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| Duke parent 2004 | Nov 24 2008, 11:25 AM |
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SOME HOLIDAY CHEER Here’s a parlor game I’ve dubbed “Robespierre” that will enliven almost any holiday gathering. First, stock a hat with slips of paper on which are written the names of each person who wishes to play, one name per slip. Feed a second hat with slips that indicate various activities or categories of thought. Whoever agrees to be the game’s Pat Sajak then selects from the players an “executioner.” Next, the moderator pulls a name from the first hat, announcing it to all. Finally, when the moderator reads aloud whatever appears on the slip he picks from the second hat, the executioner must blurt out the first words that come to mind as he associates the name with the activity. Whenever my own name finds itself conjoined with “politics,” the game often devolves into my trying to persuade my friends that I’m not really a fatalist, a reactionary, a cynic, or (my favorite) a man who has never forgiven God for allowing Mick Jagger to roam the earth these many decades. The more contrived and convoluted my efforts become, the more likely that at least one of my tormentors will remind me of my own oft-stated belief that getting my friends, all of whom are persons of years, to change their minds in matters of this sort enjoys miserable prospects--in fact, roughly those of getting George Will to concede that Metternich still walks amongst us in the person of Jimmy Carter. My good-natured critics do occasionally relent when I maintain that I’m a fatalist only in the sense that I acknowledge that life on this sorry ball will for all of us end in failure—that is, death. But when labeled a fatalist in the more specialized political sense, I comfortably, and truthfully, deny ever having been tempted to move my books and my carcass into anyone’s aging bomb shelter. I just as easily confess to yawning at all talk that celebrates living on mountain tops or with monks who deem light bulbs the work of the devil. Rather, I maintain—often with a warm glow radiating from my not unhandsome face—that although I’ll always approach “audacity of hope” ponytailed boomers with the resignation I show in the presence of the incurably ill, I wax almost Panglossian by contrast when discussing politics with their children—more precisely, that is, with those of their children still in their “formative” years. My own children, now in their twenties, present a special case. Although I’ve always been happy to talk with them about politics, I’m not confident they’ve been as pleased by these sessions as I’ve been. I’m willing to bet that when George Will talks to his own children about politics he strikes them as a great bore. One’s children almost always attend more closely to the pronouncements of teachers and even strangers than to the very same messages when delivered by their parents. Having recognized this unfortunate tendency many years ago, I adopted a program for my kids that I heartily recommend to parents groping for ways to enlighten their own children about politics and the world. I simply select the best “teachers” and “strangers” myself—in the form of books. When my children were younger, I avoided giving them books explicitly about politics. They knew too little about the history of western civilization to put such books in their proper places. So I resorted to what parents of former times routinely did: I gave them novels and collections of essays they could handle, written by men and women who conveyed in their fiction or their commentaries the astonishing complexity of the world, and the limitless possibilities of the human condition. Above all, I wanted my children to see that there is much more to life than getting and spending, and that the preoccupation of our own age with politics often pushes aside a more important desideratum—namely, a proper understanding of excellence. (Striving for such an understanding, if not for excellence itself, has been more than enough to keep me from that slough of despond that is political fatalism.) Now that my children are on their own and far beyond thinking that Bill O’Reilly and Jesse Jackson represent enlightened opinion, I’m comfortable giving them books more explicitly political—but political in the sense I’ve already alluded to. In short, the authors I advance typically decry the unwarranted penetration of politics into almost everything we say or do in our frenetic lives. So here are some of the titles that might appear under the tree on Christmas Day: In a Cardboard Belt! Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage, by Joseph Epstein (2007); Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution . . . , by Thomas DiLorenzo (2008); The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, by Robert Conquest (2005); Ever Wonder Why? and Other Controversial Essays, by Thomas Sowell (2006); Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts “Womyn” on Campus, by Mike Adams (2007); The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Law Enforcement Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice, by Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton (2008), with a tip of the hat to Bill Anderson, whose review at http://www.lewrockwell.com/anderson/anderson222.html pointed me to this book in the first place; and The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer. Almost any edition of this American classic, first published in 1951, will do. In my own Christmas stocking I’d not be unhappy to find a subscription to Mad Magazine. One can do worse in this world than be reminded occasionally of the deep wisdom to be found in the motto of that magazine’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman: “What, me worry?” Happy Holidays! 
Edited by Duke parent 2004, Nov 29 2008, 06:53 AM.
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| Musings of a Superfluous Man · DUKE LACROSSE - Liestoppers | |
6:48 AM Dec 3
