Robert Francis Kennedy, 1925-1968

Some unfinished thoughts, for an unfinished life that ended when I was almost 13. My father was making breakfast when the news came over the radio.
I don't know much, and the more I learn the dumber I get (or at least, the more cognizant of my own ignorance), but one of the things I do know is that humanity is always in a race between creation and destruction. When Sirhan Sirhan, or whoever, resolved that Robert Kennedy must die, it was for nonsensical reasons, a pact with chaos. I'm not Manichean enough to declare this a war between good and evil, nor Freudian enough to call it Thanatos and Eros, or speculate on the existence of a "death wish" or "life force".
I've been around long enough to recognize ambiguity, to understand that no one is a villain in their own eyes, not even Hitler or Stalin. Indeed, their murderousness might be due in part to seeing themselves as repositories of virtue, or, in Stalin or Pol Pot's case, simply not caring. T, H. White called it "the awful dream of Genghis Khan".
One step forward, two steps back, some build and others work twice as hard to destroy. It's a tragedy that we build these hopeful sandcastles, that can be so quickly knocked down by bullies. The answer, I suppose, would be to build a society or culture that's not so easily torn down.
But that requires certainty, something Hamlet lacks, but Anne Coulter posseses in great measure, until as Yeats says, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity."
One of my bedside books is a collection from Robert Kennedy's journals, commonplace book, and speeches put together by his son Max: Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy. There's a lot of Camus, and the Greeks that Robert Kennedy discovered after the death of his second brother:
"I feel rather like Augustine did before becoming a Christian when he said, 'I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere'" Camus says. I think of that scene in Angel when Angel believes he is about to confront "the source of evil", the Devil himself-- and instead, the magic elevator drops him off back on the street, surrounded by humanity. Humanity doesn't change its ways as easily as a dragon, and the reformer would have to cure the patient without killing him.
Some people expect this struggle to be linear, to do a job and be done with it, slay the dragon, win the Cold War, declare an "end to history" like Francis Fukyama said after the collapse of the Soviet system. But our struggles against destruction are circular, like changing diapers or washing dishes, and we have to get up and do it again. A priest who fed the hungry a la Mother Theresa to an interviewer that the worst part about his job was that it was boring.
We lost our way when the pivotal figures in the social justice movement were so violently taken out, as when the Gracchi brothers in republican Rome were killed in the street for advancing reform. The fear today is that Obama will be killed as well, and society will collapse back into irony, indifference and opportunism as it did in 1968. Maybe our model ought to be someone like Tony Benn, the British reformer who keeps chipping away at the boulders.
"Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from becoming a world where children are tortured," Camus goes on. "But we can reduce the number of tortured children."

“Die Weltliteratur” by Milan Kundera, Part One: Snobbery on the Left

I love this guy Milan Kundera. You think he's talking about one thing, then you find out he's talking about something much more profound than the stated topic and by the end of the article or book he's set off a couple of cherry bombs and who knows where the pieces land?

"Die Weltliteratur" in the January 8 NEW YORKER (it's not posted online, so you're going to have to buy the magazine) starts out asking us to read more books by foreign authors and turns into a discussion of class among so-called progressives. I was struck by his description of the abuse heaped on Camus by other intellectuals for not being the right sort of person (an Algerian pied noir) and "not knowing what to think" in order to fit in, although time has shown Camus to be on the right side of most fights and a greater friend of humanity than the occasional Stalinist Sartre.

Simone deBeauvoir gave tongue to questions about gender and social class (her thoughts on pay equity in traditionally female occupations like teaching and nursing were a revelation for me after ten years on the psych ward and twenty years as a teacher). She then ditched the raffish Nelson Algren in favor of the abusive Sartre. My prejudice in favor of Algren is well-known, but we're talking about a man whose great-heartedness was recognized instincively by Billie Holliday, versus that friend of the oppressed Jean Paul who said "it was not our duty to write about Soviet labour camps" because it might discourage the French working class who according to Sartre still believed in Santa Claus as well. I'd say maybe it was about sex, but have you gotten a good look at Sartre?

Perhaps because of deBeauvoir's involvement, the snobbery against Camus reminded me of watching the moral collapse of feminism in the 1970s, when the leaders of the movement seemed to abandon working class women who needed a fair wage in favor of navel-gazing about gender. The East Coast magazines were full of the word empowerment but out here there were a lot of abandoned single mothers who had to live in trailers and could have used some help with the electric bill. I remember women talking about Ms. magazine; the magazine's indifference to problems with their subscriptions became a metaphor for the movement leaving them behind.

I remember a childhood Baptist service when an unwashed, poorly dressed black child wandered into the sanctuary during communion; she was eating barbecued potato chips and a grape pop and I at thirteen was the only one who picked up on the symbolism. I still worry if maybe that was Jesus or Elijah, a boddhisatva or one of the ushpizin. The biggest problem in working with poor people who have a lot of problems is that they're poor and have a lot of problems.

This is wandering around a lot and I haven't even gotten to the ideas that affected me the most in this article. That Darn Kundera. Our imaginary relationship is sort of like a man with a rubber ball walking a dog in an overgrown field lined by bushes. Milan Kundera throws the ball or hides it behind his back and teases me-- "where's the ball? Where's the ball?"-- and I, with my brain not much bigger than the tennis ball, go crashing into the bushes, and emerge with mixed results.