Individual evil and the goodness of the masses
Here’s another excerpt from Edward Kennedy’s memoir, True Compass. It constitutes a kind of case study of the grieving process — i.e., Bobby’s grief after the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy.
The excerpt also offers an insight into human beings at their best:
I think often of Bobby’s grief over the loss of Jack. It veered close to being a tragedy within the tragedy. […]
He delayed returning to his duties as attorney general; he found it difficult to concentrate on anything or do substantive work. Hope seemed to have died within him, and there followed months of unrelenting melancholia. He went through the motions of everyday life, but he carried the burden of his grief with him always. […]
In mid-January 1964, while Bobby was still attorney general and before he made up his mind to resign and run for the Senate from New York, President Johnson asked him to visit the Far East to negotiate a cease-fire between Indonesia and Malaysia. He was to meet in Japan with Sukarno, the enlightened but volatile Indonesian president […].
Bobby’s official mission was to act as peacemaker; but Johnson also hoped that the assignment would lift his spirits.
Johnson, so often perceived by Bobby as an adversary, had on this occasion performed a valuable act of compassion. In Japan, Bobby and Ethel witnessed a tumultuous outpouring of friendship from the people, who wanted to show their respect and love for John Kennedy through Bobby’s presence.
I believe that the reception restored his faith that life was worth living after all.
(pp. 210-11)
I have grieved the loss of both a brother and a sister. I can relate to Bobby’s inability to concentrate, his loss of motivation, and that melancholia which spirals downward, at intervals, into darkest despair.
I learned to ride the tiger: to let it carry me where it would; to be patient with myself when I would break down in tears for very little provocation; to wait out the process until it had exhausted itself, like Muhammad Ali rope-a-doping George Foreman.
If there is any antidote for grief, it is the mere passage of time. That plus the remarkable resilience of the human spirit.
At Gethsemane, the spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. In the grieving process, the flesh proves surprisingly strong: bodily functions persist even while the spirit is utterly impotent. One day, you discover the unsuspected truth of that facile saying, “Life goes on.” Then your spirit may revive: you may return, by stages, to the ordinary business of living — partly in spite of yourself.
One morning I woke up and I knew
You were really gone
A new day, a new way, and new eyes
To see the dawn.
Go your way, I’ll go mine and
Carry on.The sky is clearing and the night
Has cried enough
The sun, he come, the world
to soften up
Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but
To carry on.(Stephen Stills, “Carry On”)
I don’t know about the “rejoice, rejoice” part, but the rest of that line is true — “We have no choice but to carry on.”
There’s another lesson to be found in the story of Bobby Kennedy’s recovery from grief. It has to do with human nature: that unseemly amalgam of terrible evil and inspiring goodness.
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Another perspective on Palin
Is Sarah Palin a prophet, a liar, or a bullshitter? This reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog argues for the last mentioned:
I’d argue that what [Sarah Palin] says has no relation whatsoever to the truth — you can’t count on it to be false anymore than you can count on it to be true. […] I know you’ve invested a great deal of time proving her to be a liar, but to my mind Palin’s a bullshitter, as defined by Harry G. Frankfurt in his book, On Bullshit.
According to Frankfurt, a bullshitter is the greater enemy of truth than a liar. The liar, by acting in opposition to truth, at least has some sense of what it is. The bullshitter, on the other hand, says only what he or she thinks will serve their immediate agenda and therefore pays little attention to what actually “is.” Over time their ability to recognize truth becomes attenuated.
Here is Frankfurt’s own description of the distinction between liars and bullshitters.
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The Prophet
Sarah Palin is in the news again. No — she is the news. Judging by the blogosphere, there is absolutely nothing else of consequence happening in the world.
The catalyst for all this coverage, favourable and unfavourable, is Palin’s new book: Going Rogue.
This analysis seems right to me:
On MSNBC, Keith Olbermann went to considerable pains to cite passages in her book that were contradicted either by facts or by past statements Palin had made herself. […]
What Olbermann and the word-obsessed, meaning-seeking media cannot grasp is that Sarah Palin is not someone you believe. She is someone you believe in.
She is not a politician. She is a prophet.
The utterances of a prophet don’t have to make sense. Not on the rational plane.
To the degree that the utterances don’t make sense, they only become more profound. It is then that the Prophet speaks in exalted mysteries and ciphers which cannot be interpreted by the rules of mundane speech:
Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
(St. Paul, 1 Cor. 2:12-16, English Standard Version.)
That’s the claim Sarah Palin makes every day. It is implicit every time she opens her mouth.
Outsiders — unbelievers — shouldn’t dare to pass judgment on Palin. She speaks in exalted utterances which only initiates can interpret. Mundane rules do not apply.
Do not parse the grammar, or look for inconsistencies between yesterday’s utterance and today’s. Only believe! And adore.
Wordmaster: anyone
When anyone is used as an indefinite pronoun to mean “anybody”, it is written as one word: Anyone could tell you the answer. Do you know anyone else who could help?
Otherwise, it is written as two words: Any one of us could have scored a high mark. A maximum of six people are allowed in this lift [elevator] at any one time.
Anything and anywhere are written as one word; any time as two words.
Source: The Penguin Wordmaster Dictionary, Martin Manser and Nigel Turton, eds., 1987.
It all makes intuitive sense to me, as a native English speaker. But you can understand why someone for whom English is a second language would be completely befuddled — as so often with this magnificent, exasperating tongue of ours!
Beethoven updated
About a year ago, Paul Wells offered his recommendations on the best recordings of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. Here’s what he had to say about Paavo Järvi and the philharmonic orchestra in Bremen, Germany:
This [recording] is in second place mostly because it’s still in progress, with only Symphonies 3, 8, 4 and 7 released in North America; and partly because the interpretations are a little quirky. I think it might be best to listen to something a bit more canonical and then you can hear how outside-the-box these Järvi interpretations are.
Aha! Here is an updated rendition of Beethoven! If Järvi hasn’t brought Beethoven into the rock ‘n’ roll era, he has at least updated him to the jazz era.
Why do I say that? Because a good jazz performance swings: i.e., there’s a propulsion to the performance, as if the next bar is always pulling you toward it. We might refer to it as a “leaning-forward performance”, to distinguish it from what I will call a “vertical performance”.
I’d like to compare two recordings of Beethoven’s 8th symphony. But first, let’s orient ourselves to the music — odds are, you can’t hum the 8th symphony from memory.
CBC Radio 2 has produced an excellent series of podcasts on Beethoven’s symphonies, which you can download for free from iTunes. (Search for “CBC Radio 2 Beethoven”.) Bramwell Tovey, the music director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, walks listeners through each of the nine symphonies in turn. Here, he introduces the first movement of Symphony #8.
Now let’s listen to an excerpt from Claudio Abbado’s version:
There’s nothing wrong with that recording. On the contrary, Abbado’s version of the nine symphonies has earned rave reviews (e.g. here).
It is, however, an example of what Paul Wells describes as a “canonical” version of Beethoven; what I have described as a “vertical” Beethoven.
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