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.
I came to agree not only with the conclusion, that it was time to get out of the warm but also with the premise, which seemed to echo Forrest’s statement that war means fighting, and fighting means killing. Americans should not get involved in a war, so I thought then and now, unless they will be defending their vital interests, and, if something is important enough to fight for, the only restraints should be moral and not political considerations.
State mandates on COVID, Biden’s take-over of the Supreme Court, Thug shootings, What to do when civilizations collapse,
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.
The United States were in origin a confederation of American republics, ruled for the most part by their own constitutions and laws and whose member states were bound in a contract of union with very strict limits. Between 1776 and 1860, the complex and republican system was devolving–by a sort of political entropy–into a simpler system that concentrated more and more power at the top.
