Lafayette Lee

“No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” ― Rudyard Kipling In Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 drama, Any Number Can Play, Clark Gable stars as Charley Kyng, a successful casino owner who finds himself on the verge of ruin as his personal and professional life unravels. Through a series of setbacks, Charley realizes his ambition is a double-edged sword and the underground empire he has painstakingly built over the years will cost him his health and family.

This week I wrote some thoughts on the recent midterm elections for IM-1776, and offered advice to the opposition party on where it should focus its immediate energies. “Knives Out For America First” An excerpt: While the divide between our nation’s elites and the political opposition’s rank-and-file is riven with many fault lines, “free and fair” elections are now the epicenter of the conflict; defeat here will mean defeat everywhere.

Yesterday I wrote a tribute to Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023) for IM-1776. He was was our greatest living novelist and will be remembered with the likes of Melville and Faulkner as the chief American mythmaker of his time. An excerpt: After passing through a ghostly Southern underworld, where Faulkner was his Virgil, McCarthy settles into his own voice. Everything after his first four novels is clean and crisp, like a canyon wind that sears your throat.