Wednesday.....Culture.....Bildung in 2012

There was a time when the best scholarship was written in the German language. I'm sure that much of the problem with liberal theology in the Christian church in America today has it's origins in the scholarship of Higher Criticism that came out of Germany over a hundred years ago. Single German words that are deep with meaning, and have no equivalent in English, would come up often in my college courses in Higher Education. The mobile Fox News web site's headline story about the problems of Toyota was titled As Toyota stumbles, schadenfreude lurks. The meaning behind the German word being that other companies might be taking pleasure in the misfortunes of their leading competitor. Dan Quayle was a United States Congressman, Senator from Indiana and this country's 44th Vice President. Three episodes in his political life have defined him. As Vice President, he visited an elementary school and misspelled the word potato. He gave a speech criticizing the television show character Murphy Brown, and he was levelled with a comment by Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen in a debate, the comment: Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy. None of his accomplishments in the corporate world and government matters. Today, President Obama pronounced the word corpsman as "corpse man" three times and he is being battered by our side. Michele Obama is being taken to task for words about her children that, to some, did not seem to be appropriate. I don't take any pleasure in his miscue or the comments about Mrs. Obama. Maybe I'm just being fair. Maybe I know how I often wince as I read my own old blogs. Maybe it is influenced by my opinion that too many Conservatives are acting like giddy school kids over their prospects in the 2010 elections, and this with serious issues at hand. I'm not concerned about being overconfident for I cannot imagine any turn of events that would quench the fire of the American people towards the economic suicide, government power grabs and textbook political methods of Saul Alinsky and Joseph Goebbels that we have experienced. Barack Obama is allowed, in my opinion, to make simple mistakes like this. Dan Quayle and George Bush should also have been. As for Hillary, she is something like the German word bildung that no one seems to be able to define. It has something to do with image, something to do with an acquired learning of some sort, from somewhere. She is articulate and purpose-driven. It is that purpose that I'm concerned with, as with Barack Obama's.