We too must suffer all the suffering around us. What each of us possesses is not a body but a process of growth, and it conducts us through every pain, in this form or in that. Just as the child unfolds through all the stages of life to old age and death (and every stage seems unattainable to the previous one, whether in fear or longing) so we unfold (not less deeply bound to humanity than to ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. In this process there is no place for justice, but no place either for dread of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit.
You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.
Now, I famously hate salad bars. I don’t like buffets. When I see food sitting out, exposed to the elements, I see food dying. I see a big open petri dish where every passing serial sneezer can feel free to cough, drool, and fondle with spittle-flecked fingers. I see food not held at ideal temperatures, food rotated (or not) by person or persons unknown, left to fester in the open air unprotected from the passing fancies of the general public. Those New York delis with the giant salad bars where all the health-conscious office workers go for their light, sensible lunches? You’re eating more bacteria than the guy standing outside eating mystery meat on a stick.
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that displaying crucifixes in Italian public schools violates religious and educational freedoms. It has ordered the Italian government to pay a $7390 fine to an Italian mother, Soile Lautsi, who has struggled for eight years to compel her children’s schools in northern Italy to remove crucifixes from the classrooms.
The Court rejected the government’s disingenuous argument that the crucifix is not a religious totem at all, but instead “a national symbol of culture, history, identity, tolerance, and”—get this—”secularism.”
Sanely, the Court concluded that secular, state-run schools, where attendance is compulsory, must “observe confessional neutrality in the context of public education,” and that crucifix-clogged classrooms “could easily be interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign and they would feel that they were being educated in a school environment bearing the stamp of a given religion.”
Crucifixes have been compulsory in Italian classrooms since the enactment in the 1920s of two laws under the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, a personage aided and enabled by the Catholic Church, which for millennia has been the premier peddler of crucifixes.
Lautsi’s husband, Massimo Albertin, said the family was satisfied with the court’s ruling. “We believe the ruling is a positive signal from Europe to Italy, which seems to increasingly lose its secularism,” he said from their home in Albano Terme. “The crucifix creates discrimination.”
Monkeys were routinely tormented and tortured in the early days of space flight—on both sides of the Cold War—but this will be the first time in decades that the doubledomes of NASA have decreed it is necessary to flog our cousins for the Greater Good of mankind.
“We realized there was a need for this kind of work,” intoned Jack Bergman, behavioral pharmacologist at Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital in Boston. “There’s a long-standing commitment on the part of NASA to deep space travel and with that commitment comes a need for knowing what kinds of adverse effects deep space travel might have, what are the risks to astronauts. That’s not been well assessed.”
The internet turned 40 this week. Astrologically speaking, having been born on October 29, it is a Scorpio, which helps explain the intensity and nastiness it brings out in people.
The first internet message was sent between the University of California in Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute, some 400 miles to the north. Actually, it is more precise to say “the first attempted message sent,” as the internet crashed some two letters into that first message. Which means Bill Gates must have been involved in the thing, even way back then.
The message was supposed to read “login,” but the web surfer was only able to type “lo” before the system went down.
“Lo” is actually a good first word to go out. It sort of has a “let there be light” feel to it. In fact, my Oxford English Dictionary tells me that “lo” was once an abbreviation for “Lord.”
I was interested in learning more about how young and troubled children perceive things and before filming started I showed some paintings to the children. The results were very revealing and mysterious. I remember one, an Italian renaissance painting which had in the background an entire city with castles and harbours and hundreds of people weaseling around unloading ships, all sorts of things going on. I would project a slide of the picture for maybe ten seconds and then turn it off and ask the children, “What have you seen?” And four or five of them in one voice shouted, “A horse! A horse!” “Where on earth is the horse?” I said to myself. So I put the slide back on and searched. “Down there!” they all shouted. And yes, in the corner of the picture was a single horse and a single horseman with a lance. It makes me think to this very day.
Jane Mayer, our correspondent from The Dark Side, has filed a valuable piece with the New Yorker on the increased use of predator drones in the War on Terra. Mayer’s piece makes four important points:
—Drones are a weapon of targeted assassination. Though traditionally disfavored or actually prohibited in this country, targeted assassination has become, with little or no public debate, the primary means by which the US wages the War on Terra.
—Drones are ineffective. Sixteen separate drone strikes targeting one individual killed more than 300 other people before the targeted man was himself killed.
—Drones create enemies. “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.”
—Drones corrupt and debase our people. From 8000 miles away, Americans observe on video screens “little people scurrying”; they then push a button, and end those people’s lives. People now smugly derided, among those who kill them, as “squirters.”
It is a convention in Anglo-American vocal music that the lyrics should make some sort of sense. The meaning may be dense, or multi-layered, but the lines should not be completely impenetrable, or flat-out imbecilic. A person of reasonable intelligence and attention should be able to suss out what is being said without herculean effort. The music reproduced below, for example, just won’t do: something more than the words “in the frog/perpen-dicular to the frog/far away from the frog/without the frog” must be imparted to the listener.
Generally the search for meaning isn’t a problem. This is particularly so because, in the popular tradition, the message is almost always both straight-forward, and the same—though usually it is at least somewhat veiled. Pop music is all about loin-joining: urging the joining of loins, celebrating the joining of loins, recalling when loins once joined. Ninety percent of all the vocal music that has ever made it onto the radio bespeaks an urgent chemical roiling that may be summarized as follows: “I feel great lust for you, and desire that we engage in sexual congress as soon as possible.” This is the sentiment that lies at the core of almost every love song . . . whether the singer is Rudy Vallee, or Ras. Of course, the veils have slipped some over the past 70 years. Thus, we have moved from the slickly sincere, buttery smooth seduction of “I Only Have Eyes For You,” to Liz Phair’s blunt, bare, matter-of-fact “HWC,” in which she cheerily chirps an ode to the outpouring of her lover’s semen.
Still, there remain those oddities, works wherein the words defy the probings of logic, intuition, or even sanity. I realized this anew recently, when, while driving, an Eric Clapton rendition of “Badge” poured forth from my radio, a song that, while still a joy to listen to, still, after all these years, makes no sense whatsoever.
US Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North is emerging now as the Charles Manson figure in this hideous scandal that crawls like a plague of maggots on the White House.
Oliver North apparently moved into the White House basement about five years ago and turned himself into something worse than the mad Dr. Frankenstein . . . He was given control of everything he could reach, from the president of Israel and secret US Army bank accounts in Switzerland to the CIA and George Bush and the home phone number of the Chinese defense minister.
Gordon Liddy was the Bad Boy in the Watergate crowd—the meanest of the mean—but all he did was commit a few burglaries, shred some papers and shoot out a street light in front of McGovern for President headquarters on Capitol Hill.
That was in the good old days, when real men were still running the White House and the president roamed the hallways at night with a beaker of gin in his fist, raving and jabbering at huge oil portraits of Abe Lincoln and John Philip Sousa while Henry Kissinger followed him around and made notes.
Gordon Liddy was cruel, but he never did anything even remotely like running a neo-Nazi shadow government out of the White House basement, skimming millions of dollars off the top of illegal arms sales to hostile foreign governments or selling weapons to a hate-crazed international terrorist like the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, who was paying North millions of dollars for TOW missiles with one hand while admittedly using the other to finance the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, which killed nearly 300 of North’s people.
Not even Tex Colson sold bombs and rockets to crazed Persian maniacs who used them to kill his own kind—and not even Kissinger would have put his arm around him and said, “Well done.”
This is a long way from “Semper Fi,” and there is a steel bed with D-rings already reserved at Bethesda for the eventual presence of Ollie North.
From Talking With Sartre: Conversations and Debates, a selection of interviews with Jean-Paul Sartre by John Gerassi, from the 1970s, to be published this fall by Yale University Press. Translated from the French by the good folks at Harper’s.
After I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time. I would say, “Okay, guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang.
The crabs really began when my adolescence ended. At first, I avoided them by writing about them—in effect, by defining life as nausea—but then as soon as I tried to objectify it, the crabs appeared. And then they appeared whenever I walked somewhere. Not when I was writing, just when I was going someplace. The crabs stayed with me until the day I simply decided that they bored me and that I just wouldn’t pay attention to them.
I would have liked my crabs to come back. The crabs were mine. I had gotten used to them. They kept reminding me that my life was absurd, yes, nauseating, but without challenging my immortality. Despite their mocking, my crabs never said that my books would not be on the shelf, or that if they were, so what?
They left me during the war. You know, I’ve never said this before, but sometimes I miss them—when I’m lonely, or rather when I’m alone. When I go to a movie that ends up boring, or not very gripping, and I remember how they used to sit there on my leg. Of course I always knew that they weren’t there, that they didn’t exist, but they served an important purpose. They were a warning that I wasn’t thinking correctly or focusing on what was important, or that I was heading up the wrong track, all the while telling me that my life was not right, not what it should be. Well, no one tells me that anymore.
A 5000-year-old sunken city off the southern Peloponnese is the latest candidate for the fabled city of Atlantis. Known as Pavlopetri, and straddling some 30,000 square meters of the ocean floor, it is the first submerged Greek city found that actually predates Plato’s 360 BCE-era references to Atlantis in Critias and Timaeus.
Meanwhile, in their continuing refusal to address climate change, the planet’s industrialized nations are proceeding to slip beneath the waves new cultures, new peoples, new civilizations, new Atlanti. The Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, for instance, is expected to disappear into the Pacific Ocean in less than 50 years.
In Dubai recently opened the $1.5 billion, 113-acre Atlantis Hotel, located on the world’s largest artificial island, offering rooms for $26,000 per night. This when roughly 1 billion people on this planet go to bed hungry every night.
In Moscow they seized a poem by Stepan Trofimovich, written six years earlier in Berlin, in his first youth, which circulated in manuscript among two amateurs and one student. It is not lacking in poetry, or even in a certain talent; it is a strange piece, but in those days that kind of thing was not uncommon. I find it difficult to give the plot, because to tell the truth I understand nothing of it. It is some sort of allegory, in lyrical-dramatic form, resembling the second part of Faust. The scene opens with a chorus of women, then a chorus of men, then of some powers, and it all ends with a chorus of souls that have not lived yet but would very much like to live a little. All these choruses sing about something very indefinite, mostly about somebody’s curse, but with a tinge of higher humor. Then suddenly the scene changes and some sort of “Festival of Life” begins, in which even insects sing, a turtle appears with some sort of sacramental Latin words, and, if I remember, a mineral—that is, an altogether inanimate object—also gets to sing about something. Generally, everyone sings incessantly, and if they speak, they squabble somehow indefinitely, but again with a tinge of higher meaning. Finally, the scene changes again, and a wild place appears, where a civilized young man wanders among the rocks picking and sucking at some wild herbs, and when a fairy asks him why he is sucking these herbs, he responds that he feels an overabundance of life in himself, is seeking oblivion, and finds it in the juice of these herbs, but that his greatest desire is to lose his reason as quickly as possible (a perhaps superfluous desire). Suddenly a youth of indescribable beauty rides in on a black horse, followed by a terrible multitude of all the nations. The youth represents death, and all the nations yearn for it. Finally, in the very last scene, the Tower of Babel suddenly appears and some athletes finally finish building it with a song of new hope, and when they have built to the very top, the proprietor of, shall we say, Olympus flees in comical fashion, and quick-witted mankind takes over his place and at once begins a new life with a new perception of things. Well, this is the poem that was found so dangerous then.
NASA is bombing the moon. Last Friday the Houston doubledomes smashed a two-ton rocket hull the size of a bus into the lunar surface. Four minutes later, a second probe, also hurtling through space at twice the speed of a rifle bullet, kamikazed into the moon.
The bombing commenced after science-types in September announced they had determined that the lunar polar regions contain water molecules. The bombing was intended to suss out just how much water might be lurking beneath the lunar surface.
The bus-bomb attack, on a two-miles-deep crater at the moon’s south pole, was supposed to send a plume of debris into space that could be analyzed for the presence of sub-surface ice. Although party-poopers at the MMT Observatory in Arizona, which closely observed the shelling, claim not to have detected any debris plume, NASA spokespeaks pooh-poohed this naysaying. “We have the data we needed to address the question of water,” said NASA’s Anthony Colaprete.
The twin bombing, intoned a second spokespeak, is “NASA’s first step in a lasting return to the moon.”
His weariness with things was frightening; it smacked of obliteration, a wall of anger and fatigue that felt as though it might sweep him into nothingness. Worst of all was loneliness.
There were times when he was capable of rejoicing in himself as a singularity—a man without a story, secure from tribal delusion, able to see the many levels. But at other times he felt that he might give anything to be able to explain himself. To call himself Jew or Greek, Gentile or otherwise, the citizen of no mean city. But he had no recourse except to call himself an American and hence the slave of possibility. He was not always up for the necessary degree of self-invention, unprepared, occasionally, to assemble himself.
And sometimes the entire field of folk seemed alien and hostile, driven by rages he could not comprehend, drunk on hopes he could not imagine. So he could make his way only through questioning, forever inquiring of wild-eyed obsessives the nature of their dreams, their assessment of themselves and their enemies, listening agreeably while they poured scorn on his ignorance and explained the all too obvious. When he wrote, it was for some reader like himself, a bastard, party to no covenants, promised nothing except the certainty of silence overhead, darkness around. Sometimes he had to face the simple fact that he had nothing and no one and try to remember when that had seemed a source of strength and perverse pride. Sometimes it came back for him.
Having been pronounced dead by Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik and various assorted Western intelligence agents, diplomats, and spokespeaks, Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud convened a press conference Sunday to reveal his resurrection and promise a new campaign of mayhem.
Mehsud’s brother, Baitullah, was killed by cowardly back-shooters on August 4, blown in half by a missile directed from the United States, as he lay abed on a rooftop in Pakistan, receiving a drip infusion for a kidney ailment. Pakistani and US officials immediately, jubilantly announced that “fierce infighting” had commenced among Baitullah’s mates over who should succeed him. Hakimullah was several times declared dead in this alleged fighting.
Sunday Hakimullah appeared with his chief deputy, also several times described as dead, numerous top Taliban commanders, the head of the Taliban’s suicide-bomb cell, a prominent Taliban press agent, and an Al Qaeda figure with a $5 million US bounty on his head.
Yesterday it was crisp all day. Never really warmed up. Mr. Sun, just not pumping it out the way he used to. Yesterday, well, “he tried to do his best,” as Neil Young once put it, “but he could not.”
The kitten, an April child who has lived all his young life in the lambent blush of sultry California summer, huddled yesterday, befuddled and bewildered. “Not likely to get any better, not any time soon,” I told him. “This is called ‘cold.’” Attempting to burrow into my feet, he makes it clear that he doesn’t like it. “And ‘cold’ is why,” say I, squatting before the wood stove, “we have this thing called ‘fire.’” And lit the match.
Yep, Mr. Sun is in trouble, up here in the Northern Hemisphere. He’s on the long slide, heading down towards the Solstice, at which time he’ll flicker out . . . to fire up anew. Northern peoples for millennia honored the passing of the sun, and his rebirth, each year at the Winter Solstice—which is why the children of Saul, when they elected to make of Jesus a Christ, decided he had been born on Christmas Day. Even though, best evidence suggests, he was really born a Pisces.
Anyway. That’s all a couple months down the road still. I wanted to post today Van Morrison’s “Country Fair,” from Veedon Fleece, the song that most says to me: undeniable arrival of autumn. But Morrison is a crusty poopstain about allowing his stuff on the tubes: as soon as somebody puts something up, his people descend to growl that it be taken down. Morrison is an ornery cuss by nature; his view of people frolicking with his songs across the tubes is also no doubt colored by the fact that, after 50 years in the music business, he’s a near-pauper, gleefully fleeced by slimeballing “managers” who serially “managed” to pocket all of his money.
So I’m left instead with “Requiem Again,” from The Durutti Column. Pretty autumn-like. Candles a good idea, too. Burning for Mr. Sun, to help him make it through.
Not knowing the language, they did not know the people. They did not know what the people loved or respected or feared or hated. They did not recognize hostility unless it was patent, unless it came in a form other than language; the complexities of tone and language were beyond them. Not knowing the language, the men did not know whom to trust. Trust was lethal. They did not know false smiles from true smiles, or if a smile here had the same meaning it had in the States. Not knowing the people, they did not know friends from enemies. They did not know if it was a popular war, or, if popular, in what sense. They did not know if the people viewed the war stoically, as it sometimes seemed, or with grief, as it seemed other times, or with bewilderment or greed or partisan fury. It was impossible to know.
They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory. No sense of order or momentum. No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause. They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite. On a given day, they did not know where they were, or how being there might influence larger outcomes. They did not know the names of most villages. They did not know which villages were critical. They did not know strategies. They did not know the terms of the war, its architecture, the rules of fair play. When they took prisoners, which was rare, they did not know the questions to ask, whether to release a suspect or beat on him. They did not know how to feel. Whether, when seeing the dead, to be happy or sad or relieved; whether, in times of quiet, to be apprehensive or content; whether to engage the enemy or elude him. They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind or anguish? They did not know. They knew the myths about the place—tales passed down from old-timer to newcomer—but they did not know which stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance. They did not know good from evil.
William Safire wrote speeches for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Well, everybody has to have a job, I guess. But just because you have one, it doesn’t mean you should earn as reward column-space on the op-ed page of the New York Times. For 32 years.
Yet that’s what Safire received, for five years of crafting such snide and slashing culture-busting phrases as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” For both Agnew, who was routinely receiving cash bribes across his desk in the Vice President’s office, and Nixon, the most ethically depraved man to serve in the White House within the lifetime of any person currently present on this planet.
Safire passed today, at age 79, of pancreatic cancer. And that is sad, as it is sad when any creature shuffles off this mortal coil. But sad too is the story of how Safire came to occupy his post at the Times, where, for more than three decades, he was one of but a half-dozen people permitted to speak from the op-ed pulpit of the premier political newspaper in this country. Even sadder is that once Safire was let in, he was soon followed into the nation’s newspapers and TV studios by legions of other hard-right political partisans. Who today so dominate the national political discourse that a rational person is reduced to accessing news and opinion off in the backwaters, in order to avoid such people.
That story is found beyond the furthur. Or, as news guys like Safire and I would say, “on the jump.”
With life tough enough to figure, you’d think people would leave off trying to suss out what happens after it, too. But they don’t. Some science types claim that’s actually what differentiates humans from other animals, brooding on the afterlife, but they’re probably wrong about that, as ravens attend funerals, and elephants weep for their dead.
In a certain sense it’s understandable, this obsession with events after the expiration of breath, since life is so short, and death is so long. Matt Groening, in a Love Is Hell strip, once put things in perspective for one of his rabbits, who was considering adultery, confronting him with a line across the entire page that represented time. The line was labeled “time you are dead.” Near the very beginning of the line lay a tiny dot: “time you are alive.”
Archy was a wise old roach, who from 1916 until 1926 directed missives to the public through the newspaper columns of journalist Don Marquis, employed first by The Evening Sun and later the New York Tribune. When Marquis left newspaper work for the magazine biz, archy went with him.
As a diminutive cockroach, archy was forced to communicate by diving head-first onto the keys of Marquis’ manual typewriter, one key at a time. Thus, he wrote all in lower-case, and not by choice, like ee cummings, but because he had to: there was no way for archy to both pound a letter key and simultaneously press the shift key. While the illustration reproduced here, the first public showing of archy, presents an archy comfortably looming over a typewriter, no such miniature device was ever prepared for the insect in his lifetime.
Archy’s musings in some ways rival Montaigne’s; beyond the furthur is his insight into the importance of beauty in life.
“Why Noah?” Arkady asked. This was a new indictment.
“He didn’t argue.”
“Noah should have argued?”
Yakov explained, “Abraham argues with God not to kill everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah. Moses pleads with God not to kill worshippers of the golden calf. But God tells Noah to build a boat because He’s going to flood the entire world, and what does Noah say? Not a word.”
“Not a word,” said Bobby, “and saves the minimum. What a bastard.”
Film actors have a genius for developing various stratagems to maximize their face-time on screen.
Common among those thespians with sufficient clout is suddenly discovering that the script needs to be rewritten, in ways that, astoundingly enough, significantly increase the number of lines, closeups, and other assorted shots afforded the discoverer. Dustin Hoffman is said to be master of this facet of the craft.
Then there are the practitioners of “the rugby school of film acting,” as director Terry Gilliam once put it, actors who physically fight for space. Gilliam describes watching Italian actress Valentina Cortese engage in such manuevers during the making of his film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen:
[W]herever the camera was pointed she knew exactly where the cross-hairs were, so that in scenes with lots of people she would always be dead centre. The other actors used to complain to me that she was kicking and elbowing them out of the way to get to the centre of the shot. Valentina got her comeuppance on her very last day, when we were shooting the scene where she enters with the headless king. That day there was a Swiss documentary crew doing a piece on her and she was being wonderfully grand, but the girl who was playing the king’s headless body was pushing and shoving her mercilessly. Suddenly she sank to the floor, sobbing, “Terry, make her stop, I can’t stand this.”
The lower house of the Argentine Congress has approved a bill that would strip monopoly broadcast-media companies of the ability to control political discourse in that country. The measure is expected to also slide through the Senate, and be signed into law by President Cristina Fernandez, who introduced it.
The nation’s existing media law, which favors monopolies, was imposed by the military dictatorship that controlled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Fernandez’ bill will restrict the number of broadcast licenses allotted to corporate bigfoots, and allow smaller companies and non-profit groups access to the airwaves.
Leftist Latin American lawmakers, like Fernandez, who seek to advance reforms in nations long run for the benefit of a privileged few, have in recent years been viciously set upon by large media conglomerates representing oligarchic interests.
The agent of reaction in Argentina is Grupo Clarin, which dominates not only the airwaves and cable, but also newspaper publishing and web traffic. The company had heretofore successfully blocked all media-reform measures.
In April of 2008, Clarin, gloating in its power, circulated the above cartoon, which depicts a silenced Fernandez. The drawing was emblematic of the fact that Clarin, through its monopoly control of Argentine media, had ensured that no positive news of government reforms had reached the Argentine people. Fernandez promptly denounced the “mafioso-like message,” emanating from Argentina’s “multimedia generals,” who she likened to the tank commanders who in 1976 overthrew the country’s democratic government.
Americans can be something of a complaining people. So many things a Bother or an Irritant or an Outrage. Many millions must daily lace their brains with chemicals so that they will not be depressed or anxious or afraid. In their homes sits a device known as the television set, a dark kaleidoscope splintering their lives into the Unattainable, the Menacing, and the Wrong.
Yet there are many Dangers of which even an American remains blissfully unaware. It is safe to assume, for instance, that not a single American will go to sleep this night worried that as s/he slumbers she will be set upon by a snake. This would not be so, if said American had been born in Bangladesh. In that nation, every year, 100,000 people are assaulted in their beds by snakes. Another 600,000 are victims of serpents while they are awake. More than 6000 die.
When you are an American, and you decide to frequent a restaurant, common irritants may include finding a parking spot, placement at a “bad table,” a rude or inattentive server, and food that is overcooked or overpriced. When you live in Bangladesh, and you decide to frequent a restaurant, your meal may at any moment be interrupted by a cobra that takes it into its head to slither into the place and begin sinking its fangs into anyone within reach.
So please, Americans, get some perspective. It may be bad. But it could certainly get worse.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has decided that traditional indicators of a nation’s economic progress are insufficient, misleading, even dangerous. Thus, he has announced, France will begin factoring into analyses of its economic vitality such intangibles as “happiness” and “well being.”
Sarkozy believes that reliance on gross domestic product—GDP—as the main measure of economic prosperity contributed to the recent global financial crisis. He is urging other nations to join France in measuring less materialistic indicators of progress.
The French President said the current crisis does not just give the international community the freedom to imagine another economic model, but it obliges the world to do so. “We do not have the choice,” he said.
(and every stage seems unattainable to the previous one, whether in fear or longing) so we unfold (not less deeply bound to humanity than to ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. In this process there is no place for justice, but no place either for dread of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit.
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