“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
The fascist heart is unsettled and isolated, uncertain and yearning for certainties. It longs for a tribe to which it can pledge its allegiance. It does not wish to think. It revels in slogans. It only wishes to feel. Emotion is right, especially among others who feel the same way. It wants to submerge itself in a tribe. The fascist heart is nostalgically utopian and mourns the loss of a […]
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Norbert Merkle, long dead, younger than I am now when I knew him, taught me how to clean a classroom, wash chalkboards, make porcelain toilets and urinals gleam, leave no floor undone. And more. For four years he was my boss in the Science building at college. He was its maintenance man and I was a callow boy who lucked into a job as a part-time custodian, work that kept […]
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I am not sure of the precise point when information took on the elements of a barrage, what now feels like an eternal explosive babble, but it happened during my lifetime. In its overwhelming nature, that barrage confuses, distracts, and dulls thought. It both infuriates and encloses one in a secure area of like-minded ideas and thus is fundamentally shallow and sensational in nature. It is destructive of solitude and […]
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Your child before you is a child anywhere. We are singing ‘Wheels on the Bus’. The child before me stands up and trundles over the pillows to turn and face the others who wait for her to make the noise of a bull charging. She roars her squeaky roar, and they all follow when the bull rides the bus, roaring and swaying, the Indian boys, the Bangladeshi, the Chinese-African-American girl, […]
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