I’m feeling like my cat Moloch’s meow.
No. This post is not about the corona virus. Its an analogy pointing out that what can become an epidemic begins with a first troublesome infection. Perhaps my campaign for Congress will be like that with a few random new readers. While I will digress into
a discussion of history books its starts with how I’m feeling as an unlikely candidate for Congress
I began monitoring my readership in 1999 with my first webpage www.snowbizz.com I had been reading tantalizing stories about such websites for five or six years but initially they required knowledge of computer coding something I had no interest in learning just as, until three years ago, I had no interest in learning a foreign language. Then Microsoft developed a software program that allowed users to put a website up more like Apple’s McPaint program.
When I was able to put a counter on my page it registered perhaps 20 visitors a day because not that many people were looking at the internet in those early days. My blog has a much more sophisticated counting mechanism twenty years on from Snowbizz and many more people sort through the Internet these days. Still, my site is not particularly well visited. I don’t have 85 million followers like President Trump’s Twitter account. As this month comes to an end my stats say that about 3,000 different people will have spent some time perusing my non stop caterwauling. I’ll keep watching that and other statistics as I wade through the Corona virus with the rest of you.
As I said in the previous post the acceptance that my Fall travels to France are become extremely unlikely has shifted my seriousness about this campaign. The incumbent and his Democratic challenges will all be in the same boat as me unable to freely mix with voter. That gives me an immense advantage. I am very nimble on the Internet should my campaign begin to catch hold.
My drive to write daily has been blunted by a couple of non productive days but when I’m cooking the pasta is served fast. Yesterday in a little over an hour I wrote close to 2,000 words. Words that will need heavy editing but I’m good at that except for the occasional typo hiccup that sneaks past me.
And I’ve not been so focused on writing the end all and be all book about American politics that I have ignored other things of importance to me. Yesterday Claudia and I made 25 sandwiches to take to our church to be delivered to CHUM’s homeless population. We walked over to our daughter’s house in masks to deliver a loaf of break that Claudia baked and we’re putting a new jigsaw puzzle together. We keep finding brainy things to watch on television from the series I’m mentioned before to PBS. Last night we watched some science programming. I keep practicing French and keep up a near daily correspondence with French speakers who want to brush up on there English. Learning French has not ended up being the two year project I first anticipated but every time I go back to some old French lesson it gets easier and easier. My goal is learning both to speak and read and write in French. Those are not the same thing as the French literate Thomas Jefferson learned when he became an ambassador in France but was so inept at speaking the language he became something of a recluse.
And I’ve resumed history reading. I’ve been reading a kindle version of a very sly history of George Washington that is wise and unorthodox in treating him as a human and not a God. Its history the way it ought to be told. And as I’ve mentioned before I have resumed reading the book Founding Rivals by Chris DeRose.
I purposely linked to a “conservative” review site because Mr. DeRose is a Republican who worked for a short time with the Republicans on Capitol Hill and who helped Wisconsin’s Sean Duffy win his campaign for Congress. I wondered if DeRose, a practicing attorney was also a member of the damned Federalist Society that is something of the Republican Party’s current version of the Illuminati. Or maybe that should be the American version the Society of the Cincinnati.
I found no such association for DeRose, who if you look him up is not the same as the former extra on the Rockford Files. In fact DeRose has written two other fetching books one that helped me better recall the order of the early presidents The Presidents’ War when there were ten living former Presidents at the time Abraham Lincoln was first sworn into office. The other one was about Lincoln’s lone term in Congress in 1847. I have been tempted to order it but I’ve kept it on my mental list for later.
Last night at 2 AM when I couldn’t get back to sleep I switched on the light and read Chapter 12 about the debate in the Virginia Constitutional Ratification Convention. The book is about the little known friendship and occasional rivalry between Presidents number 3 and 4 James Madison and James Monroe. Its a crackerjack history. Had Virginia’s delegates not endorsed the convention thee would be no United States today. Madison, one of the principle architects of the Constitution took the affirmative and his old friend Monroe riven by suspicions took the negative. This book has been a great follow up to “Decision in Philadelphia” by Chris & James Lincoln Collier about the politics at the initial Constitutional Convention. According to my reading list I read it back in 1991.
I just finished a book on the consequences of the Black Death in England, I’m reading a refreshing book about George Washington and then there is this book by DeRose. I often find when reading diverse books that there is a remarkable synergy that goes on in my head as I make connections between different episodes in history.
And that is very much on my mind as I write my own book to promote my unlikely campaign for Congress. I’ve quoted Santayana on the subject of history many times: Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Today’s Republicans can not remember the past as another prominent historian Republican war on history“>noted back in 2012. Twenty years ago I got a kick out of walking past Professor Schamas’ offices and those of several other prominent historians when I visited Columbia University to see where my grandfather George Robb earned his Master’s Degree in History back in 1915. That will be a subject in my book too.
Meow!
