Michael Goldfarb

London

Host at FRDH Podcast with Michael Goldfarb

Host FRDH Podcast @ https://t.co/ZqeATd8gje. Substack https://t.co/erkjVysCzj Hear/Read: BBC, NYTimes, Guardian, FT

Articles

FRIGHTENING OURSELVES TO DEATH

1 week ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

When you live on the thin ice of freelance journalism your survival depends on the ability to generate good, sellable ideas. Great ideas that need no selling come around rarely. Thirty-five years ago I had one of my best: a socio-cultural history of the post-war US called:“Inside Dan Quayle’s Brain”The premise was simple. In 1990, Vice-President Dan Quayle was the first American who had been born in the television age to get within sniffing distance of the Oval Office.
BY THE ROOD BRIDGE

4 weeks ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

By the rood bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stoodAnd fired the shot heard round the world. That quatrain opens the Concord Hymn, a poem written by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837 to mark the unveiling of a monument on the site of the Battle of Concord, one of the first battles of the American Revolution.
BIBLE STUDY FOR ATHEISTS: ISRAEL DEMANDS A KING

1 month ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

Difficult as it is for anti-Trump Americans to acknowledge, the Donald is a world historical figure. He has broken the critical barrier that has allowed the US to grow, amend its flaws, and flourish for a quarter of a millennium. He has demonstrated the fundamental tenets of America’s constitutional order could be violently challenged and still be elected President.
A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES BEGINS?

1 month ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

They came out across the US and in the ex-pat centers of Europe. High spirits. It was good to be out and among people in analog reality rather than hunched over laptops and phones communicating digitally. In London’s Trafalgar Square, the weather was spectacular but the crowd small and showing signs of overexposure to English wit. Erich McIlroy pictured above is a stand-up comic and he made an important point in his opening speech: Mockery is an excellent non-violent tool.
First Rough Draft of History

1 month ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

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250 YEARS, A QUARTER OF A MILLENNIUM

1 month ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

This month, 250 years ago, the American Revolution began. On April 19, 1775, a series of battles — skirmishes really — took place around Boston between regular troops of the British Army and the militia of the Massachusetts Bay colony. The day’s fighting culminated in Concord, Massachusetts by the old North Bridge, where several British soldiers, whether under orders or by mistake opened fire on the assembled militia. This fire was returned.
TRENDS IN BRIEF

1 month ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

Apologies to my paying customers for the brevity of this week’s dispatch. I am on a very tight deadline for an hour-long documentary called “NATO: Then, Now, Now What?” for BBC Radio 4 — in the studio on Friday with much yet to do. But there were two very distinct groups of events this past seven days and I wanted to note these trends and will, no doubt, come back to them. The first is the bedding down of elective authoritarianism in the US and in several of its allies.
CARPE'ING THE DIEM

2 months ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

There is a tide in the affairs of menWhich, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it servesOr lose our ventures. Julius Caesar, Act IV, scene iiiLast week, two important dates that occupied the minds of many appalled by the onslaught of the Trump regime’s second incarnation passed. The first was the idea of “53 Days”.
O LOST!

2 months ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

"O Lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again."Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel. Those words are repeated throughout Wolfe’s massive novel like a musical motif recurring in a symphony. They prefigure the feeling many in America have of the current state of affairs. We are LOST!! The irony is that many people might not be able to put those words to their feelings of something irreplaceable having been lost. No writer’s reputation has fallen as fast in my lifetime as that of Wolfe.
WHEN THE PEOPLE GET IT WRONG

2 months ago | frdhfirstroughdraftofhistory.substack.com | Michael Goldfarb

We all know the Winston Churchill quote:“Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time …”We have rarely had to think about why that might be true but the reason is playing out in front of Americans and the world right now: sometimes the democratic process of elections can bring about democracy’s destruction.