"100 Million Americans Missing"

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Near panic broke out on the set of the "Now-Today" television program when ratings analyst and industry mover and shaker Edward Donald casually remarked that One hundred million Americans had "gone missing." When asked for further clarification Mr. Donald said, "This is no statistical anomaly. It merely reflects better data recording proceedures and is backed up by a wide variety of collaborative evidence." Mr Donald, of the Giddyup polling organization, then went on to say that it was "fabulous news" in terms of increased productivity and also explained it was the cause for the apparent lack of numbers of people watching television.

"If the numbers aren't there, the people aren't there, It's as simple as that." he added, perspicaciously.

The suggestion, that the the long anticipated "Rapture" anticipating the second coming of Jesus Christ had arrived was immediately denied by another guest Anita Barber of the Christian Crusade for Fast food Freedom. She stated emphatically and somewhat indignatly that if the hour for the unbelievers to suffer unspeakable torture and damnation had arrived and the blessed had been removed to safety she would not be there on, quote "this snakeoil medicine show program" to deny the Rapture's having occurrred.

Informed sources in Washington, speaking off the record, said "the allegded situation was under review, but would have no effect on the Presidents program to radically "reinvent" the social security program nor to bring peace, freedom and the high ideals of the free market to those places in the world now suffering under the tyrannical yoke of despotic, non freedom loving harsh regimes without the freedom to even choose freedom."

Senator Thomas Joseph (Rep-New Jersey) said he found the suggestion that they all moved to Trenton New Jersey to take advantage of that states comparitively liberal food stamp policy "neither funny nor appropriete inasmuch as the voters in New Jersey know the value the value of a dollar as well as anyone."

This caused Senator Robert Powers (Rep- Colo) to quip that while he did not know where the missing hundred million Americans went they had "better not show up at the Colorado Border because we got plenty of weapons and we'll shooot 'em down like prairie dogs." This was said to general laughter from both the hall and the gallery. Mr Powers office later on issued a clarification stating that he did not meant to condone or sanction the shooting of unarmed citizens who were not posing a threat to the public order or personal property without prior notice of due intent.

Harvey .Doody, rock star and entrepenuer announced an All-Star fund rasing concert and telethon to "Find the Hundred Million" which would kick off this weekend with a Fundraiser at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel televised by MTV. He said,"The loss of a hundred million people is a great tragedy that we all feel and we just want to do whatever we can to see if we can find them,"

One proposed solution, put forth by the Bookings Institute that seems to be gathering momentum. is that actual population of the United States has been gradually misrepresnted over the past twenty fives years. Since beurocracies are largely funded according the the absolute number of persons they serve then it is in their interest to appear to serve as many as possible. This, "previous overcount" scenario has garnered growing support from many directions.

Some states are moving forward with plans to readjust population counts on an ad hoc basis, In New York for instance large sections of the Borough of Brooklyn (Former population .1.5 million, new, adjusted, population 70,000) have been dynamited and bulldozed to allow for the construction of fourty and fifty acre estates. A spokesman for the Mayor said ,"It will increase tax revenue by making the Borough a magnet for movers and shakers not only from America, but from around the world. No matter how you cut it there's just no downside."

Plans to flatten the uninhabited areas around the government buildings in the District of Columbia are being celebrated as "A gift from heaven in terms of homeland security." Already Chicago has applied for permission to do the same by leveling the south and east sides, long considered eyesores. A spokesman for the City administration said,"It may require relocating a few people, but according to the new revised figures, no more then five or six hundred." Los Angeles (Former population estimate- Four Million, revised and corrected figures 200,000) has announced similiar plans to rebuild the city the "right way" has announced a tax rebate of nearly thirty thousand dollars each to all the official inhabitants of the city. A state bond has been floated for this purpose with the promise "It will pay for itself in five years." Other states and regions are looking into similiar methods of raising revenue.

News of the non existance of so many people believed to have inhabited the United States has spread like wildfire throughout central and south america causing a massive influx of taxi drivers, lawn maintenence workers and topless dancers. This in turn has led to demands from employers that the minimum wage be reduced to two dollars an hour and child labor laws be revised to allow children to pay for their own English lessons. The US Army has begun a massive recruitment drive in Central America saying, "They work cheap and are not hesistent to use suffiecient force to crack down on the foriegn criminal elements within American borders, the way a lot of native born soldiers are becoming reluctant to."

The Major media networks in similar statements released simulataneously announced that it was the presense of union workers in their industry that had helped to manufacture the rumor of the existance of the extra hundred million people and henceforth unions woud be banned from the premises.

In a related developement the Grummar Candy Corporation of Wilkesborough has announced it has proof that rings of "population falsifiers" have used their profits to fund bogus taffy companies, thereby "cheating the American government and the American people of billions in tax revenue every year." Grummer is seeking legislation to have it's "Dandy Candy" distributed in elementary schools as an alternative to milk and cookies.

Businessman Daniel Brawny, chairman of the "We Do It Good" group of corporations, and likely Democratic Presidential Candidate in 2008, said the long delay in getting a true population count was indicative of sloppy, old style thinking by the present administration and that "what the company, er country needs, at this critical juncture in time, was a firm hand on the wheel, a tough man able to make tough decisions in a tough way, to cut the fat and the cancerous tumors out of the AMerican body politic. He spoke, appropriately from a Toughies Shooting Gallery, at the opening of latest member of the Toughies Franchise, which he incidentally owns.

One unusual note was struck when the Senator from Massachussets unwisely tabled a motion saying that new population census be done by a bipartizan committee formed for the purpose, instead of by the private firm that has been awarded the contract, He suggested that in this way every state would get the benefit of private sector experience and judgement. The motion was tabled a short time before the figures of the national overcount were slightly adjusted. There are now One million and one missing Americans. Thomas Snerp, President of Rodoxocol, a firm known to contribute heavily to the Democratic Party, was appointed to fill out the rest ofthe previous Senators term.

Kaletski hangs in there. I say it as a compliment that should he leave economics he'd make an excellent comic doing deadpan routines, In that comedy one delivers lines "as if" they were perfectly expected when they are not. Therefore, speaking of what he calls Davos Man he points to an absolute dicotomy in perception between captains of industry and government, who see their recently increased wealth and power as helping the rest of us, and the perceptions of rest of us, who would like a second opinion.

One thesis here at the Tamlinmediaco is that the exponential growth of information tech, the centralization of power, and the comparitive weakness of non buisness establishments (the church, the representative legislatures, and the educational systems for instance) has created personality niches where people who are basically good actors and showmen are given the roles of statesmen. This is not to say they don't play their roles with conviction, nor even that they are "bad people", but the skill sets are different. As Bergman would say "To play a good business tycoon on stage you don't need a businessman, you need an good actor."

The dicotomy, as Anatole points out, is the majority of such actors, blessed by fortune, prefer to give no credit to the changes that have happened over the decades and prefer to think, for all we know in sincerity, that they have gotten where they are not as puppets of the times but as puppeteers of people and ideas. To the extent that they are the result of a long process of the elimination of less suitable personalities they are correct, but the question remains what are the criterea for the sifting?

As far as they are concerned it is critical that they have good intentions.They are asking for and taking dictatorial powers on the basis of voices in their heads and are successful because of the collapse of hitherto constraining institutions and powers. Whether they are instructed by God or are meglomaniacs we cannot say. There are others who share my concerns. This battle was fought long ago and will be fought for a long time. The law has so little reason for being it's a wonder it exists at all. It's survival is by no means a done deal.

Meanwhile, there are those who are beset by doubt. I admit, my life is not tremendously fullfilling. I kinda thought I'd be somewhere else by now. I don't blame anyone, however, I blame everyone. People always told me my sense of humor would get me into trouble_ and it has.

Have been discovering the secret hidden pleasure of burnout.

Burnout- There's a few different definitions for this well used term. One, not so common nowadays refers to the person who has taken a few too many drugs and no longer functions in the real world. Another definition refers to job burnout and it's something relatively common among young police officers. It usualy strikes about two years into the job when the officer discovers that, whatever his intentions and abilitites. very little seems to change,

I am a great one for believing that the things we do we do for reasons at least to some extent based on our psychological outlook. The cop doesn't delude him or herself into thinking they can reform society but inside many of them like to feel they can find one small zone or portion of the world and make it better. That's all they ask and unfortunately however it doesn't always happen.

The anger, born of a sense of futility, is at least as often directed at ones superiors as at the bad guy on the street. And that hostility can go either way, meaning a belief either that personal behavior won't change untill social conditions change, or the other way around, social conditions won't change untill personal behavior does.

Anyone who's, for instance, taken a college level course in pre 1950's american Movies knows that by and large they were created to endorse and enforce what we may call the prevailing morality. This was especially the case in the Hollywood films because so many of the directors, screenwriters, etc, were recent immigrants and so they bought the American Dream, as it was back then, lock, stock and barrel.

Popular culture and popular song reflects a paradox where the same belief in the overall correctness of a way of life is given form by an emphasis on stories of the exploits of rebels and bad guys, be it Jessie James, John Dillenger or Marilyn Manson and Motley Crue. Underneath there's the Aristotelean premise that in any society sufficiently corrupt the good man is always labeled a devient and malcontent.

Suffice to say, as I write this, in 2005, and for the past few decades blanket condemnations of "society" are considered not only irrelevent but indicative of a weak mind. We mock those who would make such suggestions, preferring rather to see the social milieu as comprised of individuals of radically different abilities who are rewarded and punished accordingly. Personally, I would gladly trade ten IQ points for a more aggressive personality and better hair and teeth.

But anyway, going along with the assumption that the preceeding suggestion is correct, that we do now value people according to their abilities and no longer according to who their parents were, the color of their skin, or their sexual/relgious preference, it still can be said that by the time one has lived twenty years the difference in the upbringing of different people begins to be noticable.

As a line from "When the Music Died", a novel about the corporatization of the music industry in the late seventies said, "The new executive had been to an Ivy League School, was over six feet tall, blond and blue eyed, not that that prevented him from being competent but experience has shown such attributes rarely prove impediments to worldly success."

As I said in the beginning of this section though I have, over recent years, experienced a pleasent burnout. The origin of this is not different from the ordinary form. I've come to understand that no matter what I say or do, or what degree of compentency I display, my "fate", if you will, is really more a matter of luck then anything else. This has freed me in a strange way. I find myself correspondingly being no longer as judgemental of other people, of their abilities or their truthfullness. I just attribute their comparitive success (and compared to me everyone is a success :-) to luck. Whether they are honkies talking about the need for a firm hand, or minorities speaking of oppression or ordinary folks talking about the joys of owning things, once I understood, correctly, or even incorrectly, that they were wherever they were and are, because they are fullfiling a role' then the ostensive degree to which they do so becomes unimportant.

One could even go so far as to say if you're raising someone up to fill a role you don't particularly like but must have in order to sell the overall product, the less competant that person is the more they will please you.

G.K.Chesterson was an english writer/newspaper man from around the turn of the 20th century on. He wrote fair to middling poetry and interesting but not deeply incisive novels but he had the great virtue of the newspaper writer_opinions rooted in what the audience wanted to hear. Most his life was spent between the suburbs of outer London and London itself, with the occassional lecture tour of the provinces.

He did have a moment of triumph, that was when he wrote a novel called "The Man who was Thursday". This later became a play and then Orson Welles did a radio production, which is how I came across it. He called the novel "A nightmare" and it is a sort of spy story which ends with a surrealistic procession through the countryside. (One of the ALF stories borrows heavily from this, but I don't remember which one.)

I was to discover however, around two years after I was introduced to the story, that what I had thought to be a totally avant agarde and hence unEnglish break from rational reality was in fact based on actual parades that can be seen , usually in the heart of the summer during Country Fairs.

G.K. was very prolific. In his heyday, from 1900-1930, he wrote an average of three books a year. His greatest merits were invention and historical context. The Father Brown stories are unknown in the states, and I am not familiar with them, "The Napolean of Nottinghill", presages the British dsytopians by fifty years, "The Man who knew too much", became a film by Alfred Hitchcock, and as I mentioned "The Man who was Thursday" became a successfull play. He also wrote a play as a play but it ws a flop. Dialoge was not his strong suit. He can be compared to Oscar Wilde, who was conversely a master of dialoge and not strong in terms of plot or detail. What they share is the Celtic love of and familiarity with fairy tales. That allows them to present the extraordinary, or fantastic, as an alternate to and mirror of everyday reality.

He was a devout Christian and spent his last years in the study of the saints. To refer to one of our ongoing themes here at the Tamlinmediaco, that is to say the contemptable and hienous treatment of those judged losers by the new made powerfull (and the corresponding apotheois of the puppets of the Robot Masters,) in the case of the Trojan war he praises the spirit of Hector, who was defending his home and condemns Achilles as a brutal thug. He does this from his religious perspective and maintains that by the light of the world Christ himself would be regarded as no more then human trash, a pathetic loser, who did not understand the way the game is played. Chesterson's premise, needless to say, carries little weight in our present era.

It's difficult to think of Chesterson without thinking of H.G.Wells. Both were fabulists that nevertheless maintained they were "Christians with a conscience". Both were middle class chaps who wrote to make money and please a wide audience. And most immortantly nearly everything they wrote can be seen through the lens of "the bane of Engand", namely the class system. Chesterson was more humane, if that word can be used, in that he indentified more with and saw more virtue in the underclass. He would never have portrayed them as Morlocks. Wells had strong, even magnificent plots, excellent writing skills, both of which help to tell a tale. Both also eschewed the use of their first names, preferring, in the style of the day, to use initials. That signalled credibiity.

Some of the more perceptive, and less hidebound English commentors of today, including Matthew Parris, have discerned a similiarity between the Boer War and the escapade in Iraq. Britain at the time of it's African adventure was the global superpower, coming out of period of over fifyu years where nothing, internationally at least, had gone wrong, and we may say that it was inconceivable to the British that anyone would not want to be ruled by Queen Victoria. The Boers, who were German immigrants, did not see it that was. They felt they were fighting for their homes and their homeland.

Fans of radio plays know that early South African "Springbok" radio maintained a high standard and many programs were broadcast in Africaans, (the language of the Boers) which indicates the community was still sizable at least up untill the 1970's. The Brits went into to southwest Africa expecting a campaign that lasted a month or so and then they'd go home, instead the war dragged on for several years. Britain eventually did win via swamping they area with troops and resourses, but it was not a good omen.

The message was not so much that the army was no longer the effectuve force it had been, but rather that the fellows in London were out of touch with how the world viewed them.

Then, of course, came the first world war which in some ways lived up to it's name as the war to end all wars, since it was the last war to be fought between armoes in pitched battle on set battlefields. It was the last of a style of warfare that had lasted over three thousand years. Henceforth cities became the battlefield and instead of casualties being 90% soldiers and 10% civilians the numbers flipped around to 10% soldiers and 90% percent civilians.

So, aside from abilities, one finds Chesterson interesting for his perspective because he was there on the scene at the time the boer and first World wars were happening. The boer war did not begin in Africa. it began in London. G.K. was , of course, too well paid to be, like myself, constantly battling despair and hopelessness, but he was also too intelligent, too decent, and most of all, too professional, not to realize that the ground he stood upon was moving. This is what I find interesting. He had a sense that the Jingoism of the Edwardian age was just a tad too unreal and that a wake up call was on the way.

Bert Russell felt the same way, but he was grandson of a Prime Minister, a Lord, child of Free Thinkers, and he came right out and said it. But Russell wrote no novels, and did not work for a living, which is to say he did not feel the conflicting tugs between what is true and what the boss is willing to pay for.

Chesterson touches a deeper chord, because most people, in some way or another, suffer under the need to fullfill the wishes of someone else. He was like Galileo, in that he knew what he had to say, like innumerable clerks and vice presidents, he said what was required but under his breath he muttered.

Many people don't see this in his work. They see the typical "Thunderer" with opinions on everything and knowledge of nothing. Being of a sympathetic state of mind at the moment I'd suggest that inside every big mouthed, pushy, eternal smile salesman there's a would be scholar. Because they pay a price for being who they are. They are perpetually being found out and then must be on the move again.

And characters like this, Babbits, live between two worlds. One is the world they are selling, a shoddy, glittering place, made of cardboard and styrofoam. This world is always accused of being a con job. Even the Henry Kissengers and the"Tony" Blairs and Donald Trumps, know what they are , but they don't have the confidence to do anything else. Yet they are still human and so they try to find high ideals. lasting virtues, comforting reminders by which they justify their apparently self centered behavior. It is not for me to judge.

Plus you don't make the world. Most wars are unilteral. One side is hungry and the other isn't in a generous mood. Result? Conflict.

To digress even further from this digression, Chesterson more then anything, seems as if he could have benefitted from seeing a little more of the world. He was a victim of the very ease with which he made his living, that is to say the solidity and reliability of the system that recognized his ability brought with it a set of constraints he was never to overcome. You can see it in the very variety of different literary forms he worked in. In that sense he was like a less radical Coleridge.

I almost, take heart from this. As a white middle class male in recent decades I was "shocked, simply shocked" to discover that no one was interested in hearing what i had to say. I had the misfortune to live in that era when such people had been dethroned in favor of a more realistic representation of the actual public. Many, not all, of the white males that did manage to get paying jobs did so by moving to the far right where their selfishness and disregard for others was not held against them.

But I do take heart, as I said, because since my desultory ruminations have proven unwanted it's forced me out of that groove and made me the meglomaniac I am today. Chesterson had no such advantage and was employed early on and continually throughout his life, but he had real talent. Britain, with good reason celebrates her writers but in the 20th Century there was no Dickens, nor could there have been. He is the Tower of London and I have a theory that when those who serve "the great god of getting on" triumph the other Gods and muses must suffer. as in America today where we have no champions and our natural allies flee from as from the plague.

From 1750 'till 1850 English writing was the glory of the world, and then the hard headed crushed them. This theory of mine was, incidentally, originally developed to answer another thorny question which is "What the hell happened to German Composers in the 20th Century?" Where did they go? The answer is their world no longer valued them. They were not held in esteem, and so they dissappeared, to be replaced by substitutes chosen not by the muse but the autocrat, the moralist and the philosopher.

America's three greatest writers, in my book, are in order, Twain, Hemingway and Faulkner, two of which were journalists and benefitted immeasurably from the experience. Faulkner may be the surprise to some, because of his apparently limited scope, but his stuff lives in a charmed world, a world where time does not enter. Of todays living writers it's no secret I think highly of Breslin, who is so connected to the world his material is unworldly. It has charm. the best description i can give you is then when he's on form, which is most of the time, you have the impression that 98% of what he is saying is left unsaid, but implied, or even telepathically communicated.

And now, to regress from my digression and return to G.K.Chesterson he has been on my mind because he was there at the end of the "Great British Century." The number of writers at the begiining staggers the imagination, Blake, the Romantics, but come the end they petered out to irony and black comedy with Waugh, Huxley and even Wodehouse; all missing the sense of what Blake called the infinite, that is the world of potentiality. Chesterson, while not having the skills of his more famous successors, comes across as someone who still had some belief in. to use the trite expression, "the perfectability of mankind,"

So, in the same way I was shocked to discover there was no place for me in America, the Americans appear shocked to find the world could do without serving the superpower, the Brits discovered the Boers did not wish to benefit from the advantages of British rule. As an aside, you must know that Americas economics ahve been put on a different course from previously in recent years. The new course has entialed what some claim to be much suffering on the part of those who had previously looked tothe state for succor. The poor are always the first to be stollen from, for they are the weakest. Crime does not rule the world however because eventually every criminal has to move up the scale and then meets more serious opposition, often comprised of former criminals themselves. Which is to say that the questionable economic and social policies put into place in recent decades in the US may find a brick wall ahead, not because of the suffering and misery they have created but because, outside of the controlled hothouse of the national economy exist forces that are quite familiar with the game and are not impressed.

The Germans have been invading Britain for nigh on fifteen hundred years, and the Brits have been repeling them for as long. You would think one or the other would get the message, but such are the burdons of being neighbors.

Chesterson wrote a poem about one of the attempted invasions. As I've indidcated he had flashes of brilliance. At any given time , but more so in certain eras you'll run into people who are better writers then they are thinkings. It's a common malady of priests who would discourse on Morality and immortality, but newspaper writers, when presented with the freedom to go "longform" often have the oppposite problem. Their skills are honed towards saying things quickly and factually. Plus handling of dialoge is something few non fiction writers excell. Looking at the three Americans I praise, one thing they do that places them miles above others is handle dialoge. Chesterson was about passable when it came to dialoge. He not really have an "ear" for way people speak, but then few do. In his poetry that doesn't matter though and he gets to play to his strong suit.

So the poem is a war poem. The bad guy is the hun, (German) and after heming and hawing around a bit the bad guy lays his cards on the table. He says that when a man finally allows himself to see the truth (which is to say he understands he is responsible for his own actions whether there is someone to force him to be not.) he would prefer an evil God to none at all.

"But the hour shall come after his youth
When a man shall know not tales but truth
And his heart shall fail thereat.

When he shall read what is written
So plain in clouds and clods
When he shall hunger without hope
even for evil gods"

Beautiful. The truth then contradicts much of human behavior. How many times are we not presented with situations where a party will leave unspoken the idea "Yes, I am cheating you. I'm doing what's good for me personally . I am supporting the official next big thing and humanity can go to hell, because there's not a damn thing you can do about it."

And the second part is as common as well, the bad guy needs above all to claim that someone or something is forcing him to act. Because at heart he can't accept reponsibility.

Chesterson was not an idiot. He knew that when laws harming the weak were passed there were done ostensively not to enrich the rich, but rather to protect the rich from the demonic forces of the savage underclass.

Then this big fat man from the suburbs, completely helpless outside of his element, a man who could not negotiate train schedules outside of the 8:15 to Paddington, raises himself above Huxley, above Waugh, even Orwell, and other infinitly better writers by having his spokesman, Alfred, say to Gundrum, the king of the invading Germans, "we will protect the Gods of the heathens."

.......Though you hunt the Christian man
like a hare on the hillside
The hare has still more heart to run
then you have heart to ride

Therefore your end is on you
Is on you and on your kings
because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things

Like Gerard Manly Hopkins his religious impulse was at least two fold. First he needed something to oppose the institutions of the ruling class. It was so bad that the poor could not conceive even of a better life, The sway that priviledge held was perhaps more mental then economic. But you still see it. In the store clerk that refers you to their competition, in the "take it easy" attitude. I am just old enough to remember the "old south" of the US and that's what parts of the English pysche remind me of. Nothing happened yesterday, nothings happening today, and nothing will happen tomorrow. That is the ongoing legacy of slavery and you don't get a sense of it untill you've lived here and seen how things work.

As something of an anglophile I admit that side of things never occurred to me. This is not to say there is not an attraction to it. It's the attraction of the great morpheus and good manners and comfort and those things, especially with the US as it is, can become very attractive.

The second reason Chesterson turned to religion at the end of The Century of Empire, is quite reasonable. He wanted to take the discussion to a higher plane. We cannot beat the "new Romans" with swords or truth. They have more swords and louder voices. What remains is to change the question from how much a man owns to who he is.

Alexander did not have to weep after conquering the world. He could have taken up a hobby, like basket weaving or something, and that is what a sane person does. When the shows over, go home.

Another interesting parrallel between Chestersons era and our own is he was referring to the cult of the new paganism. It was associated with Neitsche and Bismark, but had adherents as well in the UK. Politically it was the doctrine of Blood and Steel and it purported itself to be pragmatic and above all the irressistable force of the future. I don't suppose it is needed to give contemporary examples of this idea, but leaving the question of it's viability or immmediate feasibility aside for the moment if we look closely we can see the hack point, the achilles heel, the vulnerability.

The apostles of power can claim alruistic motive as well as we and in addition they have the force to make their claims drown ours out. I am not speaking as someone who councils resignation to fate, nor did I enter the wasteland because I had no love for the things I left. I would like a family, a place to live, an occupation I was dedicated to, but these things were not possible in my former life. I was designated a serf, a consumer, not a producer. In short I was like most of those who read these words, only a little worse off. I needed something to believe in and was not satisfied to indentify with the suffering of others, real or feigned.

We are told over and over again by the fortunate that the future does not need us. It suggests we survive at the sufferance of our betters. It tells us we must be gratefull for what we have since society now owes us nothing. We have no birthright any longer.

A digression of the origin of the word honor. it was first used in medieval France to discribe ones inherited property and title. Often landed knights died young, leaving infants or children to survive them, Since an infant could not run a feudal manor, or castle, others would have to be appointed to do so. Needless to say, when the child grew up those who had been appointed often were hesitant to give up their positions. The legal term for the child's right to take ownership of the property of their parents was honneur, or their honor.In many instances the dispute came down to warfare. since Kings were often distant and concerned with other things. I may add also that in many of such cases the child, or children would have to be taken away and hidden, because it was obviously in the interest of the temporary rulers of the estate to kill the children and thereby become permanent owners. This became the origin of many a tale and continues to this day when it is in the interest of TimeWarner , Newscorp, et. al to kill the Tamlinmediaco and thereby remove any obstacles to their bogus authenticity. I know not how others feel but I feel I have been robbed of my pride, my self respect, livelihood and honer. In return the scum give us trinkets, tee shirts, and gaudy toys. They do not even do us the priviledge of decent burial, for that would be to confront their crimes. It would to their disadvantage for them to underestimate the degree to which I would see them suffer in recompense, while I live.

Terry Pratchett makes an amusing comment about the hero with a thousand faces. He asks,"Is there no coward with a thousand faces?" Sic transit uberman.

The flaw of the doctrine of Blood and Steel, aka, The Triumph of the Will, has been proven experientially many times. The future will not last. The thousand year reign lasted little more then a decade. Things forced together fall apart. All empires fall. The more effort expended in building them only leads to quicker collapse.

Of course southeast africa eventually did become part of South Africa. The Boers to whom it was the beloved homeland had been living there all of fifty years, not even a full lifetime. As to the Africans who had been living there since the dawn of time no concern was given. They had no guns and therefore didn't matter.