General

We’ve all heard this story in one form or another. A person finally convinces themselves to go see their doctor for some innocuous but persistent problem. Their hope is for relief from a quick injection or a round of pharmaceuticals. Sadly, for our protagonist, it will not be that simple or easy. The seemingly benign symptoms mask a hidden carcinoma lying unseen in some forgotten region of their body, the mostly tranquil surface masking a concealed decay deep in the core that denies a healthy foundation.

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.
— John F. Kennedy

This is going to be an exercise in redefining fascism after meeting with socialists on the hundredth anniversary of the great revolution. In the early 1900s, the Italians who invented the term Fascism also described it as estato corporativo, meaning: the corporate state.

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
— Benito Mussolini

Then you have that great liberal, giver over of social goods from the rich, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who once described fascism as

… a nation in which 87 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four year olds (according to a 2002 National Geographic Society/Roper Poll survey) cannot locate Iran or Iraq on a world map and 11 percent cannot locate the United States (!) is not merely “intellectually sluggish.” It would be more accurate to call it moronic, capable of being fooled into believing anything …
—Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture, June 28 2001

It’s one thing to read about the United States in the news every day, or hear about the growing sociopolitical insanity from friends via the Internet. It is another thing altogether to come back to the land of one’s birth and citizenship for a few weeks, and to observe it all directly. That comfortable feeling of safe distance that some of us who live in calmer countries (calmer on the surface, at least) cherish and hold dear is, after only eight or nine hours in an airplane, gone.

Human sexuality mirrors human culture. Mating dances of seduction and refusal, and acts of non-consensual aggression cannot be separated from traits witnessed, practiced, and internalised by the people of a particular society. It is impossible to close the bedroom door to the culture at large. Eros not only inhabits the genitals and the heart but Anima mundi as well.

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink.

Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or ‘disappeared’ … More often than not, the United States shares the blame.
— Amnesty International, 1996.

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information.  Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, 1951

Spinning through time and space on a tiny blue sphere, somewhere in an infinite universe.  Well into my 70th revolution around the burning star which sustains us.  Growing ever-closer to imminent demise, but searching…still searching…ever searching for an infinitesimal shred of understanding.  Just a worker bee, blown off course by a hurricane of conflicting information.  Separated and alienated from my Hive long ago.