3 May 2000
National Review
215 Lexington Avenue
New York City, NY 10022

RE: Art a Greek Tragedy

Dear Sir or Madam:

I realize in recent years the quality of all things has fallen, but I am still surprised to read in National Review, the self-proclaimed defender and bastion of the Western ideal, "Art: The Greek Tragedy" by Mr Klinghoffer. Mr. Klinghoffer pastes scattered Greek Funerary art into the conclusion that the ancient Greek was "shallow," unperceptive and not a little ignorant, while the modern descendent is a Turk with the raiments of western democracy.

For a magazine devoted to the preservation of the republican (or democratic) cultural ideal against the tidal wave of barbaric, iconoclastic revisionism congealing the rich western tradition into a multi-cultural goo, these declarations are pure heresy.

To compare one segment of Greek civilization, the 2000 years, from the flowering of Athens to the fall of Constantinople to the 200 years of American independence leaves American dilettantes behind in the dust as mere dabblers. The past 200 years of American independence has yet to produce an historian as perceptive as Thuccydides, a religious teacher as profound as John the Evangelist (the Devine), or a political thinker as influential as Aristotle. Deluged in the childish dreams of Hollywood melodrama, Americans lack the maturity to understand the complexity of Sophocles' Antigone the epitome of the Greek tragedy: the choice of evils and the dilemma of mutually exclusive goods. Even the great playwright Arthur Miller failed to perceive Sophoclean dual paradox in his magnificent version of An Enemy of the People.

Americans, like the previous imperial pretenders of Britain and Rome, undertook the copyist’s art with only an imperfect comprehension of the original template. Yet if by magic, the faces from the vases could be recalled to life and transported through time from the Capitoline of old to the Capitol Hill of the new, they could comfortable nestle in a country whose outward appearance in public edifices and constitution approximates the ideal from which they departed.

Very truly yours,

JOHN F CLENNAN ESQ

author of If All Men Were Angels (Denlingers 1999); Arthur Rex Britanicus: The Celtic National Epic (Fullosia 1999), Tested Positive (Inverted A 1994) Stephen Decatur My Country: A Misinterpreted Quote (Inditer 1999) his many articles and short stories are regularly carried in the Inditer On Line Press http://www.inditer.com