Michael Perelman wrote:

> Nothing for the people who are being plowed under
> by the crisis.  All we have to show for our troubles
> is Obama and Hillary.

I guess that's because:

Humans make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under
circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past --
e.g. the Democratic Party. The tradition of all dead generations (e.g.
those under Roosevelt, Reagan, Bill Clinton, etc.) weighs like a
nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be
occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating
something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of
political crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to
their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes
in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored
disguise and borrowed language. In like manner, the beginner who has
learned a new language always translates it back into her mother
tongue, but she assimilates the spirit of the new language and
expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without
recalling the old and when he forgets her native tongue.

- Julio Huato (2008)
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