Indian Democrary: Egypt, and elections

The Hindu : News / National : “India can help build democracy in Arab world”

With so much media and personal attention going to North Africa of late I was delighted to find this piece suggesting that Indians might have something to offer to these emerging democracies.  Like the USA, India is a secular democracy with an even more diverse population: linguistically,  religiously, and more.  Unlike the USA, in India there are citizens who remember when India gained its independence from Britain, not much more than 60 years ago.  This is not to say, of course, that India is THE model of a modern democracy.  Again like the USA, India has difficulties with its democratic system of government.  Among them, according to some commentators, is a tendency to equate democracy with elections and to give all its attention to elections and none to governance.  (As the American news media focus our attention on who will run for president in two years, that sounds familiar.)

crafting a sentence is part of recognizing life's joys

Facebook and other electronic media ask for brevity; in this they are like a telegram.  At least I imagine that they are like telegrams in this regard.  One is forced to think carefully about how to pack the most information into the fewest, most efficient words.  My relatively recent entry to Facebook combined with our also recent discussions and exercises focused on sentences have heightened my awareness of my own sentences.  Today, for quite some time, I fussed with this one.  I hope that the lack of specific information about what the business is and who the people are draws readers into the anticipation that is the kernel of the sentence, the doing that the doer does.

L. DeAne Lagerquist is anticipating next weekend's trip to Chicago, doing the college's business, in no small part because she has dates with several of her favorite people.

What is the business?  It has to do with the ACM program in Pune India for which I am the St. Olaf program advisor.

Who are the people? They include one former student, another Ole who is also a family friend whom I have known since she was a child and whose grandfather was my teacher, a third Ole who I never had in class but with whom I have long been a friend; and a woman whose intellect, integrity and wisdom I admire and have benefited from for two decades; also some of these women's family members.  All these are reminders of the richness of life that is multiplied by friendship. And, writing the sentence was an exercise in noticing and appreciating the gift of these friendships.

Democracy is like .....

Jessica's American Conversations: thought of the day::

"'Democracy is like blowing your nose. You may not do it well, but it's something you ought to do yourself.' -G.K. Chesterton"

Thanks Jessica!

And more on tea

For all the tea in China

Clark Bjorke's review of How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History by Sarah Rose.  Of course this pointing to this review is really for my AmCon students, just in case they might be feeling that they haven't been hearing enough about tea this semester.

"For All the Tea in China reads like a novel. It is fast paced and has a series of plot twists. It is filled with interesting characters which Rose has filled out, imaginatively. I am sure that the original source materials she had to work with, letters to and from the East India Company, invoices and shipping records, were a bit more dry."

sentences, again

Am Con students may be getting tired of my going on and on about the importance of writing sentences that provide clear access to the logical relationships between their parts.  They may be growing weary of all this attention to what I'm coming to think of as the engineering of the sentence and being asked to write about "X" in 25 words or less.  But. . . . . I also notice that Enich used the mimicing exercise to produce a fine description of AmCon itself, a description that also illumines, as we tried to do in 101, the ways that physical space influences social interaction and community values.

From the assigned reading, Pg 164: The activist pietism of the Puritans gave to the Church the duty of reforming the world and so launched into liberalism in politics and capitalism in economics; it was a religion of commitment.

From Enich:  The commutative feeling of Hoyme hall gives Amcon the feeling of camaraderie and thus ignites the flames of conversation in class and the hallways of St. Olaf; it makes great  for great exchanges.  

And Steph, Jake, and Marissa riffed on Cullen's sentence about F. Douglass to write a new sentence about Sex in the City.  Their new sentence  also helped us to notice a common American narrative, not rags to riches, but from enslaved to autonomous.

From Cullen, page 70: "His account, which traces an arc from dependency to autonomy, is one of the most vivid illustrations of the appeal of the Dream of Upward Mobility-which in his case was quite literal, as he escaped from Maryland to Massachusetts to become a free man."

Same sentence, with a SATC twist: "Her account, which traces an arc from dependency to autonomy, is one of the most vivid illustrations of female empowerment in a major city- which in Carrie's case was quite literal, as she escaped from an unhealthy relationship with Mr. Big to become a free women.

RE: commonplace books

from Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault

My mother kept a commonplace book, said Jean, a record of oddments she wished to remember: poems, quotations from books, the lyrics of songs, recipes (ice-water shortbread, cucumber and beet chutney, fish soup with verbena).  These yellow copybooks were also filled with cryptic phrases that I both longed to understand and was thrilled not to, their mystery increased their value for me.  They sat in a square stack, fifteen of them, on the corner of her writing table.  Only sometimes she dated her entries, and this I take to mean that my mother wanted to place a particular strand of thought, a loose thread of a quotation, next to a moment of particular personal potency, the here and now, say of 12 November 1926 at 3 p.m., when Keats made her feel the keenness of things, somehow marked her place int he world, marked a secret event I would never know.

Parents form citizens: on TIger Mother

Great blog post on Tiger Mother by Amy Chua
(she is the memoir author, not the blogger)


So Whitman thought that democracy needed a mythos and Hatch argues that the Second Great Awakening helped to shape the common people into a new force that drove political democracy, but it was Horace Mann who helped get the public schools going and that common education has been an essential factor in conveying whatever national mythos we've got as well as schooling us in the habits of democracy.  (How many small Americans cast their first votes in an election for first grade representative to their elementary school student council?)  All this is true and so is the fact that families form us.  After reading this blog about Amy Chu's memoir, Tiger Mother, I'm thinking about the role of family in shaping the attitudes and practices of citizenship. 

I'm going to paying attention to Tocqueville's treatment of family life, if he has one.  Certainly his section on the importance of inheritance laws is connected to family life.  He is insightful about the ways that expectations about inheriting property inform psychology and identity.  But he wrote in a time when real estate was more central to well-being than it is today; though one must note that he appears to have anticipated our attitudes.

Chua writes today and she has stirred up quite a storm of response by American parents who take her memoir as a judgment on their own practices of parenting.  Jen Westmoreland Bouchard offers an insightful response to the responses as indicative of widespread attitudes about the relationship of competence and self-confidence, and success and happiness.  I recommend reading Bouchard's comments.  I also wonder if she is correct that many parents assume that students whose self-confidence is low ought not be pushed toward competence least their confidence plunge further; if she is correct that many believe that happiness can be had without success and thus their children should be shielded from potential failure; and if Tocqueville would regard this state of affairs as evidence that we have succumbed to democracy's danger of equality of mediocrity. 

Democracy in America (DIA) #1: as the news from Egypt and that region unfolds

From the author's preface to the 12th (1818) edition.


"It is not force alone, but rather good laws, which make a new government secure.  After the battle comes the lawgiver.  The one destroys; the other builds up.  Each has a function."

Here Alexis de Tocqueville refers to the situation in France in 1848, but his words (really a warning) ring true this month as well.  Even without the sort of violence that marked our American Revolution or the French, the observation is true that building a new government and civil society require other means.  Perhaps the restraint and courtesy displayed by Egyptian protesters portends the same in months and years to come.  A society in which Coptic Christians and Muslims protect each other at prayer is to be longed for.  So too a society in which modern people value the artifacts of ancient times and pick up their own trash.  Nonetheless, even such noble impulses need fair laws, justly enforced; moreover, those laws are also to direct the actions of those who hold power and upon whom the "common" persons wait for a new government.

Whitman, sentences, mythos: musing upon

As I suggested that I might, I am now reading Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence and I am enjoying his delight in the way words are put together in ways that create not only impressions, but also worlds.  (Of course I'm also made hyper-aware of my own sentences.)  Reading Fish after we just read Whitman's "Democratic Vistas," recalls Whitman's confidence that literature plays an essential role in creating the culture that under girds the democracy, the nation itself.

What good is freedom of the press and freedom of speech if citizens are unable to express themselves clearly?  All the more reason to be diligent in our efforts to think well and to pay one another the respect of presenting our ideas in attractive and understandable prose.

Yes, I know that Whitman seems convoluted and yet, in retrospect I regret that we did not follow-up on the suggestion that each of us select the quotation we'd put on a t-shirt or a poster.  Paying attention to his sentences might help us to appreciate his artistry.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.  (

I am large and I contain multitudes)

What media folks mean by "religion"

Kate's Commonplace Blog: Check out Frykholm's Blog Post about Religion in t...: "While on Amy Frykholm's website (the author of our reading for monday), I came across a blog posting she had written about religion's role

Kate, I'm delighted that you made the effort to read Amy's blog and that you  found it useful enough to pass along via your own blog.  While an informed citizen and careful consumer of media (of all types including popular, broadcast, scholarly, etc.) is always attentive to authors' agenda and the nuances of word, alert caution is especially important with regard to the complex and often controversial matter of religion.  When Amy is with us, I hope you will ask her to say more about this with reference to the USA as well as to Egypt!  DeAne

p.s.  Amy Johnson Frykholm (St. Olaf '93) public lecture: Doing It Right: Sex, Bodies, and Christianity in American Media.  Tuesday, Feb. 15, 7:30 p.m. Viking Theater St. Olaf College.  Will be streamed.

Electronic communication and democracy

Patrick Schunck's Am Con Blog: Whitman’s vision of America...: "

Whitman’s understanding of the nation and predictions of the rise of “electric communication” partially grasps the ways the information age affects democracy. He imagined that the future communication would allow America to communicate its unique literary soul rooted in democracy to the world. He did not predict the way electronic communication would alter the nature of the government. The media has always served  as an essential link between the American people and the government. Now the sheer speed of communication creates entirely new concerns for candidates. Candidates must contend with the fact that at someone can almost always take their picture a make of video of any mistake. The media has created the need for a constant struggle to maintain a dignified image.

Thanks to Patrick for these comments that go beyond the now commonplace observation that electronic media can be used to encourage certain kinds of political engagement.  The potential for connection between people and the spread of information are important.  As Patrick points out here, there are also changes in the relationship between people and their government.  There are shifting boundaries between privacy and public scrutiny that effect both ordinary citizens and those willing to serve in public office.

Baby princess or baby citizen?

Dodging Disney In The Delivery Room

www.npr.org

Disney has begun targeting a yet untapped market: newborn babies. The news disturbed commentator Peggy Orenstein, who argues that moms, especially brand new moms, should be able to escape the "princess industrial complex."

Reading this after our 101 discussions of Disney's Pocahontas and of the notion of a "natural aristocracy;" while we are in the midst of semester devoted to democracy; and having just considered Whitman's plea for a national literary mythos . . . (breathe) . . . I wish that this story astonished me.  I wish that I were shocked that tiny infants are targeted for induction into a commercial substitute for the rich, evocative common culture Whitman called for.  I wish that I were surprised that at its heart this is an offer of a false identity premised on class privilege and potentially narrow gender stereotypes.    

The campaign to market princess stuff to pre-school age girls seems to have been sparked in part by homemade princess costumes on tiny ice-skaters.  So I ask: Could some patriotic group like the League of Women Voters instead offer all infants a recording of "This Land is Your Land," and a coloring book with stories of civic activists?  Could little ice skaters dress up like Mother Jones or Eleanor Roosevelt or even make do with warm tights, a sweatshirt sans trademarked image or clever saying, and a cute wedge hair-cut?

Civil War as problem . . . .

Yesterday in class Opal responded to my question about the problem Lincoln faced when delivering his two speeches (Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural) by pointing to the Civil War.  I pushed a bit on the assertion in the hope of getting her to be more precise about what was the problem the Civil War presented.  Then we were of on something else. 

Nonetheless, I'm still interested in that question: why was the Civil War a problem for Lincoln?  Was it so in different ways at those two moments?  Is it still a problem for us?  David Brooks' 2003 column suggests that the Civil War was a problem for Whitman. Why?  Because Whitman "had believed that the Civil War would cleanse the nation of its most serious ills," but by 1871 he could see that this was not the result.  The war had not healed the nation even if it had some how preserved the Union.  

Is it still a problem for us for the same, or a similar, reason?  On the one hand, when the war was over the Union was preserved and the slaves were freed, but on the other the people were still not unified and race is still a volatile, potentially divisive matter.  So, perhaps the Civil War is a problem for us because it reveals that there are significant matters that the citizens of this nation have been unable to resolve through political processes or other means.

Us or them: which is government? by St. Olaf Regent Peter Rogness

Here's the op/ed piece where St. Olaf regent, Bishop Peter Rogness (ELCA St. Paul Area Synod) thinks through some issues we touched on in class today and will keep thinking about.  He even mentions Lincoln's speech. 

• Grammar matters: the United States of America ARE or IS?  Is the nation unified into a single entity or are the states the primary unit?  What holds those political units together?  And how closely?
• And attitude matters: how do we regard the government, the officials we're elected and the folks on the payroll of cities, counties, states, and the nation?  Are they us?  Or, are they our allies?  Or, are they our enemies?  What is the ideal?  What the reality?  

 Important questions for us to be thinking about as we consider Democratic Vistas, "of, by, and for the people."

Democracy in Arab World

How Democracy Becaome Halal

From the NYT, a counter view to the one I mentioned in my previous posting.  This man, Reul Marc Gerecht, is a Middle East specialist with a new book coming out: The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East.  He argues that freedom as the ability to vote is becoming a widespread notion in the Middle East, alongside "freedom to worship God" and "national freedom from European imperialism." 

Worth a read.

A new semester a new-ish focus: Democratic VIstas

So, we look out over the landscape and take in what we see.  But, we also are looking for something in particular: democracy.

The recent events in Egypt have democracy much on everyone's minds these days.  We are vividly aware of the importance of freedoms of assembly and freedom of speech.  One commentator interviewed a professor of classics from Oklahoma (I've forgotten which school).  This professor asserted that democracy has only taken root in places influenced by the Greek ideals.  I wondered if this was an observation in support of democracy in Egypt or against.  In fact, his later comments made clear against, despite the Egyptians having had a Roman era.

Our task, or part of it, will be to pay close attention to our assumptions.  One of those is that democracy is a good to be desired for everyone, when in fact many people have flourished without it.  Another is our assumed and often unarticulated notions of what constitutes democracy.  This weekend Secretary of State Clinton emphasized American support for free and fair elections.  Is that an necessary component?  Is it the whole?  That professor suggested that a group of people might vote for an absolutist government.

Today we begin with some words from Lincoln.