Saturday commute cli: Indictments by the vanload

  Although out of season, indeed out of terroir,

  I thought of Jason Lowe's estimable glimpse of

  the vintner's van at the crushpad in Bourgogne,

  as the Special Prosecutor's first indictments 

  of the conspirators against the American elec-

  tions of 2016 were delivered to Federal Dis-

  trict Court in Washington yesterday. My second

  thought, was what a tourist trap that edifice

  must shortly become, as visitors from all over

  the world come to touch the façade, now demon-

  strably not false, of the American legal system.

  Grapes now ripe for pressing, if not a stamping 

  out, against rank wrath transgressing to pol-

  lute them with faux doubt. We have a Potemkin

  Congress. On, in time, to a jury of our peers.

      

Jason Lowe

Berry Brothers & Rudd©

2018

Another big day for "pure evil"

It was heartening to find the British
media picking up the rhetorical litter
from the Governor of Florida, at the
scene of yet another American massacre.
What is left of the English language
in America is so frequently nothing
more than the coded droning of Repub-
licanism's busiest worker bees, cel-
ebrating another visit from the devil.

"Pure evil" is the reflex term of art
they adopt for every civil slaughter
in their propaganda for private arsen-
als, apparently without the slightest
sense of how hilarious it is to com-
pound the superlative. With this new
gore, it was timely for that politic-
al flirt to get his marker down, be-
fore his eventual rivals, the Vice-
President, Mr Pence, and our new Am-
bassador Plenipotentiary to the Re-
ligious, Mr Brownback, could mount a
wired podium, somewhere near Fox HQ.
Dismiss the facts, rally the base,
on no account should insanity go to
waste.

But Governor Scott won that race of
rendering due process (a passion,
have you heard, of his Leader), by
sanctifying the bloodshed before the
abbatoire had even been hosed out,
the lumps and stumps of steaming,
streaming life bagged off to the ice.
Governor Scott had already shown us
that he walks on water, as the only
shoreline politician in America to
have exempted his beaches from his
Leader's war on the environment. To
find him rising above constituents'
gushing blood is no surprise.

Origins of Wednesday lxiii: Our new deli

    A fantastic growth, it seemed to me,

    every time I looked at the New Delhi

    of Sir Edwin Lutyens, a style without

    ancestry, without posterity, an archi-

    tectural sport; and I compared it, ac-

    cording to my varying mood, now with

    the Pyramids of Egypt, now with the

    great statues of Easter Island, now

    with the megaliths of Avebury or Stone-

    henge. All the same, as my eye sought

    to comprehend that great pink and white

    symmetry of palaces and pagodas, foun-

    tains and obelisks, ornamented ponds

    and regal statues, I couldn't help

    thinking of those Roman magnificos of

    whom Gibbon wrote, who "were not a-

    fraid to show that they had the spir-

    it to conceive, and the wealth to ex-

    ecute the most grandiose designs."

  

If there is anything that heartens me, on this recurrence of Valentine's Day, it is the promise of the eventual triumph of

a cultivated point of view over a disturbed frame of mind -

two familiar antagonists in the films of Alfred Hitchcock,

and even in the fantasias roiling the American government - 

which we can find in the survivorship of Gibbon, to write 

about Rome at her most hideous, and in the letters and diar-

ies of a 20th Century successor of his, still perhaps too 

warmly controversial for his virtues to be obvious. They 

are more valued with every passing day of trashings of our

point of view by a disturbed frame of mind; but most uncom-

monly beautiful, is his confiding of waging this very con-

flict before one's eyes, in a virile genius for language.

What heartens me is how he lifts himself, not by denial of

what he witnesses, but by refusing it; a benchmark mind,

for fellowship. Longtime readers here will know him, but

I am also amazed, by the refreshment in his every return.

         

         It isn't a mist, - for a mist is a delicious thing

         that creeps down English valleys in the night-time,

         leaving a cool trail of dew, - it's a stinking, pes-

         tiferous miasma that hangs over the city of Basra;

         and as I sat in its chromium-plated hotel, contem-

         plating it, I recognised that whatever disgrunted

         travellers have reported of it is true. Like Bah-

         rain, .. it smells of singed wet flannel; and the

         Euphrates seeps through it, generating dusty palm

         trees and mosquitoes. Was it really here that our

         civilization began? It seemed incredible; let us

         rather give the priority to Egypt, I said to my-

         self, and went in to dinner to escape these morbid

         reflections. And at the same time they issued forth

         from the bar, the European colonists of Basra, 

         mirthless men with paperish yellow faces. The damp

         heat had ironed out their souls, and like the lotus-

         eaters, having drunk the gin-and-bitters of Basra, 

         they wished only to live on there, among the mud-

         houses, and the festering waterways, and the Shatt-

         al-Arab Hotel, with its bed-bugs and its execrable

         local gin. 

         And yet how trivial are these outward things! For

         sitting on a stool at Basra, I learned from a casual

         fellow-passenger that he had once, in the west coun-

         try, bred a pack of basset hounds; and at once the

         miasma parted, the heat and the smell vanished away,

         the gin tasted exquisite, the paper-faced colonists

         sparkled with wit and culture, and the glorious hea-

         ven shown down on Basra, cradle of our civilization.

         

         

Hugh Trevor-Roper
The Wartime Journals
Richard Davenport-Hines
  editor
Spring, 1944
Literary Estate of Lord Dacre
  of Glanton©
I. B. Tauris, 2012

ii  Margo Davis
     Antigua ruins
     ca 1970

iv  Tassos Paschalis
      Paros
      ca 2010