RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/mount-sinai-west-point-dara-horn

On Wednesday, Tablet contributor Dara Horn delivered the following remarks at the United States Military Academy at West Point to a gathering of about 100 Jewish West Point cadets, faculty, officers, alumni, veterans, and families and friends, celebrating the 18 Jewish graduating cadets of the West Point class of 2023.

It is an enormous honor to be here today to wish you Mazal Tov on this beautiful moment in your lives, and in the shared life of our country. Normally a graduation speaker is supposed to offer new graduates a dose of wisdom and guidance. I’m supposed to advise you all to wear sunscreen, make mistakes, and live life to the fullest.

But the truth is that looking at all of you graduates, along with all the alumni, officers, faculty, veterans, and the families and friends gathered here who have poured their hearts into supporting you during these challenging years and the even more challenging years ahead, during which you have all dedicated your lives to defending our democracy, I feel completely outclassed by every person in this room. What can I possibly say to you that you don’t already know?

You are all already deeply aware of what many other college graduates only learn after years of aimlessly stumbling through life, which is that a life of meaning only comes from service to others. Compared to your peers graduating from other colleges around the country, you have all spent the last four years being extremely focused and extremely devoted. And to say something less graduation-worthy, you’ve also spent these years being extremely uncomfortable, and extremely uncool.

I can’t pretend to understand your experience, but I do know the profound value of being uncool and uncomfortable—and so does every Jew who has ever lived during the last 3,000 years.

Claudia Rosett’s Wonderful Life

She started at age seven, serving tea and cookies to Milton and Rose Friedman, and rose to cover our political economy — and dodge machine gun fire to walk among the protesters at Tiananmen Square.

The death Saturday of Claudia Rosett takes, at age 67, not only a treasured friend and colleague but also one of her generation’s greatest journalists. She came up through the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, served a tour as its Moscow bureau chief and another as editorial page editor of its edition in Asia, where she covered, among other things, the Communist Chinese massacre at Tiananmen Square.

One of the things that made Claudia Rosett such a strong journalist — aside from her brilliance and passion for principles — was her mastery of political economy. She’d imbibed this at the knee of her father, Richard, dean of the University of Chicago’s business school and a free-market sage. At the age of seven, she took tea with Milton and Rose Friedman, to whom she served cookies. She mixed all that with a major in English literature at Yale — and her own true grit.

“Some people sail through in this great golden glow,” she once told the Hillsdale Collegian. “That wasn’t me. You just keep writing and you keep asking people for work.” She got an internship at the Journal, and “when that didn’t lead to a full-time job on staff,” she said, “I just began writing wherever I could … It was just going in, asking if they needed something or if I could write something for them. And just keep writing.”

https://victorhanson.com/ossified-americana-part-one/

Here are a few institutions that have quite outlived their age.

Tribal Graduations

Consider 40 percent of California’s population now identifies as Latino, predominately Mexican American. Fifty percent of current BAs in the California State University system this year were awarded to self-described Latinos.

That paradox brings up the question, why are there Chicano/Latino separate graduate ceremonies at CSU when the Latino community is both the largest ethnic group in the state and graduates the greatest percentage of students at CSU?

Many of the Latino graduates are children of mixed marriages and do not speak English. If someone does not speak Spanish and has three grandfathers who are so-called Anglo and one Argentinian grandparent, is he allowed to participate?

Such absurd questions arise anytime we revert to tribalism, as we saw with the desperate but ultimately successful efforts of Elizabeth Warren to high-cheekbone her way into a Harvard Law professorship.

I think the prior arguments for ethnic theme houses and segregated graduations were predicated on victimized “minority status”—i.e., “marginalized peoples” who need the resonance of ethnic solidarity or indeed chauvinism to fend off various perceived threats from the majority.

But is that premise any longer valid in 2023?

What exactly is the point of a racially segregated graduation ceremony when your particular tribe is the largest in the state and the university?

Was the current practice and idea of segregated dorms and graduations a universal one or simply ad hoc to be used in particular advantageous situations?

That is, if there were a white dorm or “European-American theme house,” and a white graduation ceremony to incur “ethnic pride” and to foster “solidarity”—borrowing the protocols from the former Latino minority—would the Latino academic establishment say either “Congratulations that you followed our precedent and let us know how we can help to advise you on instilling ethnic pride in your heritage and confidence that you are vigilant against systemic bias and prejudice” or “You are flat out racists and have no business emulating the segregationist practices of the Old South”?

Then we come to the mechanics of tribal selection and qualification, a contentious process as we have learned from fierce in-fighting among tribal casino gambling enclaves.

 Godspeed to all who choose to serve and protect America. Every year I read  General Douglas MacArthur’s most inspiring speech. He wrote every word himself. No one has said it better. rsk

General Douglas MacArthur’s Farewell Speech to West Point

General Westmoreland, General Groves, distinguished guests, and gentlemen of the Corps. As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman asked me, “Where are you bound for, General?” and when I replied, “West Point,” he remarked, “Beautiful place, have you ever been there before?”

No human being could fail to be deeply moved by such a tribute as this, coming from a profession I have served so long and a people I have loved so well. It fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this award is not intended primarily for a personality, but to symbolize a great moral code – the code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent. That is the meaning of this medallion. For all eyes and for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with so noble an ideal arouses a sense of pride and yet of humility which will be with me always.

Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.

They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.