In 1988, Your Humble Blogger supported then-Senator Paul Simon’s candidacy. At the time, I only wore a bow tie on occasion; I liked his policies more than his style. Also, Rep. Gephardt had no eyebrows. Bruce Babbitt stood up for new taxes, young Prince Albert was too too good-looking, and Joe Biden stole a speech. Gary Hart destroyed his own candidacy, and besides, I never liked him. Who else? Oh, yes, the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Well, and as much as I admire the man, I have never thought he was qualified for the presidency. And there was another guy, from Brookline, but nothing ever came of it. Anyway, I supported Paul Simon from the time he said, “I am not a neo-anything. I am a Democrat,\" until he dropped out about fifteen minutes later.\n
After he retired from the Senate in 1996, he wrote six books, including a slim volume called Healing America: Values and Vision for the 21st Century<\/a><\/I> (Maryknoll<\/a>: Orbis 2003). It’s not much of a book, really; it smacks of a sheaf of notes and an outline handed over to an assistant. There are affecting bits, and annoying bits, and on the whole, it can easily be skipped.\n Oddly enough, one of the most provocative things about the book is its table of contents. He is talking about our inherited values, something Gentle Readers will not be surprised to discover piqued my interest, and each chapter more or less focuses on a value Sen. Simon considered to be American (tho’ certainly not uniquely so). Some of them are among those that are usually listed whenever American Values come up: Integrity, Equality, Compassion. Others are more likely to appear when those of us on the left think about values: Participation, Education, Conservation. Some may appear more often on the other side of the aisle: Courage, Respect for the Law, perhaps Religion.\n I always try to remember to include Humility, my own special bugaboo, and I’m glad to see it here. I also was happy to see Restraint, a valuable habit that is related to humility, and which I would like to see come back into the political arena. I don’t really think of it as an American value, but then I’ve never lived in the Midwest; I think of it as not doing what Isn’t Done, and therefore as an English value, but I’ve been known to argue for it before.\n Can you think of what’s been left off the list? Possibly the most important and most American value, maybe the quintessentially American idea? No, not Hard Work, which I always leave off my own list and was happy to see left off Sen. Simon's, or Discipline, as admirable as it is. No, it’s Optimism. The old Yankee Can-Do Spirit. We Can settle the west, We Can put a man on the moon, We Can stamp out polio. We Can educate all our children. We Can discover and refine alternate energy sources. We Can provide drinkable water. We Can have high-speed rail that is the envy of the world. We Can feed the hungry, here and abroad. We Can rebuild Iraq.\n Redintegro Iraq, In 1988, Your Humble Blogger supported then-Senator Paul Simon\u2019s candidacy. At the time, I only wore a bow tie on occasion; I liked his policies more than his style. Also, Rep. Gephardt had no eyebrows. Bruce Babbitt stood up for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1978"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16999,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions\/16999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"