My Ass is Grass

...for all flesh is as (Gunter) Grass.

Fallible, that is. I've been thinking about error a lot the last week or so. I've been thinking about the new school year and how I can get my students to overcome their fear of making errors. And I've been thinking about the different types of errors.

In a recent post on Gunter Grass, I made a not insignificant factual error. In my zeal to make a point, I misrepresented the facts of Martin Heidegger's career. I would not like such an error to be made about me (even though I am not exactly a public figure). This was a lazy mistake (not the kind I want to empower my students to make)- there's no defense to make.

The reader who made the correction asked a really interesting and provocative question:

"If you're wrong about that, isn't it possible everything else you write is also wrong?"

The question is an important one, especially in the context of the post, which was about Gunter Grass's four months in the Waffen SS and sixty years of silence about it.

This silence seems to be predicated on the notion that if we knew he was wrong about one thing, he wouldn't have any credibility about anything else.

But people aren't like that, and neither is the truth. No one has all of it, and it's when people start thinking that they do that things get scary. That's when we start asking the "quarantine questions" I discussed in the previous post, the questions that presume that our own integrity and authority are beyond questioning.

Refusing to acknowledge that we can be wrong - or that we can be both right and wrong - cuts us off from what is truly humanizing: empathy, curiosity, change.

Of course people can be wrong about one thing and right about others. Heidegger wrote much that was compelling and often beautiful. But he couldn't have been wronger in his political views or the conduct of his administrative career.

Think how much different the Kerry campaign would have been if Kerry had been able to say: "Wow - that whole voting for the war and the Patriot Act? I totally fucked up, didn't I? But if you elect me, I am going to spend the next four years working like hell to make up for it."

Instead, he let himself get locked into his initial position in order to avoid being called a flip-flopper. He spent the whole campaign trying to explain how his support for the war was different from the President's support for the war.

Clinton is now going through the same process, trying to show how her two votes for the Patriot Act and her vote to authorize force is different from the Republicans. Like Kerry, the Clinton line is: "using force on Iraq was a good idea. I didn't make a mistake. I don't withdraw my support just because I know that the intelligence was wrong. It's just the management of the war that I oppose."

Anyone else lost in this logic?

I think we need to either find a Democrat who can admit to making a mistake or find one (I'm looking at you, Feingold) who opposed the war from the start.

On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me a bit to find out that I am wrong about most things.