Looking Back Wards
Twice in the last three days I have been awoke at an inconvenient hour by a helicopter landing across the street. Some of you might be saying - well that's what you get for living next to a helicopter landing pad. This is just the point; however, I don't live next to a landing pad. The first time, last Friday, was at 0730. I suppose I should have been up, but I have a miserable cold (which is why I haven't been writting as much) and have only been getting ragged sleep. Some 12 ambulances, firetrucks, and the helicopter settled that. They had to airlift one of a group of children out because a van had spun out of control around the corner on Piney Branch and ran through a school bus stop. Fortunately no one was killed, although I understand one of the children had to have her leg amputated
10 Children Injured as Van Crashes At Bus Stop. It happened again on Sunday night at around 0115, I never got much of a sense of what that one was about, although I saw people loading a stretcher onto the helicopter. I clung to sleep longer on that occasion. There is something about a large helicopter flying slowly a hundred or so feet above your head and landing across the way which will get into your dreams and get you out of them. I find now that the sound of helicopters fills me with dread. What I had been hoping to accomplish over the Labor day weekend was to finish reading Edward Bellamy's novel "Looking Backwards 2000 - 1887". At one point, I am led to believe, this was one of the most widely read books in America
Edward Bellamy - Wikipedia. I can not for the life of me understand why. In the book a man falls asleep in Boston (this much I can follow) then wakes up to find it is 113 years later. The world, the United States -- Boston, has been transformed into a socialist paradise. This much you get in the first few pages. Then follows 200 or so pages of exposition by the charactor who awakens our hero, Julian West, explaining how all this came to pass. I'm aware that this fictional framework was merely a device for the essay and that the styles of the time may have determined, even rewarded this approach
Literature Resource Center, Author Resource Pages -- edward bellamy. It is just that so much of it reads like this: "I suppose," I said, "that the real reason that we rewarded men for their endowments, while we considered those of horses and goats merely as fixing the service to be severally required of them, was that the animals, not being reasoning beings, naturally did the best they could, whereas men could only be induced to do so by rewarding them according to the amount of their product. That brings me to ask why, unless human nature has mightily changed in a hundred years, you are not under the same necessity." "We are," replied Dr. Leete.
Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy - Project Gutenberg
He writes like a man who spent all his life in Chicopee Massachusetts. But I'm more than half way through it now, and I have a rule that if I manage to get far through a book I finish it. The socialism he envisions - and this was in 1887, he did not have the example of any existing dictatorship of the proletariat at hand to compare too - he calls National Capitalism. He seems to have imagined it as being a cross between the US Army, Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. So unlike today's grand vision: the US Army, Haliburton, and Wal Mart.
11:49:47 PM ;;
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