Posted by
Boris Tiraspolsky on Tuesday, March 31, 2009 2:01:53 AM
"But I don't think you can know in practice what is meant by administrative ardour, and what sort of thing that is.” - Fedor Dostoevsky, The Demons
Great Russian writer Fedor Dostoevsky (1828-1881)
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President Obama said: "So let me discuss what measures need to be taken by each of the auto companies requesting taxpayer assistance, starting with General Motors. While GM has made a good faith effort to restructure over the past several months, the plan they have put forward is, in its current form, not strong enough. However, after broad consultations with a range of industry experts and financial advisors, I'm confident that GM can rise again, provided that it undergoes a fundamental restructuring.
As an initial step, GM is announcing today that Rick Wagoner is stepping aside as Chairman and CEO. This is not meant as a condemnation of Mr. Wagoner, who has devoted his life to this company; rather, it's a recognition that it will take a new vision and new direction to create the GM of the future."
"Your [car] warrantee will be safe. In fact, it will be safer than it's ever been. Because starting today, the United States government will stand behind your warrantee."
Comment by Boris Tiraspolsky: Fedor Dostoevsky wrote his novel The Demons in 1873. This is a harshly satirical work about Russian revolutionaries, who are ready to kill and destroy even the innocent and helpless for a sake of imposing their "wrong ideologies". In this novel Dostoevsky invented a term "administrative ardour".
It is ironic that more then 125 years ago Dostoevsky precisely described the driving force of Obama's agenda. In 2009 we learn "what it means by administrative ardour" in policies of the President of the United States. Here is a quote from Fedor Dostoevsky's novel The Demons:
"With peculiar, gleefully-obsequious humour, he was beginning to describe the new governor's arrival.
“You are no doubt aware, excellente amie,” he said, jauntily and coquettishly drawling his words, “what is meant by a Russian administrator, speaking generally, and what is meant by a new Russian administrator, that is the newly-baked, newly-established ... ces interminables mots Russes! But I don't think you can know in practice what is meant by administrative ardour, and what sort of thing that is.”
“Administrative ardour? I don't know what that is.”
“Well . . . Vous savez chez nous . . . En un mot, set the most insignificant nonentity to sell miserable tickets at a railway station, and the nonentity will at once feel privileged to look down on you like a Jupiter, pour montrer son pouvoir when you go to take a ticket. 'Now then,' he says, 'I shall show you my power' . . . and in them it comes to a genuine, administrative ardour. En un mot, I've read that some verger in one of our Russian churches abroad—mais c'est ires curieux—drove, literally drove a distinguished English family, les dames charmantes, out of the church before the beginning of the Lenten service . . . vous savez ces chants et le livre de Job ... on the simple pretext that 'foreigners are not allowed to loaf about a Russian church, and that they must come at the time fixed. . . .' And he sent them into fainting fits. ... That verger was suffering from an attack of administrative ardour, et il a montre son pouvoir.”
“Cut it short if you can, Stepan Trofimovitch.”
“Mr. von Lembke is making a tour of the province now. En un mot, this Andrey Antonovitch, though he is a russified German and of the Orthodox persuasion, and even—I will say that for him—a remarkably handsome man of about forty . . .”
“What makes you think he's a handsome man? He has eyes like a sheep's.”
“Precisely so. But in this I yield, of course, to the opinion of our ladies.”
One more observation: an integral part of "administrative ardour" is a lacking common sense bureaucratic way of resolving problems by creating new problems.