Privilege (and the lack of it)


Virginia Woolf. Portrait by George Charles Beresford, 1902. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

We live in an era in which privilege and wealth are squandered on obscene levels of consumption and on domination and destruction — of institutions, of norms of justice and fairness, of ecosystems, of all the fragile things that we all hold in common. Things have not always been that way. Once upon a time, privilege could be used to build and sustain a shared culture, not to strip-mine it or to burn it all down, to strengthen institutions rather than to reduce them to instruments of profit and power.

What happened?

Watching the 2022 film “Benediction” left me very curious about the life of English poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967). That curiosity led me to a long biography of Sassoon (526 pages) by Jean Moorcroft Wilson published in 2003. I had expected that this book would become more a reference than something to read cover to cover, because the biography is a who’s who of an important period in English literature.

That’s the period of the Bloomsbury Group — Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes. Even more important (to me) than the Bloomsbury Group were the Inklings, of which J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were core members.

I find that I have continued to work my way through this biography of Siegfried Sassoon because so much of what’s intriguing is how these privileged people, who didn’t have to work, used their time. It was very different from how privileged people use their time today. Back then, privilege could be used to buy time, learning, and the freedom to take intellectual and moral risks.

Yes, much of that time was used for a constant, and sometimes exhausting, stream of socializing, some of it superficial. But it also meant that they met a great many people, and sometimes lasting friendships developed — Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster and Roger Fry, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. That kind of time and friendship did not exist in a vacuum. It was protected and made possible by institutions, especially the universities.

Another factor that stands out is how the privileged today and the privileged then used the great universities. Today the privileged use the universities to leverage their privilege to gain more money and more power — finance, law, and tech. Back then, two universities in particular — Oxford and Cambridge — were like engines that converted privilege into culture. Today, degrees in the humanities are at risk of going extinct, while universities are increasingly pushed toward creating wealth.

These failures amplify one another.

At the same time as the privileged few have become cultural toxins rather than cultural creators, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown ever greater. Back then, a D.H. Lawrence, who was the son of a coal miner, could find a path to recognition through hard-won education and patronage. Today, millions of families can’t afford to feed their children, let alone educate them or give them the time and the tools to develop their human potential. While the privileged run wild, the unprivileged never have much chance of coming to understand the causes of their condition or learning how to work together to do something about it. Nor do the privileged want them to understand the causes of their condition or to learn how to work together to do something about it.

For all their anger and discontent, the writers and artists of the early twentieth century still imagined better worlds, whereas our own moment seems preoccupied with just avoiding catastrophe. Dystopias make good literature (and movies) today, and for good reason.

I ask myself where the connections are between privilege (and the lack of it) and creating dystopias versus creating a better world. The only idea I can come up with is that the wrong people are running the world to suit themselves, while the rest of us are just trying to get by.

Yes, the writers of the early 20th century were privileged. But they also were builders, and they were on the top layer of their society. They foreshadowed and helped shape the precious few decades of human progress after World War II. Today’s elites are not cultural builders because the systems that reward them no longer value the things that an E.M. Forster, a John Maynard Keynes, or a J.R.R. Tolkien valued.

Privilege once made world-building possible. It was possible to very much like those privileged, world-building artists. Today, the privileged are all about owning the world and making the world better only for themselves. And they don’t have to care whether we like them.

R-r-r-r rumbledethumps


Rumbledethumps. Click here for high-resolution version.

Just as I was thinking about what to cook on a bleak midwinter day, a friend who lives in the south of France (who is Danish but shares my appreciation for British cultures) sent me a link to a YouTube video about making rumbledethumps. So I made rumbledethumps.

I have only two Scottish cookbooks. One, The Scottish Women’s Rural Institutes Cookery Book, sixth edition, 1948, does not mention rumbledethumps, but it does include a short recipe for making colcannon, which I believe is considered to be the Irish version of rumbledethumps. My other Scottish cookbook, The Scottish Cookery Book, 1956, includes a short reference to rumbledethumps among the potato recipes My guess is that rumbledethumps is so simple and so basic that no one really needs a recipe.


⬆︎ The Scottish Women’s Rural Institutes Cookery Book. Click here for high resolution version.


⬆︎ The Scottish Cookery Book. Click here for high resolution version.

I looked at a number of online recipes for rumbledethumps. Some sauté the cabbage along with the onions to precook it. Other recipes boil the cabbage. I boiled my cabbage to cut down on calories. But I suspect that much of the savoriness of rumbledethumps comes from lots of butter (or drippings) and salt. I used only a little butter and made up for it with olive oil. But in these old recipes, there really is just no substitute for butter (and lots of it), or drippings (and lots of it).

⬇︎ In the video, the cook pronounces the th in rumbledethumps as though it is a t. This puzzles me. ChatGPT says that TH-stopping is a normal feature of Scots. If so, I’ve never noticed it. Notice that he also rolls his r’s sometimes.

I wonder if I could make bubble and squeak from the leftover rumbledethumps.

Ink forever!


Click here for high-resolution version.

Keeping fountain pens in working order makes me realize how much time our ancestors must have spent maintaining their writing instruments. Monks, I believe, used pens made of feathers, reed, or bone. Fountain pens came along in the 1700s. But keeping them in working order still would have been a regular chore.

Eventually just rinsing the fountain pen’s parts aren’t enough to get the ink to flow again. The pen needs to be soaked to get the dried ink out.

The Epstein files

If you try to zoom out and consider the Epstein files from the planetary level, what do you see?

What I see is a global ultra-rich ruling class like nothing the world has ever seen before. The French Revolution was just a tempest in a teapot by comparison — one small country, with power so fragile that they all lost their heads in a few short years.

Oxfam says that the global top 1 percent possess more wealth than 95 percent of the world’s population. How did that happen? And it’s not just money and property that they own — it’s power, and entire governments. It’s probably safe to say that the top 1 percent also own more power than 95 percent of the world’s population.

No doubt they get away with 95 percent of their crimes. They’re used to that. They count on it. The Epstein files are a test of whether they can get away with crimes (and the cover-up of those crimes) that are so abominable that even the deplorables — who normally admire right-wing power — aren’t willing to ignore it.

The other thing is that, for all their money and power, they are pathetic, greasy, ugly little worms who buy young bodies to help enable their denial that they’re old and utterly undesirable, and that, without their money and power, they have less going for them than most of the homeless people living on the streets of San Francisco.

This is the story of our times, and the ball is in our court. How long will 1 percent of the global population be able to treat the rest of us like property? No guillotines would be needed. Just tax them to death.

The right-wing rage machine is sputtering


Trump rally, Manchester, New Hampshire, January 2024. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The fuel that sustains MAGA is right-wing rage. When right-wing propaganda can’t deliver enough rage, Trump’s popularity and approval ratings drop. Fox News viewers in the age 25 to 54 bracket were down 61 percent in November 2025 versus November 2024.

The job of the right-wing media is to constantly fuel the rage and demonization that it directs at anyone who stands in the way of the right-wing agenda. No ugliness is too ugly, and no lie is too great, if it generates rage. The corrupt moral nature of right-wing rage is such that it now even teaches that empathy is morally dangerous. That is, empathy for friends and family is virtuous. But empathy toward the wider world, because it leads to concerns about equality, fairness, and equal justice, is the very moral snare that liberals fall into. And liberals, of course, are evil.

But liberals are now out of power. Generating right-wing rage was easy when there were liberals with power who could be demonized — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. But a movement built on manufactured partisan rage runs out of fuel when the enemy disappears from view.

Some blame “outrage fatigue.” I don’t think that’s it. MAGA types are energized by rage rather than tired by it. Rather, this is a serious propaganda problem. If Democrats are powerless, then whom is the movement fighting? If Republicans control government, then why is life not magically improving? If Trump is president again, then why aren’t we great again? Without Democrats to blame, the rage machine becomes an ouroboros — a snake eating its own tail in search of the emotional intensity that its propaganda can no longer produce. The movement is starting to fragment as leaders who are addicted to rage and the politics of rage inevitably turn on each other.

Trump’s decline in approval ratings is partly emotional. Trump no longer provides the catharsis that MAGA types felt during the fuck-your-feelings and liberal-tears days. Trump is yesterday’s rage, warmed over, feeble, and increasingly unappealing.

None of this bodes well for MAGA’s future. But Republicans continue to have an enormous amount of power, and they will not hesitate to use it. They have two kinds of options. They can try to stay in power illegally with most of the country against them. Or they can smash a lot of furniture in an attempt to generate new themes of hysteria, rage, and fear that they hope will help them. They probably will do both.

Siegfried Sassoon


Jack Lowden as Siegfried Sassoon in “Benediction,” 2022

From Oscar Wilde to the present, there has been a continuous line of gay writers, all of them considered to be degenerate criminals until relatively recently, and all of them now vindicated as bravely many years ahead of their times — impeccably civilized in their subversiveness. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was one of the lesser known of these writers. The 2022 film “Benediction” has given Sassoon some of the attention he deserves.

The Scottish actor Jack Lowden, of course, is River Cartwright in the brilliant and ever-so-entertaining series “Slow Horses,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

Many of these writers knew each other. Gay writers living today are only a few degrees of separation from Oscar Wilde. These early 20th Century gay writers lived in dangerous times. Wilde’s trial started a dark cultural shift that lasted for sixty years. Scholars estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 men were charged with crimes up until decriminalization in 1967. There was surveillance, entrapment, trials, prison, exile, and suicide. Alan Turing, who was charged with “gross indecency,” the same charge that was used against Oscar Wilde, was only one of these. E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice was not published until 1979, nine years after his death.

Armistead Maupin and poet Gavin Geoffrey Dillard knew Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood and W.H. Auden were lifelong friends. Isherwood knew E.M. Forster. Siegfried Sassoon knew Robbie Ross (who was a loyal friend to Oscar Wilde until the very end). Siegfried Sassoon never met Isherwood, but he certainly knew of him. As a war poet during World War I, Sassoon was critical of Isherwood because he thought Isherwood was avoiding military service by remaining in the United States. Isherwood knew Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams.

Though almost all them were born to great privilege, they were not all of equal character. Lord Alfred Douglas, who betrayed Oscar Wilde, became an even greater jerk after Wilde’s death. E.M. Forster, on the other hand, would qualify as a saint, were it not for the Catholic church’s clock running about six thousand years slow. Christopher Isherwood was no saint — as is clear if you read Christopher and His Kind or watch the film “Cabaret” — though Isherwood lived a very different life after he came to the U.S. in 1939.


Christopher Isherwood (left) and W.H. Auden, 1939. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

After watching “Benediction,” I bought a copy of a 2003 biography of Sasson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches. I doubt that I will read the entire book; it’s a very detailed 526 pages. But it’s an excellent reference with a valuable index and large set of notes. “Benediction” doesn’t flinch at the gloom and embarrassing failures of Sassoon’s later years. I found it interesting, by the way, that my copy of the book, which I ordered from the U.K., had a previous life in the Hobson Library of the Joint Services Command and Staff College, which trains members of the British military.

I have known poet Gavin Geoffrey Dillard for more than fifty years. He is my oldest friend. Gavin lived in Hollywood for a good many years. Isherwood lived in Santa Monica. Isherwood was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981 and died of it in 1986. Below are two photos that Gavin took while visiting Isherwood during Isherwood’s last years.


⬆︎ Christopher Isherwood, Santa Monica, California, c. 1984. Photo by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.


⬆︎ Christopher Isherwood and Don Bacardi, Santa Monica, California, c. 1984. Photo by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard.


⬆︎ Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, Bethania, North Carolina, c. 1979. Photo by David Dalton. (For years, Gavin and I preferred twin-lens reflex cameras such as Yashicas and the Mamiya C330, which use square 620 film.)

For Gabriel

When you were an angel and I was a god,
Earthly-fair were the paths that we trod;
You, from your heaven of Saints at the Throne,
Banished, to wander, gold-haired and alone;
And I, from my pagan Paradise hurled,
Thro’ sun-shot cities of cloud to the world.

Humble you came, with your calm, clear eyes,
And parted lips; but your spirit was wise
With raptures of music and light that you’d lost …
So we loved and were happy, nor counted the cost.
For the gates were barred, and the way was hard
Up to the bastions of Heaven proud-starred;
And I was a god no more. But you sprang
To the peace of my arms … and an angel sang.

Unpublished poem by Siegfried Sassoon, dated 20 November 1918, included in Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches, 2003.

An obstinate ostinato in a time of oligarchy


Yamaha P-225 digital piano

Though in my younger days I had a piano for many years, it had been 20 years since I owned a piano. A rather large organ console now occupies all the musical space downstairs (not to mention the ten speaker cabinets upstairs). To have a real piano again was out of the question for lack of space. But I finally acquired the next best thing to a real piano — a pretty good digital piano. I put it in my bedroom, the warmest and best-lit part of the house during the winter because of the big gothic windows.

Even when I was well practiced and at my best, I was a humble intermediate-level musician. My limit was in technique, not so much my musicality. That is, I can hear better than I can play. Many times in the past I’ve gone several years hardly playing at all, and my keyboard skills fall apart. Still, there is something to playing an instrument that is like riding a bicycle. The skills never completely go away. A few months of diligent daily practice will bring it back. Recovering rusted technique is much quicker than developing that technique for the first time. I went up to the attic and found my piano music. After a few weeks of playing scales, over and over, for at least an hour a day, I should be able to once again relearn the pieces that I learned years ago.

Computer nerd that I am, I’m very interested in letting a computer (or just an iPhone) play the piano, using the magic of MIDI. MIDI files are easy to find on the internet. However, most of those MIDI files are computer-generated. They sound mechanical and lifeless. They hurt the ears. There are MIDI files played by human beings, though, if you can find them. The MIDI files are created on special pianos that record what the pianist does with great precision. When played back on an instrument such as the Yamaha P-225, it does indeed sound like a real person is playing the piano.

Between 2002 and 2018, Yamaha had annual piano competitions in which the players’ performances were recorded on a special Yamaha grand piano. Those competitions produced thousands of human-played MIDI files. The MIDI files disappeared off the internet, though. But with some digging I found that the files still exist in an internet archive. Also, a few dedicated souls retrieved all the files and organized them. I was able to find them, and I now have the entire library on my computer. Those who might be looking for those files can start here, at the internet archive.

I made another very useful discoverty. ChatGPT can read, edit, and write MIDI files. For example, in the Yamaha archive is a performance of Schubert’s Impromptu No. 3 in G-flat Major, Op. 90, D. 899. The pianist — probably a young one — pretty much murdered the piece by playing it too fast and much too heavy with the hands, particularly the left hand. That’s the kind of thing that can happen when a pianist has great technique but mediocre musicality. I had a fascinating discussion with ChatGPT about improving this performance. ChatGPT and I went through about ten iterations, in which ChatGPT made the MIDI changes I requested, and we ended up with a performance that is at least 75 percent as good as this performance by Khatia Buniatishvilli:

Many people have written about how to try to stay sane while the world is spiraling downward into fascism. Pretty much all agree that keeping civilization alive — even in small ways in our own homes — is an act of resistance.

Trump

Every day, the horrors seem to get worse. The Trump administration is trying to sell out Ukraine to Russia, with scum such as Jared Kushner in the middle of it, with plans to get rich off of looting Ukraine. Apparently Pete Hegseth gave a war-crime order to kill the survivors of a ship that had been blasted out of the water. Now they’re denying that Hegseth gave such an order, and they’re trying to throw an admiral under the bus for it. The new outrages have been so outragous that the media have temporarily forgotten Epstein.

There may be an upside. Republicans are starting to think about their political survival after Trump is gone. Trump has more than a year for more atrocities before a third impeachment becomes an option. Republicans seem to be learning that the political gains from ignoring Trump’s atrocities are starting to diminish. If Republicans have a brain, they’d support impeachment as soon as a new Congress convenes in 2027, and get rid of Trump for good. I’m not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, how about a sonata or two.

A musical note: The words ostinato (Italian) and obstinate (English) come from the Latin obstinātus. The Italian word dropped the “B” as Latin consonant clusters were simplified. In music, ostinato refers to a musical pattern that keeps repeating, obstinately, even though the rest of the piece may have moved on — for example, an ostinato bass note or bass line.

One of the best known examples of ostinato pattern is the bass line that repeats over and over all the way through Pachelbell’s Canon in D. Listen to the cello:

And here you can see these notes in the score:

And here is something from Philip Glass, the patron saint of ostinato, in this case obstinately repeating arpeggios:

What just happened? Is there a fix in the works?

The media malpractice this morning is shocking. Yesterday the entire Congress voted almost unanimously to release the Epstein files. There is no way that such an event won’t end up as a major moment in American history. And yet, the New York Times’ web site this morning has the story way down below the middle of the page, with a small headline. Not only that, but the story is completely cowardly, all about politics in Congress without a word about what this means for the Trump presidency. The Times’ lousy, cowardly columnists, at least as of 7:30 a.m., were silent.

As usual these days, we have to look somewhere else for any helpful analysis. Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack post this morning was one of her history lessons, about Gettysburg. I had to do some digging around to discover that she posted a video late yesterday, before the Senate made its move. She pretty much covers what can confidently be said at this point.

I am a person who reads for information. It annoys the daylights out of me that the trends these days are more and more toward video. I detest video as a source of information. It moves too slowly. It can’t be quickly scanned for whether it contains anything relevant, the way text can be. Don’t people read anymore? It’s possible to download YouTube videos (with some special software), isolate the audio with an app such as VLC, then generate a transcript from the audio with an app such as MacWhisper — an awkward and time-consuming process. But at least it’s possible.

Anyway, in the video, Richardson discusses the question of whether it would be possible for Trump and his appointees to suppress or strip the Epstein files, if they actually are delivered. Her bottom line is that it would not be easy, because so many people know what’s in the files and because a unanimous Congress seems to be in no mood to tolerate any funny business. There probably are few people willing to be part of a cover-up for a president who is guilty as sin, who is weaker by the day, and who just might go down because of what is in the files. They can gamble on a Trump pardon, but now they know that a unified Congress (on the matter of the Epstein files, anyway) will subpoena as many people as necessary if there are any signs that the Epstein files have been tampered with.

I keep hoping that something of major importance happened yesterday. And yet Trump has slithered away from the law and the facts time and time again. Richardson says in the video that whatever happens, it’s going to take time. How sick are we of being patient for the spectacle of Donald J. Trump utterly destroyed, because of his own crimes?

Epstein aside, MAGA political calculus clearly is changing. Once the members of Congress calculate that Trump is more likely to cost them votes than to gain them votes, it will be every scumbag Republican for himself, every one of them. They don’t care whether Trump is a pervert and rapist. They’ve known that all along. All they cared about was riding the Trump wave — as long as that wave carried them up rather than down.

Update:

It took a while, but I transcribed the audio from the Heather Cox Richardson’s video (above) and asked ChatGPT to summarize it. Here are the results.

Summary of Heather Cox Richardson on the Epstein Files Bill

Heather Cox Richardson explains how the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill (427–1) to require the Department of Justice to release the FBI’s Epstein files, and what this reveals about Donald Trump’s weakening grip on the Republican Party and the difficulty of fully burying the Epstein story.

1. What the House just did

Shortly before Richardson went live, the House voted 427–1 to require the DOJ to release FBI files related to Jeffrey Epstein. These are not the same as the roughly 20,000 documents already released from the Epstein estate, which came via subpoena. The new bill targets the FBI’s investigative files, created after renewed scrutiny of Epstein around 2018.

2. How the bill got to the floor: the discharge petition

The key procedural tool was a discharge petition, which forces a vote once it has 218 signatures. After Democrat Adelita Grijalva was sworn in, she added the crucial signature, bringing the petition to 218.

Four Republicans signed the petition:

  • Nancy Mace
  • Lauren Boebert
  • Marjorie Taylor Greene
  • Thomas Massie

Trump and his allies put intense pressure on these Republicans to withdraw. They refused. Once a discharge petition is filed, it cannot be withdrawn, so the House was obliged to hold the vote.

3. Trump’s sudden reversal

Initially Trump fought to stop the bill. Then, on Sunday night, he abruptly announced that he didn’t care if the files were released, claiming he had nothing to hide and just wanted to “get it behind us.”

Richardson argues this is clearly tactical rather than sincere:

  • Trump has done everything possible to prevent disclosure of these FBI files.
  • The previously released estate documents already contain “career-ending” material, and he appears deeply implicated.
  • If he fears the FBI files more than the estate files, then those FBI materials are likely even more damaging.

The real reason for his reversal, she suggests, is that he had lost control of House Republicans. With rumors that up to 100 GOP members might back the bill and constituents demanding transparency, Trump tried to get in front of a vote he could no longer stop.

4. Trump’s weakening political position

Richardson stresses that many Republicans now fear being caught in a cover-up more than they fear Trump himself:

  • His mental acuity appears to be slipping in a way visible to the public.
  • His tariffs are economically damaging and may be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
  • His deportation raids are deeply unpopular.
  • His and his allies’ flirtation with open white nationalism (e.g., Nick Fuentes) is splintering the party.

Republicans are increasingly calculating based on their own political survival, rather than automatically aligning with Trump.

5. The Senate becomes the key arena

The bill now goes to the Senate. To move forward, it will almost certainly need 60 votes for cloture.

  • Democrats are expected to support it.
  • The question is whether enough Republicans will join them.

Some early signals are telling. Senator Tommy Tuberville, for example, has said he will vote for the measure now that Trump has publicly blessed it. Tuberville, eyeing a run for governor of Alabama, clearly fears that voting against the release would hurt him politically.

In short, Senate Republicans face the same dilemma as House Republicans: stay loyal to Trump or avoid being seen as complicit in hiding whatever is in the Epstein files.

6. Trump’s real bet: Senate obstruction and DOJ stonewalling

Richardson suggests Trump’s apparent openness is a stall tactic:

  • He is plainly hoping the Senate will bottle up the bill.
  • If not, he has already signaled he will insist that Congress receive only what it is “legally entitled to,” setting up battles over how much the DOJ actually releases.

His Truth Social language, she argues, is basically a “neon sign” that he intends to fight over the scope of any disclosure.

7. Why a full cover-up is unlikely

Drawing on her historian’s experience, Richardson argues that fully erasing the Epstein story will be extremely difficult, for structural and practical reasons:

  • Epstein operated among wealthy, high-profile elites using modern technologies: bank accounts, flight records, security cameras, digital communications, and so on.
  • The FBI seized many thousands of hours of video from Epstein’s New York mansion.
  • At least $1.1 billion moved through his accounts; bank records exist and are not easily destroyed.
  • There are more than 1,000 survivors, who know names, dates, and events.
  • Members of Congress can read their stories into the record under the Speech and Debate Clause, making defamation lawsuits impossible.

Her broader point: in a modern, highly documented world, powerful people leave trails. Burying a story like this requires silencing a very large number of institutions and individuals. It is possible, but historically the odds favor eventual leakage.

8. Why Republicans fear delay

Richardson notes that many Republicans are terrified of a delayed scandal:

  • The longer the issue drags on, the greater the risk that a major document dump hits in 2026 or 2028, right before key elections.
  • Some believe they must “rip the bandage off” now, rather than face an electoral catastrophe later.

As Trump’s ability to deliver votes diminishes and his toxicity grows, more Republicans begin to see him as an electoral liability rather than an asset.

9. Overall takeaway

Richardson’s core conclusions are:

  • Nobody yet knows precisely what is in the FBI’s Epstein files.
  • Trump’s own frantic behavior suggests that the files contain seriously damaging material.
  • Given the scale of the network, the number of survivors, and the density of modern financial and digital records, it will be very hard to keep the truth permanently hidden.
  • The Senate’s handling of this bill will be a key test of the Republican Party’s willingness to keep protecting Trump versus protecting itself.

From her historian’s perspective, Richardson argues that in a case like this it is ultimately harder to hide the story than to find it, especially once enough people decide they want the truth.

The unenchanted travel of the here and now


A medieval inn. Source: ChatGPT 5.1. Click here for high-resolution version.

It’s an odd paradox — to very much want to know what’s happening in the world, but very much not to want to be in that world. When you’re both introverted and old, like me, then all the more does one want to be away from the world. It’s why I live in the woods now. This almost certainly has something to do with why I no longer read stories set in the here and now.

It wasn’t always that way. Back in the 1970s, Armistead Maupin’s series of Tales of the City novels changed my life. They were very much set in the here and now, in San Francisco. Those novels were a big factor in my deciding to move to San Francisco back in the late 1980s. And by the way, by an unplanned stroke of fortune, I ended up at the San Francisco Chronicle, where Maupin wrote those novels in serial form in the Chronicle. I even, at last, met Maupin at an office Christmas party. By that time Maupin was rich enough from the novels that he no longer had to work at the Chronicle.

Still, the urge to travel has never completely left me, and I hope it never does. I’ve seen most of the places that I ever wanted to see, so it’s Scotland now that best suits my anything-but-the-here-and-now attitude. In Scotland, especially in certain places, the realities of today’s world can easily be imagined away — pubs, little villages, farmland that probably looked very little different 400 years ago, moors and bogs, castles, and the sea crashing against rocky cliffs. San Francisco suited me well when I was younger, but not anymore.

But: one has to get there from here. From where I am in the Appalachian foothills, that’s 24 hours or more of the most miserable sort of immersion in the here and now — the noise and discomforts of airports, being packed into airplanes, paying through the nose for a taxi or Uber ride, and sometimes an ugly and time-wasting layover in an airport hotel. No doubt this is inevitable in an era when people travel by the millions, requiring great efficiency. The economics of travel today, it seems, have been fine-tuned to keep the level of misery just short of the level at which people will refuse to bear it. The misery is twice as great on the way home, because everything that one was looking forward to is now behind rather than ahead. Though, to be sure, being home at last is awfully nice, too.

I was unable to find any new fiction that interests me, so once again I’m re-reading The Lord of the Rings. My favorite parts, really, are the traveling parts, especially in Book 1 when Frodo and friends set out from Hobbiton and travel cross-country to Bree and to the inn named the Prancing Pony.

I’ve often been curious about what travel was like in medieval times. There were Roman roads, of course, going in all directions from Italy into the heart of Europe as well as into Britain. There were a good many people on those roads, which means that there had to be a support system for travelers. For what reasons did people travel? How safe was it? Were there a great many inns, or too few? Who walked, and who rode? What kind of wagons and other conveyances did they use? Did they travel much during the winter?

It seemed very likely to me that scholars have a great deal of information about medieval travel, so I asked ChatGPT for suggestions. I’ve ordered a 1997 reprint of Norbert Ohler’s The Medieval Traveller. It’s an English translation of the original German, Reisen im Mittelalter.

I’m hoping the book will provide some fuel for my imagination — staying right here in the woods while traveling in my imagination, and not in the here and now.

The media are totally blowing it on Epstein

It’s not just the Washington Post and the New York Times. Even fringy online media such as Huffington Post, as well as has-been online media such as Salon, are afraid to touch the Epstein document dump. Their main excuse is that the documents were “largely” already publicly available. When they do write about it, they prefer to make it a story about Democrats vs. Republicans in Congress, rather than what we know (and don’t yet know) about Trump’s involvement with Epstein because of a completely obvious government coverup.

The best place I’ve discovered so far where people are actually doing real sleuthing is in a Reddit forum, https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/. Some of the posts there will turn your stomach. I’ve appended an image of one such document below. The media’s excuse for ignoring the Tiffany Doe deposition is that it’s not new. But of course the media also ignored it several years ago when it was new. In the deposition Tiffany Doe says she witnessed Trump raping a 13-year-old and threatening to kill her family if she ever told anyone. Old news! Still nothing to see here! As usual, Trump managed to keep it out of court.

If I correctly understand the muddy pieces in the media, the recent document dump by a House committee is just a small sample of what the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department have on Epstein.

This is one of those times when it is very useful to see what is being said in foreign publications with anti-American agendas. With a completely corrupted U.S. government, and with an American media that is increasingly corrupted and increasingly timid, a huge amount of power both inside of government and outside of government is trying to keep Americans in the dark. Here’s a straightforward piece in Al Jazeera: Trump, Congress, and the Epstein files: What happens next?

It’s interesting that Russia Today, though, is working as hard to ignore the Epstein files as the American media are. There are many mentions of Russia and Russians in the Epstein files, so corrupt elements in Russia and corrupt elements in the U.S. are well aligned on this. The Russia Today story that totally tracks the U.S. coverage is here: Newly released Epstein email claims Trump ‘knew about the girls’.

It seems pretty apparent that, since Trump and his minions are so desperate to prevent any more disclosures, that they know how damning it will be. I keep wondering and wondering: When will the Republican Party, now that Trump has become so weak and is such a lame duck, come to its senses and cut Trump loose?

If and when Trump is destroyed — as seems very possible with the Epstein files — then throwing Trump under the bus would be the first priority of trying to save the Republican Party. But then, if they had any sense, they wouldn’t be Republicans. They’re still acting as though it’s impossible to remove them from power and bring them to justice. Though maybe, just maybe, some of them realize that the Epstein documents could bring them down and deliver a setback to American fascism that would last for a hundred years.

The above is an image of a part of the document dump. Here is the link.

Update:

This afternoon Harry Litman posted, at Substack, the first thorough and fearless piece I’ve seen about the Epstein document dump: Ten Things We Now Know — or Can Fairly Surmise — From the Epstein Emails.

Litman is a lawyer and law professor with a sterling résumé.

Vietnam: Quo Vadis? — the full text


Wallace Carroll interviewing young Royal Air Force pilots during the Battle of Britain. Source: Wake Forest Magazine, Wake Forest University.

Histories of the Vietnam War always refer to an editorial in the Winston-Salem Journal published on March 17, 1968, arguing for an end to the war. The editorial was written by Wallace Carroll, then editor and publisher of the Journal. In Wallace Carroll’s obituary, published July 30, 2002, the New York Times wrote:

“On March 17, 1968, he published a signed editorial in Winston-Salem under the headline “Vietnam — Quo Vadis?” that argued that United States policy in Southeast Asia was misguided and irrelevant to the goal of thwarting Soviet expansion.

“Dean Acheson, the former secretary of state and an adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, showed the editorial to Johnson and stood by while the president read it. Later that month, Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election and would begin peace negotiations with North Vietnam. In an article about events leading to Johnson’s announcement, the Washington Post reported that Mr. Carroll’s editorial had influenced his thinking.”

Who was Wallace Carroll?

In 1939, Carroll became editor of the United Press International Bureau in London. He covered both the London Blitz and the Battle of Britain. From Wikipedia: “From 1942 to 1945 he headed the European division of the United States Office of War Information, charged with all propaganda efforts aimed at Nazi-conquered Europe during World War II.” In 1955, he became head of the Washington Bureau of the New York Times. In 1963, he moved to Winston-Salem to become editor and publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal, which, under Carroll, won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1971.

Mary Llewellyn McNeil, who was in one of Carroll’s classes at Wake Forest University and who later published a biography of Carroll, wrote for Wake Forest Magazine:

“Wallace Carroll was not just the editor and publisher of the local news­paper. He was present and reported on most of the major events of the 20th century. He knew, befriended or advised nearly all the mid-century’s key decision-makers — from Winston Churchill to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhow­er. As a correspondent for United Press he covered the League of Nations in the mid-1930s, sent dispatches on the bombing of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, interviewed Field Marshal Ber­nard Montgomery following the British army’s narrow escape from Dunkirk and reported nightly from his office rooftop on the bombs falling on London during The Blitz. He was on the first convoy into the Soviet Union following the Nazi in­vasion in 1941 and remained to cover the Nazi’s initial assault on Moscow. Barely making it out, on his way home via Persia (now known as Iran), Singapore and the Philippines, he landed in Hawaii seven days after the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack and filed among the first reports from the field. He eventually became the first director of the U.S. Office of War Information in London, specializing in psychological warfare operations during World War II.”

Carroll wrote a book about his work for the U.S. Office of War Information, Persuade or Perish.

I was too young then to really appreciate someone of Carroll’s stature, but I knew Carroll when I was only a whipper-snapper summer intern at the Winston-Salem Journal, and, later, a rookie copy editor.

Online at last

Until now, the text of this editorial existed only on microfilm. A few years ago, I had facsimile made from microfilm with the intention of keying in the editorial so that it would at last exist in digital form. I never quite finished that job until recently. I uploaded the page image to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT helped me with the transcription. Update: May Llewellyn McNeil includes the text of “Vietnam: Quo Vadis” in her 2022 biography of Carroll, Century’s Witness.

Here is the link to the full text of Vietnam: Quo Vadis


Carroll introduces Dean Acheson, former U.S. Secretary of State. I believe this photo is from Shirley Auditorium at Salem College in Winston-Salem. Source: Wake Forest Magazine, Wake Forest University.