I’m not personally acquainted with Mrs. Assad, but I’m sure she’s a perfectly nice woman who just happened to be an accomplice of a historically significant war criminal. I could well have met her – she had been living in London until 2000, when she met her future husband and moved to Damascus – as I had many Arab friends at the time. The point is that accomplices of criminals, and on occasion the criminals themselves, are often perfectly nice people.
As I have noted here on a few occasions, good Catholics though they are, Italians are as distant from Christianity as any pagan.
The lively discussion prompted by last week’s post, as well as the post itself, lacked an important ingredient, namely, some kind of connection to the present. A backward glance is all very well, but what of the Babbitts of today and tomorrow?
It is difficult to overestimate the influence of the all but forgotten Sinclair Lewis novel in the period between the two world wars, a stampede of adulation which culminated in the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to the author, the first American to receive it.
Yesterday was the thousandth day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I published an article on Newsmax entitled “1000 Days of Fratricide” and thought it might be a good idea to present its overarching contention here.
For my wife’s birthday the other week we took a trip to the countryside to visit a famous vineyard, with Giulio doing the driving. There was another couple to lunch, English people from Sussex, she a bubbly IT specialist, he a teacher at a school near Cambridge. His name was Larry and he said he taught drama.
I am grateful to fate that my life as a journalist has never swerved from the path charted at the start, a way of looking at the world without grasping for pegs on which to hang stories. The peg for every story written today – inescapably, thunderously, deafeningly – is the result of the American election, a result unknown to me at this writing yet one, I concede, that may well decide the future of Western civilization.
I am not somebody, of all people, who would ever forget St. Luke’s admonishment that “a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth,” but when it comes to the possession of a good bottle of cognac, covetousness proves the stronger.
Webster’s defines “platitude” as “the quality or state of being dull or insipid,” which is unnecessarily judgmental and, ironically, platitudinous.
