Stray Thoughts

MICHAEL VENTURA
LETTERS AT 3AM –
ISSUES ’08: ‘THE SITUATION’ – Austin Chronicle – August 1, 2008

On Oct. 29, 2004, days before our last presidential election, this column ran with the headline, “Welcome to the Situation.” After huffing and puffing about the inability and/or unwillingness of the candidates to discuss the capital-S Situation frankly, I defined the Situation thus: “The great days of the United States of America are over.”
It was a sloppy use of the word “great.” By great, in that sentence, I meant powerful and rich. What could I have been thinking? On any more-or-less sane day I know power and riches are not necessary for greatness. The blacks and Creoles of New Orleans were neither powerful nor rich when they invented jazz, nor were the Wright Brothers when they gave us flight, nor was Italy when it produced the cinema of Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Luchino Visconti. For that matter, America wasn’t powerful and rich when it created its Constitution. Examples abound. America can be great without being powerful and rich. But to get on with the Situation, in 2004 I defined it like this:

Continue reading Welcome to the (evolving) Situation

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1953, a prisoner at what the world would come to know through his writing as “The Gulag Archipelago.” (Photo: International Memorial Society)

Via truthout.

On Thursday, June 8, 1978, acclaimed Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered the following address.

Opening Remarks:

I am sincerely happy to be here with you on this occasion and to become personally acquainted with this old and most prestigious University. My congratulations and very best wishes to all of today’s graduates.

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas.” Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.

Three years ago in the United States I said certain things which at that time appeared unacceptable. Today, however, many people agree with what I then said…

Continue reading Solzhenitsyn’s address to Harvard

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7540821.stm

Tributes to writer Solzhenitsyn

Flowers have been laid in tribute outside the home of the Nobel laureate
World figures have paid tribute to Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a day after his death aged 89.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev lauded him as one of the first to speak up about Stalin’s regime, and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy hailed his courage.
The author, who exposed Stalin’s prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, will lie in state in Moscow on Tuesday, according to Russian media.

Continue reading Tributes to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You want to know what this site is about? I’ve never seen it more simply and eloquently described than by Kenneth Clark in his TV series Civilization, already decades in the past. “The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn’t enough.”

No, it isn’t enough, but fortunately it isn’t quite true that there is no alternative to materialism or Marxism; and it isn’t true that the only alternative is Christianity or the other higher religions, though they are usually better than the other two choices. The alternative is being built in our time; it is a new way of seeing that will reclaim the great spiritual truths; will re-knit them into a new fabric. That involves a good deal of fumbling around, but it can be done and is being done.

Continue reading The alternative