How do we transmit values (GOOD values, that is)? E. J. Dionne Jr. provides a case in point

"If you stand for something, you will always make enemies. That is part of the price of being principled. What you should avoid are entirely unnecessary fights that advance no cause but create bitter feelings."

-- Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr., in a tribute
this week to his "second father," "Unearned blessings"

by Ken

Probably it's too facile to say that right-wingers don't acknowledge their roots, the human sources that nourished them into the people they became. After all, Paul Ryan acknowledges the inspiration he drew from that great thinker Ayn Rand, or at least he used to before he started getting embarrassing questions from people who actually knew that pathetic loop de loop actually believed, including her deep hostility to religion, which after all is one of PRyan's chiefest pretend-virtues. And right-wing economists do often pay tribute to Friedrich Hayek, and some of them may actually have read his stuff.

But in the matter of how real human values are developed and transmitted from one generation to the next, a subject you would think would be of paramount interest to people who pretend to be "conservatives," the discussion usually starts and ends with religion, which for modern right-wingers is pretty much confined to religion, usually in its most authoritarian and almost always in its crackpottiest form. (Note the built-in conflict with the Ayn Rand Wing of America's Looniest.)

In part I think (and this may be overthinking for the case of people who have basically sworn to eradicate actual thought) Righties' problem with acknowledging where they came from is that they've been trained to believe that everything they do they do on their own (except maybe for God, or a doodified version of Jesus that would make the real Jesus weep).

So it's not surprising, by contrast, to find E. J. Dionne Jr. paying moving tribute this week -- in a column called "Unearned blessings" -- to a man he had, he says, the great good luck ("that ineffable thing we call luck") to have in his life, shaping his outlook in crucial ways.

I usually think of E.J. as a shining if rare example of a person of faith whose faith has inspired him to a life as a striver for social justice. Catholics in search of a usable role model don't have a lot of options out there. E.J. has long been a shining exception. I don't know if it's ironic or a matter of course that the man E.J. celebrated this week as "one of the best human beings I will ever know," who died Monday, was Jewish.

Bert Yaffe, 93, was a businessman and a decorated Marine combat veteran -- he was a tank commander in Guam, Bougainville and Iwo Jima -- who carried shrapnel in his body to his last day. He was also a citizen-politician who ran for Congress in 1970 because, having fought proudly in a war he considered absolutely necessary, he came to oppose a war in Vietnam that he saw as a terrible mistake.

A native of Sparta, Ga., who never lost the soft Southern inflection in his speech, he moved to my home town of Fall River, Mass., after he left the service. He had married his beloved Erna and taken over a family business. He lost her to cancer in 1977, and her death deepened his engagement with the cause of health-care reform and disease prevention. This passion was an integral part of his commitment to civil rights, social justice and peace.

I got to know Bert when I was 16, shortly after my father died. I was already fortunate because he had been a very loving father, and I also had a godfather and uncles looking out for me. Bert was a life-changing bonus.

He had been the local organizer for Eugene McCarthy's 1968 ­anti-war campaign and was a prime force behind what became the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium protests. We met when I interviewed him for a high school project on the reform movement in the Democratic Party, and it happened almost instantly: He decided to take me on as an extra son -- and, bless them, his own children, Eric, Cheryl and Rob, welcomed me as part of the family.

"Bert's was the only Jewish family in Sparta," E.J. writes.

A popular kid, he joined the Epworth League, the Methodist youth group, because he wanted to go out with a Methodist girl. While remaining loyally Jewish, he proceeded to get elected president of Sparta's branch of the league. Only in America.

Later he wanted to date a Baptist girl, and he encountered a form of resistance that may be understandable only to those from traditional Southern towns. "They didn't care that I was Jewish," Bert would laugh. "What they couldn't stand is that I had been president of the Epworth League."

Here's one lesson E.J. says he learned from Bert:

Our view of expertise should never be limited to how many academic degrees somebody has. On health care, he always asked what Sarah Stokes would think.

A public health nurse he got to know as a teenager in the 1930s, Stokes worked, Bert once said, "on the red clay back roads, through the cotton fields and among the broken-down shacks and contaminated wells of Hancock County" in Georgia, which was 80 percent African American. The love Stokes showed toward those she served taught Bert to hate injustice.

Another lesson: "Make no gratuitous enemies," with the accent on gratuitous.

Faced in the early 1970s with a highly personal feud among some of our political friends, he sought to mediate rather than take sides. . . .

If you stand for something, you will always make enemies. That is part of the price of being principled. What you should avoid are entirely unnecessary fights that advance no cause but create bitter feelings. I'll always think of it as a singularly important piece of political wisdom.

Another lesson: Bert, "a devoted liberal," "always looked across ideological barricades for unexpected friends." As "a passionate believer in individual and community responsibility for promoting better health," he "was struck that at least some of his ideas overlapped with those of Newt Gingrich."

But what matters most, E.J. says, is:

The guy who befriended a 16-year-old kid showed me that you can marry a very hardheaded approach to the problems of life and politics with a joyous, spontaneous sense of love. Would that everyone could be lucky enough to have such a second father.

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