All drunken men are alike, one might say paraphrasing Tolstoy, but every drunken woman shows inebriation in her own way. Up to a point, however. When they’ve had one too many, all Russian women of my generation or younger end up singing the same song with the inevitability of a cuckoo clock chiming the hour…
As I explained in a comment, Curtin was a famous folklorist and historian of the Mongols, whose death was lamented by Teddy Roosevelt. He can be long-winded and takes for granted a breadth of reading which not everyone possesses. Nonetheless, his introduction is very useful.
What is most astonishing in Garrett’s narrative technique is his generosity to the narrators. While most novelists write from a single point of view, whether their own or that of a fictional character or of liberal philosophy’s impartial spectator, Garrett allows his people to speak for themselves and to justify their (often miserable and sometimes worthless) lives.
This was published originally (if I recall correctly) in an issue of The Texas Review. George Garret, knowing how highly my wife and I regarded The Succession, asked me to write the piece, perhaps because he had trouble finding anyone else.
Doubtless the gentle reader appreciates that in two hundred or more posts published in this space during the term of the outgoing administration I hardly ever mentioned President Trump. Instead I sat on my hands, which kept me from biting my nails, and watched the spectacle unfold. Yet kicking a man when he’s down is hardly comme il faut…
America’s Rancid Ruling Elite keep showing themselves a gang of fools who might get us all nuked. Consider the events of the past week, over the election, the protests and the demands for impeaching Trump – again. Does anyone consider the foreign policy implications of it all, especially with Russia?
I have decided, more or less, to abandon Facebook. I told my virtual friends I’d give it a month of one-way silence, and I intend to do that, but social media are a terrible distraction. I’d rather read my stack of old Braccio di Ferro comic books. It is not just that most FB posts are stupid–they are–or ill-informed–even more so–but the invitation to people to admire their own ill-considered thoughts, to stare into the mirror they have created and admire their own imperfect complexions.
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.
