WMU & "You Are Not Doing Anything" Accusation

In the TODAY paper of a few days ago, I found an ad of a US university. It was by Western Michigan University (WMU) of Kalamazoo!! Back then, I met no student from this country though I had many Arabs, some from Thailand and Indonesia around me. 20 years on, WMU, a provincial school apparently, is now recruiting students here. I wonder what my life would have been like if I had been able to stay there much longer. A useless attempt to imagine.

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This afternoon, when I was about to wake up as always, Miss Q came and I stayed in bed for a while. She was interested to know what I had been doing to find a new place. Before I answered, she told me in her usual harsh and loud tone that I was “not doing anything.” My day was totally disturbed and I did no work today. But today there was one thing she did good for me. She reminded me that the neighbor is a property agent and I immediately decided to engage her. I now hope she will find something for me. Miss Q is now partly responsible by being the initiating party for suggesting that I take up her services.

My neighbor is expecting a baby, which is a mild surprise to me. I didn’t know that she is, of course. I see her just once in a few months and exchange greetings. Miss Q, after she left this flat, was very curious. “Have you seen her husband?” etc. etc. I haven’t. I’m not interested in my neighbor’s private life.

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A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things [about WWI], even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. (George Orwell in “Looking back on the Spanish War”)

Historians of Japan and China+Korea… They seem to me a bunch of shit.

The implied objective is… a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened” – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs – and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement. (Orwell in “Looking back on the Spanish War”)

This is exactly the theme of his “Nineteen Eighty-four.” If he were here and wrote as he did in Britain, he would be in jail. His offence would be much more serious than those Kangaroo T-shirt guys.