Time For A Velvet Revolution In Arizona?

Earlier today, in the post about expanding The Squad, Flagstaff progressive Eva Putzova noted that "the future of this planet depends on this country getting a bigger squad." That was about the boldest comment any candidate I asked ventured. But boldness comes naturally to Eva, more so than most other congressional candidates. After all, she's been working on the front lines for a very long time-- and for real.

I have a long story about how Bill Clinton once came to call me and mix up Lou Rawls and Lou Reed and why that led to my first state banquet. If you just want the photos: here. I've only been to one state banquet at the White House in my life. It was for Czech President Vaclav Havel and the only reason I was invited was because it was pre-Google and I was the only one in President Clinton's rolodex who knew the difference between Lou Rawls and Lou Reed. It was the first time I got to meet so many people I was writing about here at DWT so often: from arch-villains like Charles Koch, Henry Kissinger, Jane Harman, Erskine Bowles, and Tipper Gore to some passing political figures of the day like Pat Danner (D-MO), Vic Fazio (D-CA), Richard Lugar (R-IN), Norman Dicks (D-WA), Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Samuel Gejdenson (D-CT) and William Roth, the Roth IRA guy (R-DE) to a handful of more interesting, if extraneous, figures like Kurt Vonnegut, Mia Farrow, Eric Holder, Stevie Wonder, chess grand master Lubomir Kavalek-- and my old friend Ric Ocasek who I hadn't seen in years and who had originally helped launch my career as a record mogul by producing one of my bands, Romeo Void, on a whim. The whole guest list was geared to President Havel. (I don't think he was a Cars fan but Ocasek was married to Czech model Paulina Porizkova.) Lou Reed was the entertainment that night and Havel had long credited Lou's band, the Velvet Underground, with being the inspiration for Havel's own fortitude in breaking free from the Soviet Union. That was what Havel dubbed the Velvet Revolution-- and what Eva wrote about this week for the Arizona Daily Star: Remembering, and learning, from the Velvet Revolution.

In 1989, nearly a million people in the former Czechoslovakia-- where I was born and raised-- took to the streets to peacefully overthrow the totalitarian dictatorship of the Communist Party.

That euphoric fall changed everything for me. I would not be here today, having served on the Flagstaff City Council for four years and now running for Congress in Arizona’s first district, if the young people had not believed in the power and righteousness of their demands for sweeping reform and freedom.

Everyone was on board with taking power away from what we called the old structures-- Individuals connected to the ruling party, which lacked the moral authority to govern after failing us and betraying us for 40 years.

I was 12 years old; just old enough for my observations to inform my permanent politics. Life before the Velvet Revolution was not unbearable, but it was grim. Our air and our rivers were polluted. Common areas were littered with trash. Everybody owned everything; therefore, nobody owned anything. Our environment was colorless, gray and uninspiring.

As a child, I didn’t know what we were missing under our state-run economy, where 99.9% of the population was equally disadvantaged. My parents were loving. They didn’t worry about losing their jobs, paying medical bills or rent, or how they’d pay for my college education. As a teacher, my mom never had to buy supplies for her students.

They didn’t have some of the concerns millions of Americans do, like paying for health care. But, under that state-run economy, my parents were part of a lost generation: an entire generation whose potential and dreams were never quite realized.

A very small portion of the population had it better. The Communist Party elites were the equivalent of today’s American billionaires-- living in extreme wealth made on the backs of the working class.

Growing up in a state-run economy, experiencing the transition to a political democracy and living my adult life in a developed country with a high per-capita GDP but also some of the most egregious incidents of inequality, I became a fierce fighter for progressive policies and against political oppression. I realized corruption can come from the left or the right. I realized having one party in control of all branches of government is oppressive, and that while a two-party system is better, it’s still not enough for a true democracy.

In his book Disturbing the Peace, Václav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s first democratically elected president, wrote something I subscribe to more and more: “Parties should not take direct part in elections, nor should they be allowed to give anyone, a priori, the crutches of power, since when they do they inevitably become bureaucratic, corrupt, and undemocratic. They should instead provide those who participate in power-- having been elected-- with an intellectual base, with opportunities to hone their own opinions.”

Today’s big corporations are not dissimilar to state-run economies. Their employees and small shareholders are not personally invested. They see little meaning in their work. Meanwhile, our dreams as humans are universal. Whether it’s 1989 in Eastern Europe or 2019 in the United States, we need more than just the consumption that drives our everyday lives-- we need meaning, peace, fairness and the ability to negotiate our differences without the interference of powerful interests that silence us.

In our current system, I regularly remind myself what we really wanted in 1989: freedom, equality, fairness, access to opportunities and an end to oppression. We wanted the beauty we’d been deprived of; not in a trivial sense, but in the sense defined by writer Sandra Lubarsky-- “sustaining and flourishing of life-in-relationship with life.”

As we head into 2020, I hope young people in this country will find the courage to demand transformation, and, like they did in 1989 Czechoslovakia, the older generations will allow them to lead. We must do the same thing here that we did there-- remove old structures from power-- in order to get out of the climate, health care and housing crises while re-envisioning a new democracy-- equal, inclusive, just and generous.

Are We Prepared For The Kind Of Catastrophic Disruption That Will Inevitably Lead To A Trump-Bannon Take Over?

-by Michael Wolkowitz

My old friend Michael Wolkowitz tells people he was formed in the late ‘60s. He's a dissident producer, a Social Democrat, and former board member of many progressive organizations, including a stint as the Chair of the Progressive Congress PAC. He put this post together after the Progressive Caucus Summit in Baltimore over the weekend.

I was not able to attend last weekend’s Progressive Congress Summit. I did, however, receive a thought provoking report of remarks made by Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) during a panel discussion. The essence of the report was this:

"What happens if the country is confronted by a security crisis such as 9/11 or something else, no matter what the circumstances are or who is the instigator? We know that the administration will treat this as a political power opportunity the same way Bush did. We (Progressives/Dems/Both or Other) need to think about doing a better job of responding and not letting he-who-must-not-be-named get away with trying to legitimize either himself, his presidency, or his agenda over a inflicted or self-inflicted national security crisis. She bolstered her argument by referring to the falsely created environment in the 2002 and 2004 elections. She did this quite credibly, bypassing the usual conspiracy discussion that often goes with making any point around 9/11. Conspiracy or not, 9/11 became a political strategy."

I agree with Rep. Jayapal and have been concerned about this very issue. Especially as both a Diasporan Jew and a student of 20th Century Revolutions and Regime Changes. I also believe that in addition to Rep. Jayapal's reminders of the reverberations and manipulations that stemmed from 9/11, it is also worth considering that:

Sadly, we are still on that same duplicitous  post-9/11 war footing.

See: Billions of dollars of off-budget (“PayGo” - HA) on-going war expenditures.

See: Violence, death, destruction, displacement, pain and hardship in Afghanistan/Pakistan/Libya/Syria/Iraq/...

See: Guantanamo Bay.

See: Unconsitutional domestic surveillance.

See: Thousands of undisclosed drone and special ops attacks that kill and maim thousands of innocent people.

See: The acceptance of “The Homeland” as a way of referring to our nation (American is bad enough considering the rest of the Americas).

See:  etc. etc. etc.

I mention these continuing and nightmarish issues merely because the current state of affairs requires that our imagination reach beyond 9/11. We must:

• Remember the Reichstag fire and Kristallnacht. 
• Remember overthrowing Mossadegh and installing the Shah. [Quite a list of these... Lumumba, Allende, et ALL].
• Remember Bolsheviks screwing Menshiviks (see: Bannon).
• Imagine Ivanka as Evita (sorry, always need a tee hee factor).
• Mostly, remember the Empires that have fallen. Which ones? Doesn’t matter. Other than our own current reign, they have all fallen since the dawn of recorded history. It’s just a matter of how messy, how many dead people, how much and what kind of pillaging, and who’s turn comes next.

I do not know whose Empire will come next. I do know that we must understand the entire global (animal, vegetable and mineral) context of the threats hovering and opportunities lurking if we are to survive. We must consider the history of homo sapiens who have lived and are living right now throughout the entire planet. There is a slim but real chance that what President Vaclav Havel used to say could happen: "Truth and Love must prevail over Lies and Hatred."

A Very Different Lou Reed From The Guy I Knew

A couple of days ago a book came in the mail. Before I retired from Warner Bros, books used to come in the mail all the time. They don't any longer. I opened it and it was The Life Of Lou Reed-- Notes From The Velvet Underground by Howard Sounes. Never heard of him. Never heard of the book. But before I put it aside I noticed there was a note. Oh, I had heard of him. It was a note scrawled on a memo sheet thanking me for the interview. Ah... yes, the British author who had done the biography of Charles Bukowski and then one I never read by had heard all about, Down the Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan. When Sounes called from London about coming to L.A. to interview me, I had just been diagnosed with cancer. I was still reeling and... well, more fatalistic than scared. I had misgivings but I had the (mistaken as it turns out) impression that Laurie was OK with Lou's friends doing interviews for the book. I said ok, but knew that the kind of stuff a muckraking author would want most was stuff I had promised myself I'd be taking to my grave. Sounes wanted to come talk to me anyway, since-- I gather-- few others, or actually no one, who had worked with Lou at Warner Brothers was willing to talk with him. I haven't read the book yet but I have it in a small "to be read" pile. My cancer treatments are over now but I still have a touch of "chemo-brain" and reading doesn't come as easily to me as it once did.

Then this morning someone sent me the Nico Hines piece, Monster, in the Daily Beast. That I read. Oy vey! It made me run to the little books to be read pile and grab it and look in the index for my name. It listed 10 pages where Sounes used quotes. What had I said? I sat down and read each page. Whew! Nothing bad and nothing that would piss off Lou's ghost road to what Hines called the accusations in the book of "racial slurs and abusing women." (His piece's sub-title is Lou Reed Described Bob Dylan as a 'Pretentious Kike'.)

I first met Lou in 1966. I was a college freshman. Six years older than me, he seemed much more worldly and experienced. He was 24 and I went to see his band play on St. Marks Place off Second Avenue in the East Village. I tried to go to every show they played. I had never seen anything like it. Andy Warhol was their "manager" and the Velvet Underground was part of his presentation. I originally went for Warhol, went back from the band. I didn't get to know him 'til 22 years later when Seymour Stein signed him to Sire Records, where I was working at the time. Maybe he had mellowed but I had never heard him express any of the sentiments Sounes' book attributes to him-- and I'd say I spent a great deal of time with him between 1988 and his death 25 years later. "Lou Reed, begins Hines after reading Sounes' book, "was a monster." That sure isn't how I remember him.

"I loved his music, but you have to go where the story goes," Sounes told the Daily Beast. "The obituaries were a bit too kind, he was really a very unpleasant man. A monster really; I think truly the word monster is applicable."

The genius behind one of the greatest albums of the 1960s, was unstable, egotistical, misogynistic, violent, and selfish, according to some of those who knew him best.

Reed was well-known for his outrageous public statements—he once told a journalist: “I don’t like n----rs like Donna Summer.” In private he was just as offensive, one old friend told Sounes that he jealously described Bob Dylan as a “pretentious kike.”

Nasty, racist slurs are far from the most shocking revelation in Notes From The Velvet Underground. Reed always claimed that his lyrics depicting violence against women were fictional, but the experience of his first wife would suggest otherwise.

Bettye Kronstad, who married Reed in 1973, described life on tour with the tempestuous rock star. “He would, like, pin you up against a wall,” she said. “Tussle you. Hit you… shake you… And then one time he actually gave me a black eye.”

Allan Hyman, an old school friend, said Reed had even been happy to strike a girlfriend while having dinner with him and his wife. “She would say something. He’d get pissed off at what she said and smash her around the back of the head. [My wife said,] ‘Lou, if you continue to hit her, you have to leave.’ And then he smacks her in the back of the head. So she said, ‘Get out!’”

Sounes said there was a clear pattern of this sort of behavior. “It’s quite clear that he was a misogynist and he did hit women. They weren’t all knocked about but he knocked his first wife about and he wrote repeatedly about violence towards women--he seemed absolutely obsessed with the subject.”

On his third solo album, for example, Reed sang: “Caroline says, as she gets up from the floor / ‘You can hit me all that you want to / But I don’t love you anymore.’”

In a notorious public spat, Reed also slapped David Bowie when the Thin White Duke suggested he cut down on the drink and drugs. In another confrontation with Bowie, the two men spilled out of a car wrestling and fighting each other. “Lou Reed obviously had a very ambivalent relationship with David Bowie, David Bowie really rescued his career, Transformer is what it is because of David Bowie,” explained Sounes. “He obviously resented the part that Bowie had played in his career. And that he was a much bigger star, and I think perhaps, Lou Reed fancying him a little bit at the start.”

...When Paul Morrissey, one of the Andy Warhol collaborators who knew Reed during the Velvet Underground years, was asked to take part in interviews for the book he suggested no one would want to learn more about Reed. “You need a good title like The Hateful Bitch [or] The Worst Person Who Ever Lived. Something that says this isn’t a biography of a great human being, because he was not… He was a stupid, disgusting, awful human being.”

Some of Reed’s erratic behavior may have been related to the major mental health issues he endured. After suffering a breakdown at college, he was treated with a barbaric course of electric shock therapy. When the Velvet Underground split, Reed suffered a second less well-known breakdown and was forced to return to his family home to live with his parents.

He was diagnosed as bipolar and certainly suffered manic depressive episodes.

“The way that he tried to protect himself as a vulnerable, sensitive person who, for instance, was very hurt by reviews when they were bad was to be aggressive and say: fuck you!” said Sounes.

The Velvet Underground didn’t receive the commercial success their song-writing deserved until decades after their demise but at least there had been some critical praise. As Reed’s solo-career continued that also fell away.

It didn’t help his mood.

Godfrey Diamond, Reed’s producer on Coney Island Baby, remembers an exchange late in his career. “Lou, all I want you to do is give me another ‘Sweet Jane.’ You’re the master of writing songs about people,” Diamond remembered. “He looks at me and goes, ‘Godfrey, I try to write ‘Sweet Jane’ every day,’ in this deep, awful, mean, aggravated, upset voice. Clearly, that wasn’t the thing to say.”

The foul behavior started long before the bad reviews, however. No matter what era Sounes turned to, he heard the same thing: “The word that kept coming up was prick,” he said. “Girlfriends called him a prick, people he was at school with called him a prick; people in his band called him a prick.”

It was a constant. “Lou was an easy person to despise,” said Ritchie Fliegler, who worked with Reed on Street Hassle. “He was the biggest prick I ever met, or ever worked for, but he sure wrote some great songs.”

I didn't know Lou when he was severely under the influence of drugs. He was completely sober by the time he came to Sire and the portrait Sounes and Hines paint is someone I sure didn't know, not the guy I stayed up all night with in the White House talking with Czech President Václav Havel, not the guy who several times over the years revealed his innermost fears and vulnerabilities, not the guy who contributed generously to non-profits fighting discrimination and the right-wing agenda he disagreed with so strongly... But one thing I learned over the years is that people form their own impressions and they're just as valid to them as mine are to me. Hopefully history will value value Laurie's more than... anyone else's.

Apparently Lou was an acquired taste and, like everything worth a second look, you had to make some effort to get the best of what he had to offer. Fortunately, what everyone seems to agree is that Lou wrote great songs and brought important music to the ears of tens of millions of people and influenced many of the most important musicians in the world-- not to mention the man who won freedom for his nation in what he called a "Velvet Revolution."

Who Pays For The Consequences Of Not Dealing With Climate Change?

I've only been to one state banquet at the White House in my life. It was for Czech President Vaclav Havel and the only reason I was invited was because it was pre-Google and I was the only one in President Clinton's rolodex who knew the difference between Lou Rawls and Lou Reed. It was the first time I got to meet so many people I write about here at DWT so often: from arch-villains like Charles Koch, Henry Kissinger, Jane Harman, Erskine Bowles, and Tipper Gore to some passing political figures of the day like Pat Danner (D-MO), Vic Fazio (D-CA), Richard Lugar (R-IN), Norman Dicks (D-WA), Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Douglas Bereuter (R-NE), Samuel Gejdenson (D-CT), and William Roth, the Roth IRA guy (R-DE) to a handful of more interesting, if extraneous, figures like Kurt Vonnegut, Mia Farrow, Eric Holder, Stevie Wonder, chess grand master Lubomir Kavalek-- and my old friend Ric Ocasek who I hadn't seen in years and who had originally helped launch my career as a record mogul by producing one of my bands, Romeo Void, on a whim. The whole guest list was geared to President Havel. (I don't think he was a Cars fan but Ocasek was married to Czech model Paulina Porizkova.) Lou Reed was the entertainment that night and Havel had long credited his band, the Velvet Underground, with being the inspiration for Havel's own fortitude in breaking free from the Soviet Union. And there were a ton of Czech officials, although not Milos Zeman.

Saturday, Zeman, a former prime minister, was elected-- the first by popular vote-- president of the Czech Republic. The American media is calling him a leftist but he's also a fanatic Islamaphobe on a level with our own Steve King (R-IA) and as much a Climate Change denier as any pea-size brain Republican. (Last week Florida GOP chimpanzee Marco Rubio said he isn't worried about the climate crisis since "There's a lot of things government can do but changing the weather isn't one of them.") Even the NY Times, which you might expect to know better, was celebrating Zeman's election for signaling "the end of the era of Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president for the past 10 years, whose vociferous skepticism of the European Union and scorn for the battle against climate change made him a sometimes awkward partner in Europe and the United States. " They seem blissfully unaware that Klaus and Zeman are allied and that both scorn the battle against climate change.

Over the weekend, Chris Hayes was tweeting that Obama is "the most powerful person in the world who says he's committed to averting climate disaster" and that future generations will only remember us for how we deal with the Climate Crisis. (He should invite Presidents Klaus and Zeman to make a joint appearance on his show-- along with Marco Rubio and the Koch brothers.) That video up top has nothing to do with the Czech Republic. It's from Hayes' Sunday morning MSNBC show, during which he talked about why Keystone XL is so important in terms of Climate Change.

The State Department is reportedly close to completing a review of a proposed extension of the Keystone Pipeline, to transport oil from Canadian oil sands to the United States. The pipeline is controversial to be sure, and environmentalists contend that, in order for President Obama to remain faithful to his renewed commitment to combat climate change, he must reject the pipeline proposal. Famed NASA climatologist James Hansen has said that moving to oil sands would be “a step in exactly the opposite direction” of what President Obama claims he wants to do in his second term.

So, just how bad are Canadian oil sands for the planet? According to a report published by the Congressional Research Service in June of last year, Canadian oil sands are dirtier-- and emit more greenhouse gases-- than pretty much every other major source of crude oil. Production emissions from Canadian oil sands are 102% higher than emissions from Middle Eastern crude oil, 92% higher than emissions from Venezuelan crude oil and 53% higher than emissions from Mexican crude oil.

And here’s an eye-opening statistic: Production emissions from Canadian oil sands are a stunning 134% greater than production emissions from domestic crude oil. So even “drill, baby, drill” is more climate-friendly than the oil we would get from the Keystone Pipeline.

How far are we from the ideal of "living in truth"? Just listen to right-wingers on the environment

Plus Václav Havel on capitalism and socialism


"With everything else that has been going on in U.S. politics recently, the G.O.P.'s radical anti-environmental turn hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. But something remarkable has happened on this front. Only a few years ago, it seemed possible to be both a Republican in good standing and a serious environmentalist; during the 2008 campaign John McCain warned of the dangers of global warming and proposed a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. Today, however, the party line is that we must not only avoid any new environmental regulations but roll back the protection we already have."

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column today, "Springtime for Toxics"

by Ken

The other day Howie wrote at length ("Mercury Poisoning -- A Thing Of The (Republican) Past?") about the surprising but welcome new mercury-pollution and related regulatory standards proposed by what I think we may safely call the beleaguered Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose kindest fate the next time we have Republicans in control of both houses of Congress and the White House appears to be mere elimination. As Howie pointed out, it was only to be expected that the pro-pollution screamers of the Right would quickly be on the warpath. I don't think any points can be awarded for that safe a prediction.

As Paul Krugman points out in his column today, after sketching the hard-to-deny health peril of the kind of mercury levels we're seeing in our air, ground, and water:

The new rules would also have the effect of reducing fine particle pollution, which is a known source of many health problems, from asthma to heart attacks. In fact, the benefits of reduced fine particle pollution account for most of the quantifiable gains from the new rules. The key word here is "quantifiable": E.P.A.'s cost-benefit analysis only considers one benefit of mercury regulation, the reduced loss in future wages for children whose I.Q.'s are damaged by eating fish caught by freshwater anglers. There are without doubt many other benefits to cutting mercury emissions, but at this point the agency doesn't know how to put a dollar figure on those benefits.

Even so, the payoff to the new rules is huge: up to $90 billion a year in benefits compared with around $10 billion a year of costs in the form of slightly higher electricity prices. This is, as David Roberts of Grist says, a very big deal.

And it's a deal Republicans very much want to kill.

Krugman notes that even the supposedly "different" Jon Huntsman, who "did indeed once say: 'Conservation is conservative. I'm not ashamed to be a conservationist,' "

has been assimilated by the anti-environmental Borg, denouncing the E.P.A.'s "regulatory reign of terror," and predicting that the new rules will cause blackouts by next summer, which would be a neat trick considering that the rules won't even have taken effect yet.

In this case, Krugman points out, the corporate-tool lying liars of the Right trot out all their favoriteslies about government regulation, for example that it's "job-killing." There are only two ways a lie like this can be uttered: by people who are too ignorant to know that it's a lie and don't care about their ignorance, or by people who know it's a lie and have no compunctions about lying. Here's Krugman again:

[W]henever you hear dire predictions about the effects of pollution regulation, you should know that special interests always make such predictions, and are always wrong. For example, power companies claimed that rules on acid rain would disrupt electricity supply and lead to soaring rates; none of that happened, and the acid rain program has become a shining example of how environmentalism and economic growth can go hand in hand.

But again, never mind: mindless opposition to "job killing" regulations is now part of what it means to be a Republican. And I have to admit that this puts something of a damper on my mood: the E.P.A. has just done a very good thing, but if a Republican -- any Republican -- wins next year's election, he or she will surely try to undo this good work.

It's hard to express just how many layers of lies every pol is now buried under. It's been ages since we were talking about the occasional counter-to-truth position. As I keep pointing out, it's necessary to assume that every word out of the mouth of every right-winger is a lie, but in fact as Krugman is suggesting here, it's gone way beyond that. As a society we're officially divorced from reality, totally off the truth standard.

Which brings me back to the inspiration of Václav Havel, with particular reference to that phrase "living in truth" we heard so much about the other day ("The ennobling spiritual and moral as well as political legacy of Václav Havel -- to the West as well as the East") from Columbia economics professor Jeffrey D. Sachs in his tribute to Havel, "The Power of Living in Truth." "Let us pause," he wrote, "to express gratitude to Václav Havel, who died this month, for enabling a generation to gain the chance to live in truth."

Given the trenchancy of Havel's critique of the systems of power and social organization developed under what was passed off in the Soviet bloc as socialism, I think there's a tendency among smug Westerners to think that we're off the hook. Not hardly. Here's what he had to say in 1986, before the Velvet Revolution by which Czechoslovakia was liberated, in Disturbing the Peace, after outlining the problems of the Soviet-bred systems (page 14):

All this is notoriously familiar. At the same time, I don't believe that we can wave a magic wand and dispose of these problems by a change of ownership, or that all we need to do to remedy the situation is bring back capitalism. The point is that capitalism, albeit on another level and not in such trivial forms, is struggling with the same problems (alienation, after all, was first described under capitalism): it is well known, for instance, that enormous private multinational corporations are curiously like socialist states: with industrialization, centralization, specialization, monopolization, and finally with automation and computerization, the elements of depersonalization and the loss of meaning in work become more and more profound everywhere.

Along with that goes the general manipulation of people's lives by the system (no matter how inconspicuous such manipulation may be, compared with that of the totalitarian state). IBM certainly works better than the Škoda plant, but that doesn't alter the fact that both companies have long since lost their human dimension and have turned man into a little cog in their machinery, utterly separated from what, and for whom, that machinery is working, and what the impact of its product is on the world.

I would even say that, from a certain point of view, IBM is worse than Škoda. Whereas Škoda merely grinds out the occasional obsolete nuclear reactor to meet the needs of backward COMECON members, IBM is flooding the world with ever more advanced computers, while its employees have no influence over what their product does to the human soul and to human society. They have no say in whether it enslaves or liberates mankind, whether it will save us from the apocalypse or simply bring the apocalypse closer.

Such "megamachinery" is not constructed to the measure of man, and the fact that IBM is capitalist, profit-oriented, and efficient, while Škoda is socialist, money-losing, and inefficient, seems secondary to me.

"Living in truth" is an almost unimaginably different standard from living under the illusions, or more often delusions, fostered by limitlessly greedy economic and political predators who believe they're entitled to any piled-on rewards, economic or personal, it's within their power to grab hold of, by whatever means they can muster.

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The ennobling spiritual and moral as well as political legacy of Václav Havel -- to the West as well as the East

Havel translator Paul Wilson talks about his friend on Al-Jazeera following the Czechoslovak activist and former president's death this week.

"Let us pause to express gratitude to Václav Havel, who died this month, for enabling a generation to gain the chance to live in truth."

-- Jeffrey D. Sachs, in "The Power of Living in Truth" (see below)

by Ken

As I indicated Monday night, it's been my intention to write something about the impact Czechoslovak playwright and activist and later president Václav Havel had on me. Sure, I would have liked to get to it sooner, but I had a feeling that in the grand scheme of things a few days wouldn't matter, if the message of Havel's life is as important as I think it is.

And in the interim I've been able to see, thanks to Nation of Change, the piece that Jeffrey D. Sachs, professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and special adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals, wrote for Project Syndicate, "The Power of Living in Truth." Here's how it starts:

The world's greatest shortage is not of oil, clean water, or food, but of moral leadership. With a commitment to truth -- scientific, ethical, and personal -- a society can overcome the many crises of poverty, disease, hunger, and instability that confront us. Yet power abhors truth, and battles it relentlessly. So let us pause to express gratitude to Václav Havel, who died this month, for enabling a generation to gain the chance to live in truth.

Havel was a pivotal leader of the revolutionary movements that culminated in freedom in Eastern Europe and the end, 20 years ago this month, of the Soviet Union. Havel's plays, essays, and letters described the moral struggle of living honestly under Eastern Europe's Communist dictatorships. He risked everything to live in truth, as he called it -- honest to himself and heroically honest to the authoritarian power that repressed his society and crushed the freedoms of hundreds of millions.

He paid dearly for this choice, spending several years in prison and many more under surveillance, harassment, and censorship of his writings. Yet the glow of truth spread. Havel gave hope, courage, and even fearlessness to a generation of his compatriots. When the web of lies collapsed in November 1989, hundreds of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks poured into the streets to proclaim their freedom -- and to sweep the banished and jailed playwright into Prague Castle as Czechoslovakia's newly elected president.

As I mentioned Monday night, I'm hardly an expert on Havel. I think I read one or two of his plays, and certainly a number of articles he wrote over the years, but only one of his books, the one published in English as Disturbing the Peace, but I remember vividly how shaken I was by the intellectual, moral, and emotional force of his thinking as represented in a book that didn't appear in English until 1990 but had been conceived and executed in 1985-86, still several years before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, in which Czechoslovaks overthrew the harshly repressive regime installed by the Soviet Union after the brutal repression of the 1968 Prague Spring.

The book was intended to be a "conversation" with Havel's friend the Czech journalist Karl Hvíždala, who was then living in West Germany, which created obvious logistical problems for carrying on a "conversation." Yet they managed it, and in 1986 the book was published in samizdat form in Prague. I seem to recall that it was among the first books published, now aboveground, in the liberated Czechoslovak state. By the time the English version by the Canadian writer Paul Wilson (who had translated Havel's Letters to Olga, the collection of letters he wrote from prison to his first wife, who died in 1996, which for much of the world was the first contact with Havel's remarkable voice) was published as Disturbing the Peace in 1990, Havel was the elected president of Czechoslovakia.

In his introduction, translator Wilson recalls an episode in the spring of 1975, "outside the Slavia Café, just across the street from the National Theatre in Prague," when a friend handed him "a well-thumbed sheaf of typewritten pages" -- a flagrantly illegal act in the Prague of 1975. The friend told him to pass the typescript on when he was through.

That evening, at home, I sat down to read in a state of excitement that only the knowledge of doing something illicit can bring.

It was an extraordinary essay, addressed to the Czechoslovak president, Gustav Husák, about the desolate state of the country seven years after the Warsaw Pact armies had crushed the Prague Spring. The author described a society governed by fear -- not the cold, pit-of-the-stomach terror that Stalin had once spread throughout his empire, but a dull, existential fear that seeped into every crack and crevice of daily life and made one think twice about everything one said and did. This fear was maintained by the Secret Police, "that hideous spider whose invisible web runs right through society," and it reduced human action -- and therefore history itself -- to false premise.

The letter was, in fact, a state of the union message, and it contained an unforgettable metaphor: the regime, the author said, was "entropic," a force that was gradually reducing the vital energy, diversity, and unpredictability of Czechoslovak society to a state of dull, inert uniformity. And the letter also contained a remarkable prediction: that sooner or later, this regime would become the victim of its own "lethal principle."

"Life cannot be destroyed for good," the author wrote. "A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy crust of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undermining it. It may be a long process, but one day it has to happen: the crust can no longer hold and starts to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something new and unique. . . . History again demands to be heard."

The letter, dated April 8, 1975, was signed "Václav Havel, Writer."

Two years later Havel was instrumental in forming Charter 77, the group that became the lightning rod and clearinghouse for the eventual revolution, when finally history was heard.

It's been a powerful experience, reopening Havel's Disturbing the Peace after 20 years, and reexperiencing those shivers of recognition. I want to share some of those with you in a later post, but for now I want to return to Jeffrey Sachs, who communicates a powerful sense of the revolutionary impact that Havel passed on from the revolutionary thinkers who had influenced him, a process in which Sachs himself had a chance to play a direct part.

I personally witnessed the power of living in truth in that year, when the leadership of Poland's Solidarity movement asked me to help Poland with its transition to democracy and a market economy -- part of what the Poles called their "return to Europe." I met and was profoundly inspired by many in the region who, like Havel, lived in truth: Adam Michnik, Jacek Kuron, Bronislaw Geremek, Gregorsz Lindenberg, Jan Smolar, Irena Grosfeld, and, of course, Lech Walesa. These brave men and women, and those like Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Leszek Balcerowicz, who led Poland during its first steps in freedom, succeeded through their combination of courage, intellect, and integrity.

The power of truth-telling that year created a dazzling sense of possibility, for it proved the undoing of one of history's most recalcitrant hegemonies: Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Michnik, like Havel, radiated the joy of fearless truth. I asked him in July 1989, as Poland's communist regime was already unraveling, when freedom would reach Prague. He replied, "By the end of the year."

"How do you know?" I asked. "I was just with Havel in the mountains last week," he said. "Have no fear. Freedom is on the way." His forecast was correct, of course, with a month to spare.

Just as lies and corruption are contagious, so, too, moral truth and bravery spreads from one champion to another. Havel and Michnik could succeed in part because of the miracle of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who emerged from a poisoned system, yet who valued truth above force. And Gorbachev could triumph in part because of the sheer power of honesty of his countryman, Andrei Sakharov, the great and fearless nuclear physicist who also risked all to speak truth in the very heart of the Soviet empire -- and who paid for it with years of internal exile.

These pillars of moral leadership typically drew upon still other examples, including that of Mahatma Gandhi, who called his autobiography The Story of My Experiments With Truth. They all believed that truth, both scientific and moral, could ultimately prevail against any phalanx of lies and power. Many died in the service of that belief; all of us alive today reap the benefits of their faith in the power of truth in action.

Havel's life is a reminder of the miracles that such a credo can bring about; yet it is also a reminder of the more somber fact that truth's victories are never definitive. Each generation must adapt its moral foundations to the ever-changing conditions of politics, culture, society, and technology.

It can sound, even from Jeffrey Sachs's powerfully intelligent and sympathetic remembrance, as if Havel's legacy relates exclusively, or even primarily, to the peoples of the former Soviet empire. I don't think so. I think what made Disturbing the Peace so powerful, so overwhelming for me when I first read it was Havel's strongly and eloquently expressed view that, although he was writing in the context of the failed "socialist" regimes of the Soviet bloc, an almost identical failure of moral imagination and will was built into the capitalist hierarchy.

I know I can't do justice to either Havel's commitment or his thinking, but in that next post I've promised, I want to share some of what he had to say on this subject.


UPDATE: For follow-up on Havels views about socialist vs. capitalist dehumanization . . .

. . . see "How far are we from the ideal of 'living in truth'? Just listen to right-wingers on the environment?"

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Kim Jong-Il (1941[?]-2011), Václav Havel (1936-2011)

by Ken

It's grotesque to put Kim Jong-Il and Václav Havel in the same title box, I know. All the more so since one is one of the great men to have touched my existence, while the other was . . . well, something else.

I'm going to write about Havel, probably tomorrow. I've brushed off my copy of Disturbing the Peace, the book conceived and executed as a conversation with Havel's friend the expatriate Czech journalist Karel Hvizdala (then living in West Germany) in 1985-86, when what became the Velvet Revolution was still a glimmer in the eyes of the Charter 77 activists who had organized slowly in the aftermath of the brutal Soviet repression of the Prague Spring of 1968, and was published in samizdat form in Czechoslovakia in 1986, but didn't appear in English until 1990, when the revolution had been accomplished and Havel the playwright and activist was president of the country.

It's a measure of the hold the book had over me that even after 10-plus years, including two moves, despite my dread at having to go search for it, when I went to look this morning, I found it in about 30 seconds. On the subway this morning I started looking at it again, and it didn't take long to reexperience what I had experienced 20 years ago. I want to share some of that, probably tomorrow.

As for Kim Jong-Il, well, "something else" is about the best description I can think of. What is there to say about a man who thought that the accident of his birth entitled him to wage war on his country's suffering people? Luckily, Andy Borowitz has once again come to the rescue.

Trump To Run For President Of North Korea

Promises Continuity of Leadership

PYONGYANG (The Borowitz Report) – Within hours of the death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, real estate mogul Donald Trump roiled the political situation in that Stalinist country by announcing that he would run for its presidency.

“Kim Jong-Il ruled North Korea as the egomaniacal leader of a personality cult,” Mr. Trump told reporters en route to Pyongyang. “I can offer continuity of leadership.”

But Mr. Trump’s bid may be complicated by reports that, despite his death, the mercurial Kim plans to remain in power until 2024.

“He intended to rule North Korea until 2028,” said one North Korean government source. “His death moves up that timetable a bit.”

In Pyongyang, North Koreans officially marked the death of Kim by having their first meal in thirty years.

Officials said that in accordance with the dictator’s wishes, Kim will be strapped to a nuclear weapon and buried in South Korea.

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