On the Death of a Little Man

Fitting that Professor Samuel P. Huntington should die as a mixed race African-American man readies to become president of the country that Huntington claimed for himself and "his kind." And, although Barack Obama, graduated from Harvard Law School, I am sure that Prof. Huntington of Harvard University, never made the acquaintance of the young Obama. As I wrote in my inaugural post for this blog, Huntington articulated a shallow ideological basis for the most base and gutteral elements of our society; the cancer of racism and exclusion. As a favored son, which is to say a white, anglo-saxon, Protestant Brahmin of the ruling class, Huntington clearly feared the rise of so-called "non-Western," brown, yellow or black-skinned members into American society. No wonder that not even the East Coast establishment, to which he so tightly clinged, should put the racist codger into his grave with nary a murmur and an obituary befitting an nondescript actuary. Only two days before Huntington's death, Nobel Laureate, Harold Pinter met his maker and the contrast could not be more stark. Shortly after Chilean Dictator, Augusto Pinochet, crushed Democracy in Chile, the poet Pablo Neruda died, as if expressing in his being and in his death the spirit of that society. Despite brutal repression and martial law, thousands of Chileans lined the roads for Neruda's casket and blanketed the way with roses from end to end. When Pinochet died, he was a despised little man, not unlike Huntington, remembered mostly by his coterie of criminals but despised by everyone else. So goes Samuel P. Huntington, a little man buried and quickly forgotten. Pablo Neruda and Harold Pinter were big men. They live on. As they should. As the should.


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