HOW TO RECAPTURE SELECTIVE MEMORIES
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Congress stop
LIS.
Indeed many of the roadblocks originate with
our own staff, who might well complain that if we waive the regu–
lations and procedures they've created and followed for years,
these people's complaints would seem credible
to
the public. Well,
what are the options? I believe we can reduce, if not eliminate, the
risk of controversy, by appointing one of our proven national per–
formance review reinvenrors, as Deputy INS COlllmissioner.
This is a brilliant sort of invention of reinvention; and in the case of
President Clinton, a natural move to create an office and a group of peo–
ple who are called reinventors; to reinvent everything possible that
needs
to
be reinvented. I think it was the first time in history that some–
body has actually been employed as a "reinventor." Now that is some–
thing that I think Mr. O'Brien couldn't really do. The reinventors didn't
have a core se lf. They were merely reinventors. Participles rather than
nouns. They were just
doing.
He was JUSt
being.
I think the core of humanity Mr. O'Brien showed so well still
remains; shame is its key, and shame is a difficult thing to sustain in our
day. That would be my way of looking at it.
Geoffrey Hartman :
I don't really have anything to add but this: Yes, we
are ha ppy, we a re the And rews Sisters, a nd we a re a II in ha rmon y. But
what then? Everybody in harmony; everybody saying the same thing,
but what is being said is not particularly encouraging to human nature.
So maybe, going back to Nietzsche, we have to bring up the question of
repetition, how to live with repetition . As I was writing my own screed,
the issue came up of how much historical specificity you can give to the
absent memory which I said historically might be interpreted as located
in the second generation of .Jewish imaginative writers haunted by the
Holocaust and the Second World War. ow, it's very important that it
be made specific. But maybe every generation that has some kind of
absent memory is wounded by the experience of the previous genera–
tion, which it has not witnessed. So, that's the repetition. And yet, I
would say that historical particularity is very important.
Conor Cruise O'Brien :
I think at this point I can only contribute to the
harmony that has emerged between us by an acquiescence of silence.
Stanley Crouch:
I was mightily impressed by everything the three of you
said, because all three of you sccmed
to
me to achieve what makes a
statement important; and that is that the subject remains itself while a
