Your quote from Auden rings frighteningly true here, Peter.
So much I regret the barbarism Auden saw in "September 1, 1939" -- and which the world very directly then saw massively.
Must we be mere onlookers again as the depraved take over again?
When we most need Dem candidates to voice humanities, to show that the humane has its place among some of us (many of us?), can some of our Dems rise to that? Can some model our best resources to center the individual human, stave off this "gathering storm"?
Or is Putin's nuke rhetoric escalating seriously as is our orange fat guy's stochastic terrorism, his self-aggrandizing, his now more furious calls for more hate, more violence?
Sorry, Peter, but I just don't have the glib surety of some Dems, that their old status quo will somehow just take advantage of our many obvious loonies, as if our billionaires weren't again dead serious as to supporting serious dictators, demagogues, enablers of corruption, and the self-perjured and takers of bribes on the Clarence court.
Talking of glibness, Phil, before the Republican Party was hijacked by intelligent conspirators who had understood that, in America, swastika armbands would get them nowhere... but the name of Grandma's Old Party was a guarantee of success for oligarchic tyranny, I used to see American politics as:
The Heartless Party vs. The Spineless Party...
I hope this insult is quite wrong, but there has long been such a culture of polite complacency, euphemism, hypocrisy, settled ignorance, turning a blind eye to uncomfortable realities, that the storm troopers and their dogs are once again standing by... impatiently... while the Teetotal Tamburlaine is working up their rage and lust for revenge against... their own country...
The danger is palpable. The enemy within already holds Congress hostage.
Readers of LFAA focus on voting in November. By which time, it may be too late. November's world may already be very different from the world today..
For as long as this man and his sidekicks walk free, our planet will be a very unsafe place, the survival of life forms under direct threat.
The truths you tell gall, hurt, and discomfort, Peter.
Do you think there's any way Dems can restore apt humanities to their language, and call for return of humanities in schools?
Or is it all just money? Money for phone banks. Money for door-knocking. Money for TV ads. Money for post card campaigns.
Can you cite any Dems who balk at the money status quo, and reach out by humanities for some things more?
Here's a list of my favorites. Any among them notable for you by their readiness for some things more? Or, more aptly, any likely to appear in public with any others on this list (or who should be on it) and together amplify humanities and so pointedly better call for the specific programs we need?
Jamie Raskin. Sheldon Whitehouse. Katie Porter. Dan Goldberg. Richard Blumenthal. Mallory McMorrow. Josh Shapiro. Madeleine Dean. Jared Moskowitz. Gretchen Whitmer. Ro Khanna. Abigail Spanberger. Robert Garcia. Jerry Nadler. Liz Warren. Pete Buttigieg. Shontel Brown. Ted Lieu. Amy Klobuchar. Gary Peters. Adam Schiff. Jasmine Crockett. Cory Booker. Hakeem Jeffries. Jena Griswold. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Maxine Waters. Raphael Warnock. Chris Murphy. Chris Coons. Mikie Sherrill. Pete Aguilar. Justin Jones. Maxwell Frost. Ilhan Omar. Wes Moore. Melanie Stansbury. Gavin Newsom. Summer Lee. Pramila Jayapal. Eric Swalwell. Zoe Lofgren. Bernie Sanders.
Phil you have amassed an enviable list of many of the heroes of our current congress, heroes who seem unsung in large part because they show common decency along with their intelligence, integrity and common sense, commodities which seem easy for the MSM to ignore in favor of ratings from the inflammatory rantings of the barbarians.
What do you think, Phil? Those truths gall me, they hurt and discomfort me.
Above all horrible facts like the powerlessness even of 9/11, even of DT with all his ravings and his permaputsch, to awaken Americans from their nightmare to the even more nightmarish reality we all face.
I keep thinking of Diogenes, carrying a lantern in brilliant Athenian daylight and, when asked what he thought he was doing, answering that he was "looking for a man".
Phil, since Katie Porter is not on the ballot this year, she will soon be off the list. I’d suggest a write-in campaign, but that might split the Democratic vote.
But Phil, isn't that exactly what Biden is trying to "model our best resources to center the individual human," to "stave off this gathering storm?" Our jobs as individual humans is to provide Biden a congress which can actually legislate more of those humane values which we used to call common decency!
Trying hard but, like the penitent at one Good Friday procession in Corsica, carrying a heavy cross and walking barefoot while dragging behind him massive chains attached to one foot.
No need to identify the cross borne by all Americans, but the chains are represented by a trusted ally, subverted by that ally's leadership which, to remain in power and keep the leader from having to face justice, has made the worst of the dreadful challenge thrown at him.
Over 30 000 dead, mostly women and children, total destruction of cities -- compare the ghetto, then the total destruction of Warsaw by Hitler, compare Putin's razing Grozny, and later, with Al-Assad, Aleppo...
And the worst of it, this is what Israel's mortal enemies expected and intended this man and his poisonous coalition government to do -- hence the deliberately vile provocation of their assault.
How is it possible that today, almost 80 years after the downfall of Nazi Germany, the militarists' Japan and the Axis powers, we should find ourselves having to face behavior horribly similar to that of the Nazis among those who suffered the most from their crimes?
I know that no one wants to face the destruction of Gaza, the wholesale killing, maiming and starving of its inhabitants. But what choice have we?
It is because I saw bombing as a small child, it is because of the sermon I received from my mother in 1948 after she and my father had received documentation and photos of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from my father's cousin, the British medical officer who opened up the camp during a typhus outbreak, that I write as I do.
I am not repeating the terms my mother used to qualify the greatest crimes man can commit.
The West's plodding response to Ukraine gave the go-ahead for Putin's further world-destabilization plots in the Middle East, setting up Hamas vs. Netanyahu in a no-holds-barred slaughterfest. Today, it's reported that workers for World Central Kitchen were killed trying to assist the victims between the bullies. We probably should be figuring out where next -- Poland?
I shall add that it was intensely painful to perceive the continuum between the inconceivable and unprecedented crimes of the Nazis and the conditioning to which those crimes have, inevitably, given rise among their victims.
The foulest thing about the Shoah is how the evil done besmirched victims and their memory.
It hurts to think this, let alone to say it. For a long time I could not even say it to myself.
But we are ordinary human beings, not saints. We cannot avoid the stain on the entire human race.
Your quote from Auden rings frighteningly true here, Peter.
So much I regret the barbarism Auden saw in "September 1, 1939" -- and which the world very directly then saw massively.
Must we be mere onlookers again as the depraved take over again?
When we most need Dem candidates to voice humanities, to show that the humane has its place among some of us (many of us?), can some of our Dems rise to that? Can some model our best resources to center the individual human, stave off this "gathering storm"?
Or is Putin's nuke rhetoric escalating seriously as is our orange fat guy's stochastic terrorism, his self-aggrandizing, his now more furious calls for more hate, more violence?
Sorry, Peter, but I just don't have the glib surety of some Dems, that their old status quo will somehow just take advantage of our many obvious loonies, as if our billionaires weren't again dead serious as to supporting serious dictators, demagogues, enablers of corruption, and the self-perjured and takers of bribes on the Clarence court.
Talking of glibness, Phil, before the Republican Party was hijacked by intelligent conspirators who had understood that, in America, swastika armbands would get them nowhere... but the name of Grandma's Old Party was a guarantee of success for oligarchic tyranny, I used to see American politics as:
The Heartless Party vs. The Spineless Party...
I hope this insult is quite wrong, but there has long been such a culture of polite complacency, euphemism, hypocrisy, settled ignorance, turning a blind eye to uncomfortable realities, that the storm troopers and their dogs are once again standing by... impatiently... while the Teetotal Tamburlaine is working up their rage and lust for revenge against... their own country...
The danger is palpable. The enemy within already holds Congress hostage.
Readers of LFAA focus on voting in November. By which time, it may be too late. November's world may already be very different from the world today..
For as long as this man and his sidekicks walk free, our planet will be a very unsafe place, the survival of life forms under direct threat.
The truths you tell gall, hurt, and discomfort, Peter.
Do you think there's any way Dems can restore apt humanities to their language, and call for return of humanities in schools?
Or is it all just money? Money for phone banks. Money for door-knocking. Money for TV ads. Money for post card campaigns.
Can you cite any Dems who balk at the money status quo, and reach out by humanities for some things more?
Here's a list of my favorites. Any among them notable for you by their readiness for some things more? Or, more aptly, any likely to appear in public with any others on this list (or who should be on it) and together amplify humanities and so pointedly better call for the specific programs we need?
Jamie Raskin. Sheldon Whitehouse. Katie Porter. Dan Goldberg. Richard Blumenthal. Mallory McMorrow. Josh Shapiro. Madeleine Dean. Jared Moskowitz. Gretchen Whitmer. Ro Khanna. Abigail Spanberger. Robert Garcia. Jerry Nadler. Liz Warren. Pete Buttigieg. Shontel Brown. Ted Lieu. Amy Klobuchar. Gary Peters. Adam Schiff. Jasmine Crockett. Cory Booker. Hakeem Jeffries. Jena Griswold. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Maxine Waters. Raphael Warnock. Chris Murphy. Chris Coons. Mikie Sherrill. Pete Aguilar. Justin Jones. Maxwell Frost. Ilhan Omar. Wes Moore. Melanie Stansbury. Gavin Newsom. Summer Lee. Pramila Jayapal. Eric Swalwell. Zoe Lofgren. Bernie Sanders.
Phil you have amassed an enviable list of many of the heroes of our current congress, heroes who seem unsung in large part because they show common decency along with their intelligence, integrity and common sense, commodities which seem easy for the MSM to ignore in favor of ratings from the inflammatory rantings of the barbarians.
What do you think, Phil? Those truths gall me, they hurt and discomfort me.
Above all horrible facts like the powerlessness even of 9/11, even of DT with all his ravings and his permaputsch, to awaken Americans from their nightmare to the even more nightmarish reality we all face.
I keep thinking of Diogenes, carrying a lantern in brilliant Athenian daylight and, when asked what he thought he was doing, answering that he was "looking for a man".
You've named a few.
Phil, since Katie Porter is not on the ballot this year, she will soon be off the list. I’d suggest a write-in campaign, but that might split the Democratic vote.
But Phil, isn't that exactly what Biden is trying to "model our best resources to center the individual human," to "stave off this gathering storm?" Our jobs as individual humans is to provide Biden a congress which can actually legislate more of those humane values which we used to call common decency!
Trying hard but, like the penitent at one Good Friday procession in Corsica, carrying a heavy cross and walking barefoot while dragging behind him massive chains attached to one foot.
No need to identify the cross borne by all Americans, but the chains are represented by a trusted ally, subverted by that ally's leadership which, to remain in power and keep the leader from having to face justice, has made the worst of the dreadful challenge thrown at him.
Over 30 000 dead, mostly women and children, total destruction of cities -- compare the ghetto, then the total destruction of Warsaw by Hitler, compare Putin's razing Grozny, and later, with Al-Assad, Aleppo...
And the worst of it, this is what Israel's mortal enemies expected and intended this man and his poisonous coalition government to do -- hence the deliberately vile provocation of their assault.
How is it possible that today, almost 80 years after the downfall of Nazi Germany, the militarists' Japan and the Axis powers, we should find ourselves having to face behavior horribly similar to that of the Nazis among those who suffered the most from their crimes?
I know that no one wants to face the destruction of Gaza, the wholesale killing, maiming and starving of its inhabitants. But what choice have we?
It is because I saw bombing as a small child, it is because of the sermon I received from my mother in 1948 after she and my father had received documentation and photos of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from my father's cousin, the British medical officer who opened up the camp during a typhus outbreak, that I write as I do.
I am not repeating the terms my mother used to qualify the greatest crimes man can commit.
She was, and remains, my first spiritual teacher.
The West's plodding response to Ukraine gave the go-ahead for Putin's further world-destabilization plots in the Middle East, setting up Hamas vs. Netanyahu in a no-holds-barred slaughterfest. Today, it's reported that workers for World Central Kitchen were killed trying to assist the victims between the bullies. We probably should be figuring out where next -- Poland?
I hear you, Peter.
Thank you.
God bless your fine, fine mother.
I shall add that it was intensely painful to perceive the continuum between the inconceivable and unprecedented crimes of the Nazis and the conditioning to which those crimes have, inevitably, given rise among their victims.
The foulest thing about the Shoah is how the evil done besmirched victims and their memory.
It hurts to think this, let alone to say it. For a long time I could not even say it to myself.
But we are ordinary human beings, not saints. We cannot avoid the stain on the entire human race.
Onlookers is an accurate term, unfortunately!