[lbo-talk] Chuck Grimes, RIP

[William Quimby]

In March of last year, after a thread (subject forgotten) that Chuck 
contributed to and really enlightened,
I sent a private message of thanks for his clear and useful 
contributions, and wished that he would
devote himself to writing - article, books, whatever. His reply was also 
private, but I sense that he would
have had no distress in my posting it. It illustrates what kind of a 
great comrade he was.

- Bill

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Thanks Bill.

I've played around with writing but really I was trained in the visual 
arts and my head works in images probably more suitable to lesser forms 
of expression. I also work in moods and these are very hard to sustain. 
A lot more excuses.

I tried to unravel the mind of Leo Strauss, not a worthy topic, but a 
cold intellectual interest. That turned into a long drawn out project 
that's about one third finished. And what an ordinary revelation. He was 
completely out of sync with his time and place and reacted something 
like a snail, retreating into a self-enclosure pretty much fixed in 
design after his early thirties. But the adventure was great fun since I 
had to read through Weimar and early 1930s Germany, England, then the US 
for a sense of the intellectual climate he inhabited. Wow did he react 
badly to my generation...

Changing back, the story isn't over, although I certainly have the 
feeling that a kind of shadow has disappeared a world that is racing 
into the past. The Bush and now Obama administrations have created a 
break, probably a psychotic break, with the past before 9/11 that has no 
real concrete meaning, except an amplification of already existing 
themes. But keep it up long enough and it takes on a concrete reality. 
Really nothing has changed here at all, except prices. The entire 
phantasmagorical world that Washington has created out of its own 
imagination is staggering.

Anyway thanks again. If you haven't read it, try Special Operations 
Europe, Basil Davidson, 1980 (ISBN 0575028203). It's hard to find but I 
got a used paper back from the UK on Amazon so there are still copies 
around. It's tells the story of his wartime activities in the British 
secret services with partisan groups. It reads like a novel and builds 
up a sense of betrayal between the real and the official. Davidson later 
went into African studies, colonial and post-colonial history.

Chuck

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