A rambling post, now with 33% more history!

[felis_ultharus]

Reading Henry IV, part I by Shakespeare. I'm loving it. I'm surprised it's not more popular -- I think his use of language is at its height, there, and his characters are even more interesting and better developed than in most of the Shakespeare I've read.

Of course, I've read about that era before because the two greatest works of medieval literature in English -- The Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- also belong to the era of Richard II and Henry IV (the turn of the 15th century).

Richard II was a bad king -- so bad he inspired a peasant revolt and spent the treasury in a hopeless war with France. But Henry IV really takes a beating in Shakespeare, partly because he had Richard II murdered and his heir exiled.

If Richard II was the Dubya of his age, then John of Gaunt was his Dick Cheney. Gaunt was the power behind the throne, and legend had it was descended from the devil, and Gaunt's third wife, Katherine Swynforde, had been accused of witchcraft.

Interestingly, these old stories continue to inspire good writing. J.R.R. Tolkien was an expert in this era, and it shows in his work.

And J.K. Rowling throws a House of Gaunt into her last Harry Potter. And if there's any doubt that she's hinting at John of Gaunt, the House of Gaunt has "Peverell's Ring" -- Peverell being John of Gaunt's famous ancestor.

(Sometimes I feel like a literary degree is just a license to gather trivia. But it's really fun trivia!)

Comments

[em-fish.livejournal.com]

That's the official explanation, and it's crap.

Funny, then, that it came from a thoroughly disinterested Canadian citizen who knows a thing or two about SOP for building tall structures.

As far as I am concerned, some whackos decided to lash out at The Great White Satan and they succeeded. The same way anyone else succeeds at anything from baking a pie to performing surgery: using a combination of luck and ability. Period, end of story.

I spent a lot of time in the US in the two years leading up to 9/11. Even when I wasn't looking for it, I could tell that they needed exactly zero help in becoming racist and xenophobic. They would have rallied around The Shrub whether a passel of their best, brightest CFOs had perished at Ground Zero, or not. The unequivocal support that the U.S. has shown to Israel throughout the decades is evidence enough that Americans don't care when brown people are dying in the desert. And if they never did to begin with, why would anyone need to make them stop by orchestrating a terrorist attack?

[scottevil.livejournal.com]

Funny, then, that controlled demolition explanations come from credible engineers and physicists. And that chemical evidence of thermite has indeed been found in recovered debris.

I don't deny the wackos decided to lash out at the Great White Satan. But there's staggering evidence that U.S. and even international intel knew it was going to happen, and let it happen, even helped it along.

Maybe the American public didn't need a terrorist attack to go along with an invasion Afghanistan and Iraq. But such a huge attack was, in the opinion of many, necessary to facilitate the stripping away of civil rights in the name of security and a manufactured war on terror.