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Day of Hope

Dusty Leave a comment

Yesterday was my birthday. I had a great day: my wife and I went out for an incredible brunch at a restaurant in Tucson called Blue Willow – HIGHLY recommend the breakfast burrito, if you go – and then went home and had presents – I got two awesome t-shirts and a video game, Skyrim for my Nintendo Switch, which is a lovely thing mainly because Skyrim was one of those games I avoided when it was new, since I knew it was exactly the kind of video game I love most (sandbox swords and sorcery) and would therefore consume all of my waking hours once I opened Pandora’s Box and started playing it, and as I told all of my students at the time when they asked if I was going to play Skyrim, I have a job; which means that now I have been given permission to go ahead and let my free time be consumed, partly because I deserve and need nice things, and partly because the truth is that I will not actually allow ALL of my free time to be consumed, that I can be trusted to do what is necessary even if I would rather just dive back into the video game (Hold on, the t-shirts reminded me: I need to cull my collection. Be right back. [Got rid of seven shirts. Good progress.]) – and then we went to an arcade with friends, where I got to play pinball and a car racing game and a pirate shooting game and the BIGGEST SPACE INVADERS IN NORTH AMERICA, and then we came home and ordered Chinese food in and then had huge slices of an AMAZING cake. It was a great day.

Yesterday in Washington D.C., the Republican party passed Donald Trump’s “Death to the Poors” bill (I will neither call it the B.B.B. as that shitmouth named it – though honestly I appreciate the bald hypocrisy of that, coming from the party that has been loudly and repeatedly criticizing large omnibus bills for years if not decades, until said omnibus comes from President Turdtongue – nor talk about it as a tax cut bill as the news outlets insist on calling it, while they also name it as a Asslips’s “most significant accomplishment,” which is a wild phrase: just imagine talking that way about, say, Auschwitz, or the Night of the Long Knives, or the invasion of Poland, as Hitler’s “biggest achievements” to date. I will come back to hypocrisy.), which Pres. Butt-Teeth will be signing today, in a continuation of his efforts to taint and corrupt every single piece of American culture so that nobody can ever enjoy anything ever again in this country.

Not that this is my favorite holiday: I’m a vegetarian, and I live in Tucson, Arizona, so barbecues at the park are out on both meat-related and heat-related grounds; plus my dog is terrified of fireworks, and I personally dislike the strong possibility of wildfires being started by an idiot with a bottle rocket and a match. But there are, nonetheless, reasons why I want to celebrate this holiday, and hold onto it in the face of ol’ Colon-Throat’s attempted appropriation. And I want to write about it today because I realized that the reasons for me, for us, to hold tight to the Fourth of July are the very same ideas that I want and need to write about.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about. Part of me doesn’t want to write at all: I just want to curl up on my couch, pet my dog, and play video games. (And not only because I just got Skyrim, though that is definitely part of the draw… I can hear it calling to me right now… No, wait, that’s my cockatiel Duncan screaming because he’s upset about something.) And while I want to rant about Donald Trump, and the Supreme Court, and the Congress, because all three branches of government have been captured by the proto-fascists who want to turn America into a white Christian ethnostate with a patriarchal dictatorship that is decidedly unChristian, I don’t know what the value would be in ranting: the people who would read it already agree with me, and it would just make them sadder than they already are because the horror is relentless and it’s hard to remain so ourselves; and the people who might read it who don’t agree would find it tiresome to just hear more ranting; and the people who are on the opposite side of these issues (who don’t read, but just hypothetically) would be giddy with Schadenfreudish glee, cackling about how angry I am and signing up for WordPress accounts just so they can comment “Cry more!” and throw down some of the memes I’ve been getting hit with because I have (foolishly) been commenting on news stories on Facebook. And I don’t want to create any of those responses.

I recognize that the most important thing we can do is spread good information, and so that makes me want to become a journalist, and share correct information, and – I mean, maybe I should do that. But I already have a job. And it’s a hard job, and I work hard at it. And I have a family which I love, but which, like all families, requires a lot of time and energy – and not that I begrudge that, I do not, I would spend all of my time and energy on my family if I didn’t have to work, and I look forward to the day when that happens; I’m just saying that I will not take time and energy away from my family in order to become a journalist. There are already better journalists, trained and professional journalists, out there doing that work, so I shouldn’t have to. Clearly my fight against misinformation is in my teaching, and I will continue to do my very best there, in every way I can.

But that leaves me with nothing to write about.

It is summer, and so that makes me want to write, because over the school year I am often too tired and burnt out and frustrated to write; but I have been facing this conundrum about what to write about, and I haven’t been writing much. (Also my summer has not been all that restful, but it’s mostly been family stuff, so I don’t resent it.) As I haven’t been writing, however, I have been trying to get back into my other great passion that I haven’t been able to spend enough time on: I’ve been reading. And one of the things I’ve been reading has been these:

These are my great-grandmother’s novels, published in the late 50s, when she had retired from teaching. (Have I mentioned that I come from a line of teachers and writers on  my mother’s side? This is part of that line.) I’ve never read them before, partly because I never knew my great-grandmother; for most of my life I didn’t even know that she had written books or published them or that we had copies. So I’m reading them now, and they have shown me a couple of things. First, because these are young adult books, and historical/regional fiction (They are all set in western Washington, where the Mitchells lived and where both my grandmother and then my mother were born and raised, during the frontier times between about 1970 and 1890, when the Mitchells did not live there – Faye and her husband Burt emigrated from Kansas), they are not great literature in a canonical sense: but they are good stories. And this helps to settle in me something I have always struggled with, because I am not a writer of great literature, and though I don’t want to be, I always think I should be; but I think that in truth I am, like my great-grandmother, a storyteller, not a literary giant. And I would rather be that. Second, these books, because they are set where they are and because the main character, Abby Conner, is a young woman who wants to become a teacher and a writer and who talks about what it means to be a teacher and a writer, are helping me to be prouder of the teacher and the writer that I am, because I think that my great-grandmother would probably be proud of me, and I like that – and my Nonna, whom I loved and respected but who passed before I had even decided to become a teacher, would definitely be proud of me, and I love that. And third, because my great-grandmother clearly wrote about what he knew, I have been thinking about how I need to do that. Not with my novels, which are almost certainly going to stay fantastic and more about vampires and time-traveling pirates and magical dreams that change reality; but with these blogs, and with the things that I write every day: I need to write about what I know.

So this is what I’m going to do: I’m going to write about what I know.

So. What the hell do I know?

…

I used to be optimistic.

My wife talks about it, about how I used to be much more cheerful, and much more calm, and much more positive. She doesn’t make it sound as bad as I just did: she doesn’t say all those things at once, and she doesn’t say it with any kind of accusation or disappointment or anything – never “You used to be a lot more fun!” or anything like that. She has taken note of it out of concern for me: because my general demeanor has become darker and angrier over the last decade or so. And it’s coming out in ways and in places that I don’t like: I have had a hard time keeping myself from losing my temper with my students, and I have failed at that, and lost my temper, several times in the last few years, sometimes to my real regret. I am also having a hard time keeping my spirits up in order to push back against my wife’s occasional depressing outlook, which is sometimes something she needs me to do (Don’t we all?), and which I have not been doing as well as I used to.

I suspect this happens to a lot of people, if not to all of us. We lose our idealism, and our hopefulness – those of us who ever had it, that is, which is not everyone. But I think as time goes on, and life gets harder, and as people just keep on disappointing us, over and over again – say, by re-electing an orange-tinted fascist would-be dictator even after he tried to overthrow our government the first time: it’s hard to look down the road and think that it actually goes to a better place. And while Trump certainly wasn’t inevitable, the difficult and sad things that happen as we get older are inevitable: we lose people we love, and eventually we lose ourselves, and there is often a great deal of suffering on the way to that. As that happens to us more, and as we are shielded from it less, our lives become sadder in many ways, and it makes sense that we would do the same.

I do also think the last few years have been rough on people in this country. Trump’s two electoral wins and two administrations, the pandemic, the various economic and global crises: it’s been tough to keep looking on the bright side of this pile of shit. I certainly haven’t been immune to that. In fact, it has been directly detrimental to my optimism: because I keep thinking, and saying, and arguing, and preaching, that things are going to work out the right way: and I keep being wrong. I said that Trump was going to lose in 2016, both in the primary and then in the election, and I thought that he would go to trial for his crimes and that he would get convicted, and I thought he would lose in 2024. Wrong, every time. (Okay, he was convicted, but only of the least important one, and it didn’t affect his political ambitions in any way at all, which I also thought it would. Still: he is a fucking convicted felon, and anyone who claims it was only a politically motivated prosecution, you’re goddamn right, and it was a successful one, and it should have kept people from voting for him, and it was therefore the right thing to do – but I think we can see that, even though it was a politically motivated prosecution, that didn’t affect the general populace very much: the election is evidence that the jury was honest and sincere.) That record makes me not want to keep my hopes up: not mainly because I hate being wrong and looking dumb (though I do, both), but mainly because I don’t want to give people false hope and then have them fall farther and harder when my false hope is proven wrong. Again.

But okay: now let’s talk about the Fourth of July. (See, this is why I’m so goddamn wordy and circuitous in my writing, even though the only way to write great literature is to keep it short and simple, as much as possible, to edit even more than you write: because I’m not a great literary mastermind, I’m a storyteller, and this is how stories get told. Thanks, Great-grandmother. Actually, since I called her daughter Nonna, I’m just gonna call Mrs. Mitchell Grandnonna. I hope she would like that. And let me note that, as wordy and circuitous as I am, I get back to where I want to go. Eventually.)

The Fourth of July is a convergence of three of my heroes. Three of the greatest writers in American history, because all three were three of the greatest thinkers and idealists in American history. Not all the best people, but I generally think the art, and the truth, can transcend the people who discover it or create it. If you look at science, for instance, there is not and never has been a scientist who was worthy of the power of what they discovered: not Newton, not Darwin, not Einstein… maybe Carl Sagan. I don’t know if Galileo was a good man, honestly, but how could he possibly be good enough to live up to what he did for our understanding of the universe, for what he made possible? He couldn’t. The same with great artists: the people who affect the lives of millions and even billions of other humans in positive ways couldn’t possibly be good enough in and of themselves to really be seen as deserving of the praise that their impact deserves. Martin Luther King, Jr., could not possibly be good enough as a person to actually deserve the honor that he rightfully gets as the civil rights leader and genius communicator that he was, even if he hadn’t been an egotist who cheated on his wife. But his impact, his positive impact on the world, is beyond measuring: is beyond what one person could contain. So I am willing to praise the work, and the words, and the ideas, even if the person who created those things was worse than their impact.

This does not excuse J.K. Rowling, by the way, though I do also think the criticism of Harry Potter is lazy and vicious and incorrect; but Rowling is, it turns out, a terrible person who should absolutely be canceled entirely. While we all keep reading Harry Potter. Don’t worry, it will get easier when she is dead.

So: the three people who are connected by the Fourth of July and whom I find inspiring are Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln. (See what I mean about not the best people? Douglass was a saint, but I only say that because I don’t know enough about him to know the bad stuff; Lincoln was a racist egotist, and Jefferson owned his own children. But the point here is that we need to look at the work, and the ideas, and the words.) Thomas Jefferson, of course, wrote this:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

Those two paragraphs might be the best argument ever written: because the words are perfect, the logic is perfect, and the idea was so much better than the people who formulated it that it has led to better outcomes and a better world for hundreds of millions of people, for two and a half centuries. We hold these truths to be self-evident.

All men are created equal.

(Which also means that we all suck. Just sayin’.)

And I think we know why this idea, these words, and this man are connected to this day, for me. For all of us.

Lincoln, on the Fourth of July in 1863, said this:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

This is sometimes described as the perfect speech – partly because it is so short, and therefore nothing that I ever could have produced – and there’s an argument to be made for that. I find it inspiring because I think it translates some of Jefferson’s ideals, which were intentionally more universal, into something more personal, more grounded: this is how the idea that all men are created equal comes to be an American ideal instead of a human one – though it is still, and always should be, a human ideal. Still, Lincoln and this address are why we as Americans should consider this to be something personal, something we own, not simply a truth that exists in the world. Jefferson and the Founding Fathers are part of that as well, because the Declaration of Independence was not just a statement of ideals, but also a political and pragmatic document (which is why I include the first paragraph in the quotation from it, and in what I describe as the perfect argument: that sets the purpose for the second paragraph, where all the intellectual brilliance is. But as a rhetoric teacher, purpose matters, so the first paragraph is part of that, and part of what Jefferson and the rest of them were committed to, like Lincoln.); but because the Founding Fathers were patriarchal slaveowners who didn’t want to pay taxes, their purpose doesn’t rise to the level of their ideals. Which makes them fascinating, really, because slaveowners who didn’t want to pay taxes somehow managed to formulate and then enact one of the greatest ideals in human history, that all men are created equal and that government should be based on that fact and all of the logical consequences of that fact, such as the necessity of consent; but Lincoln’s purpose in saying his words was, first, to honor the sacrifice of people who died for those ideals, which is one of the most important and perhaps most abused elements of recognizing the worth of all humans (and not something expressly focused on in the Declaration, not even in its lists of abuses and usurpations), and second, to maintain the existence of the nation based on that fact, and to help bring it closer to being a nation that lives up to its own purpose, a nation governed by a system based on the fact that all men are created equal. Those purposes are worthy of those words, of the ideas they express, as the words and the ideas are worthy of the purpose. Probably not so with Jefferson.

And then Douglass. I wish I could have heard Douglass speak, because unlike the other two, Douglass was a great speaker as well as a great writer; but at least we have the words he wrote down, and the story he told with them, the story of his own life. And if you don’t know why Frederick Douglass is connected to the Fourth of July, it’s because of this:

(1852) Frederick Douglass, “What, To The Slave, Is The Fourth Of July”

Frederick Douglass

Daguerreotype photo by Samuel J. Miller

That whole speech is worth reading. But let me focus on this:

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been tom from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

Here we see Douglass’s purpose, and the reason he also needs to be included in this list of great writers connected to the Fourth of July: because Douglass held this country to account for its hypocrisy. (Told you I’d come back to it.) Douglass showed, more clearly than anyone else, that the United States has never lived up to its ideals.

He said this:

I remember also that as a people Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a national trait—perhaps a national weakness. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans, and can be had cheap will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering Americans if I say I think the American side of any question may be safely left in American hands.

I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than mine!

My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now.

Trust no future, however pleasant, Let the dead past bury its dead; Act, act in the living present, Heart within, and God overhead.

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. This truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it near and remote, ancient and modern. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have “Abraham to our father,” when they had long lost Abraham’s faith and spirit. That people contented themselves under the shadow of Abraham’s great name, while they repudiated the deeds which made his name great. Need I remind you that a similar thing is being done all over this country to-day? Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men, shout —”We have Washington to our father.”—Alas! that it should be so; yet so it is.

The evil that men do, lives after them, The good is oft’ interred with their bones.

And this:

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Douglass said a lot that could apply to us today, which is why it is worth reading the whole speech. (And I’m thinking now I may teach it next year. We’ll see.)

But, since I have now gone on for far too long (Not gonna feel bad. Storyteller. Also, I was quoting.), let me get to my purpose: the reason why I wanted to talk about these three men and their writings on this day, the Fourth of July.

Because all three of these men represent hope.

If they did not believe that this nation could exist in its ideal state, or at least that it could come closer and that approaching that ideal would be better than moving away from it, they would never have said what they did. None of them lived in this nation in its ideal state, and probably none of them thought they ever would live in that nation: but they all believed it (or something close to it) could exist, and that that wonderful reality was worth fighting for. I know because all three fought to achieve it, for essentially all of their adult lives, with all of the considerable powers at their disposal. They fought, for years, for decades, in the face of insurmountable odds, of endless trudging through swamps of opposition, the stinking mud sticking to them and tainting everything they did and everything they saw, making absolutely no progress, for longer than some people have to live their whole lives.

But they kept fighting. Because they believed they could succeed. They did not give up. No matter what.

That’s what optimism is. It’s determination, and belief. It is hope. It doesn’t have to be based on reality and an understanding of the truth and the terrible odds stacked against us: but when it is based on that, it is that much stronger, that much more potent. That much more indomitable.

I don’t know if I’m indomitable. But I do know I’m stubborn as fuck. And maybe that’s the same thing.

I don’t know if I have that kind of optimism. But I hope I do: and so I’m going to keep fighting, and keep trying, and keep writing. Because I think that my purpose, and my ideals, are worth all of that effort, and all of that fight, and all of that struggle. And because I believe that the world I dream of is possible. Even if I never see it.

But I hope I do. And I hope you will, too.

Happy Independence Day.

Here we go.

Dusty Leave a comment
Jay's Wargaming Madness: So It Begins - 2018!

It begins tonight.

The Republican voters are caucusing in Iowa tonight, starting in a couple of hours and finishing sometimes before midnight. And the expectation is that Donald J. Trump (Is it meaningful at all that it just took me three tries to type his name correctly? Probably only indicative of the fact that I’m pretty tired right now, and I haven’t done a lot of typing in the last few weeks. Or it’s an omen.) will win, thereby “signaling” that he is “most likely” going to be the Republican party’s nominee for President this year.

Seriously, guys? I mean, come on.

So here’s the reality. Trump is definitely going to win the Iowa caucus tonight, despite the absurdly cold weather, despite the hilarious fact that some unknown number of Iowans registered as Republicans specifically so they could vote against Trump in the caucus, and, of course, despite the fact that Trump has been indicted in four different criminal cases, along with currently being in court for two civil cases, and fighting off who knows how many other claims against him personally and against his businesses. He’s going to win the Iowa caucus for the same reason he’s going to win every single Republican primary in every single state: because Republicans love him.

They love him for a variety of reasons. Some think he did a phenomenal job as President. Some think he projects an aura of strength, which they think we need with so many problems going on in the world today. Some think he is just like them, and they want to see him succeed because that implies that they, too will succeed. Some love him because he’s a racist, sexist piece of shit, and so are they, and they think he will help them to achieve the racist and sexist dreams they hold close to their hearts.

(All of these people are wrong, by the way. But they believe they are not. Don’t judge them too harshly: we all believe lies. Many people reading this believe that Barack Obama was a great man and a great president. Many people reading this believe this country is a democracy, and that we are free. Many people reading this believe that things will turn out all right in the end. None of those things are true, either.)

And then there’s the biggest group: the people who will support Donald Trump despite knowing that he’s a racist, sexist, corrupt, narcissistic piece of shit, because they believe he will be better for the country than the Democrats, and specifically Joe Biden.

Those people might be right.

All right, hold on; no, I haven’t lost my mind, and no, I haven’t surrendered to the cynicism that did definitely increase thanks to the pretty awful situation my family has gone through over the last year or so. I am probably trying to be more honest in this post than I frequently am, because normally I shape what I’m saying for my audience, and I am rethinking that. I am also certainly looking to shock some of you with this opening; and now that I have your attention and you are maybe a bit off balance, I will explain further, and see if we can come to a consensus.

Unlike Americans.

See, there has never been a single majority opinion held by Americans. Not by the majority of us. The majority of Americans do not vote, so no election has been decided by the majority; and the majority have not been consulted in every non-democratic decision made in this country, which is the vast majority of them. We don’t all agree, and we never have. What we do is comply, and accept.

We accept that the two-party system is what we are stuck with, and then we comply with that system. We accept that capitalism is the system we are stuck with, and then we comply with that system. We accept that we cannot eliminate racism from the American consciousness, and then — and this is the difficult part, but it is a true thing — we comply with the system of racism that exists in this country. We may not do it, depending on who we are, for racist reasons; I am not a racist, and I hope and trust that most people reading my writing, therefore, are not racists. Though I was brought up within a racist system and a racist culture, so there are definitely racist ideas in my head and racist feelings in my heart, and there always will be, because we do not, ever, escape our childhood and upbringing, a fact that has been brought home to me recently. But I am not a racist because I do not subscribe to those thoughts and feelings when they arise: I question myself constantly when I think about race, and I question whether my instincts are reasonable, or racist; and if they are racist, I try not to listen to them.

But I comply with a racist system. Take, for example, de facto segregation in this country, which is almost universal. I live in a less-desirable area in Tucson, Arizona. I used to live in a much more desirable area, but we rented there, and we own our home here. We own our home here because this is what we could afford: we had an area we wanted to buy in, and an area we were willing to buy in — and then there was the area we could afford to buy in. Which is where we bought.

Now: guess which, of the desirable area and the less-desirable area, is more diverse racially. You already know, don’t you? And because we want to move to the more desirable area, we will be moving out of the racially diverse area and into the racially homogenous area as soon as we can afford to. And there are plenty of good reasons for us to move — one of which is, honestly, entirely unrelated to race, and it might even be the best reason to move: our commute is too bloody long, and we’d really really like to live closer to school — but all of them, all of them, comply with and therefore encourage and maintain the racist system that is the status quo in this country. There is more crime where we are now, and less in the desirable area. The property values are better in the desirable area. There are fewer homeless people, and less trash on the street, in the desirable area. There is more open space and more green space in the desirable area to walk our dogs. Those are all good reasons for us to move, and they are why we will move. But when we do that, we will be moving our white selves into the white area, and out of the more racially diverse area. We will be maintaining the segregated status quo in Tucson.

Why? Because we can’t change it. And because we have enough other shit to deal with in our lives without spending what energy and passion we have in a futile effort to change Tucson’s, or Arizona’s, or America’s, or the whole world’s racist systems.

But, see, that’s where we’re wrong. We do impossible things by doing them. Not by recognizing that they are impossible, and then walking away without fighting. We decide to try, even though we know it is impossible, and we try, and we fight — and that’s how we win. That’s how things change.

Does it always happen that way? Of course not: impossible things are impossible for a reason, and that reason is usually enough to overcome efforts to change things that cannot be changed.

But sometimes? Sometimes things change.

And on this day, named in celebration of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I think it is only appropriate to recognize that sometimes, it is worth fighting the impossible fight, because sometimes, you win.

Even if you then get assassinated and much of the country goes right back to the same racist status quo.

It’s worth fighting for change because even though that happened to Dr. King, he still made things different. He moved the needle. Trump is no worse a racist piece of shit than half of the past presidents of this country, but the main difference now is that we recognize that he is a racist piece of shit. And that is a problem for him. He needs to fight that perception, he needs to talk in dog whistles. Not always, because there are plenty of racist pieces of shit who support him, and they like when he says shit directly like “Immigrants are poisoning the blood of this country.” (And then defends it by saying he didn’t know that was a racist piece of shit thing to say.) A century ago, he wouldn’t have had to defend that, he would have repeated it and made it part of his stump speech. So: progress. Change.

Why hasn’t the change been larger? Simple: because not enough of us fight. That’s why it hasn’t lasted longer, and why it hasn’t spread farther, and why so many of us don’t see positive results. Not enough of us fight that fight.

I want to fight. I intend to fight. Probably for more than one thing, more than one cause, more than one change. I do want to fight systemic racism: but not only that. But I want to do it right. I want to do it strategically, and intentionally, and thoughtfully — which has never been how I’ve written, or how I’ve done anything. I vastly prefer flying by the seat of my pants.

But I just spent the last eleven years writing a single story, The Adventures of Damnation Kane. And while I think I’ve written some excellent pieces on this blog, and I’m proud of everything I’ve written on this blog, that story — those books — are better. Because I spent even more time thinking about them than I did writing them.

So I need to think more about this, and I need to strategize and I need to plan. Then I need to get to work.

This post is intended to make that public, in order to give me more motivation to do this thing the way I need to do it. It’s sad that I need an additional push, but that’s the truth: I do. Otherwise I’m just going to fly by the seat of my pants. (By the way, I’m also still going to write about teaching and school, and to review books and all of that. But there will definitely be more political speech in this, and more attempts to drive and enact social change. That’s the fight. And I’m going to get into it.) And I suspect that I will continue to fly by the seat of my pants, and to write extemporaneously, while I work on my strategy and my plan; because writing is how I form and crystallize my thoughts, and this is a good way to do that; and because I am loath to try to conceal my plans. I think it will be more convincing if I can be open about what I am doing and why, all the way. Here’s hoping I’m right.

So let me bring this back to where I started: now that it is nearly 4pm MST, and that means the Iowa Caucuses are probably starting to cast their votes for Donald Trump.

I, like everyone else who opposes Donald Trump becoming President again, wish that he would just go away. I wish that he would die (and I won’t apologize for wishing that, not when he talks openly about killing people as a joke), or I wish that he would be convicted and go to jail.

But I realized something in the last week. That’s wrong.

Trump should run in the Presidential election. He should run: and we should fight him.

And we should win.

We need to have that fight, in this country, and we need to shoulder our part of that fight, and do what needs to be done. That’s what will make the greatest change.

So: I want Trump to win the caucuses tonight. I want him to succeed in putting off all of his trials until after the election. I want him to hold rallies, and say every shitty thing that comes into his little hairball of a brain, and I want millions of Americans to laugh and cheer and agree with him. I want him to win the GOP nomination and have every Republican line up behind him, and I want him to run in November.

And then I want for all of us to fucking destroy him at the polls.

Then I want him to go to jail for the rest of his miserable traitorous life. I want him to die in prison. And I want the history books to describe his legacy in actual, factual terms: I want historians in the next fifty years to write about how lucky we all were that Trump never got a second term, because of the existential danger he posed to democracy and to the rule of law and to America as a nation and as a people.

I do not want people to turn him into a martyr and pine about what could have happened if the Democrats hadn’t put him in prison (or killed him with COVID vaccines, which is, I don’t doubt, what millions of dipshit Americans will believe whenever Trump dies, however he dies) and he had been allowed to run, and they had been allowed to cast their votes the way they wanted to. I want them to vote for Trump.

And I want them to lose.

I want to fight.

I hope to convince you all to join me in that fight.

And in the next one.

Thank you for reading.

The Rest of the Words

Dusty Leave a comment

I keep not doing this: but I need to do this. Now, because there are always other things which I can write about, which I want to write about; this week I got into an incredibly stupid argument on Twitter, which is crying out for me to write a full-length takedown of my opponent; also, we had parent conferences, which opens up a couple of good discussions about students in general; also, I agreed to go to an AVID conference this summer, which means I can talk about AVID and conferences and so on; also, we had to pay money in taxes this year AND IT’S MY SCHOOL’S FAULT —

So there’s a lot I could write about.

But I need to write about this.

I already wrote about the beginning of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” but I didn’t write about the whole piece. Intentionally, because my essay was already too long, and the place where I stopped is important enough and valuable enough to receive the final emphasis of closing that piece with it; but now we need to talk about the rest of the piece, not least because it is still brilliant, nor only because it is still relevant to our society today, and the discourses we have around race and prejudice and equality and so on. Also because I said I would do this: and I need to keep my word.

So here we go again.

(One quick note: I have put some jokes in here, particularly in a couple of the links; I hope that doesn’t come across as too irreverent. Dr. King is and will always be one of my most idolized heroes. I just think that a little humor helps to get through an essay this long, with this much heavy subject matter. But I do apologize if any of the jokes hit a sour note.)

The First Essay

So the section I covered there goes to the end of the second page; I wonder how much of that length is intentional in that it seems like a piece that long and no longer could easily be reprinted in newspapers, but I don’t know. It also builds beautifully as an argument, leading to that conclusion. In any case, the next paragraph opens a new line of argument — though it is related, of course. This link shows another iteration of the letter, this one with a clear transition at this point, which I like.

YOU express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.”

Notice that Dr. King continues the same tone and structure of argument, even after he has had this incredible cri de coeur about the African-American experience in the U.S.: he states their objection, and then turns it around on them. Willingness to break laws is a concern, you say? By gum, you’re right! You all should obey the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate schools, shouldn’t you? But again, he offers this point about their hypocrisy in the politest possible way: by saying that it might be strange to see the civil rights activists doing the same apparently hypocritical thing, defending the law while breaking the law. But then he explains why the civil rights activists are not, in fact, doing anything hypocritical — and note that he uses “paradoxical” rather than the term “hypocritical:” because a paradox is only seemingly contradictory, generally from one perspective; there is another perspective by which it makes perfect sense (For instance, the paradox “To preserve peace, you must prepare for war.” It only seems like a contradiction; it actually makes perfect sense in a world where not everyone shares a desire for peace.): because there are two types of laws. King separates here the concept of “legal” from the concept of “just” — a distinction we point out again and again in our society.

Marian Wright Edelman Quote: “Never let us confuse what is legal with what is right. Everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was legal, but it was not r...”
By the way: Mrs. Edelman was referring to Dr. King’s Letter when she said this. It’s on p. 8 of this speech, for one example.

And where does Dr. King get the justification for his distinction? Why from Saint Augustine: one of the most important and influential of all Christian thinkers. How you like them apples, Clergymen?

Continuing his explanation of the distinction between law and justice, Dr. King refers to the other most influential and important Christian thinker, St. Thomas Aquinas:

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an “I – it” relationship for the “I – thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Isn’t segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.

And yes: he also referred to Paul Tillich, one of the most influential Christian philosophers of the 20th century; and to Martin Buber, “the great Jewish philosopher.” (How you like them apples, Rabbi?) Let me emphasize here, if I didn’t do it enough before, that Dr. King wrote this letter in jail: without reference materials. He just knew all this stuff. (I mean, he did have a doctorate in systematic theology; and his dissertation was partly about Tillich’s work, so.) The only way to improve an ethos argument this strong, with references to authorities this relevant to both your point and your audience, is to show that you yourself are an authority to be reckoned with.

The argument itself is remarkable. He provides three different definitions of his distinction between just and unjust laws: first, a religious one — just laws square with the law of God (and note he includes non-religious people by also calling it “the moral law”, and then brings it back to religion and Aquinas by referring to the idea of laws “not rooted in eternal and natural law”); second, a psychological definition, saying that just laws uplift human personality and unjust laws degrade it; and third, Buber’s philosophical concept of the “I-it” relationship replacing the “I-thou” relationship, turning people into objects. Into things. And look at the use of parallelism here: three reasons why segregation is unsound, followed by another way that it is wrong (and adding the idea that segregation is sinful”; three different ways that segregation is an expression of man’s evil; and a juxtaposition of two antithetical examples that match King’s categories: one just law, and one unjust law.

Then, if that isn’t enough ways to help his audience understand this concept , King gives us this next paragraph:

Let us turn to a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow, and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

That’s right, a more concrete definition, with another simple summative way to understand it: difference made legal, and sameness made legal. He’s right: this is more concrete, and has none of the religious overtones of the last paragraph — but it makes just as much sense, and is just as sound. Have we got enough ways to understand this now? Of course we do.

And then he adds another one:

Let me give another explanation. An unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout the state of Alabama all types of conniving methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties without a single Negro registered to vote, despite the fact that the Negroes constitute a majority of the population. Can any law set up in such a state be considered democratically structured?

Here Dr. King brings in another issue: voting rights. How can a law be democratic when the people were not capable of opposing nor supporting its passage, because of the suppression of their rights and their franchise? The argument is so plain and irrefutable that he doesn’t even bother to answer his rhetorical question. Instead, perhaps feeling understandably bitter as he sits in a jail cell writing about justice and injustice, Dr. King moves to one other complexity in the distinction between legal and just: when the application of a law makes it unjust. And I say he might have been bitter because his example is once again his own, talking about the city of Birmingham’s use of a parade permit ordinance to remove the civil rights activists’ First Amendment rights.

These are just a few examples of unjust and just laws. There are some instances when a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I was arrested Friday on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong with an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade, but when the ordinance is used to preserve segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and peaceful protest, then it becomes unjust.

Then he goes on to compare Birmingham first to three villains from history, and himself and his allies to the heroes who were suppressed by the villains — and then Dr. King confirms Godwin’s Law (Within a different context), while breaking the corollary to Godwin’s Law. Because Dr. King brings up Adolf Hitler. And THEN he throws in Stalin and Communism: it’s like the perfect American argument, here. Note that the three villains and heroes he mentions before going to the Nazis are both religious and political: Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who tried to kill the three Jewish prophets Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (I’M SORRY DR. KING I HAVE TO) in the Old Testament; the Romans, who tried to suppress Christianity with various atrocities; and the elite of Athens, who executed Socrates for teaching the truth. Note also that all three villains lost these fights.

Which side is Dr. King’s? Which side would you rather be on?

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience.


We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws.

Once again, Dr. King has made an argument so strong, so irrefutable at this point, after he has given so many different ways to understand it, and so many different reasons to accept it, that I really can’t fathom why people still don’t agree with this argument. Except for those who haven’t read it, of course.

The next part of King’s letter brings up the element that my brother, when I mentioned that I had written an essay about Dr. King, used to identify the Letter from Birmingham Jail as distinct from Dr. King’s other masterworks: “Ohhh,” he said to me on the phone when I was trying to tell him which piece I had analyzed, “is that the one with the white moderates?”

Yes it is.

I MUST make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

He confesses: and then he destroys us with his disappointment. This part of the essay I have trouble reading and teaching; not because it’s too complicated, or too upsetting in its language and images (as some of my students find the Perfect Sentence I wrote about in the first post) — but because it’s true, and it’s me. I am a White moderate. I mean, I’m pretty goddamn liberal — but also, I don’t act in order to achieve a more just society; I simply support the cause. It’s not entirely me, because I don’t object to the methods used by those who are more active in pursuing our common goal; but it’s me because I don’t participate in those methods.

King here juxtaposes this critique of people who support the cause but not enough, with those who oppose the cause though they claim to be understanding of it: the Clergymen. No White moderates, those Alabamians; they seem like pretty rock-ribbed conservatives, fitting perfectly into the mold of paternalistic White leaders whom King refers to above, as they compliment “their” [“our”] Negro community for keeping the peace, which is exactly what King is taking issue with. But he does it in such an incredible way:

In your statement you asserted that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But can this assertion be logically made? Isn’t this like condemning the robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical delvings precipitated the misguided popular mind to make him drink the hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because His unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to His will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see, as federal courts have consistently affirmed, that it is immoral to urge an individual to withdraw his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest precipitates violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

That’s right: not only does King compare himself, for the third time, to Socrates — now he actually compares himself to Jesus. And, of course, he’s right: blaming the victims of oppression for inciting the violence of the oppressors is precisely like blaming Jesus for making the Romans crucify him. And who does that in the story of the Passion?

Why, this guy, of course.

(I know, this is probably the wrong thing to use for this reference. But I love rock opera. Please ignore the ridiculous whiteness of the Jews in the crowd, and especially of Jesus — but DON’T ignore the AMAZING homoeroticism of the flogging performed by what appears to be The Village People, while a sunburned Disco hedonist looks on and cackles.)

In the next paragraph, King jumps back to the White moderates, connecting the two not only with their half-hearted support or opposition to King’s cause, but with a parallel to the teachings and goals of the Church:

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth of time. I received a letter this morning from a white brother in Texas which said, “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but is it possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry? It has taken Christianity almost 2000 years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.

By putting these two groups, White moderates who say they support civil rights but oppose the methods used by the activists, and the Alabama clergymen who say they understand the desires of African-Americans for freedom but show they really would rather maintain the status quo of segregation and oppression, in such close parallel, switching back and forth with what almost seems a complete lack of connecting transitions between subjects, King achieves his goal: he shows that these groups are essentially the same. There is what they say, and then there is what they do: and their actions speak louder than their words. He is thus chastising both groups, by comparison to each other: the clergymen are no better than Northern White moderates, synonymous in the South with lying hypocrisy; and the White moderates are no better than White Southerners: synonymous with racist oppressors. Neither group is willing to be coworkers with God: they are the forces of social stagnation which the coworkers with God oppose.

(Okay, I don’t think that’s me any more. Though I still worry that I would disappoint Dr. King.)

Dr. King’s next argument has to do with “extremism.”

YOU spoke of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I started thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency made up of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, have been so completely drained of self-respect and a sense of “somebodyness” that they have adjusted to segregation, and, on the other hand, of a few Negroes in the middle class who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because at points they profit by segregation, have unconsciously become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred and comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up over the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. This movement is nourished by the contemporary frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination. It is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incurable devil. I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need not follow the do-nothingism of the complacent or the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. There is a more excellent way, of love and nonviolent protest. I’m grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, I am convinced that by now many streets of the South would be flowing with floods of blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble-rousers” and “outside agitators” those of us who are working through the channels of nonviolent direct action and refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes, out of frustration and despair, will seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies, a development that will lead inevitably to a frightening racial nightmare.

Specifically, King is replying to this sentence in the Statement: “We do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.” (Blogger’s Note: Since I did that to them, I’m going to do this to Dr. King’s words: “We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.“) This line clearly pissed King off: but more important, it’s an idea that he can’t allow to shape the narrative. So as he does with so many other parts of the Statement’s argument, he smashes this again, and again, and again. He shows the two extremes in the African-American community: one extreme is those African-Americans who have been worn down by the oppression that has defined their lives; and the other is — Malcolm X. King doesn’t name the other man, with whom he was so often presented in juxtaposition as two opposites, the moderate and the extremist; but he doesn’t have to. Elijah Muhammad (Himself no moderate) and his Nation of Islam are synonymous with Malcolm X, and though King and X were a hell of a lot closer in a lot of ways than most people thought or said, it is exactly these kinds of people, these southern Clergymen, who would have used King as an example of a better leader, a more reasonable leader, than X, because King used non-violence while Malcolm X talked about violence. I suspect this comparison and the implication that King was softer and more accommodating to the oppressors’ status quo, made the man angry: and so the description at the end of this paragraph — a fine example of Dr. King showing that he did not believe that non-violence was the only way to achieve freedom: just that it was the best way, as it would not lead to “floods of blood.” If the warning is not clear, he reiterates it in the next paragraph:

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The urge for freedom will eventually come. This is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom; something without has reminded him that he can gain it. Consciously and unconsciously, he has been swept in by what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, he is moving with a sense of cosmic urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. Recognizing this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand public demonstrations. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations. He has to get them out. So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sit-ins and freedom rides. If his repressed emotions do not come out in these nonviolent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history. So I have not said to my people, “Get rid of your discontent.” But I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled through the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. Now this approach is being dismissed as extremist. I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized.

But as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love? — “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice? — “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ? — “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist?– “Here I stand; I can do no other so help me God.” Was not John Bunyan an extremist? — “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a mockery of my conscience.” Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? — “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist? — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?

(Note on the text: the iteration of the Letter I have been pulling from separates this into two paragraphs. This one doesn’t. I think it should be one paragraph.)

This is another of my favorite arguments, and not least because King again compares himself to Jesus Christ — and also to Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, along with the Jewish and Christian luminaries Amos, St. Paul, Martin Luther, and John Bunyan. (Also I love that he drops his namesake in there without even batting an eye — and don’t forget that the vast majority of Southern White Christian racists were of Protestant denominations). I also love the rapid-fire call-and-response of rhetorical questions with direct quotations that serve both as answers and as proof, while making use of all of the poetry in these various wonderful statements, and also showing off, again, King’s own erudition and understanding of the power of the right word at the right time for the right reason. And then those final rhetorical questions, with the explicit use of “we” inviting the audience — the White moderate, the White Southern clergyman, and every single person who ever reads this letter, including me and including you — to come up with our own perfect words, our own response to this call. What will we do? What kind of extremist will we be?

After this King closes his criticism of White moderates with the most terrible form of the guilt-imposing “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” position that he is using here: the “Maybe I expected too much of you.”

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this. Maybe I was too optimistic. Maybe I expected too much. I guess I should have realized that few members of a race that has oppressed another race can understand or appreciate the deep groans and passionate yearnings of those that have been oppressed, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent, and determined action.

Look at that. Look at it! “I guess I should have realized?” GodDAMN, sir. I would like to personally apologize for everyone and everything, ever. He does lighten the load slightly by naming a number of White activists, primarily reporters who had given fair or even favorable coverage to the Civil Rights movement, and thanking them for their contribution. Which makes me feel a tiny bit better because I’m writing this. But I’m still sorry, sir. I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox, the ones you were saving.

This next part, though? I got nothing but smiles for this. Because then he goes after the church.

Honestly, I’m going to skip over this, because this is not my area. I have not attended church since around about 1986, and my personal animus for religion would color my analysis of this too much. I want to pick out every single detail where King tells his fellow clergymen that the White church has let him down, and highlight every one, like some kind of manic hybrid of a mother-in-law and Vanna White, finding every single possible fault and holding it up for the audience to observe, while I smile from ear to ear. But I won’t do that. I will just point out that he specifically mentions one of the Eight Clergymen, Reverend Earl Stallings, for his action in allowing Black worshippers into his church without segregating them; this seems to me like a direct response and even challenge to the passive aggressive way the Clergymen never name Dr. King, even though EVERYBODY FUCKING KNOWS THAT’S WHO THEY MEANT. “Outside agitators,” my ass. I still recommend reading the entire letter, including this section; but here I’m just going to post his conclusion, because it’s so damn beautiful.

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson scratched across the pages of history the majestic word of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. For more than two centuries our foreparents labored here without wages; they made cotton king; and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of brutal injustice and shameful humiliation — and yet out of a bottomless vitality our people continue to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

“We were here.” I love that. “Our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America.” Just incredible.

At this point, having made all of his arguments, he’s almost — no, wait, he’s not done. He has one more thing to say.

I must close now. But before closing I am impelled to mention one other point in your statement that troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I don’t believe you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its angry violent dogs literally biting six unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I don’t believe you would so quickly commend the policemen if you would observe their ugly and inhuman treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you would watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you would see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys, if you would observe them, as they did on two occasions, refusing to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I’m sorry that I can’t join you in your praise for the police department. It is true that they have been rather disciplined in their public handling of the demonstrators. In this sense they have been publicly “nonviolent.” But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the last few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.


I wish you had commended the Negro demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer, and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose facing jeering and hostile mobs and the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride the segregated buses, and responded to one who inquired about her tiredness with ungrammatical profundity, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.” They will be young high school and college students, young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’s sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage.

He leaves this until the end. He knows that this is the one part of this letter most likely to anger his readers, because he is here criticizing the police — and even now, 60 years later (And please note that this April will be the 60th anniversary of this whole ordeal), I think we all know what happens to people who criticize the police. But he can’t not say this. He doesn’t have proof, not that the Clergymen or the White readership at large will accept — it is only the word of the arrested activists; nobody was there with a cell phone to record this scene — and you can see his bitter acknowledgement of the superficial truth of what the Clergymen said, that the police have been “rather disciplined in their public handling of the demonstrators.” Though even there, look at the use of the phrase “rather disciplined,” instead of the words “calm” and “restraint” which the Clergymen used. Notice the emphasis on “public,” immediately contradicted by the word “handling,” with its implication of manhandling, echoed in the word “disciplined,” with its sense of harsh control and even physical punishment. But of course, because he is Dr. Martin Luther King, he immediately shows how this example is the precise opposite of the “nonviolent” label the police might claim: because they are pursuing immoral ends. And they are contrasted against the truly nonviolent protestors and pioneers, who use genuine nonviolence to promote moral ends of justice — “the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage.” And since this comes here, at the very end, it has extra weight — I do think the overall length of this letter does make this seem more like a postscript than a strong conclusion; I think the passage I quoted above, at the end of the section about the church, is the real conclusion — but this is one final blow that is impossible to ignore. But of course, the police do not get the last word: that goes to the real heroes of the South, James Meredith, and Rosa Parks, and all of the people who fought alongside Dr. King for freedom. I, for one, would like to thank them all for their courage and their honor and their sacrifice.

Speaking of postscripts — and of too-lengthy writings, which need to finally be brought to a close — let me just end with the saltiest “Yours truly” in the history of letters:

If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

Because in the end, even though the accusation that the civil rights movement and Dr. King were “impatient,” were “unwise and untimely,” was entirely false and absurd — it would be much, much worse if Dr. King were too patient.

And now, Dr. King’s actual “Yours truly,” which I would humbly like to echo myself, to everyone who reads this.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood

Wallingford prepares for MLK Day ceremony

Good Art, Bad Artists

Dusty Leave a comment
Judith Beheading Holofernes, by Caravaggio: a scoundrel and murderer. The artist, that is: Judith was a warrior fighting an oppressor. And a badass.

I had a difficult conversation with a student this week.

Actually, I had several: and yes, I still need to write about how teachers have too many expectations put on us, because I acted this week as a counselor and a confidante, a corrector and a — a conspirator is too strong; but “co-worker” is not strong enough. Ah, well. Even without the perfect alliteration, I still talked to a student about cheating, and to another student about old relationships, and another student about aging family, and another student about old relationships that won’t go away; and I discussed abortion with two different classes, and the dress code with three, and racism with my co-workers…

And then there was this difficult conversation that came up with one of my favorite students.

I start every day with “Has anyone got any questions or concerns or issues you’d like to raise to the class?” And in some of my classes, there are specific students who respond to that invitation every single day: two of them ask about me and how I’m doing, which is very sweet but also invites dishonesty, because I don’t usually want to start the class with “I’m terrible and right at this second talking to all of you people is the last thing on Earth I want to be doing;” so instead I say something more neutral, even though I don’t like lying. But that’s an acceptable lie, because the class isn’t about me, even though students are happy to delay work by discussing me and my life; my job is to move them into the learning, so I do that, and it’s not a big deal.

But I have this one student who always brings something up. It’s usually something philosophical: this young person is extremely bright, extraordinarily curious, and has a deep love of learning, and so all of his free time is spent learning things or discussing things that he has learned; and all of his time in class is spent — well, the same way, really. I have shown him that I’m also interested in philosophy and enjoy talking about topics both random and profound, and so he has grown more comfortable over the school year with talking about whatever happens to be on his mind.

For perspective, he responded to my invitation Friday morning by talking about the deep anxiety he feels when he thinks about death: because, as he said, swaying in his seat and throwing his arms and head about like a wild-eyed symphony conductor, leading the orchestra of his body in playing the song of his opinion (which is the way he always talks when he gets excited about something), he loves life so much, and wants to experience everything, and the human lifespan is just not long enough! And while I was trying to disagree with him, because I am of the opinion that years are actually very, very long, and while there is never enough time to do and see everything we want to do and see, there is so very much time to do and see most things, he explained that in a few months’ time he will have a birthday and at that point he will be older than his older brother: and that comment made some things very clear to me. This is why he knows, in his bones, that life can end, suddenly, without warning, and far too early; and so of course he is anxious about it, and of course it seems to him like it is far too short. Because sometimes it is: and he knows it much better than I.

And that wasn’t the difficult conversation we had.

No, the difficult conversation came on Thursday: when he asked if it is possible to separate the art from the artist, and enjoy content created by a person you could not personally enjoy, or agree with, or even abide. And if it is possible, how could it be done?

That’s a tough conversation.

It was made worse by the fact that we disagreed on at least one prominent example of this issue, the author J.K. Rowling; and then, as we were getting into the weeds with this, I realized that I was speaking only to this one student, while the rest of the class was off on their own; so I had to cut it off. I hate cutting conversations off: particularly when they are important, as this one is, and when they are meaningful to those involved, as this topic was both to me and to this young man. And to be clear, if this had been one of my English 10 classes, which are currently studying argument, or my AP Lang class, which is just about ready to move into argument, then I would have opened the discussion up to the whole class, formalized it into a specific topic with a specific claim, and then solicited points pro and con, and counterarguments to those points, and then spent the whole class period on this if necessary; but it was College Readiness, which never studies argument, and I needed to move on. I tried to write more of my opinions on this for the young man to read, while they were working on their application essays, because part of what I had said had hit him in the feelings; but I didn’t have the time or the mental acuity to make my point clear enough.

I knew I had to write about this for this week’s blog.

(Yes, I know I am again procrastinating the analysis of the rest of the Letter from Birmingham Jail. I’ll get there. But I asked my class if I should write about what I said I was going to, or if I should procrastinate that topic and write about the one that had captured my thoughts; and they all said I should procrastinate. Who am I to dispute with a class full of honors students? At least, when they say something I want to agree with anyway. So. Here goes.)

“Tehemana Has Many Parents” by Paul Gauguin, who abandoned his wife and children to move to Tahiti and make art. Amusingly, I got this image from a New York Times article titled “Is It Time Gauguin Got Canceled?”

So the question is, if something is created by somebody who has something terrible about them personally, can we enjoy the thing that terrible person created? Or is it tainted by the terribleness of the creator? Is it possible to separate entirely the art from the artist, and enjoy content from problematic people? This question is made more difficult, of course — particularly for my students’ generation, though also for all of us older more jaded people, too — by the recent rise of the social standard which says anything associated with, for lack of a better word, evil, is also evil, and taints everyone and everything who touches it. This is the standard by which people have been cancelled online — again, like J.K. Rowling.

And that’s where this gets complicated. Because I am a liberal, and I want to promote liberal ideas like equal rights and privileges for all, and a safe, supportive community for those who are marginalized and discriminated against. And because I am a white man, and I recognize that I am not a good judge of what is hateful and hurtful, as essentially none of the hate in the world is directed at me, and even that which is doesn’t have much impact on me, as white men like me have built a society that privileges and protects us, I know that I should listen to others who say the work is offensive more than I should dismiss those claims based on the useless fact that I was not offended by the work. But I am also an artist, and a teacher, and therefore a passionate believer in the value of art, and in the defiant opposition to what I see as the unforgivable act of censorship. So my liberal side wants to support those who tell me that artists with evil ideas or acts or intentions are harmful; and my artist/teacher/free speech side refuses to even consider the idea of cancelling anyone.

That is, at least in part, what we are talking about: cancel culture. But see, the second I type that, and start to think about opposing the idea of cancelling someone like J.K. Rowling, I start to sound like what I look like: a privileged middle aged white man who has never had to deal with oppression, and is therefore too quick to protect other such privileged white people, and maintain the status quo that continues the oppression and marginalization of people who don’t look or live like me. I start to sound like a Republican, and particularly like the worst of them. I sound like Trump.

Okay. Not really. I’ll never sound like Trump, not least because I can put together a goddamn sentence; much more because I’m not a heartless, shameless narcissist. But still: it’s uncomfortable to side with the bad guys. I want to stay on the side of the angels, as I see them.

But on this? The angels are kinda wrong.

Okay, so let’s lay out the basic premise. If an artist has a bias, it is likely, but not inevitable, for it to show up in their work. This is particularly true of artists from the past, because as time goes on, and society progresses away from the oppressive past, we recognize more about what we do and have done that is wrong — not least because we are finally paying attention to what marginalized and oppressed people have been saying all along. This means that the biases of past artists were not as obvious to them as they are to us, and were also frequently more socially acceptable. Shakespeare, for instance, was atrociously anti-semitic; but that’s partly because Edward I expelled all Jews from England in 1290, and the persecution of Jews continued through Shakespeare’s time: so for Shakespeare, he was likely unaware of how the stereotypes of Jews that he knew were false and offensive. For him, simply having the character of Shylock was very progressive; he wrote a caricature of Jews (And a nasty one — a bloodthirsty moneylender), because that’s all he knew; but then he gave that Jewish caricature an important role in the play — albeit as the antagonist — and a genuinely wonderful speech that argued eloquently for the essential humanity of Jews. And then, of course, he has Shylock saved at the end of The Merchant of Venice by converting to Christianity: so yeah, pretty gross. But my point is that Shakespeare wouldn’t have recognized that as offensive in the same way that we do: he likely would have seen it as open-minded. It’s the same, though on a different scale, with Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird: the work is consciously and intentionally anti-racist, with the portrayal of an African-American man, Tom Robinson, as an innocent victim of the corrupt Alabama courts and jails, who are clearly in the wrong; and with Atticus Finch’s insistence that people be judged by their actions and not their appearance or reputation. But at the same time, there aren’t many better examples of the “White savior complex,” the idea that African-Americans are incapable of fighting for their rights, defending their own against racism and racists, just generally incapable of solving their own problems — and thus in need of rescue by high-minded White heroes. Atticus rides in on his white horse to save the day, and the Black population of Maycomb are immensely grateful and also extremely deferential, standing for him as he passes from the courtroom, and even doing the same for his children when Scout and Jem go to Calpurnia’s church. The book centers the White experience of racism, with the Black characters serving as background. But again, considering the 1960 publication date, and the author’s upbringing in Alabama in the 1930’s, it’s a damn progressive novel — which we can now see is problematic. I hate reading the scene where the people at Calpurnia’s church line up and take off their hats for the kids, and though Atticus’s closing argument is one of my favorite speeches in all American literature, there’s a part there where Atticus offers something of an apologetic for Bob Ewell, the appalling villain of the book:

“…We do know in part what Mr. Ewell did; he did what any God-fearing, persevering, respectable white man would do under the circumstances—he swore out a warrant, no doubt signing it with his left hand, and Tom Robinson now sits before you, having taken the oath with the only good hand he possesses—his right hand.
“And so a quiet, respectable, humble Negro who had the unmitigated temerity to ‘feel sorry’ for a white woman has had to put his word against two white people’s.”

Because yes, that line about “God-fearing, persevering, respectable white man” is sarcastic; but it’s sarcastic because Bob Ewell is none of those things other than a White man, and therefore it’s ironic and even absurd that he is playing the role of such a White man: but that argument relies on the idea that swearing out a warrant to arrest the innocent Black man, who was definitely not raping his daughter, is precisely what an actual God-fearing, persevering, respectable White man (Henceforth a GFPRWM) would in fact do. And that’s gross. As is Atticus’s complimentary description of Tom which focuses on him being “quiet” and “respectful,” rather than, say, dignified and respectable.

So in both of these cases, as in countless others, the bias of the artist is clearly and indelibly represented in the work. And that, I have no disagreement, degrades the work and takes away from any positive impact the work may have. The fact that neither author would necessarily have seen their art as racist or even insulting is beside the fact: we now recognize these works as such — and we’re right, because the authors were blinded by bias and cultural ignorance.

But does that bias, and that degradation it causes, mean that the work should be eliminated from our culture? Forgotten, put aside, replaced with something more current and aware?

Maybe. In some cases. In these two cases, no.

I think that, while the work shows bias and is offensive, these two examples (and others, like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) are also of such high quality and such important influence on our society, that the negative aspects do not entirely negate and disqualify the positive aspects. There are cases (like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which is both deeply racist and also pretty dang stupid as a book, even though Twain’s writing craft is always brilliant) where the negative aspects do override the positive aspects, because the positive aspects are smaller, or the negative aspects are worse; another fine example would probably be Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, interesting for historical study but otherwise definitely worth being consigned to the ash heap of history. (Clarification: I’ve never read Mein Kampf. It may be better than how I am describing it. But I doubt it. And there the author is SO bad that even work of Shakespeare’s quality should probably be discarded. I mean, it’s Hitler.)

But the important point is this: the negative aspects of the author and the work do detract, yes. But the positive aspects of the author and the work should be seen as pushing the needle back the other way, weighing in on the good side and thus counterbalancing some or even all of the negative aspects. Which means that we can’t simply discard every work by every artist we disagree with, even if that would be easy and feel nice. These decisions need to be made, even though they are hard; there isn’t a simple, fast, obvious rule. Each case should be decided individually, on its own merits — and as individual pieces, not merely one decision about the artist’s entire body of work. I would argue that the work, and our society, gains something positive by the simple process of having those conversations, even if they are difficult.

This is where I part ways with many of my fellow liberals who participate in or support what is often called “cancel culture.” The label “cancel culture” is itself biased and offensive; it is a sarcastic label, applied by the right to people on the left, which has come to be taken seriously by those on the right without any sense of humor or proportion; saying that people were cancelled because of their misdeeds and misstatements and bad personal ideologies or habits was originally a joke, though a biting one that was sometimes serious; and it gained initial popularity on “Black Twitter” — though I’m sure that’s a coincidence, and the opposition to cancelling and cancel culture from the right is in no way related. (More detail here.)

Cancelling someone often means a total separation, a total refusal to have anything to do with the person or their work; and I don’t agree with that. As I said, I think artistic work has to be taken on its merits as well as its demerits: and it has to be done on a case-by-case basis. Because if a piece of work does not reflect the creator’s biases or negative ideologies, then the only reason to cancel or refuse to engage with that piece is a moralistic judgment of the person and a sort of self-righteous attempt to remain pure and untainted by association with the offender.

And that’s bullshit.

That is not to say that I support people who have nasty opinions or who are nasty people; and that is where this argument gets even more complicated — with the idea of support. If I subscribe to Andrew Tate’s How To Be A Manly Man videos (Again, I have never actually watched Tate’s content; and I ain’t gonna), then I’m giving him money and adding to his follower count. If I share or promote them, then I am extending his reach and influence. Though, if I subscribe because I want to make fun of him and have specific evidence of what makes him a cripplingly ridiculous shitnozzle, I tend to think that counterbalances the money and the notoriety I add in his favor. Mentioning his name in this here blog is in some ways promoting him, because now people may look him up out of curiosity (Word to the wise: don’t. That is, don’t watch his videos or subscribe to his content. Feel free to read about how Greta Thunberg broke his little man-heart.), but I don’t believe that I am going to gain him followers. I recognize there is some risk of this, because somebody who reads this may look him up out of curiosity, and end up being influenced by his worldview; but I don’t really think that people who read this blog are liable to fall in line with a toxically masculine fucksack like Andrew Tate. I think the same thing about the movement in recent years to never mention the name of a mass-murderer, because some of them have said that they carry out their massacres in order to achieve notoriety; first, I call bullshit on that, because murderous psychopaths are murderous psychopaths, and if you take away one motivation, they’ll find another one; and second, which murderous psychopaths are going to read this blog, or someone’s social media post, and then get a frisson of pleasure at seeing their name? Does that really happen? I don’t buy it.

On the other hand: there is not much lost which is positive if I use general epithets instead of a specific name, like if I mention the school shooter at Sandy Hook without naming him. I don’t lose anything; I guess the phrase “school shooter at Sandy Hook” is longer and a little more unwieldy than his actual name, and one could argue that a murderer who was an attention hound would get just as much pleasure from the notoriety of his actions even if his name weren’t actually included, so naming Sandy Hook takes away the point of leaving out his name (It was Adam Lanza, by the way, and he certainly can’t benefit from me writing his name since he is dead; and the argument that giving him notoriety might inspire other shooters is too unlikely for me to accept); but generally speaking, there isn’t much harm in not writing out a killer’s name. So even if I don’t think it matters, I’m willing to follow the trend there, because it doesn’t cost me anything other than a few extra keystrokes — and considering how many extra words I put in any particular post, well.

You’re a vile one, Dr. Seuss! You have termites in your smile! You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile, Dr. Seuss…

There is, however, a cost in discarding great art, and particularly in cancelling an artist and all of their work entirely. Dr. Seuss did indeed create a number of deeply racist cartoons when he was illustrating for magazines before becoming the world’s most famous (and in my opinion, best) children’s author and illustrator; and those things are genuinely bad, and do taint his legacy because they change our view of him. But Dr. Seuss’s books are an absolute wonder, and a gift to children as well as to the world. It is not worth losing all of Seuss in order to send a message about people being racist in the 1940s. Similarly, while Mahatma Gandhi was a terrible husband and father, the incredible influence he had on the world should not be thrown aside in order to avoid “promoting” bad behavior by talking about a man who committed such bad behavior. I don’t think simply speaking about a person promotes everything they ever said or did or thought: I think promoting those particular bad works, those bad actions, those bad words, specifically, maybe promotes those negative words and deeds and thoughts — though even then, the context matters, and how you speak of the artist’s work or the politician’s words or the historical figure’s personal life, matters.

As a teacher, I also think that presenting the issues of bias and offensive material in art honestly and fully, with an understanding of the context of the artist and the art, and a clear recognition of both positive and negative impacts of the work, helps to detract from the potential negative influence of art produced by nasty people. H.P. Lovecraft, who created the Cthulhu mythos and the genre of cosmic horror, was a disgusting racist, and you can see that bias in the fact that every one of his protagonists is a white-collar white man, like Lovecraft himself; and frequently in his books, the monstrous demon or god is summoned by a group of non-white people who are frequently described as “sub-human” and shit like that. Again, the author’s bias is clear, and present in his work, and it definitely detracts. But I think if I go in as a teacher of fantasy and science fiction, and choose a story that doesn’t have the same problems (Say, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” in which the evil human minions of the evil god are, in fact, not really human — and not because they are not white [they are white New Englanders, just like Lovecraft and the story’s protagonist], but because they are part fish [And another thing that might help to prevent Lovecraft from negatively influencing my students might be pointing out that while he hated non-white people, he actually hated fish even more, which is why so many of his monsters are subaquatic and have fishy characteristics like scales and tentacles and cold blood and slimy skin. He also hated and feared air conditioners. Just sayin’.]), and in teaching it I bring up and show the negative sides of Lovecraft in a negative light for my students — I think that makes the experience overall positive, and creates a positive influence for my students, even though I’d be talking about and teaching something from a racist.

Image by Matthew Childers: who may or may not be a bad person. Or an eldritch monster. Prints available here.

Which is why I teach To Kill a Mockingbird even though it shows the biases of its author; because despite those biases, there is not another work I know of which attacks the same issues with the same brilliant prose and the same ability to captivate teenagers, even 60 years after it was written. When I find a work which does that but without the problems that come with Harper Lee’s book, I will stop teaching To Kill a Mockingbird. But I still won’t tell people not to read it or say its author’s name.

The conversation with my student got difficult because he brought up J.K. Rowling, and also Lewis Carroll. (I’m not going to talk about Lewis Carroll here: because although he is another prime example of my argument, that the vile nature of the artist does not necessarily disqualify the full value of the art, the specifics with Carroll are too toxic and taboo to discuss fairly — because Carroll was a pedophile, which we understandably see as literally the worst kind of person. I understand my student’s point that the fact of Carroll’s attraction to the actual Alice, because it is so closely connected to the work, taints the reading experience for him; I respect that, though I don’t agree. Rowling’s example is better for my overall argument, even though her opinion is also vile.) J.K. Rowling is a TERF: a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. She believes that people who have lived their entire lives with the full biological apparatus of a female person, meaning a womb and ovaries and menstruation — and who have, therefore, suffered from living under an oppressive male patriarchy which commits violence against women without hesitation — are more deserving of the name “woman” than someone who is trans. (Read this for the whole story in detail.) There’s no question for me that this bias is terrible and wrong — because trans women are women, and while the experience of cis women and trans women is different and you can certainly discuss those differences, there’s no good reason at all to argue that one or the other is a “better” or “worse” experience, or more “deserving” of anything — and also that it is a strongly-held part of Rowling’s specific worldview; but I don’t believe that it is a bias which is reflected in the Harry Potter books. Gender, and especially transgenderism, are simply not anything that matters particularly in Harry Potter. The work reflects the author’s biases in that there are more male heroes and villains than female heroes and villains; the Headmaster of Hogwarts is apparently always a man, or an evil woman (Dolores Umbridge) who is fanatically loyal to a man despite the man’s incompetence. But there’s just nothing in there about transgenderism, neither positive nor negative. It’s not a factor. The closest I’ve seen to the issue being present in the works is the idea that Rowling’s prejudices make the books, which are about an outsider who faces constant rejection, but eventually finds a place where he belongs, less wonderful for those, such as people who are trans, who found inspiration in them; and I can see that, and sympathize with those who may feel that way about the books — but that is a subjective response, which may certainly make a person discard the books: but it doesn’t mean that everyone should discard the books.

I do not think we should discard the books. I am a fan and lover and teacher and author of fantasy literature: and in the history of fantasy literature, the most influential and significant author is Tolkien — and the second most influential and significant is Rowling. Her opinions are, to me, nasty and unreasonable; but the books are wonderful, and largely untainted by those disgusting opinions. I recognize the desire to refuse to support Rowling by buying her books, or paying to see movies or other content based on her characters, all of which makes her more money — but I have to call bullshit on the value of a boycott of Rowling: she is the richest goddamn woman in Britain, and one of the richest women in the world. No boycott is ever going to touch her. No boycott, therefore, is ever going to change her opinion. Part of the issue here is her pride, her arrogance, in refusing to back down over this argument; she’s decided this is the hill she will die on, and that’s it. So let her die on it: don’t think that you can starve her out. Now, the article I linked above says that her last two books, written under the pen name Robert Galbraith, are much more connected to the issues of transgenderism and social media; though I haven’t read them, I’ll bet those are much more tainted by Rowling’s biases: and so I’m fine with cancelling those.

But not Harry Potter. Not over this.

There have been a number of commentators on the internet, it seems, who have gone back and looked at Rowling’s masterwork in order to find problems with it; but I am going to call bullshit on those, too. My student, in trying to argue that Rowling was too toxic to accept Harry Potter in our culture, said that the books are anti-Semitic, because Rowling created a race of beings who are short, ugly, deformed, big-nosed, cruel, and deceptive, and who run the banks. No: she gave goblins, who have ALWAYS been all of the descriptors I listed, a place in her magical world. Not a good place, granted, but then goblins have always been evil, as well. Reading that as an intentional negative portrayal of Jewish stereotypes is nonsense. I’ll accept it as a biased depiction of goblins, but I don’t see that as much of a concern. (Also, Griphook, while not really good, shows that the goblins have many positive qualities, and are also deserving of dignity and respect and equal treatment by wizards even if we don’t like them. So for a bigoted screed, it sorta doesn’t hold up.) The next shot was at the House Elves, and how Hermione is seen as ridiculous and stupid for standing up for this enslaved race, while all of the other wizards are entirely fine with slavery; this was described (by my student, again, who probably saw a video explaining this issue, but I have not done the research into it and did not ask for more details during the conversation, so it may have a source I am unaware of.) as supportive of or promoting slavery of a specific race. Probably supposedly an apologetic for slavery, though again, I don’t have the primary source for this. This is also nonsense, because Hermione — who is not alone in her objection to the enslavement of house elves; Harry agrees with her and eventually frees and befriends Dobby — is clearly the one in the right here; the plotline about the house elves is a criticism of the wizard world, and all of the wizards who scoff at Hermione are the ones falling in line with their society’s biases rather than engaging with them and questioning them, even when prompted to by Hermione. And those biases are wrong: even if the house-elves enjoy their situation, as many of them do, they are not seen as in the right, they are not benefiting from their slavery, as actual slavery apologists have argued for centuries. Nobody in Harry Potter says that the elves are better off for being enslaved by the wizards. They, the wizards who support slavery (And let’s note that, other than the elves who work for Hogwarts, the only two family house elves we see directly are both owned by evil families, the Malfoys and the Blacks), are the ones being critiqued, just as Voldemort, who is expressly linked to Nazi ideas and paradigms including racial purity and fascist dictatorships, is certainly not putting forward ideas Rowling agrees with, at least not in the books’ depiction of them. Rowling is certainly not promoting the idea that enslaving the house elves is right: Dobby is one of the best characters in the series, and his death one of the saddest moments in the books.

Frankly, he makes all the other characters look bad.

This, for me, shows the problem with the argument for cancelling someone: people have to go looking for reasons to do it. If the argument for discarding someone entirely stands on its own merits — as I would argue that Hitler’s work as an artist can be discarded summarily and entirely — then you don’t have to go making up shit to make them look bad, or to make the books look bad. But in trying to find something new to say, in a world where a million voices are all shouting at once, people find bad reasons to criticize people who are perfectly deserving of honest criticisms, because the honest criticisms don’t make the people look bad enough for the desired conclusion, that nobody should ever again interact with anything those bad people create. (Or because the people who make up criticisms and pile onto someone who has been singled out for attack online want to say something unique and different to promote their own brand. I’m not in favor of that shit, either. Don’t make your name throwing shit at someone else’s.) And they do the same to the art: Harry Potter is certainly male-dominated, and certainly largely monocultural, owing to the cultural experiences and biases of the author; that’s a fair criticism.

But it ain’t anti-semitic. And it’s not transphobic, either.

What Harry Potter is, is one of the most important and wonderful pieces of art created in the last half century, which has spawned other wonderful pieces of art, like the movies. (Not as good as the books, but then, they never are; the Potter movies are still excellent.) And the value of that art, the fact that in my 23 years of teaching English I have never seen books that inspired readers like Harry Potter did and still does, the fact that these books transformed our culture and gave us a dozen touchstones we can all connect to (Muggles! Dumbledore! Hagrid! He Who Must Not Be Named! Expelliarmus! Avada Kedavra! And on and on and on,), shows that the value of the art far outweighs the failures of the artist.

At least in this case.

The last thing I have to say is to speak up for the value of the right to free speech. It’s become such a political football, tossed around to try to score points in the unending nonsense debates that we use as a way to keep from having to actually understand one another and work together, that it’s maybe hard to consider it honestly for what it is: but this is perhaps the most fundamental right that humans have. Because those are our most fundamental abilities. We are social animals; we are rational animals. We therefore have ideas: and we give life to those ideas by expressing them to others who can understand them. By giving life to our own individual ideas, we give life to ourselves: we give ourselves reason to live. While I don’t think that people whose ideas tend towards removing life, or reason, or freedom, from other people, should be allowed to put their ideas into practice, or to express their ideas without rebuttal, I do believe that they must have their right to try to express their awful thoughts protected; or else we will lose our ability to respond to those terrible ideas. And when only one person is speaking, their words become truth: and that’s when you get genocide. Not as a simple “If A, then B” cause and effect; but limiting freedom of thought and freedom of communication does lead pretty directly to oppressive regimes, which are the ones who actually destroy people and their lives. And there is no communication, no speech and expression, more at risk than art: because so much of our society believes we can always do without it. We can always buy a nice poster instead, of a kitten, maybe. We can always read the poem in a Hallmark card, if we can’t read the poem about oppression. People don’t like those troubling art works: and artists are not and have never been good advocates for themselves (ourselves) or for their work. But when we lose the art, the rest of our speech is not far behind: and with the loss of free speech goes everything else we should care about.

Art is precious. Art is what defines us as a species, along with truth. Art that speaks the truth, even if that truth is mixed with lies and false beliefs, is something we desperately need, always, and often. It can’t be separated from the artist, and it shouldn’t be; we should grapple with it, and with the flawed human who created it, even more closely when it can serve as a way to learn how to be better than we are.

That’s the best we can do.

Pablo Picasso was an arrogant, womanizing son of a bitch. Who created Guernica.

The Greatest Words

Dusty 1 Comment

I just realized that I’ve never written about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This weekend seems the right time to fill that gap.

I haven’t written about the man for obvious reasons: I am not qualified to do it. I don’t know enough about his legacy or his impact on the US or on the fight for civil rights; I know what everybody else knows, and not much more. I don’t know enough of his philosophy or his writing to speak informatively and usefully about either; I know something, but not enough — and there are books out there about all of this, so I have not enough to add to that.

But there is one thing I can write about (and therefore should: because all that any of us can do is add our own unique perspectives on things to the conversation. Even if my insights are not the greatest insights, still they are mine; bringing them up can help inform or influence other people, or inform or influence the conversation, in positive ways. If we want people to stop talking about nonsense like which kind of stove we are allowed to use, then we need to make an effort to shift the conversation away from nonsense, and onto things that matter more.): and that is Dr. King’s rhetoric. (I should maybe make this a podcast episode. I don’t know if I’m ever going to continue my podcast, or if I should, but if I do, this would be a good subject.)

I don’t know that I studied his rhetoric very carefully in high school. I remember hearing the “I Have a Dream” speech. I remember that my high school choir sang what our director told us was Dr. King’s favorite spiritual, “Precious Lord.” (Can’t do it better than Mahalia Jackson.) I remember being shocked when I heard that the state where I currently live — which thought never not once crossed my mind, that I would eventually become a goddamn high school teacher in Arizona — was the only one in the country not to recognize Dr. King’s birthday as a national holiday. (Can’t do it better than Public Enemy.) I mean, who would refuse a Monday off? And who wouldn’t want to celebrate the life and work of Dr. King? But I don’t remember reading “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Not until I got to Arizona, and found out it was part of the standard curriculum at my school, and also that an excerpt from it was in the packet on syntax as a rhetorical strategy which I got as part of my training to become an AP English teacher.

So now I’ve been teaching the Letter from Birmingham Jail as part of two of my classes, Sophomore English, when we study argument, and AP Language, when we study rhetoric — specifically, syntax, the arrangement of words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs, and how that arrangement affects meaning. And as with everything I teach, the more I teach it, the more I learn about it: and in the case of Dr. King’s essay, the more I grow to revere the man who was capable of writing it.

So let me explain why.

First: context. This is the information I give to my students when we study the piece. There is some historical information; then two pieces written by white clergymen in Birmingham in the 1960s: “An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense,” which I include because the open letter written by the eight clergymen references it — and because it is a fascinating piece — and then the Public Statement by Eight Alabama Clergymen, which was the precipitating event for Dr. King’s masterwork, as the background explains. Remember that, although the Public Statement doesn’t name Dr. King, he is the target of it: he is that “outside agitator” they mention.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION FOR “LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL” BY THE REVEREND DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, 50 Years Later

APR 16, 2013

On its 50th anniversary, take a look back at a seminal text On April 12, King and nearly 50 other protestors and civil rights leaders (including Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth) had been arrested after leading a Good Friday demonstration as part of the Birmingham Campaign, designed to bring national attention to the brutal, racist treatment suffered by blacks in one of the most segregated cities in America—Birmingham, Alabama. For months, an organized boycott of the city’s white-owned-and-operated businesses had failed to achieve any substantive results, leaving King and others convinced they had no other options but more direct actions, ignoring a recently passed ordinance that prohibited public gathering without an official permit. For King, this arrest—his 13th—would become one of the most important of his career. Thrown into solitary confinement, King was initially denied access to his lawyers or allowed to contact his wife, until President John F. Kennedy was urged to intervene on his behalf. As previously agreed upon, King was not immediately bailed out of jail by his supporters, having instead agreed to a longer stay in jail to draw additional attention to the plight of black Americans.

Shortly after King’s arrest, a friend smuggled in a copy of an April 12 Birmingham newspaper which included an open letter, written by eight local Christian and Jewish religious leaders, which criticized both the demonstrations and King himself, whom they considered an outside agitator. Isolated in his cell, King began working on a response. Without notes or research materials, King drafted an impassioned defense of his use of nonviolent, but direct, actions. Over the course of the letter’s 7,000 words, he turned the criticism back upon both the nation’s religious leaders and more moderate-minded white Americans, castigating them for sitting passively on the sidelines while King and others risked everything agitating for change. King drew inspiration for his words from a long line of religious and political philosophers, quoting everyone from St. Augustine and Socrates to Thomas Jefferson and then-Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren, who had overseen the Supreme Court’s landmark civil rights ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. For those, including the Birmingham religious leaders, who urged caution and remained convinced that time would solve the country’s racial issues, King reminded them of Warren’s own words on the need for desegregation, “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” And for those who thought the Atlanta-based King had no right to interfere with issues in Alabama, King argued, in one of his most famous phrases, that he could not sit “idly by in Atlanta” because “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Without writing papers, King initially began by jotting down notes in the margin of the newspaper itself, before writing out portions of the work on scraps of paper he gave his attorneys, allowing a King ally, Wyatt Walker, to begin compiling the letter, which eventually ran to 21 double-spaced, typed pages. Curiously, King never sent a copy to any of the eight Birmingham clergy who he had “responded” to, leaving many to believe that he had intended it to have a much broader, national, audience all along.

King was finally released from jail on April 20, four days after penning the letter. Despite the harsh treatment he and his fellow protestors had received, King’s work in Birmingham continued. Just two weeks later, more than 1,000 schoolchildren took part in the famed “Children’s Crusade,” skipping school to march through the city streets advocating for integration and racial equality. Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor, who King had repeatedly criticized in his letter for his harsh treatment, ordered fire hoses and police dogs be turned on the young protestors; more than 600 of them were jailed on the first day alone. The brutal and cruel police tactics on display in Alabama were broadcast on televisions around the world, horrifying many Americans. With Birmingham in chaos and businesses shuttered, local officials were forced to meet with King and agree to some, but not all, of his demands. On June 11, with the horrific events in Birmingham still seared on the American consciousness, and following Governor George Wallace’s refusal to integrate the University of Alabama until the arrival of the U.S. National Guard, President Kennedy addressed the nation, announcing his plans to present sweeping civil rights legislation to the U.S. Congress. Kennedy’s announcement, however, did little to quell the unrest in Birmingham and on September 15, 1963, a Ku Klux Klan bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church left four young African-American girls dead.

By this time, King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail had begun to appear in publications across the country. Months earlier, Harvey Shapiro, an editor at The New York Times, had urged King to use his frequent jailing as an opportunity to write a longer defense of his use of nonviolent tactics, and though King did so, The New York Times chose not to publish it. Others did, including the Atlantic Monthly and The Christian Century, one of the most prominent Protestant magazines in the nation. In the weeks leading up to the March on Washington, King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference used the letter as part of its fundraising efforts, and King himself used it as a basis for a book, “Why We Can’t Wait,” which looked back upon the successes and failures of the Birmingham Campaign. The book was released in July 1964, the same month that the landmark Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson.

Today, 50 years after it was written, King’s powerful message continues to resonate around the world–the letter is part of many American school curriculums, has been included in more than 50 published anthologies and has been translated into more than 40 languages. In April 2013, a group of Protestant clergy released an official—albeit considerably delayed—response to King’s letter. Published in The Christian Century, one of the first publications to carry King’s own words, the letter continues King’s call to religious leaders around the world to intervene in matters of racial, social and economic justice.

An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense

In these times of tremendous tensions, and change in cherished patterns of life in our beloved Southland, it is essential that men who occupy places of responsibility and leadership shall speak concerning their honest convictions.

We the undersigned clergymen have been chosen to carry heavy responsibility in our religious groups. We speak in a spirit of humility, and only for ourselves. We do not pretend to know all the answers, for the issues are not simple. Nevertheless, we believe our people expect and deserve leadership from us, and we speak with firm conviction for we do know the ultimate spirit in which all problems of human relations must be solved.

It is clear that a series of court decisions will soon bring about desegregation of certain schools and colleges in Alabama. Many sincere people oppose this change and are deeply troubled by it. As southerners, we understand this. We nevertheless feel that defiance is neither the right answer nor the solution. And we feel that inflammatory and rebellious statements can lead only to violence, discord, confusion, and disgrace for our beloved state.

We therefore affirm, and commend to our people:
1. That hatred and violence have no sanction in our religious and political traditions.
2. That there may be disagreement concerning laws and social change without advocating defiance, anarchy, and subversion.
3. That laws may be tested in courts or changed by legislatures, but not ignored by whims of individuals.
4. That constitutions may be amended or judges impeached by proper action, but our American way of life depends upon obedience to the decisions of courts of competent jurisdiction in the meantime.
5. That no person’s freedom is safe unless every person’s freedom is equally protected.
6. That freedom of speech must at all costs be preserved and exercised without fear of recrimination or harassment.
7. That every human being is created in the image of God and is entitled to respect as a fellow human being with all basic rights, privileges, and responsibilities which belong to humanity.

We respectfully urge those who strongly oppose desegregation to pursue their convictions in the courts, and in the meantime peacefully to abide by the decisions of those same courts. We recognize that our problems cannot be solved in our strength or on the basis of human wisdom alone. The situation that confronts us calls for earnest prayer, for clear thought, for understanding love, and For courageous action. Thus we call on all people of goodwill to join us in seeking divine guidance as we make our appeal for law and order and common sense.

PUBLIC STATEMENT BY EIGHT ALABAMA CLERGYMEN

April 12, 1963

We the undersigned clergymen are among those who, in January, issued “An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense,” in dealing with racial problems in Alabama. We expressed understanding that honest convictions in racial matters could properly be pursued in the courts, but urged that decisions of those courts should in the meantime be peacefully obeyed.

Since that time there had been some evidence of increased forbearance and a willingness to face facts. Responsible citizens have undertaken to work on various problems which cause racial friction and unrest. In Birmingham, recent public events have given indication that we all have opportunity for a new constructive and realistic approach to racial problems.

However, we are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens, directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.

We agree rather with certain local Negro leadership which has called for honest and open negotiation of racial issues in our area. And we believe this kind of facing of issues can best be accomplished by citizens of our own metropolitan area, white and Negro, meeting with their knowledge and experience of the local situation. All of us need to face that responsibility and find proper channels for its accomplishment.

Just as we formerly pointed out that “hatred and violence have no sanction in our religious and political traditions,” we also point out that such actions as incite to hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be, have not contributed to the resolution of our local problems. We do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.

We commend the community as a whole, and the local news media and law enforcement in particular, on the calm manner in which these demonstrations have been handled. We urge the public to continue to show restraint should the demonstrations continue, and the law enforcement official to remain calm and continue to protect our city from violence.

We further strongly urge our own Negro community to withdraw support from these demonstrations, and to unite locally in working peacefully for a better Birmingham. When rights are consistently denied, a cause should be pressed in the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets. We appeal to both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense.

C. C. J. Carpenter, D.D., LL.D. Bishop of Alabama

Joseph A. Durick, D.D., Auxiliary Bishop, Diocese of Mobile, Birmingham

Rabbi Hilton L. Grafman, Temple Emanu-El, Birmingham, Alabama

Bishop Paul Hardin, Bishop of the Alabama-West Florida Conference

Bishop Nolan B. Harmon, Bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the Methodist Church

George M. Murray, D.D., LL.D., Bishop Coadjutor, Episcopal Diocese of Alabama

Edward V. Ramage, Moderator, Synod of the Alabama Presbyterian Church in the United States

Earl Stallings, Pastor, First Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama

So that’s why Dr. King wrote the letter. And I appreciate the irritation that made him do it — even though, as was described above, he had been looking for an opportunity to explain his understanding of his actions more fully; still, the decision to do this while he was in jail was surely due to his irritation at this particular statement by these particular men, because this would have been much easier to do when he was at his home, in his office, where he was comfortable writing. (Though he was probably able to focus better while he was in jail; similar to Malcolm X, who was able to teach himself to read and write and think while in prison because he had nothing else to do — I think I’ve said before that boredom can be useful) The fact that he was capable of producing this incredible work while in a jail cell says, better than any words I could come up with, how amazing Dr. King was.

Let me show you.

(I’m not going through the whole letter: it’s almost 20 pages long. I struggle with the decision to read the whole thing in class; I know the students completely lose focus before the end of it, but it’s just so damn good, I hate to stop reading it before the finish. Generally I read the whole thing and then only teach to a certain point: I’ll cover the same section now. And put a link to the whole letter, if anyone wants to read that. It is all good.)

Letter From Birmingham Jail

Here’s how he starts:

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

See why I say he was driven to write this because of irritation? Look at the subtle shade he throws here: starting with the matter-of-fact description of coming across the Public Statement while he happened to be in jail, which conflicts with the address to My Dear Fellow Clergymen, the contrast showing the difference between them, that though they are all clergymen, only one of them is in jail; then the not-very-subtle flex about how he seldom answers criticism: because of course he gets more criticism than these men could even dream of, and theirs is hardly the worst or the most significant of Dr. King’s critiques; he is a national figure, after all. And then the comment about his secretaries, plural, who would not have time to do constructive work — clearly putting this whole exchange into the realm of non-constructive work, along with showing how much more busy and important Dr. King is, with his large staff and his extensive constructive correspondence: all of which has come to a halt because he is currently confined in jail. So, hey, why not write back to these gentlemen? Who, he feels (but does not know, because it is not clear that they are, based on the two statements essentially in support of segregation and racism) are sincere men of goodwill? So he will try to show that he can be “patient and reasonable,” a direct reply to their criticism which he quoted, calling his actions “unwise and untimely.” And what follows is a perfectly crafted, 7,000-word shellacking of these jerks, their state, their government, their churches, their very souls, published only a week after their shallow little gripe.

So he begins:

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

Notice the polite way he pretends that their argument is not their thought, but only that they were influenced by others who held the view that he is an outsider. Notice also how he quotes that phrase, in order to refuse it legitimacy; these aren’t his words, these are the words that were thrown at him, and which these good men have unfortunately repeated. Why is here, in Birmingham? (And though he doesn’t say it, the corollary “Why am I in your jail?” echoes through this entire section, leaving them to answer that question themselves) Because he was invited here by members of his larger organization; the very same people they addressed in their own letter to the people of Birmingham, the “Negro community” and its leadership.

And that’s enough reason, of course. Hard to call someone an outsider when they were invited by insiders. And let’s note, as Dr. King points out, that his organization is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Which is in the next state. It’s 147 miles away. Google Maps says the drive would take about two hours. Boston to NYC is 211 miles. San Francisco to LA (both in the same state) is 383.

But Dr. King doesn’t stop there: having made a reasonable response to the accusation — which is lame, anyway; calling Dr. King an outsider in order to delegitimize his argument is a logical fallacy called Poisoning the Well; the source of the argument is bad, so the argument must be bad, which of course doesn’t follow, because the dumbest person in the world can say the smartest thing — he makes a second rebuttal to the claim, one that is more directed at his specific opponents here:

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

This is a more abstract argument, because the first is very plain and straightforward; this one uses a religious allusion to make an analogy. It’s a damn fine religious allusion — and actually, it’s two, because one of the eight clergymen who signed the Public Statement was a rabbi, so first he refers to the Jewish prophets of the Old Testament, and then he refers to the Apostle Paul, for the seven Christian ministers who signed the statement: but in both cases, he equates himself with the carriers of the Gospel, those spreading the word of God: which would make those who oppose him the Babylonians, or the Romans: basically the enemies of God. Neither is a good association for a clergyman to accept. But if you accept that there is injustice in Birmingham, then his intent to oppose the injustice has to be seen as a good thing, which obviously has to put him in line with the will of God. What clergyman could oppose the “gospel of freedom?”

This should be enough to shut them up — and it might have been; I don’t know how much the eight clergymen shrunk when they read Dr. King’s letter. (Imagine that, though. If a nationally recognized figure wrote directly to you. To tell you why you’re wrong. For almost 20 pages.) But he’s STILL not done. Think about that. Think about how hard it is to come up with one good response to an argument that somebody makes to you. Think how much we all struggle in forming actual, reasonable replies, particularly to unreasonable people, who do stupid things like call us carpetbaggers, which is the association the Birmingham clergymen were probably trying to make in calling Dr. King an “outside agitator.” Just one clapback is really all we can ask of ourselves. But Dr. King? He has three.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

I mean, “moreover” is just kinda mean. How do you argue with people who talk like that, and do it right? “I am cognizant” implies both that you are not, and that you should be. And then Dr. King shows that he was one of the greatest wordsmiths since Abraham Lincoln: he creates not one, not two, but three different phrases that became legendary: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

They’re all beautiful phrases: two of them perfect examples of parallel structure, putting similar phrases next to each other in order to create echoes and emphasis through repetition, combined with discernible differences made clearer by the juxtaposition; and in between a beautiful and powerful metaphor that makes clear an abstract but inspiring idea of humanity, a vast network of mutuality. It’s amazing writing. And while King’s opponents are reeling from that — again, imagine if a national figure, an international figure to be if he wasn’t yet (this was all prior to the March on Washington, but King was certainly already extremely well known; let me point out that the goddamn president of the United States intervened on King’s behalf to get him access to his attorneys while he was in jail) — he closes down the argument, by pointing out that we are all Americans, and the idea of an “outside agitator” from the same country is narrow, provincial thinking (read: stupid) that just doesn’t make any sense.

All right: having trashed the eight clergymen’s first claim, King moves on to his main argument: that his actions were neither “unwise” nor “untimely.” He introduces his argument here:

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

Look at how polite he is: he is disappointed that they failed to recognize the real problem, which is the root cause of the demonstrations rather than the demonstrations themselves — but he doesn’t say he’s disappointed in the clergymen; it’s only their statement that “fails.” He is sure that none of those good, sincere men would be satisfied with “the superficial kind of social analysis” that doesn’t focus on root causes. He knows, as they know, as we all know, that they are indeed focused only on the superficial symptoms of the problem rather than the root causes; their entire argument is that everyone should calm down, not that anyone should try to solve the problem. And then he imitates their passive voice, their passive-aggressive tone, by stating “it is unfortunate” that bad things are happening — but it’s much worse (sorry, “even more unfortunate”) that the white people caused those bad things. Isn’t it?

Of course it is.

So then King gives the description of the four steps of a nonviolent campaign: “collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action.” And then slowly, painstakingly, he goes through all of these steps in the letter. He refers to the city’s history of not only segregation but also violence — which his opponents have to stipulate, since that same violence was the root cause of their statements, and their first statement clearly asks the white people of Birmingham to stop causing problems and let the issues be worked out by the courts. (And please note that all of this exchange happened before the Children’s Crusade, which led to the famous and terrible footage of the Birmingham police using firehoses and police dogs to attack children peacefully protesting, and also before the KKK bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church which murdered four young girls. So yes, I think we can fucking well stipulate that Birmingham was a violent and racist place.) He then explains how the local community tried to negotiate, and the white people in Birmingham were the reason the negotiations failed. He talks about their attempts at self purification, and then he talks about their decision to move to direct action.

Then he talks about how the delayed their direct action. For the mayoral election. Which, one would think, would be a perfect opportunity for an agitator — perhaps a secret Communist, as King was absurdly accused of being several times — to cause as much disruption as possible, and have a large impact on the community. But they didn’t do that. And then when there was a runoff — even though one of the candidates in the runoff was Eugene “Bull” Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety who would later order the firehoses turned on children — they delayed their protest march again.

What were those guys saying about “unwise and untimely?”

Right.

He ends this portion of the argument following the same pattern he established in the beginning, with the rebuttal of the “outside agitator” accusation: first a straightforward, concrete refutation based on facts (“I was invited here,” in that first instance), and then he expands the discussion into larger, more abstract, but also more important ideas. (“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”) In this case he says this:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

I love this because he points out the hypocrisy of the White community in Birmingham asking for peaceful negotiations, and thus turns the argument around on them. It’s like he’s saying, “Negotiation? We would love to negotiate! Let’s negotiate!” And by so doing he calls their bluff, because of course, it is not the Black community that refused to talk about these issues. And then he gives us this amazing, dry, sarcastic discussion of “tension,” which I love because I love knowing that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a smartass: “I confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.'” The idea that he is confessing to something that should be plainly, easily, universally true: because what the hell is scary about the word “tension?” In fact, “tension” is necessary and important for change; and he then refers to Socrates, equating himself to the father of philosophy, the man famously convicted wrongly by his city’s establishment, and executed when he had committed no real crime other than creating “tension.” And his magnificent gift with words shows in the ultimate goal of that creation of tension: “the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.” Beautiful. And, what, are you saying you would be against that? You wouldn’t want that? Because you’re afraid of tension?

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Not satisfied with simply having shown that the protestors were not impatient or “untimely” in their marching, King takes this chance to explain to everyone everywhere why the civil rights movement isn’t willing to wait. And this is where my AP Lang class picks up this thread. First, King says this:

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

Here King is not speaking to the clergymen. The language is too aggressive: oppressor and oppressed, while absolutely the accurate terms here, are not words that will appeal to the nice churchmen who want peace and quiet. Here King is speaking to everyone who has said the civil rights movement is pushing too hard, and going too fast; and the man is tired of talking about this. And again, he makes the same point successfully, several times, which just shows the pathetic weakness of the initial claim, that the civil rights movement is going too fast and should instead just wait for things to work out. His first statement makes an entirely valid point: oppressors do not give away power, they do not simply let people go. Which makes the claim ridiculous, because why wait for something that will never happen on its own? Then his second comment, starting with “Frankly,” in which you can hear his irritation with this whole discussion, points out that people who stand to lose power are not the ones who should get to decide when the oppressed should demand their freedom. Then he raises this to an eternal, universal experience that every oppressed African-American in the US has had to deal with, has been pierced by the ring of, this word “Wait.” And he refers to Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied,” the Chief Justice’s own poetic truism.

That’s three reasons why “Wait” is a stupid argument to apply to the civil rights movement. But then, King does this:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

He puts a number on it, to show that people have waited long enough for justice: 340 years, which hearkens back to the founding of the European colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth: in other words, the very beginning of what the US claims as its history as a nation. It has always been like this here. He makes a comparison between countries the US considers both less developed, and less dedicated to the ideals of freedom and equality, the nations in the “Third World” that were at this time throwing off their colonizers and beginning to build new nations, with varying degrees of success — but all with a faster pace of change than the US, for all of our vaunted modern innovative, creative spirit and love of freedom, and he uses a fantastic metaphor to show how sad and simple this all is, that African-Americans have to fight this hard just to get a goddamn cup of goddamn coffee (Cusswords added for emphasis, because Dr. King was much too polite to say it himself).

And then Dr. King writes what may be the best sentence I’ve ever read.

Do you see that? It’s all one sentence, from after “Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” up until he says, “then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” He uses full sentences inside it, when he quotes his son asking why white people are so mean; but it’s still only one sentence. 316 words.

And it’s unbelievable: everything in it, from the way he describes the different experiences of African-Americans in the US, to the way he starts with the most active and deadliest threats, and then ends with the most personally and emotionally troubling and dehumanizing, going through all the different ways one is affected, in every single aspect of one’s life, through all of one’s identities, not only as a civil rights leader and a member of an oppressed people, but also as a husband, as a father, and as a man; everything he does in this sentence is amazing. The way he uses the second person “you” to include his — mostly White — audience, so that maybe the White people can understand some of what King and every other African-American understands, and uses “father,” “mother,” “brother,” “sister,” and every other family relationship to show that everyone, every human, are our brothers and sisters, our family. The way he names lynching and murder, and equates violent mobs with policemen, as both groups have savagely brutalized African-Americans in this country. The way he appeals to parents by including not one but two heartbreaking scenes with a father having to explain to his children why they must suffer in an oppressive and unjust society. The incredible metaphor he uses, about the people smothering in an airtight cage of poverty, in the midst of an affluent society: because the airtight cage is a paradox, a cage is only bars, so it should not be able to smother anyone; just as poverty should not be suffocating people in this society: and it in the midst of this society, because affluent people are all around those who are suffering and dying, are watching them die, and doing nothing about it. The cage itself makes this seem like a zoo: an exhibition put on for the amusement of the crowd. The poetic way he uses phrases like “your tongue twisted and your speech stammering,” and then throws the harsh, crude word “n*gger” at us as it has been thrown at him, casually, frequently, like it’s his first name.

The way this periodic sentence — a term for a sentence that has the main clause, the most important subject and verb, closer to the end than the beginning of the sentence — ends with the final statement, “then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” Making the audience wait, through 316 words, for that final statement of the sentence’s purpose. Ending with the word “wait,” that same word that set all of this off. With the incredible understatement of “we find it difficult to wait,” through lynching, through drowning, through beating, through suffocating, through the tears of children, through one’s own dehumanization: it would indeed be difficult. But it is cause and effect, if-then: when we have gone through what King and other African-Americans have gone through in this country, then we will understand. And the corollary, of course, that until we have gone through it, we cannot understand it: but at least now we have a description of it.

It’s the most amazing single sentence I know. It’s one of the best arguments I’ve ever read, in a piece that continues after this to build up his argument for another 30 paragraphs, point by point explaining why the actions of the protestors in Birmingham, and King’s movement’s actions more generally, are right and good, and should get the support that the White community denies them. I have never been capable of teaching it fully to my students: I can’t make them understand how remarkable King’s achievement is in this essay, because it’s so far beyond their usual argument that it’s like another language. I doubt I’ve done it justice here today; but I felt like I had to try.

Happy Birthday, sir. And thank you for all that you gave this society.

Home | Martin Luther King Jr: An extraordinary life

Really Really

Dusty 3 Comments

Last week I wrote that the education system, for all of its flaws and issues, is necessary.

But is it really?

Really really?

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I think that I am not sure. I want to say, without the shadow of a doubt, that it is: because education is necessary (That, I am sure of), and because there are so many people in the world who need education, there’s no way to tear down the structure we have now and build a new one — or even live without one entirely, and let people learn on their own — without losing a whole generation in the transition.

But that seems to me like an extraordinary statement: that we would lose a generation. We wouldn’t: they’d still be there, still be alive. I mean that they would lose their opportunity to gain the same education that every generation has had for the last 150 years in this country, and would lose, therefore, their ability to thrive in this culture and in this economy. But look at how much of that statement relies on the assumption that everyone should be like me, should be educated like me, that everyone should be like everyone else. I assume that the generation who would not get the current education from the system would suffer, as I know people suffer who do not succeed in education: they have to work harder, and they earn less, and they miss out on opportunities to experience life more fully: they don’t appreciate art, they are less aware of the wider world and what it has to offer, and are therefore more likely to be xenophobic and afraid of change and new experiences and ideas. But I also know that all of those things can be gained on one’s own, with travel and experience and exposure to other cultures and ideas and people.

When I say we would lose a generation, I mean that we would be saddled with people who wouldn’t be as productive, who would struggle more and need more help, and who would tend to resist and slow down our forward progress, and would certainly not contribute to it. We’d lose a generation of more of — us. People like us, like you and me. That’s what I imagine would happen if we stopped educating people. I assume they would gain the basic skills, from their parents and from educational games and Sesame Street and whatnot; and then I assume they would know little else other than entertainment, at least until they learned things the hard way, through experience, through life.

But.

That’s a lot of assumptions. And a whole lot of what I can’t describe as other than elitist bullshit. Because the core argument there is, without the system that made me, there would be people who would not be like me. Which assumes that I am how people should be. That being unlike me would be bad.

I don’t like it. I don’t like thinking that way, that my assumption of the necessity of education is just that, an assumption, and one based on elitism. Don’t get me wrong: there is evidence for it. Scads of evidence. Oodles. There are countless statistics which show the benefits of education:

Though now that I have looked at the Google search results, I see that the only statistics they show for “benefits of education,” other than benefits for certain kinds of education within the system such as the benefits of arts education or of inclusive education for students with disabilities, is exactly that one: that more education leads to more money. Which is not the most interesting argument for me, because I do not believe that life revolves around either career, or money; so using that as the sole focus for a discussion of education is obnoxious: I want to know what benefits there are, in addition to income, for the people who go through the school system. There are other benefits: primarily that more educated people have better health, more stability, and commit less crime. Here, this infographic lists several of them. (I was not trying to make a point about the total focus of education on earning money, but I guess that point is unavoidable, isn’t it? Hold onto that for a moment. Let me make this point, which is broader.)

That’s what I was talking about, that there are a number of benefits of education. (Here, this article from UMass [Woo! Home state comin’ through! Wait — what the heck is “UMass Global?] lays out the facts I have seen referenced before, with links to further resources to support the asserted health benefits associated with highly educated people, which are: 1. They’re likely to live longer, 2. They probably won’t experience as much economic or occupational stress, 3. They’re less likely to smoke, 4. They’re less likely to experience common illnesses, 5. They have fewer reported cases of mental health struggles, 6. They tend to eat better and maintain regular exercise habits, and 7. They’re more likely to have health insurance. I presume all the other benefits in the infographic are also supported by studies and statistics.) I have used these arguments in the past, in my own head if nowhere else (And 99% of the arguments I have in life are only in my own head. Since I teach argument, write arguments, and argue online on both Twitter and Facebook, that should give you an idea of how much of my usual headspace is filled with argument. [Jesus, I need to relax. No wonder my blood pressure has been going up.]), and I have heard them and seen them used many times to support the argument for education.

But here’s the thing. And again, I hate this — as you can tell by my obvious reluctance to actually make this point, and most of my arguments with myself over the past week have been between the part of me that wants to face this and the part that wants to hide from it — but I do believe that honesty is not only the best policy, it is the foundation of all other communication: so I need to say it.

None of those benefits are necessarily caused by education. All of them are only correlated. There is no reason, in most cases, to assume that the education itself caused the benefit.

People with more education earn more money in our society, yes. (Though of course, there are exceptions.) But is that because the education — the actual knowledge, not simply the achievement of a degree or certification– is necessary to earn the money? In some cases, most obviously doctors and lawyers and scientists and the like, the answer is emphatically yes, of course; but in many, many cases, the reason the higher income is correlated with the higher educational attainment is because those jobs insist on those degrees.

And I hope we all know that a degree is not necessarily because of actual education. I would make more as a college professor than I do as a high school teacher (Though really, not much more, unless I reached the most elite heights), and even though I guarantee that I could teach a college course better than many current professors, I can’t have that job because I don’t have the degree for it. I have the knowledge and skills and experience; and in my case, since continuing education is a requirement for recertification as a teacher, I have something like two to three times the post-graduate credits for a Master’s degree; but I don’t actually have the degree, so I can’t have the job.

For most of the rest, the correlation is far more connected to two other factors, which are certainly causative in our society: class, and race. Wealthier people have better health outcomes; and whiter people have better health outcomes. Primarily because health in this country costs money, and secondarily because the system is racist. Wealthier people commit less crime; whiter people commit less crime (Though that one is fraught for a bunch of reasons, because people of color are overpoliced and underpoliced simultaneously, so are more likely to be caught, arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for crime; in actuality, in this country, whiter people do commit more crime because all racial groups commit crime at about the same rates, and there are still more white people in this country than any other racial group. Most importantly, all crime rates are heavily dependent on socioeconomic factors, and those favor white people in the US — so again, the correlation is not causation in this instance. But to my point, it still ain’t because of education.) Wealthier people (Also older people) have greater civic and political engagement; whiter people have greater civic and political engagement.

Both of these factors, socioeconomic class and race, are also closely connected to — and causative of — educational attainment. Wealthier people have more education, because they can afford it and because they have more opportunity to pursue it: they don’t need after school jobs, or just to drop out and work; they don’t have to commute (or if they do, it’s in comfort); they don’t have to struggle for resources and materials like books and computers and access to libraries and so on. If they have kids (Statistically less often when young) while they are seeking education, they have greater access to childcare; ditto for providing care to older or disabled family members. People get more education when it’s easier to get, and when you feel rewarded for your successes in it, so this feedback loop is self-amplifying. White people — and again, this is largely because white people in this country are more often wealthier people — have all the same advantages. So this is mainly why educational attainment and these positive outcomes are correlated: because both are influenced causatively by class, and by race.

And then, as I noted briefly above, I have to also point out that many of the benefits overall are benefits economically: notice the “social benefits” in the infographic include “Gains in labour productivity.” And that whole third arrow section is about how all of society benefits when all of us make more stuff and make more money. I love the one one there about how society saves costs when individual citizens commit less crime and have better health. Maybe we should make motivational posters based on that. “Don’t do drugs, kids, or else you’ll become a drain on society’s resources.” So for all of those, the issue here is, there may be benefits of greater education — but for whom? In this society, where 90% of the wealth is held by 10% of the people, and almost all the gains in the past 50 years have gone specifically to that same 10% of the people, almost all the benefits correlated with education do not accrue to those who go through the system.

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So. That’s the truth. The education system creates some positive outcomes directly: I do think that greater civic engagement is good for the people who involve themselves, and I certainly think that greater awareness and understanding of the system and how it works and what is going on helps to create that engagement. But I think we can clearly see from Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that strong civic engagement does not come only from people who are the product of the educational system. And there are, as I said, a number of professions which require education; and those are important both for society and for individuals who wish to pursue them, and so those opportunities coming from education are good.

But that’s where it starts to break down for me, again: because do people who study law, and medicine, and science, really need to go through the education system? For most of them, it works, and so it isn’t an obstacle to positive outcomes; but is it necessary? Are there people who would make excellent doctors even without education? What about lawyers?

That’s not the right question, though: of course people need education to be able to pursue those occupations. The question is: do people need to be educated by a system? Can they be self-taught, and successful?

And the answer is: Malcolm X. Who had an 8th grade education. Who taught himself in prison. And who then could do this. (That last one is an hour-long speech he gave. Without a teleprompter. Compare it to any politician you can think of, both in terms of content and presentation.)

He’s not the only example, of course. There are countless others, countless because we don’t usually keep track of people who are well-educated outside of the formal system, unless they do something we laud, such as earn billions of dollars or something similar. But Malcolm X was so incredibly intelligent, so incredibly capable, so incredibly knowledgeable — just so incredible — and only and entirely because of himself, with some influence and then support from others, including his family and his faith community. But never, in any way, was he supported by the system: and yet, what he could do, and what he did, is amazing. Simply amazing.

So the truth is, the education system is not necessary. It works, for the most part, for millions of people, and that’s good; but the existence of millions of people for whom it does not work, and the existence of countless people who don’t need the system to succeed, forces me to ask the question: is the system necessary even for those millions of people for whom it works?

And the answer is, I don’t know. None of us do. We have no way to compare: education is only one path, and there is no way to come back and choose a different path in the same life, to determine what would have happened because of that other choice. (Yes, that’s a Robert Frost reference. But did you need to understand the allusion to get my point? [I think your experience is richer if you did understand it, or if you click the link, read the poem, and figure it out. I’ll get to that.]) We can look at people with education who succeed, and people without education who struggle, and we can assume that education was important for them. But in both cases, we’re cherry-picking both the examples, and the definitions of “succeed” and “struggle.” By other definitions, and in other examples, education is irrelevant where it isn’t harmful.

So last week, when I wrote that the Labyrinth was necessary and important to contain the monster, I could only make it make good sense by joking about it: because otherwise the children are the only Minotaur, the purpose and reason for the construction of the Labyrinth, the thing at the heart of the edifice; and children are not a monster who must be contained. It’s pretty upsetting to think of them that way, and to think of school as a way to contain them — quite literally putting them in the box and making them stay there, without letting them out of it. I don’t want to be that teacher, or that person, who really thinks that. I don’t believe in my usual practice that I am that teacher; there are very few instances where I insist that a student conform to my rules or expectations. But I made the joke. And when I was thinking for this week about wanting to explain and justify that joke, by explaining how the education system is necessary and important, even if the Labyrinth isn’t a good or appropriate analogy for it (In terms of the Minotaur aspect; in terms of the inescapably complex maze, it is a perfect analogy. But if you don’t need the maze, if the purpose of the maze is not valid, there’s no reason to maintain the maze.) I sat down several times intending to look up the facts to support that argument.

But I always hit this wall. I know the reasons people argue for education. And I don’t believe them.

There is the aspect I mentioned at the beginning of this, and reference with my overwrought allusions. Education expands the mind, and expands the world. Even apart from the professions that require extensive specific knowledge — and ignoring the toxic narrow-minded view that education is intended primarily to promote economic outcomes — education gives people the ability to create and apply creativity; to identify, measure, and solve problems; to connect different ideas and areas of knowledge in order to gain new insight or create new things; to communicate and empathize with others; to dream and achieve those dreams. Without education, art becomes pale and shallow, and that’s a truly terrible loss. Without education, scientific and technological progress becomes impossible, and that’s — not necessarily all bad, but it does create the possibility for great suffering, if we don’t keep changing to match our changing world. Education is necessary for many people, for many reasons: and I don’t believe education itself is ever harmful.

But education is not the education system.

I do think the Minotaur/Labyrinth analogy is perfect from one perspective: mine. And those of people like me. Because like Minos, and unlike the Minotaur, we need the Labyrinth. I am a good teacher: largely because I work well within, and slightly in opposition to, the educational system. I make the classroom a comfortable place, I make it easier for my students to come to school and succeed and feel valued there. And that’s a good thing. I also teach literature and reading and writing and thinking well, and that’s a better thing. But the things that I teach don’t need to be taught within the system: I have thought often of how much I would love to be like Socrates, or one of the other ancient philosophers, simply declaiming and discussing in the public square, teaching anyone who wanted to learn. That would be so much better than requiring a classroom full of 15-year-olds to write a five-paragraph essay. But you see, I couldn’t make a living doing that. To make a living, I need the system. My other gifts as a teacher, the way I help my students survive through the trials and tribulations of the system — not only do I not need the system to provide support to people who might be struggling, but without the system, those people would not need me. To be meaningful, I need the system.

Basically, to deal with my own problems, I need to make sure other people have problems, too. And that’s Minos and the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. Let’s take note that, not only was the Minotaur captive in the Labyrinth, but Daedalus, the artificer who designed it, was also held captive by Minos; and the tribute of 14 youths who were fed to the Minotaur every year were sent by Athens because Minos defeated them in a war. None of those problems would have existed if Minos hadn’t created them.

And the same goes for the education system. I, like Minos, could make different choices, and live a different life; I don’t believe that teaching is literally the only thing I could do — for one thing, I’d make a hell of a therapist. So I don’t literally need the educational system, I simply benefit from its existence. Minos didn’t need the Labyrinth: he could (in theory) have made better choices in the first place, and never had the existence of the Minotaur to burden him; but if he did end up with the Minotaur, I bet there could be other solutions to the problem. First and foremost, the man lived on an island: surely there were other, smaller, islands nearby. Maybe he could have built a lovely little home for his man-eating stepson, far away from the people of Minos’s kingdom; finding food might still be an issue — but presumably the Minotaur didn’t have to kill what he ate, and dead people are not terribly hard to find. Within the context of an ancient civilization, the Minotaur would be a hell of a capital punishment for Minos to inflict on Cretan criminals.

So the truth is, we may not need the education system at all, other than as a way to maintain the lifestyles of people who are part of the system: and even as one of those people, I don’t believe that justifies the Labyrinth. It is unquestionably valuable and effective for millions of people, as I said; that may be enough benefit to make it worth keeping and trying to fix the flaws and failures that make it useless and even damaging to millions of others, and ideally to make it relevant to the countless people in the third group who just don’t need it. Education is good for all, and harmful for none; maybe we can make the system reflect that. But it is also possible that a wholly new system, or no system at all, in this age of available information and crowd-sourced instruction available to anyone with broadband, would work better for more people.

I’m going to endeavor to figure it out. That’s the long term goal of this series, of this blog. To decide whether or not we need the education system (And if we do, how to fix it), and whether or not we need to replace it.

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The Court of Public Opinion

Dusty Leave a comment
George Floyd's mother was not there, but he used her as a sacred invocation
I want to open with this because I don’t want to center the discussion on me or on my erstwhile opponent in this debate: the real focus here is on the police murder of George Floyd. Rest in peace, sir.

Let’s get this out of the way first: I don’t like Ben Shapiro.

It’s not hard to understand why: he is deeply conservative and I am liberal; I believe in the value of real argument and he’s the definition of a sophist; I strive to be honest and a rational intellectual (Meaning someone who uses reason and thought to discern and communicate truth; I’m not necessarily trying to be seen as super-smart and therefore an authority — though I admit I wouldn’t mind being seen as super-smart), and he’s a manipulative liar who hides behind the trappings of pseudo-intellectualism (meaning he is trying to be seen as super-smart and therefore an authority, regardless of the actual merits of his position — and I think he is intelligent enough to know what he’s doing and why, which implies that he is either deeply cynical or tragically self-deluded).

Basically, he’s a stinky poopoo head. Just know that going in.

As a brief aside, let me address the likely counterjab from any Shapiro fans who happen to be reading this: no, I don’t hate Shapiro because he’s a conservative; I have deep respect for many conservatives. No, I’m not simply jealous; I freely admit I would love to have Shapiro’s platform, his fame and money and success, but frankly, I could get it the same way he did, the same way Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh and Steven Crowder did: I could loudly proclaim myself a prophet of outrage and amplify conservative grudges, and use my skills as a writer and a speaker to build a following. As to whether or not I dislike Ben Shapiro simply because he’s right and he proves my liberal ideas wrong, I’ll let this argument address that.

The argument I want to address specifically is this one:

I want to take this slowly: because one of Shapiro’s signature techniques is talking fast and overwhelming his opponents with words that have the appearance of sound, logical arguments. So, right from the beginning: his main claim here, as presented by the title of the video and the first 13 seconds, is that the real reason Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in the killing of George Floyd was because he had already been convicted in the court of public opinion of being a racist. He expands this in the following 45 seconds by describing Chauvin as “emblematic of an American system of racism,” and uses as evidence the claim that if you asked Americans today if Derek Chauvin was a racist, Shapiro guarantees that a majority of Americans would say yes.

I don’t want to spend too much time exposing Shapiro’s logical failings; the fact that he is a poor debater who wins with sophistry is an issue I have with him and not the central problem with this argument. But it is necessary to identify the places where his argument shifts, because one of the most common manipulations of a discussion is changing the topic, or changing the focus, or changing the argument. We all know it: one of the classic cliches is that arguments between spouses start out with one problem, but then turn into an argument about whose turn it is to do the dishes.

Shapiro does this here. Whether or not Derek Chauvin is personally a racist has nothing at all to do with whether or not he is emblematic of an American system of racism. Whether he is a racist or an emblem of racism has nothing at all to do with whether the majority of Americans perceive him as a racist. And none of that has anything to do with whether or not he is guilty of the murder of George Floyd. Again, because Shapiro is a sophist, he doesn’t seem to argue here that Chauvin was innocent of murder; he argues that Chauvin was unfairly convicted of racism, and simply implies that this unfair conviction of Chauvin for the “crime” (Shapiro’s description) of racism was the “real” reason Chauvin was convicted of murder. He also says, between about 1:00 and 1:30, that America was convicted of being racist because of this one “data point,” Chauvin killing George Floyd; he seems to be implying that America has also been unfairly convicted of that crime of racism, because the conviction of the country was dependent on the conviction of Chauvin for racism, and that conviction was unfair, and also convicting the entire nation because of this one crime is also unfair. Not the conviction for the crime of murder, again, but Chauvin’s conviction for the crime of racism. Which was unfair because it was never brought up in court, never alleged, and never proven, as he says, strongly, several times in this video.

This is what I mean about shifting the argument, and why I call Shapiro a sophist. He’s saying that racism was the reason for Chauvin’s conviction, and in almost the same breath (I don’t know if it was the same breath because I’m not sure that Ben Shapiro breathes: it is genuinely impressive how many words he can get out in a minute, without ever seeming to pause. Sorry; off-topic.) he states that race was never brought up in the trial. How on Earth is the lack of evidence supposed to serve as evidence? It’s not: his evidence is that “we all know” that Chauvin’s conviction was for racism, not for murder. His evidence is that if you asked Americans if Chauvin is a racist, the majority would say that he is. Or at least, Shapiro says (in fact he guarantees) that the majority of Americans would say that Chauvin is a racist.

What Shapiro is really relying on here is the resentment in his audience — generally a white conservative audience — about being called a racist. His audience doesn’t like to be called racist when there is not crystal clear evidence of racist action and intention presented: evidence that would meet the standard in a court of law. That is, unless you can point to the Nazi tattoo on my forehead, and the sworn statement I signed that my Nazi tattoo represents my genuine conviction that the white race is supreme, AND my conviction in a court of law for a hate crime committed in pursuance of the achievement of those white supremacist views — then it is not fair to call me a racist. And since that is his audience’s definition of a racist, calling someone a racist who does not have all of that evidence of racism is deeply offensive. Of course it is: who would want to be accused of that kind of atrocity?

This is, by the way, one of the central conflicts in our society, and it is a subject I will keep coming back to again and again: we have never had a real national conversation about what the word “racism” means, about what it is to be racist. We have not had that conversation because too many people, like Ben Shapiro and also like a much greater number of people on the left, garner too much political power out of misusing accusations of racism, which is easier if they don’t carefully define their terms. It is also much easier to continue maintaining a racist society if the definition of racism is unclear.

Shapiro points out that the evidence of Chauvin’s racism is the death of George Floyd. He says (About 1:00) that is not evidence of racism, it is evidence of a bad cop, of bad police procedure, of recklessness; it is not evidence of racism. But what is his evidence of this claim? That racism was never brought up in the court during Chauvin’s trial. As I said, the charge of racism can only be proven with evidence presented in a court of law: not in the “court of public opinion.” And in another amazing piece of sophistry, starting about 1:45, he says “Let us be real about this,” and then goes on to describe how the presentation of evidence to the public would have shifted public opinion, and therefore the verdict. He says that if the bodycam footage had broken at the same time as the video captured by Darnella Frazier, and if all of the evidence had been presented, and there had not been “20 million people in the streets declaring that America was systemically racist and that this case was and that this case was a case of racism” then it is “highly doubtful” to Ben Shapiro that the jury would have convicted Chauvin of murder.

I honestly don’t know if Chauvin is guilty of murder. I watched the video, and I saw the bodycam footage. I recognize that Shapiro is arguing here that the bodycam footage starts earlier, and shows the struggle between Mr. Floyd and the police before the officers put Mr. Floyd on the ground and before Chauvin knelt on him, and therefore it shows justification (Shapiro is alleging) for the use of force because Mr. Floyd was resisting arrest and so on, whereas the video that helped make this case so famous just starts with Chauvin applying force without giving us the justification for that force, and therefore prejudiced people against Chauvin. I did not see the extended footage as justification. I thought it showed that the police, who probably should not have been called in the first place (I don’t think passing a counterfeit $20 is evidence of criminal action requiring a police response), should not have approached a man in his car, unaware that he had been reported for passing a counterfeit $20, from out of his line of sight, startling him, scaring him and provoking an agitated response, and then using that response to justify pointing a gun at him, scaring him further and provoking an even more agitated response, and then continuously escalating the interaction until it becomes an argument about how much force is required to restrain someone who is resisting being restrained. In fact, I think the extended footage implicated the three other officers in the murder. Not because I know in my liberal heart that Derek Chauvin is racist, but because I don’t presume that George Floyd was a threat, as the police clearly did, and I don’t think that violence is justified in ending a threat, and certainly, without a question, the use of force should end when the resistance ends. If Mr. Floyd was fighting or running away, force might have been called for — but as soon as he stopped fighting, the use of force should have ended. Period. Not gone on for nine and a half minutes. Did the police see Mr. Floyd as a threat because of his race? Was his race the reason why the store’s owner called the police on him for passing a counterfeit $20? I think the answer is definitely yes, but I can’t say for sure. What I can say is that the full footage does not clearly, undeniably sway public opinion towards vindicating Chauvin’s actions, because it doesn’t exonerate Chauvin for me. Though I recognize that other people disagree with me, and think his actions were justified. I see Shapiro’s point, that the full footage might have moved people differently than just the witness’s video did; the death of Ma’Khia Bryant seems to be showing that: but that is a question of how you can move (or manipulate) public opinion, not an argument for how you can find the truth in this case: which is why this extraordinary sophistry. Just watching the videos does not prove Chauvin’s guilt or innocence, which is why I say I can’t know for sure if he was guilty or not.

But this I can say for sure: the best evidence that I know, on either side, is that 12 American citizens, after hearing weeks of evidence and argument, found Chauvin guilty on three counts including second degree murder. Shapiro has not one single argument here that is better or more reliable than that verdict. Nor do I. So I will accept that verdict as the answer, over the doubts of one Ben Shapiro. I suspect that Shapiro, who is in fact incredibly intelligent and both educated and experienced, having graduated from Harvard Law and worked as an attorney before going full time into conservative punditry, also recognizes that he does not have one single argument that is better or more reliable than that verdict. But he doesn’t say that, because he is a sophist and a manipulative pseudo-intellectual who profits from stoking the flames of outrage and partisan division, and convincing his white conservative audience that Chauvin is not guilty of racism, and therefore neither are they, and that the accusation of racism is much worse than the actual murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, because that false accusation of racism caused the wrongful conviction of Chauvin for murder, when at best he was just a bad cop following bad police procedure and acting recklessly. And why those three descriptors, Shapiro’s own, should not be sufficient to show that the killing was in fact murder is beyond me: clearly those reasons, which were presented in the trial and supported by video evidence and expert testimony, were sufficient to make the jury convict Derek Chauvin of murder.

Of course, because Ben Shapiro is a sophist and a manipulative pseudo-intellectual who profits from stoking the flames of outrage and partisan division, he builds from his claim (presented without evidence beyond his own opinion and “what we all know to be true,”) into greater assumptions and accusations, namely that this case has been entirely political, that it has been used by Democrats to build the narrative that America is racist. Again, not to get too deep into flaws in the argument and logical fallacies and such, because the focus here is simply that Ben Shapiro is wrong, but I have to revel in the towering house of cards he has built here: starting with (1) Derek Chauvin was innocent of murder; then (2) Chauvin was convicted because the public decided he was racist, along with (2B) The public would not have decided Chauvin was racist if they had seen George Floyd resisting arrest and being visibly agitated. Then you have (3) Because it was not proven in the court that Chauvin was racist, Chauvin was therefore not racist; (4) America was accused of racism because Chauvin was accused of racism, while simultaneously, (-4) Chauvin was accused of racism because America is and was and has been accused of racism; then (5) since Chauvin is not racist, America is not racist — and also (-5) since America is not racist, Chauvin is not racist — and then (6) the Democrats have taken up this issue because they use false accusations of racism for political gain. All assumptions, many of them contradictory and even absurd on their face, yet we’re just supposed to accept them as true (Because Shapiro’s audience does accept them as true, I would guess). As an example of this, Shapiro, starting at 3:28, begins talking about Philonise Floyd, George Floyd’s brother, who gave a statement about Chauvin’s conviction in which he compared his brother to Emmett Till. Shapiro gets very exercised about this, taking offense on behalf of Emmett Till’s family — and also revealing his (Shapiro’s) additional faulty reasoning for the justification of George Floyd’s death — but there are several problems with this. One is that he gets some of the details of Emmett Till’s murder wrong, but I don’t want to nitpick; I’m only pointing that out because if you want to get self-righteous about the truth, you should present the whole truth. The big problem is that he argues that the analogy is wrong because the circumstances surrounding the death of Till and the death of George Floyd were entirely different, and therefore it is a bad analogy intended to make the murder of George Floyd as tragic and abominably racist as was the murder of Emmett Till. And therefore, of course, the murder of George Floyd was not as tragic and abominably racist as the murder of Emmett Till.

But here’s the thing: that is not the analogy that is being made.

Frankly, I’m not going to speak for Philonise Floyd. His brother was killed, the murderer was convicted; Mr. Floyd is welcome to say whatever the hell he wants in the aftermath of that tragedy. He can say that his brother was the Second Coming, or the greatest American since Abraham Lincoln, or that he was cooler than Napoleon Dynamite: none of that is evidence of any of the accusations that Shapiro makes about the Democratic party using Floyd’s murder to make political hay. (I will say that Shapiro does not directly criticize Mr. Floyd: he rather goes after the more famous men standing in support of Mr. Floyd, namely Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Ben Crump — who, weirdly, I guess have to name as the head of George Floyd’s family’s legal team, which one would think could be the explanation for Mr. Crump’s presence at Philonice Floyd’s press conference, rather than the political agenda Shapiro seems to ascribe to him. Shapiro calls them all racebaiters, of course without any evidence whatsoever, allowing that ad hominem attack to support his house-of-cards assumptions about the political agenda being expressed here.)

But others have made the same connection between Emmett Till and George Floyd, so let me address that: the argument has not generally been that Floyd was murdered in the same way that Till was. Nobody has made that claim, other than Till’s cousin, Ollie Gordon, who did say that she felt the same way watching the video of Floyd’s murder as she did when her cousin was lynched. The point that has been made repeatedly is that Till’s murder, and even more importantly, his mother Mamie Till’s decision to publicize the horrifying details of her son’s murder, with an open casket funeral and published pictures of his wounds, galvanized the civil rights movement and helped bring about the changes the movement wrought over the ten years after the 14-year-old was killed; similarly, George Floyd’s murder, which was not unique but was certainly more publicized than most similar murders, galvanized the protests that happened in 2020, and may lead to some changes — potentially including the conviction of Derek Chauvin. And that is a reasonable analogy; but it does support the idea that the country is in fact racist, which is why Shapiro has to argue against it.

In the process of arguing against it, Shapiro does go after George Floyd: he describes Emmett Till with a list of negatives, all of which are points Shapiro wants to make about George Floyd. He says that Emmett Till was not someone passing counterfeit bills, that he was not a repeat drug offender, that he was not a repeat criminal who had done jail time, that Till did not hold up a pregnant woman at gun point and rob her house while her kid was in the house. And perhaps the most important point (though it is not the most emotionally manipulative point), Till did not resist arrest. Of course: none of these things matter in the slightest. George Floyd was not killed because he was a repeat drug offender, nor because he was high when the police detained him. He was not killed because he had a criminal record. He was not killed because he was passing counterfeit bills (There is no evidence, of course, that he even knew that he was passing counterfeit bills). He was, and this is the crucial point, not killed because he was resisting arrest.

George Floyd was killed because Derek Chauvin murdered him. As was proven in a court of law.

Now, I do have to point out again that Shapiro doesn’t actually say that Chauvin did not commit murder; he said that he doubted a jury would convict Chauvin of murder had it not been for the court of public opinion convicting Chauvin of racism. I don’t agree, clearly, but I will say there is some argument to be made that the jurors were swayed by the events of last summer, and by the protestors showing up in great numbers outside the courthouse throughout Chauvin’s trial. It may be that the jurors convicted because they were afraid that there would be riots if they acquitted Chauvin. That may be true, though of course it may not be; there is just as much reason to think that the jury, or at least some members of the jury, would acquit in defiance of that pressure, would even seek out the violence that may have followed an acquittal. It is extremely likely that some members of the jury would fear the consequences that might have come, that still might come, from the police because Derek Chauvin was convicted. In any case, it is not true that the jury convicted Chauvin only because of the accusation of racism. Since, as Shapiro states, race was never brought up in the trial, the only way the jury could have convicted based solely on the accusation of racism would be if they came in with that idea already in their heads, that they were prejudiced against Chauvin and no amount of evidence would ever sway them. But since 46% of Republicans and 25% of independents think it was the wrong verdict, based on the same public opinion evidence that Shapiro claims is the reason for the conviction, it’s far more likely that, if public opinion actually held such sway over the minds of the jurors, some of the jury would have voted to acquit. It’s practically impossible that the jury would be all Democrats (Also, 10% of Democrats think it was the wrong verdict, so at least one juror on an all-blue jury would have thought that, statistically speaking), and hard to believe that Republicans would overcome their prejudices while Democrats would not, based on the same evidence. One pro-police Republican voting to acquit would have led to a hung jury and a mistrial, and that has historically been exactly what happened in even the most egregious cases of police violence. Instead all twelve jurors, some of them likely sympathetic to pro-police ideas if not personally in support of them, all of them surely feeling pressure from conservative friends and neighbors as much as from liberal friends and neighbors, voted to convict. On all three counts.

Because Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. As was proven in a court of law. Without race being brought up once.

Now: is America racist? Was Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd emblematic of that systemic racism? Might the video, the case, the public response both from 20 million people on the streets and from politicians and political pundits, all potentially have had, or will have in the future, an impact on the racism in this country?

The answer to those questions is the same as the answer to this one: Is Ben Shapiro a sophist and an annoying twerp?

A Prune in the Shade

Dusty Leave a comment

So my wife and I bought a house this week, and this weekend has been busy with cleaning and moving. I haven’t had time to write. But on Friday, I did start writing something: a short dramatic scene as an example for my AP Lit class, who were assigned a similar scene, one or two characters, which would show the student’s opinion of the characters in Lorraine Hansberry’s brilliant play A Raisin in the Sun, which we just finished reading. And for the first time in a few months — since before we started looking for a house, I think — I got caught up in the writing. And I’m actually quite pleased with the result. Even though the title is lame.

You don’t need to know Hansberry’s play to understand, though this will make more sense with Raisin as the background. Hopefully you will enjoy, regardless, my portrait of myself as an unmarried author living in the 1950’s in the apartment below the five Youngers, on the day they move out of the building.

Theoden “Crankyass” Humphrey lives alone in a small apartment on Chicago’s South Side. Well, not alone: he shares the small space with his Maine Coon cat, The Witch King of Angmar, Lord of the Nazgul (familiarly called Angmar) and also with the noises from the occupants of the apartment above his: the Younger family. The apartment is dark and filled to the brim with books, piled on shelves lining the walls, mounded in haphazard stacks all over the  floor. The kitchen is neat and well-kept, with a massive apparatus that appears to be part still, part uranium enrichment device, taking up a large portion of the counter space. There is also a desk in the background covered with papers and pens and a typewriter. A single small window, open, lets in weak sunlight; in the square of light, in a great, heavy ceramic planter, is a large and thriving ponytail palm. 

Front and center there is a pair of large, overstuffed wingback chairs, with a small table between them; one of the chairs is occupied by Crankyass, a late-middle-age man with glasses and a graying beard and a permanent scowl. The other is occupied by Angmar, a glorious avatar of feline fluffiness and royal indifference. As the scene starts, Crankyass is talking out loud, equally to Angmar and to the apartment; Angmar is sleeping. His tail occasionally twitches. There is a certain amount of noise coming from above, footsteps, voices, the sound of heavy objects dragging along the floor, being picked up and put down again; at intervals the footsteps descend the staircase outside the apartment’s front door. The noise is constant, but never very loud.

Crankyass: (Looking up at the ceiling and scowling) Jesus Christ, what the hell are they doing up there? Sounds like the goddamn firebombing of Dresden. Or maybe a troupe of drunken elephants practicing their tap dance routine. 

Angmar: (twitch)

Crankyass: Every day they’re up there making noise, stomping around yelling at each other. Do they think they’re the only ones in the world? The only people in this apartment building? How about a little consideration for their neighbors?

Angmar: (twitch)

Crankyass: At least for the poor guy who lives one level lower down in this Hell-building. Sorry — (gestures placatingly towards Angmar) The poor guys. Plural. 

Angmar: (twitch)

Crankyass: I mean, we all have to live together here, in this devil-infested Hell above ground, in this… inverted Abyss. (He is pleased with the phrase, and grabs a notebook and pencil from the table between the chairs, writing it down while repeating it to himself under his breath. He closes the notebook and replaces it, and then scowls as the footsteps come down the stairs, this time accompanied by voices giving directions: “Careful! Watch that corner! Hold on, let me — okay go!”)  We all have to face the same problems, the same torments from the same grinning demons with their pitchforks and whips. We should at least try not to get on each others’ nerves, right? Isn’t that the responsibility of people who have to live with other people, to not make it worse for everybody else who has to live here?

Angmar: (twitch)

Crankyass: (Grabbing up a broom that was previously hidden behind stacks of books, he pokes it up vigorously, reaching the low ceiling without standing, and thumps it several times. A small shower of dust falls, but the noises above continue. He puts the broom down.) HEY! Stop all that racket! My cat is sleeping!

Angmar: (twitch)

Crankyass: (shaking his head) Can’t believe how inconsiderate people are. Inconsiderate and irresponsible. And the Youngers are nice, too — well, mostly. That kid’s annoying, of course. Just like any kid. Running up and down the staircase like his ass is on fire and his head is catching, stomping on every step, shaking my walls like a train passing by! 

A train passes by at this moment, on the El tracks outside; the walls shake, the window rattles; Angmar lifts his head and hisses, though the sound is lost in the racket from the train. The noise is clearly far louder than the footsteps going up and down the stairs. When the train rumbles off into the distance, Crankyass continues.

Crankyass: And do you know what I saw him doing last week? Poking a rat! A DEAD rat! Not bad enough he has to pollute my peace and quiet with his noise, he’s got to bring the Bubonic plague in here!

At this moment a rat appears, climbs atop a stack of books, looks around, and then casually departs. Angmar notices. He does not move.

Crankyass: (He also notices the rat. He also does not react to it, merely looks at Angmar not reacting. He sighs.) I guess that kid’s not too bad. Never breaks anything or throws rocks or crap like that. He’s always polite when I see him outside. Doesn’t treat me like a leper, either, like most people around here do. (His scowl deepens.) Not that I don’t understand. Not with people like that prick Lindner walking around here, making every other white person look bad. Did I tell you about him, Angmar? (Angmar lays his head down again and closes his eyes. In truth Crankyass did tell the cat about that prick Lindner, but of course that wouldn’t stop him from telling the story again.) I ran into him this morning. Snotty bastard from the suburbs, of course. Wearing a suit like he invented them. Walking around here with his nose wrinkled like there’s a bad smell. (He pauses, sniffs deeply, and his scowl deepens. He gets up and goes to the enormous contraption in the kitchen and begins turning wheels, opening valves, moving beakers about. He adds water from a clear glass bottle, and some kind of powder. A rumbling begins, then turns to a gurgling, then a whistle. Crankyass collects something from the inner bowels of the machine, and then pours it into a mug: the machine is a coffeemaker. Crankyass inhales deeply from the steam rising from the mug, and sighs in satisfaction. He turns and rants more at Angmar, now shaking an admonitory finger.)  Though of course he was polite to me. Part of the tribe, right? Us whitefolks got to stick together. Hell. He probably thought I was the landlord, come here to throw some more of these decent, hardworking folks out because they lost their jobs and can’t pay the goddamn rent. (He turns and spits contemptuously into the sink, then takes a new mouthful of coffee and swishes it around as if to wash out the taste of Lindner’s presumptions.) It’s people like that who cause the trouble, I’ll tell you that. Cause all our troubles. Turn this neighborhood into a slum, trap people here — and then act like it’s our fault that the building is falling apart, infested with rats and cockroaches, like there’s anything the renters could do — like it’s not the goddamn owner’s goddamn responsibility to take care of his property! Ohhh, he’s fast enough to bring down a world of hurt on an “irresponsible tenant” who damages his property — (He grabs the broom and pokes at the ceiling once more, harder this time, bringing down a flurry of plaster particles) — but anything that results from his neglect of that same property? Not a problem, it seems! (He throws the broom down, slams a kitchen cabinet door. Then he sags, and slowly returns to his chair with his steaming mug of coffee. He sits and scowls for a minute.) No sense of responsibility, that’s the problem. These people, they know their rights, they demand their perquisites, God forbid anyone say no to them when they want something — but they act like they don’t have to give anything back. Not even basic human decency. Consideration for others. (He scowls more, sips coffee.)

Angmar: (twitch)

A voice is heard above, a man’s voice, loud and penetrating, but the words are unclear.

Crankyass: (Looking up, listening. He puts the mug down, and then speaks to the ceiling.) He’s like that. Walter Lee. He wants what he wants, and it doesn’t matter how it affects anyone else. He comes first, and that’s the end of it. If there’s anything he has to give to other people, it’s just gonna trickle down from him when his happiness is overflowing. No sense of responsibility. 

Angmar: (twitch)

Crankyass: Too bad, too. He’s got a nice kid. Good wife, too — probably why their kid is decent. That Ruth’s a peach. Hardworking, sweet, knows how to tell a joke and how to laugh when one’s told. (His eyes grow dreamy) She’s pretty as hell, too. (Sips his coffee, then shakes his head. The dreaminess leaves him.) No idea how she puts up with that guy sometimes. Especially when he’s been drinking — good Lord, he even grabs me and throws out his big plans to get rich and important when he’s got a few shots in him. (Snorts a laugh) Jesus Christ, a liquor store. And why would you bring it up to me? Like I’m an investor. Like I’ve got money. Man, do you see where I live? Same place you do, but one floor farther away from the penthouse? (He breaks up and snorts a laugh on the last word.) How much do you think I make from these books I write? Do you think I’d stay here if I had anyplace else to go?

Angmar: (twitch)

Crankyass: (Nods as if the cat has made a valid point.) Okay, no, you’re right, I could go somewhere else. Don’t have to stay in Chicago, after all. I could probably buy a whole lake up north with what I pay in rent here. Might be nice, actually. 

Angmar: (twitch)

Crankyass: But I like it here. I like Chicago. I like the South Side. I like the building, honestly. Nice people here. (There are voices from upstairs again, but then they cut off and only one person speaks: it is Mama. Crankyass nods.) Lena Younger. She’s enough reason for someone to live here all by herself. When I moved in, it was the Youngers who greeted me, welcomed me. Lena cooked for me. Damn good cooking, too. (Pause, sip of coffee.) I didn’t think too much of her man. Walter Senior. But he told me I could ask them if I needed anything. Man. If I need anything from them. Pause) That guy worked his ass off. Drank too much when he wasn’t working, and got mean when he drank — but damn, did he work. (Looks at Angmar) How did he manage to have those two lazy-ass, spoiled kids? (He blinks, then looks chagrined) Three kids. Only two now. (Sighs)

Angmar: (twitch)

Crankyass: No, you’re right, Beneatha’s fine. She’s not lazy. Bright kid. Her, I can have a conversation with, at least. A real one. No idea how she came out of these goddamn schools, I’ll tell you that. It wasn’t Chicago Public that gave her what she’s got in her head. But Walter Lee — you know, he’s about the opposite of what his father was. Walter’s not bad to be around, not even when he’s been drinking; pretty funny, pretty friendly. Says some stupid things, sometimes. But he’s not mean. Big Walter was mean. But Walter Lee, he doesn’t know how to treat his wife, and whatever else Big Walter was, he was a family man. And his boy can’t stand to do an honest day’s work. 

Angmar: (twitch)

Crankyass: (Laughs) All right, you’re right: nobody in this here apartment works hard either. But then I don’t have a family to be responsible for. (Pause, finishes coffee. Looks around the apartment) And it’s a different thing to work hard when you’ve got a shit job like Walter’s got. (Picks up a book, flips the cover back, closes it again) He’s no dummy either — I remember him when he was Travis’s age. In fact, they were a lot alike. Walter’s mom was a peach then, too. (Suddenly a memory strikes him) Good Lord, Lena Younger’s peach pie! (It is a memory worth spending time with, and he does. Then he shakes his head, gets up and returns to the massive coffee maker, once again running it through its paces; this time he also opens the icebox and removes fixings for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich; he scarfs it down while the machine rattles and howls and steams, and as he finishes his last bite, he has coffee to wash it down. He once more returns to his chair with a full mug.)

Angmar: (He has raised his head when the icebox opens, and watched carefully; when the peanut butter and jelly came out, he lay down again; one can feel his disappointment. When Crankyass returns to the chair, Angmar does not deign to acknowledge him.)

Crankyass: Hey. (His tone is different, and Angmar responds instantly, sitting up and looking attentive. Crankyass reveals a full sardine in his hand, and reaches over to present it to the cat, who takes the fish with alacrity but without fawning thanks. He eats. Crankyass goes on with his ramblings.) Hard to say if Walter Lee put himself where he is. I say he doesn’t work hard, but who would want to work hard in that job? And for what reward? To work himself to death like Big Walter did? Walter Lee’s smart enough to have learned that lesson from his father, sure enough. He’s not much of a family man, I say, but. Easy for me to talk about having family to be responsible for when all I’ve got is the world’s laziest cat. (He pauses and glares, obviously bitter about the rat.)

Angmar: (twitch)

Crankyass: (Shaking his head and moving on) So is it Walter’s fault that he’s got a wife and a kid? Is that a fault? Was it a decision he made? Seems to me like people just fall in love — especially with a good woman like Ruth — but is that the same as choosing to be responsible for a family? Is it even a conscious choice? I maybe chose not to have a family — but maybe I didn’t have the same need for one. If you take one opportunity — say, falling in love with a good woman — does that make you responsible for the family that follows? Do you choose family when you choose love? And if not — are you responsible for that family when it does come?  Are you responsible for family you didn’t choose, just because it’s family? (He stops, considers, and then pulls out his notebook and writes for a few minutes while Angmar finishes his fish and then cleans his paws and ruff.)

Crankyass: (Reading from the notebook, occasionally scratching out a phrase and then rewriting it as he speaks.) Responsibility. The ability to respond, to give to someone something they ask for. And if you’re responsible, you respond, if you are able. Doesn’t matter if it’s fair, doesn’t matter if you have needs of your own; if you’re able, you respond. That’s it. That’s what it means to be responsible. That’s what it means to have family. To have friends. To love. To be human. (Pause; he writes for a minute more, and then continues.) If you have people you love, you should pay attention to their needs, so that they don’t need to ask with words. They can ask with need. They can ask with sorrow. They can ask with hope, or with desperation. They can ask by giving: what they give to others, they need for themselves. (Pause, sip of coffee; erases a word) But nobody can give all the time, nobody can respond to everything that other people need. Other people need more than one person has to give. The only way you can possibly survive being responsible for another is if you have other people being responsible for you, in exchange. You give to them, they have to give back to you: otherwise you’ll — you’ll give away your life.

He stops, puts the notebook down. Angmar rises, steps grandly down from his chair, crosses to Crankyass’s chair, and places himself in Crankyass’s lap. Crankyass smiles, all of the scowl disappearing for the first time, and pets and strokes the cat, who purrs loudly and comfortably. Then Angmar’s head comes up, his eyes open: the rat has returned. The cat begins to move; Crankyass recognizes the shift in mood and lifts his hands clear away from the cat: The Lord of the Nazgul moves slowly off the human’s lap — and then like lightning, he pounces, disappearing behind stacks of books; there is a brief squeal, it is cut off, and then Angmar returns, bearing a freshly killed rat. Crankyass rises, smiling broadly now, and goes to the fridge; he quickly fixes a plate of sardines, and trades the plate for the dead rat, which he puts in a bag and rolls the top down before putting it into the garbage can; he moves the garbage can over beside the door, to be taken out to the alley and disposed of later. Angmar eats his reward, nobly allowing a brief stroke from Crankyass in passing.

Crankyass: (Looking at the ceiling above, then turning towards the footsteps now coming back up the staircase outside his door; the voices of a man and a young boy can be heard in playful banter from the stairs. Blues music descends from the apartment above, though the sounds of objects moving do not stop.) Hmm. Think maybe I’ll drop in on the Youngers. See how Lena’s doing. Make sure that ass Lindner isn’t bothering them. (Pause, looks at Angmar, who has finished his fish and has now jumped up to the sill of the open window.) Maybe I’ll ask Walter if he wants to get a drink sometime. 

Angmar disappears through the window. Crankyass opens the door to the apartment — and the hallway outside is blocked by movers carrying out a large couch. Crankyass is taken aback: his mouth drops open, then snaps closed; he looks up at the ceiling, sags briefly — then laughter is heard from upstairs, several women, the sound joyous, harmonious. Crankyass smiles. Once the stairway is clear, he goes out to the stairs and climbs up, moving quickly, energetically. From the stairs his voice is heard:

Crankyass: Lena! I didn’t know you all were moving! Anything I can do to help?

I don’t know what this means.

Dusty 2 Comments

When I was six, I was walking through the woods on my grandparents’ property in Washington, and I stepped on a yellowjacket nest. I remember the sensation as my foot came down: pushing through the humus of dried leaves, a moment of resistance, and then I crunched through what I thought was solid ground, and fell lower than I thought I should have, on that foot. That’s when I heard the buzzing: z z z ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz It hit a fast crescendo and then lowered to a purposeful, ominous hum, as if I had prodded a sleeper who did not want to wake and who growled resistance at me.

Then the stings started. One, two, three, each more painful than the last, the infuriated insects stitched their revenge up my leg as I stood, frozen, suddenly unsure of the ground beneath me — was it more hollow still? Would I fall through again? — obeying my training that told me to stand still when bees landed on me because they didn’t want to sting me, after all.

But these weren’t bees: they were yellowjackets. And they wanted to sting me. Understandable, really, since I had just destroyed their house and maybe crushed some of their family members; but that didn’t make me feel good about the fiery needles jabbing into me.

Fortunately my mother was there, and having grown up on that place named for her family, she was familiar with the sound of angry bees and yellowjackets: and she realized this was not a good time to just stand still. She scooped me up and ran. Of course I realize now that she was running to get us both away from the yelllowjackets, but at the time, I was suddenly sure that she was running me back to the house because I was going to die: my father is allergic to bee stings, and even at that age, I knew the potential danger of those tiny packets of venom which I could feel throbbing in my shin — and maybe moving up through my bloodstream? Was this the end?

It was not. It was about to be my first encounter with witch hazel (a name that still feels mysterious and alchemical to me), the rapid soothing of the burning stings, a cookie or two to soothe my burning tears, and the disappointing reckoning of a mere six stings, none higher than my knee. Not enough damage for a good I-stepped-on-a-beehive story, though it’s a damn good indication of my mother’s reflexes and quick thinking.

 

That moment of stepping down onto, and then falling through the ground and into a sudden attack: that’s what 2020 feels like to me. The hollowness of the hive beneath me, incapable of holding me up, echoed in the middle of me as I realized what was going to happen, a hollowness that seemed to swell and expand even as it grew more empty and dark and cold, as if my fear were a black hole inside, swallowing more and more and growing larger with each terrified thought that fell into it: that’s what I feel like inside, right now, and for the last six months. It’s a much slower process, this time, lasting months instead of seconds; but I feel very much as though my reaction is identical: I am frozen, panicked, trying to figure out what to do and coming up with no good ideas, just standing and watching as the danger swirls up around me.

At the same time: I am not just the kid walking through the woods, this time. I’m the yelllowjackets. The hollowness inside me is the hive, and the shell around that emptiness is too weak, and can’t hold up the weight of the world that is stepping on me. And as everything going on around me crushes through me and into me, I lash out, angrily — maybe understandable, but really, useless  — and I sting, and I bite, and I attack. I have never been so short-tempered, so cranky, so bitter, so apt to strike, so apt to sting with my words and my tongue, as this year. I hate it. I can’t stop it. I can’t: I don’t have the strength. That’s what was hollowed out of me. And I can’t just set myself and bear up under the weight: because the hollowness is under my feet, too, and I am being stung even as I am stinging.

I don’t know what to do. I’m just standing here. I have been for what feels like forever.

And I’m so tired.

And this time, my mother can’t scoop me up and run me back to the house for the twin magics of herbal remedies and baked goods.

This time, I might just get stung to death.

 

Probably not. I’m aware that as high as the number of Covid-19 cases is, it’s still only a fraction of the population, and that while my state is not handling the pandemic well, I am taking reasonable precautions that should keep me safe; I will most likely come out of this with an unremarkable tally of suffering. I do not mind, this time. I would very much prefer a half-dozen stings, no permanent scars, no need for a doctor. Just some soothing liquid and a cookie or two.

But I’m not just standing still with my foot in the danger zone; I’m still walking forward through the woods. In fact, since school starts tomorrow and goes to in-person classes in four weeks, I may be stepping onto the hive, and then continuing on into it, like walking down into a hive the size of a subway tunnel, with yellowjackets the size of Shelob. (At the same time: those goddamn hobbits are coming into my home, fumbling and ripping through my webs, and they are goddamn well going to pay for it. Nasssty little hobbitses.)

What precautions do I take then, as I move deeper and deeper into this hive pit? My school is trying to stay on top of things, having offered fully online learning as an option, instituting new protocols — social distancing, mandatory* masks, sanitizing spray to be applied every two hours**, fever checks on arrival — intended to prevent the spread of the disease. I don’t know how well it’s all going to work, though; and I have no idea what to do about that. I can’t quit. If I raise too great a stink, they’ll fire me. I guess I just have to stand there. Maybe the small things hovering around me don’t want to sting me, this time.

*Mandatory here means just what it does everywhere: masks are required until someone raises a loud enough political objection, and/or presents a doctor’s note. Then, not. Hope the virus takes doctor’s notes, too. 

**Said sanitation to be applied by me, every two hours, in between classes. On a side note, the spray requires four minutes to take full effect. Time between classes is four minutes. Hope the virus will wait out in the hall.

The danger, though, is not what is haunting me. Perhaps it should be, but the thing that is building a growing ball of hollow darkness inside me, the thing that makes me feel as if my next step will land on an equally hollow surface that will drop me through and out of the world, while at the same time the weight on top of me punches through my thin outer layer and into the hollow within, is this:

I am tired.

The hollowness inside me is not just fear. It is exhaustion. I am so very, very tired. Tired from fighting, tired from standing watch, tired from holding up others as well as myself. I’m tired of watching the pandemic grow, and watching my country wallowing in ignorance and selfishness like a pig in shit — just as filthy and twice as proud of ourselves — as we deny science, and raise alarms for problems that aren’t real, pointing to imaginary dangers that somehow block out of our sight the very real danger of this virus. I am so tired of being angry about it. I am so tired of fighting with people who smugly ignore every fact and every reasonable thought because it doesn’t make them feel safe, or worse, it doesn’t make them feel strong and fearless. Saying they’re not afraid of Covid, that makes them feel strong and fearless.

It’s as if when my mother rushed to scoop me up out of the yellowjacket hive, I had pushed her down, spit on her (Because the people who think this way are some of the rudest, most inconsiderate, most contemptuous hooligans I’ve ever interacted with. And I teach high school.), and then stood with fists on hips, chin jutted, nostrils flaring, and said, “Don’t you tell me where I can stand, I’m an American. You run if you want to, you and all the other sheep!”

While the yellowjackets swarmed around me.

And of course it’s not only the virus. I am so very tired of racism. I am tired of being ashamed of what people who look like me have done to people who feel like me for centuries. I am tired of confronting the same angry, willful ignorance about the protests or about opposition to police violence. At the same time, I am tired of being treated like the people I look like by the people I feel like — and I am tired of knowing that I have no right to complain about any treatment I may suffer, because my world has been built to prop me up, and whatever I may have to go through pales in comparison to the ordeals of those who are less pale than I. I hate that people tell me I have no right to speak my opinion, to take a stand; that all I can do is get out of the way and let better people take what they have been denied for centuries, because people who look like me oppressed them, which has enabled me to become everything that I am — all of it tainted by centuries of crimes against humanity. Not my own gifts and efforts, but my privilege, I am told, is why I am who I am and can do what I can do: and that means I don’t deserve what I have, and using that privilege to try to help solve the problem earns me a sort of sly sneer from those who know that my actions on behalf of the cause are just white guilt, and really, I am still the enemy,still perpetuating the problem if I do anything other than get out of the way.

That’s how it feels. It’s maybe not true that people working for social justice think that way of me, but — that’s how it feels. Of course, maybe that’s just my white guilt talking. And my white privilege thinking that I should be the one to speak up and fight for the cause: because that means I am centering whiteness in a movement that is not intended for the benefit or the recognition of white people or white suffering. It’s so easy to fall into the same patterns that have existed unrecognized throughout my life; how can I tell what is genuine and what is instilled in me by institutions of oppression and privilege? Is everything about me broken and wrong because of the world I grew up in? Is there nothing that is me? No, I want to say; I am good, I am worthwhile, I want to help and I am capable of helping. It is not right that I get pushed aside and marginalized, stereotyped, included in sweeping generalizations, based only on my skin color, my nationality, my gender —

And how pathetic do I sound saying those words.

I’m so bloody tired of irony.

I want to help, is the problem. I don’t want to be like those ignorant yahoos I fight with. I don’t want to be selfish.

But so many people need so much help.

I can do a lot of it. I am happy to do a lot of it: happy to support my family, my friends, those who rely on me. They are struggling, too, because this year has not only been hard for the pandemic and the riots: it’s hard financially, and crippling politically, and my family has had a series of tribulations fall on us like Biblical plagues, one after another and each worse than the last, mostly medical and due to my parents’ generation reaching the stage of life where things go badly. And of course, I can’t do anything. I can’t go help them because I might infect them, and that would kill them — and that would kill me. I worry about them double, because I realize that, on top of everything else, the pizza delivery man might give them Covid-19, and then I wouldn’t be able to visit them in the hospital while they coughed their life away.

And I can’t talk about this, can’t complain about this: because everyone else has it harder than me. Everyone. It’s not just white privilege, not just male privilege; I am healthy, and have remained fully employed, at a job where I am respected and well-liked, and I am generally well-balanced emotionally. I’m not well-balanced this year, of course, but since I started off having an easier time than most, and we’ve all gone down together, I still have more of my head above water than others do who were half-drowning before 2020. So I have no right at all to complain, and if I open my mouth to do it, the response I get back (the response I should get back) is something along the lines of, “Yes, I know, I’m going through that too — and a dozen things that are worse.”

Part of me can’t stand myself, right now, for complaining that I have it too easy in life to complain. And normally, the fact that I do have it easier than most would keep me from complaining because it would keep me from suffering. And even when I do suffer, I don’t have such troubles that I need to vent, need to talk them out. Normally I don’t need much support.

But this year is not normal.

I need to vent. It helps, you see, even if you don’t see how it could possibly help, even if you don’t know why it helps, talking about your feelings helps. I need that help. I need to say how I feel, even if how I feel is gauche or insufficiently woke. (“See that? That’s white sensitivity right there. He needs to grow a thicker skin, learn to deal with being told what he’s doing wrong. It’s just that he’s never been criticized much before, not in this society built for people like him.” Yes. I know it. But this is still how I feel.) Because people need my support, and so long as I am this tired, and feel these hollows under my ribs and under my feet, I can’t give them what they need.

This is what I need: I need to talk. I need to write. I haven’t wanted to do it, not for months now, for all the reasons I’ve been talking about here. There is too much, and I need to figure out what the hell I’m really feeling; I hate to ramble and blunder and sound like I don’t know what the hell I’m getting at. But one of the difficult Catch-22s of being a writer is that writing is exactly how I figure out what I’m feeling; I usually don’t know what I’m getting at when I start writing, I just get there when I get there, and I have a pretty good idea of when to stop. I have no doubt that this blog is irritating and confusing for people who read it. I expect you, too, are short-tempered, unable and unwilling to put out a whole lot of effort helping someone else deal with their shit when you’re sitting there with both hands full of your own.

I’m sure you’re tired too.

It feels strange to write this, because it makes me feel better, and so maybe I want to share that; but I don’t want to be a bother, don’t want to be a burden.

Which is also how everyone else feels, too.

So I’m just going to say it. If what I’m saying is wrong, please feel free to correct me; but first, I need to say it. Actually, I take that back: if you have something you want to say about something I’m doing wrong, put a pin in it. We’ll circle back around to it later. For now, I just need to talk about how I feel. And I won’t ask people to listen to me, because I know you’re all struggling, too — but it would mean a lot if you did.

We all need help. We all need support. We need to ask for it for ourselves. Just asking makes us feel better: because it validates how we feel. Being willing to ask for help, from those whom you are willing to give help to, shows that you consider yourself as important as they are, as worth helping as they are. It shows them that they are not a burden on you, that they can help even as they ask for help for themselves. And everyone feels better when they can help.

I need help. I’m standing on unsteady ground, in a country that is tearing itself apart, and I’m about to go back to work where I will be surrounded (Virtually, for the most part, but still) by students — who all desperately need all the help they can get.

That’s what made me actually open this post and start writing. That’s really what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of the virus, afraid of what’s going to happen in thousands of schools across the country to hundreds of thousands of teachers and millions of students; but what scares me right now is the knowledge that those students will come to me, and they will need me. They will need me to listen to them, to understand them, to take them seriously, to help them. They are bottomless abysses of need, just like I was at their age, as we all are in that terrible time of adolescence. They will need me even more now, because their world is on fire, too.

I don’t know how much I will have to give them.

I’m so very tired.

I’m just standing here: hoping I don’t get stung.

Can someone please pick me up and run me away from the swarm?

Or if not that — can I have some witch hazel and maybe a cookie or two?

Thanks.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about pride. Where pride comes from, what makes it valuable and what makes it problematic. My central thought is this:

The price of pride is pain.

Christianity says that pride is a sin; I don’t agree, though I certainly recognize that pride can lead to sin —  arrogant dismissal of others’ value, nationalism, racial divides and conflicts, a hundred other ways that pride “goeth before a fall,” as they say. I also see where pride is strength: pride in my accomplishments, as a writer, as a teacher, as a human being, is often what keeps me going in the face of continued struggle and defeat. Pride lifts up the downtrodden and helps  them to fight back against oppression, often in the face of overwhelming odds. There is value in pride. It also may be that pride is essentially inevitable, that in a culture that constantly appraises the value of everything as good or bad, better or worse than everything else, there is no way a rational person could not see which of their traits are on the approved list, and feel a bump, or a jump, in their worth.

But like everything else that has value, pride has a cost. I think that pride has to be earned. I say it is pain, but I include painstaking effort in that; anyone who has fought hard for a skill or an ability or to overcome a prodigious obstacle knows that pain is not only limited to sharp injuries. There’s a great scene in To Kill a Mockingbird when Scout and Jem are trying to find anything in their father Atticus Finch to be proud of, and then they find that he is a crack shot with a rifle; when they ask their neighbor Miss Maudie why Atticus never bragged or showed off his ability, she says that Atticus knows better than to take pride in something that is a gift from God. His ability, the steady eye and steady hand that lets him hit everything he aims at, was not earned: it was inborn. (There’s an argument to be made that practice and training made him better, but this is both a simplification and a speculation on Maudie’s part. The point remains.) I am an American, but I did not work for that: it was an accident of my birth. I take no pride in accidents. I do take pride in the actions I have taken, the burdens I have carried, for the sake of my society, and which have made that society better; I vote, I pay taxes, I participate in the cultural and political conversations, and probably most importantly, I teach. I think that those who serve, both in civil society and in the military and public safety, have earned and deserve their pride in themselves and the country they helped to build and maintain. They (we, if I may be bold) have paid for it in effort and sacrifice, and often (they, not me) in suffering and loss.

I want to say that those who do not earn their pride before they hold it, flaunt it, and press eagerly forward to show it, chins out and hands balled into fists, will pay for their pride in suffering afterwards: that the fall will come, that they will be humbled and humiliated. But of course that doesn’t always happen. The universe is not just. There is an easy way that people with unearned pride can avoid the pain themselves, and that is simply to move the suffering off of themselves and onto others, and thus you have the Ku Klux Klan, and domestic abuse, and bullies. And Donald Trump.

But for those who are not that, who are not victimizers and warmongers, the point I want to make is that pride must be earned.

And the price of pride is pain.