Blumenthal, Party Hack

 

 Revisiting Kavanaugh v. Blumenthal

Before Judge Amy Barrett is called to answer possible objections to her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Donald Trump, it may be useful to revisit U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s questioning of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

During the Kavanaugh hearings, US Senator Dick Blumenthal warmly welcomed Christine Blasey Ford as follows, according to a transcript of the hearing testimony:  

BLUMENTHAL: Thanks, Mr. Chairman.

I want to join in thanking you for being here today. And just tell you I have found your testimony powerful, incredible [Blumenthal perhaps meant to say “credible”] and I believe you. You’re a teacher, correct?

FORD: Correct.

BLUMENTHAL: Well, you have given America an amazing teaching moment, and you may have other moments in the classroom, but you have inspired and you have enlightened America. You have inspired and given courage to women to come forward, as they have done to every one of our offices and many other public places. You have inspired and you have enlightened men in America to listen respectfully to women survivors, and men who have survived sexual attack, and that is a profound public service, regardless of what happens with this nomination. And so the teachers of America, the people of America should be really proud of what you have done.

Let me tell you why I believe you: not only because of the prior consistent statements and the polygraph tests and your request for an FBI investigation and your urging that this committee hear from other witnesses who could corroborate or dispute your story, but also, you have been very honest about what you cannot remember. And someone composing a story can make it all come together in a seamless way, but someone who is honest — I speak from my experience as a prosecutor, as well — is also candid about what she or he cannot remember.

Q: It is interesting, perhaps telling, that Blumenthal uses the word “credible” rather than truthful. Blumenthal, as Attorney General for two decades in Connecticut, is familiar with court jargon. He has himself argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Testimony can be credible – that is, believable -- without being true, or in conformity with the architecture of facts. In a period of intense partisanship – welcome to the 21^st century – there are two kinds of credible or believable world views, Democrat and Republican. We should all bear in mind Otto von Bismarck’s observation: “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” Supreme Court nominations since Democrats first borked Judge Robert Bork have been a combination of all three – hunt, war and election. Lies can be credible and believable; indeed, they fail most conspicuously when they are neither.

When Blumenthal says “I believe you” to Ford, he is asserting only his own certitude, not her’s. There is a problem. Certitude is a quality of propositions. Blumenthal is here imputing certainty to persons. He believes Ford because she is a woman accusing of improper behavior a man he does not wish to join the Court.

In his role as a U.S. Senator in the hearing proceeding, Blumenthal, as well as other partisan senators, is a juror. There can be no adequate defense against a charge viewed as true when a trier of fact, a jury, is willing to believe a charge because a testifier is a woman, whereas the accused is a man whose public reputation he wishes to despoil. Properly speaking, Kavanaugh, at the time the incident was alleged to have occurred more than thirty years earlier, was a boy in high school, and Ford was a girl in high school. Judges and jurors in trials know that evidence three decades old is perishable.

Here are some facts that were elicited during the hearing. 1) Blasey Ford did not report the incident to police at the time it had occurred, three decades before her senate testimony. Indeed, she initially spoke of the incident to no one; 2) at first reluctant to testify, she was pressed into service after having  been identified publicly by Democrat politicians familiar with her account, many of whom opposed the Kavanaugh nomination for political rather than jurisprudential reasons.  Kavanaugh was awarded the U.S. Bar Association's highest rating. We do not know whether Blumenthal was one of those who outed Blasey Ford; 3) three direct witnesses Blasey Ford identified as having been present when the molestation had occurred testified under oath that they could not support her charge. Senator Ted Cruz rang this point like a Liberty Bell when he said:

A fair-minded assessor of facts would then look to, “What else do we know when you have conflicting testimony?” Well we know that Dr. Ford identified three fact witnesses who she said observed what occurred. All three of those fact witnesses have stated on the record under penalty of perjury that they do not recall what she is alleging happening.

They have not only not — not corroborated her charges, they have explicitly refuted her charges.

A contemporary calendar in which Kavanaugh disclosed his associations and whereabouts showed that Blasey Ford’s timeline and accounts of Kavanaugh’s molestation could not have been factual. By the time Blumenthal questioned Kavanaugh, the case against him was already collapsing under the weight of elicited evidence, as the transcript indicates.

GRASSLEY: (OFF-MIKE) Senator Blumenthal.

BLUMENTHAL: Thanks, Mr. Chairman.

Good afternoon, Judge Kavanaugh. As a federal judge, you’re aware of the jury instruction falsus in — in unibus (sic), falsus in omnibus, are you not? You’re aware of that jury instruction?

KAVANAUGH: Yes, I’m — I am.

BLUMENTHAL: You know what it means?

KAVANAUGH: You can translate it for me, senator. You can do it better than I can.

BLUMENTHAL: False in one thing, false in everything. Meaning in jury instructions that we — some of us as prosecutors have heard many times, is — told the jury that they can disbelieve a witness if they find them to be false in one thing.

So the core of why we’re here today really is credibility. Let me talk…

The jury instruction cited by Blumenthal apparently did not apply to Blasey Ford.

KAVANAUGH: But (ph) the core of why we’re here is an allegation for which the four witnesses present have all said it didn’t happen.

This was nervy of the judge under scrutiny, and Blumenthal quickly changed gears, so he thought.

BLUMENTHAL: Let me ask you about Renate Dolphin who lives in Connecticut. She thought these yearbook statements were, quote, “Horrible, hurtful and simply untrue.” end quote, because Renate Alumnus clearly implied some boast of sexual conquest. And that’s the reason that you apologized to her, correct?

KAVANAUGH: That’s false, speaking about the yearbook and she — she said she and I never had any sexual interaction. So your question…

BLUMENTHAL: But…

There can be no “but.” The woman cited by Blumenthal denied the planted imputation that Kavanaugh had had questionable sex with her. Kavanaugh rose to her defense, genuinely angrily.

KAVANAUGH: … your question is false and I’ve addressed that in the opening statement. And so, your question is based on a false premise and really does great harm to her. I don’t know why you’re bringing this up, frankly, doing great harm to her. By even bringing her name up here is really unfortunate.

BLUMENTHAL: Well, calling someone an alumnus in that way, was actually interpreted…

KAVANAUGH: Well, implying what you’re implying what you’re implying about…

BLUMENTHAL: … by a number of your football friends at the time of boasting of sexual conquest. That’s the reason that I’m bringing it up. And it conflicts…

KAVANAUGH: Yes. No, it’s false.

BLUMENTHAL: … with…

KAVANAUGH: You’re implying that. Look what you’re bringing up right now about her. Look what you’re doing.

BLUMENTHAL: … Mr. Chairman, I ask that…

KAVANAUGH: Don’t bring her name up.

Blumenthal raised a point of order. Kavanaugh’s objections were answers, or an unsuccessful attempt at gallantry, not interruptions.

BLUMENTHAL: … these interruptions not be subtracted from my time.

GRASSLEY: Very well (ph). Ask your question and then let…

KAVANAUGH: She’s a great person. She’s always been a great person. We never had any sexual interaction. By bringing this up, you’re just — just dragging her through the mud. It’s just unnecessary.

GRASSLEY: Proceed, Senator Blumenthal (ph).

BLUMENTHAL: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

You’ve made reference, judge, to a sworn statement I believe by Mark Judge to the committee. Is that correct?

KAVANAUGH: I made reference to what Mark Judge’s lawyer sent to the committee.

BLUMENTHAL: You know (ph), it’s not a sworn statement, is it?

KAVANAUGH: It would — under penalty of felony.

BLUMENTHAL: Well, it’s a statement signed by his lawyer, Barbara Van Gelder. It is six cursory and conclusory sentences. Are you saying that that is a substitute for an investigation by the FBI or some interview by the FBI under oath?

KAVANAUGH: Under penalty of felony, he said that this kind of event didn’t happen and that I never did or would have done something like that. And…

BLUMENTHAL: As a federal judge, you always want the best evidence don’t you?

Here the interrogatory descends into self-destructive irony. The best evidence had all along supported Kavanaugh’s sworn testimony.

KAVANAUGH: … Senator, he has said and all the witnesses present — look at Ms. Keyser’s statement, she’s

BLUMENTHAL: Let me…

KAVANAUGH: Dr. Ford’s longtime friend… who denied Ford’s testimony that she was present when the alleged molestation had occurred. Better run away.

BLUMENTHAL: … let me move on to another topic. You’ve testified to this committee this morning — this afternoon, quote, “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”

Is it your testimony that the motivation of the courageous woman who sat where you did just a short time ago was revenge on behalf of a left-wing conspiracy or the Clintons?

KAVANAUGH: Senator, I said in my opening statement that she preferred confidentially. And her confidentially was — was destroyed by the actions of this committee.

Run away.

BLUMENTHAL: Let me ask you this, in a speech that you gave at Yale you — you described, quote, “Falling out of the bus onto the front steps of the Yale Law School at 4:45 a.m.” and…

KAVANAUGH: I wasn’t…

BLUMENTHAL: … then…

KAVANAUGH: … I wasn’t describing me. I organized…

BLUMENTHAL: … trying to…

KAVANAUGH: … Senator. Senator, let me finish, please. I organized a third-year end of school party for 30 of my classmates to rent a bus to go to Fenway Park in Boston, which was about a three-hour trip.

I bought all the tickets. You and I have discussed that before. I bought all the baseball tickets. I rented the bus. I organized the whole trip.

We went to Fenway Park. Roger Clemens was pitching for the Red Sox. We had a great time. George Brett was playing third base for the Royals — actually, he was playing left field that night. And he — and we went to the game, and got back, and then we went out. It was a great night of friendship.

BLUMENTHAL: I — I apologize for interrupting, judge, but I need to finish the quote before I ask you the question…

KAVANAUGH: I wasn’t talking about…

BLUMENTHAL: … The quote ends…

GRASSLEY: OK, we’ll let (ph)…

BLUMENTHAL: … the quote ends that you tried to, quote, “piece things back together,” end quote, to recall what happened that night. Meaning…

KAVANAUGH: I know what happened.

BLUMENTHAL: … Well, you…

GRASSLEY: Judge, let — will you quickly answer your question? And then I’m going to let him answer you…

KAVANAUGH: I know what — I know what happened that night.

BLUMENTHAL: I’ll finish asking my question…

GRASSLEY: Please, go ahead…

BLUMENTHAL: … your honor (ph).

GRASSLEY: … but do it quickly.

BLUMENTHAL: Doesn’t that imply to you that you had to piece things back together, you had to ask others what happened that night?

KAVANAUGH: No, it…

GRASSLEY: OK. You — you take your time now and answer the question.

KAVANAUGH: … Yes.

GRASSLEY: And then, Senator Crapo.

KAVANAUGH: Definitely not. I know exactly what happened that night. It was a great night of fun. I was so happy that — it was great camaraderie. Everyone looks back fondly on the trip to Fenway Park. And then we went out together, a group of classmates. And I know exactly what happened the whole night. And I’m happy.

And here comes the kitchen sink.

BLUMENTHAL: Judge, do you — do you believe Anita Hill?

GRASSLEY: Senator — Senator Crapo.

GRAHAM?: (OFF-MIKE) Time is up (ph). Your time is up (ph)…

God bless the clock. Barrett is due to be interrogated -- likely mauled by mostly male Democrats -- by Kavanaugh's interrogators this Tuesday and Wednesday, after having on Monday recorded and carved out their posturings for use in the upcoming elections. 

 

Barrett v. Blumenthal, Day One

It has been said of U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal that there is no more dangerous place in Connecticut than the space between him and a television camera. On the day after Judge Amy Barrett’s first appearance before the U.S. Senate, Blumenthal’s picture appeared twice in a Hartford paper. He was prominently featured in both an AP story, “Barrett makes case as next justice on the Supreme Court,” and a separate Connecticut story, “Blumenthal says fate of Obamacare is on the line.”

Blumenthal is used to receiving gushingly favorable press in his home state. So, no surprise there.

The first day of Barrett’s testimony was not devoted to the questioning of the nominee by senators. Barrett briefly addressed the assembled senators, after which the senators addressed Barrett, sitting mutely before them, looking somewhat like a pillar of salt wearing a medical mask. The interrogatories occurred on Tuesday and Wednesday. What is the real purpose, some may wonder, of this awkward preamble to the hearing?

Barrett, perhaps anticipating hostile questioning from Democrats, was permitted to make an initial statement, in the course of which she said, according to the AP story, that Americans “deserve an independent Supreme Court that interprets our Constitution and laws as they are written.” And the senators were permitted to make statements – political pitches, really, to their separate constituencies  that later may be carved out and presented to voters in campaign clips before their upcoming elections, which have already commenced.

As quoted by the reporter in the Hartford paper, Blumenthal’s message was: “Your nomination” – the senator, full of an unbending resolve, was speaking directly to the pillar of salt – “is about the Republican goal of repealing the Affordable Care Act, the Obamacare they seem to detest so much.”

Blumenthal has not yet told us how a single likely Supreme Court Justice would be able to “repeal” -- be it noted, a legislative term -- an act passed by Congress. Supreme Court Justices should not be in the business of re-writing congressional bills, the exclusive province of the legislature. This was a point made by all sitting Associate Justices during their separate appearances before the senators on the Judiciary Committee, not only originalist members of the court. The point Barrett stressed in her opening statement, emphasised by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during her own testimony,  was that justices of the high court should say whether laws are or are not constitutional and leave the legislative repair work to such as Blumenthal, whose detestation of originalism and originalist justices was barely concealed .

Perhaps Blumenthal did not hear her statement because he was anxious to present a political point before the November elections in his own state.

The point he did manage to make was apparently lost on reporters in Connecticut, which was this: Democrats, who believe the U.S. Constitution is a document that should be altered – some would say deformed -- by high court decisions, want justices to act as the spear points in a progressive remaking of the very nature of constitutional governance.

Indeed, that is why Barrett, whose ambition is far more humble, has been singled out by Blumenthal and other progressive saboteurs as a menace. She was treated as such by Blumenthal, who refused to meet with her prior to her hearing, a discourtesy unusual even for Blumenthal. The snub heard round Connecticut is mentioned in Connecticut Commentary.

In the meantime, Democrats such as Connecticut’s sainted Senator From Planned Parenthood, Dick Blumenthal, who denied Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett the courtesy of a private meeting before her anticipated auto de fa, are busy strewing faggots at her feet and will not be satisfied with anything less than a public humiliation, followed by a public burning. The nation’s shameless mainstream media will help light the Democrat’s Senate Judiciary Hearing pyre. Barrett, don’t you know, is a member of a Christian “cult”, a Catholic charismatic movement warmly embraced by papists such as Pope Francis and all the bishops in Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro’s Catholic Church.

The message to Catholics could not be plainer: It’s OK for Pentecostals to acknowledge the workings of the Holy Spirit in human history, but not Catholics.  It’s OK for Catholics to honor saints such as Francis and Aquinas, but to aspire to be like either is cultism. 

At the last moment, Democrats apparently decided not to claw Barrett’s Catholicism during their hearing. The pawing, Democrat senators decided, should be sufficiently subtle, not embarrassingly overt. It is not good manners, but rather political considerations that had persuaded Democrats to paw rather than claw.

 Blumenthal v. Barrett, Day Two

U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, before interrogating Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett on day two of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Hearings, laid before Barrett, according to a story in The Hill, a non-negotiable demand.

“Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), The Hill reported, “on Monday urged Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett to recuse herself from any case involving the election that comes before the Supreme Court, as Democrats prepare to push her for such a commitment as part of her confirmation hearings.”

In a prepared remark, Blumenthal intoned, “Your participation, let me be very blunt, in any case involving Donald Trump's election would immediately do explosive, enduring harm to the court's legitimacy and to your own credibility. You must recuse yourself. The American people are afraid and they're angry, and for good reason. It's a break the glass moment."

The quotable Blumenthal was at one time an editor of the Harvard Crimson, and his brief stint as a reporter armed with explosive adjectives shows. Euphemistic detonations of this kind, wholly inappropriate for a U.S. Senator attempting to gage the suitability of a possible associate justice to the high court, had been frequently deployed by Blumenthal during his twenty years stint as Connecticut’s Attorney General, and they had always played well in his state’s left of center media.

Blumenthal has not said precisely how he took the measure of the American people’s fear at the prospect of Barrett’s elevation to the court. Could the fear he feared not be a projection on the American people – all of them? – of his own somewhat frantic and fantastic misgivings? Barrett’s past record of decisions on a circuit court has not resulted in explosions or enduring harm to judicial probity, and none of Barrett’s decisions have discredited her high American Bar association rating.

Blumenthal did not demand the recusal of the other two justices seated on the Supreme Court who were also nominated by President Donald Trump should the legitimacy of the coming election be referred to the high court.

If the Blumenthal principle were to apply equitably to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, any decision made by the court likely would favor Democrat presidential contestant Joe Biden, a bosom pal of both Blumenthal and Hillary Clinton, still wincing from her presidential defeat in 2016; we see here the hidden scorpion’s stinger in Blumenthal’s demand.

The Senator From Planned Parenthood has not said, nor has he been asked, what sanctions he will apply to Barrett should she, maintaining her political independence, as befits a Supreme Court Associate Justice, refuse to bow under the lash to Blumenthal’s will. Will Blumenthal-Schumer-Feinstein-Pelosi move for impeachment, a sanction, most would agree, that has lost its puissance as a threat, having been much overused by Democrats seeking to impeach Trump before his four year term as President is affirmed or repudiated by voters at the polls?

All Blumenthal’s threats were blunt arrows. Barrett is not made of inimitable stuff, and she is a brilliant jurist. When a Republican interrogator asked her on the second day of her testimony to show senators and the public the reference documentation she had before her as an aid to answering complex legal questions, she laughingly held up an empty note pad.

Democrat senators, always with a compassionate critical edge in their voices, were making political points. To a person, they painted a gruesome picture of what would happen after Republicans and their court jesters had been successful in killing Obamacare and its various iterations, hoping perhaps the resulting conversation would tailspin into a political discussion concerning the benefits of what really amounts to universal healthcare, a government run operation that would drive up medical prices in the long run, ration health care and put out of business insurance companies clustered in Blumenthal’s Connecticut, once the insurance capital of the world.

Barrett deftly avoided the trap by reminding legislators that Supreme Court Justices were not in the business of settling partisan political disputes among legislators, though she put the point in polite judicialese. As her predecessors had done in previous judicial appointment hearings, Barrett told the trap-baiters that she could not both render just decisions from the bench and prejudice such decisions by answering questions on hot button issues – abortion and gun control have long been two of Blumenthal’s staple campaign subjects – that she would be called upon in the future to consider.

At the end of a long day, Barrett appeared unflustered; nearly every commentator, on the left or the right, seemed certain that Barrett would be confirmed; and although there is one day yet for Democrats to pull a rabbit out of their hats, Barrett seemed serene and refreshed. Her life has prepared her well against the ravages of quick witted students, rambunctious children and senators in campaign heat . At the end of his own dispiriting interrogation, Blumenthal’s hands were visibly shaking, not, one hopes, with suppressed indignation or some affliction as yet unnoticed by his hometown media.

 

Blumenthal v. Barrett, Day Three, “I won’t do that!”

A lede in a story covering Senator Dick Blumenthal’s second day questioning of Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Barrett correctly reports that the senator “spent most of his allotted half hour Tuesday questioning Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett about her support for an organization that says life begins at fertilization and on her controversial dissent in a gun case.”

At the beginning of his questioning, Blumenthal assured Barrett that her Catholic faith was not on the senate’s chopping block. But it was. Blumenthal is a master of insinuation, and pro-abortion-at-any-stage-of-pregnancy-Democrats such as Blumenthal, a regulator-in-chief Attorney General in Connecticut who unaccountably has opposed all and every attempt to regulate the abortion industry, is clearly combative in the presence of Catholics. The anti-Barrett forces, who are legion, have feverishly questioned Barrett’s association with a Catholic group regarded as a cult by many progressive ascendant elements in the Democrat Party.

Blumenthal has not been questioned closely concerning his own associations with extreme groups on the left. And, of course, there are in the country some fervent anti-Catholics who believe – half a century after historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the author of more than 20 books and President John Kennedy’s biographer, told us that anti-Catholicism is the oldest prejudice in the United States – that Catholics are programmatically incapable of permitting their First Amendment constitutional religious rights to be discarded by revolutionary progressives.

Blumenthal, not always reckless, who can speak with the tongue of an angelic lawyer, knows that he must tread softly in a state heavily populated by Catholics of all races – second wave Irish, heavily persecuted in post-potato-famine days, second wave Italians from the poorer sections of Italy, Hispanics seeking shelter from atheist, pro-socialist communists in Latin America, and Greek Orthodox Catholics fleeing the sword of Islam, most of whom still cling faithfully to their bibles and, not surprisingly, to their guns.

Not everyone in Connecticut is a Harvard graduate who has overcome the Catholic dogma that sings loudly within them. And not everyone in Blumenthal’s home state, Connecticut, trusts that the police, whom progressive Democrats want to defund, will arrive in a timely manner on their doorsteps after they have been called for assistance. In Connecticut, every attempt to cage Second Amendment rights after a horrific and murderous assault – the fatal attack by two parolees on the wife and two children of Dr. William Pettit, now a state senator, comes to mind – causes gun sales in the state to spike sharply.

On the very last day of her public testimony before the Judiciary Committee, Blumenthal prepared a cunning trap for Barrett. He asked her to affirm or “grade precedents” in three prior Supreme Court cases, 1) Brown v. Board of Education, 2) Loving v. Virginia, and 3) Griswold v. Connecticut. In 1) the court ruled that that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, in 2) that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional, and in 3) that the purchase and use by married couples of contraceptives  without government restriction was protected by the constitution.

Barrett responded that Brown and Loving had been correctly decided. She was willing to say so on this occasion because what she had said “in print, either my scholarly work or in judicial opinions is fair game,” and she had in the past said that Brown had been correctly decided. However, she declined in the case of Griswold to “grade precedents,” that is to give a “thumbs up or down” to rulings she had not commented on-- for the best of reasons: the canon of judicial ethics forbade her from doing so. Blumenthal, for 20 years the Attorney General of Connecticut, knew that he was asking Barrett to violate a judicial Canon; never-the-less, he pressed on, pulling out all the emotional stops.

“Every time you ask me a question about whether [or not] a question was correctly decided,” Barrett responded, “I cannot answer that question because I cannot suggest agreement or disagreement with precedents of the Supreme Court. All of those precedents bind me now as a Seventh Circuit judge and were I to be confirmed I would be responsible for applying the law of stare decisis to all of them.”

Blumenthal asked the judge “to think of how she would feel as a gay or lesbian American ‘to hear that you can’t answer whether the government can make it a crime for them to have that relationship, whether the government can enable people who are happily married to continue that relationship,” at which point “Barrett pushed back, saying the senator was implying she would cast a vote to overrule Obergefell [ v. Hodges],” a case in which the high court found that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry.

Her personal feelings, she had said dozens of times during her testimony, cannot and would not be permitted to color her prospective decisions on the court. Defendants and plaintiffs in every court in the land expect judges to apply the law and the Constitution to their decisions – not their personal feelings.

“I’m not even expressing a view in disagreement of Obergefell,” Barrett told Blumenthal, stepping nimbly and properly around a snare that would have impaired her objective decisions in future cases. “You’re pushing me to try to violate the judicial Canons of ethics and to offer advisory opinions and I won’t do that.”

Canons of judicial ethics, of course, mean nothing to former state attorneys general on the hunt for votes during elections. “People never lie so much,” said a refreshingly honest Otto von Bismarck, “as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.”

Early in his interrogation, Blumenthal promised his victim that the front door would be closed to anti-Catholic prejudice. In the end, the back door was flung wide open, and all the snot-nosed devils in Hell rushed through it.

Blumenthal’s Last Stand

The title of the news report was, “Sen. Richard Blumenthal makes last-ditch effort to delay Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, but Republicans prevail on party-line vote.”

Blumenthal’s last stand occurred following the termination of the Senate public hearing convened to pass on Amy Coney Barrett’s fitness to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Barrett’s elevation to the high court is a virtual certainty, since Democrats in the Senate do not have the votes to block her admission to the court.

Unlike Custer’s last stand, Blumenthal’s occurred on an empty battlefield. And Barrett, who already had been through Blumenthal’s drill, certainly will not respond publicly in the pages of Connecticut papers to issues Blumenthal had previously raised in the public Senate hearing, exhaustively covered by the anti-Barrett media.

During her public hearing, Barrett was peppered with questions from Blumenthal and others that she wisely chose not to answer.

At one point during her public hearing, a polite and mild mannered Barrett, sensing the snare tightening around her ankle, told Blumenthal, “Every time you ask me a question about whether [or not] a question was correctly decided, I cannot answer that question, because I cannot suggest agreement or disagreement with precedents of the Supreme Court. All of those precedents bind me now as a Seventh Circuit judge and, were I to be confirmed, I would be responsible for applying the law of stare decisis to all of them.”

Blumenthal tightened the snare. He asked Barrett how she would feel as a gay or lesbian American “to hear that you can’t answer whether the government can make it a crime for them to have that relationship, whether the government can enable people who are happily married to continue that relationship,” at which point Barrett pushed back, saying the senator was implying she would cast a vote to overrule Obergefell [ v. Hodges],” a case in which the high court found that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry.

“I’m not even expressing a view in disagreement of Obergefell,” Barrett said, stepping nimbly and properly around a cheap trap that would have impaired her objective decisions in future cases. “You’re pushing me to try to violate the judicial Canons of ethics and to offer advisory opinions and I won’t do that.”

Blumenthal, having stoked the fires of resentment among gays, folded his tent and marched off the battlefield.

But he would live to fight another day -- when Barrett was not present to challenge his discreditable political tactics.

No recent nominee to the Supreme Court, originalist or not, has agreed to answer the kinds of questions put by Blumenthal to Barrett -- because in answering such speculative and hypothetical questions on abortion or gay rights as Barrett correctly refused to field, the prospective justice would not thereafter be free to decide such questions should he or she be elevated to the Supreme Court – very likely in Barrett’s case, much to Blumenthal’s chagrin.

There are highly relevant questions Connecticut’s deferential media has not and will not put to Blumenthal, a progressive white-hatter.

Blumenthal had said that Barrett, should she become an Associate Justice, must recuse herself from making decisions on the high court involving election laws because President Donald Trump, who had nominated her to the court, might become involved in suits concerning ballot impropriety. Put aside for the moment that recusal and presidential court nominations are wholly unrelated, an obvious question raises its horned head: Why didn't Blumenthal at the same time call for the recusal of two other Associate Justices nominated to the court by Trump, Brett Kavanagh and Neil Gorsuch, both male Associate Justices? Do we have here an example of senatorial white privilege – Bumenthal is a millionaire by marriage several times over – once again exercising patrimonial rights over a woman?  

The objections raised by Blumenthal against Barrett, all swirl around originalism -- a mode of Constitutional interpretation different in kind from conservatism, a political worldview and another of Blumenthal’s bugbears.

Blumenthal made use of the Barrett snares in his 2017 Gorsuch interrogatories. 

Here is a 2017 report from CTMirror on Blumenthal’s interrogation of Gorsuch:

On Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision that overturned the state’s ban on contraceptives for married couples and bolstered Americans’ right to privacy, Gorsuch said, “It has been repeatedly reaffirmed.”

Pressed by Blumenthal to give an opinion on the case, Gorsuch demurred.

“My personal views have nothing to do with my job as a judge,” he said.

On Eisenstadt v Baird, which established the right of unmarried people to possess contraceptives, Gorsuch said, “To say I agree or disagree with the United States Supreme Court as a judge is an act of hubris.”

“Precedent is more important than what I think, and my agreement or disagreement doesn’t add weight towards it,” Gorsuch said.

Gorsuch called  Loving v Virginia, which ruled that banning interracial marriage is unconstitutional, “a seminal, important vindication of the original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.”

But he said little else.

“I’m drawing the same line that Justice (Ruth Bader) Ginsberg, (David) Souter and (Antonin) Scalia… Many, many people who have sat at this confirmation table and declined to offer their personal views on this or that precedent,” he said.

Of Lawrence v. Texas, which held the government can’t criminalize gay and lesbian relationships, Gorsuch said, “I’m going to give you the same answer every time.”

Blumenthal also failed to secure Gorsuch’s personal opinion on a couple of key abortion rights cases, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

A frustrated Blumenthal told Gorsuch, “Your declining to be more direct leaves doubt in the minds of millions of Americans.”

But Gorsuch said it was important to hide his views.

“If I start suggesting that I prefer or not or like this or that precedent, I’m sending a signal, a ‘promise of preview,’ as Justice Ginsberg called it, about how I would rule in the future,” he said.

He said Blumenthal, and other senators, are grilling him on issues that are “very live with controversy, which is why you are asking about them.”

When Blumenthal questioned Barrett, he was simply retracing well-worn old ground.

It has rarely, if at all, been mentioned in stories on Blumenthal that Gorsuch, an originalist Associate Justice elevated to the high court by Trump, wrote the single most important Supreme Court decision on gays, a ruling that brings gays under the ironclad shield of the Constitution’s 14^th Amendment.

Why isn’t this telling but inconvenient datum mentioned in every story that displays Blumenthal’s always cleverly buried axiom that originalists appointed to the high court are bound by their originalism to issue decrees shoving gays back into the closet?

Why, to put the question in other terms, is Blumenthal consistently treated by Connecticut’s media with the solicitude one reserves for holy icons when, in fact, he has shown himself, time and again, to be a work-a-day progressive Democrat hack afflicted with an unquenchable lust for favorable publicity?

Dart

 

______________

 

A Brief Sermon

 

(Present day, 1995. F is traveling in his car on the way to the First Congregational Church in Vernon, Connecticut. It’s winter. The roads have been cleared, but the trees are still glistening with snow.)

F: (Voiceover) I was not used to speaking before large groups of people, and I hadn’t been inside a church in years. Some people avoid churches for reasons they think good, even religious. Here in New England especially, religion has been a sometimes fearsome thing. There are all sorts of excuses for staying away, good and bad. My reason was one of the bad ones. Salvation was my worry. I could not be saved without surrendering some of my most enjoyable past pleasures, and sin, most especially the tidy, little forgivable sins, are sweet. It was Oliver Dart that dragged me back to church.

(He pulls up before the church and finds the parking lot packed with cars.)

F: Must have a good preacher here.

 (From the interior of the church, the doors are seen opening. F is seen shrouded in white light against a background of snow. The wind whispers a bit, the doors are closed and he proceeds down the center aisle. The church is crowded, filled with chiaroscuro light and shadow. The entire congregation noiselessly stands. As he proceeds, we see their faces, all following him with their watchful, anticipatory eyes.

Shots of F and the interior of the church. He begins a little sermon of sorts. We see the impressions of his remarks on the faces of the parishioners. The beauty and watchfulness of faces must play a central part in this story of war and defacement)

F: Public speaking is new to me. If I make some mistakes, I hope you will forgive me. We are all in the business of forgiveness (titters from the congregants).

Oliver Dart was a Civil War soldier, a casualty of war, who lived much of his life quietly in the shadows, not at all an obtrusive figure. His story whispers to us; it does not shout. Dart’s dearest wish was to disappear into his surroundings. The Civil War, by the way, was as brutal as it was civil.

Oliver received his war wounds at the battle of Fredericksburg in Virginia, a bloody rout for union soldiers and Connecticut’s 14^th Regiment. Colonel Porter Alexander, General Longstreet’s artillery chief, later wrote of the secondary attack on Marye’s Heights, “A chicken could not live on that field when we opened on it.” Seven union divisions were annihilated. Union forces suffered 8,000 losses, Confederate forces 1,200.

It was a photograph of Oliver after he had returned home from the battle of Marye’s Heights that drew me into his story, the photo and family blood. He is a relative.

His bones, today blanketed in purist, undefiled snow, sweeten the ground of Elmwood Cemetery, only a five minute walk from this church. The picture of him was taken by Kelloggs Brothers on Main Street in Hartford. I’m a Civil War re-enactor, which is to say I’m an amateur method actor of a kind. I have played Darts’ part in the Fredericksburg battle in some re-enactments. And I’ve found there’s a shocking difference between acting the part and being Dart.

Dart had to have his picture taken so that he might receive his Civil War pension. The image is imprinted on a carte-de-visite, a visiting card about the size of a baseball card. Summoned by Lincoln to arms, he went to war. Honor and righteousness were his guides, as Virgil was Dante’s guide in the lower regions of Hell. The bloodiest and most painful wars in our history were a prelude and passport to the mechanized wars of the 20^th century. For 17 years -- from Dec. 14, 1862, when he was wounded, until he died of consumption or tuberculosis in 1879, at 40 years of age -- Dart wore the Civil War on his face.

On the one side of the prayer card I’ve handed out to you are a few words written, it has been said, by a Confederate soldier. I’d like to read it to you now. (He reads and, as he does so, we see the faces of some of the congregants reacting to the words.)

“I asked God for strength, that I might achieve,

 I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey.

I asked for health, that I might do greater things.

 I was given infirmity that I might do better things.

I asked for riches, that I might be happy.

I was given poverty, that I might be wise.

I asked for power, that I might have the praise of others,

 I was given weakness, that I might feel the need of God.

I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life,

 I was given life that I might enjoy all things.

I got nothing that I asked for — but everything that I had hoped for.

Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.

I among all people, am most richly blessed.”

On the other side of the card, you will see the picture the Kellogg Brothers took of Oliver.

(As the cards are turned over, we see the faces react to Oliver’s face. Oliver’s face fills the screen.)

I’ve managed, through a careful study of the available records, to worm my way into Oliver’s mind, and even now, I cannot convince myself that this man -- entirely of the time and the place on God’s earth where he lived out his relatively short life – would have changed a single moment. He was brave beyond compare. In his story, there are lapses that can only be filled by those who love and respect him. That would be me.

On The Train

 

(Virginia bound 1995. B and F are on a train.)

Belisa: Have you ever been to Virginia?

F: No, miss.

B: Business?

F: (He thinks and seems doubtful.) Pleasure.

B: Are you tired? You don’t want to talk? I can pretend to sleep.

F: I’m a little shy.

B: (Exuberantly) Me too. (Actually, she’s very chatty and sociable) It’s a hard thing to shake, but I try my best.

F: (Amused) I’m willing to bet you succeed much of the time.

B: (She laughs) I can see there’s no fooling you. I’m Belisa (She pronounces it Bell-Lee-sa).

F: Pleased to meet you. Where are you coming from?

B: Greenwich, Connecticut.

F: Lucky you.

B: I’m a teacher there. I live outside Greenwich. We’re not rich, but still lucky, thank God.

F: Who are “we”?

B: The family. We’re all poor, thank God.

F: Why do you thank God that you’re poor?

B: Poverty, seasoned with honor, is a blessing.

F: (This strikes home and surprises him. He is not easily or often surprised. The swift motion of the train passing by some tall trees splashes the sun on her face. For a moment, he seems to be looking at a reel of old film stuttering with flashes of light. It passes, and he looks intently at her face. Instead of turning away at his persistent gaze, she smiles brightly.) I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to stare at you.

B: I don’t mind stares, as long as they do not have daggers in them.

F: It was the way the shattered sun, broken by the trees, just now illuminated your features. (He adds stupidly) I’m a student of the human face.

B: A photographer?

F: Not a good one.

B: A painter?

F: Not at all. What is it you teach?

B: American Studies, literature. My course begins with Jonathan Edwards, whom no one knows, and it ends with some post World War II writers, the usual menu: Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald…

F: I know Edwards. I live not very far from his birthplace in East Windsor.

B: (It’s her turn to be surprised) He’s a very important theologian and metaphysician. What do you know of him?

F: He sparked the “Great Awakening” in New England, wrote “Religious Affections” …

B: (Excited) You haven’t read that, have you?

F: More than once. (Her mouth pops open in surprise. She stares at him, at a loss for words. Mildly and humorously chastising) You shouldn’t stare so. (They both break into musical peals of laughter. A few passengers move uneasily on their seats)

F: (F is sleeping in the train. Narrator’s voice) It sure is funny how people enter your life at odd angles. Some make a racket in your memory, others leave like whispers, not a shadow of a fingerprint to be seen anywhere. These are harmless. It’s the persistent ones that create all the havoc.

(We see the scene below and hear the narrator’s voice) I knew I was related to Oliver Dart through my grandmother. But he was a ghost – fleshless, until I met the Civil War reenactor in Maryland. A woman I was with – nothing serious – went into a store to gawk at some crystals. At that time, crystals were thought to have a magic pull on the psyche. I wasn’t much into magic, so I told her I’d wait for her on a bench outside the store. We were there to observe a reenactment of the battle at Antietam, another Civil War slaughterhouse. She was as interested in Civil War reenactments, I discovered, as I was in crystals. And later, after a few painful episodes, we parted as friends.

Sitting outside the store on a bench was a re-enactor, dressed in union blues with a Civil War rifle near at hand.

Re-enactor: Are you involved in the reenactment?

F: No, just an observer, not a participant. I’ve been interested in the Civil War since I was eight. (Having some fun) I was a precocious child, but I lost more than half my precocity along the way. That happens as you grow up. You shed your genius. I’m a small-shot lawyer in Hartford.

R: Good to meet you.  I’m Oliver Dart.

F: (Thunderstruck) What!

R: I’m playing Dart’s part in the reenactment. Dart survived Antietam, luck dog, but was less fortunate at Fredericksburg. Owing to what you lawyers call “an abundance of caution,” McClellan neglected to attack Lee’s forces when he could. Lincoln was right to fire him, don’t you think?

F: I’d like you to meet someone. Be right back.

F: (Narrator voice) I rushed in to fetch the crystal gazer, but she was on to some other adventure and, when I got back out, the re-enactor was gone. I’ve referred to him continually since then as Dart’s Ghost. From then on, there could be no question of hesitation or prudence. The Civil, War swallowed me the way the whale swallowed Jonah.

(A re-enactment of the battle of Maryes Heights and Sunken Road may be found here. Union troops advance. Confederates, secure behind a wall and three deep, mow them down. Union bodies are everywhere. The smoke of the guns gradually lifts, Rebel yells fill the air. Then peace descends and all is deathly silent for a full minute. The camera pans over the bodies of union soldiers. F, playing the part of Oliver, is lying near a wall and a shattered fence post. F turns. We see the sun on his face, a blue sky through the trees. F’s eyes remain closed.  A hand stretches out and helps him stand.)

Soldier:  Time for lunch.

(Sometime later, the two are seen sitting on a stump, still dressed in uniforms, eating rations. The dead bodies are all gone.)

S: You may have wandered too deep into your part. You looked dead, or asleep. I liked the way the union troops marched bravely into the fire.

F: Yup. (Long pause) The bullets were braver.

 

The Call To War

 

(August 1862. Oliver Dart is seen marching with other recruits to a dock in Hartford, Connecticut, where he is due to take a boat to New York and from there a train to Washington DC.  The second narrator’s voice here is Dart’s.)

Dart narrator: We were all raw and energetic. I was 22 years old, a farmer out of South Windsor, newly married to my second wife, Maria Symonds of Vernon. My first wife, Emily Goodrich, died in 1860, only a year after we had been married.

I was mustered in with my brother George, a cousin, and a friend of long standing. We all went off to war elbow to elbow, certain our lives would remain unbroken by bullets and cannon, for our cause was righteous and just. We were to hack the manacles from the feet of slaves and repair, through the bloody engine of war, the breaches of the union. The debates, we knew, were all over. No one could add a word to what had been said. Bullets would now speak. The great cause called us, Lincoln called us – it was time, it was time, to beat our plowshares into swords. There was martial music in our blood. Our farms and our wives would wait for us, and when we returned victorious, we would beat our swords once again into plowshares.

On the train to DC

MORE

 

___________________________

 

This is Oliver Dart’s Timeline

 

 

March 23 1839       Born in South Windsor on Family Farm

                                Father Oliver Dart Senior

                                Mother Amanda Barber

                                Youngest of six children (five brothers and one sister)

 

November 1859      Married Emily Goodrich

                                Farmed in South Windsor

 

Sept 25 1860            Emily died

 

March 25 1861        Married Maria Symonds of Vernon          

                                 Farmed in South Windsor

                  

1861                         Civil War starts

 

 

August 4^th 1862        Oliver enlists in Union Army- 14^th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry

                                                                                    Company D

 

August 20^th 1862       Mustered In

 

August 20-25^th 1862   Trained at Camp Foote in Hartford CT

 

August 25^th 1862      Marched through Hartford to docks and boarded boats to go to

                                  New York. In New York boarded trains for trip to Washington DC

 

Aug 29- Sept 7 1862 Trained at Fort Ethan Allen outside Washington DC

 

Sept 7 1862              Marched into Maryland to join up with 2^nd Corp French’s Division

 

Sept 7-13 1862        Marching west through Maryland passing through Frederick

                                   Maryland

 

Sept 14^th 1862         Passed through South Mountain Battlefield. Saw first dead from

                                   battle and camped nearby.

 

Sept 15-16 1862      Marched toward Sharpsburg Maryland passing through South

                                   Mountain range. Camped east of Antietam Creek on 16^th.

 

Sept 17^th 1862         Heavily engaged at Battle of Antietam.  Attacked Sunken Road

                                   Position.

Sept 18-21 1862     Stayed in vicinity of Sharpsburg following Confederate retreat

 

Sept 22^nd 1862        Marched to Harper’s Ferry

 

Sept 23- Oct 30      Camped at Bolivar Heights in Harper’s Ferry

                                  Outfitted with new uniforms and equipment

Oct 30-Nov 16        Marched to Fredericksburg Virginia

 

Nov 17^th 1862         Arrived outside Fredericksburg Virginia and went into camp

 

Dec 12th 1862        Crossed Rappahannock River into Fredericksburg   

                                  Spent night in houses along Sophia Street

 

Dec 13^th 1862         Engaged in Battle of Fredericksburg {attack on Mayre’s Heights}

                                 Oliver was wounded in face by a shell burst

                                 Fellow soldiers carried Oliver back into town

                                  Spent night on porch of Rowe House on Caroline Street

 

Dec 14^th 1862         Oliver moved back across river to 2^nd Corp Hospital

Dec 26^th 1862        Transported to Stanton Hospital outside Washington DC

 

Feb 8^th1863             Discharged from Service. His brother George and George’s wife

                                  traveled to Washington to bring him home

 

Summer 1863         Oliver had two operations on his face. First one in his brother

                                  James’ home and second in his father’s home

 

June 1^st 1863            Maria leaves Oliver

 

June 18^th –Aug 28  Spent time in Hartford Hospital being treated for Soldier’s Heart

 

Sept 1863                 Returned to South Windsor and his farm

 

Dec 3^rd 1866             Oliver was granted divorce from Maria on grounds of desertion

 

March 1869              Married Auriela Barber

 

Nov 21 1871             Daughter Dora is born

 

June 7^th 1973            Son Leonard is born

 

Aug 11t 1879            Oliver Dart dies at home in South Windsor {cause of death

                                    Is listed as consumption} 40 years old

_____________________________________________

 

 

 

 

The Ghost Monologues A Triptych of Tyrants

A play in three sets. It would be best if one actor were to play all six parts. c. Don Pesci. 2019

 Caligula

(Caligula appears on stage dressed in a smart suit and tie with a boutonnière in his button hole. His is an Oscar Wildeian performance)

Caligula: So, I have become a ghost, the nearest I shall ever be to a God again; for, in life, I was a God. Divinity, you know, is the highest form of politics. What is higher or nobler than a God? … But wait, nobility has nothing to do with it, as if nobility and Godliness could ever share the same stage. A God is above that sort of thing.

As a former Emperor – now, God and ghost – everything for me was permissible, and readily understandable – to me, who was a God. The mind of God, you must remember, is unsearchable. I comprehend things, men and ideas,  by grasping my subject from the inside. Nothing was alien to me.

I am as solid as earth then because I know everything; I am in everything, and everything is in me. I contain worlds. That is how I know; through a process of identity and self-revelation. I become the thing I want to know – say, a tree, or a young boy, or a virgin – and then, at will, I swing between godliness and humanity.

You, on the other hand, seem very transparent to me. It must be so. (He makes a fist and curls his little finger at the audience, a gesture we will see later in Stalin and Kim)  I’ll bet I know what you are thinking. You are thinking -- he’s mad.

Well, in a sense, you are right. What is permissible for the God is forbidden to men. There are borders; but God is He who transcends and transgresses all borders. Gods and criminals are above the law. And in my time, no God-Emperor – there were a few of them -- transgressed more gloriously than I.

That is all you need to know about God: He is opaque and impenetrable. Nothing can pierce His surface. And yet, He is accessible to men, glad, as they say, to be of service for the price of adoration and worship. And, of course, I – as God – set the price; it is my Godly prerogative. Madness is only Divinity’s middle name. When Dionysius entered men, he drove them mad, and they knew what it meant to participate in Godliness, much to their astonishment.

Some lessons come hard, others are hard. Men always think God favors them. If they pile sacrifices at His feet, He will look favorably upon them. But God is other than you -- the thing so large and so far above you it cannot be comprehended, which is why priests and prophets speak of God in a kind of storied poetry. Since God is ineffable, He must be worshipped. It really is pointless to debate Him, something the Roman Senate never understood.

It was my responsibility, while I lived, to convince men that God was neither for nor against them. He was merely indifferent to men. And so, penetrated by God, I was also indifferent to men. One day, I would be laughing with them; the next day, I would have them for my supper. Ah, you understand me! God the gracious host and cannibal!

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: He is mad … But we’ve been through that. Anyway, all this must bore you. You moderns have gotten away from God, and He, always a slippery fellow, has gotten away from you. You are hiding from each other as children sometimes do. You have become practical atheists. Perhaps it is better so. You do not know God, and he does not know you.

I was a divinity in my time and place. I became God so that men would know God. So, you want God, I said to my fellow men: I’ll give you God -- Goddammit!!!

There is no one like me in your poor spiritless world, though there have been fraudulent copies. Your world, however, is not much different than mine. Do you realize how modern Rome was? Just for a minute, forget all the foreign surface distractions, the window-dressing of the culture that haunts and misleads you, and think of Rome as a modern empire. We had armies, you have armies. We had marriages and divorces – too many divorces -- you have marriages and divorces. We had abortion and infanticide, you have abortion and … well, you are coming to infanticide, a logical progression of abortion. Such is progress. Some day you will have it, you will realize you are Gods. We had condominiums, you have condominiums. We had a plague of lawyers, you have a plague of lawyers, lobbyists, contractors, corrupted senators, corrupted contractors, publicists, enraged political commentators, queers, actors, musicians, mimes, disturbed artists, drug dealers, witches, savants, priests, even tender young lovers -- troublemakers all. We had them all, and you have them too. How are we different then?

If you had looked out your condo window on a bright Monday morning in ancient Rome, and saw attorney Livio pounding the pavement, heading to his office near the government complex to file a brief for the widow Rostia, carrying in his hand his laptop computer, breathing heavily – for he had been neglecting his workouts at the gym – and dressed in the height of fashion, splendidly attired in , let’s say, a Pal Zileri suit and a Zegna tie (he points to his own dress)  – would you not think you were in any large city in Europe or America, circa 2019?

So then, it is the funny robes that mark the age -- and the era too? It is the dress and improvements in technology that puts distance – you call it history – between Caligula the God and, shall we say, your Presidents, governors and lions of the Senate? Do you know that Gore Vidal, once said about your Senator Edward Kennedy, “I do not mind Kennedy; every state should have at least one Caligula.” How good it is not to be forgotten.

Distance! So very important! One does not want to get too close to a God, an era or an emperor. That is why I have come to you dressed this way, so as to abolish this alienating distance between us. You have a saying: “Don’t be a stranger.” Well now, am I so very strange in this modern get-up? I know what you are thinking: You are thinking – he is mad. But we’ve been through all that. Extreme sanity, you know, can be a form of madness.

Of the twelve Caesars of Rome, I am the one least hedged about by firm facts, your historians say -- though, God knows, rumors abound. It has become accepted lore, through that notorious scold Suetonius, that I nominated my horse to the Senate. But Incitatus was a very bright horse, much more patriotic – and, I may say, less ambitious – than the average senator, swollen with spite and malice. And why not a horse to keep company with the horse’s asses in the Senate? If not much is known of me, that is because I was defaced after my death. That is to say, my historical presence was removed from all public places.

Oh, what I suffered. You don’t know the half of it. Rome was a dead Republic long before I became emperor. In my time, there was no one living who knew the glorious Republic, except in their too lively and sometimes revolutionary imaginations. But the Republic had always been an emotive idea, very popular among the people. The Republic, the Republic, the Republic – the Res Publica Romanorum, assassinated long ago by ambition, by men like Gods -- and of necessity. It lasted from the overthrow of the monarchy in 510 BC until Julius Cesar and Octavian put an end to the business in 44 BC. But in fact the Republic was buried with the corpses of the Gracchi brothers a hundred years earlier.

After them, mobs and money ruled Rome. It was this corrupted Republic, spotted with rot on the inside, that turned to Caesar for order and peace. And it was Caesar who delivered to the people of Rome the Republican reforms of the Gracchi -- a Republic, one popular Roman actor friend declared, without the bother of a Republican government. First Julius, then Octavius – then Caligula, the God.

The evolution was an inevitable and logical development, though some people, taking the libels of Suetonius as fact, persist in thinking me mad. Not at all.  I was an honest-to-god God, without subterfuge. Gods must not stand on ceremony with their worshippers. The movement from Caesar to God is not a lateral one; it is an upward thrust that necessarily must change the nature of things. When God appears, dead nature blooms. Before my time, Caesars used to parade themselves before the public as Princeps, “equals among men.” But, in fact, they were far removed from the common folk and simply pretended to be ordinary, so as not to alarm those below them, who were more numerous and collectively more dangerous.

Since the death of the Gracchi, Rome could be moved only by organized mobs. “Let them hate,” I said, “so long as they fear.” And they feared me – because I ruled by contraries, in the manner of a God. And what does a God have to do with men? God moves men by terror and love. So, to be a God is something different than to be an emperor; and an emperor is different than a Princeps, an “equal among equals.” When God is among men, equality can be of no account.

To be God is to be other. Augustus Cesar established the Cult of the Deified Emperor and promoted it, especially in the new colonies in the Western Empire. Augustus, however, always insisted that he was not divine. The Cult worshiped his numen – What would you people call it? – the personal spirits surrounding him, and his gens, the spirit of his family and ancestors. The Cult of the Deified Emperor languished under Tiberius and came to full flower only under my hand.

I made the temple of Castor and Polix in the Forum a part of the Imperial Palace. There I appeared on occasion transfigured in Godly form, magnificently appareled. You cannot tell from my present appearance how numinous I was. My religious policy spread like fire throughout the empire. I replaced the heads of the statues of the Gods at Rome with my own, including, of course, the female deities. In the godhead, sexual differences are abolished. The people, awed by love and fear, worshipped me, not merely in spirit but in truth; not merely some idea of me, but me myself – Caligula the God, in the flesh.

Judea, as usual, resisted. A plan to place a statue of myself as Zeus in the Holy of Holies, the Jewish temple at Jerusalem, was stalled by the Syrian governor. And Herod Agrippa forecasted riots here in Rome and an insurrection in Judea should my plan go forward. Who needs riots? Since the demise of the Republic, only mobs and money moved Rome. And on the point of my deification, it was necessary that Rome remain immovable. I know what you are thinking: He is mad. Yes, yes ... of course, if you like…

Rumors and half-baked truths swirled furiously around me. Some said I was mad; these I disposed of. Others whispered I had suffered a mental collapse because I had lived a reclusive life before being thrust on the public stage. Like an actor coming into the foreground from a twilight background, the bright lights of empire and notoriety struck and wounded my mind. Well, reclusive, yes. When one is hunted as a child, in constant danger of death and destruction, one tends to prefer invisibility and solitude. One wants to disappear into the background, or go masked -- like an actor.

Others said I was brilliant, disposing of a sometimes caustic and cruel wit. Philo of Alexandria, the philosopher, was of this mind. Caligula was mad; no, Caligula was a vicious jokester; he was dissolute, arrogant, egotistical, cuttingly witty … So it went.

God has many faces but escapes all attempts to imprison him in finite categories.

Speaking of jokesters, the comic genius Aristophanes, a real nuisance, once was rebuked by an offended and pious patron. Said the furious patron,  who likely was politically connected, “Don’t you take anything seriously?” Aristophanes, the scourge of politicians, replied, “Of course, I take comedy seriously.” In the same way, I took divinity seriously – and found myself utterly alone in an ocean of agnostics. In the same way,  I was serious, you understand, about my Godly prerogatives, which were limitless. Emperors – and still more Gods – are bound only by the limits they impose upon themselves. Is this madness? Is it not rather extreme sanity? Other emperors before me had plumbed the extent of their powers; only I realized it.

My death was disappointingly pedestrian to me. The emperor Tiberius had left Rome very much in the black. I blew through this public fortune quickly, recovered from the Senate some of the imperial powers ceded to it by Tiberius – quite the shadow-Republican, that one -- expanded the imperial court, and grievously disappointed the people. I gave them everything but one thing. They had bread and circuses; they wanted a Republic. Eh, the lower orders! The people had been spoon-fed the notion that the Republic was embodied in the Senate, which had become, by my time, not so much corrupt as enfeebled by ambition and political confusion.

“How I wish,” some near contemporaries misquoted me, “their heads were mounted in one neck; so that with one swift blow of the sword, I could decapitate them all.” Fantasies are often more fruitful than truths, and the Romans, it must be said, were never comfortable with Divine prerogatives. Most of all, they wanted to believe that their emperor was, like them, an “equal among equals.” Other emperors had encouraged this noxious fantasy.

And so, at 37 years of age, I, Caligula the God, was murdered by officers of the Praetorian Guard, it has been said, for purely personal reasons.

What a joke! Cassius Chaerea, joined by others, did the deed. Suetonius, who sometimes told the truth but told it slant, claims Cassius had been stung by my caustic wit and nursed in his shrunken soul a vicious revenge. We had known each other since infancy. How ironic that it was my many attempts to put the two of us on the same footing – my joking – that finally did me in.

In the service of his country, Chaerea had suffered an unfortunate wound in his genitalia. Whenever Chaerea was on duty, I gave out the watchword “Priapus,” which means “erection,” or “Venus,” Roman slang indicating a “eunuch.” Late in January, Chaerea requested the watchword of me, and I responded as usual. I had been addressing an acting troupe of young men. Enraged, Chaerea struck the first blow, and before my German guard could respond, the other conspirators quickly moved in and slaughtered the God. They carved me up pretty good. Another conspirator, Cornelius Sabinus, murdered my wife and disposed of my infant daughter by smashing her skull against a wall. I had become emperor at thirty-seven, and was ghosted after nine short years. Good Gods die young, don’t they?

It was revenge and a drift towards atheism that killed the God, the pedestrian snit of a former school chum. Can you believe it? We Romans love our revenge more than life itself. And it is this emotion, coiled in the heart like a serpent, that explains everything you need to know about the God Caligula, whose life went by contraries. You may applauded. (He bows, throws his boutonniere into the audience. As he struts off stage, the spotlight hits Chaerea)


Chaerea: Don’t believe a word this fraud says. It’s true Caligula lived his life by contraries – because he was perverse. He was always so, even as a young frightened boy. And it’s true that those in Rome who often claimed to be Republicans were no friends of the Republic. A true Republic would have swept the whole lot of them into the dustbin. And that bit about revenge – too true. Of all the emperors, Caligula was the most artful in his vengeance. Vengeance is the justice of the powerless. But Caligula was not powerless, and his vengeance was not just. The very fact that it was not just was to him a spur and permission. Have you noticed about men – not merely emperors, but ordinary men as well – that before they do good or evil, they give themselves permission?  There was no bar Caligula would not cross; his only friends were sycophants and actors. But what is an actor? A mask, an empty vessel, a significant gesture. How he acted! What a show he put on! Vengeance was his audience, Rome his theatre. Two things you must know about Caligula:  first, that he was a sublime actor; second, that he told the truth, and told it in such a way that no one would believe him.

Stalin

Stalin: Khrushchev, that clown, ruined everything. (He wiggles his little finger) With this little finger, I could have destroyed him -- if I had not died. The tragedy of my life was that I died. It was the greatest geo-political tragedy of a century full of tragic reversals.

Listen to him, this clown, bloviating to the 20th Party Congress in 1956 on the Personality Cult and its Consequences. (He reads from Khrushchev’s speech)

“We have to consider seriously and analyze correctly this matter in order that we may preclude any possibility of a repetition in any form whatever of what took place during the life of Stalin, ... who practiced brutal violence, not only toward everything which opposed him, but also toward that which seemed, to his capricious and despotic character, contrary to his concepts. Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed these concepts or tried to prove his [own] viewpoint and the correctness of his [own] position was doomed to removal from the leadership collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation."

Brutal violence, eh? The sniveling little turd.

We used to make Nikita dance for us. I’d call him on the phone, usually late at night. Well you know, when you got a call from Stalin, you were instantly alert. “What does the ogre want me for?” They knew that Stalin, “Breaker of Nations,” rarely called to chit-chat.

“Nikita, we need you here.” And so his rotundity would amble over.

“Nikita, dance for us, won’t you?”

And then, after we had our fun with him, we’d all settle down to watch a Hollywood gangster movie. Everyone would breathe a sigh of relief. Aat least this night won’t end for me in the Lubyanka!

Every great country should have a Hollywood -- and a Lubyanka. With a proper propaganda instrument and an effective rack, I could have ruled the world.

But this Khrushchev! There was always something odd about him – his eyes; they were not stone dead. Behind them was a little tremulous shiver of joy. Even when he danced, in his humiliation, his eyes danced too. Now, Lavrentiya Beriya had the eyes of a dead fish. He was a competent administrator too, a suburb revolutionary.

The true revolutionary, the indispensable foot soldier -- not the always disposable theoretician -- is like one of those Russian boxes within boxes. You open one that reveals another inside, and yet another inside, mysteries concealing mysteries. It is proper for the Father of his people to present a mysterious face to his children. No man willingly becomes the servant of the thing he knows, because as soon as you know something, you attain mastery over it. Mystery, capriciousness some people called it, and terror – he indispensible terror -- were my true ministers of state.

The people, busy about their lives, will always be easy to control. I never once worried about them. But these viper theoreticians represented a danger to me and to the Soviet State. I dealt with them -- capriciously. That blockhead Trotsky I dispatched by sending an assassin to Mexico, where he was hiding out, awaiting an opportunity. Trotsky went there to escape this (He wiggles his little finger), but our assassin found him and parted his hair with an ice axe.

Tito, on the other hand, survived the assassins we sent to Yugoslavia. None of them were successful. One day I received a note from Tito. Comrade Stalin, it said, if you send one more assassin here, I will send to Moscow one man with one pistol and one bullet – and he will not fail.

Who needed that? A most unaccommodating man was Tito, a real terror. We tossed him out of the Cominform. But after I died, he snuck in through a back window, with Khrushchev’s blessing.

Trotsky’s assassin was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison in Mexico for 20 years. In 1953, ten years after the assassination, his true identity was discovered. His NKVD connections had remained hidden until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Can you imagine? Now, that assassin was a formidable revolutionary: Tell him to go and he goes; tell him to come and he comes. He doesn’t think. He is pure action, a little God.

Ah, it was joy to be alive before the walls came crashing down – at least for me. We hid everything in broad daylight. No one noticed outside our little walnut shell noticed. We knew how to shut up and, more importantly, how to shut others up – even Westerners not entirely committed to the Soviet vision. If you want to know how it is possible to tuck under a rug a few million corpses without anyone noticing the lump, ask Khrushchev, our man in Ukraine during the famine and subsequent purges that followed in the 30’s and 40’s.

Of course, I have no right to cry “hypocrite” in connection with all this. But it would be criminal of me not to mention that Khrushchev, who denounced me for brutal crimes committed against certain anti-Soviet elements, was my primary instrument of destruction in Ukraine. And what an efficient murderer he was! How energetically he set about the business of destroying his own back yard! Khrushchev’s parents, you know, were agricultural peasants in Ukraine. He was never able entirely to kick the dirt from his shoes. He was barely literate until he reached manhood, though few regarded him as stupid. No man who crawls over so many corpses to become Premier of the Soviet Union may be called stupid.

Let’s see: I have a list here of Khrushchev’s casualties in Ukraine. (Reading from a report) “Human deaths, 4,800,000; livestock dead, 5,300,000 horses, 8,600,000 cattle, 7,000,000 swine …” – not a bad job. Pity the swine did not include Khrushchev.

But that is what it took in the golden years of the Soviet Union to subdue nations clinging by their bloody fingertip to outmoded forms, for there was no question that the future was ours. All this earned me the title: “Stalin, Breaker of Nations.” Khrushchev was more modestly known as “The Butcher of Ukraine.” We waded through oceans of blood together, Khrushchev and I – Beriya too. In the end, I also became a victim. Me, can you believe it?

Khrushchev and Beriya had learned their lessons well. They got me, some say, with rat poison. Among modern historians, the jury on my death is not yet in, for good reasons. We know how to hide corpses. Our domestic policy was simple: tell the people what they want to believe, and they will believe you. Our foreign policy was simple; keep’em guessing.

Some historians saids – poetic justice. And then Khrushchev eliminated Beriya; more poetic justice. The Soviet Union stumbled forward under Khrushchev’s stewardship. He was followed by others, each softer and more merciful than his predecessor, and finally it ended in that swamp of sympathy -- Michael Gorbachov.

Terror, terror and fear were the engines of our movement. Remove them, we knew,  and the whole edifice was bound to collapse. Before me there were other Russians who inspired fear; believe me, Ivan the Terrible was no slouch. But none used terror so efficiently as "The Breaker Of Nations."

During the famine in Ukraine, there was an Englishman in Moscow who I thought understood me. “Watch Stalin,” he said to the West, “he’ll yoke the peasants to the plows” -- to accomplish his Five Year Plan. And later, visiting his friends in the United States, some of whom were queasy about the number of corpses upon which the Five Year Plan was built, he’d say, “Well, you can’t make omelets without breaking eggs.”

I liked that one. But the Plan was a convenient mask. So long as Stalin was pulling Russia into the 20th century by its peasant beard, the West seemed to understand that every great nation is founded on a great crime. And then there was the depression, which helped to draw people’s attention away from the work of revolution. Really -- we got away with murder. One murder is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. Apologists popped out of the Western woodwork; one could see that enlightened opinion was with us. We hid everything in plain sight; no one saw. People see what they want to see. In the West, they saw Stalin fighting Hitler, and forgot all about the pact we had formed with the Fuehrer, which was easily repudiated. Over here of course, the people saw what we wanted them to see. Those who looked at us through their fingers were led straight to the Lubyanka. Terror focuses the mind wonderfully. The curtain was rung down by the denunciations of the terrorists. It became possible to think, to breathe. Finis!

What a run though: An Empire of lies and terror such as the world has not seen since Cassius Chaerea murdered Caligula. (Stalin lights his pipe and walks off stage. Spotlight n Gareth Jones)

Gareth Jones: We were a small knot of journalists living, thinking and writing together in Moscow in the early 1930’s. Some – Malcom Muggeridge, for instance – came from the socialist camp. Muggeridge’s wife was related to the Webbs, Sidney and Beatrice, English Fabians, like George Bernard Shaw, who later on played a walk-on role in the Terror Famine.

The event that parted us was the 1932-33 famine itself -- not the first time food had been used as a weapon of war. To bring Ukraine within the Soviet orbit, Stalin knew he would have to destroy all resistance. First he and his agents decapitated Ukraine: He murdered all the intellectuals – teachers, scientists, politicians, the clergy, anyone attached to the nation through their remembered affections. The peasantry was a hard nut to crack though. From Roman times until the Terror Famine, Ukraine was known as “the bread basket of Europe.” Under cover of modernization, Stalin’s Five Year Plan, private farms were displaced by collectives manned by armed farm administrators, Stalin’s agricultural shock troops.

When the peasants proved intractable, Stalin destroyed them by creating and sustaining a famine. Communist cadres went into the villages and collected all the seed grain for the following year; they even destroyed the ovens used by the peasants to make bread. Famine stretched its boney hand over Ukraine. Whole villages died out; trees were stripped bare by starving peasants who boiled leaves for nourishment. Rotting corpses of people and farm animals made the air unbreathable. The stinking corpses were concealed from the rest of the world by the mask of Stalin’s Five Year Plan – murder on a mass scale ,and the acquiescence of journalists.

I saw what lay behind the mask when I defied the censors in Moscow, boarded a train and went into the countryside. So did Muggeridge. And we saw the sickening sight, Stalin’s iron hand lying over Ukraine, the swollen belies, the silenced screams. We got the story out, Muggeridge in diplomatic pouches.
  

Much good it did… We tried to say the truth, but it was smothered with lies, manufactured most effectively by Walter Duranty, the chief correspondent in Russia for the New York Times. Other journalists called him “The Great Duranty.” Muggeridge called him the worst pathological liar he had ever met in all his years in journalism.

Duranty knew about the famine but suppressed news of it in his dispatches to the Times. Privately, he guessed that as many as six million people had died between 1932-32. Publicly, he joked that “you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” For his reportage on Stalin’s Five Year Plan, Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a prize won at a great price.

Stalin himself finally was murdered by two of his henchmen, Beryia and Krushchev. Funny, Beryia kicked the corpse and swore at it. But when it twitched, probably the result of involuntary movement, the marrow of his bones ran cold, and he ran off. As for myself, I went to China following Moscow, and there I was murdered by communist bandits. Such were the times we lived in – bloody Times. I received no Pulitzer Prize.

Kim Jong Il

(Shin Sang-ok enters the stage and approaches a large standing mirror with great trepidation. We see Kim Jong Il's image in the mirror. At the end of his monologue, Kim will step out of the mirror and address the audience)

Shin Sang-ok: I am not Kim Jong Il, though people have told me I look a bit like him; it’s the pompadour, I think. Kim could not be here. That would be impossible.

To understand Kim, you must understand something of the uses of imagery. I have a comprehensive understanding of the science of imagery, for I was a movie producer in South Korea, before I was abducted and taken to the North. One of Kim’s agents put a bag over my head and spirited me off. Well, you know -- North Korea; it’s not Hollywood… Having tried and failed to escape several times, I was put into a reeducation camp for four years.

Why is it always four years, I wonder? Why not ten, or eleven and a half? (He laughs) You are surprised, perhaps, that the camp did not rob me of my sense of humor? But believe me, when you are in camp – and everything that has brought you joy is stripped away from you, so that what remains is nothing but a naked, shivering ego, shorn of all its comforting illusions – a sense of humor may be your only saving grace. It took me years to become serious again.

I suppose the North Koreans, who have next to nothing, find themselves in similar circumstances; or at least they might, were it not for the reality bending enchantment of imagery. Once I was released from camp, thoroughly re-educated, I was treated well enough. I was conducted from the camp straight to Kim Jong Il’s … I will not call it a palace; but neither was it a hovel. Kim greeted me like an old friend. Here, in the permanent blackout of the North Korean peninsula, a light glows in the darkness. Kim Jong Il, you can be sure, is the light of this world, a product, mostly, of his creative imagination.

On the day of my liberation, Kim was light in every way: jovial, witty and bright, even though he has had little formal schooling. Light on his feet, he danced across the floor to greet me, one old school chum embracing another after a long absence. “Hello old fellow! Good to see you.” Would you believe it? The women of the country consider him “cute.” I cannot forget the image of Kim dancing to greet me, his face suffused with light. I know sincerity, and this scene was sincerely warm.

After the camp, where many of us had survived on a diet of corn flour and grass, to be received so cordially was (smile) somewhat disorienting, until I realized, almost at once, that here was a man who had no independent existence apart from his imagery. He was a living film. Kim opened a door and waved me into a room – and there it was: the largest private collection I had, until then, seen anywhere – fifteen thousand films. It is somewhat of an understatement to say that Kim is a film buff. He is, at once, the producer, director and principle actor in the film that records his life and the recent life of his crippled country. And here I was, a film maker -- a minor deity, to be sure -- in the presence of this maestro of image making. How could we fail to get along?

He was generous -- after my rehabilitation. He bought me a Mercedes, and reunited me with my wife, who also had been kidnapped by his imps and impets; she too had the marks of the prison camp on her. But our days of deprivation and re-education, we were given to understand, were now over. Apparently, Kim had need of a film maker. I was paid three million dollars a year. He settled upon me as his Leni Riefenstahl. Not a bad deal; Riefenstahl lived to be 101, outlasting Hitler by some 45 years, convinced to the last that she was an artist, not a propagandist. Perhaps she was an artist – one of those who create dangerously.

As for myself, I was impressed into service; I was not a willing subject. In the absence of freedom, it is somewhat arrogant to speak of free choices. In the prison camps, we had no choice of meals; flour and grass were on every menu. But the citizens of North Korea, so many of them, have had even fewer choices. Even here, in Pyongyang, the very center of Kim’s imagination – for the entire country is an imaginary construct -- there has been whispered talk of starvation.

In refugee areas across the Chinese border, boney children stare with eyes floating in sunken sockets at the desolation of their villages. Odd: One expects monsters such as Kim to be monstrous always. But it is not so. With me – perhaps because I was from the South, and a film maker – Kim was honest, after his own fashion. He could be brutally honest. Perhaps he wanted to have near him one man to whom lies could not be other than lies.

Our conversations sometimes were confessionals – not often, but sometimes. Even the great kings of Europe had their fools, and sometimes kings would permit their fools a certain license denied to even the most privileged courtiers. The people to whom Kim has dedicated his life and his most sacred honor, after all, live in the future he has imagined for them; they know little else. But me, I am from the South. I do know better. And Kim knew that I knew better, that I had a frame of reference different than those North Korean children, with distended bellies, who risked their lives crossing the Chinese border for a bit of rice they might bring back to their starving families.

Can’t fool me. “What did he want?” I often asked myself. Those children who crossed the border to gather food were ashamed that they had fallen so far short of their Dear Leader’s extravagant expectations of them. They were not self-reliant enough to starve quietly; their bellies told them that self-reliance was a sham. Kim threw a party for my wife and me when we were rejoined after the camps. Two bands played, a male and a female band. When the women in the band cheered him, he patted my hand and said, “Mr. Shin, all that is bogus. It's just pretense.”

What did he want with me? Affirmation, I finally decided. He wanted to be able to affirm to someone that he knew the truth, that he was not a prisoner of his own imagination, that he was not mad. That and, of course, he needed someone to jump start a propaganda effort. Propaganda is to these tyrants what cosmetics are to aging actresses: When the crow’s feet begin to appear around your eyes, you apply a little paint, and they appear to disappear. But underneath the propaganda, things remain as they are: Children starve and whip themselves because they are not self-reliant. (He moves off stage with a limp)

Kim Jong Il: (Kim’s image appears in the mirror. He steps out of the mirror) There is a little truth in all lies. First there was the testimony of my cook – that bastard! That ingrate! Now this!

One thing you can be sure of: People outside North Korea will always be ready to believe the worst of me. But here – where people know me – I am universally loved… Well, to be honest, not universally loved, but deeply loved. The people loved my father as well.

You see, in North Korea, heroism is still possible. We are brought up to identify with heroes, such as my father and – if it is not too immodest to say it -- me. But in the West, your heroes exist only in your films, which is why I have such a large collection of Western films. I have learned a good deal from them. They are my university. I’m told that Stalin and his cronies used to watch American gangster films together.

There are differences between Western heroes and Eastern heroes – and similarities too, though I think the differences are more important. The Western hero is a loner; he takes his courage from what he believes to be right. But the ethic of the West is fast changing, don’t you think? What John Wayne thought to be right is not what, say, any modern hero more representative of the West thinks is right. There is something defective about this loner theory too, don’t you think? A man alone is not a blank sheet, because a man is never alone; never an island to himself, but always part of the mainland.

And, as to the propaganda value of films, well the fate of a nation depends on its propaganda. It was Hollywood, after all, that won World War II; Hollywood and George Patton, a true American hero. Film is a kind of collective intelligence, and I value it for that reason.

But I meant to say… What was it?... Oh yes, the Eastern hero is different; the wellsprings of his heroism are different. We are not afraid of insularity, self-development, self-reliance – but always within the context of serving the greater good. Apart from the greater good, what is self-reliance but selfishness and moral anarchy? It is not given to everyone to know what the greater good is. When Shin Sang-ok was here, I tried to explain all this to him. But his time in South Korea, a stepchild of the West, had scribbled ineradicable messages on his soul. South Korea is the West as surely as New York, or any large city in America, Paris or Germany, is the West. And, sadly, he agrees with me. In South Korea, the external promptings – entirely Western – have overcome internal resolve. Even in the West, the traditional Western messages – notes of conscience – are daily being overwritten by the environment. The Western hero is no longer one who struggles against his environment; he yields to it, the way a weak man yields to a beautiful woman.

That is the truth. The West is losing its struggle with the East. It may not seem so. But the West is weak, faint of soul. That is the truth. Externalities are deceptive. Rome was rich and technologically proficient when it fell. You see: I study the West; but you do not study the East. If you had studied us, you would know that isolation is our strength. The more you isolate us, the stronger we become. We are like Antaeus in the Roman myths. Our strength comes from the earth -- from the people. To kill Antaeus, the son of the earth, Hercules had to hold his feet above the earth, and strangle him; for when his foot touched ground, Antaeus grew in strength. Are you surprised I know these things? Do you think I spend all my time in the cinema? (laughs wildly).

END c. Don Pesci 2019