Ginny

Age: 77 Place: Originally Nebraska, now Texas Family: Husband, 3 daughters, 3 sons-in-law, 3 grandchildren Occupation: Retired Education: BA, MA Nebraska; Ph.D. UT-Austin Work On hhe Double (1979-1992); taught: ta Austin, Blinn Jr. College (1993-20015), Kelly Girls intermittently.

Constitution Day

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Our government department always celebrates Constitution Day and today (a bit late) they brought back one of their favorites, H. W. Brands. His talk was aimed at our students; he walked a quite straight line describing constitutional interpretations. I felt that noting the founders knew nothing of airplanes might be interesting, but is a straw man. Still, he kept his poise on that tightrope. He could aim a little higher, it seems to me, but no one can fault his passion and enthusiasm.

And I’m grateful, finding pleasure in “Capitalism, Democracy, and the Constitution” which noted that 1776 was the date of both “manifestos” – the Declaration of Independence and The Wealth of Nations. Each semester I yoke these (with religion and speech and the press) as part of the “open marketplace” with its confidence in the eventual and incremental wisdom of our nation. (Perhaps someone who puts on his biography that he spent some time traveling in the West selling cutlery is likely to see this juxtaposition in a way few others nominated for Pulitzers do.)

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Humor as we slouch toward. . .

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An entertaining aspect of Perry’s entry has been commentary explaining Aggies (even in Texas, one says, Aggies are considered hicks;yuh think). As the t-sips describe the yell leaders and Aggies boast of National Merit scholars, true outsiders may not realize the Corps was compulsory for much of its first century. Today Perry was ably (or at least energetically) commended by a t-sipper (Plan 2) and poliltical rival. Perry’s a mensch Kinky Friedman concludes. Friedman’s style is discursive; he never edits a good one-liner. And he acknowledges that at this point he’d choose Charlie Sheen over Obama. Still the piece is affectionate and, in the end, forceful: “A still, small voice within keeps telling me that Rick Perry’s best day may yet be ahead of him, and so too, hopefully, will be America’s.” (With Kinky irony & sentiment are often paired.)

Mark Steyn, too, is a nail that hasn’t been hammered down – he, too, argues “that there are already too damn many laws, taxes, regulations, panels, committees, and bureaucrats.” (It’s about an hour.) He, too, sometimes sacrifices coherence for humor. But, in the end, his arguments for human rights and self-reliance, the core of After America, have a steady aim. His historical context is not the southwest but northeast; he chose the granite state and citizenship. And Steyn reminds us why someone – someone who thinks and someone who is a nail too stubborn to be hammered down – would choose what we too long took for granted.

The Scots & Energy

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Arthur Herman’s How the Scots Invented the Modern World, in his description of Watt (“Practical Matters: Scots & Industry”) reminds us of that great industrial moment. In the “modern consciousness” was firmly “the idea of power not in a political sense, the ability to command people but the ability to command nature: the power to alter and use it to create something new, and produce it in greater and larger quantities than ever before” (278). To create something new.

We might oppose that to the stimulus; Fitzgerald summed up the end of that old bubble in “Babylon Revisited”: “the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word dissipate – to dissipate into thin air; to make something of nothing.” But wasn’t the desire, always, of this politics to control others, not to create nor to make. And how many Middle Eastern palaces are likely to fall into ruin by the end of the next century. The self-indulgent life is often described as dissipated – but how much worse a dissipated culture.

Roy Lofquist’s point that space meant clans didn’t bump against each other may well be first cause of respect for others here; the building of the west by both north and south surely was helpful in healing those raw mid-nineteenth century wounds. But in the end, we were founded in the mercantile era and capitalism – which turns us to look at what we can do to please and entice another. Frances Hutcheson would argue as my more religious friends do – we serve ourselves by serving others. That felicity is enlarging. Our natural desire to extend our self – to create, to leave a mark can come from good works and procreation and art. But it can also come from creating a business, creating a product. Ford’s desire to make a product all could buy was capitalist, creative, and productive. Building a bigger oven and planting more wheat is better than fighting over the pieces of one pie.

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What someone else does or thinks doesn’t risk my soul – what I think does

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Looking at the bridges from the Puritans to the American Enlightenment, I came upon this (probably read long ago by other Chicagoboyz). Internalizing (as much as universalizing) means a country of multiple religious beliefs can be tolerant without its citizens feeling that their souls are risked if this is the assumption. And proselytizing to save others’ souls will also be ones of arguments, examples, words rather than of intolerance. Of course, implicitly a religion with an external locus is less likely to be tolerant – nor feel toleration is good.

In the second place. The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force. Confiscation of estate, imprisonment, torments, nothing of that nature can have any such efficacy as to make men change the inward judgment that they have framed of things.

Locke

A Female Figure of Speech

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Women in the Republic of Virtue –
In revolutions, women tale up the flag and even the sceptre: every arm and voice is needed. So among the revolutionaries were the voices of women like Mercy Otis Warren. During the following years, women’s roles in the home as educators and molders was emphasized: a “republic of virtue” required both a knowledgeable and a moral public. Perhaps the most telling invasions of twentieth century tyrants were private – as the private became the public. That insertion appalls us, as the communist regime “becomes” family and church; the patriarch’s voice, visage enters the public’s mind, casting a weighty shadow. We think of the one-child rule of China, but the valuation was little different in the Communist underground in the west, encouraging promiscuity and devaluing marriage, denigrating child-bearing and emphasizing abortion.

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