An Unfinished Nation

For some reason, I burst into tears in the middle of leading a freshman seminar discussion about the Civil War today. I had prepped several of Lincoln’s speeches, excerpts from a Southern Woman’s diary, and a part of a slave memoir from the early 1900s. The discussion went well, and because I teach my students pragmatic method (a way to approach social problem solving, based in John Dewey’s cognitive philosophy), I saved the Gettysburg address to the end.

Two things stand out and map onto other things we’ve been stressing in seminar this semester. 1) Lincoln makes a value claim in the brief piece, which he supports in a brilliant turn of rhetoric (but no real argumentation for why we *should* accept those values. It boils down to the “proposition that all men are created equal.” And he ends with a conclusion that equal people deserve a government by for and of the people. 2) He saw the nation as a work in progress, an end-in-view, a project that together we could work out. He calls America “unfinished” and says that the question is open as to whether or not a people who believe that all are equal can survive over time. He argues, without distinguishing between north and south, that the blood of the fallen answer in the affirmative, and whether or not the nation succeeds, their blood has hallowed the ground where they fell for believing it could.

I tried to read it aloud to the students after asking them a set of thought questions and found myself unable to speak by half way through (I’m one of *those* people who cannot cry and talk at the same time without sounding like a complete retard). It was very “Dead Poets Society” with me bawling my way through the last few lines and the students cheering at the end. But why was it so moving in the first place? I’m not sure. Partly the rhetoric was so beautifully done (images of dead and blood for the ideals; very much like Thomas Paine’s “American Crisis”). But that usually isn’t enough to make me make a fool of myself in front of 35 18-year-olds. Part of it was the idea of working collectively toward living out the proposition that all men are created equal, which I firmly believe in as a worthy (and maybe necessarily) goal for society. And part of it is the notion that here we are, nearly 209 years after the Constitution and 232 years after Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, and we are still an unfinished nation. Intellectually, I think that this is the best way for a democracy to be, unfinished; as soon as a democratic culture believes it has arrived, it will, by definition fail, because it will cease examining itself and end by leaving people behind. But emotionally, I find that I’m saddened not that we’re still working on the nation, but that we’re still working out the same fractures and inequalities that had existed when Lincoln gave his address.

 

Ein Deutsches Requiem

This morning I attended a free performance of Johannes Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem at the Unitarian church across the street. I went knowing nothing about Brahms except for some of his piano pieces that I had played in my late teens, back when I thought I would be a concert pianist. The “order of service” (the concert replaced the UU’s usual Sunday services) included a few pages explaining Brahms’ thinking and intention behind writing the requiem.

Many people are most familiar with Mozart’s concert setting of the requiem mass, immortalized in the film version of Amadeus. And some also know Verdi’s and Berlioz’s more dramatic requiems. (I personally love the Berlioz. Traditionally, the mass for the dead is about the suffering of sinners and the coming of judgment. It’s a reminder of the life after death where we meet our just ends. Brahms was a skeptic when it came to religion and wanted to create something more contemplative about death, more consoling to the suffering. He used the Christian Bible as text source, but chose passages that were in some ways more universal. According to the notes, he actually thought of it is a Requiem to console all mankind, rather than a “German” requiem (it was called that because he used Luther’s German translation for the text).

I am inept at describing music in words. Music, for me, is something felt, experienced, and therefore anchored in its time. And performed (as opposed to recorded) music has the added immediacy of being present with the artists. This morning’s performance was quasi-professional (an alumni chorus from Cal), but was clearly not polished like you’d find something down the street at Symphony Hall. But the music in that close, intimate sanctuary was nonetheless sublime. There are several passages where the music and words descend into a powerful, rhythm churning; and then where they soar. It has a really different feel from the Mozart and Berlioz Requiems, which though equally transcendent, but dark and brooding, in some ways, painful beauty. Brahms’, on the other hand, at the risk of sounding trite, uplifts and comforts.

It seems to combine the knowledge that this life is finite and short with the insistance that it still means something. I’ve been looking around online for a recording that I liked, and found a 2007 by the Berliner Philharmonker that I liked. If you’ve never heard it, set aside an hour, sit back and let Brahms transport you.

[apologies for the bad photo quality]

 

Celtic Crap

Is it just me, or is this so clolyingly earnest and over-produced as to be supremely cringe-worthy?

What is wrong with the Irish, these past 10 years or so, with the never ending stream of bizaro-world 2nd rate stage music productions, from River Dance to this? Is it because I’m mostly of irish descent that this embarrasses me so? [Not that I'd kick any of the lads out o' bad fer eatin' crrrackarrs, mind ye (as long as they took off those ridiculous patent lather overcoats with huge collars flitting about)]

 

Universal Health Care

PBS aired a Frontline documentary on the 15th comparing Great Britain, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland’s methods of providing universal care. You can watch it online at the Sick around the World website, and I recommend that you do. I was interested to see all the different approaches to universal care and the various problems and strengths of each (I basically only know Canada’s and the U.S.’s). If you don’t know already, the World Health Organization ranks the U.S. health care “system” at No. 37 in the world, below every other industrialized democracies and even below a few emerging nations (this is easily measurable in things like access to care, infant mortality rates, and life expectancy, etc.).

The documentary concludes with three limits that all the examined nations placed on their systems:

1) insurance companies must accept everyone who applies, and are not allowed to make a profit on basic care (and all five countries define basic care quite broadly);

2) everyone must buy insurance and the government picks up the tab for those who can’t afford it;

3) doctors and hospitals must submit to one, standardized price scheme (in Germany it was state by state)

I wonder, however, if the narrator cherry-picked particular ‘lessons’ in order to maintain a sort of market-based feel either for his own value-reasons or in order to appear more friendly to a U.S. audience. In any case, if Switzerland can make the switch in 1994, the year America failed to do so (mainly because of a multimillion dollar propaganda campaign waged by the insurance industry coupled with the “contract for america”), then why can’t we do so today? Our biggest obstacle is political timidity. It will take a massive public education campaign because Americans are so afraid of change and culturally so afraid of so-called socialism. But can we afford not to? Unfortunately, none of the presidential candidates are proposing anything that will get us to where we need to go, because none of them are willing to impose the limits described above.

 

A Couple Pics from Tilden

Steve and I drove up to the Botanical gardens in Tilden park and just had a leisurely couple of hours looking at some amazing plants, most of which were flowering. I didn’t know that there are several species of wild Irises native to California; there’s something about the shape of an iris that draws me to them, and these tiny little Cali irises caught our attention. I didn’t really take many pictures because I didn’t think the experience of seeing, touching, smelling all these cool plants would translate into photons and pixels.

After walking through the Botanical Gardens, which is the largest collection of plants native to California in the state (and world), many of which are endangered and rare, we drove down to the Lawrence Science Center on Berkeley’s campus, where I rode the whale.

Here’s the view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge far off in the distance from the science center. The Bay Area is an stupendous place to live (if you can get past all the people).

 

A New Car!

Well, I finally managed to buy my first new car, a mere 18 months before my 40th birthday. He’s a spry little fellow, a Mazda3 s Touring 5-door. I love it. Ask me again in a couple weeks when my first payment is due. Pics taken up at Tilden park above Berkeley in the East Bay.

 

Bay Area “Nature”

A few days ago, I was teaching my freshmen about the origins of Americans’ peculiar views of nature, their contradictory dual view that nature is both legitimate resource to be used for human ends and that nature is a kind of “temple” for the soul, the manifestation of the divine, the truth of our existence. We talked about how both capitalism and environmentalism emerge from the particular line that Americans took with nature starting in the colonial period, and we looked at some of 19th century landscape art and talked about Thoreau’s “Walking.” 

Whenever I do this little bit of American cultural history with students, I’m always struck by how much a product of my culture I am, that is, how American I am. I’m both an avid consumer and a rabid environmentalism. My deepest spiritual moments have all come alone in the wilderness, mounting a rise atop a peak, coming to the cliff edge, or entering a grove of Giant Sequoias for the first time. Wilderness evokes in me a profound sense of the sacred, of connection to the eons, of meaning. It feels odd to on one hand know the history of that particular cultural orientation to the non-human world and on the other hand to feel it so profoundly.

Since I moved to the Bay Area, my time outdoors has been much limited, compared to when I lived in Utah in my early 20s. I regret not having taken more time to explore and see more of the the non-human parts of California. I suspect that would have given me a much more balanced relationship to this vexing State. I feel a small sense of it when I’m running out on Ocean Beach; I have felt it powerfully in stands of old growth Redwoods; and from time to time I get just a sense of it when I’m driving down I-280 to San Jose for work, when I see the rolling California Hills covered in bright yellow grass, dotted with California Oaks.

This afternoon, I’m going to go hiking for the first time in Tilden Park, part of the East Bay Regional Parks system, which runs along the hills down the entire East Bay. In researching where I wanted to explore today, I came across a collection of photos on Flikr from throughout the EBRP District, and felt that rare connection to this place, which has been, in many ways, so alienating to me. Jump in anywhere and browse through people’s photography, looking at what lies beyond the cultural and social mess of California and see what drew people like John Muir to California. Not all the photos are great, but some of them are stunning. Maybe I’ll post a few of my own later today after the trip.

 

Have a Seat

Welcome to the Couch. As I said over on the Hammer, this is the blog where I’ll be posting personal stuff (such as race info, celebrity crushes, work frustrations, etc.) as well as cross-posting the more hoity-toity stuff from the Hammer. Other than the name change, nothing else is really different. The Hammer will be dedicated to content more geared to an academic audience (which means its readership will take a nose-dive since 95% of hits I got on any given day were for my posts about Smallville (WTF?). 

 

Amazingly Awesome Nordic-Dixieland-Bagpipe-Blues Fusion

I suck for not blogging lately. I’ll save you the lame excuses, my loyal three and a half readers, and give unto you this piece of bagpipe (from the Brilliant Belaja):

 

A Little Self-Indulgence

flowers purple changes with days
beyond books page and laptops glow
from eye corners
mind takes through
underawareness knows what knowing will not
light wanes
and flowers purple shades to black