Perspective

I think I would have to consider myself a slave to introspection. My greatest difficulties are to both get over myself and get out of myself. Lately I have, as always, been thinking a lot, and right now I would have to say my biggest focus is perspective. I realize I need to put my own life into perspective. I also think a lot of other issues our society faces could be mitigated with a little perspective.

I had to go to a conference for work the other day. I generally hate conferences and this one did not for the most part change my attitude. There was however one aspect of the conference that was very positive for me. We watched a movie called Taking Chance. It is an HBO production, starring Kevin Bacon, that is based on a journal kept by a Marine LTC who volunteered to serve as escort to the body of fallen PFC Chance Phelps from Dover Delaware to his parents’ home town in Wyoming.

It is a heart wrenching film. Bacon does an incredible job. I think this film would be beneficial to just about every American, regardless of his or her feelings on the military or the formerly named “War on Terror” or any of that. I believe this film transcends politics and policy. It helped me put a lot of things into perspective.

The other thing I have been doing lately that has really made me think is reading a book called The Stalin Epigram. It is the dramatization of the events surrounding the composition of a poem titled “The Stalin Epigram” by the poet Osip Mandestam. The poem was written largely as a response to the forced collectivization imposed on the peasants, particularly of Ukraine. This collectivization was a key part of Stalin’s domestic policy and the results were absolutely tragic.

There are two perspectives I see from this novel. The lesser and more petty is I would love to send Fox News and a whole lot of other right wing loudmouths back to the times of the purges in the USSR or the Cultural Revolution in China and let them see what the reality actually is of a brutally oppressive leftist regime. Regardless of peoples’ thoughts about President Obama, anyone who compares him to Stalin or Mao (or Hitler for that matter) is an absolute imbecile. President Obama may be making moves that would push us further left politically, but it is more in the modern German/French/British/Canadian/Swedish etc. etc. etc. version of left, not Soviet or Maoist left. I also think that people should remember that everything being done is being done through the political mechanisms provided by the Constitution and US Code and all that. People are more than free to vote the current government out of power and completely marginalize the President in 2010. I don’t think that will happen personally but, you know, whatever.

The other perspective or perhaps conclusion I am gaining from this reading is I think I want to make my life work the study of Soviet Literature, or perhaps I should say subversive Soviet literature. Considering my favorite works are by Pasternak and Bulgakov, I think I would get a lot of personal gratification/fulfillment from studying these works. I think there are lessons to be learned from the courageous writings of Pasternak, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, and others. I think I will even try to study them in Russian as well as English.

So that is what is going on in my head lately…