I love how the party that portrays itself as the Christian Party of Family Values is actually worshiping a golden idol.
@acitrano: It’s almost impossible to believe [Donald Trump] exists. It’s as if we took everything that was bad about America, scraped it up off the floor, wrapped it all up in an old hot dog skin, and then taught it to make noises with its face.
It’d be interesting if Mr. Coates adapted the Earth-23 Calvin Ellis story, but, either way, I think this is surprising, and good, news.
Quote from The Americanization of Emily:
Lt. Cmdr. Charles E. Madison: We shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on the ministers and generals, or warmongering imperialists, or all the other banal bogeys. It’s the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers. The rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widow’s weeds like nuns, Mrs. Barham, and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices. My brother died at Anzio … an everyday soldier’s death, no special heroism involved. But my mother insists he died a brave death and pretends to be very proud.
Mrs. Barnham: You’re very hard on your mother. It seems a harmless enough pretense to me.
Charles: No, Mrs. Barnham. No, you see, now my other brother can’t wait to reach enlistment age. It may be ministers and generals that blunder us into war, Mrs. Barnham. The least the rest of us can do is resist honoring the institution.
“I have nothing against football. It just seems very wasteful losing two hours of my life, to watch 22 millionaires on TV chasing a bag full of wind in their underwear.” – Guy Martin
broliloquy and korrigantsionnach:
I want a story about a king whose son is prophesied to kill him so the king is like âwhatever what am I supposed to do, kill my own kid wtf is wrong with youâ so he just raises him as normal, doesnât even tell him about the prophecy, and instead of some convoluted twist of events that leads to the kingâs murder the son grows up and when the king is very old and dying and in excruciating pain the kid is just like alright I’mma put him out of his misery.
The kingâs son becomes the new king, and is prophesied to defeat evil and bring an age of prosperity. His generals and knights all crack their knuckles but he pretty much ignores them and focuses on strengthening the infrastructure of his kingdom. Forty years later he is old and sick but still hearing his subjectsâ grievances, and a generalâs like âhow will you defeat the prophesied evil now? Youâre old and weak.â Another visitor, a teenager fresh out of the kingdomâs public education system, looks at the general like he is an ignoramus. The king eradicated poverty, housed the homeless, taught the ignorant, ended class exploitation by abolishing the nobility and imprisoning the corrupt, and established a highly respected guild of doctors that recently figured out how to cure the plague. There are no brigands because there is enough wealth for everyone to live comfortably; hiding in the woods and taking trinkets from people simply doesnât make any sense for anyone but the desperate, and the people are not desperate. Evil is a weed, explains the teenager. It grows in cracked roads and crumbling houses and forgotten corners, rooted in indifference and watered by suffering. But the king demands that broken things be mended and suffering people be made well.
No evil lives in this kingdom, says the teenager. It starved to death before I was born.
