dagblog - Comments for "And then There was Vaclav Havel"

I wouldn't say Havel was

Elusive Trope — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:22:17 +0000

In reply to I was in Praha in February of

I wouldn't say Havel was perfect and the embodiment of all that was good and decent and wise. He was just another being passing through this world. I think what can be said that regardless of what he did and didn't do, he struggled to do the right thing. Which all we can ask of ourselves, regardless of our positions within the hierarchies of society. On top of that he was able to articulate the aspirational in a powerful way, even if he wasn't always able to achieve it on a personal level.

I was in Praha in February of

A Guy Called LULU — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:11:00 +0000

In reply to And then There was Vaclav Havel

I was in Praha in February of 2002 and had heard of Havel. I took a survey questioning local opinions. I asked one person, a tour guide of about 25, what he thought of Havel. He said, "Vaclav Havel is a joke, Vaclav Havel is a shoe shine boy, shoe shine boy, fucking shoe shine boy". I decided not to bring it up anymore.
I can not say for sure what the range of possible statistical error is in my survey and I personally know very little about the man except that he got very good press in the US. So, just sayin'.

Havel's support of the Iraq

Elusive Trope — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:29:13 +0000

In reply to I hadn't realized this, but

Havel's support of the Iraq invasion has to be included in any assessment or understanding of Havel and his place in history. But to simply conclude that Havel (or anyone for that matter) came to decision because he was a conformist and a yes-man is the type of lazy and usually ideological analysis that make discussing how the Iraq invasion occurred so difficult. Havel's personal experience with totalitarian regimes alone has to be taken into account, when looking into the matter. This doesn't mean that I agree with Havel on this account. I opposed the Iraq operation then and now. But the whole issue has been so politicized that the discussion ends up being closer to a question of whether one believes Cheney and Rumsfeld were visionaries or evil incarnate, and with one's answer showing as Bush said "either you're with us or you're against us."

I hadn't realized this, but

Donal — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:00:14 +0000

In reply to And then There was Vaclav Havel

I hadn't realized this, but Larison reminds us that like Hitchens, Havel supported the invasion of Iraq.

... Perhaps because of some misguided sense of gratitude to the United States, Havel was one of the first leaders in central and eastern Europe to align himself with Bush’s folly. One of the perverse side-effects of the first two rounds of NATO expansion was to create an unhealthy eagerness on the part of the new members to fall in line behind U.S. policy, no matter how foolish or far removed from their own interests it may have been, and in this Havel was no different. Like many other leaders in the region, Havel was wildly out of touch with his own people on the Iraq war question. It can’t be stressed enough that the people responsible for weakening and jeopardizing the “trans-Atlantic relationship” during 2002 and 2003 were the Bush administration and its eager supporters in Europe. On one of the more important issues of the last decade, the famous dissident became a predictable conformist and yes-man.

we become our

Flavius — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:52:00 +0000

In reply to Thanks for this

we become our choices

automatically brought to mind Auden on the death of Yeats. Starting with

He disappeared in the dead of winter

not quite true of Havel . Hard not to quote the next few lines

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues;

down to

he became his admirers

Thanks for this

Elusive Trope — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 06:37:48 +0000

In reply to In the March 90 NYR, an

Thanks for this remembrance.

For what's it worth I do believe that applauding at the wheel of the car does make a difference just as the poet Jane Hirshfield once said at a reading during the Q&A she has to believe that monk on a rock in the wilderness praying for peace makes a difference.

A poem by Hirshfield, Rebus, comes to mind that seems to me somehow to touch on the journey Havel had in our world

You work with what you are given,

the red clay of grief,

the black clay of stubbornness going on after.

Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,

clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.

Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,

each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.

There are honeys so bitter

no one would willingly choose to take them.

The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,

honey of cruelty, fear.

This rebus—slip and stubbornness,

bottom of river, my own consumed life—

when will I learn to read it

plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?

Not to understand it, only to see.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,

we become our choices.

Each yes, each no continues,

this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.

The ladder leans into its darkness.

The anvil leans into its silence.

The cup sits empty.

How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

In the March 90 NYR, an

Flavius — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 03:38:00 +0000

In reply to And then There was Vaclav Havel

In the March 90 NYR, an excellent article by Timothy Garton-Ash about the velvet revolution includes a photo of Havel and Dubcek on a balcony together when they have just heard a piece of news about the gradually unraveling of the Soviet Union. Leaning towards one another and smiling. Two good guys.

I was in Prague in Jan of 1990. Havel and the outgoing Communist leader had reached an agreement but even a non-speaker of that language could sense the tension. The taxi driver scoffed at the name of our Hotel clearly because it resembled the name of the nearly-successful resistance movement. There were fresh flowers and lit candles at impromptu shrines, where protestors had been killed the month before. Also, encouragingly, lots of signs clearly saying, "Havel to the Castle."

A month later Havel was here. Me, too. In his case to address Congress (and go to CBGBs). I listened on the car radio. He'd thought of speaking in English, he said, but his staff convinced him it would be a catastrophe, so we would have the chance to hear the beautiful Czechoslovakian language. Then his first Czech words , repeated by the translator, were, "The last time I was in prison."

Great applause from the joint session and me at the wheel for what that's worth.

From the rest of the speech what I recall was his urging Congress to be patient with the Soviet Union because it was moving in the right direction. Of a piece with his recognizing Dubcek and opposing the "lustration"— the hunting down of ex-leaders from the communist regime—which commenced with the very different Vaclav, Vaclav Klaus whose own subsequent very different Premiership caused him to be known as the Czech Margaret Thatcher. For Klaus anyone associated with the former regime—by which he had been comfortably employed—was an enemy until they could prove otherwise. For Havel, until it was proven otherwise, they were human beings trying to get through the day.

That was Havel.

Great passage that shows his

Elusive Trope — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:20:18 +0000

In reply to I read this at Yglesias

Great passage that shows his ability to tackle the deeply complex fusion of the abstractions in our heads and the ways these abstractions get materialized and perceived in real time. Matt Welsh wrote of Havel:

Like Orwell, Havel was a fiction writer whose engagement with the world led him to master the nonfiction political essay....he used common sense to deconstruct rhetorical falsehoods, pulling apart the suffocating mesh of collectivist lies one carefully observed thread at a time.

Havel still played the game of geo-politics, but he at least wrote essays and gave speeches that in essence undermined the very game he was playing. In this manner, he was an intriguing figure on global stage.

I read this at Yglesias

EmmaZahn — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:45:45 +0000

In reply to And then There was Vaclav Havel

I read this at Yglesias Moneybox blog today. It makes me want to read more Vaclav Havel:

"Many of the great problems we face today, as far as I understand them, have their origin in the fact that this global civilization, though in evidence everywhere, is no more than a thin veneer over the sum total of human awareness, if I may put it that way. This civilization is immensely fresh, young, new, and fragile, and the human spirit has accepted it with dizzying alacrity, without itself changing in any essential way. Humanity has gradually, and in very diverse ways, shaped our habits of mind, our relationship to the world, our models of behavior and the values we accept and recognize. In essence, this new, single epidermis of world civilization merely covers or conceals the immense variety of cultures, of peoples, of religious worlds, of historical traditions and historically formed attitudes, all of which in a sense lie "beneath" it."

The Human Scale blog I wrote

Elusive Trope — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:09:09 +0000

In reply to There's a typical Czech pub

The Human Scale blog I wrote touched on this a little while ago, in its own clumsy way. The connection between one's elected leaders and the "people" is another dynamic.