even within the most difficult moments of that periodicity, Steinback’s sobering perspective and lucid faith in the human spirit.

Complement this particular fragment of the wholly magnificent Steinbeck: A Life in Letters with Albert Camus on strength of character amid difficulty, Hannah Arendt on how we humanize each other, Joseph Brodsky on the greatest antidote to evil, Toni Morrison on the artist’s task in troubled times, and Rebecca Solnit on our grounds for hope in the dark.


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"Brain Droppings" Best Books Of 2016

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