Ginny – Page 19 – Chicago Boyz

Natty Bumppo Would Understand

August 1, 2012July 31, 2012 by Ginny

Natty Bumppo

Tea Partiers want to be left alone government kept from faith and speech, guns and books. Government restrained from taking property house or wallet. Anyone who thinks those beliefs don’t have legs isn’t getting my phone calls the tea party candidate’s supporters in the primary fill the answering machine and from my husband’s relatives fill our in-box. It has legs because this is who we are, or at least want to be: responsible adults, autonomous. Equivalence with the Occupiers misses core differences; Occupiers want what they fantasize the 1% have. We are human we covet. But Americans haven’t taken to OWS because we aren’t proud of our envy; we prefer grandeur to pettiness.

The Tea Party has roots – aware that restraint of power is difficult, but has a proud American history. Washington’s greatness lay not only in his victories but also his restraint he refused (as few have) to abuse his power restraint gained him respect, gave him another kind of power. Respect for flag and country characterizes the tea party; it is respect for a greatness defined by its restraint recognizing the limits of government when it bumps against man’s intrinsic rights.

A Love Like That

July 24, 2012 by Ginny

In “Those Sexy Puritans,” Edmund Morgan argues “Puritan theology placed a high value on the affections, specifically on the love that Christ excited in believers.” Noting that “the most intense love that most people knew or felt was sexual,” in Puritan sermons, like Taylor’s poetry, the conversion experience was naturally analogized to marriage. Christ was bridegroom, the bride a believer of either sex (24). Morgan further observes that “In giving meaning to religious experience, sexual union in return acquired a religious blessing. It was, of course, conferred only on sex in marriage. Christ was a bridegroom, not a libertine. But marriage without sex was as hollow as religion without the fulfillment of Christ’s union with the soul” (25). Biology, religion and the practical linkage of family all reinforced each other, as a mother’s desire to free her heavy breasts keeps her close to and nurturing her child. The physical isn’t opposed to the spiritual; this is no denigration in Puritan thought. To them, God created natural desires that conform to a greater plan of course, when those desires are willful and alienated, they thwart the plan. Few subscribe to these beliefs now, but entering their world still helps us understand ours.

This is What Men Do

July 22, 2012 by Ginny

As on the Titanic, as on 9/11, and as in Aurora – this is what men do.

The Smallest Hive

July 20, 2012July 20, 2012 by Ginny

My friend plays bridge; she tells me the Soviets banned it. Ah, I thought, bridge is mysterious; why, I asked. But it wasn’t bridge it was the four or eight or twelve it was community, sharing an interest, and then companionship. It wasn’t as big as the God the party banned or as intimate as the family nor as public as deadened ideas in factory and academy. But it was one of those pillars Charles Murray describes in Coming Apart whose fall disorganizes and diminishes our lives – and our society. Our desire for them is strong; alienation requires strong dominance, perhaps murder random and targeted, mass and individual. At first we don’t miss them; now and here, we can choose. We often don’t weight our choices as if they are consequential. But they are.

Government has intruded more in the last four years will in the next four if Iowatrades has it right. But a half century ago we boomers loftily decided connections were oppressive. Above our water beds, posters quoted Emerson Whim, yes, that was it. Well that’s part of growing up. Eschewing those conventions, consideration of “others” was hazy. We thought, in Haidt’s terms, with our chimp minds. And that’s pretty much adolescence chimpdom. Spurning connections – religious love, familial love, communal love, and selfless passion for vocation/avocation – we devalued the hive. And the smallest, the first, hive is family.

Why the large “marriage gap” between Obama and Romney? They share one quality neither is always credited with consistency of vision. If we see a part we can understand the whole. What they don’t share, of course, are definitions of success or family, government or power, integrity or responsibility. Those multi-generation pictures of the Romneys contrast with Obama’s disinterest even in his half-siblings. He may have a broader definition of community, but it isn’t because he has built on a smaller one. Remember how he described his grandmother – family less a marker than race.

When It Was Natural for Parents to Bury Their Children

July 15, 2012July 15, 2012 by Ginny

History gives us breadth: people in action on a grand stage, consequential ideas with great if unforeseen consequences; the demographer’s statistics and tables distil huge movements into tables we can wrap our minds around. But literature, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether reporting or reflecting, chooses a smaller stage. But it also catches that universal in a distilled moment – in the feelings of a narrator, a character. It may be anecdotal but it’s anecdotal accessible to our sympathy. How much have we changed between 1650 and 2012? In some ways, a lot. Fogel’s charts demonstrate that. In some ways, not so much. We remain human.

Puritan poets are not everyone’s cup of tea the plain style helps them age more slowly, but they are still the product of a culture remarkably different from ours a frontier, theocentric if not theocratic. But a death in the family is always shattering & love for a mate is timeless. I’ll put up the Bradstreet love poems next week, but for today, let’s look at the consolations poets found in their art & their beliefs with the death of children and a spouse. (And the brevity of these children’s lives may help us better understand how large and intimate the changes Fogel describes have been.) Even if their experiences would be uncommon today, parents may still bury children and we find we understand the poet’s feelings (in hearts we recognize at once) and to a lesser degree how they thought (in minds we enter with more difficulty).