"The Time On the Beach With Fireworks Above Us" Edition

Hello,

Readers, I want to thank you. Sometimes, I think writers take their audience for granted. Not me. It is an honour and a privilege to know that of all the ways you could have shamelessly procrastinated at work you chose my newsletter.

Obligatory shilling. I wrote an article for Spectator USA about “the Great Reset” and the difference between elite conspiracies and elite consensus.

I also wrote for my Substack subscribers about serial killers and their strange niche in our culture.

“The discourse”. Justin E.H. Smith writes pessimistically but compellingly about Substack, the media and the academia:

The Word, which we may understand to designate language in any of its exalted uses, reveals the world to us. Discourse conceals the world from us behind words. When all available media for writing funnel us willing or not into “the Discourse”, you may be fairly certain that primary responsibility for the use and flow of words has been relinquished to machines, which, stupid as they are, mistake our language for data.

The matter of the heart. Melanie McDonagh wonders if Graham Greene's appalling personality existed in a symbiotic relationship with his classic books. Probably. Could anyone except a Tolstoyan egotist have had the audacity to conceive of War and Peace?

On the other hand, while genius might at times be inextricable from sin, there are far more sinners than there are geniuses. If one have to ask oneself “does my genius excuse my failings” then the chances are one has a lot less of the former than the latter.

The forgotten. Here is a brutal report from the AP on neglect in American care homes:

Nursing home watchdogs are being flooded with reports of residents kept in soiled diapers so long their skin peeled off, left with bedsores that cut to the bone, and allowed to wither away in starvation or thirst.

I wrote about this subject for the Spec USA last month. Reverend Marcus Walker writes about similarly bleak conditions in British care homes.

While I'm on the subject of US nursing homes homes, New York's narcissist-in-chief Andrew Cuomo has won an Emmy for his “masterful use of TV” during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is wonderfully Baudrillardian. I wrote about Cuomo's PR success and actual failure here and here.

Good boy. We here at THE ZONE would like to salute Turkmenistani president Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov for unveiling a giant statue of his dog. President Berdimuhamedow and I may have our differences - he is a dictator and I am not - but when it comes to honouring our canine friends we are of the same mind. I just hope he took Vladimir Putin's lesson and stopped picking them up by their necks.

Red handed. Speaking of serial killers, my favourite Polish soup is barszcz but you have to be careful when you're cooking it. If you chop up beetroot and head out before really scrubbing your hands you might get some odd looks from people who see dark red blotches staining your palms.

My other life. This morning I was walking through an estate outside my hometown when I came upon this shop:

A whole other life flashed before my eyes. Instead of being an English teacher and dilettantish opinion columnist I could be a humble vodka salesman at the heart of my community. In many ways it would be a more honest existence.

Have a lovely week,

Ben