First we had C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters in 1942, a classic apologetic novel written from the perspective of a senior tempter in the service of “Our Father Below,” offering sagely advice to his nephew, Wormwood. Then we had Paul Harvey and his well-known “If I Were the Devil” audio piece from 1965.
I don’t have much to say about what happened yesterday. The people who organized the demonstration and those, like the President, who merely agitated for it, must have known that whatever took place would play into the hands of the incoming administration and the media that represents them. Even if not a single law had been broken, they would have been portrayed as sore losers who cannot accept the results of a free and fair election.
Oscar Wilde, as the gentle reader may recall, was undone not by his own crime, which “love that dare not speak its name” was in those balmy days, but by the crime of libel, of which he had incautiously accused Lord Queensberry.
America zooms – or Zooms – into 2021 the laughingstock of the world. The global Guarantor of Democracy, bombing foreign lands with allegedly faulty elections at the drop of a parasol, continues limping toward a January 5 dual election for U.S. Senators from Georgia, a January 6 possible validation or invalidation of the presidential election by Congress and a January 20 inauguration of somebody who might have won the November 3 election.
At first glance, abetting a healthy child with full connivance of the state to “change sex” seems to have nothing to do with Marx or socialism. Considering the question more closely, however, we see that gender, like other human endowments, is a form of private property; that it is, in point of fact, a property; and that, along with money, land, and any other means of production, this property can and, a Marxist would argue, must be summarily expropriated.
The identity of the Aragonese noble family associated with mafia style poisonings in Renaissance Italy – as well as with incest, larceny, and simony, among other lesser crimes – is incidental to the story here. I can easily replace the name of Cesare Borgia with that of Claudius of Denmark, likewise known, at least to readers of Shakespeare, for murdering his brother: “My father’s brother, but no more like my father/Than I to Hercules.” Prince Hamlet, in fact, was very much on my mind when, a couple of weeks ago, I watched Alexei Navalny’s investigation into his own murder. “I...
For they shall get a gold star on their forehead from the CDC.
Wisdom comes from knowledge which comes from painfully acquired information about reality—facts. Since, as you say, you have little knowledge of the current political scene and even less of history, your concerns do not really involve rational thought but are a reflection of depression, and unfortunately, this is a mental condition that leads the sufferer to be happy to see, as the French say, “tout en noir”, all in black.
The End-of-the Worlders are going from handwringing over a possibly stolen election–please don’t tell me you know it is stolen in fact because you don’t know anything of the kind–to declaring the death of the American republic. It’s the worst sort of ditto-head approach to politics. It begins by saying, “Say, this is about the best damn country that has ever existed” and go on in the vein of Babbit’s speech to the Zenith Booster Club.
Like the word’s Italian variant, coprifuoco, “curfew”–which is now in effect in several European countries–comes from Old French cuevrefeu, “cover fire,” advice to citizens to extinguish fires at a certain hour of the evening. My wife thinks it’s sweet. “It shows concern,” she says. “Just compare it to what we say in Russian.” In Russian the equivalent is “commandant’s hour,” meaning do what you’re told or be brought before the commandant and get the regulation nine grams of lead in the back of your head. Language gives nations away.
