What can the end of the Ming Dynasty tell us about the election of Donald Trump and what comes next
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Hello and welcome to another edition of Barbarians at the Gate. I am your host, Jeremiah Jenny, broadcasting from a neutral, mountainous country with a very heavily armed militia population and bomb shelters mandated by the government in the basement of every apartment building. So I'm feeling good. But David, how are you doing? Well, our listeners should know that this is being taped on the day after, you know, the return of Mr. T.,

Actually, my family is freaking out completely. And a lot of the people here are, at least the foreigners here. I'm not so much because I was expecting this actually to tell the truth. I could see the writing on the wall and it seemed to me, I thought it would be a closer loss that...

than it was apparently. But the way I saw it, that there was no matter what happened, no matter what Trump did, no matter how vile he became and dark he became at the end, it never moved the needle. Nothing ever moved the needle since 2016.

after the grab him by the pussy fiasco. Nothing had moved it. So I thought, the fact that it's so close means he's going to win. He's absolutely going to win. And I was right. So I tweeted about this. I said, I didn't underestimate Trump. I overestimated the American public because I thought that surely there'd be a little bit of light there where people, some people, at least a small group of MAGA people would say, you know, this guy really is absolutely impossibly intelligent.

unfit for this office. But so I'm okay. It was like grieving, it's like Alzheimer's disease. You do your grieving for the last few years and the disaster hits. So I'm all right. How are you? Well, it does feel looking back over the last 20 or so years that there's something almost inevitable about the moment that we've reached. And looking back over the last 20 years,

I think about 2000, the contested election between Bush v. Gore. Then we had 9-11. Then we had endless wars. And then there was that brief, it feels brief now, eight years of the Obama administration.

But at the same time, for all the hope and optimism that era engendered, at least among a certain part of the American electorate and for people around the world who are interested in what happens in America, that seems now to be the aberration. In Chinese history, we talk about these things called restorations, perhaps the most famous and the one that

I write about the most, the Tongzhi Restoration, the Tongzhi Tongxin that occurred in the 1860s. It makes it sound like this period where things are finally back on track. But let me bring in another voice here, because with us today on the podcast, we have somebody who is not only extraordinarily well-versed in the literature of dynastic decline and the fall of civilizations, but is also...

is also a Pennsylvania voter. Joining us from South Philadelphia, by way of numerous Beijing hutongs, we have translator, literary scholar, and all-around great guy, Brendan O'Kane. Brendan, for the last 20 years, it feels like every time I've had a question, like, that's not really what restoration, tongxing, means.

I've turned to you and here you are. Help me out. What does restoration mean in the context of Chinese history? If we think of an Obama restoration before we get to this period of the Trumpian decline. So thank you for the nice intro, Jay. That word, I think I first encountered in a modern Chinese literature class.

as the title of one of the parts of the Lu Xun story, Ah Q, the real story. It does not betoken a restoration in his fortunes either. Instead, it's, you know, it's the little, at least in that context, it's also the little kind of

bump, right? The leg kicking before the corpse stops moving. And generally speaking, I think it does mean restoration, but you can absolutely use it ironically in that sense, as Lu Xun is doing. And yeah, Obama, I think we were all in Beijing election night 2008, right? We were. Boy, that was a good night. That was a great night. Seems like years, I mean, it is years ago now. It is years ago. It really does feel like an entirely...

different era. At that time, there was a message going around on mobile phones that was saying the fact that the U.S. has elected a black man as president shows that America has learned the wisdom of Deng Xiaoping, that black cat, white cat, as long as it catches the mice, it's a good cat, which I thought was a very good, one of the funniest

Back then, remember, they had the short messages on the cell phones that were always... That was a great period. People were very creative with that medium. It sort of died out. And then about a week later, the People's Daily had an editorial saying, don't get too excited. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow your roll there, everybody. He's half white and he went to Harvard. Brendan, you actually... One of the things you have studied, all joking aside, is the literature of people who have lived through eras when it...

on a political, social, cultural environment. It felt like all hope was lost, that things were in decline. And how is that reflected in the writings that they've left behind? What are some of the things they said? Are there any lessons that we can draw from them? Or are they just simply our companions, historically speaking, in a great tumble towards entropy?

I don't want to write off my 17th century homies. Perhaps they have something useful to say, but by and large, no. They're a great company. They're a wonderful company. I would not look to them for advice on building a left-wing media in the US or guarding your communications from border security or whatever. And

Basically, my short one-line thesis, as somebody who's read a fair amount of late Ming and early Qing Dynasty literature, the kind of 17th century crisis, is sometimes shit gets so fucked up that you have to spontaneously invent metafiction and irony. There's a lot of extraordinarily funny and extraordinarily sophisticated literature from this time. Jin Pingmei, which I think has a pretty good claim to being the first mastermind,

modern novel. It comes out right, I mean, it's published right at the start of the 17th century. It's written probably right at the end of the 16th. And Brendan, if I could just jump in there real quickly, and I know Jin Pingmei is one of the most famous works of literature novels in Chinese history, but for those readers who maybe aren't familiar with it or aren't familiar with this Chinese title, give us the short elevator pitch. If you were pitching Jin Pingmei in an elevator to a publisher, what would it sound like?

Northern Song Dynasty Donald Trump keeps winning and winning and winning until he nuts so hard he turns inside out and then the dynasty falls.

Aces. Yeah, more or less. And the main character, the central character, I should say, of this novel is really a Trump-like figure. He is a walking collection of appetites. He's almost inhuman. I mean, he's basically inhuman in the context of kind of thought and culture of this time. You know, he owes nothing to nobody. He has no real family. All he does is want and nothing ever satisfies him.

And he keeps winning. He keeps getting access to heights of power and connection and influence that nobody...

of his character or class should ever have. This book is set during the Northern Song Dynasty because every late Ming reader knows what happened to the Northern Song Dynasty. Jeremiah, what happened to the Northern Song Dynasty? It fell. It fell. It fell hard. That's the main thing. It just absolutely cratered. And that is in the background. What do you mean you can't trust the Mongols? I mean, they just seem like a nice, peace-loving folk.

Yeah, pro tip. If you have a problem, Mongols are never the answer. And anyway, so this is, you know, this is in the background. It's being written at the end of the Ming Dynasty at a time when, okay, so the Ming falls in 1644. It has got to be one of the most overdetermined events in all of human history. Like, I love the Ming Dynasty, but it sucked. It should not have lasted nearly as long as it did.

Its final century was, I think, momentum as much as anything else. This was a dynasty that misplaced an emperor.

I mean, they lost his ass on the battlefield like it was a schnauzer. That's not that's not considered like, you know, good governance, according to some of the earlier classics of Confucian literature. Yeah. Like when you look at a Wikipedia entry for an emperor and you see that he had two regnal titles, you know, there's a story there. And in this case, it's this guy listened to really bad advice, got kidnapped by Mongols.

The remainder of his government decided they didn't really they weren't that bothered about ransoming him. And so he just sort of sits there on his duff for a while. And that's not even the worst succession crisis that they face. And yeah, so the final century of this dynasty is just shitshow after fuck up after disaster.

You just summarized Fred Wakeman's The Great Enterprise. It's a book like a thousand pages thick. The basic preface for all grad students who ever had to read this book is like, the Ming fuck shit up, the Manchus won. What else do we need to know? Yeah, it's don't go to grad school, just remember it was a shit show at the fuck factory and it fell in 1644. And if you want real high comedy, you can look at what hung on afterwards. The Southern Ming

deeply embarrassing. Uh, there's a great book by Lynn Struve, uh, that captures that whole era in all of its glory and, and at the attempts to try to keep the Ming spirit alive until it was finally choked out. And I mean, literally choked out on the border between Yunnan and Burma by, uh,

a general Wu Sangui. Yeah, this is the dinky little fail dynasty that ended in part because its last emperor was an inconsiderate couch surfer. The story is he goes down to Burma, right? He's the Prince of Gui, is that right? I believe so, yes. Yeah, he goes down to Burma and he ends up in the court of the Burmese king. It's this court of Ava at that point. Wu Sangui chases him all the way through Yunnan, goes to Burma and basically plays let's make a deal with the Burmese. It's like,

Turn him over or Burma becomes the next inalienable part of Chinese territory forever and ever. And the court of Aba, they were already sick of him, like, freeloading off of them. Like, nah, here. So, yeah. So, the end of the Ming, right? This is a period that...

When you look back at it, it has all of this great literature, voices. I think, in fact, the title of one of the books, if not the book, is like Voices from the Tiger's Jaw or something like that. Voices from the Tiger's Jaw. Yeah, that's the Lynn Struth book. You get that and then you get the people who are born right afterwards. Right.

right? These are people who never knew the Ming dynasty, but that decline and collapse is really formative for them. I'm thinking here of something like the Peach Blossom Fan by Kong Shangren. There is a translation of that out from NYRB. It's sort of okay. Y.E. Lee is working on a new version that I'm really looking forward to. But Kong Shangren, he's born after 1644.

But that trauma shapes his life and it shapes his thinking and his greatest work of art. This kind of collapse continues and has kind of aftershock long after the kind of the brute facts. To try to link this back to Trump, I see something in common, you know, not only with the dynastic period with emperors, but also any autocrat, but maybe especially with emperors, is that you're surrounded with people who are

absolutely on the surface loyal yes men but you can never ever trust them their loyalties the fealty is more based on fear

than on actual loyalty or goodwill. And it seems to me Trump is like all these emperors, why do they have huge meals for lunch and dinner with a hundred dishes, but they only could taste a little bit of them because the servants watching will notice you have an affinity for a certain kind of duck or something, and then they'll put poison in it, right? It seems like Trump

And, you know, Putin, for that matter, look how paranoid Putin is, you know. Is this something that's in common to all this type of leadership, including the dynastic period? And it's one of the sources of the inevitable fall because it's not based on a crew working together in goodwill. It's based on power and fear. Yeah, the founding emperor of the Ming actually comes to mind here.

right? I mean, this is a guy who is, he's sort of definitionally a good emperor because he founded a dynasty instead of losing one, but they really had to struggle to portray him that way because this is a guy who was paranoid, did come up with all of these little tests for the people around him, created two secret police services because he wouldn't trust just one. Yeah, there is an authoritarian personality, an autocratic personality. Now, even the cuddliest emperor was not

Right. Right.

The Jinping Mei, I mean, there's also this secret sexual lasciviousness that's also a part of it. I don't know how secret it is. That's true. But I mean, there's so much in common here. The type of personality to take that job is the traits that can bring him to power is also the traits that is going to eventually be his downfall. Yeah. Again, talking about the fall of the Ming being overdetermined. Yeah.

A lot of it really is there at the beginning when the founding emperor places limits on how large the bureaucracy can go, prevents his descendants from having proper jobs. You know, all of this stuff that ends up coming back to bite the dynasty in the ass in a really major way. I think one important thing he does, too, is he abolishes the position of prime minister. Yes. So he becomes effectively head of state and head of government.

government and becomes, to use a phrase that Jeremy Barme, the Australian sinologist, likes to use to describe Xi Jinping, he becomes the chairman or the emperor of everything. And that works if you have a paranoid, doom freak, workaholic emperor on the throne. It does not work so well if one of your successors is, say, in the hands of the Mongols or prefers carpentry to doing actual work.

or is just ineffectual at his job. And there's no kind of guardrails there to keep things on track in those situations. And there's a nice parallel there, I think, with what we're seeing in Trump, too, is that a lot of those figures who in the first administration acted in a kind of head of government way

so that when the emperor was going off on his tangents of fantasy and revenge, there were people there could channel that into some kind of acceptable form of policy, or at least barely acceptable form of policy. They're gone. And so I think that it sets the stage for all kinds of calamities, not the least of which is the exercise of autocratic power, but also the opposite one. I mean,

Empires don't usually fall because of Machiavelli or Rasputin. They fall because of Sancho Panza. They fall because of incompetence and unchecked incompetence. And that's actually the more terrifying part of the end of the Ming and what we're looking at here with the state or the decline of the American Republic. Brendan, Jinping Mei, we're talking about the Northern Song and

how that is a stand-in for what's going on at the end of the Ming. That's a particularly famous work. Are there any other writers, perhaps less well-known, who have offered through their poetry, their journals, or just their scribblings on a piece of paper in a moment of desperation that you've seen over the last few months or recently that have allowed you to kind of, well, that you think,

Also, make them a good person or a good companion, if not a particularly helpful one, in these trying times.

So to start out with something real depressing, because this is Chinese literature, there is a pretty good pop history book, which I read years ago, called 中国文人的非常长死亡, The Unnatural Deaths of Chinese Literati. And it starts with Qu Yuan, the sort of mostly ethical author of the 出词, and it does not make it past 1949. It ends with Wang Guo, the Qing loyalist who drowned himself.

You know, you can read through this and, you know, oh, yeah, there's Su Dongpo and there's Li Zhi and there's Zhang Dai. You can read through this and it will not cheer you up exactly, but you can read through this and say, oh, yeah, that is an admirable and decent person who did the right thing. Now, so far as, you know, my 17th century homies go, I've been reading Zhang Dai lately.

And Zhang survives the Ming dynasty. He lives past 1644. And there's this category of person who gets called in Chinese yiming, which is often translated as loyalist. I dislike that translation. Leftover, basically, would be what it means. And it's somebody who's lived too long. It always refers to men. We should say I've never heard of a woman yiming, although, you know, it

Obviously, it could be possible. But these are men who are being educated. They're raised to serve.

And when the government you are raised to serve falls, you can't very well serve the new one. There were some people who did. They got a nasty little section to themselves in the Qing dynastic history, right? These are the archhen, the ministers who served two masters, which is basically like labeling them, you know, hoes. But Zhang Dai lives past 1644, goes into sort of self-imposed internal exile, as many did.

And towards the end of his life, he's preparing, the way he puts it is he's preparing to awaken from his dream of life. He writes a couple of wonderful memoirs. And Chinese literature doesn't have actually a lot of autobiography. And when you do get autobiography, it's written as if it were a biography written by somebody else. But this is really personal memoirs.

memoiristic writing. The two books have been, I think, translated in excerpt, but as far as I know, we don't have full translations in English. The one is 草案梦意, which is just 冥冥. The other one is 西湖梦寻, A Search and Dream for the West. And here's Zhang Dai at the end of his life, living in what seems to have been genuinely wretched, you know, not literary advice, like this is a guy who really struggled

to eat for the rest of his life, remembering the sort of splendor and prosperity of his youth when he was a dissolute young scamp who collected all the things that could be collected and was a connoisseur of anything you cared. And these are, I think, some of the finest essays that have ever been written in Chinese. I find them extremely moving, just as kind of

you know, little fragments of a life lived and remembered. Not to put you on the spot, Brendan, but can you perhaps paraphrase or give us a taste of what some of this sounds like, at least in translation? I can actually, sure. So here is Zhang Dai describing, you know, one of these things he's witnessed in his youth. It's the singing competition.

that took place on Tiger Hill in Suzhou on the mid-autumn festival of every year. And hopefully it'll give you a sense of the kind of writing. On the 15th day of the eighth month, they came to Tiger Hill. Locals and visitors, scholar officials with families in tow, chanteuses and accompanists, courtesans, actresses, and other bells of the demimonde, commoner wives and respectable daughters, hustlers and pretty boys, rakehells and wastrels, idlers and spongers, serving boys and confidence men,

all packed together like scales on a fish. They spread out mats anywhere they could find a place to sit, on the stone ledge where Daosheng preached the Dharma so movingly that even the pebbles moved it, or on Thousand-Man Rock beneath it, between Crane Brook and Sword Pong, in front of the shrine to Grand Secretary Shen, and even all the way to the sword-cleft stone and past the first and second temple gates. From above,

the crowds looked like geese flocking on a sand-bar or sunset clouds gathering over a river the sky darkened the moon rose and from a hundred different places arose a clamour of pipes and drums a clash of cymbals a rumble of yu yang timpani that shook earth and sky

and drowned out even the loudest shots. With the first night watch, this gave way to strings, flutes, and singers performing ensemble pieces like Unfurl the Brocade Sails and Across the Limpid Lake in a commotion of cymbals and citrons and pipes and voices that made it impossible to pick out a rhythm or tell one piece from another.

As the night grew deeper, the crowds began gradually to disperse. The scholar officials took to their pleasure boats with their families, and the people who remained set about trying to out-sing one, showing off in a farrago of southern and northern styles to the accompaniment by turns of woodwinds and strings. By now it had become possible to make out the words, and the connoisseurs in attendance offered their appraisals of each line as it was sung. By the second watch,

The crowds had quieted, and all the instruments fallen silent, save for one wisp of flute, clear and plaintive, that wound around the voices of the three or four remaining singers. By the third watch, the moon hung alone in the sky, the chill had come into the air, and everyone was perfectly silent, even the mosquitoes. One lone figure strode out onto a rock high above, sat down,

and sang, unaccompanied by flute or clapper, in a voice as fine as silk thread that rose and fell but never wavered, powerful enough to split stones and pierce clouds, every word clear as a cloud. The listener sat transfixed, listening intently to every subtle modulation of his voice. Nobody dared clap along. The hundred-odd people who sat there like stranded geese could only nod their heads in mute approval. Only in Suzhou will you find such connoisseurs.

Wow. That's great, Brendan. Tell us a little bit more. Why did you choose that particular reading? So I just, I translated this for the Middleton Festival this year and sent it around to some people. But he has...

He describes some grand scenes like this. He also has something great on the Dragon Boat Festival in Nanjing. And then he'll have something describing the qualities of tea. Not just the qualities of tea, but the qualities of water from different wells and how suitable they are for different kinds of tea. There's this genre of writing that emerges slightly before this time called Xiaoping, which I favor the translation vignette.

literally it's just small pieces. They're just tiny, you know, almost lapidary little miniatures. They don't add up to a whole book. They don't add up to a whole memoir, but you can read them individually for pleasure and dip into them, I guess. That's great. Brendan, I want to thank you so much for joining us. Brendan, you're on Substack, right?

For now. For now? Okay. Yes. That's how people can find you. And I do get, you do send these wonderful sub stacks around newsletters, around emails, I guess, around with little translations. I always enjoy reading them and really want to thank you for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. Great seeing you guys again. So David, I'm actually curious.

With everything that we're reading right now about the election and how this is going to affect U.S.-China relations, what is the view in Beijing right now? I know it's 24 hours. I know people are still processing. But you're on the university campus. You're around town. What are you hearing? What are people's first thoughts on what they're seeing happening in the United States?

Yeah, I'm more in touch with the young university students because that's who I see on a weekly basis. The media, of course, has a lot to say. They're not divulging whether the Zhongnanhai is happy about the result or not.

A lot of the people I talk to say six of one, half dozen of the other. Trump is bad for China in some ways because he's unpredictable. You know, Harris would be bad in some ways because he's just a continuation. She's just a continuation of Biden. But it's interesting, the students that were really curious yesterday when the results were just coming out, and they actually spent a long time, you know, they corralled me after class and wanted to pick my brains.

What's interesting is that these young kids have actually had quite a bit of access to our social media and our mainstream media. They don't really censor that here. Not only can you get all the debates, but also you can get Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, and...

And who else? Stephen Colbert. Stephen Colbert, yeah. You know, you get these talk show comedians, so they actually treat this whole thing like a Netflix TV show.

movie or something like that. In fact, that's not my evaluation. That's the way they put it. They would say to me, this is more entertaining than Netflix, which they also were able to watch too, which is interesting, right? In a certain sense, because of the cultural difference and the language difference, they don't quite feel it in the way that we do. For example, most of us who are native speakers and we're here or we're in the US or wherever we are,

are keenly aware of Trump's personality disorders, his narcissism, the way he talks, the kind of rhetoric that he uses, you know, hits us very vividly and very hard, but not for them so much. For them, it kind of blows over their head. They're not quite sure. And they're also not quite sure of some of the specifics of why our side, our tribe,

The left tribe is so shocked by Trump's behavior. For example, the riot on January 6th in the Capitol. Whenever I would raise that with them, they would say, well, what's the big deal? You have riots all the time. Isn't this just another one? They were angry because Trump seemed to have lost and they were there to, you know, be angry.

They had no idea of the disruption of the final thing that Mike Pence was given the duty of counting the electorate, the votes, right? They had no idea that this was an unbelievable violation of our democratic process. They just thought this was like another Black Lives Matter protest. Also, this disturbed me a little bit. They told me that they have friends, Chinese students who are now studying in the U.S.,

And that for fun, they voted illegally because in some places, all you needed was your student ID.

And you could register with your student ID and give an address and a phone number and all that. And these people told me that more than one person they know had actually voted illegally. And I said, well, who did they vote for? And they said Harris, which is very interesting. So, you know, those are a few- I can't wait for some junior Fox News producer intern doing a Google search to pull up this podcast. And then you and I are going to be the flavor of the week. You're right. We have confirmation from Beijing that-

nefarious foreign elements have voted in the election to swing the vote towards... I'm getting a note here. It doesn't matter. Yeah. For them, it's kind of fun. It's exciting. And I think for a lot of the...

It's sort of like in a Netflix TV show, the villains are always the most interesting. And even though they're vile characters, you find yourself rooting for them a little bit because you want them to keep going and you want the narrative to keep moving forward. And a lot of them think, great, Trump's still there. We have four more years of all this fun and games, right? Obviously, they're not as affected as we are. But the question I did ask, in fact, I said, who do you think in Zhongnanhai is

Is the reaction, oh my God, fuck. Or is the reaction, yes, all right.

And they said, you know, well, we have no way of knowing. But from their standpoint, they said they're both bad in different ways. They're both very, you know, detrimental to the U.S.-China relationship, but in a different way. So that's pretty much the mood here. State media, of course, is a different matter. I trust your students more than I trust the media. Yeah, that's right. Me too. Me too. Well, I have to say, my final thought on all of this before we wrap up today is, you know,

Brendan was talking a lot about the end of the Ming and that era, which is an era that I read a lot about, too. But this moment, and maybe this is a cliche, but fuck it. There's a really interesting overlap with the career trajectory of Mao here. So after 1949, Communist Party comes to power.

In the 1950s, Mao was first among equals or, you know, there were other voices in the room, strong voices, and not all the decisions made were good. Towards the end of the 1950s, of course, you have the anti-rightist movement, the purges and the Great Leap Forward and the terrible famines. And so in the early 1960s, the grownups rose.

kind of took over. People like Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, and Mao was still, of course, the chairman, but he was sidelined for a period of time. But what the grown-ups didn't realize was that he was using this time to

stew, to write his enemies list, to build up his vindictiveness. And of course, a few years later in 1966, he comes back and now he's leading this populist upsurge of anger at the elites that leads to the Cultural Revolution. And that's 10 years of complete and total chaos. And that's not a happy outcome for China.

It's also a very worrying outcome for the United States. And of course, these are not exact historical parallels. So for those people out there who are taking this literally, I am not saying that Trump is going to lead to a new great proletariat cultural revolution in the America. I'm not saying it can't happen, but bear with me. The one thing about that era in Chinese history and the one thing about this era in American history that gives me

Some semblance of hope, even if it is a bowl of hopium I am smoking desperately, is that the Cultural Revolution was so bad that once Mao died, once Mao was out of power in 1976, almost everything about that era had been rather thoroughly discredited to the extent that when Deng Xiaoping re-emerges,

and Hua Guofeng emerges in the mid-1970s, they're able to push forward policies that would have been unthinkable in an earlier era because there isn't that much. There is still some, but there's not that much resistance to their ideas on the basis of Maoism because nobody wanted to go back to that, at least at that point. So my only thought is that we may be in for a period of time

Incredible trauma for a large number of people in America. And if the nation survives, if the republic survives, and I'd like to think it will, maybe this is the cathartic moment that has everyone kind of looking at each other going, wow, that sucked. Maybe that wasn't the path we need to go down. Mm-hmm.

I don't know. I hope so. It's something I've been thinking about in the last 24 hours as I've seen the return, and not just the return, but in some ways the incredible resurgence of Donald Trump at the head of an electorate, a constituency that taps into this great anger at an elite, and this person who is very much a creature of the elite, as was Mao. That's right.

has somehow positioned himself to be the leader of the new revolution. And it's a remarkable political feat. It doesn't say much about either man as a person, but it does say something about their basest political instincts that one has to at least respect, if not admire. Anyway, that's where we're going to leave this little therapy session for today.

David, stay well in Beijing, okay? Yeah, indeed. I will try to do so. I'm fine. I'm not losing my sanity because actually, I guess if you lower your expectations, you'll always be much happier. And so I've lowered my expectations about virtually everything. I'm going to take a tip from my neighbors and try to stay neutral about the whole thing.

All right. Thank you, everybody, for joining us today at Barrier to the Gate. Tune in next time. You can find us wherever you find your podcast, Spotify, Apple, those usual places. And I think nothing is left to do in these times of trouble and strife but to listen for the drums. ♪