Against the Day

What is the modern state,” Yitzhak declared, “but a suburban house-lot taken up to a larger scale? Anti-Semitism flows directly from the suburban fear of those who are always on the move, who set up camp for a night, or pay rent, unlike the Good Citizen who believes he ‘owns’ his home, although it is more likely to be owned by a bank, perhaps even a Jewish bank. Everyone must live in a simply-connected space with an unbroken line around it. Some put hair ropes, to keep snakes out. Any who live outside property-lines of any scale are automatically a threat to the suburban order and by extension the State. Conveniently, Jews have this history of statelessness.”
“It’s not dishonorable to want your own piece of land, is it?” Fleetwood objected.
“Of course not. But no Jewish homeland will ever end hatred of the unpropertied, which is a given element of the suburban imperative. The hatred gets transferred to

“Ha! Ha!” Merle slapped his knee. “You fellows, I swear. What ‘national soul’? We don’t have any ‘national soul’! ‘F you think any different, why you’re just packing out pyrites, brother.”
“An edge of steel—mathematically without width, deadlier than any katana, sheathed in the precision of the American face—where mercy is unknown, against which Heaven has sealed its borders! Do not—feign ignorance of this! It is not a—valid use of my time!” Glaring, he joined his companions and stalked out.

“On this island,” she went on, “as you will have begun to notice, no one ever speaks plainly. Whether it’s Cockney rhyming codes or the crosswords in the newspapers—all English, spoken or written, is looked down on as no more than strings of text cleverly encrypted.

Nodding, eyes glittering with enthusiastic hatred, “Bastard we have been trying to assassinate for two years now. Nearly got him in Yokohama with nice, right-angled fragment, so close he was actually standing inside angle, but missed him by millimeters—polny pizdets! such luck, that man!”

Domenico Sfinciuno, whose family in 1297, along with quite a few others among the Venetian rich and powerful of the day, had been disqualified from ever sitting on the Great Council—and hence made ineligible for the Dogedom of Venice—by then-sitting Doge Pietro Gradenigo, in his infamous decree known as the Serrata del Maggior Consiglio. But not even Napoleon’s abolition of the office of Doge five hundred years later had any effect on the claim to what, by now, generations of Sfinciuni, in a curious inertia of resentment, had come to regard as theirs by right. Meanwhile they devoted themselves to trade with the East. In the wake of the Polos’ return to Venice, the