Douglas Mercer
October 1 2024
When Alexander Solzhenitsyn moved to America (1974) he became an instant folk and cult hero for the far right, not the Hitler far right, but the normal far fight, the ones who (if just barely) fit within the confines of the Republican party dominated by the middling right, the ones who were genteel and liked order and a strong sound foreign policy and cakes and tea, and comfortable Sunday afternoons on the backyard lawn, and who were willing to bend on any number of issues as they were the prevailing tides of the times. But for the hard right, the ones who had a copy of Witness on their bedstands, who could tell you the arcane lore of the pumpkins papers, who would go the mat in any debate over Alger Hiss’ guilt or innocence, who were likely to casually drop the phrase “Democrat Wars” without compunction, who thought that Nixon should have stayed in China, who thought that only a martial God (their God) could save things from generally going to a hell in a handbasket, who wondered aloud and often about who in fact had lost China, and who might still even among friends refer to Franklin Delano Roosevelt as “that man”; for that far right Alexander Solzhenitsyn was their beau ideal, their cause celebre, their culture hero, their hoopla and their ballyhoo, a Randian Hero against the system, a Knight Of Old who had set out to slay the dragon of collectivist Evil; and the fact that he had chosen to live in America gave them renewed vigor in chastising anyone inclined to utter the dread word “détente” or give even half credence to the Horseshoe Theory of Politics. When Gerald Ford declined to meet with the great man out of a fear that such a tete-a-tete would damage relations with the Soviet Union all hell broke loose with the crowd who loved to hear again and again how G Gordon Liddy (the only one with any guts they would say) loved to burn his hand with flame to consolidate his bona fides as a true blooded stoic. Calls of treason were in the air at the Presidential refusal and the word pusillanimous cropped up again and again, and craven cowardice and bowing and scraping were invoked, more than a few said the President was dancing attendance, and it was agreed on all sides of their little pure coterie that when it came to the man in the White House quality, as the saying went, was not job one.
Given the subsequent history of both Harvad University and Solzhenitsyn himself it seems rather amusing that the former would have invited the latter to give a commencement address but, as it happened, they did just that (1978). The speech has gone down in lore as a case of, on all sides, be careful what you wish for, for it is a known fact that more tears have been shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. For instead of delivering the expected jeremiads and denunciations of the Evil Empire, instead of speaking of the abhorrent insect like nature of drone man, instead of appealing to man’s inherent and dignified hatred of the implacable faceless bureaucrat with a truncheon, instead of touting the golden peace of democracy and freedom, and the wonder of Pax Americana, the speaker turned his vitriol on a rather softer target: America itself. He claimed that the America which had taken him in was a stultifyingly ignorant country of pleasure seekers addicted to trivia of all sorts; one that was inordinately fond of mind numbing drugs of all stripes and hues; a degenerate country with no culture to it name; a Godless country with the spiritual values of inert matter; a country piling up anti-civilizational mental trash at an alarming rate; a people who were mainlining decadence and decay at a speed that would have made Caligula blush; a people so bent on hedonistic abandonment that the tawdry and unseemly images they were projecting seemed to feed on one another after the jaded viewer had his fill; and to top it all off it was a country which was engaging in such activity with such a rather heedless, insouciant and nonchalant grin that they seemed to be doing nothing but what was resonant with singing off key in a particularly unwholesome graveyard.
To say that the speech was not well received, that is that it was about as popular as the proverbial skunk at the legendary garden party, is to say too little; mouths dropped as expectations were flouted, heads were sent spinning, and all were besides themselves, and agog, agape and aghast at the vituperative temerity of the man who spoke the words; that is they had certainly not seen that one coming, not from a million miles away. Though the speaker had appalled the many and bewildered everyone, this sudden twist and turn of events hit the far right particularly hard and after some open mouthed days of bitter soul searching when they tried among themselves to rationalize what they had heard, or assimilate it to some preconceived world view, they soon realized that it had not just gone beyond the pale but sent the pale itself on a miles long journey. And so as they dusted themselves off after the inner fracas their innate thundering for the intrinsic righteousness of America, that is for the real America, their America, also known as the side they were on, they washed their hands clean of entire affair and, still somewhat confused and not quite enough chastened, they cut their now erstwhile idol Alexander Solzhenitsyn loose faster than you can say Jack Straw, hoping to leave him twisting slowly, ever so very slowly, in the wind.
The moral of this story, and there is a moral to this story, as there is a moral to everything, is that the truth hurts and that humankind in all of it many guises and all of its vast array of incarnations can bear very little reality. But when one sees it one can recoil in horror, thunder or thump against it, one can deny it, one can erect ever more elaborate defense mechanisms and intricate reaction formations to oppose it, one can suppress it, repress it, bury it many fathoms deep, one can stick one’s head in the sand, one can avoid or ignore it, one can become indignant in the face of it, one can be aghast, one can clutch one’s pearls, one can rend one’s garments or wail and ululate, one can become up in arms, or one can even subject it to rational argument, one can take to the august pages of any number of popular or prestigious journals or papers, one can even write it off as just one of those things that happens from time to time; but whatever one chooses reality’s cardinal feature is that whatever aversions or blandishments you subject it to, whatever wild gyrations you put yourself through in order to evade it, they are all of no avail; that is it has no respect for people whatsoever and it remains true whether one believes it or not. It is this cold and implacable feature it possesses which accounts for all the pain it causes when it finally sets in.
