http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/tyranny_fails_freedom_works/ Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:35:34 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/tyranny_fails_freedom_works/#comment-666 Alex Reed Wed, 14 Mar 2007 05:16:19 +0000 http://pajamasmedia.com/claudiarosett/2007/03/13/tyranny-fails-freedom-works/#comment-666 Ronald Reagan's address has all the qualities we all loved in the man. There was always a wonderful open-hearted directness about him that told you in your bones that he meant what he said, a quality sure to have caused monumental angst amongst certain echelons in the old Soviet Union, no less amongst great swaths of the left here. There was nothing sly, or contrived, or complicated about him or the way he thought. He had the gift of correctly seeing, and easily and succinctly expressing the clean, fundamental lines of any situation. An artist's gift of seeing really. There was something in the way he thought and expressed himself, in the way he was, that made me think of him as always striding forward to see what was on the horizon. An entirely admirable and endearing man. Thanks for pointing us to this great speech. There's another one that I liked very much on the AEI roster, though for very different reasons. <a href="http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.22053,filter.all/pub_detail.asp" rel="nofollow">Mario Vargas Llosa</a>, the brilliant peruvian novelist, essayist, and sometime politician was awarded the Irving Kristol Award in 2005. Where President Reagan goes straight to the distilled core of his argument, Vargas Llosa considers his from many different, sometimes diffuse, but ultimately interconnected perspectives. He is the author of the vertiginous tour de force novel, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, the vastly imagined War of the End of the World, and Conversation in the Cathedral, a novel that, while following the ebb and flow of the lives its protagonists, also explores political power and its corruption, and the importance of personal freedom. Vargas Llosa's Irving Kristol Lecture, "Confessions of a Liberal", not unlike his novels, weaves a profusion of sinuous lines of thought. He defines himself as a liberal, in the true sense of the word, "a lover of liberty, a person who rises up against oppression", adding that "the liberal that I aspire to be considers freedom a core value." Lots to think about........Enjoy! Ronald Reagan’s address has all the qualities we all loved in the man. There was always a wonderful open-hearted directness about him that told you in your bones that he meant what he said, a quality sure to have caused monumental angst amongst certain echelons in the old Soviet Union, no less amongst great swaths of the left here. There was nothing sly, or contrived, or complicated about him or the way he thought. He had the gift of correctly seeing, and easily and succinctly expressing the clean, fundamental lines of any situation. An artist’s gift of seeing really. There was something in the way he thought and expressed himself, in the way he was, that made me think of him as always striding forward to see what was on the horizon. An entirely admirable and endearing man. Thanks for pointing us to this great speech.
There’s another one that I liked very much on the AEI roster, though for very different reasons. Mario Vargas Llosa, the brilliant peruvian novelist, essayist, and sometime politician was awarded the Irving Kristol Award in 2005. Where President Reagan goes straight to the distilled core of his argument, Vargas Llosa considers his from many different, sometimes diffuse, but ultimately interconnected perspectives. He is the author of the vertiginous tour de force novel, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, the vastly imagined War of the End of the World, and Conversation in the Cathedral, a novel that, while following the ebb and flow of the lives its protagonists, also explores political power and its corruption, and the importance of personal freedom. Vargas Llosa’s Irving Kristol Lecture, “Confessions of a Liberal”, not unlike his novels, weaves a profusion of sinuous lines of thought. He defines himself as a liberal, in the true sense of the word, “a lover of liberty, a person who rises up against oppression”, adding that “the liberal that I aspire to be considers freedom a core value.” Lots to think about……..Enjoy!

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