He Had A Pair

Alexander Solzenitzen died. 89 years old.

He was an asshole, but he was my kind of asshole.

I say that in relative ignorance: I haven't read him. But I got the gist of what he had to say about Stalin. He's the one who shamed the fellow travelers, the pseudo-intellectuals who insisted communism looked good on paper.



It looks fine on paper. If you're a sadist or a mortician.

Socialism isn't an improvement at the fundamental level. By 'socialism,' I mean the gentler variety you find in a place like France or Wisconsin. They don't lock as many people up, they don't murder nearly as many. But it's still an economic theory based on theft, something that was apparently lost on the deceased. He came to America and planted himself in Ben & Jerry's back yard and still couldn't be happy.

What socialists, including one of my closest friends in the world, fail to accept is that you cannot build an economy on the belief that people will act against their own self-interest. I don't mean in the random, gambling addiction way we all act against our own interests at times, but in the 'I want the good of the whole more than I want my own needs and wants satisfied' way a communal state requires. That kind of sacrifice is only willing given in small, intense religious communities. You can say it's because people aren't enlightened enough, but you might as well try to turn the whole world Anabaptist. It doesn't matter how good your arguments are, there's extremely few Amish for a very good reason: almost nobody wants to live like that.


Still, like my favorite photographer, Alexander's heart was in the right place. He believed there was such a thing as the truth, and he believed that it mattered. He might have been obnoxious about it, he might have been wrong about a lot of things, but he understood that it was actually possible to be wrong. And that's lost on way too many people these days.

In fact, so you don't think I'm just bashing pinkos, I'll give this example: George W. Bush has absolutely refused to acknowledge that he and his inner circle completely and totally fucked the dog about going into Iraq. They've pretended they didn't really go in because of WMDs, even though that was practically all they talked about up to the invasion. In fact, Bush has even said things along the lines of 'We are not a colonial power: look at Japan and Germany.' As if we did not in fact have military bases permanently installed in those two countries for sixty-plus years.

The Bush Administrations insistence that it has prevented terrorist attacks while assuredly inspiring an entire generation of new terrorists. Who claims terrorists will quit targeting helpless civilians and go fight well-armed, thoroughly trained and very tough U.S. Marines in Iraq instead. Bullshit. None of the 9/11 hijackers would fuck with a Marine. You want to take out 3,000 Marines, you better come with some backup, buddy.

So anyway, Bush isn't anything like Stalin. Or I wouldn't be able to write this from the comfort of my den knowing the secret police are most definitely not going to prevent me from having another martini and writing more sedition against the regime. But that doesn't mean the miniature gulag we have going at Gitmo is not a crime.

He was a consistent malcontent, too. When the Berlin Wall went the way of all things Central Planning, he went back to Russia and bitched about the new boss. Same as the old boss.

The cynical part of me asks, Well what did you expect?

But really, I love this asshole. Don't try to tell him he's sacrificing the good for the perfect that can't be. Same way I vote third party. I vote my conscience, because voting for the Coke versus Pepsi that is Republocrats and Depublicans is affirming an unacceptable status quo. I'm not a Socialist, if anything its opposite, but the machine in place has to be destroyed.

Put out of our misery.

How pitiful that I think voting third party even rates an appearance in the same paragraph with criticizing Stalinism from within Stalin's Soviet Union. I probably never agreed with Solzenitzen, but at least he didn't compromise his ideals.

And as someone who doesn't chain himself to an abortion mill's door mainly because the government has lost its sense of humor about that particular act of civil disobedience, I'm glad to see someone who can stare down a regime like Stalin's. A regime that makes the Bush administration look like a bunch of Boy Scouts with Exxon as their scout leader.