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" Back inside, I’m shown an antique cabinet in which members of the community, famous for their homegrown produce, dried herbs.The Oneida Community was an upstate tourist attraction right from the start, second, Valesky says, to Niagara Falls. I’m taking the same guided tour offered a hundred and fifty years ago to prim rubbernecks who came here to peep at sex fiends. I wonder how many of my vacationing forebears went home disappointed? They thought they were taking the train to Gomorrah but instead they got to watch herbs dry. Valesky opens a drawer in the herb cabinet so I can get a whiff. He mentions that back in the day, when one tourist was shown the cabinet she rudely asked her community-member guide, “What’s that odor?” To which the guide replied, “Perhaps it’s the odor of crushed selfishness.” Valesky grins. “How about that for a utopian answer?” To my not particularly utopian nose, crushed selfishness smells a lot like cilantro. "
68
" In three weeks, the women's team had done more for soccer in the United States than any team had ever done. Yet, the United States Soccer Federation was unprepared and unwelcoming in its acerbic response to the women's success. With petty, resentful, chauvinistic behavior, the federation would bungle what should have been its greatest moment as a national governing body. Its leaders would criticize DiCicco instead of congratulating him, they would threaten to sue the women over an indoor victory tour and they would wait an unacceptably long period before entering into contract negotiations with the team. Then, at the end of the year, the federation would offer a deal that the women found insulting. Unwilling to trust that the federation was bargaining in good faith, the women would boycott a trip to a tournament in Australia. They would become champions of the world, embraced by the president, by the largest crowd ever to watch women play and by the largest television audience for soccer in this country, embraced by everyone, it seemed, but the officials who ran the sport with the vision of a student council. Increasingly, it appeared, the only amateurs left in sports were the people running the federations that governed them. "
― , The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World
71
" In the well reported Kubizek period from late 1904 through mid-1908, with its additiona data from the circumstances of failure at school, lung ailment, and tragic episode of his mother’s death, the picture remains the same. Hitler’s character is one of bold license for a youngster, but not directed toward dissolute behavior or activity that gives a hint of evil. Hitler devoured grand opera and classical music, painted, sketched, planned a great new Linz; he wrote sonnets, communed with nature, and exuded politeness and reserve. These are activities and qualities that suggest potential, although overblown, aspirations to artistic genius. What we see, like it or not, is morally laudable behavior and aspiration on the part of a young man in his teens. But is there a dark side somewhere in this picture?If there were a dark side, it probably would have been the light gray of the contempt that he had for many of his school teachers and his resistance to formal education. Hitler’s comments in Mein Kampf support such contempt and are buoyed by his indelible comment, about his tour of the customs office where his father worked, that the clerks and officials squatted about as monkeys in "
