Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 5, 1993 TAG: 9311240273
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARSHALL FISHWICK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Once again we learned who is really in charge - Mother Nature. When Hurricane Hugo or Andrew strikes, when the Mississippi River decides to become a Great Lake, and when a drought bakes the Southeast, what can we do?
Very little. Wait for the hurricane to pass, the river to recede, and rains to wet the parched earth. The Book of Records will show this as the Year of Natural Disasters.
Others seemed man-made. As the futile meeting of the G-7 in Tokyo demonstrated, the industrial world is reeling out of control. Most of the world's leaders are powerless, hence their countries are leaderless. A sign in Berlin read: "Europe died in Bosnia." (By the way, she wasn't too healthy in Germany either.)
We seemed quite incompetent and incapable of coping with the merciless rounds of revenge in Bosnia, South Africa, Ireland, Cambodia, Lebanon. Good-bye, ECC. A supposedly united Europe was hopelessly divided. So were we. The vote on the budget bill was so close that a single vote in either the House or Senate would have killed it. So much for national unity.
That President Clinton had come on hard days was obvious. His 54.8 rating after his earlier State of the Union address plummeted to 15.6 when he touted his Supreme Court nominee, Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Nor have things improved since. We are tired of endless photo-ops with the pope, the police, ethnic revisionists and jobless defense workers. When are things really going to improve?
So-called "experts" supply numerous answers, and point their fingers at "the villains." List them and take your pick. Politicians? Congress? Lobbyists? Crooked bankers? Radical right? Radical left? Dead white males? Alive angry females? Rock bands? MTV? The media? If none of these work, how about Satan, making his triumphant reappearance in time for the Millennium?
Such speculation fades when confronted with what is to me the most tragic event of his summer: the suicide of President Clinton's close adviser, Vincent W. Foster Jr. He paid the ultimate penalty for power - his life.
In a May commencement speech at the University of Arkansas, Foster described his life at the seat of power as "hectic and challenging." In what is being taken as a suicide note, he talked of "plots and conspiracies." The public, he said, "will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staff." In Washington, he added as a bitter afterthought, ruining people is considered fun.
The very thought makes us shudder. How much personal problems and work- related problems affected Foster we shall never know. New York Times reporter Gwen Ifill wrote: "Bafflement and a measure of guilt over Mr. Foster's death [have] become common within the administration."
Not only Foster but also the nation seemed to have lost its way. The sense of community had been shattered. It was everyone for him or herself, and the devil take the hindmost. When that becomes the case, the devil is quite willing to oblige. The time has come to make common cause as we sail through perilous seas.
The word "common" is equated by some today with vulgar or cheap, but it has a long and precious history. Its roots are in two Latin words: com (``together") and munis (``bound," or "under obligation"). Things are "common" when they are bound together and shared by the whole human race. "Longing the common light again to share," John Dryden wrote in 1697. I have the same longing in 1993.
We need not ask for whom John Donne's bell tolls; no man or woman is an island, cut off from the mainland. The bell tolls for all of us.
Common sense affirms this, for it is part of our common knowledge.
A common carrier (such as a train or plane) transports all who buy tickets. A common denominator works with all numbers in the equation; common law applies to all. The House of Commons, like the Book of Common Prayer cuts through all ranks and classes. We share common rights. "Do me the common right," a character says in Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure," "to let me see them."
Those who share a common heritage form a community. We are social animals; one of our worst punishments is solitary confinement. The rupture or breakdown of community - heralded daily in our press and on our television- is a death threat to our common culture and finally to humanity itself. Let that be noted as possibly the most important message from the summer of 1993.
"All who are included in a community," wrote St. Thomas of Aquinas, "stand in relation to that community as parts of the whole." The true hallmark of the proletarian is not poverty or humble birth, but (to quote Arnold Toynbee) "a consciousness of being disinherited from one's rightful place ... being unwanted in a common community."
True community respects the individual and his or her history, and we all know that major revisions in our provincial and frequently biased histories are in order. We cannot ignore that part of history which doesn't fit our ideology - that was the fatal error of communism. False community, based on ideology, anger and manufactured history, is no solution. The end product of true community is concern; that of false community, exploitation. The former is based on consensus; the latter on conflict.
We must move from a culture of conflict to one of consensus, or at least civility. Our national motto, e pluribus unum ("out of many, comes one"), has been violated. The many has trampled on the one. For all its high-sounding goals, diversity has often led directly to disunity. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. All over the globe we see the move from nationalism to tribalism and bloodshed.
Our public schools, especially in California and New York, highlight the imminent danger. Group after group demands full "rights" for its language, culture and "diversity." What will happen if and when each of the 175 language groups (plus African-Americans, Jews, Indians, and others) demands to be taught in its own language, by its own members, trained in its own university ethnic- studies departments? And what will we do when such ethnic expansion leads, as it has in the former Yugoslavia, to ethnic cleansing? Will we have a whole series of regional holocausts?
That way lies madness. Our global village has become a global tinderbox, and sparks are everywhere. They must be extinguished. That may well require bold action and bloodshed. But as Jefferson reminded us, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants. Can we effect a new merging, a new consensus? Can individuals, many with just complaints, be persuaded that there is such a thing as a common weal, a common good?
People come together to share both ideas and objects: artifacts, mentifacts, icons, dreams, pleasures. They depend on language, gestures, codes, symbols. But the most important "thing" held in common escapes definition: a workable community of will. Jean Jacques Rousseau called it the "general will," Johann von Herder the volksgeist. Christians know it as the "holy spirit," other religions as "the One."
Call it what you will, but cling to it with all your being. With it, anything is possible. Without it, all is lost.
\ Marshall Fishwick is professor of humanities and communication studies at Virginia Tech
by CNB