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In his study of modern English writers, A Sinking Island, Hugh Kenner argues that English literat... more In his study of modern English writers, A Sinking Island, Hugh Kenner argues that English literature, as we have known and loved it, no longer exists. "There is now a literature written out of English dictionaries that England either can't claim or doesn't know if it wants." 1 "English" literature has become the property of its former colonies, or, beginning with Joyce, those writers without countries, the modernists. It is tempting to blame Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Britain's censorious supernanny, for this loss of still another national resource. 2 However, England has long forgone its place as a literary center, even among those whom Winston Churchill, that cultural imperialist, called "the English-speaking peoples." What, then, is left of purely English literature? England, that Atlantis, rises to the surface of our minds most vividly in the words of its dead writers. The publication of Philip Larkin 's Collected Poems is an ...
It is enough to turn you away from the political process to recall that neither candidate for the... more It is enough to turn you away from the political process to recall that neither candidate for the American presidency seriously addressed this issue in 1988. For Yeats "politics" was one thing and "that girl" another. She embodied simple beauty and love, the rhetoric of the heart. "But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms." By implication, "politics," for Yeats, meant difficult issues and complex analysis, the rhetoric of the head. The presidential election of 1988 obliterated Yeats's distinction. The "handlers"the campaign managers, speech writers, media consultants, spin controllers, flacks, advisers, friends, and wives of the candidatesdid their best to convince Americans that each candidate for the presidency-George Bush or Michael Dukakiswas nothing less than "that girl standing there," a worthy emblem of beauty and a sufficient object of desire. Since both Bush and Dukakis suffered from severe charisma deficiencies, each made his case by running down the other. Forget issues and analysis, implied both candidates in their misleading rhetoric and their manipulatory media messages. Come live with me and be my love, courted Bush through the long, hot summer and fall of 1988. Trust in me, cooed Dukakis. In November, America decided it liked Bush better, but all of us were diminished by the inane campaign. Small wonder that now, after the midterm congressional elections, on the brink of the 1992 presidential campaign, as a new millennium approached, we would like to forget all about 1988, a bad dream that continues to haunt the American mind. Try as they mightor as their mighty manipulators managedneither presidential candidate could match the beauty or lovableness of Ronald Reagan, the cover boy of American politics, still standing there; still smiling, nodding, joshing, and waving his way through the Iran/contra and arms-diversion scandal; still trying to remember what he knew and when he forgot it. (Reagan maintained "plausible deniability" of his subordinates' actions, though Oliver North, Reagan's point man on the Iran/contra extravaganza, assumed "that the president was aware of what I was doing and had, through my superiors, approved of it.") 6 J 06
The Massachusetts Review, 1969
... BELLOW: LOGIC'S LIMITS Shaun O'Connell For one who is, as Maxwell Geismar says, a &... more ... BELLOW: LOGIC'S LIMITS Shaun O'Connell For one who is, as Maxwell Geismar says, a "novelist of the intellectuals," ... My novel [Herzog] deals with the humiliating sense that results from the American mixture of private concerns and intellectual interests. . . . ...
The Massachusetts Review, 1981
* Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Pub lishers, 1977); John Gardner,... more * Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Pub lishers, 1977); John Gardner, On Moral Fiction (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1978); William H. Gass, The World Within the Word (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978); Eugene Goodheart, The ...
The Massachusetts Review, 2003
Page 1. Shaun OyConnell That Much Credit: Irish-American Identity and Writing Are you irish at al... more Page 1. Shaun OyConnell That Much Credit: Irish-American Identity and Writing Are you irish at all?" Davin asks Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, raising the question of identity just at the historical moment, between ...
The Massachusetts Review, 1976
Page 1. AMERICAN FICTION, 1975: CELEBRATION IN WONDERLAND Shaun O'Connell It is ... more Page 1. AMERICAN FICTION, 1975: CELEBRATION IN WONDERLAND Shaun O'Connell It is my belief that the serious artist insists upon the sanctity of the world?even the despairing artist insists upon the power of his art to somehow transform what is given. It may be that his ...
The Massachusetts Review, 1974
I was moving through a nicely-paced, thank you, fifty minutes be fore my Modern American Fiction ... more I was moving through a nicely-paced, thank you, fifty minutes be fore my Modern American Fiction class, neatly opening the bright package of John Updike's Rabbit, Run without, I thought, tearing much of the candy-colored paper, even saving the ribbon, gently lifting out the intricate ...
The Massachusetts Review, 1973
Page 1. ARTS IN REVIEW AMERICAN FICTION, 1972: THE VOID IN THE MIRROR Shawn O'Connel... more Page 1. ARTS IN REVIEW AMERICAN FICTION, 1972: THE VOID IN THE MIRROR Shawn O'Connell In a 1900 essay, contemplating "The Future of the Novel," Henry James was buoyant with optimism. Novels, he said, are mirrors, implying they ...
New England Journal of Public Policy, 1990
It is enough to turn you away from the political process to recall that neither candidate for the... more It is enough to turn you away from the political process to recall that neither candidate for the American presidency seriously addressed this issue in 1988. For Yeats "politics" was one thing and "that girl" another. She embodied simple beauty and love, the rhetoric of the heart. "But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms." By implication, "politics," for Yeats, meant difficult issues and complex analysis, the rhetoric of the head. The presidential election of 1988 obliterated Yeats's distinction. The "handlers"the campaign managers, speech writers, media consultants, spin controllers, flacks, advisers, friends, and wives of the candidatesdid their best to convince Americans that each candidate for the presidency-George Bush or Michael Dukakiswas nothing less than "that girl standing there," a worthy emblem of beauty and a sufficient object of desire. Since both Bush and Dukakis suffered from severe charisma deficiencies, each made his case by running down the other. Forget issues and analysis, implied both candidates in their misleading rhetoric and their manipulatory media messages. Come live with me and be my love, courted Bush through the long, hot summer and fall of 1988. Trust in me, cooed Dukakis. In November, America decided it liked Bush better, but all of us were diminished by the inane campaign. Small wonder that now, after the midterm congressional elections, on the brink of the 1992 presidential campaign, as a new millennium approached, we would like to forget all about 1988, a bad dream that continues to haunt the American mind. Try as they mightor as their mighty manipulators managedneither presidential candidate could match the beauty or lovableness of Ronald Reagan, the cover boy of American politics, still standing there; still smiling, nodding, joshing, and waving his way through the Iran/contra and arms-diversion scandal; still trying to remember what he knew and when he forgot it. (Reagan maintained "plausible deniability" of his subordinates' actions, though Oliver North, Reagan's point man on the Iran/contra extravaganza, assumed "that the president was aware of what I was doing and had, through my superiors, approved of it.") 6 J 06
The Massachusetts Review, 1988
WHEN A DISPLACED AMERICAN, an innocent abroad, finds himself in Ireland, singing "I will tak... more WHEN A DISPLACED AMERICAN, an innocent abroad, finds himself in Ireland, singing "I will take you home again, Kathleen" to an Irish girl, we know that he has come to a pretty pass, to a difficult passage. He is ignoring the intent of this emigrees' lament, which held out to ...
The author talks about the consequences of not respecting the climate and understanding global wa... more The author talks about the consequences of not respecting the climate and understanding global warming will cause ecocide and our own extinction. Reprinted from New England Journal of Public Policy 21, no. 2 (2007), article 5
Indeed, as soon as the least of us stands still, that is the moment something extraordinary is se... more Indeed, as soon as the least of us stands still, that is the moment something extraordinary is seen to be going on in the world.-Eudora Welty, "Place in Fiction" his place, The University of Massachusetts Boston, has been important for most of us for many years. This elegant Campus Center, open to the Boston skyline, the Harbor and the sea beyond, stands as an emblem of UMass Boston's enduring vitality, its tenacious capacity, despite setbacks, to rebuild and renew itself. Just over forty years ago this peninsula was a landfill. Now it holds the JFK Library, the Massachusetts State Archives, and a great public university. All around us this evening, as we stand still, we can see that something extraordinary has indeed gone on in this important place. Forty years ago, almost to the day, I was at a meeting in the office of Al Ryan. He and Paul Gagnon drew up UMass Boston curriculum, hired its founding faculty, and shaped its urban mission. Al's splendid office, with its rich wood-paneling and long windows, was on the thirteenth floor of the former Gas Company building, on the corner of Arlington and Stuart streets, the first site of UMB. Looking north out of the office window, I was transfixed then, as I am now again, by the moment and the perspectiveby, as James Joyce put it, "the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past." Suddenly, in September, 1965, I was above the Boston skyline, truly seeing this city for the first time: the Garden, the Common, Beacon Hill; the low, jagged, downtown skyline and the tangled streets, winding toward the harbor. Before this moment, high above Park Square, I had known Boston only through its playing fields and jazz clubs, from Fenway Park to the Hi Hat; but now I could see this "walking city" all at once-an urban landscape open with invitation and wonder, a city of large, undefined promise, for me and for the university. That was the first of many enduring gifts UMass Boston gave me: Boston. The nine years we spent in Park Squarewhen the university and everyone in it seemed brand new, making things up
New England Journal of Public Policy, 1990
It is enough to turn you away from the political process to recall that neither candidate for the... more It is enough to turn you away from the political process to recall that neither candidate for the American presidency seriously addressed this issue in 1988. For Yeats "politics" was one thing and "that girl" another. She embodied simple beauty and love, the rhetoric of the heart. "But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms." By implication, "politics," for Yeats, meant difficult issues and complex analysis, the rhetoric of the head. The presidential election of 1988 obliterated Yeats's distinction. The "handlers"the campaign managers, speech writers, media consultants, spin controllers, flacks, advisers, friends, and wives of the candidatesdid their best to convince Americans that each candidate for the presidency-George Bush or Michael Dukakiswas nothing less than "that girl standing there," a worthy emblem of beauty and a sufficient object of desire. Since both Bush and Dukakis suffered from severe charisma deficiencies, each made his case by running down the other. Forget issues and analysis, implied both candidates in their misleading rhetoric and their manipulatory media messages. Come live with me and be my love, courted Bush through the long, hot summer and fall of 1988. Trust in me, cooed Dukakis. In November, America decided it liked Bush better, but all of us were diminished by the inane campaign. Small wonder that now, after the midterm congressional elections, on the brink of the 1992 presidential campaign, as a new millennium approached, we would like to forget all about 1988, a bad dream that continues to haunt the American mind. Try as they mightor as their mighty manipulators managedneither presidential candidate could match the beauty or lovableness of Ronald Reagan, the cover boy of American politics, still standing there; still smiling, nodding, joshing, and waving his way through the Iran/contra and arms-diversion scandal; still trying to remember what he knew and when he forgot it. (Reagan maintained "plausible deniability" of his subordinates' actions, though Oliver North, Reagan's point man on the Iran/contra extravaganza, assumed "that the president was aware of what I was doing and had, through my superiors, approved of it.") 6 J 06
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2015
Pages, essays, and books pile up in libraries while pixilated words and paragraphs get packed awa... more Pages, essays, and books pile up in libraries while pixilated words and paragraphs get packed away on hard disks or float in clouds: permanence versus ephemera. Yet, as underfunded libraries turn into media centers and as digital backup options proliferate, who can tell what pages will last and for how long. These essays have long been stored in volumes of the New England Journal of Public Policy (NEJPP) or made available on the journal's website. This collection sets them in a fresh context and gives them an opportunity to reach new readers in a format that shows how issues and themes change but never disappear. In thirty years, between 1986 and 2015, I wrote twenty-one essays, reflections on books and topics of public concern for NEJPP. I was pleased when the journal editor, Padraig O'Malley, invited me to collect a selection of these essays for this special issue of NEJPP, allowing me the opportunity and the space once again to explore some crucial issues of the day (war, AIDS, homelessness, the environment) and to reflect on significant places (symbolic cities: Boston, New York, Dublin). Two essays discuss another matter of personal and public concern: Irish American culture through its representative men. I have chosen to include twelve essays here, omitting some that now seem dated in the books discussed. It has been a tense task, rereading essays I wrote some decades ago, but in the end satisfying, for they remind me of the times, tempers, and cultural contexts in which they were composed and they have things to say that I had forgotten I said. My hope is that these essays, granted a second time around, will have worthy things to say to current readers.
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2006
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2015
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2016
William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel about the leader of a slave rebellion in ... more William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel about the leader of a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, was highly praised after its publication in 1967. Then African American essayists in William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond took issue with the novel and rejected Styron's asserted right to reimagine Nat Turner's life and to assume his voice, claiming their rights of racial heritage and historical accuracy to castigate Styron for his offensive presumption. That distant argument of unshared assumptions and crossed purposes between high-minded and hypersensitive artists and intellectuals of another day may throw refracted light on the heated and principled divisions over racial issues expressed on campuses, on city streets, and in the media in our time. ______________________________________________________________________________ In the late fall of 2015, while days darkened early and leaves swirled in the wind, discontent stirred on college campuses and on city streets across the land. African Americans protested racial insults and other expressions of perceived prejudice. "I have been called the N-word too many times to count," Cynthia Frisby, a professor at the University of Missouri, said. 1 As a result of such protests, the president of the University of Missouri system and the provost of the Columbia University campus resigned. Similar demonstrations took place at Yale University over the firing of a house master who questioned those who urged racial and gender sensitivity limits on Halloween costumes. At Amherst College students conducted a sit-in at the Robert Frost Library, protesting the college's "institutional legacy of white supremacy" and all associations, including their college sports teams' nickname the "Lord Jeffs," with Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who advocated germ warfare against Native Americans." 2 At Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson, former president of the university and of the nation, was held up as a racist. At the same time, in response to a series of police shootings of young African American men caught on video, street demonstrations developed in several cities under the banner "Black Lives Matter." The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow suggested that "black bodies are a battlefield: black folks fight to defend them as external forces fight to destroy them." 3 While outrage at the police shootings was general, the response to verbal and symbolic insults on campuses was more mixed and nuanced. In the words of another Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, "we have two noble forces colliding with explosive force": the conflict between those who seek to censor or suppress verbal or other expressions of prejudice and those who defend these on the grounds of free speech. 4 Divided over what to think about the campus conflicts of convictions, sympathetic to both sides, I remembered a similar cultural debate that flared nearly half a century ago after the publication of William Styron's 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. That distant argument of unshared assumptions and crossed purposes between high-minded and hypersensitive artists and intellectuals of another day may throw
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2015
What is a city? Well we might ask, for today the city as we have known itparticularly New York Ci... more What is a city? Well we might ask, for today the city as we have known itparticularly New York City, which has long reflected the state of the nation at its best and its worst-is a disintegrating entity, a depleted idea, a diminished thing. The decline of the city, as emblem and actuality, is eroding the nation's stated commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For it is the gritty city, particularly New York City, rather than the fabled New England village that has stood as the last hope for American democracy. the place where "aliens"-the huddled masses from across the Atlantic and the internal emigrés from the heart of the country-have arrived with great expectations, and it is the city that has transformed them into committed members of the body politic. As America abandons its cities, while protecting its urban and suburban enclaves of wealth, commerce, and high-income residences, its poor citizens are sentenced to a life of diminished expectations, danger, disease, and despair that flares into occasional violence and self-destructiveness. Lewis Mumford, distinguished urban analyst, articulated his urban ideal in The Culture of Cities (1938). The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. It is the place where the diffused rays of many separate beams of life fall into focus, with gains in both social effectiveness and significance. The city is the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning. Here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civilization are focused: here, too, ritual passes on occasion into the active drama of a fully differentiated and selfconscious society. 1 Mumford stressed the goals of unity, cohesion, and coherence: for him the city should compose, out of its diverse residents and elements, one living and nurturing organism. However, he lived long enough to see his ideal vision crumble and his beloved Manhattan, the personification of that ideal, decline and fall from grace. Born in Flushing, Queens, in 1895, Mumford, who called himself "a child of the city," grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side in a "typical New York brownstone," though all of the city became his landscape of discovery: the streets were the leaves of grass through which he walked, and New England Journal of Public Policy the port of New York stood as his frontier, his Walden Pond. "Not merely was I a city boy but a New Yorker, indeed a son of Manhattan, who looked upon specimens from all other cities as provincial-especially Brooklynites," he confessed in Sketches from Life (1982). Despite its problems, deriving from vast inequities of wealth, the New York of Mumford's youth offered "a moral stability and security" which, by the 1970s, when New York City nearly went bankrupt, was long gone. As a distinguished elderly man, Mumford looked back on his old New York with wonder and ahead to an increasingly horrific New York with despair. "More than once lately in New York I have felt as Petrarch reports himself feeling in the fourteenth century, when he compared the desolate, wolfish, robber-infested Provence of his maturity, in the wake of the Black Plague, with the safe, prosperous region of his youth." 2 Mumford's memoir, so full of resonant remembrances of things past, traces his development from youth, before World War I, to coming of age as one of America's most influential cultural critics, between the wars, then to the alienated sense of a "displaced person" in modern, plague-ridden Manhattan. He is blunt, explicit, and denunciatory, like an Old Testament prophet, in his assessment of contemporary New York. "The city I once knew so intimately has been wrecked; most of what remains will soon vanish; and therewith scattered fragments of my own life will disappear in the rubble that is carried away." 3 Sunk also, like the fabled Atlantis, was Mumford's ideal vision of the city, "where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order." We now know that our cities-particularly New York City, America's Gotham or Metropolis, a city in desperate and perpetual need of rescue, as represented in popular culture by Batman, Superman, or even Ghostbusters!-have arrived at the point of the maximum diffusion of power and fragmentation of culture, a dissolving center of centrifugal forces that results in chaos and entropy. There, indeed, is where the issues and seemingly irresolvable problems of civilization are focused; there, too, are acted out the dramas of a fully differentiated and self-conscious society now in disarray and decay. In the cities the economic gap between rich and poor is dramatized. Since World War II, small manufacturing plants and sweatshops, which for more than a century have exploited but also sustained immigrants and other members of the underclass, have disappeared, like a receding tide (often to foreign shores), and these groups, composed largely of minorities, have been left behind, stranded on the beach, to fight one another over what little remains-as blacks attacked Koreans in south central Los Angeles during the riots of spring 1992. There, in the republic's center cities, things have fallen apart; the center has not held. (New York did not bum after the LA riots, to
In his study of modern English writers, A Sinking Island, Hugh Kenner argues that English literat... more In his study of modern English writers, A Sinking Island, Hugh Kenner argues that English literature, as we have known and loved it, no longer exists. "There is now a literature written out of English dictionaries that England either can't claim or doesn't know if it wants." 1 "English" literature has become the property of its former colonies, or, beginning with Joyce, those writers without countries, the modernists. It is tempting to blame Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Britain's censorious supernanny, for this loss of still another national resource. 2 However, England has long forgone its place as a literary center, even among those whom Winston Churchill, that cultural imperialist, called "the English-speaking peoples." What, then, is left of purely English literature? England, that Atlantis, rises to the surface of our minds most vividly in the words of its dead writers. The publication of Philip Larkin 's Collected Poems is an ...
It is enough to turn you away from the political process to recall that neither candidate for the... more It is enough to turn you away from the political process to recall that neither candidate for the American presidency seriously addressed this issue in 1988. For Yeats "politics" was one thing and "that girl" another. She embodied simple beauty and love, the rhetoric of the heart. "But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms." By implication, "politics," for Yeats, meant difficult issues and complex analysis, the rhetoric of the head. The presidential election of 1988 obliterated Yeats's distinction. The "handlers"the campaign managers, speech writers, media consultants, spin controllers, flacks, advisers, friends, and wives of the candidatesdid their best to convince Americans that each candidate for the presidency-George Bush or Michael Dukakiswas nothing less than "that girl standing there," a worthy emblem of beauty and a sufficient object of desire. Since both Bush and Dukakis suffered from severe charisma deficiencies, each made his case by running down the other. Forget issues and analysis, implied both candidates in their misleading rhetoric and their manipulatory media messages. Come live with me and be my love, courted Bush through the long, hot summer and fall of 1988. Trust in me, cooed Dukakis. In November, America decided it liked Bush better, but all of us were diminished by the inane campaign. Small wonder that now, after the midterm congressional elections, on the brink of the 1992 presidential campaign, as a new millennium approached, we would like to forget all about 1988, a bad dream that continues to haunt the American mind. Try as they mightor as their mighty manipulators managedneither presidential candidate could match the beauty or lovableness of Ronald Reagan, the cover boy of American politics, still standing there; still smiling, nodding, joshing, and waving his way through the Iran/contra and arms-diversion scandal; still trying to remember what he knew and when he forgot it. (Reagan maintained "plausible deniability" of his subordinates' actions, though Oliver North, Reagan's point man on the Iran/contra extravaganza, assumed "that the president was aware of what I was doing and had, through my superiors, approved of it.") 6 J 06
The Massachusetts Review, 1969
... BELLOW: LOGIC'S LIMITS Shaun O'Connell For one who is, as Maxwell Geismar says, a &... more ... BELLOW: LOGIC'S LIMITS Shaun O'Connell For one who is, as Maxwell Geismar says, a "novelist of the intellectuals," ... My novel [Herzog] deals with the humiliating sense that results from the American mixture of private concerns and intellectual interests. . . . ...
The Massachusetts Review, 1981
* Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Pub lishers, 1977); John Gardner,... more * Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Pub lishers, 1977); John Gardner, On Moral Fiction (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1978); William H. Gass, The World Within the Word (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978); Eugene Goodheart, The ...
The Massachusetts Review, 2003
Page 1. Shaun OyConnell That Much Credit: Irish-American Identity and Writing Are you irish at al... more Page 1. Shaun OyConnell That Much Credit: Irish-American Identity and Writing Are you irish at all?" Davin asks Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, raising the question of identity just at the historical moment, between ...
The Massachusetts Review, 1976
Page 1. AMERICAN FICTION, 1975: CELEBRATION IN WONDERLAND Shaun O'Connell It is ... more Page 1. AMERICAN FICTION, 1975: CELEBRATION IN WONDERLAND Shaun O'Connell It is my belief that the serious artist insists upon the sanctity of the world?even the despairing artist insists upon the power of his art to somehow transform what is given. It may be that his ...
The Massachusetts Review, 1974
I was moving through a nicely-paced, thank you, fifty minutes be fore my Modern American Fiction ... more I was moving through a nicely-paced, thank you, fifty minutes be fore my Modern American Fiction class, neatly opening the bright package of John Updike's Rabbit, Run without, I thought, tearing much of the candy-colored paper, even saving the ribbon, gently lifting out the intricate ...
The Massachusetts Review, 1973
Page 1. ARTS IN REVIEW AMERICAN FICTION, 1972: THE VOID IN THE MIRROR Shawn O'Connel... more Page 1. ARTS IN REVIEW AMERICAN FICTION, 1972: THE VOID IN THE MIRROR Shawn O'Connell In a 1900 essay, contemplating "The Future of the Novel," Henry James was buoyant with optimism. Novels, he said, are mirrors, implying they ...
New England Journal of Public Policy, 1990
It is enough to turn you away from the political process to recall that neither candidate for the... more It is enough to turn you away from the political process to recall that neither candidate for the American presidency seriously addressed this issue in 1988. For Yeats "politics" was one thing and "that girl" another. She embodied simple beauty and love, the rhetoric of the heart. "But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms." By implication, "politics," for Yeats, meant difficult issues and complex analysis, the rhetoric of the head. The presidential election of 1988 obliterated Yeats's distinction. The "handlers"the campaign managers, speech writers, media consultants, spin controllers, flacks, advisers, friends, and wives of the candidatesdid their best to convince Americans that each candidate for the presidency-George Bush or Michael Dukakiswas nothing less than "that girl standing there," a worthy emblem of beauty and a sufficient object of desire. Since both Bush and Dukakis suffered from severe charisma deficiencies, each made his case by running down the other. Forget issues and analysis, implied both candidates in their misleading rhetoric and their manipulatory media messages. Come live with me and be my love, courted Bush through the long, hot summer and fall of 1988. Trust in me, cooed Dukakis. In November, America decided it liked Bush better, but all of us were diminished by the inane campaign. Small wonder that now, after the midterm congressional elections, on the brink of the 1992 presidential campaign, as a new millennium approached, we would like to forget all about 1988, a bad dream that continues to haunt the American mind. Try as they mightor as their mighty manipulators managedneither presidential candidate could match the beauty or lovableness of Ronald Reagan, the cover boy of American politics, still standing there; still smiling, nodding, joshing, and waving his way through the Iran/contra and arms-diversion scandal; still trying to remember what he knew and when he forgot it. (Reagan maintained "plausible deniability" of his subordinates' actions, though Oliver North, Reagan's point man on the Iran/contra extravaganza, assumed "that the president was aware of what I was doing and had, through my superiors, approved of it.") 6 J 06
The Massachusetts Review, 1988
WHEN A DISPLACED AMERICAN, an innocent abroad, finds himself in Ireland, singing "I will tak... more WHEN A DISPLACED AMERICAN, an innocent abroad, finds himself in Ireland, singing "I will take you home again, Kathleen" to an Irish girl, we know that he has come to a pretty pass, to a difficult passage. He is ignoring the intent of this emigrees' lament, which held out to ...
The author talks about the consequences of not respecting the climate and understanding global wa... more The author talks about the consequences of not respecting the climate and understanding global warming will cause ecocide and our own extinction. Reprinted from New England Journal of Public Policy 21, no. 2 (2007), article 5
Indeed, as soon as the least of us stands still, that is the moment something extraordinary is se... more Indeed, as soon as the least of us stands still, that is the moment something extraordinary is seen to be going on in the world.-Eudora Welty, "Place in Fiction" his place, The University of Massachusetts Boston, has been important for most of us for many years. This elegant Campus Center, open to the Boston skyline, the Harbor and the sea beyond, stands as an emblem of UMass Boston's enduring vitality, its tenacious capacity, despite setbacks, to rebuild and renew itself. Just over forty years ago this peninsula was a landfill. Now it holds the JFK Library, the Massachusetts State Archives, and a great public university. All around us this evening, as we stand still, we can see that something extraordinary has indeed gone on in this important place. Forty years ago, almost to the day, I was at a meeting in the office of Al Ryan. He and Paul Gagnon drew up UMass Boston curriculum, hired its founding faculty, and shaped its urban mission. Al's splendid office, with its rich wood-paneling and long windows, was on the thirteenth floor of the former Gas Company building, on the corner of Arlington and Stuart streets, the first site of UMB. Looking north out of the office window, I was transfixed then, as I am now again, by the moment and the perspectiveby, as James Joyce put it, "the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past." Suddenly, in September, 1965, I was above the Boston skyline, truly seeing this city for the first time: the Garden, the Common, Beacon Hill; the low, jagged, downtown skyline and the tangled streets, winding toward the harbor. Before this moment, high above Park Square, I had known Boston only through its playing fields and jazz clubs, from Fenway Park to the Hi Hat; but now I could see this "walking city" all at once-an urban landscape open with invitation and wonder, a city of large, undefined promise, for me and for the university. That was the first of many enduring gifts UMass Boston gave me: Boston. The nine years we spent in Park Squarewhen the university and everyone in it seemed brand new, making things up
New England Journal of Public Policy, 1990
It is enough to turn you away from the political process to recall that neither candidate for the... more It is enough to turn you away from the political process to recall that neither candidate for the American presidency seriously addressed this issue in 1988. For Yeats "politics" was one thing and "that girl" another. She embodied simple beauty and love, the rhetoric of the heart. "But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms." By implication, "politics," for Yeats, meant difficult issues and complex analysis, the rhetoric of the head. The presidential election of 1988 obliterated Yeats's distinction. The "handlers"the campaign managers, speech writers, media consultants, spin controllers, flacks, advisers, friends, and wives of the candidatesdid their best to convince Americans that each candidate for the presidency-George Bush or Michael Dukakiswas nothing less than "that girl standing there," a worthy emblem of beauty and a sufficient object of desire. Since both Bush and Dukakis suffered from severe charisma deficiencies, each made his case by running down the other. Forget issues and analysis, implied both candidates in their misleading rhetoric and their manipulatory media messages. Come live with me and be my love, courted Bush through the long, hot summer and fall of 1988. Trust in me, cooed Dukakis. In November, America decided it liked Bush better, but all of us were diminished by the inane campaign. Small wonder that now, after the midterm congressional elections, on the brink of the 1992 presidential campaign, as a new millennium approached, we would like to forget all about 1988, a bad dream that continues to haunt the American mind. Try as they mightor as their mighty manipulators managedneither presidential candidate could match the beauty or lovableness of Ronald Reagan, the cover boy of American politics, still standing there; still smiling, nodding, joshing, and waving his way through the Iran/contra and arms-diversion scandal; still trying to remember what he knew and when he forgot it. (Reagan maintained "plausible deniability" of his subordinates' actions, though Oliver North, Reagan's point man on the Iran/contra extravaganza, assumed "that the president was aware of what I was doing and had, through my superiors, approved of it.") 6 J 06
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2015
Pages, essays, and books pile up in libraries while pixilated words and paragraphs get packed awa... more Pages, essays, and books pile up in libraries while pixilated words and paragraphs get packed away on hard disks or float in clouds: permanence versus ephemera. Yet, as underfunded libraries turn into media centers and as digital backup options proliferate, who can tell what pages will last and for how long. These essays have long been stored in volumes of the New England Journal of Public Policy (NEJPP) or made available on the journal's website. This collection sets them in a fresh context and gives them an opportunity to reach new readers in a format that shows how issues and themes change but never disappear. In thirty years, between 1986 and 2015, I wrote twenty-one essays, reflections on books and topics of public concern for NEJPP. I was pleased when the journal editor, Padraig O'Malley, invited me to collect a selection of these essays for this special issue of NEJPP, allowing me the opportunity and the space once again to explore some crucial issues of the day (war, AIDS, homelessness, the environment) and to reflect on significant places (symbolic cities: Boston, New York, Dublin). Two essays discuss another matter of personal and public concern: Irish American culture through its representative men. I have chosen to include twelve essays here, omitting some that now seem dated in the books discussed. It has been a tense task, rereading essays I wrote some decades ago, but in the end satisfying, for they remind me of the times, tempers, and cultural contexts in which they were composed and they have things to say that I had forgotten I said. My hope is that these essays, granted a second time around, will have worthy things to say to current readers.
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2006
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2015
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2016
William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel about the leader of a slave rebellion in ... more William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel about the leader of a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, was highly praised after its publication in 1967. Then African American essayists in William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond took issue with the novel and rejected Styron's asserted right to reimagine Nat Turner's life and to assume his voice, claiming their rights of racial heritage and historical accuracy to castigate Styron for his offensive presumption. That distant argument of unshared assumptions and crossed purposes between high-minded and hypersensitive artists and intellectuals of another day may throw refracted light on the heated and principled divisions over racial issues expressed on campuses, on city streets, and in the media in our time. ______________________________________________________________________________ In the late fall of 2015, while days darkened early and leaves swirled in the wind, discontent stirred on college campuses and on city streets across the land. African Americans protested racial insults and other expressions of perceived prejudice. "I have been called the N-word too many times to count," Cynthia Frisby, a professor at the University of Missouri, said. 1 As a result of such protests, the president of the University of Missouri system and the provost of the Columbia University campus resigned. Similar demonstrations took place at Yale University over the firing of a house master who questioned those who urged racial and gender sensitivity limits on Halloween costumes. At Amherst College students conducted a sit-in at the Robert Frost Library, protesting the college's "institutional legacy of white supremacy" and all associations, including their college sports teams' nickname the "Lord Jeffs," with Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who advocated germ warfare against Native Americans." 2 At Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson, former president of the university and of the nation, was held up as a racist. At the same time, in response to a series of police shootings of young African American men caught on video, street demonstrations developed in several cities under the banner "Black Lives Matter." The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow suggested that "black bodies are a battlefield: black folks fight to defend them as external forces fight to destroy them." 3 While outrage at the police shootings was general, the response to verbal and symbolic insults on campuses was more mixed and nuanced. In the words of another Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, "we have two noble forces colliding with explosive force": the conflict between those who seek to censor or suppress verbal or other expressions of prejudice and those who defend these on the grounds of free speech. 4 Divided over what to think about the campus conflicts of convictions, sympathetic to both sides, I remembered a similar cultural debate that flared nearly half a century ago after the publication of William Styron's 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. That distant argument of unshared assumptions and crossed purposes between high-minded and hypersensitive artists and intellectuals of another day may throw
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2015
What is a city? Well we might ask, for today the city as we have known itparticularly New York Ci... more What is a city? Well we might ask, for today the city as we have known itparticularly New York City, which has long reflected the state of the nation at its best and its worst-is a disintegrating entity, a depleted idea, a diminished thing. The decline of the city, as emblem and actuality, is eroding the nation's stated commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For it is the gritty city, particularly New York City, rather than the fabled New England village that has stood as the last hope for American democracy. the place where "aliens"-the huddled masses from across the Atlantic and the internal emigrés from the heart of the country-have arrived with great expectations, and it is the city that has transformed them into committed members of the body politic. As America abandons its cities, while protecting its urban and suburban enclaves of wealth, commerce, and high-income residences, its poor citizens are sentenced to a life of diminished expectations, danger, disease, and despair that flares into occasional violence and self-destructiveness. Lewis Mumford, distinguished urban analyst, articulated his urban ideal in The Culture of Cities (1938). The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. It is the place where the diffused rays of many separate beams of life fall into focus, with gains in both social effectiveness and significance. The city is the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning. Here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civilization are focused: here, too, ritual passes on occasion into the active drama of a fully differentiated and selfconscious society. 1 Mumford stressed the goals of unity, cohesion, and coherence: for him the city should compose, out of its diverse residents and elements, one living and nurturing organism. However, he lived long enough to see his ideal vision crumble and his beloved Manhattan, the personification of that ideal, decline and fall from grace. Born in Flushing, Queens, in 1895, Mumford, who called himself "a child of the city," grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side in a "typical New York brownstone," though all of the city became his landscape of discovery: the streets were the leaves of grass through which he walked, and New England Journal of Public Policy the port of New York stood as his frontier, his Walden Pond. "Not merely was I a city boy but a New Yorker, indeed a son of Manhattan, who looked upon specimens from all other cities as provincial-especially Brooklynites," he confessed in Sketches from Life (1982). Despite its problems, deriving from vast inequities of wealth, the New York of Mumford's youth offered "a moral stability and security" which, by the 1970s, when New York City nearly went bankrupt, was long gone. As a distinguished elderly man, Mumford looked back on his old New York with wonder and ahead to an increasingly horrific New York with despair. "More than once lately in New York I have felt as Petrarch reports himself feeling in the fourteenth century, when he compared the desolate, wolfish, robber-infested Provence of his maturity, in the wake of the Black Plague, with the safe, prosperous region of his youth." 2 Mumford's memoir, so full of resonant remembrances of things past, traces his development from youth, before World War I, to coming of age as one of America's most influential cultural critics, between the wars, then to the alienated sense of a "displaced person" in modern, plague-ridden Manhattan. He is blunt, explicit, and denunciatory, like an Old Testament prophet, in his assessment of contemporary New York. "The city I once knew so intimately has been wrecked; most of what remains will soon vanish; and therewith scattered fragments of my own life will disappear in the rubble that is carried away." 3 Sunk also, like the fabled Atlantis, was Mumford's ideal vision of the city, "where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order." We now know that our cities-particularly New York City, America's Gotham or Metropolis, a city in desperate and perpetual need of rescue, as represented in popular culture by Batman, Superman, or even Ghostbusters!-have arrived at the point of the maximum diffusion of power and fragmentation of culture, a dissolving center of centrifugal forces that results in chaos and entropy. There, indeed, is where the issues and seemingly irresolvable problems of civilization are focused; there, too, are acted out the dramas of a fully differentiated and self-conscious society now in disarray and decay. In the cities the economic gap between rich and poor is dramatized. Since World War II, small manufacturing plants and sweatshops, which for more than a century have exploited but also sustained immigrants and other members of the underclass, have disappeared, like a receding tide (often to foreign shores), and these groups, composed largely of minorities, have been left behind, stranded on the beach, to fight one another over what little remains-as blacks attacked Koreans in south central Los Angeles during the riots of spring 1992. There, in the republic's center cities, things have fallen apart; the center has not held. (New York did not bum after the LA riots, to