You can't go home again ...



"I was the ghost".

“What I am about to tell must be the experience of very many in this nation where so many wander and come back. I called on old and valued friends. I thought their hair had receded a little more than mine. The greetings were enthusiastic. The memories flooded up. Old crimes and old triumphs were brought out and dusted. And suddenly my attention wandered, and looking at my ancient friend, I saw that his wandered also. And it was true what I had said to Johny Garcia -- I was the ghost. My town had grown and changed and my friend along with it. Now returning, as changed to my friend as my town was to me, I distorted his picture, muddied his memory. When I went away I had died, and so became fixed and unchangeable. My return caused only confusion and uneasiness. Although they could not say it, my old friends wanted me gone so that I could take my proper place in the pattern of rememberance -- and I wanted to go for the same reason. Tom Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory”. 

... John Steinbeck (1902-68), American writer. Excerpt from ‘Travels with Charley: In Search of America’.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be ...

"Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked".



.... Peter De Vries (1910-93), American editor (The New Yorker), satirist  and novelist.

American "exceptionalism" defined

wanton wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless local natives

"Many thousand years ago our Aryan ancestors raised cattle, made a language, multiplied in numbers, and overflowed. By due process of expansion to the west they occupied Europe,

developed arts and sciences, and created a great civilization, which, separating into innumerable currents, inundated and fertilized the globe with blood and ideas, the primary bases of all human progress, incidently crossing the Atlantic and thereby reclaiming, populating, and civilizing a hemisphere.

blood and ideas

As to why the United States was in the Philippines, the broad actuating laws which underlie all these wonderful phenomena are still operating with relentless vigor and have recently forced one of the currents of this magnificent Aryan people across the Pacific -- that is to say, back almost to the cradle of the race -- thus initiating a stage of progressive social evolution which may reasonably be expected to result in substantial contributions on behalf of the unity of the race and the brotherhood of man".

... General Arthur MacArthur (1845-1912) justifying to the U.S. Senate the invasion and occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the 19th century when he was serving as military govenor of the Philippines, overseeing the wanton wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless local natives. He was the father of General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) of WW2 fame.