RE: [A-List] Venezuela and the Latin American "New Left"

["David McDonald" <dbmcdonald@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>As for the ad hominem attack on the pseudonym 'Grok' (derived from the old
comic 'B.C.' I gather).

The word "grok" originated in Robert A Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange
Land," a famous science fiction novel written in the mid-60's. The main
character of this sprawling novel is a human who somehow got stranded on
Mars and then rechthonicated full of alien insights. To "grok" was to
understand deeply, in a fresh and humanistically enlightening way, like an
epiphany but without God. People in the US wandered around for years
grokking this and that. Heinlein started weaving more and more right wing
politics and obsession with sex into his novels, which reached staggering
lengths and achieved total unreadability even for former fans like me.

David McDonald