Jamt
05-06-2009, 09:19 PM
I have read Spengler’s columns in Asia Times online with a mixture of reactions for a while, wondering who the hell this guy is. And now this David P. Goldman tells his story and I guess I will keep reading him, probably with a mixture of reactions.
“My Spengler columns actually began as a joke. In 1997 the Asia Times asked me to write a humor column, and the name Spengler seemed a funny touch: the author of The Decline of the West as a comic writer for an Asian daily. The print edition of the newspaper soon went under, but I revived the persona for the online-only edition in 1999. Contrary to my expectations, it won an audience and became a vehicle for more than I had originally imagined it would be.
One reason for the Spengler name was that I was working on Wall Street at the time, and a pseudonym allowed me to keep my two worlds separate. But I soon found that the Spengler mask also gave me freedom to employ striking ideas and provocative formulations—to take intellectual as well as literary risks. Along the way, I developed a core thesis that the response of nations to their own mortality was the key to understanding the great events of our time, and the existential theology of Franz Rosenzweig provided unique insights into geopolitics. What’s more, I had a great deal of fun writing as Spengler.
What I didn’t have was a great deal of responsibility. Not that those columns were irresponsible; looking back on a decade of writing as Spengler, I see many misfires and over-phrasings, but little to revise in the core thesis to which I came. Still, when writers take on a successful mask, they also shrug off a certain burden of accountability. A small group of friends slowly convinced me that to argue publicly for things one really believes requires standing behind them publicly. It demands a commitment, and to continue arguing under a pseudonym eventually came to seem to me an attempt to have it both ways.”
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1409
“My Spengler columns actually began as a joke. In 1997 the Asia Times asked me to write a humor column, and the name Spengler seemed a funny touch: the author of The Decline of the West as a comic writer for an Asian daily. The print edition of the newspaper soon went under, but I revived the persona for the online-only edition in 1999. Contrary to my expectations, it won an audience and became a vehicle for more than I had originally imagined it would be.
One reason for the Spengler name was that I was working on Wall Street at the time, and a pseudonym allowed me to keep my two worlds separate. But I soon found that the Spengler mask also gave me freedom to employ striking ideas and provocative formulations—to take intellectual as well as literary risks. Along the way, I developed a core thesis that the response of nations to their own mortality was the key to understanding the great events of our time, and the existential theology of Franz Rosenzweig provided unique insights into geopolitics. What’s more, I had a great deal of fun writing as Spengler.
What I didn’t have was a great deal of responsibility. Not that those columns were irresponsible; looking back on a decade of writing as Spengler, I see many misfires and over-phrasings, but little to revise in the core thesis to which I came. Still, when writers take on a successful mask, they also shrug off a certain burden of accountability. A small group of friends slowly convinced me that to argue publicly for things one really believes requires standing behind them publicly. It demands a commitment, and to continue arguing under a pseudonym eventually came to seem to me an attempt to have it both ways.”
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1409