the trend of human progress

     Gone With The Wind:  In the novel, when Scarlett throws the china rosebowl against the wall, Rhett Butler says, "This is too much!"


     In the movie he asks incredulously, "Has the war started?!"

     It's pretty funny. --Yes the war between the states has begun and the Union Army is here to -- hector you with smashed bric-a-brac.

_______________________________________

     When I first saw the film and then read the book, it seemed to be about romance and love and happiness and knowing oneself as opposed to self-delusion.

     It is also a meditation on war and other useless conflict between human beings.

     Gerald O'Hara leaves Ireland and builds a new life in America, and then goes right back to hating whoever he hated back in Ireland:

     The MacIntoshes were Scotch-Irish and Orangemen and, had they possessed all the saintly qualities of the Catholic calendar, this ancestry would have damned them forever in Gerald's eyes.

     Full circle.

     Second verse, 
     same as the first,
     twice as loud and
     three times worse...

          But then, this time he doesn't kill somebody and consequently have to run away again, and start over again, because -- that was a lot of work...  This time he punishes his imaginary enemies by not socializing with them.  So -- progress??

____________________________

The Guardian carried an article this week about fascism.  Below are three of the Reader Comments.

^  Nazism will start to die when the incentive in hierarchical power flow charts switches from the self interested greed of the few to fellow feeling for the many.  Good economy...good education...rational choices... circle of virtue not vice.


^  When we stop allowing sociopaths to be in charge.


yorktone
                ^  The trend of human progress is toward equality and, however slow it might seem, it always has been.  

Periodically societies experience a push against this progress.  

We call these temporary pauses fascism.  

Fascism always fails.  

We will, as a species, continue to blend and refine ourselves to the point we become conscious only of our similarities, not our differences.  

We will eventually unite and thrive.  

We kid ourselves that humanity has advanced beyond its infancy but really we are barely weaned and we mewl and puke our way toward a maturity that will see us abandon nationalities, borders, religions and conflict.  

We will do better than this, our current divided state, eventually.  

Every fascist knows this.  

They can feel the trend for progress in their bones and it terrifies them.  

They will lose and they know it.  

They squawk and they squirm, they claim their superiority, but they know, that with every generation their claim of uniqueness dissipates, their hatred is diluted, and their children will reject the poison they hold dear...

___________________________________

------------------ [excerpt, Gone With The Wind]---------------- There were hundreds of men skulking in the swamps and the mountains, defying the provost guard to drag them back to the army.  They were the ones who declared it was a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight" and they had had enough of it.  

But outnumbering these by far were men who, though carried on company rolls as deserters, had no intention of deserting permanently.  They were the ones who had waited three years in vain for furloughs and while they waited received ill-spelled letters from home:  

"We air hungry" "There won't be no crop this year -- there ain't nobody to plow."  "We air hungry."  "The commissary took the shoats, and we ain't had no money from you in months.  We air livin' on dried peas."

     Always the rising chorus swelled:  "We are hungry, your wife, your babies, your parents.  When will it be over?  When will you come home?  We are hungry, hungry."  

When furloughs from the rapidly thinning army were denied, these soldiers went home without them, to plow their land and plant their crops, repair their houses and build up their fences.  

     When regimental officers, understanding the situation, saw a hard fight ahead, they wrote these men, telling them to rejoin their companies and no questions would be asked.   Usually the men returned when they saw that hunger at home would be held at bay for a few months longer.  

     "Plow furloughs" were not looked upon in the same light as desertion in the face of the enemy, but they weakened the army just the same.

     Dr. Meade hastily bridged over the uncomfortable pause, his voice cold:  "Captain Butler, the numerical difference between our troops and those of the Yankees has never mattered.  One Confederate is worth a dozen Yankees."

     The ladies nodded.  Everyone knew that.

________________________________________

{Gone With The Wind, by Margaret Mitchell.  Macmillan Inc.  1936.}

-30-

quitting Ireland

"Land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for!  For 'tis the only thing that lasts."



     The following passages from the novel Gone With The Wind describe Scarlett O'Hara's father Gerald O'Hara.

--------------- [excerpt] ---------------- Gerald had come to America from Ireland when he was twenty-one.  He had come hastily, as many a better and worse Irishman before and since, with the clothes he had on his back, two shillings above his passage money and a price on his head that he felt was larger than his misdeed warranted.  

There was no Orangeman this side of hell worth a hundred pounds to the British government or to the devil himself; but if the government felt so strongly about the death of an English absentee landlord's rent agent, it was time for Gerald O'Hara to be leaving and leaving suddenly.  

True, he had called the rent agent "a bastard of an Orangeman," but that, according to Gerald's way of looking at it, did not give the man any right to insult him by whistling the opening bars of "The Boyne Water."

For this and other reasons, Gerald's family was not inclined to view the fatal outcome of this quarrel as anything very serious, except for the fact that it was charged with serious consequences.  For years, the O'Haras had been in bad odor with the English constabulary on account of suspected activities against the government, and Gerald was not the first O'Hara to take his foot in his hand and quit Ireland between dawn and morning.  

His two oldest brothers, James and Andrew, he hardly remembered, save as close-lipped youths who came and went at odd hours of the night on mysterious errands or disappeared for weeks at a time, to their mother's gnawing anxiety.  

They had come to America years before, after the discovery of a small arsenal of rifles buried under the O'Hara pigsty.  

Now they were successful merchants in Savannah, "though the dear God alone knows where that may be," as their mother always interpolated when mentioning the two oldest of her male brood, and it was to them that young Gerald was sent.

----------------- [excerpt 2] -----------
...If the educational equipment which Gerald brought to America was scant, he did not even know it.  

Nor would he have cared if he had been told.  

His mother had taught him to read and to write a clear hand.  He was adept at ciphering.  And there his book knowledge stopped.  The only Latin he knew was the responses of the Mass and the only history the manifold wrongs of Ireland.  He knew no poetry save that of Moore and no music except the songs of Ireland that had come down through the years.  

While he entertained the liveliest respect for those who had more book learning than he, he never felt his own lack.  And what need had he of these things in a new country where the most ignorant of bogtrotters had made great fortunes? in this country which asked only that a man be strong and unafraid of work?


------------------ [excerpt 3] -----------------
...These twin lines of somber trees were his, his the abandoned lawn, waist high in weeds under white-starred young magnolia trees.  The uncultivated fields, studded with tiny pines and underbrush, that stretched their rolling red-clay surface away into the distance on four sides belonged to Gerald O'Hara -- were all his because he had an unbefuddled Irish head and the courage to stake  everything on a hand of cards.

     Gerald closed his eyes and, in the stillness of the unworked acres, he felt that he had come home.  Here under his feet would rise a house of whitewashed brick.  Across the road would be new rail fences, inclosing fat cattle and blooded horses, and the red earth that rolled down the hillside to the rich river bottom land would gleam white as eiderdown in the sun -- cotton, acres and acres of cotton!  

The fortunes of the O'Haras would rise again.

-------------------- [excerpt 4] ---------------
...Gerald was on excellent terms with all his neighbors in the County, except the MacIntoshes whose land adjoined his on the left and the Slatterys whose meager three acres stretched on his right along the swamp bottoms between the river and John Wilkes' plantation.

     The MacIntoshes were Scotch-Irish and Orangemen and, had they possessed all the saintly qualities of the Catholic calendar, this ancestry would have damned them forever in Gerald's eyes.  True, they had lived in Georgia for seventy years and, before that, had spent a generation in the Carolinas; but the first of the family who set foot on American shores had come from  Ulster, and that was enough for Gerald.

"As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."

-30-

anything the world might cast

---------------------[excerpt, Gone With the Wind] ----------------------------------- 
     She plucked at his sleeve, speechless.
     "Scarlett," he said, "can't we go away and forget that we have ever said these things?"

     "No," she whispered.  "I can't.  What do you mean?  Don't you want to -- to marry me?"

     He replied, "I'm going to marry Melanie."

     Somehow she found that she was sitting on the low velvet chair and Ashley, on the hassock at her feet, was holding both her hands in his, in a hard grip.  He was saying things -- things that made no sense.  

Her mind was quite blank, quite empty of all the thoughts that had surged through it only a moment before, and his words made no more impression than rain on glass.  They fell on unhearing ears, words that were swift and tender and full of pity, like a father speaking to a hurt child.


     The sound of Melanie's name caught in her consciousness and she looked into his crystal-gray eyes.  She saw in them the old remoteness that had always baffled her -- and a look of self-hatred.

     "Father is to announce the engagement tonight.  We are to be married soon.  I should have told you, but I thought you knew.  I thought everyone knew -- had known for years.  I never dreamed that you -- You've so many beaux.  I thought Stuart --"

     Life and feeling and comprehension were beginning to flow back into her.

     "But you just said you cared for me."

     His warm hands hurt hers.

     "My dear, must you make me say things that will hurt you?"
     Her silence pressed him on.
     "How can I make you see these things, my dear.  You who are so young and unthinking that you do not know what marriage means."

     "I know I love you."


     "Love isn't enough to make a successful marriage when two people are as different as we are.  

You would want all of a man, Scarlett, his body, his heart, his soul, his thoughts.  

And if you did not have them, you would be miserable.  

And I couldn't give you all of me.  

I couldn't give all of me to anyone.  

And I would not want all of your mind and your soul.  And you would be hurt, and then you would come to hate me -- how bitterly!  You would hate the books I read and the music I loved, because they took me away from you even for a moment.  And I -- perhaps I--"


     "Do you love her?"
     "She is like me, part of my blood, and we understand each other.  Scarlett!  Scarlett!  Can't I make you see that a marriage can't go on in any sort of peace unless the two people are alike?"

     Some one else had said that:  "Like must marry like or there'll be no happiness."  Who was it?  It seemed a million years since she had heard that, but it still did not make sense.
     "But you said you cared."
     "I shouldn't have said it."
     Somewhere in her brain, a slow fire rose and rage began to blot out everything else.

     "Well, having been cad enough to say it --"
     His face went white.
     "I was a cad to say it, as I'm going to marry Melanie.  I did you a wrong and Melanie a greater one.  I should not have said it, for I knew you wouldn't understand.  How could I help caring for you -- you who have all the passion for life that I have not?  You who can love and hate with a violence impossible to me?  Why you are as elemental as fire and wind and wild things and I--"


     She thought of Melanie and saw suddenly her quiet brown eyes with their far-off look, her placid little hands in their black lace mitts, her gentle silences.  

And then her rage broke, the same rage that drove Gerald to murder and other Irish ancestors to misdeeds that cost them their necks.  There was nothing in her now of the well-bred Robillards who could bear with white silence anything the world might cast.



     "Why don't you say it, you coward!  You're afraid to marry me!  You'd rather live with that stupid little fool who can't open her mouth except to say 'Yes' or 'No' and raise a passel of mealy-mouthed brats just like her!  Why--"
     "You must not say these things about Melanie!"
     "'I mustn't' be damned to you!  Who are you to tell me I mustn't?  You coward, you cad, you -- You made me believe you were going to marry me--"

     "Be fair," his voice pleaded.  "Did I ever--"

     She did not want to be fair, although she knew what he said was true.  

He had never once crossed the borders of friendliness with her and, when she thought of this fresh anger rose, the anger of hurt pride and feminine vanity.  

She had run after him and he would have none of her.  

He preferred a whey-faced little fool like Melanie to her.  Oh, far better that she had followed Ellen and Mammy's precepts and never, never revealed that she even liked him -- better anything than to be faced with this scorching shame!



     She sprang to her feet, her hands clenched and he rose towering over her, his face full of the mute misery of one forced to face realities when realities are agonies.
     "I shall hate you till I die, you cad -- you lowdown -- lowdown --"  What was the word she wanted?  She could not think of any word bad enough.
     "Scarlett -- please --"

     He put out his hand toward her and, as he did, she slapped him across the face with all the strength she had.  The noise cracked like a whip in the still room and suddenly her rage was gone, and there was desolation in her heart.


     The red mark of her hand showed plainly on his white tired face.  He said nothing but lifted her limp hand to his lips and kissed it.  Then he was gone before she could speak again, closing the door softly behind him.
     She sat down again very suddenly, the reaction from her rage making her knees feel weak.  He was gone and the memory of his stricken face would haunt her till she died.

     She heard the soft muffled sound of his footsteps dying away down the long hall, and the complete enormity of her actions came over her.  She had lost him forever.  Now he would hate her and every time he looked at her he would remember how she threw herself at him when he had given her no encouragement at all.

     "I'm as bad as Honey Wilkes," she thought suddenly, and remembered how everyone, and she more than anyone else, had laughed contemptuously at Honey's forward conduct.  

She saw Honey's awkward wigglings and heard her silly titters as she hung onto boys' arms, and the thought stung her to new rage, rage at herself, at Ashley, at the world.  

Because she hated herself, she hated them all with the fury of the thwarted and humiliated love of sixteen.  

Only a little true tenderness had been mixed into her love.  Mostly it had been compounded out of vanity and complacent confidence in her own charms.  Now she had lost and, greater than her sense of loss, was the fear that she had made a public spectacle of herself.  

Had she been as obvious as Honey?  

Was everyone laughing at her?  She began to shake at the thought.

     Her hand dropped to a little table beside her, fingering a tiny china rosebowl on which two china cherubs smirked.  The room was so still she almost screamed to break the silence.  She must do something or go mad.  She picked up the bowl and hurled it viciously across the room toward the fireplace.  It barely cleared the tall back of the sofa and splintered with a little crash against the marble mantelpiece.

     "This," said a voice from the depths of the sofa, "is too much."

     Nothing had ever startled or frightened her so much, and her mouth went too dry for her to utter a sound.  She caught hold of the back of the chair, her knees going weak under her, as Rhett Butler rose from the sofa where he had been lying and made her a bow of exaggerated politeness.

     "It is bad enough to have an afternoon nap disturbed by such a passage as I've been forced to hear, but why should my life be endangered?"
     He was real.  He wasn't a ghost.  But, saints preserve us, he had heard everything!  She rallied her forces into a semblance of dignity.

     "Sir, you should have made known your presence."

     "Indeed?"  His white teeth gleamed and his bold dark eyes laughed at her.  "But you were the intruder.  I was forced to wait for Mr. Kennedy, and feeling that I was perhaps persona non grata in the back yard, I was thoughtful enough to remove my unwelcome presence here where I thought I would be undisturbed.  But, alas!" he shrugged and laughed softly.

     Her temper was beginning to rise again at the thought that this rude and impertinent man had heard everything -- heard things she now wished she had died before she ever uttered.

     "Eavesdroppers--" she began furiously.
     "Eavesdroppers often hear highly entertaining and instructive things," he grinned.  "From a long experience in eavesdropping, 
I--"
     "Sir," she said, "you are no gentleman!"
     "An apt observation," he answered airily.  "And, you, Miss, are no lady."  

He seemed to find her very amusing, for he laughed softly again.  "No one can remain a lady after saying and doing what I have just overheard.  However, ladies have seldom held any charms for me.  I know what they are thinking, but they never have the courage or lack of breeding to say what they think.  

And that, in time, becomes a bore.  

But you, my dear Miss O'Hara, are a girl of rare spirit, very admirable spirit, and I take off my hat to you.  

I fail to understand what charms the elegant Mr. Wilkes can hold for a girl of your tempestuous nature.  He should thank God on bended knee for a girl with your -- how did he put it? -- 'passion for living,' but being a poor-spirited wretch--"
     "You aren't fit to wipe his boots!" she shouted in rage.

     "And you were going to hate him all your life!"  He sank down on the sofa and she heard him laughing.

____________________________
{Gone With The Wind, by Margaret Mitchell.  Macmillan Inc.  1936.}

-30-

this is how it starts

----------------------------- [Bill Eddy excerpt] --------------- Part III looks at how to end this pattern of giving power to HCPs [high conflict people].  First, I explain methods for building relationships among groups that have been divided (Chapter 10).  

Next, I discuss how to identify and explain the patterns of HCPs to the political parties who choose candidates, to those who campaign for them, and to individual voters who want to discuss this problem with other voters (Chapter 11).  

Then, I go on to explain how anyone can expose the Fantasy Crisis Triads of high-conflict politicians to others (Chapter 12).  

I address how to be as assertive as high-conflict politicians are aggressive to block their unrestrained aggressive behavior with a more compelling message that is presented factually and repetitively with positive emotions (Chapter 13).  

Lastly, I look at how individuals and news outlets can analyze fake news, to shift the focus from promoting HCPs, their emotional warfare and their fantasy crises, to presenting more useful information about real problems and real solutions (Chapter 14).


Conclusion and Appendices

     The Conclusion reinforces the need to remain aware of HCPs in politics and the Appendices provide simple guides for recognizing their patterns and manipulations.

_____________________________________

[excerpt 2]

...Hitler didn't get his followers from the poorest people -- or the most prejudiced.  Even though anti-Semitism existed for centuries throughout Europe, Hitler taught the German people to hate Jews at a level they never had before.  

As the cultural leader of the nation, he was able to directly condition the German people to his way of thinking, primarily through his radio speeches, which reached into many Germans' homes, and movies of his rallies, which dominated the theaters -- "playing on their fears, resentments and prejudices more masterfully than anyone else."
___________________________________________

{Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths - And How We Can Stop!

by Bill Eddy}

-30-

the sixteenth president

"The conduct of the republican party in this nomination is a remarkable indication of small intellect, growing smaller.  They pass over...statesmen and able men, and they take up a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar."

~ The New York Herald (May 19, 1860), commenting on Abraham Lincoln's nomination for president at the Republican National Convention

_________________________________________

"Adopt the pace of nature:  her secret is patience."

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

__________________________________
__________________________________

Team of Rivals
The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
by Doris Kearns Goodwin


CONTENTS

PART I    THE RIVALS


1   Four Men Waiting
2   The "Longing to Rise"
3   The Lure of Politics
4   "Plunder & Conquest"
5   The Turbulent Fifties
6   The Gathering Storm

7   Countdown to the Nomination
8   Showdown in Chicago
9   "A Man Knows His Own Name"
10   "An Intensified Crossword Puzzle"
11   "I Am Now Public Property"


PART II    MASTER AMONG MEN

12   "Mystic Chords of Memory":  Spring 1861
13   "The Ball Has Opened":  Summer 1861
14   "I Do Not Intend to Be Sacrificed":  Fall 1861
15   "My Boy Is Gone":  Winter 1862
16   "He Was Simply Out-Generaled":  Spring 1862

17   "We Are in the Depths":  Summer 1862
18   "My Word Is Out":  Fall 1862
19   "Fire in the Rear":  Winter-Spring 1863
20   "The Tycoon Is in Fine Whack":  Summer 1863
21   "I Feel Trouble in the Air":  Summer-Fall 1863



22   "Still in Wild Water":  Fall 1863
23   "There's a Man in It!":  Winter-Spring 1864
24   "Atlanta Is Ours":  Summer-Fall 1864
25   "A Sacred Effort":  Winter 1864-1865
26   The Final Weeks:  Spring 1865


              Epilogue
              Acknowledgments
              Notes
              Illustration Credits
              Index

------------------- [from the INTRODUCTION] ----------------------------------- ...In my...effort to illuminate the character and career of Abraham Lincoln, I have coupled the account of his life with the stories of the remarkable men who were his rivals for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination -- New York senator William H. Seward, Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase, and Missouri's distinguished elder statesman Edward Bates.


     Taken together, the lives of these four men give us a picture of the path taken by ambitious young men in the North who came of age in the early decades of the nineteenth century.  

All four studied law, became distinguished orators, entered politics, and opposed the spread of slavery.  


Their upward climb was one followed by many thousands who left the small towns of their birth to seek opportunity and adventure in the rapidly growing cities of a dynamic, expanding America.

     Just as a hologram is created through the interference of light from separate sources, so the lives and impressions of those who companioned Lincoln give us a clearer and more dimensional picture of the president himself.  

     Lincoln's barren childhood, his lack of schooling, his relationships with male friends, his complicated marriage, the nature of his ambition, and his ruminations about death can be analyzed more clearly when he is placed side by side with his three contemporaries.


     When Lincoln won the nomination, each of his celebrated rivals believed the wrong man had been chosen.  



Ralph Waldo Emerson recalled his first reception of the news that the "comparatively unknown name of Lincoln" had been selected:  "we heard the result coldly and sadly.  It seemed too rash, on a purely local reputation, to build so grave a trust in such anxious times."

     Lincoln seemed to have come from nowhere.... --------------------------------- [end, excerpt] ---------

-30-

just one reason why

On You Tube
type in

Tracy Chapman & Eric Clapton - Give Me One Reason

and    P L A Y

-30-

worse than Watergate

"Our Republic Is Under Attack From The President"

     ...reads the headline above an opinion piece in the New York Times written by Admiral William H. McRaven, former chief of U.S. Special Operations Command.



     A Commenter wrote on You Tube:
"Trump, Mulvaney, and Rudy are like blind clowns, running around the White House lawn stepping on rakes."

--------------------------------------

Haldeman

----------------------------------------- On You Tube, type in

Clap For The Wolfman, by the Guess Who

and Play - !

-30-

"silly human pride"

     Rudy Giuliani is not special, & he is not above the law.


     I can hardly believe what Giuliani has turned into:  it's like he is trying to out-crazy Trump, in his own style of "Me Too."


Trump:  "I'm crazy!"

Giuliani:  "Me too!  Me Too!"

____________________________________

     To me, it looks as if they are cracking up.  
     F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote an essay titled, "The Crack-Up."  In today's slang, we say "meltdown."

[excerpt from "The Crack-Up" -- Esquire magazine] ---------------------------- Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work -- the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside -- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once.  


There is another sort of blow that comes from within -- that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.  The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick -- the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.

     Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation -- the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.  

One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.  This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible" come true.  

Life was something you dominated if you were any good.  

Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both.  

It seemed a romantic business to be a successful literary man -- you were not ever going to be as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived -- you were never going to have the power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you were certainly more independent.  

Of course within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied -- but I, for one, would not have chosen any other. ---------------------------- [end, excerpt]


     My dad used to quote that part about holding two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time....

     When Fitzgerald says a writer is "forever unsatisfied" in the practice of his trade, it reminds me of filmmaker Woody Allen, who has said that with each movie -- you think it's going to be great while you're working on it -- but the movies never measure up to be as good as you hoped, thought, aimed... so you make another one and do your best with that....

     When Fitzgerald talks about cracking up -- not being as good as you used to be -- being sort of broken, I think of something Keith Richards said in a documentary about Tina Turner -- how she left an abusive marriage and went forward to survive and have her own successful career -- he referred to her progress, in his gravelly voice and juicy-tart accent, as "...just -- not lettin' life take over from you"....


     ...Sort of -- the opposite of giving in to a "crack-up" or "meltdown"...

     Something else F. Scott Fitzgerald was famous for stating, in his notes on The Last Tycoon:

"There are no second acts in American lives."

     Usually when people bring up that quote, they are affectionate and respectful toward Fitzgerald but then say very enthusiastically that the topic of their discussion escapes that categorization.  ("So-and-so had a second act!  Such-and-such a person had two second acts!"
   
     Two examples of this:
Tina Turner
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis)

______________________________

     It seems like Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump should have maybe decided to be happy with their "First Acts" and then just let it lie.  

Because it isn't just right now, it's been for some number of years, for both of these folks, that if you listened to what they were saying and observed their actions and attitudes, it's like -- "OK, is this a second act, or a dumpster fire?''

____________________________

On You Tube, type in

Burton Cummings - Stand Tall - 1976 Album Cut

and Play.

__________________________________

{"The Crack-up" - February 1, 1936}

-30-