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hell, and she says to him, "We are our acts":
"Sellles les actes decident
de ce qu'on a uoulll .
..
.Tu n'es rien d'alltre que ta ule,"
our acts, being
not manifestations but simply what we are, and nothing else.
Jay Martin:
Millicent, I'm going to seize the opporrunity
to
answer first.
I found in this panel a remarkable experience. My first thought was that
we were the three spokes of a wheel in which we are all sort of coming
together. And now I am thinking that we'll soon turn into the Andrews
Sisters. There was a lot of harmony. And I think that that harmony, in
a way, was an answer to your question. I think Conor Cruise O'Brien
exhibited something of the answer to the question about appearance
and reality and fictive selves, and what might be a permanent core
behind them. From at least one angle he proved to me that he was
always destined to be a man of letters, and a brilliant politician; but not
in the sense that politicians now exist. Mr. O'Brien said, "I felt con–
strained to do something I did not entirely believe in."
COllstrailled.
"It
was a painful, demeaning experience. I found the necessity of lying."
These are all words in which there is clearly a real self, whose experi–
ence, he said, is "remembered with remorse." That's another real self, a
real self that's experiencing shame. That's clear. And shame is a pro–
foundly human experience. Confucius says that the only truly mon–
strous person is the person who has no shame, because you can't trust
him in any way whatsoever. Shame is a truly human capacity; and that's
what, I think, unfortunately for Ireland, and perhaps for the world, pre–
vented Conor Cruise O'Brien from becoming a permanent politician as
others would be. In contrast, I want to read a passage from David Schip–
pers's book
Sellout.
He describes a time during the
1996
campaign when
President Clinton, according to Schippers, considered trying to turn one
million non-citizen immigrants into voting citizens by shorrcutting the
naturalization process. It was understood that each of the freshly minted
citizens would be expected to vote Democratic. But the director of the
INS, Doris Meisner, felt some hesitation about waiving the usual FBI
and other investigative procedures for conferring citizenship. Her
response in the United States was, like Con or Cruise O'Brien's in Ire–
land, a moral one . But a political solution prevailed, a solution centered
in a political fiction-the INS could merely "re-invent" the rules. A
memo came to the President suggesting how this could be done.
INS Commissioner Doris Meisner warns, if we are too agressive in
removing the roadblocks to success we might be publicly criticized
for running a pro-Democratic voter mill, and even risk having
