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Electoral College: Bane of Our Existence

10/30/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Nothing seems so tragic to one who is old as the death of one who is young and this alone proves that life is a good thing.
​Zoë Akins
Author of The Greeks Had a Word for Them
Born October 30, 1886
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Z. Akins

My Book World

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Edwards, George C. with a foreword by Neal R. Peirce. Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America. New Haven, Yale UP, 2004. 
 
For years the electoral college mystified me, but it seemed like a concept that worked because more or less the right candidate always won both the popular vote and the electoral college vote. Then came the 2000 election, a bizarre turn of events by which five people on the Supreme Court would, through their action/inaction allow the candidate with fewer popular votes to win. And one of those justices would tell the rest of us to get over it—instead of taking the time, like a reasoned person, to explain to us why we should get over it, why their decision was such a wise one. Another justice, years later, before her death, would confess that she regretted her vote. Nice. I hope it made her feel better. The electoral college is a roulette wheel that is loaded. Rigged. Like any roulette wheel, we don’t really know until the last second which way the falseness is going to lie.
 
Author Edwards logically and factually proves his thesis as to why the electoral college ought to be drummed out of existence. Interestingly, instead of beginning with the historical context of its origins, he begins with how the electoral college works, how it among other things, cheats the voters in a particular state who vote for the “losing” candidate who may actually have more popular votes. Most important in his discussions may be the idea of political equality or more important the political inequity that the electoral college tends to foster. The biggest takeaway from Edwards’s chapter on history is the recorded fact that the electoral college was not a well-thought-out concept that received rigorous attention from its founders. No, Philadelphia was hot that summer, and men [and I mean only men] formed the electoral college in a hurry, so that they could find cooler places in which to spend the rest of their summer vacations. At every turn, Edwards has an answer for those who would retain the electoral college, especially by noting when the proponents begin with false premises. The e.c. does not protect the smaller states, as some claim. It does not maintain cohesion and harmony among citizens. Candidates are not more attentive to small states with a low number of electors nor to large states that are entrenched in one party or another.
 
In the book’s foreword, scholar Neal R. Peirce sums up what is most flawed about the electoral college: “The electoral college process, Edwards reminds us, doesn’t simply aggregate or reflect popular votes; it consistently distorts and often directly misrepresents the votes citizens have cast. Indeed, the unit vote actually takes votes of the minority in individual states and awards those votes, in the national count, to the candidate they opposed” (x).
 
Don’t worry that Edwards’s tome was published in 2004; nothing much has changed concerning the institution. Author Edwards’s study is prescient in that he states emphatically that what happened in 2000 with Bush v. Gore will happen again. Voilà, 2016! The United States must abolish the electoral college when it comes to voting for the office of the president. The time to do so has past.
 
[This book published by Yale University Press has, by my count, five typographical errors derived mainly from a lack of close reading by copy editors—rather egregious for an Ivy League press, eh?]

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Oscar Lewis's Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty

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A Writer's Wit: Caroline Paul

10/29/2020

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GPS works great. I recommend it for all cat owners who want to know what their cats do when they're not there, if you can stand the ridicule from your friends.
​Caroline Paul
Author of 
Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology
Born October 29, 1963
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C. Paul
TOMORROW: My Book World | Charles C. Edwards's Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America
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A Writer's Wit: Evelyn Waugh

10/28/2020

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One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.
​Evelyn Waugh
Author of Brideshead Revisited
Born on October 28, 1903
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E. Waugh
FRIDAY: My Book World | Charles C. Edwards's Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America
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A Writer's Wit: A. N. Wilson

10/27/2020

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If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something you write, that's obviously very satisfying, and if they howl with rage or cry, that's honey.
​A. N. Wilson
Author of The Mystery of Charles Dickens
Born October 27, 1950
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A. N. Wilson
FRIDAY: My Book World | George C. Edwards's Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America
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Mr. Putin: As Bad As You Think

10/23/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
A diary is the response to an impulse—as opposed to an instinct—for self-preservation.
​Ned Rorem
Author of The Paris Diary
​Born October 23, 1923
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N. Rorem

My Book World

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​Hill, Fiona and Clifford G. Gaddy. Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. New and 
Expanded. Washington: Brookings, 2015.
​
When I tuned in to President Trump’s impeachment trial at the end of 2019, I was impressed with the testimony of Fiona Hill, at that time former Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs on Trump’s National Security Council. Her credentials seemed impeccable, and I told myself I would read the book she co-authors with Mr. Gaddy.
 
The Hill/Gaddy team paint a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin that is not personal. They do not delve much into his upbringing or family life, only as those elements may apply to his long political life. They formulate what they refer to as Putin’s six identities, by which the book is structured: “the Statist, the History Man, the Survivalist, the Outsider, the Free Marketeer, and the (KGB) Case Officer (18).” The man manipulates or exploits each one of these identities in order to further his own career, his own strategies, and each study is an eye-opening view into the life of the real Mr. Putin.
 
Mr. Putin declares himself to be a gosudarstvennik, “a builder of the state, a servant of the state . . . a person who believes that Russia must be and must have a strong state” (40). The State is of ultimate importance, not the individual. Hill/Gaddy claim that “Putin continued with an analysis that echoed the language of the tsarist statist school, noting that Russia will ‘muscle up’ by ‘being open to change’ through state-sanctioned procedures and rules’” (55). The authors reinforce what President Obama once said of Putin, that Putin still maintains a nineteenth-century view of the world. He may utilize some of the tactics he learns while serving in the KGB, but his worldview is rooted in a glorified, pre-Soviet past: he aspires to be a tsar.
 
To summarize most of the other five areas, Putin manipulates history to strengthen his power. He is a survivalist who will do anything to get what he wants. Ultimately, his sense of strategy (over tactics, which only serve to fulfill his overarching set of goals) is one of his greatest strengths, one that Hill/Gaddy claim the West underestimates at its own peril. A man who creates a long-term strategy for the success of his State and is willing to do anything to see that it succeeds is to be to watched very carefully, something that the authors indicate the West has failed to do thus far. The West must see clearly how the man views himself, and the West, while not forfeiting its own values, must develop strategies for dealing with him, ones that realistically exploit his perceived strengths and weaknesses. Until the man is taken seriously, the rest of the world cannot deal with him in a realistic manner, and such a stance is not good for that world.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | George C. Edwards's Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America.

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A Writer's Wit: Doris Lessing

10/22/2020

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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
​Doris Lessing
Author of The Summer Before the Dark
Born October 22, 1919
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D. Lessing
TOMORROW: My Book World | Fiona Hill's Mr. Putin
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A Writer's Wit: Ursula K. Le Guin

10/21/2020

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If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
​Ursula K. Le Guin
Author of Farthest Shore
Born October 21, 1929
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U. K. Le Guin
FRIDAY: My Book World | Fiona Hill's Mr. Putin
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A Writer's Wit: Arthur Rimbaud

10/20/2020

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I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.
​Arthur Rimbaud
Author of A Season in Hell
Born October 20, 1854
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A. Rimbaud
FRIDAY: My Book World | Fiona Hill's Mr. Putin
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The Fight to Vote Is an Old One

10/16/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
When you're fifty you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. 
​Eugene O’Neill
Author of Long Day's Journey into Night
Born October 16, 1888
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E. O'Neill

My Book World

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Waldman, Michael. The Fight to Vote. New York: Simon, 2016. 

​I wish I had read this book when it came out during the run-up to the 2016 election—when I bought it. Even though the last chapters seem dated now, considering what the country has been through, the early chapters give an excellent historical account of how this country has ALWAYS been divided into two camps: those who would like to allow everyone to vote and those who would only have so-called elites vote. White (heterosexual, one assumes) male landowners comprised that group in colonial times:

“And there were men who worked as hard to restrict the vote as others did to expand it, such as John Randolph of Roanoke, who fought to deny the franchise to men without property, declaring, ‘I am an aristocrat. I love liberty. I hate equality;’” (xi)
Slowly, and only through arduous struggles, did other groups gain traction over great spans of time: African-American males, white women, African-American women and other minority groups (including the young). Still, the fight to vote has wavered back and forth, according to the whims of the SCOTUS and voter suppression activities. One group rises up and gains three feet, and another group grabs power and sends progress back two feet. And tragically . . . the struggle still continues. If readers have time, they should consider devouring this informative and at times humorous book. If you’re undecided about voting in 2020, perhaps its contents may sway you to get registered and do so now!

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Fiona Hill's Mr. Putin
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A Writer's Wit: C. P. Snow

10/15/2020

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Technology . . . is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.
​C. P.  Snow
Author of Corridors of Power
Born October 15, 1905
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C. P. Snow
TOMORROW: My Book World | Michael Waldman's The Fight to Vote
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A Writer's Wit: Katherine Mansfield

10/14/2020

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The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
​Katherine Mansfield
Author of The Garden Party
Born October 14, 1888
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K. Mansfield
FRIDAY: My Book World | Michael Waldman's The Fight to Vote
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A Writer's Wit: Ernest K. Gann

10/13/2020

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Flying is hypnotic and all pilots are victims to the spell. Their world is like a magic island in which the factors of life and death assume their proper values. Thinking becomes clear because there are no earthly foibles or embellishments to confuse it.
​Ernest K. Gann
Author of Fate is the Hunter
Born October 13, 1910
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E. K. Gann
FRIDAY: My Book World | Michael Waldman's The Fight to Vote
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The  Tragedy of Richard Yates

10/9/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
I grew up in an affluent suburban world and never worried about money until I'd grown up and found wonderfully original ways to screw up my life.
​K. A. Applegate
Author of The One and Only Ivan
Born October 9, 1956
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K. A. Applegate
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Bailey, Blake. A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. New York: Picador, 2003.
​
Tragedy is a horrendous thing for any human to endure, and yet we all do endure it to one extent or another: adverse childhood experiences, deaths, career failures, and more. The author of this exhaustive literary biography, Blake Bailey, does not employ the word lightly, neither in the title nor how he uses it throughout the book. Bailey’s subject, novelist Richard Yates, born in 1926, has about as tragic life as one can live, yet Yates uses it to formulate his fiction with a high degree of success, perhaps too well, to listen to some critics, many of whom are put off by his lack of “happy endings” or his “dim view” of humanity.
 
No matter what, Yates comes by his viewpoint honestly. In short, his parents’ divorce, not to mention he is raised by a mother who probably has a better opinion of herself than her real talents manifest themselves in her life. She believes herself to be an “artist,” and because of her opinion, her two children (Richard and sister Ruth) are always at the bottom of her priorities. On the other hand, she is a highly seductive person, among other things, encouraging her young son to sleep in her bed. On nights that she stays out late or all night, the boy child lies in bed, wondering where she is. And when she comes home and falls in next to him and vomits on his pillow, his rage is stoked in a way that remains with him his entire life. 
 
Some nuggets:

“. . . he fixed on his round eyes and plump lips as physiognomic signs of weakness; more to the point, he thought they made him look feminine, ‘bubbly,’ and he had a lifelong horror of being perceived as homosexual” (39). Hm, I wonder why, with the mother thing he has going on.
 
Friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut writes about war: “People don’t recover from a war. There’s a fatalism that he [Yates] picked up as a soldier. Enlisted men are surprisingly indifferent to survival. Death doesn’t matter that much” (75).
 
Friend and former student DeWitt Henry notes: “Dick cultivated an anti-intellectual manner, but there was nothing phony or affected about it. In places like the army and tuberculosis wards he was put in contact with unlettered people, who were just as sensitive as anybody else” (78). Yates did his best to capture natural intelligence in characters, and, in life, in his teaching at the Iowa Workshop, he landed hard on any, any arrogant student who put another’s writing down.
 
Yates discovers what the term “objective correlative” means: “I had never understood what Eliot meant by the curious phrase ‘objective correlative’ until the scene in Gatsby  where the almost comically sinister Meyer Wolfsheim, who has just been introduced, displays his cuff links and explain that they are ‘the finest specimens of human molars.’ Get it? Got it. That’s  what Eliot meant” (109). He now gets that Wolfsheim, true to his naturalistic name, traffics in human flesh and uses his understanding to find such tokens for his own characters.
“Flaubert offered a further tutorial on the proper use of the ‘objective correlative’—the telling detail that transmits meaning and emotion without laboring the point” (175)
 
“The only hope of escape was to write a successful novel—the raw material of which, he already sensed, would be the stuff of his own predicament. But he wanted to transcend the merely personal, to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment and self-pity” (175).
 
Bailey comments on claims of French critic, Jacques Cabau, that Yates is a master: “Not surprisingly the Frenchman was especially pleased by Yates’s insights into the hollowness of American life: ‘Eleven Kinds of Loneliness—a courageous theme in America, where loneliness is a sin, where success is obligatory and happiness is the first duty of every citizen’” (271).
 
Long-term friend and publisher, Sam Lawrence, says at Yates’s funeral (more of a come-as-you-are wake): “‘He drank too much, he smoked too much, he was accident-prone, he led an itinerant life, but as a writer he was all in place. He wrote the best dialogue since John O’Hara, who also lacked the so-called advantages of Harvard and Yale. And like O’Hara he was a master of realism, totally attuned to the nuances of American behavior and speech. You know what I think he would have said to all this? ‘C’mon, Sam, knock it off. Let’s have a drink’” (607).
​
Anyone wanting to get inside the head of one of the greatest American twentieth-century novelists must consider reading this book. It’s that great. My second-hand copy is marked with a “WITHDRAWN” stamp from the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library in Indiana. Guess it wasn’t much of a hit there.

NEXT FRIDAY: Michael Waldman's The Fight to Vote
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A Writer's Wit: John W. Gardner

10/8/2020

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The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.
​John W. Gardner
Author of On Leadership
Born October 8, 1912
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J. W. Gardner
TOMORROW: My Book World | Blake Bailey's A Tragic Honesty
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A Writer's Wit: elizabeth Janeway

10/7/2020

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Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.
​Elizabeth Janeway
Author of Man's World, Woman's Place: A Study in Social Mythology
Born October 7, 1913
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E. Janeway
FRIDAY: My Book World | Blake Bailey's  A Tragic Honesty 
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A Writer's Wit: Shana Alexander

10/6/2020

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What troubles me is not that movie stars run for office, but that they find it easy to get elected. It should be difficult. It should be difficult for millionaires, too.
​Shana Alexander
Author of Very Much a Lady
Born October 6, 1925
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S. Alexander
FRIDAY: My Book World | Blake Bailey's A Tragic Honesty
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A Minister's Journey

10/2/2020

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A WRITER'S WIT
Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.
​Mahatma Gandhi
Author of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Autobigraphy: The Story of My Experiments with Truth

Born October 2, 1869
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M. Gandhi

My Book World

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Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Farrar, 2004.
​
Robinson writes this novel in a very different but masterful fashion from most contemporary novels. She undertakes to have a third-generation (at least) Protestant minister tell his family’s story to his very young son by way of a letter, reviving a long epistolary tradition in storytelling. It is the kind of novel that wends itself back and forth over the same geographical (from Iowa to Kansas, literally on foot) and temporal (several generations) territories. One must retain part of the information, at least, to make sense of it all; yet Robinson skillfully reminds readers of pertinent facts, and they can uncover more as they continue their journey through the book. 
 
The elderly Rev. John Ames, who has married late in life, is fatally ill and thus wishes to share his life with his young son. Early on, he shares that in his life as a pastor he has written and filed away a large number of sermons:

“Your mother . . . was the one who actually called my attention to the number of boxes I have filled with my sermons and my prayers. Say, fifty sermons a year for forty-five years, not counting funerals and so on, of which there have been a great many. Two thousand two hundred and fifty. If they average thirty pages, that’s sixty-seven thousand five hundred pages . . . two hundred twenty-five books which puts me up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity” (19).
One doesn’t know if the son is impressed because he hasn’t yet read this long epistle, but to the reader it seem be a daunting figure. Even most novelists do not produce that much material in a lifetime. So what occupies the thoughts of a trained minister? Family issues, certainly, and we learn of his older brother Edward who studies in Europe and returns an atheist. One problem with a liberal education is that one is taught to think for oneself and what Edward thinks does not please their father; in fact, he is quite hurt that Edward refuses to deliver the prayer at a meal but even more disappointed that his son will not be following in his footsteps. 
 
Another major thread of the narrative has to do with a fellow pastor and friend, a man named Robert Boughton. (One is not sure if the first syllable is pronounced bough as in a tree’s bough, bow as in bow tie, or even buffton or booton.) Robert’s son, Jack, is a bit of a problem in a number of ways I shall not reveal, and because of them John Ames does not trust Jack. But as a matter of putting his faith in action, he finally steps up to help the troubled young man to grow and move on—his own father, Robert, not ever knowing of Jack’s troubled past. I, too, like Edward, am a former Christian, but I find the book explores the topic of spirituality in a manner that is respectful to all parties who may read the book, and that is a feat difficult to achieve.


​NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Blake Bailey's Literary Biography of Author Richard Yates: A Tragic Honesty
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A Writer's Wit: Donald A. Wollheim

10/1/2020

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I think that the first men to land on Pluto are going to make some very astonishing discoveries. But I am also sure that they will never go there in rockets. They will have to make the immense trip by some more powerful means—like the anti-gravitational drive.
​Donald A. Wollheim
Author of Secret of the Ninth Planet
Born October 1, 1914
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D. A. Wollheim
TOMORROW: My Book World | Marilynne Robinson's Gilead
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    AUTHOR
    Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA.

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