It is rare, but not impossible for me to anticipate any GOP moves, having partially grown up in a spatial juxtaposition that is now facing the nation.
First, I left home at sixteen and ran away to Congress, winning an essay contest that gained me entrance into the now defunct Congressional Pages on the GOP side. (No Democrat ever won this seat). But, second, I spent more of my life in Santa Barbara, or SB for short, which abuts the county of Kern, and was my parents choice, wanting to be near family in Weedpatch as well as Bakersfield and the Valley in Los Angeles, which also abuts Kern County which is now represented by the wanna-be Speaker of the House good ole’ or the honorable Kevin McCarthy.
Why honorable? Well we were trained to all all members of Congress honorable, not because we didn’t want to engage in a bracing heated argument or better yet, watch the members do, before and during debates.
What I’m getting at is everything in California is not as cut and dried as members of Congress representing SB, Kern, or any district within LA would like to admit. Nor is American foreign policy. Here, though this summer I got lucky.
Visiting Albania, which I told my travel companions was the North Korea of Europe — being so isolated and dominated by the totalitarian state. What is more, I called attention to the fact that a former Vice President (Pence) was in the country to none other than my husband’s political magazine — the National Review. They had invited or X us to write partisan pillow talk or dinner table discussions, all of course respectful or our own version of honorable that we practice when articulating our ideas about all sides of American domestic and foreign policy, whether it be from the left or the right.
In fact, former CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, who was a gifted statistician told me on the ride to the floor at Hunter College where they were giving me a Disability Community Outreach Award that rarely went to CUNY faculty or staff-I quickly explained why I asked my husband, Frederic Halper O’Brien (née Schwarz) to wish off my two sons, who while they came in matching polo shirts that they purchased together just before no logo Target were 13 and 15 years old. It wasn’t that a Deputy Managing Editor of the National Review would make faculty nervous. Loads of CUNY political scientists have written for them before. CUNY has faculty who write about all aspects, left, right and center. No, it was the CUNY PR nightmare I witnessed upon my arrival to CUNY 18 years earlier — and that was Heather MacDonald’s dreadful racist book about the College on a Hill.
Indeed, in 2004 the State Department had me read it. I was appointed the Director of a Summer Institute for Fulbright, which brought in 18 professors and scholars appointed by their own countries. Only four were from Europe, the rest came from China, India, Tibet, Russia, Romania, and the Ukraine . . . and I introduced them to the 42 scholars in the United States that spoke about our theme “neos & isms” America as Empire the way Amy Kaplan, as a former President of American Studies viewed the U.S. of A.
I was to read MacDonald’s book the acting director of the cultural part of the State Department, now deceased, told me so that I could understand the real purpose behind Summer Fulbright institute I directed alone, after being solicited by Peter B. (not Beinart)
This meant I had to know the backstory. Backstory, I told this director, is my favorite part of the assignment whenever I direct or administer anything. To me, there is nothing better than knowing the long, complex functions of an institution that exists beyond one generation, at least. as we congressional pages were taught to call all members of Congress sitting on the left or the right or any party in between.
Being a far west Frick and a Penelope Stout returning over 380 years later the very county she and Richard receives a land grant from the Duke of York means there is lots of backstory and that’s why it has taken me so long to finish American neotribalism from my own app or American Political Perspective, not Perspectives took so long to unravel and unwind. As the author of New Netherlands wrote teaching a seminar at Baruch College said the only thing one knows about their own family’s lineage is you’ve got it all wrong.
Ruth Frick O'Brien 