On Wednesday, November 14, 2001, at 12:18 , Ted Morgan wrote:
[..]
> Good to see drieux back in form --another good read with some sharp digs
> & insights! I agree with much of what he says about the pc-ness, the
> fixation with 'who's in - who's out,' etc. Except that this can tend
> towards a nihilistic (or perhaps postmodern) relativism: there is not
> larger truth, do your own thing, find your own truth, express yourself,
> etc.
Obviously one should start with a, 'why thank you'. And yes, the problem
of
bringing the same self critical view to 'the sixties' means risking
spinning
the process out into the forms of nihilistic solopsistic relativism that
was such the popular 'conservative' critique of 'the sixties' ever since
then. But wasn't half the fun of it all that we were risk takers to begin
with, we were young once, and willing to risk it all on a dare?
But as I look at what I want to pass along from my father to my son,
don't I too have to risk that what I am passing along is merely family
history and OurWay - perchance nothing more, no Grand Moral Imperatives,
no Divine Revelation of the Finger of God written on stone?
That I have basically figured out that the years of collecting notes,
'to my unborn son' - while a reasonably sound genetic approach, given
the highly low probability that I would be the one in my generation to
have a daughter - given the reasonable statistical profile of
generations -
merely shows up not 'the sexism' of my planning, but the sheer
probability
that comes wandering down the trail that I would have the daughter for
this generation of the family, and, well, should have planned ahead?
Some how passing along the wisdom of the women who married into our
family, was, uh, not what I was thinking about at the moment....
And the intervening years has not helped me solve the less than simple
porting over of the data that father's pass to sons, into some equally
relevant suite of facts that father's pass to their daughters. But at
least I've opted out of trying to figure out or worry about what mothers
are suppose to do in those classes of dialogs.
But I can say that I have a better frame of reference now to 'get it'
about that Marine Corp Commandant, who invited me into his study, while
he cleaned his M1911A1 .45 semi-automatic, as we waited for his
daughter to finish up, so I could take her off to what ever high school
soiree it was that I had come to pick her up for. I can empathise
now in ways I hadn't fathomed back then.
And yea, I think it is a wonderful way to help a young man focus on
what the mission is, and how to do an appropriate risk assessment.
How much of this was really there, just fixed in the way the species
goes about just doing its thing, and we could have seen it as fixed
and immutable cosmic truth, with the big Capital T, but we just didn't
have the 'time in country' to get it back then. And how much of it is
made big T truth because its as good as we can approximate it this time
around and our kids are gonna pick up our notes and relearn most of it
the same way we did, fumbling in the dark, and try and make their own
peace with the Cosmic Epsitemology Final Exam.
[..]
The short list of the basic isms
1. Racism
2. Poverty and Economic inequities
3. Sexism
[..]
But isn't the Real Irony here that these are essentially 'left over'
issues that should have been closed out BEFORE JFK took office? The
Brown v. Board of Education, upheld at bayonet point, in Little Rock,
was a Fifties Kinda Thing. Have we really settled all that much about
when it is a legitimate issue, and when it is merely more of the same
old fashion political leveraging game, pitting the US v. THEM, that
attempts to re-order the coalition elements in the right proportions
so that Our Team Wins?
I mean, hasn't the fun of the last thirty years worth of sorting out
where
we should 'back off' on that whole 'european cultural myopia' should
have been
and when was it just so much Hog Wash. Since it really isn't the fact
that we like the
bard because he is a white heterosexual male elitist snob, but because
we have stood there in the rain, and the mud, and the blood, and we
know all so well the inner meaning of the Saint Crispin's Day Soliloquy
in ways that no amount of deconstructionist post modernist method
acting English Lit Majoring will ever be able to share with us? Words
we ourselves can no better say, than that "He Got It!"
Or to take up with Jonathan Shay's "Achilles in Vietnam" approach, that
it may not have been some yuppy piece of effemete boarding school
pedantics,
but that the problem of getting back home from the war is a little more
complex than getting on the Freedom Bird and showing up back on the
block.
That we wind up there, staring not only into the face of our father, but
though him to our grandfather and grand grandfather, and the line of our
generations stretching back through time, that we share this common
thread,
this unexplainable moment, this something that separates us from our
brothers
who were not there. That it is not just some 'guy thing' but some
something
else that we share, having seen the dental floss marks in the maw of
hell.
Then waking up in the cold sweat of the instance, and the frivilous
debates
about wordings mean less to us, since we have little time left in our
life
to play word games, since one side feels that they are being repressed,
rather than breathing in the luxury of living.
"Oh excuse me, I keep forgetting that for those with the time to be
repressed
it is more important to delineate and define, and specify all the means
and
methods by which they are repressed." Or maybe the problem is that we no
longer have the luxury of bifurcating the world male and female, gay and
straight, rich and poor, black and white, we're just trying to deal with
the simpler issues on our plate, the living and the dead - and
desperately
trying to find some other mechanism to kick start the gestalt for others
than having them scream 'MEDIC!' on some nameless hill half way between
nowheres and the abyss.
The good news then is that we have a cure for all the left over ills that
were not effectively fixed during the sixties, the information is that
most of the players will not survive the cure....
but those who do will not have any ambiguity about who is living,
and who is dead....
ciao
drieux
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Nov 16 2001 - 18:38:10 EST