Abstract
Meeting and working with H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., 40 years ago changed my life in ways for which I am ever grateful. I have had the privilege of elsewhere publishing a personal portrait of my friend and colleague, Herr Professor Dr. Med. Dr. Phil. Engelhardt (McCullough 1997). Here I want to touch on two aspects of my history with Tris: my first days with Tris in Galveston, Texas; and as the beneficiary of the most impressive and effective academic placement service I have ever encountered and ever expect to encounter.
Tris will be very, very upset with even such an oblique and mathematically inaccurate literary allusion to the Gettysburg Address and its author, whom I revere. When I lived in the Washington, DC area during the 1980s, one of my favorite things to do was to visit Mr. Lincoln at night, just like President Nixon (whom my father once looked in the eye in the 1956 campaign and concluded was evil incarnate but, being a loyal Republican, voted for him. Loyalty counts; ask Tris). Tris, it seems, has another view of the Savior of our Union. On this, Stephen Wear and I agree, Tris is wrong, but we still love him. Tris will, however, be pleased that this little essay has four footnotes.
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Notes
- 1.
Readers should know that, among Tris’ many extrinsic denominations (look it up!), is the Golden Fleece Award in 1976 by Senator Proxmire of Minnesota (which is in the United States of America and therefore means that the extrinsic denomination is not much of an extrinsic denomination) to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) “For spending at least $750,000 this year on grants to doctors and others to attend vacation-like, month-long seminars.” (See http://www.taxpayer.net/user_uploads/file/Awards/GoldenFleece/fleeclst.pdf, accessed May 31, 2013.) Like most statements made by Americans, this is false. The participants in the 1974 Summer Seminar at UTMB stayed in the Flagship Hotel, on a pier over The Gulf. They were from the United States and so they panicked when they saw what they took to be large roaches – Galvestonians do not pay attention to tokens of this type less than two feet in length – “all over” their rooms. The Hotel (now demolished and replaced by some kind of pleasure palace), sensitive to the needs of visitors to Texas from international destinations, had had an exterminator come in and treat the rooms the day before our participants arrived. On the first morning of the seminar, Tris explained to the Seminar participants that they should be grateful for this respect for them as persons but his argument, complete with quotations from Latin and German (lots of Hegel) sources, fell on deaf ears. Then he made them work very hard for the month, with mountains of reading and hours of intense seminars in a windowless room in the Blocker Collection in the UTMB Library. It’s actually a spectacularly beautiful room, lined with bookcases holding fabulous rare books. Notwithstanding, all Texans know that, if you want to vacation on The Gulf, you go to Matagorda Bay or Laguna Madre and remember the heroes of Coleto Creek and La Bahia. As Leibniz would conclude, this extrinsic denomination is non bene fundadatum. Sic transit gloria metaphysica et Americana Proxmirae. (All of these italicized words appear in your Lewis and Short on your bookshelf; ask Tris if you do not know what I am referencing. ‘Proxmira’ is one of those rare first-declension, masculine nouns and appears several times in little-known footnotes in the works of Hegel and therefore in Foundations.)
- 2.
Tris will tell you that the Texian army was victoriously commanded at swampy San Jacinto, a few miles to the east of where we live (I in Houston and Tris in oh-so-tony West University Place on a street named for Lafayette College, which, in turn and in shame from which Tris has yet to escape, is named for a frog, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, who, as a God-help-us-all American general, helped win the War of Independence and American freedom from the tyrant George III and his ever-ready minions of evil in Parliament in London) by Big Drunk, aka The Raven, who saw two eagles soaring over the camp of the Napoleon of the West and his troops, many of which were about to be mercilessly cut down in revenge for Goliad, not the Alamo (whose defenders, including some Irishmen, refused quarter, met their fate, some while trying to escape on the final day of the siege, and passed into legend). Yorktown in Virginia plays second fiddle, although it is one of my favorite history destinations in the United States of America; please don’t tell Tris I said that.
- 3.
This allusion is to the great Willie Morris (1934–1999) (Morris 1967), a native Mississippian (Yazoo City, to be precise, which has a branch office of the Texas Farm Bureau, of which Tris is a member, and which ought to be the name of historical ruins deep in the swamp known as The Big Thicket and therefore is), who became one of the most famous naturalized Texans in our country’s history. Mr. Morris edited the Texas Observer, a liberal rag that remains must-reading to learn what is really happening in Texas government. Then he bumped his head, went into a fugue state, moved to New York City in the United States of America, to edit Harper’s magazine, and become very famous. The Observer’s overt left-leaning political commitments mean that, to this very day, Tris eagerly awaits each new issue, dropping everything, even Hegel, to read each fresh Observer from cover to cover when it is delivered to his home by (gasp, intubate, maximum settings!) the United States Postal Service.
- 4.
This is not a footnote.
References
McCullough, L.B. 1997. A personal and professional portrait of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. In Reading Engelhardt, ed. J. Reagan, B. Minogue, and G. Palmer-Fernandez, xi–xix. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Morris, W. 1967. North toward home. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
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McCullough, L.B. (2015). Two-Score Years Ago. In: Rasmussen, L., Iltis, A., Cherry, M. (eds) At the Foundations of Bioethics and Biopolitics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 125. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18965-9_14
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