PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS—For a more mild response, Putin could have announced: “As Washington and its servile European puppets have sanctioned us, we are turning off the rocket engines, all energy to Europe, titanium to US aircraft companies, banning overflights of US cargo and passenger aircraft, and putting in place punitive measures against all US firms operating in Russia.” Instead of acting intelligently, the witless Russians are still using the US dollar for their oil trade!
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ESMOND LYONS—Commenting —inter alia—on the misguided fixation of never-trumpers and Russiagaters, almost all captives of the Democrat party machine, who usually have the audacity of thinking themselves politically astute and progressive.
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GAITHER STEWART—William Styron remarked that it would be difficult to exaggerate the effect Wolfe had on youth and especially on those from small-town, southerly backgrounds. Himself from Virginia, Styron said that Wolfe influenced him to become a writer. Perhaps no southern writer expressed Wolfe’s total, all-consuming influence on him more than the young Pat Conroy who admitted that Thomas Wolfe took his boyhood by storm. Wolfe simply transmitted to him his fire. “Ride the trains with Thomas Wolfe in this book [Of Time and the River] and you will never look at trains the same way again,” Conroy writes. His mother, after reading Look Homeward, Angel, urged her son to become “a Southern writer.”
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ED CURTIN—Outwardly at least, the story Naipaul tells in The Enigma of Arrival is impersonal, slow-paced and almost boring in its progression (much like ordinary life). After twenty years in England – “savorless and much of it mean” – having failed in his effort to leave England with its history of colonial exploitation and become “a free man,” his spirit broken and his nerves shattered, he settles in a “cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past” on the Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge.
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BRUCE DIXON—They call this year’s atrocity the John McCain National Defense Authorization Act, worth a record $716 billion. This total doesn’t include the budget of the Afghan war, which lives somewhere else, or the budgets of several other known programs, and there are secret budgets for more or less secret programs as well. Nobody really doubts that actual US military spending has hovered around a trillion a year for several years now.
