TRUMP APPEALS TO A FAN WHO LIKES A STRAIGHT SHOOTER (TAKE COVER)

I hadn’t seen my alter ego, Foley, in several weeks and was glad to see him at the Post Office. ”Who do you like among the Republican candidates?” I asked.   

“Trump, by far.”

“What’s attractive about him?

“He tells it like it is.  I like his building a wall across the southern border of the US and Mexico.”

‘Would it be like the Berlin Wall or like the Great Wall of China?”

“It would be better than both.  It would be impregnable.”

“You mean like the Maginot line?”

“No, no. It will be about 30 feet tall and five feet thick with detectors for anyone trying to dig a tunnel under it. And every fifty feet there will be huge letters on it saying TRUMP.”  That will scare them off."

“Wouldn’t that money be put to better use for our infrastructure repairs and expansion?” 

“No way. Trump is a businessman and he knows how to make deals. Besides he’ll make America admired again.”

“Isn’t that what the Republican Presidents, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover said when they ran a campaign of ‘Back to Normalcy’ and ‘The business of America is business?’ And didn’t their policies of unregulated laissez faire lead to the excesses that caused the Wall Street crash of 1929?”

 “Not at all,” said Foley.  “These are just natural adjustments to the market, like weather cycles. It’s like Adam Smith’s invisible hand.  Usually it guides us to everyone’s benefit but sometimes it gives us the fickle finger. Humans can’t prevent these cycles from occurring but we know to respond to them.”

“And how do we do that?” I asked.

“Let the market remain unregulated and when a bust occurs have the government bail out the biggest banks and corporations.”

“Why bail out them and not the smaller investors and corporations?”

“Because billionaires are too big to allow to fail.  Ask any billionaire.”

READING HISTORICAL FICTION – NOAH GORDON’S THE PHYSICIAN

  

         I read The Physician by Noah Gordon.  It is a huge book, 750 pages in paperback, but well worth reading.  It follows the life of Rob Cole, an eleventh century orphan in London who becomes a barber surgeon and travels with his mentor throughout England selling potions and entertaining crowds by juggling. He has the gift and calling of a healer and hopes to learn real medicine.  At that time King Canute ruled England and life for most of the British Isles was harsh with high mortalities for all age groups.  Cole learns from a Jewish patient that the only decent medical school is in Persia. They don’t take Christians but they do take Jews, so he pretends to be a Jew and begins the long trek to Persia where he manages to get accepted so he can study with Avicenna.  Gordon studied medieval history, history of medicine, and the cultural and political histories of Persia and Great Britain to provide the background and feeling of authenticity for his novel.  It is a wonderful novel because it has so many subplots and events, like reading a Russian novel by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

   

        Most of my knowledge of medieval history came from courses as an undergraduate with Wallace K. Ferguson at NYU who focused on the renaissance or, as he preferred to call it, the transition from medieval to modern society.  I’ve read several books on medical history so I could check the novel against what I knew.  I know some scholars who never read historical fiction because they feel they would be deluded into believing that the history of that time is accurate when it is more likely that an author will project the present dressed up in the past and that past would be a mixture of guesswork and reality.  There is that risk, of course. But I would not shun reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace just because the author did not fight in the Napoleonic Wars. The satisfaction I get from historical fiction outweighs the errors that might creep into my understanding of past societies. A good novelist spends time in the library or doing web searches for authentic detail and broad overviews of the places and times that are described in the novel. The reader benefits by getting a general overview of a piece of history of biographical knowledge, or cultural awareness that would otherwise be absent. In some cases a good historical novel stimulates interest in reading more about that period.  I know I shall check out the life of Avicenna, the great Persian physician and scholar whose works gradually found their way into later medieval learning and the first medical schools in Europe.