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For a long time, Americans have bought into the meritocracy, the American dream ideal. But when we watched banksters completely destroy our economy and get bailed out while ordinary homeowners were intentionally left to have their homes seized and lives destroyed, it kind of made people think.
In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.
I left Kurdistan in April 2003 with the peshmerga, following their excited advance as Saddam's forces crumbled. First Kirkuk, then Mosul - where looters broke into the city museum and seized its Parthian sculptures - then Tikrit. I reported from Baghdad in month-long stints until the end of 2004.
The country has sorted itself ideologically into the two political parties, and those partisan attachments have hardened in recent years. It will take an extraordinary event and act of leadership to break this partisan divide. I thought 9/11 might provide such an opportunity, but it was not seized.
The first outbreak of America's 11-year skyjacking epidemic occurred in the summer of 1961, when four planes were seized in the nation's airspace. The last of these incidents, involving 16-year-old Cody Bearden and his father, Leon, is the one that finally forced the federal government to pay attention to the escalating crisis.
I had now been in the United States of America something like five years, working here and there as the inclination seized me, which, I must confess, was not often. I was certainly getting some enjoyment out of life, but now and then the waste of time appalled me, for I still have a conviction that I was born to a different life.
You see that even the enemy did not dare to declare war against us till they had seized our generals, for they were sensible that, while we had commanders and yielded obedience to them, we were able to conquer them; but, having seized our commanders, they concluded that we should, from a want of command and discipline, be destroyed.
Are you not moved to tears and bitter compassion, when you behold the only Son of God seized by the most impious, dragged away, mocked, scourged, buffeted, spit upon, crowned with thorns, hung upon the infamous cross between two thieves, finally in such a horrible and execrable manner suffering death, for your salvation and that of the world?
I feel like there's no reason to put myself through what I put myself through for 20-something years on airplanes, especially these days. You don't know whether your pilot is going to drop dead over the ocean; you don't know when you try to land whether the wheels are going to come down; you can be searched and seized and detained and quarantined.
