The monuments in Washington DC present our great past leaders as larger than life.  I’ve always been skeptical that great leaders shape history and have leaned towards the view that much of history was inevitable.  Recent events have gotten me question this view.  What if we had a completely incompetent president during the Civil War?  Counterfactuals are always tough because it’s hard to account for all the variables.  If a weak and ineffectual President was elected instead of Lincoln, the Civil War would have been later.  One of the facts I forgot from high school history and re-learned later was that South Carolina announced its succession before Lincoln even took the oath of office.

Competent leadership matter.  So I’m now thinking we should grateful that we had Lincoln and FDR when we needed them because a national crisis with a terrible president results in an unnecessary disaster.

Thomas Jefferson was incredibly important as a founding father of the country. Hamilton is preeminent now in the public consciousness due to the hit musical but Jefferson was at least as important in shaping the country. Over the years, my view of Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian society has dimmed but that they may not be fair since today’s agrarian culture is profoundly anti-science and anti-intellectual which certainly wasn’t what Jefferson was envisioning. And Jefferson was also flawed particularly around the issue of slavery and his own conduct with the enslaved persons he owned. A combination of greatness and flaws is so far removed from our political leadership today which is quite depressing.

I wasn’t in a mood for a pretty picture today. The dreadful CDC model projecting 2500+ deaths from COVID-19 per day, combined with the news that many states are easing their stay-at-home restrictions is too depressing. May this picture remind us that America has made it through dark days before and that poor leadership was replaced with strong leaders who led the country out of darkness.

The moniker “City of Light” conjures up romantic notions of how Paris is lit up at night. The origin of the nickname is the the 17th Century when lanterns were hung in the city at night to illuminate the streets in an effort to fight crime.

Alcázar of Seville is still an active Royale place. It has long history and served at as the residence of caliphs when Islamic caliphates ruled southern Spain. Fun fact: The Alcázar was used as Dorne’s palace in Game of Thrones.

As I wandering around the Alcázar of Seville, I came across this most extraordinary room. The light is amazing in this basement chamber.