09-17-2017, 11:28 AM
Without reading the XiXi, mention of Russia directed my thoughts to Lenin's tomb and cadaver. In Orwell's formulation, he who controls the present (the makeup artist) controls the past, and therefore the future. Every nation constantly edits its founding and procedural myths - what was Roman mythology like (or Etruscan, for that matter) before being adjusted to the Homeric standard? (Etruscan Mnerva couldn't have been much like Athena, that far from Athens!)
Today we in the US are being hectored to see (for example) Jefferson's formerly wistful, polymath smile repainted as a leer of slaveholder's lust, Robert E. Lee's strength of character in tragic circumstances as nothing more than racism... as if that word even had meaning during his lifetime, a color no painter had yet invented.
Today we in the US are being hectored to see (for example) Jefferson's formerly wistful, polymath smile repainted as a leer of slaveholder's lust, Robert E. Lee's strength of character in tragic circumstances as nothing more than racism... as if that word even had meaning during his lifetime, a color no painter had yet invented.
Non-practicing atheist