Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, 1941-2007
A few years back, a "basic catalog of worldviews"--a book passing in review the tenets of different philosophical outlooks, such as Christian theism, deism, existentialism, Eastern pantheistic monism, and postmodernism--was published under the title The Universe Next Door. It's a good title. It helps capture the inner drama of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, the distinguished historian who died this month at the age of 65: In the course of her adult life, she moved from one mental universe into another.
In the late 1970s, when she and her husband, historian of slavery Eugene Genovese, founded the journal Marxist Perspectives--and in 1986, when she founded the Institute for Women's Studies at Emory University--she was a secular intellectual who identified herself with feminism and leftist thought. By early 1996, when her book Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life appeared, she had undergone a marked evolution. But the reservations that book expressed about feminism were couched in terms of common sense: "Most women," she noted, don't share the feminists' contempt for femininity or their undervaluing of marriage and motherhood. "Sensible women" are simply puzzled by feminists' strident opposition to the "mommy track," the notion that part-time or low-pressure jobs are good for many mothers in their most intensive child-rearing years.
But all the while, a deeper development of her thinking was under way. In December 1995, it led her into the Catholic church. And in the last decade of her life, it flowered in a depth of spirituality and a philosophical clarity few achieve. Several of her essays written since 2000 and posted on the web by the organization Women for Faith and Family ( www.wf-f.org) reveal how completely she had broken with the individual-rights-based outlook dominant among her academic peers.
This later Elizabeth Fox-Genovese wrote without apology of the "transcendent purpose that should inform and guide human lives" and "the divine commandments that govern the relations among human persons and between humanity and God." "Sadly but inescapably," she wrote, "the sexual liberation of women--appropriately known as the sexual revolution--has led to the disintegration of the family, the objectification of the person, and the repudiation of all binding ties among individuals." Truth is countercultural, she came to see, and the postmodern emphasis on individual conscience is a way of sidestepping "the abiding aspects of the human condition" and the reality of evil.
With the passing of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, America has lost a courageous thinker and an elegant mind.
Faculty Whining, cont.
THE SCRAPBOOK is obliged to reveal a trade secret: Sometimes we read news stories with stopwatch in hand, ticking off the minutes between the end of a story and its all-too-inevitable sequel.
Case in point: The news, revealed recently, that Southern Methodist University in Dallas is the likely location of the George W. Bush presidential library and museum, as well as a public policy institute. The institute, administered by a private foundation, would be independent of SMU, and the Bush library and museum (like all presidential libraries, except Richard Nixon's) would be under the auspices of the National Archives.
After finishing the story, we reached for our stopwatch--tick, tick, tick--and, like clockwork, the New York Times revealed last week that certain Southern Methodist "faculty members . . . are raising sharp questions about the school's identification with [George W. Bush's] presidency." Reported the Times: "About 150 of the university's 600 faculty members [expressed] a range of concerns, particularly on whether the school's academic freedom and political independence might appear compromised by an association [with the Bush library]. Thomas J. Knock, a professor of history, said the public might have trouble differentiating between the library, museum and the university." Oh, Professor Knock, THE SCRAPBOOK assures you that the American public, despite its election of George W. Bush to the presidency, is not as stupid as all that. Even here at SCRAPBOOK U., when we think of our traditional arm-wrestling rival Emory, in Atlanta, we don't automatically conjure up the image of Jimmy Carter--whose library, museum, and public policy institute are on the Emory campus. And when we think of John F. Kennedy, our minds don't automatically wander to the University of Massachusetts at Boston, home of the JFK library. Americans are fully capable of differentiating between presidential libraries and the institutions of higher learning that welcome them.
What they don't comprehend are academics contemptuous of their fellow citizens, and historians whose juvenile partisanship--and personal disdain for George W. Bush (B.A. Yale, MBA Harvard)--are an embarrassment to scholarship in general, and Southern Methodist University in particular.
Fight, Fight . . .
As a general rule, THE SCRAPBOOK tries to ignore celebrity feuds. Careful readers will have noted our deafening silence when teen queens Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan went at it like two alley cats over a can of Fancy Feast. But sometimes the reverberations are so great from a clash of celebrity titans, that one must take notice. We refer to that 21st-century equivalent of Ali vs. Frazier, of Godzilla vs. King Kong, or perhaps more fittingly in this case of Hitler vs. Stalin--Rosie O'Donnell vs. Donald Trump. In December, Rosie fired the first shot when "Uncle Joe" Trump, who counts the Miss USA pageant among his many classy properties, decided to give a second chance to reigning Miss USA Tara Conner, who'd engaged in underage drinking and exhibitionistic lipstick lesbian behavior. Rosie, who means it when she kisses girls, castigated Trump on The View, accusing the cotton-candy-haired real estate developer of having appointed himself "the moral compass for 20-year-olds in America. Donald, sit and spin my friend."
But Trump isn't into absorbing punishment. "I'm worth billions of dollars, and I have to listen to this fat slob?" he cleverly retorted. In the ensuing month, it's been all-out war. Rosie has called Trump a "pimp," a "snake-oil salesman," and a "comb-over." Trump has called her a "degenerate," a "loser," an "animal," a "terrible person," "not smart," and "very, very unattractive." Not exactly dinner at Noel Coward's.
Given the ferocity of Trump's attacks, it's a wonder Rosie hasn't already popped a cyanide capsule or, more likely, sought death by chocolate. Enter Barbara Walters, aka Mussolini. Trump intimated that Rosie's boss on The View had privately called him, trying to end the feud and supposedly telling him, "Don't worry, she won't be here for long," and "Donald, never get in the mud with pigs."
Walters unconvincingly denied it on the air, and, according to the New York Post, Rosie angrily confronted her backstage, reaming Walters for not standing up for her, and perhaps for not assisting her in the invasion of Yugoslavia. Trump wrote an open letter to Rosie (as if the publicity tapeworm writes any other kind) informing Rosie, Barbara "lied to both of us."
Now, however, Rosie and Barbara have circled their sisterhood wagons. Walters called Trump "that poor pathetic man" on the show, before an embarrassing round of high-fives. Also calling Rosie's treatment "unfair" is Madonna, or Tojo as we've come to think of her (if Tojo wore a cone bra and had a fake British accent).
While the feud looks as though it could go on for years, THE SCRAPBOOK holds out hope that it will end with an Instrument of Surrender signed on the deck of some battleship. If all the above-mentioned parties are present for the ceremony, maybe we'll get lucky and some righteous soul will torpedo it.
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