Maddox, all well spoken. And certainly I can level no personal complaint against Michael who may have been a fine fellow.
And my family, too, has known the depredations of communism. On my wife's side, we only in the last two years freed the last of the family from the imprisoned island of Cuba, at great risk and cost.
I am at heart and by disposition, education, inclination and experience essentially a libertarian. Man is God's creation and Man's rights and liberty are God's gift and only a system that maximizes that liberty and protects those rights is worth having. I find kings every bit as detestable as communists, while recognizing they set a better table.
As for democracy -- (speaking colloquially, in the sense I think Churchill meant it, since a straight democracy is a tyranny of its own sort and a system I utterly reject in favor of a constitutional republic) -- I think Churchill -- a figure about whom, as a half-breed Irish bastard I have the deepest ambivalence -- had the right of it.
As for dueling, I am as common and low-born as a man can be and I claim the right of it by main force. Although one hopes that Scotch bottles, tumblers and pipes at table-width would resolve most problems, if needs must I'm comfortable with rifles at 200 yards, pistols at seven yards, or knives at close quarters. Swordplay, I'm afraid, eludes me.