Solzhenitsyn, JP2 + other columns of note

Upon reading the George Will column saluted above, I recommend running, not walking, to one of the great essays on the subject, "Coatesville", by John Jay Chapman:

tinyurl.com/6rshqu

[pp. 223-232]

Its eight pages of glowing moral incandescence, fresh as morning light still, were reprinted in The Best American Essays of the Century. Better still, the entire Chapman collection in which it was published in 1915, Memories and Milestones, is yours free for the browsing and the download alike, above.

Fans of, e.g., Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, William James, George Santayana, Albert Jay Nock, H.L. Mencken, &c., are likely to find in Chapman as welcome a discovery as any they have yet encountered - just ask the shade of Edmund Wilson, and the still-bright sun of Jacques Barzun, turned 100 last year. They did yeoman's work in tub-thumping a Chapman revival over the century last.

Now it's our turn.

Your columns lately have been some of your finest work.... beginning with your piece following your brother-in-law's return from Iraq, et al. I felt that the intellectual side of your ideology... vs. the religious doctrine... came shining to the surface in the Solzhenitsyn piece. And although I have come dangerously close to feeling that you've been obsessed with the sleazy Edwards slime (at risk when much was not early on substantiated), I nonetheless applauded your editorial regarding as absolutely on the money laser tight and cogent.

Meanwhile, in a PS: In my time I have seen more times than now when people in their 40s were convinced that the 'world is going to hell in a hand basket'. May I quote my mother to make a parallel to this: Once when I was in turmoil and all seemed to be sliding to oblivion I announced to my mother, "I feel like I'm losing my mind." To which she retorted, "Nonsense. I've tried to lose mine for years and it's harder than you think."

Maybe the same is true of the world we are witnessing today. Things do have a historical way of shaking out. I mean, during Watergate would we have foreseen your beloved Ronald Reagan leading the free world in the 80s, less than a decade after the sorriest episode and national disgrace complete with wholesale lots of Nixon's cabinet in prison, not the least of which was his Attorney General?

Take heart and stay cool and keep those intellectual barrel chambers cocked.

And I like to try to say things nobody else is saying and to explore areas that are insufficiently commented on in the media.

Amen. Keep it up!

I also don’t write about sports. I don’t like sports, don’t care about sports and only see sporting events as a chance to drink beer, cook and hang out.
Rod, this is exactly why we could never be friends.:-)

PS weigh in on one addendum: Per "A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare."

As someone who has been around big Texas money and fortunes all my life one way or another, I have known about a billion people who were blessed to be handed moneys and properties per their parents, both while living and after death. And from what I have seen, more than half of those who were handed such good fortune squandered it or used it to be unmotivated and ultimately fail completely. It was a golden goose type of welfare in essence...why bother hustling when we can relax and watch the flat screen. (Even seen this phenom when it was a relatively realistic inheritence vs. humongous.) This is why one of the world's wealthiest people, Warren Buffet, has given much of his fortune away.

All in all, Rod, your humble reader thinks it was a nice, worthwhile DMN article, the gist of which was, "The heroic John Paul and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, slayers of the communist dragon – that's how we like to remember them. But neither fits into the West's triumphalist liberal democratic vision."

Your take may be the generally accepted view of MSM-saturated people in the West.

Still, I hope some day some writer will explain just what it is about our Capitalist Democratic Republic that, allegedly, JP II and Solzhenitsyn see as, in your words, a variation on a materialistic theme comparable to Marxist totalitarianism.

I don't get it. Exactly what is so inherently bad about our country's system of government? As far as I can tell, we do not have a system with a built-in flaw that destroys "authentic and authoritative faith and the commitment to live by self-restraint for the greater good", as you put it? So just what did our founders do wrong, according to the generally accepted MSM view of JP II and Solzhenitsyn criticism?

Honestly, Rod, our system provides for the greater good to such an extent that when we are able to secure our liberty and simultaneously come to the aid of the long-suffering, helpless bastards in Iraq (and Israel), as well as provide aid to old folks on Medicare here, libertarians (ah-hem) go bonkers.

Anyway, don't you agree that it's really not this country's semi-capitalist system that's at fault as much as it is our concupiscence? The latter finds it easy to feed off the wealth, leisure and medical/technical good our system provides, viz. "And again I say to you: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven."

I'm one of those Conservatives you mentioned in your article: "Conservatives who championed his anti-communism struggled with the Russian Orthodox believer's harsh criticism of capitalist democracy."

Again, all in all a very worthwhile article.

The day I write something of which you approve, Daniel, is the day I stop and wonder what I got wrong.

Hahahaha. Touche'

I liked the JPII and Solzhenitsyn column, Rod--very thoughtful and interesting.

What both men (and admittedly, I know much less of Solzhenitsyn) seemed to understand was that there is a sacramental nature to reality, and that for centuries that sacramental nature has been fragmenting. Matter--ideal, flesh--spirit, earth--heaven, etc. existed once in seeming balance, and that balance has ceased to be.

In the Soviet world the emphasis was on the collective, on that would-be transcendent-without-transcendence unity of the body politic, to which the individual was subordinated. In the West the emphasis has been on the individual, who is bound by no other and may act without regard to some idea of an "other", so long as he does not violate the law. In the Soviet world the vast majority had little, and sometimes lacked their daily bread, but that was not supposed to matter so long as the "great" purpose of Communism could flourish; in the West the people have much, though we borrow much of it from their descendants, and what we lack is not material but spiritual--the greatest emptiness of all may be that we are starting to lose even the language of transcendence, since by these words are expressed realities that can't be measured empirically or proven objectively.

I read the first draft of Rod's quote interview too literally in terms of cash and property inheritance vs. I now believe true intent and point...squandering and depleting resources in the name of the immediate vs. the future of all, including our kids. If that was the issue at hand, on that one I would applaud if I had only one hand. Spent a rather long adulthood walking the conservation/ecology walk.

Exhibit A America: Shawn Hannity guest Tucker Carlson talking about how free market capitalism mandates that if they wanted to fill their Hummer with gas in a shortage, if they had the money then who is question it. (Feel free to gag)

Trust me. I've had bricks in my toilet tanks (to minimize the water used to flush) for 37 years.

Meanwhile was in Mexico City for John Paul's 1990 visit...saw his plane (Alitalia) landing.... then from a balcony hotel room his speech when he spoke in the Zocolo. What a giant and overwhelmingly powerful feeling it was...his figure as you very lovingly and correctly draw.

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.

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