# "Hour of Trust" all the hues of neil *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 20 Feb 2002* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Michael Andre-Driussi *20 Feb 2002, 15:35* There I was, writing about Nihilism ("Nile-izm," as I pronounce it) and I mentioned the helmeted astronaut in passing (probably Neil Armstrong; with that whole thread created or reported by Geoff Cohen that "Nilammon" in TBOTNS is a corruption of "Neil Armstrong"), and it occured to me that, yes, nihilism can be pronounced "Neel-izm," and how odd that is. Peters is trying to research "where it all began" and he gets the image of Chesire Cat/Neil Armstrong--and that is all he gets. A more important point which has not been articulated (though it may be well known): the corporations of "Hour of Trust" are not generic mega-corps, say McDonald's or Ford Motor Co, who have somehow acquired the Pentagon, etc. The corporations are specifically the military/industrial complex, the weapons makers, who have amassed enough wealth and power as to consume their socially decadent host, yet they are incapable of fulfilling their new roles. So they can produce such durable goods as warplanes, for example--not that they have also picked up these war factories for cheap, but rather these war factories have been their cash cows in the 50 years after WW2. =mantis= Sirius Fiction booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley Now with UPDATES! http://www.siriusfiction.com/ ---