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.

Sensing Reminds – but we forget

by

Musings, seeing Sensing (here and especially here)

Some, Chomsky for instance, look at dots from a myopic & remarkably American perspective – narrower than the most jingoistic cowboy. The difference, of course, is that America is the spider spinning a web of death and intrigue. Of course, this particular (and peculiar) pattern leaves out what we reacted against, what others did, what we prevented others from doing. They are our victims. This ignores the larger world the one Jonah Goldberg describes, the dots Glen Beck connects. And, frankly, the deaths that total up in The Black Book of Communism make the Goldbergs and Becks and David Horowitzs of the world hyperventilating, perhaps, hyperactive, more radical than conservative, bombthrowers in their own ways – still a bit saner than the Chomskys and Zinns. Exactly what does it take to be hyperbolic when we describe the Ukraine of the 30’s or the Cultural Revolution or Cambodia or the cannibalism of North Korea or the shredders of Iraq?

Read more

Great Plains

by

My brother sent a Michael Forsburg video. Onparkstreet will recognize the prairies, but tbe breadth of those skies seems an appropriate backdrop for many of our thoughts here.

Happy Warriors & Not-so-Happy Ones

by

Long before I returned to my conservative roots, I loved the humor of a Buckley – the right seemed to have more fun with ideas. Great satire points out the foibles of the disproportionate. Jane Austen understood that. It is the sharp recognition of a truth about human nature that makes us smile, albeit ruefully. Even with the rather meager set of social values Seinfeld embodied, his friends, in their superficiality and greed and general laziness, made us laugh. We laughed because they didn’t recognize what we owe to others, what living with others requires of us say, not sleeping under the desk or sharing bathroom tissue. The writer’s sense of the variety & density of our cultural restraints and our own impulses permeated that series.

We enjoyed Seinfeld and his friends because they loved words but also because we took a certain pleasure in their violation of good manners that restrained us: we wouldn’t make their choices, but we would be tempted. We restrained those impulses (or hid them) because we understood they violated not just gentility but morality. The last episode made that clear to us: in the real world, we would have felt contempt (or guilt) – but watching them, we could laugh. That wasn’t a funny episode; it was an arresting conclusion.

Read more

Images, Analogies, and Cooties

by

In a comment, Mishu linked to “The Lie of a Liberal Arts Education.” Jeff Goldstein, of Protein Wisdom, tells us after a political cartoon was posted at his site, an old teacher e-mailed him, requesting that his name be struck from the list of Goldstein’s teachers. That we are responsible for those who have studied under us would make neither my raft of old teachers very happy nor me about many of my students. (Jonathan’s need to fix my comma splices, for instance, must make one of them spin in his grave.)

I’d seen the comment (for the usual reason, groggy in the morning and late at night, I check out Instapundit). And I’d remembered it clearly, since it brought home the adolescent and enforced homogeneity of academic thinking but also because the cartoon was especially memorable, disturbing the way political cartoons can be. The visual and analogous are powerful weapons. The Muslims realize that – and we should, too. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we follow the actions of either the Jihadists or the average college faculty. When I went back later to show it to my husband, the cartoon was linked but no longer at the top of the page. It provokes, but it has a certain rightness. I found it and my husband was repelled. He felt it was in bad taste. His explanation for that gut reaction was not a defense of Obama nor of the content or the process of Healthcare legislation as would any sentient being, he sees those as pretty bad. Nor did he see it as racist indeed, worrying about that label would make any criticism difficult.

Read more

A Question

by

Is it just me, or is Paul Ryan’s I.Q. (or tenacity, research or thoughtfulness or whatever) a difference in kind rather than in degree from Democrats with whom he spars? Nerds/wonks like that aren’t great presidents, but I’d sure like him on the side of anyone who is. Give him some power and he’d clearly feel restrained by the possible, the practical. He respects us – and those with whom he argues. And he just seems so damn right.

Am I missing something – or, if I’m right, why do his remarks seem to slide off other’s well-oiled backs as if they were water? Of course, your average nerd doesn’t have hair that black and eyes that blue – he reminds me of that old Irish saying, God put in those blue, blue eyes with smokey fingers.