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.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed on that joyous Christmas Day in 1991, I’ve been pushing for America to lead the world in this multipolar direction. We could have been a benevolent First Among Equals. Instead, we insisted it was a “Unipolar Moment” with the U.S. as the “sole remaining superpower.
Webster’s defines “platitude” as “the quality or state of being dull or insipid,” which is unnecessarily judgmental and, ironically, platitudinous.
Alzheimer’s is a most sinister villain. It is one that cannot be pursued and apprehended. It cannot be incarcerated or brought to justice. No correction nor reformation is possible. Retribution and satisfaction are elusive to the victim and the weary family. If it was a man, I would challenge it to a duel.
I’ve been closely watching presidential campaigns since Nixon-Humphrey-Wallace in 1968. Here’s something weird about this one: Why isn’t Kamala running a “Morning in America” campaign like Reagan’s in 1984?
Life experience shows that causal connections do exist, though not as overtly as science would have us believe.
