I’m listening to something.
I don’t know what it’s called but it’s Chopin.
It’s something Alexa pulled
from the high capacity byte magazine
of her small black canister
which sits under a lamp upon a table
against the wall (where most of us have spent
at least a little time, sweating)
it’s power umbilical plugged to an outlet,
its invisible wireless thread stretched taut to a router
it’s bluesy halo perfectly apropos—
but whatever it is, it is necessarily of the moment
and I had asked for classical after all,
so I’m thinking Alexa must know more than I
of what this now must consist

Of what it partially consists are bell sounds
—not bells really but the closest thing
Chopin could come up with
to be played on an instrument
that sounds bell-like but which again
I admit: I haven’t a clue.
Despite having a poet’s surfeit of words
you’d think I’d not have come up short
before committing to a page, but it
is spontaneous magic as I sit here
among Chopin’s frequencies listening,
applying Chopin to the day’s doing,
wondering why, suddenly! Alexa has
shuffled Ahmad Jamal into the mix
and left me mulling what Ahmad’s
poignant jazz has to do with
what this now is
.

Jim Culleny
3/16/18

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

When I first moved into an apartment onto campus to take up my current job as faculty at one of the most prestigious institutes in India, I knocked at my neighbour's door to introduce myself, only to be asked, "What department is Sir in?" Highly amused, I responded, that actually only madam would take up residence and work here; madam, of course, being myself. What would otherwise have raised my feminist hackles, to this day amuses me, perhaps because I was able to take pleasure in overturning a kind of misrecognition, no matter to how small a degree. Gender, age and body are easy and frequent stages for misrecognition—one is seen, heard, and assumed to be of a certain age, gender, and life stage. "You don't look your age!" is a form of misrecognition that can offer pleasure or otherwise depending on whether such looking is over- or under-determined.

In the social sciences, such misrecognition informs identity. In other words, across literatures, it is only through agreeing, refusing, conforming, partly conforming, and co-opting available labels and modes of being does one gain identity. We all therefore, exist, by misrecognizing ourselves and others for there is either no core self, outside of such temporary and sometimes sedimented forms of knowing, or the possibility of gaining any authentic self is always already lost. In this short essay, this is what concerns my exploration of pleasure. For other theorists like Nancy Fraser, misrecognition refers to the denigration and refusal of common humanity in others; in other words, a literal refusal to recognize. While there are clearly pleasures to the latter, I do not take it up in this piece. However, where the first and the second come together is in reading Pierre Bourdieu, for who misrecognition resides in the everyday where things, people, and processes get attributed to available realms of meaning and thereby misrecognized as such, making no room available for the uncommon, the changing, and the different.

These days, I walk around utterly confused as to who to be. I am a thoroughly misrecognized entity; seen as woman even though I do not know how to behave in an adequately womanly fashion; considered responsible even though only I know how often I misplace my keys; accorded the privilege of teaching despite my own frequent misgivings and surrender to the "imposter" syndrome; and the most egregious burden of all, considered an adult, even though I, like most others, fake it.

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Alicja Kwade. Light Transfer of Nature, 2015.

More here, here, and here.

by Max Sirak

(Look…er…Listen! It's a free audio version for all you on-the-go…)

Conversations are like sex. There's a safe and unsafe way to go about them. Today I'm going to share with you a way to protect yourself against unwanted communicational repercussions. But, before we get there, I'd like to take a moment to pay homage to the lineage of thought which led me to this prophylactic presentation. Ideas evolve. Not always, but sometimes. If a concept is sticky enough, it hangs around, lying in wait, and resurfaces. Each exposure granting more nuance to the original idea until eventually a fresh concept emerges, related and traceable to the first, but individual in its own right.

Which is how conversational contraception was born.

"Free Movies!"

A college professor of mine would yell this, arms waving, at least once each class. Appealing to the broke nature of students, due to soaring expenses of tuition, Professor Terrill was very passionate (and demonstrative) in his attempts to steer us. Energy and enthusiasm aside, it never worked. At least not on my friends and me. We were too immersed in the other "recreational" options collegiate life had to offer. So it goes.

But that doesn't diminish the impact Prof. Terrill and his class had on me. Even now, 16 years after I was but one anonymous face in the tessellated sea of his lecture hall, I find myself thinking about ideas he taught. They were so foreign and new.

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by Brooks Riley

by Christopher Bacas

On Flatbush Avenue,
the dollar vans squawk and beep,
threading through traffic.

City buses stream
rectangles of blue-white light
across the storefronts.

From dim upper floors,
blinds drawn, shadowed, comes music:
brass band with coro.

Tuba burps madly:
a bullfrog virtuoso
looking for lovers.

Beneath an awning,
they sit by a glowing grill,
rain sizzling its lid.

A thick woman prods
the charred corn, whole or sectioned,
smoke twists around her.

In the entrance way,
on a cart, plates, condiments:
mayonnaise and cheese.

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One Evening in 1907 On The Banks Of The River Neckar, Heidelberg

by Mohammed Iqbal

The Silver moon is silent

Branches are silent as well

Valley birds that sell their songs are silent

Mountains cloaked in green are silent

Neckar flows regal under the spell of silence

Embraced by the night a world is silent

Be still, heart. Sing the blues.

Translated from the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit

by Liam Heneghan

A writer’s path is paved with the flagstones of their unread essays. Years ago I wrote an essay entitled “Soil and Myself” for the collection Irish Spirit (Wolfhound, 2001). I was attempting there to come to grips with my youthful loss of religious faith and my growing enchantment with the earth as a source of inspiration and solace. This spiritual crisis occurred in the early eighties, an era when the dimensions of our global environmental problems were becoming apparent. I fell in love with a damaged world.

My turning to nature was a physical one to be sure, but my late teen years were also a time of reverie inspired by those Irish writers that cared about both people and wild landscapes: Liam O’Flaherty, W.B. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, for example, and by all the earthy shenanigans recorded in the Irish mythological cycles. An apposite ratio of nature hikes and of literary contemplation provided me a foundation for optimistic living.

“Soil and Myself” was published, the world turned, and I moved along as writers are wont to do. Several years later, I got a letter from a reader—perhaps the essay's only one—who remarked on how the piece had moved her. She was getting on, she wrote, and was latterly attempting to draw consolation from the same sources I had. As a codicil, she noted that she had elected not to have children because of her worry about nuclear armageddon. Why bring a child into this damned world? She concluded wistfully that had she had a child that child would be my age now. By the time I got that letter I had survived nearly four decades without facing down any real calamities.

This small but arresting exchange came to mind on encountering several discussions that assume a bleak environmental future. For example, a recent Onion headline quips dolefully “Sighing, Resigned Climate Scientists Say to Just Enjoy Next 20 Years As Much As You Can.” Less drolly, the “Climate Change and Life Events” app allows users map their future against projections of future global temperatures. The future will not look like the past. The New York Times reports on some couples’ deliberations about their reproductive future in the light of such realities: “No Children Because Of Climate Change? Some People Are Considering It” (New York Times, Feb 5, 2018). A new generation considers the prospects of raising children in perilous times. Unlike nuclear annihilation, which, so far, has failed to materialize, the bombs of climate change, so to speak, have already left their bunkers, though there is some uncertainty about their yield. Facing an uncertain environmental future, and occupying a planet that horrifyingly may be unable to sustain its burgeoning human population, determining to have, or not have, a child is a fraught decision.

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I and I
One says to the other, no man sees my face and lives —Bob Dylan

When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. Neighborless and seamless, he is You and fills the firmament.….—Martin Buber
____________________________________________________

Luminous Debris

…… through the debris of ages
…… too deep to grasp I spin
but you are with me in this thing so vast
that distances lose meaning
and time is neither slow nor fast

…… some spend years slicing its flesh
thin as shaved salmon into membranes
so fine the fabric of universes pass
without tangling warp or woof
……(though certainty snaps
….. with the slightest look)

…… others count and rout particles that nest
without rest:
………………….atomic bábushka–Matryoshkas
of prosaic electricity
in ghost orbits
…………………… being like us,
both here and there in bodymind
ensconced

……………… while others
fire duet lasers to catch ageless hints
of enormous pebbles that once dropped
into a ballooning lake of spacetime
stalking gravity waves of bygone quakes
like Greeks on a hill hailing Helios,
marking arrivals, noting,
watching his horse and chariot
drop with precision
blazing into a wine-dark sea
leaving a jetblack wake

…… but you are with me
in this vast shadow

i and thou among receding sparks

luminous debris
…… under eternal sky
…… you and me
…… i and i
.

Jim Culleny
3/9/18

by Samir Chopra

A couple of years ago, I participated in a radio discussion on ‘Male Intimacy,’ hosted by Natasha Mitchell on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s show Life Matters. Natasha had invited me on to offer the ‘alternative perspective’ of an immigrant who had lived in India, the US, and briefly, in Australia. (Audio is available; I go on at the 20 minute mark; the whole show is worth a listen.)

While on air, when speaking about the cross-cultural differences in male intimacy I had experienced in my three ‘homes,’ I noted that growing up in India meant being socialized in a domain of relationships with men where physical contact was relatively unproblematic: I put my arms around my male friends’ shoulders, did not rigorously negotiate inter-personal physical space, and demonstrated affection and companionship through a variety of physical gestures—including hugs. (Avuncular affection almost always took these forms.) As the time approached for my move to the US, I was warned—by those Indians who had preceded me and were now already resident in the US—to not expect such ‘intimate’ contact when I crossed the waters, to desist from such overt displays of friendship and affection in my relationships with American men. Those warnings spoke to a culture that set much store by the careful maintenance of a physical and emotional space between its male members; ‘keep your distance’ applied to many dimensions of social interactions. I took these warnings to heart. There was no reason to disbelieve them; moreover, I was keen to ‘fit in,’ to not ‘stick out,’ to not take the risk of being called a ‘homo’ or a ‘fag’—as seemed to be the fate of those who transgressed in this domain. This was the 1980s; America seemed—from a distance—to be suffering a national crisis of masculine insecurity. I suffered from my own variant of it.

So the manner of my relationships with men changed once I moved to the US; besides the obvious psychosocial distance pertaining to matters of familial and filial structure, and political and cultural tastes and inclinations, I found men in my new home structured and conducted their relationships and friendships with each other quite differently. American men were not physically demonstrative in their claims of friendship; they did not hug their male friends; they did not put arms around male friends; they carefully established the requisite physical space between themselves and their friends. Immigration induced many changes in the qualitative and quantitative nature of my personal and social relationships with men and women alike; the parameters of male relationships in my new home denied me a very particular—and much desired when missed—kind of emotional sustenance.

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by Chris Knight

Noam Chomsky is the world’s most prominent anti-militarist campaigner and, wearing a different hat, the acknowledged founder of modern scientific linguistics. Any attempt to understand Chomsky’s huge influence on modern thought must appreciate the connection between these two roles. And to do this we must begin with a paradoxical fact: Chomsky has spent his career in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working in what was originally a military lab. As he himself says about MIT in the 1960s:

[It] was about 90 per cent Pentagon funded at that time. And I personally was right in the middle of it. I was in a military lab. If you take a look at my early publications, they all say something about Air Force, Navy, and so on, because I was in a military lab, the Research Lab for Electronics [RLE].

The Pentagon showed a keen interested in linguistics during this period. Colonel Gaines of the US Air Force recalled why during an interview in 1971. Having referred to the military’s computerised systems of command and control, both for defense against nuclear missiles and for use in Vietnam, he complained about the difficulties of teaching computer languages to military personnel. “We sponsored linguistic research”, he explained, “in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.”

If Chomsky’s linguistics was being funded for this purpose, it seems all the more remarkable that Chomsky ended up publicly opposing the Vietnam War and denouncing the very military institutions that were sponsoring his research.

Modestly, Chomsky has always downplayed any moral dilemmas, suggesting that the military had no interest in his work. But I have recently come across restricted-access documents which refer to Chomsky as a “consultant” to a project funded by the Air Force in order “to establish natural language as an operational language for command and control.”

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William Pope. L. William Pope. L: Trinket, 2015.

More here, here and here.

by Emrys Westacott

A virtue is a quality that people consider valuable, admirable, or desirable. Human beings exhibit various kinds of virtues, many of which are specific to particular roles or activities. A strong throwing arm is a virtue in a baseball player. A good memory is a virtue in a stage actor. Some qualities, however, such as courage, kindness, or generosity, are typically viewed as moral virtues.

It isn't easy to specify just what makes a virtue a moral virtue. Like certain talents, qualities such as empathy or cheerfulness may be gifts of nature or ingrained by a certain upbringing, and they can also be deliberately cultivated. So the difference between moral and non-moral virtues doesn't lie in their origin, or in the degree to which one is responsible for possessing them.

Moral virtues do tend to be qualities that it is thought good for everyone to have; but that is also true of such things as intelligence or physical fitness. In general, though, we think of particular skills as valuable for some people who engage in particular tasks, while moral virtues are qualities that it is good for anyone and everyone to have. They are those excellences that help one to be a good human being (rather than just a good x) and to live a good life. Something like this underlies the way Socrates talks about virtue in Plato's dialogues.

These days, we tend to think of moral virtues as traits that directly affect our dealings with others; they are traits that make someone a more valuable colleague, neighbor, friend, companion, or compatriot, or fellow citizen. If we adopt Peter Singer's notion of expanding the circle of moral concern, we will also count among "others" humanity as a whole, and at least some non-human animals. But philosophers, like Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the Stoics conceive of moral virtues more broadly still, as including traits that have to do with how fulfilling a life one leads. Thoreau, for instance, who could reasonably be described as a modern stoic, views curiosity about the natural world, or an ability to appreciate beauty, as moral virtues in this sense.

Can a moral virtue become outdated? However one conceives of the moral virtues, this is an interesting question to ponder.

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by Thomas R. Wells

The statistics are shocking. A Russian troll farm created false anti-Clinton stories and distributed them on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. As many as 126 million Facebook users may have encountered at least one piece of Russian propaganda; Russian tweets received as many as 288 million views. The Russians, just like Trump’s campaign itself, leveraged the adtech infrastructure developed by social media companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to identify and target those most receptive to their lies and provocations.

What is going on? Is this something new? Does it matter?

I. Do People Believe Fake News?

One popular interpretation of what is going on is that social media and its associated adtech have isolated us in filter bubbles and made us newly vulnerable to politically or commercially motivated lies. The bubble is a controlled information environment based on what we want to hear and what adbuyers want people like us to believe. Organisations that know how to use this – whether a Russian troll farm or the company hired by the Brexit campaign – can exercise enormous power over the information we are exposed to and thus our beliefs about the world.

I disagree. I think very few people actually believe fake news. Rather, they indulge in believing that they believe it. People’s relationship to such beliefs is much more like the way they relate to icecream than the enlightenment idea of respecting objective truth. Consider Pizzagate, a recent very famous example of fake news.

At the end of October 2016 an anti-Clinton conspiracy theory started circulating on fringe rightist social media and fake news websites like Infowars. Russian troll accounts seem to have been among those helping the story spread. Over the next month, millions of Americans heard or read that top members of the Democratic Party were running a child sexual slavery ring from the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC.

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by Brooks Riley

by Holly A. Case

Wilhelm Kotarbiński, Camel Cavalry (1848-1921)

"People who were not born then will find it difficult to believe, but the fact is that even then time was moving faster than a cavalry camel….But in those days, no one knew what it was moving towards. Nor could anyone quite distinguish between what was above and what was below, between what was moving forward and what backward."

So wrote Robert Musil in Man Without Qualities, describing the atmosphere in turn-of-the-century Vienna.

*

The historian Carl Schorske used Musil's "cavalry camel" passage to open the third chapter in his famous Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Written over the 1960s and 1970s, Schorske's book explained why the intricacies of Viennese high culture should concern readers of his own time, in which "liberals and radicals, almost unconsciously, adapted their world-views to a revolution of falling political expectations."

Now a mood of pessimism—sometimes of impotence, sometimes of rigid defensiveness, sometimes of surrender—settled over an intelligentsia that, whether centrist or radical, liberal or Marxist, had for several decades been united in social optimism.

Schorske noted how some liberals who had never given a whit for religion became enamored with "neo-orthodox Protestantism," and how "patrician wisdom" overtook "ethical rationalism." In short, what had once been left behind was laid in front like new track.

*

A while ago I went to see Black Panther. The best part was hearing the audience address the screen as though the characters could hear them. It reminded me of the descriptions of cinema's earliest viewers, who fled from their seats at the sight of an oncoming train on the screen.

We have a president who watches the news and calls into the news and tweets the news and is the news. So perhaps King T'Challa does hear. I feel like he even said as much at some point, in response to an outcry from the audience.

*

Apparently, a good many clock radios in Europe are running three to six minutes slow these days. The German press calls it "Weckergate" (Alarm clock-gate). It has something to do with a conflict between Kosovo and Serbia over payments for electricity in areas of Kosovo where Serbs are in the majority. Somehow this makes a lot of clocks run slow, including German ones.

A day after "Alarm clock-gate" swept the German headlines, it hit the Austrian ones. The day after that, the English-language ones.

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by Richard King

There's disagreement about who first described politics as "show business for ugly people": some commentators attribute the zinger to Jay Leno, others to political consultant Paul Begala. But there is broad agreement that whoever it was identified a genuine phenomenon. Politics in the era of mass communication has indeed become more "mediated" – as focused on personalities as it is on ideology and policy, and a prey to the dark arts of image-making and spin. The successful modern politician knows that in order to be successful s/he must defer to the media consultant and submit to the stylistic makeover. Above all, s/he knows to stick to the script.

Now, however, we have a different phenomenon – not new, exactly, but newly prominent: the political celebrity. Actors and other media personalities are increasingly engaged in awareness-raising, social media campaigns and activism, and the news media's appetite for their interventions is huge. When celebrities speak out, their words are reported, analysed, criticised, celebrated. If politics is show business for ugly people, show business is looking more and more like politics for beautiful people.

In the event, last Sunday's Oscars ceremony was a more muted affair, politically speaking, than previous recent industry gatherings, perhaps because the organisers of Time's Up and its analogues are aware that the law of diminishing returns may soon kick in, if it hasn't already. But the broader trend is conspicuous. From the celebrity envoy or "goodwill ambassador" to the "controversial" acceptance speech to the red-carpet anti-fashion statement, the idea that Hollywood and the media more broadly have a responsibility to deal with issues of social justice is now utterly mainstream.

The intersection of showbiz and activism is by no means a new phenomenon. Jane Fonda's opposition to the Vietnam War, Harry Belafonte's involvement in the civil rights movement, and Charlton Heston's advocacy on behalf of the National Rifle Association are just a few examples of celebrities lending their imprimaturs to issues that are important to them. Nor is this an unwelcome phenomenon, necessarily. It isn't incumbent on anyone to shut up about the state of the world just because they have money in the bank and a state-of-the-art home-security system, though an intelligent analysis will account for the skewed perspective such privileges tend to engender. Yes it can be irritating to hear ditsy A-listers wax political about topics they'd never heard of until the day before yesterday. But these aren't crimes against humanity. And, really, Clint Eastwood's heart to heart with an empty chair was no more embarrassing, at the end of the day, than American Sniper.

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by Paul North

Humanities professors are the true conservatives. What is it to be conservative? A professor hunches over a podium and says, "well, … you know…." The lecture begins. Well you know: Chateaubriand's pro-restoration journal Le Conservateur started it all off in 1818, proposing a return to the society of orders after the revolutionary republic. For this lecturer, saying what something is requires saying what it was. A minimum description of a conservative is that. A conservative prefers what was to what is.

Humanities professors are way ahead of the curve on this kind of thing. A rambunctious student wants to debate current events: a humanities professor blinks and says "well…it wasn't always that way." Thank goodness for the delaying, retarding, preserving "well…"! Humanities professors use the opening that a strategic "well" gives them, in order to talk about how it was.

Well…

Why don't we ask what it was to be conservative.

A classics professor dusts off a volume of Cicero and finds these words:

pro di inmortales, custodes et conservatores hujus urbis atque imperii.
Oh immortal gods, protectors and preservers of the city and the empire.

It is a cliché phrase, really. Cicero repeats it from old political chatter.

Still, it's a huge claim—who is the conservative? The gods conserve the city and the empire. Cicero has heaven in mind, the classics professor a much smaller thing. Not gods or empire—words are what's important. Who conserves Cicero's words? The classics professor of course. a conservative of the highest order, the professor nonetheless is faced with a hard question. What do Cicero's words preserve? Here is the real crux of the matter. For there are two words here, "protectors" and "preservers." What is the difference? Something is being said in the contrast between the two. The difference will help us say what it was to be conservative. Conservatores differ from custodes, though here they are put together. To know what it means to be a conservator in old Roman republican wisdom then, we also need to know what it means to be a custodian. Gods are custodians: they protect the city from inside and outside, keep it safe from tyrants and from enemies, and they carry out this protection for the purposes of preservation. Gods protect the city in order that the city may endure as it is, as it was.

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by Michael Liss

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

—Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1861, First Inaugural Address

Irony. History offers an inexhaustible supply of it. Lincoln stood on the podium that March morning across from the one man who may have most helped put him there—the Chief Justice of the United States, Roger B. Taney. Four years earlier, on March 4, 1857, Taney performed what he considered a far more pleasant duty: to swear in his fellow Dickinson College Alum James Buchanan. Then, just two days after, he lit the first match to Buchanan’s Presidency by reading from the bench what was probably the most consequential, and certainly the worst Supreme Court decision ever, Dred Scott vs. Sandford.

Dred Scott was born a slave in Missouri, owned by an Army Surgeon named Emerson, who often traveled to new postings. For roughly a decade, they lived in Illinois, a state where slavery was prohibited by both the Northwest Ordinance and its own constitution. Later, Dr. Emerson was posted to Fort Snelling in Minnesota, then a territorial area where slavery had been forbidden by the Missouri Compromise. They finally returned to Missouri, and, after Emerson died and “title” to Scott passed to new owners, he sued for his freedom and that of his wife and children. Scott won at the trial court level, then lost in Missouri’s Supreme Court. At that point, he turned to the federal courts. Finally, in 1856, the matter reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The question was achingly simple on a human level, yet agonizingly complex from a public policy perspective: Was Dred Scott entitled to freedom by virtue of the amount of time spent in free areas? Scott contended he was. Scott’s master insisted that a “pure blooded” African and descendent of slaves could never be a U.S. citizen, and so therefore was not qualified to access the U.S. courts. The case was argued in February of 1856, then reargued en banc that December to specifically address two key points.

No one would argue with the idea that the issues were timely. Slavery was always timely; it was the intractable, incurable American Original Sin. The Constitution itself was jury-rigged to accommodate it, with painful concessions to which neither side ever fully reconciled itself. Conflicts arose continuously, not just over the Peculiar Institution itself, but by anything that it touched—internal improvements, trade and tariffs, even foreign policy. Every few years there would be a flare-up, sometimes resolved by quiet compromise or concession, sometimes by grand bargains, sometimes, as in the case of the South Carolina Nullification and Secession crisis, by the application of a combination of Jacksonian tact and Jacksonian brute force.

And still, it went on. Lynchings, raids, arson, smashing of presses, intimidation. The country seethed, quieted down, then seethed again. Preachers read from different sections of the Bible to claim spiritual support for their sides. Politicians alternated between bile and eloquence; newspapers wrote inflammatory, pointless editorials; and Congress debated endlessly.

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