American Return: “Americans said they want a nation. And not just any nation—the one we’ve always had. The metanoic model for transformation—embodied by Obama’s ‘fundamental transformation’—was unmistakably relegated to the dustbin of history.”
Building Freedom Cities: “Some potential locations for a Freedom City might include Presidio National Park, Lowry Range in Colorado, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Presidio is a two-acre national park, formerly a Navy base, in San Francisco at the Golden Gate Bridge. Lowry Range is a 100-square-mile (though some land has been sold off) former Air Force base located 20 miles southeast of Denver. Guantanamo Bay is a 45-square-mile American Naval base in Cuba.”
Circling the Drain: “The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain was shit; shit beyond language, shit beyond imagination. I remembered a chocolate fountain I had seen in a shopping mall in Istanbul: that was better than this. There had been a contest, there had been designs, and the winning design was a circular drain. This did not even rise to the level of kitsch; it was simply drab, like a discount supermarket car park on a Wednesday afternoon at 3:47pm, or a shopping trolley sinking into the mud of a northern canal, or a battered pigeon pecking at an empty crisp packet. Only it was much drabber than all that. I was accustomed to the feebleness of the British state, but this, this was a new, transcendent level of failure, an unforced humiliation, an immense haplessness. I had tumbled into the heart of a collapsed star.”
Greenland: “The United States, once seemingly condemned to grey decline, now suddenly throws off miasma and elects a hurricane in human form of titanic energy and charisma, and bullets glance off his skin, a feat the Boxers thought only the highest Taoist rites could accomplish. The dam is undone, we, who were once dreaming youth, stream forth, to wash away the festering cities and inundate the settled plain.”
Thanksgiving During a Revolution: “…C. S. Lewis: ‘The little knots of friends who turn their backs on the World are those who really transform it.'”