Castro Falls
That was what the headline on one website read. I clicked on the link, hoping to read that the warden of the Western Hemisphere's largest prison camp had finally been overthrown. But no, the sonofabitch had only fallen and broken his knee. They shoot horses, don't they?
Oh, well. Have to suffice with Anthony Daniels's
pasting of the cult of personality surrounding Che, in
The New Criterion. Here's a sample:
...if we analyze Guevara’s popular appeal more than a third of a century after his timely death, we can see that it is the result of aesthetic and emotional responses rather than rational reflection, responses that are now kept alive by a good dose of commercialism. On one website dedicated to his memory, for example (www.store.che-lives.com), I found twenty-seven different varieties of Guevara T-shirts for sale, including a distressed olive-green one, one with reflective ink, a black one with glitter, and a black one with red glow. New berets were also available, the site announced with an exclamation mark, as if we had all been anxiously waiting for them, as well as baseball and trucker hats, bandannas, keyrings, Zippo lighters, desk clocks, and brooches. In short, Guevara is not so much an historical figure as a tourist destination. And most tourists don’t read too deeply into the history of the places they are going to.
The Original NeoCon is Dead
Paul Nitze, who is one of two men most personally responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union (George F. Kennan is the other), is dead.
He entered the world early in the 20th century, and watched in horror as Totalitarian Socialism nearly rendered it horrificly inhumane and uninhabitable. He left it, however, a much safer place, as his
Washington Post obit makes clear. RIP.
A (Relatively Obscure) Personal Digression...
An Eagles lyric:
There's talk on the street, it's there to remind you...
It doesn't really matter which side you're on.
You're walkin' away and they're talkin' behind you:
They will never forget you 'til somebody new comes along.
Where you been lately? There's a new kid in town.
Everybody loves him (don't they?)
. . . . and you're still around...
There's a new kid in town...
Just another new kid in town...
Ooh-Hoo, everybody's talkin' 'bout the new kid in town
Ooh-Hoo, everybody's walkin' (like the new kid in town)
There's a new kid in town (I don't wanna hear it)...
There's a new kid in town (I don't wanna hear it)...
There's a new kid in town (I don't wanna hear it)...
There's a new kid in town (I don't wanna hear it)...
There's a new kid in town (I don't wanna hear it)...[to fade]
Don't know why this song has been on some sort of synaptical tape loop inside my head, but it has...
Anthony Hecht is Dead
One of the most gifted poets and critics of the 20th century. Here's Michael Dirda's moving
reminiscence, from today's
Washington Post. And here's a sample of Hecht's verse, one of my personal favorites.
The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life
So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, "Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc."
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d'Amour.
Dead Derrida Redux
A reader sent me the following, from the website
Scrappleface...damned funny (thanks, KA):
Father of Deconstructionism Dies, If 'Death' Means Anything
French President Jacques Chirac announced today that Jacques Derrida, the father of the intellectual movement called deconstructionism, died yesterday of pancreatic cancer, "if indeed 'death' can be said to mean anything beyond the biases of culture, language, religion and philosophy."
"Of course, we can't assert anything positively about Monsieur Derrida's recent failure to exist," said Mr. Chirac, "We can't even state that he ever did exist, since he may have been a mere metaphysical projection of our own prejudices against absolutes. However, in as much as we may categorically claim anything--Mr. Derrida will not likely be showing up for work tomorrow. Although, who is to say?"
Mr. Derrida's many books and teachings spawned legions of American college professors whose stock-in-trade is to "deconstruct" literature and philosophy in order to demonstrate that, for example, the so-called classics of Western literature are so distorted by their authors' cultural prejudices as to render them useful only for literary deconstruction.
"Monsieur Derrida bequeathed a magnificent legacy to the global intellectual community," said Mr. Chirac. "He has provided us all with the intellectual infrastructure to prevent us from seeking after truth. Thanks to him we know it is fruitless to assert anything with conviction, or to say that any ideology is less true than any other. They are all equally trifling. Their value, if any, lies only in the sport they provide for college professors."
In lieu of flowers, friends of Mr. Derrida are urged to devote their lives to convincing at least one young person that there is nothing to which it is worth devoting one's life."
Scooping The Onion
Compare the headline from
The Onion's most prominent story this week -- "Irrelevant Pop Stars Unite Against Bush" -- with the first post from the August 5th edition of
The Bloody Crossroads (scroll down to see).
We at
TBC patiently await our Pulitzer...
Jacques Derrida is Dead...
...to which the only decent, civilized response is: thank God. Here's his
New York Times obit, which, according to Derrida's own philosophy, is so inherently full of its own contradictions that reading it may lead you to believe he's actually still alive. Good luck with that.
Stop the Presses!
Only a few minutes after my post below did I discover that this year’s Nobel laureate is Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek. Here are perhaps the most significant sentences from the
NY Times’ lengthy story on her award:
In other ways, Ms. Jelinek fits a more familiar pattern…The academy has also again shown a preference for literature with a political echo….Ms. Jelinek has used her literary work as a form of political engagement.
Well,
of course she’s used her literary work as “a form of political engagement.” Art has no other purpose, does it? It’s nothing if it isn’t being used to further some political goal, right? I mean, the Soviets put us right on that, didn’t they? And what, precisely, was the nature of Ms. Jelinik’s “political engagement?” According to the Times, “In 1974, she joined the Austrian Communist Party and remained a member until 1991.” Are you at all surprised? “A more familiar pattern,” indeed. And notice those dates…she was a party member at precisely the time that some of the totalitarian socialist dictators I mention below were liquidating their own populations. In fact, she joined the party the very year that Solzynitzen won the Nobel Prize for providing detailed information about the numerous horrors that Communist regimes were capable of. Props to the Nobel laureate committee: no better reflection of its “peaceful goals” than to award the laureate to someone who was a CP member during the 20th century. Good show, boys: almost as wise and informed a choice as your decision to give the Nobel Peace prize to Arafat.
Marxism is the Theory, Totalitarianism the Practice…
If the last century proved anything, it proved that correct. One question I’ve often asked but have never seen the answer to: why is it that the leaders in the last century who knew the most about Marx were the very same ones who butchered their own people in such incredibly unprecedented numbers? According to
The Black Book of Communism (published not by
Regnery but by
Harvard University Press), in the 20th century Communist regimes were responsible for approximately 80 to 100 million deaths. What do Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Castro all have in common except that they were
experts in Marxism? Not much else, actually (well, unless you’re counting the stacks of human corpses they created).
Another thing that rarely gets discussed: the people who ended up getting butchered and slaughtered were often the very same people that Marxists condescendingly claimed to be speaking for -- peasants, the working classes. The 25 million Zeks that Stalin single-handedly starved out of existence could hardly be said to have been of the privileged classes. Want more irony? Most of the proponents of Marxism and revolution throughout the last century came from the privileged classes. Where did Pol Pot learn about Marxism? In the salons of Paris, where, as one of a very few privileged Cambodians of his generation, he went for his education. Of course, you have to be an elitist to believe, as he did, that one of out seven of his countrymen should die so that he could realize his dream of a purely agrarian Socialism, the killing fields being what remained of his attempt to out-Mao Mao.
Why am I turning this crank? Because once again there’s another piece of hagiography where revolutionary/communist figures are concerned:
The Motorcycle Diaries, the movie based on Che’s Guevara’s book about his youthful wanderings in South America, was just released. It’s gotten a pass by almost every reviewer. But should it? Writing of
The Motorcycle Diariesin
Slate recently, Paul Berman puts us right on Che. Here’s his opening salvo:
The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims.
Read the rest of Berman's brilliant takedown
here...
