When I selected the first Bulldog Drummond for our ongoing discussion of books, it was partly because it is the kind of old-fashioned adventure that people like to read in the summer, and partly the author’s understand of certain fundamental things of life might remind readers of the “world we have lost.”
Afghanistan is not a natiom, much less a nation- state. It is patchwork of hostile ethnicities and regions engaged in endless conflict, alternately lapsing into a cold, or blowing up into a hot, war
I posted the first part of this new essay in haste, because I felt a weakness coming on, but I have now revised and expand the first part and added a second.
This is a slightly corrected Perspective on Afghanistan published in 2010:
“to me the most wonderful thing of all is that so wise and wealthy a nation could have ever entertained the project of occupying such a country as Kabul, where there is nothing but rocks and stones.
Biden’s performance as commander-in-chief is disastrous, but let us never forget that George Bush and his team of aspiring world-controlers had no valid reason for invading and destroying this rotten country–as I said before the invasion–and the only exit strategy that seemed likely is what is happening now
An earlier less humorous version I meant to keep in draft mode got posted (by me). If you read it, please read the new version. I have post neither column nor comment since August 1. This slacking is not due to heat–it has been in the very low 80’s here in Rockford–nor pique with anyone or anything. I’d spent much of a day eating out, smoking a cigar, and talking for hours and was not surprised to find I had a minor sore throat.
If you are unwise enough to be on one or another social medium, you will have read something like this: “If you want to disagree with my futile ill-thought out and clumsily expressed opinion on X Y or Z, go ahead and make my day. I can’t wait to unfriend you”? Do you ever wonder what is going on in someone’s mind, when he issues such a taunt? I automatically unfriend such people, even if I agree with their position. I no longer have to teach low-achieving American adolescents with exaggerated opinions of themselves. I am speaking of the early...
In reading fiction, especially fiction of the lighter sorts, readers are tempted to see the characters in abstract terms as straw men or lay figures invented to play a part or represent an idea, a virtue, or a vice.
McNeile’s plots follow the well-worn highway of adventure fiction, The plot of the first is particularly formulaic.
“L’enfers c’est l’autre.” Whatever Sartre meant by “Hell is other people,” he was certainly right about the people he liked to refer to as “salaud”—the scum who think only of their own interests and reduce the universe to their own dimensions, in other words, people like Sartre and his friends.
