The Gadflyer brings me the story that the Rev Sun Myung Moon had himself crowned Emporer of the United States and declared the Messiah at a ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in the presence and with the enthusiastic participation of a bipartisan contingent of Members of Congress. No, really.

Was Milton a terrorist sympathizer? John Carey of Oxford University, co-editor of an edition of Milton's poetry, seems to think so. Writing in The Times Literary Supplement of London on the anniversary of Sept. 11, Professor Carey said that in the weeks following the atrocity he had been haunted by the similarities between the biblical Samson and the hijackers. "Like them Samson sacrifices himself to achieve his ends," he wrote. "Like them he destroys many innocent victims, whose lives, hopes and loves are all unknown to him personally." Professor Carey wondered whether "Samson Agonistes," with Milton's sympathetic portrayal of his hero, should not be "withdrawn from schools and colleges and, indeed, banned more generally."

In his reading, the whole of Milton's work -- epic poetry, religious tracts, radical pamphlets on the side of Parliament in the English civil war -- puts one cause above all others: obedience to God. "I have no doubt," he writes, "that many of my fellow Miltonists will resist" his interpretation "because it flies in the face of what they believe as good post-Enlightenment liberals." Liberals, he says, believe in objectivity, disinterested consideration of evidence, procedural safeguards for justice and above all in the primacy of rationality. "Milton," he argues, "believes none of those things."

Professor Fish says he responds to reviews only to correct factual errors, and won't be writing to the T.L.S. He has nothing but praise, though, for Professor Carey's edition of Milton. "I would agree with Carey that the Milton I describe could be thought of as a dangerous person," he said in an interview. "It depends on what you want from poets. If you want to find political values or eternal sentiments you can agree with, Milton is a problem." Which isn't to say Professor Fish has any sympathy for calls to ban the poetry -- or for the argument, implicit in Professor Carey's attack, that postmodernists like him have no basis from which to condemn the attacks on the World Trade Center.

"What I do deny is the possibility of independent, neutral reasons," he continued. "I also think it is a mistake to say that men like bin Laden have no morals. He clearly has moral and ethical views that for many reasons we are entitled to reject and despise. The fact that our reasons cannot be given a pedigree that takes them out of the world doesn't make them any less compelling."

In 1398, almost a century before Columbus, Henry Sinclair of Rosslyn would lead an expedition to lands in eastern Canada and New England that had been visited by the Norse for centuries. His pilot was Antonio Zeno who kept detailed records and maps of the voyage. Landing in Nova Scotia on the second day of June in 1398, Sinclair sent a small army to explore. He would send his Italian navigator home and he would remain for at least one winter. From a base in Canada, Sinclair led a small army south. In Westford, Massachusetts, a skirmish with the native residents culminated in the death of Sir James Gunn. The Scottish force would leave a detailed carving in stone with the Clan Gunn coat of arms, which is still visible today. Another knight, unidentified, died or was killed on the route south, his skeleton and suit of armor to be discovered in Fall River in colonial times. The most remarkable monument to their expedition was the construction of an octagonal Templar chapel in Newport, Rhode Island. Modeled after the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Templars would erect such structures in various places in Europe. The only other such temple in Scotland was in Orkney where the Sinclair family ruled. The "Newport Tower" would later become a matter of great debate, although the earliest European explorer to view the Rhode Island coast was Verrazano who recorded it on his map. Evidence of the pre-Columbian expedition would be brought home as well.

Starting in 1436 the Sinclair family planned the construction of a remarkably complex chapel in Rosslyn with carvings of pagan heads, and items allegedly unknown in Europe until after Columbus, like cornhusks and aloe. The brought construction workers, masons, from all over to build the chapel and to construct a massive hiding place in rock that could hold a treasure as well as an army. While the masons arrived in 1436, actual work in Scotland did not begin until 1441. It would make little sense to employ workers for five years without putting them to the task.

More likely, they were at work. The Sinclair fleet had brought their army of masons to the soon-to-be-discovered New World. There they would construct the booby-trapped Money Pit. Using engineering skills known both to the Templars and St. Bernard's Cistercians, the deep shaft, the long water tunnels, the false beach and concealed drains were all put in place.

• Offers evidence that Scottish prince Henry Sinclair not only sailed to the New World 100 years before Columbus, but that he also established a refuge there for the Templars fleeing persecution.
• Shows that the Grail, the holy bloodline connecting the House of David to the Merovingian dynasty through Jesus and Mary Magdalene, was hidden in the New World.

In 1398, almost 100 years before Columbus arrived in the New World, the Scottish prince Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, sailed to what is today Nova Scotia, where his presence was recorded by Micmac Indian legends about Glooskap. This was the same Prince Henry Sinclair who offered refuge to the Knights Templar fleeing the persecution unleashed against the order by French king Philip the Fair at the beginning of the 14th century. With evidence from archaeological sites, indigenous legend, and sacred geometry handed down by the Templar order to the Freemasons, author William F. Mann has now rediscovered the site of the settlement established by Sinclair and his Templar followers in the New World. Here they found a safe refuge for the Grail--the holy bloodline connecting the House of David to the Merovingian Dynasty through the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene--until the British exiled all the Acadians in 1755.

Reagan the well-known superhawk and Reagan the lesser-known nuclear abolitionist are both responsible for the end of [the Cold War]—along with his vital collaborator Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Gorbachev factor—too often overlooked in this week of Reagan-hagiography—was crucial. If Yuri Andropov's kidneys hadn't given out, or if Konstantin Chernenko had lived a few years longer, Reagan's bluster and passion would have come to naught; the Cold War would probably have raged on for years; indeed, Reagan's rhetoric and actions might have aggravated tensions.

[. . .]

In the end, Reagan and Gorbachev needed each other. Gorbachev needed to move swiftly if his reforms were to take hold. Reagan exerted the pressure that forced him to move swiftly and offered the rewards that made his foes and skeptics in the Politburo think the cutbacks might be worth it.

Princess Diana and her soon-to-be husband, Dodi Fayed, were fatally injured in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel. The site is ancient, dating back to the time of the Merovingian kings (ca. 500 - 751 A.D.), and before. In pre-Christian times, the Pont de l'Alma was a pagan sacrificial site. Note that in the pagan connotation, at least, sacrifice is not to be confused with murder: the sacrificial victim had to be a willing participant.

In the time of the Merovingian kings, the Pont de l'Alma was an underground chamber. Founder of the Merovingian dynasty was Merovaeus, said to be descended from the union of a sea creature and a French queen. Merovaeus followed the pagan cult of Diana. In Middle English, "soul" (Alma) has as etymology "descended from the sea." "Pont," has as a Latin root "pontifex," meaning a Roman high priest. (See also pons, pontis -- bridge; passage.) "Alma" comes from the Latin "almus," meaning nourishing. One translation of Pont de l'Alma would be "bridge of the soul." Another would be "passage of nourishment." All true European royalty is descended from the Merovingians, which are believed to be descendants of Jesus Christ.

• Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia (Nicholas Brealey: London 2000) surprised me, inasmuch as I didn't like it. I'd read their first book, China Wakes - the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power and was quite impressed by it. Then again, I was 13 at the time. Part of the problem might lie with the somewhat choppy and journalistic style of the book, though that's a bit of an unfair criticism since this is assembled from their journalistic experiences throughout East Asia. I was bothered by the occasional glibness, perhaps, by the identification of Asians as unusually desperate in the period of their industrialization as compared to Westerners, since, of course, the treatment of women as disposable labourers lacking in basic civil and political rights, authoritarian political systems placing a premium on tradition and hierarchy as opposed to innovation and democracy, and an ability by workers generally to tolerate substandard conditions for menial rewards. No, those are all Asian innovations.


• Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon, edited by Joseph Tobin (Duke UP: Durham 2004) was an enjoyable study of the rise and fall of the Pokémon children's entertainment universe worldwide. Working at the Charlottetown public library, it was interesting to see young children as they clamoured for copies of the Pokémon books in our system--for comic books, or picture books, or children's short novels. What the 13 essays included in this volume do is use Pokémon as a tracer, to examine how young children worldwide in a globalized society react creatively to the spread of Pokémon. Samuel Tobin's essay "Masculinity, Maturity, and the End of Pokémon" stands out as a fascinating ethnographic investigation of how, over time, older boys at the elementary school where he worked came eventually to reject Pokémon as a kid's game. One interesting element that Pikachu's Global Adventure makes clear is the problems of translation that Pokémon faced, first in transcending its Japanese origins, then in permeating markets where relatively minor languages (i. e. Spanish, Italian, Hebrew) are used.


• Gloria P. Totoricagüena's Identity, Culture, and Politics in the Basque Diaspora (Reno: University of Nevada 2004) examines the basic dynamics of the Basque diaspora, in the Anglophone United States and Australia, in Hispanophone Latin America (particularly Argentina, Uruguay, and Peru), and in Francophone Europe (mainly Belgium)
, as well as the diaspora's relationship with the Basque homeland (particualrly with the Basque Autonomous Community). This sociological study of impressive depth demonstrates how, despite a centuries-long history of Basque transatlantic emigration, only now with the creation of an autonomous Basque quasi-state can links with the Basque diaspora be formalized. Totoricagüena's study is a fascinating examination of how the institutionalization of transnational communities can meet unexpected problems, as assumptions of a common identity are disproven by practical experience and different communities argue about what institutions and policies are needed to maintain the diaspora, particularly when it's facing more-or-less rapid assimilation. Her pessimistic conclusion--that unless the Basque government adopts policies more favourable towards the diaspora, the chance for nonpartisan institutional links between homeland and diaspora could be missed--seems to hint at what more often than not might be the fate of diaspora-homeland contacts.

• Jan Kott's Shakespeare our Contemporary (New York: Norton, 1974) is a powerful piece of Shakespearean criticism. The preface and introduction of Shakespeare our Contemporary try to position Kott, a Polish intellectual who managed to survive and outwit both Nazi occupation and the 45-year-long Communist People's Republic, as someone who knows from first-hand experience the travails experienced by the English at the end of the capricious Tudor state, as someone who can apply this first-hand experience towards clear and lucid and convincing explanations of the motives of the playwright Shakespeare and of his characters. I think they're right. I don't know whether Kott's magisterial style is his own in Polish or that of his translator (Boleslaw Taborski, incidentally), but the effect of his superb style, his profound explanations of Shakespeare's characters, and his obvious erudition in referring to European literary culture in its entirety is stunning. I'm particularly fond of his essays "Hamlet of the Mid-Century" and "King Lear or Endgame."