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.

“Redo”

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Booknotes is at the Chicago Tribune book festival; Richard Engel’s lengthy time in Iraq is recorded in My Five Years in Iraq. (Rerun tonight after midnight.) Five years matured his sense of the war; he gives a broader and longer perspective than we see from many seasoned reporters. (His analysis of the last year supports Shannon’s argument below.) Federick Kagan’s “Voting for Commander in Chief” takes the movement over the time Engel describes and weighs it against speeches by the candidates.

He pierces the ploy of childhood games, where a “redo” might freeze us at an earlier moment in time: when, say, the Ottoman Empire included Spain or when, say, Iraq was falling apart in sectarian violence and Obama’s position seemed (somewhat) sound. If we were living in an alternate universe, this might work. For many reasons, most of us are thankful we haven’t dropped into that dimension.

Whose Horses Are They?

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This blog has repeatedly called attention to the battle over the Kennewick man. A&L links to Edward Rothstein’s review of James Cuno’s Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage, which critiques the concept of “cultural property” underlying arguments that led to bulldozing Kennewick’s burial ground. The review (and Cuno) argue that that idea has been betrayed. The framers of the doctrine, he contends, had a “universalist stance”; they “would hardly recognize cultural property in its current guise. The concept is now being narrowly applied to assert possession, not to affirm value. It is used to stake claims on objects in museums, to prevent them from being displayed and to control the international trade of antiquities.” The writer finds this change “as troubling as Mr. Cuno suggests. It has been used not just to protect but also to restrict.” Rothstein concludes “But if cultural property really did exist, the Enlightenment museum would be an example of it: an institution that evolved, almost uniquely, out of Western civilization. And the cultural property movement could be seen as a persistent attempt to undermine it. And take illicit possession.”

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Faulkner’s Grip on Psychology

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“The old fierce pull of blood.” – Faulkner

Literature helps us understand human nature. Disciplines designed to do so are not always so good at it. Sometimes, indeed, they seem counterproductive. “Buried Prejudice”, an article by Siri Carpenter in Scientific American Mind (via A&L), argues that “[e]ven our basic visual perceptions are skewed toward our in-groups. Many studies have shown that people more readily remember faces of their own race than of other races.” But to Carpenter (and the researchers summarized) the tension between our understanding of truth and justice (transcendent ideals that also pulled Faulkner’s young hero, Sarty) and our feel of the tribal (which he feels mixed with “despair” and “grief”) is not the tension between feeling and thinking, the biological and the rational. Our culture has slowly developed institutions to restrain the tribal passions central to our earlier survival but detrimental to a more diverse and larger society. But, Carpenter describes a group of researchers who have found (“[u]sing a variety of sophisticated methods,” that we “unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin.” (The word “astounding” is telling.) Of course, this is not always helpful – say, in sitting on a jury – when we link (as Jesse Jackson implies he did in the catchy intro) “black” with “danger”.

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Mug Half Empty, But It’s Also Half Full

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Belmont Club links to the following news story:

The British military expressed cautious optimism at the progress. Major Tom Holloway, a spokesman, said: “The Iraqi security forces have made a real difference; this is going to be a long operation by its nature. However, rule of law is returning to the streets.”

Perseverance pays off and long operations require a core optimism. But perhaps it’s all nurtured by a bit of black humor, a bit of irony. After all, WWII was won by people who invented the term SNAFU. So, here’s some merchandising – the question is, does it toughen us or lead us to despair or, well, merely, make us smile? Whatever – I want that mug. There may well be a providential order, but today things look screwed.

And, longer term, perseverance isn’t just a trait, it’s a duty. And so Wretchard follows that story with this one by Wretchard.

2003/2008

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A&L links to a Hoover essay by Lee Harris, “Al Quaeda’s Fantasy Ideology.” His definition of this fantasy might seem to have a wider application and interest to Chicagoboyz. That he has been making these arguments and we’ve been considering them for a long while now was brought home to me when searching our site for “fantasy ideology.” This seemed more in Shannon’s line but the first “catch” was an old, angry, and interestingly prescient post by Lex inspired by a current (at that time – Sept. 22, 2003) Lee Harris essay. Here is a passage from Harris’s current essay, in which he describes how he came to understand this fantasy mindset through the arguments of a friend of his forty years ago. The friend chose a completely non-persuasive anti-war (Vietnam of course) strategy and Harris explains why:

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