Month: June 2023

I recently started reading Amanda Foreman’s book A World on Fire. The sub-title is “Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War,” and the first section of the book is introducing the major players and setting the scene.

I’m only about fifty or sixty pages in, out of eight hundred, but there was one theme that jumped out at me, and that was the passion, anger, and vitriol evident between the two parties in Congress. It reminded me very much of what we’re seeing most days in the news, although I don’t think we’ve quite reached the stage where in 1859 a Virginia newspaper put a $50,000 reward on the head of William Seward for allegedly inspiring and instigating John Brown’s raid.

Foreman goes on to relate how the atmosphere in Washington grew poisonous as Southerners sought to implicate leading Republicans in the supposed conspiracy behind the raid. Again, change some names and events and you could be in 2023 rather than 1859.

I hear a lot of talk about how in the 80’s and 90’s the House, the Senate and the President worked together for the good of the nation. Did they really? A few years after I moved to the US, came the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton. I don’t recall much togetherness. So I guess the real question is were those supposed halcyon days of the 80’s and 90’s the norm, or is normal the combative nastiness we see today, and that Foreman describes?

All of which reinforces an opinion my father first expressed many years ago. He declared a soft spot for all politicians, regardless of allegiance. It’s a deep peat bog in the English Peak District. There are many to be found in New England and around the Great Lakes.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were talking about some places we’d visited and trying to pinpoint when we’d been there. I threw out a date that sounded right, and she shook her head. No, she said. We went before COVID!

And that made me pause for a moment.

I’ve read a lot of articles and commentary on how COVID was a defining period for many people, and hadn’t really made the connection myself until then, and I wondered why.

The answer, as I see it depends on how the COVID pandemic affected you. We were incredibly fortunate in a combination of working from home and living in a semi-rural area, we were shielded from many of the issues people faced in more urban settings, especially with regard to lockdowns.

I think because we didn’t have the huge dislocation many people went through, COVID wasn’t such a defining period for us, until we looked beyond a daily, or weekly focus and considered longer timeframes. So while it took me a while to catch up with the rest of the world, I’m definitely more aware now of pre and post COVID timelines.