[Lonesome in Massachussets]

In fact Swift called himself "English", spoke of his residence in Dublin as an "exile" in "a land I hate", and did not even have an Irish accent.

Sounds like a lot of my ancestors, only they called themselves "Irish" and spoke with an Irish accent.

[Hegemony Cricket]

Hmmm. I dunno about all that, but Taylor Swift is American.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Right now, ironically enough, Nikolai Gogol's story "Dead Souls" should be compared to our current economic situation. That is, instead of dead serfs, think of them as subprime mortgages! The parallels are hilarious, if you can stand to read Gogol.

At the time, landholders were taxed based on the number of serfs they had according to the last, infrequent census. If you've been following the mortgage crisis, as mortgages were sold and resold, they have obtained the same bizarre standing as "dead souls".

"Chichikov's macabre mission to acquire "dead souls" is actually just another complicated scheme to inflate his social standing (essentially a 19th century Russian version of the ever popular "get rich quick" scheme).

He hopes to collect the legal ownership rights to dead serfs as a way of inflating his apparent wealth and power. Once he acquires enough dead souls, he will retire to a large farm and take out an enormous loan against them, finally acquiring the great wealth he desires."