Another Victim of the Protestant Terror

     

 "This is a very, very defensible case..."  (Benjamin Brafman, DSK's lawyer, NYT 5/17, p. A10)

VICTIMS OF PURITAN ZEAL  

 "Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent..." (Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, LoA edition, p. 166)

Readers impatient with my prose have perhaps already deduced that while I am writing I am frequently also doing something else, listening to music, or even NPR news reports, through the cunning i-Tunes feature of my i-Mac.  On Saturday, as I was trying to write about Enlightenment mysticism—and, yes, there was a lot of it—I became vaguely aware of something about Monsieur Dominique Strauss-Kahn, “head of the International Monetary Fund.”   This man is so famous that like JFK and LBJ or KSM he rates “initials treatment”: those in the know call him DSK.  Earlier that day detectives of the NYPD (likewise famous) had arrested him on an airplane on the tarmac at Kennedy Airport.  The plane was just about to take off for Paris, and DSK had apparently intended to go with it.  But the police, notorious spoil-sports that they are, said he must first answer accusations of rape or attempted rape brought forward by a house-maid at the Sofitel Hotel in the city, where DSK had just hurriedly vacated his “$3000-a-night suite”.

The Sofitel: understated, but not without a certain naive charm

      
 The news could not really compete with the weirdness of Emanuel Swedenborg or Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin.  In fact it was hardly weird at all, if you follow politics much.  It is true that Strauss-Kahn is a Socialist and the head of the IMF.  It is further true that Socialists preach social equality, and the IMF spends a certain amount of time lecturing the governments of the earth about how they must “tighten their belts” and “live within their means”.  Hence one might conceivably ponder the necessity of a “$3000-a-night suite” for the Socialist head of the IMF.  (Recall the powerful moral iconography of Matt Damon at the Motel Six in The Rainmaker?)  Yet even the hypocrisy quotient seems relatively mild when compared with that of one of our American good ole boy, born again, senatorial philanderers from our very own Family Values Party.

            So I never for a moment thought Strauss-Kahn’s situation the proper subject for a blog post, preferring instead to engage you about something comparatively consequential, such as Frederick the Great’s commerce with the Illuminati.  I changed my mind when I got to the gym on Monday morning, where to my amazement my good friend and fellow matutinal natator, the plasma physicist Dr. T. K. Chu, was talking about it.  To be more precise he was talking about the fact that “many” contributors to the Comments Section of the New York Times’s international news blog had already concluded that Strauss-Kahn was the victim of an obvious set-up.  He wuz framed.

            The alchemical transmutation of a drossy sexcapade to the glistering gold of political intrigue through the catalytic agent of a conspiracy theory changes matters entirely.  A really good conspiracy theory might indeed compete in wackiness with the eighteenth-century Rosicrucians.  One difference between an indifferent and an excellent conspiracy theory is that the latter can support incompatible, even contradictory explanations.  This one is excellent.  Think about it for a moment.  How beneficial might it not be for left-wing Barack Obama’s reëlection prospects were IMF types to cease scolding America for its fiscal profligacy?  Think further.  How much more beneficial might it not be for right-wing Nicholas Sarkozy’s prospects were the formidable Socialist front-runner suddenly eliminated?

            I know only what I read in the American papers—another way of saying that I know little.  So I now turned toward the French blogosphere.  So happy are my French memories that I had almost forgotten what it was that I most hated about French political anti-Americanism.  It is too simplistic to attribute it all to arrogance.  One must also factor in the ignorance.  I get a quick sobering reminder from Gilles Savary and his stimulating blog essay “Gibier de guet-apens” (roughly “Fresh Meat from the Trap.”)  Gilles Savary is a French Socialist buddy of DSK, a member of the European Parliament, and a prominent bloguiste.  His essay’s argument is so incoherent that a reader might at first miss the truly breath-taking quality of its chauvinism—both national and sexual.  Allowing the broad-minded theoretical possibility that there might actually be something in the rape charge, Savary is much more inclined to one or both of two alternative explanations: (1) feminine wiles, and/or (2) American Puritanism.

 Monsieur Gilles Savary: seldom known as GS

            “It is easy to entrap,” writes Savary “a person so little resistant to the attractions of the female tribe [gent féminine]” as DSK.  Everyone in the know knows that DSK is a “libertine”.  DSK differs from other libertines chiefly in not concealing the fact of his libertinism.  (Thus Savary).  Well, I don’t know DSK; so I’ll have to take Savary’s word for it.  But it’s hard to swallow what he serves up next.  It is this: Frenchmen wisely pay little attention to the libertinism of their public figures.  The vestigial Catholic mentality, you see, easily forgives sins so long as the sinner expresses regular contrition.  “In Puritan America, impregnated with an unbending Protestantism, they are infinitely more tolerant of money shenanigans than of the pleasures of the flesh.”  Yes, infinitely.  Bernie Madoff, take heart.

            A widely circulated photograph taken at the funeral of François Mitterand in 1996 shows the famous man’s wife and mistress standing in near proximity, grieving at the graveside.  This was slightly anterior to the breakout of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinski madness here.  Several French commentators—and a few American ones—invoked it to exemplify the sophistication and realism of French political mores as compared with the puerile Puritan hysteria of American boobs and Babbitts.

Autres pays, autres moeurs

            But that is unlikely to work this time, if it ever did.  I have no certain opinion concerning whether or not Mr. Strauss-Kahn did or did not do it, but I at least know what it is.  The prosecutors are not charging DSK with political virility, conducting politics while French, libertinism, or even vulgar indulgence of “the pleasures of the flesh”.  They have accused him of serious sexual assault.  Choosing its adverb carefully the New York Times points out that forcible rape is a crime “even in France”.  Somebody, preferably somebody French and of the gent féminine, might point that fact out to Mr. Savary.  The same newspaper identifies the complaintant as a thirty-two-year-old African immigrant, a mother who lives in the Bronx.  It seems unlikely that in turning to the NYPD such a person would be motivated by the protestantisme rigoriste of Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards, but I suppose it is possible.

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Ad lectorem

Later this week your bloguiste flies to Spain, there to applaud his spouse as she crosses the finish line at the portal of the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, toward which she has been walking, in stages,  for roughly a thousand miles.  The regular posting schedule will resume in early June.  Until then, things are iffy, blogwise.

Fresh from the Sulphur Springs Fair

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)

Mike the letter-carrier left a hefty package on my front porch on Saturday.  I smiled when I found it there, for I knew what was in it: eight beautiful, mint volumes of the Library of America, snapped up for a song (roughly five bucks apiece) in an eBay auction.  So cheap were they that I could absorb the inconvenience that I already owned two of them, which will now grace the growing libraries of one of my children or friends.  Sometimes you gain so much on the straightaways that you can easily absorb the delays occasioned by the roundabouts. 

I had been expecting the books, but was not prepared for the return address.  It turns out that I had bought them from a private party in Sulphur Springs, Texas.  That may mean little to you, but we used to play those guys in football.  My noble but fiscally calamitous, rainbow-chasing parents dragged me through eight schools in five states.  Where they dragged me to in the fall of 1952 was an East Texas town called Mount Pleasant and the high school that became my alma mater.  Sulphur Springs was about forty miles west, and for us it meant the real boondocks—an attitude doubtless reciprocated by the Sulphurians, who were, after all, that much closer to Dallas.

 Actually most East Texas towns of that era looked pretty much like “Anarene” in The Last Picture Show, except that there wasn’t nearly that much sex around—a sad reminder of the crucial difference between fact and fiction. But Sulphur Springs had a special proverbial distinction among the regional Hicksvilles and Nowhereburgs.  America’s greatest humorists have ever been its real or pretended provincials; and the parodic boast “I’ve been to the Sulphur Springs Fair”—with or without an added “twice”—was a mocking claim to exotic experience and deep sophistication.

East Texas: more like the Deep South than the Wild West

Mount Pleasant is the seat of Titus County, Sulphur Springs of Hopkins County.  About fifty miles northwest of Sulphur Springs is Bonham, seat of Fannin County, the third point in these triangulated memories.  Fannin County was the birthplace of one Great Man (Sam Rayburn, the legendary Speaker of the House); one Bad Man (John Wesley Hardin, the legendary outlaw); and at least one very Good Woman (Cora Louise Nelson Davidson, my maternal grandmother).  Born in 1873, she spent her earliest years on the Red River, the border between Texas and the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).  She was orphaned early, and sent back east to an Episcopal school in Terre Haute, Indiana, long since defunct, to prepare to be a teacher.  By the age of twenty or twenty-one she was half of the “school system” in Salida, Colorado.

 From Shadow to Reality: Cora Louise looks back over Four Generations

Indeed I had always supposed her to be a native of Colorado.  She revealed to me her Texan origins, which she seemed to regard as slightly shameful, only when I myself moved there.  We have a few things from her, now transferred in trusteeship to her great-great granddaughter Cora Louise Fleming-Benite (born 2004), including her baptismal spoon.   Since little Cora has had all her schooling in France, she probably has not needed another of her ancestor’s relics, an elementary French grammar, which begins with a lesson on how to engage a fiacre (a horse-drawn carriage) at a Paris train station.

What all this Texas stuff is in aid of is the prize book in my package of prize books from Sulphur Springs: Library of American # 168--Katherine Anne Porter’s Collected Stories and Other Writings.  Of course I already owned editions of her most famous story collections—Flowering Judas and Pale Horse, Pale Rider.  There is no better writer of short fiction in the English language, period—an utterance of critical “extremism” I am willing to defend.  But many of the “other writings,” which are not easy to find, are likewise gems, and I am delighting in them. 

Porter was born in the hamlet of Indian Creek, Texas, in 1890; she lived in the Lone Star State until early adulthood; and Texas is a recurrent theme in her writings.  Her attitude toward Texas was not unlike that of my grandmother, who could have been her older sister.   On the other hand she loved Mexico, and lived there as much as she could.  Two short essays of particular poignancy are “Notes on the Texas I Remember” and “Portrait: Old South”.  In the former she tells in her beautiful lapidary prose a horrible anecdote of a group of poor Hispanics ejected from a religious revival in Kyle, Texas, about 1897, on account of being poor and Hispanic.  She died in 1980.  I wish she could have accompanied me in spirit to my amazing fiftieth high school reunion, organized, naturally, around a home football game.   In 1954 the schools in East Texas were still racially segregated.  In 2004 many of the Mount Pleasant Tigers—including the guy who seemed to rule their backfield—were black.  Half of the high-kicking majorettes—a group hardly less important in the aristocracy of a Texas high school than its football stars—were Latinas.  People who think things never change sometimes need to think again.

Katherine Anne Porter knew most of the American literary greats of the 1920s and 1930s.  Like many of them she was a “left-wing intellectual” deeply engaged in our nation’s spectacular injustices and the strange insecurities that gave birth to the Red Scare of 1919, sadly reborn in another form three decades later.  Yet her great political masterpiece, so far as I can tell, was written in 1977, when she was eighty-seven years old!  It is her brilliant memoir—she calls it a “story”--fifty years out, of the agitation surrounding the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti in August, 1927.  Everything about it is perfect, beginning with its title: “The Never-Ending Wrong”.  How can it be that I never came upon this essay while I was writing The Anti-Communist Manifestos?

The never-ending wrong is the larger meaning of the possible judicial murder of two immigrant Italian anarchists; but there are other wrongs, including the shameful arrogance of blind political superstition. “It is hard to explain, [she writes] harder no doubt for a new generation to understand, how the ‘intellectuals’ and ‘artists’ in our country leaped with such abandoned, fanatic credulity into the Russian hell-on-earth of 1920.  They quoted the stale catch-phrases and slogans.  They were lifted to starry patriotism by the fraudulent Communist organization called the Lincoln Brigade.  The holy name was a charm which insured safety and victory.  The bullet struck your Bible instead of your heart.”  I have rarely encountered such wholeness of vision—and I’ve been to the Sulphur Springs Fair, twice.

Her every page bears the stamp of genius

Two Weddings and an Assassination

Natalie and Dany on the ballroom floor

The Sahara of my social life is not punctuated by conveniently spaced oases, but it is sometimes, for brief periods, inundated by monsoons of conviviality. Such a happy drenching characterized the last weekend. It began with a dinner party we gave on the eve the British Royal Wedding, not that the two events had the slightest genetic connection. Indeed the Royal Wedding gave me the opportunity to practice my curmudgeonly arts. I didn’t think about it. I certainly didn’t get up in the wee hours to watch it on television. And I was inwardly annoyed that conversation concerning it played a prominent role at our dinner party. This is “nothing personal,” as they say. The young couple are doubtless very nice people, and God knows they are headed for a life one wouldn’t wish on beasts of burden. But I am a patriot and a constitutional conservative. The Constitution says that “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States” and that no American official can receive “any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state”. In one of the Federalist papers Hamilton gives the motive for this clause: "One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption."

Foreign corruption—a great phrase, that. Yet true democracy seems too terrible to bear; as the liberated Hebrews of the Exodus lusted after the fleshpots of of their slave-masters in Egypt, Americans seem to lust after the hereditary aristocracy abolished more than two centuries past. Verily, we have had our reward. Whereas the vices of the Borgias or the Valois had about them a certain admirable awfulness, American aristocratic vice tends to the squalid and the banal. How can the aberrant drowning of a single girlfriend at Chappaquiddick compete with beheading several wives, or even just murdering the young princes in the Tower?

Perhaps my disgruntlement was actually founded in a groundless fear that static from the Royal Wedding might mar the sweet music of the real wedding I was to attend the next day in suburban Philadelphia. On Saturday, in St. John’s Lutheran Church in Melrose Park PA, our friend Natalie Deffenbaugh married Dany Mehry. Natalie is an alumna of the Princeton Class of 2002. Dany is Lebanese, and I don’t actually know about his school or class, except that he showed a great deal of it in marrying Natalie, a beautiful woman of dazzling intellectual ability and luminous ethical character. They are both professional international aid workers who once joyously united almost immediately faced a period of separation, as Dany returned to his assignment in Iraq, and Natalie to hers in the Congo.

The ceremony, which was intrinsically beautiful, was further beautified by the singing of the bridesmaid, Jennifer Borghi, a professional mezzo-soprano already familiar to readers of this blog. The officiant conducted the wedding service and the Communion liturgy with an easy yet impressive dignity, and she preached a brief but memorable sermon carefully crafted for a couple whose youthful vocations have been service among the world’s poor and downtrodden. Wedding couples are sometimes asked to memorize a brief passage of Scripture deemed particularly appropriate for their union. The preacher assigned to Natalie and Dany an unusually long passage—not for memorization (she reassured them) but for contemplation—the whole of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which takes up three entire chapters of the Gospel of Matthew.

 The church had an arresting architectural feature I had never before seen: a single window in the east end, cruciform, filled with a painted glass Crucifixion

The preacher had given us the hard counsel of “getting beyond the beatitudes,” and I discovered her intention for myself when I reviewed the text the next morning. What could be more comforting than “Blessed are the pure in heart”—or the meek, or the merciful, or the peacemakers? And what could be more challenging and disturbing than much of what follows?

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy’. But I say to you, Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” It is from this same passage that such phrases as “turning the other cheek” and “going the extra mile” have entered the secular vocabulary of the English language, to be used daily by thousands who have no idea of their source. But has there ever been advice more absurd than Love your enemies? I wasn’t thinking about that then--as we feasted in the church hall and danced our geriatric best to strange Levantine beats.

That might have been enough festivity for any mortal, but we capped it the following night at a dinner at the fabulous New York apartment of our friends Michael Goldman and Eleanor Bergstein. Michael, an eminent scholar of drama and a fine poet, was my colleague for forty years. The popular meaning of the word mensch might have been invented for him. Eleanor, for whom "glamorous" is one mot juste, has had a fabulously successful writing career most famously as the creator of Dirty Dancing, one of the most widely viewed films (and now stage shows) of a long generation. Lots of people know that already, but I am in a position to out her as well as an amazing cook. Nobody puts Baby in a corner…but the kitchen? Strongly advised.

 Michael Goldman and Eleanor Bergstein on the set of Dirty Dancing

We had not seen each other in a long time, and the animated conversation of old friends, which often has a priceless quality, was further enriched by the presence of other, brilliant table guests. The long evening would have been memorable even without its dramatic ending. As midnight approached, indeed as we and the other guests were just beginning to make going-away noises, the telephone rang. It was a friend and assistant of Eleanor’s, calling to advise her to turn on the television set, quick. President Obama was just about to announce the death of Osama bin Laden.

We listened to the whole of the President’s announcement. It was of a definitive solemnity, and the evening was over. We took the subway local from Columbia University station down most of the length of Manhattan to Christopher Street. As we walked a few short blocks to our borrowed apartment, the streets were already abuzz. There were occasional shouts of exultation from festive undergraduates along Fourth Street. When we got to the apartment, we immediately turned on the Tube to see scenes of more young people, now massing on Times Square and at Ground Zero. Somebody had a large American flag. There was the usual exhibitionism of playing to the camera. The vibe was of a slightly bibulous athletic event. They were all chanting, as they might chant in support of their team in the semi-finals: U-S-A, U-S-A!

Who could blame them? A mass murderer, and one who added to the enormity of his criminality the blasphemy of claiming divine sanction for his crimes, had received a just retribution, and, given geo-political realities, probably the only one plausible. Why, then, did the gloating seem to me vaguely unseemly? Sometimes, surely, just getting within shouting distance of the beatitudes ought to be enough, without contemplating the impossible task of getting beyond them.