We have all seen studies, indexes, and tables purporting to assess the level of democratic development throughout the world, and these cannot but remind us of nineteenth-century quackery – something along the lines of Drs. John Kellogg and Havelock Ellis – with its measurements of life force. The truth is we know a man’s alive, and roughly how alive he is, just by looking at him as he reads the morning paper.
Back in spring 1980 I was a Russian linguist in the U.S. Army stationed at a listening post east of Hamburg and just west of The Wall with East Germany. Not the Berlin Wall. This was The Wall that stretched from the Baltic Sea southward and separated East from West Germany. We used to listen to the Soviet Army practicing launching their nuclear missiles. One day I calculated the target position: Our position.
Barack Obama has managed to sneak back into the news. The occasion was an interview with Christiane Amampour in which he compared the modest media response to the death of 700 illegal immigrants, whose boat sank before they could enter Greece, with the hysteria over the fate of 7 rich tourists who tried to visit the Titanic.
But if I am correct in saying we are beginning afresh, would that not imply that the Trojans must be guilty, a second time, of a criminal act that defies the laws of gods and men? Exactly.
So far, no American forces have died in Ukraine. But that easily could happen as the Ukraine military’s ongoing offensive continues to falter.
I love talking about books I haven’t read. In part because it’s a national tradition, ever since everybody in Russia came up with something nasty to say about Doctor Zhivago without having laid eyes on the novel. But partly, and on a more serious note, because it’s very much in the general tradition of literary dramaturgy, when utterly fictional writers, painters, or composers tread the boards with splendid aplomb even as the reader is left wondering about what their novels, paintings, or sonatas might actually be like.
Many an ambitious ruler, seeking to extend his power, has stubbed his big toe on the brute facts of family and kinship, and many an ideological revolution that failed to reckon with the bind forces of greed and competition has been brought down by the primitive passions and instincts they had hoped to eliminate or at least suppress.
Now, “brother” and “friend” are or at least used to be rather exclusive terms. They did not refer to just anyone, much less everyone.
Friends, acquaintances, sometimes virtual strangers who are acquaintances of friends, come to visit us in Palermo and stay with us every so often. Obviously impressions of the personages inhabiting one’s own house are vivid, far more intense than of those with whom one dines or has drinks, whence, inevitably, the urge to somehow reflect on them in this diary.
This is the text of a talk presented at a conference, in Waterford, Wisconsin, attended by mostly Lutheran pastors plus a sprinkling of heretics and one papist, arranged by my friend Pastor David Ramirez.
