You'd think, but that really wasn't the case in the early 30s in Europe. I'd grant your point if he changed his mind after the Holocaust. As it was he was protesting against Nazism as Hitler came to power, well before the horrific evidence of the Holocaust - that's when it mattered most.

No, I know this was before the Holocaust. But it was still an enemy doing it. Most intellectuals in the UK in the thirties understood that Germany and Britain were going to war. So, yes, he gets credit for it being pre-holocaust. But still he did not object until somebody likely to go to war against his country started practicing it. It took that to call his attention to it. And meanwhile the anti-semitic culture he'd helped foster and keep respectable contributed to the Clivedon set that supported appeasement towards the Nazis. The time it would have really counted was not just before WWII but in the decades preceding it.

It's 60 degrees here, sunny with a little breeze -- that perfect early spring day when you have the first softball practice of the season, and the ground is all damp and squshy so that your shoes get caked in mud but you don't care because you're so happy to be back out there, and you don't warm up enough before tossing the ball around so that the next day your arm is *killing* you but you don't care because you're so happy to be back out there throwing the ball around, and everything smells damp and new and just a little fecund.

I just took a long walk, and stopped to chat with a drag queen who was walking 2 pit bulls, both of whom sized me up and decided "This is a human who needs to be licked, now!"

Now I'm eating cheddar and kalamata olive hummus and strawberries. It's a good Sunday.

The time it would have really counted was not just before WWII but in the decades preceding it.

You just know PETA is going to use this argument against us for our non-Vegan diets...

that perfect early spring day when you have the first softball practice of the season, and the ground is all damp and squshy so that your shoes get caked in mud but you don't care because you're so happy to be back out there, and you don't warm up enough before tossing the ball around so that the next day your arm is *killing* you but you don't care because you're so happy to be back out there throwing the ball around, and everything smells damp and new and just a little fecund.

And in fact, Emmett and I have just returned from our first bit of baseball practice. Official team practice is tomorrow, but we spent a good 45 minutes playing catch, shagging flies, fielding grounders, pitching, catching and taking some BP (which ain't easy with two people). Emmett is shockingly UnRusty, considering we've only played catch twice all winter.

And in fact, Emmett and I have just returned from our first bit of baseball practice.

See, somehow I knew it.

I've got B.B. King tickets tonight...deficit spending at its...well, not quite finest, but close. It just seemed like such an omen watching Scorsese's Blues and having him come here.

Oooh, erika, that'll be a GREAT show! I'm jealous.

Cool! Well, not the jealous part...I'm not petty enough to get a kick out of that today.

It's a beautiful day here, too. We were at the dog park, with zillions of dogs all romping around in delight. There was an adorable Portuguese Water Dog there, who insisted on standing in the communal water dish. It was kind of a "I am a water dog and I WILL get in the water and enjoy it. I know it's only two inches deep, but what can you do?" thing.

I just used my last bath bomb, and that was sad. Now, though I should really do laundry, I think a nap is in order. Me = lazy.

Gar, Hec said pretty much what I was going to... Chesterton was a snarky and snide anti-Semite at a time and in a culture where it was not only accepted but expected, and he wrote a lot of truly appalling and shameful things.

But it's worth noting that for a long, long time Hitler was not England's outright enemy, but a mildly worrisome man whom everyone was hoping to negotiate an uneasy peace with, and whose racism few had any problem with. At the time that Chesterton was renouncing his prior stand and writing about the terrible news emerging from Germany, he was nearly alone. Most mainstream journalists thought he was frankly nuts -- so many rumors of German atrocities in the Great War had been proven false, only a credulous idiot would believe new rumors of new atrocities; it was clearly just the same old same old (always with a subtly suggested undercurrent of even if it wasn't, why was he getting all fussed when it was only the Jews?).

One of the Chesterton biographies I read spent two lengthy chapters confronting his anti-Semitism, owning up to its foulness, refusing to justify or modify it, and making it clear that in the author's opinion anyone who loves Chesterton's writing and thought must, is morally obligated to acknowledge this terrible element to it.

But the author also believed that something did change at the end of his life, that he believed the testimony of the refugees when few British journalists did, and cared more about what he believed to be the truth than about his reputation among the other journalists, or the embarrassment of admitting his own hypocrisy. What was true mattered, and fuck-all else.

The author interviewed a London rabbi who had lived through both World Wars and endured many unpleasant varieties of British and European anti-Semitism, and the rabbi said that any British Jew old enough to remember Chesterton when he was alive remembered two things: that he'd spent most of his life saying some truly awful, nearly unforgivable things, and that at the end of his life he was one of the very few allies in the press that the Jews of Europe had.

The fucked-up hypocrisy of his ruddy jovial youth and the sorry, stubborn courage of his sick and frail old age are just bizarre, and make me heartsick, but the wild, nearly unforgivable colossal mess of the entirity of him is just weirdly riveting to me. He was part and parcel of the atmosphere that made it possible for the Holocaust to happen with so little protest, and that's unforgivable; but he believed the awful truth when he saw it, and he spoke it at the cost of the professional respect he'd spent a lifetime building up; and along the way he wrote some novels that still make me gasp. In the most depressive, despairing of my college years, Thursday was a lifeline, so mad and furiously sane and alive it held me up, kept my head above water when I was begging the universe to let me drown.

He's a godawful fuck-up and an anti-Semite and a courageous idiot and a filthy hypocrite, and I very nearly owe my life to one of his books.

Sorry for the mad-ass babbling. Shutting up now.