AT A CROSSROADS

"I sometimes have a feeling that the United States is going to wage war against the entire world."

Mikhail Gorbachev

Certain it is that a great responsibility rests upon the statesmen of all nations, not only to fulfill the promises for reduction in armaments, but to maintain the confidence of the people of the world in the hope of an enduring peace.

Frank B. Kellogg

A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.

James Freeman Clarke

Moreover, war has become a thing potentially so terrible and destructive that it should have been the common aim of statesmen to put an end to it forever.

Arthur Henderson

Mailer's evocations of Kennedy as nominee, candidate, and president are studded with effects of style and imagery that echo Scott Fitzgerald's portraiture of his own heroes. Kennedy is a resurgent image of "Renaissance man,...handsome as a prince in the unstated aristocracy of the American dream." Kennedy is a "hero" because by sheer beauty and glamor and force of personality he draws to himself the love and commitment of others even as he stands aloof and apart from them. And he is the "existential hero" because in his magnetism and his mystery, he has the capability of becoming the gathered thrust of a whole people's new and powerful and undirected life-energy into an uncharted future. For this reason, the election itself is an existential venture in ultimate and perhaps fearful choosing between the known and the unknown.

[From "Interpretation of Dreams" by Leo Bersani]

***************

Who can best lead us

Out

of

the

Darkness?
Who can best lead us

Into

the
Brightness

of

Day?
Is WAR Humanity’s unstoppable Footprint?
Will the boots of men forever stomp and destroy each other…
And this precious planet?
Is our fate already written?
In the stars?
In the Bible?
In the Mayan calendar?
In the Great Pyramid of Egypt?
In the quatrains of Nostradamus?
Or...
Is it our choice?
Yours and mine?
The current race to the White House (and all of the other metaphorical names from the world of sports that are given to this race) is an enormously important choice for the future of our children and their destinies.
Or (being negative again)...
Is it too late?
Have we already "blown it"?
I don't know.
What do you think?

Mad Plato


IT'S THE OIL STUPID!

*******

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

[From "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold]