Some people on FB are gassing on about what a stinker Hemingway was, and concluding therefore that he couldn’t write. Treating novelists as either heroes or demons, ideologues or intellectuals, is a grave mistake that is generally made by people who do not read, much less understand literature.
Since the Persian Wars—like the Punic Wars, the Crusades, and the West’s ongoing struggle with Islam—serve to define who we are, it will be useful to reread Herodotus, particularly the books that are directly relevant to the cultural struggle between the West and its enemies. For those who are picking it up for the first time, I must warn you that reading Herodotus, the most entertaining of historians, may become a habit.
A friend sent me a book by an acquaintance of my father’s and the late dean of American radio talk shows, Barry Farber. It’s called Cocktails with Molotov and is the kind of memoir that’s difficult not to like, because in this day and age the simple and truthful voice of a person who has no agenda except to amuse the reader is a rarity.
It’s time to pick another book. I propose either a selection of Tennyson’s Arthurian Idylls or else Gulliver’s Travels, which I have been intermittently rereading. My wife and I have been working through Herodotus after breakfast and have at last hit Book V, where we can turn from Scythians and Libyans and read about Macedonians and Greeks on the eve of the Ionian Revolt that leads to Darius’ invasion of 490. This week I’ll be welcoming expressions of preference on any of the above.
The main problem began last May when the death of George Floyd led to widespread riots, not only in Minnesota, but across the country. Such pusillanimous politicians as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey let the rioters burn down large parts of the city. The same thing happened in Portland, Seattle and elsewhere.
Just as there is the irony of fate, there are ironies of nomenclature. One such is writ large in the name of Alexei Navalny’s “Anti-Corruption Foundation.” As I pointed out in this space on a recent occasion, corruption in Russia is largely what stands between the Kremlin and world domination, as villains preoccupied with plundering the nation’s wealth have little time left for villainy.
One of the themes of my writing for Fleming Foundation is: We have to get along with the Russians. They have 6,000 nuclear bombs. We have 6,000 nuclear bombs. Be careful.
“O, reason not the need,” the king tells his daughter, who has just added a cancelled security detail to the lengthening list of her father’s humiliations at the hands of his perfidious progeny. Her sister has just asked him, rhetorically, why he ever needed to have those rowdy men in the house.
After Xerox copiers were invented in 1959, a few trickled into the Soviet Union. The regime immediately mandated each had to be registered with the KGB, including a copy of each copier’s unique “fingerprint.” That way those using the machines for samizdat – self-publishing – of dissident materials could be identified and sent to the gulag. The Biden regime is seeking to impose something similar with his Executive Ukase on gun control.
I have a chronic reluctance to get up before dawn to perch myself in a tree-stand at first light in the middle of deer season, but, as I faced the final week of hunting, my sloth yielded to an insatiable venison-jones which drove me, regardless of moon phase or feeding schedule, temperature or precipitation, to go out early every morning of that final week, shivering in wind and rain, before work hoping for the arrival of a doe into my kill zone.
