Ig Nobels

[alice wellintown]

There a lots of factors that divided people and reshaped the political
landscape in1960s America.  Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,  the Space
Program, Cuba,  Berlin,  and other Cold War issues plus Urban Poverty,
Education and Employment, Drugs, Violence, Crime... Plus population
explosion and immigration...Plus race and class and gender. Plus
generational conflict and the Tube. While it's difficult to over
emphasize the importance of the Vietnam Wars impact on the political
60s in America, it makes little sense to ignore a plethora of other
factors that were quite important,  and at times, more important or
pivotal. The Port Huron Statement makes this point. That Vietnam came
to dominate the debate and split the nation into fragments and
polarized groupings can not be denied. No one would try to argue
against this obvious point. However, as readers of P we look at the
marginal stories, the Herero for example. P doesn't tell the story we
know all to well, he actually makes fun of the obvious readings, the
CIA, the Vietnam, the Nixon and Ray Gun and Bush are evil... the stuff
Aunt Reet rattles off like a political sermon, the stuff Tariq Khalil
gets all puffy about, the Stencilized histories. P, like Joyce, is
never comfortable with certitudes. Like Hawthorne and his Romantic
literary ancestors he only offers us a rose of indeterminacy.

 But, on one side of the portal, and rooted
almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered,
in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which
might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile
beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the con-
demned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in
token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be
kind to him.

   This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept
alive in history; but whether it had merely survived
out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of
the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed
it, -- or whether, as there is fair authority for believing,
it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted
Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door, -- **we
shall not take upon us to determine**. Finding it so
directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now
about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could
hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and
present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to
symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be
found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of
a tale of human frailty and sorrow.