The Consultant is the story of an American marketing consultant who takes a business trip to Osaka, Japan, and talks to the wrong woman in a bar.
One thing leads to another, and he ends up in North Korea.
The story is loosely (I emphasize loosely) based on real events.
The North Korean government has carried out targeted kidnapping campaigns of civilians over the years. Most of the known targets have been South Koreans and Japanese. But there is no reason why an American couldn’t be the target of such a kidnapping. This novel explores that scenario.
The Consultant is a good read for Tom Clancy fans who also like James Clavell…or James Clavell fans who also like a bit of action.
The language situation in India is complicated. Indians speak many different languages and dialects. Imagine driving from one state to another, and the language being different. That’s the way it often is in India, depending on where you are.
India has 22 official languages. One of these is English, that being a remnant of India’s years as the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. English is usually sufficient if you only want to communicate with the Indian programmers in your company’s IT department. Beware, however. According to India’s 2011 census, only 10 percent of the Indian population claims to speak English, and almost all of these speak English as a second language, with varying degrees of fluency.
Major languages in India include Punjabi, Tamil, and Gujarati. But if you’re going to learn an indigenous Indian language, Hindi is definitely the one to start with. 57 percent of India speaks Hindi. 43 percent of Indians claim Hindi as their native language. No other Indian language really comes close in raw percentages.
As some of you may know, foreign languages are one of my hobbies and passions. For many years, I used several languages in my corporate work.
Almost all languages interest me, to one degree or another, but I don’t dare attempt to take on all of them. Some I actively avoid, because they’re difficult and the numerical incentives simply aren’t there.
Take Finnish, for example. Finnish is a very challenging language for native English speakers to learn, and no one really speaks it outside of Finland, a country with a population roughly equivalent to that of Wisconsin.
Spanish makes a lot more sense. Spanish is much easier, and is spoken in 20 different countries around the world, with 475 million native speakers.
Hindi is a major language, even though it’s only spoken in India. But Hindi is not an easy language. And until recently, there weren’t many resources for learning it.
Some Americans are rising to the challenge, nonetheless. Margaret MacLeod, a US State Department official, speaks Hindi and has recently become something of a sensation in the Indian media.
According to her State Department biography, MacLeod speaks and reads both Hindi and Urdu. Since I don’t speak Hindi, I can’t personally assess her skill level. But she seems to be fluent, as she fields questions from Indian government officials and journalists with visible ease. Indian commenters in the YouTube videos in which she appears give her high marks, too. I’m therefore willing to assume that she knows Hindi very well.
Yet further evidence that mastery of a foreign language is neither impractical nor infeasible just because one’s native language is English.
As of early this year, I have noticed something in my gym: the young people have returned in large numbers.
The young people were there in large numbers before COVID, usually to my annoyance. They were the ones who were always holding up everyone else, as they attempted to text while they worked out. I often found myself scheduling my workouts when Gen Z members were likely to be fewest in number.
The pandemic, however, bred a different kind of teen and young adult: homo housebound-introvertus. Throughout the lockdowns of 2020-1, an entire cohort of young people sequestered themselves in their rooms. There they became [even less] engaged in the real world, and [even more] immersed in the make-believe realm of social media.
They didn’t go to the gym, either. My gym was closed for only a few months in 2020, from the middle of March through early June. But the young people didn’t return when the gym reopened.
They didn’t return in 2021, 2022, or most of 2023, either.
While I don’t have any empirical data to back this up, the COVID lockdowns seemed to have had another effect on teens and young adults: weight gain. Many of them packed on the pounds. Here in Ohio, the average 16- to 24-year-old was beginning to look like a 50-year-old who had spent decades sitting behind a desk and eating too many takeout lunches from McDonald’s. I was starting to wonder how many of those kids would even make it to the age of 50, the way they were going.
Here’s the thing about youth culture, though: its only constant is change. If the recent (early 2024) influx of young people in my gym is any indication, the era of the Gen Z marshmallow may be coming to an end.
They’re still neurotically obsessive about their phones, though. The downside of the youth resurgence in my gym is the return of the inconsiderate member who sits on the ab crunch machine for five minutes while he checks his text messages. Because—dude, you can’t let a single text message go unread for even five minutes.
That’s as annoying as ever. But it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to bear for a healthier generation of young adults. I don’t want them all to die off before I do, after all.
How I wrote a horror novel called Revolutionary Ghosts
Or…
Can an ordinary teenager defeat the Headless Horseman, and a host of other vengeful spirits from America’s revolutionary past?
The big idea
I love history, and I love supernatural horror tales.“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was therefore always one of my favorite short stories. This classic tale by Washington Irving describes how a Hessian artillery officer terrorized the young American republic several decades after his death.
The Hessian was decapitated by a Continental Army cannonball at the Battle of White Plains, New York, on October 28, 1776. According to some historical accounts, a Hessian artillery officer really did meet such an end at the Battle of White Plains. I’ve read several books about warfare in the 1700s and through the Age of Napoleon. Armies in those days obviously did not have access to machine guns, flamethrowers, and the like. But those 18th-century cannons could inflict some horrific forms of death, decapitation among them.
I was first exposed to the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” via the 1949 Disney film of the same name. The Disney adaptation was already close to 30 years old, but still popular, when I saw it as a kid sometime during the 1970s.
Headless Horsemen from around the world
While doing a bit of research for Revolutionary Ghosts, I discovered that the Headless Horseman is a folklore motif that reappears in various cultures throughout the world.
In Irish folklore, the dullahan or dulachán (“dark man”) is a headless, demonic fairy that rides a horse through the countryside at night. The dullahan carries his head under his arm. When the dullahan stops riding, someone dies.
Scottish folklore includes a tale about a headless horseman named Ewen. Ewen wasbeheaded when he lost a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. His death prevented him from becoming a chieftain. He roams the hills at night, seeking to reclaim his right to rule.
Finally, in English folklore, there is the 14th century epic poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. After Gawain kills the green knight in living form (by beheading him) the knight lifts his head, rides off, and challenges Gawain to a rematch the following year.
But Revolutionary Ghosts is focused on the Headless Horseman of American lore: the headless horseman who chased Ichabod Crane through the New York countryside in the mid-1790s.
The Headless Horseman isn’t the only historical spirit to stir up trouble in the novel. John André, the executed British spy, makes an appearance, too. (John André was a real historical figure.)
I also created the character of Marie Trumbull, a Loyalist whom the Continental Army sentenced to death for betraying her country’s secrets to the British. But Marie managed to slit her own throat while still in her cell, thereby cheating the hangman. Marie Trumbull was a dark-haired beauty in life. In death, she appears as a desiccated, reanimated corpse. She carries the blade that she used to take her own life, all those years ago.
Oh, and Revolutionary Ghosts also has an army of spectral Hessian soldiers. I had a lot of fun with them!
The Spirit of ’76
Most of the novel is set in the summer of 1976. An Ohio teenager, Steve Wagner, begins to sense that something strange is going on near his home. There are slime-covered hoofprints in the grass. There are unusual sounds on the road at night. People are disappearing.
Steve gradually comes to an awareness of what is going on….But can he convince anyone else, and stop the Headless Horseman, before it’s too late?
I decided to set the novel in 1976 for a number of reasons. First of all, this was the year of the American Bicentennial. The “Spirit of ’76 was everywhere in 1976. That created an obvious tie-in with the American Revolution.
Nineteen seventy-six was also a year in which Vietnam, Watergate, and the turmoil of the 1960s were all recent memories. The mid-1970s were a time of national anxiety and pessimism (kind of like now). The economy was not good. This was the era of energy crises and stagflation.
Reading the reader reviews of Revolutionary Ghosts, I am flattered to get appreciative remarks from people who were themselves about the same age as the main character in 1976:
“…I am 62 years old now and 1976 being the year I graduated high school, I remember it pretty well. Everything the main character mentions (except the ghostly stuff), I lived through and remember. So that was an added bonus for me.”
“I’m 2 years younger than the main character so I could really relate to almost every thing about him.”
I’m actually a bit younger than the main character. In 1976 I was eight years old. But as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m nostalgic by nature. I haven’t forgotten the 1970s or the 1980s, because I still spend a lot of time in those decades.
If you like the 1970s, you’ll find plenty of nostalgic nuggets in Revolutionary Ghosts, like Bicentennial Quarters, and the McDonald’s Arctic Orange Shakes of 1976.
***
Also, there’s something spooky about the past, just because it is the past. As L.P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
For me, 1976 is a year I can clearly remember. And yet—it is shrouded in a certain haziness. There wasn’t nearly as much technology. Many aspects of daily life were more “primitive” then.
It isn’t at all difficult to believe that during that long-ago summer, the Headless Horseman might have come back from the dead to terrorize the American heartland…
If you’re feeling buyer’s remorse about the high price of college tuition, here’s some more fuel for the fire: starting this year, a handful of our universities will be offering courses about…Taylor Swift.
One of these universities is Harvard, no less. Harvard has dubbed its Taylor Swift course, “Taylor Swift and her world”. Try not to cringe as you read that.
First, we might consider the question: why not a class about Taylor Swift? Why not a class about Kim Kardashian or Tom Cruise, for that matter?
Every young generation has its own pop culture. The Baby Boomers had the Beatles, Elvis, and all those really bad beach party movies. My generation had MTV, Michael Jackson, and the teen movies of John Hughes.
I’ve met Baby Boomers who swear that there is deep meaning in the lyrics of Bob Dylan, though they’ve mostly struck me as pseudo-mystical gobbledygook. I’ve been critical of The Breakfast Club, that iconic teen movie of my 1980s youth. (The Breakfast Club mostly tried to tell 1980s teens that all of their problems, insecurities, and disappointments could be blamed on their parents.)
That said, not all pop culture is pure trash. Elements of pop culture are occasionally worthy of consumption, and even analysis. I learned something about myself by rewatching The Breakfast Club as an adult. How callow and smug I was back in those days, like so many teenagers since time immemorial.
But here’s the thing: We don’t need expensive universities to expose young people to pop culture. The mainstream media, social media, and their friends are already doing that. I saw The Breakfast Club and heard the music of Michael Jackson and Madonna without any encouragement from an adult.
No one living under a rock in 2023 is unaware of Taylor Swift. The journalistic class simpers and coos over her every move. Swift’s music is practically the only music that the media talks about, when they aren’t discussing Taylor Swift’s personal life. It has all become a bit neurotic.
From what I’ve heard of them, Swift’s songs are as superficial and/or pretentious as pop lyrics have always been. All fine and good. Pop music need not rival Shakespeare. But no young person needs to attend Harvard to be exposed to pop music.
The purpose of a university humanities class, rather, is to expose young people to worthwhile content that they might otherwise have missed (like Shakespeare, for example). Approximately one hundred percent of today’s 18- to 21-year-olds have already heard a Taylor Swift song. How many have read Milton, Malamud, and Machiavelli?
Universities have also expelled a lot of hot air in recent years about the need for “diverse” offerings. By this they usually mean ridding syllabi of “dead white males”.
I have always suspected that this was largely posturing on their behalf. When I was a college student in the late 1980s, there were plenty of works by dead white males in the English Literature department’s offerings, but also plenty of Richard Wright, Frederick Douglass, and James Baldwin. I read Richard Wright’s Native Son as a high school student in 1985. I also read a lot of Hemingway and Fitzgerald that year. The attitude back then regarding diversity was “both/and”, not “either/or”.
But what could be less “diverse” than Taylor Swift? Taylor Swift is as white-bread and conventional as you could possibly get. Swift is also the queen of the one-percenters, in the parlance of Bernie Sanders. A few months ago, her net worth passed the $1 billion mark.Want to “eat the rich”? Start with Taylor Swift.
Our universities have been in decline for decades. Since at least the 1990s, American universities have become more ideological and less serious.
University degrees are also becoming less valuable in the marketplace. Throughout this past year, there have been news reports about corporate employers’ new willingness to accept applicants who never went to college. And I’m not talking about a job stocking shelves at the local Walmart. I’m talking about white-collar corporate positions with companies like IBM, Dell, and Bank of America.
How then, should universities make themselves more relevant? By going back to basics, and providing what used to be called a classical education? How about an emphasis on real-world skills?
Harvard, at least, has chosen to assert its relevance by offering a class on “Taylor Swift and her world” in 2024. And Harvard, sadly, is not alone.
Last May conservative YouTuber Lauren Chen made a worthwhile video about the realities of OnlyFans, the much-hyped autoporning website.
In many ways, OnlyFans is nothing new. Amateur porn sites are as old as the Internet. Cam sites appeared as soon as the bandwidth was sufficient. Before the Internet, there were 1-900 phone sex lines.
But these things were always confined to isolated subcultures. And while the mainstream media may have occasionally reported on their existence, there was none of the cheerleading that surrounds the OnlyFans phenomenon.
Watch Lauren Chen’s video. She spends a little too much time going on about how appalled she is by sex work of any kind. (Yes, Lauren, we get that you are not at all interested in flashing your wares online for tips. Not under any circumstances.) But virtue-signaling aside, she highlights some stark numbers.
To be in the top one percent of OnlyFans creators essentially means that you make about as much as an average fast food worker. And you do this at the cost of starring in an online library of nude photos and videos. These will exist forever, and can be dredged up by blackmailers, jealous partners, and snooping acquaintances at any time.
The stratospheric OnlyFans numbers are for celebrities, and perhaps a handful of outliers.
But what about those outliers? You’ve seen the headlines: “Nurse quits her job to make $20K per month on OnlyFans!”
Chen doesn’t mention this, but the handful of woman-next-door outliers are largely self-reported, or rather, journalist-reported. Are liberties taken with the truth? Well, what do you think?
To be clear, I’m not here to make the case for censorship, but rather for awareness. The mainstream media is selling one narrative (“Instant riches on OnlyFans await!”). The reality is something else. (You probably won’t make much money, and you’ll create numerous liabilities for yourself that will last as long as the Internet.)
Not far from where I live, there is a stretch of Ohio State Route 125 that has been dubbed Dead Man’s Curve.
The spot is just a few miles from my house, in fact. I’ve been by there many times.
According to the urban legend, if you drive this section of rural highway a little after 1 a.m., you might see the faceless hitchhiker. From a distance, this male figure may look relatively normal. Once you get close, though, you’ll see that he has no face.
Sometimes the hitchhiker isn’t content to stand there by the side of the road and watch you. There have been reports of the phantom actually attacking cars.
Creepy, right?
Yeah, I think so, too….
Dead Man’s Curve on Ohio State Route 125 has a long and macabre history. Route 125 is the main road that connects the suburbs and small towns east of Cincinnati with the city. But much of the road (including Dead Man’s Curve) was originally part of the Ohio Turnpike, which was built in 1831. (Andrew Jackson was president in 1831, just to put that date in perspective.)
That section of the Ohio Turnpike was the scene of many accidents (some of them fatal), even in the horse-and-buggy days. The downward sloping curve became particularly treacherous when rain turned the road to mud. Horses and carriages would sometimes loose their footing, sending them over the adjacent hillside.
In the twentieth century, the Ohio Turnpike was paved and reconfigured into State Route 125. In 1968 the road was expanded into four lanes.
As part of the expansion, the spot known as Dead Man’s Curve was leveled and straightened. (As a result, the curve doesn’t look so daunting today…unless you know its history.) This was supposed to be the end of “Dead Man’s Curve”.
But it wasn’t.
In 1969, there was a horrible accident at the spot. The driver of a green Roadrunner—traveling at a speed of 100 mph—slammed into an Impala carrying five teenagers. There was only one survivor of the tragic accident.
Shortly after that, witnesses began to report sightings of the faceless hitchhiker during the wee hours. (The hitchhiker is said to be most active during the twenty-minutes between 1:20 and 1:40 a.m.) There have also been reports of a ghostly green Roadrunner that will chase drivers late at night.
Oh, and Dead Man’s Curve remains deadly, despite the leveling and straightening done in 1968. In the five decades since the accident involving the Roadrunner and the Impala, around seventy people have been killed there.
Is there any truth to the legend of Dead Man’s Curve?
I can’t say for sure. What I can tell you is that I’ve heard many eyewitness accounts from local residents who claim to have seen the hitchhiker. (Keep in mind, I live very close to Dead Man’s Curve, and it’s a local topic of discussion and speculation.) Almost none of these eyewitnesses have struck me as mentally imbalanced or deceitful.
I know what your last question is going to be: Have I ever driven Dead Man’s Curve between 1:20 and 1:40 a.m. myself?
Uh, no. But perhaps I’ll get around to it someday, and I’ll let you know in a subsequent blog post!
**When walking down lonely roads at night, beware the hellhounds!**
Jason Kelley is a college filmmaker who has accepted a challenge: walk eleven miles down the most haunted road in rural Ohio, the so-called Shaman’s Highway.
If Jason completes his task, he’ll win a $2,000 prize.
But before he reaches his destination, he’ll have to cope with evil spirits, trees that come to life, an undead witch, and packs of roving hellhounds!
A creepy supernatural thriller! Not for the faint of heart!
One day in the early spring of 2018 I traveled to a rural part of southern Indiana to attend to some family matters. (I live in Ohio, but I’m half Hoosier. My dad grew up in nearby Lawrenceburg.)
I spent most of that day in Switzerland County. You’ve probably never been there. Switzerland County, Indiana looks nothing like Switzerland. In early spring, that part of Indiana, along the Ohio River, can look a little bleak.
(Portions of the 1988 Molly Ringwald/Andrew McCarthy movie, Fresh Horses, were filmed in Switzerland County. McCarthy said of the area, “There’s the whole starkness up there; it helped the mood of the movie.” )
Southern, rural Indiana is home to several large casinos. I ordinarily have no interest in gambling venues. I ate lunch at the nearby Belterra Casino that day, though, because…there weren’t many other dining options in the vicinity.
My visit to the casino got me thinking: What if a young couple in debt visited the casino in a make-or-break effort to get ahead financially? What if they were lured there by a special offer? $300 worth of ‘free’ gaming chips?
What if their beginner’s foray into gambling went horribly wrong, and they fell further in the hole? Then suppose that a narcotics kingpin offers them an alternative plan…another way to get ahead.
All they have to do is run an errand for him. What could possibly go wrong?
That’s the premise behind my 2020 casino novel, Venetian Springs. Set in a fictional version of Belterra Casino, Venetian Springs is a story of two down-on-their-luck high school teachers who succumb to the lure of easy money. They soon discover that easy money doesn’t exist. But this is a lesson that may cost them both their lives.
Members of my generation lived to see plenty of changes in the ways popular music is consumed. We were born in the golden age of the vinyl album. As adults, many of us are learning to cope with streaming music services.
Throughout most of the 1980s, the audio cassette tape was the most popular means of buying music and listening to it. When I see nostalgic Facebook posts about physical music media from the 1980s, the cassette tape is most often the subject.
But there was another musical format that was already dying out as the 1980s began, but which was actually quite good, by the standards of the time. I’m talking about the venerable 8-track tape.
The 8-track was a plastic cartridge that had dimensions of 5.25 x 4 x 0.8 inches. Like the audio cassette, the 8-track contained a magnetic tape. But unlike the audio cassette, the 8-track was much less prone to kinking and tangling.
The 8-track was actually 1960s technology. The 8-track took off in the middle of that decade, when auto manufacturers began offering 8-track players as factory-installed options in new vehicles. Throughout the 1970s, 8-track players were popular options on new cars. 8-tracks were further popularized by subscription music services like Columbia House.
Columbia House magazine ad from the late 1970s/early 1980s
I purchased my first home stereo system for my bedroom in 1982, with money I had saved from my grass-cutting job. I bought it at Sears, which was one of the best places to buy mid-level home audio equipment at that time. The stereo included an AM/FM radio, a turntable for vinyl records, a cassette deck, and an 8-track player.
I quickly discovered that I liked the 8-track format the best, because of its relatively compact size and ease of use. That spring I bought 8-track versions of Foreigner 4, Styx’s Paradise Theater, and the Eagles Live album. All of these produced good sound (again, by the standards of that era), and none of them ever jammed or tangled. I was convinced that I had found my musical format.
It has often been my destiny to jump on a trend just as it is nearing its end. Little did I know that my beloved 8-track was already in steep decline.
8-track sales in the USA peaked in 1978, and began falling after that. The culprit was the slightly more compact, but far more error-prone audio cassette. This was the format that all the retailers were suddenly pushing. By the early 1980s, cassette players were also replacing 8-track players in cars.
I would like to say that I yielded to the march of technological progress, but this wouldn’t be truly accurate. The audio cassette, invented in 1963, was slightly older technology than the 8-track.
I did, however, yield to the march of commercial trends, simply because I had no choice. Nineteen-eighty-three was the year that retailers began phasing out 8-tracks in stores. You could still purchase them from subscription services, but they were disappearing from the shelves of mall record stores and general merchandisers like K-Mart. By early 1984, the venerable 8-track had completely vanished.
In recent years, there has been a movement to resurrect the vinyl record. I’ve noticed no similar trend aimed at bringing back the 8-track. At this point, in the early- to mid-2020s, I may be the only person left on the planet who still fondly remembers this bygone musical medium.
Here’s a sequel to a news story from September 2015.
Kim Davis, a lowly county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
You can probably already guess why, even if you don’t remember the case. Davis, an evangelical Christian and a social conservative, didn’t agree with the new state policy of recognizing same-sex marriages.
Davis was taken away in handcuffs and briefly jailed. Meanwhile, the marriage licenses were issued by other county employees.
The resultant brouhaha became an international news story for a time. I remember this well, perhaps because I live in neighboring Ohio.
Former county clerk Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses in Kentucky to same-sex couples, must pay $260,104 in fees and expenses to attorneys who represented a couple who sued, a federal judge has ruled.
I also remember concluding that Davis was in the wrong—on technical grounds, at least. When I worked in the private sector for a Fortune 500 corporation, I didn’t always agree with my employer’s policies. But I always acted in accordance with company policy. Because that’s what having a job is all about.
My private-sector employer had no authority over me beyond the workplace. When your employer is a branch of the government, however, the stakes are higher. For a government employee, the employer is the law. This means that violation of a policy, even for reasons of conscience, may make an employee a lawbreaker. Kim Davis broke the law, even though she was following her conscience.
Kim Davis was not the first American dissenter to oppose a government policy through peaceful noncompliance with the law. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) refused to pay his taxes during the 1840s. Thoreau did not want to provide the federal government with material support for the Mexican-American War, which he saw as unjust.
Henry David Thoreau
Like Kim Davis seventeen decades later, Thoreau was briefly jailed for his actions, or non-actions. Thoreau’s experiences became the basis for his essay, “Civil Disobedience”, which you may recall from high school.
Thoreau’s opponents in the 1840s saw the Mexican-American War as progress, an instrument of America’s manifest destiny. Manifest destiny was the idea that America had a God-given right and duty to expand its borders, even at the expense of other peoples and nations.
In the 1840s, the dominant political establishment was just as focused on manifest destiny as the establishment is now focused on all things LGBTQ.
American Progress (1872) by John Gast. An artistic conception of manifest destiny.
Perhaps Thoreau’s ultimate, unintended lesson is that you can’t fight city hall. Despite Thoreau’s act of civil disobedience, manifest destiny won the day in the 1840s. The federal government was victorious in its war with Mexico. Fifty-five percent of Mexico’s territory was ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Kim Davis’s act of civil disobedience did not have any real effect on the inevitable outcome, either. What was the net result in Rowan County, after all? Everyone got their marriage licenses. Other government employees simply signed the necessary documents.
But what about the punishment meted out to this modern-day Thoreau of Rowan County, Kentucky?
Kim Davis’s 2015 mugshot
Kim Davis was fired for her civil disobedience. And since she had willingly become a county employee, Davis deserved to be fired.
But jailed and financially ruined?
Consider, for a moment, the crimes that won’t earn you jail time. A few years ago, the city council of San Francisco decriminalized thefts up to $950. In New York City, there have been documented cases of violent felons being released because of court backlogs and overcrowded jails. But there shall be no mercy for a Kentucky county clerk who refuses to sign a marriage license.
Then came the endless lawsuits. Of course, the lawyers saw an opportunity to enrich themselves.
Nine years later, a federal judge has ordered Davis to pay a group of lawyers $260,104 in fees and expenses. This is in addition to $100,000 in damages that she’s been ordered to pay a same-sex couple who sued.
That’s $360,104 in total. For refusing to sign documents in a government office in a rural Kentucky county.
The aim—and the effective outcome—of all these measures is to ruin Kim Davis, to permanently pauperize her.
Once again, I’m not defending Kim Davis’s original actions. There should have been consequences for her (termination of employment). She did not deserve all of this.
Let’s return to this question of progress. I’ll remind you that in the 1840s, manifest destiny was seen as progress, “the right side of history”. By some. In 2015, some people believed (and still do) that changing the millennia-old nature of marriage is progress.
Henry David Thoreau would be remembered differently today if he had expressed his opposition to the Mexican-American War through violence. But Thoreau didn’t blow up a US Army ammunition depot. He withheld his taxes.
Kim Davis’s case would be different had she crashed a same-sex wedding, rather than simply withholding her signature. Her noncompliance, like Thoreau’s noncompliance in the 1840s, was largely a symbolic crime.
Another word for symbolic might be ideological in this context. Here’s another lesson from history: when a nation is lurching toward dictatorship, it is ideological crimes that are punished the most harshly, without any sense of reason or proportion.
This is where we must depart from Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau did not have to cope with the twenty-first-century zeal of weaponized ideological conformity. Weaponized ideological conformity has its roots in the French Revolution, and the violent leftist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Forced ideological conformity has its roots in the USSR and Nazi Germany.
The imposition of ideological conformity requires public examples. The nonconforming must be thoroughly broken in a public manner. This will dissuade anyone else who might speak out, or engage in similar dissent.
Kim Davis, to her detriment, volunteered to become a public example when she refused to sign marriage licenses for a while in rural Kentucky. Her real crime had little to do with paperwork, and everything to do with her unwillingness to affirmatively embrace the government’s new ideological orthodoxy.
Davis’s fate was a sign of things to come. Less than a decade later, teachers have been fired for failing to publicly affirm that gender is malleable, and can be arbitrarily altered by using different pronouns.
But in the case of Kim Davis, at least, the state accomplished its aims. To the best of my knowledge, no government employee has repeated her particular act of civil disobedience since.
Not far from my house is a Masonic Lodge. I drive past it on an almost daily basis. Nevertheless, I have never given the place much thought, other than to absently note its existence from time to time.
I know that many men of the Enlightenment era were freemasons. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a freemason. So were George Washington, Paul Revere, and Benjamin Franklin.
1870 portrait depicting George Washington as a freemason
Freemasonry is not something that I’ve ever considered becoming involved with. This is not because I outright dislike it, but rather because I’m just not a joiner.
Chalk it up to my background as an only child. Only children are capable of playing well with others. But we don’t particularly like to. And we especially don’t like to follow other people’s rules.
It will therefore not surprise the reader to learn that although I was raised Roman Catholic, I am a lapsed Catholic.
This isn’t because I’m opposed to the Catholic Church as a matter of principle. On the contrary, I consider the Roman Catholic Church to be a beacon of light in a messed-up world.
Nor did I have any traumatic experiences with priests as a child. My Catholic upbringing—which included Catholic schools and a stint as an altar boy—was pleasant and without incident. I have happy memories of those days, in fact.
Nor am I an atheist. I’m gullible at times, but not that gullible. I don’t like to articulate my religious beliefs in public. But suffice it to say that I believe in a Higher Power.
My lapse from the Catholic Church is related to my dislike of rules set by others. As a student I was taught that the Pope speaks ex cathedra. I simply can’t accept that any one mortal person speaks for the Almighty.
But back to Freemasonry. Pope Francis has recently reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s opposition to Freemasonry. This disapproval dates back to the aforementioned Enlightenment era.
There are doctrinal reasons for the Vatican’s objections to Freemasonry. But the bulk of the Church’s historic animus derives from competition for worldly power. Freemasonry is anti-clerical by inference and inclination. Freemasons also cheered the decline of Church power in Europe that accompanied the national unifications of the 1800s.
All of that is—or should be—so much water under the bridge. But not for Pope Francis.
On the other hand, Pope Francis has expressed suspicion of the traditional Latin Mass, implying that the use of Latin is “a reaction against the modern,” and even “backward”. Imagine saying the same thing about Jews speaking Hebrew, or Muslims reading the Quran in Arabic.
Since he became Pope in 2013, Francis has been almost a gadfly at times. He has developed a reputation for making half-baked pronouncements about environmentalism, economics, and geopolitics.
On matters that actually relate to Catholicism, he is a traditionalist when traditionalism suits him, and a modernist when that mood strikes him. In The World According to Pope Francis, Roman Catholics may not belong to a fraternal organization once patronized by George Washington, no less. But they also do not have license to celebrate the mass in the language that the Catholic Church used for centuries.
I’ve never been drawn to Freemasonry, but the current Pope might make me take a look at it, just to be contrary.
As many of you will know, I recently wrapped upThe Cairo Deception, my 5-book World War II series.
One of the final chapters of the book depicts the Beatles performing in Hamburg, West Germany in December 1962. (I won’t go into more story detail than that, so as to avoid spoilers.)
This is actually true. When I discovered this lesser known piece of rock music history, I just couldn’t resist putting it in the book, as an Easter egg for Beatles fans.
The Beatles both resided and performed in Hamburg from August 1960 to December 1962. The Beatles’ Hamburg residence took place shortly before they became a global phenomenon. The band also performed at a music venue in Hamburg called The Star-Club, as described in Postwar: Book 5 of The Cairo Deception.
The Beatles of the Hamburg period involved a slightly different lineup of the band: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best. After the group returned to England at the end of 1962, Sutcliffe and Best left the band, and Ringo Starr was hired on as the new drummer.
Led Zeppelin formed in 1968, the year I was born, and disbanded in 1980, when I was twelve.
I was therefore too young to become a Led Zeppelin fan while the band was still a going concern. But Led Zeppelin was still enormously popular when I discovered rock music as a teenager in the early to mid-1980s. Lead singer Robert Plant, moreover, was then launching a solo career, and making use of the new medium of MTV.
Most of my musical interests lie in the past. I admittedly lack the patience to sort through the chaotic indie music scene on the Internet, and I shake my head disdainfully at the overhyped mediocrity of Taylor Swift. When I listen to music, I listen to the old stuff: Rush, Def Leppard, Led Zeppelin, and a handful of others.
Led Zeppelin is very close to the top of my list. I listen to Led Zeppelin differently than I did in the old days, though. The lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven” sound less profound to me at 55 than they did when I was 15. I now appreciate Led Zeppelin when they’re doing what they did best: raucous, bluesy rock-n-roll that had only a hint of deeper meaning: “Black Dog”, “Whole Lotta Love”, “Kashmir”, etc.
And of course, reading remains my first passion. I’m still waiting for an in-depth, definitive biography of Canadian rock band Rush. (I suspect that someone, somewhere is working on that, following the 2020 passing of Rush’s chief lyricist and drummer, Neil Peart.) But a well-researched and highly readable biography of Led Zeppelin already exists: Bob Spitz’s Led Zeppelin: The Biography.
At 688 pages and approximately 238,000 words, this is no biography for the casual reader. But if you really want to understand Led Zeppelin, its music, and the band’s cultural impact, you simply can’t beat this volume. I highly recommend it for the serious fan.
In this book, you’ll learn about the honey trap in which Alexander Hamilton was ensnared in 1797. Women and sex, it turns out, were among Hamilton’s principal weaknesses.
Alexander Hamilton
There are the requisite chapters about Warren G. Harding and the Nan Britton affair. Also Eisenhower’s unconsummated sexual liaisons with his wartime driver, Kay Summersby. (Apparently, Ike was impotent by the time he became involved with the much younger, statuesque Summersby.)
Needless to say, the chapter on John F. Kennedy is among the most lurid. There are the expected entries about Marilyn Monroe, and the two White House secretaries nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle. But there are also some surprises.
According to this book, JFK was into partner-swapping mini-orgies involving other men, too (Note: not with any male-male contact, though). And of course, threesomes with two women. (What man isn’t, after all?)
While most of JFK’s conquests were on the younger side, not all of them were. When German actress Marlene Dietrich visited the White House shortly before JFK’s death, Kennedy decided that he had to have her, too.
Dietrich, born in 1901, was sixteen years older than Kennedy. She was then already in her sixties. Dietrich quickly decided, though, that she would not turn down a chance to romp with America’s youthful, charismatic commander-in-chief.
But there was one caveat: “I was an old woman by then,” she later recounted, “and damn if I was going to be on top.”
Dietrich also reported that the encounter did not last long. JFK was fast out of the gate. That assessment conformed to other reports about our 35th president.
Marlene Dietrich
John F. Kennedy
Speaking of age: JFK died at 46, when he was still in his prime. He is frozen in amber as a youngish, good-looking man.
For as long as he lived, JFK was largely attractive to women. But even during his lifetime, he showed signs of what would now be called predatory behavior. He often manipulated women into sex, and occasionally plied them with alcohol and drugs.
And speaking of age again: Some of his partners were far too young for a grown man in a position of power, even by the standards of that era.
What if JFK had not been martyred at the age of 46? What if he had served out a presumable second term and died of old age? A normal lifespan would have placed Kennedy’s death sometime in the 1990s or the early years of the twentieth century. (He would have turned 100 in 2017.)
We can assume that at a certain point—probably not far into the 1970s— the women would no longer have been quite so willing, and JFK would have met with more resistance. For JFK, sex was more than a mere biological drive. He was clearly compulsive about his conquests, and regarded sex as an extension of his power.
It is therefore not difficult to imagine JFK, had he lived, being embroiled in a sordid late-life sexual harassment scandal, not unlike those that befell both Trump and Biden. (Joe Biden was accused of sexual harassment, too, both by Senate staffer Tara Reade, and seven other women. But the mainstream media chose not to dwell on these accusations. Make of that what you will.)
Like many Americans who are too young to remember JFK in office (he died five years before I was born), I grew up thinking of Kennedy as a mythic figure. I attended Catholic schools, and a portrait of JFK hung in at least two of my K-12 classrooms, right beside portraits of the Pope and several of the saints.
But keep in mind: had he not been martyred in 1963, JFK would have been just another former president in his golden years.
I might also note that Donald Trump had no shortage of willing female partners in his 30s and 40s. In those days, Trump was not a controversial septuagenarian politician, but a glamorous tabloid billionaire. Many women wanted to be with him.
Time and age are the enemies of sex appeal. The difference between a celebrated ladies’ man and a reviled lecher is often a matter of a few years and a few wrong presumptions. Just ask Donald Trump.
