Beyond institutional amnesia, a rejection of causal analysis is the existential rock on which American Exceptionalism sits. The United States unique sense of itself depends on an ambiguous relationship to the past. History is affirmed, since it is America’s unprecedented historical success that justifies the exceptionalism.
Rock
The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore so it eats it!
It is proper that noble spirits, equipped with truth and enlightened with the Divine intelligence, should arm themselves against dense ignorance by climbing up to the high rock and tower of contemplation.
You find yourself in the world, without any power, immovable as a rock, stupid, so to speak, as a log of wood.
We are safe on the rock which is the Savior when we have yielded in faith in Him, have responded to the Holy Spirit’s direction to keep the commandments long enough and faithfully enough that the power of the Atonement has changed our hearts.
A man of great memory without learning hath a rock and a spindle and no staff to spin.
I just think we’re on this rock orbiting a sun that’s going to go out, and I don’t know that human society is necessarily a wonderful thing for the planet. I think people can be kind to one another and share things, but I don’t know that this particular iteration of civilization is to be preferred to any other.
There is a fundamental situation in which the country has reached rock bottom, that a mother can’t send her children out of the house in the morning. The country has reached rock bottom and this needs to be changed.
The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built.
Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.