My name is Jehu. Most probably it sounds foreign and unfamiliar to you,
devoid of the qualities of affection and personality which give
character to a name. It is a harsh name, cold and inhuman, like
something out of the night, an unwelcome intruder into the warmth of
familiarity. It inspires no blissful memories, nor does it kindle fond
feelings in the bosom of the hearer, instead the heart is hardened to it
like the feathers of a duck to water, repulsing it, leaving it to run
off into the ditches and by-ways of the long forgotten past, to trickle
dejectedly into those stagnant ponds where so many words of wisdom are
imprisoned: out of sight, out of mind, out of heart, out of history. Yet
while history is forgotten and misconstrued, it is repeated, for what is
life without water, which nourishes and sustains it, and what is life
without wisdom, which protects and cultivates it?

Jehu is my name, though it no longer brings the quickened pulse and keen
anticipation of happiness to the hearts of any, not even my own. For
what deference can be given to a name, though not in itself a thing of
dishonor, which represents the failure to derail the evitable fate which
wrecks the race of man again and again. Not that I myself embody such a
failure, nor even that I gave birth to the dreaded fate's latest
momentum, but as is seen time and again throughout history, one name is
brought to represent the tide of change, for better or worse, the doer
of deeds which were done not by him, but by a mass of independent doers,
yet it is written in the annals of history as the deeds of but one man.

While I had little to do, consciously, with the doom of the earth, I
will always be fingered as the villain, as the ambitious Napoleon or the