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Tuesday
I have just finished listening to Terry Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight, the fourth book in his Tiffany Aching series (which in turn makes up a part of his 41-book Discworld series). I see the brilliant Pratchett as a kind of postmodern Tolkien in that his world building is far more diverse and inclusive than Middle Earth. Rather than having elves, dwarfs, humans, hobbits and ents squaring off against trolls, goblins, orcs, and giant spiders, Pratchett has created a world in which all these figures (along with witches, vampires, werewolves, zombies, gorgons, and various other creatures from myth and folklore) must learn to get along if society is to survive. In other words, it sounds like our own world. Also, unlike Tolkien, Pratchett has a great sense of humor.
Tiffany Aching is a teenage witch who, by I Shall Wear Midnight, has established herself as the local witch in an area known as “the Chalk.” As witch, she functions mostly as doctor and veterinarian although she is also responsible for rescuing children kidnapped by fairies, guarding the population from various supernatural threats, advising the local baron, and so on.
In Midnight she must battle against a surge in anti-witch hysteria, which seems to arise from the storybook depictions of witches that everyone has grown up with. “Old stories, old rumors, and old picture books still seemed to have their own hold on the memory of the world,” the author observes.
Reading about such hysteria at the same time that we in the United States are witnessing the rise of Christofascism is illuminating. Previously hidden prejudices are suddenly fanned into open intolerance by a rabble-rousing priest known as “the Cunning Man.” Although he has died centuries before, Cunning Man has found a way to return to continue his mission. A shadowy figure with holes where his eyes should be, he spouts threats of hell and damnation as he goes after Tiffany, and his smell is as repulsive as his rhetoric. Tiffany always knows he is around because of his smell, a good metaphor for the hatred that populist demagogues stir up in their followers:
A stink. A stench. A foulness in her mind, dreadful and unforgiving. A compost of horrible ideas and rotted thoughts that made her want to take our her brain and wash it.
I can’t help but think of how Donald Trump is spurring his followers to hate immigrants, Muslims, members of the LGBTQ+ community, Democrats, moderate Republicans, and others, his own version of anti-witch hysteria. Pratchett has several passages describing how such sentiments can take over people’s minds and become lethal. For instance, people who have grown up with Tiffany or even have benefited from her healing ministrations suddenly regard her differently:
It’s always easier to blame somebody. And once you’ve called someone a witch, then you’d be amazed how many things you can blame her for.
Another passage helps explain MAGA hatred for undocumented immigrants, who are essential to our economy:
That was the problem with witchcraft: It was as if everybody needed the witches but hated the fact that they did, and somehow the hatred of the fact could become the hatred of the person.
As she encounters the hysteria, Tiffany remembers the words of one of her mentors, an old witch named Granny Weatherwax: “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”
We also encounter Pratchett’s version of the famous Martin Niemöller quote about “first they came for…”:
But it’s very easy to push an old lady down to the ground and take one of the doors off the barn and put it on top of her like a sandwich and pile stones on it until she can’t breathe anymore. And that makes all the badness go away. Except that it doesn’t. Because there are other things going on, and other old ladies. And when they run out, there are always old men. Always strangers. There’s always the outsider. And then, perhaps, one day, there’s always you. That’s when the madness stops. When there’s no one left to be mad.
And tempting though it is to put all the blame on witch finders and demagogues like Donald Trump, there’s an observation that runs through Midnight that is only too true of our own society. It to comes to Tiffany courtesy of Granny Weatherwax:
Poison goes where poison’s welcome.
One thing I’ve noticed about the rise of Trumpism is that it gives people permission to act out their own worst impulses. So it is with anti-witch hysteria in Midnight. For instance, there is a duchess who is
the kind of bully who forces her victim into retaliation, which therefore becomes the justification for further and nastier bullying, with collateral damage to any innocent bystanders who would be invited by the bully to put the blame for their discomfiture onto the victim.
One of the most terrifying aspects of such transformations is how they come to be taken for granted. Just as people barely pay attention when Trump channels Hitler or his followers cheer authoritarianism, Tiffany reports at one point, “I have seen horrible things, and some of them all the more horrible because they were, well, normal”
So what does Tiffany do? First, she calls out the hatred for what it is:
Your power is only rumor and lies, she thought. You bore your way into people when they are uncertain and weak and worried and frightened, and they think their enemy is other people when their enemy is, and always will be, you – the master of lies. Outside, you are fearsome; inside, you are nothing but weakness.
And then, like Beowulf standing up to Grendel, she declares, “Inside I am flint.”
So instead of running from the witch-burning fire, she runs towards it, leaping through it and coming out safely on the other side. The Cunning Man, meanwhile, is consumed by the flames.
Which is to say, respond to Christian fascism, not through fear or accommodation, but through confident assertions of tolerance and kindness and decency and, yes, humor. All these qualities are alive and well in Pratchett’s teenage witch, which is why I think every child should be encouraged to disappear into the Tiffany Aching series.