With all the talk of red states and blue states and regional politics, we live in a time where we often view anything not connected to us as “other.” But, oddly, at least in the Eastern United States, we have been connected across the 40th parallel by a single mountain range—the Appalachians—that has served for eons as a path not just for the hikers we see along Route 7 in the Berkshires, but by the flora and fauna that have travelled this same pathway.
Critical reviews of “A Higher Loyalty” are easy to find. Instead, I’m going to offer some excerpts many critics have neglected—reminiscences that reveal why James Comey has become the man he is, providing perspective about why he responded the way he did to the Clinton email investigation and the improper demands of Donald Trump.
It is a sad commentary on our society — and even our own little neighborhood here in the Berkshires — that a local woman who felt strongly enough about the offensiveness of Charlie Hebdo’s mockery of Islam to write about it for EdgeWise, still felt she could not risk attaching her name and face to her opinions.
It’s not so comfortable to recognize the ways in which all of us are implicated in the murderous events unfolding before our shocked and horrified gaze. As always, it helps to follow the money. If we’re honest, we have to admit that the money trail leads straight from our cars’ gasoline tanks to the terrorists blowing up themselves and others in the name of Allah.
Monument Mountain Regional High School junior Jacob Robbins was in preschool when al-Qaeda terrorists flew two commandeered aircraft into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, toppling the towers and killing more than 3,000. He recently visited the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City to find connections to a day he doesn't remember.
Why is it we always know best? Especially when we know nothing. Why? Because we are Americans? Because we know best? That, of course, is something Republicans and Democrats can always agree upon. We not only know best, but are the best.
