The More Things Change...

One of my favorite writers, Paul Theroux, who like myself is only here, it often seems, as an observer, chose the following extract from a novel by Henry James to introduce his 1976 novel about declining and failing societies and civilizations, "The Family Arsenal". One needn't read between James' lines to see the similarities between now and then and way back when...the lines speak volumes for themselves.

"I determined to see it"--she was speaking still of English society--"to learn for myself what it really is before we blow it up. I've been here now a year and a half and, as I tell you, I feel I've seen. It's the old regime again, the rottenness and extravagance, bristling with every iniquity and every abuse, over which the French Revolution passed like a whirlwind; or perhaps even more a reproduction of the Roman world in its decadence, gouty, apoplectic, depraved, gorged and clogged with wealth and spoils, selfishness and scepticism, and waiting for the onset of the barbarians. You and I are the barbarians, you know."
                                       --HENRY JAMES, The Princess Casamassima

Just Do It!

"A house divided against itself cannot stand," are not worrisome words to this Kamikaze Kongress; they would rather go flaming down in defeat next year than rankle the feathers of those Tea Party hate-mongers who locked and loaded themselves to send up these debt-defying clowns in November, 2010. The prime mission of this 'patriotic' fighter group is to remove any trace of Obama from the American DNA.

The folks who showed up to vote in 2008: the hopeful, the young, the tired, the poor, had better drag their sorry keysters to the polls next year, because so help them, this motley crew of lame-blame Representatives inspires only pity.

The Conscience of a Conservative by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare might as well have been writing about Obama vs. the Republican stonewallers when he penned the following:

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted!
Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just;
And he but naked locked up in steel,
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.

Death's Got Game

Proud missiles soar on wings of cheer
To claim the peace once claimed was dear

Seeds are sown that soon shall reap
Such grim that lurks so low, so deep

Earth's blood floods so black, so thick
Man's blood runs so red, so slick

Fortune's wheel starts and spins so
What chance death forever wins?

M. de Lesdiguières, the Roturier and The Robe

In the chapter entitled, fortuitously, "The Robe", Rafael Sabatini in his novel, Scaramouche, describes in detail the difficulty and the hazard befalling a person of lowly rank finding it necessary to appeal for justice from one whose inflated station in life has rendered him arrogant and ridiculous:

"André-Louis found him ridiculous. He knew pretentiousness for the mask of worthlessness and weakness. And here he beheld pretentiousness incarnate. It was to be read in that arrogant poise of the head, that scowling brow, the inflexion of that reverberating voice. Even more difficult than it is for a man to be a hero to his valet--who has witnessed the dispersal of the parts that make up the imposing whole--is it for a man to be a hero to the student of Man who has witnessed the same in a different sense."

bin Laden: A Hit and a Myth

If it be true, as Camus wrote, that "There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn," and if it be equally true as the Algerian then concluded, that "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart," then the demise of Osama bin Laden ought to make men of all faiths, or none, happy.

April is the 'Cruellest' Month

From his collection, Nothing But Praise, POW Henry G. Lee's painful memory of April, 1942:

Prisoner's March

(Death of a Friend)

So you are dead. The easy words contain

No sense of loss, no sorrow, no despair.

Thus hunger, thirst, fatigue, combine to drain

All feeling from our hearts. The endless glare,

The brutal heat, anesthetize the mind.

I cannot mourn you now. I lift my load,

The suffering column moves. I leave behind

Only another corpse, beside the road.