We left Cape Town last night and are steaming around the Cape in good weather. The seas can be very rough here but they are relatively calm so far. I need to amend my last post in which I wrote that in 1976 the state of Pennsylvania posted the Declaration of Independence around the state for affirming signatures to celebrate the Bicentennial. On further reflection, I’m sure it was the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the constitution. That would be more consistent with peoples’ reluctance to sign than to ask them to support the more general ideas expressed in the Declaration. The Bill of Rights refers to things like search and seizure and freedom of speech. Authoritarian types (read conservatives) would be more likely to support Patriot Act like infringements on our liberties than would liberals.
Before South Africa recedes too far in our wake, I would like to add a postscript about Rhoda Kadalie. I’ve been reading her book since I last wrote and I’m astounded that she has not been harmed or even killed. She is not at all bashful about naming names and making statements like the following direct quotations that I excerpted from the book:
•Parliament…is a cesspool.
•The more government deviates from its social contract with its citizens, the more the political leaders sound like vacuous televangelists.
•We have a deadly cocktail of graft.
•The criminals know that the legislators have violated the highest law-making body in the land and should not preach to them.
•Today people have no respect for the law.
•The rule of law will never become endemic as long as our rulers deny its culture in their own lives.
One last damning criticism from Rhoda might help put things in perspective. In a March 18, 2004 observation from her newspaper column, she wrote that “most liberation heroes become rotten political leaders. The metamorphosis from freedom fighter to dictator, in most cases, seems to be effortless.” She lists a series of names from history, including Castro, Stalin, Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot, and Jean-Bertrand Astride, among others, to make her case. She makes the interesting argument that because these guys break laws to oppose and overthrown oppressive regimes, when they assume power they do not themselves feel constrained to be law abiding. They have been conditioned to believe they are above the law. They become like their former oppressors, if not worse. Remember Lord Acton’s comment that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”? It must be even more difficult to assume the role of average citizen after being seen as the peoples’ savior. We were indeed fortunate in our history that George Washington refused to run for a third term. I remember reading that after one of his addresses, people so idolized him that they vied with one another to replace the horses that pulled his carriage.
Yesterday I spent a two and a half hour plane ride and conversation, returning from a safari, sitting next to an economics professor from the ship. I found conversation with her to be more interesting than the animal encounters. Maybe that was because she agreed with my biases and observations about America’s coming 2nd revolution. And this morning, I spent the better part of an hour before breakfast with a fellow senior passenger and wife of a faculty member, discussing SA and America’s futures. She is black, actually colored in SA parlance and social structure, and a former journalist for The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and now reads mostly British papers. She currently works directing philanthropists on donating money. Of course I told her about CHARACTER COUNTS! We had a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation. As I think I mentioned in an earlier blog, life isn’t about the destination, it’s about the journey and the friends you make along the way.
One of the topics we discussed was the dumbing down of American papers regarding foreign affairs reporting in the past few decades. I mentioned that NYC had over two dozen papers at one time, most if not all with foreign correspondents. Now the NYT is one of the few American papers that has foreign correspondents and Murdock with his checkbook is lurking in the shadows. During the Vietnam War, too many reporters filed their dispatches from the bars of swank hotels rather than brave the front lines and the gritty reality of our disastrous blunder there. Now, we don’t even see news footage of our Afghanistan or Iraq wars, or thanks to Jr., coffins of American soldiers being off loaded in the US on the evening news. We are very effectively shielded from the disastrous consequences of the heavy footsteps of our military industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about in 1954. I find it astounding that the only manufacturing industry I believe we still lead the world in is military goods. We spend about a trillion dollars a year on our current military industrial complex, have a military presence in over a 100 countries, and the public remains mostly mute as Obama asks for an increase in our military budget and a decrease in social services spending. Have we lost our collective mind?
Yesterday, still two days away from India, we began to see trash floating alongside our ship. We are evidently approaching “civilization.” The past few days I spent a bit of time picking the brain of an Indian professor on board. He actually lives and teaches at Sonoma State in California but he looks and speaks like he just stepped off a plane from New Delhi. His name is Laxmi G. Tewari and his discipline is music. His latest book, which I didn’t get the title of, was published in November, 2010. He spoke in core class the other day and described the caste system that he claims is slowly breaking down in India. In my conversations with him, he said that India’s problems began with British occupation. India got independence in about 1948 and is still recovering from the class divisions that the Brit’s presence and policies further embedded. Laxmi teaches music and he said that music for centuries taught resistance that the British overlords did not pick up on. He claims the caste system is the biggest blot on India’s history. He is upbeat on India and advises going into the countryside and interacting (without cameras) to get a real understanding of India. He closed his presentation by projecting the crowd scene picture shown below. He asked us to pick out the untouchables and brahmins (the lowest and highest castes) from this bird’s-eye view. It was a powerful example of the foolishness and arrogance of the caste system or any elitist system. It was also a good reminder of our common humanity.
In our adult passenger session yesterday, religion professor Alan Perreiah did an overview of Hinduism. As he described god after god, their purposes and domains and the vehicles they ride on (I don’t recall which god’s vehicle is a mouse), there was a lot of snickering by several of my fellow passengers. One of the main gods (I’m told there are over 300,000,000) is Brahma, the god of creation. He rides a goose named Hansa. As he spoke, I remembered having to memorize the Catholic Catechism in grade school. We only had three gods with their different attributes to memorize. How do Indian kids cope? And I also wondered if devote Hindus would snicker at the beliefs of the adult Christians among us. One hallmark of Hinduism is purportedly tolerance, although I wonder how that squares with the religious violence India has experienced in recent years. I’ll have to ask Alan. I also want to ask Alan to clarify his observation ranking the comparison of how beliefs differ between Hindus and the students in his classes on ten different issues that both groups have ranked in order of priority. Perhaps in a latter blog…
This afternoon, Bill Cuff, a professor of sociology who specializes in social justice and service, spoke in the altruism class I’ve been attending. One of the issues he addressed was the traits that people posses who are drawn to service. We all filled out a questionnaire asking us to rank 24 pairs of personal traits or characteristics. In each pair, we were asked to choose which trait we most valued, not the one we believed we possessed. Later in the class we went over our rankings, and after tossing out nine control pairs, we were asked to score ourselves giving one point to each of the “correct” choices he presented. The highest possible score one could get was 15. He then told us that the test/questionnaire ranked courage and that the average American ranking is 9.8. Bill then went on to tell of the story of Marion (Van Binsbergin) Pritchard, currently an American, bur formerly a “righteous gentile” (one who hid or helped Jews in Europe during World War II). He had interviewed Marion, whom he described as gentle and unassuming and who hid a Jewish man and his two children under the floor of her kitchen in Amsterdam. One of her neighbors was a Nazi sympathizer who did periodic searches for hidden Jews. After searching her home, he left and her guests emerged from their hiding place. A tactic used by the Nazis was to return after an initial search hoping to catch Jews who had emerged from hiding. He returned and when she opened the door for him she shot and killed him. Her sympathetic neighbors helped her dispose of the body by burying it in a coffin with someone who had recently died. When Bill repeatedly asked why she took the risk to save these people, all she would say was “you just do what you know you should do.” Her picture now hangs in the “Hall of Rescuers” in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
At breakfast this morning, I sat with Bill and we had a spirited discussion, almost a debate, on the nature of human goodness. My position is more optimistic than Bill’s and I told him I would drop in his mailbox a section from my unpublished manuscript that made a case for the brighter side of human nature. I’ll fill you in on our next discussion…
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