FB friend Patrick Mulvey posted a great comment on my previous scribbling:
“It may a small sample size but many of my babyboomer contemporaries and younger extended family members who suffer from ‘real’ mental illness…manic depression, bipolar disorder and worse…….all used illegal drugs regularly in their teens, 20’s and 30’s. I’m not saying this is the only cause of mental illness but one only has to look at our homeless problem and know that lack of housing is not the major reason.”
Last week’s post, its shabby ambience notwithstanding, has opened up a path – if not to the gentle reader’s heart, at least out of potential writer’s block – and so I tread it once more. This week I reveal myself as a feminist sympathizer, admittedly in a rather particular sense.
Sunday’s Internet Front Page of the Washington Post featured an article showing the dangerous delusions of our rulers. They’re upset that 100 percent of Americans don’t accept with Stalinist certainty the legitimacy of the recent plebiscite.
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.
