He accepted that pessimism was the good companion of thought and study, that optimism was the business of politicians, and no one believed them. He knew about the reasons to be cheerful and had sometimes cited the indices, the literacy rates and so on. But they were relative to a wretched past. He couldn’t help himself, there was a novel ugliness about. There were nations run by well-dressed criminal gangs intent on self-enrichment, kept in place by security services, by the rewriting of history and passionate nationalism. Russia was just one. The USA, in a delirium of anger, delusional
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