lee.ourand.me

Read this Who Goes Nazi? article, written by Dorothy Thompson in 1941. It’s as sharp today as the day it was written.

Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.

Who among us doesn’t know a Mr. B or two in our own lives?

Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner. […] But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.

Dorothy Thompson saw J.D. Vance coming 84 years in advance.

I think young D over there is the only born Nazi in the room.

And Stephen Miller too.

Finished reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s rendition of Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching. I’ve not read any other translations, so can’t exactly compare. But I liked her style on this: she kept commentary to a minimum. But when she did leave comments, they were incredibly insightful.

It was also neat to connect some dots as to why certain words were chosen, from my limited Chinese. E.g., the number 10,000 is used repeatedly in the book as kind of an arbitrary “a lot” value. That would’ve seemed odd to 6-months-ago me. But now I’m super-enlightened™, and know about 萬 (wàn), the Chinese word for ten-thousand.

Anyway, here’s one of my favorite chapters:

Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.

Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s useful.

Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn’t,
there’s room for you.
So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.