Condolezza, Condolezza

RantWoman is accumulating a backlog of themes needing thorough rants. Unfortunately these themes need thorough, coherent rants. Even RantWoman has her standards, so RantWoman's readers may be perplexed to realize that this item from Waging Nonviolence about Condolezza Rice's new book What Condolezza Rice Learned From her Father's Aversion to NOnviolence leapt ahead of all the other topics churning in RantWoman's febrile soul.

In the first place RantWoman finds Condolezza Rice a fascination. One reason is her speech pattern. Half the time Dr. Rice sounds like all of RantWoman's relatives from Colorado; this nasal accent weaves in and out of a lilt worthy of any daughter of the Confederacy.

RantWoman finally put together the speech pattern issue one day at her eye doctor's: RantWoman remembers one time during her summer of her worst ever eyeball horrors being ecstatic simply to be able to read the Large Pring Readers' Digest which had an article about Dr. Rice's childhood. RantWoman thinks she remembers one of her eye care professionals giving her a hard time about her choice of reading materials. If it's in Readers' Digest, it has to be true, right. The article was actually decent and spoke of Condolezza losing her best friend in the Birmingham church bombing. That would be an odd topic for RantWoman to be ecstatic about being able to read, but there it was.

Condolezza Rice further fascinates RantWoman because she is one of those women like Jeanne Kirkpatrick or Madeleine Albright who achieve prominence in foreign policy despite being really, really different from the women as intrinsically more wholesome and peaceable ideology of some a younger RantWoman hung out with.

RantWoman would now say that making women responsible for all the peacemaking in the world lets men off the hook to an entirely unwholesome extent. The maturing RantWoman has also collected enough thinking about catfight-style argumentation and girls' forms of peer pressure, that the women as intrinsically peaceable thing does not even get out the door with RantWoman anymore. RantWoman has further spent enough time in meetings with skewed gender balance to relate easily to Jeanne Kirkpatrick's grumbles about rooms full of testosterone, but that is entirely another problem.

RantWoman finds herself peeved actually about the blogger's analysis of Condolezza Rice's father Rev. Rice and Rev. Rice's views about nonviolence. RantWoman exactly understands the point of people being easily able to do the same things everyone in their circles are doing but also to know their own limits about some or another specific tough point, in this case nonviolence.

Could Rev. Rice's position have evolved through dialog wihth others? RantWoman specifically does not have an opinion about Rev. Rice's position but would pointedly note the length of time John Woolman labored with Friends over slavery. Aside from vast cultural gaps between Southern Baptists like Dr. King and Presbyterians like Rev. Rice, the tradition of laboring with one another over difficult issues is, in RantWoman's observation not as well developed among Presbyterians as it is among Friends and RantWoman would simply note that the family's move to Colorado introduced other, um interesting themes.

Matters of race and privilege are alive and well among westerners, but they play out differently. For example, one can always find matters involving people of Hispanic or Native American heritage, but there is sometimes a pretense that being African American is less of a problem or that racism is somehow less pronounced or less corrosive. Perhaps this point is one of the factors that created space for Condolezza Rice to excel at her studies, to find mentors, and to fall into line with a certain blase realism about geopolitics. RantWoman would like to save all the acid things she can further think of to say about Dr. Rice's career for another time but would like to close with a tart comment that she seldom is comfortable with anyone telling a person of another race how they shoud live in their own skin.


On the other hand, consider this extremely heartening example of nonviolence at its most powerful: http://wagingnonviolence.org/2010/10/palestinian-nonviolence%e2%80%94alive-and-sometimes-victorious/