Hope in an open sewer

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I don't know much about Vaclav Havel except that he was a playwright who became the president of two different nations (Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic) after the Soviet collapse, and that he appointed Frank Zappa as a U.S. trade and cultural advisor---first formally and then, after pressure from Secretary of State Jim Baker, informally.

Havel was an avant garde author and dissident who was hounded, beaten, and imprisoned for expressing unapproved political ideas. He's someone I'll read more about, someday, but the other day Esquire posted a short essay by Havel contributed to the print mag in October 1993. It was to commemorate Havel's death over the weekend. This passage from the piece struck me:

I've always been deeply affected by the theater of the absurd because, I believe, it shows the world as it is, in a state of crisis. It shows man having lost his fundamental metaphysical certainty, his relationship to the spiritual, the sensation of meaning — in other words, having lost the ground under his feet. As I've said in my book Disturbing the Peace, this is a man for whom everything is coming apart, whose world is collapsing, who senses he has irrevocably lost something but is unable to admit this to himself and therefore hides from it.

His observation seems precise and perfect to me, and as applicable in this time I share with you as it was 20 years ago. The whole essay is worth reading. Although he is too gracious to say it directly, one gets the idea that the communal effort to rescue Havel from drowning in a subgrade silo of sewage resembled a clown show for almost a half hour until someone came up with the brilliant, obvious way to rescue him. His point is that he would have lost his life if he and his fellow partygoers had given up hope... and not only did he live for another day, but 6 months later he became leader on the global stage.

Havel's concept of hope begs for comparison with Obama's "hope" as a political slogan, especially its relevance to the open sewer that authoritarianism and corporatism have made of our nation. To Havel, hope was concrete and imperative for survival, and therefore definitely not a corny or moonbat sentiment. I will have to put some Havel plays on my reading list.