Thursday, January 19, 2006
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Learning from history is a special faculty: some people have it and some don’t. If an entire generation of smokers were to die of cancer tomorrow, they would be replaced by a new generation of smokers. Something similar could be said of thieves, drunk drivers, sexual molesters, prostitutes, johns, pimps, and corrupt politicians who go on about their business as if they were immune to prosecution.
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Speaking of smokers, I read the following in the paper this morning: “Doctors worry about face transplant patient because she is using her new lips to take up smoking again which could interfere with her healing and raise the risk of tissue rejection.” Obviously what this patient needs more than a new face is a brain transplant.
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Are corrupt politicians obstinate ignoramuses who view history as a meaningless succession of chance occurrences? I am not sure. I suspect greed or power deprives them not only of their moral compass but also of their reason.
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Friday, January 20, 2006
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THOMAS MANN
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MANN ON MANN
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“The creative genius must first become a world in itself, in which only discoveries and not inventions, remain to be made.”
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He could write about medicine with the competence of a physician (see THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN), about music with the expertise of a composer (DOKTOR FAUSTUS), and about ancient Egypt with the authority of an Egyptologist (JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS).
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MANN IN MY LIFE
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It was at the age of 14 or 15 and in Venice that I first read DEATH IN VENICE in an Italian translation. Failed to make contact. Found his fictional characters cold and distant. But I persevered. I went on to read ROYAL HIGHNESS and TONIO KROEGER. Again nothing happened. Then, in my early twenties I read CONFESSIONS OF FELIX KRULL, CONFIDENCE MAN, his last unfinished novel, in an English translation, and that’s when I got religion.
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MANN AND NABOKOV
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Notwithstanding the fact that LOLITA and DEATH IN VENICE share a common theme (the morbid and obsessive infatuation of an adult for a minor – an American girl and a Polish boy respectively — that ultimately ends in the early death of both men) Nabokov loathed Mann with the contempt of an aristocrat for the bourgeois. Mann’s international popularity and Nobel Prize were no doubt two more contributing factors to Nabokov’s hostility.
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MANN AND SARTRE
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As a bourgeois, Mann lacked Sartre’s ferocious hatred of the bourgeois and a clearly defined political line. In the words of a critic: “He was always both conservative and radical, thoroughly proper and deeply demonic.” His fictional characters (like Naphta and Settembrini in THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN) argue endlessly about all the central political and philosophical issues of the day without reaching any apparent conclusion. As a youth, and unlike his brother Heinrich, Mann was seduced by German nationalism, but when it evolved into Hitler’s National Socialist (or Nazi) Party, he rejected it violently (see below). His attitude towards the United States, where he lived for a number of years during World War II and after, changed from admiration for FDR’s New Deal to outrage and disgust for the abuses of McCarthyism.
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LUKACS ON MANN
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“There is in Mann’s writing that now vanishing sense of bourgeois dignity which derives from the slow movement of solid wealth.”
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MANN ON HITLER
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“A brother – a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother. He makes me nervous, the relationship is painful to a degree. But I will not disclaim it. For I repeat: better, more productive, more honest, more constructive than hatred is recognition, acceptance, the readiness to make oneself one with what is deserving of our hate.” And,
“Thanks to his own baseness, he has indeed succeeded in exposing much of our own.”
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Hitler attempted to have him assassinated but failed. Hitler’s antagonism was not just political. He resented the fact that THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN sold more copies than MEIN KAMPF.
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Saturday, January 21, 2006
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The first paragraph of a front page article in one of our weeklies today reads: “A top leader of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) renewed late Thursday calls for President Robert Kocharian to take tough action against widespread corruption and other manifestations of ‘injustice’ in Armenia.”
This to me is a typical instance of empty verbiage compounded by double-talk. There is only one way to combat injustice and corruption in high places and that’s by strengthening the judiciary. Because without an independent and co-equal judiciary, the executive branch is bound to run amok. Sometimes even with an independent judiciary (as in a well-established democracy like the United States) the executive branch has a tendency to abuse its powers.
And now the question we should ask is did we in the Diaspora ever have anything resembling an independent judiciary? And if we by a miracle acquired such an institution tomorrow, how many of our leaders would escape impeachment on grounds of corruption, abuse of power and incompetence?
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