Appointment in Samarra, by John O'Hara

Appointment in Samarra
Author: John O'Hara (1934)

O'Hara did for fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, what Faulkner did for Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi: surveyed its social life and drew its psychic outlines. But he did it in utterly worldly terms, without Faulkner's taste for mythic inference or the basso profundo of his prose. Julian English is a man who squanders what fate gave him. He lives on the right side of the tracks, with a country club membership and a wife who loves him. His decline and fall, over the course of just 72 hours around Christmas, is a matter of too much spending, too much liquor and a couple of reckless gestures. (Now Julian, don't throw that drink in the well-connected Irishman's face. Don't make that pass at the gangster's mistress.) That his calamity is petty and preventable only makes it more powerful. In Faulkner the tragedies all seem to be taking place on Olympus, even when they're happening among the lowlifes. In O'Hara they could be happening to you.—R.L.

From the TIME Archive:
"O'Hara writes with swift realism, wisely avoids sentimentality"

Gibbsville
Monday, Aug. 20, 1934
APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA—John O'Hara—Harcourt, Brace

Presented is the city of Gibbsville, Pa. (pop.: 24,032), battening on the anthracite coal industry at a time when the Depression was called the Slump. In a story of only three days, John O'Hara succeeds in covering as much ground about Gibbsville as Sinclair Lewis did in describing Gopher Prairie (Main Street) in three years. He writes with swift realism, wisely avoids sentimentality.
The story is one of liquor, love and fights, of the Lantenengo Street smart set of Gibbsville, of the town's underworld. Julian and Caroline English, married four years and still in love with each other, attend a Christmas Eve party at the Lantenengo Country Club. There Julian gets drunk, dashes his highball into the fat face of the richest man in town whose stories are a bore. Result: a black eye for the richest man in town, new enemies for Julian, a fight with Caroline.
Christmas night sees another party at the Club at which Julian proceeds to get drunk again. The quarreling Englishes traipse along with other youngsters to the Stage Coach. Turning his back on Caroline, Julian takes a roadhouse entertainer outside. It was a bad choice; the girl belonged to Gibbsville's No. 1 underworldling. Day after Christmas Julian is still in a black mood when friends rake him over the coals. That night, getting drunk alone in his house, he realizes what a fool he has made of himself in three days. He goes out to the garage, shuts the door, starts the motor. But the story does not end.
Author John O'Hara, 29, is a rolling stone who has travelled from his hometown Pottsville, Pa. Journal to the Paramount studios in Hollywood. He has contributed stories to The New Yorker, Scrib- ner's, Vanity Fair. "In addition," he says, "I have jerked soda, worked on two railroads and in a steel mill, on an ocean liner and a farm . . . bummed east and west, was a day laborer. I was married once. ..." Appointment in Samarra is his first novel. A volume of his short stories, The Doctor's Son, will be published this autumn.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,747744,00.html?internalid=atb100

ANIMAL FARM, by George Orwell

Animal Farm
Author: George Orwell (1946)

No writer has ever been more naked in his contempt for power, or more ruthless in his critique of those who abuse it, than the Englishman born Eric Blair, better known to the world as George Orwell. In Animal Farm he restages the hypocrisies of the Russian Revolution with the principal figures played by, of all things, farm animals. By presenting atrocities in the terms of a fairy tale, he makes them fresh, restoring to readers numbed by the 20th century's parade of disasters a sense of shock and outrage. Paradoxically, by turning Trotsky and Lenin and their followers into pigs and horses and chickens, he reveals them as all too human.—L.G.

From the TIME Archive:
Britons chuckling at Animal Farm are calling its author the most brilliant political satirist since Swift

The Dictatorship of the Animals
Monday, Feb. 04, 1946
George Orwell, a talented leftist writer, has emerged as one of Britain's best satirists. Britons, chuckling at his new book, Animal Farm,† a 92-page laugh-and thought-provoking satire on Communism and the Soviet Union, are calling its author the most brilliant political satirist since Swift.
Beasts of the World, Unite! Farmer Jones had a good farm, but he drank too much. One night, by the mystic operations of the historical dialectic, a leftist political theoretician appeared among his farm animals. He was old Major, a prize Middle White hog. Major addressed the other creatures:
"Comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short. No animal in England knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. No animal in England is free. . . .
"But is this simply part of the order of nature? . . . No, comrades, a thousand times no! ... Why then do we continue in this miserable condition? Because nearly the whole of the produce of our labour is stolen from us by human beings. There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. . . . Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own. Almost overnight we could become rich and free. What then must we do? Why, work night and day, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human race! That is my message to you, comrades: Rebellion!"
Then old Major cleared his throat and taught his followers a song, "a stirring tune, something between Clementine and La Cucuracha," which the animals found as moving as some people find Arise, Ye Prisoners of Starvation!:
Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland, Beasts of every land and clime, Hearken to my joyful tidings Of the golden future time. . . .
Riches more than mind can picture, Wheat and barley, oats and hay, Clover, beans and mangel-wurzels Shall be ours upon that day. . . .
The Animalist Manifesto. The next three months were feverish with secret political activity. The work of indoctrination and organizing fell to the pigs, who were the cleverest of the farm animals. Two pigs were outstanding: Napoleon, a big, rather fierce-looking boar of a Stalinesque taciturnity and resoluteness, and Snowball, an ingenious pig of Trotsky-esque vivacity and eloquence. There was also a somewhat Molotovish barrow named Squealer, "with very round cheeks, twinkling eyes, nimble movements, and a shrill voice. He was a brilliant talker, and when he was arguing some difficult point he had a way of skipping from side to side and whisking his tail which was somehow very persuasive."
These three turned the ideas of old Major (he had died) into a complete system of thought called Animalism. Their most faithful converts were two cart horses, Boxer and Clover. These two had a hard time thinking anything out for themselves. But they absorbed everything the pigs taught them and passed it on to the other animals in simple form.
The Revolution came sooner and was won more easily than anybody expected. Before hay harvest, Farmer Jones got drunk for two days. Nobody milked the cows or fed the animals. At last the frenzied creatures broke into the feed room. When Jones and his men arrived with whips, the animals turned on them and chased them off the farm.
The victorious animals tossed all bits, nose rings, dog chains and castrating knives down the well. Then they tiptoed into the farmhouse, gazed with awe at the luxury of feather mattresses, the Brussels carpet and a lithograph of Queen Victoria. The animals voted unanimously that the farmhouse should be preserved as a museum. Some hams, found hanging in the kitchen, were reverently buried.
Comrades Napoleon and Snowball announced that Animalism had been reduced to Seven Commandments, which would henceforth be the unalterable law of Animal Farm. These were painted on the side of the barn. At 30 yards, any animal that could read (chiefly the pigs) could read that "All animals are equal." Later Comrade Snowball reduced the principles of Animalism to one line: "Four legs good, two legs bad."
Gee Up, Comrade! "The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others. With their superior knowledge it was natural that they should assume the leadership. Boxer and Clover would harness themselves to the cutter or the horserake ... and tramp steadily round and round the field with a pig walking behind and calling out 'Gee up, comrade!' or 'Whoa back, comrade!' . . ."
Every animal seemed satisfied except a cynical old jackass named Benjamin, the only animal who could read as well as the pigs. When asked how he liked the dictatorship of the animals, he merely observed: "Donkeys live a long time."
The bulk of Animal Farm describes the slow rise to absolute power of Comrade Napoleon and the gradual transmogrification of the pigs. Comrade Snowball proposed to industrialize Animal Farm by building a stone mill. Comrade Napoleon declared the plan nonsense. He drove
Comrade Snowball off the farm. Then Napoleon took over the plan to build the mill. While the animals starved and slaved under the slogan, "I will work harder," the pigs moved into Jones's farmhouse, and the glorification of the Leader (as Comrade Napoleon was now called) became systematic. Hens were sometimes heard to say: "Under the guidance of our Leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days." The Beasts of England song was no longer sung; the rage now was a rhyme called Comrade Napoleon:

Friend of the fatherless!
Fountain of happiness!
Lord of the swill-bucket! Oh, how my soul is on
Fire when I gaze at thy
Calm and commanding eye,
Like the sun in the sky,
Comrade Napoleon!
The Seven Commandments on the barn wall had been reduced to one. To the slow-witted work animals Benjamin, the donkey, read the new Commandment:

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.
The Author. Tall, pale, chronically ailing George Orwell, 42, leads an unspectacular domestic life in the suburbs of London. A critic, essayist and novelist (A Clergyman's Daughter), Orwell contributes (in Britain) to his schoolmate Critic Cyril Connolly's highbrow monthly Horizon and to the leftist Tribune. In the U.S. his London Letter to Manhattan's Trot-skyoid quarterly Partisan RevIew has contained some of the war's most trenchant reporting on British politics, the Home Guard (Orwell was a member), black-market shenanigans, etc.
Born in Bengal of an Anglo-Indian family, Orwell was a scholarship student at Eton (where he "learned as nearly as possible nothing"), served for five years in Burma as a member of the Indian Imperial Police, fought and was severely wounded in the Spanish Civil War as a member of the P.O.U.M. militia (the loose organization of anti-Stalinist leftists which was fiercely attacked by the Communists).
Says Orwell: "What I saw in Spain and what I have seen since of the inner workings of left-wing political parties has given me a horror of politics. ... In sentiment I am definitely 'left,' but I believe that a writer can remain honest only if he keeps free of party labels."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,776652-3,00.html

AMERICAN PASTORAL, by Philip Roth

American Pastoral
Author: Philip Roth (1997)

To decipher the late 1960's through the story of Swede Levov, whose life is cast into the fires of those years, Roth calls again upon the saturnine side of his disposition. It answers to the purpose as never before. Good-looking, prosperous Swede, who has inherited his father's glove factory in Newark, N.J., and married a former beauty queen, is not stupid, merely fulfilled. Is it this that gives him insufficient means to comprehend the Newark riots of 1967 or the transformation of his beloved daughter into a venomous teenage radical, a child capable of cold-blooded terrorism? Roth's own means are more than sufficient. A writer who is unafraid to linger in the minds of furious men, he leads us fearlessly through this man's grief, bewilderment and rage.—R.L.

From the TIME Archive:
You will search the shelf of contemporary fiction long and hard to find a parental nightmare projected with the emotional force and verbal energy that Roth brings

WHEN SHE WAS BAD
Monday, Apr. 28, 1997 By R.Z. SHEPPARD
This spring an unusual and virtually simultaneous blooming of senior novelists is taking place. Norman Mailer (see following review), Saul Bellow, the mysterious Thomas Pynchon and a seemingly perennial Philip Roth all have new works scheduled for publication. American Pastoral (Houghton Mifflin; 423 pages; $26) is Roth's fourth offering in fewer than seven years, making the 64-year-old a sort of Cal Ripkin of American letters.
Roth's three previous books--Patrimony, Operation Shylock and Sabbath's Theater--won leading literary prizes, which is no small achievement in the contentious world of book awards. American Pastoral could make Roth's record four for four.
The novel is a scorcher about prosperous New Jersey parents whose picture-perfect life is destroyed when their daughter becomes a terrorist. This cultural horror story is deepened by Roth's genius for blending humor, pathos, sympathy and rage. The effect is visceral, a queasy feeling that the bottom has fallen out of civilization, and despite our faith in reason, irrationality rules. "He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach--that it makes no sense," Roth writes about his paragon of decency and convention, Seymour ("Swede") Levov, star athlete of Weequahic High in Newark, New Jersey, during the early 1940s.
Roth has frequently celebrated his once predominantly Jewish alma mater as something like a yeshiva of assimilation. Swede, so called for his tall, blond, blue-eyed good looks, is built for a speedy launch into the American mainstream. His luck seems endless. He joins the Marines as World War II is ending; he returns from service to prepare to take over Newark Maid, his father's successful glove factory; and he marries the former Mary Dawn Dwyer, Miss New Jersey of 1949.
A golden couple in a golden time, the Levovs rise effortlessly on an unbreaking wave of postwar prosperity. They move to a 160-year-old stone house in one of the Garden State's classiest exurbs. There Mary Dawn breeds prize cattle on a 17-acre homestead and rears daughter Meredith, a bright, bubbly child the Levovs call Merry.
Grumpy might have been safer. Old Country Jews believed that acknowledging good fortune would attract an evil eye, a kineahora. Roth brings this useful superstition home when, as a teenager, the Merry Levov contracts a lethal case of '60s political self-righteousness. She blows up the town's general store-post office, killing a passerby, and then vanishes.
You will search the shelf of contemporary fiction long and hard to find a parental nightmare projected with the emotional force and verbal energy that Roth brings to American Pastoral. Every time she passes a young woman, Mary Dawn hopes it is her daughter. Hope, in fact, is no help. It only inflames the pain every day. Eventually the mother starts to habituate expensive psychiatric clinics. The ideal marriage dissolves, and long before he sickens with terminal prostate cancer, Swede begins to die of heartbreak.
Despite generous reprieves of humor, dialogue that leaps directly from page to ear and a richly textured narrative about the lost world of the '40s and '50s, Roth never lets up on his Jersey Job. When, after five years, Swede tracks down his daughter, she is living as Mary Stoltz in a squalid room in crumbling downtown Newark. She is worse than dead: an unwashed, half-starved, self-styled member of the Jain religion who prattles about the murderous effect soap and water have on germs at the same time that she confesses having blown up three more people in Oregon.
This moral lunacy is dramatized with the piercing common sense that characterizes both Roth's funniest and soberest works. "The world is not a place on which I have influence or wish to have any," says Merry through a veil, a safety net for microbes. Swede's reply cries out to distraught parents everywhere: "You are influencing me! You who will not kill a mite are killing me...your powerlessness is power over me, goddamn it!"
The stakes have definitely increased since Alexander Portnoy's mother had a conniption 50 years ago about her son's eating food that wasn't kosher. Never before has Roth written fiction with such clear conviction. Never before has he assembled so many fully formed characters or shuttled so authoritatively through time. One barely notices that the narrator is Nathan Zuckerman, the Newark-born writer who is Roth's frenzied alter id in the Ghost Writer trilogy. Significantly, the one character who most resembles Roth is a quiet master leather cutter, 40 years at Newark Maid, who lets his scissors do the talking. American Pastoral, too, fits like a glove.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,986262-2,00.html

BELOVED, by Tony Morisson

Beloved
Author: Toni Morrison (1987)

Sethe is an escaped slave in post-Civil War Ohio. Her body is scarred from the atrocities of her white owners, but it's her memories that really torture her: she killed her 2-year-old daughter, Beloved, so the child would never know the sufferings of a life of servitude. But in Morrison's novels the present is never safe from the past, and Beloved returns as an angry, hungry ghost. Sethe must come to terms with her, exorcise her, if she ever wants to move forward and find peace. Rich with historical, political and above all personal resonances, written in prose that melts and runs with the heat of the emotion it carries, Beloved is a deeply American, urgently important novel that searches for that final balance between grief, anger and acceptance.—L.G.

From the TIME Archive:
"Beloved is full of vivid images, freshly rendered"

Something Terrible Happened BELOVED
Monday, Sep. 21, 1987 By PAUL GRAY

Writing a novel about slavery in the U.S. would seem to be a fail-safe endeavor. The audience for such a book is already converted: the evil of owning men, women and children as chattel is shamefully obvious to everyone, and the heroes and villains are easy to tell apart. But it is precisely the contemporary consensus on human bondage that makes serious fiction on this subject so rare and so difficult to achieve. Imaginative literature at its best does not reinforce received opinions but disturbs them, puts them to the test of experience relived. And what is obvious to readers now -- that slavery was a moral abomination -- did not appear as unchallenged truth to everyone embroiled in its practice then. Those who possessed and those who were possessed struggled, like most people at all times, everywhere, to get through their days; neither history nor the exigencies of survival allowed them much time for meditation or outrage. To portray the texture of such lives, a novelist must be willing to forgo reflective indignation and let the characters and details speak for themselves.
To a remarkable extent, Beloved does just that. Toni Morrison, the author of four previous novels including the acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977), certainly displays slavery in all its cruelty and loathsomeness, but she does so from an intriguing, unsettling perspective. Her heroine is Sethe, who has run away from her Kentucky master and settled with her mother-in-law on the outskirts of Cincinnati. The details of Sethe's break for freedom are appropriately heroic. Pregnant with her fourth child and apparently abandoned at the last moment by her husband and fellow slave Halle, she nonetheless manages to send her three children ahead of her in a wagon bound for Ohio and then arrives there herself in 1855, after giving birth to her daughter Denver on the way.
When Paul D, another slave from the Sweet Home farm in Kentucky, fetches up at Sethe's address 18 years later, he finds evidence of defeat rather than triumph. Sethe's two oldest children, both boys, have run away. The youngest, the girl Denver, seems hostile and reclusive. The third child, also a girl, is long since dead, but her spirit disruptively haunts Sethe's house.
Evidently something terrible has happened here, and much of Beloved is devoted to a painstaking unraveling of this mystery. Sethe is an unwilling participant in the process, since she has everything to forget and believes that "the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay." She cannot quite manage this, since she is afflicted with "a brain greedy for news nobody could live with in a world happy to provide it." The arrival of Paul D brings reminders of the life she fled, but it also seems to promise happier times ahead; he frightens the noisy, disembodied specter off the premises and moves in. But soon Sethe must take in another, more upsetting guest, a young woman who materializes one afternoon in the yard and who calls herself Beloved. It is the name Sethe gave years ago to the daughter whom she murdered with a handsaw.
As it shuttles back and forth in time, Morrison's narrative slowly unfolds the rationale behind Sethe's violent act. What seems incomprehensible gradually takes on an awful inevitability. Having risked everything to escape servitude and degradation and having tasted nearly a month of freedom, Sethe saw four men on horseback approaching to reclaim her and her children: "And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them." If she had had her way at that mad moment, Sethe would have killed all her children and then herself.
Morrison's supple prose makes such desperation palpable. Beloved is full of vivid images, freshly rendered. Here is the runaway slave facing the Ohio River, which stands between her and liberation: "Sethe was looking at one mile of dark water, which would have to be split with one oar in a useless boat against a current dedicated to the Mississippi hundreds of miles away." Here are Sethe, Denver and Beloved enjoying a rare moment of pleasurable abandon on a frozen lake: "Their skirts flew like wings and their skin turned pewter in the cold and dying light."
The flesh-and-blood presence of Beloved roils the novel's intense, realistic surface. This young woman may not actually be Sethe's reincarnated daughter, but no other explanation of her identity is provided. Her symbolic significance is confusing; she seems to represent both Sethe's guilt and redemption. And Morrison's attempt to make this strange figure come to life strains unsuccessfully toward the rhapsodic: "I will never leave you again/ Don't ever leave me again/ You will never leave me again."
In the end, the implausibilities in Beloved may matter less than the fact that Sethe believes them. Uneducated, her heritage and culture reduced to a few shreds of memory, she sees no distinction between the supernatural and the equally surreal facts of her own life. Morrison's heroine is hard to understand, and to forget.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,965573-2,00.html

All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren

All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren

ALL THE KING'S MEN (464 pp.)— Robert Penn Warren — Harcourt, Brace.
This novel tells what was behind the show in a southern state like Louisiana with a governor like Huey Long. It is a tough, triumphant novel.
The narrator is Jack Burden, a newspaperman and an angry fellow full of the sardonic lingo of the pressroom. The story he unreels with a series of flashbacks and asides is the story of Willie Stark, a poor farmer's awkward, hulking son from Mason City. Willie got his political start at home as county treasurer. He was honest, and that was why a Democratic faction in the state picked him up in the backwoods in 1926 and ran him in the primary for governor.
They ran him as a dummy to split the cocklebur vote for the opposing faction; but Willie didn't know this. Willie thought the Lord was calling him to save the state and so did his wife, Lucy, who had been a schoolteacher and didn't favor drinking. Willie was pure and believed in his backers. He believed in the people, who repaid his faith by dozing through his well-reasoned speeches. Then Willie found out that he had been a sap and a sucker.
No Party, just Willie. This discovery in the end caused woe to many men. For there was a power in Willie Stark, the country lawyer. Reporter Burden, who had covered his phony campaign and seen him broken open by it, saw him again four years later after the primary in 1930. "But it wasn't a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the back room of Casey's saloon rolled into one, and when the smoke cleared away not a picture still hung on the wall. And there wasn't any Democratic party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes and his shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in his hand and was screaming for blood."
Then Jack Burden became a sort of confidential agent to Governor Willie Stark, who gave him research jobs on actual or potential enemies. Jack rode around in the Boss's Cadillac, chauffeured by Sugar-Boy, the little gunman. The Boss built the roads and the schools he had promised to his fellow hicks; he taxed the rich to pay for them. The Boss had to do other things to get and keep what he wanted. Burden got a long lesson in power and what happens to people who have it.
The Overall View. For a long time Jack Burden's watchful eye for what happens was uncomplicated by any attitudes about it. But finally the facts began to run together in a tantalizing, ominous way. This was about the time the Boss put Jack to digging up dirt on Judge Irwin, who lived at Burden's Landing, in a beautiful house near the beautiful houses where Jack and his friends Adam and Anne Stanton had grown up. The Judge, tall and straight and yellow-eyed, had taught Jack how to shoot ducks when he was a boy and had read history to him.
Jack Burden did a thoroughly successful job on Judge Irwin but he did not explode the charge until Stark's son, Tom, got a girl into trouble and political enemies started to use this against Willie. When the charge did go off, it uncovered some strange relationships (and some unnecessary melodrama). Jack's mother and his friends, Adam and Anne Stanton, and a lot of others are drawn into the vortex of events that is the swift and punishing, tragic and surprising last half of this book. It is climaxed by the inevitable assassination of Willie Stark in a corridor of the Capitol.
Robert Penn Warren, 41, onetime Rhodes Scholar and managing editor of the defunct Southern Review, has written two other novels, neither so good as this, and some first-rate poetry. In all his writing, even at its slickest—and some of this novel is pretty slick—there is a sense of doom and blood on the moon that Warren has gradually shifted into religious terms. Though the title of this book comes from a nursery rhyme, its epigraph comes from a passage in Dante's Purgatorio: "By curse of theirs man is not so lost, that eternal love may not return, so long as hope retaineth aught of green."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,933612-2,00.html

Algunas palabras y observaciones para mejorar la vida

Algunas palabras y observaciones para mejorar la vida
Francisco Vaz Brasil

Estas son algunas observaciones que pueden mejorar nuestra vida y nuestro cotidiano. Son palabras y acciones que considero mágicas.
Empiezo por los cumplimentos:
1. Cuando encuntramos alguién por las calles o en cualquier otro lugar, es muy placeroso cuando oímos el cumplimento de ¡Buenos días! o simplemente uno ¡Hola! - Eso nos hace muy bien.
Es una señal de aprecio. Así, cuando encontramos una persona querido o un vecino, o una persona a quien nos dirigimos, es importante que tengamos siempre un cumplimento a dar.¡Buenos días! Qué bueno día tendremos nosotros que damos y los que los recibieron...

2. El aprieto de manos: Cuando somos presentados a otra persona es importante que seamos calientes en nuestros apretos de manos. Mismo que en algunas culturas hagan otras maneras de cumplimentos. El aprieto de manos es una manera gentil de demuestrar nuestro respeto, consideración y cariño a los amigos nuevos o viejos.

3. Hablaremos ahora del valor de una sonrisa

Una sonrisa es parte muy interesante en nuestra vida, por lo tanto:
Se necesitan 43 músculos para fruncir el ceño pero solo 15 para Sonreír.
Una sonrisa no cuesta nada, pero vale mucho a quién lo recibe.
Ocurre en un abrir y cerrar de ojos y su recuerdo, dura a veces para siempre.
Nadie es tan rico que pueda pasarse sin ella y nadie es tan pobre que no pueda enriquecerse por sus beneficios.
Una sonrisa es el descanso para los fatigados, luz para los decepcionados, sol para los tristes y el mejor antídoto contra las enfermedades como decepciones, preocupaciones y desánimos.
Brinda siempre las personas con una sonrisa espontánea, gratuita y desinterasada. La sonrisa es mayor biene que una persona puede dar y recibir.
La felicidad depende tanto de una Sonrisa que se hace necesario que aprendamos a Sonreír lo más pronto posible.
El principio más profundo de la naturaleza humana es ser apreciado y una sonrisa demuestra aprecio.
Una sonrisa es capaz de cambiar estados de espiritu e cambiar la vida de quién lo recibe y da.
Sorría, siempre sorría. Usted jamás se arrepentirá. Sonría, ¡Siempre Sonría!
3. Ahora reflejaremos sobre el valor de un abrazo: Un Abrazo es el festejo del encuentro, el consuelo del dolor, la alegría de tener cerca de tí las personas que gustas o admiras...
Un Abrazo pone al descubierto nuestros sentimientos, nuestros miedos, nuestra necesidades y afasta todo el tipo de dolor...
Un Abrazo nos acerca corazón con corazón, nos deja sentir la intensidad de la amistad...
Un Abrazo demuestra nuestro afeto, cariño y respeto. Es resguardo... es protección...
¿Quién no necesita en algún momento de su vida guarecerse entre unos brazos llenos de ternura? ¿Quién no necesita desnudar sus sentimientos sin palabras rodeando con amor a quien uno quiere?
Los abrazos deben ser gratuitos, pero deben ser devueltos con igual intensidad...
4. El valor de un elogío: Es muy importante que sepamos hacer elogíos a quien los merece. Que el elogío sea realizado con la eloquencia que la oportunidad ofrece. Las personas que lo reciben, guardarán por siempre la honraría recibida...

5. Y, por fin, las palabras mágicas:
Las palabras mágicas que espejan nuestra educación, a las que me refiero son: Por favor, Permiso, Gracias, Muchas Gracias, Descúlpame, Perdóname. Con estas sábias palabras ciertamente nosotros abriremos todos los caminos por donde quer que esteamos. Por supuesto todos nosotros gustamos que las personas sean polidas en su modo de tratar sus semejantes. Y, así, con toda la certeza, viveremos bien mejor.

Gracias por su atención
Y los mejores Saludos,

MST: INVADINDO O BRASIL NA MARRA

MST: INVADINDO O BRASIL NA MARRA
Francisco Vaz Brasil


A propriedade privada é a base do moderno capitalismo e sobre a qual estão alicerçadas as colunas que sustentam o mundo civilizado. No entanto, atualmente, a posse, fruição e alienação da propriedade privada, no Brasil, sofrem com limitações legais e institucionais. Vivemos na era da especulação sócio-ambiental do bem imóvel. Com o advento da Constituição Federal de 1988, a propriedade passou a ter seu uso condicionado ao bem-estar social e a ter assim uma função social e ambiental, conforme consta nos seus (esquecidos e desrespeitados) artigos. 5º, XXIII, 170, III e 186, II.
Observando o princípio da função social da propriedade privada, a Constituição Federal, inscreve no art. 1º, inciso IV, entre os fundamentos da República, a Livre Iniciativa e, como garantia individual fundamental, no art. 5o., o Direito de Propriedade. Deveriam, então, ser as vigas de sustentação do edifício constitucional, onde se ergue o Estado Democrático de Direito da República Federativa do Brasil. Mas tais prerrogativas estão deterioradas. Em meu País, impinge-se o desrespeito à propriedade, num profundo atentado à lei maior.
A propriedade privada - que deveria ser protegida pelo Estado, vê-se ameaçada por ele, através de um intervencionismo que atende a interesses econômicos mal disfarçados de militância ambientalista, e de grupos de baderneiros que invadem, causam danos ao patrimônio, roubam e matam semoventes, e... as autoridades cuzam os braços; ninguém faz nada, e os prejuízos são contabilizados pelos combalidos representantes da iniciativa privada. Já não basta o Estado limitar, restringir, e interditar a utilização do solo pelo proprietário, presencia-se, já há vários anos, a formação de grupos patrocinados, que se organizam e invadem fazendas produtivas (mas mesmo improdutivas, têm um proprietário), empreendimentos que cumprem seu papel social conforme o constante e exigido pela própria Constituição. Atos de violência e baderna reinam ante os olhos dos alheios governantes e dos que deveriam fazer cumprir a lei, e, principalmente zelar pela segurança – um outro princípio básico e constitucional - dos cidadãos. Saques e invasões são realizados por estas quadrilhas de desocupados que se intitulam sem-terra, membros do MST e outras siglas, que invadem, armados com foices, facas, facões e armas de fogo e com toda a fúria e truculência, em total desrespeito ao Direito de Propriedade consagrado no Texto Constitucional.
O governo, impassível, a tudo assiste, primeiro porque não tem coragem e peito para fazer uma reforma no campo, segundo porque, por sua inoperância, torna-se o maior credor e grande patrocinador dessa balbúrdia no campo. Os cidadãos lúcidos desse País já estão cansados de assistir atos de invasão, quebradeira, dano ao patrimônio público e privado sem que haja uma moralização por parte do governo nas suas diversas esferas.
As marchas invasoras ocorrem em todo o país. A Folha de São Paulo noticia que “O número de terras tomadas já chega a 73”, somente de março para cá. O MST não respeita nem os próprios institutos de terras dos estados. Até propriedades adquiridas pelos estados para assentamentos são invadidas assim mesmo. Ainda segundo a Folha de São Paulo, em Garanhuns, o principal líder do MST em Pernambuco, Jaime Amorim, disse que “o movimento não levou em conta o fato de que Garanhuns é a cidade natal do presidente Lula quando invadiu, uma fazenda na cidade.” Amorim afirmou, no entanto, que é uma oportunidade para o presidente mostrar "se tem compromisso com a reforma agrária".
Aqui, o Pará, (como todo o Brasil assistiu pela televisão), mesmo já tendo invadido uma fazenda em Xinguara, os baderneiros do MST, em passeata, mostraram apenas uma parte do seu poderio de depredadores com armas brancas e armas de fogo, brandiam suas armas e gritavam (grunhiam), mas foram rechaçados pelos seguranças da fazenda. Saldo da refrega: 8 feridos. Naquela hora, onde estavam: A polícia. O Estado... ?