Watching the hearings of the Congressional committee investigating the January 6 coup attempt, I was struck by the moral clarity of Liz Cheney, the daughter of the principle architect of America’s disastrous Iraq invasion and a man who promoted torture. It’s ironic that, if we are able to recover from Trumpism’s attack on our democracy, a Cheney will have played an important role.
Cheney reminded me of Abdiel, the angel in Paradise Lost who first stands up to Satan when the latter is planning his rebellion against God. Abdiel finds the necessary courage in the zeal with which he “adored the Deity, and divine commands obeyed.”
Satan has persuaded a large contingent of angels that God is robbing them of their freedom by promoting Jesus over them. Of course, “freedom” for Satan is what it is for any number of authoritarian personalities: freedom to impose his will on others. One hears the word “freedom” from many on the right, but it often just means the freedom to impose their will on people of color, women, LBGTQ folk and Democrats in general. Or, in the case of millionaires and billionaires, freedom from taxation and regulation. Here’s Satan sounding like a white supremacist spouting fears of being replaced, only the replacer here is Christ (“King anointed”):
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers, If these magnific Titles yet remain Not merely titular, since by Decree Another now hath to himself engrossed All Power, and us eclipsed under the name Of King anointed…
We must cast off this yoke of oppression if we want to be free, he tells the angels:
But what if better counsels might erect Our minds and teach us to cast off this yoke? Will ye submit your necks, and choose to bend The supple knee? ye will not, if I trust To know ye right…
Of course, Satan, like Trump, wants others to bend the supple knee to him, even as he rails against tyranny. From his point, anyone who doesn’t allow him the highest rank is a tyrant. Therefore God is a tyrant.
Abdiel points out that Satan talking about God as his equal misses the framework within which they all exist:
Shalt thou give Law to God, shalt thou dispute With him the points of liberty, who made Thee what thou art, and formed the Powers of Heav’n Such as he pleased, and circumscribed their being?
Narcissist that he is, however, Satan gives all credit for his achievements to himself. As he sees it, he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps:
We know no time when we were not as now; Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised By our own quick’ning power…
For Liz Cheney, the higher power is the Constitution, to which Trump himself once swore an oath, as did many of those fallenangels legislators enabling him. To this yoke she submits her neck and bends the supple knee. To the Trumpist GOP, however, doing so is an affront. After all, she is putting the country’s founding principles over them.
Further thought: My friend and colleague Ross MacDonald, who has written a scholarly article on Milton’s angels, notes that angel issues were a hot issue when the poet wrote Paradise Lost. John Calvin was worried that, if people focused on guardian angels, they would focus on them more than on Christ. He even considered jettisoning angels altogether.
Milton acknowledges Calvin’s worry by elevating Christ above the angels. This elevation, in fact, is what triggers Satan’s rebellion. But Milton saw angels as too deeply embedded in people’s imaginations to ignore them. He therefore threads the needle, showing them as cherished guides to Adam and Eve but operating as a delegation, with each having different responsibilities. In other words, they don’t grab the spotlight the way that Satan does but divide counseling responsibilities; while powerful, they are noteworthy for their humility. They are everything that Satan is not.
This is what we want from our public servants and, for that matter, from all citizens: lean into your strengths but always remember that you are to use them in service of the greater good, not to aggrandize yourself. That is the only cause that will give your life meaning.
I’m intrigued by the insights into praying provided by Robert Pinsky’s “The Knight’s Prayer.” In the poem, we see a knight—perhaps a stand-in for the poet?—going through a series of stages before coming to understand prayer in a broader and more life-affirming way.
For much of the poem, the knight defines prayer as something against rather than something for. He “prayed in silence,” we are told, because “he found all vocal terms of sanctity impertinent.” On top of that, in praying he takes care not to adopt “the stagey pose of the figure in armor on one knee.” Praying aloud and in such a conventional pose would show that he was still too attached to worldly things.
Furthermore, he goes out of his way not to ask for anything in his praying—or as the poem puts it, he strove for “a near-absence of petition.” This even extends to not praying for the strength to not to ask for anything:
In his pride he began to abjure even The request for the strength to ask nothing.
Instead, he prays for steadfastness as he strives to be like the heroes “he most envied,” who “endured hardship and ordeals.” Their burden, as he sees it, was “worldly attachment,” while “bearing it was their mission.” He prays that God will help him fight against his own attachment to the world.
Note how his prayer continues to be phrased in the form of negatives: he doesn’t want to yield to what he sees as a weakness. The problem reveals itself in the next stanza. He’s so worried that “these prayers be for weariness of life, not love of Thee,” that he focuses on the stringency of the discipline, not on love. To this point in the poem, he’s focused on logic (“severely logical as a clever adolescent”), on discipline, on not doing it wrong. Righteousness clothes him like chainmail and he brandishes it.
Then something breaks. We don’t know what it is, only that a “personal extreme of woe and dread, neither heroic nor intolerable”—something that he thought he could find ways to silently pray about earlier in the poem—has somehow suddenly (he uses the word “abrupt”) become too much. Suddenly he fears silence and his soul, formerly so disciplined and focused, stammers to itself.
Previously he thought that “In fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” with fear being the operative word. Now he discovers “a new model for worldly attachment.” Now he finds himself not praying against but praying for.
Again, we are not told what this new attachment is, but we are given an analogy. The poet tells us that such praying is like loving and caring for a new-born child:
It was like the birth Of an infant: the father, in sudden Overthrow, turning from indifference To absolute care, a ferocity Of petition dwarfing desire…
It’s as though, prior to this moment, the knight thought he could control the prayer, and early in the poem we even encounter the words “vanity” and “pride.” When your heart is fully engaged, however, the prayer can become bigger than you ever thought possible, and your dreams of perfect competence vanish. It’s the moment when you feel “all of life flowing at once/Toward the new, incompetent soul.” Here’s the poem:
The Knight’s Prayer By Robert Pinsky
He prayed in silence.
Even in his personal extreme Of woe and dread, which was neither Heroic nor intolerable but sufficiently Woeful and dreadful, he would not waver From that discipline.
In his vanity as severely Logical as a clever adolescent, he found All vocal terms of sanctity impertinent.
He also rejected gestures: the stagey pose Of the figure in armor on one knee, Hands and brow resting on the cruciform hilt Of a still-scabbarded weapon. The words and the pose contradicted themselves, their conventionality made them Symbols of worldly attachment.
Therefore in his own prayers he strove For intimacy, a near-absence of petition. In his pride he began to abjure even The request for the strength to ask nothing.
He prayed for steadfastness. In the exploits he most envied, heroes of old Endured hardship and ordeals. Worldly Attachment was their assigned Burden of imperfection: Bearing it was their mission.
Lest these prayers be For weariness of life, not love of Thee, He had read: a standard he admired Not in the name of love But for its stringency: the gauntlet Of chainmail not folded On the breviary, but brandished, Able for the task.
Then, that abrupt personal extreme Of woe and dread, neither Heroic nor intolerable: a cause To fear the silence. The soul Stammering to itself.
It was not “In fear of the Lord Is the beginning of wisdom.”
But in fear a new Model for worldly attachment:
It was like the birth Of an infant: the father, in sudden Overthrow, turning from indifference To absolute care, a ferocity Of petition dwarfing desire, All of life flowing at once Toward the new, incompetent soul.
Feigning indifference to worldly attachment reminds me of Sir Gawain when facing the Green Knight in the 14th century romance. Gawain thinks he can shrug off his love of life, only for the Green Man to show him that he cares for it more than he thinks. His pride is stung but he has been given a gift: you think you are in control until suddenly you’re not.
Prayer as “a ferocity of petition dwarfing desire.” Wow!
I have lots of thoughts about the Congressional hearings on Donald Trump’s January 6 coup attempt, which opened last night, and am working up a post that references Milton’s rebel angels. I’ll end this week, however, on a lighter note, an interesting footnote that my English professor son alerted me to. Apparently, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy played havoc with clock sales following its publication in 1759.
Toby Wilson-Bates alerted me to a pamphlet that appeared following publication entitled “The clockmakers outcry against the author of The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy. Dedicated to the most humble of Christian prelates.” The author complained,
The directions I had for making several clocks for the country are countermanded; because no modest lady now dares to mention a word about windingup a clock, without exposing herself to the sly leers and jokes of the family … Nay, the common expression of street-walkers is, “Sir, will you have your clock wound up ?”
Apparently the pamphlet also notes that virtuous matrons were disposing of their clocks for fear that they would excite “acts of carnality.”
The offending passage occurs in the second paragraph of the novel:
Pray, my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?———Good G—! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,——Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying?———Nothing.
Tristram is telling his life story and figures that he should start at the beginning—which is to say, at the moment of his conception. His mother, operating by chain of association, thinks of the clock at the moment that his father is impregnating her with Tristram. Her question functions as a comment about the clockwork way that Walter Shady goes about having sex.
Indeed, the elder Shandy, an Enlightenment enthusiast, is so captivated by machinery and scientific thinking that he can’t accept the world in all its messy unpredictability. His insistence that scientific forceps rather than midwife knowledge be used in his son’s birth play havoc with his son’s nose. He has such definitive notions on how a child should be raised that he spends all his time writing a book on the subject during Tristram’s childhood, all the while ignoring Tristram, who grows up on his own. Sterne’s book is largely a satire of attempts to over-regulate human behavior.
Apparently clocks were an unintended casualty of his satire—or perhaps not so unintended since Sterne, in his belief in acting naturally, would probably prefer us to respond to the sun and the seasons than clocks. I am reminded of John Wilmot’s own mention of clocks in his “Satyr against Reason and Mankind.” Contrasting “right reason” with mechanistic behavior, Wilmot writes,
My reason is my friend, yours is a cheat; Hunger calls out, my reason bids me eat; Perversely, yours your appetite does mock: This asks for food, that answers, “What’s o’clock?
The passage that interrupted the clock trade also reminds me of another sexual innuendo that, for a while, made it impossible to talk about china in polite company. In William Wycherley’s 1675 comedy The Country Wife, Lady Fidget is having an adulterous affair with Horner after having told her husband she is going out to buy china. When Sir Jasper Fidget finds her in Horner’s apartment, Horner claims that she has come to examine his china collection and they go into a back room. When Lady Squeamish, another of Horner’s mistresses, shows up, she (unlike Sir Jasper) figures out what’s going on and insists that Horner provide her with china as well:
Re-enter Lady Fidget with a piece of china in her hand, and Horner following. L. Fid. And I have been toiling and moiling for the prettiest piece of china, my dear. Horn. Nay, she has been too hard for me, do what I could. Mrs. Squeam. Oh, lord, I’ll have some china too. Good Mr. Horner, don’t think to give other people china, and me none; come in with me too. Horn. Upon my honour, I have none left now. Mrs. Squeam. Nay, nay, I have known you deny your china before now, but you shan’t put me off so. Come. Horn. This lady had the last there. L. Fid. Yes indeed, madam, to my certain knowledge, he has no more left. Mrs. Squeam. O, but it may be he may have some you could not find. L. Fid. What, d’ye think if he had had any left, I would not have had it too? for we women of quality never think we have china enough.
In a follow-up play (The Plain Dealer), Wycherley has fun referencing his earlier play by having a couple of characters discuss the effects of this china scene:
Olivia: I’m resolved to make you out of love with the play. I say, the lewdest, filthiest thing is his china; nay, I will never forgive the beastly author his china. He has quite taken away the reputation of poor china itself, and sullied the most innocent and pretty furniture of a lady’s chamber; insomuch that I was fain to break all my defiled vessels. You see I have none left; nor you, I hope.
Eliza: You’ll pardon me, I cannot think the worse of my china for that of the playhouse.
Olivia: Why, you will not keep any now, sure! ‘Tis now as unfit an ornament for a lady’s chamber as the pictures that come from Italy and other hot countries; as appears by their nudities, which I always cover, or scratch out, whereso’er I find ’em. But china! out upon’t, filthy china! nasty debauched china!
Needless to say, both china and clocks made comebacks after these works appeared. For a while there, though, clockmakers and china salesmen were worried.
Yesterday Julia and I celebrated our 49th anniversary. Well, we didn’t exactly celebrate it, given that Julia was running my mother to the doctor after another fall and then taking off for a pre-cataract appointment with an ophthalmologist. I, meanwhile, was madly putting together a talk on literary angels and then delivering it. It felt like old times when we both had full-time jobs.
Still, I had time to think of memorable moments in our life—graduating and marrying on the same day (June 8 1973), three births, one son’s death at 21, ups and downs in our respective careers, journeys abroad, grandchildren, many, many foreign students living with us. It doesn’t take much for me to remember movies we saw together, books we read together, and all those other experiences that make up a life together. To be sure, it hasn’t always been harmonious, but by having worked through various tensions and disagreements, we know we have built something that will last..
This James Weldon Johnson poem gets at some of what I feel now. Here’s to #49, Julia.
The Only Beauty That Is Never Old
When buffeted and beaten by life’s storms, When by the bitter cares of life oppressed, I want no surer haven than your arms, I want no sweeter heaven than your breast.
When over my life’s way there falls the blight Of sunless days, and nights of starless skies; Enough for me, the calm and steadfast light That softly shines within your loving eyes.
The world, for me, and all the world can hold Is circled by your arms; for me there lies, Within the lights and shadows of your eyes, The only beauty that is never old.
Gustave Doré, Satan struggling through Chaos in Paradise Lost
Wednesday
This evening I’m giving a talk on angels as they appear in contemporary fantasy fiction so I’ll use today’s post for some initial brainstorming. The talk is the third of three on angels for Vacation Bible School, and, in the first, Dr. Becky Wright of Sewanee’s Theological Seminary informed us that the angels that show up in the Old and New Testaments are metaphorical rather than literal and were indeed seen that way. It was only in later years that they hardened into actual beings. Or, as we used to say when studying Marxist intellectual history at Carleton College, a once dynamic concept became reified, a shell of its former meaning.
Becky noted that translators always have to make a choice when they translate malakh (Hebrew) and angelos (Greek): both words mean both messenger and angel. Sometimes the translators choose one, sometimes the other, but in both cases we need to drop the notion of beautiful and androgynous beings with flowing locks showing up. After all, Becky pointed out, their first words are often, “Be not afraid,” and why should someone be afraid of a Hallmark card angel.
It’s more useful, she noted, to think of angels as metaphors for divine inspiration, similar to the way that Homer and the ancient Greeks personified creative inspiration as the muses. When one feels one has received a message, one searches for a way to visualize the experience and angels are one visualization.
Once Becky pointed this out, I felt right at home. After all, metaphors—or, to go broader, figurative language—are the meat and potatoes of literature, including contemporary fantasy. So what is the symbolic significance of angels in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens, and China Mieville’s Perdito Street Station?
I’ll confine myself to Pullman for today’s post. The second talk in the series was my Sewanee colleague Ross Macdonald’s discussion of angels in Paradise Lost, and the poem is Pullman’s jumping off point. In fact, “his dark materials” is a line from the poem, a reference to the material that God uses to create worlds.
Pullman has a love-hate relationship with Milton, however, and ascribes to William Blake’s perspective that “Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it.” In Pullman’s trilogy, then, he turns Milton on his head by making his fallen angels the good guys and the loyal angels the bad guys.
I find this to be a slightly shaky foundation for a story since, much as I admire Blake, I don’t agree with his view of Paradise Lost. As I see it, Satan is one of literature’s great depictions of a charismatic narcissist, and I think Milton intends for us to fall for his charisma before becoming aware of his emptiness. But set that aside. Pullman’s Satanic rebel is a couple, Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter, who go to war with God, his archangel Metatron, and his legions of angels. They have a few angels on their side, as well as witches and giant polar bears.
In Pullman’s version, God is not the actual creator but an angel who took credit for creation, which means that Pullman is not as radical as he appears. (In other words, “God” isn’t really God.) The author’s target is people who claim to speak in God’s name while twisting God to serve their own purposes. But if this is Pullman’s purpose, why not just go after the church rather than having this titanic battle in heaven, complete with flying machines and bombs.
For the record, Pullman targets the church plenty. The church we see in the trilogy is a cross between the Catholic Church of the Spanish Inquisition and the fundamentalist Protestant church of Calvin’s Geneva. Both are obsessed with purity and obedience, which means that they are prepared to do everything they can to keep children from thinking for themselves and from enjoying sexuality. They are fanatical opponents of sensuality.
The reason for the aerial battles is that Pullman wants his battle against intolerance and narrow-minded religiosity to be as spectacular as Milton’s battle in heaven. Pullman has said this His Dark Materials is his own Paradise Lost. But where Milton uses his poem to “justify the ways of God to man”—to find divine meaning to our suffering—Pullman wants us to focus on living our lives fully and sensually. He wants us to build the kingdom of heaven on earth—or to use phrase he uses, the republic of heaven.
We should not want to become angels, he notes, because they are ethereal. Pullman’s angels, rather than glorying in their immateriality, envy humans. As Mrs. Coulter notes when she is in the process of using her beauty to seduce Metatron into a trap where she and Asriel can destroy him,
[S]he trusted to her flesh, and to the strange truth she’d learned about angels, perhaps especially those angels who had once been human: lacking flesh, they coveted it and longed for contact with it. And Metatron was close now, close enough to smell the perfume of her hair and to gaze at the texture of her skin, close enough to touch her with scalding hands.
For those who think that Heaven is heavenly because it is purely ethereal, Pullman has a countervision. In his vision, Christian Heaven is a barren place, dark and empty. At one point, protagonists Lyra and Will find a way to release those trapped there—at least those who haven’t deluded themselves into thinking that their sense-starved existence is Paradise—and the dead souls are thrilled when they get a chance to mingle with the elements. Here’s Pullman describing the moment when they move from the afterlife to earth:
The first ghosts trembled with hope, and their excitement passed back like a ripple over the long line behind them, young children and aged parents alike looking up and head with delight and wonder as the first stars they had seen for centuries shone through into their poor starved eyes.
The first ghost to leave the world of the dead was Roger. He took a step forward and turned to look back at Lyra, and laughed in surprise as he found himself turning into the night, the starlight, the air…and then he was gone, leaving behind such a vivid little burst of happiness that Will was reminded of the bubbles in a glass of champagne.
As Robert Frost says, “Earth’s the right place for love, I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”
If Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are not able to defeat Metatron, then he will impose his will directly on the world rather than having to go through the church. In other words, we will have orthodoxy or fundamentalism on steroids. Some version of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, in other words.
But because they take down Metatron, the next generation will be able to think for themselves and taste, without guilt, the forbidden fruit of sexuality. In fact, we see Lyra actually feeding Will a “little red fruit” in the lead-up to their lovemaking scene. Their love, which both the church and Metatron have been doing all they can to prevent, saves the world.
Hmm, love saving the world. Where else does one encounter that idea? Maybe Pullman isn’t as anti-Christian as he seems.
I’m currently reading Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens (1990) in preparation for a Vacation Bible School lecture I will be giving on angels. I’m the third of three lectures on the subject–angels in the Bible, angels in Paradise Lost, and angels in contemporary fantasy—and I’ll share my insights in future posts. For the moment, however, I found a scene that I’m imagining as a comic rendering of Vladimir Putin ordering Russian soldiers into Ukraine.
First, a word on Good Omens, which is a remarkable collaboration between two of the greatest contemporary fantasy authors. Pratchett stands out amongst fantasy practitioners since he writes comic fantasy, which is a departure from the deadly serious fantasy that is the norm. (Think Tolkien.) Good Omens has more of a Pratchett than a Gaiman feel to it.
In the novel, the Antichrist has been delivered to an English hospital with the full expectation that he will bring about Armageddon when he grows up. A hospital mix-up, however, means that he is switched with another baby and brought up by a dull tax accountant and his wife. This wreaks havoc with Satan’s plans to have an all-out battle with the Almighty. Issues of nature vs. nurture come to the fore.
Responsible for the mix-up is the fallen angel Crowley, who has been doing Satan’s bidding for centuries. Crowley has become comfortable with his life on earth, however, and isn’t keen on it all coming to an end. He’s even become chummy with Aziraphale, his good angel counterpart, and we learn that he has never been an enthusiastic evil doer: he “did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards.” (Elsewhere we are told, “He hadn’t meant to Fall. He’d just hung around with the wrong people.”) In any event, he now drives around in a Bentley, and his way of causing evil is disrupting everyone’s internet service from time to time.
When the time comes to drop the infant Antichrist off at the hospital, Satan assumes that Crowley will be excited by his chance to bring about the end of the world. I’m thinking that he’s excited in the way that Vladimir Putin is excited at the prospect of recreating the Tsarist empire of the 19th century or the Soviet empire of the 20th. Like many Russians, however, Crowley is less interested in restoring lost glory than in enjoying his comfortable middle-class life. You’ll pick up the discrepancy in enthusiasm levels in their interchange, which occurs over Crowley’s car radio. Satan speaks with the voice of whoever is performing at the time, which in this case happens to be Freddie Mercury of the rock group Queen:
“Ohshitohshitohshit. Why now? Why me?” he muttered, as the familiar strains of Queen washed over him.
And suddenly, Freddie Mercury was speaking to him: BECAUSE YOU’VE EARNED IT, CROWLEY.
Crowley blessed under his breath. Using electronics as a means of communication had been his idea, and Below had, for once, taken it up and, as usual, got it dead wrong. He’d hoped they could be persuaded to subscribe to Cellnet, but instead they just cut in to whatever it happened to be that he was listening to at the time and twisted it.
Crowley gulped.
“Thank you very much lord,” he said.
WE HAVE GREAT FAITH IN YOU, CROWLEY.
“Thank you, lord.”
THIS IS IMPORTANT, CROWLEY.
“I know, I know.”
THIS IS THE BIG ONE, CROWLEY.
“Leave it to me, lord.”
THAT IS WHAT WE ARE DOING, CROWLEY, AND IF IT GOES WRONG, THEN THOSE INVOLVED WILL SUFFER GREATLY. EVEN YOU, CROWLEY. ESPECIALLY YOU.
“Understood, lord.”
HERE ARE YOUR INSTRUCTIONS, CROWLEY.
And suddenly he knew. He hated that. They could just as easily have told him, they didn’t suddenly have to drop chilly knowledge straight into his brain. He had to drive to a certain hospital.
“I’ll be there in five minutes, lord, no problem.”
As it turns out, Crowley’s mission doesn’t go any better than Putin’s as both Earth and Ukraine survive to live another day. Moral: Don’t expect success when you lack buy-in from your followers.
Further application: While the Antichrist is growing up, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse—make that the four horsepersons—are assembling. War is an arms dealer named Scarlett, who has auburn hair that “fell to her waist in tresses that men would kill for, and indeed often had.” We see a before and after description of “Kubolaland” that vaguely resembles Ukraine before and after the February 24 Russian invasion. Here’s before:
She was in the middle of a city at the time. The city in question was the capital of Kumbolaland, an African nation which had been at peace for the lat three thousand years. For about thirty years it was Sir-Humphrey-Clarksonland, but since the country had absolutely no mineral wealth and the strategic importance of a banana, it was accelerated toward self-government with almost unseemly haste. Kumbolaland was poor, perhaps, and undoubtedly boring, but peaceful. Its various tribes, who got along with one another quite happily, had long since beaten their swords into ploughshares; a fight had broken out in the city square in 1952 between a drunken ox-drover and an equally drunken ox-thief. People were still talking about it.
The Scarlett shows up, at which point all humor leaves the narrative:
She looked around the street: a couple of women chatted on a street corner; a bored market vendor sat in front of a heap of colored gourds, fanning the flies; a few children played lazily in the dust.
“What the hell,” she said quietly. “I could do with a holiday anyway.”
That was Wednesday.
By Friday the city was a no-go area.
By the following Tuesday the economy of Kumbolaland was shattered, twenty thousand people were dead…, almost a hundred thousand people were injured, all of Scarlett’s assorted weapons had fulfilled the function for which they had been created, and the vulture had died of Greasy Degeneration.
When it comes to Vladimir Putin and all other “masters of war,” the anger of Bob Dylan’s song is only too appropriate:
Let me ask you one question Is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could? I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul
A month or so ago the Washington Post had an article on books that schools are banning—or should I say, canceling? (I list the books at the end of this post.) All but one of the attacks are from the right and the reasons will surprise no one. To Kill a Mockingbird is the one exception in that it has been attacked by liberal parents, and that imbalance is reason enough why liberals should back off.
After all, if you ban To Kill a Mockingbird for its politics, how are you going to keep conservatives from using that same rationale to ban The Bluest Eye and Beloved and Song of Solomon and The Color Purple and Native Son and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Hate U Give and The New Kid and Black Boy and Go Tell It on the Mountain.
I’ve written several times about my own reservations with regard to To Kill a Mockingbird (for instance, here) so I won’t do more than mention some of the concerns here—how it feeds into the White savior myth, how it gives us only saintly Black figures, how it papers over the White terrorist violence that underpinned segregation. Harper Lee’s sequel Go Set a Watchman is more honest in these areas, showing how the White establishment is benign only so long as it is unchallenged. In Watchman, Atticus Finch is so upset by the Civil Rights movement than he has joined the White Citizens Council, which is basically an upscale KKK: it doesn’t engage in outright violence like the KKK but it relies on that organization to do the dirty work of voter suppression. As a result, a disgusted Calpurnia has stopped working for him.
But it’s because such conversations can grow out of To Kill a Mockingbird that I think teachers should continue to teach it—although only if it is taught along with these other works that I mention. In fact, I believe that, by looking at Lee’s two novels, one can understand a lot about what has happened to the GOP in the years since the Civil Rights movement.
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch looks saintly in part because he has an ideal defendant. Not only is Tom Robinson innocent but the book goes out of the way to note that he doesn’t, in fact, sexually desire Mayella Ewell (which would have clouded the picture for 1961 White audiences). Robinson is, to borrow a phrase from D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a “faithful soul.” The good Blacks, in that racist movie, are those who know their place while the villains are the freed slaves who want what the Whites have.
To shift registers for a moment, I think of what Jed Leland says to the entitled Charles Foster Kane about the working class on the eve of their breakup. Kane, like Finch, thinks of himself as a defender of the downtrodden, but only to a point:
You talk about the people as though you owned them, as though they belong to you. Goodness. As long as I can remember, you’ve talked about giving the people their rights, as if you can make them a present of Liberty, as a reward for services rendered…Remember the working man?… You used to write an awful lot about the workingman…He’s turning into something called organized labor. You’re not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means that your workingman expects something is his right, not as your gift! Charlie, when your precious underprivileged really get together, oh boy! That’s going to add up to something bigger than your privileges! Then I don’t know what you’ll do! Sail away to a desert island probably and lord it over the monkeys!
Substitute “people of color” for “working man” and you have what has happened to the GOP establishment. I’ve seen the shift up close because I have GOP cousins. At one time they labeled themselves “Percy Republicans,” taking the designation from the moderate Illinois Republican senator Charles Percy. They saw themselves as faithful stewards of society (and they were), and some even voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election. If Obama managed to get their vote, it was in part because he maintained a delicate balance, appearing Black but not too Black.
He lost them, however, when (1) he voiced his anger at the Cambridge, Massachusetts police for arresting Henry Louis Gates in his home (they thought he was an intruder); and (2) he observed, after Trayvon Martin was killed by a vigilante, that, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” While this endeared him to many in the Black community, who had had their suspicions about their mixed-race president, it signaled to my GOP cousins that he had thrown in his lot with the other community.
This means, however, that, like Finch, they began allying with the Bob Ewells of the world—or to get specific, with Donald Trump, whose ridiculous “born in Kenya” charge was an emotional appeal designed to delegitimize a Black president. Trump prevailed and now it’s Bob Ewell running the GOP, not Atticus Finch. To win elections, Republican politicians believe they have to attack teachers who teach novels that allude to America’s race issues and propagate fears of White replacement.
And because of that fear, they also refuse to condemn the proliferation of guns, at least when guns are mostly in the hands of rightwingers. (The country’s last meaningful gun regulations occurred when the Black Panthers were arming up.) As political scientist John Stoehr explains it,
After Obama’s reelection, Republican governors and legislators began loosening previous firearms restrictions, allowing guns in churches, parks and other public spaces. The liberal reaction was befuddlement. After the bloodbath at Sandy Hook, what they were doing was insane!
Not to the rightwingers, though. After all, the sociopolitical orders of power that had once put them on top had been turned upside down. The oppressors had become the oppressed under this rule by a Black man. Expanding the range of guns was a way out of that predicament.
To restore the natural order – the rule of white power – they first needed to bring down the current one, to knock out its foundation.
As former Bush speechwriter turned NeverTrumper David Frum has observed, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” Stoehr links the dots by showing how the chaos caused by gun violence serves that cause:
[M]ass death works in the rightwingers’ favor whether it comes from bullets or a virus. When an electorate is scared enough, it will stop turning to democracy to solve problems. It will turn to the party that promises to restore “law and order,” that is, rule by white power.
Interestingly, in To Kill a Mockingbird there’s a mention of guns in the passage that gives the novel its title. Scout reports,
When he gave us our air-rifles Atticus wouldn’t teach us to shoot. Uncle Jack instructed us in the rudiments thereof; he said Atticus wasn’t interested in guns. Atticus said to Jem one day, “I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” Or to apply the title to the book’s themes, it’s a sin to kill a deserving Black.
As long as Atticus’s class is firmly in power, he doesn’t need to resort to violence. Once white entitlement is threatened, however, he joins the White Citizens Council, and one wonders if he will turn a blind eye if guns take out people he thinks of as blue jays. After all, once previously he turned a blind eye to vigilante justice in service of a good cause—which is to say, Boo Radley killing Ewell to save Scout and Jeb.
Perhaps I’m underestimating Atticus. Perhaps, rather than tolerating white supremacists in his party, he will become a NeverTrumper. To do so, however, he would need to rethink his White identity in a foundational way. In any event, I want teachers teaching To Kill a Mockingbird to address the issues—although, as I say, such a program will only work if they teach it along with Go Set a Watchman, Bluest Eye, Beloved, Stamped and other novels targeted by rightwingers.
Other banned novels mentioned in the Post article: Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, Jerry Craft’s New Kid, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Nicole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s And Tango Makes Three, Ashley Hope Perez’ Out of Darkness, Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley’s It’s Perfectly Normal.
The original Pentecost came at a dark time, and things aren’t so great at the moment as we look at the ravages of climate change and gun violence and the rise of authoritarianism. In this simple but profound poem by the 10th century female Japanese poet Izumi Shikibu, however, there’s a glimmer of moonlight, even as the wind batters our ruined house.
Indeed, it is because our house has leaks that the light is able to get through. Often we are most open to the Holy Spirit when things are falling apart. Here’s the poem, which I found in a Poetry Foundation article where poet Jane Hirshfield has assembled “22 poems about spirituality and enlightenment.” Hirshfield translated the poem with the help of Mariko Aratani:
Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house.
A wind reportedly blew through the hall on the original Pentecost as well, bringing about its own light (tongues of fire). Into this ruined world came divine hope, as Luke informs us:
When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
May our battered hearts open themselves to the moonlight that wants to leak in, filling all with its radiance.
The heart attack suffered by the husband of one of Uvalde’s victims is one of many instances of the massacre’s collateral damage. Along with all the children who were killed, three more were orphaned when first their mother and then their father died.
MSNBC commentator Malcolm Nance tweeted out the following note after hearing about the incident:
To new widows/widowers: When I lost my wife my mother-in-law called me the next day and warned me to wake up to life because Takotsubo Myocardia aka Broken Heart Syndrome is REAL. It can kill you…with a heart attack. I could feel it coming too. I started running…in Paris.
Henry Fielding mentions the danger in Tom Jones. In this case, the broken heart is caused by a sibling betrayal but the outcome is the same:
The doctor went directly to London, where he died soon after of a broken heart; a distemper which kills many more than is generally imagined, and would have a fair title to a place in the bill of mortality, did it not differ in one instance from all other diseases—viz., that no physician can cure it.
