Big Conspiracy Theories in a Small Town

 

I was in Myerstown, Pennsylvania, today. A small town north of Lancaster. I wanted coffee and saw there were three coffee shops near the center of town. I went to Café 58 which my son Nigel suggested by looking at Google maps. 

Within a few minutes the name would change in my mind to Café [Area] 51. It was raining when I walked to the cafe. A sticker on the door said Veteran Owned business. In mid-state Pennsylvania, that was most likely to mean an Iraq/Afghanistan veteran who thinks Fox News is too liberal. 

Inside, the cafe was dark paneled, dimly lit and there was only one customer.  The owner was in his 50s. His customer at the bar was in his early 60s. I waited while they watched a video together. From several feet away, I could only tell that the video had a talking dog and a lot of yelling. 

After they watched the video, they took turns bemoaning the need for more laughter in the world; the owner turned toward me asked what I would like. I said a latte to go. He asked what flavor I wanted. I said none. He said, “Well, you want a cappuccino. A latte with no flavor is a cappuccino. I make such a good cappuccino you’ll think you are in Italy.” He said this with the air of a man of vast experience talking to a rube.

For a moment I thought about saying I spent a week in Rome last summer, so I can make the comparison, but decided against speaking. The owner and the customer started talking about someone famous they both knew. I did not catch the name, but it was a conservative activist. Then they said something about 9-11 conspiracies.  

They were laughing. But it turns out they were not laughing at 9-11 conspiracies. I should have taken my better-than-Italy-cappuccino and left, but I said, "A lot of people believe 9-11 conspiracies."

Then I told them about seeing a report on CNN on the 5th anniversary of 9-11 that said 28% of Americans believe 9-11 was an inside job. After seeing the report, I went to a local coffee shop, repeated what I heard on TV and the owner of the shop said, “Yes. It was an inside job.” 

The customer at the bar now turned on his bar stool and was facing me, feet on the floor, leaning forward. Intent. The owner said that the corner of College and Main where his shop is located is a wormhole to alternate dimensions. Going along with the joke, but knowing this was going somewhere weird, I said one of my sons lives down the street and that’s why he moved here. 

Then the owner asked me if I remembered seeing Donald Rumsfeld on the TV the night before 9-11 saying 63 trillion dollars was missing from the U.S. treasury. Then he said that on 9-11 Building 7 collapsed just like the twin towers, but no airplane crashed into it. Building 7 was where all the records were stored of the missing 63 trillion dollars. (In 2019, the entire GDP of the US was 21 trillion dollars; 63 trillion is pretty much the GDP of the whole world.) 

After that, I found myself edging backward toward the door. The owner continued saying that the reason for 9-11 was to put the Patriot Act into law and take away our rights. He said 3,000 civilians being killed was a small price for that. After all, 50,000 soldiers died in the Vietnam War to expand government control over its citizens. 

I left at that point. I sipped the cappuccino. It wasn’t very good. I decided if I finished it, I would come under some kind of mind control, so I threw it away and went to one of the other coffee shops in Myerstown. 

----

At some point in the conversation, I don’t remember at what point, the owner interjected that the Pentagon is five-sided and that makes it a pentagram. He said it with the intensity of someone who has the Truth.  

Sonnets by William Shakespeare

Last year I read C.S. Lewis' English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama and decided to re-read the Sonnets. In his history of 16th Century literature, Lewis says Shakespeare's Sonnets are the best sonnets ever and among the best poetry of a century that ended with great English poetry. 

This time I read every sonnet aloud. It meant I would read a few sonnets and put the book down for a week. Last week I finished re-reading.  The best of the sonnets are wonderful, but they are not all great. In the last twenty, I found none worth remembering.  

Here are some I liked best. If you have read them all you will certainly have a different list, but the best are so good I fully agreed with Lewis by the end of the book. 

The sonnet most familiar, certainly in the English-speaking world, is 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

And Sonnet 29, the last two lines are a brilliant end to the first ten:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Sonnet 55:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Sonnet 24, love as art:

Mine eye hath play’d the painter and hath stell’d
Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein ’tis held,
And perspective it is the painter’s art.
For through the painter must you see his skill,
To find where your true image pictured lies;
Which in my bosom’s shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes.
Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done:
Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me
Are windows to my breast, where-through the sun
Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee;
Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art;
They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

Sonnet 1 is a beautiful beginning:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

George Soros: Republicans Make Up Ridiculous Lies to Discredit a Great Man

 

George Soros, Holocaust survivor as a teenager

Last night I talked with a friend from the Army in the 1970s. He voted for Trump twice and will vote for him again. He is an Evangelical Christian and believes he supports Israel.

At one point in the conversation I was taking about how the biggest turning point in my life was when Nazis marches in Charlottesville and four days later the President said there were "fine people on both sides."

My friend than announced confidently that "George Soros worked with the Nazis against the Jews."

I was aghast.

I knew that Fox and all the right wing hate media beat up Soros every chance they had.This accusation was clearly something my friend had heard so often he could quote it like it was from a hate Bible.

I said, "George Soros is 92. He survived the deportation and murder of a half million Hungarian Jews. He was 15 years old when the war ended. He got to London at 17. Made a lot of money and helped bring down the Soviet empire. You sources of information are Jew haters and stupid."

We changed topics after that.

It is a sad joke that Evangelicals love Israel, but not Jews. Swallowing lies that are this stupid prove the point.

Putting the People You Love in Hell: Dante and Ser Brunetto

 

In Canto 15 of Inferno Dante speaks with his former mentor Ser Brunetto Latini.  His sin is not named, but it is sodomy.  He is in Hell for eternity for being homosexual.

Dante is respectful as he speaks and the conversation only ends when Latini must return to his torments. As I re-read Inferno this time, I am more aware of Dante as the author.  He chose to map his eternity on the science and theology current in the late 13th Century. But even with an orthodox eternity this is a world Dante creates.  

Every person he puts in Hell, Purgatory, or Heaven is up to him.  Dante had no way of knowing that the poem he wrote would be written about and read more than any other book except the Bible, but he could assume a very wide readership among Florentines and other Italians.  His is the first epic written in vernacular Italian, so his readership could be much wider than for books written in Latin.  

And all who read his book would know that Latini was homosexual.  Dante had to know many people who were homosexual, so why does he choose his mentor for the spokesperson of this level of Hell?  He shows respect in his imagined conversation, but how respectful is it to single out one you claim to love for eternal condemnation?

I went to a folk concert a long time ago. A woman came to the stage and said her first song would be about the guy who just broke up with her.  The song was very funny, and very clear about the man's faults; her use of shortcomings was brilliant.  She said before she sang "If you hurt a woman with an audience, everyone will know your name."  I heard Taylor Swift has sold millions in that genre.  

I understand better why Dante condemns his enemies, but Canto 15 makes me wonder why he chose his mentor for Hell.

Putting My Books in Alphabetical Order

 

A month ago, after looking for a book, I decided to re-shelve of my physical books in alphabetical order by author.  In the process, I removed three boxes of books which are now on a table in the living room. After a couple of friends get a look at them, I will donate the remaining books.

This year I am turning 70, so just as at 65, I am giving away any book I do not think I will re-read or use as a reference in the next decade. The exception is the authors I am or have been obsessed with. If I have a complete collection of their works, I keep them all.  Dante Aligheri, Hannah Arendt,  Vasily Grossman, Mark Helprin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bernard-Henri Levy, C.S. Lewis, George Orwell, and Timothy Snyder.  

I think I had 800 books a decade ago. I am below 400 now. I have many ebooks, but storage for them is invisible, so no problem with wall space.  In five years, maybe I will try something else.   

The Power of Geography by Tim Marshall

 

Earlier this year I wrote about my seven favorite books from the fifty I read last year. Tied for second place was Tim Marshall's book The Prisoners of Geography.

This year I read read his newer book, The Power of Geography.  It was fascinating in some places, but had too much detail in others.  The section of Saudi Arabia, for instance, went way to much into the sordid history of the Saudi royal family. The endpoint is a murderous, duplicitous dictator. The path was--murder and lies.

Part of the problem with the book is the thesis: it is a hope for the future book. the Prisoners of Geography tells us why geography is destiny, mostly cruel destiny. It's a better story line than "Here are the hopeful bits."

For those obsessed with geography, the book is useful and very interesting in parts: Spain and the United Kingdom especially.  But read Prisoners first.  

Reporting from the Front Lines of the War in Ukraine: Kristaps Andrejsons

Kristaps Andrejsons, Host and Creator of The Easter Border podcast

Since 2017 I have been listening to a podcast from Latvia, The Eastern Border. I began listening because I had been reading Russian novels for several years and learning Russian. The podcast alternated between current Russian politics and Soviet history--and how they seemed to be coming together.

In 2019 I was in the Riga for a few days. I contacted Kristaps and visited him in his hometown of Ludza, the easternmost town in the European Union in continental Europe. (Reunion Island is in the EU and further east.) Ludza is just a few miles from the Russian border, so Eastern Border is a good name for the podcast. I wrote about the 2019 visit here. 

Then on 24 February 2022, the format of the Eastern Border podcast changed. In the past twelve months Kristaps has traveled to Poland and Ukraine many times. He went from history podcaster to war reporter. I listened to Ukraine War Episode 136 just tow days ago.  

Kristaps has been to Kyiv, Kherson and within a few kilometers of the front line of the war.  Last week he was talking to Russian journalists who fled their country when the war started and are in Latvia.  He has talked with combat troops, journalists and leaders in Ukraine and with refugees in countries throughout Eastern Europe.

He knows soldiers from many countries, including the US, who have volunteered to fight in Ukraine. He told me about a guy who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan and came to Ukraine to fight in a war where the good side and evil side were very clear--and he is on the good side. 

Although his plans are always guarded, he may be returning to Ukraine soon with a major German publication as a translator, guide, and expert on the war.  

If you want a ground-level view of the war, Kristaps is a great reporter.  He also has deep knowledge of Russia and sources within Russia so he can decode and interpret Russian propaganda.