Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Choose Your Intellectual Poison

I probably wouldn't find my self voluntarily reading Malcolm Muggeridge. My intellectual horizon has not yet expanded that far, but it is about to. Superficially I would have simply stumbled on his name and thought him either a character from a convoluted Dicken's novel--more Tale of Two Cities than Christmas Carol. Or possibly I might think him the ultimate muggle from Harry Potter, book forty three, "Harry Ages Searching for the Fountain."

But take a minute or two to drop in at New Paltz Journal and read this:

Insight Rarely Seen

He captures it so clearly. We won't be stormed at the gates. No Attila will need turning back by a Pope. No barbarians from the North will have breached the alpine barriers. Nope, we'll simply sip quietly from the cup of hemlock, huddled over a small table counting our food stamp allotment and waiting for the mail-carrier and his three equal opportunity Young American Job Corps assistants to deliver our welfare check.

The failure to read the history of the likes of Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and the other revolutionaries of the failed experiments of the Twentieth Century while simultaneously embracing the basic concepts of their doctrine is what will do us in.

Been to see "Che" yet?

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