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Christopher Hitchens with his send off for Solzhenitsyn.
Every now and then it happens. The state or the system encounters an individual who, bafflingly, maddeningly, absurdly, cannot be broken. Should they manage to survive, such heroes have a good chance of outliving the state or the system that so grossly underestimated them. Examples are rather precious and relatively few, and they include Nelson Mandela refusing an offer to be released from jail (unless and until all other political detainees were also freed) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn having to be deported from his country of birth against his will, even though he had become—and had been before—a prisoner there.
Two words will always be indissolubly connected to the name of Alexander Isayevich: the acronym GULAG (for the initials of the Stalinist system of penitentiary camps that dotted the Soviet landscape like a pattern of hellish islands) and the terse, harsh word Zek, to describe the starved and overworked inhabitants of this archipelago of the new serfdom. …
Pickerhead has learned to pay attention to David Warren, even when he starts out in obtuse fashion. Turns out his essay on the “truths we know in our hearts” is timed perfectly for the passing of one of the 20th Century’s bravest truthtellers.
… A university professor has told me, “A certain amount of discretion is necessary. You must say things in a way sufficiently cumbersome, that those who can handle the truth will get it, and those who can’t, will not.” This was his prescription for academic survival, in the age of the “politically correct.”
Prudent advice, to be sure, but then one remembers the proverb of William Blake: “Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid, courted by Incapacity.”
We (royal) ought consistently to seek the obvious truth. That is the calling. Why do we hesitate?
Low motives easily suggest themselves. “I should like to keep my job. I should like to stay out of prison. I should like to avoid being hauled before a Human Rights Tribunal. I should like to have a quiet life, and continue paying my spousal support. Things may seem bad sometimes, but they could be worse.”
The cock crows thrice. There are saints, there are people who know that there are saints, and there are people who don’t know. One should aspire to rise at least to the middle condition. Not everyone is called to martyrdom, but everyone is called to witness.
Even journalists.
To witness what? To witness the news, or what appears to be news; to witness the unusual or significant; to describe or explain some aspect of current history.
Getting the facts straight — a far more difficult task than most readers or even journalists realize — is one of those ethical absolutes. It is a precondition for truth, though not the truth itself. For it is easy to lie with all your facts straight. …
Speaking of truth telling; in Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn asked himself what he would have been like had he been recruited into the NKVD organs rather than becoming an artillery officer.
“So I would (try) to imagine: if, by the time war broke out, I had already been wearing an NKVD officer’s insignia on my blue tabs, what would I have become? Nowadays, of course, I can console myself by saying that my heart wouldn’t have stood it, that I would have objected and at some point slammed the door. But later, lying on a prison bunk, I began to look back over my actual career as an officer and I was horrified.”
The June 2004 week when we celebrated Reagan’s life found five essays on the Gipper written by Mark Steyn. We had one yesterday. Today two more. One from the Sun-Times and one from National Review.
… Ronald Reagan is beyond the Clark Cliffords and Arthur Schlesingers now. When it comes to his reputation as a great president, the people are way ahead. In that respect, if the citizens of this great republic will forgive a monarchical comparison, let me return to the passing of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
She was 102, so it wasn’t exactly unexpected. The BBC and other broadcasters had long ago decided that most of the people who cared about the old girl were themselves long dead. So, come the day, they sloughed it off. Old woman, no big deal, all in the past. And then they spent the rest of the week trying to explain why they’d got it so wrong.
Outside the studios, over half a million people solemnly filed past her coffin as she lay in state at Westminster Hall, and a million lined the streets for her funeral, including some who’d flown in from Canada and other far-flung realms.
Something similar happened last week. Hundreds of thousands of Americans waited quietly in line in California and then in Washington to say goodbye to their president. Meanwhile, back on the air, the big networks struggled to find the tone. On the day itself, the assembled media grandees agreed that he was an amiable fellow with a big smile who told a good joke. If you’d tuned in 10 minutes late to ”Larry King Live,” you’d have assumed he was doing one of his special tributes to some half-forgotten comic or TV host from the ’50s that no one had very much to say about.
Back in the real world, the people waiting hours to get in to the Rotunda were there not just because Ronald Reagan was amiable but because they grasped that he was a significant figure in the life of this country and the world. Here too the events of two years ago are instructive: The Queen Mother was the last living representative of Britain’s wartime leadership. She didn’t win any battles, of course, but, advised to go to Canada, she instead stayed on in London, toured bombed-out streets in the East End, and took a direct hit at Buckingham Palace. To those on the streets of Westminster in 2002, she symbolized resolve and then victory in a great cause.
That’s what this week’s mourners understand about Reagan, too. He also symbolizes resolve and victory — in a slyer, slipperier war, but one which he won just as decisively. Some saw it then. More see it now. One day even the network anchors and Ivy League professors will get it.
Why is it Liberals think they’re so much smarter than those on the right? Peter Schweizer has some answers.
During the 2000 election, George W. Bush was often given the moniker “stupid.” A Boston television reporter tripped him up with a “pop quiz,” asking him the names of foreign leaders. At the same time, his opponent, Vice President Al Gore, was presented as the consummate intellectual. He went out of his way to drop phrases like “Cartesian revolution” and used complex metaphors like “the clockwork universe” in his speeches.
Indeed, Gore seemed obsessed with proving how smart he was — and the media was his willing accomplice. The media reported at least a dozen times that Gore was “the smartest kid in the class.” Bloomberg News observed that Gore had little patience for those “a few IQ points short of genius.” The New York Times asked (in all seriousness), “Is Gore too smart to be president?” His biggest challenge, the paper explained, was “to show that he is a regular guy despite a perceived surplus of gravitas, which at least some Americans seem to find intimidating.” This liberal assumption that a candidate can be just too darn smart to win a presidential election in this country goes back to Adlai Stevenson.
What proof was there of Gore’s alleged gravitas? How exactly did the media know that Gore was so smart and Bush so dumb? In fact, the record did not indicate any of this was true. It was often alleged, probably with reason, that Bush only got into Yale because his father had gone there and his grandfather had been a Connecticut senator. Yet Gore, with high school Bs and Cs (his only As were in art), got into Harvard in part because (like other politicians’ sons, including a raft of Kennedys) his father was a famous senator. At Harvard, Gore’s grades did not improve. In his sophomore year he earned a D, a C-minus, two Cs, two C-pluses and one B-minus. He was in the bottom fifth of his class his first two years in school. Later he flunked out of divinity school (failing five of his eight classes) and dropped out of Vanderbilt University Law School. Gore was once asked (after having served in the U.S. Senate for several years) to name his favourite president. “President Knox,” he replied. …
Emmett Tyrrell has interesting ideas for history reading this summer.
Slate reviews a new GPS/Traffic device.
Most of the time, you can get along fine without in-car GPS. Your daily commute is marked by well-worn drudgery: You drive to work, to the store, and back home, rote trips for which you don’t need help. And nowadays when you are lost, your phone can probably assist you. So it’s no surprise that GPS firms are suffering. This week, shares of Garmin, the once-high-flying market leader, plummeted after the company lowered its revenue expectations for the year and delayed the launch of its long-promised smartphone, a device investors hoped would unshackle Garmin’s fortunes from the apparently sinking GPS market.
But a few months ago, a Silicon Valley start-up called Dash Navigation put out a product that could well revive the sagging business. The Dash Express navigator packs a killer feature that other GPS systems lack: the Internet. Network connectivity powers Dash’s primary attraction: what the company calls “crowd-sourced traffic.” As you traverse your favored metropolis, the Dash Express anonymously transmits information about its location and speed to a central server. Every other Dash driver does the same. Using this data, Dash can paint a stunningly accurate picture of traffic patterns. Have you ever been stuck in a jam and wished there were some way to look two miles ahead to see whether things are still ugly? Dash essentially does that for you.
I’ve been testing the Dash Express for a week, and I’m floored. …
Humor section starts with the story about trash inspections in San Francisco. If you don’t recycle, do you get sent to the garbage gulag?