Canadian essayist David Warren has a sardonic essay observing the kerfuffle going on in the USA, and I noticed this sentence:
The reader who has made himself aware of only the USAID payments will understand what may, or rather will, be revealed as the Musketeers survey the remaining ninety-nine-one-hundredths of the U.S. government
Musketeers? Hmm: that is the second time I have read that term used.
it is a reference of course to the novels and later the many films about the Three Musketeers .
Wikipedia writes: It is in the swashbuckler genre, which has heroic, chivalrous swordsmen who fight for justice.
The original Musketeers of course were called that because they shot muskets, an early form of a rifle. Again, Wikipedia notes
...the Musketeers were open to the lower classes of French nobility or younger sons from noble families whose oldest sons served in the more prestigious Garde du Corps and Chevau-legers (Light Horse). The Musketeers, many of them still teenagers, soon gained a reputation for fighting spirit and unruly behaviour
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trivia note: the novel was written by Alexander Dumas. His father was born a black slave in what is now Haiti, and was later taken by his white father to France where he became a general in Napoleon's army, and he was partly the inspiration for the novel the Count of Monte Cristo.
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