What we want: honesty and integrety

From William Brown's Character in Crisis: A Fresh Approach to the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament.

"In other words, moral virtues tend to cut across all situations of conduct, from professional to personal.  To compartmentalize the virtue of honesty by relegating it to, for example, one's personal life but excluding it from one's professional conduct, is no virtue.  Virtues are by nature all encompassing."

This is at the heart of why we care about public officials obeying the tax laws and not engaging is illicit relationships; because trustworthiness, or un-trustworthiness, is not contained in a single arena of life. That said, a mixed anthropology that recognizes that human beings are not purely virtuous also must evaluate the effect of flaws in one arena upon the whole.  One error may not be an indication that the whole is damaged beyond suitability for service.  Seldom will there be a public official or private person whose behavior in every situation is beyond reproach so we must exercise judgment about our contemporaries (including ourselves) and about historical figures.  Perhaps this is somewhat less difficult in retrospect since we can attempt to see the overall pattern and the consequences, but in the present we can not take into account what is still to come.

disguises

Prep for fall. . .  reading Gay NewYork about drag balls . . . remember the original Tea Party and the role of disguises in several arenas of life. 

technologies

Here in my air conditioned library carrel, using my computer, I notice how many ways the work of a scholar has changed in the last half-century or so because of technology. 

1. I locate information and sources using various on-line tools rather than sitting on the floor flipping through paper indexes or searching through printed bibliographies or letting my fingers do the walking in the card catalog.
2. I still scribble notes on paper and sketch out the contours of a paragraph or essay that way, but the revising is all "block move" and "delete" and typing something new.  The process has some echoes of the palimpsest, but what I have scrapped off the skin is gone and what is left comes out of the printer pristine.
3. I consult with others by phone or in person having flown across the nation rather than by handwritten letters entrusted to the postal service.
4. Though the day is tropical, I keep working as if it were cool and dry.
5. Older, but still significant, electric lights!

Pigs and history

High on the Hog  This link to a posting on  "Cooking With Ideas" blog about a book by that title.  Here's a snippet. The post has links to longer reviews as well. 

"High on the Hog, [to book] by Jessica B. Harris, is subtitled A Culinary Journey from Africa to America and is a swell, detailed, overview of much of that history. It includes pain -- of course, given the history of slavery, Jim Crow and ongoing discrimination -- and lots of history I did not know. Not surprisingly much of this revolves around the ways food and culinary prowess have been historically important across the centuries. Thus, for example, slaves selling and bartering food as a way to survive and, on occasion, accrue enough to purchase their freedom, continuities of foodstuffs (including the Columbian exchange wherein plants made it from the Western hemisphere to Africa and then came back with slaves as part of their diet), the role of free (and enslaved) African Americans in food service in urban areas (I was particularly intrigued by a historical figure named Robert Bogle in Philadelphia and by the place of oysters in New York City), and the role of trains in the history of American culinary development."

Seems like a book I'd like and one that takes a very "AmCon" sort of approach to its topic.  The study of "food ways" seems to be booming along side concerns about eating well (healthy and ethical and tasty).  No doubt this is because food tells us so very much about who we are and what we value, both as individuals and was groups.

revision = forgiveness

“Aesthetic luck is the major argument in favor of working through a process of revising a piece of writing through its many drafts.  If you are a supremely talented artist and you hit a lucky da, then maybe you can write a poem or a story or a chapter of a novel that needs no revision.  If you’re a regular writer with your appointed portion of aesthetic luck, you’ll need to come at the piece again and again. I like to think of revisions as a form of self-forgiveness: you can allow yourself mistakes and shortcomings in your writing because you know you’re coming back later to improve it.  Revision is the way you cope with the bad luck that made your writing less than excellent this morning.  Revision is the hope you hold out for yourself to make something beautiful tomorrow though didn’t quite mange it today.  Revision is democracy’s literary method, the tool that allows an ordinary person to aspire to extraordinary achievement.”  David Huddle, “Let’s Say You Wrote Badly This Morning”  Breadloaf Anthology, 1989.

This retrieved from lost in an old file while in early preparation for the move to a different office this winter.  Timely because the summer involves lots of writing.  Timely because one project concerns "professing vocation" and in it I'm exploring an analogy between responding to a call and writing a sentence.  (Yes, the preoccupation continues.)

the value of knowing your neighbor

Interesting suggestion for why the US legislators seem so much more contentious than in a previous 'golden' era: because fewer of them live in D.C. so they don't socialize with each other and get to know each other as human beings.  Instead, they fly back to their home districts where they attend fund-raisers and hear from those who voted for them.  I've heard this theory from more than one source now.  The moderating influence of knowing your neighbors seems plausible as one factor.  Another, forgetting that once elected, one represents all the voters, not only the votes of one's supporters.

shifting notions of identity

In 201, "remaking America," we are interested in the many ways Americans reconsider and revise their nation, their national self-understanding, and their personal identities.  Of course I'm thinking about this as we prepare, but I'm pretty sure that this is not the only reason that I'm noticing lots of books and discussion on similar topics.  If the early 20th century was a time of great concern for the reform of American society (women's suffrage, temperance, better government) and even as the years past a time of innovation (electricity, telephones, radio, movies, automobiles), the last 20th and early 21st are as surely a time of great interest in reconfiguring personal and group identity (gender, sexuality, race, family). 

So here are links to NPR stories about three books that take up these themes in different genres:

Latte Revolution a young adult novel that takes up shifting understandings of racial identity.

Incognito a memoir and a one-man play by a man who, having grown-up as white, learned that his father was black.

Who We Are--And Should It Matter in the 21st Century? a non-fiction exploration of several intersecting identity factors (e.g. nationality, race, gender, sexuality) by a journalist who describes himself as "a black Brit who's lived in New York for nine years."

Although I have not included them here, I do notice that books and discussions about technology and about the USA's role in global politics and about the environment would also fit.  There is one about being connected to the internet all the time, and many about what we eat, and lots about the end of the American century.   So, AmCon students, stay alert and make a list that you can use in the fall.

Day 11 and still counting

MN is still shut down, sort of.  Many "essential services" are still running, though the Gov. is working without pay and thereby setting an example for the  other "high income earners" he wants to tax more.

Very odd to drive by all those interstate rest stops with big CLOSED signs on them and the entrance barricaded.  We also took some older "scenic by-way" routes.  On those the wayside rests are still open since they are not state run and the services are less.

Can we take this shut down as an opportunity to determine both which services are indeed vital and what is a fair way to fund them?

qualified to lead?

Day 6 of the Minnesota State Government shut-down.

In an interview someone observed, "People are always complaining that politicians do not adhere to their principles.  Now they are and people are complaining about that."  The comment was in response to the interviewer's observation that both sides, the governor and the republican leaders, reporting that they are being advised by voters to "hang tough."

So, the question arises: what qualifications are the ones that convince voters to elect a legislator or a governor or other government officials?  And, is there any connection between those qualifications and the qualifications for being a voter?

I'm remembering the debates about universal suffrage as the USA made its way toward that step-by-step.  There was the notion that voters needed to own land so that they would not be under the influence of their employers: financial independence as a necessary prerequisite of independence of judgment.  There was a notion that one should be able to read.  I won't rehears the whole long debates, only note that along side the notion that suffrage is a "right" there has been the notion that it carries responsibilities for which there may be some qualifications that increase the possibility that wise choices will be made by the vote of the majority.

Most often what we are choosing when we vote is people to represent us in making other choices: about laws, about government services, about funding those.  And, back to the question about what qualities are needed to do those tasks.

• Shall we vote for the person whose views of a few issues coincides most closely with our own?  If so, what is the "winner's" obligation to those positions?  One issues politics has a long tradition in the USA, going back at least to the issue of temperance. 
• Shall we vote for the person whose values seems most in sympathy with our own?  If so, are we willing to allow that the "winner" might make decisions based on those values that are different than we expected?
• Shall we vote for the person whose personal life we most admire or against the one whose we do not?  Is this a matter of character?  Do we want to be represented by people who have demonstrated their trustworthiness and good judgment in "a little" in the expectation that they will do the same in larger, more public matters? 

Of course we all might say that we want leaders whom we can trust.  But that leaves me wondering still about the basis of the trust and about what we trust them to do.  In an old essay about MN politics Bill Holm described a USA senate race and asserted that it was "a race the voters could not lose."  Why?  because both candidates were worthy of the voters' trust that they would govern wisely for the whole.

Day 6: wanting to see more ability to lead, less hanging tough on campaign rhetoric and more doing the job of governing on the basis of basic values and commitments.

more on Interstate Highways

1920s in Iowa

Later in Los Angeles, Californ

Big Road  Not long ago I wrote about HOT TEA's installation over I-35 and the allusion it makes to highways as rivers.  Now, a link, to a story about a book about the highways themselves.  The review suggests a rather up-beat treatment with the realistic assessment that the system would not be built today.  The interview also mentions the Lincoln Highway as a precursor of the mid-20th century system. 

I've lived in several towns that "old" Hwy 30 passes through and I once determined to drive it from NW Indiana where I lived to a town west of Chicago to visit friends.  Even 25 years ago Hwy30 was not a super-highway!  On the way home I used the Interstate and Tollways. 

Even in retrospect the experiment is a reminder of the interconnection of time and space/distance.  How far a place is from where I am is not only a matter of miles, but also of minutes.  And how far I'm willing to go is much influenced by how long the journey will take.

As we prepare for our 201/fall semester focus on "Remaking America," we will give some minor attention to the model-T and the ways that transportation technology (e.g. automobiles and roads, to be followed by air travel) remade Americans perceptions of their nation and their experience of it.