While Tom and Casy were wondering what had happened, Muley Graves, a diehard tenant farmer, came by and disclosed that all of the families in the neighborhood had gone to California or were going.
In Iraq's case this was the Baath, or Renaissance, Party, a vehicle which he ultimately transformed, through terrifyingly capricious ruthlessness, into a fascistic tool for his own absolute control.
The purpose of the transcranial stimulator was actually to shortcut the subject into achieving an elusive mental state known as " flow" — a term popularized by Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
It was the same intangible, unspectacular courage that all the Wilkeses possessed, a quality which Scarlett did not understand but to which she gave grudging tribute.
Its informal conversational style would make interaction comfortable, and yet the machine would remain slightly unpredictable and therefore interesting.