Arts & Letters

Further Mutterings on the More Succinct & Sound Remarks by Jonathan & David

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Knowing history is an important part of being educated, not only because it’s good to honor the people who came before us, and who built the world that we take for granted, but also because if we don’t know what people did in the past we will needlessly repeat many of their mistakes. This is as true on an individual level as it is in geopolitics. We forget it at our peril, and too many people have forgotten it. Jonathan

Honoring is thanking, respecting, learning from. This is something that takes us a while to understand. Some find it hard to see Hamlet as a tragic hero – he’s too self-absorbed, too cynical, too indecisive, too – well, too non-heroic. He doesn’t do great deeds, he is more worried about his father’s ghost than he is about the kingdom his father ruled. That diminishes heroism. He’s the adolescent tragic hero. Well, we’ve got plenty of them.

Some day, people may look back on our time as that of “The Adolescent.” (I hope it ended with a new period so harshly entered on 9/11 but I fear it may not.) David Foster’s “temporal bigotry” comes from a lack of sympathy & imagination as well as history. Most of all, it comes from hubris. But it is not an Olympian hubris; rather it is that of a teen-ager in the throes of first love, unsure of his own dignity and self, angered by the demands of classes and work he finds demeaning. He complains the world is not sufficiently accommodating, voices the petty doubts of the village atheist and classroom cynic.

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Books That Should Exist, But Don’t: The South African Military

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Millions and millions of books. Even in the history field, thousands and thousands. Usually monographs on pretty narrow topics. But amidst all that, despite the numbers, you sometimes find that a book you want just does not exist.

I got thinking about South Africa recently, due to a perusal of Ralph Peters’ remarkable essay The Lion and the Snake, hat tip Eddie. And it occurred to me that I knew less about the South African military than I’d like. It is a remote corner of the Anglosphere which I’d like to know more about, and being me, I wanted to start from the military angle. I went looking for something like Granatstein’s history of the Canadian Army, or this essay collection on the military history of Ireland. I found remarkably little. There are unit histories, and an official (or semi-official) history of South Africa in the Second World War, and some books about the South African Army from the 1980s, and a few other odds and ends, such as this short essay, and this interesting list of books (click on “literature”). So there is a fair amount of material out there, but nothing comprehensive. I want someone else to do the research, the heavy lifting, and put the whole thing together for me, with an nice annotated bibliography.

Despite substantial searching, I am forced to conclude with regret that there is no one volume history of the South African armed forces, or military history of South Africa. I think we are too close to the transition from the apartheid regime to the successor regime. Old wounds are still open.

Still, too bad. It would be a very fascinating story, told as a continuous narrative. Lots of military, political, cultural and racial drama. The Dutch settlement, the British capture of the Cape, the Zulu Wars, the Boer War, South African expeditionary forces in both world wars, the Cold War era struggles against guerillas in adjacent countries, The military’s involvement in sustaining the apartheid regime, the clandestine nuclear program, the current ambiguous situation, including the virtual privatization of important segments of the South African Army into mercenary bands for hire, and some predictions and guesses about what the future might hold. What a tale. Even if it covered only the 20th century, starting with independence, after the Boer War, it is a story which would certainly have a lot of interest and lessons. It belongs in one volume. I hope someone writes it.

I close by opening the floor to our readers: Do you have any book recommendations about South Africa, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, etc., not necessarily limited to the military angle.

Books Read

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I have been enjoying James McCormick’s book reviews on the blog very much. The quality of these items is a blessing and a challenge. I have been intending for a long time to do some “book reports” for the blog on things I have been reading, but I have not gotten to it for many valid reasons. The way I read is not conducive to taking notes, reflection, etc. I read while walking to the train, cooking, evacuating, a minute here a minute there. I read fast and I retain pretty well what I read. I can read in almost any posture and in any setting with any volume of background distraction, something I have learned out of necessity. Still, while this is the only option available to me, it is far less than the ideal way to read a book. At this point in my life, it is that or nothing. I just ingest the books as best I can and try to retain something of value from them.

So, instead of a book report, I just attach a list of books I have read in the last 16 months or so. It may be of interest to some of you. I hope to write about some of these at some point in the future.

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Partial to the The Partial Critics

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Last week, to wean myself of my television habit, I sat down to read a Howells biography, but glanced at the books piled beside my chair, waiting to be reshelved. Some I’ve ignored for decades, packing them in box after box in move after move. The one on top, by one of my old teachers, was published in 1965.

I’d never been much interested in theory; in those days, the study of literature was not yet dominated by meta-criticism. Then, I confess, literature seemed primarily a way to objectify and understand my own inner chaos. The level of abstraction required to think in terms of literary theories was just not the way I thought. But, that last spring at Nebraska, I enjoyed Lee Lemon’s critical theory seminar & the play of those conversations. Sometimes books wait for us; last week, I found myself lost in his. The Partial Critics beautifully embodies an attitude I remembered: respectful of literature & its bounty, of the critics he critiques with affection.

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Roger Scruton Knows What to Appreciate – And What Not To

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Noam Chomsky is rather despicable. But I’ve always had mixed feelings when his name came up: one of my first classes at U.T. was in transformational grammar, taught by one of hisi students, fresh out of grad school himself. I remember it with great pleasure for a personal and trivial reason (I met my husband) but also as just a great class. Our teacher, young & fresh faced, would become visibly excited, walk back and forth in front of the room, motioning to the chalkboard and its diagrams of syntax & sense. I can still see him, leaning against the wall and intently looking at the board. He’d hold the chalk against his lips, then suddenly move across and move an element, point to a connection. We were there, we were being taught, but for a moment, he’d forgotten us, absorbed in the idea in front of him. We were watching thought – engaged, cheerful thought – in motion. It was electric – that was man thinking, drawing us into his world, Chomsky’s world. We loved Chomsky’s famous debate with Skinner. We were, of course, on Chomsky’s side.

And in that way, we still are. His analysis that blends nurture and nature leads us to understand language & human nature. The sense of universality that lies beneath these sentences informs my thinking to this day. I never studied trans gram again; that teacher, energizing as he was, didn’t get tenure. Yes, much has fallen by the way. But today, Roger Scruton discusses Chomsky by noting that electricity as well as how far Chomsky has fallen in his ability to connect ideas, to selflessly lose himself in thought. Scruton’s first paragraph is clear: “Noam Chomsky’s popularity owes little or nothing to the eminent place that he occupies in the world of ideas. That place was won many years ago in the science of linguistics, and no expert in the subject would, I think, dispute Prof. Chomsky’s title to it.” But if Chomsky thinking – like my old teacher – could be a beautiful sight, Chomsky feeling is less attractive. At one time, he lost himself in ideas; now, as Scruton concludes: “he is not valued for his truths but for his rage, which stokes the rage of his admirers. He feeds the self-righteousness of America’s enemies, who feed the self-righteousness of Prof. Chomsky. And in the ensuing blaze everything is sacrificed, including the constructive criticism that America so much needs, and that America–unlike its enemies, Prof. Chomsky included–is prepared to listen to. “

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