I’ve been laid up with a relapse of bronchitis (it’s a seasonal thing with me, so I should start giving them names, like hurricanes) … so … because bronchial infection Barry has laid me low for the last three days, I’ve been doing a lot more lollyblogging of late.

Here are some of the things that caught my attention …

I watched the documentary Camp 14: Total Control Zone the other night, about Shin Dong-hyuk, a North Korean who was actually born into a prison camp and therefore grew up there. Witnessed his first public execution at age four … it’s an appalling story, but one that more people around the world should know. Jay Nordlinger, of National Review, often writes about tyrannies around the world and the political prisoners who live there. Or just ordinary citizens … he has an article about Yeon-Mi Park, another North Korean defector. Her story is also, of course, appalling, but especially inspiring. She has adapted to life in South Korea very quickly, and extremely well, and she is now using her newfound celebrity status (she has a television show, a website, TED talks) to do what she can to take down the Kim regime back in her native country. Nordlinger’s article requires a subscription, but you can watch her tell her own story at the Oslo Freedom Forum, which is even better. I know I’ll never see the movie Titanic in the same light again. The whole story is pretty surreal, and the drama I see unfolding over the next few years could be amazing, like watching Sailor Moon take down the Dark Kingdom. I say that in awe of the young woman, by the way.

In talking about the black market in Korea, Park makes a pretty incredible statement, “Once you start trading for yourself, you start thinking for yourself.” I tend to focus on the dark side of desire, maybe even the seamy underbelly, but the statement harkens back to my Libertarian upbringing.

That got me thinking about Adam Smith and his metaphor about the Invisible Hand. That was the context in which I first read him—a high school economics class taught by Howard E. Schmidt. Schmidt had us reading von Mises, Rothbard, Hayek. I’ve forgotten most of it, but one thing that was drilled into me especially deep was the Adam Smith’s paradox of value, which led to the subjective theory of value (von Mises, I’m pretty sure). I say all this because I think it was that emphasis on subjectivity drew me just a little closer to the rabbit hole that is Kierkegaard, which is why writers such as Auden and of course Percy had so much appeal for me in college.

Thinking about the libertarians got me thinking about Charles Murray, most notorious for The Bell Curve, but also the author of Human Accomplishment, in which he uses statistical analysis to determine who were the most important people in the arts (which strikes me as laughable, but I haven’t read the book). Anyway, I saw him on a rerun of C-Span, talking about his book Coming Apart, which includes this analysis of “Belmont & Fishtown“, two real places that he uses as paradigms for upper middle class white folk and working class white folk, respectively. Fairly damning stuff, in what it says about the way we as a country are losing virtues that were once common to both classes.

Betcha knew that already, didn’t you?