Date: Fri, 26 Dec 1997 15:40:42 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Christmas presents



"Why must every Christmas be so unalterably shitty?" Sheila complains,
stamping out her cigarette.  I am not unempathatic; the crowds, the
commercialism, the peculiarly exhausting ennui of it all.  "I'll be glad
when it's over," she and I say, though I remain silent.  I don't want to
talk about this in front of the children.  "You sound like one of my
ex-wives" is my way of dismissing the conversation.  "I *am* one of your
ex-wives," she reminds me.  The others look at me.  They're all ex-wives,
too.  Mine.  They come with the children, and we usually spend the holidays,
together.  I still enjoy seeing them, and, I hope, there is still enough of
the old feelings left that they don't mind seeing me, either.  Dinner
proceeds, inexorably, though not without its pleasantries.  I am expecting
something.

That "something" are books.  My family knows that I love books, in a
different but no less intense way than I love them,  though I frequently
can't stand to be around those who write them.  "You're just jealous," Teri
tells me.  She's right.  I am jealous, though not of the writers of books.
I am jealous of those who can effortlessly, economically, and with
disturbing clarity, write; those who can take ideas in hand, synthesize,
analyze, and spit out pithy, concise sentences that actually make sense.
There are a few people like that on this list.  I like to give books to
people who can do that, as a way of associating myself with them, hoping
that whatever measure of that inexplicable quality that they possess may rub
off on me, too.  It never does.

I like to receive books, too, and that's what this is all about.  This year,
my favorite is Abbot Gleason's new *Totalitarianism: The inner history of
the Cold War* (Oxford), which is, so far as I know, the first real attempt
to treat the "Sovietology" debate as history.  His is the best resume of
"totalitarianism" by a mainstream scholar I have yet seen, beginning with
the positive meanings of the term under Mussolini and proceeding to its
negative usage in Germany by the opposition to Hitler (which Trotsky first
turned against Stalin).  He talks about everybody in a brief but sensible
way: Hannah Arendt, Carl Friedrich, Brzezinski and Raymond Aron on the one
hand, as well as the "revisionists" Jerry Hough, Stephen Cohen and Sheila
Fitzpatrick, on the other.

Every conceivable political usage of the term is examined in the light of
cold war politics.  And he ends with this eminently wise suggestion:

"Perhaps what has been called totalitarianism will over the next few years
come to be seen as only the most extreme example of a phase in human history
in which the transforming powers of the state, of politics, were greatly
exaggerated by political actors, at the expense of slower and more complex
cultural and economic change likely to be far more durable."

This, with minor amendments and clarifications, is what I tried to say once
in a thread on "the statistical minimum for genocide" on the old marxism
list.  Were I endowed with the expository gifts of Professor Gleason, I
could have said it with equal felicity and clearness.  

I am, as they say, green with envy.

Louis Godena    

  



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