Anthony O'Hear, Great Books. A journey through 2500 years of the West's classic literature, ISI, Wilmington, DE 2009

As usual with products of the Jesuit tutoring, O'Hear puts his deeply incisive account into the service of unrestrained Catholic propaganda and Victorian social values. According to him there is natural and immutable hierarchical order in society as well as in arts.

Even more acute example of this proselytizing can be found in (Brother?) Vaccaro's commentary to an excellent but very strange in its literacy Steven Pinsky translation of Dante's Inferno. Would anyone be interested in the Divina Comedia after seven centuries if its only content were the personal ascension of someone Alighieri to the heights of Catholic Orthodoxy?

Richard Bernstein, The East and West. The history of erotic encounters, Vintage Books, 2009.

Scabrous description of sex exploitation and, sometimes, rape, of the Asian women by the Western men presented as exotic adventure.

This is worse than crime, this is an error

"This is worse than crime, this is an error", once said Prince De Talleyrand. Putin's decision to run for the next President of Russia goes into that category. For the time, I expected that the Tandem (Medvedev and Putin) will obfuscate the issue but closer to the election jointly support a third candidacy, for instance, the Minister for Regional Policies Kozak. Feelers from Moscow were also to a different tune. Newly elected Head of the Federation Council (the Senate), Mrs. Matvienko, suggested direct elections of the senators--currently they are elected by the provincial legislatures as in the US before 1912--the order, which replaced ex-officio appointments, which marred the Yeltsin years. Because the Kremlin was intimately involved in promotion of Matvienko, her "suggestion" must have been vented with Medvedev and Putin in a very deliberate manner. This decision is not so wrong in practice, as in its symbolism. Finally, Medvedev, though a good man did not cut a particularly convincing figure of a president, and Putin is genuinely popular.

But the idea that the leaders of the country are not chosen by the electorate but by a ruling Party Congress could not come in less opportune times. There are obvious signs, even among very loyal commentators, of tiredness and a feeling that a country is on the wrong track. While Russia comes out of the crisis relatively unscathed, the revival is anemic by the standards of emerging markets, and its political system, less than two decades old, is widely regarded as sclerotic. The Wiseacre-in-Chief, a late Prime Minister Chernomyrdin told that "No matter what we are making, the outcome is either the CPSU or a Kalashnikov rifle." United Russia Party, which is a dozen years old, acquires old habits particularly quickly despite the fact that majority of its leading members had their careers after the fall of the Soviet Union and many are (former) businessmen. Namely, they are a collection of provincial bosses who tightly control policies in their regions and represent the most corrupt part of business in cahoots with the state.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this arrangement: every viewer of "Boardwalk Empire" can see for herself/himself that the period of the fastest industrial expansion of the US was characterized by monstrous corruption and unholy union between politicians and businesses, frequently mediated by criminal classes. But for this one needs a significant openness of a political system to energetic (if not more honest) newcomers, the process, which United Russia was created to terminate. I nevertheless hope that the next four years will put forward a new group of leaders (mentioned above Kozak, Matvienko, Finance Minister Kudrin are the prime candidates), which can gently turn the country in a different direction without ruining the unquestionable achievements of the past decade.

M. MacMillan. Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, Random House, 2002.

Margaret McMillan's book is a propaganda rag in support of neocon policies of redrawing the map of the world with the superior US air power. As is usual with neocons, who, not altogether without foundation, disdain the ability of recipients of their agitprop to think, the purpose of the book is revealed in the preface by late Richard Holbrooke, the preeminent and the most successful practitioner of neoconnery.

The book proffers a revisionist theory that the architects of Versaille system were not the wreckers of everything, which remained in the wake of the World War I ultimately responsible for the extremist direction of public policy in the defeated nations, but the benefactors of humanity. The arguments cannot be rendered here without diminishing reader's IQ by a significant bit. The book was published in 2002 when it seemed that US colonial wars would lead to the new millennium of American domination of the world. Then even such moderate as David Gergen proclaimed on CNN that we need to get into Iraq sooner rather then later to finish with it sooner, so that we can start war against Iran quicker. Now this (and the precepts of the Lady McMillan's books) look as madness but these were the times, "now very far away" when Anglo-American elite was totally under the spell of the magic thinking of the neocons.

Joan Biskupic, American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

The book is a rationalization of Scalia's behavior and his alleged "legal theories." The lackadaisical author fondly writes about his background and formative events in Italian America. But there is nothing to rationalize or explain.

He is a power-drank bigot, and that's all to it. Corruption by power is a story as old as the world itself. There is no logic behind his "legalistic" thinking; only demagoguery which serves as justification of exercise of unrestrained power of a Supreme Court Justice and an intellectual leader of the Roberts court.

Justice's Scalia behavior is not without its subtle humor.  When his crony Vice President--if anytime the double entendre of Vice was more suitable--shot a man in the face on the hunting expedition, obviously to have fun and test his invincibility, few people paid attention to Scalia's presence. In fact, as a member of an Opus Dei, Scalia must lead monastic life in the world. Monastic lifestyle in eyes of most people is poorly amenable to hunting. But again, many Renaissance popes included hunting and other pleasurable activities in their tenures. Yet nobody in American media dared to ask: "What other proclivities of the Renaissance popes Judge Scalia may be harboring?"

Steinberg, J., Bismarck: A Life. Oxford University Press, 2011; Pflanze, O., Bismarck and the Development of Germany, Princeton University Press, 1971.

Not a bad biography but it is essentially an abridged and popularized version of Pflanze's three-volume study of the same persona, available in English. Steinberg emphasizes immense contradictions in his character: a militarist who never served the colors, etc. While many facts of the Bismarck's personal life are new, the analysis of his foreign policy is rather mundane and adds little to a conventional narrative.

I took this book to learn something about Bismarck's domestic policies, in particular, a contemporary debate on his "White Revolution": workers' legislation and the like. Bismarck writes very little about that in his memoirs and is generally sparse and evasive on his motives. Furthermore, he is usually dismissive and combative as far as arguments of his opponents are concerned.

My verdict: it is a good present for a history buff friend but not a particularly good source to study his life. Pflanze is slightly better and is significantly better illustrated--one of the most telling sources of sentiment are contemporary magazine caricatures--but my knowledge of German is too limited to recommend anything definitive at this point.

Curios

The title of the PhD dissertation (Psychology, SUNY Binghamton, 2011):

              The Effects of Gonadectomy on Age- and Sex-Typical Responses to Novelty, Ethanol Intake
               and Sensitivity in Sprague-Dawley Rats


I still try to visualize possible displays of the above situation. None of them are pretty.

K. Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Money in the 21th Century, Penguin, 2007, 979-0143038283 and T. Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, ISBN-10: 08050774x.

I take an issue with a number of contemporary writers who, while, discussing the phenomenon of the rising control of the of the American institutions and political process by the religious right refuse or are afraid to take the decisive step. They must recognize that what is called “Evangelical Christianity” in the US is not Christianity at all but a completely new religion. In fact, it has more in common with Imperial cult of the Ancient Rome, namely it is a glorification (sacralization) of militaristic state as a collection of self-contained, male-centric monadic families. 

            Historically, Christianity meant different things to different people. However, if we place such diverse characters as St. Augustine, Calvin, Luther, St. Francis, Torquemada, Ivan the Terrible and Theresa of Avila across the table, we can try to distillate a common ground from their positions. This common ground would not be theological as well as their views on uses and misuses of violence. However, they could, probably, agree on the following set of principles:

            1. Accumulation of wealth is intrinsically suspicious and accumulation of wealth for wealth’s sake is outright sinful;

            2. There is an afterlife. Salvation cannot be achieved through intermission by any human agency and requires Divine Grace and/or Providence;

            3. Prayers are important for achieving salvation in the afterlife but it cannot be achieved without Divine intervention;

            4. Repentance of sins is an important activity in itself yet achieving salvation through it is problematic;

            5. State and family may be important or not, but they are insignificant in comparison to the community of the faithful, the Church.  

            I call the above five principles “operational Christianity.” Now let us contrast these with American “evangelicalism.” The motive of helping the poor is entirely absent from it. Evangelicals and associated politicians express outright hostility towards the poor. Furthermore, any attempts on the part of other people to help the poor are considered despicable and threatening (“socialism”, “class warfare”). 

            Material wealth is the main distinction of the member of the evangelical community. Afterlife plays an insignificant doctrinal role in the so-called “Evangelical Christianity.” The purpose of prayer, similarly to the established Hellenistic religions is to assure well-being in this world, also mainly understood in material terms (e.g. “The Real Housewives” and the ultimate “Housewife of Wasilla”). Repentance is required not from the ranks of the faithful but from the despised outsiders. All what is needed for a rather unspecific Salvation is having the right attitude and following the political precepts and dictums of the leaders. 

            While the personality of Jesus Christ and the Bible play some role in the Cult of Americanism, significant continuity also existed between the late paganism, especially in its Stoic version, and the Early Christianity, as well. It was demonstrated not only in ideology but also in iconography. Byzantine mosaics displayed the community of saints, who looked very much alike a council of the late Roman nobles addressing their concerns to the Emperor. Crucifixes were unknown; one needs to be a historian of antiquity to distinguish between images of Christ the Good Shepherd and Adonis-Osiris of the polytheistic cults. Fishes of early Christian emblems would not be out of place in any Mithraic tabernacle. Only when the Christianized Germanic pagans extinguished a last vestige of the Roman antiquity in the West, the European Christianity acquired its own pictorial and conceptual language. US evangelicalism shares with the Imperial Cult of the Classic Rome its glorification of manliness, aggression and military victory as core cultural values. The high practitioners of the American Empire can be treacherous cowards and sadistic misfits but this contradiction with warrior ethos is absolutely common with the Roman Imperial ideology, as well as with the Byzantine Orthodoxy, as well as with the Nazi pseudo-Germanic paganism. 

            Instead of society/community, which is proscribed as a heretical concept—“There is no such thing as society, only individuals” (M. Thatcher)—the Empire theoretically consists of monadic families, each with the male progenitor at its apex. Hence, the “family values” first and foremost are centered on the continuation of the line of the propertied “men-warriors.” The fact that the role models of the evangelical universe demonstrate their virility more in the alcove than in the battlefield (R. Limbaugh, N. Gingrich, Sen. Vitter, B. O’Reilly--five only legitimate children, Prince Rupert M.) has as little influence on their jaded-eyes supporters as the pranks and unmanly appearance of Caligula or Nero had on the conquest agenda of the Imperial Rome. After their generals conquered another wretched tribe, Augustus or Claudius could always emerge on the decks of their pleasure barges in full regalia and declare: “Mission accomplished.”