To Americans, who treat eating as either a shameful necessity–the worse food tastes, presumably, the more moral is the consumer–or as an opportunity for displaying a lifestyle choice, the sacred meal is a notion even more alien than the good meal. Americans eat worse than any wealthy nation in the history of the world.
There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Taxes are an infamously good way to discourage whatever they tax. For this reason and others, the income tax and the property tax are especially bad ideas, for they discourage both work and ownership, along with mandating that all forms of work and property produce a minimal amount of cash.
The tone of the whole piece, which uses “fascism” or “fascist” 14 times, is that of a young Red Guard during Mao’s Cultural Revolution 50 years ago, shutting down all voices it doesn’t agree with: “Last year, we stood with students who righteously shut down the Trump regime mouthpiece Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley, and we were part of preventing the parade of fascist monsters from storming the same campus in a so-called ‘Free Speech Week’ last September.
This is essentially a letter from Munich, where my wife and I flew last week – I to celebrate the composer Vladimir Genin’s sixtieth birthday, Olga to take part in a grosse Jubiläumskonzert in honor of the occasion. This took place on Sunday evening in Munich’s Gasteig, incongruously – for anyone familiar with Genin’s music – a modernist monstrosity along the lines of London’s Barbican and the new Seine Musicale in Paris.
As I sat at the café, I said to myself,
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,
But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind
The modern age, argues Berdayev, has ended with the catastrophe of the Great War and a “New Middle Age” is upon us, where all will eventually choose between religious belief and the ersatz religion of ideology.
