A Tempering of Dreams, Chapter 2

A TEMPERING OF DREAMS is a novel: pure fantasy with imaginary characters, and no effort whatsoever at historical accuracy. It is based on remembered images of a bygone time, and has no particular purpose beyond enjoyment. It will appear serially as each chapter is completed; there is no schedule. MG,Jr.

A Tempering of Dreams, Chapter 1
8 May 2022
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2022/05/08/a-tempering-of-dreams-chapter-1/

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Chapter 2

A nearly imperceptible breeze of freshness carried the muted cacophony of city sounds past the Ginkgo foliage in the courtyard below, through his open window to caress him awake. Sergio found himself in his own bed. “So I guess I made it out of Joe’s sometime before dawn,” he thought to himself. Then he remembered, “Holy shit! I’ve got Chemistry!” So he briskly rolled himself out of bed, looked at his watch, quickened his pace and dressed, grabbed his books for the day and huffed down to the Burness Building’s big ancient steeply banked auditorium with the Chemistry lecture already underway, and found himself an empty wooden seat in the back row. He took out his notepad and ballpoint pen, and began trying to listen, and figure out where they were in the subject.

“Organic chemistry” said a velvety mezzo soprano voice next to him, “Chapter 8. We started it last time, remember?” Sergio turned, surprised, “Thanks, yeah,” he said nodding. She had a lovely oval face framed by long thick straight black hair that tumbled over her shoulders and down her back, dark eyes set in clear glistening whites and rimmed by long mascara-enhanced lashes, a delicately shaped nose, dark well-defined brows and a lush rosy button of a mouth. “Thanks again,” he said as class was breaking up, and she smiled back. Everyone left Burness and scattered to other classes. He saw her walking up Campus Green ahead of him, her black hair fallen over her purple long-sleeve pullover and down to her waist with the wispy ends waving across the top of the flare to the lower half of her fulsome hourglass figure, which was covered by loose-fitting dark blue jeans.

He climbed the stairs to his Spanish class in College Hall, settled in with notepad and pen ready, and then noticed that she was in this class too. They smiled their amusement at this coincidence, across the room to each other. After class they walked to meet and introduce themselves. She was Angela Celli, a psychology major. Since neither of them had a class for an hour, Sergio suggested they get coffee in The Underground, the snack bar in the basement of College Hall. That would be his lunchtime breakfast, with cream and sugar for added substance.

Angie was from Pittsburgh. As she told him about herself he looked into her beautiful face and down her long-chain brass necklace with its big round gleaming pendant resting on the deep purple stretch knit top covering the swell of her ample bosom, right over where its hidden deep valley would be. Angie offered Sergio a cigarette, and they both lit up, smoked and talked over their coffees.

“What’s that?” Angie noticed that Sergio had a separate journal book, obviously not for school.
“Oh, it my poetry book. I write poems.”
“Really!”
“Yes. I learned to do it watching my father. He wrote many romantic poems to my mother, and he loves to sing arias from zarzuelas.”
“Zarzuelas?”
“Spanish operettas. Gay ’90s stuff.”
“And you’re studying engineering?” They both laughed at that one.

“Where have you been!” They were startled to see Roger Solely right there booming his greeting. “Sergio! We have missed you, man, since last semester. What happened? You disappeared!”
Sergio introduced Angie to Roger, an upperclass man, telling her that he and Roger’s buddies had often gone to concerts downtown early last fall, before school had gotten too intense for him.
“Oh, we saw D’Oyly Carte’s ‘Penzance,’ ‘2001’ in Cinerama, ‘Madame Butterfly’ with the glorious Beverly…” Roger rattled off happily to answer Angie.
“Sills, for Beverly” Sergio interjected for Angie, then to Roger, “Look, Roger, engineering is hard, man, and I’ve really got to study all — the — time!”
“You’re such a good boy. Look, call me, we get together all the time, and I’m putting up some sketches at an Architecture show that’s coming up and I want everybody to come. And don’t be a stranger!” With that, Roger flipped his dangling silk Paisley scarf back over his shoulder and trotted off.

Angie looked into Sergio’s face with an inquisitive yet amused look. Sergio wondered if an anthropological observation of his psychological profile was now underway.
“You know, last semester when I got here, I met Roger and his pals, and would go out with them to the opera and movies, since I love classical music and they do too, and they knew the town, and always got tickets. Also, they had all kinds of booze in their apartments, and that was good for me. Anyway, just before Thanksgiving vacation, we were all in the room and kind of a fight broke out, and I saw that I was being seen as the prize in a ‘Boys in the Band’ kind of setup. Roger got kind of heated, and claimed I’d be spending Thanksgiving with him, not any of them. I’d already figured out that he wanted my thick lips around… well, you know. He was dreaming. They all have some quick wits, and they know a lot about artsy stuff, but they’re not my scene. I can go see the symphony by myself if I want to. So that’s where Roger’s coming from. I… ah… like people… like… you.”
“Girls?”
“Yeah, most definitely.”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“Ah… no. You?”
“Not really.”
“Well, maybe WE can go out sometime.”
“I think that’d be fun.” She gave him the phone number to her shared suite in Hill Hall, and then they each took off to their late classes.

“Have you ever wondered what makes for a beautiful woman?” Joe asked Sergio walking back from College Hall after their Meal Plan dinners.
“Being between eighteen and twenty-one.”
“Nothing more?”
“Miniskirts and tight sweaters help a lot.”
“A lustily physical perspective, but perhaps too limited.”
“Well, they have to have some spirit, know stuff and not be ditzes, and just be nice to talk to. Why do you ask?”
“You seem in a much better mood than yesterday, and I don’t think it is only from hash afterglow.”
“I met a girl in class today, and she’s… interesting.”
“Indeed!”
“I got a phone number, maybe she’ll answer it someday.” So Sergio told Joe the outlines of that day’s story before they settled into rolling and smoking joints, and listening to ‘The Doors’ and ‘Strange Days’ to kick the ya-yas of the Draft and Colorado out of their minds. Next day Sergio bought Huxley’s ’The Doors of Perception’ at the Book Store. He decided to keep his grades up just in case he could evade the Draft and pursue his engineering dreams. A new image had now been added to that dream complex: Angie.

Angie did answer his phone call. They went out to see a screening of ‘Casablanca’ by the University Film Society in the College Hall theater, and then walked around on Campus Green smoking cigarettes and talking, before Sergio took her down to The Underground to buy them both Philly Cheesesteak sandwiches and coffee milkshakes. It all felt good for both. Angie had to get back to Hill Hall by 11 pm, because she knew the entry monitors didn’t get too upset about having to unlock the gates for latecomers till then. There was a call box on the outside of the fence.

They walked outside from College Hall through Campus Green into the shadows near the big trees far from the pathways, and embraced into a deep kiss. Wordlessly, they lay down on the grass and pressed their bodies into each other within their embrace, kissing deeply, gently, slowly. Her lush black hair brushed against his face as he looked down into her eyes and submerged himself into her gaze.

Time came to go, and he walked her back to Hill Hall. She asked him to call again soon so they could have a Spanish study night in her suite with the girls, who were all in less advanced Spanish classes and some struggling. Then, whistling in his mind, he walked back to his room through a sequence of shadows and street lamps alternately disappearing and then illuminating the granularity of the pathways to sharp relief. The air was cool, he was warm.

Days later he went to the Computer Center in the Electrical Engineering building to work on a Fortran IV programming project. He spent hours typing out his program onto a deck of IBM cards each punched by the typewriter with a hole array encoding one line of his program’s instructions, then feeding the deck into the card reader and waiting for his turn when the printer would clack out his calculated results on big sheets of folding paper connected by perforations. This occurred several times as he corrected errors after each run. Eventually he got it right and was able to carry out a printout with columns of numbers that would satisfy the needs of his assignment. It was getting near dinnertime. He walked across 40th Street to Hill Hall and had Angie called from the reception desk. She appeared, smiling, and led him through carpeted white hallways hung with framed pastel-colored prints of abstracts and landscapes, down to her suite. Five other girls were there. When Angie had invited him, she said he’d get dinner in exchange for his Spanish help. And indeed he did, Veal Parmesan, in Hill Hall’s large cafeteria with all seven of them. The apple pie and ice cream were good, too, and the coffee.

Now that they all knew each other a little bit better, it was back to the suite for study time. After about thirty minutes of pronunciation and grammar corrections, and translations, the talk really started, and the music. And these girls were into the music, they had a huge stack of discs. First it was Janis Joplin’s ‘Cheap Thrills,’ which was without a doubt the gospel music of Hill Hall in 1969. A hash pipe had been produced for that, and gaily passed around to mutual satisfaction. A thick towel had been rolled up and pushed against the bottom of the door, and a vent was blocked with a piece of cardboard, as precautions. After Janis it was Creedence Clearwater for a rollicking stone, and someone mentioned that a Woodstock Music Festival had been announced for August, where Creedence would appear and all kinds of top bands were now signing up for it, and maybe even Dylan and the Beatles would appear. Then Crosby, Stills and Nash was put on the player for the choral part of the service, and after that Judy Collins for the heartfelt poetry of later evening.

It was nearly time for lockdown and the other girls went off to their own rooms. “Do you want to stay?” Angie asked leadingly.
“Sure, but how?”
“Oh, it’s easy, Janet does it all the time. You just stay in here till after the gates open in the morning, we get breakfast, and I’ll take you to the door from there. They’ll never notice.”
“Who’s Janet?”
“My room mate. You don’t know Janet?”
“Won’t she come back? No, I don’t know who she is.”
“She’s the most popular girl in the Pig Book, a cheerleader. I get calls for her ALL the time. All the guys want to date her. Her boyfriend’s a football player and she’s out all the time, his place or cheerleading practice, and class. She probably won’t came back. But if she does, don’t worry, she does the same plenty of times.”

The suite had a small half-bath with toilet and sink, so that was convenient. Shower rooms were elsewhere down the hall. They kicked off their shoes, Angie turned out the lights, and they embraced on the bed into long kisses. He pressed his warm palms into her back and pushed her close as she melted herself into him. Rays of lamplight from 40th Street shone through the window to give the room a film noir atmosphere. Sergio pulled his head back so he could look into Angie’s shining eyes, and caressed the side of her face for a long moment, then slid his hand slowly down her neck to the rise of her breast. She accepted willingly because she loved the feel of his hands: all warmth and gentle pressure with no hurry, no grab.

“Can we get rid of the belt buckle?” she asked. So they each ditched the belts. When they embraced again, he slipped his hand under her blouse in back, and felt her skin. When next they surfaced for air, she unbuttoned his shirt front enough to slide her palm over his chest, she wanted to feel his skin, too. Wordlessly, he took off his shirt and undershirt, and she pulled off her blouse. Then it was so much better, warmth to warmth. As he moved his hand pressure over the contours of her back, he would pass his fingers over the backstrap of her bra, it had four hook-clamps. Heavy duty. He tested lightly to see if he could unhook it one-handed. “You’ll never do it. Here, let me,” and sitting up she undid it letting it fall away. In the half light he saw that her breasts were luxuriantly rounded masterpieces of femininity with large dark nipple moons. Skin to skin was a plush dual ecstasy. Sergio’s pants were getting much too tight, and both their legs were yearning for each other. So the jeans fell away, he had his cotton boxer shorts, she had her nylon panties, all else was skin.

Sergio slowly stroked her fulsome body along the length of it he could reach from within their tight embrace. He pulled back a bit to cup his hand around her breasts, and across them to then run his palm down the deep valley between, and down over her stomach. She put her hand against her waist in front and said “Not below here.”

“Yes,” the boundary was made clear, and he acknowledged that. Eventually his hand began edging past her waist in back and she made no resistance to that move, so soon he was gliding over the nylon caressing her large firm well rounded butt with his warm pressured touch. And she was pulling in on his with outstretched palms, with only a thin layer of cotton and and a thin layer of nylon separating the pulsating urges of their creative forces to merge. Time no longer existed, only an eternity of passionate immersion.

The door opened, light from the hallway flashed into the room and was then cut off as the door quickly closed. Sergio froze, Angie whispered “Janet” into his ear, and he was glad that at least they were under the covers. Janet scurried into the half-bath for a few minutes before emerging to drop herself into her bed on the opposite side of the room. Soon enough she was breathing slow, asleep. Angie whispered “Don’t worry, Janet is cool, it will be okay in the morning.” And they, too, soon fell asleep, warmed entwined in their embrace.

Sergio opened his eyes to see Angie sitting on Janet’s bed with both of them in full length bathrobes. The two girls looked at him as the new day dawned in his eyes.
“Um ah… good morning” he said.
“I’m sorry I came in so late. Hope I didn’t scare you.” Boy, she was bubbly.
“No, no, it was all part of a nice time.”
“Okay, look,” Janet said, “I’ll go up and bring back some coffees and bagels while you two get ready. Brad’s coming over soon for the two of us to go to the practice field,” and off she went. So they took turns for the water closet while the other got dressed. Janet returned with a cupholder tray for three paper-cupped coffees, and a bag of bagels with packets of sugar, creamer and cream cheese. Hill House treated its girls good. She went into the half-bath to dress and prepare herself for her day, while Angie and Sergio relaxed into their breakfast. Janet emerged in surprisingly short time, dressed in a short skirt cheerleader uniform, with her long blond hair swinging in a ponytail, and her delicate faintly freckled face shining with enthusiasm. She was a spectacularly vivacious petite, with a perfect lithe and lean gymnast’s body, and a completely disarming and engaging personality. And what a smile! But she was also an imp.

“Who’s Brad?”
“Quarterback of the JV team. Brad Jackson. He’s on a football scholarship.”
“Are you on a cheerleading scholarship?”
“Well, yeah, but I’m majoring in medical technology. Brad wants to be a pro.”
The phone rang, Brad was ready to be escorted in.
“Oh Angie!, can you go get him, please! I’ve gotta finish and pack my bag!”
Angie laughed as this was obviously routine and left to retrieve the Hulk. Janet hurriedly stuffed her big gym bag with extra clothes, schoolbooks, towel, makeup items, extra socks, a sweatshirt, pens, pads, sunglasses and a brimmed cloth hat. Then she got a bright idea.

“Oh my God! That big lunk thinks he’s so cool and’s got it over everybody. I wanna make him jealous! Let’s play a trick!” She tossed her bag by the door, jumped across the room, and threw herself over backwards to plop onto her bed, whose bedsprings bounced up and down a few times from the impact. She held out her arms and said “Jump on me!” This terrified Sergio.
“What’s he gonna think if he comes in and sees that!”
“EXACTLY! Come on! come on! come on! Before he gets here! It’ll be such a gag, he deserves it!”
Sergio did not move.
“Come ON! Jump on me!” with her arms outstretched wiggling her luscious little body, with a devilishly gleeful grin, just as the doorknob was being turned. Sergio thought to make a break for the half-bath, when Angie opened the door and walked in with Brad, who looked, unsmiling, at each of them, and Janet bubbled “Oh Brad! Aren’t you glad to see me?”

Brad was not happy, but the twelve feet between Sergio and Janet was somewhat reassuring, so he didn’t let himself loose his cool about it.
“Come on Jan, we’re gonna be late. Lets go!”
“Brad, this is Sergio, Angie’s boyfriend.”
The two men nodded at each other, then Janet grabbed her bag (Sergio noticed that Brad had not done so) and the football people left.

“You like Janet?” Angie asked with a very serious face.
“Well yes, she’s fun-loving. But hey, look, I’m not interested in Janet, I’m interested in you.”
“Everybody’s interested in Janet” she pouted, and Sergio then first detected the deep ocean of melancholy that Angie carried within her.
“I — am not interested — in Janet. I — am interested in you. In — you.”
“Guys have dated me because they knew I roomed with Janet, and wanted in”
“I did not know about Janet, I am not chasing after cheerleaders, I — like — you. Really.”
“What were you doing?”
“She wanted to make the Hulk jealous, and I wasn’t doing anything. Look, let me have a kiss, and I’ll write you a poem”
“You won’t get out of it that easily.”
“Well, how about two kisses and a poem?”
“Okay,” and she melted into his embrace to absorb his love.

Sergio walked into his Residence Hall thinking “Thank God I don’t have an early class today.” As he walked down the wing of the third floor hallways with his group of rooms, he saw all the doors open and the guys looking at him as he walked by. Joe, smiling broadly, was standing in the doorway of his room adjacent to Sergio’s. “The prodigal son returns” he said.
“What’s up, Joe?”
“Admiration, I believe”
“What?”
“I must confess that you were observed penetrating Hill Hall last night, and emerging this morning. So we are… curious.”
“Nothing happened, it was a just a Spanish study night.”
“Commendable modesty.”
“There’s nothing to be jealous about.”
“Yes, admiration is a more pleasant word.”
“Oh, you guys,” Sergio said, shaking his head as he closed the door of his room behind him. “Jealousy” he thought, “amazing!” Then he sat down at his desk to work out some calculus problems. Leaning back, he looked out his window at the beautiful bright day, and suddenly felt very very satisfied.

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A Tempering of Dreams, Chapter 3
12 May 2022
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2022/05/12/a-tempering-of-dreams-chapter-3/

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A Tempering of Dreams, Chapter 1

A TEMPERING OF DREAMS is a novel: pure fantasy with imaginary characters, and no effort whatsoever at historical accuracy. It is based on remembered images of a bygone time, and has no particular purpose beyond enjoyment. It will appear serially as each chapter is completed; there is no schedule. MG,Jr.

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CHAPTER 1

“Oh man!, I’d give up every kind of drug if I could get a motorcycle.” Balmy spring sunshine fell through Bernie’s long brown wavy curls and onto his Italian Renaissance painting of a face, which gave its smooth light skin a soft glow while casting his slightly sunken cheeks into muted shadows. Joe had just told him of a classmate whose father was gifting his son with a new Honda 350, and Bernie just shook his head slowly and gave his reaction to the news in the typically soft calm laconic way in which he spoke, moved, and did everything.

The three of them were shambling across the ragged green lawn inside the Men’s Dormitory Quadrangle in the Spring of 1969, each thinking about something completely different from sitting inside stuffy college lecture halls taking notes on the droning instruction they would need to pass exams on to prove to their Draft Boards that they deserved to keep their student deferments from military service.

Joe was the guru of marijuana rituals in the freshman dorm where Sergio had met him in the Fall Semester of 1968, and been initiated into the smoking arts in Joe’s dorm room bubble of nighttime darkness suffused with Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” issuing from the little record player. Joe, Sergio and a few others on that third floor smoked grass at night as if ancient Hopi men enwombed below ground in a darkened kiva immersed in their merged meditations. As freshmen not from rich families, and shy, these guys had no chance of gaining any of the coeds’s attention at the mixers put on by the Resident Advisors of the men’s and women’s dorms, because there were always plenty of upperclass men with cars, money, grass and experience in attendance, to offer the freshman girls much better opportunities for fun, and better prospects for their husband hunting.

So Joe’s nightly hazy blue bubble of Dylan-infused darkness, with sporadic little orange flashes of flame pulsing out of matchheads and into joints being sucked on, was a refuge from a dangerous and unfriendly world for these boys fresh out of high school and precariously shielded from the Vietnam War by the uncertain promises of their 2-S student deferments.

Joe had a hooked nose set above thin lips always cast into a slight smile for a pleasant face rimmed by dark bushy hair that made him look like a bemused lanky overgrown cherubim. Joe was from Colorado and wanted to be a poet, but his rancher and coal business father insisted he major in economics and plan on joining his company. That is why Joe had made sure to get himself into the University in Philadelphia instead of going to college at Colorado State, and he was hoping to figure out a way of escaping from his preprogrammed fate before graduation in four years, or perhaps sooner if the draft came after him since his grades, except in English, kept sinking. Joe smoked dope all the time, both for his poetic art, and just to make the best use of time during the uncertain duration of his term of freedom.

As usual, Joe was dressed in his blue pajamas, red bathrobe and tawny corduroy bedroom slippers, whose soles were worn ragged by always being scrapped along the asperous surfaces of the sidewalks and streets of the campus and the city, by Joe’s shuffling gait. He was accompanying Bernie on his way to meet Bernie’s friend on the far side of the Quadrangle from whom Bernie got his psilocybin mushrooms and LSD. Bernie, who was Joe’s supplier of grass, had fallen under the spell of mushrooms and acid, and had introduced Joe to psilocybin who also fell in love with it. So Joe was going along with Bernie to buy some for himself. Sergio got his weed from Joe, who was sweet and hardly ever took any money for it, in this he was a missionary: “Everybody must get stoned.”

Sergio liked these two easygoing guys. Bernie was the stereotypical image of a tall lanky hippy. He was bare chested except for a loose and open rawhide vest with dangling strands of fringing that swayed as he walked, he had a rainbow of colors beaded necklace threaded by a rawhide shoelace that hung down to his breastbone, and a similar bracelet that hung loosely around his slender wrist. His unbelted bell-bottom blue jeans were faded, with the frayed stringy bottom edges of the overlong legs dragging along the ground and drooping over his big dusty bare feet. He was beautiful, Jesus never looked better. Bernie was a biology major, maybe. He wanted to walk through verdant landscapes under sunny skies catching glimpses of wildlife, and collecting mushrooms in the woods. Bernie Petrocelli’s people were Italian, his father ran a small produce market in a rural town.

Sergio had joined Bernie and Joe Willis on this languid trek because he wanted to see what the single occupancy dorm rooms for upperclass men looked like in the only corner of the Men’s Quad where they had them, because he’d applied for one for the following Fall Semester of his sophomore year. Sergio was an engineering major because he liked airplanes and submarines and motorcycles and sports cars, and dreamed about someday having his very own sports car manufacturing company like Enzo Ferrari. Sergio wanted to build his own slinky fast-moving motorized chariots. Like Joe, Sergio Romero was of average height unlike willowy Bernie who was noticeably taller, and Sergio dressed like the typical suburban New York kid that he was: with a soft-patterned button-down long-sleeve cotton shirt open at the collar, golden-colored brushed cotton bell bottom jeans cinched with a thin wide brown leather belt that was closed by being looped around through a big brass ring, and squarish suede shoes. Sergio was a Puerto Rican from New York. He had dark wavy hair that he’d let grow out over his ears and down his neck, a wide nose, brown eyes, and a moustache like that of the 1940s movie stars he liked, and that trailed off the upper corners of his thick-lipped mouth, and he had a coffee-and-cream colored skin tone.

The idea of that Honda 350 motorcycle made them all think, especially after hearing Bernie, the most committed pharmacologist of altered consciousness that both Joe and Sergio knew, admit so frankly at how fulfilling possession of such a transport mechanism could be in comparison to all his chemical forms of daring personal exploration. While Joe thought the idea very appealing, as Arlo Guthrie had expressed in song, he still believed some caution was warranted because his hero, Bob Dylan, had been laid up for quite some time the previous year after he’d fallen off his Triumph motorcycle on one of the byways of Woodstock, and Richard Fariña — “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me” — had fatally fallen off of his own motorcycle in Carmel, California three years earlier. And nobody believed Joe would ever give up grass for anything, because it formed his protective cloud of sanity.

Sergio had read the road test report on the Honda 350, “It’s got a twin cylinder overhead valve four-stroke engine,” he told them. He routinely read car and motorcycle magazines, and he hoped to save up his summer job earnings to be able to buy one in maybe two years. He figured that remote as the prospect of getting that bike was for him, it was still more likely than being able to get a girlfriend, and probably safer. Bernie and Joe would have wanted girlfriends too, but that seemed impossible for all of them under their present circumstances. So thank God for weed, and mushrooms, and car magazines, and Joe’s record player, and Draft Cards with 2-S printed on them. Maybe next year they’d each meet and win over some lovely freshman coeds.

They reached the far side of the Quad, with an archway shaped entrance to that 19th century pseudo Oxford-Cambridge architectural style brick-red masonry complex of sleeping quarters that was everywhere edged and trimmed with sandstone ornamentation that featured so prominently in the promotional photographs used by the University. Bernie and Joe entered and went off to the left to find their supplier, while Sergio went right to seek out the first floor room he’s been told he could inspect. It was narrow, the size of a small storage room, which is probably what it had been until the 1940s, and just big enough for a single bed and a desk, and a tight little closet. It had a small window high up at the far end above the desk. What else could he possibly need?, since he expected to just sleep there, and be studying math and physics and chemistry most of his time awake, and go out for meals and doing his laundry.

Sergio arrived at the main archway shaped entrance to the Quad from 38th Street, halfway back from his room inspection at the far side of the Quad, and went to the checkerboard of mailboxes under the archway. He unlocked the one for his room and took out a long envelope. It was a letter from his mother, and that was always nice. He walked happily past the line of stinking Ginkgo trees along the side of the building at the close end of the Quad, and into his Residence Hall, upstairs to his room, and sat on his bed opening his letter. A check made of light blue paper fell out, $100, he loved his mother. He pulled out a sealed letter from the envelope, it was from the Draft Board. That could not be good, his heart sank, his stomach tightened, and his asshole puckered.

A cover letter stated: “You have been reclassified as 1-A because of your academic failure to maintain the grades necessary to merit a Student Deferment.” A new Draft Card was enclosed, with “1-A, immediately available for military service” printed on it. A second letter began: “You have been selected for military service….” and went on to require Sergio to report to a Draft Reporting center in New York City by the end of the month.

Panicked, Sergio rushed to Kenn Lancaster’s suite on the first floor of his Residence Hall. Kenn was a graduate student writing a thesis in political science, and had the job of being the local Resident Advisor in this freshman residence hall. Kenn was a cleancut man from Shaker Heights, Ohio, with light straight thinning hair, a narrow face, and who dressed in the casual collegiate men’s style of the time of button-down shirts, slacks and penny loafers. Kenn’s suite was supplied with a telephone, and Sergio quickly explained his need for using it. Kenn nodded seriously, and walked off to let Sergio make his call.

“How can you say I failed academically? I made the Dean’s List, and I have the letter to prove it. How can you take away my student deferment, you’ve made a terrible mistake!”
The witch at the Draft Board answered in her nasally voice, “You have to come in and report, follow the instructions in the letter.”
“But you’re completely wrong!, you’ve made a mistake!”
“Your name is Sergio Romero, right?”
“Yes!”
“Well our records show that you flunked out of college, so you no longer deserve a student deferment.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. You’ve obviously confused me with someone else.”
“It doesn’t matter, once we start the process we just keep going.”

Sergio was thunderstruck. He put the phone down, standing still, his mind paralyzed. Kenn came out of his bedroom and up to him, and Sergio told him what had happened. Kenn took the Draft Notice out of Sergio’s hand and read it through. “You know,” he said, “at the bottom here in small print it says if you have any objections to this notice, you can write a letter to the Draft Board asking for a review hearing of your case and your reasons for wishing an excusal.”
“By when?”
“The end of the month. I’ll bet it would buy you some time.”
Sergio rushed back to his room and immediately typed out a letter to the Draft Board, requesting a review hearing, on the mechanical Olympia typewriter his father had given him as a High School graduation present. He threw on a corduroy jacket, left, took his letter straight to the Men’s Quad Post Office, behind where the mailbox array was, bought an envelope and stamp, sealed the letter and addressed it, and put it in the US Mail postbox.

Then he went out across 38th Street and down to College Hall, bypassing it since he had no appetite for eating a bland mushy Meal Plan dinner in the Dining Room, and across the Campus Green under the oaks and maples to 40th Street, and into Smokey Joe’s. He asked for a beer at the bar, which he knew he’d get since he dressed conservatively enough, and sported a moustache, which both made him appear like an over twenty-one-year-old man legally allowed to buy beer, instead of an underage 19-year-old college kid. He went over to the cigarette machine, popped in two quarters, and pulled the lever for a pack of Winston’s. He lit one up and sucked in that first sweet tobacco flavored hit of little death, sulking over his beer.

Three people walked into the darkly wood paneled cavern that was Smokey Joe’s, from the dusky light out on 40th Street, two men and a woman. The men were the usual sort of shaggy-haired loosely dressed college men, obviously not freshmen, maybe frat boys. The woman was stunning. She was tall, statuesque, with a full bosom like Sophia Loren, nicely rounded not overlarge butt discernible under her dark brown miniskirt sashed with a braided belt, and long lovely white legs extending below that brief enticing veil over velvety dreams. She wore a large brimmed dark brown floppy hat from which cascaded long glistening waves of lush dark wavy hair that framed her smooth almond shaped face with its bright dark eyes under unplucked brushy brows, a rounded nose and full lips beneath which white teeth flashed out through her animated smiles as she spoke with her male companions. She wore a short fake fur jacket opened in front, giving a fine view of the rolling hills carpeted in a stretched maroon turtleneck blouse.

“What’ll you have, Elena?” her trailing wolves inquired.
“Oh, just a Pepsi.” Which the men ordered along with with their beers and three slices of pizza. Sergio watched that fluttering vision of feminine loveliness eating her pizza and sipping her Pepsi, obviously amused and delighted by the eagerly hopeful attentions from the two guys whose simulations of knowledgeable maturity and cool were being projected with anticipation. Sergio took slow drags on his cigarette between sips of his beer, watching from across the room.

“A Pepsi,” so Elena was a freshman. That meant she lived just down 40th Street from Smokey Joe’s, at Hill House, the very modern Women’s Dormitory, which would definitely have a reliable heating system, and also housed its own fine quality Dining Hall. Hill House was a square smooth-face red brick colored three story building centered in its own green adjacent to grassy playing fields, and surrounded by an empty moat fenced on the outside with a tall black iron fence whose sturdy vertical railings were topped with deeply hooked outward and downward facing spikes. It was a fortress, and the only way in or out was across a causeway, gated at both ends, over the moat to the barred pair of heavy doors of the guarded entryway. The outer gate was opened at 8 am and closed at 10 pm, and the entrance was always guarded to prevent any but the resident girls from entry during visiting hours without permission from one of the girls, who could appear in person to escort her guest in from the reception lobby, but usually just called over to the entry desk from her room suite, which all had telephones. The Hill House girls lived in the modern 20th century of the 1960s, the Men’s Quad boys lived in the tattered remnants of the 19th.

Sergio felt a tap on his left shoulder. It was Joe, he’d not seen him come in. “I see you are observing the circling of Ruffed Grouse about an alluring hen,” he said with his usual smile.
“Yeah.”
“And I notice you are indulging in traditional libations and aromatics. You must be cogitating on deep matters.”
“Yeah Joe, they took away my 2-S”
“Oh, that is indeed deeply disturbing. Why?” and Sergio told him the story.
“Well, then we must await the correspondence in a week or two. Did you eat?”
“No.”
“Agreed. Why don’t I buy a pizza here, and we repair ourselves to my room, to nourish our bodies there, and our spirits with some grass? Tomorrow you can begin thinking of what might have to be done, tonight we can just be.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Let’s do it.” And Sergio finished his smoke and beer while Joe ordered the pizza and they waited for it. He then noticed that Elena and her suitors had left while he had been talking with Joe. Maybe she went to their frat house to smoke some joints and play pool, he could imagine her leaning over in her miniskirt to take a long shot across the pool table, or maybe she just went back to Hill House to study, but she looked too popular for that. Anyway, now he had a mission: “Get laid before I get killed in Vietnam.”

“Bernie gave me some hash,” said Joe, dropping a green pellet into a short squat onyx pipe. “Take a hit” he said solicitously, flicking his lighter onto the hash as Sergio sucked in the burning haze hard. His mind unglued and he expanded out into viscous sensation. He and Joe traded hits from the pipe consuming the hashish till they were each far gone deep into their own vast private inky stoned nothingness. Outside Joe’s window the night was black and still.

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A Tempering of Dreams, Chapter 2
10 May 2022
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2022/05/10/a-tempering-of-dreams-chapter-2/

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Is Climate Change Inevitable?

Magdalenian Girl: a facial reconstruction by Élisabeth Daynès of a 24 year old woman whose ~15,000 year old skeletal remains were discovered in the Dordogne region of southwestern France in a limestone cave known as the Cap Blanc rock shelter.

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Is Climate Change Inevitable?

Greg asks (28 April 2022):

(1) Do you believe that climate change is an inevitable consequence of our highly technical, industrial civilization?

(2) Is it necessary to abandon the American lifestyle to ensure the habitability of the planet?

I’ve asked this question to quite a few people recently, and the general response has been ‘if we don’t do anything drastic now, then yes’.

(3) Is there any data that particularly worries you?

(4) What do you make of this?

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My response to Greg:

(1) Yes.

(2) Yes.

(3) Ocean acidification; ocean heating; seawater freshening in the North Atlantic; CO2 lifetime in the atmosphere (long); accelerating rate of deforestation; accelerating rate of carbon (CO2 + CH4) emissions; accelerating rate of fossil fuel use and planned use; expansion and severity of drought, aridity and “heat”; low use of regenerative agriculture despite increasing soil depletion and crop failures (food); biodiversity loss in general: plants, mammals, fish, insects; the low fraction of materials being recycled.

Forgive me for not quoting numbers for “data” here, but I am sure such can be found by any interested person with an Internet connection and who is willing to spend some time in the search.

(4) Global Warming Climate Change (GWCC) is an inevitable result of the high volumes of CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions exhausted by powering our highly technical, energy-intensive industrial civilization with fossil fuels. That “powering” also includes the use of extensive industrialized chemical and factory farming for soil-depleting and high water use/irrigated monoculture food production; and for huge production and polluting waste of (hydrocarbon-derived) plastics.

I believe it is possible to have a worldwide equalization of the standard of living to a high and “modern” level, by a combination of (a,b,c,d):

(a) using “green” (a.k.a., “sustainable”) sources of energy (solar-electric, solar-thermal, wind, hydro, tidal, geothermal),

(b) commitments to lifestyles based on efficiency instead of consumerism,

(c) the use of technology (e.g., aided by electronics and computers) to improve the harvesting of energy and its distribution through linked local networks,

(d) a political consensus to democratic socialism (since capitalism, militarism and fascism are inherently anti-egalitarian and tied to high uses of fossil fuels, for “power”).

It is only a GWCC Earth-degrading zero-sum game of “survival” if calorie-and-kilowatt exclusionary tribalism is paramount. That need not be the case, but the alternative “green” paradigm would require a global consensus to deep cooperation of indeterminate duration, and to large-scale, long-term economic planning.

The many dramatic scenarios about “the collapse of civilization” and “human extinction” in ‘X’ number of years, published (like most everything) as hyperbole to get attention, all presume (and most desire) a continuation of current trends — “business as usual” — and are thus only useful to the extent they prompt wider thinking and action along the lines of the Green Paradigm (GP) that I described.

By direct observation of our social reality today, all those scary predictions have so far been useless. The American Way Of Life (AWOL) and extreme worldwide inequity seem safely assured of being able to continue plowing on as the unwinding story of our civilization for quite some time. Perhaps some serendipitous shock will alter world consensus thinking before it is “too late.”

We are each and all wedded to our ways of life, our “lifestyles,” our routines and our expectations, and even the thought of making profound and permanent changes to those is resisted because in essence such changes would mean changing how we think of ourselves, and changing how we actually “are” and act.

There are always some people doing this, individually, at any time: when confronted by a sufficiently “life-changing” event, or tragedy, or flash of enlightenment, and they are then compelled by their new outlook to deconstruct and then reconstruct themselves into a new form. Some call this “rebirth,” others “recovery,” and some “conversion” or “satori.”

The great challenge of transitioning our current civilization to the Green Paradigm (or, the Post-Carbon World) is that most of the worldwide us would have to make such personal permanent changes concurrently within a timescale of at most a decade, and cooperatively on nested geographical scales from local to national to international.

The planetary-scale problem of Global Warming Climate Change and Biodiversity Collapse cannot be “solved” in a haphazard, piecemeal, sporadic, short-term manner; the solution procedure must be a permanently sustained comprehensive effort of planetary scope. Climate Change science has shown us that the weaker that effort, and the longer the delay before starting it (which ideally should have been decades ago), the sooner and longer (centuries? millennia?) and worse will be the sequence of environmental challenges and disasters we and our descendants will have to experience.

On the basis of my own calculations of Global Warming — which are generally consistent with the results of the professional climate scientists, and which I have described in numerous articles posted elsewhere — I see global warming continuing for a long time regardless of what we do or don’t do about it. However, the more timely and extensive and sustained our counteractions against it — that is, the extent and promptness of the “greening” of our civilization — the slower the rate-of-rise of that global warming, the lower the ultimate temperature plateau at which it peaks, and the sooner the world average temperature cools back to the lovely pre-industrial level that nurtured the 15,000+ year development of our human civilization. But we should think in terms of centuries of committed effort in order to achieve that complete recovery.

Finally, I wish to make a positive sociological point. Anything we do to improve human solidarity, social cohesion, “economics as if people mattered,” the worldwide standard of living and its uniformity (the Human Development Index) — because such socio-economic changes are needed in order to construct our response to GWCC — would make the experiences of life better for every individual regardless of whatever subsequent geophysical-environmental challenges came our way, and for however long our Green Paradigm civilization managed to continue.

Instead of tribes competing to “live longer” than the rest, we would be cooperating to all “live well together” for whatever timespan of habitability Planet Earth would be willing to allow us.

My advice: be grateful, be kind, have fun, and give life and love your best efforts throughout your time alive.

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ABOUT YOU FACEBOOK PEOPLE

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ABOUT YOU FACEBOOK PEOPLE

Much as I hate FACEBOOK, I have learned much about people from it. There is a very wide variety among you, which should be obvious because there is such a wide variety of individual types within our common species: homo sapiens.

But also, I took the policy of being fairly liberal in who I accepted as “friends” (and FACEBOOK labeling has so desecrated that noble word) with the result that my FACEBOOK contacts are quite varied even though I, like everyone else, have definite preferences as to the kinds of people I want as (“to”) “friend.” So from all of you and your associated contacts who post comments, I get to see a wide swathe of human types: good, mediocre, innocuous and irrelevant.

Who is who I never say because I have a policy of not making personal characterizations, which either are or could be taken as insults. Everybody takes themselves to be the measure of “reasonableness” and their opinions, especially political opinions, to be the measure of “correctness” and “accuracy.” I am no different in that regard, though I do try to be conscious of my own “settings” to try to avoid fooling myself when evaluating new information, since it could possibly teach me something new and worthwhile.

I attribute this last cautionary attitude to both a natural inclination and to my long years of rigorous training in the sciences (the real sciences), the scientific method (European Enlightenment thinking), and many years of actual scientific investigation (and with mathematics and physics). As a result, I find most of what you’all post to vary from logical, well-documented and erudite, to pathetically self-centered and idiotic.

I remind myself that many people are afflicted, lonely, poorly educated, and have unfilled emotional and psychological needs, and their FACEBOOK posts may mask cries for help and solicitations for acceptance and compassion, and just be outbursts of sorrowful anger and frustration. I avoid poking into all postings that initially strike me as stupid and pathetic, because they may be harboring deeper layers of emotional murkiness that their breezy superficiality does not hint at.

All of this informs my policy on “unfriending.” Basically, I only do that when I have finally decided that an individual is irredeemably tiresome, or insulting, or obdurately stupid beyond what their innate intellectual capabilities should allow for. It is so much easier to just ignore such people until (and if) they become insufferable, and in that way I can avoid being unnecessarily hurtful. As to me being “friended” and/or “unfriended,” you’all can do as you like.

Long ago I learned that people believe what they want to believe because those chosen beliefs let them feel good about themselves. Belief is emotional because the chosen beliefs are taken to be ego-defining, and hence people become very defensive, even quite hostile, when you challenge their “ideas” because they take such criticisms as attacks on their egos — on their actual being. This can be avoided between interlocutors disciplined in the scientific method, because they know that their ideas are not “them,” they are separate abstract constructs. Such constructs are retained as long as they are practically and morally useful — that is, validated by objective reality — and discarded when found to be erroneous, and improved constructs can be adopted. But most dialogs on FACEBOOK are of the intellectually undisciplined emotive-reactive type. So the best responses are most often none.

The postings I find most interesting deal with societal and political issues, with art, music, literature and photography, with Nature and our grand geophysical context, and with deep insights into human psychology and the human experience. A small sprinkling of trivial amusements is also enjoyable. I don’t expect others to share my interests, but I find others more interesting if they do.

From my perspective, the most important political struggle in the world today is that between “Democracy” and “Fascism.” By “democracy” I mean secular societies of wide inclusiveness and with a high degree of personal freedom/liberty, and which are organized under government regimes that are democratic/parliamentarian, and have a significant portion of their domestic policy being that of a social-welfare state (the more the better) and with as little corruption as possible. By “fascism” I mean the exact opposite of “democracy.”

The next most important political struggle in the world today is that between “Socialism” and “Capitalism.” By “socialism” I mean that the entirety of the state apparatus and the economic paradigm of its society are organized for the benefit of ALL its people, without regard to the desires of economic special interests for preferential treatment and exclusionary protections to give them a “leg up” in their self-aggrandizing contentiousness. By “capitalism” I mean governments owned by an agglomeration of corporate and financial institutions, and managed by the collective political arms of those organized capital interests, primarily for the benefit of the self-aggrandizing activities of those capitalist institutions and the careerists manning (and ‘womanning’) them.

Most of the nation-states in the world today are capitalist (I can’t think of a purely socialist one, except perhaps Cuba), and some of the capitalist nation-states are more “democratic” and some are more “fascist.” From my perspective, and broadly speaking because all nation-states are flawed to some degree, The United States, Latin America and Western Europe are primarily democratic, while Russia under Vladimir Putin is fascist, Syria under the al-Assad family dictatorship is fascist, and China is authoritarian, which for me is equivalent to fascism. Authoritarian regimes are also common elsewhere in the world, and they always include oppressed populations, sometimes even of majority numbers, but segregated by ethnicity, or religion, or physiological attributes (a.k.a., “race”), or language, or relative and enforced poverty. The ultimate logic of fascism is genocide (“The ultimate logic of racism is genocide” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.).

So, I see struggle #1 as Democracy versus Fascism, and struggle #2 as Socialism versus Capitalism.

The singular existential threat of planetary scale and of alarming immediacy that we face today is human-caused Global Warming Climate Change. I have written volumes about this since 2003, but that is no longer necessary. In the last two or three years, the last shreds of climate change ‘denialism’ have all fallen away. Everybody now accepts the fact that global warming is reality, but humanity has yet to do anything real in response to it. So both fossil fuel use and the average global temperature keep rising at accelerating rates.

The only effective response to tamp down global warming, and in the ideal to permanently stop emitting carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases, would necessarily have to be a cooperative and coordinated worldwide effort. In order for such an effort to be mounted and sustained indefinitely, it would be necessary to equalize the standard of living around the world, so as to offer all people everywhere an equivalent degree of protection from economic hardship and natural disasters, and to equitably tax all people around the world for the resources needed to maintain our linked programs of environmental preservation. In essence, we need World Socialism in order to be able to effectively counteract Global Warming Climate Change (GWCC).

The immediate reaction by “the rich” on hearing this is: “you want to take wealth, luxury and comfort away from us to pay for poor people,” and the immediate reaction by those “poor people” is: “we are suffering the brunt of this deadly climate change, which you are causing, so you owe us!” But ‘we are not all in it together,’ so the rich will continue to claw fossil fuels out of the Earth and burn them up because that is the source of their physical, and thus military, and thus financial power, and therefore of their overall political power domestically and internationally; and the poor will continue to seek to acquire fossil fuels and burn them up because that is the quickest way to move themselves out of grinding poverty, brute labor, and lives of precarious survival. Because the idea of worldwide human solidarity is too challenging and too frightening for most, we are relegated to a fractious “law of the jungle” (and actually the animals of the jungles are not as unnecessarily bestial as narcissistic humans can be).

Therefore, in order to have any chance of slowing and ultimately stopping Global Warming Climate Change we first need to have World Socialism, or a high degree of it; and before we can develop that we need a predominantly democratic world, because socialism will never emerge from a world strangled by fascism’s grip.

That is why the support for the Ukrainians’s defensive war against Russian aggression driven by Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy is so important. Defense of Ukraine is of course essential to protect the lives, culture, and liberty of individual Ukrainians and of their nation-state, but it is also important in the defense of democracy generally against the attacks on it by fascism. There are many places around the globe besides Ukraine where that struggle is taking place, Palestine, Syria, Myanmar easily come to mind, but at the moment Ukraine is a particularly intense flashpoint in that struggle that has galvanized much world public attention (including mine).

My contention is that the global “we” — especially in its most privileged nation-states — should do our best to support and arm the Ukrainians, and other oppressed people facing similar existential threats from fascist aggression, to help liberate them, and then expand those initially bilateral bonds of human solidarity into a broader international bond of human solidarity that is democratic and then socialist (as I have characterized those terms). In that way we erode the extent of fascism while expanding the domain of social justice and moral humanism, and simultaneously increase the extent and effectiveness of humanity’s Global Warming Climate Change counteractions.

To say that this is idealistic and impractical in our realpolitik civilization is simply to make excuses for preferring to sink into ignominious defeatism and dishonorable opportunism. There is no shame in ultimately failing to reach our desired goal in this tiered and multi-faceted global struggle, there is only shame and dishonor in failing to give that struggle our best collective efforts and to continue them.

Novalis paraphrased Herakleitos’s observation on the karmic drift of the unexamined life, as “Character is fate,” but it is important to realize that the nature of that personal moral character can be defined by the kind of fate one seeks to aim at by intentional actions. The world that humans inhabit never passively nor spontaneously improves (or not for long at least), but the worst possibilities can be prevented, and the sporadic catastrophes can be helpfully responded to after the fact, when the global we is more integrated through bonds of human solidarity: democratic socialism.

So all that goes into my thinking as to the value of my posts, and of yours, on FACEBOOK, not that I have any illusions that any of our posts actually “change people’s minds” (you can only do that for yourself, in reaction to your experiences in life), let alone influence the potentates and “change our world.” But we can stimulate each other’s thinking by what we choose to share on “social media,” and some of that might lead us each to reexamine prior assumptions, and even possibly decide to replace some of them with new and improved idea-constructs. In that way we improve ourselves.

So that is how I go about using FACEBOOK, and why, and how I view you’all in general.

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One Life, Many Lives

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One Life, Many Lives

Democracy is how human dignity is preserved institutionally. Socialism can only be brought about by individual commitment and effort, not by top-down political mandate. Capitalism is the economic face of fascism, and the sociological face of settler-colonialism and its imposition of slavery — and of genocide.

The most important struggle in the world today is that between Democracy and Fascism. This is more important than the struggle between Socialism and Capitalism because until the world is democratic it cannot achieve socialism, and without World Socialism no effective counteraction and adaptation to Climate Change can be implemented. A human civilization that would perish by Climate Change would necessarily have to be fascist, and a human civilization that would prevail against the existential threats of Climate Change would necessarily have to be democratic and socialist.

Fascism has many varieties but all are easy to recognize: wherever human dignity and democracy are suppressed, that is where fascism rules. While it is easy to see that potentates and the wealthy are fascist because that is the ideology that sustains their privileged positions and schemes of self-aggrandizing and exploitative inequality, it can seem paradoxical that working-class people would willingly choose to act as functionaries in the enforcement and bureaucratic mechanisms of fascism’s machinery, until you realize that human weakness and lack of moral character and a lack of a sense of honor are common.

Patriotism is a hoax, the only values worth fighting and dying for are: family and honor. And World Socialism means including all peoples and their communities within your allegiances to “family” and “honor” — just as those people would, in that ideal, include your family and your right to dignified living, within their allegiances to “family” and “honor.”

We humans are only as good as our willingness to take care of each other. It is very easy to see our deficiencies in this regard, but it is better to try overcoming them. That effort will be as eternal as the continuation of our species, and the mark of its success will not be the eventual achievement of some perfected societal advancement, but that at any moment a serious effort continues in that direction.

It is not possible to achieve that success for the world if the preservation of your uninterrupted comfort is paramount. There is no blame in being annoyed if such interruptions must happen, but there is no honor, and there is great shame, in seeking to avoid such annoying inconveniences by making excuses justifying the sacrifices of the lives and liberties, cultures and independence of other peoples, just to preserve your material comforts and ego.

So: am I an idealist and a romantic?
Yes.

Have I judged people harshly based on their responses, or lack of them, to the Russian-Ukrainian War?
Yes.

Do I worry this might reduce the number of my friendships, and perhaps significantly?
No.

Most friendships are quite superficial, and I have learned not to expect too much from “friends,” because most people just want you to play a supporting role in their own dramas of receiving attention, and for that they often want you to compromise your ideas and principles so as to harmonize with theirs.

For everybody, the first step toward World Socialism is the development of a well-integrated and principled moral character. The chasm, between the sordid reality of “now” and the projected idealization of the desired “then,” is never a justification for surrendering to defeatism. We are only as good as we do.

I seek to be truthful, not popular. I aspire to be worthy, not acclaimed nor egotistical, even knowing how socially challenging and personally difficult achieving that can be. I cannot think of a better way to make an anonymous life significant, and fulfilling.

The Ukrainians are fighting for their lives, families, culture, personal honor and national independence, and we support them because their struggle is one of the sharpest points of conflict in the world today that is also for the defense of democracy, and of our own morally humane honor.

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From Spain through Orwell to Ukraine

The best analysis I have found of the Russian-Ukrainian War (RUW), and the international political environment that frames it, was written by George Orwell in 1943: Looking Back On The Spanish War. Related to that analysis are Orwell’s insights, in his 1949 essay Reflections on Gandhi, on the limits of pacifism — which is always an affectation of the bourgeois political Left — when confronted with the urgencies of a Just War. The defensive war being fought now by Ukrainians is a Just War.

In using Orwell’s essays to form an analogy between the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Russian-Ukrainian War of today, I rhetorically equate “Ukraine” with the Spanish Republic (the “Republicans,” the “Loyalists,” the democracy, the “reds”), and I rhetorically equate “Russia” with Francoist forces (the “rebels,” the Falangists, the Fascists, the “whites”). The analogy of 2022 Ukraine to 1930s Spain is not always perfect here, so I will occasionally use the symbol * to remind you of when I especially want to draw your attention to those relationships of analogy.

But first, let me present a summary, by Daphne Lawless, of the arguments within “leftist” circles, about Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia’s continuing aggression. After that I state my position on the war, and then proceed with the exercise in historical analogies, which I proposed at the outset.

Daphne Lawless (15 April 2022):

The really amazing thing is hearing old timer anti-imperialists/peace activists and young tankies alike, making PRECISELY the same arguments for why Russia should be left alone to do its wicked business in Ukraine as their sworn enemies – Zionists – do for Israel’s wicked deeds in occupied Palestine:

“The Ukrainians/Palestinians aren’t angels – in fact, some may even be fascists”,

“Russia/Israel is just defending its borders and its right to protect itself from its aggressive neighbours, who are using Palestine/Ukraine as a cat’s paw”,

“Why don’t Ukrainians/Palestinians just surrender to the stronger army to save lives?”

It’s especially amazing since they were so morally clear about why a regime infinitely more “dodgy” than Ukraine – Saddam’s Iraq or the Taliban’s Afghanistan – would not be improved by imperialist bombs and tanks. And they were right.

But then, they did the same thing in Syria, and in Bosnia – or even in East Timor, where it was explicitly argued that the consequences of Australia/NZ intervention would be much worse than simply leaving the Indonesian army to finish the genocide.

That logic was morally bankrupt then – a parody of the noble slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow”. The idea that actual genocide is tolerable as long as Western imperialism doesn’t get involved is leading to an explicit alliance between communists/socialists and actual fascists – just like it did in the 1930s.

I stand with the rights of ALL oppressed people to resist imperialist aggression and invasion; and for their rights to use ANY MEANS NECESSARY to defend themselves, including buying a fuckton of arms from whomever will sell to them. YES, that means, for example, I defend the Solomon Islands’ right to do a deal with PR China should they choose to do so. To argue otherwise (because it might be of benefit to the imperialism that you, personally, oppose) is to say to those people: “it is better for you to die, for your children to be enslaved/stripped of their culture, than for a certain imperialist power to get any advantage over the other one which happens to be genociding you”.

It is an abstract, inhumane politics which sees only states where there are suffering people. It is a blindspot which is just unchallenged on most of the activist Left, and it is one reason why “normies” have no interest in Left organisations.

MG,Jr. response to Daphne Lawless:

I agree that Daphne Lawless’s statement (above) is superb.

I had a very dear friend, Louis Proyect (RIP) who was the best-informed Marxist I had ever met, and I learned much from him. Besides his encyclopedic knowledge of Marxism (Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, everything) and of international affairs, his outstanding gift as a political analyst was that he never lost sight of the true goal of all such activity: to always relieve human suffering — even if sacrificing one’s ideological consistency was necessary at times. That focus on people first is what set Louis above all the legions of campists, and tankies, and bourgeois recreational Leftists I have seen across the Internet this century.

So, yes, “class analysis” is good, “dialectical materialism” is amusing (the Old Communist who took Jorge Semprún under his wing in the German WWII concentration camp explained it to Jorge: “Dialectical materialism means always landing on your feet”), but it is also materially, factually, historically true that sometimes NATO is good too. You can only see this if you can accept: people over ideology.

About campists and tankies: They obsess so much about what they are “against,” that they blind themselves to what they should be “for.” “Campism” is the modern continuation of Stalinism. “Tankism” is the ignoramus variety of campism.

I am not interested in ideology, I am interested in moral truths that help people generally. Such truths are always beyond the narrow confines of ideology — “political” or “religious” — and in fact are so simple that children and even animals can instinctively understand them. It takes intelligence, education and maturity to be able to find excuses justifying murderous immorality. And it takes intelligence, education and “maturity” to be able to encrust very limited thinking with jargon so as to project a facade of commanding erudition. It is my impression that for most people (even the “smart ones”) that their political awareness boils down to confirmation bias and witch burning.

Daphne stated the facts very clearly. If you cannot agree with them it is not because Daphne is factually in error, but because you are intent to defend an idea you personally identify with, despite it being contradicted by objective reality. This is not uncommon (unfortunately), it is called cognitive dissonance.

George Orwell on the Spanish war [and parallels to Ukraine, and elsewhere, today]:

“The essential horror of army life…is barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to be fighting in. Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in all armies. Orders have to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship of officer and man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior. The picture of war set forth in books like All Quiet on the Western Front is substantially true. Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers. It is true that the social background from which a army springs will colour its training, tactics and general efficiency, and also that the consciousness of being in the right can bolster up morale, though this affects the civilian population more than the troops. (People forget that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.) But the laws of nature are not suspended for a “red” army any more than for a “white” one. A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just. Why is it worthwhile to point out anything so obvious? Because the bulk of the British and American intelligentsia were manifestly unaware of it then, and are now.”
Looking Back on the Spanish War (LBOTSW)

“As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from money and mere physical safety…We have become too civilised to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don’t take the sword perish by smelly diseases. The fact that such a platitude is worth writing down shows what the years of rentier capitalism have done to us.”
— LBOTSW

“I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish civil war. I know that some were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved solely on the grounds of political predilection. Everybody believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present [1943]…there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.”
— LBOTSW

“…the Left, the people who normally pride themselves on their incredulity…”
— LBOTSW

“The truth, it is felt, becomes untrue when your enemy utters it…But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen. The fact often adduced as a reason for scepticism — that the same horror stories come up in war after war — merely makes it rather more likely that those stories are true. Evidently they are widespread fantasies, and war provides an opportunity of putting them into practice. Also, although it has ceased to be fashionable to say so, there is little question that what one may roughly call the ‘whites’ [autocracies, conservatives, fascists — MG,Jr.] commit far more and worse atrocities than the ‘reds.’ [democracies, liberals, socialists — MG,Jr.]…The volume of testimony is enormous…These things really happened, and that is the thing to keep one’s eye on.”
— LBOTSW

“The broad truth about the war [1936-1939 — MG,Jr.] is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their chance of crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis and by the forces of reaction all over the world.”
— LBOTSW

The broad truth about the Russian-Ukrainian War is that the Russian autocracy of Vladimir Putin thought it saw a chance of crushing Ukrainian independence and recolonizing Ukraine, and took it, and the nature of all the other governments around the world can be gauged by their responses to Russia’s aggression, and which responses must certainly arise out of sympathy with or antipathy to Russia’s war goals, because they either mirror or conflict with the closely held political desires of those governments.

“Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. [Look up ”Frank Pitcairn” for more about this — MG,Jr.]…I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’…But the broad picture of the war which the Spanish* government presented to the world was not untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists* and their backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the circumstances it could not have been otherwise. The only propaganda line open to the Nazis* and Fascists* was to represent themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain* from a Russian [1930s — MG,Jr.] dictatorship. This involved pretending that life in Government Spain* was just one long massacre.”
— LBOTSW

This is exactly the template of the current Russian propaganda about their war in Ukraine. The bogeyman of a looming Russian (Stalinist) dictatorship in 1930s Spain projected by the Spanish Fascists and their backers (primarily Germany and Italy) has its parallel today in the Russian-Ukrainian War with Vladimir Putin’s propagandistic projection of the bogeyman of a looming Azov Battalion style neo-Nazi dictatorship seizing control of (in fact already controlling) the entire Ukrainian nation. It is remarkable how closely Vladimir Putin’s projection of a casus belli onto Ukraine mirrors the nature of his own regime in Russia.

“This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history.”
— LBOTSW

“But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future?…Against the shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let fascism, or possibly even a combination of several fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in England [and America — MG,Jr.] underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature [movies, for Americans — MG,Jr.] in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?”
— LBOTSW

“In the long run — it is important to remember that it is only in the long run — the working class remains the most reliable enemy of fascism, simply because the working class stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of society. Unlike other classes or categories, it can’t be permanently bribed. To say this is not to idealise the working class…Time after time, in country after country, the organized working class movements have been crushed by open, illegal violence, and their comrades abroad, linked to them in theoretical solidarity, have simply looked on and done nothing; and underneath this, secret cause of many betrayals, has lain the fact that between white and coloured workers there is not even lip-service to solidarity. Who can believe in the class-conscious international proletariat after the events of the past ten years? To the British working class the massacres of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, or wherever it might be seemed less interesting and less important than yesterday’s football match. [Americans behave identically — MG,Jr.] Yet this does not alter the fact that the working class will go on struggling against fascism after the others have caved in. One feature of the Nazi conquest of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia, including some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people who squeal loudest against fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism when the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and moreover they can be bribed — for it is evident that the Nazis think it worth while to bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the other way about. Too ignorant to see through the trick being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of fascism, yet sooner of later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so, because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of fascism cannot be fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do…What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible…The common people knew in their bones that the Republic* was their friend and Franco* was their enemy. They knew that they were in the right, because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able to give them.”
— LBOTSW

“When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of war…there is always the temptation to say: ‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral.’ In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, blimps [e.g., Donald Trump, Bashar al-Assad, Xi Jinping], and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won [and this time I hope it will be — MG,Jr.], the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened.”
— LBOTSW

“The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin — at any rate, not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with eyes in their heads realised that the Government could not win the war unless there were some profound change in the international set-up…[dare I say massive weapons transfers to Ukraine and forgiving its foreign debt, dare I say Russia blocked in the UN by its reorganization, dare I say: NATO — MG,Jr.]…The Fascists won [in 1939 — MG,Jr.] because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn’t. No political strategy can offset that.”
— LBOTSW

“Whether it was right…to encourage the Spaniards* to go on fighting when they could not win [if unsupported and undersupplied from abroad — MG,Jr.] is a question hard to answer. I myself think it was right, because I believe that it is better even from the point of view of survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting.”
— LBOTSW

“When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity…But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about…lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them…The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what-not who lecture the working-class socialist for his ‘materialism’! All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your child will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done. Not one of those who preach against “materialism” would consider life livable without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we chose to set our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard of living of the whole world to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than the war [WWII — MG,Jr.] we have just fought. I don’t claim, and I don’t know who does, that that would solve anything in itself [politically — MG,Jr.]. It is merely that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real problems of humanity can be tackled. [We cannot effectively tackle Climate Change until we first ‘Make poverty history,’ as Nelson Mandela said — MG,Jr.]…

“How right the working classes are in their ‘materialism’! How right they are to realise that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! All the considerations that are likely to make one falter — the siren voices of a Petain [or Marine Le Pen — MG,Jr.] or of a Gandhi, the inescapable fact that in order to fight one has to degrade oneself, the equivocal moral position of Britain [and the United States — MG,Jr.], with its democratic phrases and coolie empire, the sinister development of Soviet Russia [and again! — MG,Jr.] the squalid farce of left-wing politics — all this fades away and one sees only the struggle of the gradually awakening common people against the lords of property and their hired liars and bumsuckers. The question is very simple. Shall people…be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan’t they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner of later, but I want it to be sooner and not later — some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come.”
— LBOTSW

George Orwell on Gandhi and pacifism:

“Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he were not only sympathetic to the Western left-wing movement, but were integrally part of it. Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines. But one should, I think, realize that Gandhi’s teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all things and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. They make sense only on the assumption that God exists and that the world of solid objects is an illusion to be escaped from…But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is ‘higher.’ The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all ‘radicals’ and ‘progressives,’ from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.”
Reflections on Gandhi [ROG]

“Even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did not — indeed, since his whole political life centered round a struggle for national independence, he could not — take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins. Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the late war [WWII — MG,Jr.], one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: ‘What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?’ [And since WWII we have been faced with the same question for many other populations: Palestinians, Mayans, Bosnians, Rwandans, East Timorese, Libyans, Syrians, Rohingya, among others, and now in light of the Bucha atrocities, Ukrainians — MG,Jr.] I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I heard plenty of evasions…

“But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer…was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which ‘would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.’ After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly…

“Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths…

“It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the régime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard from again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practice civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukrainian famine, it would make no difference.”
— ROG

“But let it be granted that non-violent resistance can be effective against one’s own government, or against an occupying power [on the order of Britain and colonial India — MG,Jr.]: even so, how does one put it into practice internationally?…Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement. Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is gratitude a factor in international politics?”
— ROG

The extraordinary thing about Orwell is that he so clearly states the obvious about the social conditions of the times, then and now, and which few can even bring themselves to face without excuses, fantasies and lies, if at all.

So, to conclude:

The Ukrainians are fighting a Just War of defense against ongoing Russian aggression, which includes mass atrocities committed against Ukrainian civilians.

There is no morally justifiable pacifist response to this war, nor morally justifiable position of neutrality regarding it.

All excuses advanced to justify the Russian aggression in Ukraine, by both Vladimir Putin and “anti-imperialists” opposed only to US-NATO-Western “expansionism,” are complete lies aimed at enforcing inhuman ideologies in the forms of:

Conquest and colonization — Russian imperialism:
the destruction of the Ukrainian state and culture, and the subjugation of its people, and

Ideological consistency over the relief of human suffering:
the opposition by “anti-imperialists” of assistance to Ukraine regardless of how many Ukrainians would die as a result, because those anti-imperialists do not want any weakening of Russian opposition to Washington-consensus geopolitical power, nor any expansion of that power, as a result of any assistance the United States, in particular, might render Ukraine.

Helping Ukraine win its war as quickly as possible is the right thing to do, not just for the benefit of Ukraine, but for the moral and political advancement of the whole world.

“This is the nature of war: by protecting others you save yourself.”
Seven Samurai (1954)

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Reflecting on ‘Sentimental Education’

This lovely antique photograph was posted by Alexander Pademelon Johnson. I made a copy and touched it up a little bit, and the result is shown here. I just so happen to be reviewing (again) ‘Sentimental Education’ by Gustave Flaubert, and this delicate Parisienne seems to have stepped out of that time.

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Frédéric Moreau, at “Madame Dambreuse’s house for one of her regular evening receptions” falls into conversation with a typical group of men of substance:

“Most of the men there had served at least four governments; and they would have sold France or the whole human race to safeguard their fortunes, to spare themselves the least twinge of discomfort or embarrassment, or simply out of mere servility and an instinctive worship of power.”

This last quote has stood out for me as perhaps the finest gem in Gustave Flaubert’s 1869 novel, ’Sentimental Education,’ a novel that is filled with literary gems. This characterization of self-interest by men of substance, members of the bourgeoisie, strikes me as timeless and absolutely true of such a large portion of the people of my time — male and female — in my American society, and across the entire political spectrum. That one phrase, about people being led, “simply out of mere servility and an instinctive worship of power” says it all about self-interest as pursued by moral cowards of shallow intellectual depth. And doesn’t our society reflect just that?

’Sentimental Education’ was, supposedly, Franz Kafka’s favorite novel. If so I can easily see why. Thinking about it always draws me deep in contemplation about my own emotional — “sentimental” — course through life.

Who am I? I cycle through each character in ‘Sentimental Education,’ though never quite fully in each case, vaguer, more tentative, more naïvely pathetic at times. Maybe that is good, and maybe unimportant.

I was an Arnoux, but never with sufficient confidence to be so flamboyantly foolish, my joys in beauty quieter and not philandering, my affections while Arnoux more guarded. But like Arnoux, I love my children with that same fatherly abundance of affection, which was also true of Dick Diver, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ’Tender is the Night.’

I was a Frédéric, but not so inconsistent, alternating between childish sentimentality and self-pity, and cynicism of hollow bravado, between fear of lack of acceptance locking him in lonely isolation, and fear of exposure to ridicule when displaying for public attention. I accept that one must make emotional commitments and maintain them if one is to have any hope of securing some personal stability, some personal peace. But one cannot expect too much from others, as all are overwhelmed by the dramas and trivialities of their own lives.

And for some years I was a Deslauriers, absolutely certain of his political acumen and of the ignorant injustice of the world to that amorphous anonymity of social clay called “the people,” and with intent to himself, though this is also so much envy railing out of frustration at the personal failure to stumble onto the good luck conveying one into the ranks of the perpetually rewarded and exclusively immunized.

I lack the stubbornness to entrench myself in bitter unawareness, so I will always fail to be an ideologue, as Sénécal was, that ultra-leftist extreme of Deslauriers’s mushy self-centered liberalism. Sénécals I know of: people of iron certainty, which they imagine — if even they do that — that such purity of conviction gives them a soul, but are absolutely devoid of human-heartedness. Though none of the Sénécals I know, or have ever known, have any physical courage to be little Stalins, all their iron is in words, all their actions less vaporous than electronic noise. The self-defense of an irrelevant ego’s self-righteousness can be so pathetic. I leave to all today’s Sénécals their clamor of competitive hungers for acclaim by the vacuous herds they aspire to lead.

And to have a Madame Arnoux, why conceive such an impossible dream?, of a barely older woman of compassionate maturity to mother over all your little boy insecurities, and elevate your self-respect by your possession of her exclusive devotion.

Much easier to find a girl as light-minded and youthfully gay as Rosanette, to grow into a reliably steady partner in a mundane joint life of pedestrian conformity — assuming she does not later deteriorate into borderline personality disorder as a luxury indulgence to compensate for aging, for out of such conventional joint lives are children most easily — and kindly — raised. And of such children it is the odd ones — not many — who can break free of the dullness they incubated in, to take flight in their own independence.

Love is pure tragedy for those who only want it to be pure sunshine.

“The trouble with ‘Sentimental Education’,” said Massingill, “is that you have to know so damn much in order to enjoy it.”
“Do you think that novels should be devoid of historical facts, and cast off references?”
“Absolutely!,” he replied, “a successful novelist knows how to write entertainment for completely empty minds. Anything else is a profitless pretension, that you would probably call art, in what is always a purely commercial enterprise: the selling of bound paper smudged with printed words.”
I could see why Massingill was such a successful book publisher. I did not submit my manuscript.

In many ways I see similarities between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender is the Night’ and Gustave Flaubert’s ‘Sentimental Education.’ Both are about inner conflicts and inconsistencies about “love,” and both have richly detailed prose while also being “realistic.” For me, both are affecting and both are timeless.

Look into that lovely face, and imagine being Frédéric Moreau or Richard “Dick” Diver.

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Vladimir Putin: Can the God of global fascists and Nazis “de-Nazify” a country?

by Michael Karadjis

Syrian Revolution Commentary and Analysis

By Michael Karadjis

Former head of the Ku Lux Klan, David Duke, with Putin’s ‘fascist brain’, Alexander Dugin, discussing how to save the White race

According to Russian president Vladimir Putin:

“The United States continues to receive more and more immigrants, and, as far as I understand, the white, Christian population is already outnumbered … White Christians have become a minority, less than 50 percent now. … Russia is a vast territory, from its western to eastern borders, it is a Eurasian space. But as regards culture, even language group and history, this all is undoubtedly a European space, as it is inhabited by people of this culture. … we have to preserve all this to remain a significant centre in the world.”

Putin’s appeal to “great replacement” theory, his dog-whistle to the “White Christian” world that must be “preserved” lest it become a minority, demonstrates clear ideological…

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Tyrants are bullies, and bullies are cowards

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Tyrants are bullies, and bullies are cowards

To tolerate a foreign tyrant is to make the calculation that his victims are expendable is an acceptable exchange for being able to continue with the present degree of peace and comfort in your national life.

Nations can VOLUNTARILY choose to stop tolerating another’s tyranny by willingly expending some of their blood and treasure to come to the aid of the defense of victim populations, and by considering such acts on their part to be investments in human solidarity that can help build up a worldwide solidarity that is then capable — eventually — of confronting, attenuating and even solving existential problems of global scope, such as: climate change, nuclear disarmament, providing healthcare and disease eradication globally, and the elimination of: poverty, famine and food insecurity, statelessness and refugee streams of displaced desperate and precarious populations.

Nations can also INVOLUNTARILY be driven to cease tolerating a tyrant when he attacks, invades, and inflicts war upon your nation, so then you reluctantly make common cause with his previously (and still) victimized populations.

Making the correct national policy choices for the long term requires that your nation have the most astute, finely balanced, both deliberative and decisive — as needed — as well as fundamentally moral national leaders: politically, militarily, economically and sociologically.

What we need is World Socialism with NATO-for-All: NATO4A.

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FROM INDIVIDUAL BELIEF TO UNIVERSAL MORALITY

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FROM INDIVIDUAL BELIEF TO UNIVERSAL MORALITY

People believe what they want to believe so they can feel how they want to feel. Emotional reactivity is quick, and judging is easy. Rational deliberation is slow, and thinking is hard. So, the former is the instinctive and popular choice for seeking a favorable outcome in response to a present difficulty. The use of rational analysis by logical thinking based on objective data to understand reality is not the popular choice. Using the rational method to seek universally equitable moral outcomes, in terms of individually experienced benefits and individually assumed responsibilities, is the least popular use of the rational method of engagement with reality. The elimination of existential threats of global scope, or the most effective responses to attenuate them, can only be realized by the universal acceptance of the rational method guided by an equalizing morality. The quality of an individual’s moral character, and of a collective’s politics, can be determined by which of these factors dominate its composition. — And, from all of this we generate our futures.

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