"a peculiar state of pathology" . . .

[OneBlueSky]

truth may sometimes be stranger than fiction, but every so often fiction captures truth with laser-like precision . . . I'm currently reading Darwin's Children by Greg Bear, and tonight I ran across a passage that I really sums up the current state of our craziness:

"(He) could no longer bear to watch TV or listen to the radio. So many loud voices shouting lies for their own advantage. America and much of the rest of the world had entered a peculiar state of pathology, outwardly normal, inwardly prone to extraordinary fear and anger: a kind of powder keg of madness."

a "powder keg of madness" is such an accurate description of the American psyche in 2003, I think . . . if that "extraordinary fear and anger" ever blows, watch out . . .

one other line also caught my attention:

"Washington eats truth and spins shit."

that could be someone's campaign slogan, don't you think? . . . :)

[Spazito]

1. Wow, that really does describe how I feel, big time!

I watch what is happening south of the border and used to watch US tv channels but now make a point of bypassing them for this very reason:

"So many loud voices shouting lies for their own advantage."

I want my old neighbour back.

[Bozola]

2. excerpts from

Stand on Zanzibar

Fighting in an army is a psychotic condition encouraged by a rule-of-thumb psychological technique discovered independently by every son-of-a-bitch conqueror who ever brought a backward people out of a comfortable, civilized state of nonentity (Chaka Zulu, Attila, Bismark, etc.) and started them slaughtering their neighbors. I don't approve of people who encourage psychoses in their fellow human beings. You probably do. Cure yourself of that habit.

from You: Beast by Chad C. Mulligan


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NEGRO Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed -- not by its residents -- Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.

PATRIOTISM A great British writer once said that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying a friend he hoped he would have the decency to betray his country.

HISTORY Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I knew people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.

HUMAN BEING You're one. At least, if you aren't, you know you're a Martian or a trained dolphin or Shalmaneser. (If you want me to tell you more than that, you're out of luck. There's nothing more anybody can tell you.)

LOGIC The principle governing human intelligence. Its nature may be deduced from examining the two following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people: "I can't so you mustn't," and "I can but you mustn't."

COINCIDENCE You weren't paying attention to the other half of what was going on.