Lloyd Bowers was born in Columbus, Georgia in 1952, graduated from Furman University in 1976, and has lived in Charleston, South Carolina since 2002.
The Results of Polar Bear Research is Lloyd's first novel and was published in 2007. Lloyd's next book, Keep These in the Family, is a collection of twelve stories and was published in 2010.
"I grew up in the South," says Lloyd. "The Southern Appalachians is a sort of fixed foot in my life, and the summer-time is a great time to gravitate unpredictably in social settings."
"Freedom is a Public Utility, published 2014, developed from the discovery of a stash of old family letters, dated 1812 to 1857, mailed to my great-great-grandfather John Siegling, who emigrated from Erfurt, Germany, and settled in Charleston in 1820. That he was en route, or 'unterwegs,' for five years impressed me.
"Divide the Country! was published February, 2020. It reflects my concern about the disunity, and even partisan hatred, that plagues the U.S."
If my reader spends any time at all on Facebook, he can't miss the posts from left-wing bloggers who want to "eradicate" whole classes of people. They make a lot of jokes about chopping off their heads, feeding them to killer whales, or sending them down inside leaky submarines. The level of violence surprised me, like extortionists fronting a protection-racket.
In my last post, "Biden's Handlers", I mentioned Alejandro Mayorkas, the Director of Homeland Security. He appeared on the TV show Meet the Press in February of this year to shore up concerns about President Biden's mental health, and described the President, during frequent meetings with him, as "sharp" and "focused".
When Joe Biden took over as President of the United States from Donald Trump in 2020, I learned the names of most of his cabinet officers. As the years went by, I forgot most of them. So when The Daily Show ran film-footage of this man commenting on the mental health of President Biden, I had no idea who he was. From his spirited defense of President Biden, I assumed he was a presidential "handler", one the men who protect the President's public image.
I had a political-science instructor in college with a left-wing orientation to governmental leadership, reflecting his childhood, growing up in a poor, Native-American family in Florida. During class, he expressed his dislike for Dixiecrat politicians and their disapproval of "pointy-headed bureaucrats" messing up the precepts of good government, but maybe he did not realize that both sides deride pointy-headed bureaucrats, from time to time.
This article appeared in the German newspaper Die Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper and concerns the decision of the United States Supreme Court to immunize Former President Donald Trump against prosecution for past offenses. The Supreme Court voted predictably 6-3 for Trump, splitting pretty cleanly along political lines. Chief Justice Roberts "delivered the opinion of the court", and Kavanaugh, Alito, and Thomas agreed with it. In addition, Thomas and Justice Barrett wrote separate "concurring" opinions. The Democrat Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson dissented strenuously.
Do we really want everybody to believe in equality, rather than in competition? Don't we want athletes to win and enjoy the fruits of their success? The uncompetitive Ungame came out in the mid-seventies and remains popular to this day. It comes with a game-board. The players roll the dice and move their pieces around and around the game-board until everyone grows tired of the intrusively personal questions that the Ungame poses to its players.
I guess I am an atypical American. When I was in college, I befriended several students who had spent a semester studying in Germany and Austria. Most of them could speak German to some degree and also had an interest in art, history, and architecture. I enjoyed listening to them recount their experiences over there and knew that, when I finished college, I wanted to travel to Germany and Austria, too.
At age 72, I get tired of saying "When I was younger, I used to . . .", but the truth is that, during a man's lifetime, his interests change, or they become unavailable to him. At any rate, I used to play chess. My father taught me how, and said it was the closest thing to war, itself, because it succeeded on the basis of strategy, rather than on brute force.
The Harvard theologian Margaret Miles published a book about church-art in 2006, titled Image as Insight, that describes the importance of Medieval church-art in Europe to communicate the message of the Gospel to a largely illiterate population. On its front cover, "The Visitation", a fresco by the Italian artist Giotto (circa 1267-1337) portrays the meeting between the pregnant Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and the pregnant Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. The Bible says John leapt in his mother's womb.
I read most of Ayn Rand's books in high school, around 1970; but deluged with homework during college, I did not bother with them again, and do not know if I even have copies of them, still. During my working years, I had less time to read and became more selective about what I did read, and that included less fiction and more things like history and biography. Rand died in 1982, pretty much in obscurity.
William Sheridan Allen was a history professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He served in that capacity until 2001 and passed away in 2013 at age 80. In 1965, he published The Nazi Seizure of Power, which sold so well, he revised it and reissued it in 1984.
I learned about the Goebbels Diaries ("Tagebücher" in German) from a series of articles in the German news-magazine Der Spiegel. Spiegel must have received a heads-up about the publication of the diaries in book-format because the books (4 volumes) did not come out until 1992. The Spiegel articles, on the other hand, ran from 30 August until 21 September 1987.
