Tainted matter unfit to eat

Those who have learned precepts as mere theory want to vomit them up immediately, just as people with weak stomachs do with their food. Digest your precepts first, and you will not vomit them up in this way; otherwise they really do turn to vomit, tainted matter unfit to eat. Then show us some change that results from those precepts in your own ruling faculty, just as athletes can show their shoulders as the results of their training and diet, or those who have learned various arts can show the result of their learning.

A builder does not come up and say, "Listen to me lecturing on the builder's art", but acquires a contract to build a house and shows by building it that he knows the art. And you should do likewise; eat as a man, drink as a man, adorn yourself, marry, sire children, play your part as a citizen; put up with abuse, bear with an inconsiderate brother, bear with a father, bear with a son, neighbour, fellow-traveller.

Show us these things so we can see that you have in truth learnt something from the philosophers. No; but "Come and listen to me reading out my commentaries." Away with you! Look for someone else to vomit over.

- Epictetus, The Discourses

A spectator of himself and of his works

But god has introduced man into the world as a spectator of himself and of his works; and not only as a spectator, but an interpreter of them. It is therefore shameful that man should begin and end where the irrational creatures do. He ought rather to begin there, but to end where nature itself has fixed our end; and that is in contemplation and understanding and a way of life in harmony with nature. Take care, then, not to die without ever being spectators of these things.

- Epictetus, The Discourses

But you are wretched and discontented, and if you are alone, you call it desolation, but if you are with men, you call them cheats and robbers and you find fault with even your parents and children and brothers and neighbours. Whereas you ought, when you live alone, to call that peace and freedom, and compare yourself to the gods; and when you are in company, not to call it a crowd and a tumult and a vexation, but a feast and a festival, and thus accept all things with contentment. What, then, is the punishment of those who do not? To be just as they are. Is a person discontented at being alone? Let him be in desolation. Discontented with his parents? Let him be a bad son, and let him grieve. Discontented with his children? Let him be a bad father. 'Throw him into prison.' What kind of prison? Where he already is.

- Epictetus, The Discourses

Both the executioner and the victim

One walks along the streets of Magadan through high-walled corridors dug out in the snow. They are narrow, and when another person is passing one must stop to let him by. Sometimes at such a moment I find myself standing face-to-face with some elderly man. Always, one question comes to my mind: And who were you? The executioner or the victim?

And why am I moved to wander? Why am I unable to look at this man in an ordinary way, without that perverse and intrusive curiosity? For if I could summon up my courage and ask him this question, and if he responded sincerely, I might hear the answer: "You see, you have before you both the executioner and the victim."

This too was a characteristic of Stalinism - that in many instances it was impossible to distinguish these two roles. First someone, as an interrogating officer, would beat a prisoner, then he himself would be thrown into prison and beaten; after serving his sentence he would get out and take revenge, and so on. It was the world as a closed circle, from which there was only one exit - death. It was a nightmarish game in which everyone lost.

- Ryszard Kapuscinski, Imperium

Easy to predict the chances

Thus, for example, one hundred thousand Abkhazians want to separate from Georgia and form their own state. It is small wonder. Abkhazia is one of the most beautiful corners of the world, a second Riviera, a second Monaco. Well, the Abkhazians hit upon the same idea that twenty years earlier occured to the inhabitants of that superb and eternally sunny island in the Caribbean called Antigua. The island was a British colony. In the 1970s, the inhabitants of Antigua formed a national liberation party, declared independence, and leased the island to the Hilton Hotel chain. London had to dispatch an armed expedition (four hundred policemen) in order to dissolve the party and annul the contract. So too here, in the Caucasus: the liberated Abkhazians could very well sign an agreement with some Western hotel company and finally begin to live the good life!

But will Georgia give up Abkhazia, it being such a tasty morsel? There are four million Georgians and only one hundred thousand Abkhazians. It is easy to predict the chances.

- Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium

Somebody had earlier stolen his Stalin

One of the NKVD people went from bench to bench distributing the stamps. "Children," said our teacher with a voice that resembled the sound of hollowed wood, "these are your leaders." There were nine of these leaders. They were called Andreyev, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Mikoyan, Molotov, Khrushchev. The ninth leader was Stalin. The stamp with his portrait was twice as large as the rest. But that was understandable. The gentleman who wrote a book as thick as Voprosy Leninizma (from which we were learning to read) should have a stamp larger than the others.

We wore the stamps attached with a safety pin on the left, in the place where grown-ups wear medals. But soon a problem arose - there was a shortage of stamps. It was ideal, and perhaps even obligatory, to wear all of the leaders at once, with the large Stalin stamp opening, as it were, the collection. That's what those from the NKVD also recommended: "You must wear them all!" But meantime, it turned out that somebody had Zhdanov but didn't have Mikoyan, or somebody had two Kaganovichs but didn't have a Molotov. One day Janek brought in as many as four Khrushchevs, which he exchanged for one Stalin (somebody had earlier stolen his Stalin). The real Croesus among us was Petrus - he had three Stalins. He would take them out of his pocket, display them, boast about them.

- Ryszard Kapuściński, Imperium

I'd rather use a nuclear bomb

"I still think we ought to take the dikes out now," Nixon offered. "I think - will that drown people?"

"Zhat will drown about two hundred thousand people."

"Oh, well, no, no. I'd rather use a nuclear bomb. Have you got that ready?"

"Zhat, I think, would be too much. Too much."

"The nuclear bomb. Does that bother you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ's sakes!"

Kissinger paused, taken aback. He collected himself, eventually responding with the one thing he knew would talk the president down from his flight of fantasy: "I think we're going to make it." Until Election Day, he probably meant; Saigon would hold on at least until then.

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

Whose America was but a memory

"Anyone who appears on the streets of a city like Kent with long hair, dirty clothes, or barefooted deserves to be shot," a Kent resident told a researcher.

"Do I have your permission to quote that?"

"You sure do. It would have been better if the Guard had shot the whole lot of them that morning."

"But you had three sons there."

"If they didn't do what the Guards told them, they should have been mowed down."

A letter to Life later that summer read, "It was a valuable object lesson to homegrown advocates of anarchy and revolution, regardless of age."

Time had called the Silent Majority "not so much shrill as perplexed," possessed of "a civics-book sense of decency." Pity poor Time, whose America was but a memory.

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

At Northwestern, students carried a flag upside down, the symbol for distress. "A hefty man in work clothes," according to Time, tried to grab it, saying, "That's my flag! I fought for it! You have no right to it!" The kids started arguing. "There are millions of people like me," he responded. "We're fed up with your movement. You're forcing us into it. We'll have to kill you. All I can see is a lot of kids blowing a chance I never had."

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

Through the looking glass with Richard Nixon

"The president dictated eight memos outlining a public relations push-back. It was part of the foreign policy game. De-escalation was contingent on [North Vietnam] believing Nixon would escalate; which was contingent upon keeping presidential approval ratings high; which was contingent on the appearance of de-escalation. As one of the big syndicated columnists, Roscoe Drummond, observed, only grasping one-tenth of the complexity, unless Vietnam looked to be winding down, 'popular opinion will roll over him as it did LBJ.' At which Nixon thundered upon his printed news summary, 'E&K - Tell him that RN is less affected by press criticism and opinion than any Pres in recent memory.' Because he was the president most affected by press criticism and opinion of any president in recent memory. Which if known would make him look weak. And any escalatory bluff would be impossible. Which would keep him from credibility as a de-escalator; which would block his credibility as an escalator; which would stymie his ability to de-escalate; and then he couldn't 'win' Vietnam - which in his heart he didn't believe was possible anyway.

Through the looking glass with Richard Nixon: this stuff was better than LSD."

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

Their new unpopularity

"[NBC producer Lew Koch] was inordinately proud of what they'd produced - 1968's version of Bull Connor's fire hoses: glorious moral theater, naked evil being visited upon innocents. He repaired to NBC headquarters at the Merchandise Mart after that first broadcast filled with self-satisfaction. A sympathizer with the antiwar movement, he thought he had advanced their cause considerably. The assignment editor asked him to help with the phones; the switchboard was overwhelmed.

The first call: 'I saw those cops beating the kids - right on for the cops!'

Another: 'You fucking commies!' He was referring to NBC - as if they had instigated the riots.

The calls kept coming, dozens. They came to all the networks, for days upon days. Some people saw noble cops innocently defending themselves. Others accused the networks of hiring cops to beat up kids to spice up the show. Lew Koch was so shaken by the experience, he left for a soul-searching six-month leave of absence."

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

"Godfrey Hodgson wrote of the media about-face: 'They had been united, as rarely before, by their anger at Mayor Daley. Now they learned that the great majority of Americans sided with Daley, and against them. It was not only the humiliation of discovering that they had been wrong; there was also alarm at the discovery of their new unpopularity. Bosses and cops, everyone knew, were hated; it seemed that newspapers and television were hated even more.'"

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

Two-thirds of Chicago cops called themselves racists

"Chicago cops had been angry for years. In 1960, after a corruption scandal, they had inherited a new police superintendent, Orlando W. Wilson, who was a college professor, one of the founders of the academic discipline of criminal justice. They saw him as an ivory-tower puritan, obsessed with showing arrests for the kind of 'victimless' crimes - drinking, whoring, gambling - by which cops from time immemorial had padded their weekly pay envelopes by looking the other way. [..] They hated him for his policy of replacing retiring white commanders with Negroes (40 percent of new sergeants were black his first year); in one survey, two-thirds of Chicago cops called themselves racists. These cops hated him most especially for holding them back from busting 'civil rights' troublemakers. During the riots in 1966, ten thousand officers working twelve-hour patrols felt as if they were hardly allowed to arrest anyone. Sixty-four quit that June alone, thirty-seven before they were eligible for pensions.

Wilson quit in 1967. His successor continued his policies. One of his first acts had been to shut down a Ku Klux Klan cell operating within the force, with its own arsenal of firearms and hand grenades."

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

"The pundits said [Robert] Kennedy was a uniter. The facts showed he was a divider. But to an Establishment hungry beyond measure for signs of consensus, the myth answered a psychic need. Moderates can be seized by ideological fever dreams as much as extremists; it has always been thus."

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

Well, somebody's going to get hurt

"On Januar 31, 1967, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, flanked by eight security guards, briefed some one hundred student-government presidents and campus-newspaper editors who had signed a letter questioning the war: football players, fraternity presidents, mainstream kids, stunned into silence by the obvious lies their secretary of state expected them to believe.

A kid from Michigan State: 'Mr. Secretary, what happens if we continue the policy you've outlined ... this continued gradual escalation until the other side capitulates ... up to and including nuclear war, and the other side doesn't capitulate?'

Rusk leaned back, hissed forth a stream of tobacco smoke, and solemnly replied, 'Well, somebody's going to get hurt.'

Here, before their eyes, was the maniacal air force general Buck Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove. The room drew silent, their thoughts as one: My God, the secretary of state is crazy.

The madness was not hard to spot, if you chose to spot it. The problem was facing the wrath of all those decent Americans who didn't want to face that their government was mad."

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

"Hangers-on urged [George] Romney to run in the open to build his national following and prove his grasp of the issues. His statehouse aides cringed: they knew the last thing that would help their boss was to rehearse in public. He was too damned forthright, too earnest - especially about Vietnam. He grappled with it honestly. Which would make what he said sound absurd, since everyone else was in denial or lying."

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

How I failed in business and in life

"Go to a bookstore, and look at the business shelves: you will find plenty of books telling you how to make your first million, or your first quarter-billion, etc. You will not be likely to find a book on "how I failed in business and in life"—though the second type of advice is vastly more informational, and typically less charlatanic. Indeed, the only popular such finance book I found that was not quacky in nature—on how someone lost his fortune—was both self-published and out of print. Even in academia, there is little room for promotion by publishing negative results—though these are vastly more informational and less marred with statistical biases of the kind we call data snooping. So all I am saying is, "What is it that we don't know", and my advice is what to avoid, no more."

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"I tell people don't get your representation of the news from television, because it hits you in a part of your brain, and the way it hits you is much more the story than if you'd read it. And if you read it, it's much more distorting if you read words than if you're reading statistics."

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The deaf will be very hard of hearing

Pundits who, in these exciting times, are eager to loosen the reins on their inner prophet, will find inspiration in the words of Rabelais from Pantagrueline Prognostication for 1533:

"This year, the blind will see very little; the deaf will be very hard of hearing; the dumb will hardly speak; the rich will keep themselves somewhat better than the poor, and the healthy than the sick. Many sheep, oxen, pigs, geese, pullets and ducks will die, whilst among monkeys and dromedaries the mortality will be less cruel. Old age will prove incurable this year because of the years gone by. Sufferers from pleurisy will have great pains in their sides; those who suffer from a runny belly will frequently go to the jakes; this year catarrhs will flow down from the brain to the lower limbs; and there will all but universally reign an illness most horrible, redoubtable, malignant, perverse, frightening and nasty which will so confuse everybody that they will never know what wood to use for their arrows, and will often madly write treatises in which they argue about the philosopher's stone; Averroës (in Book Seven of the Colliget) calls it Shortage of cash."