It was of great delight that a perusal of a second hand stores book shelves revealed another gem. One of the Harvard Classics, It was printed when I was in my early 20’s. Roughly 6 decades ago. (The 1^st publication date is 1939) What a find for a dedicated fan of reading books and storing them away with groaning shelves everywhere in our house.

This book has English essays from Sir Philip Sidney to Macaulay. Ben Johnson, Joseph Addison, Johnathan Swift and David Hume to name a few of them. Quite an assortment of analysis, praise of earlier authors is in this book. A treasure to a writer to glean ideas, precious quotes and insights. They did it, why not me?

The essay by David Hume on Taste was intriguing. It struck to the bedrock of philosophy on human behavior. That sort of subject has been on the best seller list since the times of Homer and the Greek writers of that era.

Everyone, well, most everyone likes to know if their visions of civilized society and the world we live in have been written about. Written and put into practice for all of known history.

Stunningly, yet another movement has begun to re-write history to suit tastes of some group alienated from truth. Akin to ‘1984’ or ‘Brave new world’ classics are these attempts. Always for power and influence as though anybody with the ability to think and read would fall for it. Propaganda is the term and even during WWII there was a ministry of propaganda in Nazi Germany. It was headed up by Joseph Goebbels and his pal, Leni Reifenstahl. The movie that Leni made, Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) showed the Nazi dream and is still known as the most successful propaganda film of all time.

It’s an old story that, driven by insanity, drives the insane to rewrite human history to fit their version of reality. Today it is the denial of truth of humanity itself. Not only revisionist history to enable money to be funded to people that feel they are owed for things that happened over a century ago, but to rewrite history that somehow enabled these things. The oppression happened but not at all as re-written. Some of the derogatory language had been imported from Scotland as well as their lightening quick deadly response to insult, real or imagined. These things are still embraced today by youths that do not know real history. Read some Tomas Sowell for clarification.

Oh, I forgot, no one reads these things today going back to Greek philosophy forwards to today. Movies of distraction are popular. Considering our confused nation and the recession, it fits the mind set of the great depression of the last century. Scholars and thinkers are passe’ and it’s the New Thing that captures the hunger of our nation. “History is false” “Change your sex if you feel like it” “Educate the children to all these lies”

Why? Indeed, the question of the hour. Even our government has been deluded and encourages lies much akin to the WWII ministries of propaganda. As Solomon wrote, all is vanity and there is nothing new under the sun.

Why do these things happen over and over again throughout our history? It goes back to our very beginning. “Did God really say?” And thus, the battle had begun. Read all about it.

It’s interesting and sometimes pretty good. Jack Gator