(from The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.)
". . . It was all so unnecessary. Nobody would have bolted from Donald's base if he had embraced a commonsense approach to COVID. Tens of thousands of lives would have been spared, and the economy, after a short-term hit, would have bounced back. His most deranged supporters would have hailed him as a hero - and a lot of his detractors would have, too. But Donald is constitutionally incapable of leading. . . "
(from The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal, by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.)
". . . He made the pivot to the Big Lie in the earl morning hours after Election Day, before the results were even announced. He completely believed that he could turn things around. There was no reason for him not to - he always had. And let's face it, seventy-four million of us, if the 2020 election results are any indication, never felt that they'd been betrayed at all. Or, worse, those voters put the betrayal to the side because they understood the degree to which having g a white supremacist in the Oval Office benefitted them . . . "
". . . The music of prehistoric cultures is first firmly dated to c. 40,000 BP of the Upper Paleolithic by evidence of bone flutes, though it remains unclear whether or not the actual origins lie in the earlier Middle Paleolithic period (300,000 to 50,000 BP). There is little known about prehistoric music, with traces mainly limited to iconographical evidence, as well as some simple flutes and percussion instruments. However, such evidence indicates that music existed to some extent in prehistoric societies such as the Xia dynasty and the Indus Valley Civilisation. Upon the development of writing, the music of literate civilizations—ancient music—was present in the major Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Persian, Mesopotamian and Middle Eastern societies. It is difficult to make many generalizations about ancient music as a whole, but from what is known it was often characterized by monophony and improvisation. In ancient song forms, the texts were closely aligned with music, and though the oldest extant musical notation survives from this period, many texts survive without their accompanying music, such as the Rigveda and the Shijing Classic of Poetry. Many cultures have coupled music with other art forms, such as the Chinese four arts and the medieval quadrivium. . . Historically, religions have often been catalysts for music. The Vedas of Hinduism immensely influenced Indian classical music, while the Five Classics of Confucianism laid the basis for subsequent Chinese music. Following the rapid spread of Islam in the 6th century, Islamic music dominated Persia and the Arab world, and the Islamic Golden Age saw the presence of numerous important music theorists. Music written for and by the early Christian Church properly inaugurates the Western classical music tradition,[4] which continues into medieval music where polyphony, staff notation and nascent forms of many modern instruments developed. In addition to religion, or the lack thereof, a society's music is influenced by all other aspects of its culture, including social and economic organization and experience, climate and access to technology. The emotions and ideas that music expresses, the situations in which music is played and listened to, and the attitudes toward musicians and composers all vary between regions and periods. Many cultures have or continue to distinguish between art music (or 'classical music'), folk music and more recently, popular music. . ."
