East of Eden: Part 1

First of all I think I should start this blog by mentioning that the picture you see below is printed on the back of the book. When I first saw it, I turned to the inside pages and read that the Latin inscription means "To the Stars on the Wings of a Pig" and that John Steinbeck described himself as a "lumbering soul, but trying to fly." Immediately I loved this, and considered it as a tattoo idea. I could only hope that I would like Steinbeck's work, so that the tattoo would be justifiable. Now that I'm 400 pages in, it seems like an even better idea.

Holy shit this book is good.
But it's really long.

I don't know if I could ever write a really long book because I have been trained to have such a focused story-line structure. Most ideas I come up with would best be represented by about 300 pages, or the equivalent of a two hour movie. I think I know why this is, too. It's because I read more short books than long books (because I find them to be easier to digest in a short period of time, and I find that more gratifying) and I've watched way more movies than I've read books.

Don't get me wrong, I've read a lot of books. I'm actually somewhat amazed by how much my reading history weighs whenever I have to pack it up and move it around. What if that's how people talked about how well read they were? What if it was totally normal for me to say, "I like to read, I've read about 1,000 lbs of books." You'd be like, damn, that's pretty heavy, he must be a smart guy. And you'd be right.

I think the reason East of Eden gets away with weighing eight pounds is that it spans a really long amount of time and chronicles the lives of many protagonists, who you stay with for 50-100 pages each and then leave. Multiple protagonists really appeal to me (like Megamorphs, that shit was awesome) and I really like books that give me as many perspectives as possible. As I Lay Dying is a great example of that. The reader gets about 40 different first-person narrators over the span of like 250 pages (roughly two pounds.) East of Eden isn't exactly like that, though. You have John Steinbeck (narrating as himself, which I think is at once strange and incredibly cool) looking back on what I assume is a fictional account of his family history. He is hardly in the book at all as a character so far, and when he does show up he's just a kid. Mostly the story of his family history focuses on his grandfather, his eight aunts and uncles and the Trask family.
Now, I haven't got all the meaning of Steinbeck's lineage worked out, and it might not be too exciting to read about anyways if you haven't read the book, so I won't bother with that. What I will bother with is the Trask family.

East of Eden is, as the title may hint towards, a retelling of the book of Genisis. As time in the story progresses, the roles to be played are shifted, which I think is a really interesting concept. Say a man's purpose in the story is to represent God. When he gets old and dies, that's a big deal, but the story still has hundreds of pages left, and it moves on. Then it finds another God figure. The same goes for the characters that represent Cain and Able. Charlie and Adam Trask at first represent Cain and Able, down to the character traits and Cain's marked forehead. After Charlie dies, it's Adam's sons Aron and Cal who continue on the legacy, and it seems that the family is doomed to repeat this pattern. There are, of course, Adam and Eve characters as well, and a lot more stuff I'm sure I'm missing because one book I haven't read is the Bible. That's probably like an 18 pounder, if it's printed on normal paper and not that impossibly thin stuff I always see it on.

One thing about writers, they love to read. And reading does things to a writer. Obviously it makes them better, as it conditions them to an amazing use of language, but it also infests them with epic greatness. T.S. Eliot said something to this affect: Not only can you stand on the shoulders of giants as a writer, but you should. In fact, you must.
That's not really very close to what he said, but it's the idea. In this field it's important to understand your background. It's important to understand the greats, and it's important to draw on that greatness and use it to your advantage. I can't name a single person more avid about this than Eliot, who name-dropped Shakespeare tragedies and characters from the Bible like it was going out of style. But he was good, that's the point. It works. As Steinbeck says in East of Eden, "I believe mankind only has one story." And that story is the classic retelling of good vs. evil. So what makes you think you can make up a brand new story, when really all anybody wants is to see conflict and conflict resolution, the clean, hard questions as Steinbeck puts it. The great stories are told, you can't invent them, you have to make them your own. You have to embrace the giants, stand on their shoulders, and make them into something unique.

Note: I might not do a part two of East of Eden if I feel like I've rambled all I can ramble. If the ending is awesome I'll let you know.

College For Free 8: Writing

It's been a while since my last update. Almost three weeks, a record for this blog, and an amount of time I never intended to go without an update. There were a lot of factors in my reluctance to update. I've been pretty busy with different jobs and projects, and the blog sort of takes a back seat to the things in my life that pay or are most centrally important to my existence as I define it. This is sort of an off-handed thing I do, and while I enjoy it, I don't feel compelled to it like I do to other aspects of my life.
Also, I wasn't really sure what to write about. I knew in the beginning I should have parceled out the good subjects I had in mind for the College For Free section, and now, only eight installments in, I'm grasping for things to talk about. Unfortunately, a lot of little things that I thought could make their own entries have already been covered because I discovered that they fit better under the umbrella of a larger idea. So, I might have to change the face of the blog altogether once I run out of stuff to talk about.
Fortunately, it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn't yet talked about a few things that I know a good deal about. Namely, writing, which is what my degree is in and what should probably have been the first thing I discussed on this blog.

For those of you who read my review of America's public school system, it will come as no shock to learn that I was mostly disappointed with my college experience. Well, in some aspects. There is a side of me that wishes it would've been more intensive, more challenging, more worth the money. Of course, there's also a side that would've hated that challenge and may not have been up to it, so who knows what would've happened had that been the case.
Anyways, my disappointment comes mostly from the structure of the program itself. In four years at Western Michigan University, took five writing classes. I took Writing Fiction and Poetry (basically just a simple intro class,) Advanced Fiction (in which we read Annie Proulx and discussed craft minimally,) Advanced Poetry (I'm not a poet, so I got nothing out of this class,) and the top undergrad level Creative Writing Workshop (twice.)
Some of you may be missing the point here, so let me back up real quick. This is what my degree is in. My whole degree. And I took five classes on the actual subject. And WMU is supposed to have a good writing program.
I won't go through and bitch about each of these classes individually, but I will tell you that I can't even make a list of the things I learned from these classes. Maybe the reason it's taken me so long to get around to this particular subject is because, unlike colonization and human evolution and the formation of a star, I can't recall very much actual information when I look back on my writing classes.
Now, to be fair, writing is extremely difficult to teach. The lines of right and wrong in writing, as in any other art, are extremely difficult to see, let alone teach. Everyone brings their own opinions to the table, so when you assemble a group of writers your bound to see people butting heads and disagreeing with each other over what is acceptable and what isn't. There are no fundamental truths of writing. As a young man, Kurt Vonnegut taught fiction, and as the teacher he would pass around a list of 14 rules for writing at the beginning of each semester. These were rules that Vonnegut believed were fundamental to the craft. Yet, when discussing them, Vonnegut admits that he himself has broken a few of these rules, and that many of his favorite writers continuously break all of them.
Because there are no fundamental truths, it seems to me that most of my writing teachers stayed away from strict lecture and left the class to discussion, in which disagreements often ended with the two opposing parties agreeing to disagree. While this is useful to some extent, a bunch of kids waxing intellectual about shit they would love to understand but kind of don't is just about the most infuriating thing in the world to me. When I know that there's someone in the room who knows an awful lot about writing but isn't saying so because it may not be an absolute "truth," I can't stand it. Writing teachers, while incapable of being correct by definition, should stand their ground when it comes to lecture and pass along the truths that they have come to believe in and live by. If a student doesn't like it, that's fine. I've always found that the English language is better when the rules are broken, but in order to break the rules you have to understand them. The more rules you understand, the more you can break.

So, unfortunately, I can't set about listing a great deal of things that I learned about writing in college. But, now you know what it's like to pass easily through an underdeveloped writing program, and College For Free is all about giving you the full experience.
Here are some things that I did learn about writing while in college. I learned a lot, but I don't know how much from class. I hear pretty often that the best way to become a writer is to read, or that writers are readers who occasionally write, and things of that nature. Well, I've found it to be mostly true. If you want to write, I think the best way to do it is to read a lot, pay attention to what works for you as a reader, and replicate it in your writing. As a young writer, it also helps to be dating Lindsay Holbrook. I certainly learned more from her than I did from any classrooms.
Take these tips or leave them, because they're probably wrong anyways.
Subtlety
I think it's a really natural impulse to make everything over the top when it comes to fiction. At the end of 90% of all undergrad short fiction, there is a death. It used to be a joke that the story wasn't over until someone was dead or married. The alternative to that ending, which became popular at the last half of the twentieth century, is the epiphany ending. What I've found in writing is that, while these things are interesting topics, they're not always the best. One example of subtle writing that I particularly like is an ending called a "false epiphany," in which the narrator is creating his own meaning out of the circumstances of the story, while it's clear to the reader that this epiphany is incorrect. This is like the ending of Native Son. Also, while death is an interesting topic, I find it's actually less interesting to focus on the gory details of the death itself. That's what horror movies are for. The real intrigue for me comes in the contemplation, speculation, and more complex emotions and reactions that follow death.
Cliches
Cliches, as concepts and as phrases, are always a bad idea. Cliches are boring, tired, and lazy in a writer. Don't do it. Don't ever do it. Using cliche phrases to describe your characters and get your reader through your story will suck all the genuine goodness out of your writing. Real writers stand above the rest because they don't have to be cliche, they find ways around old words and find new ways to express familiar ideas. So, if you wouldn't ever want to describe a character as having a face "only a mother could love." We've all heard it a million times, and while your reader may not exactly yawn over this quick little phrase, it's certainly not going to grab their attention. In fiction, every word has to be custom. Every sentence has to drip with originality, your originality, because if your voice and wit and full concentration aren't coming through on every page, then why would anyone bother to read your work?
Dedication
I once heard an author say that writer's block doesn't actually exist, it's actually just a form of not trying. I have found that to be absolutely true. The story doesn't just come to you, it doesn't just flow out of you like you're Stephen King in The Dark Tower Series. You have to work for it, you have to think about it all the time and roll it around in your mind. Most importantly, you have to write.
Just as great ideas can seem impossible to set down on paper, a mind with no ideas to be found inside will let greatness leak out onto the page every now and then if you just keep your fingers moving on the keyboard. As any writer will tell you, sometimes it takes six pages to get one good page, or just one good idea, but when you have it you have it and you can expand on it.
Revision
Because of this, a lot of things you write are going to have to be thrown out. I've always found that a full re-write is always best. Certainly it's less tedious than going through the original line by line and deciding what to cut and what to keep. I like to keep the original copy next to me and start with a fresh Word document when I do revisions. Also, I've found that it's important not to get attached to every line, every scene, or even every character. Sometimes whole sections of your work need to go, and if it's for the better of the story overall, that's what has to happen. Don't get hung up on losing the pieces that don't quite fit. You can always use them later.
Greatness
I find it extremely useful to compare myself to greatness with incredible harshness. A little daunting at first, but how else are you ever going to get better? As I said earlier, if you read a lot and keep in mind the techniques that you like, you'll be a better writer. One thing I've always noticed is that, because so much of the story exists within the writer's head, it's almost impossible for a writer to know if the story is doing what he wants it to do. I've found that stealing techniques of particular effectiveness from other writers is a great way to ensure that you are getting your point across even when it might feel that it isn't working. Also, reading fiction of Pulitzer Prize standard (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) or classic works of fiction (East of Eden) will help you understand that you can never be as good as these authors, and will thusly make you try harder. At least, it's always worked for me.

That's all I've got right off the top of my head. That seems to about cover it. Really, writing is just all about writing. Just like everything else in the world, you have to do it a lot to get good at it. I think that may be the most important thing I learned about writing while in college. If you want to be a writer, you've got to write.

News and Human Rights 7: Honduras Constitutional Crisis

I'm not sure any editorializing is really necessary in this story, so all the moralizing and big picture messages I usually paste all over these articles will probably be absent from this one. This is all pretty cut and dry stuff, and mostly I think it's useful because I get to jump on my high horse and tell you that there are things going on in Honduras and that Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift is not what you should be paying attention to when you consider current events.
I think that maybe I should name my high horse. What do you think a good name would be for a horse that you use to jump on and get real preachy and bleeding heart liberal about everything? Maybe Kanye West.
Yeah, it's gonna be Kanye West.
Alright, so Honduras.
Not the most politically stable place, historically. That kind of goes without saying, since Central America in general has been pretty rocky since, like, 1500. Mostly this has to do with white people coming across the ocean (as do so very many of our world's current political problems) and within the last thirty years or so, America has done its fair share of damage down there, as was discussed in the Chomsky blog. If you didn't read the Chomsky blog, just suffice it to say that America looks out for America's interests, not for the interests of brown people in foreign countries. So if it's a choice between a democratic socialist government that's already in place and working perfectly fine or a military coup that will ensure staggering human rights violations and the destruction of democracy itself, America won't get caught up in moral baggage. It will choose the financially sound decision, and coups are good for business. At least that has been my impression of the region's history, correct me if I'm wrong.
I would like to stress at this point that the most recent political upheaval in Honduras was not US backed, thankfully. Obama commented that the coup was illegal and that it would set a dangerous precedent in the world if we were to revert back to a time when coups were the standard for political transformation. As usual I both agree and hope he means what he says.
Here's the story about the Honduran Constitutional Crisis of 2009:
Honduras, by nature, is slightly suspicious of dictators. They haven't had a real good relationship with them in the past and they just don't want anything to do with them anymore. For this reason the presidential term in Honduras, according to the constitution, is only one term and only four years. I'm not a political science major so I can't say with any knowledge whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. But that's the whole trick to government, everybody thinks everyone else is doing it wrong. Here's a good joke I know in that same vein:
Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.

Anyways, Manuel Zemalya is the current president of Honduras, and earlier this year he called for a preliminary poll to be held on June 28 to see if the people of Honduras would be interested in adding a fourth ballot to the general elections that are scheduled to be held in November. What he said, exactly, is this: "Are you in accord that in the general elections of November 2009 there be included a fourth ballot in which the people decide whether to convoke a National Constituent Assembly?" What he means by "National Constituent Assembly," is that there would be an opportunity to revise and rework the nation's constitution.
Remember what I said about Hondurans being suspicious of dictators? Well, this suspicion led many to believe that Zemalya was basically trying to sneak into the constitution before the end of his term and extend the length of his presidency. According to the German newspaper Die Welt, "Opponents of Zemalya believe he was pushing the limits of democracy with his drive to extend the single four-year term of presidents to allow re-election."
See, I wouldn't call that pushing the limits of democracy. First of all, Zemalya and many others have observed that it would be impossible for Zemalya to run for re-election because the re-election is to be held on the same day as the ballot for the Constituent Assembly. Any political effects that the constitutional revision would allow for would come into play after Zemalya was technically out of office.
What I do think is pushing the limits of democracy is for the military to organize a couple hundred soldiers, storm the presidential palace, put a gun to the head of a democratically elected president, and deport him to El Salvador simply because he suggested an opinion poll in order to find out who would like to take another look at the constitution. Either pushing the limits of democracy, or, as Obama put it, committing a crime. And that is exactly what happened in Honduras on June 28, the day the opinion poll was to be taken.

Since the military has seized control of Honduras, police and military brutality is unsurprisingly on the rise. Amnesty International has reported hundreds of instances of students and civilians being brutalized by the police, beaten with batons while in the midst of peaceful marches and protests. Women have been especially vulnerable to these attacks and women as old as 59 years old have been beaten with batons during peaceful resistance. Many have been detained but released without charges. Curfews and check points have also been put into affect and are largely arbitrary, it would seem. To me, these look like great way to control for the sake of control.
As I read about these things, I can't help imagine how badly it would suck to live in a place where one morning you might wake up and your entire life has been flipped upside down because of a military coup. I don't think any of us can really understand what that would be like.
"Shit, did you hear? This morning Obama got marched out of the White House with a gun to his head and they sent him to Canada. Now the military's in charge, there's check points all over the roads, and everybody who thinks that this isn't such a good idea is getting their asses handed to them with the business end of a baton."
Sounds like a science fiction movie, but it's reality for millions and millions of people all over the world.
Oops, there's that moralizing stuff again. Sorry about that.

As of today, Zemalya is claiming to be back in Honduras while the government and a UN spokeswoman assure the rest of the world that this is not the case. The US has a lot of stuff going on right now, it's true, but our government needs to put more pressure on the Honduran military to allow its rightfully elected president to return to office for the remainder of his term, and to let democracy continue from there on out. For now, the situations goes unresolved.

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian and Einstein's Dreams

While these books don't have much to do with each other, they are sort of similar in their bizarreness, their shortness, and their short chapters. Also, I read both of them in the same week, so I would feel like I was cheating if I spaced them out for two separate entries.

First, I think I should digress and talk a little about how I came to have these books in the first place. As you may or may not have heard, a few weeks ago my girlfriend Lindsay and I were on our way to New York City for the end-of-summer-road-trip of a lifetime. First to NYC, where we were to stay overnight in Time's Square and see the nightlife, then on to Atlantic City and the ocean, followed by Philadelphia, and finally to Washington D.C. Instead, we ended up stranded on the Ohio turnpike when a piston misfired through the motor of Lindsay's Saturn, leaving a softball-sized hole in its wake. We found ourselves in downtown Sandusky where the hotels are overpriced, the recommended dining is The Weenie Hut (we ate their twice) and by the grace of god there happens to be a Borders. After a wrecked car and a trashed plan to see the East Coast, I wasn't in the mood for the likes of David Foster Wallace (author of Infinite Jest, over 1,000 pages long.) I wanted something short, something easy to read and easy to get a lot of good stuff out of in a short period of time. While it's usually hard to find even one book like this, I managed to find two.

God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian is really classic Vonnegut. By this I mean the tone is perfect, the chapters are short, every page is brilliant and nothing happens the way you expect it to. This 76 page book is a collection of radio broadcasts that Vonnegut did in Texas some years back, claiming to be in the company of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Kevorkian, while in a state-of-the-art maximum security prison in Texas, supposedly induced a number of near-death experiences for Vonnegut, at which time Vonnegut was able to go up to Heaven (just outside the pearly gates, as entering would mean his actual death) and interview whoever happened to be around that day.
What's best about this book is not the interviews themselves, for, in typically Vonnegut fashion, very little attention is paid to what the book is actually supposed to be about. Instead the reader gets a lot of Vonnegut's musings on death, for instance, that there is no hell. In this book, Adolf Hitler is shown to be strolling around outside the gates, and he confides in Vonnegut that he wishes some likeness of himself would be erected (I think) in the UN headquarters in New York with a German engraving that would be the equivalent to "Excuse me," or "Beg Your Pardon," in English.
We also find out that angels are the souls of babies who have died and whose souls are raised in heaven. In this book, as always, I enjoyed Vonnegut's undying optimism and humanism. Everyone goes to heaven, how nice is that? Vonnegut's epitaph is at its most appropriate in this book: "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman was second on my reading list, and it too was filled with three-page chapters and a lot of interesting stuff. This book is all about mis-imagining, or maybe re-imagining, time. The book is supposed to take place in the dreams of Albert Einstein while, in his mid-twenties, he was working in a patent office in Germany and at the same time coming up with his theory of relativity. The dreams in question take up about 90% of the book, and each one is an exploration of the daily lives of parallel universes (it would seem) where time exists completely differently from the way we experience it. In one reality time is a loop and all actions are repeated over and over again into infinity. In another it has been discovered that time moves slower for people further from the earth, so all houses are built on stilts up in the mountains. Likewise, another dream shows all buildings on wheels because it has been discovered that time move slower for people in motion. In one dream, time is not a reality, time is a sense like sight or taste. However, some people are born with a type of time-blindness and are out of the flow of time altogether.
What was most interesting for me about this book is that you begin with kind of easy observations about differences in time (that time might be a loop) and end with increasingly personalized and complex imaginings of time. Time becomes more and more relative to the people experiencing it as the books goes on, which while not the exact meaning of relativity, is genius nonetheless.

These are both books you can read in an afternoon and they are jam-packed with interesting ideas. They are good for the same reason poetry is good. Sometimes it's nice to swim in a sea of language, characters, plot and metaphors for hundreds of pages. But sometimes it's nice to read a book cover to cover in one sitting and soak it in as a whole right then and there. I like the idea that a couple of hours can alter your perception of the world around you if you've got a good enough book in your hands.

College For Free 7: The United States School System

This blog is about due for a rant, and this is as good a topic as any. In fact, this may be the best topic.

Since the time we are entered into the system, we're told that next year things will get harder. School may not be that serious right now, but next year it will be harder. In second grade I was told I had to learn cursive because next year I wouldn't be allowed to turn in anything written in print. In third grade we were told we couldn't talk during the tests because if we did that sort of stuff next year our teacher would simply take it away and rip it up. Sure, slacking off in middle school seems fun, but once you get to high school it's a no nonsense, all business, fucking bloodbath of discipline and homework. Alright, so high school's not that hard, but college is no laughing matter. You at least have to pretend to try in college. I mean, it's college for God's sake. It must be hard, right?
Truth: School never gets harder.

I once saw an episode of Doug in which Skeeter told our hero that once they got to middle school, everything would change for worse. Specifically, I remember a theory about the tests being so hard that they wouldn't even have questions written on them. The students would be expected to write their answers unprompted on a blank piece of paper and, ultimately, fail. But of course, when they actually arrived and began their classes, they found that it wasn't so bad after all, nor was it very different from elementary school, and everyone went about their business as usual.
This is an absolutely perfect description of my experience in the public school system.

I think the fatal flaw in our school system is the same fatal flaw that exists everywhere else: Money. When you turn such a fundamental system as education (or health care for that matter, but I'll get to that some other time) into a business, it is doomed for failure. This is a long-standing problem, but No Child Left Behind really wrecked shit, let me tell you. The crime of No Child Left Behind is that it relies on standardized testing, which has very little to do with actual intelligence. Intelligence is better measured through creativity and inquisitiveness, not the ability to blindly memorize facts for the duration of an hour-long test.
Here's the ugly truth of the matter: some kids need to be left behind. Not left behind in the big picture, I mean left behind a grade. If a student isn't performing up to par with the rest of his peer group, if he isn't grasping basic concepts, if he hasn't shown mastery of the subjects needed to complete that level of education, he should be: a) shown special attention if these short-comings are not his fault or b) be held back if it is the student's unwillingness to learn that is slowing his progress. It seems to me that a vicious snow-balling phenomenon begins very early on in the education process, a phenomenon among teachers called "Not My Problem."
I'm not sure when this process starts, at what grade level a child shows up ill-equipped to deal with the most rudimentary tasks of education and the teacher simply shrugs it off, but I know it happens. Students that aren't performing at an acceptable level are pushed through the system with C's and D's, failing to comprehend the value of education and, in fact, feeling alienated from subject matter that they should have been helped with instead of scraping by in. Scraping by is not really acceptable anywhere, ever, so why is it acceptable when building the foundations of an educated society? I really, really wish I knew.
This is how we end up with a generation of people who do not understand the very most basic things about the English language, even when it is the only language they know how to read, write and speak. This is how we end with a generation of people who can't do multiplication in their heads and who don't have any awareness of the true nature of the world. The system dictates that the students must perform well in order for the school to receive funding. But the students aren't doing well, because all the teachers know that it is far too late to sit down with a high school student and explain the difference between "to," "too," and "two." So what do these teachers and school systems do? They lower the standards until the bare-minimum becomes acceptable work.

Let me say something that sounds like bragging but is actually regret: I did very well in school. I have never failed a class in my life. I was the English Laureate of my high school. I graduated college in 4 years with Magna Cum Laude honors and a 3.7 GPA. And, to be honest, I have never tried very hard at school. In fact, for the most part, I didn't try at all. The quality of basic public education has become so sub-par that a college essay written with fantastic grammar, spelling and vocabulary will receive an A every time REGARDLESS of content.

Why is this in the College For Free section? Because this is something that I've always known but didn't start to depress me until I came to college. In elementary school I thought middle school would be hard, and it wasn't. The same went for my transition for high school. In college, I really thought that the lie would be real this time, that I would be challenged, that I would be pushed, that the classes would be hard and my classmates would be smart and the material would be worth getting out of bed for. Sadly, that was not the case. As I sat in lecture halls surrounded by disinterested students checking their facebooks and playing games online, I realized that college is actually just high school part 2. A college degree has become so expected in our country that the standards have necessarily been lowered to greet all those high school graduates who, from day one, have been pushed through the system while teachers stood back and said "not my problem."

My conspiracy theorist side says that this all makes perfect sense, because it's really easy to govern a population that is more interested in celebrity gossip than the tyrannical abuse of power exhibited across the globe by their own country. It's very easy to control a group of people who can't even spell the word "government." When you don't teach empathy or world history or colonization as part of the K-12 agenda, it takes no effort at all to convince an entire nation of people that Muslims (all of them) hate our freedom. Man, the only thing that would make people easier to control would be to make them poor. You can't very well question the government when you're trying to feed your family and keep your house. You just don't have time.
But that's ridiculous, right?
I don't know. Nothing is certain, ever. It's turtles all the way down, didn't you know that?