In Anticipation Of Tonight's Debate, An Essay That Deserves To Go Viral

These are busy busy days for  OS, with little time to read, much less write.

However, this essay merits attention, as we limp down the home stretch of a dispiriting political season.

What, one may ask, does the account of this particular obscure 20th-Century monster have to do with the situation we now confront?

In a word, everything.

Our President, and those around him, and those around them, all arrive to us from an academic and intellectual universe that deliberately turns the blind eye to atrocities committed in the name of Progress. Historical Necessity, you know. 

It's all so very polite, well-dressed, well-spoken, tweedy-jacket and sensible hairstyles for both genders. White wine, aged cheese, gossip over who will and won't be granted tenure.

It lionizes people like Castro, Chavez, Che, Arafat, Mugabe, Eva Peron, even Ken Philby wasn't that bad a chap.  He had his reasons, and he was sincere in his feelings as he created all that havoc. One must understand these things, you know.

That horrible man Mr. Solzhenitsyn, well he just doesn't exist. The cheek of him, saying all those things at Harvard after we had honored him so. 

He'll not be invited back, Nobel Prize or no. What was the committee thinking?

Ideas have consequences, and ideologies produce outcomes.

OS asks one thing of his readers. Consider the consequences and outcomes, historically, of the ideas and ideologies promoted by this present administration.

Then, go vote--early--as OS has a premonition of chaos engendered at the polling places of America on Election Day.