The fire began at 6:30 p.m., Paris local time, on Monday, April 15, 2019. An hour later, people, who watched from a distance, stared in horror as the top portion of the 300 foot spire broke off and crashed down through the cathedral’s roof.

     Some 400 firefighters, working from the inside, extinguished the last of the flames by 3:40 a.m., on Tuesday, by pointing low-pressure water hoses at the flames, to minimize damage to the contents, pulling thousands of gallons of water from the Seine River via a pump boat.

     At the same time, some 100 policemen and municipal workers formed a human chain and passed objects from inside to outside, in a valiant effort to preserve them.

     The next morning authorities assessed the damage. The wooden-beamed lattice work inside the attic that ran the length of the cathedral was destroyed, but the twin bell towers at the west end stood intact, as did the organ’s 8,000 pipes, and the rose-tinted stained glass windows.

     On Wednesday, April 17, President Emmanuel Macron promised the French people that the state would rebuild the cathedral in five years.

     The first steps were to clear out the charred beams and the scorched limestones, secure the interior from the elements by a massive tarpaulin stretched over scaffolding, and work to ensure that the 28 flying buttresses that supported the exterior walls would stand and not collapse.

     Once workers completed the clean-up, officials split the reconstruction work into 140 lots and requested bids. They selected some 250 businesses.

     About 2000 oaks trees from across France were selected, cut down, dried, and transported to sawmills, where carpenters began to cut, hew, and assemble them into rafters for the attic.

     Blacksmiths forged certain tools that the carpenters were required to use—two-man crosscut saws, broadaxes, etc.—the same tools that medieval workers used on the original attic.

     Some 45,000 cubic feet of stone was transported to the site to rebuild the collapsed vaults.    

     On December 7, 2024, President Macron opened the doors of the re-created cathedral.

     It is a miracle that the work was finished in five and a half years, just days before Christmas. 

     Builders began work on Notre Dame in 1163 A.D., and the work lasted for at least 180 years. 

     In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself emperor of France inside Notre Dame. 

     In the 19th century, the French writer, Victor Hugo, built his fictional tale, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” around Quasimodo, a bell-ringer in the towers. 

     In 1944, Notre Dame hosted Charles de Gaulle for France’s liberation from the Nazi’s.

     There are those who insist upon a stupendous worship venue, like Notre Dame, massive, elaborate, and awe-inspiring. Others, including the 17th-century Puritans, argued for simplicity, and a reserved sanctuary, without stained-glass windows, statues, paintings, vestments, etc. 

     The Friends, aka the Quakers, are more extreme. They insist upon a barren meeting house, with wooden benches, no focal points, like altars or pulpits. “Their meeting houses often resemble local residential buildings and avoid ornamentation, spires, and steeples.”

     Which kind of worship venue is correct? The answer depends upon a person’s preference. I like a pipe organ, a piano, a choir, an altar, a pulpit, and stained glass windows. Others may not.

     Yet, one can argue for simplicity by reading Luke 2.

     Shepherds at night on a rocky hillside, an angel, a heavenly choir sings, “Glory to God in the highest. Peace on earth. Goodwill to all men.” The shepherds find the child in Bethlehem lying in a manger, or a feed trough. Sheep, shepherds, a stable, a manger, not a refined venue.

     One can argue for the opposite by reading Matthew 2. That writer mentions three Magi from the East bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, three of life’s finer things. 

     Whichever venue you prefer, with ornamentation or without, embellished or stark, enjoy the Christmas season. Peace to my readers.

Fintan O’Toole, a writer for “The New York Review of Books,” wrote in his July 18, 2024 column, that, “Being close to Trump was like being friends with a hurricane.” O’Toole lists a series of people’s names who worked for Trump, believed him, and then faced legal troubles.  

     Rudy Giuliani appeared in court in New York City, on Tuesday, November 26, 2024, because he failed to turn over all his assets to the court.

     His crime: he defamed two election workers in the state of Georgia, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, accusing them of election fraud in the 2020 election in that state. The pair took Giuliani to court, and a judge awarded them $148 million, reduced later to $146 million.

     Giuliani pleaded with the judge, “I have no car, no credit card, no cash. They have put stop orders on my business accounts, and I can’t pay my bills.” The judge was less than sympathetic.

     It gets worse. In July, officials disbarred Giuliani in the State of New York, and in September, Washington D.C. did the same. Thus, Giuliani has lost his means to a livelihood. 

     In November of 2018, Michael Cohen, Trump’s long-time attorney, pleaded guilty to lying to a Congressional committee. In December that year, a judge sentenced Cohen to three years in a federal prison. In all, he served thirteen and a half months, plus one and a half years at home. 

     Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, sat in prison twice.

     On August 18, 2022, Weisselberg pleaded guilty to 15 felony counts of evading $344,745 in taxes over fifteen years. He was required to pay back “almost $2 million in back taxes, interest, and penalties, without any right to appeal.” In 2023, he served 100 days in prison.   

    The second time, in 2024, Weisselberg served five months in prison, on Riker’s Island, for two counts of perjury, lying under oath, during Donald Trump’s civil business fraud trial.

     Steve Bannon was released from prison on October 29, 2024, “after serving a four-month sentence for defying a subpoena in Congress’s investigation into the attack on the Capitol.” 

     Bannon’s next trial is now set for February 2025, this time for wire fraud and money laundering related to his scheme to raise funds for a charity, “We Build the Wall.” He and his cohorts raised $25 million but retained hundreds of thousands of dollars for themselves.

     On the final day of Trump’s presidency, in January 2021, he pardoned Bannon of federal crimes, but Bannon faces state charges for the same crimes.

     After almost four years, 944 defendants have had their cases adjudicated and received sentences for their criminal activity on January 6, 2021. About 562 have received prison sentences. The Justice Department continues to arrest and prosecute attackers, once identified. 

     On November 8, 2024, two Chicago men, Michael Mollo Jr., and Emil Kozeluh, were arrested for their participation in the criminal attack upon the Capitol Building.

     Certain of Trump’s closest advisors in the White House have either faced prosecution or still may: Mark Meadows, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulus, Roger Stone, Peter Navarro, and Sidney Powell.

     On November 12, 2024, the Supreme Court rejected a plea from Mark Meadows to move his Fulton County, Georgia election interference prosecution to a federal court.

     Certain of Trump’s lawyers have faced indictment for their words and actions over the 2020 election: Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Cheseboro, Jeffrey Clark, and John Eastman. 

     Fintan O’Toole said, “each paid legal bills and will always bear the stamp of criminality.”

     Certain of Trump’s enablers escaped legal trouble: Mike Pence, William Barr, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, John Kelley, Chris Christie, and Mick Mulvaney. Yet, O’Toole said, each had to “face Trump’s sadistic ingratitude.”

     O’Toole writes, “The ruler’s ultimate expression of power is the destruction of those on whom he has relied most, the ones who have been such good servants.” 

     A quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, “The Great Gatsby,” sums it up. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.” 

Strange how certain books captivate my interest, others not as much. I find myself going back again and again to reread Mark Forsyth’s 2013 book, “The Elements of Eloquence.”

     In Forsyth’s “Preface,” he writes, “Shakespeare was not a genius. He was the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. Instead, he learned rhetorical techniques and tricks.”

     Of Shakespeare’s first plays—“Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “Titus Andronicus,” and “Henry VI, Part 1”—Forsyth says, “there is not a single memorable line in them.” But the young poet / playwright kept learning, and transformed himself into a word craftsman.

     Forsyth argues that Shakespeare’s first memorable line was from “Henry VI, Part 2,” when one peasant says to another, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Then in “Henry VI, Part 3,” a character says, “I can smile, and murder while I smile,” an example of anastrophe.

     In each additional play, Shakespeare learned to lay down a series of thought-provoking lines. In “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Julius Caesar,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Hamlet,” and “Romeo and Juliet,” he chocked each full of wonderful lines.

     A wit once called those illuminating lines, “Jewels in your mouth.”

     A favorite of mine is found in “Julius Caesar,” “O that a man might know the end of this day’s business, ere it come, but it sufficeth that it will end and then the end is known.” 

     Forsyth writes a series of quick chapters, 39 in all, and in each he describes a single rhetorical trick. The first chapter he entitles “Alliteration,” and then says, “Nobody knows why we love to hear words that begin with the same letter, but we do.”

     For example, “Full fathom five thy father lies,” comes from “The Tempest,” and, “The barge she sat like a burnished throne, Burned on the water,” from “Antony and Cleopatra.”

     In recent years, people would say, “ban the bomb,” “power to the people,” “put a tiger in your tank,” “it’s enough to get your goat,” “cool as a cucumber,” and “dead as a doornail.” 

     On page 12, Forsyth makes a startling statement. “You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it’s much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.”

     “Alliteration is the simplest way to turn a memorable phrase.”

     In chapter 16, Forsyth considers the “Tricolon.” Three is a magic number. “Eat, drink, and be merry.” “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” “Truth, justice, and the American way.” “Faith, hope, and love.” “Friends, Romans, countrymen.” “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

     Not one, not two, and not four, but three items points to completeness.  

     In chapter 21, Forsyth explains that Shakespeare surrendered to iambic pentameter, what Forsyth calls, “the Rolls-Royce of verse forms,” or “the king of English verse forms.”

     An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, “te-TUM.” A series of five iambs in a row, a single line, is a pentameter: te-TUM, te-TUM, te-TUM, te-TUM, te-TUM.

     Two examples: “If music be the food of love, play on,” from “Twelfth Night,” and “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” from “Hamlet.” Each line contains just ten syllables.

     Tuesday of this week, November 19, marked the 161st anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s delivery of his address at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

     I wonder, how did Lincoln learn to write like that? Brief, to the point, only 272 words, inspirational, motivating. Lincoln read a lot, most often Shakespeare’s tragedies. He read and re-read “Macbeth” throughout his life, often aloud to others whom he forced to listen.

     John Hay said of Lincoln, “He read Shakespeare more than all the other writers together.”

     Near the end of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln tried his hand at the elements of eloquence when he tied alliteration to a tricolon, “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” 

Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was elected President of the United States of America on November 6, 1860, for a four-year term. One year later, on November 6, 1861, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was elected President of the Confederate States of America for a six-year term. 

     Between those two dates, eleven states, each in the south, voted to secede from the Union and form their own government, the Confederates States of America. 

     That division between north and south over the issue of slavery had widened into a chasm that neither side could bridge. It was Lincoln’s victory that prompted the southern states to secede. The southerners feared that Lincoln would terminate slavery, their way of life.

     Jefferson Davis was inaugurated on February 22, 1862, George Washington’s birthday, in Montgomery, Alabama. Some 10,000 people came out to witness the inauguration.

     Jefferson Davis spoke that day and said,

    “I enter upon the duties of the office to which I have been chosen with the hope that the beginning of our career as a Confederacy may not be obstructed by hostile opposition to our enjoyment of the separate existence and independence which we have asserted, and, with the blessing of Providence, intend to maintain.”

     That hope had already been dashed ten months before, on April 12-13, 1861, when southern canons had fired upon Fort Sumter, and war came upon the south and Jefferson Davis.

     That evening after his inauguration, Davis wrote to his wife, Varina, and said,

     “The audience was large and brilliant. Upon my weary heart were showered smiles, plaudits, and flowers; but beyond them, I saw troubles and thorns innumerable. 

     “We are without machinery, without means, and threatened by a powerful opposition; but I do not despond, and will not shrink from the task imposed upon me. As soon as I can call an hour my own, I will look for a house and write you more fully.”

     Three years later, on May 5, 1865, Jefferson Davis met with his cabinet in Georgia and dissolved the Confederate government. He had no more troops or cannons to advance the fight.

     Secession had not proved the panacea that the southern states had anticipated, had hoped for. 

    Instead, it ushered into their towns and cities an unimaginable and vicious war, incredible destruction of property, immense bloodshed, and thousands of deaths of young southern boys.

    Between November 6, 1860, and November 5, 2024, lies 164 years of relative peace between the states. No civil wars. Yet, today there is no shortage of opinion writers who warn readers and caution the wiser sorts that the potential for strife exists, and it is alarming.

     In the “New York Review of Books,” dated November 7, 2024, two writers—Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson—wrote the following.

     “Two years ago, when the U.S. was still convulsed by January 6, we suggested that the possibility of spiraling violence verging on civil war warranted serious consideration. It remains imprudent to dismiss it. MAGA fever has hardly broken.”

     “Today the U.S. political situation radiates civil instability.”

     “Many Republicans refuse to see January 6 even as a contravention of American constitutional democracy, let alone as an insurrection, characterizing it as as exercise of free speech that got a little out of hand.”

     “The rhetoric of his campaign has been grossly autocratic and anti-constitutional, and he has demonstrated clear intent to rally willing Republican state election officials to refuse to certify the vote.”

     When I wrote this column on Sunday, November 3, I did not know the election’s outcome.

     When you, my friends and readers, read these words, the American electorate may have voted into the Oval Office either a former President, or the current Vice-President.

     Secession fever in 1860-1861, and MAGA fever in 2024.

     I take hope that someday in the future MAGA fever will break. Maybe not now but someday.

Allen Guelzo, history professor at Princeton, tells a story about Lincoln that he included in his recent book, “Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment.” 

     Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862, one and a half years into the Civil War. He justified his Proclamation out of “military necessity.” Eleven states of the Union had rebelled and threatened the Federal Government’s very existence.

     Freeing slaves in the Confederacy, Lincoln argued, would harm those rebellious states’ ability to further prosecute the war against the Union. Democracy was under attack. He had to act.  

    Yet, Lincoln chose to limit his Emancipation Proclamation’s scope. 

     For example, Lincoln chose not to set the slaves free who were living in Tennessee, a Confederate state then under the Union army’s control. There was no “military necessity” there.

     In addition, Lincoln did not free slaves in Virginia’s forty-eight western counties that made up the new state of West Virginia that had chosen to remain inside the Union.

     Lincoln did not free twelve parishes in Louisiana, also under the Federal army’s control.

     Finally, Lincoln did not free slaves in the pro-slavery states that had chosen to remain within the Union: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.

     Some disagreed and argued that Lincoln should free all slaves wherever they lived in all states, but Lincoln refused. He dared not to step outside the Constitution and the law.  

     Salmon Chase, Lincoln’s Secretary of Treasury, was one who urged Lincoln to cast away his justification by “military necessity” and to free all slaves now.

     Lincoln replied to Salmon Chase on September 2, 1863. In his letter, Lincoln wrote,

     “The original proclamation has no constitutional or legal justification, except as a military measure. If I take the step, without the argument of military necessity, it might be politically expedient and morally right.

     “Would I not thus give up all footing upon constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the ‘boundless field of absolutism?’”

     Lincoln’s last words—“the boundless field of absolutism”—was a quote that Lincoln had lifted from one of Jefferson’s letters from the 1820’s. The word “absolutism” refers to a monarch, a king, an autocrat, or a tyrant, someone who lives outside the law, unchecked and unrestrained.

     On January 6, 2021, a guy named Kevin Seefried, then 51 years old, from Delaware, a former slave state but not one in the Confederacy, paraded a Confederate flag throughout the Capitol.

      Two years later, on February 9, 2023, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, told Seefried that his actions that day with that flag were “shocking,” and “outrageous.”

     “McFadden criticized Seefried for jabbing the flagpole at a black U.S. Capitol Police officer.” The judge looked at Seefried and said, “I hope you realize how offensive it is.”

     Seefried was convicted on five charges, including obstruction of an official proceeding—the joint session of Congress that was working to certify the Electoral College vote that day. Judge McFadden sentenced Kevin Seefried to three years in prison. 

     Last week, I took a few days off from work and flew to Charleston, South Carolina. I wanted to see Fort Sumter, the site of the Civil War’s first battle. The ferry ride to the small island in Charleston’s harbor lasted thirty minutes. I walked about the grounds for the next forty minutes.

     A flagpole stands in the center of the island, the island’s highest point. I looked up and atop the pole I saw whipping in the wind a massive United States flag, the stars and stripes forever, hovering over Fort Sumter.