My blog title is based on a quote from G.K. Chesterton, one of my favorite essayists. Reading Chesterton, and noting how “prophetic” he is, reminds me of Noam Chomsky’s claim that the Old Testament prophets were that day’s version of “dissident intellectuals.”
Chesterton could fall into that category of “dissident intellectual,” although I’m not sure that he and Chomsky would find each other congenial, and although Chesterton might not qualify as an “intellectual” (especially insofar as that has become a term of art, connoting an air of snotty superiority rather than merely denoting thoughtfulness and ability to articulate ideas clearly).
I have been rediscovering Chesterton on my new Amazon Kindle (an early Christmas present from my wife, who thought it might facilitate Christmas shopping for me as people could give me cheaper Kindle editions of books instead of dead tree versions). He had a astonishingly low crap tolerance, though a lot of the crap he put down so effectively that it should have gone skulking back to the abyss from which it came nevertheless runs rampant today.
So you can look forward in the near future to some postings, tagged “Chestertonia,” consisting especially of some of Chesterton’s wonderful aphorisms, with perhaps a few less mellifluous observations thrown in. It’s just my part of making the world a merde-free zone. No thanks necessary.
I currently am reading Chesterton’s “What’s Wrong with the World” (Kindle edition something like $.95), and highly recommend it.
I also have begun reading some of Chesterton’s compadre, Hillaire Belloc. What a pair!
“The Servile State,” a Belloc classic and my first Kindle book (which I may someday remember as distinctly as I remember my first music CD: Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, recorded by the Robert Shaw Chorale; better lucky than good), is another dandy, dirt cheap on Kindle, equally prophetic, and succinct. I only hope that I can find some sequel, as “The Servile State” does not have “a happy ending.” Belloc thinks a hopeful and positive (Distributist) emergence from capitalism’s inevitable fall is hugely more difficult to achieve than a wrenching emergence.
A word about Kindle: if you don’t yet own one, and even if you don’t expect ever to own one, you can get free Kindle applications for your smart phone or computer, then buy books (or get freebies from places like Project Gutenberg) and read them on these alternate devices. I actually began reading The Servile State on my smart phone, and then picked it up seamlessly, through Amazon’s nifty Whispersync, after my Kindle arrived (Best Buy was sold out and I bought online).
Sorry for my nine-day posting hiatus, by the way. I never promised any regular schedule of posting, but I’m a bit surprised at how much time got away from me.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 