For many or most history is the study of what man did in the past, in different times and civilizations. Yet man is both the protagonist and the writer of history. It is he who develops a historical understanding of the past. And while studying the past man really studies himself.
Which brings to the fore and in question the inherent subjectivity of history. Take the battle of Waterloo, for example. For some, the genius of Wellington ensured the victory of the ‘coalition.’ For others Napoleon’s hemorrhoids significantly influenced the outcome. An objective observer, while recognizing the unquestionable conclusion of the battle, would consider both Wellington’s skills and Napoleon’s physical conditions as contributing factors. Continue reading
A man’s life’s no more than to say ‘one’ – Hamlet tells his friend Horatio (1). And Voltaire has a character from one of his novels declare, “… We in a manner begin to die the very moment we are born: our existence is no more than a point, our duration an instant, and our globe an atom… I consider myself as a single drop in an immense ocean.”
Samuel Butler published his novel Erewhon in 1872. The title is the (almost) reverse spelling of ‘Nowhere’ and it applies to a country the author discovered. He probably had in mind the Southern island of New Zealand where he minded sheep for a while.
Trump’s supporters, having found the vanity of conjecture and inefficacy of expectations, resolved to prove their own existence, if not by violence, at least by physical presence.
It now seems certain that we have a Joe Bidet for president. For if a rose by any other name would smell as sweet (1), a Biden, metaphorically speaking, by any other name still smells like a poorly maintained sanitary device, however many euphemisms the imagination may body forth out of the forms of things unknown. (2)
During the cold war the West called dissenters those Russians in the USSR who voiced their complaints against the system. A definition – ‘dissenter’ – which, processed through the lexical grinding machine of the CIA and associates, was actually stripped of its original meaning to become a weapon of trivial instrumental imperialist propaganda. Said it another way, it was the dissenters who gave the pigs of the animal farm the tools for the pigs’ full spectrum propaganda.
If flattery is the infantry of negotiations, then mendacity is the air force of politics. There are exceptions, but as a practical rule truth tellers are not deemed worthy of the public trust.
It takes strength, endurance, resignation and stomach to like Donald Trump. Not for what he actually is. Under the pen of Alexandre Dumas, for example, Trump may even appear as a not-dislikable Yankee D’Artagnan of sorts. Maybe with less finesse than the original musketeer, whose contained yet French swaggering captivated millions of readers, when reading was still ‘cool’.
There is a history in all men’s lives (1), and in the history of their lives men often meet with mysteries, meaning events inexplicable via the resources of common sense and logic. Some mysteries are terrestrial, some metaphysic. Setting metaphysics aside, I’ll deal with the terrestrial.
Associating medicine with charlatanry smacks of ignorance and arrogance, two semantic relatives often found together. Perish the thought! But there is currently an exuberance of acknowledgment of a dubious medical pandemic, coupled with gross discrepancies in related statistics and fierce debates among disagreeing experts.