New Orts #52
January 12 MMXXV
A Book Recommendation: Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a staff writer at The Atlantic. Her most recent book is Autocracy, Inc.—The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. To read it is to understand that what's about to be unleashed in the Disunited States of A is not new or unprecedented: rather, it's one more instance of a global scourge which has been metastasizing for several decades. Autocracy, Inc. is a brilliant exposition, meticulously researched and footnoted and beautifully written. It left me far better informed, and even more pessimistic about the future, than I was. This global disaster won't be reversed in my children's lifetime, nor likely in my grandchildren's.
Personal Note: I was fortunate to come of age in the USA during the post-WWII decades, in retrospect a golden era (for all its problems) in US history. Sad to see the US experiment in Enlightenment democracy being systematically destroyed, on the eve of its 250th birthday, for generations to come and maybe forever. It was sheer good luck, not foresight, that drove me to Canada in 1970. And it’s sad to see that Canada will likely soon be overtaken by the same global malaise. See this article in the New York Times, January 9, 2025. The first paragraph is:
Pierre Poilievre, the man who is the favorite to become Canada’s next leader, has painted his country as “broken” and ridden with “crime and chaos.” He has derided Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a “wacko” and his ministers as “crazy,’’ “disastrous,” “incompetent and discredited.”
Sound familiar?
The political and commercial morals of the United States of America are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.
— Mark Twain, autobiographical dictation, 30 June 1907. Published in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2 (University of California Press, 2013)
Until we know that joy is exactly what's happening, minus our opinion of it, we're going to have only a small amount of joy.
— Charlotte Joko Beck, Enlightenment, Joy, The Meaning of Life, and Dogs
Love the Joko Beck quote!!