Á mes amis en France, merci! On Sunday the 12th of October something seismic happened. These things do happen from time to time, but you have to look for them. Sometimes they are immediately apparent; sometimes, upon reflection, we can see that a particular event was an inflection point. Back during President Trump’s first presidential campaign… (the one...
When I was in college, I had the distinct pleasure of taking Western Civilization I and II with Dr. David Harnett. I idolized the man. It was not just his expansive knowledge of Western History, but his style… and style he had in spades. His suits were perfect, his cufflinks gleamed, and each time he walked into the...
It has been said Nero rejoiced in the destruction of Rome. That might be pushing it a bit… I think he reached a point of being so overwhelmed he lost his capacity for rational thought. His “joy” may have been, in a sense, a self-defense mechanism. We now find ourselves similarly situated. Rome is burning… or to...
Hunter S. Thompson, who, I must say, has always been a literary hero of mine, is often known as the “father of gonzo journalism”. I find this moniker to be wholly misguided. While it might have served him as a form of branding, it did nothing to explain either the genre he excelled at or...
This last week has been, well… a “week” for my family. Last Wednesday (as you were hopefully reading the blog), Sandy, Carolyn, Chaney and I, along with Sandy’s extended family, were at Rose Hills Cemetery laying Sandy’s father to rest. I want to talk about her father, my father-in-law, and the girls’ grandfather, in a bit because...
“I will not debate any Holocaust Denier.” These were the words of Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of religious studies at Emory University and an expert on the effects the Holocaust has had on modern Jews. This seems reasonable. Those who have made a cottage industry of denying the Holocaust ever occurred are typically animated by a commingling...
I could smell the cigar smoke before I entered the library. The intense aroma had become a permanent companion to the club, much to the chagrin of some of our more delicate members. Sitting in his usual chair by the fire, the LTC stared intently into the flames, a half-length cigar in his left hand...
My good friend, Dan Gwaltney, joined me on my last sojourn to West Point. Since he had never been there before, Chaney and I decided to give him the platinum tour, so to speak. It started off at the West Point Visitors’ Center and then we went to the West Point Museum to see some...
We have certain characters… fictional characters… who have acted as proxy guides and, in some cases, guardian angels as we traverse the decades of our lives. Role models, and we absolutely need role models, help us to understand the amorphous goals of what we want to become. Sometimes these are purely career related; sometimes they...
In 1989 I was getting my class notebook ready in my dorm room. I had an afternoon Spanish II class I was dreading, but it was a graduation requirement from the University of San Francisco, so I had no choice but to go. (That was true, and my foreign language skills were less than ideal....
