Category Archives: Editorials

Palaima: Listen to the stories contained in a song

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Posted: 12:00 a.m. Thursday, March 14, 2013 Austin American-Statesman
http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/palaima-listen-to-the-stories-contained-in-a-song/nWq9z/

Palaima: Listen to the stories contained in a song

By Tom Palaima

Regular Contributor

Our city proclaims that we are the “live music capital of the world.” We may then be live storytelling capital of the world, too.

The songs played and sung in Austin’s many live music venues throughout the year and during our annual music festivals reach into our hearts and souls. The words and music make us feel happy and sad, sometimes at the same time. They take us outside of ourselves and to places deep inside we never reached before. They make us see how big small things are. They tell us we are not alone in our joys and miseries, that good or bad times don’t last always.

We can think of songs and music purely as entertainment and of musicians and songwriters as the entertainment industry. We can also view the stories we read, listen to, or watch on screens or stages as diversions from our real lives. More and more we are conditioned to view songs, music and stories as products.

This is not surprising. Books often come to our attention when they become New York Times or amazon.com bestsellers. Austin’s cultural treasure, BookPeople, which represents itself as “a community bound by books,” compiles monthly bestseller lists by categories. Movies succeed or fail as measured by box office tracking. And we can follow the fate of CDs on the Billboard 200, the Waterloo Records Top 50 or the Shiner TX Top 10.

Still, it is more than nostalgia to feel a loss when the stories embedded in songs, poems, books, plays and movies are promoted primarily as commercial products. We can unthinkingly act like consumers out to satisfy appetites rather than participants in a creative social process. We can forget what BookPeople’s slogan stresses: stories are for, in and of communities.

Consumerism leads to irreverent behavior. As mere consumers, we may fail to appreciate the unique, never-again communal aspects of a live performance. As unthinking consumers we may talk drunkenly through a Blind Boys of Alabama performance or propose that Willie Nelson be engaged to play music during a conference dinner. I have had both experiences, but not passively.

Fortunately, there are ways we can get back in touch with reverence for the art of telling and singing and hearing stories. Last week in the School of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin, lecturer David Junker and professor Tracy Dahlby collaborated to bring to campus lifelong master storyteller Gioia Timpanelli. They created spaces where she could tell and talk about stories her grandmother told in Sicily, stories the Inuits, the Japanese and the Irish tell, stories akin to American blues and the folk songs of Woody Guthrie.

The late Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Frank McCourt proclaimed, “No one in the world, yes, in the world, can tell a story better than Gioia Timpanelli.” Timpanelli proved him right for almost three hours in the evening by lamplight. She gave us spoken proof that the art of telling hearth stories was not one-way communication or rote performance. Her stories came forth like jazz variations responding to the collective needs and experiences of us, her audience.

She spoke, like our own grandmothers, to our minds and to our hearts. She stressed, in one aside, that stories were “not useful.” “You cannot buy stories,” she said. “What would you buy?” She made us see how preposterous it was to think we can buy a defiant spirit, a deep feeling, a magical journey into timelessness.

Timpanelli riffed on Yeats and Keats. Stories were made from “memory and hope.” Stories were not utilitarian, but important for “soul-making.” Stories “make community”; tap into “tears, joy, ecstasy, sorrow”; help us to feel compassion and empathy; and get us thinking and talking about the many strange ways we have of being human.

Stories are true, Timpanelli told us. Life is hard. Giants do exist, and they always want more. Fairy tale characters live happily ever after. There is no guarantee we will.

My guitarist friend John Inmon has told me that, whenever he plays, he keeps in mind that music comes into being when it reaches the ears and then the hearts of the human beings who have come to hear him play. As we listen to great musicians in Austin, make sure they know we are there fully to accept and respond to the song gifts they offer.

And be generous at the tip jar.

(Posted for Palaima by dygo)

 

Palaima: Boy Scouts not prepared for decision on gays

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Posted: 1:22 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2013

http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/paliama-boy-scouts-not-prepared-for-decision-on-ga/nWHPZ/

Palaima: Boy Scouts not prepared for decision on gays

By Tom Palaima  Regular Contributor

No matter what the leaders of the Boy Scouts of America eventually decide about the longstanding no-gays policy that the organization reaffirmed just seven months ago, there are good reasons to highlight what their decision will say about us as a society.

Most large social organizations and political entities tend to make haste slowly, even on important issues, unless forced to act quickly in a crisis. Current thinking is that Boy Scout leaders may well leave the decision to individual local sponsoring groups. This means that the debate about permitting non-heterosexuals to participate as members of the Boy Scouts will continue at the local level for a good long time.

Second, what are the consequences when leaders or leadership groups make what we might call “Pontius Pilate” or “pass the buck” or “politically expedient” or “best we can do” decisions that cede their own responsibility for making decisions to others.

To some Americans, in the current political climate, entrusting the decision about whether or not to admit gays to local sponsoring groups has a kind of states-rights appeal. To others, this is why it seems like a bad alternative.

Think of the Jim-Crowism that persisted in Southern states for a century and more after the Emancipation Proclamation. We are still feeling its harmful after-effects.

How many people of good moral, religious or political conscience, looking back, think it was a good idea to leave it up to states and local communities to decide whether to keep people of color at the back of public buses, in separate substandard schools, at their own hotels and restaurants, drinking from separate water fountains and even using different restrooms? In their extreme forms, such white-only practices promoted hatred also of Catholics, Jews, homosexuals and Americans from other regions who spoke out for change.

Between 2001 and 2009, I was an active Cub Scouts den leader and Boy Scouts assistant scout master. I know the positive effects that scouting can have on boys and girls, young men and young women. Throughout that time, I thought the policy excluding gays was wrong and still do. I also was troubled by the atmosphere of bias and stereotyping around issues of gender and sexual orientation that the policy promoted.

Gov. Rick Perry spoke out in favor of the no-gays policy, “Scouting is about teaching a substantial amount of life lessons. Sexuality never has been, doesn’t need to be.” In my opinion, his viewpoint is as out of step with the times and our way of life as Jim Crowism was. And the American BSA’s anti-gays policy puts it far behind other democratic countries.

Five years ago, Linda Hagberr, director of communications of the Swedish Guide and Scout Council, wrote to me, “(Our) policy is to be open for all young people (defined as under the age of 18) and all adults that adhere to the Scouting principles. Swedish Guiding and Scouting do not exclude anyone due to being gay or lesbian. It is by us regarded a personal issue and does not affect the leaders’ capability of being a good scout leader and role model for young people.”

Already 10 years before that, John Fogg of the Scout Association in the United Kingdom, said: “Our policy is firmly that no young person or adult should receive less favourable treatment because of their sexuality, gender, marital status or ethnic origin.”

Think back to what Perry thinks are the good old days. How many of us would have benefited from age-appropriate discussions about sexuality and gender identity and related life issues? If you are a parent, think of the world your children are growing up in.

We now have openly, as we have always had secretly, gays and lesbians in Congress, in the military, in churches, in classrooms, in locker rooms and in stores and businesses. Would it not be good for all our future political leaders, soldiers, ministers, teachers, athletes and business people, regardless of sexual orientation, to learn life lessons from one another and from adult role models within the time-tested programs of America’s scouting organizations?

Tim Jeal’s definitive biography — published in 1989 — of Lord Baden Powell, the founder of the scouting movement, marshals strong evidence that he was in all probability a closeted gay man himself. How would his opinion match up with Rick Perry’s or mine or yours?

(Posted for Palaima by dygo)

I recommend you vote for reality

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Posted: 12:00 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012

Austin American-Statesman print edition October 31, 2012

http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/palaima-i-recommend-you-vote-for-reality/nSrL2/

Palaima: I recommend you vote for reality

By Tom Palaima,  Regular Contributor  tpalaima@sbcglobal.net

Like many other Americans, I have already cast my votes in the local, state and national elections at an early voting center. My parents worked at polling stations when I was growing up outside Cleveland, Ohio. The working-class sons and daughters of immigrant Americans took the right to vote seriously. They knew how much was at stake for them in elections at all levels.

We are lucky that simple in-person early voting is available in Texas. It isn’t everywhere, although it seems like a no-brainer. As Dr. Victoria DeFrancesco at the LBJ School of the University of Texas at Austin puts it, “the issue of insuring early voting and/or mail-in voting is of fundamental importance to ensuring the right to vote.”

Many Americans, rich and poor, cannot be sure of voting on election day because of the jobs they hold or their family and personal obligations. Yet 18 states withhold from their citizens the simple insurance of a basic right.

In Florida, where the bogeymen of hanging chads, broken voting machines and incorrect voter registration lists still haunt citizens, early voting days have been reduced from 14 to 8 and the freest day for the working poor to vote early, a final Sunday, has been eliminated. Understandably then, large crowds of voters have been reported at early voting centers. The early voting location at UT Austin’s Flawn Academic Center has been bustling all week.

I cast my vote early for another reason, so that I would not be tempted to watch, read or listen to any more campaign advertisements or what passes for analysis of candidates and their positions on cable news networks.

Do so and you will be exposed to two viruses that have invaded our body politic, educational systems and news organizations and our very lives, the spin and brand viruses. The chief symptom of infection is our willingness to be satisfied with pretenses rather than realities, what we are told rather than what we know in our hearts.

Let’s look at high-profile sports, where, as Tom Boswell argued 30 years ago in his book How Life Imitates the World Series, we can behold what we value or tolerate as a society.

The two biggest sports stories right now in Austin, besides the sizably publicly funded Formula One circus, underscore what is wrong with public figures who cast blame on others, debates that focus on image control, and campaigns that turn on how much money candidates can raise for advertising. They also make clear that higher education is not a hospital to cure these ills, but a laboratory now to breed and perpetuate them.

The first story is the doping scandal that has cost Lance Armstrong his Tour de France titles and his sponsorship income. The second is the bargain-basement record of the UT Longhorns football team under penthouse-salaried head coach Mack Brown. Both stories are clear-cut instances of finally detecting fire where smoke has long been seen and smelled.

Yet about Armstrong’s systematic, long-term unethical behavior and coercion of others to cover it up, we are told by UT advertising professor Neal Burns that Armstrong should rebuild his personal brand, “essentially to disappear for some time,” then come back and “really work on again creating a positive image of himself.” A marketing professor at the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania who researches “moral decoupling” by consumers concurs. Armstrong can survive by exploiting our “psychological wiggle room.”

Meanwhile, on Orangebloods.com Mack Brown, whose astronomical salary is supported by revenues from the Longhorn Network (LHN), blames the dismal performance of his teams in the three years since he received a $2 million raise on his having to spend three hours per week, plus travel time, taping interviews for LHN. His exercise in blatantly self-serving spin and in pointing fingers at the goose that lays his golden eggs has drawn wry observations from national sports commentators.

UT safety Kenneth Vaccaro may have identified an antidote, advising that the players “forget about all the stuff that is distracting at Texas, the Longhorn Network, all the fans, all the glory, all the Nike, and get back to just playing football, because that is all that really matters … .”

I hope Mr. Vaccaro graduates and runs for local public office. I will cast an early vote for him. He wants to live in a real world with simple and sound values. Don’t you, too?

Remembering Those Who Served on Veterans Day

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“Remembering Those Who Served” Austin American-Statesman

http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/palaima-remembering-those-who-served/nS2T8/

Posted: 12:00 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 10, 2012  Print edition November 11, 2012

By Tom Palaima, Regular Contributor

Every four years, Veterans Day in the United States closely follows national election day. This is fitting. Our country was founded through a revolutionary war and kept together through a civil war that cost the most lives of U.S. soldiers by far of any war our soldiers have ever fought. What was happening to soldiers in two wars (Korean and Vietnam) largely influenced the decisions by two incumbent presidents not to run for re-election. Since I was born in 1951, the president’s role as commander-in-chief has been a central topic of presidential election campaigns.

In the 13 years I have been writing commentaries for the Austin American-Statesman, we have had too many occasions to talk about wars, historical and current, why they are fought, whether they are worth the price paid by American men, women and children, whether the human and psychological costs of fighting are shared equally throughout society, and what those who do the fighting go through when they return to us.

Veterans and their families are concerned that the soldiers of their wars are treated fairly once they return home. As time passes, they and we see the war of our own generation — we are lucky if there was only one — lose contemporary meaning. It is jolting when the war that affected us, as soldiers or civilians, becomes ancient history to new generations, when “our” war is kept alive in movies, songs, books, newspaper clippings (and bookmarked URLs), old letters and objects that tap into deep emotions and memories. Many students who are now graduating from the University of Texas at Austin were not yet born when the active six-month combat phase of Operation Desert Storm had ended in February 1991.

Veterans of the Vietnam War know what it is like to live in the shadow of a great war that was fought with strong support on the home front, clear goals (get to Rome, Berlin and Tokyo) and big symbols of good and evil. All veterans know the personal costs of war and the moral ambiguities they faced while performing their own roles in the fighting or supporting those doing the fighting, no matter how righteous their war is.

It was important for Vietnam veterans to create their own national monument. They took the initiative. Controversially at the time, they chose a monument that downplayed traditional symbols of heroism and glory.

What we call the Vietnam War formally ended in 1975. By 1979 a Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund was incorporated and just after Veterans Day in November 1982 a wall of names cut into polished black granite was dedicated. As of 2011, 58,272 names are commemorated. By contrast, the national World War II Memorial was dedicated in 2004, almost 60 years after the war formally ended. A national memorial to Korean War veterans took 42 years.

The Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan come to our attention most often now surrounding veterans’ issues. The high rates of suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans of these two wars have been called an epidemic. News reports have covered the difficulties recent veterans face finding jobs and receiving services owed them. Such attention and strong support by veterans of past wars led to the dedication of UT’s Student Veteran Center on Veterans Day 2011, many wars and 128 years after the university was founded.

On or around Veterans Day, let the veterans you know feel your gratitude and your heartfelt concern for the sacrifices they have made, sometimes well beyond their own choosing. Let them know that while public memorials and government and institutional services might be a long time coming, our human hearts are as resilient and tenacious as their spirits.

A Statesman reader proved this recently. He wrote to me: “I remember my dad standing in line with his lunch bucket waiting to vote before the start of the afternoon shift at the steel mill. The union had told him to vote for Adlai Stevenson but he was determined to vote for Ike as it was the Democrats and Truman that had sent his oldest son to freeze in Korea.”

Because of his memory, I have reread UT professor and veteran Rolando Hinojosa-Smith’s Korean Love Songs. I am now reading Bob Drury’s and Tom Clavin’s grimly vivid and literally chilling account of Korean War fighting by United States Marines, The Last Stand of Fox Company.

Sometimes we need to be reminded to remember what we never should forget.

Tom Palaima, regular columnist for the Austin American-Statesman is a professor of Classics at University of Texas at Austin: tpalaima@sbcglobal.net.

 

The dangers of rushing through life’s stages

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Palaima: The dangers of rushing through life’s stages

[On-line title: “The dangers of rushing into the working world”]

Posted: 2:04 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 27, 2012

http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/palaima-the-dangers-of-rushing-into-the-working-wo/nSNSt/

By Tom Palaima  Special to the Austin American-Statesman

PRINT EDITION Friday, September 28, 2012

“There is a time to every purpose under heaven.” But is that time four or five years long and what is it for?

Several years ago, I heard my friend Ira Iscoe, Ashbel Smith Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, give a talk on Erik Erikson’s theories about the developmental stages of man. Iscoe’s talk was typically lucid. His and Erickson’s ideas have rattled around in my brain, heart and soul as I have thought about how what the ancient Greeks called a “teknon,” literally ‘birthed thing,” develops into a socialized adult.

The Greeks were not alone in emphasizing the “thing-ness” of young human beings. Continue reading →

Bill Powers and the University of Texas at Austin Board of Regents: Historical Perspective

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Marsha Miller/
COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

 

“Powers’ comments about regents didn’t have to be ‘strong’ to be too much”
Tom Palaima, Regular Contributor

Austin American-Statesman Published: 7:14 p.m. Monday, May 14, 2012

Print edition May 15, 2012

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/powers-comments-about-regents-didnt-have-to-be-2356115.html

On his Burkablog on May 9, the senior executive editor of Texas Monthly, Paul Burka, who has long covered the governor’s office in Texas politics, reported that University of Texas President Bill Powers’ job might be in jeopardy because of his “strong opposition” to the decision of the UT System Board of Regents to freeze tuition at the UT flagship for the next two years. When I read Burka’s blog entry and the comments on it, I wondered what Powers said or did that would constitute “strong opposition.”

I kept in mind that, in Texas, presiding over the 29th-ranked university in the world, according to the most recent survey in the Times Higher Education, does not necessarily give the president a lot of what the Romans called auctoritas or dignitas.

To understand the UT System power hierarchy, just remember that etymologically a president sits, regents play at being kings, and the governor pilots the ship of state, often, it seems, without a rudder, map or sextant.

Lutcher Stark, who for 24 years (1919-1943) made being a regent his “outstanding hobby,” held this view: “The president of the University of Texas occupies the position to the board of regents as a general manager of a corporation does to its board of directors.” Indeed, according to Continue reading →

Paul Woodruff’s Impact Is Deep and Wide at UT Austin

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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/woodruffs-impact-is-wide-and-deep-2440156.html

“Woodruff’s impact is wide and deep”

Tom Palaima, Regular Contributor

Austin American-Statesman

Published on-line: 6:25 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2012 print edition Thursday, August 23, 2012 p. A 6

I recall a conversation I had with Professor Paul Woodruff, a close friend and colleague at the University of Texas at Austin, about a dozen years ago. In retrospect I know that one person can make a difference.

Woodruff was then serving as director of the Liberal Arts Plan II Honors Program, a position he held from 1991-2006. He was more than the director of this rigorous program in the humanities and sciences. Woodruff was what Socrates was to his pupils, a resident  “genius”, the guiding spirit who embodied the values and ways of teaching, learning and living Continue reading →

Aurora Shooting: “Encourage all to nurture safer communities”

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Palaima: Encourage all to nurture safer communities

Tom Palaima, Local Contributor  Austin American-Statesman

Updated: 10:35 p.m. Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Published: 7:04 p.m. Tuesday, July 24, 2012  Print version July 25, 2012

Driving up to Denton on Friday afternoon I received a call from the Fox news station in Austin asking me whether the shooting in Aurora, Colo., was connected with “The Dark Knight Rises” Batman movie that was playing in the theater where James Holmes is suspected of killing 12 and wounding 59 people.

For more than two decades, I have studied how human beings respond to violent acts in different historical and cultural settings. On Saturday, Austin’s CBS affiliate asked me how to talk to children about the Aurora shooting.
Continue reading →

Palaima: Budget woes and our misguided priorities

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Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/budget-woes-and-our-misguided-priorities-1248545.htm

COMMENTARY
Palaima: Budget woes and our misguided priorities

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Saturday, February 12, 2011

In reviewing a book on imperialism, power and identity in the Roman empire, I had a frequent sense of déjà vu derived from reading at the same time about the public values that prevail in our state.
Continue reading →

Palaima: Closing doors to the future

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Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-closing-doors-to-the-future-1302538.html

COMMENTARY
Palaima: Closing doors to the future

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Sunday, March 6, 2011

When my friends and I were growing up, public education was held sacred by our parents. As the children of immigrants, education had been their way into American society and their way up the economic ladder.

Continue reading →