While book shopping for reading material, I was recently confronted with a three-way dilemma. I had the choice between Volume 20 of “InuYasha,” a book of quotations, and a photo anthology of the First World War: I had enough money to buy one of them. I picked the book of quotations. I do so love books of quotations – though I can’t say as to why – with 20,000 entries, Random House Webster’s Quotationary made a legitimate claim to being the “definitive source” for such things. I mean, it was that or eat 20,000 fortune cookies.
In addition to being a source for quotes for any occasion (it’s set up for alphabetical search), I’ve discovered that this book has other uses too. For one thing, I sometimes suffer from the kind of insomnia that comes from being unable to shut one’s brain down at the end of the day. Enter the magic cure! All I have to do is keep reading the Quotationary until the wee hours of the morning, and call it quits when I can’t understand any of the Aldous Huxley quotes anymore. Then I know that my brain is well and truly overheated, and I should go to bed.
Can you hear the jackboots coming?
Recently interviewed by Amy Goodman on the radio news program Democracy Now, Naomi Wolf described what she says are the ten steps to dismantling democracy, which is the topic of her new book, “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.” Though at first her ideas may seem to resemble those of the paranoid street person claiming the nearness of “the end,” her theory is by no means lacking in substance or example. She supports her theory with historical fact and abundant examples. From Hitler to Pinochet, she lays down the basic steps that have historically been effective in setting up the fascist state.
Step number one: invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy. She cites Stalin’s statements about sleeper cells, a made-up term that is, frighteningly enough, being re-circulated in the U.S. by the Bush administration. Wolf then reminded listeners about how Pinochet “talked about a real threat: armed insurgents. There were armed insurgents, but he hyped it using fake documents.” She goes on to make her case with the events following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.