I have received a number of queries about different aspects of my most recent book, and, rather than answer each one privately, it seemed a good idea to make it a public forum. I may soon transfer it to our Forum section, but I shall begin it here on the front page.
The worst news was the return of the threat of nuclear annihilation, which had vanished after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. The new Eve of Destruction arrived courtesy of Joe Biden’s “Armageddon” foreign policy, as he described it.
But setting aside national peculiarities, one might suggest a general rule, which is that, generally speaking, the people empowered to make decisions for a community should belong to that community and have to face the consequences of their decisions.
Now, as in all good Trollope novels, there is at least one moral theme that runs like a conspicuous thread throughout the variegated fabric.
A reader’s comment on last week’s post triggered an inchoate thought, and in its wake a lucid recollection. I remembered my erstwhile and now late father-in-law who, among his other dubious accomplishments, was a friend of Donald Trump, most closely so in the latter’s Ivana phase.
When I was a kid growing up in a Detroit suburb in the 1960s and 70s, the only time the lights went out was during a severe electrical storm where the tornadoes knocked out the power lines. Snow, even seven feet?
The first incident in Jesus’ life recorded by John is the dipping ritual performed by one Ioannes, who is not the same person as the writer.
The most obvious indication of subjugation by whatever means is the end of traditional law and custom, which are replaced by the whim of the sovereign, whether sovereignty be exercised by one man, or several, or a by party or faction or sect.
I return to last week’s night at the theater of the absurd as news comes that the royal couple, the Duke and the Dauphin – all right, Dauphine – of our times, have demanded that Buckingham Palace apologize to them for Lady Hussey’s impertinence. The impertinence, as the gentle reader may recall, lay in asking a woman in outlandish garb where she came from.
If we survey human history, looking for examples of subjugation, there is no lack of material: the Children of Israel in Egypt and later under the rule of Babylonians, Persians, Babylonians, and Romans; the not-quite indigenous peoples of the Americas, subjugated by European colonists…
