“The Day Is Done” functioned as the introduction to an anthology that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow compiled in 1844 called The Waif. In it, he declares that one purpose of poetry is to soothe us when we are feeling sad and depressed.
But only certain poems can perform this function. Longfellow prefers “some simple and heartfelt lay” over “the grand old masters.” He wants “some humbler poet, whose songs gushed from his heart” over poems that feature “mighty thoughts.” Many of the poems in The Waif are anonymous, and one doesn’t find Shakespeare’s intricate sonnets, Milton’s lofty pastorals, Dryden’s imperious verse, Pope’s witty couplets, or the high Romantics’ soaring lyrics in the collection (with the exception of one quieter-than-normal Percy Shelley poem). Instead, there are mostly poems of the kind that Longfellow himself wrote.
What I appreciate about “The Day Is Done” is how Longfellow is modeling reading practices for his audience. If you sit down before the fire with a book of poetry and lose yourself in it,
the night shall be filled with music And the cares that infest the day, Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And as silently steal away.
Here’s Longfellow’s introductory poem:
The Day Is Done By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The day is done, and the darkness Falls from the wings of Night, As a feather is wafted downward From an eagle in his flight.
I see the lights of the village Gleam through the rain and the mist, And a feeling of sadness comes o’er me, That my soul cannot resist:
A feeling of sadness and longing, That is not akin to pain, And resembles sorrow only As the mist resembles the rain.
Come, read to me some poem, Some simple and heartfelt lay, That shall soothe this restless feeling, And banish the thoughts of day.
Not from the grand old masters, Not from the bards sublime, Whose distant footsteps echo Through the corridors of Time.
For, like strains of martial music, Their mighty thoughts suggest Life’s endless toil and endeavor; And to-night I long for rest.
Read from some humbler poet, Whose songs gushed from his heart, As showers from the clouds of summer, Or tears from the eyelids start;
Who, through long days of labor, And nights devoid of ease, Still heard in his soul the music Of wonderful melodies.
Such songs have power to quiet The restless pulse of care, And come like the benediction That follows after prayer.
Then read from the treasured volume The poem of thy choice, And lend to the rhyme of the poet The beauty of thy voice.
And the night shall be filled with music And the cares that infest the day, Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, And as silently steal away.
Further thought: The last two lines are the most famous. I remember coming across a comic parody of them when a child that I still remember to this day:
A man approached a weighing machine To-wards the close of day A counterfeit penny dropped into the slot And silently stole a weigh.
Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri has a brilliant essay—one of her very best—about why books are disturbing. She pretends to agree with those conservative school boards and politicians but, in the process, actually makes their case for them: books really are dangerous. In other words, rather than being defensive about books, Petri goes on the offense.
As her article makes clear, if you are disturbed by literary power, you’ll want to ban pretty much all fiction. Or all fiction except for those works that are (to use her adjectives) stale and bland.
I could imagine the authorities in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 using her article to make their book burning case:
This is no good. Such books are bad. Maybe all books are bad, not just the challenged ones. Books follow you home and pry open your head and rearrange the things inside. They make you feel things, sometimes, hope and grief and shame and confusion; they tell you that you’re not alone, or that you are, that you shouldn’t feel ashamed, or that you should; replace your answers with questions or questions with answers. This feels dangerous to do, a strange operation to perform on yourself, especially late at night when everyone else in the house is sleeping.
They are an insidious and deadly poison. Years after you read them, they come back and bother you late at night. They clang around inside your skull. They make strange things familiar to you and familiar things strange again. They have no respect for the boundaries of your dreams. They put turns of phrase into your gut where you digest them slowly and regurgitate them where they are least expected.
They make you cry, show you despair in a handful of dust, counterfeit life in strange ways and cheat you with shadows. Nothing happens in them at all, or they take you to hell and take you back out of it. They teach you how to fold a paper airplane or what is the wrong dress to wear. When people in them do things that are wrong, you are just as upset as you would be if you knew them.
Petri gives a pass to a few books, those which are “less threatening” because they lack integrity.
Some of them, of course, pose less of a risk. They take you nowhere; they contain only stale, bland, erroneous facts; they are full of people you dislike, and you understand them less when you put them down than when you started. These are less threatening. Their illusions are less complete.
These are books that don’t sink as deep. If we dislike the characters, it’s not because they’re bad like Uriah Heep or Inspector Javert but because they’re—well, stale and bland. We’re not as invested in them and, as a result, “the illusions are less complete.”
Petri fully acknowledges all the mixed feelings that come with reading:
Let me tell you about something that a book did: It convinced me that the things inside it were true; it told me so many lies that I started to believe it. I loved it; it infuriated me; I broke its spine in half. Books have taken me into dark woods and the bellies of whales and spat me out dazed and blinking into my own living room and knocked me around backward and forward through time and delivered me gossip from the distant past and facts from the recent present.
I heartily agree with her summation:
Books give you recipes for living, and some of the recipes are good and others taste foul the first time you try them. You read them with friends and come away with entirely different ideas of what has happened. They are uncontainable, uncontrollable, except if you never open them.
So yes, books are dangerous. Come to think of it, so are relationships. Avoiding either could well lead to quieter lives. Or as Thoreau puts it, lives of quiet desperation. As Petri, referring to the Virginia school board that reversed its ban, puts it,
You are right to be frightened of them, and it is very bad they are being brought back. You will realize they are much too dangerous when you think of all they can do.
To commemorate the Jewish festival of Hanukkah or Festival Festival of Lights, which is early this year (November 28-December 6), I share two poems. For those who need an explanation, Wikipedia tells us that
Hanukkah is a Jewish holiday which celebrates the victory of the Maccabees over the larger Syrian army. It also celebrates a miracle that happened during this time, where just a day’s supply of oil allowed the menorah in the rededicated Temple in Jerusalem to remain lit for eight days.
Both poems play with light imagery. In the first, Marla Baker connects Hannukah with the creation story, including God endowing humans
with capacity To distinguish dark from light, with capacity To create holy sparks, see into the shadows and Shine light where it is dark.
“And You saw that it was very good,” she concludes.
A Hanukkah Prayer for a Time of Darkness by Marla Baker
Creator of All, In the beginning You made the night sky luminous with the light of the moon and the stars and You made the daytime bright with the light of the sun and Saw that it was good.
And You created human beings in Your own image, with capacity To distinguish dark from light, with capacity To create holy sparks, see into the shadows and Shine light where it is dark. And You saw that it was very good.
Creator of All and Rock of Ages, In the time of the Maccabees once more You worked a miracle of light, Permitting our ancestors to rededicate holy space. And it lasted eight days and eight nights. Creator of All and Rock of Ages,
In the dark of night, at the darkest time of year We light candles in remembrance of the miracle, One more each night until there are eight.
Creator of All and Rock of Ages, Too many lights have been extinguished. The world has grown too dark. Creator of Light and Dark, Teach us once more to see into the shadows, To shed our light in all the dark corners and to Create holy sparks for all humankind So that once more we can say It is very good.
Similar imagery can be found in Mark Strand’s “The Coming of Light.” Again, the Genesis story is invoked, especially the line, “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” The coming of love, the coming of light and the coming of life are all seen as one and the same. Stars gather in the heavens and, below, “candles are lit as if by themselves.”
Even in this time of darkness, when all seems bleak, “dreams pour into your pillows.”
The Coming of Light by Mark Strand
Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sending up warm bouquets of air. Even this late the bones of the body shine and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.
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.
