"Desperate Democrats"

 Everyone wants us to vote early. Resist the urge if possible, unless external factors make that your only choice. While there are only eight days to go, much can happen. Besides, there is a sense of community in going to the Polls on election day. Voting is a privilege limited to democracies and a responsibility of all eligible citizens.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Desperate Democrats”

October 28, 2024

 

“When a man has reached a condition in which he believes that a thing must happen because he does

not wish it, and that what he wishes to happen never will be, this is really the state called desperation.”

                                                                                           Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

                                                                                           Studies in Pessimism

                                                                                           Translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders, 1913

 

Polls tell us the election is too close to call, and I am not going to argue with those who make their living predicting what people will do. Nevertheless, Democrats act desperate; they act as though they expect to lose. They know they have played badly the hand they were dealt. That President Biden had been in mental decline was known by all who have watched his appearances over the past few years. Yet Democrats played Sergeant Schultz – “I know nothing” – and re-nominated him anyway. It was only after his disastrous debate with former President Trump on June 27, when his decline could no longer be denied, that he was unceremoniously dumped.

 

That gave Democrats less than two months to consider candidates who would appeal to a majority of delegates at an open convention to be held in Chicago from August 19 to the 24^th. Instead they chose to coronate Vice President Kamala Harris who had only once visited the border for which Mr. Biden had given her responsibility – about her only real responsibility. Previously, she spent four years in the U.S. Senate, where The Hill, based on roll-call votes, placed her as the second most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the U.S. Senate in the 21^st century, second behind Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Prior to the Senate, she had served thirteen years as an Attorney General, first of San Francisco and then of California. 

 

A few weeks of “joy” accompanied her selection, but with her refusal to hold a news conference, to submit to other than “friendly” interviews, or to explain her change of opinions on policies, the bloom of excitement over her selection wilted. 

 

Her campaign has struggled to focus. She has been the Vice President for almost four years, but she cannot defend an economy, which brought the highest inflation since the 1970s. We have had unprecedented border crossings, which brought fentanyl and crime into the country, and that changed the composition of towns across the land. The Biden-Harris foreign policy has given us a revanchist Russia; a destabilizing, militaristic China; a North Korea sending troops to Russia; and an Iran intent on securing a nuclear bomb, while using proxies to eradicate Israel. As well, anti-Semitism has been on the rise on college campuses by students whose loans Mr. Biden would like to forgive – in other words, to have taxpayers assume the burden of repayment. Unsurprisingly, public trust in government is half what it was twenty years ago. Ms. Harris no longer talks about climate change, wind power or EVs, as they are associated with elites, those whom she claims to disdain. The abortion issue (her only issue) has been tempered with reasonable responses from both Trump and Vance. She has been left with bashing Trump as a would-be dictator, a Fascist, even though she does not seem to know the word’s socialist origins. As the Wall Street Journal editorialized last Friday: “But the climb up the rhetorical dictator chain in the final stages of this election looks like a last-ditch Democratic strategy to save Ms. Harris from defeat.” In comparing Mr. Trump to Hitler, her handlers are insulting fifty million or so Trump supporters. And, as Daniel Henninger pointed out in his recent Wall Street Journalop-ed, at the same time moderate Democrat Senators Baldwin, Casey, Slotkin, Tester – all up for re-election – have adopted Trump-like positions on energy, tariffs, and U.S. manufacturing. Leaders of the Democratic Party are looking desperate as they attempt to preserve a progressive, out-of-touch candidate, but many of their down-ballot candidates are acting pragmatically.   

 

It is not just the choice of a bad candidate, or the fact that Biden’s mental decline was kept hidden. Over the past several years, Democrats have abandoned their middle-class roots, as they adopted a bar-bell approach toward the electorate. On the one hand, the sanctimonious, cultural and economic elites who believe their self-proclaimed moral superiority justifies calling political opponents low-IQ “deplorables” – misogynist, racist, homophobic and xenophobic. On the other end of Democrat supporters are those who feed off government largesse – “green” companies, government employees, university administrators and professors who feed off the government teat, union leaders (but not all union members), indebted students, and illegal immigrants. Independent voters, however, do not vote in blocs. They are individuals. Contrary to President Obama’s harangue, Black men who do not support Ms. Harris are not misogynists. They simply believe her policies are not in their best interests. Progressive Democrats, who control the Party, have no tolerance for those who question why biological men should be able to compete against women in sports. They have little forbearance for those who live by Christian values, or those who support legal immigration but not its illegal cousin. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” is a 500-year-old proverb that is applicable to millions of American voters.  

 

Most Americans are not happy with our choices for President. Most of us believe that the first five Presidents – Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, men who helped found this nation – would be appalled that we must choose between Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. But now, Democrats feel that desperate times call for desperate measures. But whether name-calling will work is anyone’s guess. The polls have the race too close to call. But I wonder. Thirty-seven years ago, Random House published Donald Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal. It reached number one on The New York Times best sellers list and stayed there for thirteen weeks. In it he wrote: “The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead.” Will his words prove prophetic? In Walden, Henry David Thoreau offered sensible advice: “It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” In The Art of the Deal, Trump was writing of business deals; nevertheless, his words are applicable in today’s rancorous political environment: Caveat candidatus!

"Why Read Moby-Dick?" by Nathaniel Philbrick

I was excited to come across this book a few weeks ago, which speaks to one of America’s most beloved novels. Perhaps it is age, but I find comfort in re-reading books I have enjoyed. Estimates are that between 500,000 and a million books are published each year through traditional publishers, which means that we can only read a small fraction of each year’s annual output. Yet there are authors that have stood the test of time – Shakespeare, Austen, the Brontë sisters, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Trollope, Wharton, Wodehouse, E.B White, and Melville, just to name a few – that deserve a re-reading. Every year I try to re-read a few and am always glad I did. 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Why Read Moby-Dick? Nathaniel Philbrick

October 26, 2024

 

“‘Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this

combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards

them both with equal eye.’ This redemptive mixture of skepticism and hope, this genial

stoicism in the face of a short, ridiculous, and irrational life, is why I read Moby-Dick.”

                                                                                        Why Read Moby-Dick?, Nathaniel Philbrick

 

Like many, I read Moby-Dick in my youth. I read it as a sea adventure about half-mad captain Ahab chasing the white whale that had cost him a leg. I read it again about ten years ago and found the story had improved with (my) age – what happens when man interferes with nature, and the harsh realities of a crazed person seeking redemption. In Nantucket about a month ago, my wife and I visited the Nantucket Shipwreck and Lifesaving Museum. There, I came across this short (127 pages) book by Nathaniel Philbrick, published in 2011.  Philbrick is the author of several histories, best known for In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. 

 

The book is a tribute to Herman Melville’s classic. It is a series of essays, each independent, though collectively cohesive – a mixture of re-telling the story and biographical sketches. It begins with Melville in the Berkshires, his difficulty in putting on paper the story he wanted to tell, and his mentee-like friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, a man within whose stories expressed “…truths so profound and disturbing they ranked with anything written in the English language.” We are told of how Melville, ten years before the 1851 publication of his novel, shipped out on the whaler Acushnet from Fairhaven, Massachusetts; so had familiarity with his fictional whaling ship Pequod. He compares Ishmael, the narrator of Melville’s story, to Holden Caulfield, as an “engaging…vulnerable wiseass who invites us to join him on a quest…” We learn that Ahab’s search for Moby-Dick mimicked Melville’s search for an explanation of being.

 

As Philbrick writes, it took almost seventy years for Moby-Dick to be recognized as the classic it is. He reminds us of how, in the intervening years, the United States had changed: A Civil War had been fought to end slavery, the westward push altered the contours of the United States, and industrialization ended the nation’s rural origins. The story is part of our past. In the final chapter, “Neither Believer nor Infidel,” Philbrick quotes Hawthorne, from his 1856 journal, of Melville’s quest for eternal truth: “He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” Moby-Dick is fiction, but it is also part autobiography.

 

Like the well-known opening sentences in Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, Tolstoy’ Anna Karenina, and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the three-word first sentence of Moby-Dick is one you will not forget: “Call Me Ishmael.” You will want to read the second, third, and fourth…until you finish the book.

 

……………………………………………………..

 

Reading Philbrick’s book has prompted me to read Moby-Dick once again. The copy I bought is a hard-cover from Sea Wolf Press, with the cover and illustrations by Mead Schaeffer taken from the 1923 Dodd, Mead & Co. edition.

"Threats to America"

 

Sydney M. Williams

https://swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Threats to America”

October 21, 2024

 

“The extraordinary thing was the way in which everyone took it for granted that this oozy, bulging

wealth of the English upper and upper-middle classes would last forever, and was part of the order of things.”

                                                                                                George Orwell (1903-1950)

                                                                                                Such, Such Were the Joys,

                                                                                                 Published posthumously, 1952

 

The differences between today and the years preceding World War I are far greater than any similarities. Nevertheless, I worry that the collapse of the Soviet Union 1991, and the concomitant elevation of the United States to global hegemon, has caused complacency toward persistent external threats – a complacency not unlike that which existed in Europe in the first decade and a half of the 20^th Century, before the Great War provided reality in its horrors.

 

………………………………………………………………………

 

The West has enemies, those to whom liberal democracies represent a threat. The autocrats in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are fearful of what free speech would do to their positions of power. Democracy is an anathema to ideological authoritarians, be they on the Left or the Right, which is why the United States is portrayed as the “Great Satan” by the zealot Ali Khamenei and his followers, and why it is challenged by all four authoritarian states. Nothing is more fearful to a tyrant than freedom.

 

Yet other threats consume the media, particularly so-called “threats to democracy,” by which Progressives mean the re-election of Donald Trump to serve a second term; the flood of undocumented immigrants; abortion; and the threat of climate change. Largely ignored, as well as enemies abroad, is the imminent threat of financial default because of unending federal budget deficits that have grown our debt, as a percent of GDP, from 33% in 2000 to 121% in 2023. It is a trend that was aggravated by the long period of extraordinary low interest rates following the 2008 credit crisis. Nevertheless, all threats should be taken seriously. Democracy is fragile. It can fall to enemies from within or without. Allowing possible terrorists into our country, along with known criminals has consequences for our citizens. Abortion, in my opinion, was best described by President Clinton – it should be “safe, legal, and rare.” As for climate, Earth and the solar system are not eternal. At some point they will cease to exist. Will man be the cause? I don’t know, but I suspect not. The best way to improve the environment is to promote economic growth. And reckless government spending will negatively impact our standards of living.

 

However, it is the threat of another major war, one that sets the U.S., Europe and the West against elements of totalitarianism – Russia, China, Iran and North Korea – that is the subject of this essay. In that regard, understanding some of the causes of the First World War are instructional. Apart from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and today’s war in Ukraine, Europe has gone for almost eighty years without a continent-wide conflagration, a situation with some similarities to Europe during the ninety-nine years following the end of the Napoleonic wars, wars in which an estimated five to six million people died. Like today, Europe was not entirely free of war following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 – the Crimean War of 1853-1856 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 together caused less than a million deaths. Nevertheless, one asks: Does absence of war mitigate its horrors, thereby rendering it more likely?

 

Just as Britain and France were not prepared for war in 1914 (this despite Britain, with their Empire encompassing over 20% of the world’s population, being the hegemon of that era), the United States is not prepared today. The idea of war seemed impossible in 1914. “…nothing really mattered: not them, or the world, or even herself” is the way Robert Harris puts it in his new novel, Precipice. Close ties of heads-of -state combined with diplomacy and negotiation made the prospect for war seem unlikely then, just as victory over the Soviet Union brought us Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” in 1991. In 1985, as Reagan was prosecuting Soviet Communism, U.S. defense spending, as a percent of GDP, was 6.6%. In 2023, at 3.4%, it is just over half that level. The real purpose of a strong defense is to prevent wars by limiting what enemies might do. Ironic as it might sound today, the sign at the entrance to Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (a SAC base at the time) in the early 1960s read: “Peace is Our Profession.”

 

It has been reading Precipice, mentioned above, which has me thinking of this issue. The novel, which begins in early July 1914 and goes through May 1915, is largely based on the author’s access to letters written by Britain’s Prime Minister H. H. (Herbert Henry) Asquith to his paramour, the socialite Beatrice Venetia Stanley, a woman less than half his age. Christopher Clark’s 2011 book The Sleepwalkers is a history of events and alliances leading up to August 1914. That first decade of the 20^th Century was characterized by strong industrial growth in Europe, abetted by trade and raw materials from their Empires. Peace and prosperity were the rule, as displayed in characters from P.G. Wodehouse’s novels. Like today’s tech billionaires, the wealth of European aristocrats in that first decade was expected to last forever. While democracy and individual freedom were not up to today’s standards, and royalty still reigned in most European countries, progress toward liberalism had been made. 

 

Today, two allies of liberal democracy are fighting existential wars of survival. Israel is at war against two of Iran-funded proxies – Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in northern Israel and southern Lebanon. As well, a third Iran-funded proxy, the Houthis in Yemen who have attacked more than 80 merchant ships in the Red Sea. (Last week’s U.S. led B-2 attack on some of their fortifications was a welcome, albeit belated, response.) That Israel fights an existential threat does not appear to be appreciated by those who encourage her retaliations to be “proportional,” whatever that means. If we were attacked as Israel was we would strive to annihilate our enemy. The loss of the one democratic state in the middle East would have a cataclysmic, destabilizing effect on the Middle East and for Western-style liberal democracy in other parts of the world. While we can sympathize with innocent Palestinians in Gaza, the terrorists who represent them must be destroyed, as their goal is the total eradication of the State of Israel. And that is why mullahs who govern Iran must not be allowed to get a nuclear weapon.

 

The February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine is the second instance where the United States must be firm in its support. Does anyone really believe that Mr. Putin would be satisfied with a few eastern provinces when its fertile western plains, or steppes, are considered the world’s “breadbasket?” Yet, the Biden Administration has been slow in giving them the kind of offensive weapons they need to win, and former President Trump seems only interested in reaching an unexplained settlement.

 

Neither political party puts foreign policy near the top of their lists of concern. The Biden-Harris team has made some massive blunders: the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the abandonment of the Bagram Airbase; restarting negotiations with Iran, which has allowed them to come within weeks of a nuclear weapon;  the release of $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets; a failure to deter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2021 and then, in June 2021, suspending $100 million military aid package to Ukraine after Russia assured Washington it would halt aggressive troop movements near Ukraine’s border; allowing Russia’s Nord Steam 2 to continue to operate, thereby allowing them to fund their fight for Ukraine; failing to fully support Israel, our closest Middle East ally, in their existential fight against Iranian-backed terrorist organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah; side-lining the Abraham Accords agreed to by the Trump Administration; permitting a China spy balloon to transverse the United States.

 

There is no assurance a Trump-Pence team would have done better, except that Mr. Putin, after seizing the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 when Barack Obama was President, waited until Mr. Biden became President before attacking eastern and northern Ukraine. And most foreign policy experts agree that the Trump-initiated Abraham Accords showed promise for Middle East peace. 

 

However, both political parties bear responsibility for the state of today’s sorry global situation. While Democrats and Republicans have been spinning tales (fables, really) of their opponents beliefs and behavior, our enemies have been weaving the fabric that has cloaked their desire for world domination. The media, in siding with one political faction or the other, has served to keep the American people ignorant and divided, thereby preventing rational, intelligent debate.

 

On the afternoon of August 3, 1914, with Germany about to invade Belgium, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey observed: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” For twenty million people his words proved prophetic. Their lives were extinguished. Britain and France were not prepared for war in 1914. Today we live in another frightening time, yet we have let our defense budget lag. The United States is not interested in expanding its territory, nor does it wish to impose its way of life on others. It does, though, have a mandate to protect its people. Remember, the first purpose of a strong military is to prevent war, and only second to prosecute war if it comes.

"Home"

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Home”

October 19, 2024

 

“Maybe the best part of going away for a vacation – coming home again.”

                                                                                                     Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007),

                                                                                                     Meet the Austins, 1960

 

A couple of weeks ago Caroline and I returned from a long weekend visit with a grandson, whom we love and are proud; but what really brought happiness was returning to our apartment on Monday. Charles Dickens is alleged to have said: “Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.”

 

I have always liked being home, whether it was where I grew up, school or college, but especially the homes Caroline and I have made – from our first apartment to our six houses in four Connecticut towns, to our new home, an apartment at Essex Meadows. As we age, we are embraced by those we knew, know, loved and love, as well as by the places we have been and the people and events we have seen and experienced, all of which can be recalled through photos and mementos. Even on the bleakest of days, I gorge on memories of bygone days by observing and picking up treasures: photo albums, books, sculptures created by my parents, paintings and drawings, a few by Caroline, my parents, siblings, children and grandchildren.

 

On my desk are photos of Caroline, our children and grandchildren. There are photos of my parents and siblings, as well as ones of my grandparents. There are postcards from a brother, now deceased, who suffered from Prader-Willi Syndrome, a photo of the group with whom I skied in Vail every winter for twenty years, and a framed photo of an evening with Wodehousian Drones of New York. On the walls are drawings of my parents, paintings of our house in Old Lyme, portraits of Caroline and my mother, and a framed letter from P.G. Wodehouse to my uncle when a student at Andover. In Emma, Jane Austen wrote: “There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.”

 

Home is awakening in a familiar bed. It is following a morning ritual – breakfast with the day’s newspapers. It is talking with Caroline about the day’s schedule, a few hours at the computer, a walk and cup of tea in the afternoon. A perfect day in eating dinner with family or friends, or while watching an old movie. In his book The Poet at the Breakfast Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. includes this poem “Homesick in Heaven.”

 

“For there we loved, and where we loved is home,

Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts,

Though o’er us shine the jasper lighted dome: –

The chain may lengthen, but it never parts!

 

In a 1938 posthumously published collection, The Coloured Lands, G.K. Chesterton wrote: “It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic to his own imagination as he can.” To which I reply, Amen!

"The Curious Attraction of Donald Trump"

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“The Curious Attraction of Donald Trump”

October 14, 2024

 

“‘But he hasn’t got anything on,’ a little child said.”

                                                                                                                The Emperor’s New Clothes, 1837

                                                                                                                Hans Christian Anderson

                                                                                                                Translated by Jean Hersholt, 1952

 

Despite the fact that he is coarse, rude and humorless, Donald Trump is attractive to millions of Americans. Most are religious and believe in their families and communities; they are patriotic, diligent, and endowed with an uncommon level of common sense. But what accounts for this attraction? While I don’t pretend to have all the reasons, simply addressing the question is instructional. He is despised by those who have made service in government their life’s work. He is despised by those who find vulgar his ravaging of the English language. He is despised by those who cannot stand his orange hair and red ties. On the other hand, he is loved by those who represent what Franklin Roosevelt once referred to as the “Forgotten Man” – America’s working men and women at the middle and lower end of the economic scale. His acolytes are those who do not neatly fit into an elitist identity – meaning they are largely white, working class people from fly-over states, those who Barack Obama once derided as clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” In other words, he is attractive to America’s broad middle class.

 

These people have watched as Democrat-led, Washington’s establishment divided people into identifiable sectors – women, people of color, proponents of LGBTQ, etc. – those seen as victims of white oppressors. His fans, the so-called oppressors regardless of social position or economic status, love that he is nemesis to progressive politicians; to administrative lawyers who feed off government; to university professors and administrators who rely on public grants; to private sector union leaders (but not union members); to school boards who protect predators and approve schools dispensing tampons in boy’s bathrooms; to spoiled college students who want their student loans paid off; to a media enriched by political ads, and to those enthralled with a sense of their own virtue; and to an entertainment industry that lacks any moral sense.

 

Using data from Statista and OpenTheBooks, spending on federal elections (President, Senate and House) compounded annually at roughly 14% between 2000 and 2020, while government spending compounded at about 7.5% over that same time. However, over those same twenty years median household income only compounded at two percent. The consequence is that lower and middle-income families have been left behind, as government bureaucrats, bankers, and media people have grown fat. Has this increased spending helped the middle classes? Last week, The Connecticut Mirror reported that United Way estimates that 40% of Connecticut’s households faced poverty in 2022. Keep in mind, Connecticut ranks eight when states are measured by median household income. Also donors, be they individuals, corporations or unions, expect a return on their investment. Remember Solyndra, the California-based solar panel company that in September 2009 received $535 Million from President Obama’s Energy Department and two years later filed for bankruptcy.

 

But I believe there is more to this. Political Parties are not static entities; they change over time, reflecting changing demographics and their own self-interests. For twenty years – 1932-1952 – the Democrat Party held the White House. Over the next forty years – 1952-1992 – roles were reversed, with Republicans holding the White House twenty-eight years and Democrats twelve. During those sixty years, only one election was close in terms of the popular vote – 1960. The elections of 1948, 1968 and 1992 were affected by third party candidates. But in most contests over those sixty years victors won overwhelmingly. However, in the past thirty-two years – 1992-2024 – Presidential elections, with the exception of 2008, have been close, reflecting a more divided (and less compromising) nation.

 

In the 1960s, Republicans were the Party of East Coast elites, big business and Wall Street. In 1968 they adopted a “Southern Strategy,” a term popularized by political strategist Kevin Phillips. Since 1932, the “Party of Lincoln” had been losing the Black vote to Democrats, so the Southern Strategy involved a plan to go after conservative white southern voters who, since the Civil War, had been Democrats. That, in my opinion, was a mistake – a short term fix to a long term problem. Today, once again the two political parties are undergoing another fundamental change, with Republicans pursuing working people, regardless of race, as Democrats implement a bar-bell approach – wealthy coastal elites, university professionals, media types, etc. on the one hand, offset with immigrants, students, and those who claim victimhood on the other.

 

I do not pretend to be able to predict the outcome of this election. Neither candidate would be my choice, though Mr. Trump’s actual Presidency (2017-2021) was better than his current campaign would suggest – and certainly better than the last four years of Biden-Harris, in terms of the economy, inflation, immigration, and foreign affairs. As for the Democrat alternative, what would we be getting? Ms. Harris’ performance on CBS’s 60 Minutes gave lie to her politics of “joy.” Like the child who viewed the Emperor’s new clothes in the epigraph above, there is little she has provided on which we can judge her. 

 

Donald Trump’s appeal reflects the fact that, even after almost ten years in the political limelight, he remains an outsider. He is an amateur politician in a coliseum of lions. It is as though a high school physics teacher and amateur tennis player stepped onto the courts at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center and won the U.S. Open. He is despised by the establishment because he is not one of them. He promised to “drain the swamp,” which he never did, but he is still seen by Washington insiders as a threat to their comfortable lives. He has been attacked relentlessly. The Mueller investigation (begun in May 2017) into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign found, two years and $30 million later, no evidence of coordination or cooperation with Russia during the campaign. That investigation, like the failed impeachment attempts and the more recent Fani Willis and Jack Smith prosecutions, have only increased his support. Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is real; its amplification by the media feeds his fans.  

 

The “progressive” Left is driven by a self-righteous sense of personal virtue. Think of President Obama telling Black men that if they do not vote for Kamala Harris they are misogynist. His sanctimony did not allow that they have minds of their own. In assuming this mantle, Democrats have abandoned the broad middle class of working voters – most of whom are white – those who once comprised their base. President Trump recognized that failure, which provided an opening. That, in my opinion, is at the heart of his attraction to so many Americans. 

Review - "Clear," Carys Davies

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Clear, Carys Davies

October 12, 2024

 

“Each time they rose he glimpsed the rocky shore, the cliffs, the absence of any kind of landing;

Each time they descended, the rocks vanished and were replaced by a liquid wall of gray.”

 

“looking back, there was only one thing that was completely clear to him,

And that was that he had loved the time he had spent with John Ferguson.”

                                                                                                                                                Carys Davies

                                                                                                                                                Clear, 2024

 

At 185 pages this is more of a novella than a novel. It is a story of solitude and human connection. It is a story of tenderness, courage and love. And it was an eye-opener for an American with only a dim knowledge of mid 19^th Century Scotland and two forces that impacted the country at that time: First, the Great Disruption when 450 Presbyterian ministers, rebelling against the patronage that allowed landowners to install their own ministers, broke away from the Church of Scotland; they were left homeless and without churches. Second, the Highland Clearances that forced the evacuation of inhabitants against their will from their homes in the Highlands and on Scotland’s northern islands, so landowners could raise sheep. 

 

John Ferguson was one who broke away from the Church of Scotland, and “became a poor man by throwing in his lot with the Free Church of Scotland.” Newly married and without income, he accepts a job to carry out a survey of a remote island and to evict the one person, Ivar, still resident. There would be no need for anyone to full-time supervise the thousand sheep to be brought there. Shearing and gathering lambs would be done once a year. The boat to take John and Ivar back would return in a month.

 

The story centers around John’s fall from a cliff shortly after arrival, and the care given him by Ivar who speaks only Norn, a form of Norse that even in the 19^th Century had largely disappeared. A strong bond develops between the two men. John’s accident gives purpose to Ivar’s lonely life. And John’s dependency on Ivar makes him question whether he can carry out his mandate. A calotype of Mary, John’s wife, plays a central role. Mary, concerned for her husband, hires a boat to bring him home early.

 

Ms. Davies’ story is atmospheric in terms of time and place. I was drawn to this remote, windswept island, adorned with cliffs that lead to pastures above, and to the two men at the center of the story. In the “Author’s Note” is a glossary of Norn words, a language that dates back to 1468 when the Danish King, Christian I, pawned the islands as dowry for his daughter who wed James III of Scotland. 

 

This is a short but beautifully written book whose images are matched by a sensitive description of a friendship, all of which will stay with you long after the last page has been turned.