Love for Sale

Page 23 July–August 2008 Kalantzis continued on next page Mattson continued from previous page of history contradict the sort of air-tight theoretical arguments political theorists like McGowan make. There are organizational problems as well. In a book that doesn’t discuss foreign policy very much, we are suddenly faced—in a section answering critics of liberalism—with neoconservative hawks. McGowan’s suddenly having arguments that the reader isn’t really ready for and that a book of this size can’t do justice to. There’s another problem with who is missing from his critics’ list. We meet traditional conservatives and libertarian crackpots but nowhere those who dissent from liberalism while remaining somewhere on the center-left. I speak of the Democratic Leadership Council types (those who influenced the Clinton administration) or the original “neoconservatives”—not the Bushies—who analyzed certain problems with the welfare state while not calling to destroy it (say, Irving Kristol during the 1970s). Neither group shows up in the book, though they often pose harder questions for someone like McGowan to defend against. Finally, McGowan’s wedding vows between liberalism and democracy seem too tight. But here we get into larger arguments we’d be better to thank McGowan for starting rather than trying to solve in the course of a short review. A lot of what McGowan writes about has been said before, and he recognizes his own book as a restatement of a doctrine. But what’s weird is how much he argues that these ideas are out there and available without necessarily explaining just why conservative values have won so much influence recently. I know, it’s not fair to tell a writer that he should have written another book about why conservative ideas appeal. But in the end, I’m left wondering if the problem is really one of articulating the liberal philosophy afresh or finding ways to make the principles a lived reality within today’s political circumstances. The first is easier, the latter, because more important, brutally difficult. Nonetheless, if we ever get to a point where a liberal renaissance in American politics comes to be—and I for one am praying hard right now—we’ll have McGowan’s book, in part, to thank for that moment ’s inspiration. Kevin Mattson teaches history at Ohio University and is author of When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism and co-editor of Liberalism for a New Century. love for sAle Dimitrios Kalantzis BuT a PassaGe in Wilderness Margo Berdeshevsky Introduced by Marie Ponsot Sheep Meadow Press http://sheepmeadowpress.com 104 pages; paper, $12.95 Who am I? What am I? What do I want with my life? Where is America? What is America? What is the wilderness in which I am lost? —Anzia Yezierska, “America and I” “Out of the wilderness of possibility comes a vine without a name.” This epigraph Margo Berdeshevsky uses for her latest collection of poems, But a Passage in Wilderness, is misleading. Berdeshevsky ’s wilderness is not always of possibility; it is filled with doubt and cynicism as much as with hope and despair. Her wilderness is of uncertainty, so much so that her stanzas are sometimes a collection of open-ended conditional statements; the ifs are there, but the thens are conspicuously absent. If peace slides in like a lover on a virgin’s sheet, not cruel not frightening, if sun will not move; if we will not need to bury or begin or name a shadow that has strangulation in its open busy hands. If we will not need to bury, or begin. These lines are taken from the most arresting poem in the collection, “Best Love and Goodbye.” Written in March 2003, it is like an ear pressed to the endless sky listening for the harbinger of the war that has lasted nearly five years. “There is no war yet. // Soon.” The impending war makes the lines chillingly rhetorical. Peace does not slide in; we will need to name a shadow; we will need to bury. Berdeshevsky moves from the personal to the political with a dancer’s grace. A poet writing today more than ever...