The Cyanide Hole

Poisonous Questions, Our Specialty

Barack Obama and The Mummy

Posted in Americana, Politics on June 9th, 2008

For me, watching the Obama boom is a little like watching The Mummy. The wizard Imhotep, who promises the destruction of modern civilization and the enslavement of the human race, has cast a spell upon the unthinking mob. The population of Cairo marches through the streets behind the wizard, in lockstep, beating drums and chanting Im-Ho-Tep (Boom!) Im-Ho-Tep (Boom!) Im-Ho-Tep (Boom!), while a rain of fire and a plague of flies poison the air around them.

Today Barack Obama promises the destruction of entire nations, the continuation of war, empire, and economic enslavement. He has cast a spell on the unthinking mob, which marches through the streets behind him, in lockstep, beating drums and chanting O-Ba-Ma (Boom!) O-Ba-Ma (Boom!) O-Ba-Ma (Boom!), while shit-rains and threats of homelessness beat upon their ears.

In Bull Durham, Susan Sarandon expresses envy of people who have “never been cursed with self-awareness.” Obama and Hillary together seem to have attracted an army of just such people. And if in fact I have been watching too many DVD movies, still I understand that Obama isn’t dangerous. What’s dangerous is the ninnies to whom he plays. As long as these “progressives” keep on as they are, things will get progressively worse for the nation.

Ever since 1984, Democrats have made an industry of denial. My advice to readers is: “Don’t worry about Obama. The wheels are going to come off his bogus parade in very short order. The proper thing to worry about is how we’re going to survive the McCain presidency.”

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Feeding the Birds

Posted in Americana, Fact, Food on May 18th, 2008

My landlady loves to feed the birds. Outside my north window are nine feeders, each of them full of one concoction or another, all of them put there to tempt wild birds. In season (and in no particular order) we host Purple Grackles, Boat-Tailed Grackles, European Starlings, Robins, Cardinals, Mourning Doves, Blue Jays, Ladder-Backed Woodpeckers, Downy Woodpeckers, Red Breasted Woodpeckers, English Sparrows, Chipping Sparrows, White-Crowned Sparrows, Indigo Buntings, Bluebirds, Nuthatches, Black-Capped Chickadees, Gold Finches, House Finches, House Wrens, Hummingbirds, Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks, Red-Winged Blackbirds, Baltimore Orioles — and if I’ve left any out it’ll be some of those I haven’t seen for a day or two. Those I’ve listed are here most every day of late.

The Orioles and the Finches are my favorites. The orange blaze of the Orioles, the fiery yellows and reds the Finches flash absolutely thrill me when I see them whizzing across the spring-green lawn. The Finches — dozens of them — come for Niger thistle seed. The Orioles (I’ve counted six cocks this year.) flock in for fruit and sugar: they love sliced fresh oranges and (Of all things!) grape jelly. Landlady buys big, economy-sized jars of the cheapest grape jelly she can find. She puts the jelly in a pie tin and sets it out atop the clothes-line pole, and the Orioles just go nuts for it. They slurp down quarts of the stuff every week. All of them have purple beaks.

I told Landlady the other day she should put instant coffee crystals in the jelly. The Orioles are so buzzed on sugar already that the addition of caffeine to their diet might cause spontaneous Oriole combustion. It would be kinda neat to see one of those bright orange boogers go screeching across the lawn and explode KABOOM! in midair. It’d be a holenuther take on the Roman candle. Maybe we could win the $100,000 prize (or whatever they pay) for the wildest home videos on that TV show Landlady likes to watch.

She says “Not.” So we’re still broke and always will be, I guess.

Landlady has a special syrup feeder just for Hummingbirds. Thing about that is, the syrup draws bees, too. And Hummingbirds are such wee creatures that bee-sting can kill them. The Hummers know it: they’re afraid of bees. Still, baby Hummers must be fed. So it’s always a show to watch Mr. & Mrs. Hummer battle the bees for their sweets. And if Mrs. Hummer, by herself, gets into a brawl with more bees than she can handle, her tiny mate will come rocketing into the scrum and draw the bees away from her. It’s a fine, brave, thrilling thing to watch little Mr. Hummer risk death to save his true love, and it happens here at least once a week during summer.

I’ve been to air shows. I’ve seen top-gun fighter jocks do awesome tricks with planes, and every one of those tricks has a descriptive name: the barrel roll, the loop, the falling leaf, and other such. Now I’m here to tell you that when hot-shot Hummers and bad-ass bees get into an aerial dogfight, they do all those fighter-jock tricks and then some. They do jaw-dropping, clock-stopping things for which there are no descriptive names, partly because those things defy description and partly because some of them happen too fast for the eye to follow.

Woodpeckers, Nuthatches and Starlings all go for suet. The manufacturers sell suet filled with bugs & worms, or seeds, or bits of fruit. Landlady puts out two or three blocks of the stuff at least twice a week. The rest of the birds seem happy with black-oil sunflower seed, and Landlady feeds about 50 lbs. of the sunflower seed every month.

I don’t know what other people feed birds, but our birds don’t seem to like that “wild-bird mix” of seeds that many stores sell. If Landlady buys that stuff, our birds pick the sunflower seeds out of the mix and leave the rest. The millet (and whatever else is in there) sits in the feeders for months (if we allow it) while our birds go looking (I suppose) for sunflower seed in other people’s yards. They don’t have to look far; most everyone in our town feeds them.

Orioles are spectacular, as I’ve already mentioned. Robins and Jays and Starlings and Blackbirds and Grackles are pretty but, on the whole, our bigger birds seem less showy than our small ones. And if the violence of the Hummers and the Finches is occasionally comic, violence between the bigger birds often takes on a darker hue.

For example: I once saw a mated pair of Mourning Doves peck a third dove to death on the ground beneath the feeders. If the third bird was sick or injured or something, I do not know. I just know that the mated pair worried her viciously for about 45 minutes before one of them sent in a telling lick that either killed her outright or knocked her unconscious. She went down limp and never moved for the rest of the day. Dove cocks came by several times and violated the inert body. The poor thing was still there next morning, when I went out and picked it up and threw it in the trash.

Two cocks — one a Blue Jay and the other a Robin — once got into a short scrap I’d gleefully pay $20 to see again. The way it was, Mr. & Mrs. Blue Jay both got up on the wrong side of the nest. They were all over the feeders, bullying and harrying the smaller birds. In a matter of minutes they drove all the others away from the food.

Mr. Jay then perched on top of the clothesline pole like King Kong on the Empire State Building. He puffed himself up and screamed his primacy — but not for long.

Cock Robin was perched, watching, unseen, in the tippy-top of a 30-foot tree on the other side of the yard. He dropped off his perch like a stone and came howling down, gaining speed in a power dive. He hauled out of his dive within inches of the ground and, skimming across the grass, pulled up sharply and used all of his momentum to slam that big, solid, red breast of his right into Mr. Blue Jay’s soft, nougaty center. Splat!

I’d estimate that Cock Robin was doing all of 40 mph when he threw that body check. The big Jay never even saw it coming. The impact slammed Mr. Jay off the clothesline pole and three or four feet backward, where the Jay fell to earth on his neck and shoulders, pissy end up.

Mr. Robin stood quietly on the pole and watched while the Jay used about 30 seconds to regain his feet and put himself back into a shaky semblance of working order. Then the Jay and his spouse flew away, and we didn’t see them any more last year. They are back, now, but they are much better behaved.

We humans, when we encounter a stupid person, often label him or her “bird-brained.” I now believe the term is inaccurate because birds, I’ve found, are not stupid creatures. All of those who feed here know who feeds them and where to find her. When the feeders are empty, some go to the window ledge in front of Landlady’s desk and peck at the glass. I’ve seen a cock Oriole stand in the empty jelly tin, out on the clothesline pole, and pantomime slurping grape jelly. His head (with beak open) dipped down into the pan. His head then came up (beak closed), and he worked his jaws vigorously while he kept one beady eye focused on Landlady’s window. Sparrows fly up to the glass, bumping and fluttering against the pane until they draw some attention. Woodpeckers perch on the suet feeders and stare hopefully at the house. When Landlady goes out to the feeders, the birds perch on the eaves and watch what she does. When I go out to the feeders, the birds fly away until I go elsewhere.

Every year the eggs hatch. Every year the mated pairs bring the fledglings to the feeders and show them where and how to get their groceries. I sometimes get a kick imagining conversations that might take place if birds could talk like humans:

Ma Starling (perched on a tray of sunflower seed): “This here’s the grocery store and the diner, kids. This is where you go when yer hongry. The humans will always feed you.”

Johnny Starling: “Are you sure about that, Ma? Why would humans want to feed us all the time?”

Pa Starling: “Well, Johnny, it’s a funny thing and I can’t figger it out myse’f. Near’s I can tell, humans jus’ like to be abused. Every day we fly over here and crap all over everything. We steal most of their groceries and throw the rest on the ground. We call ‘em filthy names when they let the buffet run empty. We rattle their windows and kill the grass hereabouts and drive their cats plumb loco. What goes on b’tween birds and humans really don’t make no sense, but I try not to worry about it. The food here is the best I ever had, an’ it’s easy to git, so I just keep comin’ back. You will, too, if yer smart.”

Suzy Starling: “Gee, Pa! What will happen if the humans ever get wise and quit feeding us?”

Pa: “Why, we’ll have to go back to eatin’ like we allus et b’fore!”

Johnny: “How did we always eat before, Pa?”

Pa: “Uh — to tell the truth, son, it’s been so long since I et like we allus et b’fore that I fergot how we allus et b’fore. Great Grampa use’ ta tell about flyin’ out to a pasture and perchin’ on the back of a cow until the cow got inspired.

Johnny: “What’s ‘inspired,’ Pa?”

Pa: “That’s what happens to cows that git bored with life. They git frustrated ‘cuz they can’t think of anythin’ interestin’ to do. That’s when they git inspired.

“Anyways, Great Grampa allus said that after the cow got inspired, you could hop down off the cow an’ git a nice, hot lunch by pickin’ bits o’ grain out o’ the cow’s inspiration.”

Suzy: “Inspiration? What’s ‘inspiration’?”

Pa: “It’s what Great Grampa allus said.”

Ma: “Trust us, kids! Our way is better.”

There seems little doubt that Ma Starling is right: When humans feed birds, birds eat more and better than they can possibly get in the wild. What happens to birds that have never made their way in the wild, what becomes of birds — birds that, through two or three generations, depended entirely upon humans for their eats — when events they cannot fathom suddenly deprive them of commercial bird food is a thing I do not know.

I hope I never have to make a comparable adjustment.

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Global Famine, World War, and the Impending Suicide of Capitalism

Posted in Journalism, Patriotism, Politics, War on May 4th, 2008

Wall Street financial criminals and the United States government together are almost certainly responsible for skyrocketing grain prices that are causing food riots globally. This is a story somebody should pursue. I’ve been pushing it around the Web with little luck. Please take what follows and nag every journalist you know to death with it:

Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Paulson are pumping hundreds of billions of inflationary dollars into financial markets. They seek in so doing to prop up the floor under their Wall-Street pals, who suddenly find investments in sub-prime mortgages and derivatives thereof going South in a big hurry. The investors, for their part, are selling their worthless but artificially inflated assets as fast as they can find buyers (mostly U.S. taxpayers) for the junk.

The billions now fleeing Wall Street, we are told, are being invested in commodities such as gold and oil and (ahem!) grain. The upshot is that while Wall Street melts down, the price of oil and grain futures shoots up accordingly. Now there are food riots in Third-World countries due almost entirely, we are told, to climatic conditions and to the price of energy.

Horse manure.

If I was a journalist who had the resources of an organ like, say, The Washington Post upon which to draw, I bet I could make a few phone calls and dig up more than enough information to draw a straight line between the billions fleeing Wall Street and the price of rice in places like Haiti and Bangladesh.

Unless mainstream media pick up on that story, hundreds of millions of people will starve and a world war may well have to be fought (and no telling who will win that war). All of that so a lot of crooked, fat-cat fugitives from financial-market justice can get fatter still by creating famine, war, and human misery in general.

And so it is that when Paulson preaches to starving third-world nations that they’d do well to avoid price controls on food grains and George Bush pledges billions to help Third World nations buy rice, both men actually work to aid their rich pals by propping up commodities prices in ways that make it look like they’re dispensing alms to the poor.

I’ve been watching all of that develop in the headlines for weeks, from the discomfort of my living room computer desk. To date attention paid the story (when it gets any attention at all) comes almost as a footnote buried deep within stories about problems it actually creates. In an article about potatoes, for example, The Scotsman reports: “One factor helping the potato remain affordable is the fact that unlike wheat, it is not a global commodity, so [it] has not attracted speculative professional investment.”

To the extent that Congress thus far pays mere lip service to re-regulation of commodities trading and financial markets, and to the extent that Congress helps Bush prop up the outrageous price of grain (a problem which he and his pals have created for profit), Congress is every bit as complicit in this commodities bubble as Paulson, Bernanke and Bush.

Thus my question to mainstream media: “When in hell are you bigshot journalists gonna wake up and smell the disaster that’s swooping down on this country?” Do you realize that, as I write, Third-World grain growers (led by Thailand) are working to create a rice cartel (modeled upon OPEC) that will reduce and regulate the price of rice globally? And don’t you stop to think what a successful effort in that direction will mean to America? Can you spell “Chicago Board of Trade Chopped Up & Burned by Third-World Grain Growers”?

Financial writer Ellen Brown wrote recently that capitalism is presently consuming itself. In light of current events, Ms. Brown might better have written that “capitalism is busy creating a global political climate in which capitalism will be a crime.” What will it mean to America when one dollar buys one yen, when Wall Street is no longer the financial capitol of the world and the world’s greatest commodities exchange is located in Bangkok (or maybe Beijing)?

I have no influence. There’s nothing I can do about any of these things. Bigshot journalists like you, on the other hand, sit in a vantage point from which you can yell bloody murder and shake things up. Please start at once. The whole world is watching.

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Personal Honesty Is the Price of Dope

Posted in Books, Writers & Writing on January 30th, 2008

Iremember once I was a three-stripe sergeant, the NCO nominally in charge of about 20 young Marines. A couple of my kids were hitch-hiking from Yuma, AZ, to Los Angeles — where they hoped to score a giant, economy-sized bag of LSD. They were standing alongside the freeway just west of El Centro, CA. Ambient temperature was about 120 degrees. They wanted a ride real bad.

The kids got picked up by two women and a man in a van — all of them longhairs who were obviously twisted on something major. When my kids got in the van, the longhairs were in the middle of this “heavy” conversation about how important it is to all of us — as human beings, you know — that we each do something CREATIVE with our hands.

My kids were invited to join the conversation by the driver, who turned to them and said something like, “Hello! My name’s Mary and I weave cloth. This is Johnny: he masturbates [or something]. And this is Sally, who knits dog sweaters for the ASPCA [or something, I don’t know what].” Then she asked my kids, in the roundest and most condescending of tones: “And YOU — what is it that YOU do with YOUR hands?”

The kid with the sense of humor grinned and answered cheerily: “Us? Oh, we’re Marines! We kill people.”

The van screeched to a stop, the door opened as if by magic, and my kids found themselves standing along the freeway in 120-degree heat once more. The quiet kid wanted to murder the jovial kid, but he couldn’t do it because he was laughing too hard to make the effort.

My kids did finally get to LA and they brought back some righteous acid. But I enjoyed the story more than anything.

The story was funny when it happened in 1971. Today it seems prescient. Hunter S. Thompson was right when, with his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he acknowledged obliquely that the hippie movement never really took off because most longhairs couldn’t handle their dope.

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If you have a lousy sex life, remember: you can always get screwed in politics.

Posted in Politics on January 11th, 2008

Over on Atlantic Free Press, Stephen Pizzo has posted an article about the current state of the U.S. economy. Mr. Pizzo thinks the economy stinks and will smell worse before it smells better, if in fact it ever does smell better.

I won’t argue. I don’t know enough about economics to argue with anybody who knows enough about economics to write an article about economics. For me, the nicest thing about economics is that lectures on the subject make me vomit an interesting shade of green.

Mr. Pizzo’s article caught my eye because it discusses inflation. In that discussion, Pizzo recalls President Gerald Ford’s moronic, 1975 effort to stem the tide of inflation by urging Americans to wear little red buttons emblazoned with big white letters: “WIN”.

Old farts like me will recall that WIN was an acronym for “Whip Inflation Now.” Young farts probably can’t believe that any president of the United States ever did anything so stupid, but they shouldn’t laugh. After all: they never knew Gerald Ford, and I hear they’re still signing up to go to Iraq.

One good thing about WIN buttons: They were cheap. Mine came as a prize in a sack of potato chips. I remember we were smoking pot and we had the munchies so bad that when my buddy tore the sack open, he pulled a little too hard. The sack came apart and chips flew all over the place. My buddy fought the dog for the big ones. I snatched the WIN button off the floor and consoled myself for the loss of the chips by eating cookies, which were still in a bowl on the table.

We were in college at the time. I wore my new WIN button to school. Imagine the thrill I got when the most beautiful girl in my history class — who had never once in six weeks acknowledged my existence — suddenly developed an interest in me. She sat with me in the cafeteria at lunch. After we ate she took me home with her, where we screwed like a pair of demented weasels all afternoon and evening and far, far into the night.

Next morning I woke up and, of course, reached for the beautiful girl lying next to me.

She did not respond as expected. Instead she evaded my grasp and sat bolt upright on the edge of the bed. Cold as ice, she drilled me with her meanest look. “Get out of here!” she exclaimed. “I’m done with you. I never want to see you again. Go!”

“Why?” I asked. “You were so hot yesterday afternoon and all night last night. I thought you liked me! What is this, all of a sudden?”

“It isn’t ‘all of a sudden,’” she said. “It’s the same now as it was yesterday and last night. I only brought you here because you were wearing that WIN button!”

I was incredulous. “The WIN button? What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

Her answer was unanswerable: “I always wanted to fuck a Republican.”

I could have tried to salvage the situation by telling her that I voted for George McGovern. But I didn’t. For one thing, I was afraid she might feel cheated and avenge her loss by yelling “Rape!” For another, I sympathized with her impulse and didn’t want to spoil her triumph.

So that’s how it was: I started out thinking WIN buttons were a particularly stupid joke but ended up thinking they were a pretty good thing. Believe that or else, as it suits you. And thanks, Stephen Pizzo, for the memories.

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John Edwards may know where the bear goes poo-poo, but that doesn’t make him smell any better.

Posted in Politics on January 7th, 2008

Some of the E-mails I get, you’d think I never, ever say anything positive. It ain’t so, I tell ya! For example: I once said some pretty nice things about cornbread and, among other reasons, I’m here now to say one or two nice things about Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards.

An article in the online edition of The Los Angeles Times for Nov. 14, 2007 hints that Edwards may be one of the few Democrats who actually understands what’s at stake in Election 2008. Speaking of those who oppose him in the upcoming Iowa Democratic caucus, Edwards reportedly accused Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of being “. . . entrenched in a system that is broken.

“We have very different views,” he told about 50 people at . . . a restaurant in Cedar Rapids. “Sen. Clinton believes the system is
OK. . . . The corruption and all of it will be OK.”

Speaking of Sen. Barack Obama, the Times quotes Edwards again: “Obama, to his credit, believes you bring everyone together, you negotiate and you get things done. I don’t. I believe it’s a fight, an epic fight.”

Now I understand that politicians in a heated campaign will say just about anything that could conceivably help them win. So I have no way of knowing if Edwards actually meant what he reportedly said. But I do know that what he reportedly said is 100 percent correct.

That’s the last of the nice things I wanted to say about John Edwards. Now it’s time to exercise the rest of my (related) agenda.

Election 2008 is not about welfare for or empowerment of one or another of the Democrats’ cherished minorities. It’s not about single-payer healthcare. It’s not about gun control. It’s not about the war in Iraq or the energy crisis or any of that. It’s not even about bringing members of the Bush Crime Syndicate to justice. What’s fundamentally at stake in Election 2008 is nothing less than the primacy of the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law and, hinging upon those two questions, the survival of the United States of America as a republic and a democracy.

The man or woman who next wins the presidency will inherit an obscene, towering mess. If the new president wants to turn America back toward constitutional government and democracy, cleaning up the mess must be his or her top priority. In order to accomplish the task, he or she will have to be impeccably clean, unimpeachably honest, ferociously brave, highly intelligent, shrewdly insightful, and tougher than the proverbial nail. His or her cabinet officers will need similar qualities because, in order to clean up said mess, they will have to tear the U.S. government to pieces brick by board and, in doing so, reestablish the rule of law. The task will not be easy and it will not be quick.

Short term, reformers will ease their task somewhat by opening an honest, rigorous investigation of the Bush Crime Syndicate. Any such move will do much more than put a lot of Bush henchmen in prison: it will spark a panic among the thousands not yet charged — those previously unidentified Bush moles in Congress, in the judicial branch, in regulatory agencies, in state governments and elsewhere. Many of them will flee public service and scuttle like terrified cockroaches into any hole that promises refuge. While that panic lasts, the reformers’ cause will advance quickly.

In the midterm, the process of media reform will be more difficult and consume more time than the task of bringing Bush and his creatures to justice. News coverage of the Bush regime demonstrates repeatedly and conclusively that the corporate-capitalist model of media ownership does not serve democracy. Before democracy can be reestablished in America, big news corporations must be broken up and new models of news-media ownership must be created.

Said process will be more interesting still because ravages and repercussions of the Bush Crime Syndicate will leave large numbers of Americans unemployed and needy. Thus many Americans may for the first time in their lives have leisure in which to discover an interest in things like politics and press ownership and the interplay between the two. Will the mob sit by quietly while the issue of press-ownership is decided for them? Will the mob elect deputies to make the relevant decision(s) in meetings governed by Robert’s Rules of Order? Or will the mob instead take inspiration from great populist leaders such as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and Maximilien Robespierre? Other options will certainly present themselves but, regardless of what the mob finally chooses to do, the result will instruct everyone concerned.

Long term, dogged American reformers will find that the strongest and most bitter opponents of democracy and republican government — both here and abroad — are sandbagged into powerful positions in global banking and finance from whence they have for long ruled the world without regard to law or scruple. Some such criminals can be brought to justice. But many — maybe most of them — are beyond the reach of law and so, probably, are the anonymous few who own and employ them. To free America from the grip of those people will mean breaking America free of the institutions they control. That particular divorce will be the work of years — of decades, even — if ever it is deemed final.

Taken all together the task of rebuilding America after eight years of the Bush Crime Syndicate (the ne plus ultra of a hundred and fifty years of corporate rapine and war) promises to be the work of 50 years or more. American leaders in years to come will have to juggle a vast number of priorities, many being of a magnitude that simply boggles the mind. Any reform agenda will have to be accomplished in an environment of global unrest and domestic civil disorders. In short, reform of our present system looks impossible on its face and therefore only a crazy person would want to be the next president of the United States — which brings me back to John Edwards and the Democrats.

I put no stock in John Edwards. He talks vaguely of taking America back from the corporations, but his demeanor and his rhetoric on the stump emit no heat. I detect no fire in his belly. He does not convince me. Heaven only knows what he truly thinks and feels. Obama, for his part, seeks to fire crowds with talk of uniting Red-State and Blue-State America. Obama thus wants the wolves and the sheep to lie down together. If Obama gets what he wants there will be no reform, and the result will more likely be a generation of shaggy purple offspring who (as soon as they’re old enough) will kill and cook and eat their parents. Ruthless corporate managers who presently govern us through their Democratic and Republican jackals will cede no power to anyone who asks them nicely but doesn’t carry a club. If Edwards or Obama or their foolish supporters think differently, they will learn the truth soon enough.

A Second American Revolution is coming. You might think that the latest kink in the saga of whistleblower Sibel Edmonds (Published in the Times of London, yet!) makes a second revolution inevitable, but it does not. What makes the coming revolution inevitable is the adamantine refusal of American leadership — people such as John Edwards and Barack Obama — to embrace the necessity of radical systemic reform.

This year’s struggle for the leadership of America is indeed an epic fight, just as Edwards told The Los Angeles Times. That’s because hidebound conservatism, pursued to its logical end, ends always in revolution. It happened in France. It happened in America. It happened in Russia and China and Romania and in dozens of other nations, over and over, throughout history. If present circumstances are let to run their full course, it will happen here again. And if you think — as I do — that it’s a damned long time overdue, take a tip from Charles Dickens:

In A Tale of Two Cities, Monsieur Defarge notes despairingly that the revolution is a long time coming. He fears that he and Madame Defarge will never live to see it and, if they see it, they won’t live to see what he believes will be its glorious end.

“How long,” demanded Madame, composedly, “does it take to make and store the lighting? Tell me.”

Defarge raised his head thoughtfully, as if there were something in that too.

“It does not take a long time,” said Madame, “for an earthquake to swallow a town. Eh well! Tell me how long it takes to prepare the earthquake?”

“A long time, I suppose,” said Defarge.

“But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces everything before it. In the meantime, it is always preparing, though it is not seen or heard. That is your consolation. Keep it.”

 

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