As I sit here, I have a nice cuppa joe, have read the only interesting part of our local paper (the arts & entertainment section), and am watching BookTV.
Yesterday I read two books: The Godless Constitution and Little Birds. The former was a polemic that explored the wall of separation between church and state in the country and ranted against the Xtian right. It was exceedingly interesting. Not only did I learn quite a bit but I also just love tales about Thomas Jefferson. On my bookshelf sits a 6-volume biography of Jefferson and the nickel is my favorite coin as his visage is on it. While I recognize that the Founding Fathers were mere mortals and highly imperfect, Jefferson is a bit of a role model for me. I would love to be able to go back in time and meet the guy. He was a true Renaissance Man, a genuine product of the Enlightenment. Intelligent, articulate, a leader, an amateur scientist and inventor, founder of the University of Virginia, promoter of agrarian ideals, politician, statesman, and on and on. It's incredibly disheartening to think of Jefferson, our third president, and men like him building a country from scratch after booting out the English crown and then to turn around and see George W. Bush in the White House. A very unintellectual man, the leader of the free world who, in my opinion, is so because of his father and not really because of any qualities of his own.
It sometimes flummoxes me how little Americans know about the founding of this country. In order for me to graduated from the 8th grade and get into high school, I had to pass a test on the Constitution. My Social Studies class that year was dedicated to passing the test. We started off my learning about the Age of Exploration, moved on to the colonization of this land, and on to the formation of the Republic. As a class, we went over the Constitution section by section, article by article, and amendment by amendment. It seems that most people only have these concepts about "free speech" and a "right to bear arms".
More locally for me, I live in a city named after James Madison, known as "Father of the Constitution" for good reason. The streets on the isthmus here are named after the signers of the Constitution, men who, for the most part, are unknown to Americans. Most of them aren't on our money and don't have national holidays in their honor. Richard Bassett, Jonathan Dayton, Nicholas Gilman, et al. I have lived on Bassett, Dayton, and Gilman Streets. King Street was not named after Martin Luther King, Jr. but after Rufus King of Massachusetts. (Though we do now have a boulevard named after MLK.)
Speaking of history, a gentleman named Chalmers Johnson is on TV talking about his book The Sorrows of Empire. He makes many comparisons between the United States right now with the Roman Empire. Very disconcerting...
All of this aside, the book refuted the claims of the religious right in this country that the United States was found to be a "Xtian Nation". A lot of good history - I wish the book were longer.
I also read Anais Nin's Little Birds. Never having read anything by her, I was excited to explore some unknown territory. And I wasn't disappointed.
A reader emailed me saying that the story about the woman on the dunes was her favorite and I must say that I really enjoyed it as well. Overall the book was good. I think that Nin writes very well and I love the way she describes passion and sex. (I found myself becoming hard more than once.) My main gripe is that I wish most of the stories were longer. They were like a tease and I thought that there were various emotions, various feelings of the characters that, in my opinion, deserved to be fleshed out more as they seemed to have bearing on the story. But these emotions were often glossed over in the name of moving the story forward. I found myself wanting to see the bigger picture, to see more depth of the conflicting emotions, if that makes any sense. Still, as I said, I did enjoy the book tremendously. As for the story about the woman on the dunes, I really loved the juxtaposition of the encounter on the dunes with the one in the crowd watching the hanging. Two very different scenarios for the flowering of passion. Great stuff!
Last night, my roommates and I went to see The Fog of War. Again, I cannot urge you enough to check out Errol Morris' body of work. I promote him, not only because he is a graduate of the same university as me, but because he is a great documentarian. One roommate and I loved it while the other didn't get anything out of it, which I found unfortunate. Morris doesn't make your typical documentaries. There's no omniscient narrator, no man with a deep voice telling the audience things that they are then supposed to take as truth. There's no real story, no great examination of events. Morris does character studies. And in The Fog of War he studies Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense from 1961-68. I was rather shocked that Stevie didn't know who he was.
The film isn't about history, it's about a person. It's also about the nature of truth. Ken Burns makes documentaries that relate events to viewers. Morris isn't interested in that as much as documenting how elusive truth is. The viewer isn't supposed to believe everything McNamara tells you. He describes how he went to college and loved his philosophy/ehtics courses. Then he is in the military during World War II and helped the brass decide to fire bomb Japan resulting in the horrendous loss of countless women and children. Then he begins working for Ford Motor Company where he is instrumental in implementing saftey features such as padded dash boards and seat belts. After that, he becomes Secretary of Defense under JFK and the Vietnam War begins. So many contradictions, so much ambivalence. Who is Robert McNamara? Why did he refuse to criticize the war after he left office? Wherein lies the truth?
Morris doesn't present a series of events in a history lesson, he presents a person and asks the viewer to extract an impression of the person. And to take that impression and then ask "What does this say about me? About all people?" I think this is why Stevie didn't like the film, didn't understand it. He was expecting to see a chronological series of facts, to be given concrete information. Instead he was given a series of contradictory reminisces and asked to think about how McNamara is himself. And, in my opinion, Stevie wasn't prepared to nor inclined to do so.
I know I've been threatening this for a while, but today - I swear to Christ - I am going to see The Passion of the Christ. Oh, and my next read is going to be The Bell by Iris Murdoch.
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