Time for Another Velvet Revolution

      

It wasn’t exactly a New Year’s resolution, but Curmie kinda promised himself he’d write at least one blog post a week and would finish two academic articles in 2025.  Alas, to steal a line from the old song, his get up and go has got up and went.  He’s spent only a couple hours on those articles in the last fortnight.  Similarly, despite the abundance of topics to write about here, he hasn’t finished a blog essay in over a week. 

He’s got a paragraph or so written about the GOP’s re-invigorated attacks on the 1^st Amendment; the willingness of major universities to submit to these authoritarian impulses may be included in this piece or it may be a separate post.  Another topic would be the repercussions of NIL on collegiate athletics. 

But a confluence of completely independent events has got Curmie thinking that if he wants to get out of his current funk, it needs to start with some commentary about the April 5 protests.  More than anything, it was the chronological propinquity of those demonstrations and a Facebook post by a Friend of Curmie that made something click in his mind.  No, she wasn’t talking about anything having to do with the current US administration; she wanted to know if anyone could send her a copy of Václav Havel’s play, The Memorandum.  (Curmie could, and did.)

This request happened at about the same time as Curmie saw one of those Facebook “memories,” also about Havel.  It was about a recipe for roast pork and potato pancakes that Curmie had tried for the first time as a sort of remembrance on the occasion of Havel’s death and made again with a couple of minor alterations for Easter a year or two later (hence the late March date).

There is little doubt that Havel is the most significant Czech-language writer in history.  (Kafka was Czech, but he wrote mostly in German.)  His plays—The Garden Party, The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, Largo Desolato, The Memorandum, and Temptation, among others—negotiate the intersection of absurdism and socio-political commentary.  Curmie is a fan: he’s directed two of those plays and acted in another.  Curmie has worked in those capacities on three different plays by the same author for only one other dramatist: that guy from Stratford-upon-Avon.

For all that, Václav Havel’s place in the history books (except for the theatre history books) is secured not as a dramatist, but as an essayist, dissident intellectual, and ultimately as a politician.  Several of Havel’s books—The Power of the Powerless, Open Letters, Disturbing the Peace, Summer Meditations, Living in Truth, The Art of the Impossible—occupy a place of honor in Curmie’s office.  Curmie has been known on more than one occasion to read a chapter or two from one of those volumes when he needs a little inspiration… or courage.

More than anything, though, Havel is known for his leadership of what came to be known as the Velvet Revolution: the complete overthrow of Russian/Communist authority in what was then Czechoslovakia.  Impressively, perhaps miraculously, this happened without bloodshed.  Hence, “velvet.”  (Apparently it’s called the “Gentle Revolution” in Slovakia, but that term loses the reference, intended or otherwise, to the mutual admiration between Havel and Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed.)  Compare this to, say, Romania, where over 1000 people were killed, and both Communist General Secretary Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife were tried and executed. 

Havel was subsequently elected president of Czechoslovakia, in which position he oversaw the “Velvet Divorce,” in which that artificially created country was divided into the two nations we now know as the Czech Republic (a.k.a. Czechia) and Slovakia.  Havel was promptly elected president of the former. 

It’s worth repeating: the Velvet Revolution was known for two things: huge protests and the absence of violence.  April 5 was sort of like that.  Curmie raises an eyebrow of skepticism that the crowds totaled 5.2 million protesters, as organizers claim.  (The Cheeto Chiseler doesn’t have a monopoly on exaggeration.) But the right-wing media’s estimates of “tens of thousands” are beyond ridiculous.  FFS, there were tens of thousands just in Boston, just in Washington, just in New York, just in Chicago… you get the idea, Gentle Reader.  That photo at the top of the page?  Taken in that hotbed of leftist ideology, Utah.  There are a lot of folks there.

There were, as far as Curmie can determine, no incidents of violence or even trespassing by protestors.  No attacks on police.  No buildings stormed.  No death threats against elected officials.  The closest thing to illegality Curmie can find is that a woman in Oregon allegedly keyed a city truck, scratching the paint job.

There was, of course, the usual bullshit about the protesters being paid.  (Would ‘twere so; Curmie could use a little help replenishing his retirement funds now that 47 has crashed the stock market.)  This plaint is particularly ironic coming from the likes of the Apartheid Asshole, who bragged about his attempts to buy votes in the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race.  As God (the internet wag, not... you know...) writes, “Elon can’t believe we hate him for free.”

Even the occasionally perceptive Ann Althouse is complaining about protesters using “uniformly sized white poster board” and employing slogans they read somewhere.  Also, the poster-bearers were clustered near the speakers.  (Not true, and even if it were, who cares?)  Oh, (OMG!) and there were some mass-produced posters.  Or at least that seems to Curmie to be the subject of her whine; her writing borders on the incoherent, as defenses of the Emperor of Trumpistan so often are.

What does all this mean?  For one thing, like the refusal of GOP legislators to actually meet with their constituents, it means the power plays of the MAGA moguls aren’t working.  They want us scared.  They prove themselves willing to do unconstitutional, illegal, and unethical things and think that their show of force will be sufficient to cow any opposition.  But even if 5,000,000 people didn’t show up on Saturday, a hell of a lot did.  And on the 19^th there are likely to be at least as many, especially if the absurd tariffs haven’t been lifted by then. 

Oh, there’s one other thing about the Velvet Revolution: It was successful.  The Russian puppets lost.  Keep the faith, Gentle Reader.