At his press conference Friday, the President-Elect said he was rereading Lincoln for “inspiration,” but he may also want to take another look at David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest.”
Like JFK, Barack Obama values brains, but Halberstam’s book might inspire him to be wary of the hubris that can blindside academic brilliance without accompanying insight into the realities of human behavior, as it did with Kennedy’s overachievers who went on to bring down LBJ with their tunnel vision of the Vietnam war.
Obama has shown the self-awareness and empathy–some call it “emotional intelligence”–needed for leadership but, in overturning all the clichés about “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” the real test will come in creating and managing a government with all those qualities.
“The second most remarkable thing about his election,” Nicholas Kristof writes, “is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual…
“Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse—a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance—doesn’t get very far either.”
But, Kristof adds, “It doesn’t help that intellectuals are often as full of themselves as of ideas.”
September 28th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
Dear Brave Souls,
You may have noticed that Joe, our Ed-in-Chief, had written about how I would be covering the DNC from outside, and that I posted for two days and suddenly went incognito for a long while with no posts. Just on that second day of the DNC, we’d had a loved one in our family suddenly-diagnosed with that one word none of us wants to hear… one of the most staggering words in the English language that anyone, I think, can ever hear… and this diagnosis of Stage IV, was delivered with such harshness and lack of care that the dr’s delivery wounded as much as the diagnosis, only in a different way. I think there must be something somewhere called ’second degree crimes against the spirit.’
So. For one more day, I was trying to alternate between hospital and DNC, about 50 miles apart from each other and from my home ….until I felt I could not, just could not do it; that spirit and soul were wholly resisting being dragged away like a poor dog hauled away by its collar, while scraping and clawing to stay with its loved one.
(Before I threw in towel, I hope you did catch a bit more than just the nonstop MSmedia coverage of ‘funny-hats-balloon-drops’ at the DNC– via my posts about the craziness re Michelle Malkin on the street (with video); as well as the Fox producer being manhandled, (along with film clip); and a clang piece on Al Jazeera news org renting a country-and-western tavern normally patronized by tough motorcycle/ war vets. I was also able to write about police interviews re men arrested for bragging they’d come to kill Obama, and all the guns and weaponry they had with them. There were several other articles I was able to put up on TMV)
But turning away from DNC, it is now over a month ago… and I am still writing for TMV and my other column at The National Catholic Reporter online, and am daily thinking of ways to just love and support our loved one. I know you know it from your own experience in life– it’s not fancy– at bottom, it’s just that I don’t want her to be alone. Also, oddly, I think you have to take time to be in another reality (writing) so you can remain strong in the other world too. It’s an odd mix of needing to be in several worlds at one time or the heart will somehow not rest right, I think…
So, today, I came to ask you this about some critical provisions for this road ahead…
I am ask if you have music you listen to lift you, strengthen you, calm you, would you post your suggestions here?It may be helpful to others who are walking a hard road right now, as well.
I’ll share mine with you below… that is, the musics I listen to that I find create and change mood, outlook, perhaps even attitude… Music as vitamins. Music as medicine, maybe. Music maybe even as steroids! Here are my lists:
He was as American as you can get. The actor who died today was an icon, but the man was even more–someone who loved his country, not in an abstract or flag-waving way, but as a patriot who opposed bad wars and gave millions to people in pain.
In 1968, our paths crossed as we both stepped out of our working lives to try to stop the war in Vietnam. When I invited him to lunch with a dozen magazine editors, he told me the prospect of talking about himself was so unnerving he had stayed too long in a steam bath to calm down. Sitting next to him, I had to titrate the balance of beer and ice water to keep Newman relaxed and hydrated as he eloquently described his feelings about the war.
In the early 1980s, our mutual friend A. E. Hotchner wrote about their light-hearted efforts to bottle and sell Newman’s salad dressing. Since then, a line of Newman’s Own products has earned a quarter of a billion dollars for charities, especially those affecting children.
“While his philanthropic interests and donations were wide-ranging,” reads a statement from his foundation, “he was especially committed to the thousands of children with life-threatening conditions served by the Hole in the Wall Camps, which he helped start over 20 years ago. He saw the Camps as places where kids could escape the fear, pain and isolation of their conditions, kick back, and raise a little hell. Today, there are 11 Camps around the world, with additional programs in Africa and Vietnam. Through the Camps, well over 135,000 children have had the chance to experience what childhood was meant to be.
“In Paul’s words: ‘I wanted to acknowledge luck; the chance and benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others, who might not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it.’”
Paul Newman was married to Joanne Woodward for 50 years, and they lived in Westport, Ct. When someone asked him about marital fidelity, he famously answered, “Why go out for hamburger when you can have steak at home?”
He will live forever in old movies as Butch Cassidy, Henry Gondorff, Cool Hand Luke, Hud, Fast Eddie Felson and all those memorable Americans he created, but some of us will remember him as the man with the bluest eyes we had ever seen–and the biggest heart.
In a hybrid of defense closing argument and political obituary, David Brooks in today’s New York Times comes forward as a character witness for “a serious man prone to serious things.”
Citing his candor, humility, “crusade” against corruption and, most of all, his “impressive” years as the Iraq war deteriorated, Brooks attempts to separate that John McCain from today’s campaigner “without a groundbreaking argument about why he is different” who has had to “rely on tactical gimmicks to stay afloat.”
Brooks says that failure comes “in part because of his Senate training and the tendency to take issues on one at a time—-in part, because of the foolish decision to run a traditional right-left campaign against Obama and, in part, because McCain has never really resolved the contradiction between the Barry Goldwater and Teddy Roosevelt sides of his worldview.
“One day he’s a small-government Western conservative; the next he’s a Bull Moose progressive. The two don’t add up–as we’ve seen in his uneven reaction to the financial crisis.”
September 12th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
We could see pods of whales this time, and
call it First Semester, and
go up where they trap humongous crabs and call it
Quarterly Exams, and
we could look straight down on the AlCan, and
tip a wing and wave at villagers, and
hoist up over mountains all the way to the Chukchi, and
call it Sociology and Cartography, and
we could land in knee-high fog on a lake I know, and
call it Ancient History, and
we could eat so much fresh fish we’d grow gills, and
call it Retro-Evolution, and
we could make a small fire and
let the gentle smoke make us tired, and
we could call it Elemental Physics, and
we could laugh a lot, and
we could sleep dreamily at night, and
the ka-trillion stars overhead
would cover us like a sparkling blanket
in this dark, and
we could call that True Astronomy, and
we could shed all the clanking armor
our cynicism has created, and
name its true genus: Self-sedation, and
we could remember who we were once,
in all goodness and wild instinct, and
we could be restored, and
we could forget
to have our usual ‘metro-induced amnesia,’ and
instead just be
Broken …
Broken –Open– By This Beauty Everywhere…
July 6th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
THE SELKIE
Starbucks chose the motif of the mermaid, a beautiful and ancient motif about which there are many stories. In one of my books I tell the story about how just such a mermaid sickens and dries out when lured to land by a man who says he loves her. But, she cannot abide his way of living, nor what he requires of her… she cannot become as the man wishes just because he wishes it so.
She is harmed by being forced to live endlessly according to land-locked rules. The mermaid– often in the oldest stories, called ‘the selkie,’– has to return to the water in order to live. During her time on land, she gradually loses the sparkle to her flesh, loses her moistness. Her body is dried, weakened and her eyes gone near blind, …but one night, she hears the call of the old grandfather selkie calling her home. Somehow, she finds her way to the water again, and diving under the waves, is restored.
But not without sadness, to leave the man. And not without the man’s sadness to have lost his dream.
Here in the west where I live, there once were mom and pop coffee shops everywhere. They had magazine bars and great live music, and small delis, and armchairs and outdoor seating under umbrellas, and many kinds of tea and coffee. Some had short order. Some had bakeries attached out back. Mom and pop and whoever worked there knew not only everyone by name, but by ailment, by achievement, by current challenge each customer was happily or sadly facing. You know, asked after every soul who walked in.
The mom and pop joints were more like Cheers than like American Idol. There were regulars; the core group that was friendly and funny. Strangers were included, invited into the conversations with a, Hey buddy what do you think? There was much, much laughter.
In the week since he died, after all the millions of words about his life, there is the question of, beyond the self-love of media people celebrating themselves, why do so many people everywhere care so much about Tim Russert’s death?
Peggy Noonan has the start of an answer: “The world admires, and wants to hold on to, and not lose, goodness. It admires virtue. At the end it gives its greatest tributes to generosity, honesty, courage, mercy, talents well used, talents that, brought into the world, make it better…That’s what we talk about in eulogies, because that’s what’s important. We don’t say, ‘The thing about Joe was he was rich.’ We say, if we can, ‘The thing about Joe was he took care of people.’”
In the week’s outpouring of sentiment, there was a striking emphasis on Russert’s random acts of kindness-concern for people and their families far beyond the token gestures of a political life. After all the talk about his work, we are left with the residue of a sweet man who lived out E. M. Forster’s injunction, “Only connect!”
What we long for in our hyperactive, overcrowded and wised-up lives is some joining of what Forster called “the prose and the passion”–some sense of a feeling heart behind all the cunning and the calculation of it all.
Tim Russert of Buffalo and Washington knew just what E M. Forster of Cambridge and “Howard’s End” meant.
One night in 1968, my father was in a Manhattan ballroom for the first time in his life, watching Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. hand me an award. The expression on his face was the essence of “nachas,” the word immigrants used for the joy and pride their children give them to redeem a lifetime of suffering.
I had been six or so at a Fourth of July parade when the colors came by and my father’s hat went flying from his head, knocked off by the beefy hand of a red-faced man behind us pointing at the flag. Shame and rage rose in me, but my father only smiled sweetly, nodded and bent to pick up the hat.
Years later, I read that, as a child, Sigmund Freud was told by his father that a man had grabbed his new fur cap and flung it into the mud, shouting, “Jew, get off the street.” Freud recalled angrily asking, “What did you do?” His father answered calmly, “I stepped into the gutter and picked up my cap.” In dreams, Freud would later note, a hat may stand for male genitals.
My father never talked about the past. I knew him only as a man who went to work early, came home late, ate his dinner, kissed me goodnight and went to bed. We did not play ball or go to games or listen to them on the radio. He told no stories and passed on no fatherly wisdom. He expected nothing, envied no one. He just slaved sixty hours a week to put food in my mouth, and he loved me without words. What I learned about his life came later and not from him.
June 12th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
“He was the meaning of joy,” said John Nordmeyer, an uncle.
There are a bunch of middle aged men across the nation who tonight sit quietly in their living rooms. The TV set might be off.
They didn’t want to eat much tonight.
Many are at their laptops now, silently tap tap tapping out messages to reach out to others. To try to find some, something. Words would help. But, maybe accurate words would actually hurt.
When my husband heard the news at work, he’d immediately sent me an email. The email header said something this rough gruff guy never says. The subject line read: Please pray with me. His email ended, “I’m so sad for them I can’t even talk about this.” I called him right away. He said in that semi-strangled voice that men use when they feel everything and yet numb all at the same time: “Baby we lost four of our boys.”
I had heard; a call had come from a post-trauma colleague just before who was 20 miles outside Little Sioux camp. It’s bad, my friend said. It’s bad. More than half injured bad. 4 dead.
My husband is a scout master, has just raised by hand along with other hardworking scoutmasters an entire litter of little guys for the last many years. They just crossed over from cub scouts to boy scouts three months ago.
I go to banquets with long tables covered with paper tablecloths and eat baked beans and barbeque and soggy corn. I sit through the many awards and beadings and orders conferred on grown men (and women) of every age and condition …those who give huge amounts of their lives weeknights and weekends to teach wood lathing, survival skills, soup kitchen hash slinging, cooking, sewing, finances, stalwartness, honor and manners to a bunch of darling fissioning young scamps.
Then one day, it all comes together. The young scouts line up and their shirts are not sloppy at the belt line anymore, their ties are on straight instead of flying sideways They carry on a conversation that has content instead of giggling like squirrels, they pray together and mean it, play together and achieve together, and mean it.
There are some who critique the Boy Scouts for various reasons, but tonight, with two dead boys aged a mere 13, and the other two dead boys having merely 14 years on this earth… that they are gone after a fierce tornado hit a special Boy Scout camp, a camp called to rendezvous under the banner of Leadership… well, in the Scouts, even though people don’t know each other when they live hundreds and thousands of miles apart, they know each other. They do. Brothers by different mothers. Siempre.
It has often been said that just as there is no such thing as a former Marine, there is also no such thing as a former Boy Scout. Well speaking as a Boy Scout for nearly 30 years I felt obligated to post a little bit about the recent heroics by a group of young Scouts in Iowa.
This week a tornado ripped through a Boy Scout camp in Iowa. The storm killed four of the scouts and caused many injuries. Given that these are just boys, barely into their teens, it would not be at all surprising for them to have reacted with panic or fear.
But that is not what happened with this brave group of men. Echoing the long time Scouting motto “Be Prepared” they quickly sprang into action. Scouts moved to provide first aid to the injured around the camp, becoming the only form of rescue or relief as outside rescuers fought fallen trees to make the mile long trek to the camp.
Iowa Governor Chet Culver has praised the Scouts as true heroes, and I am hard pressed to argue with his assessment.
So the next time you see a group of Scouts out helping the community, take a minute to remember that sometimes these young guys in uniform show some of the heroics of their older brothers.
June 10th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
The River Time Machine
Split bamboo was enough once,
no fancy graphite anything.
‘Whipping the water’ beautifully…
was not yet ‘a casting-arm arc’
plotted with computer precision
Away from clattering cities,
it was just one soul
standing in the water…
Where did the ability to swing the line
so gently left to right, come from?
How did pulling the rod tip back slow
find its knack in a man?
And now, where does letting loose the line
Find its way into men who have been trained
to leave no light showing
between any two moments of their days?
Yet, isn’t it clear that all the old knowing
can rush back into any over-civilized man…
just by him wading into wild water?
This Memorial Day, as they have for the past five years, residents of Skowhegan, Maine will be thinking about Jay Aubin, one of the first among 4081-and-counting American troops to die in Iraq.
What the numbers conceal is the continuing grief of countless families, friends and neighbors in every corner of the country who live with the loss of young men and women like Aubin, who was 36 when he died on March 20, 2003, leaving behind a wife, two young children and memories of a good life.
On a wall at Margaret Chase Smith School in Skowhegan are pictures of him from the time he was a middle-schooler who wanted to be a pilot to photos of a Marine officer with his flight helmet next to a helicopter with markings on the side: Capt. “Sweet Pea” Aubin, so named for his upbeat attitude.
A teacher there has used him as a model to show students they can achieve whatever they want and still be kind to people. “If you can be ‘Sweet Pea’ and be a macho Marine pilot, you can be ‘Sweet Pea’ on the playground, ‘Sweet Pea’ in the cafeteria,” he explains. “There’s no reason not to be nice no matter who you are or who you want to be.”
Apparently he never changed. As a Marine, Aubin, who didn’t drink, would check a bus out of the motor pool and park in front of the dance hall after a ball to provide rides for those who drank too much.
“If the helicopter goes down and anyone is killed, I want to go, too,” he once told his mother.
Aubin died in a crash during a dust storm near the Kuwait border in the first days of the war.
Today, as politicians make speeches and veterans march and flags fly, the people who knew him will be thinking of a man called “Sweet Pea,” as countless others will be remembering young men and women like him. No words or symbols will take away the pain of losing them.
May 11th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
For those whose good mothers have died
…for those who were lucky enough to have had what I call, “a beautiful, imperfectly-perfect mother,” but one who too early passed from this world, especially hard when she has been the ground note for her sons and daughters.
Some of us did not have a mother we can remember without fear, but even that doesn’t keep us from recognizing that special bond between many mothers and their children wherever we see it– and blessing that such bounty came to pass for them.
This is just meant to place a hand on the shoulders of those who might miss their mothers, just to take a moment to say, even though your mom is gone or leave-taking in some way, there was and is presence of her still. As long as you are here, she is here.
