He Gave Prague Castle the Bird

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Life is Elsewhere is the title of a novel by the Czech, novelist, dissident and pornosopher Milan Kundera, The title was taken from an expression graffittied on Paris walls during the '68 riots, which coincided with the soon to be repressed Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. Now the former Czechoslovakia is made up of The Czech Republic and Slovakia and though both are free of the Communist party, they are not, in the opinion of a whole new generation of artists and dissidents free of corruption. Materialism of the undialectical sort brings is own form of oppression. The Times ran a story about the Czech artist David Cerny who is literally pointing his finger at the ruling party of Czech president Milos Zeman (“Angrty at Prague, Artist Ensures He’s Understood,” NYT 10/21/13). “He installed on the Vlatava River a 30-foot-high, plastic purple hand with a raised middle finger…that points directly at Prague Castle.”  Cerny, in general, according to the Times, doesn’t pull his punches “depicting Germany as a network of motorways resembling a swastika” and “displaying a caricature of a former Czech president inside an enormous fiberglass rear end.” Jonathan Franzen recently published a volume of essays by and commentary on the great l9th century satirist and editor of Die Fackel (“The Torch”), Karl Kraus, The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus. Kraus excoriated the foibles of Viennese society (“psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy” is one of  his gems). Vienna is only a stone’s throw from Prague and one wonders if Kraus’s spirit doesn’t live on in Mr. Cerny’s freewheeling attacks.

Freedom

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (l954) and Roe v. Wade (l973) were arguably the two most momentous decisions in Supreme Court history. If the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were direct products of the thinking of Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke. Then Roe v.Wade and Brown v. Board  (which turned over Plessy v Ferguson, the famed “separate but equal” decision of l896) were not only reflections of two great libertarian movements—civil and women’s rights—but also the culmination of an evolutionary process as manifested in jurisprudence. But these two decisions were not only milestones of political, economic and legal thinking. They define an era that began with The New Deal, the Camelot of the Kennedy White House with its resident intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the hope of the troubled Obama Years. When we think about the ideals that manifest themselves in the liberal wings of both the Democratic and Republic parties, Roe v Wade and Brown v. Board redefine the notion of Inalienable Rights. Freedom is the title of Jonathan Franzen’s bestselling novel and it would be hard to imagine this work of fiction and all the complexities of the world it describes without Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board whose outcomes were declarations of new freedoms. Yet Conservative thinkers who criticize these two decisions are probably right. Both Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board of Education extended the notion of human liberty beyond the original intentions of the writers of the Constitution. "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties!" exclaims Hamlet. How will the verdicts  of our 21st Century Supreme Court define or redefine the Rights of Man?

Freedom

“They resemble any number of well-meaning couples for whom ‘the home’ has become a citadel of aspirational self-regard and family life a sequence of ennobling rites, each act of overparenting wreathed in civic import—the ‘issues’ involving cloth versus disposable diapers, or the political rectitude of the Boy Scouts, or the imperative to recycle batteries—and the long siege of the day heroically capped by ‘Goodnight Moon’ and a self-congratulatory glass of zinfandel.” The reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom have been universally over-the-top, but this quote from Sam Tanenhaus’s piece in this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review is particularly significant. However much one agrees with Tanenhaus’s praise of the book, Freedom certainly inspired him to make one of the most cogent statements ever written about the parenting style of the baby boom generation. Furthermore, when he was first appointed editor of the Book Review several years back, Tanenhaus, the author of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography and The Death of Conservativism, was rumored to be more interested in non-fiction than fiction, to the consternation of many novelists and short story writers. By assigning himself the review of Freedom, and concluding that the novel “illuminates, through the steady radiance of the author’s moral intelligence, the world we thought we knew,” he is making an argument for the gravitas of fiction at a time when the serious novel has failed to lay claim to its classically oracular role. By writing about Freedom in the way he does—thereby adding Franzen’s book to the list of great American novels, from Herzog and Catch-22 to Portnoy’s Complaint, Rabbit Run, The Natural and, mostly recently, Infinite Jest—Tanenhaus is making a case that there is still a great American novel.