tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610803938756668468.post6088823960006112509..comments2024-03-28T07:08:58.221-04:00Comments on Todd Seavey: Book Selection: John Reed vs. Hernando de SotoTodd Seaveyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08589187886030112999noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610803938756668468.post-91521425049268477112010-02-20T13:46:00.000-05:002010-02-20T13:46:00.000-05:00[...] We the Living may be the most normal-human-f...[...] We the Living may be the most normal-human-feeling Rand story of which I’m aware, particularly her willingness to make Andrei the Communist a surprisingly sympathetic character. Socialism, as depicted in Rand’s work, is an inexcusable, alien offense in the U.S. but a genuine tragedy in Mother Russia. The convincing scenes of Party meetings at the local university, with their air of participatory democracy (marred by out-of-sight executions and backroom deals), reminded me very much of the unintentionally poignant descriptions in American Bolshevik reporter John Reed’s writings of his experiences in the early Soviet Union, when people really believed that the spontaneous collective bridge-building and so forth that they were engaged in was a model for the freer and more spontaneous future they were creating (with only occasional hints in the Reed essays I read of drafts, food shortages, and other rapidly-widening cracks in the armor of the worker’s paradise). [...]Todd Seaveyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08589187886030112999noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610803938756668468.post-43931766023098025652009-10-30T14:34:00.000-04:002009-10-30T14:34:00.000-04:00[...] Dave Whitney and the Rand-bashing writer of ...[...] Dave Whitney and the Rand-bashing writer of that GQ piece have something in common with me — we were all at Brown around the time of the collapse of Communism (as were some of the undergrad Objectivists insulted in the GQ piece). There as a grad student just a few years earlier, as it turns out, was the author of a book I picked up at a DC used books store (once more semi-coincidentally fumbling my way toward the familiar, in a way that suggests far more complex and subtle filters at work in this world and in our psyches than we are consciously aware of): Edward Abrahams’ The Lyrical Left: Randolph Bourne, Alfred Stieglitz, and the Origins of Cultural Radicalism in America surveys Greenwich Village radicals circa World War I and stresses the interesting point that they were in some ways more libertarian (even with John Reed and other revolutionaries among them) than the Progressive/liberal crowd over at the then-new magazine The New Republic, then located a few blocks north of the Village in Chelsea. [...]Todd Seaveyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08589187886030112999noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610803938756668468.post-41379361523599672152009-10-08T22:18:00.000-04:002009-10-08T22:18:00.000-04:00And note my “Update” comment above.And note my “Update” comment above.Todd Seaveyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08589187886030112999noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-610803938756668468.post-75794279492728954672009-10-08T19:15:00.000-04:002009-10-08T19:15:00.000-04:00Cool, I’m going to DVR that PBS show. I read some ...Cool, I’m going to DVR that PBS show. I read some of de Soto’s stuff a while back. Thanks for the heads-up …Dylannoreply@blogger.com