| | Stephen, thanks for all those links. The story of the photonic band gap was well worth the effort. I printed out the authors and titles for the two books about the self.
The vignettes are like any work of art: you see in them what you bring to them. Just for one, aircraft carriers were not constructed for mercy missions, and if they were, Objectivists would be at the head of the mob to shut them down, complaining about the evils of altruism. But, there are several other ways to interpret the story.
I don't travel much, a couple of business trips to Canada, that's about it. We lived in Las Cruces for 18 months and never went to Mexico. In January 2000, I worked for a newspaper that sent me to Basel. Actually, it was a nice little place, and I truthfully felt a twinge of homesickness for it about a week later, when I was sitting at my desk. Basel would be a great place to retire to -- if I were ready to retreat from life. But for all of that, there was a special sense of safety, not physical, but metaphysical, when I deplaned in New York, walked through the gate, flashed my passport and the customs guard said, "Welcome home, sir."
That sense of "home" is universal and subjective. One home is not better than another, though circumstances take us away, sometimes permanently, to happier environments. In my neighborhood, growing up, there were a lot of DPs (displaced persons; stateless refugees from World War II), as well as earlier immigrants. No two ways about it: the old country was just plain dopey and American was cool. I was a guest at a faculty party a couple of weeks ago and an old woman asked me, "What kind of name is that?" I said, "It's American. We're all Americans here."
No one else at that party would have identified John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie or Donald Trump and Martha Stewart as examples of what makes America great. Being "American" means different things to different people, depending on who you are inside.
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