As some may have noticed, there have been no new added posts to this site. There was “more than one cause of this effect,” as Polonius would say, and none of greater weight than the others. Perhaps the prevailing one has to do with the book I have written, titled “Shakespeare in Pictures – How to Store in mind scores of Shakespearean quotes to entertain your friends and discourage your enemies, with Mnemonic Frames.” This is my answer to a general question such as, “Shakespeare is a tremendous source of effective quotes, but how can one ever remember them?” ‘Mnemonic Frames’ is a method I developed through many years to keep in mind a large number of pointed quotes ready for delivery at the eight time and place. The new book is actually a ‘printed book + Internet combination’.
Another reason is that through the years, my articles had their largest audience with the website “The Saker.” For various reasons that website has stopped operations earlier in the year (in the US)
For about one year, I have been making a weekly (Monday) contribution to a radio program out of London titled, https://andrewcarringtonhitchcock.com/ Andrew’s program has a large audience worldwide.
The 550 plus articles all available on this website describe specific events under a ‘Shakespearean’ perspective – in their own way they are the essence or the concentrate of 12 years of current world history. Depending on time (‘the ceaseless lackey of eternity’ – Rape of Lucrece) I may collect them into a printed volume. 10-12 years of world history observed through a Shakespearean eye.
Finally, I have concentrated by efforts in producing videos, accessible through the tags in the index. Effective immediately, all new videos will also be listed in the landing page of this website, and will be accessed accordingly.
I take this occasion to thank all those readers and followers who have purchased a copy of my “Your Daily Shakespeare – an Arsenal of Verbal Weapons to Drive your Friends into Action and your Enemies into Despair.’ The letters that I regularly receive from readers, describing the success they enjoyed by dropping the right Shakespearean quote at the right time, are a source of continued satisfaction. Where the sense of humor and the sense of beauty are not yet dead, there is still hope.
Thank you for your continued support,
Jimmie Moglia
By and large, for an ideology to take root among a people or a nation it is necessary to transform the individual into the mass man. For masses are – before in time and now often in the impalpable ether – what crowds are in space. Namely a large quantity of people unable to express their human qualities – for members of masses are not connected to each other either as individuals or as parts of a community. In fact they are only linked through some impersonal, abstract, crystallizing and often de-humanizing factor. 
When events do not make sense or are such as sense cannot untie,(1) an option is to forget all about them – the head-in-the-sand solution. Another is to remember that man is but a quintessence of dust (2) and often, therefore, not even worth the dust that the rude wind blows in his face. (3)
Comparisons are often like bikinis, what they reveal is suggestive, what they conceal is vital. The principle equally applies when comparing the history of nations, as implied in the title, which echoes Gibbon’s 6-book, monumental “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”.
All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity, (1) and from this point of view Gorbachev’s life is no different. Especially when equally remembering that all the world is a stage and all men and women merely players (2).
Does art imitate nature or is nature herself inherently artistic? The debate has engaged the minds and pens of many critics and philosophers. But, given that comedy is equally a form of art, when man becomes unintentionally comic, is his comicity attributable to art or nature?
Words being arbitrary, they owe their power to association, and have the influence which custom has given them – for language is the dress of thought. Therefore on hearing the words “Democracy in America,” some will think of Alexis de Tocqueville’s book by the same title. Others, not having read the book (an enterprise of no mean feat), will think that it took a Frenchman to appreciate American democracy, as it existed nowhere else.
The mythical average citizen probably believes that the universe is under the perpetual superintendence of uncontrollable forces. And that the hallucinating social changes currently occurring – and of which he is sometimes the victim – are akin to a force of nature.
An Eastern monarch, of whom we know the existence but not the name, kept an officer in his house whose employment it was to remind him of his mortality, by calling out every morning at a stated hour, “Remember prince that thou shalt die.
“One, no-one, one hundred thousand” is the title of a novel by Italian author Luigi Pirandello.