Hello Gerard. It’s hard for my psyche and skin not to cringe in something akin to ‘horror’ the more I read and learn about everyday American life. I’ll be reading your 10o letters to Hilary, and anything else of yours I might find too. There is little of value to glean these days from journslism and watching the Presidential campaign through European English media is to watch a three-ring circus in what increasingly feels like the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s psycho ward. I’ve wondered about the aspiration of religious spires too, not least a curiosity piqued in turn by a decade long exposure to the rituals of Italian Catholicism by Italians. As an outsider, observance, in its practical context, has brought me to consider that perspective, like denial is arbitrary and on the appropriation scale, a thing of real beauty when it specialises in the ideology of yours or mine and has pretty little to do with humanism, even less with God, I suspect. It seems to me, the act of taking on the point of view of the ‘other’ demands the one act of selflessness of which we seem increasingly incapable — acknowledging dignity and in the expression thereof exposing an ioata of real, not religious ‘compassion’. It involves a basic act of fundamental sensibility and when any state regards itself as a business first and country second, dignity will head up the redundancy list. I admire your strength and courage and appreciate the chance to learn from you about life inside the totalitarian kitsch (Kundera) sold as the proverbial American Dream, so thank you.