No Politics!

"If Bonaparte became a ruler of exceptional treachery and mendacity, it must be remembered that he emerged from a political background [the French Revolution] where a man's word meant nothing, honor was dead, and murder was routine"--Paul Johnson, Napoleon

Saturday Dawna and I saw some more '60s TV.  We saw a two-part episode of Mission:  Impossible in which they tricked a slave-selling Middle Eastern ruler into putting his brother's English wife up for sale!  And there was an episode of The Time Tunnel where they arrived at the scene of a 1910 coal mine disaster and miners were trapped underground but nobody would rescue them because they thought Halley's Comet was about to destroy the world anyway! (I don't like these plot setups with everyone being willfully passive--neither here nor in High Noon.)

Today was the latest Reading Out Loud Meetup.  The topic was political writing and the event was called "No Politics!" I read "King John and the Abbot of Canterbury" and a 1988 Alexander Cockburn article from The Nation about exposing the My Lai massacre.  We also read a Nation article by Ring Lardner Jr. listing all the stupid stuff many Americans believe; a bit from Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind with Rhett Butler saying that all wars were about money; Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach";  Robert Frost's poems "The Gift Outright," "Mending Wall" and "America Is Hard to See"; a Saul Alinsky passage about the haves and the have-nots. Someone also showed a Bolshevik poster that said, "There are two parties:  the Communists and their enemies"!

I was thinking some more about Excalibur.  As I know from posting my old diary, 15 years ago the first regular Space Shuttle, the Columbia, blew up at the same time as I was reading The Once and Future King.  That got me to thinking, back then, about how if the Kennedy presidency was like Camelot then the Space Program was like the quest for the Holy Grail.  And I just remembered that the Columbia made its first flight back in 1981 at about the same time as Excalibur was first released!