In a recent column, Masha Gessen turned her reflections Andrei Sakharov. I felt guilty, because Sakharov was probably the most notable prisoner of conference in the Soviet Union; too important to kill but to knowledgable to ever stand a chance of exile. He's an interesting contrast to Solzhenitsyn who was able to escape communism and go off to Vermont to complain that it wasn't Russia. No, it wasn't; but then, neither was Russia.
Gessen raised a point that Sakharov made in his first anti-government writing, the one that got him sent to internal exile and kept him accompanying his wife and giving his own Nobel Peace Prize. He expressed the opinion that autocrats were criminals, actually guilty of crimes; were very narrow-minded; and, had no ability to anticipate what was going to happen.
Well, it is getting dark, but it's still light enough to see, and this is a great description of our only serving president.
At the same time, I was looking for some way to put Trump in a class. Nixon was a lot of bad things, but he wasn't ignorant, nor stupid, nor greedy, nor a coward. That was when I discovered a piece about Isaiah Berlin and his Hedgehog and Fog imager. Berlin was interested in language and in classification and differentiation, and meant this one as a thought experiment. Turned out to be more than that but as he said, "Every classification tells you something."
This is what I've spent entirely too long working on. I haven't been feeling at all well, and I'll use that for the excuse.
