Tag Archives: Palaima

Palaima: The ‘me-firstism’ of UT athletics

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http://www.dailytexanonline.com/opinion/2011/09/25/%E2%80%98me-firstism%E2%80%99-ut-athletics

Palaima: The ‘me-firstism’ of UT athletics

Thomas Palaima
The Daily Texan
Published: September 26, 2011

On the advice of a colleague, I watched the 30-second Bevo commercial online for the new Longhorn Network.

Then I watched the network’s opening sequence. He added, “Even you, cynical as you might be, will be amazed at what this University has become.” I am in fact dumbfounded.

The Bevo commercial for the network proves the old adage “seeing is believing.” It should have a disclaimer saying that no intelligent minds were abused in filming this commercial involving bovine and human animals.

We see a high-dollar flat-screen television installed in a livestock trailer so that Bevo, typecast as the mindless, inarticulate ruminant that he is, can gaze helplessly and blankly at ESPN sporting events pictured on the screen.

What a metaphor for what the network will do to further dumb down what is now known as the Longhorn nation. And this mindlessness is being promoted by the flagship institution of higher education in our state.

President William Powers Jr. declared in his State of the University Address that we were working hard to obtain the “widest possible distribution” for the Longhorn Network. He added that “everyone in the UT family can help the effort by contacting their providers and requesting the network.” He has been spending much of his time, according to news reports, flying to other schools to try to work out suitable arrangements for our sports programs.

Meanwhile, The Daily Texan reports, “The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board directed UT to eliminate its degree in Greek studies following this academic year. The board has suggested colleges cut certain degree programs with low enrollment in order to ease state-wide budget cuts to education.” The fact of the matter is that elimination of this degree option will not save a penny, and it comes at a time when our active religious studies programs in ancient religion are creating greater need for ancient Greek to be offered.

UT’s unilateral and single-minded greed in creating a major single-school sports network while a member of a conference that should be united in maintaining fair levels of competition among cooperating members hardly constitutes a lesson in the kind of good citizenship that the values and goals laid out for higher education on the Forty Acres are intended to instill.

The “me-firstism” of UT athletics has even led to our athletics director and upper administrators being satirized on YouTube as Adolf Hitler and spineless Wehrmacht officers. The video’s dialogue offers an uncanny analysis of how things have gone. One classic line in der Fuehrer’s rant is “OU is now gonna demand more money, and we have to find a replacement school we can win against.” Regardless of whether you think Hitler parodies are funny, the clip unfortunately gets across how far the spirit of sportsmanship has declined because of the inequality of resources among schools in the Big 12.

Finally, lost in all the discussion of which schools are bolting to escape UT athletics’ fanatical grasping at cable Lebensraum and other commercial revenues is what must be the worst perversion of American higher education caused by big-time sports madness. The academic side of UT will end up affiliated with whatever schools the sports program decides to form a conference with.

Texas A&M, Nebraska and the University of Colorado were the next three highest-ranked schools academically, after UT, in the Big 12. When schools like them leave, the faculty fellowship exchanges with them become defunct.

Cooperation in research and teaching among institutions depends on maintaining long-term relationships. This can be seen in the Big 10. These relationships are especially crucial as diminishing resources everywhere make schools more dependent on cooperative arrangements. Right now at UT, they are subject to the whims of the empire of about 500 student athletes and their opulently rewarded coaches and administrators.

Palaima is a classics professor and served for three years as a UT representative on the national Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics.

Review: Invisible Romans: Prostitutes, Outlaws, Slaves, Gladiators, Ordinary Men and Women…The Romans That History Forgot

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Times Higher Education

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=417130

How the other 60 million lived
Tom Palaima discovers the hopes, dreams and lives of ordinary people living under Imperial Rome

Published: 16 June 2011

Title: Invisible Romans: Prostitutes, Outlaws, Slaves, Gladiators, Ordinary Men and Women…The Romans That History Forgot
Author:Robert Knapp
Reviewer: Tom Palaima
Publisher:Profile
ISBN: 9781846684012 and 9781847654472 (e-book)
Pages: 384
Price: £25.00

The lowly and invincible of the earth – to endure and endure and then endure, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” It takes writers with profound human sympathies, such as William Faulkner, to capture what the mass of humanity do with their lives in any period of human history. Faulkner’s short story Tomorrow, quoted here, is one of this earth’s most curiously moving stories about a father’s love for a son. Faulkner calls “invincible” the forgotten and nameless poor whom Robert Knapp calls “invisible”.

In Invisible Romans, Knapp finds ways of making the lives of the non-elite citizens, freedmen and slaves, men, women and children, who lived during the first three centuries of the Roman Empire, more than visible. In direct, almost storyteller-like prose, he makes us feel what life was like for ordinary people living between the ages of Augustus and Constantine, what troubles and sorrows they had daily, with what mindsets they faced their tomorrows, what joys they took from life, how they got by – or didn’t.

Knapp sometimes sacrifices rigour by referring generally to sources. For each of his nine chapters, however, he does give intelligent guidance to readable scholarly treatments. There is also a useful “who’s who” and “what’s what” of literary evidence.

Why is such a book called for? To answer that, one picture is worth a reviewer’s paragraph of words. Go to David Lebedoff’s 2008 parallel biography of Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell, The Same Man, and look at the photograph of the Bright Young Things who, one early morning in London after a Mozart costume party, commandeered jackhammers from a crew of nameless and, even in the photograph, all but faceless street workers.

As Knapp notes, some 50 million to 60 million ordinary people lived out their lives in a Roman Empire dominated by “a tiny, self-perpetuating elite that was limited and defined by wealth, tradition, blood and power”. The super-elite senators and equestrians and the lesser elite members of the decurial order who ran things in cities and towns taken together numbered no more than 200,000. Yet they controlled 80 per cent of the wealth of the Empire. How did we ever come to use the expression “how the other half lives”?

Knapp ferrets out how the other 99.5 per cent lived by mining inscriptions, mostly funerary; graffiti; papyrus letters; sources, such as magical papyri and the 1st century AD Carmen Astrologicum, that reflect the concerns of ordinary people seeking to ward off ever-threatening misfortunes, get love or vengeance, or grab hold of rare good luck; New Testament stories naturally directed at working-class (if they were lucky) Christian communities; the comprehensive collection of Roman legal materials known as the Digest; Greek romance literature; Apuleius, Petronius, Phaedrus and Plautus; and standard works from the canon that mention in passing how the other 60 million live.

Read Invisible Romans and you will be disabused of any fantasies of going to Roman baths. They offered, as Knapp describes, “for the ordinary and elite alike, not only social interaction but a dangerous lack of hygiene shocking even to contemplate”. You will also find out why, in an age of constant underemployment, a career as a soldier was coveted, despite the long-term commitment, danger, separation from family and the legal celibacy that it imposed.

A photograph of the signatures that two women slaves named Delftri and Amica, working together in a roof-tile factory, crudely scratched into the soft clay of one of the tiles alongside the imprints of their tiny shod feet speaks volumes about the todays and the hopes for tomorrows of Knapp’s Romans made visible.

This is a remarkably kind and thoughtful book.

Review: The Last Pagans of Rome

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Times Higher Education

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=417316§ioncode=26

Published: 1 September 2011

Title: The Last Pagans of Rome
Author:Alan Cameron
Reviewer: Tom Palaima
Publisher:Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199747276
Pages: 896
Price: £80.00

If you have a week of uninterrupted spare time, a knowledge of Roman imperial literature and history, however dormant, a passable command of Greek and Latin, and you have enjoyed reading classic histories of ancient culture by historians such as Edward Gibbon, or always wish you had, then treat your mind to Alan Cameron’s The Last Pagans of Rome. Cameron here dissects and deconstructs more than 100 years of scholarship about the transition from what we call late Roman imperial pagan culture to what is known as the triumph of Christianity.

As befits a scholar whose work in this area since 1964 includes countless articles and reviews and six books, the weighing of ancient evidence and modern scholarly opinion in The Last Pagans is meticulous. It is also controlled by the broader understanding of cultural processes and human motivations that makes a thinking senior scholar a scholar worth reading rather than a scholiast who has made it to old age. The Last Pagans re-examines what religious beliefs and practices mean in the social and political context of the late fourth and early fifth centuries AD.

Each chapter requires that serious attention be paid to the subtle, interwoven threads of Cameron’s own arguments. It is well worth the effort, but the book itself makes it harder for readers than necessary. Some Latin and Greek passages are accompanied by translations; others are not. Some cited texts are given in the footnotes; others are not. Non-specialist readers, like myself, are given no helpful chronological tables of key events and figures or authors and their works. Some readers will be thrown momentarily off track by simple errors of presentation. For example, in the chapter where Cameron treats the religious or secular meanings of major pieces of classical revival and pagan art (bronze medallions, silver plates, illuminated manuscripts, ivory diptychs), the middle figure on the Lampadiorum ivory panel is described as having a mappa (a kind of napkin that the suffect consul releases to mark the start of the games he is sponsoring) in his left hand and a sceptre in his right, when in fact the opposite is true.

Cameron opens his introduction with a quotation from Gibbon about the “ruin of paganism, in the age of Theodosius” as “a singular event in the history of the human mind”. He grabs our attention by proclaiming that “the romantic myth” of a class of pagan aristocrats who in the 380s and the following decades were “fearless champions of senatorial privilege, literature lovers, and aficionados of classical (especially Greek) culture as well as traditional cults” must be dismantled.

He proceeds to do so by reconsidering how the history of the period was shaped, what effect the perspective of Christian writers had on creating the false constructs of a “pagan revival” and a “last pagan stand” spearheaded by an aristocracy who, in Cameron’s view, were “arrogant, philistine land-grabbers, most of them”. To be successful, members of the Roman elite also had to be shrewd, politically adept and pragmatic. This is hardly a pool that would contain many zealous champions of paganism, which, after all, was not even a formal religion. Cameron argues convincingly that few of those whom we now call “pagan aristocrats” self-identified as pagans. Nor did they rally around the usurper Eugenius for religious reasons. And there was no true pagan revolt.

Our age of ever-increasing wealth disparity gives us ample reason to support Cameron’s incredulity at the prevailing notion of a senatorial aristocracy devoted to classical culture, literature and philosophy and to collecting and correcting manuscripts. Ironically, Christian leaders such as Jerome and Augustine were truly learned in what we call the Classics. They “could not resist to show off their classical culture when writing to members of the elite, whether pagan or Christian”. By contrast, Ammianus Marcellinus, “the most important pagan writer of the age”, pillories late 4th-century Roman aristocrats for “arrogance, ostentation, superstition, gluttony, and cruelty”. He notes that former houses of what we would call literary patrons now shunned “men of learning and sobriety” and “their libraries are like tombs, permanently closed”.

In demolishing the long-standing theory that the images on the bronze medallions known as contorniates were part of an active pro-pagan propaganda campaign in the late 4th century, Cameron stresses that “the ‘conflict’ over classical culture was entirely one-sided. While some Christians condemned it, there is no evidence that pagans ‘promoted’ it.” On wall paintings, floor mosaics and precious objects such as the silver Mildenhall plate, “Dionysus is not portrayed as a saviour or redeemer” or as a rival of Christ. “His mission is simply to bring men and (especially) women joy in the form of wine.

“Nowadays,” Cameron notes, “we place such culture heroes on postage stamps.”

Palaima: Single-sex education study flawed

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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-single-sex-education-study-flawed-1912538.html

COMMENTARY
Palaima: Single-sex education study flawed

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Thursday, October 11, 2011

In the late 1960s, I learned how to read and think and talk and write at St. Ignatius High School, an all-boys school in Cleveland. Many of my teachers were Jesuit priests. They had doctor of divinity degrees and doctorates in a second subject area. They had done serious community service, like work among the urban poor in the United States or in foreign countries.

Our teachers at St. Ignatius were devoted to the life of the mind and to our minds. But they never forgot our souls and spirits and hearts. They taught us how to think. They even taught theology skeptically. My high school education prepared me to question my Catholic faith, but it instilled positive moral and social values that enrich my life to this day. I looked forward to school every day, although I had to travel 20 miles for 75 minutes on a public bus each way. I left home at 6:30 a.m. and got back in rush hour, about 6 p.m.

The buses were packed with working-class men and women and with teenage boys and girls going to Catholic high schools in the city. I felt lucky to be getting an education. I sensed how poor life could be without a cultivated mind and caring spirit. The worldly wise Jesuits reinforced this idea.

The controversy surrounding “single-sex schooling” and the Ann Richards School raised by a two-page article, “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling,” in the journal Science struck a deep chord in me and in others. I read the article as if it were assigned reading in a second-year English class at St. Ignatius. Here is my homework.

We might expect a priori that an article co-authored by eight active founders and board members of a national organization championing coeducational schooling would show some bias. It does.

Its authors, including a psychology professor at the University of Texas, accuse educators who support single-sex schooling of pseudo-science. For a psychology professor to join in doing this is “a pot calling kettles black.” Psychology itself is not an exact science.

The eight authors criticize proponents of single-sex schooling for cherry-picking their arguments. But they cherry-pick a straw man, a random “teacher in a single-sex public school classroom,” whose opinion they quote from a local newspaper, the Gaston Gazette.

Conforming to recent politically driven data mania within higher education, the Science article equates school success solely with standardized test scores. It declares that a sample single-sex school achieves the same high results as a sample magnet program. Instead of praising and supporting both kinds of schools, it proposes getting rid of single-sex schools. It then argues that the high scores of students in both types of schools are linked to their admissions policies, as if this is somehow bad. Should we then eliminate both magnet and single-sex schools?

The Science article does briefly consider a larger social issue. But it has nothing to do with the wide range of reasons that make parents want to send their children to single-sex schools.

The eight authors cherry-pick a United Kingdom study that argues that men who have had single-sex schooling are more likely to get divorced than those with co-educational educations, yet “no parallel differences were found for women.” We can make four points about this inept logical gambit:

Citing a U.K. study that isolates education as a factor in divorce is of dubious relevance to our American experience. British manners, customs, social attitudes and cultural values are very different from ours.

Does this mean that the authors think single-sex schooling is OK for women since they do not become more divorce-prone because of it?

If this were relevant and valid, why should we not isolate the factors in single-sex schooling that produce such results and adjust them to make men less divorce-prone?

My brother and I both went to coeducational grade schools. Unlike me, he went to coed high schools. He has been divorced twice. I have been divorced three times.

The factors leading to our divorces are many: family dynamics, religion, growing up in the 1950s, our individual personalities, our ex-spouses, bad luck.

I have seen therapists for more than 20 years now. Not one has said to me, “Tom, you should have gone to a coed high school.”

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

Palaima: Remembering origins of Veterans Day

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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/remembering-origins-of-veterans-day-1957502.html

COMMENTARY
Palaima: Remembering origins of Veterans Day

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Tuesday, November 8, 2011

How many Americans know why we observe what we now call Veterans Day on November 11th? How many know what this national holiday originally commemorated? How many read the presidential proclamations issued yearly to guide our remembrance?

World War II veteran Paul Fussell wrote in his award-winning 1975 study of the human significance of World War I, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected.” The supreme irony is how easy it is for those of us who are not veterans or do not know veterans to hold onto unrealistic expectations about war.

On Oct. 8, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Proclamation 3071. It informs us that on June 4, 1926, Congress passed a resolution that Americans should observe the anniversary of the end of World War I, Nov. 11, 1918, with appropriate ceremonies. In 1938, Congress made Nov. 11 a legal holiday called Armistice Day.

Eisenhower changed Armistice Day into Veterans Day because of “two other great military conflicts in the intervening years,” World War II and the Korean War. Eisenhower declared these wars necessary “to preserve our heritage of freedom.” He called upon us as American citizens “to reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that (the) efforts (of veterans) shall not have been in vain.”

Ironically, two years later we began promoting enduring peace with 58,178 official American military casualty deaths in the Vietnam War between June 8, 1956, and May 15, 1975. The start is ironically hard to pinpoint because there was no formal declaration of war. The last casualties occurred two weeks after the war ended with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.

As our troops pull out of Iraq, there will be ironic deaths like these and like British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen’s. Owen voluntarily returned to the fighting in France in July 1918 so that he could write about the realities of trench warfare. He was killed on Nov. 4, a week before the armistice. In the preface to his poems, Owen wrote, “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” Their realism strips away the lofty sentiments about noble sacrifices in most presidential Veterans Day proclamations. His poems and his death remind us instead how long it takes and how much it costs to stop wars once we start them.

The very word “armistice” offers a strong warning. It means “a temporary cessation of the use of weapons by mutual agreement.” It reminds us that no war will end all wars.

Indeed, Kurt Vonnegut, who as an American POW survived the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, grasped the irony of doing away with Armistice Day. Born Nov. 11, 1922, he recalled that, when he was a boy, “all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the 11th minute of the 11th hour of Armistice Day,” the moment when “millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.” Veterans told him that on the battlefield, “the sudden silence was the Voice of God.” So it must have seemed.

Obscenely ironic was that, after the armistice had been generally announced at 5 a.m., generals still ordered soldiers into battle. The 11,000 casualties suffered in the war’s final six hours exceeded those on D-Day. Henry Gunther, a U.S. Army private from Baltimore, was killed at 10:59 a.m.

These stories don’t tell us everything about what makes war so traumatic for veterans. But they continue a long tradition of soldiers trying to tell us. At the start of this tradition, Homer and the Greek tragedians distilled the essence of what veterans have to say: Owen’s pity, Fussell’s irony, Vonnegut’s deep feelings of senseless absurdity and Eisenhower’s sincere longing for an enduring peace.

On Thursday from 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., noted director and translator Peter Meineck will bring his national initiative, Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives, to the University of Texas at Austin with a free program of readings from ancient texts about war designed for veterans and the concerned public. A dialogue discussion will follow with Sharon Wills, Team Leader for the Postraumatic Stress Disorders Clinical Team at the Austin VA Outpatient Clinic.

See http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/classics/events/20475 for details.

At 11 a.m. Friday, the opening of the University of Texas at Austin’s Student Veteran Center is scheduled.

See http://www.texvet.org/event/2011-11/grand-opening-university-texas-austins-student-veteran-center.

Make Veterans Day meaningful wherever you are.

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

Palaima: Excess in education hurts everyone

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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/excess-in-education-hurts-everyone-2041751.html

COMMENTARY
Palaima: Excess in education hurts everyone

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Tuesday, December 19, 2011

As published with, in square brackets, a section that was edited out.

The ancient Greeks had two famous sayings that have been used as guides to ethical conduct even in modern times: gnothi sauton “know yourself” and meden agan “nothing to excess.”

Diodorus Siculus reports in his “Library of History” how the Spartan statesman Chilon (sixth century BCE) carved these two maxims, and a third one, on a column in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi as offerings to the god. Diodorus declared that Chilon’s apophthegms were worth more than all the magnificent dedications set up at Delphi during its long history by rich and powerful men, cities and countries. His sayings helped men lead good, humanly rewarding lives rather than accumulate wealth and power.

In Diodorus’ view, we can only know ourselves by becoming truly educated. True education will make us wise, moderate and prudent. False education will lead us to wrong values and eventually to ruinous excess.

“Observing due measure in all things” was equally important. Chilon therefore advised that we should “prefer to lose money to gaining it dishonestly because the one causes misery in the short term, the other in the long term.” Oliver Stone will never make a movie about this maxim.

Still reading about Chilon gets students thinking about moral and ethical values. In McGuffey’s “New Fifth Eclectic Reader,” widely used in the late 19th century, lesson XLII took up the theme: We must educate. It did not mean education to acquire the skills to make money, but education to develop “the conscience and the heart,” because otherwise “we must perish by our own prosperity in our haste to be rich and mighty.”

I have been thinking about what is called the “ethics flag” in undergraduate courses at the University of Texas at Austin. Ethics is a tricky and sensitive subject. It therefore tends to be avoided or given lip service in higher education. One assumption seems to be that, like former U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart and pornography, we will recognize unethical behaviors when we see them, and also know where they will lead.

Let’s take the recent scandal in the UT Law School as a case in point. As the American-Statesman‘s Ralph K.M. Haurwitz reported this month, an outside foundation provides private money that the dean controls.

http://www.statesman.com/news/local/ut-law-dean-forced-to-step-down-2021690.html

Is this a bad idea?

It is if the dean never read or thought about what concerned Chilon and McGuffey’s Reader and awards himself a $500,000 forgivable loan or if he offers a spokesperson the title of “visiting scholar” and $101,292 and she accepts. Where would they get the idea that to do such “not illegal” things was OK?

As we might guess, they had a model ready to hand. The chancellor and all the presidents in the UT System have modest base salaries paid by state appropriations. They get whopping amounts of money from supplemental outside sources called excellence and gift funds or interest on temporary investments. In fiscal year 2011, UT President Bill Powers’ base salary was $65,945. He received a $547,667 dollop from such other sources. Coaches’ salaries work the same way.

But university salaries should be determined by guidelines based on a holistic vision of the true good of public education. [Those in control of ‘private monies’ can play favorites. The regents can decide that the president of UT Austin who needed $265,279 in supplemental funds in 2003 cannot get by without twice that amount ($534,655) six years later. And the president’s successor as law school dean might decide that such wealth is his due measure, too.]

Wealth and power act upon ethics like narcotics. In the aftermath of the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal that has ruined the lives of at least 10 boys and those who know and love them, the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum met in New York City Dec. 7-8, “a must-attend by college athletics glitterati.” Penn State and its ethical issues were barely mentioned.

But Powers attended and spoke against reining in immoderation, or, as he put it, “We need to be careful not to punish success.”

But we should punish what is called success, wherever it leads to habits of behavior that cause those entrusted with the common good to act contrary to sound ethics, in extreme cases, to leave young boys undefended from adult predators.

Why, after Penn State and many other intercollegiate sports scandals, would the president of our public university want to help big business go on as usual?

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

Palaima: Facing life’s end on the obituary pages

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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-facing-lifes-end-on-the-obituary-pages-2080419.html

COMMENTARY
Palaima: Facing life’s end on the obituary pages

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Thursday, January 5, 2012

‘I been meek
And hard like an oak
I seen pretty people disappear like smoke
Friends will arrive, friends will disappear.’

-Bob Dylan, ‘Buckets of Rain’

‘I see dead people. All the time. They’re everywhere.’

-Cole Sear, ‘The Sixth Sense’

In what we hope will be for us all a happy new year, more than 2 million Americans will die. The older we get, the more the odds turn against us of making it through another year. If we think about it, that’s the way we want the odds to work, even if we are beyond what used to be the standard retirement age of 55.

Human beings, since well before Herodotus reported the fateful death of the son of the Lydian king Croesus in early manhood, view the deaths of those who have not yet lived life fully as a tragic inversion of the natural order. But the deaths of those we know and love affect us deeply, no matter how old they are when they die.

We also feel the loss of public figures in many different arenas of our human experience. In 2011, we lamented the passing of actor Harry Morgan (96), movie star Elizabeth Taylor (79), literary critic and political commentator Christopher Hitchens (62), boxer “Smokin’_” Joe Frazier (67), television journalist Andy Rooney (92), computer visionary Steve Jobs (56), assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian (83), and blues musicians David “Honeyboy” Edwards (96) and Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins (97). We may have noted wryly that living the blues can, if one is lucky, lead to a ripe old age. Even the deaths of infamous bogeymen like Osama bin Laden (54), Moammar Gadhafi (69) and Kim Jong Il (69) get us to reflect on the nature of our times here on Earth.

As we get older, we experience at a predictably increasing rate the loss of human beings who have intersected with our own lives enough to make us stop and take notice.

In 2011, my 60th year, I helped write memorial notices in January for my closest male friend in Austin and in December for a good friend from graduate school days whom I visited in October and my graduate school mentor and a kind of second father for 38 years, Emmett L. Bennett Jr. Emmett’s life achievements merited a half-page obituary in The New York Times on Jan. 1, 2012. These people were inextricably bound to my own life. Now they have disappeared. Yet they are still here as ghosts. They still affect me. They have magical powers to bring to life the person I was when I knew them.

If the deaths of young people are heart-breaking because of our need to have had a longer time with them, the loss of older friends makes us see who we were at different points in our lives and how we have come to be who we are now. Have you ever wondered where your life has gone while you have been living it?

I asked my friend Margalit Fox, an obituary writer since 2004 for The New York Times, how she deals with the daily task of making sense of death. She explained that it was something that had worried her when she took the position. But after seven years she sees professional obituary writing as crafting stories about how the recently deceased got from point A to point B in their lives and accomplished things worth the telling. She believes there is no better medium than the obituary for talking about what it means to be alive.

As Marilyn Johnson writes in her best seller about obituaries, The Dead Beat, “Obituaries are history as it is happening. Was he a success or a failure, lucky or doomed, older than I am or younger? Did she know how to live? I shake out the pages. Tell me the secret of a good life!”

That is what it comes down to: the secret of a good life. Obituaries are like prompts for essay questions about those who have died. Did she or he lead a “good life”? Why? Why not?

And the ghosts of the departed make sure we ask the same questions again and again about our own lives before we, too, become ghosts.

Not a bad New Year’s resolution for us all.

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

REPLY by classicist James Tatum

Letters Austin American-Statesman on-line January 9 print January 10, 2012

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/details-of-major-issues-teens-shooting-death-coal-2091780.html go to page 2

Memory of the dead

Re: Jan. 5 Tom Palaima commentary, “Facing life’s end on the obituary pages.”

I like Tom Palaima’s columns and his latest one especially. It made me remember a little epitaph that my grandmother Laura Frankie Harvey was fond of repeating to me. She was born in Paris, Texas, in December 1888, conceived, evidently, during the famous Blizzard of ’88, when it was said you could walk on the frozen bodies of cattle from Fort Worth to Kansas City.

Remember man that passeth by
As thou art now so once was I
As I am now so thou must be
Prepare thyself to follow me.

To which some wag appended,

To follow thee’s not my intent
Unless I know which way thee went.

Jim Tatum
Norwich, Vt.

What Military Recruiters Are Doing to Fill the Ranks

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http://hnn.us/articles/8945.html

Monday, December 20, 2004

What Military Recruiters Are Doing to Fill the Ranks
Tom Palaima

Mr. Palaima, recipient of a MacArthur genius award, teaches war and violence studies and ancient history at the University of Texas at Austin. He thanks Mr. David Hill for the reference to “The Recruiting Sergeant.”

Good morning, good morning, the Sergeant he cried.
And the same to you, gentlemen, we did reply,
Intending no harm but meant to pass by,
For it bein’ on Christmas mornin’.

But, says he, My fine fellows, if you will enlist,
Ten guineas in gold I’ll stick to your fist,
And a crown in the bargain for to kick up the dust,
And drink the king’s health in the morning.

For a soldier, he leads a very fine life,
And he always is blessed with a charming young wife,
And he pays all his debts without sorrow or strife,
And he always lives pleasant and charmin’,

And a soldier, he always is decent and clean,
In the finest of clothing he’s constantly seen.
While other poor fellows go dirty and mean,
And sup on thin gruel in the morning.

Says Arthur, I wouldn’t be proud of your clothes,
For you’ve only the lend of them, as I suppose,
But you dare not change them one night, for you know
If you do, you’ll be flogged in the morning.

And we have no desire to take your advance,
All hazards and dangers we barter on chance,
For you’d have no scruples for to send us to France,
Where we would get shot without warning. (© Bob Dylan 1992)

The traditional Irish folk song”Arthur McBride” was written down in Limerick in 1840 and made popular again by Bob Dylan in 1992. In it, the young hero refutes and resists a military recruiter’s false promises.

In mid-19th-century Ireland, recruiting sergeants preyed upon poor Irish boys, promising them adventure, honor, fine clothes and romance instead of pre- and post-potato-famine destitution. Poverty and ignorance have always been the military recruiter’s best friends.

Irish recruits in the 1800’s had to serve as battlefield fodder in the British army for eightpence a day. They were subject to cruel discipline, receiving 25 to 1500 lashes with a cat-o-nine-tails for offenses like changing out of their uniforms. Still for many, military life was better than starvation.

Seventy-five years later, little had changed. The British were now recruiting in Ireland for the war to end all wars. This inspired another anti-recuiter ballad entitled”The Recruiting Sergeant” written by Seamus O’Farrell. It was covered recently by the Pogues:

As I was walking down the road a feeling fine and larky oh
A recruiting sergeant come up to me, says he”you’d like fine in khaki oh
For the King he is in need of men, come read this proclamation oh
A life in Flanders for you then, ‘t would be a fine vacation oh”

“That may be so” says I to him”but tell me Sergeant deary-oh
if I had a pack stuck upon me back would I look fine and cheery-oh
For they’d have you train and drill until they had you one of Frenchies
oh it may be warm in Flanders but it’s draughty in the trenches oh”

The sergeant smiled and winked his eye, his smile was most provoking oh
he twiddled and twirled his wee moustache, says he”You’re only joking oh
for the sandbags are so warm and high the wind you won’t feel blowing oh
well I winked at a caitlin passing by, says I,”What if it’s snowing oh”

Come rain or hail or wind or snow I’m not going out to Flanders oh
There’s fighting in Dublin to be done, let your sergeants and your commanders go
Let Englishmen fight English wars, it’s nearly time they started oh
I saluted the sergeant a very good night, there and then we parted oh

Recruiters nowadays use the same techniques, but with a new sophistication that aims at making their targets more pliant and susceptible to their sales pitches. The hard sell and the gaps between promises and realities are still there. And our national economic policies ensure a steady supply of young men for whom the military is the main route out of poverty.

So long as that supply line exists, disapproval of our foreign wars will never reach the intensity of the Vietnam War period. Back then, even wealthy young men like our current president had their lives affected by the universal draft.

Austin American-Statesman reader Vic Blackburn (1LT, 82nd Airborne Division, 1968-1970) recently reminded me of Col. (ret.) David Hackworth’s views on this subject:”Most recruits in the All Volunteer Force come from non-vocal, working-class families–a disproportionate number from the poor and from minority groups–while more privileged Americans are conspicuous by their absence.” Soldiers drawn from a universal draft”keep all our citizens more closely involved and invested; they are our bottom-line deterrent to war.”

While most parents of teenagers worry about sex, drugs, alcohol and music, parents in certain neighborhoods and school districts also worry about recruiters.

Army Adventure Vans: They’re Flashy. They’re Dangerous. They’re Targeting 500,000 students. They’re Coming To A School Near You. Marguerite Jones of Austin, Texas does. She called me about the sleek, two-million-dollar 18-wheeler military Cinema Van that pulled up outside Travis High School around Veteran’s Day. In a scene resembling playground drug-pushing, her son William and his freshman peers were lured on board and offered free access to the most sophisticated high-tech battle-simulation computer games. All they had to do was give the recruiters their personal information. The kids were told by their school that they had to sign up to get credit for PE class. Meanwhile the recruiters said they needed the information to prove to their superiors that they had been doing their jobs. Indeed.

The U.S. Army sponsored game”America’s Army” and Kuma Reality Games use military battle simulation and retired military consultants to transport their targeted youth audience of 12- to 15-year-olds right into the Battle of Fallujah, Operation Anaconda, and Uday and Qusay’s Last Stand. These games are exciting and ultra-realistic, except in representing the real finality if the American soldier avatar should get himself killed or severely wounded.

At a recent week-long conference I attended at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, a video-game expert spoke of playing the Battle of Fallujah online while watching Marines on CNN do battle on the exact same streets. The video game Full Spectrum Warrior asks youths,”Do you think you have what it takes to become a nationally renowned squad leader?” (Note: How many squad leaders from Iraq or Afghanistan do you think the average American can name?) It also touts the fact that it is based on a game commissioned by the U.S. Army.

The web sites that offer such games for a $9.99 monthly fee have direct links to military recruiting web sites. Imagine the lure of the plush van and sophisticated equipment for kids from homes that cannot afford computers.

Students in targeted schools are further invited to join Junior ROTC. Austin has Air Force Junior ROTC at Reagan, Akins, Westwood, Bowie and McNeil high schools, i.e., the lower-income, predominantly minority schools. The same pattern holds true acros the state, with Junior ROTC’s in traditionally minority regions or areas of urban and rural economic stagnation.

The Army Junior ROTC web site calls its version a”Character and Leadership Development Program.” We might wonder why affluent suburban high schools like non-minority urban high schools do not need to develop these same civic virtues.

Further preying upon teenage insecurity and parental anxiety about their children’s future, the military has devised the Delayed Entry Program. Seventeen year-old kids can sign up for military service, ostensibly to gain credit towards higher rank in the year or more before graduation and basic training. There are a number of specified reasons that legally permit these teenagers later to opt out, but recruiters have been known to misrepresent and high-pressure reluctant graduates or non-graduates into”living up to their commitment.”

Military recruiting then starts with underprivileged twelve year-olds and never lets up. It is supported by money-making video-game manufacturers and schools that are obliged to allow recruiters access to students and student information or lose funding under the provisions of the federal No Child Left behind Act.

I proposed in another recent essay that stop-loss orders and veteran call-backs, while perfectly lawful, were immoral. Austin American-Statesman reader Vic Blackburn disagrees. He calls them and current recruiting practices criminal. What do you think?

A shorter version of this essay appeared in the Austin American-Statesman (12-15-04).

Review: The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan

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http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=419076

The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan
By George Steiner

New Directions Publishing

223pp, £15.99
ISBN 9780811219457

Times Higher Education 23 February 2012

Creativity? It’s all Greek to me

Tom Palaima lauds a reflection on the millennia-old struggle to express original ideas through language

What are thoughts? Who has them? Who first had them? How are thoughts thought? Is thinking thoughts different from expressing them? How are thoughts expressed? What happens to them when they are? Are thoughts and feelings tied together? If the process of having thoughts came into being, can it also come to an end? If so, what might cause this terrifying possibility to happen?

None of these questions is asked so plainly in George Steiner’s The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan, but all are explored with subtle care. Thoughtful readers will come away with heightened sensibilities and intimations about the Western tradition of humanistic thought. I think Steiner, if he were to speak or write plainly, would say that having a sense of understanding bordering on knowing is the best that even the most thoughtful homines sapientes can do. It is not glib to call to mind Plato’s account of Socrates’ explanation, at the end of his own life – in fact, when his own life was in peril – of his relationship to thoughts: that he was wiser in not thinking he knew things that he did not know.

This is a dense book. Its pages are filled with ideas written in Steiner’s own poetic, almost Johnsonian Latinate, prose. It contains many unglossed terms and phrases taken from serious Hebrew, Greek, Roman, German, French, Italian, Russian and Romanian thought-makers. In most cases, simple English equivalents for Steiner’s own abstract words or for borrowed terms and phrases – and all their attendant implications – cannot be found. There is no way to do this book justice in a review, but arguably, and fortunately, no way to do it serious injustice either. Why? Because in The Poetry of Thought, Steiner is writing down his own thoughts on thoughts for himself, rather than for us who do not have his polymathic familiarity with philosophy, poetry, music, literature and mathematics from the Greek pre-Socratics until the late 20th century.

There are no notes. There are no indices. Some few translations of the words of cited thinkers are given in a brief appendix. The translations seem to have been done when Steiner himself was wrestling with how to understand in English the thought content of the original passages. Steiner calls his book an essay. It is. It is also an argument in the literal sense. It casts light and helps us see.

Steiner’s thesis is that the “intellectual and poetic creativity” of the Greeks “during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. remains unique in human history. In some respects, the life of the mind thereafter is a copious footnote.” The Poetry of Thought extends that footnote. Steiner starts from the song poems of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles and Homer before them, from metaphor that gave birth to abstract thoughts and to poetic instincts and tools that have been used by thinkers throughout the Western tradition to express what Coleridge called “thoughts all too deep for words”.

In a brief last chapter, Steiner reflects on the new technologies that threaten privacy, silence and memory, that block our paths to “the poem and the philosophical statement”. He writes that “the humanities” (his quotation marks) “bleakly failed us in the long night of the twentieth century”. But he places hope that “somewhere a rebellious singer, a philosopher inebriate with solitude will say, ‘No'”, and thereby rekindle the lightning of thought of Heraclitus and of Karl Marx. Steiner shares Marx’s belief that books and words can “irradiate the dormant spirit of men and women, rousing them to humanity”.

“In the beginning was the Word”, and the word may make a new beginning.

Published 24 January 2012
Reviewer : Tom Palaima is professor of Classics, University of Texas at Austin.

Palaima: Shootings in Afghanistan have roots in our history

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COMMENTARY
Palaima: Shootings in Afghanistan have roots in our history

Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Monday, March 19, 2012

If you live long enough, one sure fact of life is that history will repeat itself and pose questions about who we are and try to be as civilized human beings.

Earlier this month, in southern Afghanistan, a 38-year-old U.S. sergeant with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, a veteran of three tours of duty in Iraq, slipped off base and into two villages and killed at least 16 fellow human beings in three homes. Among the dead were nine children and three women. He set 11 bodies on fire. He apparently acted alone and surrendered upon returning to his base.

Reactions bring a sense of déjà vu to anyone familiar with the wars American soldiers have fought in the past 50 years. Even guarded official responses are in their own ways sincere and true.

A mother is reported to have opened the flowered blanket in which her 2-year-old daughter’s dead body was wrapped and asked, “Was this child Taliban?” Of course, she wasn’t. The woman’s daughter’s death is unholy. It offends our moral and religious codes, our deep-rooted instincts to protect the young and innocent.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the killings were “acts of terror and unforgivable.” Of course, they look like acts of terror to people who know firsthand what terrible acts terrorists commit. Forgiveness should be sought from the hearts of those who loved the victims.

President Barack Obama issued a statement that mostly rings true, “This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the people of the United States has for the people of Afghanistan.”

Of course, mass killing of defenseless innocents by an experienced soldier is beyond tragedy.

There is no question that American soldiers are well-trained and learn rules of engagement to follow even in environments where the enemy is hard to identify. Most Americans do not lack respect for the people of Afghanistan, even if few of us have personal ties with Afghans or can even locate their country on a map.

The deputy commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Adrian Bradshaw, declared, “I cannot explain the motivation behind such callous acts.” He probably cannot. But I bet he could begin a list of factors that would lead an experienced soldier, a married father of two, to do what he did on that morning.

Online, opinions are varied and less guarded, as we also might expect. Many see the killings as understandable, though not condonable – a product of the stresses our volunteer soldiers now face in the formally undeclared wars we are now fighting. They point out that our soldiers serve too many tours of duty and that veteran suicides have reached record rates. They call for us to pull our troops out of Afghanistan and not send them anywhere else. They wonder how soldiers operating under constant strain can hold themselves together while overseas and return as psychologically healthy human beings.

One spouse of a Special Forces veteran writes eloquently that this kind of brutal murder “is not what (Special Forces) soldiers are trained to do. The Special Forces code is ‘free the oppressed’ and that is what they are trying to do. The danger that they put themselves in to bring freedom for these people.”

Indeed, Obama stresses, “In no way is this representative of the enormous sacrifices that our men and women have made in Afghanistan.”

Finally, Obama was asked point-blank whether this incident in Afghanistan was comparable to the My Lai massacre that took place, uncannily, five calendar days later, March 16, 1968. He dismissed the comparison, saying in Afghanistan “you had a lone gunman who acted on his own.” But we should remember that, controversially, only Lt. William J. Calley was convicted on the charge that he did “with premeditation murder Oriental human beings, whose names and sex are unknown, by shooting them with a rifle.” Yet more than 500 women, children and old men were killed on that single day.

Seymour Hersh, who won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking the My Lai story in November 1969, will deliver a public lecture on Thursday at the University of Texas.

Make an effort to come to listen to what he thinks about the history he has lived through and sees now. History, unfortunately, will just not go away.

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

Learn more

Seymour Hersh speaks at 7 p.m. Thursday at UT’s AT&T conference center. Information: www.utexas.edu/know/events.

Addendum

The initial charge against Calley as reported by Mr. Hersh was as reported here with the total number dead adding up to 109.

In the event, Calley was charged with four specifications alleging premeditated murder in violation of Article 118 of Uniform Code of Military Justice:

Art. 118. Murder

Any person subject to this chapter who without justification or excuse, unlawfully kills a human being when he– 1) has a premeditated design to kill; 2) intends to kill or inflict great bodily harm; 3) is engaged in an act which is inherently dangerous to others and evinces a wanton disregard of human life; or 4) is engaged in perpetration or attempted perpetration of burglary, sodomy, rape, robbery, or aggravated arson; is guilty of murder, and shall suffer such punishment as a court-martial trial may direct.

The specifications:

Specification 1: In that First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr. …did, at My Lai 4, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of South Viet-Nam, on or about 16 March 1968, with premeditation, murder an unknown number, not less than thirty, Oriental human beings, males and females of various ages, whose names are unknown, occupants of the village of My Lai 4, by means of shooting them with a rifle.

Specification 2: In that First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr…did, at My Lai 4, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of South Viet-Nam, on or about 16 March 1968, with premeditation, murder an unknown number, not less than seventy, Oriental human beings, males and females of various ages, whose names are unknown, occupants of the village of My Lai 4, by means of shooting them with a rifle.

Specification 3: In that First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr…did, at My Lai 4, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of South Viet-Nam, on or about 16 March 1968, with premeditation, murder one Oriental male human being, whose name and age is unknown, by shooting him with a rifle.

Specification 4: In that First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr…did, at My Lai 4, Quang Ngai Province, Republic of South Viet-Nam, on or about 16 March 1968, with premeditation, murder one Oriental human being, an occupant of the village of My Lai 4, approximately two years old, by shooting him with a rifle.