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.

Digressions, again

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Much discussion today has been whether or not Obama should have been willing to sit on a board with Ayers. I can’t see why people should have to justify that kind of connection. But much discussion begs the bigger question, shifts grounds. A wife who sets up panels on which these friends can pontificate, a candidate who announces in the friend’s living room all imply a weightier connection. And the whole board thing seems a less innocuous when it gives charitable money to those who fund a board member’s election bid. And then there is money for Rashid Khalidi, but of course he needs a larger megaphone and Obama recognizes his charitable duty to provide it with other’s funds.

I’d like to point out, though admitting it’s pretty much a distinction without a difference, that Bill Ayers is a professor in an education department and not an English one. Unhappily, this reinforces Lex’s comment to my earlier post – radicals were wise to hi-jack education departments. And perhaps they were most of all wise in making sure that very little understanding of history, political theory, or even literature was rich enough to lead students to the “restlessness” of the educated and aware.

Not that, mind you, my restless students today, taking a long time to find the majesty of Sophocles and the tragedy of Oedipus, didn’t make me long for some Ritalin. (Many were, eventually, moved. I’m no expert on Sophocles or film, but I never tire of Michael Pennington, Claire Bloom, John Gielgud performing the old story. And even my restless students eventually became awed, moved by the inevitability of fate and tragedy.) I would be interested in knowing if others have a version they have enjoyed – those tapes are wearing out. And Obama himself, seem strangely fated – trying to run from the feckless nature of his grandfather, his father and yet denigrating his more dutiful grandmother, leaving his mother out of his narrative. Who is he? Well, he’s half-white, raised by whites. He’s a lot of other things, too. But for all the elegance of the fall of his suits, he doesn’t seem at ease with who he is. The anger from being on-edge leads to tensions; its effect underlies the grievances we heard today.

Digressions

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Just a comment to Lex’s post that got digressive:

We’re used to this inability to understand the “other”    from statists;  Obama merely summarizes “What’s the Matter with Kansas” in a couple of clauses leading to his belief (like Franks) that if yahoos  would see the world correctly – that is, as he does –  they would understand their oppressed nature and the government/Obama  as savior.  They know better:   believing a government can prevent the tragedies of life (whether lung cancer or hurricanes, economic downturns or sin) leads to  bitterness;  believing that a leader can solve the big problems encourages misery (the people)  and  megalomania (the leader).

Refusal to accept limitations in our power also leads to demonizing the “other”. One of my students said she wanted life like it was under Clinton. Before 9/11? I asked.   She said, yes. If we’d just elected Gore. Yeah, right. Things should be perfect; it should be exactly as I want it. It isn’t. Someone is at fault. We’ve spent eight years of BDS; if we listen to Wright and note the subtext of Obama’s campaign, this is just the beginning. Hannity and O’Reilley can take care of themselves and aren’t exactly innocent of demonizing others; still, how many Linda Ramirez-Sliwinskis, indeed, how many like Obama’s grandmother, will be exiled from the great American family? How many will eventually be the subject of “hate time”? We have already seen Obama as unifier and it isn’t heartening.

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Quoting WSJ

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Twenty years [Forty] ago last week, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. The toll his family took was heavy. But the goal was – is – worthy. Bret Stephens contrasts King with Mugabe. Those who admire (mostly past tense, of course) both missed the core concept of the Civil Rights movement, of the assumptions of the will to live free. David Hackett Fischer notes how freedom and liberty are intertwined concepts in our history. Still, it is the very limits of our freedoms and liberties (the points where they touch others) that gives them shape and power, within those broad limits they empower us. If we don’t accept the limits of our freedoms – our human condition, others’ freedoms – they become perverse. Willing our death, willing other’s – that hardly changes our condition. And the most perversely revolutionary thought doesn’t throw over tradition for a universal of individual growth but rather to allow expression of one individual (one corporate) will that uses each to express that will. (Perhaps talking about Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” over and over with freshmen newly exposed to that terror makes me read the editorial pages with hyperbolic context – or maybe it is Conrad’s that is the real context.) Anyway, here is Stephens:

Maybe the question is better put this way: Why is it that “progressivism” seems so prone to nihilism? Friedrich Nietzsche, who knew something about nihilism, had an answer: “Man,” as he famously concluded in his Genealogy of Morals, “would rather will nothingness than not will.” Ultimate freedom, complete liberation, demands that man overthrow every constraint, or what Nietzsche called “a revolt against the most fundamental preconditions of life itself” including life itself. In this scheme, nature and the natural order of things become subordinate to the mere act of willing. This is the essence of totalitarianism, a political order that recognizes no higher authority, no limits and no decencies.
 
Which brings us back to Martin Luther King Jr. In his 1958 essay “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” King described his encounter with, and rejection of, Marxism. “Since for the Communist there is no divine government,” he wrote, “no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything force, violence, murder, lying is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end. . . . I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God.”

“Exterminate the brutes!” may be the colonial view but it was also Stalin’s, Hitler’s and it wasn’t just the cry of Europeans in Africa but also of Cambodians in Cambodia, Rwandans in Rwanda. Wars prove less deadly than democide, for winning a battle doesn’t require the extermination of the “restless spirit” Frederick Douglass describes.

Keeping Austin Weird

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George Will looks at Austin’s campaign to keep itself weird. A useful contrast between the two flagship schools and the communities that house them might be interesting – community participation, generosity, attitude toward the “other.” Of course, analyzing levels of religious commitment, political philosophy, and applied citizenship in such minor commitments as voting and jury duty and larger ones such as enlistment would also be interesting. Last night, we watched Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace. He chooses to focus on the application of Wilberforce’s beliefs in the practical realm of politics, but the undercurrent (as certainly was true) was that the driving force that impelled him was his belief in the universal rights of man, his belief in a God and the God-given nature of those rights. But, of course, he was someone who was interested not just in believing but in acting. There is nothing more beautiful nor more useful than the practical application of the great beliefs.

Packing my boxes to move, I kept writing Austin, Nebraska – but once there, well, it felt like home for me as for so many others. Soon, Willy was setting up the first of the Dripping Springs concerts and I was reading manuscripts by the great twentieth century writers in one of the best two or three libraries in the world. Fromholz described himself as a rumor in his time and people claimed he’d run for governor (I don’t think very seriously, but who knew then). It’s cooler and dryer than much of the state and more laid back than about any place. Still, when both my kids packed up to move last year, they also felt they’d lived there long enough. I guess, in a way, so had we over twenty years before. It’s a good place to be young, but walking the dog down streets full of broken glass was getting to our daughter who lived in West campus; the rents had raised from our day but the druggies still dealt on the drag; the street people had gotten sadder (or maybe we’d just gotten older).

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I Agree With You, How About You?

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Instapunk’s description of Obama reminds me of a tendency we all have – to become what others find attractive.   That can be charming.    But sometimes it is a device at once to distance ourselves from others and to ingratiate ourselves with them.   One of my son-in-law’s friends was an air force brat.   In their early years, he said, their moves every few months were harder on his brother , who actually cared about the new friends he made each year.    He said, with some bravado we expect, that moving was fine  with him – it usually happened  about the  time people were getting fed up with him, had figured him out.    Such children learn to adjust,   learn to pick up on what others want, learn  charm.

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