Robert Bly, the celebrated Minnesota poet and key figure in the men’s movement, died this past week. While I liked how Bly used the Grimm Brothers’ story “Iron John” to ground his search for the wild man within, I must say that I never felt drawn to the men’s movement that he championed. I had other projects that seemed more important, like teaching full-time, raising three boys, and being a good husband. Still, Bly was always a fascinating figure.
I share a poem that seems appropriate, given the way “Bach’s B Minor Mass” talks calmly about death and assures us that all will be well (“The orphans will be fed”). Images of devastation are offset by birds, messengers to the spirit world. “The tidal wave that/ Wipes out whole cities is merely the wood thrush/Lifting her wings to catch the morning sun,” Bly tells us, and “Even after/Their tree has splintered and fallen in the night, once/ Dawn has come, the birds can do nothing but sing.”
Bach’s B Minor Mass
The Walgravian ancestors step inside Trinity Church. The tenors, the horns, the sopranos, the altos Say: “Do not be troubled. Death will come.”
The basses as they sing reach into their long coats And give bits of dark bread to the poor, saying, “Eat, eat, in the shadow of Jethro’s garden.”
The clarinets remind us of the old promise That the orphans will be fed. The oboes reply, “Oh, that promise is too wonderful for us!”
Don’t worry, my dears. The tidal wave that Wipes out whole cities is merely the wood thrush Lifting her wings to catch the morning sun.
We know that God gobbles up the Faithful. The Harvesters on the sea floor are feeding All of those ruined by the depth of the sea.
We know that people live and die. Even after Their tree has splintered and fallen in the night, once Dawn has come, the birds can do nothing but sing.
I’ve been so focused on U.S. racism in recent weeks that “Thanksgiving Poem” by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), America’s first great Black poet, seems miraculous. Dunbar, son of two former slaves and himself a victim of racial prejudice, nevertheless writes a poem of gratitude.
As an aside, I note that Dunbar’s final novel, The Sport of the Gods, deals with a situation that appears to be far more common that many realize: a man is found guilty of a theft he didn’t commit, spends time in prison, and only gains his freedom thanks to the man who framed him recanting on his deathbed. As I write this, we can lift up thanks that the wrongfully convicted Kevin Strickland has finally been released from a Missouri prison after spending 42 years behind bars, and that two of the men accused of killing Malcolm X have also been exonerated. While we’re at it, let’s offer up thanks that Oklahoma’s Julius Jones was taken off death row. Doubts about whether Jones was in fact guilty prompted Oklahoma’s governor to make the move, although the governor is still trying to make sure that Jones will spend the rest of his life behind bars, we’ll take our blessings where we can find them.
Yet despite living in a society where African Americans are treated unjustly, Dunbar focuses on the gifts he has received. It’s a reminder that, however grim the times, we can find things to be thankful for.
A Thanksgiving Poem By Paul Laurence Dunbar
The sun hath shed its kindly light, Our harvesting is gladly o’er Our fields have felt no killing blight, Our bins are filled with goodly store.
From pestilence, fire, flood, and sword We have been spared by thy decree, And now with humble hearts, O Lord, We come to pay our thanks to thee.
We feel that had our merits been The measure of thy gifts to us, We erring children, born of sin, Might not now be rejoicing thus.
No deed of our hath brought us grace; When thou were nigh our sight was dull, We hid in trembling from thy face, But thou, O God, wert merciful.
Thy mighty hand o’er all the land Hath still been open to bestow Those blessings which our wants demand From heaven, whence all blessings flow.
Thou hast, with ever watchful eye, Looked down on us with holy care, And from thy storehouse in the sky Hast scattered plenty everywhere.
Then lift we up our songs of praise To thee, O Father, good and kind; To thee we consecrate our days; Be thine the temple of each mind.
With incense sweet our thanks ascend; Before thy works our powers pall; Though we should strive years without end, We could not thank thee for them all.
It appears that the defense attorneys for the killers of Ahmaud Arbery have been taking a page out of Georgia’s racist past in their attacks on the victim. An Audre Lorde poem (thanks to John Stoehr’s The Editorial Board for the alert) explores how we should respond.
It was bad enough that Arbery was essentially lynched for jogging through a mostly white neighborhood. It was bad enough that the public prosecutor didn’t immediately arrest the killers, believing that they were justified by a Citizen’s Arrest law that was codified into Georgia law in 1863 so that slaveowners could chase after their runaway slaves following the Emancipation Proclamation. (Arbery’s killers were arrested only when video footage surfaced.) But on top of all that, the killers’ defense lawyers have been nakedly racist, first striking as many Blacks as they could from the jury, then complaining about black pastors in the courtroom, and finally—thanks to Laura Hogue—dehumanizing the victim:
“Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices that he made does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in his khaki shorts with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails.”
Civil rights attorney and former prosecutor Charles Coleman, Jr., commenting on the case, observed that the killers had essentially regarded Arbery as a “runaway slave” and that Hogue’s words, while racist, were also strategic:
“Her word choice was intentional, her descriptions were unnecessary. And the description ultimately is inflammatory,” Coleman told CNN.
It was an “attempt to sort of really trigger some of the racial tropes and stereotypes that may be deeply embedded in the psyche of some of the jurors,” Coleman said.
Lorde’s poem is about an equally egregious racist killing, followed by an egregious verdict by an 11-1 white jury. Although it was written in 1978 before cell phone footage, “there are tapes to prove” what transpired.
You’ll learn about the killing and the trial as you read the poem so I’ll focus here on the poet exploring her reactions. Anger so overcomes her that her emotional state is “like a desert of raw gunshot wounds.” While she is filled with thoroughly understandable hatred and destruction, however, she fears that these emotions will disempower her. “I am lost without imagery or magic,” she laments.
In the opening stanza she distinguishes between poetry and rhetoric, the difference being that poetry opens us up and rhetoric closes us down. Poetry doesn’t let one stay in one’s hatred and destruction, no matter how justified, but forces one to look within and find similarities with the killer. Such self-honesty is what Lorde means by “being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.”
Her anger at the killing and the subsequent injustice burns so hot that she imagines meting out the same punishment to some innocent White. The revenge fantasy reminds me of Guitar in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Guitar, formerly protagonist Milkman’s best friend, becomes so bitter about white supremacists murdering African Americans that he joins a terrorist group that kills a random and innocent Caucasian for every innocent Black who is killed. This proves too much for Milkman, who is searching for a healthier way to deal with racism. By having the two square off at novel’s end, Morrison shows that there’s a dark response and a light response to social injustice. Blacks as well as Whites have both sides.
As an aside, I note that this is why white school boards are wrong to ban Toni Morrison, who is not hesitant to call out anyone guilty of prejudice. Blacks can demonize Whites just as Whites demonize Blacks. The difference is that demonizers with power do a lot more damage than demonizers without power.
Lorde too depicts a Guitar-like response to a white cop killing a 10-year-old and the jury setting him free. In it, she imagines herself as an angry black teenager who rapes, beats, and then incinerates an 85-year-old white woman. Or maybe she’s reporting an actual incident. What people would say about the episode is what they should say about killer cops: “What beasts they are.” In other words, just as the poet steps into a killer’s shoes, she invites white readers to step into her black shoes.
Lorde’s poetic exercise forces her to look at a side of herself, and of her people, that resembles the oppressor. If she is honest, she can’t retreat into self-righteous rhetoric. Toni Morrison also rejects that retreat.
Before Lorde gets to her dark fantasy, however, she talks about another Black response. The one woman of color on the jury goes along with the verdict of not guilty, saying that the white jurors “convinced me”—which as Lorde observes, actually means,
they had dragged her 4’10” black Woman’s frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had
As a result of her capitulation, this woman
lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children
What we see, in other words, is two ways in which people of color can disempower themselves: capitulate to white society or imitate its brutality. Rhetoric in the end won’t save them so Lorde turns to poetry to hold on to her dignity, her humanity, and her power:
unless I learn to use the difference between poetry and rhetoric my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
Lorde has every right to be furious. She knows, however, that she can’t allow that anger to destroy her.
Here’s the poem:
Power By Audre Lorde
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and my stomach churns at the imagined taste while my mouth splits into dry lips without loyalty or reason thirsting for the wetness of his blood as it sinks into the whiteness of the desert where I am lost without imagery or magic trying to make power out of hatred and destruction trying to heal my dying son with kisses only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.
A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and there are tapes to prove it. At his trial this policeman said in his own defense “I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else only the color”. And there are tapes to prove that, too.
Today that 37 year old white man with 13 years of police forcing was set free by eleven white men who said they were satisfied justice had been done and one Black Woman who said “They convinced me” meaning they had dragged her 4’10” black Woman’s frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children
I have not been able to touch the destruction within me. But unless I learn to use the difference between poetry and rhetoric my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire and one day I will take my teenaged plug and connect it to the nearest socket raping an 85 year old white woman who is somebody’s mother and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time “Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.”
The Georgia defense attorneys are saying, “Notice the color,” and “What a beast Ahmaud Arbery was.” If the jury rises to the occasion and refuses to succumb to racist rhetoric, then we’ve progressed a little bit and poetic understanding stands more of a chance.
Hammat Billings, illus. of slave catcher from Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Tuesday
Having written yesterday about Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, I turn today to the Ahmaud Arbery killers, who themselves are in the final stages of their trial. The three men, two of them armed, chased the jogging Abery in two trucks, cutting him off. Because he then attacked them, they are now, like Rittenhouse, pleading self-defense. They also are claiming that they tried to make a citizen’s arrest on the grounds that Arbery, being black, must have had something to do with past thefts in the neighborhood.
As many have noted, the killing resembled an old-fashioned lynching, and there’s another disturbing connection with the past: they resembled slave catchers from pre-Civil War days, chasing down a fleeing black man because of his skin color.
When I heard an MSNBC commentator make this comparison, I thought of the slave catchers in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Eliza, her newborn child, her husband George, and others are involved in a breathtaking chase with violent and lecherous vigilantes on their heels. Fortunately, unlike Arbery, they manage to escape, in part because they have their own guns:
Another hill, and their pursuers had evidently caught sight of their wagon, whose white cloth-covered top made it conspicuous at some distance, and a loud yell of brutal triumph came forward on the wind. Eliza sickened, and strained her child closer to her bosom; the old woman prayed and groaned, and George and Jim clenched their pistols with the grasp of despair. The pursuers gained on them fast…
At this point, the slaves leave the wagon and flee into the hills. Their Quaker guide, Phineas Fletcher, takes them along a narrow ledge, which puts them in a position to defend themselves:
A few moments’ scrambling brought them to the top of the ledge; the path then passed between a narrow defile, where only one could walk at a time, till suddenly they came to a rift or chasm more than a yard in breadth, and beyond which lay a pile of rocks, separate from the rest of the ledge, standing full thirty feet high, with its sides steep and perpendicular as those of a castle. Phineas easily leaped the chasm, and sat down the boy on a smooth, flat platform of crisp white moss, that covered the top of the rock.
“Over with you!” he called; “spring, now, once, for your lives!” said he, as one after another sprang across. Several fragments of loose stone formed a kind of breast-work, which sheltered their position from the observation of those below.
The pursuers show the same kind of confidence that Arbery’s killers may have exhibited as they closed in on him:
“Well, Tom, yer coons are farly treed,” said one [of the slave catchers].
“Yes, I see ’em go up right here,” said Tom; “and here’s a path. I’m for going right up. They can’t jump down in a hurry, and it won’t take long to ferret ’em out.”
Then follows a verbal exchange in which escaped slave George Harris exposes America’s justice system of the time:
At this moment, George appeared on the top of a rock above them, and, speaking in a calm, clear voice, said,
“Gentlemen, who are you, down there, and what do you want?”
“We want a party of runaway niggers,” said Tom Loker. “One George Harris, and Eliza Harris, and their son, and Jim Selden, and an old woman. We’ve got the officers, here, and a warrant to take ’em; and we’re going to have ’em, too. D’ye hear? An’t you George Harris, that belongs to Mr. Harris, of Shelby county, Kentucky?”
“I am George Harris. A Mr. Harris, of Kentucky, did call me his property. But now I’m a free man, standing on God’s free soil; and my wife and my child I claim as mine. Jim and his mother are here. We have arms to defend ourselves, and we mean to do it. You can come up, if you like; but the first one of you that comes within the range of our bullets is a dead man, and the next, and the next; and so on till the last.”
“O, come! come!” said a short, puffy man, stepping forward, and blowing his nose as he did so. “Young man, this an’t no kind of talk at all for you. You see, we’re officers of justice. We’ve got the law on our side, and the power, and so forth; so you’d better give up peaceably, you see; for you’ll certainly have to give up, at last.”
“I know very well that you’ve got the law on your side, and the power,” said George, bitterly. “You mean to take my wife to sell in New Orleans, and put my boy like a calf in a trader’s pen, and send Jim’s old mother to the brute that whipped and abused her before, because he couldn’t abuse her son. You want to send Jim and me back to be whipped and tortured, and ground down under the heels of them that you call masters; and your laws will bear you out in it,—more shame for you and them! But you haven’t got us. We don’t own your laws; we don’t own your country; we stand here as free, under God’s sky, as you are; and, by the great God that made us, we’ll fight for our liberty till we die.”
George stood out in fair sight, on the top of the rock, as he made his declaration of independence; the glow of dawn gave a flush to his swarthy cheek, and bitter indignation and despair gave fire to his dark eye; and, as if appealing from man to the justice of God, he raised his hand to heaven as he spoke.
Thanks to the Fugitive Slave Law, which allowed slave catchers to pursue slaves in non-slave America, the law is in fact on the side of the pursuers. As we see when juries rule in favor of cops and White vigilantes who shoot Black men, too often it continues to be on the side of today’s pursuers. If it weren’t for video footage of the Arbery slaying, his killers might be walking around free today. As we await the jury’s verdict, we’ll learn soon how much—or how little—we have progressed from the justice of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s day.
Further thought: At one point in her narrative Stowe unleashes her bitter sarcasm upon the slave catchers and slave traders, who she notes are on their way to evolving from human scum to respected civic leaders:
If any of our refined and Christian readers object to the society into which this scene introduces them, let us beg them to begin and conquer their prejudices in time. The catching business, we beg to remind them, is rising to the dignity of a lawful and patriotic profession. If all the broad land between the Mississippi and the Pacific becomes one great market for bodies and souls, and human property retains the locomotive tendencies of this nineteenth century, the trader and catcher may yet be among our aristocracy.
Whether the catchers have become our aristocracy is debatable, but historians have drawn lines from slave catchers to southern Klansmen to today’s racist police.
Kyle Rittenhouse having been found innocent, on grounds of self-defense, after shooting three people, I am repurposing a past post on Bertolt Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule. While the play deals with class rather than racial differences, it still explains why a young White Man avoids consequences in ways a Black man never could.
While I am disturbed by the laws that allowed Rittenhouse to get away with murder, I am also unsettled by the images—15 minutes before the shooting—of police thanking Rittenhouse for being there with his (illegal) weapon, despite the curfew, and giving him water. Nor did they arrest him after the shooting, later explaining that he didn’t look like someone who would shoot people. Rittenhouse returned home (across state lines) and turned himself in the following day. Had a Black man wandered into the area with a gun, is there any question that he would have been treated far differently?
Basically, only Whites are allowed to plead self-defense when it comes to gun shootings, even when no one would have been killed had Rittenhouse not brought a gun to Kenosha. Whites can walk with impunity carrying automatic rifles whereas people call the police on Blacks just for making them uncomfortable. One of the clearest expressions of the double standard has come from Wisconsin’s own rightwing senator Ron Johnson in remarks about the January 6 Capitol insurrection:
“Even though those thousands of people that were marching to the Capitol were trying to pressure people like me to vote the way they wanted me to vote, I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned,” Johnson said during the radio talk show The Joe Pags Show. He was discussing his recent comments downplaying the danger that day and he has said he “never really felt threatened.”
“Now, had the tables been turned — Joe, this could get me in trouble — had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned,” Johnson continued.
In other words, people who look like me are by definition friendly whereas people who don’t must be repelled by gunfire.
Brecht’s play dramatizes the double standard. It’s not an exact parallel since Rittenhouse’s victims shared his skin color and, unlike the victim in the play, they actually threatened him (although the first two were unarmed and the third, who had a gun, thought he was dealing with an active shooter). But as in the play, privilege allows the killer to plead self-defense.
Like many of Brecht’s plays, Exception and the Rule is a parable about class relations. A merchant who must cross a desert in order to make a fortune kills his porter after mistaking a helpful gesture as a hostile move. Although the porter has offered him some of their dwindling water supplies, the merchant thinks that man is attacking him and shoots him. Despite this, the judge in the subsequent trial exonerates him, ruling, “In the circumstances as established it was inevitable that he should believe himself threatened.”
We can see the verdict coming when the judge is questioning the merchant. Similar reasoning led the jury to free Rittenhouse:
What you mean is that you were right to believe that the porter must hold something against you. So you did indeed kill someone who might well be harmless, but only because you could not have known that he was harmless. It happens sometimes with our police. They shoot into a demonstrating crowd, a harmless crowd, but they shoot because they can only believe that these people are going to drag them off their horses and lynch them. These policemen shoot out of fear. And their fear is that of the reasonable man. What you mean is that you could not have known that this porter was an exception to the rule.
Merchant: One lives by the rule, not the exception.
The reasoning is reiterated in the judge’s ruling. Even though the judge concludes that the porter was indeed engaging in a kindly act, he finds against his widow:
The merchant belongs to a different class from that of the porter. He could only anticipate the worst. He could not credit that the porter whom he had ill-treated, as he himself has said, would offer him an act of friendship. His common wit told him that he was in the greatest danger. The isolated nature of the area must have caused him great anxiety. The distance from the police and the restraint of the law would encourage his servant to demand his share of the water. The accused therefore acted in justifiable self-defense regardless of whether he was actually threatened or merely believed himself to be threatened. In the circumstances as established it was inevitable that he should believe himself threatened. The case is therefore dismissed; and the widow’s claim fails.
Brecht’s message is that it doesn’t matter how nice a worker or a merchant is because classism is systemic. Therefore, stop trying to placate your boss, who will turn on you the moment it is to his advantage. For Brecht, political action is the only solution.
In our situation, it’s racism that is systemic. If you are Black, it doesn’t matter what’s going on inside your head because you are automatically regarded as a threat by virtue of your skin color. Coincidentally, the case of Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger who was chased down and killed by three men, goes to the jury tomorrow. They too are claiming self-defense.
In this case, they may not escape justice since there’s video evidence of them chasing Arbery until, feeling cornered, he finally turns and charges them. Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule, just as there was an exception for Derek Chauvin’s cold-blooded murder of George Floyd. To let cases this blatant go would expose the system even more than it has been exposed. But for the most part in America, Blacks are assumed to be guilty and Whites innocent until proven otherwise.
That’s why gun laws don’t work for both sides, why Blacks can’t “stand their ground” or “open carry” with the same impunity as Whites. The play explains it to us. In a majority White society with America’s racial history, it would not be reasonable (in the eyes of a white judge and white jury) for Blacks to feel threatened by Whites. After all, Whites aren’t threatened by Whites. Unreasonable fear would be a Black afraid of and shooting a White.
It’s why one often sees videos of police talking down, ignoring, or even (as in the case of Rittenhouse) praising Whites with guns while shooting
–12-year-old Black boys with toy guns (Tamir Rice); –Black men who innocently pick up an air rifle from a store shelf (John Crawford); and –Black men who calmly inform police, during a traffic stop, that they have a registered firearm in their glove compartment (Philando Castile).
Juries invariably give these officers a pass, just as they gave George Zimmerman a pass when, playing vigilante, he assaulted and killed teenager Trayvon Martin.
Those who complain about schools teaching Critical Race Theory don’t realize that only by confronting and exploring together our race history can we as a nation move beyond Whites’ irrational race fears and start interrelating as fellow human beings. It’s why we need more Toni Morrison in our schools, not less.
As we prepare for Advent, today’s Gospel reading (John:18:33-38) features the famous truth interchange between Jesus and Pilate. The passage always bring to my mind poet William Cowper’s reflection upon truth in his long poem The Task.
Here’s the reading:
Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, “I find no case against him.”
The long and rambling chain of associations that make up The Task lead to numerous reflections, some very powerful. In this excerpt, Cowper perhaps echoes Samuel Johnson’s poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes” and is certainly referring to both Isaiah 40:6 (“All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field”) and Ecclesiastes 1:2 (“vanity of vanities; all is vanity”). If everything “fades like the flower disheveled in the wind,” then all that survives is “the only lasting treasure, truth,” which Cowper compares to an amaranthine flower:
All flesh is grass, and all its glory fades Like the fair flower dishevelled in the wind; Riches have wings, and grandeur is a dream; The man we celebrate must find a tomb, And we that worship him, ignoble graves. Nothing is proof against the general curse Of vanity, that seizes all below. The only amaranthine flower on earth Is virtue; the only lasting treasure, truth.
To go off on a tangent for a moment, the “amaranthine flower” to which Cowper compares truth was a mythical flower whose blooms were believed to never fade. It shows up in Paradise Lost (Book III) where Milton notes that, after Adam and Eve’s “offense,” the amaranth removed to heaven, where it shades the fount of life and is used by God’s angels to “bind their resplendent locks”:
Immortal Amarant, a flower which once In Paradise, fast by the Tree of Life Began to bloom, but soon for mans offense To Heav’n remov’d where first it grew, there grows, And flowers aloft shading the Fount of Life, And where the river of Bliss through midst of Heavn Rolls o’er Elisian flowers her amber stream; With these that never fade the Spirits elect Bind their resplendent locks inwreath’d with beams
But back to Cowper’s discussion of truth. His arrival there after observing that all else will fade brings him to the passage from John:
But what is truth? ’twas Pilate’s question put To truth itself, that deigned him no reply.
If Jesus doesn’t reply, Cowper says, it’s because of the questioner. He does reply to those who are humble, candid and sincere, qualities which Pilate cannot claim:
And wherefore? will not God impart His light To them that ask it?—Freely—’tis His joy, His glory, and His nature to impart. But to the proud, uncandid, insincere, Or negligent inquirer, not a spark.
Imagining that he is being cross-examined as Jesus was, Cowper defines truth elliptically, shifting to metaphor. Truth can be like a good book or a good minister—if you don’t appreciate them, then the problem is with you:
What’s that which brings contempt upon a book And him that writes it, though the style be neat, The method clear, and argument exact? That makes a minister in holy things The joy of many, and the dread of more, His name a theme for praise and for reproach?— That, while it gives us worth in God’s account, Depreciates and undoes us in our own?
Finally, referring to Jesus’s metaphor of his kingdom as a “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:45-46), Cowper compares truth to that pearl—but it’s a peal available only to the poor and despised:
What pearl is it that rich men cannot buy, That learning is too proud to gather up, But which the poor and the despised of all Seek and obtain, and often find unsought? Tell me, and I will tell thee what is truth.
V.P. Mike Pence on Jan. 6 certifying the 2020 election
Friday
We’re slowly but surely getting a clearer picture of Donald Trump’s coup attempt, and it appears to have come much closer to succeeding than we realized. In the end, we were saved by the most unlikely person imaginable: Donald Trump’s sycophant-in-chief, Vice President Mike Pence.
Literature is filled with stories of unlikely heroes. The hobbit who saved Middle Earth is the first who comes to mind, but Mike Pence is no Frodo. I think of him more as one of A.E. Housman’s hirelings in his delicious little poem, “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.”
Before applying it, here is my simplified understanding of the coup attempt:
–Trump wanted to create enough doubt about the election that Mike Pence would refuse to certify the election but instead send it back to the states, where anything could happen; –to create doubt, Trump pressured Attorney General Barr and various governors, secretaries of state, and election boards in critical states to claim voter fraud; –those in the White House who resisted him after the election were fired and replaced by flunkies ready to carry out his will; –during all this time, Pence was put under intense pressure, not only by Trump but by lawyer John Eastman and others, who redefined his duties by reinterpreting the Constitution; –to further pressure Pence and Republican members of Congress, Trump inspired a mob to descend upon the Capitol. The mob was financed by, among others, various rightwing billionaires; –while Trump may or may not have anticipated that the mob would storm the Capitol, once they did so, he refused to call them off for four hours; –if Pence had refused to certify the election, Trump’s circle anticipated there would be massive protests from Biden supporters. Various fascist and white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys would then get involved, seeking to stir up trouble, at which point Trump could declare martial law and, voila, stay on as president. It was because the Armed Forces feared such a scenario that they stayed away from the Capitol when it was being attacked.
As a result, for only the second time in American history (the first being 1860) we did not have a peaceful transition of power. Democracy was in danger of “falling” as America’s “foundations fled.”
And who stood true to the Constitution? Who, despite immense pressure, performed the duties he was constitutionally required to do? The man who had groveled before the Trump for four and a half years.
In Housman’s poem, the unlikely heroes are mercenaries who, against all odds, insist on fulfilling their contractual obligations:
Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
These, in the days when heaven was falling, The hour when earth’s foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood, and the earth’s foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.
Pence, when he convened Congress and called for the certification vote following mob violence, did indeed hold the sky suspended. And while he did not, like the mercenaries, die in the process, he is politically dead, loathed by both sides. No one, outside of Housman, gives either mercenaries or sycophants credit when they do something noble. Why should either hirelings or Mike Pence be applauded for just doing their job?
But given all the incentives for them to have acted otherwise, we should hold them up and honor them.
Yesterday I wrote about a Los Angeles Review of Books article that seeks to debunk the myth of a classical education. There has never been a time, Naomi Kanakia argues, that we have had massive numbers of students studying the classics. A golden age, during which “the average undergrad could… quote Homer in the original Greek, and when the US Senate was filled with philosopher kings who slept with Marcus Aurelius under their pillows,” exists, like most golden ages, only in our imaginations.
The article disappointed me slightly because Kanakia barely discusses what a classical education does for one. It’s little more, she says at one point, than a class marker. Although she acknowledges at one point that her own extensive reading has “contributed immeasurably to my development as a person,” and at another that the classics “probably” make one “a better thinker or more capable leader,” that’s it. She says nothing else about what her immersion in the classics did for her.
Instead, she treats a classical education like a club she worked very hard to join, only to learn, upon admittance, that it has hardly any members. She walked into hallowed halls, only to find them empty. I sense a feeling of betrayal in her piece, as though she were sold a bill of goods.
She did, however, prompt me to look back at my own life to determine why I don’t fit her profile. While I won’t say that my upbringing was a golden age, it contained more than a few classics, starting with high school.
I attended Sewanee Military Academy, an Episcopalian prep school (now St. Andrews at Sewanee) that believed very strongly in teaching great literature from the past. My first year we read The Iliad, The Odyssey, David Copperfield, and Kim; my second year we surveyed American Literature; my third year focused on British Literature; and the fourth year featured World Literature. The American Literature course was not well taught so I don’t remember it very well, although I do recall Catcher in the Rye (which I hated)and also some fellow student pointing out to me that Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is a masturbation poem. The British Literature course, on the other hand, was my favorite course of all those I have taken. It started with Beowulf and went up through Dylan Thomas, and along the way we read Chaucer, Shakespeare (Hamlet), Donne, Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, the Romantic poets, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham and a host of others. In our senior-level World Literature course, meanwhile, we read Antigone, Crime and Punishment, Siddhartha, Camus, Ibsen, and others.
The immersion in the classics inspired me to take Carleton College’s interdisciplinary two-semester humanities course, the first focused on 5th century Athens, the second on the European Renaissance. Although I was a history major, I took two of the British survey courses, a course in the Irish Renaissance, and a course on utopias (including The Republic, More’s Utopia, Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, and various 20th century utopias and dystopias). I also took a classics course on Greek mythology and, in French, the two surveys (starting with The Song of Roland and ending with Sartre) and courses on Diderot, Rousseau, and the 20th century French novel.
Then I attended a graduate school (Emory) that still had a traditional curriculum, which meant that we had a comprehensive exam covering a long list of works, from Beowulf to Faulkner. We were also encouraged to sit in on undergraduate survey courses to fill in any gaps.
So as far as my own education was concerned, it was fairly classical, even though I didn’t learn Greek and though my two years of high school Latin weren’t enough for me to read any literature. And because I had had this type of background, I was prepared to teach survey courses when I became a professor. Figuring that I’d better teach the highlights in my survey classes, which I regarded as a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe where my students should at least get a taste of London, Paris, Rome and Berlin–I taught Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, etc. My colleagues did more or less the same. I don’t know whether this confirms or refutes Kanakia’s view of American education.
But let me get to a second point of reflection, which is what I owe the cultural conservatives mentioned by Kanakia. First, here’s what she has to say in a passage I quoted yesterday:
[M]ost books about the humanities take it as a given that we exist in a fallen time, that the golden age of the Classical education is in the past, but lately I’ve started to wonder if that time ever existed. In recollecting my own education, I’ve started to wonder if the contemporary notion of a “Classical education” is largely the product of a series of popular books that began with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and continued through Jacques Barzun’s The Culture We Deserve (1989), Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy (2009), William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep (2014), and others. Like me, these writers were usually outsiders, many of them Jewish (which is to say, they were not themselves part of any notional WASP aristocracy), and they had in their youths at some point bought into the idea of a Classical education. They had pursued this ideal and now found the reality — the position of the Classics in our culture and our educational system — to be somewhat lacking.
Part of me embraced and part of me rejected what these men—they seemed to all be men—had to say. While I too honored the authors they honored, I hated how political conservatives hijacked the classics, using them to batter our multicultural society. “Austen, not Alice Walker” was the slogan of some, which infuriated me since I taught both Austen and Walker and loved them both. “Dead white men” (and a few token dead white women) were used as a club against living authors of color in ways that I found reprehensible. While I have taught Jane Austen so many times that I have parts of her memorized, I have done the same with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Lucille Clifton’s Quilting, and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” They all sing to me, each in his or her own key.
But back to the canonical authors. It became a mission of mine to wrest them away from the reactionary agendas promoted by Lynne Cheney and William Bennett when they headed the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts under Reagan and Bush. If Percy Shelley is right (and I believe he is) that the great authors have a deep vision of human freedom, making them the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” then by teaching and blogging about them, I hope to connect readers with their liberating visions. As Shelley, writing of Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, puts it,
The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life…. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
The dusty classics enlarge our imaginations—or to use Lisa Simpson’s verb, embiggen us—and so do the best contemporary authors, including that current target of rightwing attacks, Toni Morrison. And as Shelley preaches, if our imaginations are enlarged, then we become motivated to create a world in which all of us—whatever our class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, or sexual identity—can have the freedom to put our full selves into play.
We feel the stirrings of possibility when we are in the grip of a great work of literature. My mission is to connect readers with works that will set the wheels in motion and give them a sense of where they might go with them.
Zinaida Serebriakova, Zinaida Serebriakova Reading a Book
Wednesday
A fascinating article in the Los Angeles Book Review questions whether there was ever a golden age where most students were classically educated. According to Naomi Kanakia, it’s a myth that isn’t borne out by the facts.
Speaking as one who believes fervently that one should be well read and that classic literature enhances one’s life, I’m sad to say that she seems to have a point.
Kanakia starts with her own longing for that vision:
I’m an immense fan of books that bewail the state of the humanities and plead for a return to the educational system of yesteryear, when the average undergrad could, we are told, quote Homer in the original Greek, and when the US Senate was filled with philosopher kings who slept with Marcus Aurelius under their pillows.
She then reports that, for the past twelve years, her own reading choices have been shaped by her determination to achieve a “classical education.” She has done this, she says,
because I thought it was what you did: I thought all writers read Tolstoy and Euripides and Chaucer — that a writer would be laughed out of town if they weren’t familiar with the “the canon.”
Like the Vietnamese immigrant Phuc Tran, whom I wrote about recently, Kanakia used Clifton Fadiman’s The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classical Guide to World Literature to determine her reading choices. As a result, over the past 12 years she has read
Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus, Suetonius, Tacitus, Plutarch, the Bhagavad Gita, Defoe, Gibbon, Fielding, Richardson, St. Augustine, Rousseau, Voltaire, Cervantes, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Gogol, Chekhov, Pushkin, Cather, Faulkner, Woolf, Waugh, Nabokov, and others.
Much of Kanakia’s article is about her realization that few people in the past have subscribed to such an ideal. They didn’t do so in ancient Rome or in Elizabethan England or in 19th century Oxford-Cambridge-Harvard-Princeton-Yale. Indeed, more periods of history than not have thought it “ungentlemanly” to pay too much attention to books. Nor, she reports, do most contemporary writers advocate such an education:
[A]fter I came into contact with the literary world, I realized that I’d been operating from a very mistaken — and hopelessly bourgeois — set of beliefs. I’ve only rarely met other writers who care about the Classics. When one National Book Award–winning author asked me my favorite authors, I responded, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Henry James, and he chided me, saying I should read more contemporary books (I read plenty of contemporary books, but I’d think it strange if someone’s favorite author of all time was still alive).
She discovered the same was true of her classmates in a Master of Fine Arts creative writing in which she enrolled:
Forget about reading Homer, most hadn’t read Middlemarch or David Copperfield. To the extent that they were influenced by literature, it was by recent American literature: Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson were popular influences. Virginia Woolf, at least, had some adherents, but even the modernists weren’t terribly popular, though most had some familiarity at least with Faulkner and Hemingway….According to the Classical model, this is essentially the same as being uneducated.
Kanakia wonders whether her vision was shaped by cultural conservatives like Harold Bloom and Allan Bloom—and whether they themselves were moved by wanted they wanted to believe than reality:
[M]ost books about the humanities take it as a given that we exist in a fallen time, that the golden age of the Classical education is in the past, but lately I’ve started to wonder if that time ever existed. In recollecting my own education, I’ve started to wonder if the contemporary notion of a “Classical education” is largely the product of a series of popular books that began with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and continued through Jacques Barzun’s The Culture We Deserve (1989), Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy (2009), William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep (2014), and others. Like me, these writers were usually outsiders, many of them Jewish (which is to say, they were not themselves part of any notional WASP aristocracy), and they had in their youths at some point bought into the idea of a Classical education. They had pursued this ideal and now found the reality — the position of the Classics in our culture and our educational system — to be somewhat lacking.
Only twice in American history, Kanakia argues, has the ideal of a classical education ever predominated amongst those in power:
The ideal that haunts America is the notion of an educated elite: a political class that is also well versed in Classical literature and history. But it’s clear, at least to me, that whether such an elite ever existed in the United States is debatable. If it did, it was only at two moments: in late 18th-century Virginia and early 20th-century New England. The Virginian planters — the children and grandchildren of adventurers — used their wealth and leisure to study. In many cases, they were the first generation of their family to be formally educated. And the early 20th-century WASP elite, finally freed from the religious shackles their ancestors had worn, tried belatedly to catch up to the continental attainments that their great-grandparents had fled from….[T]he founding fathers were highly educated and well versed in Classical culture, as was the run of patrician presidents early in the 20th century: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt.
Kanakia’s conclusion: While the ideal of being well-versed in the classics has been around for a long time, for the most part those in power have only paid lip service to it. This had the effect, however, of motivating people who saw it as a ticket to joining the power elites. As I noted in my post on Phuc Than, that is exactly how he saw it. As a result, they often came closer to the ideal than those they strove to emulate:
As Richard Karabel documented in his monumental work The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (2005), the general raising of academic standards at elite universities is almost entirely due to the entrance of Jewish students at the beginning of the 20th century. Because Jewish kids took all this stuff seriously: they actually studied Latin and Greek; they actually studied and absorbed the Classics. In this devotion, they were continuing a process that’s occurred repeatedly throughout history: the children of the bourgeois exploiting brief periods when a Classical education might gain them an advantage in a changing world. They’re similar to the Florentine notaries who studied the secular Classics to improve their Latin and rise in the civil service. Or to the educated laymen of the 14th and 15th centuries in England, scions of gentle families impoverished by the Black Death or merchant families enriched by it, who turned their knowledge of Latin into influential positions at a court that had traditionally been the preserve of the priesthood. Or to Cicero, a fiery orator and novus homo (his family had never held a consulship) who put his talents in the service of an aristocratic party that needed a “man of the people” who could bear its standard and oppose the rising tide of populism.
And then she notes,
What proponents of the Classical education misunderstand is that people never learned Latin and Greek merely because it would “make you a better thinker” or “give you access to the world’s knowledge.” They learned those languages because, at certain times and places, it offered a concrete way of getting ahead. Generally, those were times and places when there was strong growth in a nation’s management responsibilities and when the traditional aristocracy was unable to meet those responsibilities. The middle class, to prove itself, would adopt the culture of the aristocrats, and do it better than they ever could. At most other times, the Classics would languish: they would either be actively disdained, as in early medieval Britain or high Republican Rome, or they would be given mere lip service, as during most of American history. It’s only the active engagement of the middle class that has ever renewed knowledge of the Classics.
And as is always the case, if strivers are too successful at adopting the culture of elites, the elites will simply change the culture:
In some ways, these Jewish students killed Classical education, because Harvard and Princeton and Yale realized that, if they were only to admit students on the basis of their knowledge of Greek and Latin, their entering class would be entirely Jewish.
By the end of the article, Kanakia arrives at a couple of discouraging conclusions. One is that a classical education will not produce leaders, at least in the current environment:
Notice, I leave aside the question of whether knowledge of the Classics makes you a better thinker or more capable leader. I would argue that it probably does but that, in most eras, the wisdom conferred by the Classics is more likely, as Tocqueville noted, to discourage you from pursuing them. As we can see in our own culture, nuance and wisdom are nowhere particularly desired. This is a time for anger, action, and black-and-white thinking.
Another is that most Americans will not be helped by a classical education:
For the bulk of Americans, who are destined to be employees rather than bosses, and whose public role, even as citizens, has been increasingly devalued by the slipping-away of our democracy, there is little need to concern oneself with their education, nor do I think it will be possible to get them to ignore the fact that the wisdom conferred by a Classical education will be useless to them in the life of precarity and drudgery to come.
And further on,
The Classics can’t save us. They can’t generate wealth and opportunity from nothing.
I won’t spend time today talking about why I disagree—my daily essays are devoted to the many different ways that the classics can indeed “change your life”—but I nevertheless find Kanakia’s article very useful. It has me thinking about why I think the way I do. Tomorrow’s post will share those reflections.
For the moment, I’ll just note that she does make one important concession in her final paragraph:
[A]t the moments when [the classics] are most useful, the moments when ordinary people once more have a role to play in public life, they inevitably emerge to guide the way.
Kanakia doesn’t provides examples as to how exactly this guidance will work. Her piece is much more about classical education as a means of credentialing rather than as a way to learn vital life skills. Nevertheless, I’m glad to see her acknowledge that, at certain times, the classics can prove useful.
