Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

“The Colors of Infamy” by Albert Cossery

Sunday, November 20th, 2011

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Work produced in the final stretch of an artist’s career often displays the creator’s sense of freedom at the close. Simplicity, accessibility, brevity, lightness, and an avoidance of the over-determined often characterize these autumnal works. In the field of painting, think of the airy ribbons of primary colors on pure white fields in Willem DeKooning’s late period works, or the floating colored paper cut-outs of Matisse’s final years. Among writers, consider the lighthearted last novel of William Faulkner, “The Reivers” (reiver is an old-fashioned term for a raider, plunderer, or thief), and the joy Thomas Mann clearly had in sketching the progress of the morally flexible young hero of “Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years,” the novel left unfinished at the time of his death at age 80.

Put Albert Cossery’s “The Colors of Infamy” (Les Couleurs de l’Infamie) in that category. Written at age 85 after a decade and a half of silence since his previous publication, this final work, the shortest of his novels, fills a mere 92 pages. It offers a sketch of his constant themes and a handy summation of his lessons. Except for the very serious questions it touches upon, I would call it a light entertainment. All in all it provides a good entry point for new readers interested in sampling “the Voltaire of the Nile.”

On the streets of Cairo we follow three characters, each in his own way an outcast from society. Ossama is an educated but unemployed 23-year-old who has chosen to become a high-class pickpocket. He “instinctively grasped the flaw of a society based on appearance,” and so he dresses richly to more easily prey on wealthy marks, not unlike the con-man Felix Krull who learns that society operates under the premise that illusion is reality. Nimr is Ossama’s street-smart teacher in the thieving trade, and is somewhat affronted that Ossama has gone upscale. Karamallah is a middle-age writer and intellectual whose rebellion against the corrupt system has led to imprisonment followed by exile to his family’s mausoleum. The book’s slender plot gains motion when these three come together to decide how best to confront an injustice. A shoddily constructed apartment building recently collapsed, leaving 50 dead, and Ossama acquires an incriminating letter that firmly assigns culpability for the horror to a powerful real estate developer. What’s to be done with such knowledge?

The open-ended discussions these three engage in include age-old questions. Is it possible to be virtuous and become rich? Is the world complicated and absurd — an idea “dreamed up by illustrious thinkers from cold climes” — or does the world still possess an “Edenic simplicity” of a kind that all men can enjoy, as Cossery’s stand-in, Karamallah, believes? Is happiness within our reach? And to speak of an issue of critical importance to societies aspiring to fairness and equal opportunity: Is business “unimaginable without corrupt networks”?

This is a novel of ideas that will impress you with its contemporary resonance. I was immediately startled by the opening pages of this 1999 novel, when Ossama surveys a bustling Tahrir Square and wonders about the future of its denizens (the author unaware the site was to be transformed during the 2011 Arab Spring into a locus of revolution). Does Cossery have something to say to an America that today is exhibiting Egypt-like traits: a growing cohort of educated but unemployed youth; a growing inequality of wealth; a growing sense that 1% have inordinate power over the fate of the other 99%? Here is a book to talk about.

The translation from the French, by Alyson Waters, is excellent, smoothly capturing Cossery’s rich and elegant prose. For those interested in reading an insightful online interview with the translator, Google the phrase, Alyson Waters on the Colors of Infamy. Some may find Cossery’s prose old-fashioned or overwrought (too adverb- and adjective-heavy), but I suspect for most it will be a respite from the inelegant prose we encounter regularly in our daily reading, especially online. Critics have noted Cossery’s prose has a Balzacian touch. This stylistic similarity is matched by the two French authors’ common view of society. Cossery adopts as a truism Balzac’s notion that behind every fortune is a crime.

As for the meaning of the book’s title, fear not: this is revealed two pages from the end.

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A shorter version of this review is posted on Amazon.

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“Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life” by Ann Beattie

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

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Ann Beattie set for herself a daunting challenge when crafting Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life.

Three players occupy the book’s 300 pages — Ann Beattie, Richard Nixon, and Pat Nixon. Each of these persons is known for practicing a strain of obscurantism, deliberately preventing the facts or full details of something from becoming known. For Beattie this has been an aesthetic choice (Jay McInerney once described this choice as a “refusal to overdetermine her characters, her reluctance to explain their behavior”). For President Nixon the practice was a political strategy that ultimately led him to the brink of impeachment. For his wife Pat Nixon this behavior was an emotional defense, the means she chose to preserve personal dignity in the face of prying inquisitors.

Ann Beattie and Pat Nixon: for this Novelist to imagine that Life, and then to deliver a relatively satisfying reading experience, is something of an achievement. Beattie jettisons the staid narrative conventions she long since mastered in favor of boldly litting out for new territory. She wills Mrs. Nixon likewise to escape her comfort zone. What emerges is an imaginative literary concoction that initial critics have labelled, accurately, as unclassifiable, genre-bending, playful and polymorphous, and unlike anything Beattie’s written before.

What’s to like? If you’re a die-hard Beattie fan, my advice is dive right in. Part of your enjoyment will be finding just how suitably matched are the author and her subject (consider, for example, how many of Beattie’s stories contain the incomprehensible mystery of an oddly paired woman and man). Mrs. Nixon is made up of a well-paced series of chapters, over 40 in all, each representing another attempt by Beattie to conjure up something, anything, of the elusive, real Pat Nixon. There are autobiographical glimpses as well: of Beattie’s relationship with her mother, and husband; scenes set in the couple’s house in Maine.

What may be of interest to readers beyond the circle of Beattie acolytes are the chapters that interrupt the experimental fictions and turn instead to a general examination of the art of writing. In these pages Beattie engages in literary analyses of her favorite authors (Chekhov and Carver especially) and her favorite short short stories. Reading these terrific asides is like auditing one of Professor Beattie’s creative writing seminars at UVA. In a similar vein she offers haunting ruminations on the limitations of language and the limits, finally, of knowing anyone. All is not dour, however. The book is animated by Vaudeville-like antics, once its dark opening pages give way to story after story that reminded me of an experimental variety show. It’s a stylistically diverse exhibition whose theme is, Who was Pat Nixon?

Beattie tells us her guiding spirit for these proceedings is Donald Barthelme, a writer whose stories she admires for their mix fact and fiction, high and low, art criticism and gossip and comic strips. A few chapters adopt Barthelme’s brand of flash fiction, inserting Pat Nixon into exceptionally compact stories that focus only on incident rather than rolling out an arced narrative. You are in for a heady blend of serious dirge swirled with playful yelps (as in the chapter about Elvis’s visit to the White House). One delight: you’ll find Beattie’s mimicry of President Nixon’s speechifying (even in his private moments with Pat) to be as clever as that of Philip Roth in his Nixon-era satire, Our Gang. Her humor is more subtle, though, as apparent when she sums up Mr. Nixon: “This is not a little boy to whom you would have wanted to give an ant farm.”

I wondered if Beattie wasn’t also riffing on the Pirandello quandary of characters in search of an author. In a recent interview Beattie confessed: “I came to understand as I was writing that I too was a character in the book.”

What’s not to like? Well, Mrs. Nixon is not a book for history buffs nor is it a good choice for readers seeking a conventional biography. Beattie does not hold herself out as an historian, not even one of amateur status. She made little or no effort to uncover new facts or details about Pat Nixon and instead relied on existing published sources. In the Notes section she lists the material she read; the one book that looms largest is daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s loving biography, Pat Nixon: The Untold Story (1986). I recommend that as your better bet, especially if you want a biography as a gift to please a traditional reader. Certainly be wary of “Mrs. Nixon” if you were resistant to Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999), Edmund Morris’ unconventional and largely fictionalized biography of President Reagan. Mrs. Nixon is a book for the adventurous, literary minded reader.

A couple omissions should be mentioned. In an early chapter entitled “Major and Minor Events of Mrs. Nixon’s Life,” Beattie includes dozens of items but forgets to list the weddings of her two daughters. An odd oversight, I’d say.  Also, while the author says she was interested to find other writers who treated Pat Nixon imaginatively (for example, she includes a poem by David Kirby entitled, “Skinny-Dipping with Pat Nixon”) , she does not mention the John Adams opera, “Nixon in China,” whose libretto by Alice Goodman features Pat Nixon as perhaps its most fully formed character.

After the hit-or-miss quality of the middle sections of the book, I was struck by the simple power of its concluding two chapters. These serve as twinned goodbyes. In the first farewell Beattie presents some final personal thoughts on writing (“All writing is about altering time.” “You erase yourself every time you write.”). In the final goodbye Mrs. Nixon, “quietly loyal and enigmatic” to the end, is set free.

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A shorter version of this review is posted on Amazon.

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Normalizing Reading by Women

Sunday, August 14th, 2011

In modern societies today women read, yet we should not forget that in earlier periods of those same societies this was not the case. There was a time when women were not expected to read, were not taught to read, and were in effect forbidden to read. Even today there are 30 nations where the female literacy rate is less than 50%. Cultural factors are responsible for some of this shortfall.

As with all human liberation movements, the history of the rise of female literacy is a story with many heroes and heroines. It occurs to me that among those assisting the movement have been artists who created images of women engaged in the quiet and sometimes defiant act of reading. Art has the means to do good, even if those means are hidden.

While surfing online this morning I came across a painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), Jeune fille assise lisant, les cheveux sur les épaules (oil on canvas, 12 3/4 x 9 3/4 in.; 32.3 x 24.7 cm):

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As depicted by Corot, the girl has settled into a pose commonly found in portraits of readers. The pose establishes a stable, triangular composition. The sitter’s torso turns slightly and her head tilts downward. An engaged viewer of this work searches first for the person’s eyes. That search leads to the sitter’s eyelids whose expressiveness communicate a fixed regard. Our gaze follows her gaze, alighting upon her gentle hands hovering over (and ultimately touching) the object of her regard.

There is something familiar about the composition. It somehow feels natural, comforting. The activity depicted — a person caught in the act of quietly contemplating something that powerfully demands attention — seems worthwhile and worthy.

Now suppose a male of pre-modern views, one who believed a woman should not be caught reading, came face to face with Corot’s composition. I believe something subtle but quietly powerful would have happened, because the painting’s formal qualities contain an antidote with the power to subvert his views.

What hidden thing in the composition exerts this counter-pressure? What, subconsciously, softens the viewer’s opposition? What might engender feelings of acceptance? The answer, I propose, is found in the body of images cherished in the viewer’s memory, such as this:

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(Giovanni Bellini, Madonna in Admiration of the Sleeping Child )

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Thus can artists leverage the power of composition to normalize new thinking.

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A Bumper-Sticker That Nevers Goes Out of Style

Sunday, April 10th, 2011

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Odds and Ends – No. 3

Saturday, January 1st, 2011

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American (Ah-MAIR-eh-ken) Dialects

In what can best be described as a labor of love, Rick Aschmann has been building a website documenting “North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns.” It’s available here. Reading Aschmann’s exhaustive, discerning, explanatory texts, one theme emerges: most of us are blissfully unaware of the confusing peculiarities of our own dialects, and somehow we manage to understand each other.

On Planes and Trains, Scanning the Books of Others

I’m not alone in being curious about what others are reading, and I freely indulge my curiosity when walking down the aisle of a train or plane, standing on the subway, or sitting with strangers in a waiting room. Yet I wonder, is it rude to look over someone’s shoulder at what they’re reading? Is it wrong to exceed the limit of a quick glance, to surreptitiously read someone else’s book for as many seconds as your position allows? I have a feeling this is wrong — maybe because the action parallels the offense of cheating on a schoolroom test, looking at your neighbor’s paper. Still, it is at worst a quick and victimless theft.

What’s of interest to me is that during the swipe, the thief’s eye and mind is sometimes able to capture enough information to render a judgment on the quality (high or low) of the spied-upon book. Case in point: on a plane last year, as I sat in an aisle seat, I had the opportunity, lasting several seconds, to read half a page of a paperback novel held open by a passenger sitting across the aisle, one row forward. I never learned the title of the book or the name of its author, yet I still remember these phrases gracing the page: “I said stiffly,” “It rang a faint bell,” “The bodies festered,” and, “It was all but intolerable.”

Disrespecting our Flowing Waters

Why does Google Maps not routinely tell us the names of rivers and streams in the areas we are researching?  When you zoom in on the location you’re interest in, using the map or hybrid map/satellite option, and you notice a nearby river or stream or creek, there is no indication of its name. Also, plugging into the search box the names of river and streams usually provides disappointing (or no) results. Suppose you wanted to quickly locate where the North Platte River meets its sister, the South Platte River. Good luck. Am I alone, or part of too small an audience, wanting, and finding value in, that information?

The Value of Elementary School Teachers

I’m one of those people who, half a century later, can rattle off the names of their Kindergarten and elementary school teachers: seven women who are responsible in no small measure for the person I am today. Over the last five decades, ball players’ salaries have risen to a level hundreds of times the average salary of other skilled workers and craftsman. Salaries of CEOs have lofted to ever higher multiples of their company’s typical employee’s salary. Public school teachers’ salaries? Shamefully, teachers have not shared in the economic rewards they deserve.

What do teachers deserve? According to emerging empirical evidence, the answer is a hell of a lot more than their current compensation.  See, for example, the working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, entitled, “The Economic Value of Higher Teacher Quality”.  Adam Ozimek’s thoughts on where this leads, are here. Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist who is also investigating this subject, estimates that an excellent kindergarten teacher is worth a salary of $320,000 a year.

An article in the NY Times explained it this way: “Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more. All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too. The economists don’t pretend to know the exact causes. But it’s not hard to come up with plausible guesses. Good early education can impart skills that last a lifetime — patience, discipline, manners, perseverance.”

A Convergence of Look

The faces of Senator Susan Collins of Maine and John Lennon made frequent appearances in the news in recent weeks — hers, because of  her key role in passing legislation during the Senate’s lame duck session; and his, accompanying stories on the 30th anniversary of his death. See if you agree that something in the photographs suggests a blood relationship:

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Odds and Ends – 1

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

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Sarah Palin and Refudiategate

Palin was in the news last week for her use of a new word refudiate, an apparent conflation on her part of refute and repudiate. The ensuing to-do was, I thought, much ado about nothing. This sort of slip of the tongue, or to use a fancier term, verbal lapsus, is not uncommon. Haplologies are a type of verbal lapsus in which the speaker blends half one word and half of another.  Wikipedia offers this example: “stummy” instead of “stomach” or “tummy.” I’m a fan of these spontaneous, uncontrolled creations. Whenever one is uttered in my presence, I jot it down. Favorites from my personal collection:

refreshions (refreshments + concession [stand])

illeligible (illegible + ineligible)

verocious (ferocious + voracious)

gidget (gadget + widget)

obliviated (oblivious + inebriated)

And then there are instances of a long-form haplology, utterances that create a weird new figure of speech by blending half of one common phrase with half of another (with bonus points for displaying metaphoric confusion). Here are words I’ve actually heard come out of people’s mouths:

“The plaintiff is gonna ring our clock!” (wring our neck + clean our clock)

“He’s green behind the ears” (green, meaning inexperienced + wet behind the ears)

“They handed us a fiat accompli” (by fiat + a fait accompli)

“That’s the point where me and Sam parted waters” (parted company, meaning disagreed + Mosaic parting of the waters)

Less Than an Existentialist

Is it just me or do you too want to barf when, two and a half minutes into this interview on “Morning Joe,” Bret Easton Ellis slips in the word ennui ?

What ever happened to . . . ?

Who knows from whence cometh the tunes that pop into our head and take over the day’s sonic background. The other day I started singing along to a song that appeared from nowhere and just would not let go: “You and Me Against the World“.  And I asked myself, what ever happened to Helen Reddy? And the answer is she retired from live performance and returned to Australia, where she is a clinical hypnotherapist and motivational speaker. More here and at her website (naturally) here.

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Here comes a decade-long, Big Five-O party

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

A collective shrug of “Uh, who cares?” greeted the recent spate of 40th anniversary celebrations. Woodstock? Yawn. The moon landing? Snooze. The birth (arguably) of the Internet?  Feh.

But while these fortieth birthday parties fizzled, that won’t stop promoters exploiting all of the upcoming big Five-O shindigs.

In just a few weeks the calendar will flip to the year 2010.  As with any year, 2010 is an abstraction. Right now 2010 is content-free, sans emotional resonance, non-seductive. Yet our culture is at the mercy of a base-10 numbering system. The media, needing to fill time and space, will grab at mathematics: 2,010 is the sum of 1,960 plus the very marketable, “Hey, it’s been 50 years, so let’s get a party on!”  With box cutter knives in hand, the whole exploitive band of writers, commentators, filmmakers, sordid hangers-on, are all poised to attack the packed  boxes labeled “the ’60s.” Unpacked, their contents will be spilled across every available screen.

If I were asked to set the agenda for this non-stop orgy of baby-boomer nostalgia, I’d first remind my staff that the distinction of the 1960s was not so much its general calamities amidst general progress. That can be said of every decade in recent world history. What the ’60s was more “about” was something in the realm of feeling: a relentless pow! pow! pow! of special tragedies and triumphs of an intensely personal kind. To set up this theme, I suggest the festival begin on January 4 with a somber program devoted to Albert Camus. An odd choice? Perhaps; but hear me out:  It was on January 4, 1960, that the 46-year-old Camus, then at the height of his creative powers, a man immersed in the struggle for individual freedom in an absurd universe, met a violent death in a car crash. Surely this was a lesson for us, a warning to prepare for a decade-long reminder of an inescapable truth: Everything that grows holds in perfection but a little moment.

Which, on a happier note, will also set the stage for a 2017 program devoted to Twiggy.

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UPDATE (11-23-2009): Today, the New York Times reports that, to mark the 50th anniversary of Camus’ death, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to transfer the writer’s remains to the Pantheon in Paris, one of the most hallowed burial places in France.

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Chasing the Horizon

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

I became enamored of the poetry of Stephen Crane back in junior high school.  Gnomic, ironic, and all too brief, Crane’s free verse has a special appeal to the adolescent sensibility.  Here’s a poem I memorized:

          I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
          Round and round they sped.
          I was disturbed at this;
          I accosted the man.
          ”It is futile,” I said,
          ”You can never — “

          “You lie,” he cried,
          And ran on.

As a teenager I sympathized with that small man pursuing the horizon.  All honor was due to Sisyphus and his lesser brethren.  Decades later I’m inclined to see the fellow as mad, a denier of fact, a fool. 

I was reminded of this today when reading a provocative post on The Daily Dish, written by guest-blogger Jim Manzi.  His essay (yes, the post is substantial enough to deserve that label) is entitled “The Socialism Implicit in the Social Cost of Carbon.”   Manzi argues, convincingly I think, that calculating a social cost of burning carbon — toting up its heavy negative externalities – is a fool’s errand.  It represents a blinkered approach to the goal of optimizing human welfare over the long term.  There is every reason to believe we will misquantify the costs, and no reason to believe the costs of this one activity are more egregious than those of any other social activity pursued in our interconnected world.  Man-made climate change is real, yet the seeds of Armageddon are hidden in a myriad of human actions (our pride and prejudice was clear before it went nuclear).  Somehow the role of global bad guy, most horrible among horribles, has been dealt exclusively to carbon, forgiving other worthy applicants.  We unthinkingly set about pursuing curtailment of fossil fuel burning, even when curtailment efforts may harm us more than the harm of inaction. 

Manzi refers to our current fixation on carbon’s cost as chasing an endlessly receding horizon of zero risk.

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No, General, I won’t fund your culture war

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

Yesterday’s mail brought a fundraising letter from Lt. Gen. Josiah Bunting, III, a man of great distinction.  Bunting asks for money on behalf of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a component of which, the Lehrman American Studies Center, he serves as President.  The letter bothers me for four reasons.

1.  Who’s there?

The unsolicited letter is written in a manner that’s sure to annoy more than a few recipients, and I wonder why ISI didn’t assign someone with the right skills to edit it, if only to sand down its grating style.  Given Bunting’s long career as a writer, scholar, and educator, it’s hard for me to believe that he drafted, edited and finalized the document.  Which is to say that when, in the paragraphs that follow, I indicate that “Bunting writes …” or ”According to Bunting …”,  I sincerely hope I’m wrong and that the text I’m citing is not in fact conveying his voice, his temperament and his knowledge, but instead is content furnished by ISI and anonymous staffers. 

2.  The familiarity ploy

Before the letter launches into histrionic mode (more about that, below), Bunting warmly addresses me as “Dear Friend,” and soon thereafter as “My friend.”  Now, I swear I don’t know him from Adam, yet he says he knows me.   An ersatz friendly tone is often found in charity fundraising letters, of course, following a template pushed by consultants.  But Bunting says I (along with thousands of others who received the same letter) deserve a bear hug for good reason:

Your name has been given to me as a steadfast supporter of the preservation of America’s founding principles; a steward of freedom who cares deeply about the future of our nation.

Is he channelling Eddie Haskell or what?  And yet, unctuousness aside, who am I to quibble with this glowing description of me?  But, on the matter of familiarity, wouldn’t it be nicer, I’m thinking, to receive an unsolicited letter that displays honesty and humility?  And for a model I turn to an uneducated fourteen year old named Huckleberry Finn, who, in his own overture to readers, in his very first words, confesses:

You don’t know about me . . . 

So, anyway, I decided to dig deeper into the letter.  And that’s when I came upon a creepy come-on, as I’ll describe next. 

3.  Questionable command of English

Here is the third sentence of the letter:

As a true American patriot, I know you are concerned about the direction of America’s colleges and universities.

Well.  One thing I am a true believer in is English grammar and clear writing (while, Lord knows, I mess up all the time).  A rule students learn in high school and are expected to obey in college and beyond is that a modifier (“a true American patriot”) should be placed as close as possible to the word it modifies (“you”).  Although there are colloquial exceptions to the rule (in spoken English), the rule should be followed if there is a risk of confusion due to the presence of more than one noun/pronoun the modifier could be describing (here, both “you” and “I” are candidates).  Bunting himself is half a century removed from his undergraduate degree in English, but rules are rules, and clear writing is timeless.  If ISI truly intends to flatter the reader, or even if it’s just a ploy, the drafter should consider this formulation:

As a true American patriot, you are undoubtedly concerned about the direction of America’s colleges and universities.  

The thought I resist is that the Lt. General is trumpeting his honorable military service and combining it with a boast of uncanny power to discern like-mindedness in others:

I, as a true American patriot, know you too are concerned about the direction of America’s colleges and universities.

In its original state the letter gives the impression of being either a slap-dash effort or a crude stage for chauvinism — a terrible irony in a letter requesting money to support improving higher education. 

On to page two, where this plea pops up:

But, who’s going to climb a hill for others if their hearts are bitter towards their own culture?

Something is not right.  The word “who” can be singular or plural.  In this sentence it appears to be plural, referring to persons (plural) who possess hearts (plural).  But the word “who’s” is a contraction of “who is,” a misplaced singular.  The sentence needs not an “is” but the plural verb “are.”  Or, in the alternative, the simultaneously singular- and plural-fitting verb ”will” will do the trick, as in the sentence, “But, who will climb a hill for others …”  Yet another possible reading of the sentence is that the author meant for the cited “hearts” to belong to the “others” for whom the single hill-climber is making a sacrifice.  But this makes no sense in the context of Bunting’s argument, which is that young persons must be inculcated with unquestioned love of country (we must “nurture the next generation of patriots”), for if we do not, we will fail to produce  citizens able to meet the demands of inevitable wars.  Then again, the letter’s expository prose is so muddy at times that the reader may be unavoidably flummoxed.  

In the first of his two post-scripts on page four, Bunting proudly informs us ISI’s charter says the organization’s headquarters “cannot be in the nation’s capitol.”  Well, of course not.  The word “capitol” (with an “O”) always refers to a building.  Watch the cute video, here, on this point.  The building housing our nation’s legislative branch is the U.S. Capitol.  It was Thomas Jefferson who insisted the legislative building be called “the Capitol.”  

us-capitol-building-west-face

 

 

 

 

It’s a large building, to be sure, but it would be the height of arrogance for ISI to think it had a chance of being located inside the nation’s capitol.  In contrast, “capital”  (with an “A” as the final vowel) refers to the District (see Article One, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution) within which the federal government, and many a non-governmental organization, reside.  The same capitol-versus-capital distinction applies at the state level.  With this error, ISI, which sponsors the National Civic Literacy Board, earns a bonus point for irony.

Let me stop there, and express the hope that an intern with serious skills is hired to scrub through the next ISI letter prior to its release.  

4.  The culture war is here for you to join

What galls me is this:  ISI’s presumption that I am on its side.  I’m not speaking of the “side” in favor of improving classical education while strengthening all Americans’ understanding of our country’s long history and our nation’s uniqueness.  On that ground I have my feet firmly planted, thanks to a superb liberal arts education.  As a student of political science and history, and as a current participant in government, my mind and heart are there too.  No, I’m referring to the  letter writer’s assumption that I stand on his “side” in a great cultural war the far right desires to foment. 

The letter is very clear on this point:  the reader will be judged to be either “upholding the principles of the Founders” (values to be defined by . . . the Lt. General?) or found unworthy of  ”confidence.”  For now, at least, I’m in Bunting’s good graces; he reports I have been tested and, in his words, ”You have proven your dedication to the values upon which this country was built.”  (Should I keep a copy of that certification in my wallet, in case I need it to pass through check-points, come the revolution?)

Presumptuous? Arrogant? Scary undertones of Big Brother?  You betcha!  The  four page letter is chock full of radical right code words, phrases, and bêtes noires.  An ideological slant is never far from the surface, and frequently bursts through.  ISI says the American university system is being poisoned by a toxic culture.  Students are paralyzed by revisionist liberals.  A cadre of apologists (a term the letter neither defines nor assigns to named individuals) have made it their life’s work to disconnect our young people from the values and institutions that sustain a free and humane society.  Moreover, if we do not act, the anti-freedom crowd will gain the upper hand in the fight for our future leaders’ hearts and minds.  The letter closes with a statement that would fit nicely into a ritual session of Two Minutes Hate:

It is our job to expose them and I am counting on Americans like you to help us educate for liberty. 

I am struck by what is absent from the text.  Nowhere in four full pages addressing  American principles does the word democracy (or any of its variants) appear.  It seems Bunting believes the “nation’s heritage” ended before 1800, and so nowhere is there an appreciation of two centuries of subsequent history — a history forged by American people of faith and courage and intelligence equal to (or in the case of religious faith, exceeding) that of the leaders who emerged during the period of armed Revolution.  The letter displays a fetishistic attachment to the Founding Fathers, to the exclusion of our grandly successful, ongoing American experiment.  When describing today’s youth, Bunting casually tosses off calumnies (“their hearts are bitter towards their own culture”).  These are the words of a curmudgeon blind to the actual lives and character of young Americans.  (Say it ain’t so, Joe!)

I believe the study of history, which Bunting says he supports, shows America to be an unfinished nation.  Our nation is still being created.  This idea scares many people, I know.  Many prefer the sclerotic over the dynamic.  But the rest of us — and I believe we are the democratic (small “d”) majority — must steadfastly guard against the baleful consequences that would flow if personal fears prevailed.  That is the true threat to our lives, our liberties, and our happiness.

Whenever I encounter someone arguing that the America they live in today is not the country of their youth, let alone the country as founded over two centuries ago, I’m reminded of W. S. Gilbert’s lines satirizing a particularly sorry fellow:  “The idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this, and every country but his own.”   As with us all, time’s fell hand ultimately will sweep them from the scene. 

I am struck by the aging of persons prominantly embracing a Manichean world view.  I’m noticing, for example, how Pat Buchanan is becoming unsteady in his argumentation.  Just this week he asserted, erroneously, that no blacks fought and died in the Vicksburg campaign (video, here; historical facts, here and here).  Sadly, the reason Buchanan denies history is so he can argue white males have a superior claim of ownership of America, de facto (long exclusive possession) if not de jure.  Also this week, in a different forum, Buchanan misquoted the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution in support of a related wacky argument, to the effect that the progeny of the Founding Fathers (white males) are the legitimate inheritors of a nation “created” back in 1787. 

All of which goes to show, some folks way past their college years need remedial education in this nation’s history.

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“We do not . . . .”

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Emergency evacuation chairs were recently installed in the stairwells of the building where I work.  Each device is encased in a storage cover, imprinted with a pictograph:

evacuation-chair-2

 

Is it just me, or does this picture remind you of a torture session straight from the dreams of Dick Cheney?

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Posted in Photos, Politics, What Were They Thinking?? | 1 Comment »