These unfortunate men and women had come by the thousands to California, dreaming of a better life, only to find themselves marooned in unsanitary, overcrowded camps and reviled by local residents.
“The really crucial decisions were made at the tail end of the Truman years, with Acheson as Secretary of State and Rusk as his principal deputy for Asia. This was the period when the United States went from a position of neutrality toward both sides in the Indochina war to a position of massive military and economic aid to the French. The real architect of the American commitment to Vietnam, of bringing containment to that area and using Western European perceptions in the underdeveloped world, was not John Foster Dulles, it was Dean Acheson.”
― The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations
― The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations
“We were furrowing the waters of the Indian Ocean, a vast liquid plain, with a surface of 1,200,000,000 of acres, and whose waters are so clear and transparent that any one leaning over them would turn giddy.”
― Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
― Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
“Events,” wrote George Ball, paraphrasing Emerson “are in the saddle, and ride mankind.”
― The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations
― The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations
“Under Fire would take you out of your head and your body too, the space you’d seen a second ago between subject and object wasn’t there anymore, it banged shut in a fast wash of adrenaline. Amazing, unbelievable, guys who’d played a lot of hard sports said they’d never felt anything like it, the sudden drop and rocket rush of the hit, the reserves of adrenaline you could make available to yourself, pumping it up and putting it out until you were lost floating in it, not afraid, almost open to clear orgasmic death-by-drowning in it, actually relaxed.”
― Dispatches
― Dispatches
“This, one suspects, may have been the reason which moved John to assimilate the newborn man-child to the figure of the avenger, thereby blurring his mythological character as the lovely and lovable divine youth whom we know so well in the figures of Tammuz, Adonis, and Balder. The enchanting springlike beauty of this divine youth is one of those pagan values which we miss so sorely in Christianity, and particularly in the sombre world of the apocalypse—the indescribable morning glory of a day in spring, which after the deathly stillness of winter causes the earth to put forth and blossom, gladdens the heart of man and makes him believe in a kind and loving God.”
― Answer to Job: (From Vol. 11 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung)
― Answer to Job: (From Vol. 11 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung)
David’s 2025 Year in Books
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