Peter McMillan

The theme of the writings presented in this collection is history, sometimes fictions but mostly opinions based on the interpretation of facts—real events, real people, real places and ‘real’ ideas. Included in this volume are 30 short pieces—six flash fictions and 24 nonfictions. (The last three are new in this newly expanded edition.) The nonfictional writing consists of book reviews along with a few letters to North American political leaders, which, realistically speaking, may have only ever been read by a junior staffer. The subject matter of the nonfiction is largely political and the topics broadly fall under the category of governance and freedom within the state and sovereignty in international relations. There is a fair bit of history and political theory in the books as well as in the reviews. Their accounts and explanations are shaped by facts and opinions, and, of course, values. The same applies to the reviews. Writers from every age have thought of theirs as something special in the history of humanity. We’re no less presumptuous. To hear us go on about it, one would think that most human history of any consequence has been recorded from the modern era. What we judge important now may be reassessed hundreds of years from now. We’ll never know how. What we do have are artifacts that give some sense of what some people were thinking and doing during our time. To the future ‘us’, it may be laughable, grotesque or—pity the age—viewed with envy. Below the level of political labels, there lies something much more fundamental to our species. In Rebellion, Robert Kagan expresses this pithily: “Once they [immigrants] attain these goals, however, their fervor for liberalism has often faded. “I’ve got mine” is among the most basic of human sentiments.” Not for a minute do I believe Kagan’s remarks to be limited to newly immigrated folks. He’s talking about us, our kind, our species. And as you read these authors’ works for yourself, you will find that there are many other ‘sentiments’ that we have in common irrespective of race, religion, language and a host of other identity markers. _____ This collection does not presume to be a definitive, comprehensive or even necessarily representative body of artifacts. It is an eclectic accumulation of interpretations of how certain people live and think in this part of the world—North America—at this time as collected by a curator of no particular renown. And with the exception of a short story by Italo Calvino and a sociopolitical treatise by Hannah Arendt, that time is the early 21st century. A list of the titles and authors of the texts reviewed follows on the next page. It is hoped that this will be helpful to the reader in choosing what, if anything, to read beyond this Introduction. The author’s short fictions in Part One constitute his contribution.

Books like Artifacts of a Troubled and Troublesome Species

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