Pragues Spring

A greengrocer snaps somewhere. He breaks the rules of the game,calls the emperor naked,upsets the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together and enables everyone to peer beneath the curtain. Just a year ago,a vegetable vendor,Mohamed Bouazizi,did something similar he set fire to himself in Tunisia and set in motion the Arab Spring that has brought down a few dictatorships,and threatens a few more. But that greengrocer who snaps belonged to the aftermath of another spring,the original spring of the 20th century the Prague Spring and was the precursor to the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia that brought down the communist rule without firing a single shot. That greengrocer belongs to the triumphant 1978 essay against totalitarianism,The Power of the Powerless,by Vaclav Havel the playwright of the absurd,the Kafka lover who claimed he was the only one who understood him,the ultimate dissenter,the essential humanist,the reluctant president,Czechoslovakias,and later the Czech Republics,voice to the world and itself.

The president who,in self-mockery,cycled around the Castle in the initial days of his rule,also gave Prague a role in NATO and the EU and invested it with an aura of humanism powerful enough to stand up against jackboots. With the death of Havel at 75,what the world has lost is a voice that roused human consciousness to bring down dictatorships. His axiom was simple: it is essential to live in truth. It echoed in the fall of the Berlin Wall,in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In a world again wracked by greengrocers calling emperors naked,a voice like Havels would have both made sense of it and given it a direction.