Art / Literature / Culture
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Joined May 2024
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This hill, though high, I covet to ascend;
The difficulty will not me offend.
For I perceive the way to life lies here.
Come, pluck up, heart; let's neither faint nor fear.
Better, though difficult, the right way to go,
Than wrong, though easy, where the end is woe.
The Pilgrim's Progress
John Bunyan
Friends are more important than ideologies. To destroy those who have been seduced by bad ideas, but not eaten alive by them, would be miss the whole point of fighting the good fight to begin with.
- Robert A. Heinlein
from his novel, Beyond This Horizon
“No Man’s Land”
James H. Knight-Adkin
NO Man’s Land is an eerie sight
At early dawn in the pale gray light.
Never a house and never a hedge
In No Man’s Land from edge to edge,
And never a living soul walks there
To taste the fresh of the morning air;—
Only some lumps of rotting clay,
That were friends or foemen yesterday.
What are the bounds of No Man’s Land?
You can see them clearly on either hand,
A mound of rag-bags gray in the sun,
Or a furrow of brown where the earthworks run
From the eastern hills to the western sea,
Through field or forest o’er river and lea;
No man may pass them, but aim you well
And Death rides across on the bullet or shell.
But No Man’s Land is a goblin sight
When patrols crawl over at dead o’ night;
Boche or British, Belgian or French,
You dice with death when you cross the trench.
When the “rapid,” like fireflies in the dark,
Flits down the parapet spark by spark,
And you drop for cover to keep your head
With your face on the breast of the four months’ dead.
The man who ranges in No Man’s Land
Is dogged by the shadows on either hand
When the star-shell’s flare, as it bursts o’erhead,
Scares the gray rats that feed on the dead,
And the bursting bomb or the bayonet-snatch
May answer the click of your safety-catch,
For the lone patrol, with his life in his hand,
Is hunting for blood in No Man’s Land.
2
425
The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell ain't half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.
Blood Meridian
C. McCarthy
3
418
‘Horatius Slaying his Sister Camilla after the Defeat of the Curiatii’
(c. 1790)
Etienne Barthélemy Garnier
2
356
‘I always liked to hear about the old-timers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can't help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can't help but wonder how they'd have operated in these times.’
2
364
‘You are not a man anymore. You are a soldier. Your comfort is of no importance and your life isn’t of much importance. Most of your orders will be unpleasant, but that’s not your business. They should’ve trained you for this, and not for flower-strewn streets. They should have built your soul with truth, not led along with lies.’
Steinbeck, “The Moon is Down”
“There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the old south. Here in this pretty world gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of knights and their ladies fair. Of master and of slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A civilization gone with the wind.”
“I rushed at her with my sword drawn as though I would kill her, whereon she fell with a loud scream, clasped my knees, and spoke piteously, saying, ‘Who and whence are you? from what place and people have you come? How can it be that my drugs have no power to charm you? Never yet was any man able to stand so much as a taste of the herb I gave you; you must be spell-proof; surely you can be none other than the bold hero Ulysses, who Mercury always said would come here some day with his ship while on his way home from Troy; so be it then; sheathe your sword and let us go to bed, that we may make friends and learn to trust each other.’”
— The Odyssey, Book 10
Translation by Samuel Butler
1
164
“What we are dealing with, he said, is a race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than niggers. And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there's no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them.”
7
359
How did the Pawnee Indians fertilize their seed corn in the spring of 1838?
They roasted a teenage Sioux Indian girl, chopped up her body, gave her heart to the chief to eat, and then squeezed the blood from the remaining body parts onto the seed corn as it was planted.
Pawnees called the ritual the Skidi Morning Star Ceremony
10
545
Dearborn is Muslim today because of Henry Ford
In the early 1900s, Ford was one of the largest employers of foreign born immigrants
By 1920, 75% of his Model T assembly line was foreign born and a majority were Muslims
His company had programs to try to “Americanize” them, but it didn’t work
In 1921 Muslim immigrants built a mosque in Highland Park, Michigan, the first in the US
Thousands of Muslims moved to Dearborn to work at Ford, establishing the largest Muslim community in America
Some of my numbers are wrong, as many have pointed out. The BBC article I cited likely cherry picked limited demographic numbers from that time in order to exaggerate the size and influence of Muslims in Dearborn. I redact that source and statistic.
The point of my post wasn’t to denigrate Henry Ford—his life or his work. he said and did many admirable things. I was only pointing out the long term consequences of his business decision to recruit and hire immigrants of Arab and Muslim descent.
It was harsh and unfair for me to say that “Dearborn is Muslim today because of Henry Ford.” He died in 1947, before the immigration floodgates opened after WWII and Hart-Cellar. I think if he had known what Dearborn would become, he would have done things differently. It wasn’t his intention to turn Dearborn into a majority Muslim city, nor could he foresee that happening at the time. He simply hired immigrants (including Arabs) because they were less likely to complain or unionize. He did what he thought was best for his company.
