Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn died the other day. What an incredible, odd, crabby guy. Brilliant in his thinking, legendary in his cantankerousness. He might have been a charming guy but it looked like he had all the charm of the villain who gets caught at the end of every Scooby Doo episode. And he had the blinking, 'you've just torn off my disguise!' look to match.

Oddly enough, I never read A Day in the Life or Gulag, though I read much about them. I did read Cancer Ward, however. A great book. The subjects it touches on -- politics and labor camps and materialism, etc -- can be an overlay of sorts for the U.S. No, we don't have labor camps (although we have far too many people -- men -- in prisons), but in a larger sense, some people are in the same suspended sense of misery imparted by a gulag: miserable job, debts up the wazoo, not much hope, etc. And certainly the materialism -- it's unbelievable. We buy buy buy and basically shit shit shit. Produce, use, discard, repeat.

America, as Alex Sol-zn saw it in the 70s, was living in "an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses." And our vulgar materialism and weak morals would doom us the way Stalinism (and its descendant philosophies) would doom the Soviet Union. I think he was entirely confused about the mores of the U.S. -- individualism (the me generation), low culture (imagine what he thought of reality TV), and for the most part godless (sure, everyone thinks they're faithful/spiritual, but they don't act spiritual and the old European sense and most know nothing about the bible -- new or old test). "On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility." So he wasn't a fan of the West either, really.

Now don't get me wrong. I think it's all great. I love this country. And who is to say what is right? Materialism, individualism, communism, socialism, capitalism, watching jism? The only factor that makes whatever thing "right" is people's freedom to choose that thing. Here in the U.S. we choose to be material. We choose to watch mind-numbing TV and follow assidously the thinnest crust of society -- celebrity. And buy all manner of stuff and live well beyond our means. It's dumb and it's stupid and it's banal and it's a huge waste. But is it wrong in the grand scheme of things? I don't know. From a resource standpoint, yes, it's wrong. We can't keep using and wasting indefinitely. And perhaps it can be argued that we become so soft and wasteful and fat that we become easy pickings for the hordes waiting for us to stumble; and we start looking at the world from a Hollywood-movie script viewpoint (life is fair and has happy endings and big business is bad and the we're all bad and must be punished for our frittering!). But in the grand scheme-humanity standpoint? Who the hell knows?

"Until I came to the West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined to what an extreme degree the West had actually become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it…All of us are standing on the brink of a great historical cataclysm, a flood that swallows up civilization and changes whole epochs." Congressional testimony, 1975

Let's hope he's wrong.