Raise Your Hand

 

 

Some time ago I wrote a little essay about things and signs, res and signa in Latin, in relation to a little book Saint Augustine wrote on that subject.  Signs are of course of many kinds, but among the most prominent in human cultures are verbal signs.  This is probably a too elaborate way of saying something rather simple.  Language is absolutely fundamental to human societies, but language is also marked by ambiguities requiring interpretation.  The same sound means bear (an animal), bear (the verb) and bare (the adjective), among other things.  Hence the shaggy dog question: How can a bear bare to bear a bare bear?   According to some linguistic theories both ancient and modern, language can never completely eschew ambiguity.  The Stoic linguistic experts said that words could be explained only by using other words: “That is like bringing an unlit candle into a darkened room!”  Even more ambiguous very often are signs that are pictorial and gestural.  I present as examples some problems of “signage” raised by two eminent alumni of my institution, Princeton, who would appear to be on opposite sides of our deeply divided political culture.

 The first is Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University.  He earned his doctorate in the Princeton History Department in 1984.  President Roth has written a couple of op eds that I have found interesting, one of which was recently in the New York Times: “Trump is Selling Jews a Dangerous Lie” (4.07.25).  Though chiefly concerned with the iniquities of Donald Trump, he also criticized Elon Musk and the Anti-Defamation League, a group that had in his view soft-pedalled the implications of a provocative body gesture Musk had performed from a public stage.  “The president hadn’t been in office a full day before the Anti-Defamation League spoke up to defend Elon Musk for throwing what sure looked to me like a Sieg heil.” I had missed out on this episode at the time, but it was clear that “throwing a Seig heil” had to mean that Musk had performed a Nazi salute, and he had done this at a party celebrating Trump’s inauguration three months ago.  Wow!  I may have missed this, but the rest of the world did not.  There is even a Wikipedia article on the “Elon Musk salute controversy.”

 

Princetonians singing "Old Nassau" in the '80's
 

            It turns out the gesture may have been imported from France, and it has a French name, quenelle.  Such quenelles as I have known are gastronomic delicacies, but signs (verbal and gestural) mean different things in different times and places.  “In late 2013, following its use by professional footballer Niccolas Anelka during a match, Jewish leaders, anti-racism groups, and public officials in France have interpreted it as an inverted Nazi salute and as an expression of antisemitism.  French officials have sought to ban the gesture due to its perceived subtext of antisemitism.”  The triumphant or defiant arm reach actually has no single conventional meaning, or indeed any conventional meaning.  It is more than doubtful that protesting black American Olympians in 1968 intended it as “throwing a Sieg heil” in a celebration of fascist power.  It was at the time described by some as a variant or perhaps desecration of an “Olympic salute”—another supposed common gesture of which I was unaware.  You can read about that one in a journalistic essay of 2012 by Rose Eveleth, published four years before Trump’s first inauguration*.  Elon Musk is one of those public figures I would be  inclined to dislike on the grounds of his obscene wealth alone, but that is my problem.  The idea that he was “throwing a Seig heil” with crypto-fascist intent is kind of looney.  Has Dr. Roth never himself sung the anthem of his doctoral alma mater, “Old Nassau”, with its weird but statutory arm gesture?

 

            My second subject is a bearer of strange signs rather than a strange interpreter of them.  I refer to Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, of the great undergraduate class of 2003.  Michael Roth didn’t quite overlap with Pete Hegseth at Princeton, but there is in general little commerce between undergraduate and graduate students in any event.  I remember Hegseth by name as a notable basketball player, but I never met him.  As a man tattooed, he is perhaps rare but by no means unique among Princetonians.  He was preceded by at least one celebrity, Secretary of State George Schultz, who thus explained the factors discouraging him against a presidential run of his own: “I’m afraid the country is not ready for a president who might have a tiger tattooed on his rear end.”   That’s Tiger, as in Princeton Tigers.  I suspect the country is by now ready for more or less anything, but Schultz, alas, died at a great age a few years ago.  What Hegseth has tattooed very prominently over one bicep is the Latin sentence Deus vult.  I am no expert, but this is one of the more learned tattoos I have encountered.  It means “God wants or wills [it],” it being the First Crusade.  The phrase was the crowd’s enthusiastic answer to the Pope’s suggestion of a holy war made at the Council of Clermont in 1096.  The war’s ostensible purpose was to “liberate” the holy biblical sites in Palestine and to safeguard the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem.  This verbal exchange was in all probability conducted in the vernacular, but chroniclers generally wrote in Latin.  You may or may not know how all that crusading business worked out, but it was, well, complicated.

            According to various reputable sources various proto-fascists have adopted this phrase (Deus vult) as their motto, so that it is now, according to critics, an emblem of white supremacists.  As it happens, I have encountered one or two of those supremacist types over the years, but none of them looked to me like Latinists.  Though I am strongly in favor of studying Latin, all good things have their limits.  There are many reasons to be tentative about Hegseth’s appointment to direct the largest, most expensive and perhaps most important division of our government, the one charged with the national defense in a dangerous world.  What special gifts or experience argue in favor of such an appointment?  But his tattoos and their putative interpretations are perhaps pretty far down on the list of concerns and may have already attracted more attention than they merit.

 

            I remember writing one time about Rudyard Kipling’s swastikas.  The swastika is an ancient Indo-European emblem of prosperity and well-being the English writer adopted as a personal symbol more than thirty years before the Nazis arrived in power.  Kipling was one of the most prolific and popular Anglophone writers of the first quarter of the twentieth century, and had millions of readers.   At least one of the collected editions of his works published in the 1920s is prominently decorated with swastikas in its binding.  After the 1920s came the 1930s.  And after that came a great world war.  A specialized journal devoted to Kipling and his works repeatedly had to point out that the swastika could not have had for him a meaning in any way connected with Adolph Hitler or the National Socialist Party of Germany.  For him it invoked the fascinating, often exotic energies of the mysterious India of his birth.  Use the Moby Dick test.  Queequeg was no less effective as a harpooner for all the tattoos covering his face, as Ishmael himself came to learn.  We have enough to worry about in how our new Secretary of Defense will handle the harpoons.  A good place to begin there is with an old adage: Loose lips sink ships.  We can  fret over the pigmented epidermis later.

Fascist elephant?

 

Spine of a Kipling novel?

 

*“The Olympic Salute We Don’t Use Anymore Because it Looked too Much Like Heiling Hitler” (Smithsonian Magazine, August 10, 2012). 

 

 

 

 

Civic Virtue

 

Lorenzo de' Medici, "the Magnificent"

 

Perhaps my title needs a question mark: Civic Virtue?  Or even reformulation as an actual interrogative sentence?  Is there even such a thing as civic virtue?  Now, obviously there are virtues that can be deployed to the benefit of the community and of one’s neighbors in particular: paying your taxes promptly, supporting local charitable and service organizations, contributing to or participating in joint civic activities.   There is a certain civic virtue perhaps in keeping the exterior of your grounds in a reasonably tidy condition.   You can cut your lawn grass in a timely manner and refrain from throwing your empty beer bottles into your yard.  Try to keep from having more than two jalopies up on cinder blocks in the driveway at any one time.  That sort of thing.  But is there such a thing as civic virtue as relates to cities themselves?  Can a city ever be said to be “virtuous”?

 

 Civic virtuoso by Norman Rockwell

These questions arise in my mind attendant upon a book review I have been asked to write.  Its title is Florence and the Idea of Jerusalem, a title with the increasingly uncommon virtue of telling you what the book is actually going to be about.  The time period covered is often referred to by historians as early modernity.  Several of the religions of the world have the concept of “holy places,” many of which are cities said to be sacred.  In medieval and Renaissance Italy the powerful city-state of Florence liked to think of itself as a “new Jerusalem”.  One can say only “Join the club!”  In fact I doubt that there was any conurbation of even moderate size that in one way or another didn’t exhibit signs of a kind of Jerusalem-envy.  But Florence, as with most things, did Hierosulamism with a flair.

A city can be virtuous by law.  I spent a good deal of my early life in a little place in north-central Arkansas, Baxter County.  The county seat was a quite small town—a good deal larger now, though still small, called Mountain Home.  During all the years of my youth Baxter County was “dry”—meaning that the trading in or consumption of alcohol was prohibited by law.  Between 1920 and 1933 the whole country was by law in theory “dry”.  I stress the “in theory” part, because violations (bootlegging) were rife and created organized crime on a vast scale.  Because of the rampant criminality and gangsterism that followed in its wake, enforced prohibition eventually came to be generally regarded as a disastrous failure and was repealed.  (I might add that lots of Americans really liked to drink.)  Prohibition had been imposed by the ponderous device of constitutional amendment, and it was repealed by the same means.  But prohibitionists could not be repealed, and there were still a lot of them around too, especially in the rural south.  So by a system called “local option” still operating in many southern states in my youth the residents of a county could choose to be either wet or dry as they pleased.  There are, I believe, still some dry counties in Arkansas.  An unpremeditated alliance of bootleggers (of whom there were a few) and Baptists (of whom there were not a few) perpetuated the system.  Motivation and implementation are seldom in perfect alignment.  The nearest places to get loaded were a group of dubious but busy establishments just over the Missouri state line about fifteen miles due north of Mountain Home.

Getting back to Renaissance Florence, it was a pretty lively place, quite apart from all the humanists walking around with copies of Cicero in their pockets.  The place was overbriming with professional religious—in its nominal rather than its adjectival meaning of "members of religious orders"--rapacious noblemen, armed bravos, prostitutes, pickpockets, beggars and conmen.  I say nothing of the common cutthroats and cut-purses publicly executed on a regular basis.  Lorenzo de’ Medici was more or less a strict contemporary of Dominican reformer, Girolamo Savonarola. Perhaps I should say “would-be reformer”.  Savonarola had major ambitions to turn the city into a kind of giant monastery.  His ambitions along these lines enjoyed some early promise and a famous bonfire of vanities; but his progress was definitively  when he was hanged and burned alive in a public square.  The secular powers were, shall we say, very secular.  Concerning all this I can recommend George Eliot’s underappreciated historical novel Romola.  If you don’t have time for that, as you probably don’t, at least read “Minever Cheevey”, a delightful little poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson.  “Minever loved the Medici, Albeit he has never seen one.  He would have sinned incessantly, Could he have been one.”

                                                             Savonarola

 

The aspirations to civic sanctity among Renaissance humanists have given us some interesting episodes.  The monastic and the ascetic might seem to be antithetical to the civic and the secular.  But here we find a cultural heavyweight like Erasmus asking the following strange question: “What else is a city, I ask you, but a large monastery?”  One can probably think of a number of other things else; but of course Erasmus was hinting at the proto-Protestant idea that the aspiration to “religious life” was an option for all Christians, not exclusively those in religious orders.  Florence certainly offered some options.  Yet the attempt to infuse civic government with high-minded religious or ethical ambition began in ancient times and in my own lifetime has been the motive of action for idealists in many lands.  John Calvin did his best to sanctify the city of Geneva in the sixteenth century.  Our own American history is replete with the communal search for social righteousness as expressed in social experiments like the Brook Farm community of the 1840s.  The many “communes” of the 1960s are still fresh in my own mind.

In many respects our county’s seventeenth-century Puritan origins have lived on, though sometimes only in echoes and shadows.  We hear repeated endlessly the phrase attributed to the Puritan preacher John Winthrop that “we shall be as a city upon a hill.”  Virtue is to be displayed, as so also once was vice.  It is probably fortunate that we have abandoned scarlet letters, prominently placed town stocks and pillories, and public executions; but there are still means of conveying social disapprobation.  Every few years the public reaction to some unfortunate incident in the New York subways gains special notoriety and puts on display our unresolved attitudes concerning the nature, limitations, or dangers of demonstrating civic virtue, or perhaps even of defining it.

The Mess at Columbia

 

            It is in a quasi-apologetic spirit that I return to some subjects only recently touched upon.  Like many others who have spent a lifetime teaching, I find many aspects of our unsettled cultural moment disquieting.  In assessing the strengths of American social institutions, we may be apt to underestimate the importance of our system of higher education.  American colleges and universities are unique in the world in terms of their number, their variety, and the role they have played in advancing important national goals and aspiration, including democracy itself.   To be honest, one has to point out the contrast between the exceptional nature of American higher education and its sometimes mediocre (or worse) public high schools.  It is therefore a cause of particular sadness to me when I sense, as I do at this moment, a diminution of the respect with which Americans regard the state of higher education just now. Our American system of higher education has been pricing itself out of the easy reach of the general population for decades.  It seems to me now in danger of stumbling into outright cultural hostility with that population as well.

 

            At one level the problem is a money problem, as so many of our national problems are.  There are macro- and micro-manifestations of the financial problem.  On the macro level, there has been an agreement between government and research institutions that universities would conduct all kinds of scientific research useful to the government and mainly paid for by the government—theoretically, but only theoretically, with no strings attached.  The cultural contract between our colleges and the general population is informal and implicit, but it has been reasonably clear.  Whatever other benefits collegiate institutions may claim to offer—principal among them the personal and spiritual growth of individual students and the preparation of citizens prepared for vigorous and informed participation in democracy—the frequently explicit claim of life-long economic advantage has been prominent.  Parents have been willing to scrimp and save for the demonstrable probability that their material sacrifice will enhance the prospects for the material prosperity of their offspring.  For a variety of reasons, this rationale is no longer a consensus.

           

            Columbia University in New York City, possibly the most famous of the many great educational institutions in what is probably still thought of by many as our nation’s greatest city, is going through a stressful time.  In fact, it is in a huge mess.  The latest tribulation is the resignation of an interim president appointed after the resignation of a predecessor who herself barely warmed the seat in the presidential office.  This has pretty much been an all-girl band.  And the latest lady is already being menaced by the congresswoman whose Perry Mason-stye cross examinations in a congressional committee hearing ended the executive career of the Penn president nearly instantly.  Ex-President Shafik of Columbia, who happens also to be a peer of the British realm and returned to England after only a year in New York, was in my opinion an outstanding educational leader.  But she was not a commando nor a barroom brawler,  both of which roles may now descend upon a college president almost capriciously  The newest temporary leader is being called an acting president as opposed to an interim.  Though I have never taught at Columbia University, I have had some reasonably close connections with the institution and have had many friends there.  To observe from a distance the distress of one of the world’s flagship institutions must be painful to anyone concerned with high quality higher education.

 

            Our universities inherited from their medieval European ancestors a certain sense of privilege when compared with other sections of civil society.  The phrase “ivory tower” is one that suggests an institution liberated from our own daily struggles and challenges in order to pursue a contemplative purity.  Many college professors think of themselves as modern ascetics who have sacrificed the fleshpots of Egypt for the cold but bracing water streams of Academe.  Never mind the fatuousness of the idea.  It is one that preserves a faint racial memory of the monastic origins of our universities in the Latin Middle Ages.  But just how unmonastic a great American university actually is may be suggested by the fact that Columbia now needs many millions of dollars of government money to operate on all cylinders.  And I mean many: four hundred million.  The Trump Administration says it is unwilling to provide the wanted and wonted money unless Columbia redresses certain alleged features of its “campus culture”.  The dereliction of which Columbia is accused is being soft on anti-Semitism.  The context in which this dereliction is supposed to have manifested itself are campus protests relating to the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, a militant group of Palestinians. 

 

In the neo-Manichaean style preferred by the New York Times the issue was thus analyzed: “Many professors saw it as surrender, a reward to the Trump administration’s heavy hand. Conservative critics of academia celebrated it as an overdue, righteous reset by an Ivy League university.”  One discovers what the it was in that sentence—either surrender or reward, in the paper’s dramatic prose—only later in the sentence.  It was the decision by the administration of Columbia University to cooperate with requirements concerning the conduct of students participating in political protests on campus.

 

It is easy to deplore the implications of a full-throated culture war between American academia and the current presidential administration, but rather harder to avoid the conflict itself.  That the research universities truly need government money is suggested by the staggering shortfall of four hundred million dollars with which Columbia was threatened.  It may require a little more intellectual subtlety to appreciate that the government is no less in need of what American colleges and universities uniquely provide to the nation’s well-being.  And it is just possible that intellectual subtlety ought to be more of a national priority.

 

Applicants take extreme measures to gain entrance to top-ranking schools

 

A Cultural Weekend

 

I am coming off what was a highly satisfying cultural weekend.  Years ago there were two movie theaters in our no longer so little town.  One of them gave up the ghost so many years ago that I can barely remember it, but the other, the Garden, hung on and eventually metamorphosed into the kind of “art” cinema every college town should have and usually does.  It has to a degree prospered and seems recently to have had a qualified interior spruce up.  It is no longer in obvious need of roof repair.  From the frequency with which we receive its begging letters it appears to remain appropriately marginal from the business point of view.  But of course it is wonderful to have an “art” cinema in town.  We find ourselves in fairly frequent attendance.

 

So near the end of last week we went to view “The Tree of Life.”  I had never seen this film; in fact, I don’t think I had ever even heard of it.  The setting of “The Tree of Life” is a little difficult to describe, as it includes both highly imaginative cosmic topography and (mainly) that of a modest middle class section of a sizeable Texas town or small city, which I think “is” Waco, in the 1950s.  East Texas is apparently an especially apt geography for “coming-of-age” movies.  I remember another great one from fifty ago: “The Last Picture Show.”  Waco is not an unknown place on the national scene, and it is certainly known to me as a professor of English literature  It is the home of Baylor University, an important cultural institution in the state, and a center for the study of Victorian poetry, especially that of the Brownings.  There is a certain eccentricity to academic libraries.  There are some outstanding specific topical collections on individual writers to be found scattered throughout the world.  In the middle of the 1950s I was living in a little town in East Texas, Mount Pleasant, where I graduated from its high school in 1954.  Mount Pleasant is maybe a couple of hundred miles northeast of Waco.  This must have been about the time of the imagined setting for “The Tree of Life.”  The makers of the film had spent a lot of time on authenticity of the film’s setting.  So I experienced a certain vague sense of dejà vu arising from my own late adolescent experience in East Texas.

 

            I am by no means a cinema buff, and I knew nothing of this particular movie in advance, except that it was supposed to be good—a judgment that I regard as an understatement.  The film is in my view superb.  Not that I could tell you exactly what it is “about,” beyond what is accurately if elliptically suggested by its title.  I would have to see it again even to be sure I could summarize all the elements of the plot accurately.  But the acting—including that performed by several very young actors—is superb.  It is not always easy to predict those sections of the population likely to be moved by a work of art, but this one has broad ambitions.   If you are a mother or a father—or are closely related to anyone who is, such as your own parents—you will almost certainly be moved, pensive, curious and reflective after seeing this film.  One of the things you will be pensive about, even if you have never heard the word before, is what Aristotle called mimesis—the fascinating and mysterious ways in which art is made to “imitate” life.

 

Jennifer Borghi, soprano

 

            Well, that was (I think) Friday night.  We now move on to Saturday night and something, as they say, completely different: Mozart’s Requiem performed by dedicated and talented singers from the chancel steps of a mini-cathedral, the Princeton University Chapel.  Except that it isn’t “completely different,” of course.  The energies of art, though highly differentiated, are quite often surprisingly convergent.  Anybody who watches “The Tree of Life” is likely to be set to thinking about the meaning of life.  Anyone who listens intently to the Mozart Requiem is guaranteed to be set to thinking about both life and death.  The huge chapel was nearly full for this superb performance, which was offered to the Princeton community as a free gift.  Amazing!    It was an event we would both want to attend under any circumstances, but there was in this instance a particular reason that guaranteed our presence.  The soprano soloist was Jennifer Borghi, who has been our friend since she was an undergraduate here twenty-some years ago.  Jen’s singing on this occasion was particularly strong and beautiful, I thought, as indeed was that of the other soloists.   It was a stunning performance.

 

 

            I suppose it is possible to react to a religious liturgy in purely aesthetic terms; then again it is possible to take a shower with your socks on.  I do not recommend it. Mozart himself was deeply religious, however conventional his actual religiosity may seem to us.  I remember seeing a letter of his, written when he was twenty or twenty-one, in which he practically gloats over the death of Voltaire.  But people’s meditations upon eternity tend to sharpen and mature as they approach its portals.  Given the fact that he was working away at his Requiem on his own death-bed, I can hardly doubt that the Last Things were on his mind.  The word requiem has become a bit dark and scary, but it actually means neither death nor a death dirge.  It means rest, as in relaxation, freedom from physical or mental effort.  The first two words of the Mozart requiem Mass petition for an eternal rest bathed in perpetual light.  That is solemn, sober, exalted; but it is far from tragic. 

 

            The simple medieval hymn Dies irae (“Day of Wrath”) appears early in the work.  Dies irae, dies illa/Solvet saeclum in favilla/Teste David cum Sibylla…(Day of wrath, that day/Will dissolve the earth in ashes/As David and the Sibyl bear witness…)  This little poem—it has a second strophe of three lines—is a nearly perfect example of medieval literary humanism.  It hard wires together the archetypes of the biblical and the classical-gentile prophetic traditions, the latter of which is so often explicated and illuminated by the former.  I spent a good deal of my scholarly career trying to understand and demonstrate this theme in early European poetry and the visual arts.   The Sibyl (who guides Aeneas between the worlds of the living and the dead) is the gentile “type” of the Hebrew king and prophet.  The word sibyl came to denote various versions of the female prophet.  Mozart attempts in music what so many Renaissance poets attempted in their verses.  He produced a work which, imitating the spiritual scheme from which it rises, defies mortality.

turned out to be not quite the last

 

 

           

Unamended Speech

 

    The written Constitution of the United States is an intricately structured document worked out over a long period of vigorous debate, complex compromises, and artful dodges.  The deliberations in Philadelphia occupied several months of the year 1787.  But there was definitely something about the process that, if not quite haphazard or spur-of-the-moment, was dramatically incomplete.  It gave intricate instructions about how laws were to be made, but said very little about the people for whom they were to be made, interpreted, and enforced. The over-all authority for the document was grand and noble—it was the people of the new nation expressing themselves through elected representation.  But precious little was said of the people themselves.  The wise men who had devised the document were of course aware that their work, however impressive, was partial and radically incomplete, and they made pretty precise rules about how it could be improved, corrected, clarified and expanded—all of which activities fell within the definition of a single word, to wit, amendment.

 

    Amending the Constitution began almost immediately with ten more or less related amendments largely concerning the rights of individual citizens as opposed to governmental structures.  These we call the Bill of Rights.  The First Amendment is a doozy: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.  There is probably more cultural history packed into these forty-five words than was lost in the tragic incineration of the Library of Alexandria.  The blanket authorization of freedom of religious belief and practice, freedom of speech, freedom to write and publish, freedom to petition the Government—extraordinary!  Freedom of speech is what is on my mind at the moment, as various voices in or around the Trump Administration are seeking to get rid of a foreign-born “student activist” from Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil.  They don’t like some of the things he has said, but since most of them know in their heart of hearts that he presents what many of us regard as an open-and-shut free speech case they are trying to find some possible criminality in his personal or intellectual associations to justify his expulsion.  This evasion offers a kind of screen behind which an illiberal idea can to some extent enjoy a spurious plausibility.  And it does seem destined for success.  One highly respectable conservative guru—respected by me, among others—has declared that this is not a free speech case at all, but an administrative issue of immigration status and the shade of green on Mr. Khalil's green card.   Mr. Khalil’s offense is a thought-crime.  He appears to be an open supporter of Hamas, for example, and so…so what?  The Bill of Rights says nothing about qualifying the rights of people with whom we disagree, or whose ideas most or even all the rest of us may actually find repellent, even dangerous. 

 

    Many of the greatest quotations in history are not actually quotations yet accurately represent the thought of those to whom they are attributed.  If Voltaire didn’t actually utter the following words, he certainly lived them: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.  That sentence structure dramatizes, quite gratuitously, Voltaire’s own privilege of dissenting from the ideas expressed.  And it is the template of most such expressions.  It contains its own implicit “virtue signalling”.  But Mr. Khalil’s right to express his ideas is in no way dependent upon what Voltaire, you, I, or anybody else might think about Khalil or his ideas.  Not that there is no good explanation for the hostility to “absolute” freedom of speech.  Quite apart from the business of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater—or its contemporary telephonic form, “SWATing,” making maliciously false reports to the police--people don’t much like hearing themselves, their country, their political ideas, their religious beliefs roughly countered, denied, traduced or insulted.  I certainly don’t.  But that is one of several annoyances you simply have to suck up if you sincerely adhere to democracy.  It could even happen that your preferred candidate in a presidential election might not prevail.

 

    Majoritarian rule, a feature of our democracy, is hardly without its inconveniences.  But Churchill’s famous, possibly sardonic, remarks on the topic still command attention: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”

 

    There are many inconveniences attendant upon old age.  I discover new ones daily.  But one enjoys also the great advantages of memory, experience, and perspective.  I can laugh out loud at much of the apocalypticism of certain sections of the American press.  I repeatedly read that “never before in American history have we witnessed” this, that, or another enormity that I last witnessed in my thirties or forties if not later.  Democracy does require work, apparently more work than most citizens are willing, or perhaps too many of them, able, to perform.  Perhaps it really is the best of an imperfect suite of options.  Things are often very messy in democratic systems.  But the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.  Churchill has a discouraging word of wisdom on that subject too: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

 

 

Dulce et decorum?

The proud tower

 

            This has been a week when a kind of unplanned and unexpected serendipity of coherence has emerged from the reading we have been doing.  I use the plural because Joan and I, in addition to whatever we happen to be reading on our own, usually are also slowly working through a book we are sharing aloud.  We share it, but she does the work of the actual reading, both on account of personal preference and vocal mellifluousness.  We are just now in the midst of a wonderful read that I could recommend to anyone: The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig.*  Zweig, an excellent and once popular Austrian writer, was born in 1881 and died in Brazil (along with his wife) by suicide in 1942.  A highly cultured European cosmopolitan Jew, he left an autobiography that is, among other things, a pained lament for the shocking barbarism of the European wars that had destroyed the old Europe of his youth and his fevered dreams. 

 

Stefan Zweig
 

As the topic of literature war is of course a prominent, indeed dominant subject and spiritual theme.  On almost any reader’s list of the world’s greatest novels, Tolstoy’s War and Peace is likely to appear at or near the top.  I myself would put it right at the pinnacle, but I shall not spend any effort justifying my judgment here, except to say that I regard the title itself as brilliant.  To the extent that all art holds up its mirror to life, war and peace are what human history, and therefore the lives of those men and women who made history or simply endured or suffered it, has chiefly consisted of.  In the Western literary traditions with which we are familiar war can be said to have had a paramount role.  The Greek Iliad and the Latin Æneid, the most obvious inspiration of the vernacular epics of the Middle Ages  and the Renaissance, have their narrative origins in ancient myths of an Ur-conflict, the Trojan War.  Hence Beowulf, hence the Song of Roland.  Did not Horace himself, the ur-guru of literary critical theory,  say that the Trojan War is the only right subject of the ambitious poet?

 

The First World War (still often called the “Great War” despite being eclipsed in many categories of horror by the Second) had a profound literary posterity, brilliantly discussed in the important work by the late Paul Fussell, a personal acquaintance of mine: The Great War and Modern Memory.  Zweig was in no sense a military historian.  I should describe him as an acute aesthetic commentator.  Perhaps in fact he regarded “historical” perspective as no part of his task.  But he did see in the war the obscene negation of all the positive impulses of the old European culture, a disaster not merely apocalyptic but also incomprehensible.

 

            Life forces upon us unexpected Jungian synchronicities.  Why else should I have happened by chance this week to see a brief moment of the English “Antiques Roadshow”—a mere snatch of the program--which featured a book once owned by Wilfred Owen, perhaps the most tragic of the young English poets lost in the First War.  It was  a book preparing a young confirmand for the sacrament of confirmation and a first Holy Communion, given to him by his parish priest .  Those who know Owen only or mainly through such terrifying poems as “Dulce et decorum est”—the line comes from Horace, It is sweet and fitting [to die for one’s country]--may be startled to discover in their youthful author a  pious Anglican ‘teen-ager still wholly innocent of the horrors of blasted bodies and  rotting flesh.  The chief impression left on my mind by this glimpse of fairly recent history was that war, which has so often been the subject of great poets, has also been the death of poets.  The episode ended as all of us hope that episodes on the “Antiques Roadshow” should end.  The expert evaluator informed the gobsmacked current owner of this rather battered pious and pedestrian  religious handbook that he was the unknowing possessor of a small fortune.

 

            As an Austrian Zweig was expected, indeed practically required, to hate with a gem-like intensity the military leaders of the enemy, and to hate especially Lord Grey “the perfidious British Foreign Minister.”  This the humane and cosmopolitan Viennese poet was incapable of doing, as hating was not his thing.  But his fellow Germanophone dramatist Ernst Lissauer gave German-speakers literary leadership in this field with his wildly popular “Hymn of Hate for England”.  “Disastrously,” write Zweig, “it was soon obvious how easy it is to set the forces of hatred working, for here the stout, deluded little Jew Lissauer was anticipating Hitler.”

 

                Quite indirectly, Lissauer sent me back to Barbara Tuchman, two of whose brilliantly written works (The Guns of August and The Proud Tower) were published in a single volume in a splendid Library of America edition edited by Margaret MacMillan, herself an eminent scholar of the Great War.  This book is on my own shelves, and I actually found it—far from the only possible result of my searching for one of my books.  The Proud Tower is one of those books whose title, if it doesn’t quite say it all, manages still to say a whole lot.  Zweig was a secular Jewish intellectual unlikely to turn to semi-theological explanations for historical developments.  I, as a Christian scholar of medieval European literature, am under fewer constraints in doing do.  Pride, superbia, was in the old European thought the mother of all sins; and it was in plentiful supply in all the royal houses of Europe as the Old World hastened to its definitive end.  I do not think I am abusing Tuchman in saying this, for the title of her work is a clear allusion to the biblical Tower of Babel, a canonized emblem of absurd human presumption.  The first section of Tuchman’s Proud Tower is entitled “The Patricians”, and it begins with a Who’s Who of the high and the mighty Englishmen who formed “the last government in the Western world to possess all the attributes of aristocracy in working condition…”—the British Cabinet in 1895.  I cannot quote this brilliant beginning to Tuchman’s book at length.  It is about twice as long as this blog essay.  But I can give you a glimpse.  Among the Cabinet officers was the Lord President of the Council, “a Duke [of Devonshire] who owned 186,000 acres in eleven counties whose ancestors had served in government since the Fourteenth Century, who had himself served thirty-four years in the House of Commons, and three times refused to be Prime Minister.”  One wonders what this fellow would have thought of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est” and the flower of Albion’s youth marching blindly through a gas attack, “bent double, like old beggars under sacks/ Knock-kneed, coughing like hags…”

 

God damn England!

*originally first published in German as Die Welt von Gestern (Zurich, Wiliams Verlag, 1942), trans. by Anthea Bell (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), pp. 472.

Mother Tongue

 

I post this essay on Ash Wednesday animated by a strange feeling more like unease than penitence.  A good deal has been happening of late on what I shall call the Presidential Front.  Mr. Trump has been operating at a high speed and a high decibel level that has captured journalistic comment of despairing or of admiring tenor depending upon the predilections of the commentators.  What is at the center of public discourse just at the moment is his highly public and even more highly publicized dressing down of Volodymyr Zelensky, the beleaguered president of Ukraine.  This episode was such “good television” as Mr. Trump accurately described it, that it has captured the attention of the world press and its commentariat and is likely to keep it through several news cycles.  Like most people, I have a lot of thoughts about this episode, but my ideas lack any possible expert authority or originality, and I have no intention of forcing them upon a group I respect as highly as I respect my loyal readers.  There is an old Latin adage preserved by Erasmus: ne sutor ultra crepidam.  This is generally expressed in English as “Shoemaker, stick to your last”—a last of course being the metal frame upon which a cobbler forms a shoe under construction.  The contemporary version of this is Stay in your own lane.  My lane is by no means that of political science, international relations, or most of the other things that dominate the news.  I am a professor of English, and a long retired one at that.  Nonetheless, in the very week of the Zelenksy brouhaha, our President executed an official pronouncement right smack in the middle of my own narrow lane.  And it deserves my comment.

 

On March 1, 2025, the President of the United States made it official, it being the English language, which is now by executive fiat the national tongue.  All I can say is Whew or maybe even Thank God.  I am a retired professor of English, and for long decades the uncertainty surrounding the question has never entirely relaxed its grip on my subconscious.  Though I was unable to articulate the fear even to myself, I was always haunted by the possibility that it might turn out that for all those decades during which I had been studying Caedmon, Chaucer, Christopher Marlow, Pope, Dickens, Emerson, and Danielle Steel, the official language of our country had actually been Albanian.  I know that it sounds far-fetched, but so does a lot of stuff one reads from the front pages of reputable newspapers.

 

My sarcasms probably fail to amuse, but the question of an American “official language” is either disingenuous or simply ludicrous.  It is not an actual question but a political contrivance.  What language is the only language spoken, read, and written by the vast majority of citizens of the United States?  What language overwhelmingly dominates the hugely variegated world of print in our nation?  Without competence in which language are the social and economic prospects of anyone living in this country most likely to be constrained?  The principal language of the United States of America is the English language, as it has been since considerably before the nation’s founding, that founding conventionally taken to have occurred on July 4, 1776, with the publication in English of the Declaration of Independence from the British monarchy.  On that date it was not the only language being spoken by American natives.  There were already living here, and certainly in the contiguous land destined for political incorporation sooner or later, quite a few speakers of Amerindian languages and not a few of other European languages, including French, German, Dutch and (especially) Spanish.

 

I think that the “official language” business is mainly about Spanish.  There are millions of Spanish-speakers in this country.  There are New Mexican aristocrats whose families were living in Doña Ana County before the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought, and there are desperate Guatemalans who waded across the Rio Grande six months ago.  This “hispanic” population is about as homogenous as the “Southern whites” and other vast tribes subjected to confident journalistic over-simplification.  The various forms of Spanish spoken among this large population—with widely differing levels of competence, it must be added--may enrich the American linguistic scene; but it is in no way a threat to the cultural primacy of American English.

 

Many of us born and raised in the US are strictly monolingual. But we happen to be in the minority from a global perspective.  That is, statistics show that more than half of the people in the world speak more than one language. A majority are bilingual (speak two languages), and a significant proportion are polyglots (more than two). However, in the US, about 75% of Americans are monolingual English speakers. But where exactly does this disparity come from? Why are Americans so much more likely to be monolingual than people from other countries?  The reasons are found, naturally, in issues of historical development and in differences in economic and political power—like so much else, the luck of the draw.  You might say that our shared language is yet another advantage like our ample spacious and fertile land and our mainly temperate climate.  Like other valuable assets our linguistic advantage can be taken for granted or appreciated and nourished.

Once upon a time, in a small town in east Texas, I had a great high school English teacher. Her name was Mrs. White.  I suppose that by today’s loosey-goosy standards she would be regarded as a stickler for rules.  She firmly believed in something she called “educated English,” a feature of culture that imposed discipline and art on the human capacity for oral and written verbal communication.  She was absolute death on the comma splice and the run-on sentence, which she seemed to categorize as criminal conspiracies rather than untutored solecisms.  But she presented the mastery of spoken and written English in attractive, indeed aspirational terms, as a universal human possibility available to all.  Like such other inevitabilities of human life such as breathing, walking, eating, sleeping, singing, dancing, line-backing, dress-making, guitar-plucking, cow-milking, cotton-picking—her catalogue included practically everything ‘teen-agers habitually had to do, wanted to do, or simply did—like all these things, the English language could be “done” either well or not so well.  She made trying to “do” it well a lot of fun, as indeed it is.  But so far as I know President Eisenhower never made it “official.”