Ginny

G ewirtz’s post on “idiots” links this site to a bizarro world. Baldilocks’ point seems well taken: “Only a racist would automatically think of race whenever monkeys are mentioned.” These comments are projections. The deeper the racism/sexism/homophobic nature, the greater the assumption that others out there are much, much worse. But the inhabitants of that particular fever swamp reminded me of an anecdote I like to tell.

A few years ago, my husband sent me to Bread Loaf for a summer session. The whole thing seemed a bit too precious, but perhaps that was because I’d become middle-aged, as were almost all the tuition-paying attendees. And I wasn’t really a writer nor really writing.

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This Sunday’s Booknotes (8:00 p.m. and again 11:00) on C-SPAN 1 features John McCain, Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life. The Booknotes site notes:

“Courage,” Winston Churchill explained, is “the first of human qualities . . . because it guarantees all the others.” As a naval officer, P.O.W., and one of America’s most admired political leaders, John McCain has seen countless acts of bravery and self-sacrifice. Now, in this inspiring meditation on courage, he shares his most cherished stories of ordinary individuals who have risked everything to defend the people and principles they hold most dear.

The book was published by Random House.

C-SPAN 2’s BookTV features its monthly “in-depth” session; this month, the subject will be Simon Winchester. The 3-hour session weill be repeated throughout Sunday afternoon and night (Noon to 3, 5 to 8, and midnight to 3 in the moning). Winchester’s first book was published in 1974; he has often appeared on this channel, including discussions of Krakatoa and The Professor and the Madman.
Winchester, trained as a geologist and then serving as a foreign correspondent, has often taken interesting perspectives on his subjects. His works reflect that variety.

Encore Booknotes repeats the interview with Richard Brookhiser on The Way of the Wasp: How It Made America at 7:00 Saturday evening and 11:00 Sunday morning ). . History on Book TV focuses on The First World War by Hew Strachan (11:00 Saturday evgening and 8:00 unday evening). The Public Lives choice is Fred Kaplan’s The Singular Mark Twain – an unusual literary subject for the channel , at 8:00 Saturday evening and 10:30 Sunday evening.

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InstaPundit pointed to Tom Junod’s Esquire piece, “The Case for George Bush” . This is blue state territory–journal, audience, writer. Junod contrasts his contempt for Bush with his respect for the principles in the president’s speech to the Air Force Academy. And he begins to doubt that cynicism, that dissing Bush really helps all that much. This is another good speech in which Bush lays out, if we want to see, the principles by which he acts. And I feel vindicated in my affection for Bush’s much earlier speech disussed in the post beow.

Junod begins with the assumption that Bush is, well, pretty weak man. But, he has come to recognize it is Bush who noticed the tectonic shifts going on in our world. Of course, a red stater, I occasionally winced as I read the essay. But this is bracing. Because Junod appears honest with himself, we can talk. In the end, he discriminates between what is real and what is not. He also does a lot of historical analogies and betrays a nice sense of proportionality.

Small criticism: He uses a final analogy that doesn’t work all that well. Bush hasn’t gone around crying wolf. In fact, he has been faulted for not crying wolf enough in the summer of 2001. The truth Junod is getting at isn’t all that well served here. But all of us do that at times, trying so hard to make our perspective real, grasp at comparisons that don’t work. Junod is clear and we see him thinking; that is important. If it is on the level of reality that the next months will be fought, we will all be better for it.

Edgar Lee Masters gave us Lucinda Matlock almost a century ago. That plainswoman, dead at ninety-six and having outlived many of her twelve children, speaks to us from her grave: “Degenerate sons and daughters, / Life is too strong for you– / It takes life to love Life.” Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, published in 1916, arrived just a few years after the Education of Henry Adams , whose great power comes from his very listlessness, his lack of purpose. That we see as twentieth century. But that tough old broad, that wonderful character captured in but a few lines and spanning the nineteenth century – she, too, has something to tell us in the twenty-first.

It takes energy to love life; it takes life. Striding through the world, facing life is embracing what is. That requires a certain toughness, a certain honesty. But the cynicism of post-modernism doesn’t face reality. It breeds the cynicism that deadens energy. It is cynicism that simplifies, that disengages. Cynicism pins the other, struggling pinned and wriggling on the wall. The cynics sometimes fancy themselves skeptics; would it were so. Skepticism notes complexity, asks questions. A skeptic is distinterested but intellectually engaged. A skeptic doesn’t welcome despair but does ask us to doubt our illusions. A skeptic asks, Is it worth it? But to post-modernists, there is no worth, so nothing is “worth it.” So a young man’s response to the stoicism and heroism implied by the lines of firemen taking last rites as they entered the burning World Trade Center was that such men were “sick” and Michael Moore assumes no one could consider their lives – nor their child’s life – worth “saving Fallujah.” [Sorry about the mistake.] The assumption in both cases is not that of someone who asks, are the lives saved worth the loss? Nor is there a sense that loving life is loving another’s life – indeed, of loving the many others, the unnamed and even unknown others. No, such a choice only comes from greed or insanity or stupidity.

But this is the air through which we move; we have seen cynicism; we have seen Chicago. We aren’t surprised by the phenomenon Virginia Postrel noted, the last-ditch, crazy, projection – if George Bush is the problem, then we don’t need to deal with the real problem. Sometimes it seems as if a lot of grouchy teens were awakened by 9/11 and are irritated at the world for making them get up. And Bush, well, if we can pin him with a phrase, we don’t need to deal with the facts his very presence reminds us are true.

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Arts & Letters links to Stacy A. Teicher’s “A Fresh Definition of Inheritance Comes Into Vogue”. Apparently experts (some legal) are now employed in writing “ethical wills” in which one generation wills its values to the next. While these date back to the 1970’s (this was a new concept to me), as Teicher observes, it has “ancient precedents.” What we want to give our children are the nuggets we have mined through painful experience; what we want to give them is a refined version of us. The essay concluded with links to two websites and a do-it-yourself guide from the Jewish Ethical Wills Society.

All emphasize the spiritual nature of such a legacy and, indeed, one author, Barry K. Baines, won an award for one of the “Best Spiritual Books 2002.” While some jargon is that of the courtroom, of apportionment of material goods, all understand that what is being discussed here is not the stuff of pre-nups and property.

Both sites extract money in exchange for an expert’s aid in finding that in communicating those truths in a form later generations recognize and use. At first, I felt critical. But, I admit ours has become a society of “experts” in service; summing up one’s life and what one has learned is likely to be difficult. As an expert at acrylic nails or Christmas lights or even the quite meaningful wedding dinner can help us, why shouldn’t we use someone’s services for this more complex task?

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