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Show tIia Park Rprnrri H Ca4tA d t -..- -IT. n,'r Thursday, September 7, 1995 D Page B9 jby GARY WEISS Record guest writer Renewing America or running for Pres? The fact that Newt Gingrich. Sneaker tof the House and putative guru of the Republican revolution, created more jcontroversy with his book deal than with his book, begins to make some sense after reading To Renew America. While certainly filled with enough radi cal proposals and extreme statements to evoke a variety of strong emotions, this is, at the end, just another politician's book. Rather than the kind of challenging, challeng-ing, "Third Wave" debate he admires and promises, To Renew America is a carefully designed product meant to pre sent l ne apeaner as ne would like to be viewed. This is as disappointing as it is obvious. obvi-ous. Despite my own unreconstructed liberal beliefs, I've gained a healthy measure of respect for Mr. Gingrich's often thoughtful approach to the discus sion of issues. Unlike many of his fellows, fel-lows, he has appeared willing to consider, consid-er, and even credit, the positions of the opposing side, to acknowledge the value of things he may not support. In To Renew America this side of Newt Gingrich is all but invisible. Even more frustrating is the superficial way in which many of his subjects are examined. exam-ined. The Speaker is obviously bright, often scholarly, and generally a very effective communicator. But I found this book shallow in the extreme. It relies on the kind of emotionally potent oversim plifications we expect from campaign rhetoric, not from the presumably serious work of a man whose stated mission is to effect deep changes in American society. Structurally, To Renew America is organized around several numerically defined presentations, presenta-tions, such as "six major changes" Gingrich believes "are necessary to leave our children with an America that is prosperous, free and safe." and "five basic principles which form the heart of our civilization" and "eight steps for improving opportunities for the poor." Much like a self-help book, this arrangement allows Mr. Gingrich to crisply tick off neatly packaged responses to these challenges. This works but only as long as we don't question the way he's defined them. Also, this design avoids the untidy business of examining these problems in terms of their real depth and complexity. For readers interested in governance and the political process, this approach serves only to trivialize the issues Mr. Gingrich says he wants to discuss, such as the federal deficit, welfare and government govern-ment bureaucracy, among many others. Newt Gingrich To Renew America The unfortunate result is that issues he has examined in depth get lost in the fluff. I found his thought s on education, for instance, to be insightful, creative and most importantly, related to the real difficulties of providing public education educa-tion to a rage of students with vastly diverse needs. This is what I hoped for in the book, but such discussion is overwhelmed by the rest of the conservative fireworks display. The substance of the book is to demonstrate the failure of Democratic policy both for those the liberal "welfare state" was meant to help, and also for the other Americans the ones who have developed deep resentments about the way things have gone, and presumably, elected the new Republican majority. Again, Gingrich tries to relate his positions to images of the quintessential quintes-sential American. He defines this as "The classic American is an independent, self-reliant, hardworking hard-working person of no great wealth or social status sta-tus who nonetheless has good sense, great courage, and a fierce love of country." Based on that, he makes the case that government, govern-ment, unions, "groups rights," anything that detracts from the lone individual struggling strug-gling up the economic ladder, is suspect and anti-American. In language like that above, he adeptly uses the mytho-poetics of our culture to denigrate any institutionalized institu-tionalized help for "groups." Of troubling interest to me was the similarity between many of these statements state-ments and much of the pre-FDR rhetoric that was used to justify the stark economics eco-nomics and callous treatment of workers, eventually leading to the Great Depression. For instance, the Speaker's comment on the destructive nature of welfare; "The greatest moral imperative we face is replacing the welfare state with an opportunity society. For every day that we allow the current conditions to continue, we are condemning the poor and particularly poorer children to being deprived of the basic rights as Americans." A stirring and reasonable sounding thought that fits neatly into Newt Gingrich's "Six Challenges," but like so much else in To Renew America, it avoids consideration of the lessons of our own history. There's also a sinister side to some of these glittering generalities. For instance, Mr. Gingrich rails apocalyptically against what he calls "group rights." He asserts that our fundamental rights were granted us by our "Creator." And, he states, "They cannot be taken away by the government because our Creator outranks out-ranks the government. Similarly, neither can they be taken away by a group." He goes on to define group rights as follows: "Group rights are about grievances, lawsuits, conflict and the use of government coercion to impose a solution on an adversarial relationship... relation-ship... Group rights would reconstitute America into a seething band of competing, legally defined groups maneuvering against one another for governmentally imposed special privileges." To "prove" an argument based on the Creator's precedence over the government is not only bizarre, but coming from the Speaker of the House, frightening. Although we are a religious nation, our system is based on the idea that those who may not believe in a Creator, or who may have a vastly different concept of religion, have, by law, an equal voice in our country. And despite the highly pejorative remarks about group rights, the fact is that these groups include the largest "group" in America women, as well as organized labor, and other non-majority Americans who, by law and custom, cus-tom, were excluded from the mainstream of continued on B12 iyit fliw 1KI.V ' ' Located upstairs in the Raquet Club, 1200 Little Kate Road Your local Sport Bar Features coverage of your favorite Collage and NFL Games on 2 Giant TV Screene plus more. . Also Our Lunch Menu to available during the games on Saturday & Sunday And Try our Monday Night Game food Specials. Group Reservations Available A private club for me benefit of its members Remember Sneakers for Sporte 649-7742 FROM NOW ON, NOTHING WILL STAND IN YOUR WAY. 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