Two Forms of Education

David Brooks of the New York Times has a real knack for framing issues in a simple, cogent and effective way. In his column on January 27, he quoted a report from a Harvard committee charged with coming up with, as it were, a mission statement about the purpose of a liberal education. Brooks took that statement and contrasted it with a conservative perspective that he gleaned from ON THINKING INSTITUTIONALLY by a political scientist named Hugh Heclo.
The Harvard document stated that the aim of a liberal education was “to be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements,” and to promote “the individualism of modern culture.” The idea was to shake up the belief system or the values of the student coming to Harvard, “to disorient young people and help them find ways to reorient themselves.” The key was to assist them in “breaking away” and “to think for themselves.” In sum, a person with a liberal education should question the status quo, not make it sacrosanct, and he should be prepared to pursue a “personal identity.”
As for the conservative mission statement in regard education, Brooks puts it this way: “We are defined by what life asks of me (and) the rules and obligations that tell us what we are supposed to do.” We live and learn by traveling through institutions (family, school, church, profession or craft), all of which bear the stamp of Tradition, which contains the values created and agreed upon a long time ago, values validated as worthy life guidelines and stellar examples to emulate. The new generations give these institutions respect, gravity, and credibility. The idea is affirmation, not to question their worth or reality. Moreover, the person will live with a sense of debt to Tradition, with a sense of owing something to this support system and its abiding ‘truth.’ The institutions constitute a “delivery system” and a “covenant” that supplies “psychic profits.” (”Ask not what your country can do for you, but what can you do for your country.”)
I went to college bred in the context of family, church, Catholic schools, and working class values. When it came time to select a college to go to I was torn between Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin. It was my art teacher who wanted me to go to Notre Dame. She was a Dominican nun who had a MA in sculpture from the school. She kept telling me, “If you go to Madison, your faith will be tested.” I chose Wisconsin and she was right, I lost my faith, and I was glad I did, as it liberated me to seek my own identity. How did it happen? I met a great variety of people with different perspectives and values, including my first atheist and communist. I listened to a lot of critical minded professors that I found persuasive and insightful. I had sex for the first time. (Catholicism had held me back.) After reading “Nature” and Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, I began to think of spirituality in non-institutional ways. By my junior year at UW, I stopped going to church. And I never looked back.
At age twenty one I saw my goal in life as Individuation, a search for personal identity. Institutional molds struck me then and now as external garments, something tried and true that has social sanction, a ready-made face in the crowd. I chose to ‘carve my own mask’ and to do it by internal guidelines. For example, here are two dreams I had while finding a new life in California. In one I saw a circus strongman breaking chains wrapped around his chest, something akin to Anthony Quinn in “La Strada.” There could hardly be a more telling and vivid image for the liberation I felt. A few weeks later I dreamt of a fallen cathedral; it looked like it had been bombed, it was so full of stony debris. It was darkest night and the only part of the structure still standing was the nave with a magnificent Rose Window glowing like a multicolored jewel in the cosmic night. I worked to clear the debris and piled the stones up outside the foundation which was still intact. Clearly, my intentions were to reconstruct the church, but by my own lights, such as they were.
Life is a circle of choices. Many will chose the institutional path, but I chose the search for personal identity, to be the architect of the inner man. And I thank the education that provided me with an opportunity I am not sure I would have had without it.

Rush for Judgment?

All of Obama’s extraordinary efforts to involve Republicans in his Stimulus Package went for naught. The Democrats put $300 billion worth of tax cuts in the Bill just to please the GOP members in the House and when the vote came yesterday not one of the 177 Republicans voted for the package. The final tally was 244 to 188, as 11 “Blue Dog” Democrats voted nay as well. Obama should now say, bleep them, we don’t need them and it’s clear they don’t want to join us, so let’s take the $300 billion in tax cuts out of the Bill and put that money where it should have gone in the first place, into Infrastructure expenses, where more jobs can be made available. (100,000 people have already lost their jobs this week.)
In sum, the rule of the day is still polarization and it doesn’t look like the situation will change anytime soon. Our new president was naïve to think he could sweet talk them into bipartisanship when he knows the GOP remnant in our current government is all to the right and moving further in that direction all the time. He also mentioned Rush Limbaugh’s criticism; indeed, it now appears that the titular head of that remnant of the Republican Party is none other than Rush Limbaugh. He has been anointed to that position by the FOX AND FRIENDS trio and others on cable TV this morning. The trio on FOX showed a picture of Rush on Mount Rushmore, being one of the four on that national icon. His response to that was typical for his giant-sized ego: “It looks like it has been there for a long time.” He does seem to be calling the shots and this morning he said he would soon reveal his own Stimulus Plan that, unlike Obama’s, “will work.” It sounds like he better run for office and put his mouth where the votes are.
Some say Rush is an entertainer who uses politics to amuse and distract the 20% out there that who cheer his screed and applaud his antics. Well, all I can say is, only a bankrupt party would follow a glib clown as leader and spokesman.

The Duchess of Chatsworth

The Duchess of Chatsworth
My wife and I watched “Mama Mia” together Friday night, and after she went to bed I watched “The Duchess” alone, going to bed after midnight. The former was silly and not my cup of tea, but the latter was better than I expected: It had more substance than an upper class costume drama, which is what I expected. This was the case because of the woman involved and her wrestling with male dominance in the person of her husband, William Cavendish, the 5th Duke of Devonshire. She was a proto-feminist in the 1780s and he was an aristocratic slug that never did appreciate the woman he had for a wife and companion.
Georgiana Spencer (Keira Knightly) was hooked up with Cavendish (Ralph Fiennes) by her ambition mother (Charlotte Rampling) who did all the negotiating on her daughter’s behalf. If that name Spencer rings a bell it is because Georgiana was the Great Aunt, several generations removed, of Princess Diana, who was also from the House of Spencer. The Duke may have been a social prize, but as a human being he was hardly a bargain. Very early into the marriage she started complaining to her mother that he enjoyed the company of his hounds more than her society and rarely deigns to talk to her at all. Other than for sex and their steady diet of social occasions, he paid little attention to her. The Duke of Devonshire was a stuck-in-the-mud Tory, an unthinking aristocrat who thought introspection was beneath his dignity, and a man who never engaged in self-criticism, which was unbecoming to a man of his social standing. Wit and charm were frivolous virtues as far as he was concerned; they were not a bedrock need in his personality and played no part in his duties. Poor Georgiana was stuck with this brick of a man and boorish lover. But his word was law and she knew it. Her gripes about him were certainly justified and she did manage to carve out her own niche in high society. She became what we today call a celebrity. It worked for her until she butted heads with the Duke, to discover how poor her options as a woman were against the patriarchal bulwark of the English Aristocracy.
There is a famous painting of the Duchess by Thomas Gainsborough. It shows a handsome woman dressed to the nines, which is how we see her in the movie. She was known as “The Empress of Fashion” and was a real style-setter. She supported the forward-looking Whig party and was a good friend of Charles Fox and Charles Grey, both of whom took a turn as Prime Minister. She was a notorious gambler and could drink most men under the table. Grey became her lover and she bore him a love child, a little girl. He persuaded her that the American Revolution was but a prelude to one about to occur in France, ideas that the Duke ridiculed as sheer nonsense. In his view the social hierarchy would go on forever, with men like himself still in charge.
The Duke married Georgiana, not for her wit, social graces, or influence on fashion, but as a pumpkin eater—to be perpetually pregnant until she provided him with a male heir. In the first nine years of marriage, she had two daughters, two still births, two miscarriages, and raised one girl he sired with a servant girl who had died. But no male heir, something he was obsessed with. After being estranged from him due to a live-in mistress, he literally raped her one night and that intercourse led, finally, to the birth of a male heir.
Ralph Fiennes plays Cavendish as insensitive and totally locked into his historic prerogatives as Duke. When Georgiana tried to strike a deal with him—he could have his live-in mistress, so she should be able to have her lover, Charles Grey—but he responded with, “I don’t make deals. I don’t have to.” Naturally, the double-standard had to prevail. When she attempted a secret rendezvous with Grey at Bath, the Duke showed up with her mother in tow. He gave her an ultimatum: Give up Grey or you will never see your children again, plus, “I will destroy Grey’s political ambitions, too.” Her mother, who represents previous generations of women who long ago have knuckled under to patriarchy, just shook her head and walked away from her daughter without a word. But, understandably, Georgiana cannot abandon her kids and she doesn’t want to blunt Grey’s political ambitions. When she went home to Chatsworth, the Cavendish estate, the Duke displayed a tiny bit of kindness toward her. The movie doesn’t deal with her life beyond this point.
Keira Knightly did as well with this role as she did with “Pride and Prejudice.” She was able to turn up her emotional range when it was called for. She looked good too, in all the fancy gowns and hairdos. The marital tensions she and Fiennes generated are quite convincing, and the movie relies heavily on their dual performances. The two are center stage most of the time.
One curiosity about “The Duchess” is there is nary a mention of Christianity in the film; we never see a clergyman throughout the tale, unlike a Jane Austen story. The narrative stays away from religion completely, staying strictly on the secular and social levels, rather refreshing for an English biography.
The film is now available on DVD.

"Brideshead Revisited"

In 1982 PBS presented an eleven hour serialization of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, “Brideshead Revisted.” The new film version with Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon is 133 minutes long. The condensation means they left out most of the “bright young things in love” sections which characterized the social and party life of young upper crust people in England of the twenties, and instead focused entirely on sex and religion in the Marchmain family, the aristocrats of the Brideshead Estate, dealing with them in anecdotal fashion and with a heavy dose of psychology. There is little sense of a ‘Lost Generation’ of English youth between the two World Wars, the life span of the narrative, and scant awareness of the minority status of Catholicism in Britain, or, for that matter, no reference to the dwindling power of the UK. The story seems to take place within a historical bubble, with few tentacles reaching out to a wider world.
The PBS version made a star out of Jeremy Irons who played Charles Ryder. I doubt it’ll do the same for Matthew Goode who plays the painter and friend of the Marchmain family. Other than Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon, who are Lady and Lord Marchmain, and terrific in their parts, the rest of the cast is weak and minus charisma as performers. The original director was supposed to be David Yates and his players were to be Jude Law as Charles, Paul Betttany as Sebastian and Jennifer Connelly as Julia. Yates dropped out to direct one of the “Harry Potter” films and the plans fell through. The crucial encounters between Lady Marchmain and Charles, the nonbeliever amid strict Catholics, besides being intellectual thin, don’t work too well because Thompson’s chops as an actress simply overwhelm Mr. Goode. Ben Whishaw plays Sebastian and Haley Atwell, who was also in “The Duchess,” plays Julia. Julian Jarrold, the new Director, has certainly shot a better looking film, more cinematically satisfying, but he did not get the verve or brio the characters needed, although Atwell was passable. The script is too pedestrian and not clever enough in its intellectual arguments about religion. The setting was great. David Yates wanted to use Chatsworth as the estate, the same one used in “The Duchess,” but instead they used Castle Howard in North Yorkshire. It was more impressive, if that’s possible.
Religion is basically Lady Marchmain’s hammer to nail her children down as she saw fit. Very early on she drove her husband out of the house—he couldn’t stand what she was doing to their children--to live with his mistress, Cara, (Greta Scacchi) in Venice, Italy. The young people go to Venice, which is when Charles, who has been enamored of Julia from the first moment he saw her, makes his first pass at her, an encounter seen by Sebastian who had homosexual designs on Charles all along. That breaks that spell. Lady Marchmain had at first befriended Charles, seeing him as a good influence on her wayward son, who starts drinking heavily after Venice. But then she comes down hard on Charles and banishes him from Brideshead because Julia must marry a Catholic. Her attitude made me think of Paul Morel’s mother in SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence who similarly could not let her children go. Lady Marchmain kept them as pets on a short leash, squeezing the life out of them. But she tells Charles, “I have only wanted to make them safe in the world.” Sebastian, a serious alcoholic, goes off to Morocco where he spends the rest of his life in a monastery. Charles and Julia marry other people, but when they see each other again, which is several years later, they make love and decided they love each other and will divorce their spouses. The mother has already died by then and father shows up with his entourage of servants and caregivers to die in the house he grew up in. It’s a heart problem. This pushes Julia to a crisis. Her older brother Bridey (Ed Stoppard) calls in a priest which angers Charles who knows that Marchmain doesn’t want a priest. The question is would he hold out or give in to family pressures, or his own buried faith rising to the surface as the darkness closes in. What force will prove the strongest?
I was raised a strict catholic so the story really resonated for me. I experienced the complete brainwashing but finally broke away when I went to college, although influences lasted for years. But I know that all that early stuff is still buried in me, bubbling like magnum in some dark pocket in my being, and I often ask myself will it assert itself anew? Will I call out for a priest or die firm in my decades-old stand as an agnostic? To see what happens to Lord Marchmain, Julia and Charles you will have to see the movie. It has its weaknesses but it is also provocative on a very basic level.
The film was released last July but is now available on DVD.

Towelhead

Something that always delights me is to run across a sleeper film, something you’ve never heard of which turns out to be very interesting or very good. “The Visitor” was such a film, which was a sweet, unexpected surprise. The movie “Towelhead” is another such sleeper. My main reason to pick it up was Aaron Eckhardt was in it and he’s an actor I like. When I got the DVD home I discovered the film was the product of the imagination of Alan Ball, the director behind the Oscar-winning film, “American Beauty,” and the creative genius behind HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” my favorite all-time serial comedy/drama. So my excitement grew as I put the DVD on my player.
“Towelhead” did not disappoint. The film examines two aspects of American suburbs, racism among the various kinds of people who live there, and as a secondary theme, adult sex with a minor, or, if you will, the Polanski syndrome. Peter Macdisi, who played the egomaniacal art teacher in “Six Feet Under,” is Rifat Maroun, a divorced Lebanese father whose 13 year old daughter comes to live with him in the suburbs somewhere in Texas in 1991, during the first Gulf War. Moroun has a good job at a good salary, and he has a girl friend he sleeps with regularly. However, his attitude toward his daughter, Jashira (Summer Bishil) is medieval, puritanical, and abusive. He is in short a lousy father and very bigoted as she finds out later in the story. Jashira looks much older than 13 and is sexually precocious and too curious for her own good. When she and her father meet the neighbors, the Vuosos, the husband, Travis (Eckhardt), a redneck truck driver, is instantly turned on to her. He becomes enflamed over her Lolita-like tendencies and charms. And there is no question she is a gorgeous young lady, with a lovely face and a body to make men of all ages take notice. She also has problems at school with kids who make fun of her odd name and unusual looks; but one boy, Thomas (Eugene Jones), an African American, has his sights set on her right away. You wonder who will score with her first.
It’s Travis. He doesn’t have intercourse with her but he breaks her hymen with erotic foreplay. Meanwhile, Travis’ son, Zach, who Jashira has been babysitting, calls her a “towelhead” and “sand nigger,” which ends the relationship between the two families. Thomas makes a unique play for her sexual interest by offering to shave her pubic hair, which he does without making any advances. When her father finds out she is hanging out with an African American teenager he displays a rank prejudice toward Thomas; but they continue to see each other and to start to engage in intercourse, which she enjoys. She knows she is playing a dangerous game but she can’t stop herself. A neighbor lady (Toni Colette) tries to protect Jashira from Travis, but he pulls a fast one to get next to her. He shows up one night, telling her he is leaving for Iraq at 4 AM, and she feels sorry for him, so she does a strip tease for him and permits him to make love to her. She sees him in the morning going to work as usual and she knows he has lied to her.
At a dinner party the following night at the neighbor lady’s house there is a blow up regarding all the deception going on. The father realizes his daughter has been screwing the black boy and Jashira blurts out that Travis had sex with her the night before and had lied about leaving for the war. The upshot of all this truth-telling is Travis is arrested and Jashira and her father come to a reconciliation of sorts. End of story.
It is the performance of young Summer Bishil that propels the drama and the actor who elevates the movie beyond ordinariness. She is, by the way, older than 13. Eckhardt and Jones provide a nice contrast as lovers—one young and the other much older. Eckhardt is oily but sensitive in his fashion. Thomas is more experienced than Jashira and more honest and straight-forward than Travis; but he remains a young man in attitude, and therefore, much more compatible. Peter Macdisi is easy to hate, as he is such a hypocrite and his parenting skill are that of a Neanderthal. In conclusion, Alan Ball did a great job dealing with his two topics and having his actors handle things so discreetly with touchy material. It made for powerful drama.

Burn Before Reading

Maureen Dowd opened her column Wednesday Morning with the image of G.W. Bush leaving Washington D.C. in a green helicopter. She characterized his departure as “Exit the Boy King,” an apt metaphor I would say. Polite to fault, the Obamas waved goodbye as the Bushes got into the aircraft and took off. The crowd of 2 million down below cheered his departure, not so much with a job-well-done in their hearts, but more like good riddance, as a national nightmare had come to an end, as, finally, an intelligent adult has taken the reins of power and brought with him a team of the best and the brightest who are “shovel ready” to try and save the nation before it sinks like the Titanic.

I had my morning coffee while I watched the “Morning Joe” program on MSNBC. He and some of his friends were criticizing people on the left for booing Bush and Cheney yesterday, for having that ‘good riddance’ attitude. I have no objection for Obama to pull the country toward the center and to treat Bush within the context of the presidential respect. But Bush can’t leave town without blame for what his decisions have wrought, both in terms of dollars and lives lost or severely damaged; he can’t step away with the memory of torture on the minds of the most of us, a stain of revulsion that he left behind; and by refusing to enforce regulation he allowed the moneymen on Wall Street and Main Street to run amok with greed and debt schemes that have brought our economy to its knees, with another depression becoming more and more a possibility. The indictment could go on and on. He left the nation “tangled up and blue” and to say ‘good riddance’ is not an extreme statement from an angry populace. It is not a moment to turn the other cheek; there was too much of that over the past eight years, in the Congress and among the people of America. But it is time to bring the better angels of our nature to the fore. President Obama struck the right note on Monday when he said,” Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin the remaking of the nation.”

Besides the stirring words of the inaugural ceremonies, there is the image of that crowd of 2 million people, of happy, jubilant people of all colors and creeds, young and old, all freezing together on the Mall but warm inside with the fires of hope and a new beginning.

2009-1-3: The Southern Strategy gone awry. Since Paul Krugman received his Nobel Prize for economics, he has been more willing to call a spade a spade. Today he called the Republican Party a party of whiners, using Phil Gramm’s unfortunate phrase from the presidential campaign coming back to haunt them. He argues that the long time strategy of the Republicans, “The Southern Strategy,” has paid off—for the Democrats. That is, the south is now the only geographic region the GOP is dominant in and as everyone now knows to win a national election you have to be able to win the votes of Hispanics and African Americans. If Obama does a decent job he isn’t going to lose any of the black votes. That’s the bad news for Republicans. Krugman says the party decided 40 years ago “to make itself the party of racial backlash.” Plus they made choices based on loyalty not expertise, thus showing their contempt for competent governing. Bush was an incompetent president who ran a government by the unqualified. Is it any wonder we are in the mess we are in? All you have to do is think back to Katrina, Bush standing next to Mike Brown, the head of FEMA, saying to him, “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie.” It was perfectly obvious the reverse was closer to the truth. Brownie knew horses, not floods and hurricane relief. Their racism used to be coded and disguised; that won’t work anymore. We’ve all wised up. One of the men running for RNC chairman is using that ditty making the rounds on talk radio, “Barack the Magic Negro,” sung to the melody of “Puff the Magic Dragon.” It’s all in fun they say, just a little whimsy, no harm, no foul. Krugman thinks Bush’s eight year tenure is the endgame of the GOP’s political strategy “that has dominated the scene for more than a generation.” It was a great ride for the Republicans while it lasted, but they have now painted themselves into a corner (the south) and the “real America” that Palin and Bush like to talk about is now a narrow plank that the party must walk. Real America is looking a bit different these days, with an African American President, 5 women in the cabinet, even two Republicans, with diversity, team of rivals, and multiculturism being the clarion call of a new day dawning.