Some books bring back memories. And so it is for me, with Stephen King’s illustrated novella, Cycle of the Werewolf.
I remember purchasing this book at the B. Dalton bookstore in Cincinnati’s Beechmont Mall in the mid-1980s. I had only recently become a Stephen King fan, and I was working my way through his entire oeuvre, which then consisted of about ten years’ worth of novels and collections.
The copy I bought in the 1980s has long since been lost. I’m glad to see that the book is still available, with the original illustrations from Bernie Wrightson.
You can get a copy of Cycle of the Werewolf on Amazon by clicking here.
The Japanese media is well aware of President Biden’s recent characterization of their country as “xenophobic”.
Damn those Japanese, and their unwillingness to accept thousands of undocumented immigrants. Why can’t they shape up, and fling open their borders?
Ergo, the Japanese are “xenophobic”.
What do we mean by ‘xenophobia’?
Xenophobia is a Western concept and an exclusively Western preoccupation. The rest of the world takes for granted a certain degree of what our nattering class regularly denounces as xenophobia.
Most of the world accepts as a given that people have a stronger attachment to their family and neighbors, than to people living an ocean away.
Most of the world believes that stark differences in basic customs and values lead naturally to conflict.
Only the West—and only the recent manifestation of the West— seeks diversity for diversity’s sake.
You can be offended by that last statement if you choose, but it’s a fact. Ask a Chinese, a Ugandan, a Pole, or a Saudi to expound on the importance of diversity (or multiculturalism). They’ll laugh in your face.
Translating xenophobia into Japanese
The Japanese media therefore had to improvise the translation. They translated Biden’s assessment as:
日本は「外国人嫌い」
This means, “The Japanese dislike foreigners.”
That isn’t exactly the same thing as “xenophobia”. But philosophical concepts are often reliant on cultural context, and typically don’t translate well.
There is no concise English translation for the Japanese concepts of of 本音 and 建前. They have to be explained. And so it is with “xenophobia” in Japanese.
Yet Macron wants to deploy French troops to Ukraine. What??
The European media is…slowly…starting to change its story on Ukraine. Or rather, the chickenhawks’ battle cries are gradually giving way to reality.
As detailed in the above video (at the 4:22 mark) around 900,000 draft-age Ukrainian men have fled abroad, most to European Union countries. That was out of a prewar population of about 43 million.
To put that in perspective: during the Vietnam War, around 50,000 American men fled to Canada to avoid the draft. That was from a US population of around 203 million.
This means that the number of Ukrainian men who have fled abroad to avoid fighting for their own country, on their own soil, is infinitely larger than the number of American men who fled abroad to avoid fighting in Southeast Asia, in a country that most of them had barely heard of.
Ergo, the Russo-Ukrainian War is [much] less popular with draft-age Ukrainian men in 2024 than the Vietnam War was with draft-age American men in 1968.
That’s a problem, for obvious reasons. And it does support the argument that the war is ultimately a NATO proxy war against Russia.
At the same time, European chickenhawks like French President Emmanuel Macron and EU President Ursula von der Leyen continue to beat the war drums. Neither of them has ever served in the military of any country
Macron has even suggested deploying French troops should the draft-dodger-depleted Ukrainian lines break.
Wouldn’t it make sense to put the Ukrainian draft dodgers on the front lines first? Or is it time to radically reassess the current Western strategy of “fight until the last Ukrainian?”
There is yet another Rambo film in the works, apparently. Sylvester Stallone, age 77, will return to his iconic role for the final (?) time, perhaps.
I have been a Rambo fan since the first movie came out in 1982. Rambo III (1988), in which John Rambo went to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, was the best of the bunch, in my opinion. But all of the movies have been watchable, if not exactly profound.
I will freely admit that much of my love for this movie franchise is pure 1980s nostalgia. I miss that more optimistic, sensible decade. So long as Rambo movies keep coming out, the 1980s aren’t truly dead, perhaps. The insanity of the 21st century, while pernicious as a bad rash, can still be banished to the sewers from which it came. We can hope.
But I have another, and even more personal reason for my tireless loyalty to the Rambo brand.
Sylvester Stallone was born in 1946, the same year as both my parents. I’m now in my mid-50s. But so long as there is an active action hero old enough to be my dad, I’m not really so old, am I? Something to ponder during my next trip to the gym.
At any rate, I will never completely lose my faith in Western civilization, so long as there is another Rambo movie to look forward to. After that, all bets are off.
Mark Hamill is a well-known Biden fanboy. He seemed genuinely pleased by his opportunity to visit his Uncle Joe at work today.
I was nine years old in 1977, when Hamill first appeared as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars pilot film. That was almost fifty years ago.
Today Hamill is a 72-year-old former actor. He will always be respected for his work in the first three Star Wars movies. (He’s received decidedly mixed reviews on the more recent ones.) But in the late 1970s, Star Wars was a cultural phenomenon, and Mark Hamill was Taylor Swift-level famous. Trust me, I was there.
Like many fading Hollywood stars of the Baby Boomer and Gen X generations, Hamill has turned his attention to politics. And like most of Hollywood, he’s a shill for the Democratic Party.
Hamill is not, from what I can tell, a far-left radical. He’s a boilerplate, establishment Democrat. Nor is he as obnoxious as Alyssa Milano.
But Hamill is cringeworthy at times. For example, in the run-up to the 2020 election, he said that “the Force is with Joe Biden.” Today he called Joe Biden “Joe B Wan Kenobi”.
A “Skywalker effect” in 2024?
Readers who are pleased with Joe Biden’s performance will think that all of this cheerleading from Hamill (and his fellow celebrities) is grand stuff. But will Mark Hamill persuade any voters who are on the fence?
My guess is: voters who are willing to take political advice from celebrities have already decided to vote for Joe Biden. It’s doubtful that any Hollywood celebrity can ever do more than preach to the Democratic choir.
The rest of us may have fond memories of Luke Skywalker. But Joe Biden reminds us of Grand Moff Tarkin on sleeping pills.
You have to love the nutritional rationalizations of the early to mid-20th century. The above poster exhorts us to eat more donuts in order that we may do more to support the war effort. But don’t forget to buy war stamps, while you’re at it!
In the 1940s, few Americans were alert to the risks of heart disease or diabetes.
Of course, our obesity rates were also much, much lower. While sweets were eaten without guilt, they were eaten in small quantities. And most people were far more physically active, even though no one had a Planet Fitness membership.
Brian Cox is a 77-year-old British actor whom I’ve never heard of, though I have seen some of the movies that Wikipedia tells me he’s appeared in. Cox has had character roles in scores of films since the early 1970s.
For some reason, Cox thought it was necessary to tell an interviewer recently that the Bible is “one of the worst books ever”, and that “only stupid people believe it.”
I hate to turn this into yet another “Okay, Boomer,” moment. But Brian Cox is apparently living in 1966. In its April 8, 1966 issue, Time magazine famously asked the question, “Is God Dead?”
Cox would have been twenty at the time. I was a little more than two years from the day of my birth.
My point here being: it is no longer edgy for a self-assessed Western intellectual to declare his disdain for Christianity. In fact, a declaration of atheism has become rather trite, or at the very least, ho-hum. On the contrary, it is edgy for one of our Western cultural elites to declare that she is a Christian believer.
Western Europe’s march toward secularism and atheism did not begin in the benighted 1960s, although the 1960s accelerated it. Western Europe’s slide toward nonbelief began in the nihilism that followed the devastation of the First World War.
The American author Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961) was a European by interest and temperament. Hemingway always felt most at home in Europe, and it was in Europe that he got his start as a writer.
Read Ernest Hemingway’s post-World War I European novel, The Sun Also Rises. It is a story of soulless, uninspired people making their way through a bleak, amoral universe.
The Sun Also Rises, 1926 first edition
Hemingway was an atheist—or at least an agnostic. In his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, he coined the phrase, “All thinking men are atheists.”
Hemingway died by his own hand at the age of 62. He killed himself with a shotgun.
Western Europe, too, is committing a sort of slow suicide. Having forsaken both faith and tradition, this is a culture that can no longer be troubled to reproduce itself. Practically every European country is aging, shrinking, withering, a shadow of its former (and mostly Christian) self.
The only positive population growth in Europe nowadays comes from Muslim immigration. Europe’s Muslim immigrants haven’t gotten the memo on atheism yet. More on this in a moment.
As Europeans have grown increasingly secular over the past one hundred years, Islam has become the fastest-growing religion in Europe. Europe’s old cathedrals draw the tourists. But it is the mosques that draw the transplanted faithful.
If Brian Cox wanted to say something edgy about faith and atheism, then, he took the coward’s way out. Why pick on a religion that is dying out in Europe, anyway? Why not target the one that some of Europe’s residents still actually believe in?
But Brian Cox, being a coward (or possibly just an out-of-touch codger) did not say that the Quran is a bad book that only imbeciles follow. He picked an easy target, a religion whose remaining followers will only shake their heads at him, rather than murder him for blasphemy.
On second thought, maybe Brian Cox just wanted to say something dismissive about religion—something that would have been edgy in 1966—while making sure that he celebrates as many remaining birthdays as possible. An atheist, after all, has nothing to be hopeful about in the hereafter.
In the writing of fiction, there is one ironclad rule: don’t kill the dog.
Author Stephen King once related how he received dozens of angry letters from readers who were irate over Greg Stillson—the villain of The Dead Zone—killing a dog in that novel.
King replied to some of them: reminding them that The Dead Zone was fiction.
King’s defense was likely to no avail. A large percentage of the population has an intense, and (I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to, anyway) irrational attachment to dogs.
Why is this? Dogs serve as an object of projection for all ideal human virtues. Therefore, the dog is idealized.
Dogs cannot talk. Therefore, they can’t say unkind things to you. And a dog won’t reject you, so long as you feed it.
This attachment to dogs goes way back, all the way to prehistoric times. Canines and people have a long, evolutionary history together, a fascinating subject in its own right.
More recently, the author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894) wrote:
“You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.”
The love of dogs crosses political, economic, and generational lines. My grandfather, a World War II combat veteran, told me about the grief he endured when Rusty, the family dog, died at some point in the 1960s. My grandfather (pictured below with my mom, grandmother, and the aforementioned Rusty) loved dogs.
As for me, I neither love dogs nor hate them. I’m not an “animal” person, even though my mother and my grandfather certainly were. Nor am I going to pick an argument with you if you have what I would regard as an excessive attachment to canines. There are some arguments that simply aren’t worth picking; and that’s one of them.
Noem has since been skewered by commentators on both the left and the right. It’s now generally agreed that her “murder” of the aggressive dog will make her too toxic and controversial as a potential running mate for Donald Trump.
I have a friend who keeps hunting dogs. He has told me that especially aggressive dogs are sometimes destroyed when all else fails. People who maintain animals for utilitarian purposes—whether as livestock or as beasts of burden—tend to view them differently than people who keep them as pets. You’re unlikely to find a farmer who names his cattle, even if he primarily keeps them for milking rather than beef. It’s just a different mindset about animals on the farm.
But don’t expect people to be rational where dogs are concerned, any more than they are rational about much of anything else of late. While intense affection for dogs does go way back, it seems to be exacerbated nowadays, as many of us are less connected to other humans.
I’ve also noticed a trend of single middle-aged women and childless couples heaping parental affection on dogs (and in some cases, cats). The expressions “dog dad” and “dog mom” entered our lexicon a few years ago. Not everyone uses such terms in a tongue-in-cheek manner. We now have a National Dog Mom’s Day. Yet another example of twenty-first-century America taking everything to ridiculous extremes.
That said, I make no plea here for a defense of Kristi Noem. She should have known better. As a politician, she is uniquely positioned to know how unhinged America has become.
You’ve probably noticed that many of America’s college campuses have turned into dysfunctional protest camps of late. With the weather turning warmer, the protests that began at Columbia University have spread to campuses throughout the country.
This comes at a time when three things are happening:
Public opinion is turning against our universities, especially those in the so-called Ivy League. This is a big shift from a generation ago.
“But wait!” some of you will shout. “Those college students are protesting what’s happening in Gaza! Certainly that gives them the right to skip class and take over public spaces! What’s wrong with you? You must be out of touch!”
Let me ask you this: Do I have a right to stage a noisy, disruptive demonstration at my local McDonald’s or Applebees in protest of world hunger? Do I have a right to harass you, as you leave Wendy’s with your 20-piece Chicken Nugget Combo?
What? I don’t? That’s ridiculous, you say?
But wait…isn’t world hunger an important issue?
I am not making light of the ongoing tragedy in the Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes back a century. There are legitimate grievances on both sides. There are, moreover, Americans of sincere goodwill on both sides of this debate.
That’s one thing. Suburban white kids cosplaying as Hamas militants on the campus of Columbia University is another. If the students want to help the Palestinians, let them spend this summer serving meals and washing laundry in a refugee camp. I’d have them scrub a few toilets, too.
It isn’t as if this is the first time campus chaos has erupted in recent years. And most of the students’ “issues” are not all that weighty.
Not so long ago, Yale students were protesting…Halloween costumes. Cultural appropriation, or pronouns, or some such nonsense.
Students at Princeton University pressured university officials to change the name of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Why? They didn’t like something that Woodrow Wilson had said or written more than a century ago. So they screeched and bellyached and shouted until university officials toed their line.
One cannot blame the students entirely. The universities were already becoming leftwing monocultures when I was a college undergrad in the late 1980s.
Even that was not the very beginning. The problem began in the 1960s, twenty years before I stepped on campus.
What we are seeing now on university campuses is the result of a half-century of rot from the inside out. The present condition did not develop overnight, and it won’t be fixed overnight.
But at least the public is now starting to pay attention to the problem: the sorry state of our overpriced and increasingly unproductive universities.
That, ironically, is the one positive development likely to result from the latest wave of student protest tomfoolery.
I’m a lifelong language learner, and I’ve long had an interest in Russia. Russian is one of the languages I study.
And no—before you ask—the present situation doesn’t change that. I grew up during the Cold War. Ambivalent feelings toward Moscow have always been a part of my psyche. That doesn’t make Russia and its ancient civilization any less interesting as a field of study.
I follow a handful of Russia-based YouTubers. Among these is Sasha (Alexandra) of the YouTube channel Sasha Meets Russia.
In the video below, Sasha explains why she has decided to say “do svidaniya” (goodbye) to the USA, and stake her future in Russia.
As an American, Sasha is uniquely prepared to emigrate to Russia. Though she spent most of her life in the United States, she is of mixed Russian-American heritage. She speaks fluent Russian, along with native English and fluent French.
Nevertheless, her dissatisfaction with what the USA has become in recent decades will resonate with many Americans who don’t speak Russian. She refers, wistfully, to what America was in the 1950s and 1960s. One need not go back that far. I would settle for what America was in the 1980s or 1990s.
Especially notable is Sasha’s account of confronting “woke culture” as a teenager and public school student in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts about ten years ago. I’m grateful that I missed all that nonsense, as a student of an earlier era.
Why am I bringing her to your attention? Partly because of her youth. There has never been a shortage of 50- and 60-year-olds who are convinced that the society around them is going to hell. But this is the assessment of an educated, physically attractive Gen Z woman who would have plenty of prospects wherever she went.
Yet she doesn’t choose to stay here. She chooses the country that our mainstream media and political elites constantly denounce as evil.
Molly Ringwald was born the same year I was, and her movies were part of the teen culture in which I came of age.
I don’t think I would have ever described myself as a Molly Ringwald “fan”, exactly, but nor was I a detractor. Like most Gen Xers, I saw her movies, in the same spirit that I watched MTV and listened to bands like Journey and Bon Jovi. Pop culture was more monolithic in those pre-Internet times, and you kind of took what they gave you.
I enjoyed Ringwald’s performance in The Breakfast Club (1985), a movie that almost all people my age have seen at least once.
Ringwald was a gifted teen actress. She was also a gifted twentysomething adult actress in the 1994 television miniseries, The Stand. She starred as Frannie Goldsmith, the heroine of Stephen King’s beloved apocalyptic horror novel.
So I have no qualms with Molly Ringwald the thespian. I have been far less impressed with Molly Ringwald the public person. In recent years, she’s become a fashionably left-leaning celebrity gadfly, mouthing all the familiar slogans when goaded by journalists and interviewers.
Most particularly, Ringwald seems to feel a compulsive need to apologize for the John Hughes teen movies that made her famous. Bashing the creations of the late Hughes (1950 – 2009) has become a peculiar obsession of hers.
Case-in-point: during a recent interview, Ringwald declared:
“Those [John Hughes] movies are very white and they don’t really represent what it is to be a teenager in a school in America today.”
I’ll overlook the obvious non sequitur here: John Hughes was a Baby Boomer who made movies about teenage life in the mid-1980s. Although he technically wrote about Gen Xers, he was probably thinking about Baby Boomers most of the time. At any rate, Hughes never aspired to depict teen life in the mid-2020s. The mid-2020s were still forty years in the future, and many of those yet unborn teens’ parents hadn’t even met yet.
But that isn’t what Ringwald is really getting at. She is implying that because Hughes’s movies did not feature racially diverse casts, there was somehow something retrograde, or even racist about them.
Pop culture in the 1980s actually was quite diverse. Yes, it was the decade of Molly Ringwald, Bruce Springsteen, and Madonna. But it was also the decade of Michael Jackson, Prince, Whitney Houston, and Billy Ocean. We all watched The Cosby Show on television. Eddie Murphy was on everyone’s list of favorite comedians, both in stand-up and in film.
(In many ways, the music scene was far more diverse in the 1980s than it is now. Black artists got proportionately more mainstream attention, whereas nowadays everything in the pop music space is maniacally focused on blonde, vapid Taylor Swift.)
But what about those movies of John Hughes? It isn’t technically inaccurate to say that they were “white”, if we must call them that. There is no evidence that John Hughes was specifically opposed to racial or cultural diversity, but racial and cultural diversity clearly weren’t his focus.
And…so what? Diversity, in the best sense of that word, doesn’t mean—or shouldn’t mean—that every film, TV series, novel, and toothpaste commercial is suspect if it doesn’t contain a box-checked, racially diverse cast of characters. If everything is box-checked to death, then that becomes the norm, and nothing is truly diverse. Diversity, when carried to ideological extremes, can become monochromatic, predictable, and boring.
I don’t remember ever watching The Cosby Show, and saying, “Where the heck are all the Asian Americans and Native American characters? Where are the Jewish and Muslim characters?”
Real life itself, moreover, is not always diverse. During the 1980s, I attended a suburban high school not unlike the one depicted in The Breakfast Club. There were a handful of Filipino students, and a few kids with partial Japanese heritage. Other than that, my high school was as white as Wonder Bread. I make no apology for this. The degree of racial and ethnic diversity in one’s environment has always depended on where one lives.
Molly Ringwald is old enough—and smart enough, I suspect—to realize her own folly. Her hand-wringing about her 40-year-old movies being “white” seems to be her way of keeping herself “relevant” in a chaotic twenty-first-century culture that is neurotically obsessed with identity politics.
I would have a lot more respect for Ringwald if she would simply own her past performances (which were quite good, on the whole) rather than pandering to the diverse but intolerant present. Not even Claire Standish was such an abject conformist.
-ET
Molly Ringwald as Claire Standish in The Breakfast Club (1985)
The Greatest American Hero was a comedy-drama superhero series that ran for three seasons, from 1981 to 1983.
Here’s the premise: Ralph Hinkley, (later Hanley—I’ll explain why in a moment) is a substitute teacher in the Los Angeles public school system. Extraterrestrials bestow on him a suit that gives him superhero powers.
After that, Ralph (played by William Katt) works with his FBI sidekick, Bill Maxwell (Robert Culp) to thwart criminals, and accomplish the usual superhero endeavors.
Ralph is also aided by his divorce lawyer, Pam Davidson (played by Connie Sellecca).
The show premiered on March 18, 1981. On March 30, 1981, a whackjob named John Hinkley Jr. shot then-President Reagan and three other individuals. This was an association that the show’s producers obviously wanted to avoid. So Ralph Hinkley became Ralph Hanley.
Was The Greatest American Hero great TV? Oh, heavens no—not even by the modest standards of the early 1980s. But I would submit that this was not bad TV, either.
I watched The Greatest American Hero on occasion. It was light entertainment, with a bit of light action, and tolerably likable characters who were lightly drawn.
The Greatest American Hero was also responsible for giving a generation of adolescent boys a crush on Connie Sellecca.
Happy birthday to American actress, producer, and former model Connie Sellecca, born May 25, 1955, whose credits include the comedy-drama television series Flying High, comedy-drama superhero series The Greatest American Hero, and the soap opera Hotel. pic.twitter.com/RB9r83LiYb
A personal note here, on the international reach of this show and the aforementioned actress. In the mid-1990s, I worked with a Taiwanese man who was about my age. We were discussing American pop culture one day, and he went out of his way to express an appreciation for both The Greatest American Hero and Connie Sellecca. Make of that what you will.
In 1938, the planners in Nazi Germany know that war is coming. They are eager to acquire the atom bomb.
They are working against Allied governments, operating both in Germany and abroad. (And not all of the Reich’s accomplices are German nationals.)
A group of ordinary Americans and Germans are forced to choose sides. Their choices will lead them into a web of betrayal, murder, and espionage.
Their paths meet in Cairo, Egypt, where the Reich is hunting a fugitive atomic physicist.
The main characters:
Betty Lehman is a 19-year-old girl from Dutch Falls, Pennsylvania. Her family is active in the German-American Bund. Betty has been recruited to betray her country in the service of the Reich.
Rudolf Schenk is an undercover agent of the German Gestapo. He wants to do his duty. But can he abandon his last shred of conscience?
Jack McCallum is an American treasure hunter in Cairo. He falls for two women: one who is working undercover for the Third Reich, one who is fleeing the Gestapo.
Heinrich Vogel is a physicist who fled Germany for Egypt. He and his young adult daughter, Ingrid, face a daily game of cat-and-mouse with the Gestapo. His goal: to reach Britain or America before the Gestapo reaches him and his daughter!
The United States House of Representatives has just passed a bloated foreign aid package that will send $25 billion to Israel and a whopping $60 billion to Ukraine. The House also approved legislation that could potentially ban TikTok, the Chinese-made app that is so beloved among members of Generation Z.
We haven’t had a foreign policy election since 2004, when the US was embroiled in the war in Iraq. (2008 probably should have been a foreign policy election; but at least half the country was so punch-drunk on the ascension of Barack Obama, that not much else mattered.)
In recent election cycles, foreign policy has hardly been a factor. We’ve been obsessed with abortion, and LGBTQ this and that, and the personality of a certain Republican candidate.
This election might be different. The Biden Administration has involved the United States in two major conflicts. One is a bottomless quagmire in the former Soviet Union. The other is an apparent fight to the death between Israel and the Palestinians.
The United States is generally seen to be on the “right” side of the Ukraine conflict. But what’s our bottom line? How far are we willing to go, over the question of whether the Russian flag or the Ukrainian flag flies over the Crimean peninsula, and a few oblasts between Ukraine and Russia? How many more billions of taxpayer dollars—and Ukrainian and Russian lives—is it worth? Is it worth the very real risk of World War III?
And then there’s Israel and Palestine. My attitude toward the two sides could best be summed up by Mercutio’s line in Romeo and Juliet: “A plague o’ both your houses! I am sped.” I’m not a Zionist. I’m not a pro-Palestinian. I’m sick to the gills of them both, and their bloody, childish conflict.
The wars in the former USSR and the Middle East could come back to bite us in any number of ways—and I’m not only talking about the taxpayer dollars that could better be spent elsewhere. (But think, for a moment, about all that could be done with that $85 billion: all the highways and bridges, all the medical care, all the education.)
The conventional wisdom used to be: fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here. That old chestnut predates the ICBM and the suicide bomber.
Our entanglements in Ukraine and the Middle East endanger us because by picking sides, the Biden administration has picked two fights. Our government has made each of us a proxy combatant in two wars. If you’re an American citizen, you are now indirectly at war with the Russian Federation and Palestine.
Are those wars in your best interest? That’s a question you should be asking yourself as an American citizen—and as a voter—as Election Day approaches.
How I wrote a horror novel called Revolutionary Ghosts
Or…
Can an ordinary teenager defeat the Headless Horseman, and a host of other vengeful spirits from America’s revolutionary past?
The big idea
I love history, and I love supernatural horror tales.“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was therefore always one of my favorite short stories. This classic tale by Washington Irving describes how a Hessian artillery officer terrorized the young American republic several decades after his death.
The Hessian was decapitated by a Continental Army cannonball at the Battle of White Plains, New York, on October 28, 1776. According to some historical accounts, a Hessian artillery officer really did meet such an end at the Battle of White Plains. I’ve read several books about warfare in the 1700s and through the Age of Napoleon. Armies in those days obviously did not have access to machine guns, flamethrowers, and the like. But those 18th-century cannons could inflict some horrific forms of death, decapitation among them.
I was first exposed to the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” via the 1949 Disney film of the same name. The Disney adaptation was already close to 30 years old, but still popular, when I saw it as a kid sometime during the 1970s.
Headless Horsemen from around the world
While doing a bit of research for Revolutionary Ghosts, I discovered that the Headless Horseman is a folklore motif that reappears in various cultures throughout the world.
In Irish folklore, the dullahan or dulachán (“dark man”) is a headless, demonic fairy that rides a horse through the countryside at night. The dullahan carries his head under his arm. When the dullahan stops riding, someone dies.
Scottish folklore includes a tale about a headless horseman named Ewen. Ewen wasbeheaded when he lost a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. His death prevented him from becoming a chieftain. He roams the hills at night, seeking to reclaim his right to rule.
Finally, in English folklore, there is the 14th century epic poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. After Gawain kills the green knight in living form (by beheading him) the knight lifts his head, rides off, and challenges Gawain to a rematch the following year.
But Revolutionary Ghosts is focused on the Headless Horseman of American lore: the headless horseman who chased Ichabod Crane through the New York countryside in the mid-1790s.
The Headless Horseman isn’t the only historical spirit to stir up trouble in the novel. John André, the executed British spy, makes an appearance, too. (John André was a real historical figure.)
I also created the character of Marie Trumbull, a Loyalist whom the Continental Army sentenced to death for betraying her country’s secrets to the British. But Marie managed to slit her own throat while still in her cell, thereby cheating the hangman. Marie Trumbull was a dark-haired beauty in life. In death, she appears as a desiccated, reanimated corpse. She carries the blade that she used to take her own life, all those years ago.
Oh, and Revolutionary Ghosts also has an army of spectral Hessian soldiers. I had a lot of fun with them!
The Spirit of ’76
Most of the novel is set in the summer of 1976. An Ohio teenager, Steve Wagner, begins to sense that something strange is going on near his home. There are slime-covered hoofprints in the grass. There are unusual sounds on the road at night. People are disappearing.
Steve gradually comes to an awareness of what is going on….But can he convince anyone else, and stop the Headless Horseman, before it’s too late?
I decided to set the novel in 1976 for a number of reasons. First of all, this was the year of the American Bicentennial. The “Spirit of ’76 was everywhere in 1976. That created an obvious tie-in with the American Revolution.
Nineteen seventy-six was also a year in which Vietnam, Watergate, and the turmoil of the 1960s were all recent memories. The mid-1970s were a time of national anxiety and pessimism (kind of like now). The economy was not good. This was the era of energy crises and stagflation.
Reading the reader reviews of Revolutionary Ghosts, I am flattered to get appreciative remarks from people who were themselves about the same age as the main character in 1976:
“…I am 62 years old now and 1976 being the year I graduated high school, I remember it pretty well. Everything the main character mentions (except the ghostly stuff), I lived through and remember. So that was an added bonus for me.”
“I’m 2 years younger than the main character so I could really relate to almost every thing about him.”
I’m actually a bit younger than the main character. In 1976 I was eight years old. But as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m nostalgic by nature. I haven’t forgotten the 1970s or the 1980s, because I still spend a lot of time in those decades.
If you like the 1970s, you’ll find plenty of nostalgic nuggets in Revolutionary Ghosts, like Bicentennial Quarters, and the McDonald’s Arctic Orange Shakes of 1976.
***
Also, there’s something spooky about the past, just because it is the past. As L.P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
For me, 1976 is a year I can clearly remember. And yet—it is shrouded in a certain haziness. There wasn’t nearly as much technology. Many aspects of daily life were more “primitive” then.
It isn’t at all difficult to believe that during that long-ago summer, the Headless Horseman might have come back from the dead to terrorize the American heartland…
