Tom-A-ta, Tom-MAH-ta ... Patriot, Nationalist … What’s in a Word?

Tom-A-ta, Tom-MAH-ta ...  Patriot, Nationalist … What’s in a          Word?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 11/4/18

            Oh, the stir recently created by a simple, easy to understand word.  Words are the vehicles on which our thoughts ride.  The rub comes when someone takes exception to our choice of vehicles.

            Boldly – how else would he do it? – President Trump at his Houston, TX rally used the word “nationalist.”  That unknowing, uncaring fellow even declared, “I am a nationalist.”

            Well, so am I.  And so is anybody else “who is devoted to his or her nation” (Webster’s New World Dictionary), “who advocates for national independence” (The Merriam-Webster 2004 edition) and “who is patriotic, favoring an independent nation” (my smart phone).

            And how did the chattering class respond?  They threw onto the President’s verbal vehicle a load of fake definitions.  “Nationalist,” one media star pouted, means “white nationalist.”  Another self-appointed lexicographer insisted that the word means “nativist,” and “nativist” is an ethno-centric expression that no President should use.

            Of course the President was using the word “nationalist” in the context of and in opposition to the word “globalist.”  The semantic path he was taking he had taken before.  During his first year in office he stated, “I’m the president of a nation, not of the world.”

            It’s true that “nationalist” has become a pejorative term, that is, one that has moved at least partially from respect to disrespect.  Consider the word rhetoric which means “the art of oratory.”  Today in common usage it has come to mean “hot air” (“The politician was merely engaging in rhetoric,” we say), but not so in formal usage.  So is it with “nationalist.”  The word long pre-dated Hitler, had a noble meaning, and the chattering class knows it.  Even so, CNN and MSNBC used the word’s pejorative meaning as a weapon to associate the President with Hitler. 

So it goes.  Mind readers are everywhere these days, claiming the occult power to read our minds and hearts.

            Please.  Family, tribe, nation, globe.  This sociological arrangement has been with us from Day One.  Free sovereign nations with borders are a good idea, partly because they are typically a coalition of tribes.  I don’t believe I would like living in a white nation.  My black friends are too big a joy to be without.

             Is American liberalism, which in times past fostered lofty ideals (integration, voting rights) so exhausted that it fusses about vocabulary words and searches for the President’s every imagined slight?  Martin Luther King, Andy Young and other icons of the 1960s dressed up in coats and ties to march and lead the way for a cause that was just.  Their dignity and eloquent, precise words contributed to their success. 

            Contrast these fearless, rhetorically skilled men to the leftist protestors of today who dress like the homeless, scream in anger, and hurl vulgar words that do nothing but turn ordinary people off.  To these people and the progressive elites behind them, nationalism and populism have become unacceptable words. 

            In a span of 25 years the focus of liberals has shifted from the working class to the themes of multiculturalism and globalism.  The constituency whose support they could always count on is now the deplorables they can’t corral.  This working class is now the “populists,” another term that repulses and frightens political elites.  These populists, of course, are also nationalists, and as Salena Zeto puts it in her highly acclaimed book, “The Great Revolt,” these Trump-supporting populists/nationalists are “a culture craving respect.”     

            This Tuesday, the nationalists/populists will know how much political power they hold.  Will Joe Lunchbox prevail in the midterm election?  Or will victory go to the media and to Target, Delta, Google, Dick’s Sporting Goods and other corporatists who have turned their backs on regular folks, siding with the cultural left instead of their customer base?

            Regular folks rejoice that Donald Trump has flustered the previously untouched news media, driving them to distraction.  They crave action on several fronts, particularly the growth of the administrative state with its bureaucrats and unelected executive branch agencies that actually run the country.  They also desire proper response to migrant mania.  If this makes them “nationalists,” they proudly wear the label.

            Trump has won the hearts of the Democrats’ base, creating a blue collar revolution.  If his personal negatives, which are many, don’t prevent a midterm victory, we can assume that the word “nationalist” wasn’t a bad choice of words after all, and that normal, hardworking folks, the demographic that keeps the nation humming, are back in play.

Roger Hines

10/31/18

The Age of Foolishness

                                 The Age of Foolishness

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 10/21/18

            There are some things we can dismiss as trivial and fleeting, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s questionable genealogy, but there are other things like pronouns and peanuts to which we best pay attention.

            Who would have thought that pronouns and peanuts would ever reach political discourse or that self-respect and charm would go out of style and have to be re-taught?

            Why pay attention to pronouns and peanuts?  Because they provide examples of outlandishness and tyranny that are making inroads, especially in California.  Also because our children will fall victims if they are not taught how to resist outlandishness and tyranny.

            Now that the all-gender bathroom issue has waned, the pronoun issue has begun sweeping the country.  From where?  You guessed it.  Academia.  Oh, the foolish, wasteful things birthed, nourished, and indoctrinated in settings where people should be learning math, science, history, and p.h.y.s.i.o.l.o.g.y.

            Many of academia’s well nourished children move on to government and education where they set or enforce policy and thereby spread the foolishness.  Take New York City, for example.  The New York Times reported recently that beginning in 2019, New York City will allow citizens to be identified on their birth certificates as “male,” “female,” or “X.”  No more limiting people to those old-fashioned, sexist, “binary” identifications like “male” and “female” or “he” and “she.” 

            Today’s word, children, is “non-binary.”  Hello, increased diversity. Goodbye, physiological facts.  Hello, California.  New York City is catching up with you.

            Regardless of how NYC’s decision affects grammar books and teachers, it will certainly cause confusion for state and federal agencies that deal with official documents requiring correct identification.  Has anyone seen an “X”-box on their income tax return?  Don’t rule it out.  Our Age of Foolishness is well afoot.

 Let Topeka or Peoria snicker, but parents in New York and California are organizing, according to The Weekly Standard magazine, and are raising their babies as “theybies.”  Their kids “will choose their own gender and appropriate pronouns when they’re ready.”

            I won’t be snickering.  If you think the activist parents will get nowhere, pause and count on your fingers the Congressional members who already subscribe to such thinking.  I just did and ran out of fingers and toes both.  Columnist Heather Mac Donald’s expression, “the diversity delusion,” is absolutely in play here.  Watch as the list of reality-denying “snowflakes” grows. 

            As for peanuts, journalist Michael Warren recently recounted a phone call received from his son’s school nurse: “It appears your son Henry had a sandwich in his lunch box that looked suspiciously like peanut butter.  Please be reminded of our school’s total nut ban.”  One must ask if there is any corner of our existence into which government and schools will not venture.

            Another facet of the Age of Foolishness is the loss of personal pride and even charm.  The government can’t be blamed for this.   As recently as the late nineties, I stood at my classroom door (a requirement) to, among other things, send to the restroom those young men whose shirts were not tucked in.  Tucked or untucked wasn’t actually the issue.  Trying to instill at least a measure of self-pride was.

            Since then, of course, looking nice has been abandoned and Georgia’s commissioner of labor, Mark Butler, views it as a problem.  In the October 7^th edition of the MDJ, Butler reported that Georgia job-seekers are showing up for interviews dressed inappropriately.  Business owners have informed Butler of the “soft skills” lacking in far too many applicants.

            Charm is typically defined as “a quality that attracts, pleases, delights, and arouses admiration.”  For my generation Carey Grant, Aubrey Hepburn, Ronald Reagan, and Olivia de Havilland filled the bill, but what 25 year old today knows of these self-respecting icons?  They do know of the ill-clad rock stars (and the preachers who dress like them), the foul-mouthed comedians, and celebrities who provide no example of class.

            “Charm,” writes Joseph Epstein, “is the song we don’t want to end, the painting that won’t leave our minds, the man or woman we wish never to leave the room.”  It is “our relief from the doldrums and drabness of everyday life.”

            In the Age of Foolishness, charm or looking nice is scoffed at.  Though charm elevates the spirit and brightens our day, comfort is much more highly prized.  But charm is more than dress.  It’s personality, civility, and manners.

            Charm isn’t in the eye of the beholder.  Everybody understands it except perhaps the purveyors of foolish pronouns, the enemies of peanuts, and all the others who are undermining respect, caring nothing about norms.

            Charm isn’t just traditional.  It is profoundly human.

Roger Hines

10/17/18

           

           

           

Where Do We Go From Here? The Sexual Revolution has long been over and both sides lost. One side, the revolutionaries, argued that sexual freedom was natural, that the restraints of past years were “Puritanical,” “Victorian,” and out of touch with modernity. To the revolutionaries, “sexual purity” was laughable. Birth control, they asserted, had rendered restraint unnecessary. Sex education would give teens all they needed to deal with their new freedom and its risks of venereal diseases and pregnancy. The revolutionaries apparently never taught high school or college. Perhaps they failed to understand that adolescence is a time in our lives when all the education in the world cannot overcome youthful passions in the absence of a moral upbringing. The revolutionaries made light of the other side, the traditionalists. Traditionalists argued that sex was sacred, not just another form of pleasure. The revolutionaries scoffed at the new expression of the seventies, “traditional values.” They argued that wherever sex education failed, it was because there wasn’t enough of it, or it wasn’t being introduced early enough. The line for this great divide was first drawn in 1948 when the famous “sexologist” Alfred Kinsey published “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and in 1953, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.” Kinsey’s “findings” about sexuality, woefully unscientific and based on interviews, were refuted by many psychologists; however, Kinsey and other likeminded “sexologists” continued to assert that happiness and fulfillment come from expressing one’s sexual urges regardless of cultural norms or religious beliefs. After Kinsey, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire emerged, presenting casual sex as a lifestyle. Today, with internet and cable porn and sex-saturated commercialism, the departure of America from a broad Christian consensus on sexual morality is virtually complete. And just how did both sides lose? Traditionalists, who understood that whoever wins the culture wars wins our children, lost partly because of the stance of public education. The children of traditionalists had to endure sex ed in middle and high school unless their parents kept their children out of it. My wife and I chose the latter, which means our children escaped the central message of secular sex ed: “Be careful, do certain things and you won’t get pregnant.” The children of traditionalists, if they were subjected to sex ed, were taught that sexuality is mere biology. It’s the facts of life. What do values have to do with it? Ah, values. How they seem to get in the way of secular culture. Traditionalists, fighting Hollywood and the shifting public sentiment, lost because they still believed that nothing is more values-laden than sexuality, that sexuality is physiology plus emotions, affection, love, and even trust. Sex ed, wittingly or not, attaches sexuality to the Darwinian worldview that men and women evolved from animals, and animals are, well, animalistic, particularly when it comes to their appetites and sexual urges. But the revolutionaries lost also. Whether secular educators, pornographers, movie makers, Planned Parenthood defenders, abortion sympathizers, or politicians who cater to all of the above, they all are now caught in a web of hypocrisy. Freedom from our Puritanical past was supposed to make us better, certainly happier. But then along came Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul who proved that we need the old rules again. Supposedly, the old rules for sexual relations were outdated and oppressive; yet, who can argue that men have behaved better under “sexual liberation” than they did under the former Christian cultural consensus? The revolutionaries also lost in that they too must live under the consequences of their own arguments. For instance, the Center for Disease Control reports that 4 out of 10 children in the U.S. are born to unmarried women, and that the spread of STDs is at an all-time high. Apparently, all the condom talk has failed. Georgian Phil Kent in his excellent book, “The Dark Side of Liberalism,” writes, “The Dark Side constantly attacks what is right and true.” Kent’s timely book echoes John Richard Neuhaus’ claim that the public square has become the “naked square,” shorn of and now disallowing any mention of transcendent values. So here we are. The revolutionaries searched for the soul’s basement and found it. But Kent’s last chapter is titled “Where do we go from here?” and his answer is apt: “Fight for future goals with an optimistic eye and a fearless heart.” I believe Kent’s optimistic advice is compelling because I’ve seen the sad eyes of too many youths who have tried the way of the revolutionaries, “the dark side,” and are ready for something far more soul-satisfying. Yes, there is hope. A counter-revolution is still possible, and it will necessarily be led by parents who refuse to let a sex-sated culture snatch their children. Roger Hines 10/10/18

                              Where Do We Go From Here?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 10/14/18

The Sexual Revolution has long been over and both sides lost.  One side, the revolutionaries, argued that sexual freedom was natural, that the restraints of past years were “Puritanical,” “Victorian,” and out of touch with modernity. 

To the revolutionaries, “sexual purity” was laughable.  Birth control, they asserted, had rendered restraint unnecessary.  Sex education would give teens all they needed to deal with their new freedom and its risks of venereal diseases and pregnancy.

The revolutionaries apparently never taught high school or college.  Perhaps they failed to understand that adolescence is a time in our lives when all the education in the world cannot overcome youthful passions in the absence of a moral upbringing.   

The revolutionaries made light of the other side, the traditionalists.  Traditionalists argued that sex was sacred, not just another form of pleasure.  The revolutionaries scoffed at the new expression of the seventies, “traditional values.”  They argued that wherever sex education  failed, it was because there wasn’t enough of it, or it wasn’t being introduced early enough.

The line for this great divide was first drawn in 1948 when the famous “sexologist” Alfred Kinsey published “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and in 1953, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.”   Kinsey’s “findings” about sexuality, woefully unscientific and based on interviews, were refuted by many psychologists; however, Kinsey and other likeminded “sexologists” continued to assert that happiness and fulfillment come from expressing one’s sexual urges regardless of cultural norms or religious beliefs.  After Kinsey, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire emerged, presenting casual sex as a lifestyle.  Today, with internet and cable porn and sex-saturated commercialism, the departure of America from a broad Christian consensus on sexual morality is virtually complete.

And just how did both sides lose?  Traditionalists, who understood that whoever wins the culture wars wins our children, lost partly because of the stance of public education.  The children of traditionalists had to endure sex ed in middle and high school unless their parents kept their children out of it.  My wife and I chose the latter, which means our children escaped the central message of secular sex ed: “Be careful, do certain things and you won’t get pregnant.”

The children of traditionalists, if they were subjected to sex ed, were taught that sexuality is mere biology.  It’s the facts of life.  What do values have to do with it?

Ah, values.  How they seem to get in the way of secular culture.  Traditionalists, fighting Hollywood and the shifting public sentiment, lost because they still believed that nothing is more values-laden than sexuality, that sexuality is physiology plus emotions, affection, love, and even trust.  Sex ed, wittingly or not, attaches sexuality to the Darwinian worldview that men and women evolved from animals, and animals are, well, animalistic, particularly when it comes to their appetites and sexual urges.

But the revolutionaries lost also.  Whether secular educators, pornographers, movie makers, Planned Parenthood defenders, abortion sympathizers, or politicians who cater to all of the above, they all are now caught in a web of hypocrisy.  Freedom from our Puritanical past was supposed to make us better, certainly happier.

But then along came Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul who proved that we need the old rules again.  Supposedly, the old rules for sexual relations were outdated and oppressive; yet, who can argue that men have behaved better under “sexual liberation” than they did under the former Christian cultural consensus?

The revolutionaries also lost in that they too must live under the consequences of their own arguments.  For instance, the Center for Disease Control reports that 4 out of 10 children in the U.S. are born to unmarried women, and that the spread of STDs is at an all-time high.  Apparently, all the condom talk has failed.

Georgian Phil Kent in his excellent book, “The Dark Side of Liberalism,” writes, “The Dark Side constantly attacks what is right and true.”  Kent’s timely book echoes John Richard Neuhaus’ claim that the public square has become the “naked square,” shorn of and now disallowing any mention of transcendent values.

So here we are.  The revolutionaries searched for the soul’s basement and found it.  But Kent’s last chapter is titled “Where do we go from here?” and his answer is apt: “Fight for future goals with an optimistic eye and a fearless heart.”

 I believe Kent’s optimistic advice is compelling because I’ve seen the sad eyes of too many youths who have tried the way of the revolutionaries, “the dark side,” and are ready for something far more soul-satisfying. 

Yes, there is hope.  A counter-revolution is still possible, and it will necessarily be led by parents who refuse to let a sex-sated culture snatch their children.

Roger Hines

10/10/18

Higher Education, Higher Bankruptcy

                      Higher Education, Higher Bankruptcy

             Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 10/7/18

Six weeks after turning 20, I walked onto the campus of the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.  Somehow I sensed that I had found myself.  Not that the junior college I had attended had failed to stretch or inspire me.  It, too, was a remarkable place.  East Central Jr. College in Decatur, Mississippi had reminded me of Daniel Webster’s remark about his beloved Dartmouth, “She may be small, but there are those of us who love her.”

            Southern Miss, though, was a growing university, already bigger than Ole Miss or Mississippi State.  I had never seen a village, as it were, known for the splendor of Greek architecture, whether in its classroom buildings, the dome-clad administrative building, the president’s home, or even student dorms.  The buildings seemingly pointed to high purpose.  Their columns pointed you to things beyond your present world, things like a better world.

            Ninety miles to the north where I had grown up, one rarely saw resplendent buildings.  Our glory was mostly futuristic: the fresh meat we would enjoy for a few months after killing hogs or the beautiful sight of the garden and the fields after all the crops were “laid by,” left to grow while we anticipated harvest.

            There was present glory, of course.  We had neighbors up and down the road who cared for each other, and plenty of food although almost everything else was always in short supply.  As for architecture, even the smallest country churches had steeples that pointed gloriously upward, a reality that had an unrealized effect on us. 

            Entering the university campus was a life-changing experience. The buildings and grounds around me held promise.  They would deepen my understanding of history and of the importance of beauty.  They would remind me that someone had the vision and foresight to build fair gardens like this campus in order for youths to prepare themselves to do their part in advancing civilization.  They would deepen my respect for my father who was so smart, so well read, and so interested in the world, yet so bound by responsibilities that he would never have dreamed of walking onto a university campus.

             I know, these are all high-flung thoughts.  Today, that American institution called the university cares little for high-flung thoughts or tradition.  To the modern university, tradition is a shackle, certainly not an inspiration.  Not so in European nations.  For all their wrongheadedness (globalism, incurable love for monarchy’s remnants, the near expulsion of Christianity), at least they don’t tear down buildings just because they are 15 years old.  Not ruled by total pragmatism, their appreciation of landmarks and of history exceeds that of America by light years.

            One wonders if there’s any easy cure for what’s wrong with the university.  Serious students will excel in spite of the university’s weaknesses, but what about the masses, those students who are there without any future vision, who have no sense of anything transcendent, and are therefore drawn to the protest movements, the party scene, and the outlandish “new way of viewing life” such as transgenderism, “fluidity,” and other “alternative life styles.”  There was a time when professors and administrators held students to tough standards.  Get your tails to the library or go back home.  We’re here not just for you but also for the future of the nation and of civilization.

            Universities are now in an intellectual crisis.  Having essentially abandoned their original purpose of liberal education and of becoming an enlightened “friend of man” as Aquinas put it, they are stuck in career ed (for which few people need a university), in sanctuary from the outer world, and in sports mania.  Families go into debt for this?  Examine the course offerings of a major university.  Compare the direction of academia today to the vision of the great Catholic theologian and educator, Cardinal John Henry Newman.

            The university is being replaced by “university life.”  Scholarship is being replaced by the indoctrination of equality, diversity, social justice, and cultural cleansing.  The therapeutic turn of higher education has led to the infantilization of university students.  Across the country there is a head-spinning array of practices intended to make university students feel “safe.”  Many universities are providing chill-out rooms.  Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School allow therapy dogs in their libraries.  Emotional fragility is the order of the day.  Universities are teaching fear, not courage.

            Droll thoughts, I realize.  But ask university students if their thought world is being challenged, or if their love for life or for anything outside of themselves is being deepened.  Financial bankruptcy is one thing, but intellectual/spiritual bankruptcy is quite another and is much sadder.

Roger Hines

10/3/18

           

             

Wishing Women Well

                                  Wishing Women Well

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 9/30/18

            I’m thinking a great deal about women teachers these days, their school year still lying before them.  In fact, I’m going to sing their praises since I know from close experience how important and how unheralded they are.

            Why women teachers?  Frankly, because their influence on me and the debt I owe them is beyond measure.  I’m not referring to the teachers who taught me, though I also owe them a great debt of gratitude, but to female colleagues past and present.  I’m grateful for the men with whom I’ve taught over the years.  Coaches, particularly, are my heroes.  But in the two states, six schools and three colleges I’ve taught in, the women teachers have outnumbered the men more than two to one.  Individually and as a group, these women bear several distinctives.

            Some readers will view the following observations as condescending.  Sorry.  I still open and close the car door for my wife and intend to do so until I’m bent double.  Others might think these observations are out of step with modern times.  I certainly hope so.  There are many things about our exciting present world which I hope I never adapt to such as declining manners, vulgar language, our nation’s passionate love affair with alcohol, and all of the outlandish talk about choosing our gender.  In many ways the present age is better; in many ways it isn’t.

            But regarding women, it’s a long way from the ‘70s cry, “I am woman; hear me roar” to the contemporary “Me Too” movement.  Gloria Steinem, in her first issue of “Ms Magazine” declared, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”  Turns out, quite a few women now need the help of men and other women alike to bolster their claims of past male misbehavior.

            I’ve been surrounded by women my entire life.  Here’s how: one mother, ten sisters, fifteen nieces, one wife, two daughters, two daughters-in-law, six granddaughters, and over 400 stellar women in the teaching profession.  Except for the ten sisters, such a scenario is not uncommon for most other men in teaching.

            For what they are worth, here are four conclusions I’ve drawn from working among females.

            One, they are as protective of men as men supposedly are of women.  OK, risky language for these overly sensitive times, but most female teachers, married or not, parents or not, possess a Mama Bear complex.  To me this is joyous.  The first year I taught school, every woman in the building encouraged and “looked after” me and two other male neophytes.  My second year, at age 23 at an all black school, dear female teachers who knew my unstated and un-discussed mission for being there would say, “Mr. Hines, we gonna look out for you and you gonna be alright.”  Lord, I loved those women and still do.

            Women teachers tend to “look out” for their male students as well as for the coaches and all other male teachers.  Such an attitude makes for a productive and enviable workplace.

            Two, their sense of self and self-confidence is neither fragile nor undeveloped.  Women teachers are tough.  You will probably never hear a female teacher demand “safe space” or “sanctuary.”  You might hear a big 6-foot boy beg for safe space from his female teacher.  One of the pleasures of life is seeing a petite female teacher dress down a big, tall, smarty pants boy, reducing him to fear.

            Three, their families perch at the front of their minds.  Please get this.  Female teachers with families deal with children or teens all day, go home and serve their families, and then at 9:30 or 10:00 PM sit down to prepare or review for their next day of teaching.  Standing before people to teach requires ongoing thought and preparation.  Am I trying to evoke sympathy for female teachers?  Yes.  They manage two operations, a family and a full teaching load.  So, of course, do non-teaching working women, but right now I’m celebrating teachers.

            Four, like my wife Nancy, most women teachers could run the world.  Organization and execution are two of their greatest strengths.

            Oh, Nancy, I see you denying yourself, pouring your life into the lives of a husband and four children.  Betty Gray, Sue Gandy, Stella Ross, Jeanette McCloud, and Carla Northcutt, you my five female supervisors, I see you lending your inestimable intelligence and energy to Cobb County Schools, making a mark that still is apparent today.

            God, please bless all of our women teachers and please give them a good school year.

Roger Hines

9/26/18

           

The Augusts of My Life

                                 The Augusts of My Life

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 9/9/18

            With the exception of three years, I have entered a public school or college classroom every August of my life since 1950.

            Pardon the excursion into numerology, but that’s sixty-nine Augusts minus three which equals sixty-six.  Of those sixty-six Augusts, sixteen were spent as a student; fifty were spent on the other side of the desk.

            Today in London, England I am pondering those fifty Augusts that began in 1966. This, my fiftieth August year, is being interrupted by a brief vacation.

            Yes, I ponder.  Why have I given fifty Augusts to teaching youths and young adults about language, literature, English history, and writing?  Why have I pointed students to merry England, English poets, and the grandeur of London, that beacon of western civilization?  Of what good is teaching English literature?  Who actually thinks youths can be dragged from their technology long enough to learn, much less appreciate what things were like before technology enveloped us all?  What do English studies have to do with gainful employment?

            More personally, how did I go from southern country boy to lover of England and a teacher of poetry and all things British?  Good grief!  My youth was spent hoeing, castrating calves, cleaning barns and chicken houses, picking cotton, digging potatoes, and wringing chickens’ necks in time to have chicken for supper.  Since I enjoyed every day of it, how did Shakespeare, Tennyson, Charles Dickens, and Churchill wiggle their proper selves through my mundane existence into my brain and soul?

            They had some help, and not just from my parents and teachers.  Up and down a country road, farmers and their wives lived, practiced, and exemplified the contemplative life.  They may have never heard of England’s William Wordsworth but they believed that “the world is too much with us / getting and spending we lay waste our powers / little we see in nature that is ours.”

            Those farmers also cared about what was going on in the truly “outside” world.  They had endured the Great Depression and sent sons to the second Great War.  They had plenty to contemplate.  Contemplate and speak of it all, they did.

            It was a Greek non-writer, Socrates, who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” but it was the many British writers who, like Tennyson, urged contemplation and challenged readers to “to seek a newer world / to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”  Hobson Harvey may have been the only farmer on Old Highway 80 ever to quote Tennyson, but all of them would drop poetic lines from time to time, indicating that somewhere along the way the poets of yesteryear had reached them.

            For the questions raised in the fourth paragraph above, I found answers many Augusts ago.  I saw the answers writ large on the faces of high schoolers as far back as the late sixties.  It was obvious, and still is in this fiftieth August year, that youths need the contemplation that the study of literature provides.  I’ve learned that college students as well need and can find answers for life’s deepest questions (meaning and purpose) in literature and in the thoughtful discussion of it.  Sports, malls, and pleasures of all sorts can provide needed respite and relieve stress, but they don’t deal with life’s deepest questions.  Literature does.  In a fashion, so can history. 

            I’m glad I stayed in teaching.  Twice I almost quit.  Yes, what most drives teachers from teaching is students and what most keeps teachers in teaching is students as well.  Learning that former student Harold Melton was installed this week as Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court was an emotional delight.  Melton was a prince if I ever saw one.  Running into former students who have successfully maintained a small business is just as satisfying.  Both the Harold Meltons and the Average Joes can keep a teacher going.

            Tomorrow we go to Downing Street.  No doubt a guide or a brochure will resurrect Disraeli, Gladstone, Churchill, and Thatcher, and let them say a few words.  But for all the contributions that Prime Ministers have made, the poets and the natural world they pointed us to have prodded the soul more.  As Wordsworth put it, “One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man / Of moral evil and of good / Than all the sages can.”

            Next week it’s back to the books and resumption of the fiftieth August since, as the American poet Frost reminded us, “the woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.”

Roger Hines

9/5/18

           

                   

           

Long Live the Nations

                                                Long Live the Nations

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 9/2/18                   

Is denialism a word?  If not, let’s make it one, defining it as the mental state of those who absolutely cannot (will not?) accept a verifiable reality.

 Denialism is a condition marked by an irrational refusal to accept the reality of a historical event such as, say, a presidential election. Those afflicted with this condition, the deniers, are off the rails, seemingly beyond help. Their condition leads to blindness, obstinacy, and incurable anger.    

One example of this affliction is former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.  Bill Clinton’s former cabinet member declared this week that the Trump presidency should be annulled.  Asserting that Robert Mueller’s findings could prove Trump colluded with the Russians to win the election, Reich went on to argue that such findings would further prove that Trump’s presidency “was therefore not authorized under the U.S. Constitution.”   

Such a leap of logic and such hazy words are the reason God made lawyers.  Lawyers, since they traffic in hazy English, could probably understand Reich’s logic and explain how annulment would be effectuated, but for us simple lay people it’s clear that Mr. Reich and many other deniers cannot accept the fact that Donald Trump was elected President.  Twenty-two months after that election, Reich and other Trump-haters are still shaking their heads, protesting, crying, hurling epithets toward Pennsylvania Avenue, and plotting.

            My question is what do Reich and others who are similarly afflicted think of those who put Trump in office?  We know the answer.  Those who put Trump in office are the unwashed, the non-college graduates, working folks, people of faith, neo-Confederates, Southerners and mid-landers, non-readers, NASCAR fans, and closet segregationists.  You might call them deplorables.

            Oh yeah, they’re also America First types and “nativists,” or nationalists.

            This last designation – nationalists – to whom the media is unwilling to grant personhood, is the reason Trump won and deniers lost.  As in Europe, so is there in America a nationalist/populist insurgency, a sentiment that rejects globalism and argues for sovereign nations.  On the rise across the globe, nationalism is actually a simple cry for localism, for a place in the sun where people of like values, traditions, and customs can live, work, and raise their families.

            When John Kerry was running for president, his wife Theresa Heinz declared she was a globalist.  When George W. Bush and Barack Obama were serving as president, they governed as globalists.  “We’re a global economy,” they both preached.  “Those jobs are not coming back.”

            Well, jobs do come back when different leaders with different policies prevail.  Nationalism is the reason Britain broke from the European Union.  It is the political force that has been felt in Italy, France, Austria, India, and Japan.  Under-represented and unnoticed for too long, the world’s deplorables are speaking out.

            What was communism other than the forceful gathering up of small European nations and placing them into a “union” of Soviets?  Communism ran roughshod over small nation states with their own languages, borders, and culture.

 If there was ever a fake nation, it was Yugoslavia, a post-World War I concoction of six republics with five languages, three religions and two alphabets.  Wish my Italian sister-in-law could tell you about it.  As the joke goes, there was never but one Yugoslav and that was Tito, the Yugoslavian dictator.  When Tito died in 1980, Yugoslavia died with him as at least six nations began to re-assert their cultural identity.

Donald Trump’s rise to power, like Britain’s exit from the EU, was brought about by a renewed spirit of nationalism.  Like it or not, the cry, “Build the Wall,” is no different from the cry of the Balkan states who wished to establish anew just who they were.

Democrat, Republican, and media elites are nervous.  Deplorables actually scare them.  Poor students of history, the elites seem not to know that nationalism freed the Soviet Union satellites from Russian domination thirty years ago.  Deplorables believe nationalism will free them from lost jobs, open borders, lawless illegal aliens, and bad trade deals. 

There’s hope.  The U.S. and Mexico have reached a deal on trade.  What happened to the trade war?

Those deplorables (the normals) are smart.  Unlike the deniers, they understand the meaning of nation, community, and culture.  They know that nationalism is not at odds with free markets and that it has often nourished resistance to tyranny.

How interesting. If the near future belongs to nationalists, it automatically belongs to the deplorables who understand manual labor and geo-politics as well.

Who would have thunk it?

Roger Hines

8/29/18