"The Road to Character" by David Brooks (Book Review by Bob Racine)

                                Published by Random House, 2015

Anyone who watches the nightly News Hour on Public Television with any regularity should be familiar with Mr. Brooks.  As a pundit and columnist for the New York Times he is called upon each Friday evening, along with Mark Shields, a syndicated columnist, to analyze the week’s news in depth and make prognostications on where the institutions of our government and society are trending.   His most recent book feels to me like a departure from his usual stock in trade, though that may be because I have not read any other of his writings; I only know, and look forward to, his weekly spoken comments in front of the camera that comprise one of the highlights of what I consider the best news program on any TV channel.  (Others who rank with him besides Shields are Michael Gerson and Ruth Marcus, who sometimes fill in when one of these two regulars is absent.)  

The book is based on an assumption that most of us who are entangled in the modern world can hardly refute – that in this twenty-first century, character is not the first consideration when people are planning their lives.  We are living in the age of what Brooks calls the Big Me.  He takes to task the widespread idea that one can do anything one sets one’s mind to do, all by one’s self.  And the notion that joy and satisfaction are the product of self-assertion and aggressive self-advancement!  And the claim, either direct or implied, that “I am special!”  He asserts that there are two faces to each one of us, two sides of the coin, the external person and the internal one, what he calls Adam I and Adam II.  Let me permit him to tell you in his own words, from his Introduction, how he differentiates between the two:

“Adam I (the external) wants to build, create, produce, and discover things.  He wants to have high status and win victories.”  Adam II, the internal, “wants to love intimately, to sacrifice self in the service of others, to live in obedience to some transcendent truth, to have a cohesive soul that honors creation and one’s own possibilities.” 

There is another set of contrasting terms he uses to elucidate this duality of human nature: the “resume virtues” and the “eulogy virtues.”  The former consists of what you offer as proof of your qualifications for one job or another, proof of your accumulated experience, your education, your visible and certifiable attributes that you hope will advance a career and build prestige.  Adam I in other words!  The latter, the eulogy virtues, are those that one would want to be remembered for at life’s close, how one related to others, how one demonstrated caring, what one achieved in service to high ideals, how much of a lasting gift to the surroundings one became during that lifetime.  The very essence of Adam II!    

Lurking at the margin of each observation he makes is an air of the confessional.  He makes clear at one point that he wrote the book “to save my own soul.”  Yeah!  Nothing less!  I do not believe he meant by this that in writing it he was trying to earn his salvation.  In a separate on-line communication recently he set forth his idea of character in its truest form: 

“About once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. . . They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued.  You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude.  They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing.  They are not thinking about themselves at all.”  He goes on to say:  “It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level of career success, but I have not achieved . . . that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.”    

He takes us through a wide spectrum of biographical material, very detailed and thoroughly researched, of people who having completed their earthly lives and are among those in his estimation who had to struggle to find their way out of absorption in Adam I to arrive at a life in Adam II.  He casts a very wide net.  Although it confounds me as to how he thought writing about people in history could turn him into that quality person he wishes he were, I do have to concede that he is thorough about it.   He leaves no stone unturned.  A student of history would be enthralled.

Of course, all the individuals whose lives he visits are deceased.  He probably chose the dead over the contemporary because they have all completed their journeys and supposedly for that reason best embody the motif of the eulogy virtues.  And he is not skimpy with his material; he is, if nothing else, quite thorough and scrupulously well organized.  He errs perhaps more on the side of two much than not enough.  He packs a lot of words into this 270-page tome.

For this reason I do not suggest that the reader take on the entire work.  If you read the Introduction and the last long chapter, you have the heart and soul of his presentation.  Think of the intervening chapters as a smorgasbord.  Decide which biographies stir your interest and curiosity.   Naturally with a review in mind I had to ingest the whole thing, but there are some people he treats who failed to arouse mine.  These are his choices in alphabetical order, and I leave it to each reader to choose what is appealing:  Augustine of Hippo, Dorothy Day, Dwight Eisenhower, George Eliot (alias Mary Anne Evans), Samuel Johnson, George C. Marshall, Frances Perkins, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin.

What we have is the sort of publication in which just about everything the author wants to say is contained in each and every chapter.  If you make a thorough study of any part at random, you are likely to come away from the study feeling as if you have heard everything the author wants to say.  Each and every chapter opens up the total trajectory of the theme.  His writing does not exactly build, one layer on top of another leading toward some ultimate summation.  Each is a special wording, a particular expression of the basic premise. 

Let me not give the impression that I hold any part of the book in serious question.  I found nothing that I would disagree with propositionally.  His judgments about maturity and moral consciousness are quite pithy and sound.  He claims not to be a generous person, but he is more than generous with the space he takes to enlighten us.  He has not written a fiery encyclical or thrown down any gauntlet; he speaks like a friend to a reasonable audience.  He appreciates the fact that character is not something that can be laid out in easy steps.  The road to this character cannot be reduced to a formula or “a shopping list.”  Adam II has to be cultivated over time, a molding and shaping process that stems from a lot of hard internal work and struggle. 

I only wish he had told us about how he personally is undergoing this process.  His is a little too much of an intellectual approach at times.  He never quite gets out of the role of commentator.  Next time maybe he will open his own heart a little wider, tell us about how his own narrative is shaping up, give us more personal testimony.  For all he has put down on paper, he never discusses his own personal life.  Who is David Brooks?  Where is he on the journey?   What transcendent truth is he aiming to be obdient to?

Or maybe he should forget about historical figures and delve further into the lives and experiences of these people he says he meets and admires so much, who he claims he would like to emulate.  Their stories I would guess are every bit as absorbing and would speak to us today with far more incisiveness.  At any rate, he does not make clear how his new personal experiment is coming along.  Has he “saved his soul,” to any extent at all?  Brooks should not belittle the career choice he has made or what he has done with it, as he seems on the verge of doing.  We need the commentators, the pundits, the columnists.  Their overview of what is going on in the world does great good.  His insights, and, yes, even his scholarship, serve a very moral and spiritual purpose.  I am not always sure whether I agree with what he says, but I for one thrive on his words – every week, every season of the year.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Selma (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

                                 2 hrs & 8 min, color, 2014

It has been a half century this year since the events so boldly depicted in “Selma” occurred, the march from Selma, Alabama to the courthouse in the state capitol of Montgomery (in 1965) in which hundreds participated and which broke open the case for voting rights for racial minorities in this country.  It was the catalyst for legislation inaugurated a few weeks later by President Lyndon Johnson known as the Voting Rights Act.  But I am trying to think ahead about how the movie might be regarded after another fifty years when most of us have passed on.  For those who pull it off the shelf then and watch it – our children and children’s children – I wonder how it will settle upon their minds and hearts.  Will the Selma events be given a Centennial as stirring as the half century observance has been, or will the ardor have cooled with the passage of time?

I would not call it an intense fear that I am undergoing around this question; call it more a qualm.  The remnants of the Jim Crow doctrine, at least implicitly, have not been completely stamped out in our nation, as certain happenings in the news have recently made evident.  So many who have taken to the streets of late in a mode of violence and destruction have created, unintentionally perhaps, a bitter and maybe lingering taste in the mouth of lawmakers and rank and file citizens over the prospect of overt protest, even the non-violent variety, which Martin Luther King exercised in his conduct of that landmark march.  There were peaceful protesters at work in Baltimore this past month while rioting was taking place, but from where I sit it appears that their work was upstaged by those who hollered and threw stones and broke glass.     

It was not only brave of Director Ava DuVernay to include the harshest moments in the story but it was fitting.  The days before the final march on the capitol occurred under the watchful eye and the protection of the U.S. Government were those of tremendous fear and tension and anxiety and pain.  Those brave souls were gambling with their lives, a few of which were eventually required.  They were walking into a toxic nest of hate and militarized enforcement of a brutal law – a law of not only segregation but of humiliation and systematic dehumanization by the state and local authorities – authorities authorized to crush a peaceful rebellion at any cost and with extreme impunity. 

Inevitably the nightstick played a major part in the oppression.  I was braced for what I had heard on screen before and knew was coming – the cracking of skulls, the skulls of unarmed men and women who meant no harm.  I looked up Nightstick on-line and learned that it had its origin somewhere around the midpoint of the 19^th century.  It has been called by various names – a cosh, billy stick, billy club, truncheon, cudgel, even baton (apparently before that term was humanized by its use as the scepter carried by drum majors and majorettes in marching bands).  They are made of either plastic, rubber or (the imaginably worst of all) hard wood, or a combination of two or more of these.  You can order one on-line, and they come in various styles and at varied prices, but each and every entry I scanned referred to it as an implement used by police.  Give me teargas before having to go up against one of those diabolical rods.  Yes, “Selma” is a commemorative motion picture but one in which we are not spared the grim details.  It is bound to be an emotional experience for anyone who sees it.  The only film I have seen that would top it for being more disturbing and gut grabbing is “12 Years a Slave”, reviewed by me on this blog a year ago. 

Naturally it is upsetting for those of us who believe in equality of the races and champion those who fight for its recognition on the front lines of social justice.  It is upsetting for all of us who consider those brave marchers to be spiritual kin and forebears.  Even those who have mixed feelings about King’s methods and the choices he made in tight spots cannot help but be disturbed by the raw brutality that was practiced against his followers.  The line that divides decency from indecency was crossed, maliciously, and that should be enough to capture the sympathy of all decent folk.  But the film should also be disturbing and unsettling for even the most flagrant racists, though for the opposite reasons.  There is something in the racist mentality that recoils violently against being outwitted by any crusader for rights they would like to see denied.  Watching one of their hated enemies triumph should be enough to boil their blood.  And blood did boil on the day of the first attempt at a march.

But violent moments are not the only ones in “Selma” that disturb and penetrate.  Early in the footage we walk with a real life black woman named Annie Cooper, played with restrained dignity by Oprah Winfrey, as she proceeds by herself into the Montgomery courthouse and submits her application for voter registration.  She is not accosted physically but is emotionally browbeaten by the clerk, who asks her ridiculous questions that he would never think to ask a white person, ones she of course cannot answer, her lack of information serving as his excuse to deny her application, and he takes obvious delight in humiliating her.  It is a quiet encounter, but it seethes with high minded bigotry and malice. 

There is a moment in the Selma jail cell between King (David Oyelowo), Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo) and others of his compatriots, after Sheriff Jim Clark arrests them, that is almost creepy.  The cell is so dark that it takes the cinematographer’s finesse for us to see any of their faces, even in profile.  They speak in the lowest of tones, contemplating their fate, knowing that the cell is bugged.  King is worried; someone in that darknes responds by reminding him that the prize they seek requires commitment to building a path, “rock by rock.”  That would surely be a difficult idea for anyone to grasp and hold onto, while a prisoner deprived of all mobility. 

An even more sobering conversation takes place quietly and privately between King and his wife Coretta (Carmen Ejogo), wherein she opens up her bag of worries.  She is supportive of his cause, but she trembles at the “cloud of death” hanging over them “like a thick fog.”  (Of course in hindsight we know just how close death really was; that fear was justified beyond all imagining.)  J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker), convinced that King is “a moral degenerate” who must be destroyed, makes a significant contribution to the couple’s torment with his anonymous threatening phone calls.

Coretta confesses her own insecurity, which assaults her much more when she is alone, when he is out of town.  With superbly controlled energy the actress gives life to this woman not heard from all that much in public, and Director DuVernay and Screenplay Writer Paul Webb give her adequate time and space to do so.  I do hope we will be seeing more of Ejogo in future productions.  She has a lot of presence.  

As some “in the know” have pointed out in the past months since the film’s release, especially Andrew Young, who was witness to the interchanges between Lyndon Johnson and King, there is one small but regrettable misrepresentation that mars the film a bit.  Tom Wilkinson does a first rate job of embodying the President, but he is forced by the script to make the man more defensive, reticent and slow to action than the record will bear out.  I agree that Johnson’s career was horribly besmirched by his choice to start the Vietnam War, but let us give him credit where credit is due.  As a Southern politician he paid a big political price for his brave stance on Voter Rights and racial equality. 

The film opens when King goes to Sweden to receive the Nobel Peace Prize followed by a brief glimpse of the scene at the Alabama church in which four innocent little black girls died when a bomb was detonated on a Sunday morning two years before the Selma incidents.  These two brief happenings serve as a fitting foreword to the drama on the road that follows.  It is not long before King sheds the ascot he was compelled to wear for that foreign occasion and gets back into the trenches. 

David Oyelowo gives a shrewd and sensitive portrayal of the man.  He has a grasp upon the way King spoke, something of his verbal cadence and slow deliberate style, even when making an impassioned speech.  Yet he does this without being self-consciously imitative of the man.  My understanding is that he was not allowed access to exact copies of King’s actual words.  But he did not need them.  

And finally comes the march that really made the difference, participated in not just by local individuals but of teeming hundreds from across the country who answered King’s appeal for participation.  A day of transforming history!  It is a potent reminder that strength in numbers is not just a quaint trivial saying but a working truth.  Watching those droves of peaceful advocates pouring onto that highway, of one mind in pursuit of one clear purpose, is a movie moment of rare exaltation of spirit.  The filming of it, under the archway of the real Edmund Pettus Bridge and on to the capitol itself could not have been done with more technical competence and mixed with more fitting music on the soundtrack.  It is a splendid intertwining of dramatization and old black and white footage from the actual march in ’65.  The rhythm and the verve are wonderfully displayed.  The whole sequence feels like the bursting of anointing and healing oil onto our heads.  If future generations are not moved by viewing the picture, it surely will not be the fault of its makers.  Bless you all for making it come to past.    

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

An Ocean Memory (Poetry by Bob Racine)

Ancient she roars

mutable mother colossus of islands

and coral reefs and prodigious continents.

Ancient she moans

somewhere off beneath the moon.

And all we hear by night is her

fitfulness on the shore,

outside our window. 

    

Never resting as we do, she awaits our

promenade at dawn,

feisty with her salt in our faces.

It was not always so.

Once we were young and

the roar was all we heard. 

In her breakers we scoured off our fears,

her crescendos no match for our yelp

of savage infancy. 

                  

We encamped for her power, a roll with

the waves of her delirium.

                  

She played havoc with our wits and senses,

her finger of foam roistering about our feet,

the blast of her breath upon our

sweating limbs,

a plunge into the stark naked terror

of our imaginations. 

Under her spell we gaped at the sun and the clouds,

took our feeble measure of the stars

that sprawled over her at night

like icons of a heaven too far from our reach,

and dared to ask whereof we came to be and

why our dreams always begin and end

on some far flung shore of the mind.

  

Only in her presence

did we dare think of immortality.

Now, she pounds with a distant drumbeat. 

At her chaos we now blink, though stirred

even yet, day and night,

by her passive resistance

to eternal sleep.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

The Rigorous but Healing Habit of Forgiveness (Essay by Bob Racine)

All six of my grandchildren are doing well.  They are all healthy, clean cut, intelligent, fun-loving kids, and talented to boot.  My son and my daughter have done a marvelous job of parenting, setting boundaries but not so stringently that self-discovery is hampered.  (I find myself sometimes wondering what I ever did to deserve them.)  The oldest is 15, the youngest 8.  My prayers for and concerning them are of course ones of thanksgiving, but those prayers are also mindful of whatever future crises they will face.  Right now they are all thriving and blossoming.  But I know that pain will eventually enter those lives in some form, and I also know a truth that at this moment they do not have the maturity to grasp – that that pain will be essential to their learning. 

The pain of which I speak hopefully will not be that of an unseasonable or premature malady of body.  I rather have in mind the pain that others will inflict, the pain that cuts to the heart.  My prayer is that they will be as ready for it as anyone can be, though this kind of wounding is not always one that you have the chance to prepare for.  It can be unforeseen.   In response to my review of “The Imitation Game,” someone made this observation: “The movie does such a good job of reminding us that we are all wounded, even a genius like Alan Turning. We need only scratch the surface of almost anyone to find life scars just beneath the surface.”  Someday my beloved grandchildren will wear scars, either visible or invisible, after being the recipient of cruelty or betrayal or dishonesty or just blatant unkindness, delivered by person or persons at this point unknown.  I trust that they will be armed for the encounter, but even the most armored soldier in battle is subject to the likelihood of wounding, and wounds stick around.  They may scab over, but they stick around!  As one of the long time walking wounded I know this all too well.

All this I have said is by way of introduction to the forever crucial subject of forgiveness.  

A lady who is a member of my church once suffered the loss of a teen child, not by disease or accident, but by the hand of a murderer.  A daughter she loved dearly was killed, wantonly and treacherously, by someone before whom the daughter was vulnerable, defenseless.  It happened about forty years ago, and more than once over those many years she has shared her continuing grief and depicted in words the continuing struggle she has had with forgiving the assailant.  Her faith demands forgiveness of her; she knows all too well how personally self-destructive it is to harbor hate and to nurse the compulsion to strike back, for vindication and retribution.  So every morning upon awaking she bows in prayer and meditation seeking another day’s grace and help in forgiving the killer she hardly knew.  She takes some satisfaction from knowing that the guy was caught, convicted and imprisoned for life.  But how do you live with a pain like that, knowing that it will always be inside of you?  What does forgiveness even mean in a situation like that?   

One does not once and for all forgive a person or persons.  This grieving mother knows that it has to be forever renewed, if not publicly then inside the mind and heart.  On October 2, 2006, a local milk delivery man in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania walked into the West Nickel Mines Amish School, a one room schoolhouse, chased out all the adults and all the boys in the room, tied up the ten girls who remained and shot every one of them before taking his own life.  Five of the girls died, the others survived after extensive hospital care.  Within a matter of hours the incident was known across the country and the world, and a most remarkable thing happened:  the entire Amish community went on record as jointly forgiving the killer and coming to the aid and comfort of the milkman’s family.  All non-Amish peoples were astounded at this group decision and outpouring of humble forbearance.  (A one-character play pertaining to this tragic event entitled “The Amish Project” is now making the rounds, recently staged here in Columbia.) 

But despite this public ritual chorus of compassion and dispensation, we can only begin to imagine what the private struggle must have been, especially for the parents and family members of the slain girls and the girls who somehow survived, now nine years older, who lost their innocence much too early.   Each individual in that community had to confront the happening on her/his own.  Inner feelings accruing from the traumatic event must continue to demand considerable soul searching and much daily renewal of the forgiving spirit, not unlike what the woman in our church says she must put herself through each morning in prayer.  Yes, there was a group consent publicly announced, but the inner turmoil cannot be estimated by anyone outside that Amish village settlement.

The forgiveness we must practice can be likened to medicine taken to stave off the ravages of old wounds.  The scar cannot be erased, only controlled, regulated.  That medicine, if its prescription is suitable to the symptoms, has to be taken for the rest of one’s life.  I am sure we have all heard of foolish people who when they have not for some time suffered from the aches and pains assume that the medication has done its job, no longer needed on a continuing basis, and stop taking it, or start fooling around with the dosage, only to find out in short order that they were exceedingly mistaken, when a new onset of the symptoms occurs.  They forget that the prolonged absence of symptoms was due to the medication.  

Can we actually compare forgiveness to a pain medication?  If the wound is deep enough, most certainly yes! 

Leaving the subject of personal injury and healing for a moment, I would like to say a few words about the forgiveness of people we have never personally confronted.  How does a member of one race or the citizens of one country or the devotees of one religion forgive the atrocities committed against it by another race or country or cult of piety?  

One great testament to the power of intercultural and interfaith and interracial healing that grew out of the events of 9/11 is a confederation of women who call themselves the Daughters of Abraham.  It began in Boston that same tragic year of 2001, when a group of them met for worship and the cultivation of understanding between Judaic, Muslim and Christian beliefs and traditions.  The movement caught on and has spread until at present a total of about 25 Daughters of Abraham groups are active throughout the U.S. and Canada.  It actually got underway as a book club bringing the participants together to share and compare writings by authors from each of these traditions, one from each of the three on a monthly basis.  There are national guidelines for the conducting of these studies.  A Christian woman friend of mine who belongs to one of the cells reports that she has found a caring heart and mind inside all three of these faiths, expressed in a shared concern and love for the poor and the marginalized everywhere.   It is my hope and that of others I know that this dialogue will catch on at every level of our pluralistic society and that men of each tradition as well will eventually embrace the notion and practice.  We cannot have too much of this kind of thing in a world where people are murdered for their beliefs and practices, where barriers are erected that are lethal and dehumanizing.    

All the way through World War II, during which I progressed from the age of 8 to the age of 12, I was drenched in propaganda about the enemy.  Caricatures of “the Japs” and the Germans were displayed everywhere – in movies, on posters and on radio (no TV in those days).  I was brainwashed into the corporate hate, even though I never suffered any personal loss or trauma at the hands of those nations.  In England of course it was a different story.  Unlike the inhabitants of the British Isles, I never had bombs dropped on my city or countryside.  No member of my family was ever killed in combat or interred, tortured or executed.  And yet I felt injured, in soul and spirit, as I learned of so many who had and saw newsreels about the devastation overseas.  It took me some years to come around to seeing the Japanese people as human beings, as vulnerable to sorrow and loss as myself.  I learned to distinguish the rank and file of Japanese citizens from the politico-military regime under which they had been subjugated and by which they were brainwashed. 

Perhaps my grandchildren’s scars will come chiefly from that kind of internalizing of an international crisis, if not from personal injuries.  The world they will have to enter, the one we will be leaving them, I fear will test their metal and their character unlike anything those of my generation have known.  To be sure they will have more than a passing chance to learn what forgiveness is and how it must be trusted to heal. 

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.