You say you want a Velvet Revolution

You say you want a Velvet Revolution

by digby

This is a lovely piece by RJ Eskow about Václav Havel, a true man of the ideas:

On a warm evening in 1991, a colleague and I found an out-of-the-way café in the old part of Prague. Two men with blank expressions stood outside. The interior was dim and close, with room for only eight or nine tables. The place was almost empty. Just a sleepy waitress, a bartender polishing glasses, and a single patron who sat alone drinking wine and chain-smoking cigarettes.

The President of Czechoslovakia wasn’t reviewing official papers. He was reading a book, a startlingly un-Presidential act to our American eyes. My companion, a neoconservative State Department official, already admired him for defying and defeating a Communist state. He’d impressed me by bringing a writer’s sensibility and an affinity for true underground culture to his role as head of state.

Václav Havel even tried to appoint Frank Zappa as his Minister of Culture. “We’re not rock musicians,” Zappa told a reporter back in the sixties. “We’re electronic social workers.” The State Department wouldn’t let Zappa assume the post, but Havel had made his point to the Czech public by offering this apparatchik’s position to the composer of songs like “What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?” (“Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it’s your mind.”)

We never spoke to Havel that night. It didn’t seem polite to offer anything more than the curt nod of acknowledgement any café patron gives another at that hour. But Havel spoke to us, to all of us. And on the occasion of his death, the real lessons of his life’s work are in danger of being lost.

Today we’re told that the Occupy movement is too idealistic, too naïve. Naïve? Try Havel’s words if you want naïve: “May truth and love triumph over lies and hatred.”

Think of that as the Velvet Revolution’s “one demand.”

Read the whole thing. Eskow draws a very interesting parallel between Havel’s critique of the ossified communist system he helped topple — and the greed and decadence of today’s 1%. I wouldn’t have seen it quite that way and it’s very thought provoking, (particularly in light of the discussions around the sphere and here by David, about the future of the Occupy movement.)

Havel was something special, an artist and writer who put himself on the line and joined the fray as a politician. That’s brave and unusual. Eskow points out his later errors and failures of nerve, but rightly, in my mind, observes:

Havel seemed unhappy in the role of leader. It’s possible than he lost sight of his deepest insights, his truest gifts. It was the outsider Havel, the dreamer of the impossible, the surrealist and absurdist, we should remember. That’s the Havel who can and should inspire dissidents everywhere.

“Is the human word truly powerful enough to change the world and influence history?” he once asked. With his life and his words, Václav Havel gave us his answer. He showed us the power in each individual and the responsibility that accompanies that power.

That legacy seems especially instructive right now.