AP Sources:
1918 to the present
H.L. Mencken,
"On Being an American" (1922)
Apparently there
are those who begin to find it [America] disagreeable--nay, impossible. Their
anguish fills the Liberal weeklies, and every ship that puts out from New York
carries a groaning cargo of them, bound for Paris, London, Munich, Rome and way
points--anywhere to escape the great curses and atrocities that make life
intolerable for them at home. Let me say at once that I find little to cavil at
in their basic complaints. In more than one direction, indeed, I probably go a
great deal further than even the Young Intellectuals. It is, for example, one
of my finest and most sacred beliefs, reached after an inquiry extending over a
score of years and supported by incessant prayer and meditation, that the
government of the United States, in both its legislative arm and its executive
arm, is ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and disgusting--and from this judgement
I except no more than twenty living lawmakers and no more than twenty
executioners of their laws. It is a belief no less piously cherished that the
administration of justice in the Republic is stupid, dishonest, and against all
reason and equity--and from this judgement I except no more than thirty judges,
including two upon the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. It is
another that the foreign policy of the United States--its habitual manner of
dealing with other nations, whether friend or foe--is hypocritical,
disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable--and from this judgement I consent to
no exceptions whatever, either recent or long past. And it is my fourth (and,
to avoid too depressing a bill, final) conviction that the American people
taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish,
ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in
Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages, and that they grow more timorous,
more sniveling, more poltroonish, more ignominious every day.
-----------------------
Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933
I am certain that
my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will
address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our
Nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole
truth, frankly and boldly. Nor did we shrink from honestly facing conditions in
our country to-day. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will
revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that
the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning,
unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into
advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and
vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves
which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that
support to leadership in these crucial days.
In such a spirit
on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank
God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have
risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by
serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents
of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side;
farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in
thousands of families are gone.
More important, a
host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally
great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark
realities of the moment.
----------------------
"Stalking
Death with a Camera," in Douglas Botting, The Second Front (June 6, 1944)
"If your
pictures aren't good," Robert Capa often used to say, "you're not
close enough." Certainly Capa got close enough to the action on June 6,
1944. The veteran combat photographer, who had covered the Spanish Civil War
and the World War II campaigns in North Africa and Italy for LIFE, was in the
first wave to head for the Easy Red sector of Omaha Beach.
At 6:31 a.m.,
when Capa left his landing craft with a rifle company of the 16th Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, he knew that he was
risking his life. But he did not have death on his mind. He was thinking
"very much of getting the best pictures of the day." His first
impression was that "my beautiful France looked sordid and
uninviting." The Germans' invasion obstacles had turned the pleasant
shoreline into "the ugliest beach in the whole world." To reach the
sand, he and the riflemen had to traverse some 100 yards of tidal flats in the
face of machine-gun fire. As the bullets "tore holes in the water"
around him, Capa kept shooting pictures furiously. He headed for the protection
of a burned-out amphibious tank and reached it "between floating
bodies." Then as the tide came in, he made it to the beach and threw
himself on the sand.
Now began a
savage mortar bombardment that pinned down the Americans. Capa felt "a new
kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and twisting my face." He
attempted to reload his camera, but could not, his hands were trembling so.
"I did not think and I didn't decide it," he wrote later. He stood up
and ran toward an incoming landing craft. "I knew that I was running away.
I tried to turn, but couldn't face the beach." As he climbed on board, he
felt an explosion. "The skipper was crying. His assistant had been blown
up all over him, and he was a mess." Capa turned and took one more
photograph of the beach. He had made 106 pictures in all.
His three rolls
of film were rushed to LIFE's London office for processing. There a darkroom
technician, eager for glimpses of the landing, dried the film too fast. The
excessive heat melted the emulsion and ruined all but 10 frames.
----------------------
John F. Kennedy,
Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961
Mr. Chief
Justice, President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, President Truman, reverend
clergy, fellow citizens,
we observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of
freedom--symbolizing an end, as well as a beginning--signifying renewal, as
well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn
oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago.
The world is very
different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms
of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary
beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the
belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but
from the hand of God.
We dare not
forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go
forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has
been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by
war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and
unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which
this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at
home and around the world.
Let every nation
know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any
burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to
assure the survival and the success of liberty.
---------------------
Martin Luther
King, Jr., "I Have a Dream" (August 28, 1963)
Five score years
ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, signed the
Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light
of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of
withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of
captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the
Negro is still not free.
One hundred years
later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation
and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a
lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.
One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of
American society and finds himself an exile in his own land….
I have a dream
that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its
creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created
equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons
of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down
together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state
of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and
oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a
dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not
be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I
have a dream today.
I have a dream
that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping
with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a
situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands
with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and
brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall
be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be
made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the
Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope.
This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be
able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we
will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful
symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to
pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for
freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the
day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning,
"My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land
where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside,
let freedom ring." And if America is to be a great nation, this must
become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from
the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the
snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of
California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from
every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let
freedom ring.
When we let
freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from
every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of
God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and
Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the Old Negro
spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at
last!"
---------------------
David Riesman,
"The Suburban Dislocation" (1964)
In the days of
Lincoln Steffens and later, people emphasized the "shame of the
cities," and in the Twenties major novelists emphasized the constraints of
small-town and occasionally of small-suburban life. Today, the comparable
worry… is conformity: writers point to the uniformity of the ranch style,
the everpresent television antennae, the lamp in the picture-window (which
usually provides a view of the nearly treeless street, the cars, and someone
else's picture-window). Observers have been struck by a kind of massification
of men in Levittown and other housing developments such as was once postulated
for the endless residential blocks of the cities created by the industrial
revolution….
Although
upper-class and upper-middle-class people have lived in the suburbs of our
great cities since the 1880s or earlier, the cities before World War II still
retained their hegemony: they engrossed commercial, industrial, and cultural
power. The city represented the division and specialization not only of labor
but of attitude and opinion….The city, that is, provided a "critical
mass" which made possible new combinations--criminal and fantastic ones as
well as stimulating and productive ones. Today, however, with the continual
loss to the suburbs of the elite and the enterprising, the cities remain huge
enough for juveniles to form delinquent subcultures; but will our cities be
able to continue to support cultural and educational activities at a level
appropriate to our abundant economy?…
Where the husband
goes off with the car to work (and often, in the vicious circle created by the
car, there is no other way for him to travel), the wife is frequently either
privatized at home or must herself, to escape isolation, take a job which will
help support her own car, as well as the baby-sitter.
The children
themselves, in fact, before they get access to a car, are captives of their
suburb, save for those families where the housewives surrender continuity in
their own lives to chauffeur their children to lessons, doctors, and other
services which could be reached via public transport in the city. In the
suburban public schools, the young are captives, too, dependent on whatever art
and science and general liveliness their particular school happens to
have….
---------------------
Anonymous
Soldier, from Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Soldiers Who Fought
There (1981)
I was enjoying
the feel. There were a couple of guys saying they didn't enjoy the feel. That
was junk. We had a sense that we was no longer that GI who had to march, who
had to salute. That was shit. We didn't have to salute nobody. We dressed the
way we wanted to dress. If I wanted to wear the boony hat, I wore the boony
hat. If I wanted one sleeve up and one sleeve down, I did it. If I didn't want
to shave, I didn't. Nobody fucked with nobody in the field. An officer knows if
he messed with you in the field, in a fire fight you could shoot him in the
head. This was standard procedure in any infantry unit. Anybody tells you
differently, he's shitting you.
If you mess with
my partner as an NCO [non-commissioned officer] or something like that, in the
unwritten code there, I had the right to blow your brains out. And the guys
would do it. Those lieutenants and the CO didn't mess with nobody in the field.
They didn't say, "Hey soldier, why is your boot unbloused? Why is your
hair long?" Everybody just said fuck it.
I had a sense of
power. A sense of destruction. See, now, in the United States a person is
babied. He's told what to do. You can't carry a gun, unless you want to go to
jail. If you shoot somebody, it's wrong. You're constantly babied till you go
to the grave. The only people's got the authority is the judges or the
Establishment.
But in the Nam
you realized that you had the power to take a life. You had the power to rape a
woman and nobody could say nothing to you. That godlike feeling you had was in
the field. It was like I was a god. I could take a life, I could screw a woman.
I can beat somebody up and get away with it. It was a godlike feeling that a
guy could express in the Nam.
--------------------
Ronald Reagan,
from a campaign speech (August 23, 1984)
The choices this
year are not just between two different personalities or between two political
parties. They're between two different visions of the future, two fundamentally
different ways of governing--their government of pessimism, fear and limits, or
ours of hope, confidence, and growth….
In 1980 the
people decided with us that the economic crisis was not caused by the fact that
they lived too well. Government lived too well….
Our government
was also in serious trouble abroad….
But worst of all,
Americans were losing the confidence and optimism about the future that has
made us unique in the world….
We can all be
proud that pessimism is ended. America is coming back and is more confident
than ever about the future. Tonight, we thank the citizens of the United States
whose faith and unwillingness to give up on themselves or this country saved us
all….
Isn't our choice
really not one of left or right, but of up or down? Down through the welfare
state to statism, to more and more government largesse accompanied always be
more government authority, less individual liberty and, ultimately,
totalitarianism…. The alternative is the dream conceived by our Founding
Fathers, up to the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with an orderly
society….
We came together
in a national crusade to make America great again, and to make a new beginning.
Well, now it's all coming together. With our beloved nation at peace, we're in
the midst of a springtime of hope for America. Greatness lies ahead of us.
--------------------
Kathryn Schultz,
"Global Warming Right Now," Rolling Stone (February 20, 2003)
With the likely
exception of some classified contraptions belonging to the Department of
Defense, the IBM SP at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder,
Colorado, is arguably one of the largest, fastest supercomputers in the world.
Likewise, the program it is running is among the most sophisticated software
ever designed. Together, the hardware and the software do just one thing,
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: evaluate the probable impact of
global climate change on planet Earth.
Some 1,700 miles
from Boulder, the White House maintains that humans still know far too little
about the causes and implications of climate change. In December, President
George W. Bush announced plans to study the issue for five more years before
taking significant action to regulate the emissions that fuel global warming.
This announcement was met with dismay among climate scientists--precisely the
people you would expect to be pleased, given that the news guaranteed them a
few more years of job security.
But those
scientists have reason to be more concerned about global warming than the rest
of us: They know more than we do. One thing they know is that our country is
rapidly heating up. Last year was the second-hottest in recorded history
(closely trailing 1998), and temperatures in the US are expected to rise faster
in the next century than they have in the last ten millennia. In our lifetimes,
Chicago will start to feel a lot like southern Missouri; by 2090, it'll feel
almost like Texas. In straight numbers, that means that by the end of the
century, the United States will be, on average, five to nine degrees Fahrenheit
hotter than it is today. You'll sweat the most if you live in the West or the
Northeast--or, heaven forbid, in Alaska, where temperatures could rise as much
as eighteen degrees by 2100. As the National Assessment (the authoritative
report on climate change in the US) dryly puts it, "These changes will, at
a minimum, increase discomfort."
No kidding. They
will also increase air pollution (because warmer air traps pollutants closer to
the surface of the earth), not just in cities but also in the Catskills, the
Berkshires, and other mountainous regions of the Northeast. There will be more
heat-related illness and death--up to a fivefold increase in New York and other
big cities by 2090. More alarming, although less certain, is the possibility
that warmer weather could lead to the spread of afflictions such as Lyme
disease, as well as other infectious diseases that are rare or little-known in
the US (dengue fever, hantavirus, malaria), a concern that was heightened by
last summer's outbreak of West Nile virus. And then there's the unhappy fate of
winter as we know it: By mid-century, thirty percent of the snowpack in the
Rocky Mountains and fifty percent of the snowpack in the Cascades will be gone.
In addition to
bumming out the snowboarders, the melting snowpack will contribute to rising
sea levels, as will thermal expansion. (Water expands when it gets hotter.) The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--the world's leading authority on the
issue, composed of more than 1,000 prominent climate scientists from around the
world--predicts a one- to three-foot increase in sea level in the next century.
The higher-end estimate would threaten to drown more than 10,000 square miles
of the United States. New Orleans, which has an average elevation of eight feet
below sea level, could become the next Atlantis. Nor would the rest of the
country get off easy. Gulf Islands National Seashore, located off the coasts of
Mississippi and Florida, would be swallowed by rising waters, as would other
barrier islands along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Pacific Ocean beaches would
erode, and low-lying areas such as southern Puget Sound, near Seattle, would be
inundated with seawater.
Even just a
one-foot increase in ocean levels could be potentially catastrophic, because
higher sea levels mean bigger storm surges during extreme weather--and with
global warming, extreme weather will become more frequent. A storm such as the huge
nor'easter that struck New York in 1992 could put JFK Airport under twenty-five
feet of water and flood the Lincoln Tunnel.
Worse, the
combination of rising seas and frequent storms poses a serious threat to
freshwater supplies. Water is fast becoming the nation's most precious
resource; at $1.49 for a nine-ounce bottle of Evian, it's pricier than
gasoline. Climate change will lead to more overall precipitation in the United
States, but that's no guarantee against water shortages. Too much of the precipitation
will fall in the winter, leaving the warmer months more drought-prone than
ever. Too much of it will fall as rain, instead of snow, which melts throughout
the summer to replenish water sources. Too much will evaporate because of
higher temperatures. And too much will come from severe storms, which are
actually bad for the water supply: Heavy rains send chemical runoff from
agriculture, industry, and urban areas into rivers and streams, and floods can
cause sewage systems to overflow and contaminate reservoirs.