Rather than give you a rehash of the recent “election” and whether President Trump somehow can overcome the blatant stealing of his victory, I thought I’d write about something else. Everyone not just in America, but across the globe, has known one day Trump’s reign would end, whether in 2021 or 2025. So everyone has been preparing.
When this cotton-mill boy went down to the University in 1959, he noticed something at once. There was a division between the superior US (that is, them) and the inferior THEM (that is, us). The division had nothing to do with intellectual distinction or even athletic prowess, but the members of US definitely regarded themselves as superior.
More than any election in my lifetime – and I remember the 1964 Goldwater bid when I was nine – this one has been nothing but one revolting development after another. One reason is this election has been going on since this time four years ago. Just before the November 2016 plebiscite, Hillary and her minions ginned up the Russia Hoax as a guarantee against Trump’s possible victory. At the time I wrote on this very site that it was impossible for the Russians to rig our election because it’s too complex. That turned out to be the case, as...
I’ve just started rereading Sophocles’ Ajax. I’m not sure why, apart from the need to keep reading Greek, but there is something that has always attracted me in the portrait of the staunch reactionary who goes mad, after being dishonored, and of his glib enemy, Odysseus, who learns humanity. (I have a strong hunch that in his depictions of Odysseus–as in his Oedipus–Sophocles is dealing with the Athenian mentality of his own day, and that scholars who see the poet’s friend Cimon in Ajax are on the right track.) If five people promise to start reading it, I’ll start a...
As the gentle reader may remember from previous posts, my wife is a concert pianist who, over the last few years, has been busy bringing to light the time capsule of classical music which Shostakovich left buried in Azerbaijan, largely in the form of his beloved Kara Karaev. Now Azerbaijan is at war with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, while in Europe her concert engagements have been cancelled or postponed indefinitely due to the coronavirus. So evenings Olga and I sit in the kitchen, poor and sober, debating what can be said in appeals to potential sponsors of the recording...
Here in the Old World, there is often a lot of debate about the Electoral College anytime a US Presidential election looms, but the truth is that so few people, even in the US, really know much about it (beyond what the media tells them). Hence my European friends often ask me what the deal is and what I think about the system. The truth is that the history behind the Electoral College is pretty interesting, and gives us some insights into how America’s current form of government has traditionally tried to function.
In his book, Tye digs up the corpse of Senator Joseph McCarthy with the intent of comparing his maligned career to the current administration of Donald Trump. The Democrats, who have gone full Marxist, could find no better grave to desecrate and phantom to exorcise than that of Joseph McCarthy.
One such soup I decided to concoct last week, and may I warn the gentle reader not to try it at home. I began preparing beef stock the day before, and on the following day the confounded recipe kept me in the kitchen from nine in the morning until the dinner guests arrived
Some are saying this is the most consequential election in US history, or at least the in lives of the oldest among us. I’ve heard that for many elections, beginning in 1964, when LBJ’s infamous “Daisy” ad warned Barry Goldwater would blow up the world. After AuH2O lost big and LBJ escalated the Vietnam War in 1965, conservatives bitterly quipped, “They said if I voted for Goldwater, we’d get war. I voted for Goldwater, and we got war.”
I had known Pierre only slightly, and my wife still less, as the acquaintance largely predated her arrival in my life, but it was Pierre on whom the story she told at dinner pivoted. As the guests had been challenged to recount the “oddest” of their experiences, I debuted with the bizarre personal episode posted here last week. And Olga, likewise dredging her memory, came out with the tale of Pierre.
