Pundits are beginning to suggest that one reason Obama doesn’t have a lot of achievement to show for his first year in office is that he spent so much time on health care reform. Yeah … . All I can say is that if he spent a lot of time and energy on health care it wasn’t easy to notice.
He certainly didn’t spend EFFECTIVE time and energy. LBJ got all kinds of Republican votes for Civil Rights, Medicare and Medicaid. Obama hasn’t gotten one Red senator to go with him. LBJ was a master at the art of compromise and trade-off—but the finished bills that came to his desk were pretty much what he wanted in their essentials.
What Obama has, so far, is a thousand or more pages that no one fully understands (it would be interesting to find out if ANYONE in Congress has actually read either of the whole bills through). He has allowed Congress to create a big target that any disaffected soul can shoot verbal arrows at—whether Republican or Democrat.
I don’t pretend to understand either the Senate or the House bill and I’m sure I won’t understand the reconciled bill that finally emerges from closed door sessions. (So much for Obama’s promise of open deliberations—back to Chicago style politics?) It’s unlikely that most of the members who eventually vote for or against the final bill will understand it any better than I.
One thing I do know, as do most people who have any kind of a handle on the situation, the cart has been firmly positioned in front of the horse.
Going in, there were two major problems with American health care—too many millions had no health care at all (incidentally the new bill will NOT include all of these). Second, health care cost too much, and costs were rising without any attempt at restraint.
It was as if every health care provider were allowed to act like a defense contractor in an emergency situation—what’s a few billion here or there in cost overruns? My grandfather worked as a receiving clerk in a major Grand Rapids hospital fifty years ago. He used to regale us with stories of how much sheer waste and misuse he saw from his small vantage point.
It truly offended his Dutch soul to see all the goods that hospital ordered and either never used or tossed out. He could see lots of ways in which the system could be changed—to deliver the same care for considerably less cost. This was fifty and sixty years ago.
So, it is obvious that before you can overload a crashing system with millions of more patients (like piling more debt on Chrysler), you have to figure out ways to effectively cut costs. (No, boys and girls, this does not mean more health care rationing than exists now—very possibly LESS. Just better use of what is there.)
Get rid of the waste that my grandpa saw—after all many of these institutions are “non-profit”, which means they have little motivation to beef up a bottom line by cutting costs. Consolidate the dozens of health care providers who order this or that test without talking to each other—I shouldn’t have to walk into a specialist’s office and find out that his computer knows nothing about me or my condition. He should immediately know everything my GP and any other specialist knows, what tests I had, what medicines have been tried, et cetera.
And, above all, above all, there should be a single payer. If we went our medical system to survive, private insurance companies—except as supplements to Medicare for the wealthy, if they want them—should be obsolete. They are a luxury we cannot afford.
Correcting a glitch in my health insurance shouldn’t require five hours on the phone, as it did me. It should be like a single or call to Social Security. Bingo! The problem is fixed. Not with private insurance. Having one payer will allow it to force cost savings on the whole industry.
We won’t have that. There will be no real means of controlling rising—and potentially bankrupting—costs. The Republicans are right—as it stands, costs will just go up more. And we won’t even cover everybody who needs it.
If Obama does as good a job in Afghanistan as he’s done on health, we may as well surrender now. Nothing he promised has come to pass. Should we vote for this mess? If you truly believe that nothing else is possible, I guess you hold your nose and say, Yes. But after all these decades, it’s a pity to think that this mess is all we’ve accompolished.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Heritage Lost IV
Nothing I have written so far should be seen as an evaluation of the comparative worth of any particular culture. Or a denigration of any. I merely say that we Americans are a product of a particular culture and, in order to understand who we are, it is vital that we know and understand that culture. Otherwise we risk becoming confused and ineffective.
The culture we are a product of is that of 2,000 years of British/Anglo Saxon (English) history. Our democracy, our habits of governance, the words we speak, the common illusions we make all rise out of an English/American past.
This is true whether we are white, black or yellow, European, Asiatic or African. We all come here—some to escape hanging, some from debtors’ prison, others to flee religious or political persecution, still others chained to the hold of a slave ship, yet others to avoid starvation. Almost none of us came by choice.
Millions of us share tales of misery and privation leaving our homes, of relatives that died on Atlantic voyages, of nativist persecution as we came ashore. We all faced harsh prejudice—because of an Irish brogue, a dark skin, a Catholic or Jewish faith.
Somehow we stopped being Zulu, Irish, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, Bantu, Jewish, Italian, Japanese, French, Finnish, Korean, or English—and became Americans. I am a student of names—but it is more and more common to meet an American who hasn’t the faintest notion where his ancestors came from or what his name might mean.
THAT is why this country works. Benjamin Franklin expressed concern about the nation holding together as more and more non-English folk crowded ashore even in his day. Not to worry; they BECAME English /Americans. They adopted enough of the culture of the founding fathers to rub the rough and potentially violent edges off their diversity.
Whether the person sitting next to you had a Polish grandfather or had an ancestor on the Mayflower, the language he speaks is as much a product of Shakespeare and the King James Bible as that of any Londoner or Yorkshireman.
He believes in—and more importantly UNDERSTANDS—how this thing called democracy works. He has, without knowing it, absorbed a thousand years of English experimentation and experience (some of it quite bloody) in our unique form of self-government. It is HIS culture.
He is no longer European, African or Asian—he is this unique thing called “American” that began with the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Mayflower Compact. A past that builds upon Milton, the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, the English Civil War, the rise of Parliament to a co-equal position with that of the king, the defense of democracy on battlefields in Europe and America (at Bunker Hill and Saratoga, both sides were fighting to defend democracy as they saw it), and throws in Kit Marlowe, Dunne, Swift, Addison, Edmund Burke, Hobbes, John Locke and Walpole—this is now HIS past. It forms him as much as it does any WASP.
No. He should not forget or be ignorant of the heritage he came from, be it Dutch, Chinese or West African. But, above all, he should know and understand his AMERICAN heritage. I will go so far as to say that he is not fully an American who does not know its past and its tradition.
For one thing, Democracy is actually a delicate flower. It only seems to grow well in certain soils—it doesn’t even do that well in many parts of Europe. To keep it, we must understand how it grows and what it needs to nourish it. Other cultures will not, cannot do this.
A common language binds a nation together like no other glue can. Diversity in language can be as dangerous as a load of nitro-glycerin. I can think of few things in history that have torn a nation apart faster. The Cold War, for instance, grew out of a two thousand year old split between the Latin speaking half of the Roman Empire and the Greek speaking half. The two halves spent most of those millennia at war or in a state of near war.
Study other cultures, well and good. Necessary, even. But jolly well learn your own first. It’s not necessarily better than any other—but it is most necessary to know it. That’s what we’re drifting away from in our schools today.
The culture we are a product of is that of 2,000 years of British/Anglo Saxon (English) history. Our democracy, our habits of governance, the words we speak, the common illusions we make all rise out of an English/American past.
This is true whether we are white, black or yellow, European, Asiatic or African. We all come here—some to escape hanging, some from debtors’ prison, others to flee religious or political persecution, still others chained to the hold of a slave ship, yet others to avoid starvation. Almost none of us came by choice.
Millions of us share tales of misery and privation leaving our homes, of relatives that died on Atlantic voyages, of nativist persecution as we came ashore. We all faced harsh prejudice—because of an Irish brogue, a dark skin, a Catholic or Jewish faith.
Somehow we stopped being Zulu, Irish, Dutch, Polish, Chinese, Bantu, Jewish, Italian, Japanese, French, Finnish, Korean, or English—and became Americans. I am a student of names—but it is more and more common to meet an American who hasn’t the faintest notion where his ancestors came from or what his name might mean.
THAT is why this country works. Benjamin Franklin expressed concern about the nation holding together as more and more non-English folk crowded ashore even in his day. Not to worry; they BECAME English /Americans. They adopted enough of the culture of the founding fathers to rub the rough and potentially violent edges off their diversity.
Whether the person sitting next to you had a Polish grandfather or had an ancestor on the Mayflower, the language he speaks is as much a product of Shakespeare and the King James Bible as that of any Londoner or Yorkshireman.
He believes in—and more importantly UNDERSTANDS—how this thing called democracy works. He has, without knowing it, absorbed a thousand years of English experimentation and experience (some of it quite bloody) in our unique form of self-government. It is HIS culture.
He is no longer European, African or Asian—he is this unique thing called “American” that began with the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Mayflower Compact. A past that builds upon Milton, the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, the English Civil War, the rise of Parliament to a co-equal position with that of the king, the defense of democracy on battlefields in Europe and America (at Bunker Hill and Saratoga, both sides were fighting to defend democracy as they saw it), and throws in Kit Marlowe, Dunne, Swift, Addison, Edmund Burke, Hobbes, John Locke and Walpole—this is now HIS past. It forms him as much as it does any WASP.
No. He should not forget or be ignorant of the heritage he came from, be it Dutch, Chinese or West African. But, above all, he should know and understand his AMERICAN heritage. I will go so far as to say that he is not fully an American who does not know its past and its tradition.
For one thing, Democracy is actually a delicate flower. It only seems to grow well in certain soils—it doesn’t even do that well in many parts of Europe. To keep it, we must understand how it grows and what it needs to nourish it. Other cultures will not, cannot do this.
A common language binds a nation together like no other glue can. Diversity in language can be as dangerous as a load of nitro-glycerin. I can think of few things in history that have torn a nation apart faster. The Cold War, for instance, grew out of a two thousand year old split between the Latin speaking half of the Roman Empire and the Greek speaking half. The two halves spent most of those millennia at war or in a state of near war.
Study other cultures, well and good. Necessary, even. But jolly well learn your own first. It’s not necessarily better than any other—but it is most necessary to know it. That’s what we’re drifting away from in our schools today.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Heritage Lost III
Historically, what happens when a nation becomes truly diverse—multi-lingual, made up of widely different cultures and religions? Historically? They, more often than not, start shooting at one another. A classic case is the early United States.
One section of the nation remained resolutely medieval. It was championed by men like Jefferson and Calhoun—who viewed common folk as “dogs”. Its foundation was essentially agricultural, with an upper class that lived on large estates serviced by peasants/slaves.
Land and the peasants/slaves attached to it was the basis of wealth. It was a slow paced often elegant way of life in which gentlemen, like their English upper class equivalents, did not dirty their hands by doing any money making work.
Factories, and the accoutrements of an industrial society, were considered—at best—déclassé. Education was deemed to be the exclusive prerogative of the “better sort”. Whites in that society dreamed of a day when they too might rise—like Andrew Jackson—to the level of society that rode to hounds and lived in substantial manor houses.
North of the Pennsylvania border was a wholly different nation—as diverse as a country could be from the antebellum South. It was something new, unlike almost anything the world had ever seen before. It had become one of the first societies on earth to figure out a way to create a middle class without the necessity of slave labor to maintain it.
The basis of its wealth was industrial production, railroads, increasingly mechanized farms and great clipper ships that bought and sold in every quarter of the globe. It was perhaps the first society on earth in which real wealth was counted in cash money.
In its newness, reveling in the produce of its factories and businesses—or of its sole proprietor farms—it looked with distain on its Southern half, imagining itself to be morally superior because its labor force (slaving at a dollar a day for six twelve hour days a week without benefits) was nominally “free”. The contempt was richly returned by the South.
The diversity became so total that by mid-century they became utterly unable to communicate with one another. While the British and French empires were able to work out the slavery issue without firing a shot, Americans couldn’t even talk about it.
Post Masters in the South were forbidden to deliver mail from addresses in the North suspected of having abolitionist leanings. Not even in the throes of the McCarthy witch hunts was free speech so limited.
As early as 1775, a Pennsylvania delegate to the First Continental Congress (Joseph Galloway) remained loyal to England, explaining that the differences between North and South were so great, that if the British Army were withdrawn, civil war would be inevitable. He was right.
Oh, but you, say—that’s an extreme example. Has no French Canadian ever sent a mail bomb to some one in Canada whose chief crime was that he spoke English? Have Spanish Basques ever tried to kill Spaniards who speak Spanish? Ever notice how well the Walloons and Flemings of Belgium get along? Or the Frisians and Hollanders of the Netherlands?
How about the tribes of Sri Lanka? Or the warring tribes of Nigeria. What of the Muslim and Hindu sections of India—now divided into two separate nations? To celebrate the initial division, a Hindu radical assassinated Gandhi. Now they merely threaten one another with nuclear weapons. Or there is always Rwanda.
Diverse human tribes have a long history—oh, they’re starting to make hostile noises in Northern Ireland again and little love is lost between Israel and the Palestinians—of not getting along too well. They just should not be made to share the same sandbox.
Now let’s look at why this country—uniquely—has worked. Up to now.
One section of the nation remained resolutely medieval. It was championed by men like Jefferson and Calhoun—who viewed common folk as “dogs”. Its foundation was essentially agricultural, with an upper class that lived on large estates serviced by peasants/slaves.
Land and the peasants/slaves attached to it was the basis of wealth. It was a slow paced often elegant way of life in which gentlemen, like their English upper class equivalents, did not dirty their hands by doing any money making work.
Factories, and the accoutrements of an industrial society, were considered—at best—déclassé. Education was deemed to be the exclusive prerogative of the “better sort”. Whites in that society dreamed of a day when they too might rise—like Andrew Jackson—to the level of society that rode to hounds and lived in substantial manor houses.
North of the Pennsylvania border was a wholly different nation—as diverse as a country could be from the antebellum South. It was something new, unlike almost anything the world had ever seen before. It had become one of the first societies on earth to figure out a way to create a middle class without the necessity of slave labor to maintain it.
The basis of its wealth was industrial production, railroads, increasingly mechanized farms and great clipper ships that bought and sold in every quarter of the globe. It was perhaps the first society on earth in which real wealth was counted in cash money.
In its newness, reveling in the produce of its factories and businesses—or of its sole proprietor farms—it looked with distain on its Southern half, imagining itself to be morally superior because its labor force (slaving at a dollar a day for six twelve hour days a week without benefits) was nominally “free”. The contempt was richly returned by the South.
The diversity became so total that by mid-century they became utterly unable to communicate with one another. While the British and French empires were able to work out the slavery issue without firing a shot, Americans couldn’t even talk about it.
Post Masters in the South were forbidden to deliver mail from addresses in the North suspected of having abolitionist leanings. Not even in the throes of the McCarthy witch hunts was free speech so limited.
As early as 1775, a Pennsylvania delegate to the First Continental Congress (Joseph Galloway) remained loyal to England, explaining that the differences between North and South were so great, that if the British Army were withdrawn, civil war would be inevitable. He was right.
Oh, but you, say—that’s an extreme example. Has no French Canadian ever sent a mail bomb to some one in Canada whose chief crime was that he spoke English? Have Spanish Basques ever tried to kill Spaniards who speak Spanish? Ever notice how well the Walloons and Flemings of Belgium get along? Or the Frisians and Hollanders of the Netherlands?
How about the tribes of Sri Lanka? Or the warring tribes of Nigeria. What of the Muslim and Hindu sections of India—now divided into two separate nations? To celebrate the initial division, a Hindu radical assassinated Gandhi. Now they merely threaten one another with nuclear weapons. Or there is always Rwanda.
Diverse human tribes have a long history—oh, they’re starting to make hostile noises in Northern Ireland again and little love is lost between Israel and the Palestinians—of not getting along too well. They just should not be made to share the same sandbox.
Now let’s look at why this country—uniquely—has worked. Up to now.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Heritage Lost II
I may have misstated things in my last blog. We aren’t losing our literary and cultural heritage; in many cases it is long gone. I substituted again today—this time in an English class. They were all diligently reading Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”.
Let’s pass over the fact that they were being assigned a single twenty-eight page chapter for a weekend’s work—which the teacher called a “very long” assignment. (My high school English teachers would probably have given us the whole 105 page book for a single weekend.)
Out of curiosity, I asked each class if they had any idea where Steinbeck got the title from. Tilt. So I told them about Bobby Burn’s poem, “To a Mouse”. I quoted the relevant line, “The best laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”
One young man, very sarcastically, observed, “We’re all much smarter now.” I plowed on. None had any idea that “East of Eden” is a Biblical reference or that “The Grapes of Wrath” comes from the Bible through “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
Since none of them knew, I doubt very, very much that the teacher had any idea (she could easily be my daughter). No one in any room I’ve ever subbed in knew that “Lord of the Flies” comes from an old Biblical reference (albeit satirical) to the devil.
Authors rarely use references like these for titles without making a point. You can miss part of what the whole book or story is about if the title means nothing to you. Neither this teacher nor her students knew or cared.
But how could you fully understand Hemingway’s intent in “The Sun Also Rises” if you didn’t understand the reference to the life-weary writer of the Biblical book, Ecclesiastes, who uses the endless, mindless rising and setting of the sun as a metaphor for the pointlessness of life.
If you don’t know there is a background—or a metaphor—why bother to read this or any book at all? (I remember how excited I was, back in elementary school, when I suddenly realized that Jack London was doing more than tell a story in his “Sea Wolf”.
He was telling me—he was trying to proselytize—his moral view of the universe in the words of his main character. But without the background I already had in literature and the Bible, I doubt if I would have gotten it.) If Steinbeck has something to say beyond the immediate tragedy of Lennie getting shot, these kids are unlikely to notice.
The kids I saw today—bright, decently affluent, many college bound—have no cultural foundation that can help them see beyond the story at hand. Allusion, reference, metaphor are lost on them. This is what was so upsetting to the college teacher I wrote of last time—who found that her students had no knowledge of the most common Biblical/cultural figures and stories.
How would you teach about computers to a primitive tribesman who’s never seen written language or symbols, never seen an electronic device, never even seen a metal box or a glass screen? That’s pretty much the predicament we’ve placed ourselves in--for history and literature.
To have a frame of reference or a context requires having some basic background information. We’re raising a generation that has largely been deprived of just the raw information needed to understand the stories—in newspapers or in books—going on around them.
We expect these virginally ignorant youngsters to maintain a functioning democracy, to hold a society together, to pass on a culture and way of life to future generations.
Just how likely? More on this later.
Let’s pass over the fact that they were being assigned a single twenty-eight page chapter for a weekend’s work—which the teacher called a “very long” assignment. (My high school English teachers would probably have given us the whole 105 page book for a single weekend.)
Out of curiosity, I asked each class if they had any idea where Steinbeck got the title from. Tilt. So I told them about Bobby Burn’s poem, “To a Mouse”. I quoted the relevant line, “The best laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”
One young man, very sarcastically, observed, “We’re all much smarter now.” I plowed on. None had any idea that “East of Eden” is a Biblical reference or that “The Grapes of Wrath” comes from the Bible through “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
Since none of them knew, I doubt very, very much that the teacher had any idea (she could easily be my daughter). No one in any room I’ve ever subbed in knew that “Lord of the Flies” comes from an old Biblical reference (albeit satirical) to the devil.
Authors rarely use references like these for titles without making a point. You can miss part of what the whole book or story is about if the title means nothing to you. Neither this teacher nor her students knew or cared.
But how could you fully understand Hemingway’s intent in “The Sun Also Rises” if you didn’t understand the reference to the life-weary writer of the Biblical book, Ecclesiastes, who uses the endless, mindless rising and setting of the sun as a metaphor for the pointlessness of life.
If you don’t know there is a background—or a metaphor—why bother to read this or any book at all? (I remember how excited I was, back in elementary school, when I suddenly realized that Jack London was doing more than tell a story in his “Sea Wolf”.
He was telling me—he was trying to proselytize—his moral view of the universe in the words of his main character. But without the background I already had in literature and the Bible, I doubt if I would have gotten it.) If Steinbeck has something to say beyond the immediate tragedy of Lennie getting shot, these kids are unlikely to notice.
The kids I saw today—bright, decently affluent, many college bound—have no cultural foundation that can help them see beyond the story at hand. Allusion, reference, metaphor are lost on them. This is what was so upsetting to the college teacher I wrote of last time—who found that her students had no knowledge of the most common Biblical/cultural figures and stories.
How would you teach about computers to a primitive tribesman who’s never seen written language or symbols, never seen an electronic device, never even seen a metal box or a glass screen? That’s pretty much the predicament we’ve placed ourselves in--for history and literature.
To have a frame of reference or a context requires having some basic background information. We’re raising a generation that has largely been deprived of just the raw information needed to understand the stories—in newspapers or in books—going on around them.
We expect these virginally ignorant youngsters to maintain a functioning democracy, to hold a society together, to pass on a culture and way of life to future generations.
Just how likely? More on this later.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Heritage Lost
We are losing our heritage—everything that made us uniquely American, uniquely democratic and gave us the most flexible and utilitarian language in the world. We’re just letting it drift away—and that should give us pause.
I subbed again today—in a well appointed suburban school with lots of students headed for college and a bright faculty. I greeted one of those faculty members with a “Merry Christmas”, which momentarily baffled her until I explained that today was the Feast of The Epiphany, or the Feast of The Three Kings or Russian Christmas.
She smiled through her blank look. I couldn’t resist adding that yesterday was “Twelfth Night”, at which she batted my arm and admitted, “I have no idea what you are talking about.” I enjoy doing that sort of thing now and then.
(On St. Patrick’s Day I, a good and Protestant Hollander, try to wear orange. No one gets it or even notices it—although most of them wear something green. No doubt a white carnation—symbol of the House of Orange--would leave them even more oblivious.)
Today in one of my classes I showed part of the film, “Schindler’s List”. The kids didn’t get it. At all. One, with a confused look on his face, turned to me and asked if those were German uniforms on the soldiers.
The Hebrew Shabbat prayers at the beginning reduced them to snickering giggles, with no idea what they might be watching. When they saw people herded onto cattle cars, no one had any idea what was happening. Any and all undercurrents in the film passed them by with neither understanding nor impact. (Only the explicit sex scene evoked any interest.)
I realized it would take hours to give these seventeen year olds any idea of what was going on in the film, what it was all about. I didn’t have the time and, speaking from experience, these kids would not have hung in for the explanation.
Occasionally I will give an historical or Biblical reference when giving an assignment in an English or history class. Blank, bored looks. The backgrounds of historical figures—whose actions dramatically affect the lives of these kids now—are of zero interest.
Something as esoteric as Genghis Khan (whose conquest of Asia made the Marco Polo trip possible and began the quest that sent Columbus to America) or Napoleon leaves them totally clueless—a cluelessness utterly without curiosity.
Make a Biblical reference today—forget the religious aspect—and see how many kids can recognize names like “Judas”, “David and Goliath” or “Samson and Delilah”. A college English instructor of my acquaintance got so frustrated at the inability of her students to recognize Biblical allusions in literature that she taught a whole section on common Biblical names and terms.
She was as irreligious as a human can get, but she understood that a huge amount of our cultural heritage goes out the window of the reference points are lost. It isn’t just the Bible. When I was in high school we covered Bobby Burns.
See how many students reading Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” can tell you that the title comes from a Burn’s poem—let alone which poem! Go through a modern literature anthology and see how many of the short stories and poems come out of the English/American past. Very few.
THAT’S our heritage. Kids go through school never exposed to Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, let alone Bronte, Chaucer, Milton or Jane Austen. What about Jack London or A. Conan Doyle. THAT’S our tradition—that one that formulated our language and our American heritage.
The books have lovely stories from Africa, South America and Asia. I do not denigrate them. But they are NOT the building blocks of THIS nation—and OUR language.
Next time, let’s take a quick look at what happens when a culture loses—or never gains—its own distinctive characteristics and traditions.
I subbed again today—in a well appointed suburban school with lots of students headed for college and a bright faculty. I greeted one of those faculty members with a “Merry Christmas”, which momentarily baffled her until I explained that today was the Feast of The Epiphany, or the Feast of The Three Kings or Russian Christmas.
She smiled through her blank look. I couldn’t resist adding that yesterday was “Twelfth Night”, at which she batted my arm and admitted, “I have no idea what you are talking about.” I enjoy doing that sort of thing now and then.
(On St. Patrick’s Day I, a good and Protestant Hollander, try to wear orange. No one gets it or even notices it—although most of them wear something green. No doubt a white carnation—symbol of the House of Orange--would leave them even more oblivious.)
Today in one of my classes I showed part of the film, “Schindler’s List”. The kids didn’t get it. At all. One, with a confused look on his face, turned to me and asked if those were German uniforms on the soldiers.
The Hebrew Shabbat prayers at the beginning reduced them to snickering giggles, with no idea what they might be watching. When they saw people herded onto cattle cars, no one had any idea what was happening. Any and all undercurrents in the film passed them by with neither understanding nor impact. (Only the explicit sex scene evoked any interest.)
I realized it would take hours to give these seventeen year olds any idea of what was going on in the film, what it was all about. I didn’t have the time and, speaking from experience, these kids would not have hung in for the explanation.
Occasionally I will give an historical or Biblical reference when giving an assignment in an English or history class. Blank, bored looks. The backgrounds of historical figures—whose actions dramatically affect the lives of these kids now—are of zero interest.
Something as esoteric as Genghis Khan (whose conquest of Asia made the Marco Polo trip possible and began the quest that sent Columbus to America) or Napoleon leaves them totally clueless—a cluelessness utterly without curiosity.
Make a Biblical reference today—forget the religious aspect—and see how many kids can recognize names like “Judas”, “David and Goliath” or “Samson and Delilah”. A college English instructor of my acquaintance got so frustrated at the inability of her students to recognize Biblical allusions in literature that she taught a whole section on common Biblical names and terms.
She was as irreligious as a human can get, but she understood that a huge amount of our cultural heritage goes out the window of the reference points are lost. It isn’t just the Bible. When I was in high school we covered Bobby Burns.
See how many students reading Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” can tell you that the title comes from a Burn’s poem—let alone which poem! Go through a modern literature anthology and see how many of the short stories and poems come out of the English/American past. Very few.
THAT’S our heritage. Kids go through school never exposed to Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, let alone Bronte, Chaucer, Milton or Jane Austen. What about Jack London or A. Conan Doyle. THAT’S our tradition—that one that formulated our language and our American heritage.
The books have lovely stories from Africa, South America and Asia. I do not denigrate them. But they are NOT the building blocks of THIS nation—and OUR language.
Next time, let’s take a quick look at what happens when a culture loses—or never gains—its own distinctive characteristics and traditions.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Tiger Woods And Forgiveness
Brit Hume caused a stir the other night by suggesting that Tiger Woods might find the forgiveness, the restoration, the emotional and spiritual healing in Christianity rather than in the Buddhism he has supposedly embraced.
Hume suggested that Woods leave his chosen faith and return to Christianity. People went into shock over this statement for a couple of reasons. 1) Christianity has a reputation for being a noxious set of beliefs and behaviors among many decent people.
Unfortunately some of its adherents do a great deal to earn Christianity its bad rap by their actions (sniping abortion providers), their sometimes intemperate words, and the appearance many give of being opposed to any program that benefits the poor—happily ignoring the Biblical suggestion that “he who gives to the poor lends to the Lord” (and can expect payback).
2) Most folk have absolutely no idea what Christianity actually teaches (I didn’t say how it behaves in all too many cases, but the ideal it promulgates, however fitfully.) Christ gives us a clue in the term he uses to identify his own teachings.
He calls his message the “good news”. Good news about what? Specifically the good news that he has come to reconcile humans to their estranged deity. In other words, the whole movement begins with a story of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Having reconciliation at the core of the faith is unique to Christianity. A) man betrays God and earns a traitor’s penalty. B) God takes the initiative and sends Christ to pay that penalty and to effect a reconciliation between the offended and the offender.
That notion is not found in any other faith or religion. Not Hinduism, not Buddhism, not Islam or Shintoism, or any other form of religion. That one point is unique to the teachings of Christ. It is brilliantly depicted in Michelangelo’s fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Here God reaches out to man to reconcile.
Often in the New Testament, before healing a sick person, Christ first tells him that his “sins are forgiven”. This, more than mere healing from disease or even death, is the real “good news” he came to bring.
Mr. Hume has rightly chosen to ignore all the ways in which Christians show intractability in behavior and a very human unwillingness to forgive anyone for anything they object to—and he has taken us back to the most basic tenet of his own faith.
He is suggesting that possibly Mr. Woods greatest need right now is to realize that all of his blunders, foolishness and damaging behavior can be forgiven. He can be reconciled with his God, with the better side of himself, with his public and, possibly, with his own family.
It is not a concept Woods will find in Buddhism. Hume is saying that this reconciliation—and the path to it—just might be Tiger Woods’ greatest need at the moment. There is no question that at this moment Mr. Woods appears to be staggering about like an ox that has just been struck with a hammer blow right between the eyes.
He clearly needs to reconcile something in his life, if only to put things back in perspective. It starts with saying something like, “I’m sorry; I really messed up.” Then you go on from there. “Forgive me; I shall amend … .”
“I know it was wrong; I know it was stupid.” What more can anyone say after he’s said that? Especially if it has the ring of sincerity. Hume was trying to his best to suggest a way back for Tiger—one that many fans would understand and be forced by their own beliefs to accept.
It might be a good strategy as well as good theology.
Hume suggested that Woods leave his chosen faith and return to Christianity. People went into shock over this statement for a couple of reasons. 1) Christianity has a reputation for being a noxious set of beliefs and behaviors among many decent people.
Unfortunately some of its adherents do a great deal to earn Christianity its bad rap by their actions (sniping abortion providers), their sometimes intemperate words, and the appearance many give of being opposed to any program that benefits the poor—happily ignoring the Biblical suggestion that “he who gives to the poor lends to the Lord” (and can expect payback).
2) Most folk have absolutely no idea what Christianity actually teaches (I didn’t say how it behaves in all too many cases, but the ideal it promulgates, however fitfully.) Christ gives us a clue in the term he uses to identify his own teachings.
He calls his message the “good news”. Good news about what? Specifically the good news that he has come to reconcile humans to their estranged deity. In other words, the whole movement begins with a story of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Having reconciliation at the core of the faith is unique to Christianity. A) man betrays God and earns a traitor’s penalty. B) God takes the initiative and sends Christ to pay that penalty and to effect a reconciliation between the offended and the offender.
That notion is not found in any other faith or religion. Not Hinduism, not Buddhism, not Islam or Shintoism, or any other form of religion. That one point is unique to the teachings of Christ. It is brilliantly depicted in Michelangelo’s fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Here God reaches out to man to reconcile.
Often in the New Testament, before healing a sick person, Christ first tells him that his “sins are forgiven”. This, more than mere healing from disease or even death, is the real “good news” he came to bring.
Mr. Hume has rightly chosen to ignore all the ways in which Christians show intractability in behavior and a very human unwillingness to forgive anyone for anything they object to—and he has taken us back to the most basic tenet of his own faith.
He is suggesting that possibly Mr. Woods greatest need right now is to realize that all of his blunders, foolishness and damaging behavior can be forgiven. He can be reconciled with his God, with the better side of himself, with his public and, possibly, with his own family.
It is not a concept Woods will find in Buddhism. Hume is saying that this reconciliation—and the path to it—just might be Tiger Woods’ greatest need at the moment. There is no question that at this moment Mr. Woods appears to be staggering about like an ox that has just been struck with a hammer blow right between the eyes.
He clearly needs to reconcile something in his life, if only to put things back in perspective. It starts with saying something like, “I’m sorry; I really messed up.” Then you go on from there. “Forgive me; I shall amend … .”
“I know it was wrong; I know it was stupid.” What more can anyone say after he’s said that? Especially if it has the ring of sincerity. Hume was trying to his best to suggest a way back for Tiger—one that many fans would understand and be forced by their own beliefs to accept.
It might be a good strategy as well as good theology.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
It's Them Damn' Pitchers
The final issue of “Newsweek” every year has been a double issue. I’ve always looked forward to it—because it has always had a large section at the back of the book that is filled with best editorial cartoons of that year.
I set this year’s issue aside until I had a nice relaxed day to open it and peruse the cartoons. This year, there was a single page with a grand total of six editorial cartoons. Why?
I fell in love with editorial cartooning back in the late 1940s when I whiled away summer days in the stacks of the Grand Rapids Public Library. Over the years I came upon all sorts of fascinating things—Civil War diaries, official evaluations on the effectiveness of American Strategic bombing during World War II (which, obviously, no one in the Pentagon had read by the 1960s), but my greatest delight came in reading the editorial cartoonists.
My immediate favorite was David Lowe of the “London Times”. He skewed the rising Nazis, British policy before the war, and American foolishness throughout it all with delicious ease. He helped form my historical images of Stalin, Hitler, Colonel Blimp and the American Congress as no one else ever has.
My second favorite was, immediately, the young corporal William Mauldin’s “Willie and Joe” cartoons of World War II. (I got my hands on a memorial edition last year—they’re just as good now as they were then.) Willie and Joe shambling past a bombed French farm house with the housewife glaring at them, “Don’t blame us, lady.”
(To my mind, Mauldin was never as good when he went on to draw civilian cartoons for the St. Louis “Post-Dispatch” after the war, second Pulitzer Prize or no. I gather Charles Schulz’s “Snoopy” agrees with me.)
There were more modern cartoonists that I thoroughly enjoyed—internationally syndicated cartoonist Patrick Oliphant created a little penguin, Punk, to stand at the bottom of his cartoons and make wonderfully sarcastic comments. (Did Punk share Oliphant’s Pulitzer?)
The “Washington Post’s” Herblock did perfectly dreadful—and deserved—things to people like Joe McCarthy and Nixon. He drew from 1929 to 2001, pulling down three Pulitzer prizes, probably deserving more. Want a fast overview of Twentieth Century American history? You couldn’t do better than scan an anthology of Herblock’s cartoons.
I could go on. Did anyone ever do a better job at political satire than Walt Kelly’s “Pogo”? Every example of human behavior—and foibles—is represented in at least one of his animal characters. V.T. Hamlin created the wonderfully satiric “Alley Oop” in 1932, threw in a time machine the year I was born and went on poking holes in social pretenses for decades.
So I’ve always enjoyed looking at “Newsweek’s” annual review of what editorial cartoonists are saying now. They denied me that pleasure this year. I’m not happy. They substituted the review with printed interviews with Hillary and Henry Kissinger, Hamid Karzai, Geithner, Bill Clinton and Jeff Bezos. I got half-way through them and realized I was bored to tears (I don’t trust was Karzai SAYS; I want to hear what he DOES. Capice?)
News is going away—not just in “Newsweek”. So is pungent commentary, as it has been so vividly illustrated for the past century or more on editorial pages by brilliant cartoonists.
Perhaps the highest accolade given to an American political cartoonist came in 1876 when Spanish police recognized fugitive political Boss Tweed from a Thomas Nast cartoon in “Harper’s Weekly”. The man had stolen around five billion (in modern dollars), he’d escaped prison, but an editorial cartoon finally brought him down.
As Tweed put it, “It was them damn’ pitchers”. Apparently the editor of “Newsweek” felt the same way about them.
I set this year’s issue aside until I had a nice relaxed day to open it and peruse the cartoons. This year, there was a single page with a grand total of six editorial cartoons. Why?
I fell in love with editorial cartooning back in the late 1940s when I whiled away summer days in the stacks of the Grand Rapids Public Library. Over the years I came upon all sorts of fascinating things—Civil War diaries, official evaluations on the effectiveness of American Strategic bombing during World War II (which, obviously, no one in the Pentagon had read by the 1960s), but my greatest delight came in reading the editorial cartoonists.
My immediate favorite was David Lowe of the “London Times”. He skewed the rising Nazis, British policy before the war, and American foolishness throughout it all with delicious ease. He helped form my historical images of Stalin, Hitler, Colonel Blimp and the American Congress as no one else ever has.
My second favorite was, immediately, the young corporal William Mauldin’s “Willie and Joe” cartoons of World War II. (I got my hands on a memorial edition last year—they’re just as good now as they were then.) Willie and Joe shambling past a bombed French farm house with the housewife glaring at them, “Don’t blame us, lady.”
(To my mind, Mauldin was never as good when he went on to draw civilian cartoons for the St. Louis “Post-Dispatch” after the war, second Pulitzer Prize or no. I gather Charles Schulz’s “Snoopy” agrees with me.)
There were more modern cartoonists that I thoroughly enjoyed—internationally syndicated cartoonist Patrick Oliphant created a little penguin, Punk, to stand at the bottom of his cartoons and make wonderfully sarcastic comments. (Did Punk share Oliphant’s Pulitzer?)
The “Washington Post’s” Herblock did perfectly dreadful—and deserved—things to people like Joe McCarthy and Nixon. He drew from 1929 to 2001, pulling down three Pulitzer prizes, probably deserving more. Want a fast overview of Twentieth Century American history? You couldn’t do better than scan an anthology of Herblock’s cartoons.
I could go on. Did anyone ever do a better job at political satire than Walt Kelly’s “Pogo”? Every example of human behavior—and foibles—is represented in at least one of his animal characters. V.T. Hamlin created the wonderfully satiric “Alley Oop” in 1932, threw in a time machine the year I was born and went on poking holes in social pretenses for decades.
So I’ve always enjoyed looking at “Newsweek’s” annual review of what editorial cartoonists are saying now. They denied me that pleasure this year. I’m not happy. They substituted the review with printed interviews with Hillary and Henry Kissinger, Hamid Karzai, Geithner, Bill Clinton and Jeff Bezos. I got half-way through them and realized I was bored to tears (I don’t trust was Karzai SAYS; I want to hear what he DOES. Capice?)
News is going away—not just in “Newsweek”. So is pungent commentary, as it has been so vividly illustrated for the past century or more on editorial pages by brilliant cartoonists.
Perhaps the highest accolade given to an American political cartoonist came in 1876 when Spanish police recognized fugitive political Boss Tweed from a Thomas Nast cartoon in “Harper’s Weekly”. The man had stolen around five billion (in modern dollars), he’d escaped prison, but an editorial cartoon finally brought him down.
As Tweed put it, “It was them damn’ pitchers”. Apparently the editor of “Newsweek” felt the same way about them.
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