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July 05, 2007

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Evanston fourth of July parade:

http://www.evanston4th.org/

best damned parade in the country.

check out the gallery of pics from previous years.

If I'd known you were there, Katherine, I would have waved as we went by.

Ut parva componere magnis:

little things like annual parades happen because a lot of people get off their butts and put a lot of time into it. And if people don't make the effort, then it doesn't happen.

Thanks, Katherine, for urging all of us to get up off our butts and make this country happen.

Thanks, Katherine.

Thanks. I'm a fan of Stoppard, but haven't read that play yet. Your own thoughts are lovely.

It's really important to me that all my high rhetoric not overshadow the importance of my links to the Bolivian dancing & the Unfogged personal ads. (Here is one of my contributions to the latter, but a lot of others are far more impressive.)

I like that a lot, Katherine, as is unsurprising for someone who owes as much debt to Stoppard as I do. (Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth remains a lynchpin in how I think about totalitarian life.) That particular combination of hope and joy and grief and awareness is good for me anytime, but particularly right now. Thanks.

Herzen's statement that

The submission of the individual to society, to the people, to humanity, to the Idea, is a merely a continuation of human sacrifice, of the immolation of the lamb to pacify God, of the crucifixion of the innocent for the sake of the guilty…
is, I think, something I needed to read right now: I get tied up frequently in morbid speculations about the possibility that I need to make myself miserable for the greater good (usually from some elaborate utilitarian argument or assumption of collective guilt), never mind that the speculations don't actually do any good.

But it's gotten to the point that I start to become afraid of believing or saying such things about the importance of the individual, for fear of becoming a useful idiot again for imperial aggression against oppressive regimes, or for some sort of right-libertarian, I've-got-mine-Jack callousness. The state of things is that corrosive.

Thought I recognized the words in the title. Very nice post, thanks.

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