LOVE AND DEATH

Caption: This man is now portraying the impetuous and occasionally violent Dmitri Karamazov. The character of Snegiryov is played by the toy monkey.

El Cabrero is still on something of a Russian literature jag. There's no telling at this point how long it will last, although I do promise to try to keep it shorter than The Brothers Karamazov.

I haven't seen a lot of Woody Allen films, but did get a kick out of his spoof of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Love and Death, both of which are, after all, their major themes.

For Dostoevsky, the two were intertwined. He was haunted by death long before it finally caught up with him. When he was still a teenager, his father died suddenly amid rumors that he had been killed by his serfs.

As a young man, he fell in with a group of radicals and was arrested and sentenced to death. As William Hubben puts it in Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Kafka (how's that for a lineup?), after several months in prison, he was one of a group of 21 prisoners scheduled to be executed at 7:00 a.m. on the morning of Dec. 22, 1849:

They were led out into the prison yard to stand on the scaffold, and the officer in charge read to each the fatal words of the verdict, "Sentenced to be shot!" The prisoners' clothes had been taken off, and for twenty minutes they waited in the ice-cold temperature for the final moment to come. Dostoevsky embraced two of his friends in a last farewell. He wrote later of this "last" moment, "I kept staring at a church with a gilt dome reflecting the sunbeams and I suddenly felt as if these beams came from the region where I myself was going to be in a few minutes."

Suddenly an officer came galloping across the square, signalling with a handkerchief to announce that Tsar Nicholas I, "in his infinite mercy," had commuted the death sentence to prison terms in Siberia...

That ought to do it, huh?

Unbeknownst to the prisoners at the time, the "rescue" was staged, a pure example of the theater of power. Siberia probably wasn't' much of a picnic either.

It's probably no wonder that he delved the dark side like few other writers, pondering the problem of evil, guilt, and suffering. But he is also the writer of redemption, compassion, and love in the face of death.

Here's Father Zossima's advice on his deathbed in the Brothers K:

Brothers, have no fear of men’s sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.

Alas, it's easier said than done. Good, though.

DEMOCRACY AND/OR GROWTH. Jonathan Chait in the June 4 New Republic discusses a column by an American Enterprise Institute economist who

points out that, over the last decade and a half, free-market dictatorships had faster economic growth than free-market democracies. The obvious explanation would be that dictatorships tend to be poorer countries (e.g., China) that can grow more quickly by catching up with modern technology. But Hassett offers up a different interpretation: Unlike democracies, dictatorships "are not hamstrung by the preferences of voters for, say, a pervasive welfare state." In other words, while Western democracies are held back by voters--with their pesky demands that citizens get health care and old people not be left to starve in the streets--autocracies march nobly toward a free-market paradise.

This reminds me of a passage in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment where a character says that

compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself, and that that's what is done now in England, where there is political economy.

Back to the future indeed...

GOATS TO THE RESCUE. Finally, the title of this Times article tells it all: "In Tennessee, goats eat the vine that ate the South." The ones around here would probably refuse to eat the kudzu out of spite...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS, A LITERARY BONUS AND AN ONION

Caption: This is him.

The more you learn about President Bush's proposed federal budget, the less there is to like.

Here is a fairly detailed but still readable analysis from the American Friends Service Committee's
Washington Office.

Here's the intro:

The federal budget is the ultimate embodiment of our nation’s priorities and direction, a roadmap of our shared plans as a society. What will our tax money buy? What are the moral mandates we share? What are our national aspirations today? What are our intentions with regard to future generations?

The Fiscal Year 2008 budget request released by the Administration this week offers a troubling response to these questions. The request seeks the highest level of military spending in two decades – even before supplemental funds for current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are taken into account.

It includes supplemental FY07 war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan that would bring the annual expenditure for those conflicts to a level more than five times higher than the entire State Department budget for the same period. It proposes cuts to essential programs that help children receive health care and elders pay their heating bills, while spending billions for a “virtual fence” on our southern border.

And that's just the intro.

SPEAKING OF THE DEVIL, here's another Brothers Karamazov moment brought to you by Dostoevsky. It involves the retelling of an old Russian folk tale about "a very wicked old woman" who never did a single good deed in all her life.

Her guardian angel was desperate to think of some way to rescue her from the devils who threw her into the lake of fire. He finally told God that he once remembered seeing the old woman pull an onion from her garden and give it to a beggar...

And God said to him: Well, take that onion and hold it out to her in the lake, let her catch hold of it and pull, and if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.

Well, the angel held out the onion and told her to pull herself out.

And he began pulling her cautiously and was on the point of pulling her out when the other sinners in the lake, seeing that she was being pulled out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But the woman was terribly wicked and she began kicking them. 'It's me who's being pulled out,' she said, 'and not you. It's my onion, not yours.'

You can probably guess the end. The onion broke and she fell back in.

Moral of the story: methinks the big boys need to do a better job of sharing the onions and stop kicking people down. The rest of us probably should too.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED