March 27, 2003
Synchronicity And Vaclav Havel
I have this guideline that if I hear something distinct and new in several random places within a short period of time, I should pay attention and follow up.Well, today I was reading Jonathan Alter's weblog over on msnbc.com, and he was talking about Patrick Moynahan giving the second best speech he ever heard, in opposition to the 1991 gulf war. He parenthetically noted that first place was a speech by Vaclav Havel. I'd never heard of Vaclav Havel, but you know, distinct name.
Then about twenty minutes later I was catching up on some Buffy The Vampire Slayer news, which had the shooting script for when Amber Benson was supposed to appear as The First/Tara, rather than that other actress appearing as The First/Carrie when Benson refused. I'm not usually into shooting scripts, but since this was an earlier revision, I decided to page through it. And about 1/3 of the way in, a vampire is attempting to reminisce with Buffy by reminding her that he let her crib off of his Vaclav Havel essay in European History, back before the vampire was dead.
Well, in this case I thought two was enough. You don't hear that name every day, much less twice and in such entirely unrelated contexts.
So I looked him up, and here's a speech he gave in 1994. It's a very interesting speech, with parts of it relevant to what I enjoyed about the Paul Berman article I blogged about a few days ago, and some of what I drive at in my war position. I think it skips some possibilities in its conclusion, however. I don't think that the excellent first 2/3 of his speech really lead into his basic conclusion (which I'm really dumbing down here) that we all need to rediscover God.
Plus, to bring it full circle, he even has a throw-away comment about comforting/frightening ourselves with thrillers about vampires.
I'm not sure what to follow up on beyond this, but it was a fun little hunt.