Blaming History by Michael Tomasky, The American Prospect

Blaming History by Michael Tomasky, The American Prospect

Hat Tip: Truthout

Blaming History Friday 19 December 2008

Michael Tomasky explains how Milan Kundera's The Joke changed his view of politics.

So the assignment is "a book that changed my view of politics." Harder than it sounds. I will confess that when I was a younger man, I was far more likely to think of records, as we used to call them, as life-changing, and if pressed, I could probably to this day defend the proposition that The Basement Tapes taught me as much about America as did, say, either John Steinbeck or V.O. Key.

I could name something predictable by Schlesinger or Hofstadter, or one of those seminal works on the 1960s or Watergate that I and most other American liberal males of my generation display on our shelves and in select cases have actually read to completion. But the idea of "life changing" led me to reach into the memory hole for those rare occasions when reading a book so fired my mind that, while I was immersed in it, I could think of nothing else. You know the feeling: You can't wait for work or class to finish so you can plow back into the book; as you near the end, you actually slow down because you don't want it to stop and can't imagine not being able to read it anymore.

It turns out that it's a novel, Milan Kundera's The Joke, that met for me the above criteria: The book is quite political and contains within its pages lessons about how people adapt to the larger political contexts in which they live. These are lessons that were and are more universal than one might assume - given that Kundera was assaying totalitarian society - about what can happen when the stirrings of the soul are thwarted by the imperatives of the state.

Read the entire essay here: Blaming History by Michael Tomasky, The American Prospect

20081219 Blaming History by Michael Tomasky for The American Propsect