I
In 1992, I spent much of my free time planning a murder.
I mapped it out it out to the last detail: victim, weapon, motive, opportunity, covering the tracks, the whole meticulous homicidal mess. In the end, it went almost exactly according to plan, and was a complete success.
Almost.
Fortunately for all concerned, the murder was fictional: the plot of a mystery novel, Murder Among Friends, published in 1993. It sold out two printings; that was the successful part.But I’m remembering it now for a different reason. One of its central plot elements, indeed the underlying theme — the reason I wrote it —was not the homicide, but the context: the murder was a portent, a forerunner of a larger real-life conflict, with a grim history and an ominous future. I could feel it coming then; two decades later, long after the novel ended with this part unresolved, it has moved from fiction to perilously close to fact.
Its history was our American Civil War (the first one): my tale was set in one of its most contested killing fields, the splendid and fertile Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, near Winchester. The Valley was fought over repeatedly, and changed hands between Blue and Grey dozens of times. Today its landscape is dotted with battlefield memorials and war cemeteries.It seemed an apt locale for early warnings of a potential repeat catastrophe. Further, the Valley had the other feature I wanted for my story: a long and turbulent, but little-known Quaker presence.
Category Archives: Revolution
Solar Eclipse? Meh. Wake Me When It’s Over.
The best part for me about the total solar eclipse I actually saw (on July 10, 1972), came several months later, in Carly Simon’s wonderfully bitter tune “You’re So Vain,” and the line about the cad she was sticking it to went to Saratoga New York for a horse race, and then:
“You flew your Lear Jet up to Nova Scotia,
To see the total eclipse of the sun . . . “
That’s what I did. Continue reading Solar Eclipse? Meh. Wake Me When It’s Over.
AFSC: When the Slides Went Awry, And The Key Questions Weren’t Asked . . .
Last month I attended two presentations by the new AFSC Director of Quaker Engagement, Brian Blackmore, at Durham and Chapel Hill Meetings here in North Carolina.
Blackmore, just a year in the job, is the successor to Lucy Duncan, a longtime AFSC staffer who was unceremoniously fired in early 2022 when she tried to start a staff uprising to stop a major internal reorganization. Continue reading AFSC: When the Slides Went Awry, And The Key Questions Weren’t Asked . . .
FBI Ignored Internal Warnings, Screwed Up Bigtime on Jan. 6 Insurrection Threat. Why??
NBC NEWS EXCLUSIVE — CAPITOL RIOT
Before Jan. 6, the FBI predicted extremists would be ‘very willing to take action’ over a 2020 election dispute.
An FBI “red cell” report predicted that law enforcement action and a “lack of coordination” between groups would prevent widespread violence in response to a disputed election.
WASHINGTON — One week before Election Day 2020 and just over two months before the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, an internal FBI analysis concluded that domestic violent extremists were “very willing to take action” in response to a disputed election but that “law enforcement preemption” and the “disorganization” of extremist groups “likely would hinder widespread violence.”
The so-called red cell report — the type of exercise that became widespread after the federal government’s Sept. 11 intelligence failures and are meant to challenge conventional wisdom and encourage outside-the-box thinking — was titled “Alternative Analysis: Potential Scenarios for Reactions of Domestic Violent Extremists to a Disputed 2020 US Presidential Election.” NBC News obtained a redacted copy of the report through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Dyer: Police Killings & Trouble In France
Violence in France
On Saturday, the fifth day of violent protests all over France against the police killing of an unarmed teenager,, the daily arrests dropped below 1,000 for the first time – but the violence became even more extreme.
By Gwynne Dyer, in Opinion — July 4 2023
In L’Haÿ-les-Roses, a southern suburb of Paris, protesters rammed a stolen car through the gates of the mayor’s home shortly after midnight, and then set the vehicle on fire so that the blaze would spread to the house.
The mayor, Vincent Jeanbrun, was still at his office trying to deal with the situation, but his wife, Melanie Nowak, and their two children aged five and seven were in the house.