"Makesicko City," Carlos Fuentes labeled it, in his dystopian 1987 novel "Christopher Unborn," "an immense ulcerated crater, a cavity in the universe" and "the chancre of the Americas".
The stars and galaxies, were moving as if immersed in the gravity of giant invisible clouds of so-called dark matter -- "missing matter" the Swiss astronomer Dr. Fritz Zwicky labeled it in the 1930's.
They immediately labeled it, in the words of Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who heads the party's campaign arm, a naked act of "political self-preservation," and they sought to portray it as an isolated case growing out of Pennsylvania's political environment.
The other side, for its part, has turned Ms. Fluke and the verbal abuse she suffered into a convenient symbol of "the Republican war on women," as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has labeled it in a series of fund-raising emails.
Economic sanctions also created illegal schemes to channel money directly to presidential palaces, such as the notorious food-for oil program in Iraq, which ended up being "the biggest financial scandal ever", as one American senator labeled it in 2008.
So here is my thought: "Hateration" (as Mary J. Blige so brilliantly labeled it in her hit song "Family Affair"), is an ego-driven response to shame: our feelings that we haven't lived up to our own standards, and that therefore we aren't good enough.
