What you just saw was a putsch by the Inner Party against Joe Biden, the duly elected president of the United States and the nominee for re-election by the Democratic Party after winning the vast majority of primary voters. Here’s the 2024 count:
I’ve been in 15th century Florence, to be precise, colloguing with Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola, Savonarola, Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Machiavelli, and others. As a traveler in time and space, I was eager to share my thoughts on the American present, which for them is an unimaginably distant future.
The real question in the attempted assassination is not, could a 20-year-old shoot and nearly kill former President Trump, but how he was allowed to get in position to do so. The shot itself was not that hard. Here’s some perspective.
I remember when President Reagan was shot on March 30, 1981. I was serving in the U.S. Army in West Germany as a Russian linguist in a mobile intelligence unit.
Two kinds of ideas animate the world. One kind is private, hermetic, sovereign; I would go as far as to call it anaerobic, by analogy with the bacteria that perish when exposed to air and light. Fedor Tiutchev, Russia’s most original nineteenth-century poet, had this variety in mind when we wrote his “Silentium”: “Keep silent, secret, and obscured / Thy thoughts and dreams without end, / And let them rise like stars, inured / To darkness regnant in thine head.”
The present tense of verbs, vocabulary for getting around and talking about the weather.
My paternal grandmother’s family was from Vitebsk, where it was well remembered that as a callow youth Marc Chagall made a living painting shop signs in that provincial town. It turns out, however, that the canvases Chagall produced in the years preceding his emigration to France are perhaps the only pictures of lasting value – of genius, a more impulsive chronicler would say – ever painted on the territory of the Russian, and then Soviet, empire.
While the Ciompi were clashing with the Grassi, Archbishop Giovanni Visconti’s nephew, Bernabò Visconti (who had allied himself by marriage to Mastino II della Scala of Verona), was constructing a powerful base in Central Italy by conquering papal territory on the Tuscan border.
The Guelph elite might have regained power permanently had the various families been able to work together in harmony, but the Donati, Adimari, and Tosinghi were constantly at odds.
Florence had always been close to Rome, and her relationship with the Papacy would be encouraged by the war which broke out between Florence and Ghibelline Pisa and then with Ghibelline Siena.
Children are often asked by adults, especially by those who have made a stinking mess of their own lives, what they want to be when they grow up. Mercifully, before the child is able too speak for himself, there are parents on hand to answer the question. I always say I want Vasily to become a painter.
