Editor's Page
True Tales / The Escape Route by Frank Thomas Smith
Look lieutenant, we’re part of the intelligence
cadre of this operation. We briefed you guys day before yesterday. Weren’t you
there? I mean you can’t interrogate us. Well, you could, but what’s the point?
Besides, it’s late.
The young officer looked at Ted Jung and me with tired eyes. It was late. And what was
the point? he must have been thinking.
He was in uniform, combat fatigues, with a
colt 45 on his belt. Ted and I were in civvies, me covered by a Bogart trench
coat and Ted a green German loden overcoat. Two grunts who could barely keep
their eyes open were sitting on chairs on either side of the room with M1
rifles between their legs.
Okay, he said. I’m putting in the log that
we captured two members of the local underground who confessed after a
relatively short but hard interrogation; they also gave the names of other
collaborators. How’s that sound?
Sounds good, I said...
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Features
Throwing in the Towel - What the Bankruptcy of White House Policy Means for
the Israelis and Palestinians by Sandy Tolan
Washington has finally thrown in the towel on its long,
tortured efforts to establish peace between Israel and the Palestinians. You
won’t find any acknowledgement of this in the official record. Formally, the
U.S. still supports a two-state solution to the conflict. But the Obama
administration’s recent 10-year, $38-billion pledge to renew Israel’s arsenal of weaponry, while still ostensibly pursuing “peace,” makes clear just how bankrupt that policy is. For two decades, Israeli leaders and their neoconservative
backers in this country, hell-bent on building and expanding settlements on
Palestinian land, have worked to undermine America’s stated efforts -- and paid
no price. Now, with that record weapons
package, the U.S. has made it all too clear that they won’t have to. Ever...
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Innocence
by Gaither Stewart
In his novel, The Idiot, Dostoevsky wrote
that beauty can save the world, admitting however that “beauty is difficult
to judge … and is a riddle.” I would humbly add that the writer’s world-saving
beauty must be accompanied by a major measure of innocence, precisely the
innocence of the novel’s hero, Prince Myshkin. The Prince’s physical flaw, his
epilepsy which was also Dostoevsky’s affliction, can be overlooked; in the eyes
of bourgeois society of then and now Myshkin’s deplorable flaw is his
innocence. In his late twenties, the last four years of which he has spent in a
Swiss sanatorium, Myshkin has preserved many of his childhood qualities: he is
naïve, impractical, compassionate and kind, because of which most of the novel’s
adult characters consider him an idiot. In reality, Dostoevsky did not have in
mind the innocence synonymous with naiveté or inexperience, but instead the
innocence of the clean hands of virtue and morality...
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Win, Lose or draw - Special Operations Command Details Dismal U.S. Military Record
by Nick Turse
Winning: it’s written into the
DNA of the U.S.A. After all, what’s more American than
football legend Vince Lombardi’s famous (if purloined) maxim:
“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”? Americans expect to be number one.
First Lady Michelle Obama recently called the
United States the “greatest country on Earth.” (Take
that, world
public opinion, and your choice of Germany!) Democratic
presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went even
further, touting America
as “the greatest country that has ever been created.”
Her rival, Donald Trump, who for political gain badmouths the country
that made him rich and famous, does so in the hope of returning
America to supposedly halcyon days of unparalleled greatness.
He’s predicted that his presidency might lead to an actual
winning overload. “We're going to win so much,”
he told supporters...
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Book Review
Christ Comes to Skopelos - Selected Poetry by Frank Thomas Smith, reviewed by Monique Sanchíz de Mihalitsianos
Christ Comes to Skopelos is a compilation
of some of the poetry Frank Thomas Smith wrote in his
journeys around the world. The book starts with the calling and coming
of the Christ to Skopelos 'several years before his year / Two-thousand'.
This introductory poem serves as the
opening of the book and sets the tone for the following initial poems: A tone
of reflection and observation. But this observation, which is mostly of people,
is far from being morose or melancholic.
Instead, these observations are filled both
with empathy and quiet understanding. It’s almost as if the author himself,
during these opening poems, was gifted with a sort of encompassing feeling for
humankind… reminiscent of the Love, I suppose, the Christ feels for us, for all
of humanity... Continue reading
Fiction
The Stranger by J. D. Salinger
The maid at the apartment door was young and snippy and she had a part-time look
about her. "Who'd ya wanna see?" she asked the young man
hostilely.
The young man said, "Mrs. Polk." He
had told her four times over the
squawky house phone whom he wanted to
see.
He should have come on a day when there wouldn't be any idiots to answer the house
phones and doors. He should have come
on a day when he didn't feel like
gouging his eyes out, to rid himself
of hay fever. He should have come - he shouldn't have come at all.
He should have taken his sister Mattie straight to her beloved, greasy chop
suey joint, then straight to a matinee,
then straight to the train - without stopping once to take out his messy emotions,
without forcing them on strangers.
Hey! Maybe it wasn't to laugh like a
moron, lie and leave...
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My Other me by Frank Thomas Smith
Vienna:
it was my last meeting before mandatory retirement, something I
myself had mandated. I had noticed that old people never want to
let go; my father and his father were like that. My grandfather was
still haunting the Board meetings at ninety. My father merely held
onto the company's reins until 75, when I took over. Rationally I
knew that I would also some day reach the age of mandatory
retirement, but 65 seems as remote to thirty-year-olds as thirty does
to teenagers. General Meetings are still always held in romantic foreign places.
Considering that our head office and main manufacturing units are in
Milwaukee, almost anywhere fits the description. This has the dual
advantage of keeping everyone in a good mood and limiting the
number of stockholders attending. I arrived a day early, wishing to
renew my acquaintance with Vienna, a city very rich in history and
beauty and blood and which never changes, at least outwardly...
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Anthroposophy
La casi olvidada idea de la sociedad trimembre
por Frank Thomas Smith
El impulso
para fundar la primera Escuela Waldorf en Alemania en el año 1919 surgió de la
iniciativa de un empresario, colaborador de Rudolf Steiner, que quiso poner en
práctica el concepto principal de la "sociedad trimembre": la
libertad del sector cultural de la sociedad. No por nada fue denominada
"Escuela Libre Waldorf". La palabra Waldorf proviene del nombre de la
fábrica de cigarrillos de la cual era director el mencionado empresario. La
intención original fue crear una escuela para los hijos de los obreros de la
fábrica, aplicando las ideas pedagógicas de Steiner. A partir de esa
primera escuela, comenzó a desarrollarse la educación Waldorf y se fundaron
otras escuelas no sólo en Alemania sino también en Inglaterra, Holanda,
Escandinavia, Suiza y Estados Unidos. Este desarrollo se vio interrumpido en
Europa en la época del Tercer Reich, cuando las escuelas Waldorf fueron
clausuradas por los nazis... Continuar
William Shakespeare by Rudolf Steiner
According to a remark by the famous writer Georg Brandes, we should include Shakespeare in the German classics. And if we
consider the enormous influence Shakespeare has had on Goethe, schiller and the
development of German literature in general since he was rediscovered in the
middle of the eighteenth century, especially through Lessing, we must agree
with that remark – especially in view of the excellent translations of his work
by
Schlegel and Tieck.
A legend has arisen about Shakespeare
and whole libraries have been written about each of his works. Academics have
given many interpretations of his plays, and finally a number of writers have
decided that an uneducated actor could not have produced all the thoughts which
they discovered in Shakespeare's works, and they became addicted to the
hypothesis that not William Shakespeare, the actor of the Globe Theatre, could
have written the plays which bear his name, but some other highly learned man,
for example Lord Francis Bacon of Verulam...
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Reincarnation and Karma - Lecture Three by Rudolf Steiner
When we observe how life takes its course around us,
how it throws its waves into our inner life, into everything we are destined
to feel, to suffer or to delight in during our present existence on the
earth, we can think of several groups or kinds of experiences. As regards our own faculties and
talents, we find, to begin with, that when we succeed in something or other,
we may say: being what we are, it is quite natural and understandable that we
should succeed in this or that case. But certain failures, perhaps just those
that must be called misfortune and calamity, may also become intelligible
when viewed in the whole setting of our nature.
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"Apologia" concerning the publication of the the First Class Lessons: Apologia
Karmic Relations, Volume IV, Lecture 3 by Rudolf Steiner
We
understand only the very smallest part
of human history and of our own life if we consider it in its
external aspect, I mean in that aspect which we see from the
limited viewpoint of our earthly life between birth and death. It
is impossible to comprehend the inner motives of history and life
unless we turn our gaze to that spiritual background which
underlies the outer, physical happenings. People do indeed
describe as history the events that take place in the physical
world, and they often say that this history represents causes and
effects. Thus they will approach the events of the second decade
of the 20th century, describing them as the effects of events in
the first decade and so forth. Yet how is so great an illusion
possible? It is as though we saw a running stream of water
throwing waves up on to the surface and tried to explain each
successive wave as the result of the preceding one, whereas the
forces bringing forth the waves are really penetrating upwards
from below...
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First Class Lessons - Volume Four - First Lesson in Prague
By Rudolf Steiner
Since
the Anthroposophical Society has been re-founded in a new form during
the Christmas Conference, what had been given in the old
Anthroposophical Society as esoteric instruction in various groups
shall now stream into the School for Spiritual Science, which shall
be a kind of center for the whole anthroposophical movement within
the Anthroposophical Society. Naturally, according to the nature of
its activities, this School will be centered at the Goetheanum in
Dornach; and there we will strive more and more and will finally
achieve the form which is sought: that it be expanded to reach all
the friends who belong to the anthroposophical movement the world
over who cannot come to Dornach. And what I will tell you today in
this lesson and in the next esoteric class, my dear friends, will be
spoken within this School for Spiritual Science. Continue reading
Poetry
Desolation Row by Bob Dylan
They’re selling postcards of the hanging
They’re painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They’ve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they’re restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row...
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Jardines Lejanos/Distant Gardens by Juan Ramón Jiménez
...He visto en el agua honda ...I have seen in the fountain's
de la fuente, una mujer deep water, a woman
desnuda... He visto en la fronda naked...I have seen in the frond
otra mujer... Quise ver another woman...I wanted to see
cómo estaban los rosales how the rose bushes looked
a la lumbre de la luna, in the splendor of the moon
y encontré rosas carnales. and found carnal roses.
Quise ver el lago, y una I wanted to see the lake, and a
mujer huyó hacia la umbría. woman fled toward the shadows.
Continue reading.
Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Millay
All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I stated from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
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You can find us under the
Southern Cross in the Traslasierra Valley, Province of Córdoba, Argentina. Visitors always welcome. Just follow the sign that reads: La Cruz del Sur.
Frank Thomas Smith, Editor
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