Liz > Recent Status Updates

“I did warn Roger about the line between opulence and bad taste“ she said. “that was your mistake” said the major. “They are the same thing, my dear“

“ a Homo sapien was a primitive hunter who had woken each day with the knowledge he could kill. And now, the equivalent knowledge was only that he would wake up each day and buy something.“ p. 182

“ I’d also heard that humans were a life form of, at best, middling intelligence and prone to violence, deep sexual embarrassment, bad, poetry, and walking around in circles. “

Reviews the American class and wealth imbalance in several lenses. Including good health and wealth due to a blessing/on right side of history/ better than others.

Oh, the memories of Crystal Pepsi, Zima, life connected to a landline, the beginning of Internet dial-up, music not on a platform, grunge and rap, all things Generation X.
yes, I was in this world which is so different 30 years later. This book does a nice job encompassing so many of the issues of the day and explains it to people who were not around in the 90s.

The Trump Administration would claim with fanfare that supplies were on their way to the states and leave it to the career civil servants whose job was to interact with State officials to reap the humiliation when those supplies failed to arrive... Among other consequences of the White House's strategy was that it gutted The credibility of the career Federal officials.

In theory, the CDC sat atop the system of infectious disease management in the US. In practice, the system had configured itself to foist the political risk onto a character who had no social power. It required a local Health officer to take the risk and responsibility, as no one else wanted to... people were far less likely to blame a health officer for what she didn't do and what she did.

The concourse is teeming with fans. The natives are restless. It has been a frustrating game thus far and they blow off steam by spending money. Happily there is retail at every turn and it's the same everywhere... the airports, the hotels, the Arenas and Convention centers, in the downtown and the suburbs alike, retail dominates the land. Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.

Like wealth discrepancies, mortality rate provide a rough indication of relative freedom, and when social classes die at radically different rates from one another, some are obviously last free. An important part of freedom is not having to make sacrifices for people who don't have to make sacrifices for you.

People love to believe they're free, though, which is hard to achieve in the society that has outsourced virtually all of the tasks needed for survival.... In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. That is a great blessing but allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all- are forms of government tyranny.

" Soldiers experience this tribal way of thinking at War, but when they come home they realize that the tribe they were actually fighting for wasn't their country, it was their unit. It makes absolutely no sense to make sacrifices for a group that, itself, isn't willing to make sacrifices for you. That is the position American soldiers have been in for the past decade and a half."

"A caste system builds rivalry and distrust and lack of empathy toward one's fellows. The result is that the United States, for all its wealth and innovation, lags in major indicators of quality of life among the leading countries in the world."
Let's remember this when we contemplate our city public schools, health care system, high incarceration rate, high maternal mortality rate when compared to rich countries.

In America, news outlets feed audiences a diet of inner city crime and poverty so out of proportion to the numbers that they distort perceptions of African Americans and of societal issues as a whole... Af-Americans account for 59% of the poor people depicted in the news. White families make up 2/3 of America's poor, at 66%, but account for only 17% of poor people depicted in the news.

The scapegoats are blamed for a crime rate that they alone do not cause and for drugs that they are no more likely to use than the dominant caste, but for which they are incarcerated at 6 times the rate as whites accused of similar offences. .and.. behind bars for having been in possession of a substance that businessmen in the dominant caste are now converting to wealth in the marijuana and CBD industry.

-Reagan was exactly the kind of president that allowed white America to be secure in its commitment to the value gap. His smile, his down home charm, exuded exactly the opposite of the vitriol of loud, Southern bigots. Reagan's was genteel racism and, politically, he knew exactly what he was doing: playing on the fears and hatreds of some white people, especially in the South, the West, and the suburbs for politics

Wow-- I'm addicted-- great plot and writing!

now THIS is good summer reading with my daughter!

quick read, well written, despite having seen the movie! Luckily, hints at the scary torture of the kiddies!