ALEXANDRIA VIRGINIA-2006
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RESOURCES/REFERENCE/RESEARCH
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{4} DEMOCRATIC PARTY MATTERS: National, The states of VA, OH, CT and PA are Given Emphasis,
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{5} EYE ON THE RIGHT: Links to Both Right Wing Organizations and Right Wing “Watch Organizations”.
{6} MISCELLANEOUS: Links to additional sources of relevant Information of interest and import.
{7} THE REFERENCE ROOM: Online Dictionary, Thesaurus, and Encyclopedia and Translation Services.
{8} FUN STUFF: Sources of Political Humor, both in good and bad taste, as well as extensive links to
Cartoon Sources.
{9} THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE-2008 Rank Order Pyramid 2000/2004 Information History Clickable
with map.
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TRACK THE NEWS IN THE POLITICAL HOT SPOTS:
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“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government,
so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution
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-- Thomas Jefferson --
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JAMES CARVILLE, ETC. POLLING DATA SURE TO UTILIZE THE “RELATED LINKS” BUTTON AND REVIEW REPORTS
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DECEMBER 8, 1912 – JANUARY 5, 1999
THOMAS “TIP” O’NEILL
“ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL”
THE QUOTABLE “TIP”
END PARTY MATTERS SECTION
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EYE ON THE RIGHT
THE THEOCRACY WATCH
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THE VITAL CENTER
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VIEW FROM THE LEFT
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MISCELLANEOUS
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THE REFERENCE ROOM
THE SAM ADAMS SHELF
SAM
BOSTON ARCHIEVE
THE SAMUEL ADAMS REFERENCE SHELF
SAM ADAMS --- THE GRAND INCENDIARY
THE QUOTABLE SAM ADAMS
"Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, 'What should be the reward of such sacrifices?' ... If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!" --Samuel Adams
Samuel Adams, Founding Father & American Patriot:"... it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds ...."
Samuel Adams, printed in "Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts", at 86-87 (Peirce & Hale, eds., Boston, 1850):
"That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of The United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms ...."
Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776:
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
SAM ADAMS AT AUTHORS QUOTE DATA BASE
SAM ADAMS AT TUBEGATOR QUOTES BASE
SAM ADAMS AT LIBERTY TREE GET-A-QUOTE
[1] HOMESTEAD.COM – REV.WAR - ADAMS
[2] The Lucid Café Library Web 2
[3] Wikipedia.Org - Sam Adams
[4] Yahoo Reference Encyclopedia
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THOMAS JEFFERSON
AND
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE STUDIES
THOMAS JEFFERSON RESEARCH ROOM
THE QUOTABLE THOMAS JEFFERSON
BRAINY QUOTES.COM (THOMAS JEFFERSON)
A democracy is no t more than mob rule, where
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent
of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.
Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind,
for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government
those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations,
perverted it into tyranny.
Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one,
he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
If God is just, I tremble for my country.
I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world,
and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature.
They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.
In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.
Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable,
than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
“Every generation needs a new revolution.” Thomas Jefferson
WIKIPEDIA.ORG (THOMAS JEFFERSON)
WIKIPEDIA.ORG (QUOTES: THOMAS JEFFERSON)
BARTLEBY.COM (ENCYCLOPEDIA: THOMAS JEFFERSON)
BARTLEBY.COM (ENCYCLOPEDIA: JEFFERSON---QUOTES)
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God 1 entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Declaration of Independence.
The Avalon Project at Yale Law School
Thomas Jefferson First Inaugural Address
First Inaugural Address
March 4, 1801
FRIENDS AND FELLOW-CITIZENS,
Called upon to undertake the duties of the first executive office of our country, I avail myself of the presence of that portion of my fellow-citizens which is here assembled to express my grateful thanks for the favor with which they have been pleased to look toward me, to declare a sincere consciousness that the task is above my talents, and that I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge and the weakness of my powers so justly inspire. A rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry, engaged in commerce with nations who feel power and forget right, advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye -- when I contemplate these transcendent objects, and see the honor, the happiness, and the hopes of this beloved country committed to the issue and the auspices of this day, I shrink from the contemplation, and humble myself before the magnitude of the undertaking. Utterly, indeed, should I despair did not the presence of many whom I here see remind me that in the other high authorities provided by our Constitution I shall find resources of wisdom, of virtue, and of zeal on which to rely under all difficulties. To you, then, gentlemen, who are charged with the sovereign functions of legislation, and to those associated with you, I look with encouragement for that guidance and support which may enable us to steer with safety the vessel in which we are all embarked amidst the conflicting elements of a troubled world.
During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more felt and feared by some and less by others, and should divide opinions as to measures of safety. But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens -- a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations. Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people -- a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.
I repair, then, fellow-citizens, to the post you have assigned me. With experience enough in subordinate offices to have seen the difficulties of this the greatest of all, I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it. Without pretensions to that high confidence you reposed in our first and greatest revolutionary character, whose preeminent services had entitled him to the first place in his country's love and destined for him the fairest page in the volume of faithful history, I ask so much confidence only as may give firmness and effect to the legal administration of your affairs. I shall often go wrong through defect of judgment. When right, I shall often be thought wrong by those whose positions will not command a view of the whole ground. I ask your indulgence for my own errors, which will never be intentional, and your support against the errors of others, who may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts. The approbation implied by your suffrage is a great consolation to me for the past, and my future solicitude will be to retain the good opinion of those who have bestowed it in advance, to conciliate that of others by doing them all the good in my power, and to be instrumental to the happiness and freedom of all.
Relying, then, on the patronage of your good will, I advance with obedience to the work, ready to retire from it whenever you become sensible how much better choice it is in your power to make. And may that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity.
Jefferson Papers Page
Inaugural Speeches Page
Avalon Home Page
© 1996 The Avalon Project.
THE SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON
On taking this station on a former occasion I declared the principles on which I believed it my duty to administer the affairs of our Commonwealth. My conscience tells me I have on every occasion acted up to that declaration according to its obvious import and to the understanding of every candid mind.
In the transaction of your foreign affairs we have endeavored to cultivate the friendship of all nations, and especially of those with which we have the most important relations. We have done them justice on all occasions, favored where favor was lawful, and cherished mutual interests and intercourse on fair and equal terms. We are firmly convinced, and we act on that conviction, that with nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties, and history bears witness to the fact that a just nation is trusted on its word when recourse is had to armaments and wars to bridle others.
At home, fellow-citizens, you best know whether we have done well or ill. The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These, covering our land with officers and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which once entered is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of property and produce. If among these taxes some minor ones fell which had not been inconvenient, it was because their amount would not have paid the officers who collected them, and because, if they had any merit, the State authorities might adopt them instead of others less approved.
The remaining revenue on the consumption of foreign articles is paid chiefly by those who can afford to add foreign luxuries to domestic comforts, being collected on our seaboard and frontiers only, and incorporated with the transactions of our mercantile citizens, it may be the pleasure and the pride of an American to ask, What farmer, what mechanic, what laborer ever sees a tax gatherer of the United States? These contributions enable us to support the current expenses of the Government, to fulfill contracts with foreign nations, to extinguish the native right of soil within our limits, to extend those limits, and to apply such a surplus to our public debts as places at a short day their final redemption, and that redemption once effected the revenue thereby liberated may, by a just repartition of it among the States and a corresponding amendment of the Constitution, be applied in time of peace to rivers, canals, roads, arts, manufactures, education, and other great objects within each State. In time of war, if injustice by ourselves or others must sometimes produce war, increased as the same revenue will be by increased population and consumption, and aided by other resources reserved for that crisis, it may meet within the year all the expenses of the year without encroaching on the rights of future generations by burthening them with the debts of the past. War will then be but a suspension of useful works, and a return to a state of peace, a return to the progress of improvement.
I have said, fellow-citizens, that the income reserved had enabled us to extend our limits, but that extension may possibly pay for itself before we are called on, and in the meantime may keep down the accruing interest; in all events, it will replace the advances we shall have made. I know that the acquisition of Louisiana had been disapproved by some from a candid apprehension that the enlargement of our territory would endanger its union. But who can limit the extent to which the federative principle may operate effectively? The larger our association the less will it be shaken by local passions; and in any view is it not better that the opposite bank of the Mississippi should be settled by our own brethren and children than by strangers of another family? With which should we be most likely to live in harmony and friendly intercourse?
In matters of religion I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the Constitution independent of the powers of the General Government. I have therefore undertaken on no occasion to prescribe the religious exercises suited to it, but have left them, as the Constitution found them, under the direction and discipline of the church or state authorities acknowledged by the several religious societies.
The aboriginal inhabitants of these countries I have regarded with the commiseration their history inspires. Endowed with the faculties and the rights of men, breathing an ardent love of liberty and independence, and occupying a country which left them no desire but to be undisturbed, the stream of overflowing population from other regions directed itself on these shores; without power to divert or habits to contend against it, they have been overwhelmed by the current or driven before it; now reduced within limits too narrow for the hunter's state, humanity enjoins us to teach them agriculture and the domestic arts; to encourage them to that industry which alone can enable them to maintain their place in existence and to prepare them in time for that state of society which to bodily comforts adds the improvement of the mind and morals. We have therefore liberally furnished them with the implements of husbandry and household use; we have placed among them instructors in the arts of first necessity, and they are covered with the aegis of the law against aggressors from among ourselves.
But the endeavors to enlighten them on the fate which awaits their present course of life, to induce them to exercise their reason, follow its dictates, and change their pursuits with the change of circumstances have powerful obstacles to encounter; they are combated by the habits of their bodies, prejudices of their minds, ignorance, pride, and the influence of interested and crafty individuals among them who feel themselves something in the present order of things and fear to become nothing in any other. These persons inculcate a sanctimonious reverence for the customs of their ancestors; that whatsoever they did must be done through all time; that reason is a false guide, and to advance under its counsel in their physical, moral, or political condition is perilous innovation; that their duty is to remain as their Creator made them, ignorance being safety and knowledge full of danger; in short, my friends, among them also is seen the action and counteraction of good sense and of bigotry; they too have their antiphilosophists who find an interest in keeping things in their present state, who dread reformation, and exert all their faculties to maintain the ascendancy of habit over the duty of improving our reason and obeying its mandates.
In giving these outlines I do not mean, fellow-citizens, to arrogate to myself the merit of the measures. That is due, in the first place, to the reflecting character of our citizens at large, who, by the weight of public opinion, influence and strengthen the public measures. It is due to the sound discretion with which they select from among themselves those to whom they confide the legislative duties. It is due to the zeal and wisdom of the characters thus selected, who lay the foundations of public happiness in wholesome laws, the execution of which alone remains for others, and it is due to the able and faithful auxiliaries, whose patriotism has associated them with me in the executive functions.
During this course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness and to sap its safety. They might, indeed, have been corrected by the wholesome punishments reserved to and provided by the laws of the several States against falsehood and defamation, but public duties more urgent press on the time of public servants, and the offenders have therefore been left to find their punishment in the public indignation.
Nor was it uninteresting to the world that an experiment should be fairly and fully made, whether freedom of discussion, unaided by power, is not sufficient for the propagation and protection of truth—whether a government conducting itself in the true spirit of its constitution, with zeal and purity, and doing no act which it would be unwilling the whole world should witness, can be written down by falsehood and defamation. The experiment has been tried; you have witnessed the scene; our fellow-citizens looked on, cool and collected; they saw the latent source from which these outrages proceeded; they gathered around their public functionaries, and when the Constitution called them to the decision by suffrage, they pronounced their verdict, honorable to those who had served them and consolatory to the friend of man who believes that he may be trusted with the control of his own affairs.
No inference is here intended that the laws provided by the States against false and defamatory publications should not be enforced; he who has time renders a service to public morals and public tranquillity in reforming these abuses by the salutary coercions of the law; but the experiment is noted to prove that, since truth and reason have maintained their ground against false opinions in league with false facts, the press, confined to truth, needs no other legal restraint; the public judgment will correct false reasoning and opinions on a full hearing of all parties; and no other definite line can be drawn between the inestimable liberty of the press and its demoralizing licentiousness. If there be still improprieties which this rule would not restrain, its supplement must be sought in the censorship of public opinion.
Contemplating the union of sentiment now manifested so generally as auguring harmony and happiness to our future course, I offer to our country sincere congratulations. With those, too, not yet rallied to the same point the disposition to do so is gaining strength; facts are piercing through the veil drawn over them, and our doubting brethren will at length see that the mass of their fellow-citizens with whom they can not yet resolve to act as to principles and measures, think as they think and desire what they desire; that our wish as well as theirs is that the public efforts may be directed honestly to the public good, that peace be cultivated, civil and religious liberty unassailed, law and order preserved, equality of rights maintained, and that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his father's. When satisfied of these views it is not in human nature that they should not approve and support them. In the meantime let us cherish them with patient affection, let us do them justice, and more than justice, in all competitions of interest; and we need not doubt that truth, reason, and their own interests will at length prevail, will gather them into the fold of their country, and will complete that entire union of opinion which gives to a nation the blessing of harmony and the benefit of all its strength.
I shall now enter on the duties to which my fellow-citizens have again called me, and shall proceed in the spirit of those principles which they have approved. I fear not that any motives of interest may lead me astray; I am sensible of no passion which could seduce me knowingly from the path of justice, but the weaknesses of human nature and the limits of my own understanding will produce errors of judgment sometimes injurious to your interests. I shall need, therefore, all the indulgence which I have heretofore experienced from my constituents; the want of it will certainly not lessen with increasing years. I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy with His providence and our riper years with His wisdom and power, and to whose goodness I ask you to join in supplications with me that He will so enlighten the minds of your servants, guide their councils, and prosper their measures that whatsoever they do shall result in your good, and shall secure to you the peace, friendship, and approbation of all nations.
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THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
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"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." Lincoln's Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862.
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THE QUOTABLE FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT
I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.
I'm not the smartest fellow in the world, but I can sure pick smart colleagues.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.
The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials,
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The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power
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or any controlling private power.
Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. Franklin D. Roosevelt
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
FDR
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THE MARK TWAIN READING ROOM
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THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER
MARK TWAIN
An angel, and kill a priest! An angel who did not know how to do wrong, and yet destroys in cold blood hundreds of helpless poor men and women who had never done him any harm! It made us sick to see that awful deed, and to think that none of those poor creatures was prepared except the priest, for none of them had ever heard a mass or seen a church. And we were witnesses; we had seen these murders done and it was our duty to tell, and let the law take its course.
"You have answered your own question," he said. "I will expand it. Man is made of dirt -I saw him made. I am not made of dirt. Man is a museum of diseases, a home of impurities; he comes to-day and is gone to-morrow; he begins as dirt and departs as stench; I am of the aristocracy of the Imperishables. And man has the Moral Sense. You understand? He has the Moral Sense. That would seem to be difference enough between us, all by itself."
"What is the Moral Sense, sir?"
He looked down, surprised, over his great spectacles, and said, "Why, it is the faculty which enables us to distinguish good from evil."
It threw some light, but not a glare, and I was a little disappointed, also to some degree embarrassed. He was waiting for me to go on, so, in default of anything else to say, I asked, "Is it valuable?"
Ursula bridled at this and said: "Perhaps you would like to have it. You must be rich, with your fine clothes and quality airs." Then she sniffed and said: "Give it to the rich - the idea! The rich don't care for anybody but themselves; it's only the poor that have feeling for the poor, and help them. The poor and God. God will provide for this kitten."
"What makes you think so?"
Ursula's eyes snapped with anger. ~Because I know it!" she said. "Not a sparrow falls to the ground without His seeing it."
"But it falls, just the same. What good is seeing it fall?"
Then they drove splinter after splinter under his nails, and he shrieked with the pain. Satan was not disturbed, but I could not endure it, and had to be whisked out of there. I was faint and sick, but the fresh air revived me, and we walked toward my home. I said it was a brutal thing.
"No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it," and he went on talking like that." It is like your paltry race - always lying, always claiming virtues which it hasn't got, always denying them to the higher animals, which alone posses them. No brute ever does a cruel thing - that is the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he does it innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing as wrong. And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting it - only man does that. Inspired by that mongrel Moral Sense of his! A sense whose function is to distinguish between right and wrong, with liberty to choose which of them he will do. Now what advantage can he get out of that? He is always choosing, and in nine cases out of ten he prefers the wrong. There shouldn't be any wrong; and without the Moral Sense there couldn't be any. And yet he is such an unreasoning creature that he is not able to perceive that the Moral Sense degrades him to the bottom layer of animated beings and is a shameful possession. Are you feeling better? Let me show you something."
"It is some more Moral Sense. The proprietors are rich, and very holy; but the wage they pay to these poor brothers and sisters of theirs is only enough to keep them from dropping dead with hunger. The work-hours are fourteen per day, winter and summer - from six in the morning till eight at night -little children and all. And they walk to and from the pigsties which they inhabit - four miles each way, through mud and slush, rain, snow, sleet, and storm, daily, year in and year out. They get four hours of sleep. They kennel together, three families in a room, in unimaginable filth and stench; and disease comes, and they die off like flies. Have they committed a crime, these mangy things No. What have they done, that they are punished so? Nothing at all, except getting themselves born into your foolish race. You have seen how they treat a misdoer there in the jail; now you see how they treat the innocent and the worthy. Is your race logical? Are these ill-smelling innocents better off than that heretic? Indeed, no; his punishment is trivial compared with theirs. They broke him on the wheel and smashed him to rags and pulp after we left, and he is dead now, and free of your precious race; but these poor slaves here - why, they have been dying for years, and some of them will not escape from life for years to come. It is the Moral Sense which teaches the factory proprietors the difference between right and wrong - you perceive the result. They think themselves better than dogs. Ah, you are such an illogical, unreasoning race! And paltry - oh, unspeakably!"
"But, after all, it is not all ridiculous; there is a sort of pathos about it when one remembers how few are your days, how childish your pomps, and what shadows you are!"
"There is that misused word again - that shabby slander. Brutes do not act like that, but only men."
"Well, it was inhuman, anyway."
"No, it wasn't, Seppi; it was human - quite distinctly human. It is pleasant to hear you libel the higher animals by attributing to them dispositions which they are free from, and which are found nowhere but in the human heart. None of the higher animals is tainted with the disease called the Moral Sense. Purify your language, Seppi; drop those lying phrases out of it."
With the last word he vanished, to our sorrow and disappointment. We got the men and Father Adolf, and we saw the man die. Nobody cared but the dog; he mourned and grieved, and licked the dead face, and could not be comforted. We buried him where he was, and without a coffin, for he had no money, and no friend but the dog. If we had been an hour earlier the priest would have been in time to send that poor creature to heaven, but now he was gone down into the awful fires, to burn forever. It seemed such a pity that in a world where so many people have difficulty to put in their time, one little hour could not have been spared for this poor creature who needed it so much, and to whom it would have made the difference between eternal joy and eternal pain. It gave an appalling idea of the value of an hour, and I thought I could never waste one again without remorse and terror. Seppi was depressed and grieved, and said it must be so much better to be a dog and not run such awful risks. We took this one home with us and kept him for our own. Seppi had a very good thought as we were walking along, and it cheered us up and made us feel much better. He said the dog had forgiven the man that had wronged him so, and maybe God would accept that absolution.
This boy was Gottfried Narr, a dull, good creature, with no harm in him and nothing against him personally; still, he was under a cloud, and properly so, for it had not been six months since a social blight had mildewed the family - his grandmother had been burned as a witch. When that kind of a malady is in the blood it does not always come out with just one burning.
It was bitter cold weather when Gottfried's grandmother was burned. It was charged that she had cured bad headaches by kneading the person's head and neck with her fingers - as she said - but really by the Devil's help, as everybody knew. They were going to examine her, but she stopped them, and confessed straight off that her power was from the Devil. So they appointed to burn her next morning, early, in our market-square. The officer who was to prepare the fire was there first, and prepared it. She was there next - brought by the constables, who left her and went to fetch another witch. Her family, did not come with her. They might be reviled, maybe stoned, if the people were excited. I came, and gave her an apple. She was squatting at the fire, warming herself and waiting; and her old lips and hands were blue with the cold. A stranger came next. He was a traveler, passing through; and he spoke to her gently, and, seeing nobody but me there to hear, said he was sorry for her. And he asked if what she confessed was true, and she said no. He looked surprised and still more sorry then, and asked her:
"Then why did you confess?"
"I am old and very poor," she said, "and I work for my living. There was not way but to confess. If I hadn't they might have set me free. That would ruin me, for no one would forget that I had been suspected of being a witch, and so would get no more work, and wherever I went they would set the dogs on me. In a little while I would starve. The fire is best; it is soon over. You have been good to me, you two, and I thank you."
"There - he wouldn't drive children mad with hunger and fright and loneliness, and then burn them for confessing to things invented for them which had never happened. And neither would he break the hearts of innocent, poor old women and make them afraid to trust themselves among their own race; and he would not insult them in their death-agony. For he is not besmirched with the Moral Sense, but is as the angels are, and knows no wrong, and never does it."
Lovely as he was, Satan could be cruelly offensive when he chose; and he always chose when the human race was brought to his attention. He always turned up his nose at it, and never had a kind word for it.
"Money!" he said; "they've got plenty of it. They pay me two grochen a week, besides my keep. And they live on the fat of the land, I can tell you; the prince himself can't beat their table."
In any community, big or little, there is always a fair proportion of people who are not malicious or unkind by nature, and who never do unkind things except when they are overmastered by fear, or when their self-interest is greatly in danger, or some such matter as that. Eseldorf had its proportion of such people, and ordinarily their good and gentle influence was felt, but these were not ordinary times - on account of the witch-dread - and so we did not seem to have any gentle and compassionate hearts left, to speak of.
"It is serious, friends, it is very serious. Always before, we had a protection. It has failed."
The others shook, as with a sort of chill, and muttered those words over - "It has failed." "God has forsaken us."
We talked together, and I had the idea of trying to reform Satan and persuade him to lead a better life. I told him about all those things he had been doing, and begged him to be more considerate and stop making people unhappy. I said I knew he did not mean any harm, but that he ought to stop and consider the possible consequences of a thing before launching it in that impulsive and random way of his; then he would not make so much trouble. He was not hurt by this plain speech; he only looked amused and surprised, and said:
"What? I do random things? Indeed, I never do. I stop and consider possible consequences? Where is the need? I know what the consequences are going to be - always."
"Oh, Satan, then how could you do these things?"
"Well, I will tell you, and you must understand if you can. You belong to a singular race. Every man is a suffering-machine and a happiness-machine combined. The two functions work together harmoniously, with a fine and delicate precision, on the give-and-take principle. For every happiness turned out in the one department the other stands ready to modify it with a sorrow or a pain - maybe a dozen. In most cases the man's life is about equally divided between happiness and unhappiness. When this is not the case the unhappiness predominates - always; never the other. Sometimes a man's make and disposition are such that his misery-machine is able to do nearly all the business. Such a man goes through life almost ignorant of what happiness is. Everything he touches, everything he does, brings a misfortune upon him. You have seen such people? To that kind of a person life is not an advantage, is it? It is only a disaster. Sometimes for an hour's happiness a man's machinery makes him pay years of misery. Don't you know that? It happens every now and then. I will give you a case or two presently. Now the people of your village are nothing to me - you know that, don't you?"
I did not like to speak out too flatly, so I said I had suspected it.
"Well, it is true that they are nothing to me. It is not possible that they should be. The difference between them and me is abysmal, immeasurable. They have no intellect."
"No intellect?"
"Nothing that resembles it. At a future time I will examine what man calls is mind and give you the details of that chaos, then you will see and understand. Men have nothing in common with me - there is no point of contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little vanities and impertinences and ambitions: their foolish little life is but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no sense. Only the Moral Sense. I will show you what I mean. Here is a red spider, not so big as a pin's head. Can you imagine an elephant being interested in him - caring whether he is happy or isn't, or whether he is wealthy or poor, or whether his sweetheart returns his love or not, or whether his mother is sick or well, or whether he is looked up to in society or not, or whether his enemies will smite him or his friends desert him, or whether his hopes will suffer blight or his political ambitions fail, or whether he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected and despised in a foreign land? These things can never be important to the elephant; they are nothing to him; he cannot shrink his sympathies to the microscopic size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to the elephant. The elephant has nothing against the spider - he cannot get down to that remote level; I have nothing against man. The elephant is indifferent; I am indifferent. The elephant would not take the trouble to do the spider an ill turn; if he took the notion he might do him a good turn, if it came in his way and cost nothing. I have done men good service, but no ill turns.
"The elephant lives a century, the red spider a day; in power, intellect, and dignity the one creature is separated from the other by a distance which is simply astronomical. Yet in these, as in all qualities, man is immeasurably further below me than is the wee spider below the elephant.
"Man's mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches little trivialities together and gets a result - such as it is. My mind creates! Do you get the force of that? Creates anything it desires - and in a moment. Creates without material. Creates fluids, solids, colors - anything, everything - out of the airy nothing which is called Thought. A man imagines a silk thread, imagines a machine to make it, imagines a picture, then by weeks of labor embroiders it on canvas with the thread. I think the whole thing, and in a moment it is before you - created.
"I think a poem, music, the record of a game of chess - anything - and it is there. This is the immortal mind - nothing is beyond its reach. Nothing can obstruct my vision: the rocks are transparent to me, and darkness is daylight. I do not need to open a book; I take the whole of its contents into my mind at a single glance, through the cover; and in a million years I could not forget a single word of it, or its place in the volume. Nothing goes on in the skull of man, bird, fish, insect, or other creature which can be hidden from me. I pierce the learned man's brain with a single glance, and the treasures which cost him threescore years to accumulate are mine; he can forget, and he does forget, but I retain.
"Now, then, I perceive by your thoughts that you are understanding me fairly well. Let us proceed. Circumstances might so fall out that the elephant could like the spider - supposing he can see it - but he could not love it. His love is for his own kind - for his equals. An angel's love is sublime, adorable, divine, beyond the imagination of man - infinitely beyond it! But it is limited to his own august order. If it fell upon one of your race for only an instant, it would consume its object to ashes. No, we cannot love men, but we can be harmlessly indifferent to them; we can also like them, sometimes. I like you and the boys, I like Father Peter, and for your sakes I am doing all these things for the villagers."
He saw that I was thinking a sarcasm, and he explained his position.
"I have wrought well for the villagers, though it does not look like it on the surface. Your race never know good fortune from ill. They are always mistaking the one for the other. It is because they cannot see into the future. What am doing for the villagers will bear good fruit some day; in some cases to themselves; in others, to unborn generations of men. No one will ever know that I was the cause, but it will be none the less true, for all that. Among you boys you have a game: you stand a row of bricks on end a few inches apart; you push a brick, it knocks its neighbor over, the neighbor knocks over the next brick - and so on till all the row is prostrate. That is human life. A child's first act knocks over the initial brick, and the rest will follow inexorably. If you could see into the future, as I can, you would see everything that was going to happen to that creature; for nothing can change the order of its life after the first event has determined it. That is, nothing will change it, because each act unfailingly begets an act, that act begets another, and so on to the end, and the seer can look forward down the line and see just when each act is to have birth, from cradle to grave."
"Does God order the career?~
"Foreordain it? No. The man's circumstances and environment order it. His first act determines the second and all that follow after. But suppose, for argument's sake, that the man should skip one of these acts; an apparently trifling one, for instance; suppose that it had been appointed that on a certain day, at a certain hour and minute and second and fraction of a second he should go to the well, and he didn't go. That man's career would change utterly, from that moment; thence to the grave it would be wholly different from the career which his first act as a child had arranged for him. Indeed, it might be that if he had gone to the well he would have ended his career on a throne, and that omitting to do it would set him upon a career that would lead to beggary and a pauper's grave. For instance: if at any time - say in boyhood - Columbus had skipped the triflingest little link in the chain of acts projected and made inevitable by his first childish act, it would have changed his whole subsequent life, and he would have become a priest and died obscure in an Italian village, and America would not have been discovered for two centuries afterward. I know this. To skip any one of the billion acts in Columbus's chain would have wholly changed his life. I have examined his billion of possible careers, and in only one of them occurs the discovery of America. You people do not suspect that all of your acts are of one size and importance, but it is true; to snatch at an appointed fly is as big
For a day or two the whole village was a chattering turmoil over Frau Brandt's case and over the mysterious calamity that had overtaken the mob, and at her trial the place was crowded. She was easily convicted of her blasphemies, for she uttered those terrible words again and said she would not take them back. When warned that she was imperiling her life, she said they could take it in welcome, she did not want it, she would rather live with the professional devils in perdition than with these imitators in the village. They accused her of breaking all those ribs by witchcraft, and asked her if she was not a witch? She answered scornfully:
"No. If I had that power would any of you holy hypocrites be alive five minutes? No; I would strike you all dead. Pronounce your sentence and let me go; I am tired of your society."
So they found her guilty, and she was excommunicated and cut off from the joys of heaven and doomed to the fires of hell; then she was clothed in a coarse robe and delivered to the secular arm, and conducted to the market place, the bell solemnly tolling the while. We saw her chained to the stake, and saw the first thin film of blue smoke rise on the still air. Then her hard face softened, and she looked upon the packed crowd in front of her and said, with gentleness:
"We played together once, in long-gone days when we were innocent little creatures. For the sake of that, I forgive you."
We went away then, and did not see the fires consume her, but we heard the shrieks, although we put our fingers in our ears. When they ceased we knew she was in heaven, not with- standing the excommunication; and we were glad of her death and not sorry that we had brought it about.
"Very well," he said. "Would you like to see a history of the progress of the human race?-its development of that product which it calls civilization?"
We said we should.
So, with a thought, he turned the place into the Garden of Eden, and we saw Abel praying by his altar; then Cain came walking toward him with his club, and did not seem to see us, and would have stepped on my foot if I had not drawn it in. He spoke to his brother in a language which we did not understand; then he grew violent and threatening, and we knew what was going to happen, and turned away our heads for the moment; but we heard the crash of the blows and heard the shrieks and the groans; then there was silence, and we saw Abel dying in his blood and gasping out his life, and Gin standing over him and looking down at him, vengeful and unrepentant.
Then the vision vanished, and was followed by a long series of unknown wars, murders, and massacres. Next we had the Flood, and the Ark tossing around in the stormy waters, with lofty mountains in the distance showing veiled and dim through the rain. Satan said:
"The progress of your race was not satisfactory. It is to have another chance now."
The scene changed, and we saw Noah overcome with wine.
Next, we had Sodom and Gomorrah, and "the attempt to discover two or three respectable persons there," as Satan described it. Next, Lot and his daughters in the cave.
Next came the Hebraic wars, and we saw the victors massacre the survivors and their cattle, and save the young girls alive and distribute them around.
Next we had Jael; and saw her slip into the tent and drive the nail into the temple of her sleeping guest; and we were so close that when the blood gushed out it trickled in a little, red stream to our feet, and we could have stained our hands in it if we had wanted to.
Next-we had Egyptian wars, Greek wars, Roman wars, hideous drenchings of the earth with blood; and we saw the treacheries of the Romans toward the Carthaginians, and the sickening spectacle of the massacre of those brave people. Also we saw Caesar invade Britain-"not that those barbarians had done him any harm, but because he wanted their land, and desired to confer the blessings of civilization upon their widows and orphans," as Satan explained.
Next, Christianity was born. Then ages of Europe passed in review before us, and we saw Christianity and Civilization march hand in hand through those ages, "leaving famine and death and desolation in their wake; and other signs of the progress of the human race," as Satan observed. And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars-all over Europe, all over the world. "Sometimes in the private interest of royal families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose-there is no such war in the history of the race." "Now," said Satan, "you have seen your progress down to the present, and you must confess that it is wonderful-in its way. We must now exhibit the future." He showed us slaughters more terrible in their destruction of life, more devastating in their engines of war, than any we had seen. "You perceive," he said, "that you have made continual progress. Cain did his murder with a club; the Hebrews did their murders with javelins and swords; the Greeks and Romans added protective armor and the fine arts of military organiza tion and generalship; the Christian has added guns and gun' powder; a few centuries from now he will have so greatly im' proved the deadly effectiveness of his weapons of slaughter that all men will confess that without Christian civilization war must have remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of time."
Then he began to laugh in the most unfeeling way, and make fun of the human race, although he knew that what he had been saying shamed us and wounded us. No one but an angel could have acted so; but suffering is nothing to them; they do not know what it
Satan laughed his unkind laugh to a finish; then he said: "It is a remarkable progress. In five or six thousand years five or six high civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world, then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people. They all did their best-to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its history-but only the Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian-not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The Turk and the Chinaman will buy those to kill missionaries and converts with."
By this time his theater was at work again, and before our eyes nation after nation drifted by, during two or three centuries, a mighty procession, an endless procession, raging, struggling, wallowing through seas of blood, smothered in battle smoke through which the flags glinted and the red jets from the cannon darted; and always we heard the thunder of the guns and the cries of the dying.
"And what does it amount to?" said Satan, with his evil chuckle. "Nothing at all. You gain nothing; you always come
out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously reper forming this dull nonsense-to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who address you in the language of master to slave, and are answered in the language of slave to master; who are worshiped by you with your mouth, while in your heart-if you have one-you despise yourselves for it. The first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not yet failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built. Drink to their perpetuation! Drink to their augmentation! Drink to-" Then he saw by our faces how much we were hurt, and he cut his sentence short and stopped chuckling, and his manner changed. He said, gently: "No, we will drink one another's health, and let civilization go. The wine which has flown to our hands out of space by desire is earthly, and good enough for that other toast; but throw away the glasses; we will drink this one in wine which has not visited this world before." We obeyed, and reached up and received the new cups as they descended.
"Oh, it's true. I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves. Think of it! One kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps in iniquities which revolt both of them. Speaking as an expert, I know that ninety-nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics in the long ago. And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart into the harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates witches and wants them killed. Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noise - perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do it - and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end.
"Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race - the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions."
I did not like to hear our race called sheep, and said I did not think they were.
"Still, it is true, lamb," said Satan. "Look at you in war - what mutton you are, and how ridiculous!"
"In war? How?"
"There has never been a just one, never an honorable one - on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful - as usual - will shout for the war. The pulpit will - warily and cautiously - object - at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and here is no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you willsee this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers - as earlier - but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation - pulpit and all - will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
That lawyer finished quite seriously, and with dignity. He pointed to the money, and said:
"The love of it is the root of all evil. There it lies, the ancient tempter, newly red with the shame of its latest victory - the dishonor of a priest of God and his two poor juvenile helpers in crime. If it could but speak, let us hope that it would be constrained to confess that of all its conquests this was the basest and the most pathetic."
"What an ass you are!" he said. "Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane. Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases. I have taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind; I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the result - and you criticize! I said I would make him permanently happy, and I have done it. I have made him happy by the only means possible to his race - and you are not satisfied!" He heaved a discouraged sigh, and said, "It seems to me that this race is hard to please."
There it was, you see. He didn't seem to know any way to do a person a favor except by killing him or making a lunatic out of him. I apologized, as well as I could; but privately I did not think much of his processes - at that time.
Satan was accustomed to say that our race lived a life of continuous and uninterrupted self-deception. It duped itself from cradle to grave with shams and delusions which it mistook for realities, and this made its entire life a sham. Of the score of fine qualities which it imagined it had and was vain of, it really possessed hardly one. It regarded itself asgold, and was only brass. One day when he was in this vein he mentioned a detail - the sense of humor. I cheered up then, and took issue. I said we possessed it.
"There spoke the race!" he said; "always ready to claim what it hasn't got, and mistake its ounce of brass filings for a ton of gold-dust. You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things - broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them - and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon - laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution - these can lift at a colossal humbug - push it a little - weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage."
"It was a vision - it had no existence."
I could hardly breathe for the great hope that was struggling in me. "A vision? - a vi -"
"Life itself is only a vision, a dream."
It was electrical. By God! I had had that very thought a thousand times in my musings!
"Nothing exists; all is a dream. God - man - the world - the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars - a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space - and you!"
"I!"
"And you are not you - you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream - your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me . . .
"I am perishing already - I am failing - I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever - for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!
"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago - centuries, ages, eons, ago! - for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities.
Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! . . .
"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.
"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"
He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.
By Mark Twain
The Essence in Excerpt
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on… in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpouring of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.
Sunday morning came-next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their faces alight with material dreams-visions of a stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender!-then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths.
The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation -- "God the all-terrible! Thou who ordains, Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!"
Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was that an ever--merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory - and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal,” Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"
A stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside -- which the startled minister did -- and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said
"I come from the Throne-bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd and grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import-that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of-except he pause and think.
"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two- one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of His Who hearth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this-keep it in mind. If you beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! Lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.
"You have heard your servant's prayer-the uttered part of it. I am commissioned by God to put into words the other part of it-that part which the pastor, and also you in your hearts, fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly?
God grant that it was so!
You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory-must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle-be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it-for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him who is the Source of Love, and who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
(After a pause)
"Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits."
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.
LIAM O’FLAHERTY
Liam O’flaherty
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�I was born on a storm-swept rock and hate the soft growth of sunbaked lands where there is no frost in men’s bones. Swift thought and the flight of ravenous birds,and the squeal of hunted animals are to me reality Liam O’ Flaherty
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The Sniperby LIAM O'FLAHERTY
The long June twilight faded into night. Dublin lay enveloped in darkness but for the dim light of the moon that shone through fleecy clouds, casting a pale light as of approaching dawn over the streets and the dark waters of the Liffey. Around the beleaguered Four Courts the heavy guns roared. Here and there through the city, machine guns and rifles broke the silence of the night, spasmodically, like dogs barking on lone farms. Republicans and Free Staters were waging civil war.On a rooftop near O'Connell Bridge, a Republican sniper lay watching. Beside him lay his rifle and over his shoulders was slung a pair of field glasses. His face was the face of a student, thin and ascetic, but his eyes had the cold gleam of the fanatic. They were deep and thoughtful, the eyes of a man who is used to looking at death.He was eating a sandwich hungrily. He had eaten nothing since morning. He had been too excited to eat. He finished the sandwich, and, taking a flask of whiskey from his pocket, he took a short drought. Then he returned the flask to his pocket. He paused for a moment, considering whether he should risk a smoke. It was dangerous. The flash might be seen in the darkness, and there were enemies watching. He decided to take the risk.Placing a cigarette between his lips, he struck a match, inhaled the smoke hurriedly and put out the light. Almost immediately, a bullet flattened itself against the parapet of the roof. The sniper took another whiff and put out the cigarette. Then he swore softly and crawled away to the left.Cautiously he raised himself and peered over the parapet. There was a flash and a bullet whizzed over his head. He dropped immediately. He had seen the flash. It came from the opposite side of the street.He rolled over the roof to a chimney stack in the rear, and slowly drew himself up behind it, until his eyes were level with the top of the parapet. There was nothing to be seen--just the dim outline of the opposite housetop against the blue sky. His enemy was under cover.Just then an armored car came across the bridge and advanced slowly up the street. It stopped on the opposite side of the street, fifty yards ahead. The sniper could hear the dull panting of the motor. His heart beat faster. It was an enemy car. He wanted to fire, but he knew it was useless. His bullets would never pierce the steel that covered the gray monster.Then round the corner of a side street came an old woman, her head covered by a tattered shawl. She began to talk to the man in the turret of the car. She was pointing to the roof where the sniper lay. An informer.The turret opened. A man's head and shoulders appeared, looking toward the sniper. The sniper raised his rifle and fired. The head fell heavily on the turret wall. The woman darted toward the side street. The sniper fired again. The woman whirled round and fell with a shriek into the gutter.Suddenly from the opposite roof a shot rang out and the sniper dropped his rifle with a curse. The rifle clattered to the roof. The sniper thought the noise would wake the dead. He stooped to pick the rifle up. He couldn't lift it. His forearm was dead. "I'm hit," he muttered.Dropping flat onto the roof, he crawled back to the parapet. With his left hand he felt the injured right forearm. The blood was oozing through the sleeve of his coat. There was no pain--just a deadened sensation, as if the arm had been cut off.Quickly he drew his knife from his pocket, opened it on the breastwork of the parapet, and ripped open the sleeve. There was a small hole where the bullet had entered. On the other side there was no hole. The bullet had lodged in the bone. It must have fractured it. He bent the arm below the wound. The arm bent back easily. He ground his teeth to overcome the pain.Then taking out his field dressing, he ripped open the packet with his knife. He broke the neck of the iodine bottle and let the bitter fluid drip into the wound. A paroxysm of pain swept through him. He placed the cotton wadding over the wound and wrapped the dressing over it. He tied the ends with his teeth.Then he lay still against the parapet, and, closing his eyes, he made an effort of will to overcome the pain.In the street beneath all was still. The armored car had retired speedily over the bridge, with the machine gunner's head hanging lifeless over the turret. The woman's corpse lay still in the gutter.The sniper lay still for a long time nursing his wounded arm and planning escape. Morning must not find him wounded on the roof. The enemy on the opposite roof covered his escape. He must kill that enemy and he could not use his rifle. He had only a revolver to do it. Then he thought of a plan.Taking off his cap, he placed it over the muzzle of his rifle. Then he pushed the rifle slowly upward over the parapet, until the cap was visible from the opposite side of the street. Almost immediately there was a report, and a bullet pierced the center of the cap. The sniper slanted the rifle forward. The cap clipped down into the street. Then catching the rifle in the middle, the sniper dropped his left hand over the roof and let it hang, lifelessly. After a few moments he let the rifle drop to the street. Then he sank to the roof, dragging his hand with him.Crawling quickly to his feet, he peered up at the corner of the roof. His ruse had succeeded. The other sniper, seeing the cap and rifle fall, thought that he had killed his man. He was now standing before a row of chimney pots, looking across, with his head clearly silhouetted against the western sky.The Republican sniper smiled and lifted his revolver above the edge of the parapet. The distance was about fifty yards--a hard shot in the dim light, and his right arm was paining him like a thousand devils. He took a steady aim. His hand trembled with eagerness. Pressing his lips together, he took a deep breath through his nostrils and fired. He was almost deafened with the report and his arm shook with the recoil.Then when the smoke cleared, he peered across and uttered a cry of joy. His enemy had been hit. He was reeling over the parapet in his death agony. He struggled to keep his feet, but he was slowly falling forward as if in a dream. The rifle fell from his grasp, hit the parapet, fell over, bounded off the pole of a barber's shop beneath and then clattered on the pavement.Then the dying man on the roof crumpled up and fell forward. The body turned over and over in space and hit the ground with a dull thud. Then it lay still.The sniper looked at his enemy falling and he shuddered. The lust of battle died in him. He became bitten by remorse. The sweat stood out in beads on his forehead. Weakened by his wound and the long summer day of fasting and watching on the roof, he revolted from the sight of the shattered mass of his dead enemy. His teeth chattered, he began to gibber to himself, cursing the war, cursing himself, cursing everybody.He looked at the smoking revolver in his hand, and with an oath he hurled it to the roof at his feet. The revolver went off with a concussion and the bullet whizzed past the sniper's head. He was frightened back to his senses by the shock. His nerves steadied. The cloud of fear scattered from his mind and he laughed.Taking the whiskey flask from his pocket, he emptied it a drought. He felt reckless under the influence of the spirit. He decided to leave the roof now and look for his company commander, to report. Everywhere around was quiet. There was not much danger in going through the streets. He picked up his revolver and put it in his pocket. Then he crawled down through the skylight to the house underneath.When the sniper reached the laneway on the street level, he felt a sudden curiosity as to the identity of the enemy sniper whom he had killed. He decided that he was a good shot, whoever he was. He wondered did he know him. Perhaps he had been in his own company before the split in the army. He decided to risk going over to have a look at him. He peered around the corner into O'Connell Street. In the upper part of the street there was heavy firing, but around here all was quiet.The sniper darted across the street. A machine gun tore up the ground around him with a hail of bullets, but he escaped. He threw himself face downward beside the corpse. The machine gun stopped.Then the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother's face.
“The Sniper,” a story about the Irish civil war, was Liam O’Flaherty’s first published piece of fiction. It appeared in 1923 in the London publication The New Leader. Over the years, it has been reprinted several times, and as of 2004 it could be found in O’Flaherty’s Collected Stories. “The Sniper” helped set O’Flaherty firmly on the writer’s path. Upon reading it, Edward Garnett, an influential London editor, recommended a publisher bring forth the novel that O’Flaherty had just completed. Thus began a literary career that lasted for three decades.
O’Flaherty was intensely involved in Irish politics as a young man, joining both the Communist party in Ireland and later the Republican army. Nonetheless, throughout his career, O’Flaherty only wrote a handful of overtly political stories. In the fall of 1922, after taking part in the Four Courts incident as a Republican soldier, O’Flaherty fled Ireland. Settling in London, O’Flaherty procured a typewriter and wrote “The Sniper” while the devastating Irish civil war was still going on. O’Flaherty drew upon his experiences to create a piece of fiction that shows that the civil war had repercussions stretching far beyond the field of battle. O’Flaherty places his protagonist, a sniper, in a kill or be killed situation. After the sniper shoots an enemy soldier, he discovers he has just killed his brother. The sniper’s emotional detachment throughout the story, coupled with this startling ending, allows O’Flaherty to indirectly address the way in which the Irish civil war led to the disunity of Irish society.
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Liam O'Flaherty
Famine. Famine is the story of three generations of the Kilmartin family set in the period of the Great Famine of the 1840s. A `masterly historical novel', rich in language, character and plot, a panoramic story of passion, tragedy and resilience. `O'Flaherty is one of the most heroic of Irish novelists, the one who has always tackled big themes, and in this great novel, succeeded in writing something imperishable... Mary Kilmartin (the heroine) has been singled out by two generations of critics as one of the great creations of modern literature. And so she is.'
From review by novelist John Broderick, Irish Times
An extract from Famine a novel by Liam O’Flaherty
In spite of the previous year’s blight and the scarcity of food, the quantity of potatoes planted that spring was even greater than usual. Now the crop showed signs of being a bumper one. The spring had been severe. There had been frost and snow even in the first part of April. But June brought a heat that was almost tropical. Under the urge of this heat, the potato plants grew to an enormous size and their luxuriant foliage, dotted with beautiful white and pink blossoms, made Black Valley look like a flower garden. The people began to hope that their hardships were nearly over and that God would again bless their labor.
On St. John’s Eve, they made bonfires in accordance with the ancient custom. Then they took coals from the fires and carried them around the boundaries of their gardens, to ward off evil from the earth’s fruit. Next morning, they went out and plucked a few stalks in each garden. Lo! the seed had increased abundantly. There was wild rejoicing everywhere. Old Kilmartin was exalted.
?What did I say?? he shouted, as he spilt a small kish of the new potatoes on the kitchen floor. ?God doesn’t send hunger for long. He sends it to remind us of our sins. But when we repent he sends riches. The earth is rich. God has blessed our earth.?
At noon, on the feast of St. John, they sat down to a meal that was for them a real feast. Mary had got a few young onions from the plot at the back of the house. She chopped them up and mixed them with the new potatoes. There was a piece of salt fish which Sally O’Hanlon had given her, the result of another bit of thieving on the part of that generous neighbor. Although there was no milk to complete this favorite meal, hunger supplied its place as a savory. They all gorged themselves. Even Maggie had left her bed and taken her place at table, excited by the wonderful news of the new crop. The dog had his dish by the back door and the poor animal ate so much that his stomach swelled out to a point on either side. Of late he had got thin.
It was at this moment, while they were happily eating their meal, that the destructive attitude of Divine Providence again manifested itself. All morning, the sky had been spotless and the sun shone in all the glory of its summer heat. And then, suddenly, the sky darkened. Lightning flashed. A torrent of rain began to fall. Thunder rolled across the firmament. It grew as cold as in the midst of winter. It was horrifying. It all happened within the space of a few minutes. They were struck with awe. They dropped their knives into the kish and stared at one another. They crossed themselves.
Thomsy was the first to speak.
“Has it come again?” he whispered. “That's how it started last year.”
“Silence,” said the old man, rising from his stool. “Do you know what you'?re saying?”
“Let’s go on our knees, Mary said, and ask God to have pity on us.”
They all went on their knees and recited the rosary, begging God not to send the blight on their crop. When they had finished, it seemed that the Lord heard their prayer, for the storm ended as suddenly as it had begun. The sky did not clear, but the thunder and lightning ceased. A drizzling rain continued to fall and it became very hot. The old man then suggested that they should sprinkle holy water on the gardens. Mary took a bottle of holy water they had in the house and went with him. They visited all the gardens and sprinkled the water on the plants here and there, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. A number of other families, seeing them so engaged, came forth and did likewise.
It was a strange sight, truly, in the drizzling rain, under a dark sky, to see all those simple people going around their gardens with holy water, asking pity of the Lord.
Next day, the sky cleared and the sun came forth. It had rained heavily during the night and the blossoms had been washed from the stalks by the downpour, but when the old man went out with his spade once more and dug, he found that the crop was still wholesome.
“Praised be God!” he said.
Mary and Thomsy had come out with him and when they saw that the potatoes he threw out with his spade were whole, they burst into tears with joy.
“Oh! Aren’t they big?” Mary said, as she went on her knees to pick them carefully. “I never saw them so big at this time of year.”
“True for you,” said the old man, digging eagerly, “That proves to you how it pays people to stint themselves. There are fools over there in Glenaree that ate some of their seeds and now they'?ll only have half a crop in spite of the great harvest that’s coming. Two extra gardens I sowed. We’ll have seventy bushels this year instead of the usual forty, or my name isn’t Brian. Don’t be talking, woman, we’ll soon be on our feet again. Never say die. If our stock is taken, we’ll begin again little by little. While we have the land we have the riches. Now that the tyrant is dead, we’re safe from persecution. The new agent that will come to be over us might be a Christian man. He’ll give us time over the rent and maybe the government might step in with a loan. It happened before in the time of the great hunger. Ah! If only Martin was here with us, to see this great crop. Poor man! Many a drop of his noble sweat he gave sowing them.”
At the mention of Martin's name, Mary stopped picking. She felt a sharp pain in her bosom and then a terrible emptiness spread all over her body, as if she had been suddenly disemboweled by a monstrous hand that carried off at one scoop, her heart, her lungs, all her vital being. With a rush, the agony passed into her brain and a feeling of shame made her go weak, so that the color left her cheeks and she rose to her feet trembling. The thought flashed through her head.
“For days I haven’t thought of him.”
Thomsy looked at her anxiously and said: “What ails you, Mary?”
“Nothing,” she said, laughing foolishly. ?Only I got so excited and ...”
“Go on into the house,” said the old man, too intent on his own joy to notice that it was Martin’s name which had disturbed her. “You’ve been doing too much lately. Rest yourself. Pick those potatoes, Thomsy.”
Mary went towards the house. What heavy heat it was! The smell of the growing plants was still in her nostrils even after she had left the garden. It was sickening. Tears were now streaming down her cheeks.
“Oh! darling,” she muttered, “it wasn’t for want of love of you that I didn’t think of you this while. I was afraid to think of you. Oh! I’m afraid of the hunger, and the little milk I have for our Michael.”
Indeed, such was the case. Every moment of the day and during most of the night, her mind was tortured by the terrible thought that soon there would be nothing for the little child and that she would have to go out on the highways with him, begging. And this torture dulled all else, dulled even the torture of Martin’s absence. Only once had she heard of him since Chadwick’s death. A man brought news that he was with a band of men on an island off the coast, away to the west, and that he was safe there, at least for the present. But that was a poor consolation. What of the future? What prospect was there of ever being with him again, or of escaping from the country? It was this awful thought which made her afraid to think of him.
Another violent storm came on the last day of the month. They did not trouble greatly about this one, since the first had done no damage. even so, a rumor got abroad that the blight had struck in the County Cork. Would it come this far? Every day, they anxiously inspected the crop. But the days passed without any sign of the evil. The potatoes that were dug for food still remained wholesome. It promised to be a miraculous crop. Even Mary began to take courage. And then, on the fifteenth of July, the bolt fell from the heavens.
When old Kilmartin came into his yard shortly after dawn on that day, he looked up the Valley and saw a white cloud standing above the Black Lake. It was like a great mound of snow, hanging by an invisible chain, above the mountain peaks. It was dazzling white in the glare of the rising sun.
“Merciful God!” he said. ?What can that be?”
The rest of the sky was as clear as crystal. The old man stared at it in awe for some time. Then he ran into the house and called out the family to look at it. Mary and Thomsy came out. They were as startled as the old man.
“Did you ever see anything like that?” the old man said.
“Never in my natural,” said Thomsy. ?It’s like a ...”
“Snow,” Mary said. “It’s like a big heap of snow.”
“How could it be snow?” said the old man. “And this the middle of summer? It’s a miracle.”
“Or would it be a bad sign, God between us and harm?” said Thomsy.
Other people came from their cabins and stared at the cloud. There was a peculiar silence in the Valley. The air was as heavy as a drug. There was not a breath of wind. The birds did not sing. And then, as the people watched, the cloud began to move lazily down upon the Valley. It spread out on either side, lost its form and polluted the atmosphere, which became full of a whitish vapor, through which the sun’s rays glistened; so that it seemed that a fine rain of tiny whitish particles of dust was gently falling from the sky. Gradually a sulphurous stench affected the senses of those who watched. It was like the smell of foul water in a sewer. Yet, there was no moisture and the stench left an arid feeling in the nostrils. Even the animals were affected by it. Dogs sat up on their haunches and howled. Not a bird was to be seen, although there had been flocks of crows and of starlings about on the previous day. Then, indeed, terror seized the people and a loud wailing broke out from the cabins, as the cloud overspread the whole Valley, shutting out the sun completely.
All this time, the whole Kilmartin family had remained in the yard. Mary clutched the baby in her arms. Nobody thought of preparing breakfast, although the morning was now well advanced. It was only when the wailing began and Maggie joined in it, that Mary came to her senses and said:
“Don’t frighten the child with your whining. There’s no harm done yet. Hold the baby, mother, while I get breakfast ready.”
“True for you,” said the old man. “There’s no harm done yet. Into the house, all of you. Pooh! Afraid of a fog, is it?”
Maggie stopped crying, but she went back to bed and closed the door of her room. The others made an attempt to be cheerful. Like people who feel the oncoming panic of despair, they gave voice to expressions of optimism which they knew to be false.
“I often saw fogs heavier than that,” Ellen Gleeson said, as she rocked the baby in the hearth corner.
“As heavy as that?” said Thomsy. “Sure that’s not a heavy fog. I saw a fog once that was as thick as night. You can see to the end of the yard in this one.”
“You can see farther,” said the old man. “On the south side there, you can see as far as Patsy O?Hanlon’s house. It’s not a thick fog. It’s funny the smell that comes from fogs.”
“I never smelt a fog before like that,” said Mary. “It must be a new kind of fog. But a fog can do no harm in any case. If it was rain now, that would be a different story. Rain might rot the potatoes and they ...”
“Nothing will rot the potatoes,” said the old man. “God forgive you for saying such a thing.”
Mary cooked some Indian meal and turnips, of which a few still remained. While they were eating, a further astonishing thing happened. The sky cleared almost instantaneously. The sun shone brilliantly. Yet this change, which should have cheered the watchers, only increased their awe, for the stench still remained. They all stopped eating. The old man got to his feet. He reached for his hat and fumbled with it, looking about him at the others with the expression of a small boy who has committed some offence of which he is ashamed.
“Blood an ouns!” Thomsy said, jumping to his feet.
With his mouth wide open, he stared at the old man. Then they both clapped their hats on their heads and rushed from the house. Mary ran to the cradle, picked up the child and pressed it to her bosom.
“What ails ye?” her mother said.
Maggie began to wail in the bedroom. All the color had gone from Mary’s cheeks and her eyes seemed to have enlarged. She handed the baby to her mother and whispered: “I’m going out to look at the gardens.”
Thomsy and the old man, one after the other and with their hands behind their backs, were walking slowly down towards the potato gardens. Mary ran until she reached them. Ahead she could see the gardens, still shining in all the glory of their dark-green foliage, under the radiant sun. But the stench was now terrible. In single file, they came to the first garden and leaned over the stone fence close together, staring at the plants.
“They’re alright,” said the old man. “There’s nothing on them.”
“Whist!? said Thomsy. “What’s that I hear?”
Towards the north, in the direction towards which Thomsy pointed, Mary and the old man saw people looking over fences, just as they themselves were doing. These people had begun to wail. In this wailing there was a note of utter despair. There was no anger in it, no power, not even an appeal for mercy. It was just like the death groan of a mortally wounded person, groaning in horror of inevitable death.
“It’s the blight,” Mary whispered. “Oh! God in Heaven!”
“Look,” gasped the old man through his teeth. “Look at it. It’s the devil. It’s the devil himself.”
With outstretched hand, that trembled as if palsied, he pointed to a little hollow about ten yards within the fence. Here the growth was particularly luxuriant and the branches of the potato stalks were matted as thickly as a carpet. Mary and Thomsy followed the direction of his hand and while he babbled foolishly they saw the evil appear on the leaves. A group of little brown spots had appeared and they spread, as if by magic, while they watched. It was just like the movement of an incoming tide over a flat, sandy shore. It was a rain of spot spreading rapidly in all directions.
“Oh! God Almighty!” Thomsy cried. “Save us, oh, Lord! Jesus! Mary and Joseph!”
Rubbing his short, fat arms against his sides as if he itched, with his round, bearded face turned towards the sky, he prayed for mercy. Mary felt the same emptiness within her as on that other day when the old man mentioned Martin’s name. Now, however, she did not think of Martin. The whole world seemed to have become emptied. The hand had scooped out everything. There seemed to be weights at the back of her eyes and her forehead became deeply ridged by the labor of keeping them open. Then a violent sobbing shook her. She closed her pained eyes and covered them with her hands. She leaned against the fence and gave way to a fit of sobbing. Yet no tears came from her eyes.
“The devil,” shouted the old man, “he’s on us. He’s on us.”
Uttering shriek after shriek, he climbed over the fence, fumbling so much that he dislodged several stones. He strode through the stalks, that came up to his waist, across the ridges, until he came to the affected spot. The stench was now that of active corruption. The old man seized the stalks that were marked with spots and began to pull them. The leaves withered when he touched them and the stalks snapped like rotten wood. But the potatoes clinging to the uprooted stalks were whole. The old man dug into several of them with his nails.
“They’re not rotten,” he cried, laughing hysterically. “Come on, Thomsy. Pull the stalks that are rotten. We must stop it spreading. Mary, you come as well. Pull the stalks. Pull. Stop it spreading.”
Excited by the old man’s frenzy, Thomsy also climbed over the fence and waddled through the stalks, but he halted when he was a few yards from the old man, who was pulling feverishly and shouting. The old man was now surrounded by a widening lake of spots.
“Sure, it’s flying all over the garden,” said Thomsy. “Look, man. It’s all round you. You can’t stop it.”
“What’s that?” said the old man, raising his head.
He looked all round him pathetically. Then his mouth fell open and he stood up straight. His hands dropped to his sides.
“You’re right,” he said faintly. “It’s the hand of God. God’s will be done.”
Thereupon he crossed himself and bowed his head. Not troubling even to collect the potatoes he had pulled up with the stalks, he marched slowly back to the fence, carelessly trampling over the stalks that were still untouched. Mary turned away from the fence as he approached. She began to walk back to the house.
The wailing was now general all over the Valley.
THE FINAL PHOTOGRAPH OF LIAM O’FLAHERTY
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John Fitzgerald Kennedy said: "We will go to the moon. We will go to..." and:
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But let us begin.”
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The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness,
but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially
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THE INAUGURAL ADDRESS JANUARY 4, 1960reedom. . . symbolizing an end as well as a beginning. . .signifying renewal as well as change for I have sworn before you and Almighty God theme solemn oath our forbears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago.
The world is very different now, for man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forbears fought are still at issue around the globe. . .the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution.
Let the word go forth from this time and place. . .to friend and foe alike. . . that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. . . born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage. . .and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today. . .at home and around the world.
Let every nation know. . .whether it wishes us well or ill. . . that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge. . .and more.
To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share: we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United. . .there is little we cannot do in a host of co-operative ventures. Divided. . .there is little we can do. . .for we dare not meet a powerful challenge, at odds, and split asunder. To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free: we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom. . .and to remember that. . .in the past. . .those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside. To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery: we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required. . .not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
To our sister republics south of our border: we offer a special pledge. . . to convert our good words into good deeds. . .in a new alliance for progress . . .to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. . .and let every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.
To that world assembly of sovereign states: the United Nations. . . our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support. . .to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective. . .to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak. . . and to enlarge the area in which its writ may run.
Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our adversaries, we offer not a pledge but a request: that both sides begin anew the quest for peace; before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science engulf all humanity in planned or accidental self-destruction. We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed. But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course. . .both sides overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of Mankind's final war.
So let us begin anew. . .remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us. Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms. . .and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations. Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce. Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah. . .to "undo the heavy burdens. . . let the oppressed go free."
And if a beachhead of co-operation may push back the jungle of suspicion. . . let both sides join in creating not a new balance of power. . . but a new world of law. . .where the strong are just. . . and the weak secure. . .and the peace preserved. . . .
All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days. . . nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.
In your hands, my fellow citizens. . .more than mine. . .will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe. Now the trumpet summons us again. . . not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need. . .not as a call to battle. . . though embattled we are. . .but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle. . .year in and year out, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation. . .a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny. . .poverty. . .disease. . .and war itself. Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance. . .North and South. . . East and West. . .that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger; I do not shrink from this responsibility. . .I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it. . .and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
And so, my fellow Americans. . .ask not what your country can do for you. . .ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world. . .ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the Freedom of Man.
Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds; let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY THE 35TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917 in Brookline Massachusetts. He had served in the United States Navy, where he received the Navy Marine Corps Medal for Heroism, while he was commander of PT109, for his heroic actions that saved the lives of his men. He was the first Catholic President, and was the youngest President to have been elected in the United States. Richard M. Nixon, the Republican Candidate, was Kennedy's contender, but Kennedy won the 1960 Presidential Election. The voting was close in the popular voting, with Kennedy receiving 34,226,731 votes to Nixon's 34,108,157 votes, but the Electoral College gave Kennedy 303 votes to Nixon's 219 votes.
One of the most famous quotes in American history was made by President Kennedy in his inaugural address, "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."(1) Kennedy's tenure as president was witness to the Bay of Pigs Invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis where Cuban exiles trained and funded by the CIA launched an attack to overthrow Communist dictator, Fidel Castro. Assassination cut short his presidency when he was shot on November 22, 1963, while traveling in a convertible in downtown Dallas, Texas. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, was sworn in as the 36th president aboard Air Force One, a few hours after the shooting.
President Kennedy spoke in Berlin, Germany on 26 June 1963. He gave his speech to the people of Berlin and to the rest of the world in defiance of Communism. The following is his speech:
I am proud to come to this city as the guest of your distinguished Mayor, who has symbolized throughout the world the fighting spirit of West Berlin. And I am proud to visit the Federal Republic with your distinguished Chancellor who for so many years has committed Germany to democracy and freedom and progress, and to come here in the company of my fellow American, General Clay, who has been in this city during its great moments of crisis and will come again if ever needed.
Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was "civis Romanus sum." Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is "Ich bin ein Berliner."
I appreciate my interpreter translating my German!
There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass' sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin.
Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us. I want to say, on behalf of my countrymen, who live many miles away on the other side of the Atlantic, who are far distant from you, that they take the greatest pride that they have been able to share with you, even from a distance, the story of the last 18 years. I know of no town, no city, that has been besieged for 18 years that still lives with the vitality and the force, and the hope and the determination of the city of West Berlin. While the wall is the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see, we take no satisfaction in it, for it is, as your Mayor has said, an offense not only against history but an offense against humanity, separating families, dividing husbands and wives and brothers and sisters, and dividing a people who wish to be joined together.
What is true of this city is true of Germany--real, lasting peace in Europe can never be assured as long as one German out of four is denied the elementary right of free men, and that is to make a free choice. In 18 years of peace and good faith, this generation of Germans has earned the right to be free, including the right to unite their families and their nation in lasting peace, with good will to all people. You live in a defended island of freedom, but your life is part of the main. So let me ask you as I close, to lift your eyes beyond the dangers of today, to the hopes of tomorrow, beyond the freedom merely of this city of Berlin, or your country of Germany, to the advance of freedom everywhere, beyond the wall to the day of peace with justice, beyond yourselves and ourselves to all mankind.
Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free. When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great Continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe.
When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades.
All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner."(2)
President Kennedy's note card.
JOHN McADAMS ON THE ASSASSINATION
ENCYCLOPEDIA OPENTOPIA.COM (ASSASSINATION)
WE DARE NOT FORGET TODAY THAT WE ARE THE HEIRS OF THAT FIRST REVOLUTION. LET THE WORD GO FORTH FROM THIS TIME AND PLACE, TO FRIEND AND FOE ALIKE, THAT THE TORCH HAS BEEN PASSED TO A NEW GENERATION OF AMERICANS—
BORN IN THIS CENTURY, TEMPERED BY WAR, DISCIPLINED BY A HARD AND BITTER
PEACE, PROUD OF OUR ANCIENT HERITAGE—AND UNWILLING TO WITNESS OR PERMIT
THE SLOW UNDOING OF THOSE HUMAN RIGHTS TO WHICH THIS NATION HAS ALWAYS
BEEN COMMITTED, AND TO WHICH WE ARE COMMITTED TODAY AT HOME AND
AROUND THE WORLD.
THE KENNEDY POST OAK-
ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETARY
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THE PARISIAN CAFÉ COFFEE HOUSE
THE CAMUS CORNER
ALBERT CAMUS
THE QUOTABLE ALBERT CAMUS
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds - a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents. In 1953, excess is always a comfort, and sometimes a career.
A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.
THE LITERARY OUTLAW
LEVITY.COM (NOT HUMOROUS)
WIKIPEDIA.ORG (ALBERT CAMUS PAGE)
ALBERT CAMUS ( THE GOOGLE SEARCH)
BRAINY QUOTES(ALBERT CAMUS-AUTHORS)
QUOTATIONS PAGE.COM (ALBERT CAMUS PAGE)
ALBERT CAMUS (THE GOOGLE SEARCH: THE WORDS OF)
A RESEARCH GUIDE (SET: PHILOSOHY)
SEARCH ABOUT.COM (EXISTENTIALISM)
WIKIPEDIA.ORG (EXISTENTIALISM PAGE)
LOOK SMART TRENDS.COM (EXISTENTIALISM)
- ALBERT CAMUS -
NOVEMBER 7, 1913 – JANUARY 4, 1960
IN THE GENRE: A JOURNALIST’S WRITING
THE ROBERT FROST LOUNGE
ROBERT FROST
ROBERT FROST
WIKIDEDIA.ORG (ROBERT FROST)
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN ROBERT FROST
bTwo roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I couldTo where it bent in the undergrowth;Then took the other, as just as fair,And having perhaps the better claim,Because it was grassy and wanted wear;Though as for that the passing thereHad worn them really about the same,And both that morning equally layIn leaves no step had trodden black.Oh, I kept the first for another day!Yet knowing how way leads on to way,I doubted if I should ever come back.I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.
From The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, 1923, 1928, 1930, 1934, 1939, 1947, 1949, © 1969 by Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1936, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1953, 1954, © 1956, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1962, 1967, 1970 by Leslie Frost Ballantine.
Birches by Robert Frost When I see birches bend to left and rightcross the lines of straighter darker trees,I like to think some boy's been swinging them.But swinging doesn't bend them down to stayAs ice-storms do. Often you must have seen themLoaded with ice a sunny winter morningAfter a rain. They click upon themselvesAs the breeze rises, and turn many-coloredAs the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shellsShattering and avalanching on the snow-crust--Such heaps of broken glass to sweep awayYou'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,And they seem not to break; though once they are bowedSo low for long, they never right themselves:You may see their trunks arching in the woodsYears afterwards, trailing their leaves on the groundLike girls on hands and knees that throw their hairBefore them over their heads to dry in the sun.But I was going to say when Truth broke inWith all her matter-of-fact about the ice-stormI should prefer to have some boy bend themAs he went out and in to fetch the cows--Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,Whose only play was what he found himself,Summer or winter, and could play alone.One by one he subdued his father's treesBy riding them down over and over againUntil he took the stiffness out of them,And not one but hung limp, not one was leftFor him to conquer. He learned all there wasTo learn about not launching out too soonAnd so not carrying the tree awayClear to the ground. He always kept his poiseTo the top branches, climbing carefullyWith the same pains you use to fill a cupUp to the brim, and even above the brim.Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.So was I once myself a swinger of birches.And so I dream of going back to be.It's when I'm weary of considerations,And life is too much like a pathless woodWhere your face burns and tickles with the cobwebsBroken across it, and one eye is weepingFrom a twig's having lashed across it open.I'd like to get away from earth awhileAnd then come back to it and begin over.May no fate willfully misunderstand meAnd half grant what I wish and snatch me awayNot to return. Earth's the right place for love:I don't know where it's likely to go better.I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,And climb black branches up a snow-white trunkToward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,But dipped its top and set me down again.That would be good both going and coming back.One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. From The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, 1923, 1928, 1930, 1934, 1939, 1947, 1949, © 1969 by Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1936, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1953, 1954, © 1956, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1962, 1967, 1970 by Leslie Frost Ballantine.
ROBERT FROST (THE GOOGLE SEARCH)
THE WORDS OF ROBERT FROST (THE GOOGLE SEARCH)
BRAINY QUOTES.COM (ROBERT FROST)
KETZLE.COM (WELL ORGANIZED FROST LINK SITE)
THE MAGAZINE RACK
MAGAZINE SOURCE LINKS
* YOU CAN CLICK HERE
WORLD-NEWSPAPERS.COM (SET: PHOTOGRAPHY LINK)
AMAZING SERVICE: MAGAZINES BY SUBJECT, PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINES WORLD WIDE,
NEWS BY COUNTRY OR SUBJECT
THE MAGAZINE BOY.COM
IN CHARACTER.COM (HOME)
IN CHARACTER.COM (ARTICLE)
MAGAZINE DIRECTORY.COM
ONLINE MAGAZINES (THE GOOGLE SEARCH)
*UNIVERSITY OF IOWA (JOURNALISM RESOURCES)
NEWS AND POLITICS MAGAZINES
ROLL CALL.COM
THE PROSPECT.ORG
HARPERS ONLINE.ORG
DISSENT MAGAZINE.ORG
THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE
IN THESE TIMES.COM MAGAZINE
CAMPAIGN LINE. COM MAGAZINE
COUNTER PUNCH.ORG MAGAZINE
THE NATION.COM
TIME MAGAZINE ONLINE
US NEWS MAGAZINE.COM
LIBERTY UNBOUND.COM
Z MAGAZINE.ORG ONLINE
THE NEW REPUBLIC ONLINE
MSN SLATE.COM MAGAZINE (AGAIN)
THE HARVARD INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE MAGAZINE.COM
RELAXATION MAGAZINES
HISTORY TODAY.COM
AMERICAN HERITAGE.COM
DISCOVER MAGAZINE.COM
THE SIERRA CLUB MAGAZINE.ORG
ARIZONA HIGHWAYS MAGAZINE.COM
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE.ORG
SCIENCE DIGEST (NOW IN USA TODAY: NEWS/HEALTH)
ENTERTAINMENT/MOVIE MAGAZINES
BOX OFFICE.COM
IF MAGAZINE.COM
SCREEN DAILY.COM
THE FILM JOURNAL.COM
SENSES OF CINEMA.COM
VARIETY MAGAZINE.COM
ROTTEN TOMATOES.COM
BRIGHT LIGHTS FILM.COM
THE CELEBRITY CAFÉ.COM
ATN ZONE.COM MAGAZINE
FILM MAKERS MAGAZINE.COM
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY.COM
THE CIGAR BAR
CIGAR AFICIONADO MAGAZINE.COM
GIGAR MAGAZINE SEARCH (THE GOOGLE SEARCH)
PHOTOGRAPHIC MAGAZINES
ZOOM NET.COM
PHOTO ARTS.COM
AK47.TV ONLINE MAGAZINE
BLIND SPOT .COM MAGAZINE
LEPP PHOTO.COM MAGAZINE
ONLINE PHOTOGRAPHY.COM
THE SENSUOUS LINE.COM MAGAZINE
JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINES.ORG
NIKON WORLD MAGAZINE
NIKON (THE GOOGLE SEARCH)
LEICA.COM (ALL LEICA MAGAZINES)
THE NEW LEICA LFT MAGAZINE ONLINE
POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINE
OUT DOOR PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINE
PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINE ONLINE (THE GOOGLE SEARCH)
SHUTTERBUG MAGAZINE (BETTER ONLINE THAN PRINT VERSION)
CAMERA COLLECTORS (THE GOOGLE SEARCH)
MACRO PHOTOGRAPHY (THE GOOGLE SEARCH)
VISUAL ARTS AND PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINES (THE YAHOO.DIRECTORY)
THE PHOTO NUDE ARTS
COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINES
THE WORLD
PC MAGAZINE
INFO WORLD.COM
PC WORLD MAGAZINE
THE SOURCE MAGAZINE
COMPUTER WORLD.COM
COMPUTER SHOPPER.COM (BETTER ONLINE THAN IN THE PRINT)
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CLOSE REFERENCE ROOM
THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE -2008
THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE-2008
CA-55
TX-34
NY-31
FL-27
IL-21 __ PA-21
OH-20
MI-17
NC-15 __ NJ-15
MO-11 __ TN-11 __ WA-11
270 ELECTORAL VOTES AND VICTORY
MOVING THROUGH THE INTERNAL LINKS PROVIDED, WILL
FURNISH A REVIEW OF 2000 AND 2004 EVENTS IN ALL STATES
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FUN STUFF
THE QUOTABLE GEORGE W BUSH???
BUSHISMS
WORTH 1000.COM
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CAUTION – STOP AND READ!
Any Consistent And Long Term Program Of Internet Search And Interaction Will Inevitable Place A Computer At Risk Of Infection, Data Loss Or Corruption. I Highly Recommend The Following Tools/Programs Of Defense That Reside On The Machine That Has Fashioned THE “ALEXANDRIA TOOLBOX”.
BILLP STUDIOS WIN PATROL That Tracks By The Minute Changes Taking Place On Your Computer And Any And All Changes That Have Taken Place Without Your Knowledge And Permits You To Deal With Them In A Friendly “Common Sense Interface.
NORTON/SYMANTEC’S ANTI VIRUS PROGRAM Coupled With The Company’s Go Back Program, As A Minimum. ZONE LABS, ZONE ALARM PROGRAM Linked To The NETWATCHMAN Reporting Service. LAVASOFT’S AD-AWARE SE PLUS Anti-Adware/Anti-Spyware Program Linked To Their MESSENGER CONTROL MODULE. WEBROOT’S SPY SWEEPER As The First/Primary Line Of Defense Against Such Malware. JAVACOOL SOFTWARE SPYWARE BLASTER And EUSING SOFTWARE’S REGISTRY CLEANER, A Program That Is So Clear In The Information Provided That Almost Anyone Computer Can Attend To The Machine’s Registry Cleaning Needs Without Fear Of Inadvertent Damage. Invaluable In A Multi-Layered Online Defense Approach Is PCTOOLS, SPYWARE DOCTOR.
The BIG FIX PROGRAM LINK often offered by computer manufacturers as part of the initial bundled software package. I Cannot Over Stress The Value Of McAFEE’S FREE SITE ADVISOR PROGRAM Which Will Automatically Inform You Of Dangerous Or “Dirty Sites” As Well As Allowing You To Submit Sites For Examination And Evaluation. Though There Are Free Offerings Of Many Versions Of The Programs Addressed Here; The Full Featured Company Supported Purchased Versions Are Worth Every Cent Of The Purchase Price.
There Are Many Competent Sources From Which Can Fashion A Serious, Competent Layered Protection Scheme. Other Sources Include: PANDA SOFTWARE, FSECURE, KASPERSKY SOFTWARE And BIT DEFENDER SOFTWARE. There Are Additional Tools That Should Be In Everyone’s Reserve, Including, But Not Limited To, SPYBOT SEARCH AND DESTROY And MERIJN’S HIJACK THIS.
The Graphic Which Follows Indicates My Browser Preference, As It Is Significantly More Stable And Less Vulnerable To The Attacks, Vulnerabilities, Instabilities And Crashes Of Internet Explorer. I Suggest You Investigate MOZILLA FIREFOX!
I Am Not Either Dependent Upon Or Happy With Microsoft Offerings Have The Auto Update Feature Set On Its’ Notification Level So That I May Pick And Choose Updates As Well As Research The Integrity Of Any Patch Before It Is Installed. There Are Other Competent Defensive Anti Viral And Firewall Programs Available That You May Simply Like Better. To Research Current Offering I Suggest The Pc World And Cnet Internet Sites For Current Evaluations And Pricing.
THE FOLLOWING LINKS WILL PROVIDE COVERAGE FOR SECURITY NEEDS
WHILE EMERGENCY CALL DOWN TOOLS WILL BE FOUND IN THE REFERENCE ROOM
ON THE TECHNOLOGY SHELF
CNET.COM TECHNOLOGY SOURCE
PC WORLD ONLINE MAGAZINE.COM
FIREWALL SOFTWARE (GOOGLE SEARCH)
ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE (GOOGLE SEARCH)
ADWARE/SPYWARE SOFTWARE (GOOGLE SEARCH)
COMPUTER PROTECTION SOFTWARE (GOOGLE SEARCH)
IN CONCLUSION
DOES ANY THING ON THESE PAGES SEEM FAMILIAR TO YOU?
DO THESE THINGS MAKE SENSE TO YOU?
DO YOU WATCH SUCH THINGS ON YOUR TV?
DO YOU RESEARCH THEM ON YOUR COMPUTER?
DO YOU TALK TO OTHERS ABOUT SUCH THINGS?
DO YOU HAVE DREAMS ABOUT SUCH THINGS?
DO THE WORDS “RED” AND “BLUE” HAVE MORE
MEANING THAN A BOX OF CRAYONS?
DO YOU GET EMOTIONAL TO THE POINT OF
CURSING ABOUT SUCH THINGS?
IF SO YOU HAVE OUR CONDOLENCES.
YOU ARE A “POLITICAL JUNKIE” AND…
THERE IS NO KNOWN CURE!
FACE IT; YOU’RE IN THE RIGHT CORRECT (LEFT) PLACE!
THE ALEXANDRIA TOOLBOX
“IT’S THE ECONOMY STUPID!”
postamble();
THE END
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