Welcome to the American Story. This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

This story is one in a series about an immigrant boy who became my good friend

and holds a special place in the history of the

Claremont Institute.

He was born American but in the wrong place.

I call this one, Totus Porcus.

In those golden days of graduate school in 1970s,

Clermont, before and after which I hastened to add there were and

continue to be even more golden days in innumerable exotic locations.

Peter and a handful of friends and fellow students would regularly set aside their Plato,

Lincoln, and Shakespeare, and their Greek or German studies for an evening of poker. The style for some years now has been to play

nothing but Texas Holdom. But in those days we played everything from five-card

stud to Anaconda,

often beginning soberly with the former, and ending in high drama with the latter,

gliding through some five-card draw, seven-card stud, Chicago, A.C. Doosy, and other American standards, according

to the dealer's moods and inspirations, or popular demand.

On a good night, if the classicists came along, you could get the hands called in Latin.

There was never any violence, all was music, of the American variety ranging from blues to jazz to

mowtown to country and then again depending on the, someone might drift into German drinking songs.

But that always seemed kind of showy.

One thing did not change. In the course of the evening, every time, as if it were part of a

providential order or natural law, this thing would happen. We would play a hand and Peter exercising the

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