IF ever it is possible to analyse someone’s brain function after death, I am sure they will find that Donald Trump has a cash register wired in, next to the oversized greed gene (Nicola Sturgeon warns of ‘horrific consequences’ of anti-Semitism after synagogue shooting, The National, October 29).
The latest shooting in the US gets the response from the president that church and synagogues now need to buy more guns.
When children were gunned down in a Florida school, Trump’s response that we need to arm teachers, and pay those willing to hold arms in school a bonus.
The assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist in Saudi Arabia, has Trump hoping to push this problem under the carpet in case the US loses the chance for a $100 billion profit from arms sales.
All of these deaths from guns, arms, are seen in the mind of Trump, not as a national tragedy but as a business opportunity to boost the profit for the guns trade and arms manufacturers of the US. Trump just sees such deaths as unfortunate collateral damage to a few kids, worshipping Jews and fake-news-providing journalists.
With days to go from the US mid-term elections, Trump has to ensure that the cash rolls in from the arms trade and the guns lobby of whom he is a massive supporter.
How sick is that?
Max Cruickshank
Glasgow
REGARDING Pittsburgh and the Make America Great Again bomber – when are the GOP going to acknowledge that what needs diffusing is Trump’s disgusting, fully loaded rhetoric?
As Republicans whined on about other vile incidents where their own were targeted, eg with white powder (or white power as Fox News initially tweeted!), none of them had the decency to also point out that previous presidents never celebrated, for example, violence against the press and assaults against women.
Trump is the problem, and his response? To bitch-tweet that the attempted political assassinations of top Democrats distracted from Fox News’s coverage of South American migrants. Democracy is not in crisis its in an intensive care unit.
Amanda Baker
Edinburgh
HAMISH MacPherson writes an interesting article about James Boswell in the latest edition of the Sunday National (The promiscuous Scot made famous for his biographies of Samuel Johnson, October 28).
Your readers may be interested to know of Boswell’s connection to a well-known building in St Andrew Square, Edinburgh, at the corner of Thistle Street. Today’s No 19 is now a hotel and was previously the HQ of the Scottish Life Assurance Co. It was rebuilt in the early 1960s from three of the original houses dating from the late 1770s, numbers 18, 19 & 20 at the start of the building of Edinburgh’s New Town. This development marked the “grand separation” of the rich from the poor in Edinburgh.
The first incumbent of No 20 was Elizabeth Boswell of Auchinleck, step-mother of James Boswell, and cousin of his father. It is said that James inherited the property when Elizabeth died in 1799, but it is unlikely that he lived there.
Interestingly, the first person to live in the original No 19 was Lady Betty Cunningham, who was the youngest sister of James, Earl of Glencairn. James was the benefactor to our Bard, Robert Burns. Rabbie was so grateful to James for patronage and for being instrumental in the production of the Second Edition of his poems that, when James died in 1791, Robert wrote his Lament For James, Earl Of Glencairn. This poem is to be seen in most, if not all, books of Burns’s poems.
He sent a copy of it to Lady Betty at No 19 St Andrew Square, and in his accompanying letter he wrote, “If, among my children, I shall have a son that has a heart, he shall hand it down to his child as a family honor, and family debt, that my dearest existence I owe to the noble house of Glencairn”.
You can see from pictures that the original 18th-century houses, No 18, 19 and 20 during the Second World War, had blacked-out windows. The Edinburgh Stock Exchange was next to them, and occupied the corner tower, across Thistle Street.
Dennis White
Blackwood
I WAS considering responding to Jim Fairlie (Letters, The National, October 21), but I am in basic agreement with those who have. I think that it is time for Mr Fairlie to write an article about his vision of a truly independent Scotland.
He needs to show us how this truly independent country will actually function in this 21st-century world. The National should allow him the space, perhaps in the Sunday edition, and this could perhaps be the start of a series about a future Scotland as seen by the ordinary people of Scotland.
Robert Mitchell
Stirling
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