Atomized junior

Dedicated to the smallest particles of meaning on the web
Atomized Links:



theUsual Suspects:




Terrifying face of the Other
(a bloglist)


Radio Radio
WMUC 88.1fm College Park, MD.
Streams:
high, low


WZBC 90.3 FM Newton,MA.
Stream
WFMU-FM
91.1 Jersey City, NJ; 90.1 Hudson Valley, NY
32k stream (low),
128k Stereo stream (high)


Subscribe to "Atomized junior" in Radio UserLand.

Click to see the XML version of this web page.

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


Monday, September 4, 2006
 
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    comment [];trackback [];


Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
2006 Paul Bushmiller.
Last update: 9/12/06; 7:33:38 PM.
September 2006
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
          1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Aug   Oct


Prolegemma to any future FAQ.

Who are you again?
paul bushmiller
what is it exactly that you do?
at the least, this.
What is this?
it's a weblog.
How long have you been doing it?
3 or 4 years. I used to run it by hand; Radio Userland is more convenient.
Ever been overseas?
yes
Know any foreign languages?
no
Favorite song?
victoria - the kinks
RockandRoll? Favorite American song then
Omaha - Moby Grape
Favorite Movie
Billy in the Lowlands
favorite book?
any book I can read in a clean well lighted place
Is this one of those websites with lots of contentious, dogmatic and brittle opinions?
no
What do you expect to accomplish with this?
something

Site Meter