Received the folllowing e-mail: ” You post in a fairly civilized venue, so you may not be familiar with all the types described here…yet!” Well, I figure we try to be civilized, but some do seem familiar.
Ginny
Captain Vere & Citizen Smash
It’s that season and I’m grading final essays where my students try to struggle with Melville’s Vere and the choices he made. Melville’s ambivalence leads close readers to doubt he approves of Vere’s choice, but his “The Housetop” (about the race riots of 1863) shows the chaos when the rule of law breaks down. Vere is no straw man. An intelligent reader can make his case, too.
And so, taking a break, I turn to Citizen Smash. There I find a description of the consolation he feels that his friend’s death has met not with revenge but with justice: indeed, the rule of law, the rule of Iraqi law. And we look at his muted and sad pleasure and are struck by the hope that order may arise from the Mesopotamian chaos.
The factor of Juan Cole, on the other hand, leads us to the chaos in minds closer to home – minds that apologize, apparently, for not only murders of those who “look Jewish” but find in the persecuted Baha’i faithful the evils of fundamentalism. (Thanks to Belmont Club, in a rather strange post that mixes identity fraud with its complaints about Cole.)
But let’s concentrate for the time on the glass that is certainly half empty with the loss of Smash’s friend, but is half full with those steps toward civil society. And we can be thankful that, even with all the hoopla about the Peterson trial, we live in a society that is, by and large, governed by laws.
SOME DAY, THIS WILL MAKE A GREAT ANECDOTE
My daughter broke her ankle this week; she�s spent far more time than she would like looking around her. So, as people do, she started making up narratives: about our ill-arranged glasses, personifying the odd assortment of dishes, and sympathizing with the petals that fell from the flowers we bought to cheer her up. As Thoreau says, each of us looks outward from a sedes, a seat, each sees his own horizon. In the twentieth century, people emphasized these horizon’s personal, arbitrary nature. Well, perhaps. I like the nineteenth century (perhaps the twenty first) which saw in the small a microcosm of the large. But, then, that�s what I want to think. Listening to her, I dug out an old essay. If it is all that arbitrary, then the interest of this story is pretty much nonexistent. It isn’t very dramatic. Well, we’ll see.
I�ve always loved Franklin�s cheerful pragmatism, his argument that �Felicity, when I reflected on it, has induc�d me sometimes to say, that were it offer�d to my Choice, I should have no objection to a Repetition of the same Life from its Beginning, only asking the Advantage Authors have in a second Edition to correct some Faults of the first.� The second thing to reliving it, he observes, is telling it. Of course, I�ve always felt a good deal more rueful about my own (a good deal less successful and a good deal more fragmented) life. But with the �hidden text,� my readers, like Franklin�s, �may read it or not as they please� without distracting themselves from the timely and public world of our usual posts.
Black Adder for the Defense
While being subjected to a series of Mr Beans on transatlantic flights has not been, well, my cup of tea, I’ll admit that Rowan Atkinson can be funny. And, besides, isn’t that the whole point of most British humor (a good lot of humor) – to make fun of the very things we respect and value highly. The nanny state is reaching new heights of silliness as well as control. See this and this. Both via Butterflies and Wheels.
Karzai
Let’s note today’s inauguration. And let’s look at the joy covered by CNN and the New York Times. And we can feel pride that we helped:
At a news conference with Cheney earlier in the day, Karzai was quick to thank the United States.
“Today whatever we have achieved — the peace … the reconstruction … the fact that Afghanistan is again a respected member of the international community — is because of the help that the United States of America gave us,” he said.
“Without that help, Afghanistan would be in the hands of terrorists, destroyed, poverty stricken and without it’s children going to school or getting an education.”
Yes, there are terrorists and poppy fields. But this is a chance to look at a glass that seems to be more than half full.