Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Dave Bergman is neat
Dave Bergman at "A Detroit Salute" last night.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
On Literary Pleasure
'Learning tends to be, in various ways and for various reasons, pleasurable, and for many of us learning from poems (or novels or movies or pop songs) tends to be doubly pleasurable, to flesh and spirit equally, to mind and heart simultaneously--that harmony, that interdependence of our faculties seems to me of the essence for this enjoyment, for these literary pleasures. But as [Roland] Barthes insists and Aristotle, were he not something of a prude, would agree, without the sensual urge for the satisfaction of the senses, the mind's and the spirit's pleasures, unsummoned by the sensual imagination, would not exist. Delighted cognition would no more exist than would the pleasure of solace or diversion, and so it is the carnal pleasure in reading poems aloud, the heard voice's evoking images and sounds and meanings, that I emphasize. And this pleasure has much less to do with that cunning honey smeared on the rim of the medicinal cup (but what child was ever twice fooled by that ruse?) than it does with the slow and imperceptible nurture that Valery assures us we forget that we ingest, so intent we are on sucking the sweetness from the orange.'
W.R. Johnson, 'The Death of Pleasure: Literary Critics in Technological Societies' (from The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics?, Karl Galinksy, ed., p.202)
W.R. Johnson, 'The Death of Pleasure: Literary Critics in Technological Societies' (from The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics?, Karl Galinksy, ed., p.202)
Monday, January 23, 2006
Monte Cristo
The wiffle and I watched The Count of Monte Cristo the other night. I'd seen it once before, but had forgotten a lot of it. Man, that movie is SWEET. The narrative is so compelling. I started reading (an abridged) version of the book several years ago, but didn't finish it. I'm going to have to move that one back to the list in the uncut form.
In other news, sorry for the lack of posts around here lately. I'm sure our 1-3 readers are very disappointed.
In still other news, somebody from church gave me NBA Live 2005 a few weeks ago for the computer. I've never been much of a video game guy except for Mario Kart, NHL '95, and Tecmo and Super Tecmo Bowl. But this game is cool. Pistons simulation, narrated by Marv Albert and the czar Mike Fratello.
Peace to you and your extended kin networks.
In other news, sorry for the lack of posts around here lately. I'm sure our 1-3 readers are very disappointed.
In still other news, somebody from church gave me NBA Live 2005 a few weeks ago for the computer. I've never been much of a video game guy except for Mario Kart, NHL '95, and Tecmo and Super Tecmo Bowl. But this game is cool. Pistons simulation, narrated by Marv Albert and the czar Mike Fratello.
Peace to you and your extended kin networks.
Friday, January 13, 2006
Duty, Honor, Country
Originally delivered at West Point on 12 May 1962. In this speech, Douglas MacArthur reminded American soldiers of a trinity that they must always uphold. MacArthur was born in January, one hundred twenty-six years ago. But mostly I just wanted to post a fine speech about ideas now deemed unfashionable in some corners (or coasts or colleges) of our country....
Duty, Honor, Country
by Douglas MacArthur
No human being could fail to be deeply moved by such a tribute as this [Thayer Award]. Coming from a profession I have served so long and a people I have loved so well, it fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this award is not intended primarily to honor a personality, but to symbolize a great moral code-a code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent. For all hours and for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with so noble an ideal arouses a sense of pride, and yet of humility, which will be with me always.
Duty, honor, country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.
Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.
The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.
But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the Nation's defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.
They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for actions, not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never to take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.
They give you a temperate will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of an appetite for adventure over love of ease.
They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and joy and inspiration of life.
They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.
And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory?
Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man-at-arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefield many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world's noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless.
His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me; or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy's breast.
But when I think of his patience in adversity of his courage under fire and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements.
In 20 campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand camp fires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people.
From one end of the world to the other, he has drained deep the chalice of courage. As I listened to those songs [of the glee club], in memory's eye I could see those staggering columns of the first World War, bending under soggy packs on many a weary march, from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle deep through the mire of shell-pocked roads to form grimly for the attack, bule-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective, and for many to the judgment seat of God.
I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death. They died, unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory.
Always for them: Duty, honor, country. Always their blood, and sweat, and tears, as we sought the way and the light and the truth. And 20 years after, on the other side of the globe, again the filth of murky foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts, those boiling suns of relentless heat, those torrential rains of devastating storms, the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails, the bitterness of long separation from those they loved and cherished, the deadly pestilence of tropical disease, the horror of stricken areas of war.
Their resolute and determined defense, their swift and sure attack, their indomitable purpose, their complete and decisive victory - always through the bloody haze of their last reverberating shot, the vision of gaunt, ghastly men, reverently following your password of duty, honor, country.
The code which those words perpetuate embraces the highest moral law and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated for the things that are right and its restraints are from the things that are wrong.
The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training--sacrifice. In battle, and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave when He created man in His own image. No physical courage and no greater strength can take the place of the divine help which alone can sustain him. However hard the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind.
You now face a new world, a world of change. The thrust into outer space of the satellite, spheres, and missiles marks a beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind. In the five or more billions of years the scientists tell us it has taken to form the earth, in the three or more billion years of development of the human race, there has never been a more abrupt or staggering evolution. We deal now, not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier. We speak in strange terms of harnessing the cosmic energy, of making winds and tides work for us, of creating unheard of synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; to purify sea water for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundred of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of spaceships to the moon; of the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all times.
And through all this welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purposes, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishment; but you are the ones who are trained to fight.
Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the Nation will be destroyed, that the very obsession of your public service must be duty, honor, country.
Others will debate the controversial issues, national and international, which divide men's minds. But serene, calm, aloof, you stand as the Nation's war guardian, as its lifeguard from the raging tides of international conflict, as its gladiator in the arena of battle. For a century and a half you have defended, guarded, and protected its hallowed traditions of liberty and freedom, of right and justice.
Let civilian voices argue the merits or demerits of our processes of government: Whether our strength is being sapped by deficit financing indulged in too long, by Federal paternalism grown too mighty, by power groups grown too arrogant, by politics grown too corrupt, by crime grown too rampant, by morals grown too low, by taxes grown too high, by extremists grown too violent; whether our personal liberties are as thorough and complete as they should be.
These great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution. Your guidepost stands out like a ten-fold beacon in the night: Duty, honor, country.
You are the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense. From your ranks come the great captains who hold the Nation's destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds.
The long, gray line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, honor, country.
This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war."
The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished--tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll.
In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, honor, country.
Today marks my final roll call with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the river, my last conscious thoughts will be of the corps, and the corps, and the corps.
I bid you farewell.
Duty, Honor, Country
by Douglas MacArthur
No human being could fail to be deeply moved by such a tribute as this [Thayer Award]. Coming from a profession I have served so long and a people I have loved so well, it fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this award is not intended primarily to honor a personality, but to symbolize a great moral code-a code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent. For all hours and for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with so noble an ideal arouses a sense of pride, and yet of humility, which will be with me always.
Duty, honor, country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.
Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.
The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.
But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the Nation's defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.
They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for actions, not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never to take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.
They give you a temperate will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of an appetite for adventure over love of ease.
They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and joy and inspiration of life.
They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.
And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory?
Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man-at-arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefield many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world's noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless.
His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me; or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy's breast.
But when I think of his patience in adversity of his courage under fire and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements.
In 20 campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand camp fires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people.
From one end of the world to the other, he has drained deep the chalice of courage. As I listened to those songs [of the glee club], in memory's eye I could see those staggering columns of the first World War, bending under soggy packs on many a weary march, from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle deep through the mire of shell-pocked roads to form grimly for the attack, bule-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective, and for many to the judgment seat of God.
I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death. They died, unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory.
Always for them: Duty, honor, country. Always their blood, and sweat, and tears, as we sought the way and the light and the truth. And 20 years after, on the other side of the globe, again the filth of murky foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts, those boiling suns of relentless heat, those torrential rains of devastating storms, the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails, the bitterness of long separation from those they loved and cherished, the deadly pestilence of tropical disease, the horror of stricken areas of war.
Their resolute and determined defense, their swift and sure attack, their indomitable purpose, their complete and decisive victory - always through the bloody haze of their last reverberating shot, the vision of gaunt, ghastly men, reverently following your password of duty, honor, country.
The code which those words perpetuate embraces the highest moral law and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated for the things that are right and its restraints are from the things that are wrong.
The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training--sacrifice. In battle, and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave when He created man in His own image. No physical courage and no greater strength can take the place of the divine help which alone can sustain him. However hard the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind.
You now face a new world, a world of change. The thrust into outer space of the satellite, spheres, and missiles marks a beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind. In the five or more billions of years the scientists tell us it has taken to form the earth, in the three or more billion years of development of the human race, there has never been a more abrupt or staggering evolution. We deal now, not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier. We speak in strange terms of harnessing the cosmic energy, of making winds and tides work for us, of creating unheard of synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; to purify sea water for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundred of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of spaceships to the moon; of the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all times.
And through all this welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purposes, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishment; but you are the ones who are trained to fight.
Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the Nation will be destroyed, that the very obsession of your public service must be duty, honor, country.
Others will debate the controversial issues, national and international, which divide men's minds. But serene, calm, aloof, you stand as the Nation's war guardian, as its lifeguard from the raging tides of international conflict, as its gladiator in the arena of battle. For a century and a half you have defended, guarded, and protected its hallowed traditions of liberty and freedom, of right and justice.
Let civilian voices argue the merits or demerits of our processes of government: Whether our strength is being sapped by deficit financing indulged in too long, by Federal paternalism grown too mighty, by power groups grown too arrogant, by politics grown too corrupt, by crime grown too rampant, by morals grown too low, by taxes grown too high, by extremists grown too violent; whether our personal liberties are as thorough and complete as they should be.
These great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution. Your guidepost stands out like a ten-fold beacon in the night: Duty, honor, country.
You are the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense. From your ranks come the great captains who hold the Nation's destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds.
The long, gray line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, honor, country.
This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war."
The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished--tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll.
In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, honor, country.
Today marks my final roll call with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the river, my last conscious thoughts will be of the corps, and the corps, and the corps.
I bid you farewell.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Two Detroit poems
Today is the birthday of the poet Philip Levine, born in Detroit in 1928.
----------------------
THE DRUM
Leo's Tool & Die, 1950
In the early morning before the shop
opens, men standing out in the yard
on pine planks over the umber mud.
The oil drum, squat, brooding, brimmed
with metal scraps, three-armed crosses,
silver shavings whitened with milky oil,
drill bits bitten off. The light diamonds
last night's rain; inside a buzzer purrs.
The overhead door stammers upward
to reveal the scene of our day.
We sit
for lunch on crates before the open door.
Bobeck, the boss's nephew, squats to hug
the overflowing drum, gasps and lifts. Rain
comes down in sheets staining his gun-metal
covert suit. A stake truck sloshes off
as the sun returns through a low sky.
By four the office help has driven off. We
sweep, wash up, punch out, collect outside
for a final smoke. The great door crashes
down at last.
In the darkness the scents
of mint, apples, asters. In the darkness
this could be a Carthaginian outpost sent
to guard the waters of the West, those mounds
could be elephants at rest, the acrid half light
the haze of stars striking armor if stars were out.
On the galvanized tin roof the tunes of sudden rain.
The slow light of Friday morning in Michigan,
the one we waited for, shows seven hills
of scraped earth topped with crab grass,
weeds, a black oil drum empty, glistening
at the exact center of the modern world.
------------------------------------------
THE TWO
When he gets off work at Packard, they meet
outside a diner on Grand Boulevard. He's tired,
a bit depressed, and smelling the exhaustion
on his own breath, he kisses her carefully
on her left cheek. Early April, and the weather
has not decided if this is spring, winter, or what.
The two gaze upwards at the sky which gives
nothing away: the low clouds break here and there
and let in tiny slices of a pure blue heaven.
The day is like us, she thinks; it hasn't decided
what to become. The traffic light at Linwood
goes from red to green and the trucks start up,
so that when he says, "Would you like to eat?"
she hears a jumble of words that mean nothing,
though spiced with things she cannot believe,
"wooden Jew" and "lucky meat." He's been up
late, she thinks, he's tired of the job, perhaps tired
of their morning meetings, but when he bows
from the waist and holds the door open
for her to enter the diner, and the thick
odor of bacon frying and new potatoes
greets them both, and taking heart she enters
to peer through the thick cloud of tobacco smoke
to the see if "their booth" is available.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were no
second acts in America, but he knew neither
this man nor this woman and no one else
like them unless he stayed late at the office
to test his famous one liner, "We keep you clean
Muscatine," on the woman emptying
his waste basket. Fitzgerald never wrote
with someone present, except for this woman
in a gray uniform whose comings and goings
went unnoticed even on those December evenings
she worked late while the snow fell silently
on the window sills and the new fluorescent lights
blinked on and off. Get back to the two, you say.
Not who ordered poached eggs, who ordered
only toast and coffee, who shared the bacon
with the other, but what became of the two
when this poem ended, whose arms held whom,
who first said "I love you" and truly meant it,
and who misunderstood the words, so longed
for, and yet still so unexpected, and began
suddenly to scream and curse until the waitress
asked them both to leave. The Packard plant closed
years before I left Detroit, the diner was burned
to the ground in '67, two years before my oldest son
fled to Sweden to escape the American dream.
"And the lovers?" you ask. I wrote nothing about lovers.
Take a look. Clouds, trucks, traffic lights, a diner, work,
a wooden shoe, East Moline, poached eggs, the perfume
of frying bacon, the chaos of language, the spices
of spent breath after eight hours of night work.
Can you hear all I feared and never dared to write?
Why the two are more real than either you or me,
why I never returned to keep them in my life,
how little I now mean to myself or anyone else,
what any of this could mean, where you found
the patience to endure these truths and confessions?
----------------------
THE DRUM
Leo's Tool & Die, 1950
In the early morning before the shop
opens, men standing out in the yard
on pine planks over the umber mud.
The oil drum, squat, brooding, brimmed
with metal scraps, three-armed crosses,
silver shavings whitened with milky oil,
drill bits bitten off. The light diamonds
last night's rain; inside a buzzer purrs.
The overhead door stammers upward
to reveal the scene of our day.
We sit
for lunch on crates before the open door.
Bobeck, the boss's nephew, squats to hug
the overflowing drum, gasps and lifts. Rain
comes down in sheets staining his gun-metal
covert suit. A stake truck sloshes off
as the sun returns through a low sky.
By four the office help has driven off. We
sweep, wash up, punch out, collect outside
for a final smoke. The great door crashes
down at last.
In the darkness the scents
of mint, apples, asters. In the darkness
this could be a Carthaginian outpost sent
to guard the waters of the West, those mounds
could be elephants at rest, the acrid half light
the haze of stars striking armor if stars were out.
On the galvanized tin roof the tunes of sudden rain.
The slow light of Friday morning in Michigan,
the one we waited for, shows seven hills
of scraped earth topped with crab grass,
weeds, a black oil drum empty, glistening
at the exact center of the modern world.
------------------------------------------
THE TWO
When he gets off work at Packard, they meet
outside a diner on Grand Boulevard. He's tired,
a bit depressed, and smelling the exhaustion
on his own breath, he kisses her carefully
on her left cheek. Early April, and the weather
has not decided if this is spring, winter, or what.
The two gaze upwards at the sky which gives
nothing away: the low clouds break here and there
and let in tiny slices of a pure blue heaven.
The day is like us, she thinks; it hasn't decided
what to become. The traffic light at Linwood
goes from red to green and the trucks start up,
so that when he says, "Would you like to eat?"
she hears a jumble of words that mean nothing,
though spiced with things she cannot believe,
"wooden Jew" and "lucky meat." He's been up
late, she thinks, he's tired of the job, perhaps tired
of their morning meetings, but when he bows
from the waist and holds the door open
for her to enter the diner, and the thick
odor of bacon frying and new potatoes
greets them both, and taking heart she enters
to peer through the thick cloud of tobacco smoke
to the see if "their booth" is available.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were no
second acts in America, but he knew neither
this man nor this woman and no one else
like them unless he stayed late at the office
to test his famous one liner, "We keep you clean
Muscatine," on the woman emptying
his waste basket. Fitzgerald never wrote
with someone present, except for this woman
in a gray uniform whose comings and goings
went unnoticed even on those December evenings
she worked late while the snow fell silently
on the window sills and the new fluorescent lights
blinked on and off. Get back to the two, you say.
Not who ordered poached eggs, who ordered
only toast and coffee, who shared the bacon
with the other, but what became of the two
when this poem ended, whose arms held whom,
who first said "I love you" and truly meant it,
and who misunderstood the words, so longed
for, and yet still so unexpected, and began
suddenly to scream and curse until the waitress
asked them both to leave. The Packard plant closed
years before I left Detroit, the diner was burned
to the ground in '67, two years before my oldest son
fled to Sweden to escape the American dream.
"And the lovers?" you ask. I wrote nothing about lovers.
Take a look. Clouds, trucks, traffic lights, a diner, work,
a wooden shoe, East Moline, poached eggs, the perfume
of frying bacon, the chaos of language, the spices
of spent breath after eight hours of night work.
Can you hear all I feared and never dared to write?
Why the two are more real than either you or me,
why I never returned to keep them in my life,
how little I now mean to myself or anyone else,
what any of this could mean, where you found
the patience to endure these truths and confessions?
Monday, January 09, 2006
After the suicide of the West
by Roger Kimball, from The New Criterion
excerpt:
It seemed fitting that a symposium devoted to the subject of "Threats to Democracy" should convene on the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. Not only was it one of the greatest sea battles in history, but it was also a battle greatly pertinent to the questions that guided our deliberations: What is the nature of the threats to democracy, to the culture and civilization of the West, and how can we best respond to those threats?
Let me say at the outset that I believe that Lord Nelson had the right idea--sail boldly in among your enemy's ships, start firing, and don't stop until you've reduced them to a shambles. It was good for England and for the rest of Europe that the Duke of Wellington proved himself to be of like mind a few years later. "Hard pounding, gentlemen," he said at Waterloo. "We'll see who pounds longest."
excerpt:
It seemed fitting that a symposium devoted to the subject of "Threats to Democracy" should convene on the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. Not only was it one of the greatest sea battles in history, but it was also a battle greatly pertinent to the questions that guided our deliberations: What is the nature of the threats to democracy, to the culture and civilization of the West, and how can we best respond to those threats?
Let me say at the outset that I believe that Lord Nelson had the right idea--sail boldly in among your enemy's ships, start firing, and don't stop until you've reduced them to a shambles. It was good for England and for the rest of Europe that the Duke of Wellington proved himself to be of like mind a few years later. "Hard pounding, gentlemen," he said at Waterloo. "We'll see who pounds longest."
On George Clooney and 'Print the Legend'
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Helprin, Without Which Conservatism is Stillborn
One final article from the 50th anniversary issue of National Review.
-------------------------------
Without Which Conservatism Is Stillborn
Culture is not something for which you can buy a ticket; it is cradle and crucible
MARK HELPRIN
Although some who use Conservatism as an implement may not think so, Conservatism broadly speaking stems from an impulse of far greater import than politics alone. And in this regard, perhaps the most fundamental division between conservatives and modern liberals is a belief or disbelief in an ordered universe, the splendor of which is an invitation to man to try for his justice and works to approximate the constancy and balance of natural laws, and for his reticence in the command and direction of others to be appropriate to his limited powers.
To believe instead in accident and disorder is to refuse the evidence of a universe that hangs together rather well, in favor of the primacy of man, and therefore the legitimacy of pure power. The implications of this philosophical and temperamental difference — divine purpose for the conservative bent of mind and random disorder for the liberal — play themselves out in every conceivable situation.
Locked in struggle with its opposite, each tendency is continually presented not only with primarily intellectual propositions, but with problems arising from nature, the development of society, and the advance of knowledge, and with combinations arising from the interaction of all. Given this unceasing stream of problems, one must react either by propounding a new thesis or by arguing in antithesis. In static and traditional societies, such as the Islamic world, where belief is more settled than not, the antithesis — not as a challenge to orthodoxy but as a block on change — enjoys every advantage. In the West, where the mainspring has been newly arising ideas and initiatives, the advantage is almost always with the new thesis, with the offering rather than with the recoiling.
William F. Buckley’s extraordinary strategical contribution to public life from mid-century onward has been that his energy and brilliance have allowed him and his collaborators to offer, while floating in a sea of liberal theses, not only a persistent flow of counterarguments but a sea of their own credible, viable, and intriguing propositions. Unlike many others, Buckley sensed that the doctrines of Liberalism had become sufficiently stale to allow a new tack. Their lethargy and recession would open wide avenues down which he would drive, and he did, when no one thought it safe to do so, even though, manifestly, it was.This realization, which has changed history, was Reagan’s hallmark as well. Although many focus on the positiveness of Reagan’s temperament, his achievement lay in the positiveness of his ideas. Not only his temperament but his unjustly maligned intellect enabled him to concentrate upon assertion rather than defense. He was thereby able to capture the agenda and the imaginations of the Republican party, a majority of the American people, and a good part of the world, leaving his opponents in a reactive hissy fit to which he paid little heed not because he was deaf to their arguments but because he was traveling faster than the speed of their sound. So too with the success of modern evangelical Christianity, which, blissfully unaware of its detractors, harvests immense numbers of adherents fleeing from the failures and presumptions of orthodox disbelief.
Conservatives are instinctively aware that in politics as in religion success gravitates more readily to proposal than to disposal. They know that continuation of the enterprise requires more Buckleys, Reagans, and Thatchers with the talent and charisma to lead them from the chaotic skirmishes of the day into what Churchill called the broad sunlit uplands.
Conservatism awaits this, but in the waiting, despite frequent bravado, are intimations of stagnation, reversal, and loss. This is because conservatives, knowing the power of proposal rather than disposal, thesis rather than antithesis, truncate its application and limit it to politics and religion, with which they are comfortable and familiar, while the major part of the battle is fought elsewhere.
For any gains in politics, no matter how indelible they seem, can easily be washed away — in a generation, in a decade, year, month, or minute — by culture, the great Conservative terra incognita, ceded not merely to Conservatism’s transient political opponents, which would be minor, but to its habitual philosophical opponents, which is not.
Even though frequently mistaken as something for which you can buy a ticket, culture is the cradle and crucible not only of all politics but of those things that politics serve and for which they exist in the first place. Fundamental politics are born not, as some insist, from conflicts of distribution, but from emotion, identity, love, and belief — all things that culture shapes and by which it is shaped — and to attempt to preserve the political work of decades without addressing culture (the word itself is insufficiently expressive) is to entrust water to a sieve. Even to perceive culture as the guardian of politics rather than the other way around is to entrust the same water to the same sieve.
Conservatives have yet to approach culture as William F. Buckley approached political philosophy half a century ago. The theses of our culture are almost universally propounded by the Left — in education at all levels; publishing of all types; film and television; what used to be the fine arts; music; and in the libraries and museums, where history can be altered with an unnoticed deaccession or the flick of a caption. Looking upon all this as if silent upon a peak in Darien, Connecticut, are armies of conservatives who mainly react. There below them, stretching to the horizon, is the Pacific, and because they hesitate to swim in it, they are reduced to criticizing it. What will prevail in man’s life or imagination, the ocean or those who — even if rightly — take exception to it?
That the antitheses are usually just is irrelevant to the outcome, for here as almost everywhere the initiative rules. Consider the relative impacts of film and of film criticism; music and music criticism; education and criticism of educational fashion. Cultural abominations thrive not because they are insufficiently criticized but for lack of adequately supported competition.
Although not a few conservatives with a self-sacrificial bent are at work in the belles lettres and beaux arts, the conservative masses (what a delightful phrase) have largely ceded these fields or have been frozen in or out of them in the reactive position from which conservatives must be freed if their enterprise is to succeed and their principles are to thrive.
At the turn of the last century, the threads of modernism came together and produced a violent cataclysm — first in philosophy, art, and opinion, and then in the unrivaled destruction brought by total war, in the enslavement of nations, multiple genocides, and a vast and continuing human alienation. The core elements of the modernist proposal — that there is neither God nor absolute truth, the universe is accidental, and man, though he is merely a mechanism, is nonetheless the measure of all things — are the reigning postulates of the contemporary West. But, like most orthodoxies, modernism — its power having freed it from taking account of truth — stands habitually in contradiction to the realities it denies, and has entered the coercive stage in which nihilistic philosophies play out their last days. Triumphant as it is, its every move will add to the counter pressure that eventually will overturn it.
Because it is necessary not only to sink rival ships but to sail one’s own, independent forces (in addition to and beyond the counter pressure) must come afresh over and above the battle. There are at least two. The first is science, which originally engendered the present orthodoxy by its mastery of temporal powers. Samuel Johnson said that just because a man can electrify a bottle does not mean that he is qualified to solve the problems of war and peace. And, today, the ability to describe a molecular or astrophysical process does not even touch the skirts of the deepest and most abiding questions. Nonetheless, science is directed at verifiable truth, and despite retrograde ideologies that cling to the scientific establishment, the more that science illumines the darkness, the more whatever is seen appears wonderfully coherent, even if not entirely predictable or comprehensible. Given that the driving force of science since its beginnings has been to discover coherence, though science in its first blush and infancy gave rise to the present nihilistic orthodoxy, science as it progresses may turn out to be one of the engines that overturn it.
The second element that can ride over and above the battle and leave inconstant policy questions behind, can and should be a resumption — in the writing of novels, the teaching of students, the making of films, the publishing of books, the painting of paintings — of the course civilization has followed naturally and universally, in which the postulates that animate art and culture are unity, symmetry, balance, beauty, justice, humility — those things that, although once taken for granted, a sickened culture rejects; those things that are the children of an ordered universe, which, even if should it prove not to have had an Author, is structured as if it did.
In the Sixties, the Left, having failed to make revolution, embarked upon a long march through the institutions. One can only admire its persistence, while at the same time rejecting its powerful tactics, which have brought ruin. The object for the Right must be neither to root out that which is “incorrect” (something at which the Left, fundamentally wedded to coercion, has excelled) nor to ravish institutions that are three-quarters dead from having been ravished over decades, but to make and keep alive the works and principles to which those institutions can turn in the crisis of their bankruptcy.
Many of these principles have been long enough in exile that to uphold them now, not in opposition but in assertion, would be like building a new city. Devotion to them is hardly without risk, but the universal truth that is their origin is also their strength. And, besides, whether one is successful or not, it is better to work in the light of civilization than to gather riches in the dark.
Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and a visiting fellow of Hillsdale College, is the author, most recently, of the novel Freddy and Fredericka. His website is www.MarkHelprin.com
-------------------------------
Without Which Conservatism Is Stillborn
Culture is not something for which you can buy a ticket; it is cradle and crucible
MARK HELPRIN
Although some who use Conservatism as an implement may not think so, Conservatism broadly speaking stems from an impulse of far greater import than politics alone. And in this regard, perhaps the most fundamental division between conservatives and modern liberals is a belief or disbelief in an ordered universe, the splendor of which is an invitation to man to try for his justice and works to approximate the constancy and balance of natural laws, and for his reticence in the command and direction of others to be appropriate to his limited powers.
To believe instead in accident and disorder is to refuse the evidence of a universe that hangs together rather well, in favor of the primacy of man, and therefore the legitimacy of pure power. The implications of this philosophical and temperamental difference — divine purpose for the conservative bent of mind and random disorder for the liberal — play themselves out in every conceivable situation.
Locked in struggle with its opposite, each tendency is continually presented not only with primarily intellectual propositions, but with problems arising from nature, the development of society, and the advance of knowledge, and with combinations arising from the interaction of all. Given this unceasing stream of problems, one must react either by propounding a new thesis or by arguing in antithesis. In static and traditional societies, such as the Islamic world, where belief is more settled than not, the antithesis — not as a challenge to orthodoxy but as a block on change — enjoys every advantage. In the West, where the mainspring has been newly arising ideas and initiatives, the advantage is almost always with the new thesis, with the offering rather than with the recoiling.
William F. Buckley’s extraordinary strategical contribution to public life from mid-century onward has been that his energy and brilliance have allowed him and his collaborators to offer, while floating in a sea of liberal theses, not only a persistent flow of counterarguments but a sea of their own credible, viable, and intriguing propositions. Unlike many others, Buckley sensed that the doctrines of Liberalism had become sufficiently stale to allow a new tack. Their lethargy and recession would open wide avenues down which he would drive, and he did, when no one thought it safe to do so, even though, manifestly, it was.This realization, which has changed history, was Reagan’s hallmark as well. Although many focus on the positiveness of Reagan’s temperament, his achievement lay in the positiveness of his ideas. Not only his temperament but his unjustly maligned intellect enabled him to concentrate upon assertion rather than defense. He was thereby able to capture the agenda and the imaginations of the Republican party, a majority of the American people, and a good part of the world, leaving his opponents in a reactive hissy fit to which he paid little heed not because he was deaf to their arguments but because he was traveling faster than the speed of their sound. So too with the success of modern evangelical Christianity, which, blissfully unaware of its detractors, harvests immense numbers of adherents fleeing from the failures and presumptions of orthodox disbelief.
Conservatives are instinctively aware that in politics as in religion success gravitates more readily to proposal than to disposal. They know that continuation of the enterprise requires more Buckleys, Reagans, and Thatchers with the talent and charisma to lead them from the chaotic skirmishes of the day into what Churchill called the broad sunlit uplands.
Conservatism awaits this, but in the waiting, despite frequent bravado, are intimations of stagnation, reversal, and loss. This is because conservatives, knowing the power of proposal rather than disposal, thesis rather than antithesis, truncate its application and limit it to politics and religion, with which they are comfortable and familiar, while the major part of the battle is fought elsewhere.
For any gains in politics, no matter how indelible they seem, can easily be washed away — in a generation, in a decade, year, month, or minute — by culture, the great Conservative terra incognita, ceded not merely to Conservatism’s transient political opponents, which would be minor, but to its habitual philosophical opponents, which is not.
Even though frequently mistaken as something for which you can buy a ticket, culture is the cradle and crucible not only of all politics but of those things that politics serve and for which they exist in the first place. Fundamental politics are born not, as some insist, from conflicts of distribution, but from emotion, identity, love, and belief — all things that culture shapes and by which it is shaped — and to attempt to preserve the political work of decades without addressing culture (the word itself is insufficiently expressive) is to entrust water to a sieve. Even to perceive culture as the guardian of politics rather than the other way around is to entrust the same water to the same sieve.
Conservatives have yet to approach culture as William F. Buckley approached political philosophy half a century ago. The theses of our culture are almost universally propounded by the Left — in education at all levels; publishing of all types; film and television; what used to be the fine arts; music; and in the libraries and museums, where history can be altered with an unnoticed deaccession or the flick of a caption. Looking upon all this as if silent upon a peak in Darien, Connecticut, are armies of conservatives who mainly react. There below them, stretching to the horizon, is the Pacific, and because they hesitate to swim in it, they are reduced to criticizing it. What will prevail in man’s life or imagination, the ocean or those who — even if rightly — take exception to it?
That the antitheses are usually just is irrelevant to the outcome, for here as almost everywhere the initiative rules. Consider the relative impacts of film and of film criticism; music and music criticism; education and criticism of educational fashion. Cultural abominations thrive not because they are insufficiently criticized but for lack of adequately supported competition.
Although not a few conservatives with a self-sacrificial bent are at work in the belles lettres and beaux arts, the conservative masses (what a delightful phrase) have largely ceded these fields or have been frozen in or out of them in the reactive position from which conservatives must be freed if their enterprise is to succeed and their principles are to thrive.
At the turn of the last century, the threads of modernism came together and produced a violent cataclysm — first in philosophy, art, and opinion, and then in the unrivaled destruction brought by total war, in the enslavement of nations, multiple genocides, and a vast and continuing human alienation. The core elements of the modernist proposal — that there is neither God nor absolute truth, the universe is accidental, and man, though he is merely a mechanism, is nonetheless the measure of all things — are the reigning postulates of the contemporary West. But, like most orthodoxies, modernism — its power having freed it from taking account of truth — stands habitually in contradiction to the realities it denies, and has entered the coercive stage in which nihilistic philosophies play out their last days. Triumphant as it is, its every move will add to the counter pressure that eventually will overturn it.
Because it is necessary not only to sink rival ships but to sail one’s own, independent forces (in addition to and beyond the counter pressure) must come afresh over and above the battle. There are at least two. The first is science, which originally engendered the present orthodoxy by its mastery of temporal powers. Samuel Johnson said that just because a man can electrify a bottle does not mean that he is qualified to solve the problems of war and peace. And, today, the ability to describe a molecular or astrophysical process does not even touch the skirts of the deepest and most abiding questions. Nonetheless, science is directed at verifiable truth, and despite retrograde ideologies that cling to the scientific establishment, the more that science illumines the darkness, the more whatever is seen appears wonderfully coherent, even if not entirely predictable or comprehensible. Given that the driving force of science since its beginnings has been to discover coherence, though science in its first blush and infancy gave rise to the present nihilistic orthodoxy, science as it progresses may turn out to be one of the engines that overturn it.
The second element that can ride over and above the battle and leave inconstant policy questions behind, can and should be a resumption — in the writing of novels, the teaching of students, the making of films, the publishing of books, the painting of paintings — of the course civilization has followed naturally and universally, in which the postulates that animate art and culture are unity, symmetry, balance, beauty, justice, humility — those things that, although once taken for granted, a sickened culture rejects; those things that are the children of an ordered universe, which, even if should it prove not to have had an Author, is structured as if it did.
In the Sixties, the Left, having failed to make revolution, embarked upon a long march through the institutions. One can only admire its persistence, while at the same time rejecting its powerful tactics, which have brought ruin. The object for the Right must be neither to root out that which is “incorrect” (something at which the Left, fundamentally wedded to coercion, has excelled) nor to ravish institutions that are three-quarters dead from having been ravished over decades, but to make and keep alive the works and principles to which those institutions can turn in the crisis of their bankruptcy.
Many of these principles have been long enough in exile that to uphold them now, not in opposition but in assertion, would be like building a new city. Devotion to them is hardly without risk, but the universal truth that is their origin is also their strength. And, besides, whether one is successful or not, it is better to work in the light of civilization than to gather riches in the dark.
Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and a visiting fellow of Hillsdale College, is the author, most recently, of the novel Freddy and Fredericka. His website is www.MarkHelprin.com
Solzhenitsyn, Empire-Slayer
Again, from National Review's 50th anniversary issue.
------------------------------------
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
Empire-Slayer
by Daniel J. Mahoney
Solzhenitsyn’s massive Gulag Archipelago was published in English in three volumes between 1974 and 1978. It is one of the indispensable books of the last fifty years not least because it undermined the moral and political legitimacy of the entire Communist enterprise. This unique “experiment in literary investigation” brilliantly wove together Solzhenitsyn’s personal experience and the testimony of 256 former prisoners with historical research and spiritual reflection. It allowed readers on both sides of the Iron Curtain to encounter totalitarian oppression as though for the first time, “to hear and see what it was all like: search, arrest, interrogation, prison, deportation, transit camp, prison camp . . . Hunger, beatings, labor, corpses,” to cite the words of the Russian writer Lydia Chukovskaya. Moreover, Solzhenitsyn’s multifaceted, often sardonic authorial voice served as a powerful instrument for indicting Communism and all its works.
At their root was mankind’s and Solzhenitsyn’s nemesis: ideology. Unlike the conventional analyses of academic historians and political scientists, Solzhenitsyn’s understanding never treated the Soviet Union as merely one tyranny among others. Rather, it was an ideological regime built upon the twin pillars of violence and lies. It was “thanks to ideology” that the 20th century experienced “evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.” Ideology allowed tyrants and intellectuals alike to justify the unjustifiable and to amplify violence to nearly unimaginable levels.
This central focus of Solzhenitsyn’s work made it much more difficult to blame the Soviet tragedy on Stalin’s “cult of personality” or on local conditions that were somehow peculiar to an “authoritarian” Russia. As the late Martin Malia argued in an analysis profoundly indebted to Solzhenitsyn, every Communist regime has manifested a nearly identical “genetic code.” Despite important cultural differences between Russian, Asian, and Caribbean Communism, every Communist experiment has been marked by a single-party regime based on a mendacious ideology that demonizes real or imagined enemies of socialism. Solzhenitsyn’s insight was to highlight the insidious nature of ideology, and to make its absurdities fully visible to the Western imagination.
Gulag takes aim at the Manicheanism inherent in every project for the revolutionary transformation of man and society. The ideologist denies the permanence of the imperfection inherent in the human condition. Using the full force of his artistry Solzhenitsyn defends the timeless distinction between good and evil against its pernicious replacement by the ideological dichotomy between Progress and Reaction. The bitter experience of the Soviet camps led Solzhenitsyn to recover the age-old insight that “the line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.” More broadly, Solzhenitsyn returned to the wisdom of philosophical Christianity through reflection on his personal experience of human nature in extremis.
The Gulag Archipelago established beyond any doubt that 20th-century totalitarianism originated with Lenin, the founding father and spiritual icon of the Bolshevik party-state. Faithful to his Marxist inspiration, Lenin initiated a nihilistic project for (in his words) “purging Russia of all sorts of harmful insects.” In this, he was faithfully followed by Stalin. In Gulag Solzhenitsyn shifts the attention away from the high-profile Communists who were victims of Stalin’s purges and terror to those ordinary Russians and Ukrainians who perished by the millions as a result of the insane effort to create a new man and a new society. Solzhenitsyn provides a riveting account of the “metastasization” of Soviet terror from its beginnings in Lenin’s “Red Terror” and the first concentration camps on the Arctic Solovetsky islands. He rightly deems collectivization and the war against the independent Russian and Ukrainian peasantry to be the most terrible crime of the Soviet regime. The targeting of the “kulaks” was the first experiment in mass totalitarian democide — “one that was repeated by Hitler with the Jews and again by Stalin with nationalities that were disloyal to him or suspected by him.”
The second and third volumes of Gulag are animated by an invigorating and instructive tension between Solzhenitsyn’s appreciation of the prospects for spiritual “ascent,” even amidst the degradation of prison and the camps, and his equally profound recognition that ideological tyranny mutilates the bodies and souls of most human beings. Solzhenitsyn does justice to both the rare experience of spiritual growth through redemptive suffering and the pressing need to defend human dignity against every device of soul-destroying tyranny. Political liberty is by no means the most important thing for Solzhenitsyn. But, in his view, it is a crucial precondition for the moral development of human beings.
For this reason, Gulag has an indestructible place in our political, moral, and human self-understanding. To be sure, from the early 1920s through the late 1960s, there had been no shortage of books written about totalitarianism or the Soviet camp system. But none had come close to moving hearts and minds the way The Gulag Archipelago did upon its publication. Gulag is replete with facts and contains many instructive passages of historical, legal, and philosophical import related to the rise of the Soviet “sewage-disposal system.” But it took a great work of art to capture precisely what was entailed in the ideological deformation of reality.
There is every reason to welcome new works of historical scholarship that draw on previously inaccessible material from the Soviet archives. Solzhenitsyn has certainly done everything to encourage and support such endeavors. But an excellent work of recent scholarship such as Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (2003) will never displace The Gulag Archipelago because they serve different, if complementary, purposes. Because Solzhenitsyn brought beauty as well as philosophical reflection to bear upon the truth, The Gulag Archipelago was able to convey the monstrousness of the ideological Lie. It illumined the truth about “the soul and barbed wire” precisely because it transcended the concerns of historical scholarship, narrowly understood. To his great credit, Solzhenitsyn understood that the elaborate ideological fictions that defined Soviet Communism were vulnerable to a truly artful rendering of “the soul of man under socialism.” With the publication of The Gulag Archipelago on December 30, 1973, Solzhenitsyn could plausibly maintain that this was the moment foretold by the “foul midnight hags” of Macbeth, the fateful moment “when Birnam Wood shall walk.” Having done its initial work, Gulag continues to be of much more than historical interest since it illumines enduring truths and serves as our best antidote against the recurrence of the totalitarian temptation.
Mr. Mahoney is a professor of political science at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. He is the author of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology and of Bertrand de Jouvenel: The Conservative Liberal and the Illusions of Modernity.
------------------------------------
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
Empire-Slayer
by Daniel J. Mahoney
Solzhenitsyn’s massive Gulag Archipelago was published in English in three volumes between 1974 and 1978. It is one of the indispensable books of the last fifty years not least because it undermined the moral and political legitimacy of the entire Communist enterprise. This unique “experiment in literary investigation” brilliantly wove together Solzhenitsyn’s personal experience and the testimony of 256 former prisoners with historical research and spiritual reflection. It allowed readers on both sides of the Iron Curtain to encounter totalitarian oppression as though for the first time, “to hear and see what it was all like: search, arrest, interrogation, prison, deportation, transit camp, prison camp . . . Hunger, beatings, labor, corpses,” to cite the words of the Russian writer Lydia Chukovskaya. Moreover, Solzhenitsyn’s multifaceted, often sardonic authorial voice served as a powerful instrument for indicting Communism and all its works.
At their root was mankind’s and Solzhenitsyn’s nemesis: ideology. Unlike the conventional analyses of academic historians and political scientists, Solzhenitsyn’s understanding never treated the Soviet Union as merely one tyranny among others. Rather, it was an ideological regime built upon the twin pillars of violence and lies. It was “thanks to ideology” that the 20th century experienced “evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.” Ideology allowed tyrants and intellectuals alike to justify the unjustifiable and to amplify violence to nearly unimaginable levels.
This central focus of Solzhenitsyn’s work made it much more difficult to blame the Soviet tragedy on Stalin’s “cult of personality” or on local conditions that were somehow peculiar to an “authoritarian” Russia. As the late Martin Malia argued in an analysis profoundly indebted to Solzhenitsyn, every Communist regime has manifested a nearly identical “genetic code.” Despite important cultural differences between Russian, Asian, and Caribbean Communism, every Communist experiment has been marked by a single-party regime based on a mendacious ideology that demonizes real or imagined enemies of socialism. Solzhenitsyn’s insight was to highlight the insidious nature of ideology, and to make its absurdities fully visible to the Western imagination.
Gulag takes aim at the Manicheanism inherent in every project for the revolutionary transformation of man and society. The ideologist denies the permanence of the imperfection inherent in the human condition. Using the full force of his artistry Solzhenitsyn defends the timeless distinction between good and evil against its pernicious replacement by the ideological dichotomy between Progress and Reaction. The bitter experience of the Soviet camps led Solzhenitsyn to recover the age-old insight that “the line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.” More broadly, Solzhenitsyn returned to the wisdom of philosophical Christianity through reflection on his personal experience of human nature in extremis.
The Gulag Archipelago established beyond any doubt that 20th-century totalitarianism originated with Lenin, the founding father and spiritual icon of the Bolshevik party-state. Faithful to his Marxist inspiration, Lenin initiated a nihilistic project for (in his words) “purging Russia of all sorts of harmful insects.” In this, he was faithfully followed by Stalin. In Gulag Solzhenitsyn shifts the attention away from the high-profile Communists who were victims of Stalin’s purges and terror to those ordinary Russians and Ukrainians who perished by the millions as a result of the insane effort to create a new man and a new society. Solzhenitsyn provides a riveting account of the “metastasization” of Soviet terror from its beginnings in Lenin’s “Red Terror” and the first concentration camps on the Arctic Solovetsky islands. He rightly deems collectivization and the war against the independent Russian and Ukrainian peasantry to be the most terrible crime of the Soviet regime. The targeting of the “kulaks” was the first experiment in mass totalitarian democide — “one that was repeated by Hitler with the Jews and again by Stalin with nationalities that were disloyal to him or suspected by him.”
The second and third volumes of Gulag are animated by an invigorating and instructive tension between Solzhenitsyn’s appreciation of the prospects for spiritual “ascent,” even amidst the degradation of prison and the camps, and his equally profound recognition that ideological tyranny mutilates the bodies and souls of most human beings. Solzhenitsyn does justice to both the rare experience of spiritual growth through redemptive suffering and the pressing need to defend human dignity against every device of soul-destroying tyranny. Political liberty is by no means the most important thing for Solzhenitsyn. But, in his view, it is a crucial precondition for the moral development of human beings.
For this reason, Gulag has an indestructible place in our political, moral, and human self-understanding. To be sure, from the early 1920s through the late 1960s, there had been no shortage of books written about totalitarianism or the Soviet camp system. But none had come close to moving hearts and minds the way The Gulag Archipelago did upon its publication. Gulag is replete with facts and contains many instructive passages of historical, legal, and philosophical import related to the rise of the Soviet “sewage-disposal system.” But it took a great work of art to capture precisely what was entailed in the ideological deformation of reality.
There is every reason to welcome new works of historical scholarship that draw on previously inaccessible material from the Soviet archives. Solzhenitsyn has certainly done everything to encourage and support such endeavors. But an excellent work of recent scholarship such as Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (2003) will never displace The Gulag Archipelago because they serve different, if complementary, purposes. Because Solzhenitsyn brought beauty as well as philosophical reflection to bear upon the truth, The Gulag Archipelago was able to convey the monstrousness of the ideological Lie. It illumined the truth about “the soul and barbed wire” precisely because it transcended the concerns of historical scholarship, narrowly understood. To his great credit, Solzhenitsyn understood that the elaborate ideological fictions that defined Soviet Communism were vulnerable to a truly artful rendering of “the soul of man under socialism.” With the publication of The Gulag Archipelago on December 30, 1973, Solzhenitsyn could plausibly maintain that this was the moment foretold by the “foul midnight hags” of Macbeth, the fateful moment “when Birnam Wood shall walk.” Having done its initial work, Gulag continues to be of much more than historical interest since it illumines enduring truths and serves as our best antidote against the recurrence of the totalitarian temptation.
Mr. Mahoney is a professor of political science at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. He is the author of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology and of Bertrand de Jouvenel: The Conservative Liberal and the Illusions of Modernity.
Paul Johnson, The All-Explainer
I will post three articles from the recent 50th anniversary celebration issue of National Review. They are each well worth a read.
------------------------------
PAUL JOHNSON
The All-Explainer
by Roger Kimball
I forget the name of the sage who observed that some of the most pleasurable, the most productive, the most illuminating reading is re-reading. Whoever it was, my recent experience re-reading Paul Johnson’s magisterial book Modern Times served to corroborate his wisdom. What a treat! What vistas of learning, of anecdote, of human folly, triumph, cruelty, and compassion.
I first read Modern Times shortly after it was published in 1983, and it is still both invigorating and horrifying. It is invigorating because Paul Johnson, a man incapable of writing a dull page, makes the political, cultural, and moral itinerary of the 20th century crackle with interest. It is horrifying because the century he surveys was the bloodiest in history.
There’s an oddity about the horror for people like me and, I suspect, most readers of National Review. Having been born and brought up in the United States, too young to have fought in any of the century’s major wars, I knew the horrors only at second hand. The slaughter of the Great War; Hitler’s obliteration of European Jewry; Stalin’s famines, purges, and camps; the Japanese in Nanking; Mao Tse-tung’s homicidal mania; Pol Pot; Castro; Saddam Hussein — the 20th century is far and away the bloodiest, cruelest, most barbaric century on record. How to reckon the horror?
It is beyond reckoning. But here’s the oddity, the dissonance. Horrible as the century was — the worst ever — it was also the best ever: the most enlightened, the most prosperous, the most humane (where it wasn’t nastiest), the most technologically advanced. Like Dickens’s tale about the French Revolution, the 20th century, our century, was — it is — the best of times, it was — it is — the worst of times.
The wheel turns: Where do we let our eye linger, our allegiance catch? One of the great triumphs of Modern Times is Johnson’s capaciousness: His embrace is Whitmanian in its generosity (though not in its sobriety and judicious wisdom). Modern Times is a book with a theme and a moral. The theme revolves around relativism — moral, epistemological, metaphysical. The Modern World, Johnson writes in his opening flourish, began on May 29, 1919, when Einstein’s theory of relativity was experimentally confirmed, thus shattering the complacent confidence of the Newtonian worldview. Of course, the theory of relativity is not the same thing as relativism. Johnson acknowledges this. And yet, like the second law of thermodynamics (which popularized the term “entropy”) or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the theory of relativity was science that cast a large metaphorical shadow. Was it misunderstood — even un-understood? It didn’t matter. Johnson is right that the popular appropriation of Einstein’s theory is a good illustration of the “dual impact” of scientific innovators: Their theories change our understanding of the physical world; “but they also change our ideas. The second effect is often more radical than the first.”
The embrace of relativism was a harbinger, a symptom of a seismic shift in the way people view the world. People? Well, educated people, anyway, of which we have a greater and greater supply. (I say “educated”: I mean “schooled.”) It is often said that relativism is the conviction that, when it comes to morals, there is no such thing as absolute values and, when it comes to knowledge, there is no such thing as absolute truth. It is worth meditating on the use of the word “absolute” here. Someone should contact OSHA about its being unfairly overworked. What a relativist really believes (or believes he believes) is that 1) there is no such thing as value, and 2) there is no such thing as truth. The word “absolute” is merely an emollient, a verbal sedative intended to forestall unhappiness. What after all is the difference between saying, “There is no such thing as absolute truth,” and saying, “There is no such thing as truth”? Take your time.
The first upsurge of relativism can seem like fun. It’s a Cole Porter–ish, Jazz Age tipsiness: a moral holiday from the stuffy concerns of . . . well, of everything that nailed things down and inhibited one.
The hangover is not long in coming. At bottom, relativism is a religious problem. “God is dead,” Nietzsche proclaimed in the 1880s. What he observed was an emotional, not an historical, fact. The unspoken allegiance to something transcending the vicissitudes of human desire had been (among the elites, anyway) shattered. “If there is no God,” Dostoyevsky said, “everything is permissible.” Meaning what? Johnson’s long book is in part an illustration of and a commentary on those pronouncements of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky. “Among the advanced races,” Johnson notes, “the decline and ultimately the collapse of the religious impulse would leave a huge vacuum. The history of modern times is in great part the history of how that vacuum has been filled.”
Relativism is the theme; the moral of Modern Times might be indexed thus: “Utopianism, dangers of. See Communism, ideology, professional politicians, socialism.” It is a sobering thought that Lenin (for example) was a committed humanitarian — Johnson speaks of his “burning humanitarianism, akin to the love of the saints for God.” But here’s the rub: “His humanitarianism was a very abstract passion. It embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, or even interest in, humanity in particular. He saw the people with whom he dealt, his comrades, not as individuals but as receptacles for his ideas.” The paterfamilias of this brand of sentimental humanitarian was Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “I think I know man,” Rousseau said mournfully toward the end of his life, “but as for men, I know them not.” It’s a short step from Rousseau and his emotions of virtue to Robespierre and his candid talk about “virtue and its emanation, terror.” Lenin was a utopian. Hitler was a utopian. Ditto Stalin, Pol Pot, and . . . you can complete the list. All were adept practitioners of what Johnson calls the 20th century’s “most radical vice: social engineering — the notion that human beings can be shovelled around like bags of cement.”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The irony is that modern times have been at their best not when aiming openly at making the world a paradise but by inadvertence. How many “innovations designed to increase human happiness ended by diminishing it”? There are many lessons to be taken away from this wonderful book. Here are two: 1) “The experience of the twentieth century shows emphatically that Utopianism is never far from gangsterism.” 2) “There is no such person as History. It is human beings who decree.” Anyone who really absorbs those lessons has learned a great deal indeed.
Mr. Kimball is co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion, and publisher of Encounter Books.
------------------------------
PAUL JOHNSON
The All-Explainer
by Roger Kimball
I forget the name of the sage who observed that some of the most pleasurable, the most productive, the most illuminating reading is re-reading. Whoever it was, my recent experience re-reading Paul Johnson’s magisterial book Modern Times served to corroborate his wisdom. What a treat! What vistas of learning, of anecdote, of human folly, triumph, cruelty, and compassion.
I first read Modern Times shortly after it was published in 1983, and it is still both invigorating and horrifying. It is invigorating because Paul Johnson, a man incapable of writing a dull page, makes the political, cultural, and moral itinerary of the 20th century crackle with interest. It is horrifying because the century he surveys was the bloodiest in history.
There’s an oddity about the horror for people like me and, I suspect, most readers of National Review. Having been born and brought up in the United States, too young to have fought in any of the century’s major wars, I knew the horrors only at second hand. The slaughter of the Great War; Hitler’s obliteration of European Jewry; Stalin’s famines, purges, and camps; the Japanese in Nanking; Mao Tse-tung’s homicidal mania; Pol Pot; Castro; Saddam Hussein — the 20th century is far and away the bloodiest, cruelest, most barbaric century on record. How to reckon the horror?
It is beyond reckoning. But here’s the oddity, the dissonance. Horrible as the century was — the worst ever — it was also the best ever: the most enlightened, the most prosperous, the most humane (where it wasn’t nastiest), the most technologically advanced. Like Dickens’s tale about the French Revolution, the 20th century, our century, was — it is — the best of times, it was — it is — the worst of times.
The wheel turns: Where do we let our eye linger, our allegiance catch? One of the great triumphs of Modern Times is Johnson’s capaciousness: His embrace is Whitmanian in its generosity (though not in its sobriety and judicious wisdom). Modern Times is a book with a theme and a moral. The theme revolves around relativism — moral, epistemological, metaphysical. The Modern World, Johnson writes in his opening flourish, began on May 29, 1919, when Einstein’s theory of relativity was experimentally confirmed, thus shattering the complacent confidence of the Newtonian worldview. Of course, the theory of relativity is not the same thing as relativism. Johnson acknowledges this. And yet, like the second law of thermodynamics (which popularized the term “entropy”) or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the theory of relativity was science that cast a large metaphorical shadow. Was it misunderstood — even un-understood? It didn’t matter. Johnson is right that the popular appropriation of Einstein’s theory is a good illustration of the “dual impact” of scientific innovators: Their theories change our understanding of the physical world; “but they also change our ideas. The second effect is often more radical than the first.”
The embrace of relativism was a harbinger, a symptom of a seismic shift in the way people view the world. People? Well, educated people, anyway, of which we have a greater and greater supply. (I say “educated”: I mean “schooled.”) It is often said that relativism is the conviction that, when it comes to morals, there is no such thing as absolute values and, when it comes to knowledge, there is no such thing as absolute truth. It is worth meditating on the use of the word “absolute” here. Someone should contact OSHA about its being unfairly overworked. What a relativist really believes (or believes he believes) is that 1) there is no such thing as value, and 2) there is no such thing as truth. The word “absolute” is merely an emollient, a verbal sedative intended to forestall unhappiness. What after all is the difference between saying, “There is no such thing as absolute truth,” and saying, “There is no such thing as truth”? Take your time.
The first upsurge of relativism can seem like fun. It’s a Cole Porter–ish, Jazz Age tipsiness: a moral holiday from the stuffy concerns of . . . well, of everything that nailed things down and inhibited one.
The hangover is not long in coming. At bottom, relativism is a religious problem. “God is dead,” Nietzsche proclaimed in the 1880s. What he observed was an emotional, not an historical, fact. The unspoken allegiance to something transcending the vicissitudes of human desire had been (among the elites, anyway) shattered. “If there is no God,” Dostoyevsky said, “everything is permissible.” Meaning what? Johnson’s long book is in part an illustration of and a commentary on those pronouncements of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky. “Among the advanced races,” Johnson notes, “the decline and ultimately the collapse of the religious impulse would leave a huge vacuum. The history of modern times is in great part the history of how that vacuum has been filled.”
Relativism is the theme; the moral of Modern Times might be indexed thus: “Utopianism, dangers of. See Communism, ideology, professional politicians, socialism.” It is a sobering thought that Lenin (for example) was a committed humanitarian — Johnson speaks of his “burning humanitarianism, akin to the love of the saints for God.” But here’s the rub: “His humanitarianism was a very abstract passion. It embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, or even interest in, humanity in particular. He saw the people with whom he dealt, his comrades, not as individuals but as receptacles for his ideas.” The paterfamilias of this brand of sentimental humanitarian was Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “I think I know man,” Rousseau said mournfully toward the end of his life, “but as for men, I know them not.” It’s a short step from Rousseau and his emotions of virtue to Robespierre and his candid talk about “virtue and its emanation, terror.” Lenin was a utopian. Hitler was a utopian. Ditto Stalin, Pol Pot, and . . . you can complete the list. All were adept practitioners of what Johnson calls the 20th century’s “most radical vice: social engineering — the notion that human beings can be shovelled around like bags of cement.”
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The irony is that modern times have been at their best not when aiming openly at making the world a paradise but by inadvertence. How many “innovations designed to increase human happiness ended by diminishing it”? There are many lessons to be taken away from this wonderful book. Here are two: 1) “The experience of the twentieth century shows emphatically that Utopianism is never far from gangsterism.” 2) “There is no such person as History. It is human beings who decree.” Anyone who really absorbs those lessons has learned a great deal indeed.
Mr. Kimball is co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion, and publisher of Encounter Books.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
More on the iPod Nation
I should have mentioned the names of the Dave Van Ronk songs I’ve been digging on lately. One is called ‘Jesus Met the Woman at the Well’, which is basically John 4:16-19 and 39. It has some nice ring-composition, beginning with v.39, going back to v.16, and ending again at 39. The other is called ‘Michigan Water Blues’, and both are available for free download at Amazon.
The other track I’ve been liking is 'Reconstruction Site' by the Weakerthans from the album of the same name, also available free at Amazon.
Finally, I’ve found the joy of podcasts. One I’ve subscribed to is this indie rock thing that just gives you one track a week with a little bit of talking before and after–-one of the backlogged songs from November is a sweet tune by Rocky Votolato. I also subscribed to one from Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. Its most recent offering is a very good Christmas sermon by Philip Ryken on John 3:17.
The other track I’ve been liking is 'Reconstruction Site' by the Weakerthans from the album of the same name, also available free at Amazon.
Finally, I’ve found the joy of podcasts. One I’ve subscribed to is this indie rock thing that just gives you one track a week with a little bit of talking before and after–-one of the backlogged songs from November is a sweet tune by Rocky Votolato. I also subscribed to one from Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. Its most recent offering is a very good Christmas sermon by Philip Ryken on John 3:17.
Bob Seger
Bob Seger, legendary working class rocker and native son of Detroit, recently emerged on stage for only the second time since his farewell tour in '96.
He appeared on stage in Detroit with 3 Doors Down, singing "Landing in London." He also appears on the album version of the same song.
Could 2006 be the year Seger makes a return?
Hey, what is the New Year if not a time to hope?
He appeared on stage in Detroit with 3 Doors Down, singing "Landing in London." He also appears on the album version of the same song.
Could 2006 be the year Seger makes a return?
Hey, what is the New Year if not a time to hope?
Dante, Fujimura, and September 11th
a sample from the article:
The flames that surround Mr. Fujimura, who paces the middle of the main gallery debating how high to hang each canvas, have a subtext. His work since 9/11—when he spent the morning trapped in a subway beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center—is about "crossing the chasm of history," he says, "back to the fallen Jerusalem that Jeremiah witnessed." The terror attacks and their aftermath prompted questions not only about the meaning of his art but the meaning of his life: "Is New York City like Babylon or Jerusalem? How do I remain faithful here, even among the rubble?"
The flames that surround Mr. Fujimura, who paces the middle of the main gallery debating how high to hang each canvas, have a subtext. His work since 9/11—when he spent the morning trapped in a subway beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center—is about "crossing the chasm of history," he says, "back to the fallen Jerusalem that Jeremiah witnessed." The terror attacks and their aftermath prompted questions not only about the meaning of his art but the meaning of his life: "Is New York City like Babylon or Jerusalem? How do I remain faithful here, even among the rubble?"
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
iPod Nation
First of all, Happy New Year!
Second of all, because of a couple of very generous Christmas gifts, I've officially joined the iPod nation. Some things I've enjoyed listening to lately:
Braid.
Hey Mercedes.
The wonderfully tongue-in-cheek (at least, I hope it's tongue-in-cheek) song 'Art is Hard', off of Cursive's The Ugly Organ.
'Why Bother at All', Koufax.
Lead Belly.
Dave Van Ronk.
Small Brown Bike; I just discovered that out of their ashes some members have formed a band called LaSalle. I've heard one track, and it was sweet. Michigan rock.
The Magnetic Fields' hilarious cover of 'If I Were a Rich Man' from Fiddler on the Roof.
'Then It Won't Hurt No More', The New Lost City Ramblers.
Finally, somehow a song called 'One Moment' by Jon Dee Graham ended up on our computer, though I don't remember downloading it. Some of the lyrics seem vaguely appropriate for the Christmas season, so here they are (these are from the Patty Smyth cover, since in my quick search I couldn't find a page with an entry for Graham):
Second of all, because of a couple of very generous Christmas gifts, I've officially joined the iPod nation. Some things I've enjoyed listening to lately:
Braid.
Hey Mercedes.
The wonderfully tongue-in-cheek (at least, I hope it's tongue-in-cheek) song 'Art is Hard', off of Cursive's The Ugly Organ.
'Why Bother at All', Koufax.
Lead Belly.
Dave Van Ronk.
Small Brown Bike; I just discovered that out of their ashes some members have formed a band called LaSalle. I've heard one track, and it was sweet. Michigan rock.
The Magnetic Fields' hilarious cover of 'If I Were a Rich Man' from Fiddler on the Roof.
'Then It Won't Hurt No More', The New Lost City Ramblers.
Finally, somehow a song called 'One Moment' by Jon Dee Graham ended up on our computer, though I don't remember downloading it. Some of the lyrics seem vaguely appropriate for the Christmas season, so here they are (these are from the Patty Smyth cover, since in my quick search I couldn't find a page with an entry for Graham):
In the name of the fifty-three saints
I will go searching says
Seek out the hurt he says
Where comes this pain
Could it be a whirlwind spinning in the dark
An animal in your heart he says
I will find the same in time
One moment to another
One moment to another
One moment to another
With the baby that went before
There will be no suffering says
There will be no hurt he says
For either or the one
He will into this world
He's an easy thing he says
No mishappenings he says
The innocent will come in time
One moment to another
One moment to another
One moment to another
There will be no suffering
There will be no hurt
