Anticipating My Antonia and 201

Next fall I'll be joined for AmCon 201 by my dear friend Mary Titus and we will read, among other works, Willa Cather's My Antonia, so this NPR story is a little foretaste of what is to come.  NPR on Cather 

"My Antonia reflects not just a particular period of time in America's adolescence, but if you happened to relish it when you were young, experiencing it again, from a more seasoned perspective, might also shed light on your own journey and bring into focus the Antonias and Jim Burdens who have influenced you along the way."

The notion that the book is from "America's adolescence" is provocative today as we also wonder about what life stage the nation is in.  Shall we think of  9/11 as the end of a sort of extended childhood innocence as we came up against the very real truth that not everyone loves us as much as Alexis did?   Is the life cycle still a useful metaphor?

Wild West and Modern Conflicts

BBC reports that the US effort to locate and kill Osama Bin Laden was called Geronimo, a reference to an Apache of the late 19th and early 20th century.  He was a fierce fighter and unwilling to surrender to the forces of the United States.  Just how we are to take this appropriation of his name for our current counter-terrorism efforts is subject to more than one interpretation.  Is Bin Laden like him and thus hunted or are we now as fierce as he was?  In any case, as the BBC points out, we are reminded that old stories are carried forward in efforts to make sense of the new by rendering it less novel.  Doing so can also obscure what is different and give misdirection.

Change: military, political, cultural (religious)

This morning the news is all about the death of Bin Laden.  It evokes that Tuesday morning in 2001 when the news was all about the attacks on the USA.  Some of the images from that morning are reappearing in this morning's news.  So are some of the questions.

In 2001 we heard that the world had changed.  Now we hear reporters commenting upon what has changed.  Will the death of one man, even this one, make the world a safer place?  Will it return Americans to our pre-9-11 sense of security?  I think not.  I hope not.  Let us not revert to naive illusions about our strength and our influence.  I hope we have learned something about ourselves (that we are vulnerable to criticism and to attack) and our place in the world (that we are not everyone's ideal or every nation's model).

Mark Juergensmeyer's comments about this death/killing in the larger context of ongoing political change in North Africa are insightful and instructive.  His suggestion that the end of the Bin Laden era is signaled less by the man's death than by popular, peaceful demands for regime change in Egypt is worth careful thought.  So too his exploration of the religious dimension of those protests in Egypt and elsewhere.  Here is a snippet.

The dramatic popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Islamic world have demonstrated that protests that have been nonviolent in their inception (and have become violent only in response to bloody attempts to repress them) have been far more effective, and supported with a more widespread moral and spiritual consensus.  
What brought down the tyrants in Egypt and Tunisia, as it turned out, was about as far from jihad as one could imagine. It was a series of massive nonviolent movements of largely middle class and relatively young professionals who organized their protests through Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of electronic social networking.

What are the lessons here, not only for American foreign policy, but also for our own on-going efforts to live up to our ideals of freedom, equality, and democratic life?

From Black Elk to the 21st century

Paul Schultz, a former president of the National Indian Lutheran Board, advocate for Native Americans, tribal elder and faith healer in the White Earth band of the Anishinaabe (Chippewa) tribe in Minnesota, died March 19. Schultz, 66, died at his residence in White Earth, Minn.

We've been reading Black Elk, thinking about the "fate" of Lakota people in the late 19th and early 20th century, imagining their struggles, thinking about the survival and changes in their culture.  This obituary of a contemporary Anichinaabe is a reminder that the struggles are not over, that changes continue, that both of those are parts of survival.  No doubt someone could write a revealing account of the history of mid- to late-20th century Native American life through the story of Paul Schultz' life.  For, now a read of this obituary is instructive.

Dreams of Immortality?

E J Dionne's op-ed piece published in today's Mpls Star-Trib asserts that the USA health care system will not be reformed without an honest admission that finally everyone's health care fails, that is to say, no matter how much money one has and no matter how good the care one receives, sooner or later, everyone dies.  Spending more on higher quality care can lengthen life, but in the end, it does not save lives.

Not only modern Americans long for immortality.  This has been a human dream for dozens of centuries in dozens of cultures.  But, modern Americans may be particularly susceptible to the illusion that we can achieve it: not just better living through chemistry (that old Monsanto slogan), but longer, unending living through technology.

Is that the freedom we want, to live this life forever?  Is that freedom or is it better understood as captivity to what we know? 

Might equality of quality of life be a more democratic, and more realistic, dream?