No Exit<\/strong>.<\/p>\nI don’t believe that – that there’s no way out of this mess. But I do think that we Americans have alway believed that our system would save us from the dips into corruption and power politics that have plagued us from our beginnings – that our system is "self-correcting." I’m not so sure anymore that our system itself is self-correcting. I think our system was intended to allow us to be self-correcting, but it will only work if we rise rise to the challenge. Frankly, I don’t think we Liberal types are the only force that’s needed right now. We’re the ones making the noise, but the Administration has a strong track record of being able to block what we do and invalidate what we say. I think it’s in the hands of right-thinking Conservatives and Republicans [the people who put these fools into power] to throw in the towel. I just returned from a part of the world where they [the powerful] did not see this kind of writing on the wall; where they [the powerful] continued to support this kind of absurd abuse of power; and where they [the powerful] plunged their whole segment of the world into 80+ years of painful darkness. <\/p>\n
America is only Amerika<\/strong> if we let it happen. Our Founding Fathers were not Hermann Kafka [Fanz’s dad]. And our history doesn’t have to be Kafka-esque<\/strong><\/em> [but it is, unfortunately, possible]…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Well, we’re back from our trip – marred only by a cold virus that struck me down with a vengence in the Prague airport [that I expect will probably hit all my fellow passengers in a few days – my apologies]. Such trips are always personal epics and take a while to come in to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![](\"http:\/\/visel.freeshell.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/02\/amerika1.jpg\")
Well, we’re back from our trip – marred only by a cold virus that struck me down with a vengence in the Prague airport [that I expect will probably hit all my fellow passengers in a few days – my apologies]. Such trips are always personal epics and take a while to come in to focus. I looked forward to digesting the history and stories from the trip – coming to some new understanding of what feels like the modern Dark Ages of 20th Century Eastern Europe [a story from which they are recovering with a vengence]. One has the sense that the decaying Monarchies, the Nazis, and the Communists are finally fading, and that they’re coming up for air.<\/p>\n![\"Kafka's](\"http:\/\/www.zwyx.org\/portal\/kafka\/kafka_draws.jpg\" "\\"Kafka's")
One thing we did was visit a small Franz Kafka Museum in Prague [I’d always pictured him in prewar Berlin, which was very wrong]. He spent his life in the Jewish Quarter of pre-WWI Prague. There, I bought and re-read his ![](\"http:\/\/prawfsblawg.blogs.com\/prawfsblawg\/images\/picture_kafka_drawing.jpg\")
It’s little wonder that the novel was unfinished as there is no possible resolution. It’s more a statement than a story. But, I thought of it as I read the news of the last several weeks. For Kafka, Amerika<\/strong> is a derogatory slang term – a symbol of unfulfilled promise. A harbinger to Satre’s later No Exit<\/strong>.<\/p>\n