People love big things. Big cars, big houses, big countries. Something in the human brain still worships scale, as if the mammoth that impressed our ancestors is still walking somewhere behind us. And so, many citizens will proudly point at the map and say: “Look how enormous it is — this is greatness.” They say it with the same confidence with which a smoker says his cough is “just from … Read the rest
There’s a special kind of language that doesn’t tell you what’s happening—it tells you what to feel about it. It’s an art form, really. A performance where words pretend to inform but actually sedate. Bureaucrats, generals, and “information managers” have refined it into a linguistic ballet: graceful, bloodless, and utterly lethal to thought.
It’s called doublespeak. Or, in the more poetic tongues of the East, necro-speak—the language of the … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
“The world is a comedy for those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel” – Horace Walpole
“Only the Lonely” was the signature song of a guy named Roy Orbison, a star in the early rock’ n’ roll era. Orbison died in 1988 of a heart attack at the age of 52. Songs are full of lonely guys; they were back … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ As we study history together, I often show documentary films to my students. When these films are about the distant past, there is a voice (or person-moderator) who walks us through the information, using whatever illustrations can be mustered. But as we get nearer to modern times the documentaries come to life: actual human action in black and white. From the late 19th … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ I remember working in a pub in Crawley, near Gatwick airport in London. Many years ago. I was by then probably in my early 30s. Yet, as they say, ‘everybody gets old, but you can stay immature forever.’ That would have been me back then.
I had lived in Bath during the 1970s, returned to the US to do a Master’s degree … Read the rest
