.....In the aftermath of the last presidential election, Rebel Girl spent an inordinate amount of time staying up late, listening to the songs of the Spanish Civil war (Freiheit!), and sipping Greek Metaxa (five stars!)......It seemed to help.
.....This year, she's getting started early and has vowed healthier habits.
.....If you too feel the looming doom, she suggests brewing large mugs of Redbush Chai tea (resist the sweetener!) and reading George Orwell. He always helps.
.....Today's reading is from his essay "The Lion and the Unicorn," published in 1941. An excerpt (bolded phrases are Reb's, of course):
"Almost entirely we are governed by the rich, and by people who step into positions of command by right of birth. Few if any of these people are consciously treacherous, some of them are not even fools, but as a class they are quite incapable of leading us to victory. They could not do it, even if their material interests did not constantly trip them up. As I pointed out earlier, they have been artificially stupefied. Quite apart from anything else, the rule of money sees to it that we shall be governed largely by the old - that is, by people utterly unable to grasp what age they are living in or what enemy they are fighting. Nothing was more desolating at the beginning of this war [WW II] than the way in which the whole of the older generation conspired to pretend that it was the war of 1914-18 over again. All the old duds were back on the job, twenty years older, with the skull plainer in their faces… It was like a tea-party of ghosts. And that state of affairs has barely altered. The shock of disaster brought a few able men like Bevin to the front, but in general we are still commanded by people who managed to live through the years 1931-9 without even discovering that Hitler was dangerous. A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses."
