NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, Dec. 20, 2007
--any life that ends in exile cannot have been totally mediocre. P. 10
--The first time that a male black seadevil meets his much larger mate, he bites her and never lets go. Over time, his veins and arteries grow together with hers, until he becomes a fetus-like dependent who receives from his mate’s blood all the food, oxygen, and hormones he requires to exist. The cost of this utter dependency is a loss of function in all of his organs except his testicles, but even these, it seems, are stimulated to action solely at the pleasure of the engulfing female. When she has had her way with him, the male seadevil simply vanishes, having been completely absorbed and dissipated into the flesh of his paramour, leaving her free to seek another mate. P. 47 –should find a robot instead
---[To preclude internal civil war, Roman historian Ronald Syme wrote] it was necessary [for Augustus] to invent a foreign danger that menaced everything that was American—oops, I mean ROMAN. P. 52
--The country quietly accepted the decision in BUSH V. GORE, liking it or not. At the time I thought that was right. We have to be able to look somewhere for finality, and in our system that is the Supreme Court. Today I am not quite so sure. More vocal protest against a lawless decision might have been better for the country and the Court.—p. 61--Antony Lewis. So even a liberal can see it now...
--I didn’t realize the immense prestige that inhumanity and brutality have among nationalists. I also didn’t grasp to what degree they are impervious to reason. To point out the inevitable consequences of their actions didn’t make the slightest impression on them, since they refused to believe in cause and effect .... As is usually the case everywhere, a craven corrupt intellectual class was unwilling to sound the alarm that war crimes were being committed, accustomed as they were ... to being servants to power. 71,72—Simic writing on Americans—oops, I mean SERBS
--For Hitler ... it seemed obvious that America had achieved its industrial advantage and high standard of living through its conquest of the West and its extermination of the Native American population. If Germany, as Europe’s leading power, did not do something similar, the “threatened global hegemony of the North American continent” would degrade all the European powers to the level of “Switzerland and Holland.” ... Hitler’s drive to conquer Eastern Europe was based on a very modern model, a model of colonization, enslavement, and extermination that had its parallels in the creation of European empires in Africa and Australia, or the 19th century Russian conquest of Central Asia and Siberia. 76 USA!USA!
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