Notes, no scandal

Returning to the blog thinking I have to be profound. I’d rather be depressed. In this regard, I’m reading Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s account of the political genius of Abraham Lincoln. It is a wonderful read; I have been fascinated with Lincoln for much of my adult life. I recall reading Gore Vidal’s novel Lincoln, and come to understand how Lincoln’s presidency defined the modern United States, if not in its politics then certainly in its existence. In my own focus on ethics and moral standing in education, I am drawn by what appears to be Lincoln’s ethical stance in the world. In comparison to every other politician I have ever studied, only Lincoln has virtue. Indeed, I read (in part) a book called Lincoln’s Virtues, much of what I (partly read) is reinforced by Kearns’ account. He was a great man.

On every page the reality of slavery in the United States assaults me. Imagining travel in the South where slaves could always be seen working the fields overseen by people who owned them, and who justified that inhuman unimaginable ownership with arguments absurd, I am overcome with revulsion for American character and history. I take comfort in the abolitionists, but abhor their necessity. This week’s parashah concerned the exodus from slavery in Egypt: Pharoh’s heart is so hard. Could it be that there is nothing new under the sun?

Saw another teacher movie: Notes of a Scandal. Not at all idealistic, Sheba enters the profession to escape her mundane and difficult life, and finds not rewards in teaching art, but in sexual passion. She begins an affair with a fifteen year old student for which she is punished by a lonely, vindictive and finally, predatory Barbara Covett. Then Sheba goes to jail for ten months for her seductions. There is no idealization in this film regarding the profession, but there is neither real critique either. The teachers seem burnt out, world- and school weary, but content to train their future plumbers and servants; the school is clean, the students sartorially uniformed, and the curriculum irrelevant, but in place. The center of the film is Sheba’s search for wild passion to escape her own burnt out life. She has a child with Down’s syndrome, an adolescent daughter acting out as adolescent daughters are wont to do (I have two of them, I know, I know!), and a husband who loves her but is twenty years older than she. Ironically, he was her professor years before, and must have been captured by her youth and beauty. I think finally he understands his wife, Sheba, because of his relationship with her. Sheba’s attraction to Stephen Connelly is comprehensible, and even free of our judgment, because too many of us live lives in which the passion has been crushed by the process of living our lives. Because so much that defeats us in our lives is out of our control, perhaps it is that the sexual passion which so powerfully suppresses all of our rational control holds some attraction as a positive alternative to the diurnal matter of our lives. Perhaps this is a film which on some level advocates our surrender to passionate embrace.

And to return to Lincoln: to study Lincoln and to return to the daily news only serves to highlight the decadence of our political landscapes and characters. We would not see his like again. It is our tragedy. And right now, this realization depresses me no end.