Legacy MattersWho knew that Pez was a Viennese candy marketed to adults as an alternative to smoking?
The idea to market the candy to children in dispensers with heads and feet came from the United States, and Curtis Allina, a survivor of concentration camps made it happen.
Curtis Allin, 87, Put Heads on Pez Dispensers.
Introduced into the United States in the early 1950s, Pez sold fitfully. Then someone thought of remarketing it as a children’s candy, in fruit flavors, packed in whimsical dispensers. It fell to Mr. Allina to persuade the home office in Vienna, by all accounts a conservative outfit that took sober pride in its grown-up mint.
Mr. Allina prevailed, and the first two character dispensers, Santa Claus and a robot known as the Space Trooper, were introduced in 1955. Unlike today’s plain-stemmed, headed-and-footed dispensers, both were full-body figures, completely sculptured from top to toe.
Frank Furdedi in Spiked argues Let’s give children the ‘store of human knowledge’
In flattering kids as ‘digital natives’ for whom the past is irrelevant, we degrade a vital adult mission: transmitting knowledge.
Present educational fads are based on the premise that because we live in a new, digitally driven society, the intellectual legacy of the past and the experience of grown-ups have little significance for the schooling of children.
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Although education is celebrated as one of the most important institutions of society, there is a casual disrespect for the content of what children are taught. Curriculum engineers often display indifference, if not contempt, for abstract thought and the knowledge developed in the past. .
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Sadly, the ceaseless repetition of the idea that the past is irrelevant desensitises people from understanding the influence of the legacy of human development on their lives. The constant talk of ceaseless change tends to naturalise it and turn it into an omnipotent autonomous force that subjects human beings to its will.
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The fetishisation of change is symptomatic of a mood of intellectual malaise, where notions of truth, knowledge and meaning have acquired a provisional character. Perversely, the transformation of change into a metaphysical force haunting humanity actually desensitises society from distinguishing between a passing novelty and qualitative change. That is why lessons learned through the experience of the past are so important for helping society face the future. When change is objectified, it turns into spectacle that distracts society from valuing the truths and insights it has acquired throughout the best moments of human history.
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An attitude of conservation is called for specifically in the context of intergenerational transmission of this legacy. Until recently, leading thinkers from across the ideological divide understood the significance of transmitting the knowledge of the past to young people. Conservative thinker Matthew Arnold’s formulation of passing on ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ is virtually identical to Lenin’s insistence that education needs to transmit the ‘store of human knowledge’.
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A liberal humanist education is underpinned by the assumption that children are rightful heirs to the legacy of the past. It takes responsibility for ensuring this inheritance is handed over to the young.
While we haven't been able to erect a memorial at Ground Zero, the Russians gave us a moving sculpture in Bayonne New Jersey, overlooking the New York harbor. Astonishing that I never knew about it before this week.
A Beau Geste: the 9/11 Tear Drop Memorial
The Tear Drop Memorial was created by Georgian/Russian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli and is officially titled "To the Struggle Against World Terrorism" or "The Memorial at Harbor View Park". The monument is located at The Peninsula at Bayonne Harbor, New Jersey, and is lined up to look upon the Statue of Liberty. The persons most likely to see it would be those coming into the harbor by boat.
The monolithic block of vertical, earth-colored stone is over 100 feet high. It appears rent in the center from top to bottom and in the gap is a 40 foot, four ton nickel-plated tear drop. The base of the monument is a multi-faceted onyx pedestal inscribed with the names of all of those that perished on 9-11-01, from Flight 93 in Pennsylvania to the Pentagon to the twin Trade Towers.
The symbolisms of this touching and costly gesture are as profound as those of our adopted First Lady, the Statue of Liberty. The Tear Drop and the Russian people deserve, in spite of whatever else they are, a commensurate acknowledgment of this moving symbol of sympathy. It's a crime that even three years later the Russian's simpatico for our losses has not been widely recognized by America and her leaders.
September 1, 1939 by George Marlin
Seventy years ago today, Adolf Hitler started the most horrendous war in the history of mankind by ordering the German Wehrmacht to invade and conquer Poland. The Polish army fought valiantly but they were no match for Germany’s sixty-five highly mechanized divisions and 1.8-million troops.
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Hitler, who despised Poland and held that all Poles were subhuman, ordered his invading army to kill “without pity or mercy, all men, women and children of Polish descent or language.” In the first thirty days of occupation, the Wehrmacht destroyed 531 towns and villages and murdered over 16,000 civilians. Hitler’s aim was more than expanding Germany’s borders; he wanted the “annihilation of living forces” by means of extermination and enslavement. “All Poles,” Heinrich Himmler declared, “will disappear from the world.” The Nazi Governor General of Poland, Hans Frank, told his henchmen: “The Pole has no rights whatsoever. . . . A major goal of our plan is to finish off as speedily as possible all troublemaking politicians, priests, and leaders who fall into our hands.
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To successfully eliminate Polish nationalism, which had survived centuries of oppression, the Nazis knew they had to suppress the Church. In the annexed Polish lands, the Nazis were ruthless. Catholic churches, seminaries, monasteries, schools and universities were closed. Five thousand priests and nuns were imprisoned in concentration camps. Over 1,800 priests, 200 monks, 300 nuns and 100 seminarians died in the camps. In the post-war Polish White Book, the government conceded that Catholic life under the Germans was reduced “to what it was at the time of the Catacombs.”
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In those catacombs, Karol Wojtyla would become a priest, then cardinal and then pope.
And for forty-five years, as priest, cardinal-archbishop, and pope, he relentlessly pursued a strategy of cultural resistance that eventually undermined Poland’s Communist government, destabilized Soviet domination throughout Eastern Europe, and brought down the Iron Curtain.
I watched the flag pass by one day.
It fluttered in the breeze.
A young Marine saluted it,
and then he stood at ease.
I looked at him in uniform
So young, so tall, so proud,
He'd stand out in any crowd.
I thought how many men like him
Had fallen through the years.
How many died on foreign soil?
How many mothers' tears?
How many pilots' planes shot down?
How many died at sea?
How many foxholes were soldiers' graves?
No, freedom isn't free.
Kelly Strong
From 1776 the Musical, here is Momma Look Sharp
It's a long line of men willing to die so that we could be free from 1776 until today, across time and space. Let us give recollect and give thanks to all the fallen.
Blackfive introduces the Warrior Legacy Foundation and Ace joins in
Matt has a post up at BLACKFIVE telling the whole story, but basically those of us who didn't feel the warrior class and those who support them were being heard have formed this group. We will be ensuring that the stories that have been ignored are told to all Americans and the world and that the service and sacrifices of our troops are recognized and honored. Membership is open to anyone who believes this cause is worthy.
The Warrior Legacy Foundation is a non-partisan organization that is committed to the protection and promotion of the reputation and dignity of America’s Warriors.
Across every generation, at war and at peace, America has asked her citizens to protect liberty and defend freedom at all costs. No matter the terrain or political climate, America’s Warriors have met every challenge and made every sacrifice that was asked of them in order to defeat our enemies and protect our way of life. The Warrior Legacy Foundation is a passionate advocate for the preservation and elevation of the hallowed legacy of the American Warrior Class.
They have asked for nothing and have given us everything.
Father Patrick Desbois is a French Catholic priest who, virtually single-handedly, has undertaken the task of excavating the history of previously undocumented Jewish victims of the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union, including an estimated 1.5 million people who were murdered in Ukraine. Father Desbois was born 10 years after the end of World War II -- and yet, through his tireless actions, he exemplifies the "righteous gentile." The term is generally used to recognize non-Jews who, during the Holocaust, risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis. Father Desbois is a generation too late to save lives. Instead, he has saved memory and history.
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Father Desbois's French grandfather was imprisoned in a forced-labor camp in Rawa Ruska in the Ukraine during the war with 25,000 other French soldiers captured by the Germans. This initially motivated the priest to travel to the region and learn more about all of the Nazis' victims.
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Father Desbois is tired, as the circles beneath his eyes attest, but he wants to learn more. In 2009, he and his team will expand their work into Belarus and Ossetia. He hopes people will contact him through his organization's Web site, yahadinunum.org, and tell him where to look for more mass graves and more eyewitnesses to history.
"These were young children who were forced, in the course of one day, to fill the grave and to witness," Father Desbois said. "They heard the last words of the dead. They want to speak."
Time is working against the priest, who accompanies researchers on most of their trips into the former Soviet Union and has, to this point, personally interviewed 823 witnesses. Each interview takes up to two hours, and his team takes 10 to 15 trips a year to the region, each lasting no more than 17 days because, he explains, "We can't bear more, psychologically." But the surviving witnesses, most of whom were children at the time of the massacres, are already in their late 70s and early 80s, and Father Desbois worries that they won't be able to tell their stories for much longer.
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But this project that has become his life's work, he says, is inspired by two sources far greater than either history or circumstance. One is "min hashamayim," Father Desbois says in Hebrew -- from heaven, which inspires us to build relationships with our fellow human beings. The other inspiration, he explains, comes from the earthly world, and what is written in Genesis about the blood of Abel, murdered by Cain: "The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground."
I've written about Father Patrick before in The Evil That Men Plan and Do
These people want absolutely to speak before they die," says Father Desbois of the bystanders. "They want to say the truth."
As heirs to Western civilization, our common legacy as is so vast and so great, we can not take it all in. At best, we dip into it from time to time, sometimes as a citizen when we vote or speak against the government without any fear ; sometimes as believers when we gather in faith communities to worship God without any thought that we may be endangering our lives. Other times we are transported in a museum before a Renaissance painting or a Greek sculpture or in a symphony hall listening to Bach's St. Matthew's Passion.
But often we depend on others to communicate the greatness of someone long dead but whose legacy still nourishes minds and hearts. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was such a man.
According to George Eliot, Goethe was "Germany's greatest man of letters. —poet, critic, playwright, and novelist—and the last true polymath to walk the earth." I suppose he holds a similar position in the German imagination as Thomas Jefferson, another polymath, holds in the American imagination.
The Reader's Companion to World Literature says
Goethe comes as close to deserving the title of a universal genius as any man who has ever lived. though he will be considered here as a man of letters, it is important to remember that he had an intelligent grasp of all the arts, that he successfully carried burdensome responsibilities as a public administrator, and that his scientific interests led him to make significant contributions to mineralogy, optics, comparative anatomy and plant morphology.
Today we look to bloggers who write about what they love. Elizabeth Powers is the Goethe girl, a writer and literary scholar with a Ph.D in German literature and a consultant to the Metropolitan Museum. She loves Goethe and has begun a blog Goethe Etc. that vibrates with sympathy with this great man and, like him, is interested and learned about many things.
Maybe that's how we ordinary people can preserve Western civilization. By writing about what we love and value, sharing our appreciation with the world and passing it on to the people we love.
Maybe we only have time for quick bites of what we most need - the accumulated wisdom of the past. For me, quick bites are quotes and here are some:
On Character: Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.
On Courtesy: There is a courtesy of the heart; it is allied to love.—From it springs the purest courtesy in the outward behavior....There is no outward sign of true courtesy that does not rest on a deep moral foundation.
On Happiness: The most happy man is he who knows how to bring into relation the end and the beginning of his life. One has only to grow older to become more tolerant. I see no fault that I might not have committed myself.
On Kindness: Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.
On Life: Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character. Life is the childhood of our immortality.
On Love: We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
On Immortality: Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.
On Architecture: I call architecture frozen music.
On Nature: Nature is the living, visible garment of God.
On Riches: Riches amassed in haste will diminish, but those collected by little and little will multiply.
On the Bible: It is a belief in the Bible, the fruit of deep meditation, which has served me as the guide of my moral and literary life.—I have found it a capital safely invested, and richly productive of interest.
And others I liked
Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.
Which is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.
First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.
A photo album by a Nazi leader in the camp that lay forgotten in an attic for sixty years.
"They were young and out for a good time."
Auschwitz through the lens of the SS looks a lot like a resort camp.
Cohen:
We all know that monsters do monstrous things. But when you see people who look like they're nice guys, in a fairly benign setting, and we know for a fact that they were doing monstrous things, then it raises all sorts of questions about what's man's capacity for evil. In a different setting would they still be monsters?
White:
They were all too frighteningly human.
Erbelding:
It makes you think about how people could come to this. That they don't look like monsters. They look like me. They look like my next door neighbor. Is he capable of that? Am I?
By focusing on his sexual life, the recent BBC series on the Tudors fails, I am told, to
remind us that Henry VIII became a bloody tyrant. John Hinton calls it A spot of blood and grease on the history of England.
Holbein's strutting monarch shows Henry in his last dozen years when, in Charles Dickens's glorious phrase, he was "a spot of blood and grease on the history of England".
This was the man who broke with Rome and made himself supreme head of the Church, who married six wives, divorcing two and executing two others.
Henry dissolved 600 monasteries, demolished most of them and shattered the religious pieties and practices of a thousand years. Drunk with power - not to mention the wine, women and song of his endless days of pleasure - he beheaded nobles and Ministers, some of them his closest friends, tortured to death rebels and traitors, boiled prisoners and burned heretics.
He was 18 when he suddenly became king. What did Sir Thomas More see in him as a young king? How did a virtuous prince become a bloodthirsty tyrant?
In astonishment and dismay, Sir Thomas was to become one of the Henry's victims, climbing the scaffold and later being made a saint. But earlier More had proclaimed in verses he penned to celebrate Henry's coronation that he was a new messiah and his reign a second coming.
Look what was in the attic of the family home of Thaxter Spencer in Waltham, Mass, for more than a hundred years until he donated the photo albums, letters and diaries to the New England Historic Genealogical Society last June
The earliest photo, taken in 1888, of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan.
Jan Seymour-Ford, a research librarian at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, which both Sullivan and Keller attended, said she was moved to see how deeply connected the women were, even in 1888.
"The way Anne is gazing so intently at Helen, I think it's a beautiful portrait of the devotion that lasted between these two women all of Anne's life," Seymour-Ford said.
From This Republic of Suffering, the new book by Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard University.
Mortality defines the human condition. "We all have our dead — we all have our Graves," a Confederate Episcopal bishop observed in an 1862 sermon. Every era, he explained, must confront "like miseries"; every age must search for "like consolation." Yet death has its discontinuities as well. Men and women approach death in ways shaped by history, by culture, by conditions that vary over time and across space. Even though "we all have our dead," and even though we all die, we do so differently from generation to generation and from place to place.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century. The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, an estimated 620,000, is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. The Civil War's rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II.
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In the Civil War the United States, North and South, reaped what many participants described as a "harvest of death." By the midpoint of the conflict, it seemed that in the South, "nearly every household mourns some loved one lost." Loss became commonplace; death was no longer encountered individually; death's threat, its proximity, and its actuality became the most widely shared of the war's experiences. As a Confederate soldier observed, death "reigned with universal sway," ruling homes and lives, demanding attention and response
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The need to manage death is the particular lot of humanity.
It is work to deal with the dead as well, to remove them in the literal sense of disposing of their bodies, and it is also work to remove them in a more figurative sense. The bereaved struggle to separate themselves from the dead through ritual and mourning. Families and communities must repair the rent in the domestic and social fabric, and societies, nations, and cultures must work to understand and explain unfathomable loss.
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The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.
If you are collecting information about your family origins, you must see The Peopling of the World to see how far back your ancestors go.
Kudos to the Bradshaw Foundation for the presentation created by Stephen Oppenehimer that shows the world migrations of the human species based on the latest genetic research based on a synthesis of recent mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome evidence with archaeology, climatology and fossil study.
They call it an "iLecture" ( information lecture), a fact-driven documentary film presenting the latest theories using experts from around the world and plan a new one each month, harnessing technology to open up the ancient past.
Fine foundation work and a hat tip to Maggie's Farm.