Random suggested reading:
1. My Dallas Morning News column this week finds Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Pope John Paul II as the peerless moral witnesses of the blood-soaked, ideologically insane 20th century. But their heroism is tragic.
2. A Q&A one of my editors did with me for the News site has attracted some broader notice within the journalists' blogosphere. I think the way I ended it pretty much sums up the orientation of this blog:
I believe the world is going to hell in a hand basket, but I just want to make sure there's enough ice around to keep my drink fresh till the end.
3. I don't think I've ever said this before, but if you read Maureen Dowd's scathing take on the Edwards affair, you will have read it all here before (but not nearly as expertly written, of course). Excerpt:
He has an affair with Hunter, while he's honing his speech on the imperative to "live in a moral, honest, just America." A married former aide says he's the father when she gets pregnant, even though she's telling people Edwards is the dad. And one of his campaign donors pays off Hunter to get her resettled with the baby out of North Carolina.But the Breck Girl wants a gold star for the fact that he sent his marriage into remission when his wife was in remission. That's special.
In his statement, he bleats: "You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself. I have been stripped bare." Isn't stripping bare how he got into this mess?
It isn't like we didn't know that the son of a millworker was a little enraptured by himself, radiating self-love from his smile and his man-in-a-hurry airs and the notorious $800 bill for a pair of haircuts and his two-minute YouTube hair primping to the tune of "I Feel Pretty."
Well, I called him "Silky Pony," but "Breck Girl" will do.
4. George F. Will, amid the gloom of the present moment, reaches back in US history and finds solid, empirical reason to hope. Excerpt:
So, remember Springfield. The siege of the jail, the rioting, the lynching and mutilating all occurred within walking distance of where, in 2007, Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy. Whatever you think of his apotheosis, it illustrates history's essential promise, which is not serenity -- that progress is inevitable -- but possibility, which is enough: Things have not always been as they are.
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And now I've read the Dowd column--witty. Almost makes up for her starstruck squealing about how Obama is really "Mr. Darcy" (get it? Pride and PREJUDICE? And the only reason not to vote for Obama is...?) from last week.
Even when Maureen Dowd is bad on an off day, I eat her columns like traler trash with Little Debby moon pies. Her Edwards column is an eclair.
Although his writing was brilliant and he had an excellent moral intelligence, towards the end of his life, he mourned the end of the soviet union and called Stalin the greatest Russian leader. He also became one of the chief supporters of Vladmir Putin and was reportedly very anti-semitic. He was apparently very nationalistic and desired a strong and powerful Russia at the expense of other states.
This sums up the standard view of Solzhenitsyn among people who haven't read anything the man wrote.
Simon: "This sums up the standard view of Solzhenitsyn among people who haven't read anything the man wrote."
I take it you have not read what the man SAID.
www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,druck-496211,00.html
"I take it you have not read what the man SAID."
Where, exactly, is the anti-Semitism in this interview? He's tough on his own Russian people and is suggesting that the Jews should exercise a similar amount of self-examination/self-criticism as well. I am, in general, a supporter of the Jews and of Israel and I fail to find that anti-Semitic.
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