Truck

Richard Freeman's

WIP- the History of the World in Alphabetical Order... 

Rianca@aol.com

History W

Wabbly

            Low, barbarous word (Dr. Johnson) … wobble.

            “People who respect nothing dread fear. It is upon fear therefore that I have built up my organization. Those who will work with me are afraid of nothing. Those who work for me are kept faithful, not so much because of their pay as because they know what might be done if they broke faith.

            “The United States government shakes a very wabbly stick at the lawbreaker, and tells him he’ll go to prison if he beats the law. Lawbreakers laugh and get good lawyers. A few of the less well-to-do take the rap. But the public generally isn’t any more afraid of a government prison sentence than I am of Pat Roche. Things people know about amuse them. They like to laugh over them and make jokes. When a speakeasy is raided, there are a few hysterical people, but the general mass are light-hearted. On the other hand, do you know of any of your friends who’d go into fits of merriment if they feared being taken for a ride?”

            Al Capone  Interviewed by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.  Liberty Magazine

            Pat Roche was the chief investigator for the state’s attorney of Illinois.

Wackiest

            ? – Slang.

            Welcome to Liberia, scene of one of the wackiest, and most ruthless, of Africa’s uncivil wars. It’s a war with a general named Mosquito, a war where the soldiers got high on dope and paint their fingernails bright red before heading off to battle. It’s a war where combatants sometimes don women’s wigs, panty hose, even Donald Duck Halloween masks before committing some of the world’s most unspeakable atrocities against their enemies. It’s the only war that hosts a unit of soldiers whop strip off their clothes before going into battle and calls itself “the Butt Naked Brigade.” It’s a war where young child soldiers carry teddy bars and plastic baby dolls in one hand and AK-47s in the other. It’s a war where soldiers smear their faces with make up and mud in the belief that “juju,” West African magic, will protect them from the enemy’s bullets.

            Keith B. Richburg  Out Of America

            These fellows aren’t scared of Pat Roach or Al Capone.

Wafers

            O. N. F., Late L., Du. – Waffle, goffer, gopher.

            In a Feminist college course, our teacher asked if we had experienced arousing rape fantasies. One girl tearfully raised her hand and said this was true for her. My heart started beating so fast it was all I could do to stay put. I was just as ashamed as she of these fantasies, but I would never have admitted them. Our professor was actually quite kind to her, if misinformed. She comforted the girl by saying that, as women, we had been brainwashed by the patriarchy to eroticize our subordination to men. She said those fantasies were very common, which is true, and that we could “overcome” them by exposing our fantasies to feminist analysis and by our increasing self-esteem.

            She was dead wrong. In fact I knew she was wrong later that night. Despite my assertive self-confidence, rock-hard feminist analysis and weekly shift at the rape crisis hotline, I could still crawl into bed and successfully masturbate to those same disturbing fantasies that had aroused me since I was a child. Feminism and self-esteem  had no more effect on my erotic hot spots than the communion wafers I used to take every Sunday, hoping they would wash away the devil’s seed inside me. Clearly, religion and linear politics were useless in explaining the unconscious and subversive quality of eroticism.

            Susie Bright  Sexual Reality

Wags

            Swedish, Old Norse – Waggle.

            “So you too are a lunatic about books, with a head that wags from too much reading?”

            “That’s right. I don’t think I could exist without books. To me, they’re the whole world.”

            Kafka’s eyebrows narrowed.

            “That’s a mistake. A book cannot take the place of the world. That is impossible. In life, everything has its own meaning and its own purpose, for which there cannot be any permanent substitute. A man can’t, for instance, master his own experience through the medium of another personality. That is how the world is in relation to books. One tries to imprison life in a book, like a songbird in a cage, but it’s no god. On the contrary! Out of the abstractions one finds in books, one can only construct systems that are cages for oneself. Philosophers are only brightly clad Papagenos with their own different cages.”

            Gustav Janouch  Conversations With Kafka

            Considering the philosophical system of this book, I appear to be living in an invisible cage… but then who would ever want to cage a magpie?

Wage

            Old North French, Goth -  To wed… wages of sin and wage war.

            The accumulation of wealth in the hands of a minority is, no doubt, a universal and apparently unfailing concomitant of civilization. Japanese employers believe that the wages which they pay are not too low in relation to the comparative inefficiency  of Japanese labor, and the low cost of living in Japan. Low wages, thinks Japan, are necessary for low costs; low costs are necessary for the capture of foreign markets, foreign markets are necessary for an industry dependent upon imported fuels and minerals; industry is necessary for the support of a growing population in islands only 12% of whose soil permits cultivation; and industry is necessary to the wealth and armament without which Japan could not defend herself against the rapacious West.

            Will  Durant  Story Of Civilization Vol. 1

Wagon

            Du.

            We were sprinkling disinfectant my the mortuary, when the dead wagon drove up and five bodies were packed into it. The conversation turned to the “white potion” and “black jack,” and I found they were all agreed that the poor person, man or woman, who in the infirmary gave too much trouble or was in a bad way, was “polished off.” That is to say, the incurables and the obstreperous were given a dose of “black jack” or the “white potion” and sent over the divide. It does not matter in the least whether this be actually so or not. The point is, they have the feling it is so, and they have created the language with which to express the feeling – “black jack,” “white potion,” “polishing off.”

            Jack London  The People Of The Abyss

            And God only knows what will happen to the deplorables under single payer.

Wailed

            O. N., M. E. – To cry woe.

            In this collection of symbols and vows it is easy to see the layers of historical memory and the practical intentions. These last are akin to the presidential inaugurals in democracy – the promise of prosperity, respect for the laws, regard for the poor, justice for all, and a firm foreign policy.

            The visual and musical dressing up under the monarchy was in keeping with the taste of a time, when holy days, processions, public prayer, and hymns to the Almighty saturated the daily life of the people with religious feeling. There was entertainment in worship, and nothing else was so well organized as to compete with it. The secular world of today entertains itself in other ways, not less mass-designed, and feels it can afford to do without lavish public rituals. Besides, its desire for government is not the same, less deferent, more greedy. Nothing in any case warrants Mark Twain’s imputation that kingly ritual was  “hypocritical mumbo jumbo.” At the death of a good king the people wailed and wept – at home, in church, in the streets. They prayed between their bouts of grief. The loss was personal and intense and charged with anxiety about the future. Today, such a collective emotion about rulers is felt only after certain assassinations.

            Jacques Barzun  From Dawn To Decadence

Waist

            M. E. – To grow… wax.

           

            Hitler sprung his Arbeitsdienst, his Labor Service Corps, on the public for the first time today and it turned out to be a highly trained, semi-military group of fanatical Nazi youths. Standing there in the early morning sunlight which sparkled on their shiny spades, 50,000 of them, with the first thousand bared above the waist, suddenly made the German spectators go mad with joy when, without warning, they broke into a perfect goose-step. Now, the goose-step has always seemed to me to be an outlandish exhibition of the human being in his most undignified and stupid state, but I felt for the first time this morning what an inner chord it strikes in the strange soul of the German people. Spontaneously they jumped up and shouted their applause. There was a ritual even for the Labor Service boys. They formed an immense sprechchor – a chanting chorus – and with one voice intoned such words as these: “We want one leader! Nothing for us! Everything for Germany! Heil Hitler!”

            William  Shirer  Berlin Diary

Waitress

            O. N. F., O. H. G.

            After Stalin’s guests had drunk themselves into a stupor, his daughter recalled their “personal bodyguards would step in, each ‘custodian’ dragging away his drunken ‘charge….’” Khrushchev insisted he and others asked waitresses to pour them “colored water instead of wine,” but Stalin “fumed with anger and raised a terrible uproar.” According to Mikoyan, Stalin wanted to “loosen our tongues: so as to find out “who was thinking what.” Khrushchev thought Stalin found it entertaining to watch the people around him get themselves into embarrassing and even disgraceful situations. For some reason he found the humiliation of others very amusing. Khrushchev imagined that someday the vozhd would go so far as to “take down his pants, relieve himself at the table, and then tell us it was in the interests of Russia.”

            William Taubmann  Khrushchev

Walks

A.  S. – To roll, stamp, wallow.

I think it’s appropriate to take a few minutes to reflect on some of the issues that people of faith have in common, and from my perspective, as I have traveled extensively now through New York and have been in the company of so many different New Yorkers from so many different walks of life. I agree that the challenge before us, as individuals, as members and leaders of the community of faith, as those who already hold positions of public responsibility and those who seek them, that we do all share and should be committed to an understanding of how we make progress, but we define that progress broadly, deeply, and profoundly.

Hillary Rodham Clinton