Andrew Clavin critiques U.S. Syria policy as weak, contrasting it with Reformation Day’s legacy—Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, the printing press’s role in spreading vernacular Bibles (risking heresy like Tyndale’s execution), and modernity’s accessibility to scripture via apps. He links ISIS’s rejection of women’s rights, art, and technology to a broader anti-modernity crusade, comparing it to Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, which ended with the Peace of Westphalia’s secular governance. While citing Malala Yousafzai’s activism as hope for an Islamic Reformation, Clavin questions whether Islam can reform without betraying its violent verses, leaving Ayan Hirsi Ali’s call unanswered amid Syria’s chaos and Putin’s intervention. [Automatically generated summary]
I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria.
No American boots on the ground in Syria.
This is disgraceful.
The American president is sending our troops into Syria without their boots.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Claven Show.
All right.
You know what I love?
I love modern technology.
I am ready now to run away and marry modern technology and carry it off to my mountain fastness.
I think this is, I mean, I've been thinking about this all weekend.
There are certain things in the world that are, that are terrific.
They're wonderful twice.
They're wonderful first because they're there.
And then it's wonderful when you think about it that anybody would just make them, that anybody would do them.
I mean, I've always, not to get too personal, but I've always felt this way about women's makeup and pretty clothes, you know.
There's this short story.
It's a good short story, but it has the greatest title in the world.
The title is Girls in Their Summer Dresses.
And every guy who hears that title knows exactly what it's about.
Exactly, they all go like, oh yeah, girls in their summer dresses.
And it's like, when you see that, it's wonderful in itself.
And it's also wonderful that girls do that, you know, that they go in and they dress like that and they make themselves up and the world is then better.
And you're like, oh, thank you.
This is like a good thing that you did.
I mean, this is my thing about the arts in general.
This weekend, my wife and I went to a play at the Geffen Playhouse here in LA.
The play was called Guards at the Taj.
And there's this moment when you're watching a play, when you're watching anything, when suddenly you realize, I'm always thinking about the writer because I'm a writer and I'm thinking, ooh, this guy's got this.
This is going to be good.
And it's not, I mean, a play, this was a pretty serious, interesting play, but it's not just some serious, interesting stuff.
I mean, I'm a big fan of thrillers and suspense and action stories.
And I remember the first time I saw Die Hard.
And remember that the terrorists came into the building and Bruce Willis is barefoot and he's alone, but he's got a gun and he's got these skills.
And I just remember thinking, the minute that happened, it's got to be the first 10 minutes of the picture.
I just remember thinking, ooh, that's good.
That's that.
They obviously know what they're doing.
I mean, Mel Gibson, lethal weapon, the same thing where you realize he jumps off the building and you realize, I get it, he's so nuts, he's a lethal weapon, which is probably true of him in real life too.
But like, you know, you just think this is good.
And I remember we were sitting in this play, Guards at the Taj, it's called, Guards at the Taj.
And I just remember this moment when I suddenly thought, and it takes a little while longer because it was a deep play, more complex piece of machinery, more things that could go wrong.
And after about half an hour, I thought, no, this guy has got this.
This is good.
And suddenly I just had this moment when I realized how amazing it is that there was some guy backstage who had turned this piece of wood that was a stage into a medieval Indian torture chamber with just incredible gore.
You were there.
And then there were these actors.
They had to pretend they were seeing the Taj Mahal for the first time.
And they're looking at us.
They're looking out at the audience.
And their eyes filled with tears of awe.
And I just thought, like, you know, that's, I mean, I couldn't do that.
Reformation Day Revelations00:15:20
Could you do that?
You know, it's like, it was just an amazing thing.
And it's just a spectacular thing that somebody took the time to learn how to do that and then makes the world better.
You know, that's a better place.
So technology, this is what I'm talking about, technology.
You just get back to why I love technology and why.
Consider this for a minute.
Saturday, which some of you may have thought was Halloween, was actually Reformation Day.
Did anybody know this but me?
You did.
Okay, there you go.
This is the day that commemorates the day that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the wall of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany.
And, you know, they were selling, the Pope had decided to sell indulgences to finance the building of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
And, you know, this is not to knock the cap.
You know, whenever people tell stories like this, they wind up kind of bashing the Catholic Church, the medieval Catholic Church.
But just always remember that many of the things that you love in life come from the medieval Catholic Church, like marriage, you know, things like chivalry, the code of chivalry was actually just written.
The church hired writers to create the code of chivalry because real knights were such idiots and were always fighting with each other that they developed this code.
So the whole idea of how powerful people should treat the weak, how men, gentlemen would treat women, how a knight treated a lady, you know, that all comes from the Catholic Church so much.
And even, you know, to this day, when the USSR fell, the Catholic Church was a main force of this.
So I'm not bashing the church, but they were powerful.
All powerful institutions get corrupt.
And they were selling indulgences.
So you paid to get yourself or somebody you loved out of purgatory where he was being punished for his sins.
And if you paid the church money, they then got out of purgatory faster and got to heaven faster.
And Martin Luther was a monk and he was like, what?
What?
So he wrote these theses, saying this shouldn't happen, and he nailed them up on the church.
And it wasn't supposed to start this revolution, but it did because the printing press had been invented and the ideas spread really fast.
And so it became this big deal.
Part of this Reformation, okay, that people were celebrating on October 31st while you were out dressing up and eating candy.
We serious people were thinking about this.
No, I wasn't.
But, you know.
Part of this was translating the Bible into the vernacular because the church had been very reticent to do that, to translate the Bible.
The church had kind of posed itself between people and God.
And your idea of what was in the Bible was not important.
It wasn't what the church was telling you, the Bible said.
And so Martin Luther translated it into German, but other people translated it.
And it was dangerous stuff.
I mean, I don't think anyone was actually ever killed specifically for translating the Bible, but people who translated the Bible were killed.
And it was part of a complex of the things that they were charged with.
William Tyndale, who published, who translated one of the great English Bibles before the King James, was put to death for heresy.
And that was part of the complex of the things that he did.
Okay, so think about that for a minute, right?
This morning, every morning, the first thing I do when I wake up after saying hello to my wife is I reach out for my iPad and I press this big button, right, that even I know how to use.
Like I press this big button and there's this thing, this little square that says the Holy Bible, right?
And I touch this thing.
It's called the U version.
Let's give them credit for the app because it's one of the great apps of all time.
I mean, you press this thing and you not only get the Holy Bible, you get like dozens of translations of the Bible, dozens of languages.
There are languages on this thing that I have never heard of.
I mean, there's not just one or two languages.
There's like 20 languages I've never heard of.
I don't know where they speak them.
But there's the Bible.
It's all translated right there in front of you.
And just the other day I opened the Bible, I got this quote.
So I'm just pressing on this button, right?
I get this quote, David is talking to God, and he says to God, with the merciful, this just pops up.
This is the verse of the day on this Bible app, right?
With the merciful, you show yourself merciful.
With the blameless man, you show yourself blameless.
With the purified, you show yourself pure.
And with the crooked, you make yourself seem tortuous, which means twisted.
So with the crooked, you make yourself seem crooked.
I'm like, dude, That's profound.
I mean, here's this thing coming over your iPad, and it's just the first thing you see in the morning.
And that's a profound thought.
And all through the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, there are these scenes where that is shown to be true, that people see, they only see God clearly when they become more like him, basically.
And the less they are, and there's this interchange.
You know, people forget this.
They think of the Old Testament God as being very stern and judgmental, but there's this whole interplay.
Right after God goes and talks to Abraham in the Bible, there's this scene where God decides he's going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.
And God goes to look at Sodom and Gomorrah to see if there's anybody worth saving.
And Abraham says to him, and this is just right after Abraham has found God.
Abraham says to him, are you going to kill the righteous people just because there are some unrighteous people in the city?
What if there are 50 righteous people?
And God says, all right, well, I'll save the city if there are 50 righteous people.
And Abraham says, what if there are 45 righteous people?
And God says, two chapters ago, I made you a Jew and already you're negotiating with me?
All right, I made that part up.
I'm writing that part of the Bible.
But there's this interplay between these two characters, God and Abraham, where God appears to, the more mercy Abraham has, the more mercy God reveals in himself, and the more justice, the more justice, and so on.
All right.
So this is what I'm thinking about all week in this, how amazing it is.
You know why ISIS cuts off people's heads?
I've read a lot of articles about this.
I mean, there have been articles in serious journals.
The New York Times had an article, I think it was the Times, had an article about it.
What the symbolism of this is and what the tradition of it is and all this.
ISIS cuts off people's heads because that's the part of people they hate.
ISIS, these are the guys who don't want women to put on makeup and summer dresses.
These are the guys who don't want there to be art and plays and movies that tell us about ourselves and question life and bring our imaginations into the world.
And these are the guys who don't want there to be technology where the word of God is delivered into your house so you can make up your own mind.
If these guys could figure out how to cut off your head and keep you alive, they would do it.
That to them would be the perfect world, a world of people without heads.
In fact, that's what their version of Islam is.
It's a way of creating people who have no heads.
It's a way of creating people who don't think, don't dream, don't aspire, don't question, don't do any of these things.
So here's an article that was in the Wall Street Journal, which I pull up on my Wall Street Journal app.
I will say that the Wall Street Journal in its dead tree form is delivered to my house by a presumably illegal alien who looks like he's about 12 years old.
He always brings the Wall Street Journal.
Time Warner, not so much.
So I have a lot of respect for the kid.
But anyway, here's an article that's talking about Luther's contribution.
It's talking about Reformation Day.
And he says, Luther's contribution to the modern world is a doctrine of freedom of conscience rooted in a religious view of human nature and the nature of belief.
For Luther, coercion produced hypocrisy, not piety.
He says, Martin Luther wrote, here God's word must strive in the human heart.
If that does not accomplish the end, it will remain unaccomplished, though secular power, through secular power, though secular power fill the world with blood.
All right, now here's where this guy goes with this, all right?
Hence the question, given the failed revolution of the Arab Spring, can Islam undergo a similar reformation?
One hopeful sign is the outrage at the atrocities carried out under the banner of Islam.
Another is Pakistan's Malala Yusfasafsi, I'm sorry, the teenager shot in the head by the Taliban for campaigning that women be allowed to attend school.
She has launched an educational movement, call it a revolution for rationality, as Egalitarian as anything the Muslim world has seen in centuries.
The European states endured a long season of religious violence and political absolutism, drenching much of the continent in blood, until Luther's vision of human freedom quickened the conscience of the West.
In this sense, whatever our religious beliefs, we are all Protestants now.
Well, I don't know if we are all Protestants now.
That doesn't make much sense to me.
But what he's talking about, there was a war in the 17th century called the Thirty Years' War.
Nobody knows about this war anymore.
It's even hard to find books about it.
I have read two books about it, and I still know really, very, very little about the Thirty Years' War because it's really a complicated war and very hard to understand.
But basically, what was happening is the Holy Roman Empire, all these German states, started to come apart because the emperor was a Catholic, a devout Catholic, and there were all these little states with princes who were now Protestants.
And so there started to be all this tension between them.
And one day the emperor sent some of his delegates to Prague to sort of try and make peace, and they threw the delegates out the window.
And this was called the defenestration of Prague.
Defenestration is literally a word for throwing people out the window.
This is my second favorite name of an historical event, my first favorite name being the Diet of Worms.
But the defenestration of Prague started one of the bloodiest wars in history.
30 years, it laid these states waste.
I mean, people were dangling from the trees, hanging from the trees like fruit.
It was just an absolute bloodbath.
And the reason it was a bloodbath is once these states started to fight with each other, the powerful nations of Europe moved in to try and get position.
And they started supporting, you know, the Austrians and the French and the Swiss all started maneuvering for power.
Only the British stayed out of it.
I have a friend named Anatole Kaletsky, who's an economist in England and kind of on the left side, but still a capitalist.
So like every now and then, once I heard Rush reading one of his articles on the air, so I immediately wrote him a letter going, ha ha ha, you know, Rush is reading one of his articles, because I'm a very annoying friend, you know.
But he wrote a piece saying we should learn from the 30 years' war to stay out of the Middle East because England stayed out of this.
And after the 30 years' war laid Europe waste, England became the biggest financial power in Europe.
And so he was drawing that lesson from it.
Still, the comparison is with the Thirty Years' War.
What happened at the end of the 30 years' war is there were a series of treaties.
They were called the Peace of Westphalia.
I know you woke up this morning thinking, what about the Peace of Westphalia?
But in fact, it affects your life in a big, in a major way.
The Peace of Westphalia established the right of sovereign states to have their own religion and their own government.
So it created the world of nation-states that is actually falling apart around us today.
I mean, this is the world that as Americans, we all grew up in, thinking we are America, we are exceptional, we have a right to our own governance, we don't invade other countries simply because they're doing something we don't like.
All of that is the peace of Westphalia.
That's all of where that idea comes from.
When the people went out and protested George W. Bush's wars because it was none of our business, that was the peace of Westphalia.
That's what they were talking about.
And it is coming undone.
So the question is, what's going on in the Middle East?
Is this the Thirty Years' War?
Are we seeing, is what we're watching not these evil Islamists taking over the world, taking over Europe?
Is what we're seeing the beginning of their reformation in the same kind of bloodshed that our Reformation took place with?
Well, first of all, we just have to point out the fact that what's happening in the Middle East, Obama is now sending our troops in.
He's only sending in under 50, he said, and obviously he's sending them without boots.
And he's promised 16 times, 16 times he promised there would be no boots on the ground, but now he's sent in these people because there's nothing else he can do.
He has bungled this thing so badly that it's almost unbelievable.
I mean, he started out when he came into office right away.
He started to make peace with this tyrant, this mad tyrant in Assyria, Assad.
And George W. Bush had tried to do that and then realized the guy was a snake and pulled out.
Obama opened talks with him.
I think he even sent diplomats in to talk to him.
So when the peaceful protesters showed up at the Arab Spring asking for democracy, Obama and our old friend Hillary Clinton, who you may remember from our election, said, oh no, he's going to be a reformer.
Hillary Clinton said, some people think of Assad as a reformer.
I thought, who thinks of this butcher as a reformer?
But she said, he was.
So we were not going to do anything.
We didn't do anything.
And Syria devolved into civil war because Obama did nothing.
So then Obama said, well, we're going to bomb.
We're going to bomb the ISIS troops that are in there, you know, the real Islamists.
But it's not going to get any further than that.
So he came out and gave a speech.
You have the cut of Obama talking about how he's going to bomb things.
But that's it.
That's the end of it.
Many of you have asked, won't this put us on a slippery slope to another war?
One man wrote to me that we are still recovering from our involvement in Iraq.
A veteran put it more bluntly.
This nation is sick and tired of war.
My answer is simple.
I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria.
I will not pursue an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan.
I will not pursue a prolonged air campaign like Libya or Kosovo.
This would be a targeted strike to achieve a clear objective, deterring the use of chemical weapons and degrading Assad's capabilities.
Uh-huh.
The problem with Obama is nothing he says sticks to the wall, you know?
I mean, like, so he, now he says, you know, well, he bombs and nothing goes on, so he goes to the United Nations and says, I have to get together the international community, you know, because whenever Obama speaks, the international community says, did you hear something?
You know, I guess not, you know.
I mean, I don't even know if there is an international community.
He gets up at the United Nations and he says, you know, we all have to get together and do this.
Do Unto Others00:07:21
And Vladimir Putin stands up and basically says, I'm going in.
I'm going in there.
I'm going to start bombing people.
I'm going to send in tanks.
I'm going to unite the Shia forces in Iraq and Iran.
So help me, if you were watching MSNBC when this happened, I swear this is true.
Chris Matthews stood up and said, well, this is kind of like, you know, Roosevelt and Stalin joining together to fight Hitler.
But of course, Putin had no intention of fighting Assad.
He's promoting Assad.
He's backing Assad.
So now Obama is stuck.
And now this whole thing about boots on the ground is over.
Obama has to go in.
He has to go in.
Because Putin, remember, is defending a failed state.
He has no money.
His armies are falling apart.
Only Obama's weakness keeps Putin in power.
Only Obama's weakness keeps Russia looking as if it's a workable state.
So now Putin's going in there and coalescing this, basically this empire of evil in the Middle East.
He's shaping this empire of evil in the Middle East.
So Obama's going to send 50 of our guys in without boots to stop this.
Just play the Josh Earnest clip.
This is the White House spokesman telling us what's going to happen now.
I certainly wouldn't underestimate the capability and capacity of our U.S. Special Operations Forces to be an important force multiplier anywhere in the world they're deployed.
And the president does expect that they can have an impact in intensifying our strategy for building the capacity of local forces inside of Syria to take in the fight on the ground to ISIL in their own country.
So you can see that this is the 30 years' war.
This is the 30 years' war in terms of the major powers coming into this failed state, like the Holy Roman Empire was this failed state, and the Middle East is this failed state of loosely formed principalities that are coming apart in this civil war between one form of Islam and another.
It's very similar to the 30 Years' War.
And now these are guys are getting in there and they have to mix it up.
They really have no choice.
I mean, so many of these things in retrospect, people say you shouldn't have gotten involved, but you kind of have to.
What are you going to do?
You can't just sit there and let Putin make this coalition of evil.
You've got to stand up against ISIS and against Assad.
And Obama, who's always on the right side of history, has to come over to the real side of history where the rest of us live and do what has to be done.
And the minute he's gone, whether it's Hillary Clinton or a Republican, we're really going to have to take action and start to repair the terrible, terrible damage Obama has done in the Middle East.
So it is like the 30 Years' War.
The question is, are they going to come out of this with a reformed Islam?
Can they come out of this with a reformed Islam?
This is now kind of a meme, a thought that's going through some people who are hopeful on the other side, including Ayan Hirsi Ali.
Ayn Hersi Ali is one of my heroes.
I think she should be anybody's heroes.
They're always heroes.
They're always referring to her in these kind of nebulous terms on the left, you know, like she's a bomb thrower, when one article said about her.
You know, she's a controversial figure.
She's not a controversial figure.
She is a stone hero.
She is a woman who stood up against Islam, stood up against honor killing, and was basically chased out of Europe by these monsters, these Islamist monsters.
She's now living in America.
She's still under threat.
She still has to be protected.
The woman is like a, you know, she's beautiful.
She's articulate.
She's like some kind of queen from another planet.
And she is a genuine hero.
I read her book, Infidel, which is her autobiography, which is great.
I really recommend it.
I haven't read this other book she's written called Heretic, the Coming or the Need for a Reformation in Islam.
She's calling for a reformation in Islam.
And here she talks about her hope, why she has hope.
It's a pretty grim hope.
But listen to Ayan Hirsi Ali talk about her hope for Islam.
I watched the lynching, which is just, it is so horrible.
The lynching of a woman who is a pious Muslim.
She was accused of burning the Quran.
She did not burn the Quran.
In fact, she was arguing for something even more pure.
You know, practice Islam at its purest, don't be selling amulets.
And the man who was selling the amulets cried, she burned the Quran.
And a mob of men ran at her and lynched her.
That's not an extraordinary phenomenon in that part of the world.
What was extraordinary and what gives me hope is the reaction of the Afghani women who then demonstrated on the streets, carried her coffin, again, not allowed in Islam.
That's in your face when it comes to Sharia law, and screamed for their rights.
That gives me hope.
Well, you know, I would never, you know, want to contradict Ayan Hirsi Ali.
I said she's a courageous woman, but let me just go back for a minute to the quote from the Psalms that came up on my iPad through the miracle of modern technology, all right?
With the merciful, this is David talking to God, and he says, with the merciful, you show yourself merciful.
With the blameless man, you show yourself blameless.
With the purified, you show yourself pure, and with the crooked, you make yourself seem tortuous.
At the end of the Thirty Years' War, Christendom was ashamed of itself.
There are quotes of contemporary figures saying if people from the outside were looking at Christendom, they would think Christianity was a barbaric religion.
They had betrayed with this absolute vast bloodshed.
They had betrayed the very principles of Christianity.
Love your enemies.
Love your neighbor.
Judge not lest he be judged.
And when they formed the peace of Westphalia, it was formed out of ideas that can be found in the New Testament.
The separation of church and state, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar unto God, that which is God.
The idea that we were now going to live closer to the ideas in the New Testament by separating, by allowing people to believe as they wanted to believe, which was much closer to the New Testament idea.
The other day, I no longer watch atrocity videos from ISIS.
I no longer watch these bloodshed videos that they send over.
I figure I've seen them.
I know what they are.
But the other day I did watch one.
I watched ISIS running over a guy with a tank.
They were killing a young man by running him over with a tank.
And with the video, there came a quote from the Quran, and it said, and if you punish an enemy, O believers, punish with an equivalent of that which you were harmed.
In other words, do unto others before they do unto you.
Do unto others as nastily as they do unto you.
Christianity reformed itself in keeping with its ideas in the same way the United States reformed itself after the Civil War in keeping with its ideas of freedom and equality.
Can Islam reform itself with ideas from Islam?
Do Unto Others00:04:16
I'm just going to leave you with that question.
I'm not going to answer it, but I'll just leave it right there.
All right, listen, that's all I have to say about that, but I did want to say it.
I want to bid a fond farewell to Fred Thompson, the actor and senator who died at the age of 73.
I had a chance to share a couple of beers with him more than once, a few times.
He was a dignified and unpretentious guy who had done so much.
I mean, just a con, you know, he was a United States senator.
He was an actor.
He had that big part on Law and Order for a long time.
He had been in dozens of movies, but just a straightforward down-to-earth guy and a really honorable member of the conservative movement.
So farewell to him and condolences to his family.
He was 73.
Stuff I like.
I have to be honest with you.
I'm sorry, Lindsay, but I'm so happy to be out of the Halloween stuff I like.
It was just getting a little dark for me.
I mean, I love that stuff, but the good side of it was so many of the newspapers put out their favorite Halloween stuff on Halloween.
You think it's too late.
The mood has already passed.
So at least we built up.
We gave you a chance to read this stuff before Halloween came.
Now I want to move over to some lighter stuff.
Douglas Adams, the guy who wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he moved to Santa Barbara when I was living there, just before he died.
He died within months of moving there, but they were going to make his movie.
They were going to make Hitchhiker's Guide into a movie, so he came to California.
And so I got to know him just before he died.
And I remember we got into this kind of friendly debate about comedy and tragedy, whether comedy ages more than tragedy, whether it dates, whether old-fashioned comedy is, you know.
And in the middle of this, I said, and he argued, I argued that serious stuff lasts longer, that it's easier to understand tragedy written in the old days than humor written in ancient Rome.
And he disagreed with me.
And I quoted a famous line about Shakespeare.
The critic William Hazlitt said of Shakespeare, Shakespeare's tragedies are better than his comedies because tragedy is better than comedy.
And Douglas, who was a very witty guy, said, Shakespeare's tragedies are better than his comedies because Shakespeare wasn't funny.
So the issue was unresolved.
However, I do think that it's very rare that books of comedy, any kind of comedy, last into the present day.
This is an exception.
If you have never read the books of P.G. Woodhouse, W.O.D.E. House, Woodhouse, that deal with Jeeves and Wooster.
Wooster is a gentleman and Jeeves is his butler.
These are, to this day, some of the funniest things I have ever read.
When I discovered these, I don't sleep very much and I lie awake at night and I read and I try not to disturb my wife, but I would read these things and I would roar with laughter.
One day, one night at three in the morning, my wife just woke up and I was, I mean, tears were, I was laughing so hard and she just picked up a pillow and just smacked me on the head with it.
I just kept waking her up every night reading these things.
Read the Jeeves and Wooster stories, the Jeeves and Wooster novels.
When I walk into somebody's house and I see these novels on their bookshelf, I know that we're going to get along no matter what their politics, no matter what their religion, there is something about these books that lasts and lasts.
Woodhouse was an amazing writer, underappreciated.
He was popular, but he was underappreciated for his skill and talent.
During World War II, he was captured by the Germans and he was put under very dire conditions and separated from his wife.
And they kind of bullied him into making some broadcasts that were not propaganda broadcasts.
He actually teased the Nazis during these broadcasts, but the very fact that he made the broadcast made him kind of persona non grato when he got back to England.
When you read the real story, it was very sympathetic and kind of pitiful, the situation he was in.
He was a 60-year-old guy, separated from his wife, scared out of his wits, and he made these things.
And he still managed to tease the Nazis and still managed to go on the air and make fun of them, but it really hurt his reputation.
It doesn't matter.
The Jeeves and Wooster books and stories are the best thing ever.
Don't watch.
They did a great version of them on PBS.
It's still nowhere near as good as these books.
I mean, there's just something about the prose in these books that is unbelievably great.
That is everything I have to say, possibly forever.
But even so, I will be back tomorrow and say more.