Winston Churchill once described Russia  as :  "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.,"   This Blogger has had cursory, limited, and superficial, dealings in Holy Mother Russia. He found that the best key to understanding it was reading E.M. Forster’s epic novel about Colonial India, A PASSAGE TO INDIA.    The novel explores the layers of India, riddle, mystery, enigma.   The good-hearted Brit colonizer, CYRIL FIELDING applies his Anglican modernity and tolerance to understanding India, and fails. DR. AZIZ applies his Muslim mental superiority to understanding the nation his religion conquered, and fails.  The Hindu mystic, PROFESSOR NARAYAN GODBOLE may or may not understand India, but he will never tell.   Russia has layers and layers and layers. The modernized Russian, the insular Russian, and, at the hidden core, the atavistic Russian, combining the Mongol and the Viking.   The atavistic Russian does not like suffering; ho...

This Blogger’s faculty adviser, when he got his Masters in Creative Writing at San Francisco State,    was the Greek poet Nanos Valaoritis. He died in 2019, at the age of 98.   He was an extraordinary man; not only a poet, he was a lawyer, novelist,    and translator.     He had spent many years living in Paris and London, during their literary hey days; he knew  T.S. Elliott, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thoma s. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anouilh and Mauriac.   He had returned from Paris and London to live and teach in Athens. That part of his life was aborted when, after the Colonel’s coup, he was  pulled from his classroom, arrested and tortured. ,  The Junta informed him that unless he went into exile, his family, friends and students would be arrested and subject to torture.   The first day in his class, he proclaimed that we would not be studying soap opera; he hated soap opera.   A comely student raised her hand, and asked him, “...

In 1992, the American Cold War warriors, after winning a war against the Soviet Union, which rivaled the Punic Wars in longevity, stood down. They were weary from wars in jungles, highlands, altiplanos, and back alleys, from doing dangerous and great things. So, like Lawrence of Arabia, they swapped their high wire lives for mundane joy, as a boatload of T.E. SHAWS (T.E. Shaw was the name used by Lawrence when he dropped off the grid of fame).    They left the victorious Republic as the most powerful political entity in recorded history; so powerful that credible historians thought society was at the end of History.   However, rather than bask in victory, the Liberal Elite decided to transform the Republic, through social engineering, into a multicultural, diverse democracy.   That Elitist transformation ran into a minor seminal problem: multicultural democracies are incapable of being governed as democracies. As John Stuart Mill noted in his tome, REPRESENTATIV...