New Year's Eve
Dec. 31st, 2003 10:54 am![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
Today finds me at the Bank, waiting for the email announcing an early dismissal, and when I am let go I shall go home and back to sleep, and wake up some time before midnight. Maya, who got back from the MLA last night, is in favor of Champaigne, and I have never been exactly against it myself. And of course if Srsti is home we will no doubt be watching Law and Order. And Law and Order. And Law and Order.
Tomorrow, St. Michael's for St. Basil's day.
My personal new year begins on St. Ephrem's Day, St. Thomas Aquinas' to you of the Roman Church and Rite. And of course the Byzantine new year begins on September 1, which for the Old Calendrists falls on our September 15. And Celtic New Year's Eve will be celebrated by a great costume parade in the Village, which I attended for the first time two months back.
This is a time when folks feel free to indulge in nostalgia, which is all right if it is not destructive. I happen to be recalling Barry Goldwater's 1964 run for the Presidency, which took place my senior year -- of high school -- long before most of you were born, which was the beginning of my political consciousness, or one of the beginnings of it, as I had also been reading the pamphlets of the Socialist Labor Party. Today the Ludwig von Mises Institute published Remembering Karl Hess, Goldwater's great speechwriter, with a link to an essay Hess published in Playboy my senior year in college, just before I left for Greece. Today was the first I read it; very few copies of the magazine circulated at Earlham, and I never really read it until I started dating Maya some years later, when her father's magazines found their way into the bathroom of what is now my apartment.
I wanted to find a paragraph from this most eloquent essay, "The Death of Politics," to link to it; the temptation was great to quote the whole thing, but I shall content myself for now with the opening, in the hope that you will click to read more, even if, and perhaps especially if, those miserable times of 1968 and 1969, times not so unlike our own, were not yet your times:
This is not a time of radical, revolutionary politics. Not yet. Unrest, riot, dissent and chaos notwithstanding, today's politics is reactionary. Both left and right are reactionary and authoritarian. That is to say: Both are political. They seek only to revise current methods of acquiring and wielding political power. Radical and revolutionary movements seek not to revise but to revoke. The target of revocation should be obvious. The target is politics itself.
Good words for now as well as then, I think.