Initial Post

Why am I doing this? I don't presume anyone gives a lick what my thoughts are. Well, a few people do. My wife does, mostly because she has to endure my exposition of them. A couple of friends and acquaintances are . . . well, politely interested. But I haven't decided whether I'm going to let them know about this blog or not. I suppose I'm mostly doing it for myself. More to keep track of my own thoughts and ramblings and, if I keep it up, maybe look back in six months, or a year, or two years, and determine whether I really am getting dumber all the time. Dumber all the time? Yeah. Looking back a dozen years or so when I was a twenty-something hothead (and not the thirty-something hothead I am now), I see a fellow who was (1) substantially more naive about politics ecclesiastical and secular, as well as about everything else, but (2) a serious reader who spent a lot of time in fairly heady books. You know, for instance, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and then several books by Christopher Dawson, especially his thin collection of Gifford Lectures, The Making of Europe, as an antidote. Now, I'm back to reading mostly fiction. I picked up another book of Dawson's this summer, a compilation by ISI called Dynamics of World History, and lo-and-behold, the thing is stunningly over my head. What happened to me? Curmudgeon