Sir Walter, the Scot

The Death of Morris the Spy, by Camille-Joseph-Étienne Roqueplan (1827)

Edinburgh fascinated me on my first visit before I knew I was destined to be a tour consultant. Navigating the Escheresque street levels of the old city was playing three three-dimensional chess. Even digital Google maps couldn't straighten that out. And monuments to Sir Walter Scott were everywhere! No wonder the Scottish Nation loves him as reality superseded fiction when he was the one who found the crown jewels of Scotland hidden in a chest deep in the dungeons of Edinburgh Castle!

More confident in my Welsh experiences, I have much to learn about Scotland. (And I'm still learning all I can about Wales!) I thought it necessary to do a bit of literary study of the great Sir Walter having only read Ivanhoe, when I was much younger and more prone to adolescent dreams of knights and fair damsels offering only unrequited love. Ivanhoe isn't much about Scotland either.

So I took it upon me to read the the Waverley Novels. Waverley was first thinking that would be enough or at least encompassed the Waverley oeuvre. But, no, all the Scott novels are supposedly in the canon. I next read Rob Roy thinking that will do it covering both the 1745 and 1715 Jacobite Risings. Scott is still an entertaining read, but he's no timeless Dickens. It is interesting that Scott was writing two hundred years ago and it's now over three hundred years since the rising of 1715!

A Bad Day for fascists

In honor of the French election in which the far-right, nationalist candidate resoundingly lost, we hope and pray for America and share the following:

Take that, fascists!

Holland Saves Western Europe!

The Red, White, and Blue, and Orange!

Ziko-C - Own work. Kerktoren Oude St Mauritius, Silvolde, Koninginnedag 2008. Toren uit ca. 1570.

Not that I'm a big expert on internal or external Dutch politics, but the weak election results of the Partij voor de Vrijheid - PVV (Party for "Freedom") of yet another nationalist populist who shall remain unnamed on this blog was a good sign yesterday. It shows that the march of nationalism that resulted in so many millions of deaths in the horrific wars of the 20th Century may be turning a corner in 21st.

A friend an I discussed the cycles of history yesterday and how we fail to learn to stand up for the rights of the oppressed. The struggle keeps cycling around but blood and horror always seems to rule on this earth. Before the nationalistic wars of the 19th Centuries, we had the nations battling over colonies and slavery and the oppression of peoples of different cultures and tones of skin color. Before that were the feudal kingdoms of "might makes right" and he who had the most gold or bigger sword lorded it over the serfs, peons, or peasants.

But back to the plucky Dutch (I have some ancestry there, by the way, on both my Dad and Mom's side. 19th Century Mormon converts on my Dad's and back to Colonial New Amsterdam Dutch on my Mom's). In the 20th Century, the Netherlands were rolled over by the Nazi war machine surrendering but never quite as their resistance was strong. Many helped Jews escape to neutral Sweden. The resistance wore the hidden safety pins to flash their unity that have now become a symbol of support of immigrants and refugees in this country as I wear them. After the war, Mormon Dutch gathered their potato harvest to feed the starving survivors in . . . Germany. It was such a relief to see their rejection of nationalism yesterday.