Friends + Interlocutors,

It seems I have a subscription to the Washington Post. I don’t remember subscribing. A friend kept sending me editorials by David Ignatius which I couldn’t open, so maybe that is the reason I signed up. 

I’m not a fan of Ignatius, but here he starts off quoting Robinson Jeffers, of whom I am a fan. Jeffers is amazing. Based on certain things he wrote, he could be classified as an extremist and alienated. He was certainly against the grain of his time, which was the 1920’s, 1930’s and ‘40s.

He would not have been a fan of Ignatius. But this particular editorial about America’s 250th anniversary is okay. Herewith is an item I wrote about Jeffers some years ago. It gives you an idea of where Jeffers was coming from. It is not where David Ignatius is.

Along related lines, I’ve just finished the book, 1781, The Decisive Year of the Revolutionary War. I recommend it wholeheartedly. It is spellbinding and reconfirms my view that the war for independence from Great Britain was a tremendous gamble, and could have gone either way, and that George Washington would not have finally won it, but for the intervention of France. 

England took its revenge not long afterwards in the War of 1812 when the English burned down Washington. With this in mind and the fact that there were so many Irish and German immigrants in America in the early 20th century, I still do not understand how the Wilson White House could have tricked the country into joining the English in their war on Germany in 1917. That changed everything.

Patrick

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