AtdTDA: [38] p. 1083 " Look at 'em down there."

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

          Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 
          From: "Dave Monroe" :

             "Darby shrugged.  'News to me.  Inconvenience, we're only the
          runts of the Organization, last at the trough, nobody ever tells us
          anything--they keep cutting our orders, we follow 'em, is all.'
             "'Well, we were over by Mount Etna there back in the spring,'
          Penny said, 'and you remember those Garçons de 71, I expect.' ..."
          (AtD, Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 19)

Wow! We've been at this for a year and a half. . . .

The rest of the passage speaks to me as well, in particular the phrase:

          . . . .the modern State depended for its survival on 
          maintaining a condition of permanent siege

          . . . .As the ordeal went on, it became clear to certain of these
           balloonists, observing from above and poised ever upon a cusp 
          of mortal danger, how much the modern State depended for its
          survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege--through 
          the systematic encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies
          and spirits, the relentless degradation of civility until citizen was
          turned against citizen, even to the point of committing atrocities 
          like those of the infamous petroleurs of Paris. Then the Sieges 
          ended, these balloonists chose to fly on, free now of the political 
          delusionsthat reigned more than ever on the ground, pledged 
          solemnly only to one another, proceeding as if under a world-wide, 
          never ending state of siege.
          (AtD, Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 19)


From: Specters of Militarism, Nationalism Dog Independence Day
by Jim Lobe

          WASHINGTON - As U.S. citizens mark their annual celebration
          of patriotism, the Fourth of July holiday, they might do well to
          also ponder the specter of two other ”isms” that threaten the
          Republic's durability and strength raised by two important books
          published over the past year.

          ”America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism,”
          by Financial Times columnist Anatol Lieven, warns that the U.S.
          polity is turning its back on the civic patriotism of the ”American
          Creed” of liberty, the rule of law, and political egalitarianism in
          favor of an ”American antithesis,” a radical and vengeful 
          nationalism that recalls the worst tendencies, and mistakes, of
          Wilhelmine Germany just before World War I.

           ”The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by 
           War,” by retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, contends that the 
           country's recent love affair with force and exaltation of the soldier 
           threaten both the military institution, as policymakers expect it to 
           solve ever more problems, but also the republican ideals on which 
           the U.S. was founded.

            ”Of all the enemies of public liberty,” Bacevich quotes former 
            President James Madison as writing in 1795, ”war is perhaps 
            the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops 
            the germ of every other. ...No nation could preserve its freedom 
            in the midst of continual warfare.”

          Published by Oxford University Press, both books offer some 
          of the most trenchant and original criticism of the trajectory of 
          U.S. foreign and military policy that has surfaced since the U.S. 
          invasion of Iraq in March, 2003.

          Although their analyses of that trajectory -- and the larger social 
          and cultural trends that underpin it -- would not be unfamiliar to 
          left-wing analysts, the two authors could not possibly be confused 
          with the ”blame-America-first” crowd that has been scapegoated 
          so frequently by the U.S. right since the Vietnam War.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0702-05.htm