Since You Asked

Sad, ashamed, mortified. The organization envisioned by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to provide a place for sovereign nations to work out their differences short of armed conflict has been lectured to by a failed reality television star with a severely limited understanding of the consequences of global human suffering. Trump's foreign policy, to the extent that he has one, has the same objects his domestic policy has. More, more, gimme, gimme, mine, mine.  If you're my ally, feel free to chase whatever goals you choose, even if they doom the planet to a premature heat death.  If I think you're my enemy, nuclear annihilation is in your future. My parents watched the world descend into depression and then worldwide conflagration because of short-sighted knuckleheads like DJT who thought simple solutions existed for wildly complex problems.  They don't.  Humans sharing a planet with limited resources is a complicated and ever-evolving dance, not a negoti

It’s possible this actually isn’t Ross Lockridge Jr’s fault. That’s a pretty equivocal statement, especially when one considers the herculean effort Lockridge put into the writing of Raintree County. His original MS was 600,000 words, but pressure from Houghton Mifflin, M-G-M, and the Book of the Month Club obliged him to cut it by a third. Now 400,000 words, it still weighs in at a hefty one thousand plus pages. The effort to tame the work, probably compounded by severe depression, cost Lockridge his life. He committed suicide at age 33, soon after the novel’s publication in 1948. Ross Lockridge, Jr. But Raintree County, despite all that editing, remains a bit of a mess. It is at once indulgent, narcissistic, and even shallow, while still being a great read and a valuable polemic on the nature of government, the treatment of women, and the horror of war. So much of it is so good and so promising. Lockridge has a true, unerring, solid gold gift for narrative. The se