(no subject)

[solitary_summer]

[Still in TM's diaries, will take a while. Especially the sheer length of the comments part (about 2:1 in the later volumes at least) can occasionally be tiring, even sticking to the read two months of entries, then browse through the comments, rule. Moreover, frustratingly enough often things I'd like to be explained aren't.]

It's equally frightening and depressing how politically acute some of it is - or at least appears to be, taking into account the (my?) tendency to draw over-simplifying parallels. (Then again, when we're apparently reduced to fighting islamistic terror via women's headscarves, it does smack of the beginning of hysteria and not a little insecurity about what we're actually fighting for, or against...) But too many passages from the 1949 unpublished essay Anläßlich einer Zeitschrift show how little has changed, except the name of the enemy/'enemy'...

»Was den Völkern fehlt, ist nicht das Wissen um die Kluft zwischen einem Katalog der Menschenrechte und den Zuständen hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang, sondern das Vertrauen zu der Aufrichtigkeit derer, die mit dem Programm der Menschenrechte Politik machen.« Das ist wohl der wichtigste Satz den das Schweizer Blatt gedruckt hat, ...


I feel like I'm ofter too frustrated with politics, to the point of wanting to throw up my hands in despair & turn my back on the whole mess, and that can't be healthy, at least not at my age, but then again, the one party I ever voted for with real conviction and sympathy disappeared from the political stage after only a few years, because Heide Schmidt, perhaps having come to the conclusion that after years in the FPÖ every further compromise would have been one too many, refused to make concessions in order to be more popular. Intelligent, liberal leaning to the left, no dumbing down, no more easy populism - apparently a deadly combination & mistake in Austria.

It must have cost her, I can't help thinking that. I heard her speak once publicly during a manifestation against a (then still only) possible coalition between the ÖVP and FPÖ, and even being hoarse from a cold she was great, very charismatic. She must have known that she could have had more success if only she'd been willing to modify her aims and means a little.

They accused her of being too intellectual, too cold. Too intelligent.

When I now see what a party, one of whose more prominent functionaries years ago cheerfully and unrepentedly admitted in public that in all his life he'd read but one book, is tying to sell us for president under the catchword of feminism I want to gag. I doubt, or really, really want to doubt, that her favourite movie is, in fact, Pretty Woman as she mentioned in one of those questionnaires, but I can't help thinking playing dumb is even more unforgivable a sin in a female politician than in a male one.

There must be something terribly wrong with a state of things where intelligence (or any appearance thereof) is detrimental to a politician's career.