Category Archives: Editorials

AAS February 20, 2014 Guthrie’s legacy: How to face the hard path

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Guthrie’s legacy: How to face the hard path

Posted: 11:31 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2014  PRINT VERSION February 20, 2014

By Tom Palaima – Special to the Austin American-Statesman

Show me how, how to fight my battle in life /Show me how to fight / And I’ll run away with you.

Teach me how, how to fight my hard times in life /Teach me how to fight and / I’ll run away with you.

And I will never dread the day I will die / ’Cause my sunset is somebody’s morning sky.

—Woody Guthrie, “My Battle”

These profound words were written by American folk music genius Woody Guthrie. We never heard them until Jonatha Brooke recently set them to music. I heard Brooke’s version sung with extraordinary meaning by Eliza Gilkyson in the “Walking Woody’s Road” show she performed with her fellow Austinites Jimmy LaFave, Slaid Cleaves, Sam Baker, Bobby Kallus, Glenn Schuetz, Phil Hurley and Chip Dolan.

Guthrie spent his too short lifetime looking at and feeling with ordinary people. He did his utmost to make all Americans see the neediest among us. One could say that Woody was a one-man national version of the Austin American-Statesman’s Season for Caring program.

He began his adult life during the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl. He lived and fought alongside farm families forced off their land, seeking desperately anywhere for basic living wages.

Woody fought against fascism in World War II. He wrote his poignant song “Deportees” in 1948 when he read in a newspaper that a planeload of migrant workers died in a plane crash and were treated as a nameless and worthless mass who, to quote from his “Pastures of Plenty,” silently “come with the dust and go with the wind.” To Woody, every human being had dignity.

The ancient Greeks believed that we learn who we are and how to treat others through our own suffering. Modern American culture promotes the illusion that a life of perpetual enjoyment is our birthright. But we all learn eventually that the Greeks were right. We all confront what another American musical giant sang out, “I’ll never get out of this world alive.”

Woody wrote “My Battle” when he faced something worse than Hank Williams’ realization of our mortality. In 1952, he was diagnosed with Huntington’s chorea, a degenerative disorder that would rob him of his mind and leave him alive, but somehow dead. He was permanently involuntarily institutionalized in 1956.

Eliza’s evocation of what she calls Woody’s “dark night of the soul” in singing “My Battle” was so moving that I asked her where her inspiration came from. I asked other soulful people what they thought of the song.

Eliza said she could feel starkly Woody confronting “one of those archetypical pivotal moments in the life of someone who serves and suffers on the world stage.” She could empathize with Woody “looking left and right for a way out and ultimately accepting his fate,” much like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. And she knew the power of seeking someone with whom to share life’s inevitable tragic moments with strength and dignity. She found her life partner, University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen, a committed activist for social justice, at an antiwar rally.

Recently retired Statesman feature writer Brad Buchholz, a longtime friend, feels Woody’s words partly through his own battle with cancer. He says, “Eliza inhabits the song. She makes Woody’s words and experience real to us. She is sensitive and understands.” He hears Eliza saying, “I’ve been there. I know what that means. I know that trial. I know that longing.”

Brad’s partner, Margaret Slovak, a beautiful and humanly caring jazz guitarist, was robbed of her full creative powers by a sudden motor vehicle accident. She performs for patients battling with cancer and other life-changing injuries and losses. When she heard Eliza sing Woody’s and Jonatha’s song, she thought, “Each one of us faces life-changing physical and emotional challenges through accidents, diseases, loss of loved ones. We come out the other side stronger with an increased awareness of what really matters in life. Most importantly, we learn how to give and receive love in the purest sense.”

Lucinda Alwa, a Methodist minister in an economically challenged community in Wisconsin, knows the despair of losing a loved one suddenly. She writes, “Woody’s song gives a striking sense of peace. Whatever Woody meant by the line, ‘I’ll run away with you,’ I find myself running away with the song. It melts the dread, soothes the soul, lights the sky.”

Thank you, Woody, Jonatha and Eliza, for reminding us that we are all hard travelers through life together.

Palaima is a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Palaima: Pope Francis & Karl Marlantes Tell Us We Need to Feel & See Need

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Palaima: Comforts of society make it difficult properly to see need

Austin American-Statesman  Posted: 11:53 a.m. Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2014

http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/opinion/comforts-of-society-make-it-difficult-to-properly-/ncfHR/

By Thomas Palaima – Regular Contributor

Pope Francis, Time magazine’s person of the year for 2013, enjoined us in his Christmas message to “place ourselves at the service of the poor.” His message took me back 50 years to my Jesuit high school days when the Catholic Church and our country were trying to put into action the radical religious and political message of Jesus Christ found in Matthew 25:35-46.

Roman Catholics then were instructed by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and Pope John XXIII to “recognize the essential dignity of every human being.” Governments worldwide were charged with “protecting the rights and equality of all citizens as part of their essential role in promoting the public good.” In response to the courageous actions of Americans in the civil rights movement and the realities brought home by race-related urban riots in Los Angeles (1965), Cleveland (1966), Detroit and Newark (1967), Washington (1968) and elsewhere, our own government developed the Great Society programs.

The Gospel passage that Pope Francis uses begins, “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” The Gospel writer and the pontiff both make clear how easy it is for us not to see those in need.

In fact, we have to go beyond seeing need. We have to internalize the feeling of need and act upon it. We all belong to groups, organizations and institutions within society, including our own families. Most of these only have the moral conscience we infuse into them.

We need to reach the stage of “consciousness and spiritual maturity” about how we contribute to and tolerate the human suffering of others that United States Marine Corps veteran Karl Marlantes writes about in his recent book, What It is Like to Go to War. Marlantes write profoundly about the debilitating effects that war experiences will continue to have on young men and women unless we all change our ways of thinking.

He makes two key points that we can apply to our civilian lives. The first is that “our young warriors are raised in possibly the only culture on the planet that thinks death is an option.” Indeed, we shy away from looking not only at death, but at the realities of poverty, income disparity and lack of access to essential services like health care.

Marlantes’ second point is that in American culture, we no longer have initiatory rites of a “spiritual nature” that make us aware of hunger, of how easy it is to die, of how small and vulnerable we are. He points out that “we mostly undergo a series of partial initiations and we undergo them unconsciously and without guidance.”

Pope Francis calls for us to place ourselves at the service of fellow human beings who are poor, hungry, homeless and marginalized. I think he means more than writing out a check to Meals on Wheels or working a few weekends a year for Habitat for the Homeless or doing one Eagle Scout project. These are all good and important acts. But the pope means something very akin to what Marlantes understands from his service in the U.S. Marine Corps and his own resulting life problems. We need to initiate or re-initiate ourselves to feel the needs of others in ways that re-focus our own appetites, desires and actions on others.

When I was young, we Catholics fasted during the Lenten season before Easter. We ate no meat on Fridays. We fasted until after we received the Eucharist on Sundays. My father recalled in his teenage years during the Great Depression calling out and claiming “core” when a buddy was lucky enough to have an apple to eat. We reminded ourselves regularly of hunger.

In the last year of the Great Depression, Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind” captured the spirit of the times when she declared, “I’m going to live through this and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again.” Pope Francis asks us to do more than look to ourselves. He asks us to be so committed to tending to the needy around us that eventually no one will go needy. He asks us to remember that Jesus was a social activist.

Palaima is a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Austin American-Statesman 120713 A slow erosion of core government services

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Palaima: A slow erosion of core government services

Austin American-Statesman

Posted: 7:00 p.m. Friday, Dec. 6, 2013  Print edition December 7, 2013

http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/palaima-a-slow-erosion-of-core-government-services/ncBmy/

By Tom Palaima

“Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got / Till it’s gone.”

It took a trip to Hawaii in 1970 for Joni Mitchell to realize that we let important things slip away without noticing until it is too late. She wrote these lines after looking out from her hotel room window at “beautiful green mountains in the distance.” She then looked down on “a parking lot as far as the eye could see, this blight on paradise.”

Sometimes a long view helps, like Mitchell’s out across natural distance and then down upon the impervious pavement made by and for human machines. In other cases, a view through time helps.

Since the 1980s, I have been watching the dismantling of public services motivated mainly by the idea that government is inefficient or worse. In most cases that I am aware of, the process has been gradual.

Budgets are cut a little at a time or frozen below yearly cost increases. Regulations are changed; legal safeguards removed; institutional structures modified. All this is done in the name of free enterprise. The effects are felt down the line, and they are generally felt by those who had little say in the decisions being made or little grasp of the consequences of those decisions.

You can think of your own examples. In my mind are the steady cutbacks in state funding of public higher education, insufficient appropriations for the long-term maintenance of highway infrastructure, removal of controls over savings and loan institutions, budget cuts for National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting System and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the undoing of the safeguards of the Glass-Steagall Act (Banking Act of 1933) through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (the Financial Services Modernization Act) of 1999.

Front and center in my mind right now is the United States Postal Service, an independent agency of the federal government that was viewed as so important by our founding fathers that the United States Constitution mandates that Congress “establish Post Offices and post Roads.”

Note that the USPS is a vital national “service,” just like our armed services. It is part of a worldwide postal system that is arguably one of the greatest feats of international cooperation the world has ever seen.

In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. It mandates that the USPS uniquely set aside from its revenues $5.5 billion per year for 10 years in order to cover retiree health care 75 years into the future.

So when you read the headlines this last month: “Postal Service crisis persists: The agency has lost $41 billion since 2007” (Nov. 11) and “U.S. Postal Service cites $5 billion loss” (Nov. 16), do look at the fine print, do the math and think of the bottom line.

Consider also that in the United Kingdom standard-service first-class letters up to 3.5 ounces cost 96 cents. In Sweden, first class mail up to 0.7 ounces costs 90 cents and then up to 3.5 ounces $1.80. U.S. postal rates are kept well below such rates: up to one ounce 46 cents; two ounces 66 cents; three ounces 86 cents; 3.5 ounces $1.06.

Think also of the human beings throughout our country who depend on postal service, like the widow of my late cousin Paul. In 2000, at age 57, Paul, a mechanical engineering grad of Cleveland State University and a Vietnam vet, was laid off from his long-time job as a computer numerical control programmer when the once vibrant industry-based economy of Cleveland was just about finished rusting away. He died in September 2005, feeling thrown away.

Paul’s widow, Elizabeth Palaima, mother of their three now grown children, is a high school graduate who admits that she barely made it through her math courses. She writes me simple letters about the daily joys and problems faced by her children and grandchildren in economically blighted Cleveland. She encloses clippings from the newspapers, occasional snapshots and drawings her grandchildren have made. Since May 15, 2011, I have received and kept 198 letters, each mailed from the front porch of her small house and safely delivered to my Austin mailbox for 46 cents each. It is what she can afford and how she stays humanly in touch.

Elizabeth, like many Americans, cannot pay the entrance fee and high toll charges on our electronic information highway. She depends on a service from our government that Abraham Lincoln declared was “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Palaima is a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin  tpalaima@sbcglobal.net

MOOCs, Braindead Megaphones, the Golden Goose & the Artzt of Public Discussion

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Palaima:

Talk loud and say something  (on-line title) Dopey Discourse Is All Too Prevalent (print title)

Austin American-Statesman Posted: 12:49 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2013

http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/palaima-talk-loud-and-say-something/nbT7b/

https://utexas.app.box.com/s/t3qtk25kbbvn3p5ccf8r

By Tom Palaima – Regular Contributor

Recently I heard Karen Artzt, Ashbel Smith Professor Emeritus of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Texas at Austin, give a talk about some of her life’s work. She explained the process of searching for coding sequences in mammalian genomes and how the results help prevent physical defects from developing in young children.

Artzt was asked what new discoveries lie ahead. She took time to think and then said, “Progress in this field of research is saltatory.” She traced in the air with her index finger a research timeline marked by sudden steps upward.

In that moment, Artzt’s thoughtful command of language matched her mastery of science. Even those of us who abide by George Orwell’s rule to use plain English words whenever possible knew that the Latin-derived word saltatory — proceeding by leaps rather than gradually — was perfect.

Later, I wondered why Artzt’s reply struck us as so special. I think I now know why, and it is no trivial matter.

We are used to listening to what George Saunders calls “braindead megaphones,” presenters of information who, as the late godfather of soul and plain-speaker of many social and political truths, James Brown put it, practice the art of “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing.”

Artzt gave a direct answer. She did not pretend to know what she could not know. She did not preen as an expert in the spotlight. She told us the truth.

The truth is what James Brown learned growing up in the soul-destroying Jim Crow poverty of Barnwell, S.C. and Augusta, Ga. In his autobiography, Brown said that “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing” was “aimed at the politicians who were running their mouths but had no knowledge of what life was like for a lot of people.”

Instead of straight talk and meaningful discussion, we get in the media and from our political, cultural and institutional leaders what Saunders calls “dopey communication.” Leaders have agenda to push and push fast. They short-circuit discussion and truly democratic deliberation. They speak to wide audiences who have little time to think over what is said and no opportunity to pose questions or counter arguments. Their language is vague, unclear, filled with jargon phrases and assertions unsupported by facts.

For example, UT Austin and the UT System have been mobilizing quickly to be major players in producing massive open online courses (MOOCs) that can be taken electronically by tens of thousands of students worldwide. UT President Bill Powers made a public statement in February, “Our faculty is enthusiastic about this frontier.”

This sounds good. But it is an assertion without proof. It requires that Powers knew that a solid majority of faculty members last February were very keen on the massive online course offerings. But he could not know that without a well-constructed anonymous survey taken after meaningful discussions with the general faculty in the many schools and programs across campus about the many pros and equally many cons of using MOOCs in higher education. It is savvier to claim faculty enthusiasm about a frontier. People used to braindead megaphones will believe it.

One reason to push ahead is that enthusiasts think there is lots of money to be made by developing and offering the MOOCs. Raising revenues is good, but only if we do not cause serious collateral harm to education.

No matter. The Institute for Transformational Learning was authorized by the UT System in August 2011 and established in 2012 “to leapfrog our current efforts” at blended and online learning. In other words, we are leaping right over wise broad-based deliberation.

The institute’s executive director Steven Mintz told the faculty council in March that the use of MOOCs “is the golden goose, and I want to support that goose.” But no one knows whether online courses will be the money-generator that Mintz imagines or the very fairy tale to which Mintz refers.

“The Golden Goose” is tale 64 in the Brothers Grimm collection. In it, all who greedily and without forethought try to pluck golden feathers from the golden goose become stuck to it and to each other. In the end they are thoroughly discomfited.

On MOOCs and other matters our university leaders should think carefully and make haste slowly. They should invite thought from the united faculty of experienced scholar-educators whose work is largely responsible for our ranking 25th among world universities in the latest “Times Higher Education” survey. They surely should know how to tell a golden goose from a goose that will lay a golden egg or no egg at all.

Palaima is a classics professor at the Univeristy of Texas at Austin.

Longhorn Football: Hubris, Counterfactual History and Mythological Lessons

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Longhorn football could learn a thing or two from Greek myth

The Daily Texan Published on-line September 18, 2013 Print edition September 19, 2013

http://www.dailytexanonline.com/opinion/2013/09/18/longhorn-football-could-learn-a-thing-or-two-from-greek-myth

By Tom Palaima

In my many years of teaching ancient mythology, I have absorbed, as I hope my students have, the important lessons about life that the original myth-makers embedded in their stories.

One lesson is to be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it. A variant is to make sure you follow through on your side of whatever bargain you strike. A third is not to get too big for your britches — the Greeks called this hubris.

The immortal and ageless goddess Dawn falls in love with a handsome prince of Troy named Tithonus. She steals him away and asks Zeus to make him immortal. Zeus asks her, “Do you want anything else?” She says no.

Zeus makes Tithonus deathless, but not ageless. He grows older and older, shrivels up and finally turns into a chirping cicada—not what Dawn had in mind.

A similar fate befalls the Cumaean Sibyl. According to Ovid, Apollo loves the Sibyl so much that he offers to grant her one wish if she will make love with him. She asks to live as many years as the grains of sand she holds. When she later refuses to give up her virginity, Apollo gives her long life, but lets her, too, grow old.

Counterfactual history, like Winston Churchill’s famous 1931 essay “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” focuses on key moments and their consequences by wondering “What if?” What if Dawn had thought through her request? What if the Sibyl had followed through on her promise?

Given the major distraction that the poor performance of the Longhorns football team has become lately at our university, it is worth posing a big counterfactual historical question. What if Vince Young had not scored the winning touchdown with nineteen seconds left in the 2006 Rose Bowl, considered by ESPN the fifth greatest play in the history of NCAA football?

The touchdown won the national title for the UT Longhorns, just weeks after William C. Powers, then dean of the UT Law School and long a sports enthusiast, was officially named the 28th president of UT Austin.

Winning the national championship was for head coach Mack Brown the NCAA sports equivalent of being head of a team of researchers awarded the Nobel Prize. As national champions, the football program brought in a bonanza in revenues from marketing souvenirs and our UT trademark.

The chief financial officer of the self-operating UT athletics program Ed Gobles has proclaimed, “We eat what we kill.” Translation: whatever monies athletics raises, it spends. Athletics director DeLoss Dodds has crowed, “We are the Joneses.”

The die was cast. From the Vince Young Rose Bowl onward, there has been no restraining athletics. Hubris has prevailed.

Stadium expansions, large salary increases coaches — not only in football, and a $1 million annuity for the athletics director were approved by the cronies within the UT sports silo, the regents who attend football games in the president’s skybox or their own, and the wealthy donors who, according to a local sportswriter, really decide whether head coaches are hired and fired.

The sense was that we would win another national title.

And we almost did. The Longhorns lost to Alabama 37-21 in the national title game following the 2009 season. Trouble was, right before that loss, Mack Brown was given, over the strong protest of a core of faculty leaders, a $2-million raise. That set in motion the decamping of his heir apparent Will Muschamp.

Without Muschamp’s defensive coaching genius, the Longhorns fortunes have faded. Talk now is of winning Big XII titles. But this hope is almost counterfactual, given that teams coached by Mack Brown have only been Big XII champions twice in his fifteen years at UT (2005 and 2009).

One more counterfactual thought. If UT had lost the 2006 Rose Bowl, perhaps Vince Young would have played another year of college football, reined in his hubris about his own abilities, and faced the transition to the fame and fortune of professional football with more maturity.

One positive fact: Young has now earned his degree in Youth and Community Studies and has a loving wife and child. He can do some real good in the world before old age overtakes him, as it overtook Tithonus, and overtakes us all, even our greatest athletes.

Palaima is the Armstrong Centennial Professor of Classics. 

Austin American-Statesman 09/13/2013 Palaima: If Mack Brown Were On the Tenure Track

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Palaima: If Mack Brown were on the tenure track

Austin American-Statesman Posted: 12:55 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 12, 2013  Print Edition September 13, 2013 
http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/palaima-if-mack-brown-were-on-the-tenure-track/nZtsw/

By Tom Palaima – Regular Contributor

The big questions in Austin right now are what grade do we give Mack Brown for his performance as head coach of the University of Texas football team, and who gives him his grade?

Sportswriters are giving out C’s, D’ and F’s for play on the field. Here let me propose that it would be much better if decisions about coaches, expenditures, admissions and academic standards were made with a wider range of voices, perspectives and values.

Athletics decision-making has long operated in a silo. Regents, a sports-enthusiast president, other insiders and a few carefully chosen and easily outvoted outsiders decide on hiring and firing and set spending priorities in a self-operating sports enterprise.

What if decision-making in athletics at UT was modeled on the university’s system for promotion and tenure ? The promotion and tenure system obtains broad perspectives from inside and outside the university. It involves the tenured faculty and university administration at many levels of authority. It virtually eliminates decisions based on cronyism, except at the highest levels, where such decisions are at least transparent. It allows at every stage for fact-finding and debate.

Before you say it just can’t work, hear me out. And imagine your own analogies to UT big-time sports.

Assistant professors apply for tenure and promotion generally in their sixth active year at the university. During their first five years, committees and chairpersons or directors within their units have assessed their annual reports and given them specific advice on how to improve in the year ahead.

In the promotion and tenure year, full dossiers relating to research, teaching and service are compiled and closely reviewed. Five or more evaluations of research are sought from distinguished scholars worldwide, chosen to be knowledgeable about a candidate’s areas of specialization but unbiased. Long gone are the days, for the most part, of the good-old-boy system, when going to the finest schools and knowing the right people assured tenure.

Chairpersons or directors and committees of tenured professors judge each case separately within units. Everyone knows the stakes are high for the candidates and for the future of their units. Budgets are tight. Investing in the right person is crucial.

The two departmental decisions are scrutinized by a college-wide committee of professors and by the dean within each college. Their two college-level decisions then go to the provost and president. Not much gets missed or overlooked, but appeal safeguards are in place in case the process is flawed.

We complain about decision-making by large committees. Yet UT has made real progress every 25 years because of broad-based committees like the Commission of 125. In the promotion and tenure process, stacking committees upon committees and including the independent opinions of chairpersons, program directors and deans really does work.

It was recently reported to professors that the prevailing philosophy in the provost’s and president’s offices is that UT is not in the business of awarding tenure and promotion to B+ professors. We were also told that research productivity is the bottom line. Mentoring, advising, award-winning teaching, university, professional and community service won’t get assistant professors tenure if they have not gotten an A in research now and for the predictable future.

These are hard standards. I have seen them used. The assistant professors who received the Texas Exes Jean Holloway Teaching Award the year before and after I received it in 2004 were denied tenure. One was a brilliant linguist in Germanic Studies, the other a government professor.

Imagine a similar process and standards applied to Mack Brown. We would discount academic matters like six-year graduation rates of players and the heavy use of tutors. We would discount as outreach service his fundraising and recruiting skills and Longhorn Network appearances. The bottom line would be productivity on game days.

What grade would a broad-based system of evaluators outside the sports silo give a coach who recruits A+ athletes and coaches them in A++ facilities to play against mostly B and lower-grade teams? He chooses his own assistants who are paid A+ salaries.

Right now the problem is defense. But in 2008, 2009, 2010 under Will Muschamp, then-anointed successor to Brown, the Longhorns had the top defense in the Big 12.

The silo did not offer tenure to A+ Muschamp. Instead, they gave a $2 million raise to Brown, who has only coached two teams in his entire career to conference titles.

Would a promotion and tenure-style committee make and stand by the same decision?

Palaima is a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Commentary August 9, 2013 on Information Age, Writing as Therapy, Douglass Parker, Tutto Theatre, James Pennebaker and “Zeus in Therapy”

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Douglass Parker’s Zeus in Therapy is being performed August 16-25 at the Rollins Studio Theatre at the Long Center for Performing Arts 701 W. Riverside Drive in Austin, TX.

See:  http://thelongcenter.org/events/venue/rollins-theatre/
http://www.TuttoTheatre.org

Others Say: Information Age

Palaima: Zeus Poem’s Revealed a Great Soul’s Inner Life

Posted: 12:00 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 8, 2013 Austin American-Statesman print edition Friday August 9

http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/palaima-opening-the-door-to-our-inner-selves/nZHdZ/

 By Tom Palaima – Regular Contributor

It seems like a long-forgotten age, but it was only yesterday, relatively speaking, when most of us lived our lives as closed books. Now we spontaneously twitter, offer ready opinions on blogs, reveal facts about our lives and our loved ones on Facebook. We need to be LinkedIn. We use online dating services to weed through prospective significant others. We risk our lives and the lives of others texting while driving. We even get our souls straight with God via online church worship and counseling services.

It is hard to remember when a cartoon or newspaper clipping taped to an office door was a rare portal into the heart and mind of its occupant. Affixing personal handwritten or typewritten thoughts to a door was a radical act of revelation.

What is the cut-off age for feeling uneasy about the openness that our electronic information technology has introduced? The source code for World Wide Web was released into the public domain in 1991. By 2001, our National Security Agency began warrantless collection of our already voluminous email and Internet usage records, a practice the NSA continues in modified ways. Yet most of us are not concerned.

When was the sea change in how we feel about protecting what we think and say? How old do we have to be to worry about how we now communicate? Even setting aside whether privacy of communication protects who we are and whether monitoring inhibits how we relate to others, the new openness seems to diminish the personal pleasure of discovering what is unique in other people. We now tell all to everyone. We used to tell little to a precious few. But that little was a precious little.

These concerns come together when we use writing as therapy, as a way of probing and uncovering our deepest feelings and innermost thoughts, as a means of getting things off our chests once we identify, through introspection, what is on our chests. The power of psychiatric therapy stems from confiding in a trustworthy, sympathetic, informed and expert other or small group of others. We once singled out and confided in friends, loved ones, fellow workers using the same criteria.

My colleague at the University of Texas at Austin James Pennebaker pioneered 30 years ago a therapy now known as expressive writing. It encourages individuals to recall, explore, bring together, and write about their deepest positive and negative emotions and later to process what they have written. Pennebaker affirms that an important factor is that “participants believe that their writing is taken seriously, is held in confidence, and will have no adverse social effects on them.”

In the old paradigm, the colleagues who placed thoughts on their doors were revealing their inner selves in a guarded way. Their doors protected them from thoughtless spontaneous responses. But the thoughts on their doors made us aware of who they were and what issues of the day interested, worried or delighted them.

I have been brought to these thoughts of mine by memories of a dearly departed colleague, Douglass S. Parker, who taught at UT-Austin for nearly 40 years. Douglass died at age 83, early in 2011. He was a brilliant and influential translator of Greek and Roman comedy and the one professor on our distinguished faculty whom I long advised students to take a course from before they graduated.

Douglass himself said he was a “jazz improvisationalist trapped in a classicist’s body,” “an itinerant trombonist who took a wrong turn in 1946,” when he began serious study of Greek and Latin literature. He taught students about imaginary worlds conceived by great minds from Homer and Dante to Tolkien. His own imaginative powers were prodigious. Austin’s stellar jazz trombonist Jon Blondell, himself now ill, recalled Douglass to me as “that UT prof who really had chops.” Douglass also had a humane and sympathetic soul.

From 1979 to 1993, Douglass posted poems on his door that record what the supreme Greek god Zeus said about his life in imagined therapy sessions. At the time, I was too young and career-focused to grasp that Douglass was revealing his soul to us. Such profound insight into the human condition often comes from going through troubles in life.

Douglass’s 52 poems of inventive genius have been lovingly collected and edited. They will be performed by Tutto Theatre Company at the Long Center for the Performing Arts, August 16-25. Sit at Douglass’s door. His words will open doors in your own hearts.

Palaima is a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

UT commencement: A sliver of idiocracy

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UT commencement: A sliver of idiocracy
Austin American-Statesman July 5, 2013http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/palaima-the-future-is-now/nYbsB/

TOM PALAIMA

Have you ever seen the movie “Idiocracy”? The comedy came out in 2006, directed by Mike Judge, creator of “Beavis & Butt-Head” and “King of the Hill.” In “Idiocracy,” a completely average (in intelligence, talent, ambition, personal appeal) Army clerk (Luke Wilson) and a prostitute (Maya Rudolph), who has bargained her way out of charges, are guinea pigs in an experiment to send human beings a year into the future.

Instead this odd couple is sent 500 years into a broken-down future. In the year 2505, consumerism and know-nothingism have brought society to ruins after five centuries of satirically depicted “reverse Darwinism.”

People with lower IQs, talents and personal motivation have out-bred people who have natural abilities to serve society. However, the future is also in ruins because the so-called high-IQ educated class cares for no one but themselves.

“Idiocracy” is a horror film, too, if you are worried about where our hyper-materialistic culture is heading with our problems in government, education, health care, public services, political leadership and neglect of the common good.

What scared me, when I watched a recorded version, was fast-forwarding on mute through commercial breaks. The commercials blend seamlessly with scenes in the movie. It was hard to tell when today’s valueless, mind-numbing commercials ended and the movie about our whole society become terminally bored, self-centered and addicted to mindless consumerism started again.

Returning to the here and now offers little comfort. Let me give one recent example of idiocracy writ large and put up in lights.

This May, I was part of the high faculty turnout for the general spring commencement ceremony at the University of Texas at Austin. While graduates at other universities were being addressed by J.K. Rowling, Bill Cosby, Stephen Colbert, President Barack Obama and Denzel Washington, we listened to Olympic sprint champion and Texas Ex Sanya Richards-Ross, who attended UT for two years a decade ago, talk about herself for 23 of the 25›½ minutes her commencement address lasted.

Richards-Ross congratulated graduating students for “fighting the urge to go to Sixth Street every night.” We were told that other schools are pretty cool, but the 40 Acres has “one of the best business schools, a national champion football team and the mascot with the most swag.” Graduates learned, “It’s all about you. The world is your oyster. Failure is temporary. Giving up is permanent.” And for 23 minutes, we were given examples of this me-centered, succeed-at-all-costs philosophy. We heard about her training habits, health problems and a few setbacks from grade school onward. She thanked briefly her father, her husband, her family and a nameless ninth- grade teacher, but did not talk about a single coach, teacher or teammate who helped or inspired her along the way.

As for intellectual or cultural content, besides Bevo, the night life on Sixth Street and the 2005 national champion, naturally, version of Longhorns football, we heard one online quote from Aristotle about practicing making perfect and another from Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, about never giving up.

One person, besides President Bill Powers, was mentioned by name, but only by first name. Both Powers and Richards-Ross made reference to “Vince,” as if everyone in the world should know who Vince is.

Powers explicitly congratulated Vince at the start of the evening for completing his degree. This turned out to be Vince Young, a poster child for lots that is wrong with NCAA and professional sports in our country.

It is good that Young, like other student athletes who get far off track, has persevered to get his degree. But I also thought of all the graduating seniors who struggled unsung to get their degrees on-time in education or social work or engineering, those with UTeach degrees who are already giving back or those headed for Teach for America to give back. I thought of graduates who admire the beauties of calculus, a Faulkner short story, a Maya Angelou poem, a speech by Martin Luther King, a rap song by Lil Wayne.

Our flagship institution of higher education should single out those who will never know fame and fortune, but will win many successes working with people who need what they have worked hard to learn.

True idiocracy may be 500 years away, but a sample was right here, up close, looking at itself in the mirror, at UT commencement this year.

And we politely applauded.

Palaima is a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

(Posted for Palaima by dygo)

Palaima: For veterans, every day is Memorial Day

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Palaima: For veterans, every day is Memorial Day

Austin American-Statesman http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/opinion/for-veterans-every-day-is-memorial-day/nX6zR/
Posted: 10:54 a.m. Thursday, May 30, 2013 PRINT May 31, 2103

By Tom Palaima – Regular Contributor

Memorial Day is now behind us, but not for many soldiers and veterans of our country.

My friend Charles E. Patterson is now senior counsel with Morrison Foerster law firm in Los Angeles. His online biography tells us that he served “as an officer in the United States Marine Corps at various duty stations, including the Republic of Vietnam, 1966-1969.” What that matter-of-fact description and Chuck’s extensive legal résumé do not reveal is the memorial that he, like other veterans, carries in his heart to those who served alongside him.

Two fellow soldiers Patterson remembers vividly are Lance Cpl. Manuel Pina “Manny” Babbit and 1st Lt. Henry Marion Norman. Both served with Patterson among the Marines besieged for 77 hellish days at Khe Sanh in 1968.

Norman died at Khe Sanh on March 30, 1968, at age 28, “due to a mortar, rocket, or artillery incident.” Manny Babbitt died on May 4, 1999, one day after his 50th birthday. He was executed by the state of California by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison.

During the long siege at Khe Sanh, Babbitt received a head wound from rocket shrapnel. He was under frequent artillery fire from the enemy. He felt the thunderous force of 100,000 tons of bombs dropped by the U.S. Air Force around the Marine base. He later fought in five other major campaigns in Vietnam.

Babbitt grew up in an environment of poverty and physical abuse. He was 17 when he quit school in the seventh grade. When he came back from Vietnam, he would have been a poster child for post-traumatic stress disorder, only at that time there were no posters for PTSD. Its severity and prevalence among veterans were not yet recognized.

Still, Babbitt was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, dissociative reactions and periods of amnesia. He became a street person, “the town crazy.” On a foggy night in December 1980, Babbitt killed a 78-year-old woman in whose house he had sought shelter. Patterson believes Babbitt acted in a flashback, thinking he was under siege.

At Babbit’s trial in 1982, according to a New York Times report, his court-appointed lawyer “never called witnesses who had served with Mr. Babbitt in Vietnam, never documented his family history of mental illness, an aggravating factor in the post-traumatic stress, and never sought Mr. Babbitt’s Vietnam medical records.” The lawyer later admitted that he ”failed completely in the death penalty phase” of the trial. On May 14, 1982, the jury imposed the penalty of death on Manny Babbitt.

In March 1998, Babbitt, on death row, received a Purple Heart for wounds suffered at Khe Sanh. Four fellow veterans of the siege stood by. Patterson filed the forms that made sure Babbitt received the medal he had earned in service of his country. Patterson and his firm also put in thousands of hours pro bono from 1997 to 1999 in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to have Babbitt’s sentence commuted to life imprisonment.

At the time, Patterson said, “Manny’s a Marine. He was in Khe Sanh. I know I could depend on him to do what he could to save my life. He should be able to depend on me to do the same thing. There’s that obligation.” He and Babbitt both had scars from exploding shrapnel.

Patterson expressed the deep injustice done to Babbitt in his legal writing. He expressed the injustice done to Norman in his poetic writing.

“Marion Henry Norman Khe Sanh, 1968”

They took your life
As if it belonged to them.
If only they had told me
They needed a life,
I would have given them mine.

I wonder
What they did with your life?
Perhaps,
If they don’t need it now,
They’d give it back.

—Ca Lu, March 1968

I saw you dead
But never buried.

In my heart you’ve lived,
Laughing, smiling Hank.
I would keep you there forever,
In a memorial more perfect
Than hands could build.

Finding an end to my war
I can mourn you now.
And, in sadness, leave
This loving, painful,
Magic caretaking,
So I may live
At peace.

To celebrate your death,
To elevate your life,
And its conclusion,
Which was neither sweet,
Nor fitting, Duty’s harshest price
For which the consideration
Should have been honor.

—The World, 1983

For veterans, every day is Memorial Day.

Palaima is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin: tpalaima@austin.utexas.edu.

(Posted for Palaima by dygo)

Palaima: Finding the courage to confront wrong

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Austin American-Statesman Posted: 7:00 p.m. Tuesday, April 16, 2013 Print Edition April 17, 2013
http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/palaima/nXM2y/

Palaima: Finding the courage to confront wrong

By Tom Palaima, Regular Contributor

On June 5, 1989, we witnessed one of the bravest acts in modern history. We saw the man who acted bravely. We have not seen him since. Have you ever wondered why even small acts of personal moral courage like his are so rare?

I have all year while teaching my Undergraduate Studies class on ethics and leadership and my mythology class at the University of Texas at Austin. In mythology this past week, we discussed Euripides’ “Medea,” Jules Dassin’s film “A Dream of Passion” that is based on the “Medea,” and the Andrea Yates case. We pondered what led fictional and real women, who were good mothers and had strong religious values, to kill their own children. Factors included abandonment, social isolation, skewed religious beliefs and narcissistic men lacking in empathy for their children and the women who loved them.

At nearly every step in Euripides’ play, Dassin’s film and Andrea Yates’ marriage, the persons involved and others who looked on could have prevented bad things from happening.

Why don’t we act when we see things going wrong with others where we live and work, in our country, in our world?

I think we delude ourselves into thinking things are not that bad, that we can suspend our values and get back to them later, that we are acting no differently than everyone else, that the little we can do will make little difference. We speak in euphemisms and generalities. We downsize and outsource while we are firing people. We say we are reducing social security benefits and raising co-payments in health plans, not making it harder for many retirees to pay for food and shelter and many parents to afford health care for their children. We say we are waging war to bring peace.

Fortunately, we do have role models who let us know we can do better. In my class, we discussed Martin Luther King’s last speech “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” (April 3, 1968). King was killed the next day. He was in Memphis tending to those who were weak and in need, striking sanitation workers.

A remark by King is often cited, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” King was murdered in large part because he was living that motto fearlessly.

We also have role models who are more like us. In the early ’60s, Bob Zellner was a student at Huntington College in Montgomery, Ala. He began attending black civil rights meetings. The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on his campus.

He explains his awakening: “I grew up in Alabama. Many people don’t realize that … apartheid was the system in the South. Everything was segregated. It was just the way things were. You didn’t think about it. Sometimes when you’re inside a system, you can’t see it very well. But children are not born racists. They are taught to have racial attitudes.”

Zellner then explains how he was instructed by the owner of the country store where he worked, a kindly and good man, that if other white people were in the store, you don’t say “yes, ma’am” and “no, sir” to a colored person. Zellner could not and would not accept that he should disrespect an elder because of skin color. He knew it was wrong and he acted. He joined in peaceful civil rights demonstrations. He was beaten and almost blinded in McComb, Miss., by locals who had been taught hateful racial attitudes.

In his last speech, King thanked God that he lived in the troubled times of the 1960s because “we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them.”

Common individuals can act when problems don’t force everyone to. Marshall Laughead, a freshman in the UTeach program, talked to me with glowing enthusiasm about “Tank Man,’ the solitary Chinese man whose very name and fate are still unknown. On June 5, 1989, he stood with two shopping bags in front of a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square. He showed the world that we can even stop giant mechanized monsters of war by taking a few steps in the right direction and standing our ground. His picture is worth 750 words.

Palaima is professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin. tpalaima@sbcglobal.net.

(Posted for Palaima by dygo)