I heard that before the war and the concomitant impoverishment of the Russian oligarch, wideboys from Moscow and points east used to rent whole villages in Sicily for parties, which they had learned from their betters to call corporate entertainment.
The trip begins on an auspicious note. Yesterday a Trump-appointed Federal judge in Florida struck down the Biden administration’s imprudent and unlawful extension of the mask mandate in airports, airplanes, etc.
At this point in John’s narrative, even a reader as obtuse as I am should begin to see the connection with Chapter 8, in which the Pharisees had denounced Jesus as a Samaritan and a demoniac.
This week I continue with my son’s boozy epistles. They help me to keep off the subject of the war in Ukraine, which I follow with maniacal devotion. Yet as the gentle reader will likely agree, even a confounded zealot needs a break, if only for some virtual communion with his kin. Here Nikolai describes his stay as a houseguest in the home of a family in Mazères, near Bordeaux.
As a child in the 1950s, my father–not a conservative but a Democrat–discouraged us from going to Disney movies, though he did not object to anything about Duckburg and its citizens.
Last Train to Dixie, a collection of essays by Jack Trotter, was published last year by Shotwell Publishing, a Southern press presided over by the grand panjandrum of Southern historiography, Clyde Wilson.
I wonder if the gentle reader has had occasion to remark that, first in middlebrow newspapers and now almost universally throughout the media, the paragraph is disappearing. As in all properly constructed, literary prose, the paragraph in the service of journalism once played the same role as the order of service does in church liturgy.
Of course the real interest in the question lies not in the grammatical confusion that partially obscures the meaning, but in the easy assumption that human suffering must be caused be caused by the sin of an individual himself or by the sins of his ancestors, whose guilt he has inherited.
