John Coyne Babbles

Wofford's Message on Obama

[I received this from Harris Wofford and thought that you might like to read it. Also, did you hear Chris Matthews around 11:30 pm last night going on about Obama, saying that there isn't a Peace Corps Volunteer from the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s who wouldn't vote for him.]

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January 1, 2008

To Friends and Service Colleagues in Iowa:

Last night while celebrating the New Year, I also looked back on the campaigning for Barack Obama that I did last month in Iowa and New Hampshire. On December 5, at Cornell College in Eastern Iowa, it was an honor to introduce Barack Obama to give his “Call to Service” to an enthusiastic audience of hundreds of students, faculty and other Iowans. In presenting him, from a perspective of four-score-and-one years, I tried to convey how lucky we were to have this new leader who can touch our souls and lift our sights to the great challenges facing our country and the world.

Indeed, I have not felt like this since the days of high hopes with John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. As one who was fortunate to coordinate the civil rights section of the l960 Kennedy campaign and then serve as special assistant to the President, to campaign in 1968 for Robert Kennedy, and, from the 1950s on, to work – and walk – with Martin Luther King, I see Barack Obama picking up the torch that they lit.

That conviction grows stronger each day as I watch Barack face the tests of a national campaign. My greatest hope is that for the next four years he will be talking with us, in his direct and thoughtful way, in our living rooms on television screens. And that he will be talking, in a new spirit and new terms, to people and leaders around the world—and working with members of Congress and the leaders of all sectors of our society to find common ground on the most important issues of our time.

At this eleventh hour before the caucuses, I want to make sure that friends and colleagues in Iowa from AmeriCorps, Iowa’s Communities of Promise, Senior Corps, Learn & Serve, Habitat for Humanity, Campus Compact, mentoring programs, Volunteer Centers and the Iowa Commission on Volunteer Service, have had the opportunity to hear or read Barack’s full Call to Service and his outline of a comprehensive and bold Plan for Universal Voluntary Citizen Service: Helping All Americans Serve their Country. You can find those messages at: BarackObama.com but for your convenience I am attaching them here.

Obama Call to Service Speech, December 5^th, 2007 Cornell College Mount Vernon Iowa: http://www.barackobama.com/2007/12/05/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_36.php

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6iEVajGngE 

Policy: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/service/

As an advisor to Senator Obama on this proposal and as one who is delighted by his aim to make service the common expectation and experience of all Americans, I want to spread the word about his commitment to expand AmeriCorps from some 75,000 slots a year to 250,000, to double the Peace Corps, to strengthen senior service programs, to promote service-learning at all levels of education, and to fund further social innovation and support for social entrepreneurs in education and the non-profit sector.

My New Year’s resolution is to do everything in my power to persuade friends and fellow citizens to help bring about his nomination and election. So, please excuse this intrusion from afar, from one who is envious of your historic opportunity to make a difference in the course of our country. I hope you will agree with me that it is important for others in the service field to know the bold expansion that Barack proposes and promises – especially the volunteers or former volunteers in AmeriCorps programs, VISTA, Foster Grandparents, Senior Companions, RSVP, mentor programs, Habitat, and the Peace Corps or the teachers that have seen first hand the positive power of service learning.

If you do agree, then in these remaining hours, in the most practical and appropriate ways, help get the message about Barack’s service plan to those you think would be interested .You may, of course, forward this email to others.  I trust you understand that I am not writing in any official capacity; indeed, last year I stepped down as co-chair of America’s Promise, with Alma Powell, so that I would be free to write and campaign in this election.  We all know that our non-profit work cannot officially be in support of any candidate, but we also know there is a season for all things, and this is the season to choose a president, and to practice what we preach about self-government.

At Cornell College, Barack Obama, like John Kennedy, turned “Ask” into a strong verb, and students there and elsewhere in this campaign, and people of all ages, are conveying that they are ready to say Yes to a new call to service—and to action to bring Americans together for the common good, of this country and the world community. I hope by your votes, despite snow and cold weather, you will help Obama turn the page and write a new chapter in the history of service and civic action.

Let me add three points:

First. Although I do not have the luck to vote in your caucus, I’m no stranger to your state.  Iowa friendships go back to the 1960 presidential campaign; then in l964 I accompanied Sargent Shriver on a campaign trip for John Culver’s first race for Congress. In the campaigns of 1986 I worked with Iowa Democrats while I was state chair of the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania.

In the United States Senate, 1991 to 1995, I appreciated the great leadership of Senator Tom Harkin—and his generous campaigning in Pennsylvania in support of my own election and reelection. In the later 1990s as CEO of the Corporation for National Service and in more recent years on behalf of America’s Promise I enjoyed working with Governor Tom Vilsack on Iowa’s Promise campaign for children and youth and with the growth of Iowa’s excellent Commission on Volunteer Service, continued now by Governor Chet Culver.  This spring I plan to speak to Iowa economic developers, chambers of commerce and utilities about how service and community engagement is a vital piece of the social capital that is essential to keeping Iowa communities strong. Therefore, I appreciate how seriously you take your responsibilities as citizens, and wish you well at the caucuses Thursday.

Second. Important as national service is for many of us, the overriding issue for America is our relationship to the world. Who, as President, is most ready and able to reverse the downward path our leaders have taken us in these last years of misconceived and misguided war in Iraq and of a unilateral “my way or the highway” approach to most of the world’s major problems?

Not since Robert Kennedy in his 1968 campaign has there been a candidate with a view of the world in whom I had such hope as I have now for Barack Obama. If he is elected President next November I think most Americans will feel better about themselves, about America, and about our prospects for peace in the world. And I expect most of the world   to welcome constructive American collaboration and leadership.

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There is a long and impressive roster of those with great experience and responsibilities in world affairs, who have joined in support of Obama and advise him, including President Kennedy’s closest adviser, Theodore Sorensen; President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski; Senator Ted Kennedy’s former foreign policy adviser, Gregory Craig; President Clinton’s Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig, his Assistant Secretary for Africa Susan Rice and his National Security Adviser Anthony Lake.

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As a personal note, my own readiness for Obama’s international leadership stems above all from an interest in world affairs that began on the eve of World War II when my grandmother took me on a six-month trip around the world, to many of the earth’s trouble spots, including Palestine, the Indian subcontinent where we saw Gandhi, and Shanghai which the Japanese had just conquered and largely destroyed.  In the Army Air Corps in 1944-45 I wrote a little book, It’s Up To Us, on how to win the peace; attended the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco; and, after college, in l949-50, spent most of a year in India, with some time in Pakistan, Israel, and Europe, reported in a book my wife Clare and I wrote, India Afire. While practicing law in the l950s, I helped Kennedy’s later Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles write a number of books and articles on foreign policy, and traveled with him in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Soviet Asia, Russia, Poland and Yugoslavia.

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In all those travels, I found a reservoir of good will for America, which now has been drastically drawn down. In memory of my trip around the world in 1938, in recent years I have taken my grandsons around there 12^th birthdays on six-week trips around the world. From those fresh journeys I have seen how far America’s standing in the world has fallen, and how much we need someone like Obama to reclaim our proper role on this great globe.

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Third. It is not out of lack of respect for the other major Democratic contenders that I support Barack Obama.  I know, like, and respect them all. After working with Hillary Clinton so closely on the effort she led for universal health coverage, it was hard for me to have to tell her that my commitment to Obama transcends old ties and friendship.

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The struggle for universal coverage was Hillary Clinton’s major responsibility during Bill Clinton’s presidency and it turned into the major failure of his first term. I do not blame her for that failure. The bitter partisanship of those years may have doomed anything as big and controversial as health care reform. But that failure is part of her experience and our national experience.

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We don’t want that past experience of political polarization to be the prologue to our future. This is our second chance. We need a fresh start, with a new leader.

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All the major Democratic contenders are now committed to securing universal health coverage. I consider Barack’s approach the most workable way to achieve that goal, but there is no purpose in playing a game of “my plan is bigger and better than yours.”

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A presidential candidate may promise; a President proposes to Congress but Congress disposes. On health reform as on other critical problems, a successful President will consider all the plans on the table, including those from one’s opponents and from the independent and private sectors. To achieve universal health coverage, the President must draw leaders of Congress from both parties into the process of shaping a bill that can secure the necessary bi-partisan majority. I believe Barack Obama can do that.

That is the kind of process Barack Obama can lead, as he builds an administration of national unity and seeks to shape an era of international consensus and cooperation.

Good luck Thursday,   

Harris Wofford

Maureen Orth Puts Bobby Kennedy In His Place

The December issue of Vanity Fair has a wonderful piece by Maureen Orth (Colombia 1964-66) titled, "When Washington Was Fun" that begins with her meeting--Maureen was just out of Berkeley and one of those radicals-- Robert Kennedy on the presidential yacht, the Sequoia, six months after JFK's assassination. [Oh, she also met Jackie that night but that's another brief item in the article.]

So, Maureen writes about saying to her dinner partner Bobby Kennedy: "What are you going to be next, vice president or senator?,"I asked rather impudently, because I did not want him to think I was a brainless bimbo. [Maureen a 'brainless bimbo'?]...."What do you think I should be?," Kennedy shot back, his steel-blue eyes boring into me."

"Well, I think you should be senator," I said, "because everyone remembers you trying to twist arms at the last convention, and I don't think Lyndon Johnson will let you be vice president." He then opened up a barrage of questions: "Who are you? What does you father do?" In the middle of one of my answers, he turned away and waved to a group of tourists on a boat at least a hundred yards from us across the Potomac. I was highly insulted, for I had been planning to enlist in the Peace Corps, whose director was his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, and suddenly Bobby Kennedy seemed to me like just another pol."

In the article Maureen rounds up all the grand hostesses of bygone days and asks: 'Who killed Washington society?'

Well, I'd say Bush, and I'm sure he won't be inviting Maureen to the White House or Crawford, Texas anytime soon.

The Peace Corps Produces a Real Artist

From Time Magazine

November 1, 2007 5:45

Quick Talk: With RPCV Martin Purvear

 

LACAYO: You grew up in Washington, D.C., where a lot of the art is public art. It's monumental, something meant to be enduring, weighty. Do you think that entered into your thinking about sculpture, either as a model or as something to undermine?

PURYEAR: I don't think I was influenced by the sculpture in public places. It was more a question of what I saw in museums, in particular once I became interested in thinking of myself as an artist. But I certainly was aware of civic and commemorative sculpture. I remember very clearly as a child a pair of horses in front of the Department of Commerce. I have them as strong memories and still go back sometimes to get a refresher of that feeling. They were carved in stone, massive draught horses being managed with great effort by some very muscular men. That struck me. But I don't think the other sculpture, the commemorative work, entered into my thinking very much as art.

LACAYO: You started as a painter. When did you move to sculpture and what was it that made you decide that sculpture was where you should go?

PURYEAR: I painted my way through undergraduate education. But I was very fascinated by the idea of sculpture. I don't think the place I studied at the time, Catholic University, had the strongest department for sculpture. The faculty was weighted towards drawing and painting. When I got my degree, I think it was at that point that I really started to think about how I wanted to work.

After that I was away from the U.S. for four years and a couple of things happened. One is that I started to work abstractly. I was a representational painter in the beginning and then gradually the work became more and more non-objective. By the time I left the country and went to the Peace Corps in West Africa I was really interested in looking for structures behind what you could see with your eye.

At the same time in West Africa I stopped painting. I made lots of drawing and lots of wood cuts. And the work became more and more graphic and more and more abstract and then I left and went to school in Sweden for two years. And at that point I began to make sculpture on my own. I wasn't really in a program, I was just experimenting with different ways of constructing things. But that's where it became pretty clear to me that I was more interested in making things than in making images of things.

LACAYO: When you went to the Peace Corps in 1964, Minimalism was just beginning to make itself known in the U.S. Were you aware of it?

PURYEAR: I was unaware of it when I left the States. The art I was looking at, a lot of it was American abstract painting, Motherwell, Kline. Tapies and Dubuffet, they were also impressing me a lot at that point. But when I came back Minimalism was in full force as an influence in the art world. So was Conceptualism.

Richard Lacayo writes about books, art and architecture at TIME Magazine, where he arrived in 1984. He is the co-author, with George Russell, of Eyewitness: 100 Years of Photojournalism and has won various lesser known journalism prizes, which he keeps in his desk drawer.

Everyone Needs an Editor [Not just me]

Some of you might have read about Tess Gallagher [the widow of Raymond Carver, and his second wife] who wants to publish 17 of Carver’s original short stories. Carver was a minimalist [A literary style exemplifying economy and restraint], and his most successful collection of stories, and what put ‘minimalist’ on the map, was entitled, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It was published by Knoft in ‘81 and edited by Gordon List, the prince of minimalist editors.

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Gallagher, herself a well known writer and poet, wants to publish her late husband’s stories as they were original written. Carver, who died in ’88 at 50, had tried to set the record straight himself. According to an article in The New York Times [The Arts Section, on Wednesday, October 17, 2007] “He restored and republished five of the stories” and published them in a collection entitled, Where I’m Calling From. These were edited by yet another well known literary editor, Gary Fisketjon, also at Knopf.

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Carver, it seemed, tried to stop the publication of that first, famous collection. List had “heavily edited, and in many cases radically cut, the stories before publication to hone the author’s voice.” At the time, [Motoko Rich writes in the NYTIMES] Carver begged Mr. Lish to stop production of the book. Carver had written Lish saying that he had “made so many of the stories in this collection better, far better than they were before.” He was afraid of what his writer friends [Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Geoffrey Wolff and Don Hall would think.] But Knopf went ahead and published it to much critical acclaim.

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Published, these edited stories [by Gordon List] made Carver’s career. When they appeared Doris Betts in the Washington Post praised Carver’s “verbal skill, the distilled pungency, the laser focus of his implacable vision.” Michael Wood, writing in The Times Book Review, said “his writing is full of edges and silences, haunted by things not said, not even to be guessed at.”

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Lish’s papers are the Lilly Library of Indiana University and for the last 25 years two English professors—William L. Stuff and Maureen P. Carroll--have been reconstructing original versions of Carver’s stories.

So, if you think "you've been edited!" take a look at the original,[that Tess Gallagher wants to publish] and how List edited it in 1981:

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The original version:

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L.D. put the shaving bag under his arm again and once more picked up the suitcase. "I just want to say one more thing, Maxine. Listen to me. Remember this," he said. "I love you. I love you no matter what happens. I love you too, Bea. I love you both." He stood there at the door and felt his lips begin to tingle as he looked at them for what, he believed, might be the last time. "Goodbye," he said.

  "You call this love, L.D.?" Maxine said. She let go of Bea's hand. She made a fist. Then she shook her head and jammed her hands into her coat pockets. She stared at him and then dropped her eyes to something on the floor near his shoes.

   It came to him with a shock that he would remember this night and her like this. He was terrified to think that in the years ahead she might come to resemble a woman he couldn't place, a mute figure in a long coat, standing in the middle of a lighted room with lowered eyes.

   "Maxine!" he cried. "Maxine!"

   "Is this what love is, L.D.?" she said, fixing her eyes on him. Her eyes were terrible and deep, and he held them as long as he could.

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Okay, here is how Gordon Lish edited that same material:

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   L.D. put the shaving bag under his arm and picked up the suitcase.

   He said, "I just want to say one more thing."

   But then he could not think what it could possibly be.

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Well, you can say one thing about minimalists...they write short.

RPCV Makes The HILL'S 'HOT' List, And He Is A Republican!

[Just when you thought my blog was about important issues, I give you this!]

Every summer The Hill publishes a list of the 50 hottest folks on Capitol Hill. Jeff Eisenhauer, who was in Tanzania, as an environmental PCV, made the list. Today, the 26-year-old works for Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.). He's not married, but he's 'involved.' Anyway, what worthy woman would go out with a Republican, RPCV or not! [Maybe, she'll think she can change him over time and with enough love. No, it never works. If they are a Republican at 26, they'll be Dick Cheney at 50!]

Every summer The Hill publishes a list of the 50 hottest folks on Capitol Hill. Jeff Eisenhauer, who was in Tanzania, as an environmental PCV, made the list. Today, the 26-year-old works for Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.). He's not married, but he's 'involved.' Anyway, what worthy woman would go out with a Republican, RPCV or not! [Maybe, she'll think she can change him over time and with enough love. No, it never works. If they are a Republican at 26, they'll be Dick Cheney at 50!]