In three weeks I begin my first full-time post-college job. I'm going to be a field representative for the College Republican National Committee. Essentially, I'm going to spend August to November driving around some as-yet-unassigned territory - hopefully in the northeast or the upper south, but nothing's guaranteed - helping out CR chapters and candidates wherever they may need help.

I'm excited, I'm terrified. I'm going to blog about the experience if they'll let me. It's going to be the adventure of a lifetime, It's going to be by far the longest stretch of time I'm ever gone without seeing my family. I start out in D.C. in mid-August learning everything that I don't know about grassroots politics and then I have a few days to finish getting my life in order and three months' worth of junk loaded into the back of my bumper-sticker-covered Ford.

This is not AT ALL what I expected.

I'd be willing to bet on it if I had anything to bet: Mike Huckabee is going to win the Iowa Republican caucus. I'm going to be there to watch it.

I fly out tomorrow afternoon and I'll work at Huckabee's Iowa headquarters for five days. I'll fly back late on the 22nd, spend Christmas at home, return to Iowa on the 26th and stay through the caucus on January 3rd.

I'm going to be smack-dab in the middle of a presidential campaign - the campaign of someone who I believe in with all my heart. I'll probably get to meet Chuck Norris, too.

I'll blog the fun stuff here. I'll blog the political geekery at http://smalltownamericaforhuckabee.blogspot.com
(All the fun "___________ for Huckabee" blog names that possibly could have applied to me were already taken, so I had to wax a bit creative,)

"The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours. But to win it requires total dedication and a total break with the world of your past. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that...yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth."
-Ayn Rand

One sign said, "Throw Ceraso out of the county's car and out of office."
One sign said, "Honk if you want Ceraso to pay for his own gas."
My sign said, "Ceraso and Balya: Corruption With Legs."

We'd only been out for a few minutes when an elderly man in a brown corduroy coat ambled up to me and held out a camera. I wasn't sure if he was a journalist or just a concerned citizen who enjoyed my sign and my use of First Amendment rights. He took my picture, and then he took my name.

And then he said, "Good, we'll need that for the law suit we're going to file against you," and walked into the courthouse just across the street.

After my first moment of blind panic, my instinct was that he wanted to scare me away, and that I was not going to let myself be scared away. I regrouped with my CR friends, they confirmed my instincts, and we returned to merrily waving our signs and dancing jigs every time we got a honk.

But this won't die. I've gotten an online threat from someone who says that I'll be sued along with the Westmoreland GOP and the Republican State Committee of Pennsylvania - I assume for defamation of character. I emailed Commissioner Ceraso himself to ask if he knew that, at the very least, one of his supporters is threatening to sue me on his behalf. It's been more than twenty-four hours and I haven't heard a word in reply. I did some research and found that in the case of a defamation suit, the burden of proof that Balya and Ceraso are, in fact, corruption with legs, rests firmly on the defendant. That is not, from what I can dredge up of my Intro to American Law class that I took freshman year, how case law usually works. I don't know what to do. This is not exactly what I wanted for my senior year of college. They'd have to be crazy to sue a college kid, I think, but all the visible evidence has previously shown that they are not especially nice guys.

So, my friends, what do you know about libel and slander? Am I sprouting grey hair over nothing?

I feel the need to go back to Poland. I'm not sure what to do about it. I'm not sure if there's anything I can do about it. I'm not sure what I think it would solve to go and stand in the ruins again. I don't think it would make any difference at all in the world. But I need to see again that there are still daisies blooming outside the crematoria at Majdanek, that songbirds still make their homes in the trees around Treblinka, that on Friday nights in Krakow old Jewish women still join hands with young Jewish boys and sing the ancient Sabbath songs. Dr. Cary told me as we got on the plane that the March of Remembrance and Hope would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Maybe so, but what I saw and heard and felt and smelled...yes, smelled, the gas chambers at Aushwitz still smell of Zyklon-B....none of it will ever let go of me. None of it is ever very far from the front of my mind. I think it is a good thing that I will never forget, but sleep hasn't come so easy since May.

He was recently convicted for the massacre of 148 Shiite Muslims - the opposition to his Sunni Ba'athist party, but he is responsible for a horrific number of deaths. His crimes include the genocide of as many as two hundred thousand ethnic Kurds in two campaigns - one in 1988 and one immediately after the Persian Gulf War. His regime was notorious for its methods of torture, which included acid baths and professional rapists. He murdered his own son-in-law. Reports that he fed political opponents into industrial meat grinders and wood chippers have never been satisfactorily proved, but significant evidence to this point was introduced at his trial.

Tonight at just past 10 PM the word went out to the world that Saddam is dead, hanged for his recent conviction. CBS's Katie Couric broadcast the report I heard, and she was careful to point out that he was accused of genocide and torture. In the face of the dozens of mass graves that have turned up in Iraq in the last three and a half years, I am dumbfounded by her inability to own up to the fact that Saddam was actually a murderous despot. Of course, her predecessor is Dan Rather, who was granted a famously chummy interview with Saddam right before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. But, looking beyond Katie Couric's lack of moral courage and inability to call a spade a spade or a brutal dictator a brutal dictator....

Many say that the death of Saddam will have no positive effects on the path to establishing a free, stable Iraq. I think we can afford to be cautiously optimistic. Those who are working to rebuild Iraq haven't had much of a psychological boost in a long time. With Saddam's death the people of Iraq can finally close the door on three blood-soaked decades and look forward. With Saddam's death the people of Iraq can finish freeing themselves of the long shadow he casts on their national consciousness. The changes may not be immediate, but they will come.

(cross-posted to SHU College Republicans blog)

"...now she was pulling the cherries off the hat one by one."

Lucynell's behavior here is indicative of an O'Connor theme wherein no matter how hard one may try to hide a flaw, it will always come out. Lucynell's mother may have dolled her up to look like an ordinary girl having an ordinary wedding day, but as desperately as Big Lucynell might want Little Lucynell to be like all the other girls, Little Lucynell just can't be stuffed in the mold. She may have looked like all the other girls for a short time, but all the trappings of fancy dress and fancy hat can't conceal for long that there is just something not quite normal about her. O'Connor comes back to this theme back and again - most strongly with The Misfit, but at other times too. No matter how hard anyone may work to superficially conceal it - with manners, religion, dress - a person's inherent flaw will always expose itself.

A significant theme of this novel is wrapped up in the diverse ways that different people respond to hardship. One of the driving points of the entire story is Mommy's unending, unbowing, unfailing strength and grace in the face of incredible odds, in the face of troubles that would flatten most of us. To any of us Mommy is the very model of courage. So it is interesting - both surprising and completely unsurprising - that the one time in Mommy's life she wasn't strong haunts her.

What is significant about this passage is what is not said. Mommy tells us that Dee-Dee never forgot, reminded her years later. But Mommy is the one who is remembering the incident in vivid detail. More importantly, Mommy is the one who CHOSE to tell this story. In the whole crazy story of her incredibly crowded life, Mommy thought that THIS incident was significant enough in her own personal development to recount. Mommy clearly still feels the sting of guilt and shame that is the central focus of this incident. This demonstrates how what we might think are obvious assumptions about characters are perhaps not so obvious. We look at Mommy and see uncomplaining Grace and strength. Mommy looks at a life full of accomplishment driven by love and isolates this incident to recount many years later.

My paper is on Flannery O'Connor, and we've beaten her work to death in class. Several important themes have returned time and time again in our discussions: religion and spirituality, tolerance and compassion vs. the lack thereof, race, class, and gender and how they interact, and the meaning of a handicap. While Roberts devotes a great deal of space to anticipating specific factual questions - characters, quotations, settings - I think in the context of a culminating exam for the entire course it would be more appropriate to have and we should expect to see the more general, comprehensive questions that he discusses in less detail. I think for the exam it is important to read each work for the overlying theme and to find examples that support that specific theme.

I probably went a bit much into detail, but my presentation was essentially an outline of my paper, as understanding O'Connor's interpretation of death is essential to understanding her work as a whole.

•Flannery O’Connor’s portrayal of the issues surrounding death has come under fire from some critics who say that her work is evidence of a lack of basic compassion.
•Her critics aren’t wrong when they say that O’Connor’s images of death are completely without any kind of human sentiment BUT this is not because she was an awful, insensitive, cold-hearted person.
“A Good Man is Hard to Find”
•Her entire family is evidently gunned down. Does the grandmother give any evidence of caring? Not really. No.
•Immediately after shooting the grandmother, The Misfit picks up a cat to cradle it. He’s just gunned a person down and is now showing affection to a cat. The Misfit is meant to be slightly imbalanced, yes, but it is powerful symbolism that he will show tenderness to an animal while completely disregarding human life. (O’Connor 29)
•The Misfit is a murderer, but is not really such a bad man. He praises his parents to the skies, shows all the little courtesies of a proper Southern gentleman, and freely discusses his ideas about theology and morality. That the purveyor of death can be shown in such a sympathetic light is indicative of O’Connor’s theories that maybe death wasn’t really such a bad thing. (O’Connor 22-29)
“The River”
•Bevel/Harry is just a child, yes the image is clear that he embraces his own death. He certainly is rational terms may be unaware of the implications of what he does. However, we have grown accustomed to the Dylan Thomas sentiment that we must “not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light” and it shocks us that anyone, but especially such a little boy, would embrace death not in this way, not as a the means of escape that some believe suicide offers, but as something to strive for. Imagine for a moment what a stir this must have created in the more innocent world of the 1940s South. (O’Connor 22-29)
“A Late Encounter With the Enemy”
•Sally Poker is on pins and needles that her grandfather won’t live until her graduation. This isn’t because she’s especially fond of her own kin who she’s lived with for probably all of her life. It is instead because she wants the status that comes from having her grandfather sit on the platform as a dignitary. (O’Connor 155-156)
•He dies in the middle of the stage and nobody notices. Wait, what? (O’Connor 168)
“The Displaced Person”
•When Mrs. Shortley dies, Mrs. McIntyre tells us that “anyone would have thought they were kin” (O’Connor 240). She also tells us that it took her three days to get over the death of this person who was like kin to her. Three days. (O’Connor 240)
•Mrs. McIntyre, Mr. Shortley, and their African-American farmhand all see that Guizac is about to be crushed to death by a tractor, a pretty horrible fate. The text never describes them as “frozen with shock and horror” or anything redeeming like that. They apparently just don’t care. (O’Connor 249-250)
•Mrs. McIntyre is fairly annoyed when she catches the priest administering last rites to Guizac. (O’Connor 250)

•One problem I have had with my thesis – I guess this would be the antithesis – is the problem of proving that O’Connor was not trying to make a point about the inhumanity of her characters in depicting death so dispassionately.
Possible answers to antithesis
-It is significant, I think, that none of the reactions of her characters are consciously cruel. (Even the Misfit can come off as a lovable nut.) Her characters are simply apathetic. It is as if death is a non-issue, which, to O’Connor, it was.
-I’m open to polite guidance.
Why O’Connor Wasn’t Just Cold-Hearted and Crazy
•O’Connor understood better than most the inevitability of death. It is significant that she watched her father die of lupus, so that she could virtually chart the course of her own illness according to her memories of his brief life. In her mind, I would imagine, it’s going to come when it comes, so why should anyone bother to fight it?
•O’Connor’s Catholic faith told her that heaven offered something better than anything that could be found on earth. This is most clearly illustrated in “The River” with the tragic tale of Bevel/Harry.
•To O’Connor, there was a kind of spiritual purity in death that we all should be striving for all our lives. This philosophy is illustrated again most clearly by Bevel, but also by The Misfit’s little epigram on the grandmother’s life.
•O’Connor: “For me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in this world I see in its relation to that.” For O’Connor the central aim and end of human life was your faith journey toward the face-to-face encounter with Jesus Christ himself. Death is simply the last step on that journey, the portal to a world where Jesus lived. How could she possibly think death was a bad thing if it brought her that close to Jesus? Instead, it was something to be celebrated.

"...now she was pulling the cherries off the hat one by one."

Lucynell's behavior here is indicative of an O'Connor theme wherein no matter how hard one may try to hide a flaw, it will always come out. Lucynell's mother may have dolled her up to look like an ordinary girl having an ordinary wedding day, but as desperately as Big Lucynell might want Little Lucynell to be like all the other girls, Little Lucynell just can't be stuffed in the mold. She may have looked like all the other girls for a short time, but all the trappings of fancy dress and fancy hat can't conceal for long that there is just something not quite normal about her. O'Connor comes back to this theme back and again - most strongly with The Misfit, but at other times too. No matter how hard anyone may work to superficially conceal it - with manners, religion, dress - a person's inherent flaw will always expose itself.

"'That's valuable,' he said. 'That's a collector's item,' and he took it away from the rest of them and retired to another chair."

This is quite a deliberate and obvious use of irony on O'Connor's part - but only if the reader has a frame of reference from which to begin.

So too it should be with the book that Bevel/Harry has come home with - The Life of Jesus Christ for Children Under 12. To those reading this story from a certain frame of reference, that value of the book lies in its ability to educate, to evangelize. To thisfriend of Bevel/Harry's parents, the value of the book has nothing to do with its wonderful potential to illuminate the young mind. Instead, to him, the value of the book has only to do with the fect that it is very old and nicely bound and someone could get a lot of money for it from a collector. This is the sort of double-edged irony that O'Connor does so well: if you're coming from a Christian background you get it and if you're not you probably don't. With this passage O'Connor is illustrating the competing values of two competing worlds: the transcendental world of the Christian, which values a thing for the good it can do in the world, and the earthly world of Bevel/Harry's parents and people like them - a world which values things only according to their market value.

"I was always worried that Tateh's gun would go off and accidentally kill him while he was cleaning it. Although I was afraid of him, I didn't want anything to happen to him."

I think this can be best explicated by Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind: "How closely women cluth the very chains that bind them."

For tose unfamiliar with the term, Stockholm Syndrome is the term applied to the irrational loyalty that a hostage may feel for a captor. I researched it on Wikipedia, and in all the cases cited, the victim was unable to mentally resist the camptor. Such famous cases cited include that of millionaire Patty Hearst, kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, who ended up aiding and abetting the group in their illegal activities without trying to resist, and Elizabeth Smart, the 14-year-old girl who made headlines several years ago for being kidnapped, and despite physical and sexual abuse from her captors lived with them for many months without needing to be restrained. Mommy's situation, however, is different. Unlike those suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, Mommy is clearly afraid of her captor - er, father. She clearly resists him mentally even if she is trapped in her home. So why does she feel this loyalty to him? it is so utterly illogical. Why does she feel loyalty to someone who has done nothing to inspire it?

"Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice,
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice."

I admire Frost's work for the elegant spareness of his language. He says a great deal in very few words. This poem, however? I have read it a number of times in the past. It shows up everywhere. I think it appeals to the more sordid side of our natures. (People like to read about desire.) And every time I have ever read it I have thought to myself that Frost took at least twice as many words as he needed to say what he wanted to say.