research & development

I still find it difficult to put my observations into words. I feel I could have received a better education. My intellect could be so much keener, but instead I'm stuck with this rattling, hissing contraption.

Putting Invitation to a Beheading aside for the time being. Reading Conscience of a Conservative by Goldwater as research for the novel I'm taking notes on. It's 50 years old; today's conservative would call Goldwater a liberal. The man supported unions! He did make the point that participation in and support of a union should be voluntary, and that large unions should be busted up by the government just as it had busted corporate and industrial monopolies 80 years previously.

Are these notions that should make a liberal Democrat seethe? I've heard much denigration of "right-to-work" laws from the left, but subjugation of the worker by a faceless union discomfits me as much as such treatment by a corporation. It doesn't seem illogical that a union can be just as easily corrupted as a corporation, and it makes as little sense to allow a union with mandatory participation to force a fee which goes toward political contributions and campaigns if we also feel that corporations have no business influencing our governments' laws.

I was waiting for Goldwater to draw a false equivalency between mandatory union fees and governmental taxation, but he does not do so -- explicitly, anyway.

It's all so tiresome. It is good that federal government has established a welfare state, because there are days, weeks, months when I want the world to rot. Surely I'm not the only one who experiences these despondencies, and wouldn't be a horror if indigents relied solely on "private charity" -- a euphemism for the whimsy of the wealthy.

I am depressed today, and do not feel like feeding you. I am angry today, and want you to suffer.

What is it like to disregard other humans, utterly without heat? My personal agony, which I share with Raskolnikov, is to countenance the consciencelessness of the psychopath while suffering my own conscience; to envy someone who can do anything while I burn in the knowledge, the feeling, that I must do the right thing and only the right thing -- therefore experiencing none of the pleasure of benevolence and shared humanity and all of the shame of iniquity.