Ginny – Page 139 – Chicago Boyz

Tabloid News: Conviction

January 15, 2005 by Ginny

At the risk of degenerating Chicagoboyz into Fox or CNBC, let’s note CBS reports a verdict at Ford Hood, where

Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr., the reputed ringleader of a band of rogue guards at the Abu Ghraib prison, was convicted Friday of abusing Iraqi detainees in a case that sparked international outrage when photographs were released that showed reservists gleefully abusing prisoners.

This CBS story, like most, doesn’t give the context to help us pass the test at the Mudville Gazette. However, it does seem to purposely mislead and choose interesting phrasing in an attempt to blow CBS’s horn. “The deck was stacked against him once charges were filed, especially after his supervisors refused to back him up” their legal expert notes. A network enamoured of “cover up” chooses “back him up” here?

Apparently the jury decided men in their thirties were capable of choosing evil on their own. It saw neither noble savages nor a need for aluminum tinfoil beanies.

Connections

January 14, 2005 by Ginny

A few years ago, in a personal exorcism I suppose, I wrote a personal narrative that relates to the topic of Ken’s post. All of us, but I think women more, are torn between our will or ego or simple desire to be alone and our need to connect with others in family and community, to lose ourselves (that ego) in something bigger – our loves, our families, our jobs, our religions, even our countries. When we talk about giving life meaning we usually are not talking about pure expressions of will. But, when we talk about being ourselves, becoming ourselves, we aren’t talking about being a part of a whole but being that single, willed self. We know the fear that is central to The Awakening, that the newly self-conscious but generally clueless Edna feels that her children will pull her back into unconsciousness, will compromise her willed self. We may think she is silly, but her experience, told in 1899, really foretells the century rather nicely. On the other hand, we suspect that her isolation from her sisters, her husband, her friends signals that, maybe, her choice arises from something that she has lost, something rather precious. Anyway, so I wrote this ridiculously long and personal narrative because I (and I suspect others) do feel a pull between the individual and the communal, the scholarly and the familial, the ego and submersion in something larger than us. It is a girl thing – I know – discursive, personal. But, still, the article Ken discusses is a girl thing, too. It is just that it is also a guy thing, in the end.

I entertained a college boyfriend with my fantasy: six ancient wailing women in flowing black would accompany me to the altar. Not surprisingly, he, too, became ambivalent about the wedding we discussed endlessly (and, as it turned out, pointlessly). Years later, at twenty-nine, I did marry, having found a good father for the children I intended to bear. Old fashioned, conventional: that was me. Although wary of storybook weddings, I saw transcendence in that ancient institution. Of course, those wailing women meant something; much of my life has passed and I am only beginning to understand what they mourned.

Pope in the Coal Mines

January 12, 2005 by Ginny

My father, who was a rural mail man, and the local Missouri Synod minister organized a Great Books club in our village in my youth. They and their friends thoroughly enjoyed it. We are talking about a farming community of 500 – over a hundred miles from a city of even 50,000. (Nebraska a few years ago – perhaps still – had more school districts than all but one other state, even though its population is a million and a half. Towns & school districts are small.) The contempt some modern scholars have for such ambitions, delights, and approaches has often bothered me. Some draw back with horror from the Arnoldian vision, but its tough respect for all of us is one of our richest heritages.

New Diamond

January 10, 2005 by Ginny

Reference to Michael Hiteshew’s review of Guns, Germs and Steel.

Last week, I enjoyed reading Hiteshew’s remarks (Dec. 28) and they brought back memories of a book I also enjoyed. Diamond’s insights have seemed to me useful and interesting. I was less happy to wake up to an NPR interview with him this morning, as he complained about global warming and overpopulation. It seemed, well, more trite than I’d remembered. These days I (appropriately) trust my memory less and less. However, when a friend sent “Kicking the Habitat” by Francis Fukayama, a review of Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed this afternoon, I began to suspect a more politicized or at least transitory agenda.

I certainly don’t get much read – Lex is intimidating – but thought the review might prompt discussion so I could learn more about both Diamond and Fukayama.

Fighting Terrorism as a “Lesser Evil”

April 21, 2007January 8, 2005 by Ginny

Michael Ignatieffï¿½s theories are grounded in an attempt to understand human nature for only that leads to the doable. His vision is tragic ï¿½ he acknowledges the great ironies and paradoxes of being human. Of Blood and Belonging examines the powerful ties of kinship and our desire to belong ï¿½ ties important in ways that can both comfort and destroy us. Reading it, I remembered a local Serbian economist who was one of the customers at my little business; in 1990 or so I remarked (in my naivetï¿½) that Yugoslavia, [here I reveal my slovenliness; looked it up a week later and he is Hungarian – though obviously our conversation was about Yugoslavia; sorry] with its lovely coastline, would surely not tear itself apart in the coming years because it had so much going for it in terms of tourism, beauty, a bright economic future. He did not laugh, though he treated my stupidity with polite condescension: I teach economics, that is my intellectual life, he said; but people, to them, money is not important – they act from the passions of blood and the heart, of who you are and who ï¿½theyï¿½ are.. He was right of course. (And the course supplement we sold, heavy on Hayek, was my superficial introduction to what economics was ï¿½ or could be – about.) Ignatieff, like that economist, understands what Faulkner describes as ï¿½the old fierce pull of bloodï¿½. That old Mississippian understood the heart counters this pull with another, the magnetic universals that transcend our tribal loyalties – abstractions he saw embodied in the law and reaching toward a justice and truth independent of the subjective. Ignatieff, the Canadian, uses similar tensions and arrives at similar conclusions. In The Lesser Evil, he argues those passions must be woven into a world of laws, without which governance is chaotic and brutal; it is, he would argue, ï¿½prepolitical.ï¿½

He is in the internationalist tradition, one given to US-bashing. Clearly, people like Anthony Lewis welcome this as central to Ignatieff’s vision. But The Lesser Evil argues, for instance, that giving any quarter to the kind of terrorists who have become nihilists is wrong. Often, he surprises. I’m looking forward to other’s, probably broader, contexts for the work I quote from below: