Category Archives: Editorials

Palaima: Poetry is one way to make sense of war’s horrors

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By Tom Palaima

Austin American-Statesman || Direct URL
Posted Sep 12, 2014 at 12:01 AM
Updated Sep 25, 2018 at 5:53 PM

“You asked if we’ve got enough cannons.

They laughed and said: More than enough

and we’ve got new improved antitank missiles

and bunker busters to penetrate

double-slab reinforced concrete

and we’ve got crates of napalm and crates of explosives,

unlimited quantities, cornucopias,

a feast for the soul,

like some finely seasoned delicacy

… and we’ve got cluster bombs, too,

though of course that’s off the record.”
–Dahlia Ravikovitch, “The Fruit of the Land,” translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld.

A friend of mine asked me a few weeks back — when Israeli airstrikes in Gaza were confined to blowing up cross-border tunnels and had not yet shifted to destroying high-rise apartment buildings of middle-class families, and associated offices and shopping malls — what book to read about the continuing conflict there.

What book can explain the history of violence and hatred in a way that makes sense of the logic of directing violence at mothers, fathers and children in order to get those then-homeless and traumatized people, and others who care about them, to put pressure on a duly elected terrorist element (Hamas) in their government to stop their acts of violence against Israeli soldiers and civilians?

Who makes such choices? On what balance scales do they weigh what they call the accidental deaths of women and children, the displacement of families and the destruction of schools and hospitals? How can we look at news images of these attacks so unimaginatively, just as we once looked at footage of the bombing of Hanoi or Tokyo, and the smart bombs we dropped ten years ago on buildings in Baghdad trying to kill the sons of Saddam Hussein?

One quote from a 38-year-old engineer who escaped with his four children and aged mother calls into question the strategy of violence. He would speak, I guess, for tens of thousands whose lives will never be the same: “I have become homeless, my children’s fear will never be soothed, and something new has now been added to our feelings toward Israel and all the world, which has been looking on without doing anything.”

His words seem powerless when the violence on both sides is so deadly and taps into deep human feelings that terrible wrongs have to be righted. They reveal how the suffering of normal human beings can go unrecognized, or worse yet, be noticed and justified by desire for vengeance: We cause suffering because they caused suffering.

I answered my friend eventually that we might read what people with poetic sensitivities have to say. Maybe it’s better, I thought, to feel raw truths than to try to make sense of what is senseless. So I wrote to Naomi Shihab Nye and Chana Bloch for their advice. I have now read a selection of what they recommended: “Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments” by Oz Shelach; “Does the Land Remember Me?” by Aziz Shihab; Dahlia Ravikovitch’s collection of poems “Hovering at a Low Altitude;” and more broadly, Nye’s collection of stunning poems written by many ordinary people on the question that is its title: “What Have You Lost?”

Charles Griswold in the “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy” sums up Plato’s warning about poetry, that poets and their poems “induce a dream-like, uncritical state in which we lose ourselves in the emotions in question (above all, in sorrow, grief, anger, resentment).”

But when the logic of international politics leads to bombings of civilian targets; when reason dictates the targeted killing of leaders of what are called, from our perspective, terrorist organizations; when we feel justified in striking out with violence preemptively, we might be wise to feel the conflicting feelings that sympathetic poets and writers can evoke, the ambiguities that cast doubt on what seem like rational, clear-cut and necessary decisions. Ravikovitch’s poems leave us with feelings of sorrow, loss and waste, no matter which side we favor or at whom we point our blaming fingers.

In “But She Had a Son” and “What a Time She Had,” Bloch and Kronfeld explain, “a grieving Israeli mother loses her son in a questionable military operation.” In “A Mother Walks Around,” “a pregnant Palestinian woman loses her fetus as a result of beatings by Israeli soldiers.” And Shelach gives us this to ponder: “When the undercover squads began operating, we reported the deaths of ‘wanted locals.‘” When it became clear that innocent people were being killed by mistake, “we updated the term to ‘local inhabitants suspected of being wanted.’”

Commentary: With North Korea, there’s danger of losing a war by winning

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By Al Martinich and Tom Palaima
Posted Jul 19, 2017 at 12:01 AM
Updated Sep 25, 2018 at 11:49 AM

North Korea has warned of a war with the United States and the capitalist “puppet” state of South Korea. President Donald Trump has been bellicose in tweets about North Korea’s missile tests and nuclear arsenal and has spoken of a surgical strike against its bases. Meanwhile U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis warns that North Korea’s response would lead to “probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes.”

As we suffer through the intense heat of another Austin Saharan summer, how are we as citizens to make sense of all this? How can we really feel what the worst combat will be? We can start by reading “The Useless Servants,” acclaimed native Texan writer Rolando Hinojosa’s remarkable diarylike account of his service as an artillery soldier in Korea in the 1950s. If you do, you will feel the chill and the dread of what even World War II veterans among Hinojosa’s fellow soldiers agreed was the worst kind of fighting in their experiences.

From October 1950 through March 1951, Hinojosa offers many variations on a single theme: Korea is a deadly cold and miserable place to wage war. “Cold, cold days and night.” “Woke up next to guns. Sheet of ice over blankets; gun tubes look like big olive-green popsicles.” “Very cold.” “This wind will cut your soul. It’s a tough place and time for a fight.” “These are
Siberian winds up here and everything freezes.” “North Korea is an icebox.” That’s just late October to mid-November. True winter is still a way off.

Do we really want to wage any kind of war there? At some point, we will have to put boots on the ground — and our soldiers will be wearing them. Do national and international security considerations override concerns about our soldiers and any human beings on the Korean peninsula?

We should think rationally about what war with North Korea would look like. Once Kim Jung Un gets intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching Alaska and Washington State, he is ruthless and reckless enough to start a war — even though it would mean the destruction of his own government.

As bad as that prospect is, we think there is a worse one for the United States: following against North Korea the policy of preventive war that we used against Iraq in 2003. Inflicting enough damage on North Korea to neutralize its army would cause the collapse of its economic and social structure. Available food and health care would go to the military, leaving
millions of starving, homeless North Koreans to flee into China and South Korea. Neither country would be able to handle the influx of refugees — and each would resent the United States for causing the disaster. The refugees would probably not be able to return to their homes for years.

The world at large would likely blame the catastrophe on the United States. The United States could not expect sympathy or aid from other countries, since it has been following a policy of narrow self-interest at least since January. Even assuming military success, we would be morally bound to pay for the needed aid of the refugees we created — and also to
rebuild the infrastructure of North Korea to a quality better than prewar. A devastated North Korea would be the sympathetic victim. North Korea would win by losing.

How might such a disastrous situation occur? If Kim’s inflammatory rhetoric continues to be met with like rhetoric from Trump — and Kim’s intercontinental ballistic missiles create fear in us as citizens, especially Trump’s loyal supporters — Trump may think he has a mandate to attack first. The canny Kim could lure the United States to attack through saberrattling.
Trump would not be the first president whose proud self-image led him to a bad decision.

If the scenario just sketched seems unlikely, there is a kind of precedent: In the 1950s, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, near bankruptcy, attacked the U.S., lost the war, and was financially compensated. It is all set forth in “The Mouse that Roared” by Leonard Wibberley. To paraphrase Karl Marx, history repeats itself — the first time as fiction, the second time as
tragedy.

Sniper’s War and Anti-Terrorist Terrorism

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Common Dreams June 25, 2018
Sniper’s War and Anti-Terrorist Terrorism
commondreams.org/views/2018/06/25/snipers-war-and-anti-terrorist-terrorism

Have you ever been sniped at – a bullet “cracking” as it just misses you? Probably not, unless
you’re ex-Army or Marines, a grunt fighting on foot, like my friend Ben Whitney (a pseudonym), aVietnam vet and professor of history who has good reasons for wanting our joint piece to
appear under my name only.

Snipers play an important, but not unproblematized, part in formal warfare, where trained
soldiers are fighting one another. But using snipers to control situations where civilians are
protesting, demonstrating, even rioting, as in Gaza last month where Israeli snipers fired upon
Palestinian civilians participating in the “Great March of the Return,” raises serious moral issues that we all need to work through with our minds and our hearts.

What we are discussing here is a kind of organized terrorism that is not confined to any one
nation or to any single trouble spot in the world. The movie “Detroit” centers on sniper fire upon police and National Guradsmen during the Detroit race riot of July, 1967. In the city of Austin in February, 2015, an estranged husband was shot and killed by a sniper while allegedly pointing a rifle at a police helicopter dispatched to circle and monitor the scene. To some it seemed an excessive use of force. The 27-year-old man, named Sawyer Flache, had hurt no one and had no history of any violent behavior.

Many soldiers appreciate the talents of a Chris Kyle, America’s sniper, who won accolades for his stories of racking up more than a hundred “kills” in Iraq. But chances are some don’t, especially if, like Ben Whitney, they’ve narrowly escaped a sniper’s bullet. Put yourselves where they have been. Feel how cold-bloodedly unpredictable, yet personal it is. The sniper peers through his scope and calculates, “Not that one, no, not him – yes, HIM” and squeezes the trigger. By delivering death, sudden, silent and random, snipers instill fear and anxiety into the enemy. They bring terror. Read Iraq War vet Brian Turner’s now classic poem “Here, Bullet” (2005) and you’ll get the sniper’s message: “…here, Bullet, here is where the world ends, every time.”

Snipers, shooting at trained soldiers like themselves, are part of modern warfare. But what about Israeli snipers shooting at desperate crowds of Palestinian civilians, at best armed with rocks and sling-shots?

Such actions would be regarded as unlawful in United States military circles and provoke public outcry. Our national reaction to the Kent State shootings (four dead and nine wounded civilians) on May 4, 1970 is still alive and unresolved fifty years later. The complex judicial issues, federal and civil, played out over nine years and reached no clearer moral or legal directives than this: “Better ways must be found to deal with such confrontations.” A U.S. District Court judge, while acquitting eight former guardsmen, strongly cautioned: “It is vital that state and National Guard officials not regard this decision as authorizing or approving the use of force against demonstrators, whatever the occasion or the issue involved.”

Even Chris Kyle noted that “the fact that an Iraqi had a gun would not necessarily mean he could be shot,” adding “make an unjustified shot and you could be charged with murder” (read American Sniper [2012], pages 170-71). But Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the state of Israel have long chosen not to be bound by such civilized restraints, as their army and state maintain the right to defend themselves and their borders against unarmed demonstrators across a buffer zone three football fields (300 meters) away.

The IDF have used tactics and weapons of formal warfare against civilians before, including
cluster bombs dropped on Lebanon, fuel-air bombs dropped on Gaza, and bee-hive rounds. The lopsided box-score recently from Gaza reads Israeli snipers 112 dead (men, women and
children) – Palestinian slingers 1 (one injured Israeli soldier).

Israel, as the occupying force in Gaza, should adhere to the international laws of war regarding the legal treatment and protection afforded civilians. Read the Geneva Conventions and Protocols regarding the use of weapons of war among a civilian population. They prohibit the use of battlefield weapons against women and children in particular, and civilians broadly. But, Israel continues to use snipers against the weakest of targets.

As the United Nations Human Rights council has voted (Friday, May 18th) for an inquiry into the use of disproportionate force in Gaza, it would be helpful to remember the one clear lesson of Kent State: “Better ways must be found to deal with such confrontations.” Kids with sling-shots and stones will never be a match for snipers and their rifles. And but for chance’s strange arithmetic, as unforeseeable as a sniper’s bullet, the kids in Gaza could be any of our kids.

AAS Palaima Aug 25 2017 UVA UT Austin Texas A&M reactions to white supremacism

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http://www.mystatesman.com/news/opinion/commentary-how-uva-helped-its-studentsrecognize-the-evil-around-them/FRmJH8rBJIPDNxUQc1Fl0J/

Commentary: How the University helped its students recognize the evil around them

Opinion

By Thomas G. Palaima – Special to the Austin American-Statesman

Posted: 11:34 a.m. Thursday, August 24, 2017

photo by Andrew Shurtleff  University of Virginia’s President Teresa Sullivan, right, walks with students, faculty and Charlottesville residents during a candlelight vigil on the campus on Wednesday, Aug. 16, in Charlottesville, Va (Andrew Shurtleff /The Daily Progress)

This is a hard time to strive to be a decent human being, but an important time to do so. The recent loss of life and harm to flesh and blood and hearts and souls in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12 involved students from the University of Virginia.

We live in one of the centers of civilized culture and higher education in our state. We may be tempted to view Charlottesville as an isolated remote event. This would be a mistake.We saw in images and in words the deep-rooted feelings of hatred and anger that motivated individuals on both sides in Charlottesville to act as they did.

VIEWPOINTS: On racism, a president who’s lost the moral authority.

It can’t happen here we might say. Only we know it can.

A key figure in the Unite the Right rally, Richard W. Spencer, spoke in Charlottesville on the morning of Aug. 12. Last December, he spoke at Texas A&M and was scheduled to speak again until A&M officials — citing the “risks of threat to life and safety” — recently canceled theevent. Were they wrong to do so? If your child were on the A&M campus, what would you want to happen?

Keep in mind that the organizers of the planned Spencer event issued a press release saying, “Today Charlottesville, Tomorrow Texas A&M.”

Spencer himself did not react to what happened in Charlottesville with the horror and sorrow a great many of us felt. He declared, “It was a huge moral victory in terms of the show of force.” He rejoiced that the “political violence” that he thought “had just become impossible” was right there just waiting to happen.

Ahead of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, UVa president and former University of Texas graduate dean Teresa Sullivan called for students to view the demonstrators as provocateurs and simply ignore them. Indeed, they did on Friday night. During their torch-lit rally, the white supremacists paraded through the UVa campus peacefully, despite their hatefilled chants. The violence Spencer longed for — that took him back to the days of 1930’s NaziBerlin — came on Saturday.

ALBERTA PHILLIPS: Think the Klan, Nazis are history? Not with Trump’s blessing.

Think it cannot happen here?

White and black extremist groups are on the Southern Poverty Law Center Hate Map throughout Texas. The United White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, aka the Texas KKK, proudly lists chapters in 31 towns and cities; 18 are concentrated north of I-20 in the far northeast.

The KKK is multifaceted. It directed hatred in the 20th century against immigrants, blacks, Jews, Catholics and even unionized workers. The SPLC Hate Map lists a neo-Nazi Web site, The Daily Stormer, right here in Austin. Given the economic, social, racial, gender and educational disparities and tensions in our country right now, almost every community should consider itself a tinderbox.

Would you want to be a university president making the kinds of decisions that had to be made at A&M and at UVa? In my opinion, UT Austin president Greg Fenves offers us a way forward by example. Fenves mobilized all forces on campus in response to what turned out to be a true perception that incidents of sexual harassment and sexual assault have been vastly under-reported.

The CLASE report of Spring 2017 brings out into the open — as Charlottesville did for race hatred — the true nature of the problem. One figure suffices: Fifteen percent of female undergraduate students surveyed reported having experienced rape since enrollment at UT.

Fenves’ decision was gutsy and risky in these days of spin. However, I would want my child attending an institution where a problem is known and acknowledged and faculty, staff, students, mental health counselors and police officials are informed and aware and sensitive to it.

DEBBIE HIOTT: Why do headlines focus on racism? Because it still lingers.

We can only fight the enemy we see.

Sullivan made half the right call. She let the event take place. She should have made sure that those called upon to show the restraint of Gandhi’s followers or civil rights demonstrators who put their faith in Martin Luther King would get their say at soon-to-be-held open public forums.

A&M officials responded in good faith to protect the students in their charge — but they might have erred in not letting those students give witness to the open-minded decency and self-discipline they possess.

Palaima, a regular Viewpoints contributor, teaches courses about music and societyat the University of Texas. He is Armstrong Centennial Professor of Classics.

 

UT-Austin doesn’t really care to educate football players

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Dallas Morning News August 26, 2017

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/08/25/ut-austin-really-care-educate-football-players

Written by

Thomas G. Palaima, Contributor

Connect with Thomas G. Palaima

I have followed and written commentaries about big-time sports at the University of Texas at Austin for some 15 years. Between 2008 and 2011, I was the UT and Big 12 representative on the national Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics. I was invited to lunch by former athletics director DeLoss Dodds, who knew and adeptly practiced the art of keeping your enemies closer. I sat in his and President Bill Powers’ skyboxes. The idea seemed to be that I would find this misuse of adult time and tasteless display of conspicuous consumption — which should find no place at a public university — so desirable that I would not rock the boat in the future.

It did not have that effect.

At Dodds’s insistence, I even had personal sit-down time with soon-to-be-disgraced Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. His revered high school mentor, Fr. Thomas Bermingham, S.J., had once been a dear colleague of mine at Fordham University. And I heard Graham Spanier, then president of Penn State, emphasize to Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics reps in January 2011 what high moral standards he enforced within his entire NCAA athletics program, top to bottom. Ten months later, Jerry Sandusky.

In 2009-10, I thought we had reached the promised land. Then U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who had been a student athlete at Harvard; then NCAA president Mark Emmert; and then President Barack Obama all called for “independent faculty oversight of NCAA programs at universities and colleges.” Emmert told us that it was a bad idea for any institution of higher education to have separate fundraising organizations for academics and athletics, as UT Austin still does: Texas Exes and the Longhorn Foundation. I brought these proposals to the floor of the faculty council.

It turns out that no University of Texas president wants to lift his rod and take us across to the promised land of real education for all student athletes and serious integration of sports into the academic, cultural and scientific mission of our great public university. Instead we stay in the land of smoke and mirrors, make-believe, and even immoral looking-the-other-way.

Recently, I went online with the Longhorn Foundation to see what ordering season tickets for this fall would entail. Three tickets in Section 28 for 6 games were each $660, total $1,980. But those tickets will not be sold to anyone without a $2,500 “donation” to the Longhorn Foundation for each ticket. So, three season tickets cost $9,480, and $7,500 is considered a voluntary tax-exempt donation to higher education. I would say this is the morally gray world our university leaders tolerate, but it is just black-and-white wrong.

Okay, so they raise lots of money this way. What does the football program do with it? Well, our program this spring videoed its new head coach Tom Herman taking a sledgehammer to football lockers in good repair. They were all replaced with $10,500-apiece lockers that the UT director of high school relations proudly proclaimed via Twitter as “unfreakingbelievable.” The Dallas Morning News called them “uncharted territory” in a “college football world where a teams’ facilities are pretty much indistinguishable from a high-end Vegas hotel.” Worse yet, UT President Greg Fenves explained, “You have to impress 16- and 17-year-old kids when you’re looking at locker rooms across the country.”

I disagree. No, you do not. You are not a pimp or a drug-pusher.

What you should do is sit down with those players and their parents or guardians or favorite teachers and tell them this:

“If you come to UT-Austin, we run a tight ship. We don’t want to outdo Las Vegas in order to fool you into thinking a few years spent in glamorous facilities will mean something to you and your families in 10, 20, 30 years. We’ll give you a real education. We’ll limit your playing and practice time to the NCAA regulation of 20 hours a week. We won’t be like all those other conniving programs where players spend 37 to 43 hours, according to the NCAA’s own survey. We’ll teach you how to keep to a budget so you won’t blow $28 million in NFL salary, as UT’s Vince Young did, or the $30,000 to $50,000 you’ll hopefully be making at first after you graduate. We’ll look out for you.”

But no, we won’t.

Thomas G. Palaima holds the Armstrong Centennial Professorship of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. Email: tpalaima@austin.utexas.edu

Let Confederate Statues lead charge promoting clear principle, symbolic chains, and open Socratic self-criticism

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UT should keep Confederate statues but add context with plaques

Posted on-line: 11:27 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2015 Austin American-Statesman

Print Edition Wednesday August 12, 2015

Al Martinich and I wrote this public response to the report of the Task Force on Historical Representation of Statuary released to the president and the public yesterday morning (August 10th), arguably one of the deadest days of the year for drawing faculty, student, staff and community response.

The subject phrase summarizes our main points. We explain them more fully in the commentary here below.

We particularly were concerned about direct or indirect notions in the report (1) that our University could not openly be seen to be involved in self-examination and self-criticism and (2) that a clear statement of ethical values on an important social issue might be considered ‘inflammatory’.

Ours is a public university that proclaims on its seal that the education it offers is the guardian genius of democracy.  We should obey always the Socratic principle that “the unexamined life is not worth living”—and certainly not worth paying tuition money for.

TGP and AM

http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/opinion/ut-should-keep-confederate-statues-but-add-context/nnHS4/

By Al Martinich and Tom Palaima – Special to the Austin American-Statesman

The Task Force on Historical Representation of Statuary presented University of Texas President Gregory Fenves this week with five options for the controversial statues of Confederate leaders.

One option is to keep the statues but to add “explanatory plaques that would enhance the educational value of the six statues and provide historical context.” We think this is the best option. But it can be improved.

“Educational value” and “historical context” are too vague and evasive. An objection to that option is that it is “difficult to provide contextualizing statements that are strong enough to counteract the powerful message sent by bronze statues on high pedestals on our Main Mall, while not so strong or intemperate as to be simply inflammatory.” We think otherwise.

What if all six statues had a plaque with the same unequivocal message: “The University of Texas condemns slavery and regrets that its history is closely tied with slave owners who never recognized the equality of African-Americans and Hispanics”? Would this message be weak or inflammatory? No, it would forthrightly declare the true values of the university and the state of Texas.

In addition to the plaques, chains should be added at the ankles of the statues. The meaning would be clear and conspicuous. If anyone should be enslaved, even symbolically after the fact, slave owners should be. Slavery shackled the ideal of developing a society that treated all people equally.

The report also objects that adding plaques “would be like engaging in vigorous self-criticism on the university’s homepage.” Yes indeed! And all for the good! This is no objection. It is a strong reason to do so. No human institution is perfect, as the statues themselves show. Self-criticism is crucial for a healthy democracy.

Universities, especially public universities like UT Austin, are special places. The values of the university should be expressed clearly and discussed. UT’s core values are generally cited as marketing tools that establish what in the present discussion is historically ironic, a “brand” that distinguishes UT Austin from other universities competing for students. The core values are learned by rote like the Ten Commandments: Once learned, they are rarely consciously put into practice. The values should be examined again and again in the context of what has happened in our society over time, what is happening now and what is likely to happen under the guidance of those few graduates who become our future leaders — and the many, many other students who become the day-to-day doers and the heart and soul of our country.

We have long been preoccupied at the University of Texas at Austin with maintaining a façade of high achievement. We focus on those who attain high distinction in the classrooms, out in service to the community and on athletic fields. We forget that our university, like our society as a whole, is made up of struggling human beings with varying talents and abilities. To have all passersby, students, their friends and families, and other outside visitors be reminded on a regular basis of the fundamental questions — historical and contemporary — posed by race, ethnicity and other behaviors within society as whole will work to strengthen our democracy.

Socrates in 399 B.C. accepted a death sentence rather than go on living without questioning the moral and ethical values of his society. The one core value of our university that should trump all should be that the unexamined life is truly not worth living. It was a lack of strong commitment to imaginative self-criticism in Texas that enabled slavery and later promoted racial discrimination. Imagine yourself and your children as slaves. Feel the chains around your ankles. Would you support slavery?

The other four options presented to our president involve removing one or more of the statues to some other location. Keeping any of the statues unaltered is offensive. Removing all of the statues is a way of suppressing our history and missing an ongoing teaching opportunity.

Once more: No human institution is perfect. Self-criticism is crucial for a healthy democracy. Universities are special places where the values of our culture need to be discussed in the future much more than they have been. Let the Confederate statues lead the charge in what is always an uphill battle against human ignorance and prejudice and toward examined lives of dignity and respect for all of us and all our children.

Al Martinich and Tom Palaima are professors at University of Texas at Austin.

Helping musicians helps keep the music alive in Austin (HAAM)

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lhs-Haam-benefit-day-04Palaima: Helping musicians helps keep the music alive in Austin

Posted: 6:00 p.m. Saturday, March 21, 2015 Print edition Sunday March 22, 2015

By Tom Palaima – Special to the Austin American-Statesman

Can you imagine your life without music?

Really think about it, and not just about right now.

Think back through all the different stages of your life, your treasured memories, the rough seas and the stretches of smooth sailing, lonesome thoughts and spontaneous joys shared with friends and loved ones. Chances are you’ll remember songs and tunes along with them.

Rather than where were you when you first heard a song or a musician, think of the performers and their music and remember who you were then and who was with you in your life. To paraphrase lines from Austinite James McMurtry’s recent CD “Complicated Game,” songs write our lives. They remind us of our common humanity, in big ways and small.

This is no new development. In the period that is the focus of my research at the University of Texas at Austin, the late Greek Bronze Age (1600-1200 BCE), the oral songs that defined the culture most people think of as the golden age of Greece were already being sung.

On a wall painting to the right of the royal throne in the sacred hearth room of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos (1200 BCE), a colorfully robed male singer, lyre in hand, sits outdoors on a well-worn rock outcropping. He sings and plays to banqueters sharing drink. A mythical bird flies off toward the throne, symbolizing the “winged lyrics,” the phrase Homer uses to describe the magical way inspired music reaches our ears.

Three centuries later, as Professor Joann Hackett reminded us in a recent presentation to our UT Institute for Scripts and Decipherment, from excavations of a shrine at an Israelite-Judean caravan stop in the eastern Sinai, we have large storage jars with painted “Hebrew blessing formulae and cultic scenes” referring to Yahweh and his potential companion goddess Asherah. Prominently depicted is a seated woman lyre player, perhaps singing out the blessing.

And the Rev. Will Rambo of Tupelo, Miss. — fittingly the birthplace of Elvis Presley — recently observed, after watching shepherds at work during a trip to the Holy Land, that the image of Jesus as a good shepherd derives partly from the fact that at herd collecting stations where shepherds brought their flocks for protection at night, there were no problems in the morning separating out whose sheep were whose. The sheep really do know their shepherds’ voices from hearing them sing their pastoral songs, just as I instantly recognize a Denny Freeman, Richard Jessee or John Inmon guitar riff or a line sung by Carl Hutchens, Jesse Gregg or Jimmy LaFave.

Pope Francis recently took aim at the “disastrous” homilies his flock of faithful hear from their priests, words that “do not reach the heart.” You know you cannot say that about the Austin musicians you regularly go to hear. They reach your heart.

Now try to imagine Austin without live music. A frightening thought, isn’t it? It will never become a reality so long as we continue to be good shepherds to the 9,000 musicians who, according to Chris Alberts, director of development for the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians, now live and perform in the Austin area.

History also proves unfortunately that being a musician, literally one of those dedicated to the arts of memory goddesses known as the Muses, generally involves an itinerant lifestyle and getting by on the kindness of strangers. Few Homeric or Judaeic bards, medieval minstrels, Appalachian folk singers, blues artists on the chitlin circuit or British shoegazers were free of troubles with money. Few of their descendants who perform at the Cactus Café, Poodies Roadhouse, the Saxon Pub, the Mohawk, the Gallery or the Skylark Lounge have large investment portfolios to manage.

HAAM got started in 2005 because the late Robin Ratliff Shivers was contagiously passionate about the music in her life and had the crazy idea that musicians should have access to regular medical, dental, vision, hearing and psychiatric care. She went about making that happen. Austin foundations, businesses and individual donors, too many to mention, have made it possible for the 60 percent of Austin musicians who do not qualify for subsidized medical plans and the 40 percent who have gaps in coverage to protect their health before crises develop.

If you enjoy the sounds you hear Austin’s talented musicians, young and old, making, go to www.myhaam.org. And remember Austin’s ever more challenging cost of living the next time the tip jar is passed.

Palaima is a classics professor at the University of Texas.
– See more at: http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/opinion/palaima-helping-musicians-helps-keep-the-music-ali/nkbb4/#05de1d51.3469532.735775

Minds of 2015 graduates in Liberal Arts give hope for the future

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Palaima: Minds of 2015 grads give hope for future

Posted: 11:00 p.m. Wednesday, May 20, 2015

By Tom Palaima – Special to the American-Statesman

The University of Texas at Austin at the end of the spring semester is a place of relics and memories. Senior thesis writers and Ph.D. dissertators in the humanities leave their supervisors and readers with an assortment of parting gifts.

Their completed work offers insights into the human experience: how and why our society doesn’t work as well as it should, what individuals can do to make a difference, what lies we are told, what lies we tell, and what lies we want to believe. I speak here personally about five students I have worked with who are leaving my colleagues and me with the kind of empty-nest feelings that other faculty share.

Plan II honors student Brina Bui worked with psychiatrist Stephen Sonnenberg and me analyzing art programs in pediatric hospitals in Texas’s five major cities. Only Dell Children’s Hospital here in Austin employs trained art therapists who use art in an informed therapeutic process to discover what children are feeling and thinking. Bui’s research suggests that art programs, despite their therapeutic value, generally are viewed as inessential add-ons in pediatric hospitals and are not prioritized in their budgets.

Johnathon Reddinger, who is part of the Polymathic Scholars Program, studied representations of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Hollywood films and documentary films. Reddinger joined the Marine Corps out of high school in summer 2007. He was deployed in summer 2009 to Al Anbar province, Iraq and in winter 2010-2011 to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, serving as 0311 Infantry Rifleman and 0313 Light Armored Vehicle Crewman. He matriculated at UT Austin in 2011. Reddinger doesn’t see the wars American soldiers fought in the war films Hollywood makes.

In his view, Hollywood films do bigger box office when their ideologies match the audience’s. This explains the switch from anti-war sentiments in Vietnam war films to patriotic sentiments in Iraq and Afghanistan war films. Hollywood films leave out, except in hints, “the debilitating injuries — mental and physical — that soldiers sustain on the battlefield and then bring home.” They stereotype the enemy and do not show how our wars devastate other cultures. Documentaries about soldiers and film interviews with soldiers, even ‘stars’ of Hollywood features like Chris Kyle, get at the truth. But the truth doesn’t sell tickets or reassure the general public or help recruit more soldiers.

Ciaran Dean-Jones’ Plan II thesis, directed by me with Sonnenberg and historian George Forgie as readers, helped earn him a $3,000 UT Co-op George H. Mitchell Award as one of the top seven undergraduate researchers this year. Dean-Jonesstudied President Abraham Lincoln’s writings closely to trace how Lincoln’s emotional and psychological struggles in early adulthood related to the theological beliefs he developed during the Civil War. As seen in his second inaugural address, Lincoln took to using the suffering of the Civil War to move our divided nation toward reconciliation rather than punishment of the South.

Commander Mike Flynn, a 1995 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, also came to UT in 2011, like John Reddinger. He is taking up a teaching appointment at the academy this fall. His doctoral dissertation in comparative literature, directed by Katie Arens with Cesar Salgado, Hector Dominguez-Ruvalcaba, Gabriela Polit and me as readers, runs a PTSD Geiger counter — as he puts it — over the literature set during the drug-war violence in Colombia. Flynn identifies the broader social pathology of trauma and highlights the destructive force of human greed, the signifier that destroys all significance. His work focuses our attention on complex PTSD, on the ways trauma is transmitted across generations and from person to person, on how it persists in memory, and on what narration can do partially to heal personal and collective trauma.

Finally Jorge Wong, a classics major and McNair Scholar, explored the crisis — ancient Greek for point of decision — that King Agamemnon, himself an inheritor of multigenerational trauma, faced in the Greek tragedy named after him. Agamemnon was given the same choice Yahweh gave to Abraham: Sacrifice your child or bear the consequences of divine disfavor. Jorge highlighted the Greek ritual vocabulary the playwright Aeschylus used to make clear to readers and viewers from 458 BCE to the present how complicated the factors in Agamemnon’s decision were.

My memories and relics of this academic year preserve my faith in students with bright minds and passionate souls who persist in examining who we are as a society and my gratitude to my learned colleagues who provide inspirational nurturing to fledglings in the UT nest and even old birds like me.

Palaima is a classics professor at the University of Texas.

Failure to reform NCAA is at Root of Cheating Scandal at University of Texas at Austin

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Palaima: Failure to reform NCAA is at Root of Cheating Scandal

Posted: 12:00 a.m. Friday, June 19, 2015 Austin American-Statesman
print edition Saturday June 20, 2015

http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/opinion/palaima-dont-blame-victims-in-athletics-cheating-s/nmf8H/

By Tom Palaima – Regular Contributor LINKS TO COIA reports at bottom

As we move through life, we experience moments of revelation when we see clearly what meaning we want our lives to have, how we will spend our time on this earth. Saul, on the road to Damascus, was surrounded by a blinding light, went three days without sight, food or drink, and changed his ways of thinking. He became St. Paul.

Sometimes we realize we have had enough, like world welterweight boxing champion Roberto Durán 35 years ago conceding his rematch with Sugar Ray Leonard by telling the referee, “No más, no más.” Durán was widely ridiculed, but he knew it was the right thing to do. He went on to hold titles as a light middleweight and middleweight and is considered the greatest lightweight boxer of the twentieth century.
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Brad Wolverton alleges that three student athletes who played basketball between 2003 and 2014 at the University of Texas were guilty of academic misconduct and “illustrate how the university has appeared to let academically deficient players push the limits on academic integrity as it has sought to improve its teams’ academic records.” Notice how easy it is to blame the victims.

From September 2008 through May 2011, I was the UT and Big XII representative on the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, a national organization formed originally to try to make sure that all student athletes in the big-time sports entertainment industry known as the National Collegiate Athletics Association get something we could call an education.

COIA’s members have a bit of St. Paul in them. They are mostly senior professors who have reached a point where the problems that major NCAA sports programs cause for the academic integrity of their institutions obligate them to try to do something.

In my case, the timing seemed right. In 2007 the Austin American-Statesman published a series of front-page stories on the excesses of UT’s NCAA program. Remarks from the UT athletic director and his chief financial officer like “We eat what we kill,” meaning we raise lots of money for sports and are darn sure going to spend it all on sports, and “We are the Joneses,” meaning we kill and eat so much more than most everybody else that they all want to be like us, made me think that someone in a position of power in the UT Tower or the Legislature or the Board of Regents would do something.

I was dead wrong. Likewise, graduation rates for minority athletes were embarrassingly low, and the differentials in standardized exam scores between regular students and basketball and football players were shocking to anyone who prioritized education and intellectual life.

In late January 2011, COIA met at Big Ten headquarters near Chicago. We heard talks from NCAA President Mark Emmert, from Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany, and then from Graham Spanier, for 15 years president of Penn State University. All stressed the morality and integrity of NCAA sports and the need for independent faculty oversight of NCAA programs. There is still none at UT.
Spanier went further. He assured us that every year he spoke to everyone having anything to do with NCAA sports on his campus and told them if they knew of the smallest infraction, he wanted to be informed so he could correct the matter. Nine months later, in November 2011, came revelations about sexual predator Jerry Sandusky and the “conspiracy of silence” by Spanier and other top officials at Penn State. That was my “no más” moment.

The NCAA mandates that student athletes should devote no more than 20 hours a week to their sport. Their own survey in 2008 proved that football players average 44.8 hours per week. Their Academic Progress Rate requires cumulative GPAs of 1.8, 1.9 and 2.0 at the end of the second, third and fourth years. UT’s average GPA for all students, including athletes, is ca. 3.2. And a satisfactory APR requires completion of only 80 percent of coursework by the end of the fourth year. The NCAA then runs a system in which, in comparison with average students, student athletes have too little time, many make poor grades and many end four years without a degree.
The academic misconduct of the NCAA, countenanced by regents, university presidents, college coaches, season ticket holders, men’s and women’s athletics councils, sports writers and NCAA officials is what needs to be addressed. They should all head toward Damascus before it’s too late.

FOR links to COIA reports 2009 and 2011, see http://www.utexas.edu/faculty/council/2008-2009/reports/COIA_08-09_rpt.pdf

http://www.utexas.edu/faculty/council/2010-2011/reports/COIA%20REPORT%20APRIL%2011%20PALAIMA.pdf

Perhaps we should be honest about unhappiness

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Palaima: Perhaps we should be honest about unhappiness

http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/opinion/palaima-perhaps-we-should-be-honest-about-unhappin/nkKHw/#a0c0d70a.3469532.735656

Tom Palaima

Posted: 12:43 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015

By Tom Palaima – Special to the Austin American-Statesman

In his recent book “Cowardice,” Chris Walsh points out that the life expectancy of American males doubled between 1850 and 2008, going from 37.2 years to 75.5 years. He pinpoints one momentous effect that this and other changes, like increased urbanization, have had on us. They have made our “greatest fear, that of death, seem distant and vague.”

Here is a related case in point. At a recent meeting of experts on public health care issues in Texas, a psychiatrist speaking on behavioral (mental) health care quoted Sigmund Freud on what his therapy was aimed at. Freud stated that he was trying to transform the “hysterical misery” of his patients into “common human unhappiness.” This prompted general laughter from the audience and other panelists. I wondered why.

To borrow a phrase Willie Nelson used when I interviewed him about his classic song “Jimmy’s Road,” the general laughter at Freud’s remark struck me as “some kind of strange thing.” Willie’s song, written back in 1968, expressed his deep feelings about the damage the hard experiences of war can cause to the body, mind and soul of any young person. Listen to it once or twice and you, too, will wonder what is funny about Freud’s insight.

Freud was dead serious, and the word “misery” connotes pity and sympathy for those who are suffering. When I was a young and pious Roman Catholic altar boy, during the Easter season we performed a solemn ritual known as the Stations of the Cross. We followed Jesus Christ on his suffering path from his condemnation (station 1) through his crucifixion and death (stations 11 and 12) to his entombment (station 14). We sang and chanted prayers in Latin in our thankful belief that Jesus, the son of God, took on such misery himself because he saw our suffering and pitied us.

Recognizing our own suffering, we sang the Litany of the Saints, petitioning Jesus Christ, “miserere nobis,” “have mercy on us.”

Freud like all caring medical practitioners treated those who came to him as literal “patients,” from the Latin patior “I suffer.” He knew their psychological suffering deserved to be relieved. He also knew that, no matter how successful he was, all he could do was to return his patients to the normal human condition.

Why does it strike us as “some kind of strange thing” that our normal human lives partake of “common unhappiness”? Is it because not wanting to confront our own doubts about our lives, we look away from the general misery of our fellow human beings? Our founding fathers looked at reality. On July 4, 1776, they declared that happiness was a goal to be pursued. We now seem to view it as a state that is already ours, and rightly so, so long as we ourselves have acquired and maintain the right mix of income, power, education, job security, retirement income, religious piety, and health and life insurance.

We delude ourselves when we equate happiness with a protected and blinkered way of living. This delusion will vanish if we reflect upon the many hardships and sorrows we face moving through relatively privileged lives. It will vanish if we look at those on the bottom of our increasingly steep social and economic and educational pyramids. It will also vanish if we take time to look, listen, read, hear and learn.

To return to the medical profession, I recommend the writings of poet William Carlos Williams, a medical doctor among the urban poor and needy. In his essay “The Practice,” he flatly declares, “I have never had a money practice; it would have been impossible for me.” And he speaks of “the peace of mind that comes from adopting the patient’s condition as one’s own to be struggled with toward a solution.” Rejecting what we would now call nightly news as a useless distraction, he finds “whole academies of learning” in a single patient’s eyes.

Walt Whitman, too, discovered soul-shaking truths about our general capacity to look away from human unhappiness. In late 1862, he became aware of the abominable treatment of wounded Civil War soldiers while searching for his wounded brother George in field hospitals. He stayed and worked devotedly with the wounded. He found that just listening in a human way might be enough to help a soldier pull through.

We all know in our hearts that human unhappiness is not uncommon, no matter how much we want to pretend that it is distant, vague or laughable.

Palaima is a classics professor at the University of Texas.