A Kamikaze pilot who lived.
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The Yokaren, Mr. Odachi pointed out, were different from other kamikaze, students who had been yanked out of their schools and consigned to death with little preparation or training. Still, the young men in Mr. Odachi’s program were groomed to die in aerial combat even before Japan’s desperate turn to suicide missions.
Cadets were celebrated as cherry blossoms, a flower whose vivid beauty is accentuated by its brief existence. Even the buttons on their uniforms, embossed with the flower, served as a reminder of their imminent death in battle.
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the paranoid style in american politics
The classic 1964 Richard Hofstadter essay in Harpers
I first read it in American History class
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American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
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