It Sure Is A Rising

Compared With How We've Ducked It In The United States, Canada Should Be Really Proud Of How You Have Welcomed A Significant Number Of Refugees - Far More, In Fact, Than We Americans Have, Even Though Our Population Is Vastly Larger.

It Sure Is A Rising Tide, And We Have A Particularly Nasty Exemplar Of It In The U.s., In Donald Trump.

How Many Really Great Writers Are There Who Are Totally Non-political? You Can Hear The French Revolution In The Poetry Of [percy Bysshe] Shelly And [john] Wordsworth; You Can Sense The Vast Inequalities Of Tsarist Russia In [anton] Chekhov And [lev] Tolstoy.

Things Have Gotten Openly More Extreme In The Last Few Years. I Was Lecturing In Hungary, Whose Prime Minister, Victor Orban, Is An Example Of This Trend. All Over Budapest, Statues Have Been Replaced, Museum Exhibits Have Been Redone, To Turn Ethnic Hungarians, Not Jews, Into The Prime Victims Of The Germans During World War Ii. Five Years Ago, Who Would Have Thought This Possible?

The Late Nadine Gordimer In South Africa, For Example, Had A Wonderful Ability To Get Her Country's Injustices And Contradictions Down On Paper. Ditto For Her Countryman The Great Playwright Athol Fugard.