Midcentury Journey

I too prefer a good yarn to a boring factual story.  There are some stories that would be told whether they ever happened or not, and this appears to be one of them.  I would prefer more characterization of the guy who drove the train off the tracks, and the value of a good sidekick can't be underrated, and a woman, for when they make the movie.  I would like a shrewish wife who wanted the finer things, and maybe there was some kind of subplot where she and the engineer could make some money off the deal.  How about what he really did was drive the engine to Shelbyville and sell it there and lied about taking it into the swamp?  That would account for why it never was found.  Of course the finer things in life didn't bring happiness to Abigail, they never do, and the marriage foundered and Abner could be found at Al's Tap, late most any night, putting away boiler makers and muttering, "I shoulda driv her into the swamp, by gum that's what I shoulda done."

We'll see how well Old Dog thinks the rule of law will prevail when Trump is found guilty as sin, but the republican ruled house refuses to do anything about it.

Young folk are fickle and prone to forget to get to the polls if Nicki Minaj (It's been a long time since I have been able to shoehorn her fake butt into the annals of The Institute) is holding a concert on that day.  I'm not sure that they know what socialism is, I'm not sure if anybody knows anymore, maybe they just mean Bernie, which is okay, he's fine.

But what they really seem to like is that awful pc postmodernism, the stuff where you have to be warned if somebody might say something that would offend you so that you can leave the room, and where they have to have safe places where only lesbian Puerto Ricans with a deaf child can go.  Liberal-wise this is just as bad as Trumpism in its total disregard for Objective Reality.

I was going through a pile of books I bought at the Newberry Library book sale last merry month of July and I came across Midcentury Journey by William Shirer.  He's the guy who wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I expect the dawgs have read.

You know we are in our seventies but we will never be grownups the way that WW II generation was when they were even in their forties.  The Greatest Generation took down the Nazis, The Barely Adequate Generation fought the Vietnamese to a standstill and then bugged out.

At the beginning of the book he is on a plane to Vienna in 1950 to look over the landscape to see what will arise from the ashes of the great war.  He is reminiscing about the beginnings of it, the rise of all the nationalist strongmen, (eerily similar today with our Trump, Brexit, and the new regimes in eastern Europe), despite education, travel, and so on which had been thought to foster democracy and peace. 

He talks of philosophers who had once been complacent but now were becoming increasingly worried.  None of the names was familiar to me except Thomas Dewey, I think I heard him mentioned once or twice, I am still not sure if he was the guy who invented the Dewey Decimal System.  I guess nobody will remember the philosophers of today.  Well neither do we, who listens to philosophers anymore?  Maybe we should.  Maybe we should listen to philosophers as lodestones, to hone our thoughts, so we don't believe a hodge podge of this and that, much of it contradictory.

Isn't that the purpose of The Institute?