A Beautiful Tale of Love and Death

            We just got back from a quick trip to the opera—Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Lyric Theater in Chicago.  Occasional extravagances of that sort are an unanticipated possibility of retirement, but even so we should hardly have indulged were the opera not a pretext for meeting up with Tamara, a very old and dear friend, recently widowed, who lives in Michigan.  We had been “young marrieds” together nearly a half century ago.  Charles and I spent several years together as junior faculty colleagues before the goddess Fortuna sent us our differing ways.  Death, the definitive separation, is of a different order.  Any sensitive person will probably have an empathetic sense of widowhood, but the long-married are likely to intuit it with a particular poignancy.

I recently read that divorce rates in America have been in noticeable decline, but even before I was able to register a silent, inward satisfaction at the news the next paragraph was upon me with its disquieting explanation.  The reason fewer people have been filing for divorce is that so few people have been getting married in the first place.  There is comparatively little difficulty in putting asunder those whom God has never joined.

“The iconic American family, with mom, dad and kids under one roof, is fading” says another statistical essay in a recent Economist.  “In every state the numbers of unmarried couples, childless households and single-person households are growing faster than those comprised of married people with children, finds the 2010 census. The latter accounted for 43% of households in 1950; they now account for just 20%. And the trend has a potent class dimension. Traditional marriage has evolved from a near-universal rite to a luxury for the educated and affluent.”

            A “luxury for the educated and affluent”—perhaps rather like flying trips to Chicago to attend the opera?  Our great literature has principally concerned itself with three things, two of which are God and marriage, frequently enough in combination.  English professors used to spend a lot of time worrying about “the decline of the novel.”  I think what they were really worrying about—either without realizing it or without being willing to realize it—was the decline of God.  The basis for the greatness of Moby Dick and Les Misérables and The Brothers Karamazov is actually the God-question.  Take that away, and artistic grandeur is an uphill struggle.

God’s literary disappearance still left us with marriage.   Marriage resolves complication, restores order.  The comic (meaning optimistic or happy) template of our literature is the so-called marriage plot: the “Knight’s Tale”, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, almost anything by Jane Austen.  The Marriage Plot, indeed, is the title of a novel, currently much admired, by Jeffrey Eugenides.  And it’s a really great title.  So it is more than a little alarming, simply in literary terms, to face the possibility that narrative fiction may soon lose marriage as well.  “Thus they split, and lived uncommitedly ever after.”  That seems a little lame.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

That is not the problem with Lucia di Lammermoor.  Donizetti’s opera (1835) is based in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), and like most of Scott’s great tales this one was based in “real life”.  Our modern fetish for individual autonomy hardly prepares us for that old world (or most of our modern one outside the industrialized West) in which social relations are familial before they are personal.  If marriage can lead to comic fulfillment, the prohibition of marriage can lead to tragic destruction.  Hence according to the unfortunate comparative principle touched upon in my last post, Lucia di Lammermoor inevitably became “the Scottish Romeo and Juliet”.  

Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)

Yet things are worse even than that.  To forbid Lucy Ashton from marrying Mr. Right (Edgardo Ravenswood) would have been bad enough even without forcing her to marry Mr. Wrong (Arturo Bucklaw).  The sinister combination of oppressions means, in terms of a fine old essay on Scott’s novel by Andrew Lang, that Lucy is both Juliet and Ophelia: “for Lucy, in her soft and fragile beauty, her dutifulness to parental authority, and her final madness, corresponds to Ophelia with some closeness.”  Here are the ingredients for disaster, and on Saturday night in Chicago at least three geniuses—Scott, Donizetti, and the Alabaman soprano Susanna Phillips—made of it a disaster not soon to be forgotten.

Susanna Phillips as Lucia di Lammermoor

All art is determined by both its form and its content.  The very concept of bel canto opera is that the beauty of the singing matches the splendor of the dramaturgy and the moral dignity of the narrative content.  I had never before seen this opera, and I had read the Scott story so long ago that I could remember nothing more than the basic narrative situation.  But it hardly matters.  I have discovered that works of art are like Heraclitus’s river.  You never can step into the same river twice.  The intellectual and spiritual experiences of one’s seventies are not those of one’s fifties, let alone those of one’s twenties.  In some miraculous way the old is also new.  The word re-reading is thus inexact.

Still, in art as in life the complement of change is continuity.  The origins of our romance tradition are sometimes traced to the opening words of the medieval story of Tristan and Iseult: “My lords, would you hear a beautiful tale of love and death?...”  That might be called the bel canto of the eternal human experience.

“My lords, would you hear a beautiful tale of love and death?...”

De-Bard

 Roland Emmerich: a lean and hungry look, with a clear focus on the box office

My dear old Dad had a number of really corny jokes and riddles, apparently devised by and for the simple-minded, that he would pull out for all occasions.  This was unfortunate, since at the very best they worked on one occasion.   “My name’s Schmaltzmeller.  I sell Fuller brushes.  Anything you want to brush up on?”  Also: “I call my sweetie Oleo.  I haven’t any but her.”  That sort of thing.  Well, yesterday I had amazing success with one of these chestnuts.  I was walking along with a young lady when I injected into the conversation, all casual-like, one of my Dad’s favorites.  “Do you know who,” I asked her, “is buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

            Got her!  She fell for it!  Of course it is true that that the young lady, my granddaughter, is six years old, has had all her education (meaning pre-school and first-grade) in France, had never heard of Ulysses Grant, and did not know what a tomb was.  Still, my feeling of triumph was considerable.  If you wait long enough, and stoop low enough, you can find an audience for almost anything.

            I presume that is the principle animating the Hollywood “Shakespeare” film directed by Roland Emmerich and about to be unleashed upon us.  News of its dread approach has been crackling through the synapses of English Teacher listservs for the past month.  It is entitled Anonymous, and amid much foot-stomping, boob-baring, head-chopping, quill-flourishing, and fire-blazing (otherwise known in Hollywood as “Tudor history”) it dusts off the old one about Shakespeare not actually writing the plays of Shakespeare, which were in fact written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.

THREE CONTESTANTS

Lord Verulam (Category: niftiest hat)

The Earl of Oxford (Category: itchiest chest; cf Donnelly, below)

William Shakespeare (Category: coolest earring)

            The pre-emptive concerns of English teachers have to do with the cinematic power to render their students’ simple ignorance invincible—what might be called the “Kennedy effect”.  By the late nineties most undergraduates I met at the supposedly elite university in which I taught were sure that President John Kennedy had been assassinated by CIA agents—Lee Harvey Oswald having been nothing more than a convenient patsy, though of course also the possible author of the works once attributed to Christopher Marlowe.  That was on account of a movie of Oliver Stone’s (JFK, 1991).

            America’s English teachers constitute an endangered species already.  They have the unenviable task of trying to coax the kids to get beyond Act One, Scene Two even in the CliffsNotes version.  They need to persuade them of the redeeming social content of technical terms like soliloquy, stichomythia, and dramatic irony.   It is an annoying distraction, to use one of our President’s favorite terms of disapprobation, to have to explain to them that Shakespeare wrote the plays of Shakespeare, as of course he indubitably did.           
            Though it has by now been around for quite a while, the idea that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare is a comparatively recent aberration; it couldn’t appear until the last of Shakespeare’s close friends, business partners, and fellow players had all been dead for a couple of centuries.  When the theory did arrive, it must have been at least potentially pleasing to college professors.  It maintained that it was impossible that anyone could master the learning deployed in the plays without benefit of a college education, whereas it was a well-known fact that William Shakespeare was diploma-less. “Thou hadst small Latin and less Greek.”  Didn’t his old buddy, Ben Jonson, write that himself?

In fact he did—in a passage in which he compared Shakespeare, by no means unfavorably, to some other under-educated playwrights, such as Euripides, Æschylus, and Seneca, none of whom had college degrees, there being no colleges from which to get them back in the day.  Anyway, it must have been somebody else—Lodge, Greene, Chapman—yes, Chapman was the best bet, though even there one could occasionally identify the leaden hand of George Peele.

            Lord de Vere, though a late starter, is proving to be a strong finisher.  He could not append his name to Macbeth or The Merry Wives of Windsor because writing plays was, in the eyes of polite society, infra dignitatem, aristocratically speaking.  The hot candidate beginning in the later nineteenth century was Lord Verulam, the Viscount St. Albans, more familiarly known as Francis Bacon.  Bacon was not merely a much more appropriate author of Shakespeare’s plays than was Shakespeare, he was also immensely learned.  It takes erudition to write stuff like “The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon ...”

            Better yet, since espionage was one of Bacon’s many things, he had developed an interest in codes and ciphers.  Under these circumstances it was certain that, although he published all his plays under the ridiculous name “Shakespeare,” he cunningly left coded messages within them revealing their true authorship.  The great expert in crypto-Shakespeareanism was Ignatius Donnelly, author of The Great Cryptogram (1888) in about a thousand pages, a sequel to his equally revolutionary Atlantis : the Antediluvian World (1882).  Donnelly was a Republican congressional representative from Minnesota—founder of a great tradition.  Few men achieve even one truly cockamamie idea in a career.  Donnelly was so prolific of them as to capture the title “Prince of Cranks,” so far without serious challenge.

 Ignatius Donnelly (R-Minnesota)

            The word is that if you can manage to backmask the sound track to Anonymous—play it backward at one-third speed—it offers other startling revelations.  It gives a definitive resolution to the stirred-or-shaken controversy, and it confirms the fact that Nine-Eleven was engineered by the Mossad.  Finally, after centuries, we learn why Hamlet hesitated.

 Shakespeare's breakfast

           

The Class War

We must deny before God and man that one’s attitude towards men may be determined solely by considering them as representatives of this or that class….Every man is made in the image of God, however indistinct that image may become, and every man is called to eternal life; in the face of these truths, all differentiation by class, all political passion, all the superfluities that social life piles daily on the human soul are trivial and unavailing.                 

Nicholas Berdyaev, Christianity and Class War (1931)

There is in contemporary America a widely shared perception that a large and growing disparity in material well being among our citizens is problematic from both the social and the moral points of view.  I confess that I share this perception. I regard the situation as serious and dangerous.  On another occasion I might attempt to address its substance directly.  It is conceivable that an expertise in medieval Franciscan thought, in which the biblical account of Dives and Pauper (see Luke xii) received penetrating analysis, might allow me to say something useful--but only barely conceivable.  What this essay is about is class war.

 Lazarus (Pauper) at the Door of Dives   Heinrich Aldegrever, 1552

            President Obama has called for increased tax rates for rich people (a vaguely defined group variously denominated as “the most fortunate among us,” “millionaires and billionaires,” “job creators,” “small businessmen,” and “Warren Buffet”).  Several Republican politicians immediately indicted this proposal as class warfare.  The President himself just as quickly denied the charge, but since then other Democrats have opined that a little class warfare is just what we need.  In informal remarks innocent of any serious pretensions to coherence, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to suggest that the famous phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was a salvo in an early skirmish of the class war.  Less equivocal is the essay entitled “Obama, Don’t Run from Class War" by Howell Raines, former Numero Uno at the New York Times.  I have seen several others in a similar vein.

To be sure Raines stresses a concept of “non-violent” or metaphoric class war.  I still protest.  A professor of English can hardly adopt a general hostility toward metaphor, but there are some metaphors that have been ruined by being made literal, just as there are literal realities that have been ruined in becoming metaphoric.  If you look up the word holocaust in an old reference work you will see that it is the English form of the biblical Greek term for the “burnt offerings” that played such an important role in early Jewish sacrificial worship.  It was a theological concept.  Perhaps one in a hundred people who talk about the Holocaust today knows that fact; but it doesn’t matter, for what holocaust is is what Auschwitz made it.  To use the word in its old sense would be pedantic and trivial.

Having spent a certain amount of time studying twentieth-century Communism, I have a similar attitude to the phrase class war.  The phrase made its serious claim on the modern consciousness through Karl Marx. Marx believed in the “class war,” though the word famously used in the first sentence of the Communist manifesto was “struggle” (Kampf), which is a little different from war (Krieg).  “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

I must pause to say that I am no Marx-basher.  A lot more of the people who talk about Marx flippantly would do well to read some actual  Marx.  Much of it is tough slogging, but no fair reader will fail to find even in the leaden pages a profound and original thinker animated by an attractive humanistic spirit.  I want to adopt the attitude of the great Russian Orthodox philosopher Berdyaev, from whom I took the epigraph for this post.  The dedication of Christianity and Class War reads as follows: “I dedicate this book to the memory of KARL MARX who was the social master of my youth and whose opponent in ideas I have now become.”  Marx is no more responsible for all things done in his name or that of his ism than Freud is personally responsible for Ernest Jones’s interpretation of Hamlet or Jesus Christ is responsible for the Spanish Inquisition.

Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948)

Marx was a social analyst, not a revolutionary practitioner of political power, and it was left to later Communists in power like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot to define what “class war” meant in a concrete sense.  What it meant is so appalling that the words should not be used in a casual way.  In statistical terms class war has meant something like the following (taken from the Black Book of Communism, p. 4):

            The Soviet Union, 20 million dead

            China, 65 million dead

            Cambodia, 2 million dead

            North Korea, a million dead

            Vietnam, a million dead…

and more.

            Class war means that it is right and necessary to kill a very great many people.  I suppose that Marxism was never more prestigious among western intellectuals than in the 1930s, which was the decade of the Spanish Civil War, regarded by most intellectuals as a nearly pure instance of good (the Spanish Republic and its allies) versus evil (Franco and his Nationalist insurgents, with their allies.)  The following events from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) are well-documented.  Nationalist soldiers upon battling their way into a largish village against stiff resistance gathered all the male population of the place into the town square.  A committee of officers then examined the hands of all the men who had been rounded up.  Those with heavily calloused palms were removed for immediate execution, the assumption being that as manual workers they must be Communists or Communist supporters.  In other places where the Republican forces and their international allies were for the moment victorious, all men (and sometimes women) in religious garb were shot.  In at least one instance anyone wearing a religious medal was shot.  Here the assumption was that such people were necessarily “class enemies”.

            By all means let us have vigorous political debate in this country.  Let us debate our absurd tax code and even, if we have the stomach for it, reform it.  Let us engage our “enemies in ideas,” to use Berdyaev’s term; but, please, leave the class war out of it.

 Class War: some collateral damage in Spain

East-Anglian Church-Crawl

 Cansell Grove Farmhouse, Rattlesden, Suffolk

The homeward flight to America, like the outbound flight two weeks earlier, was surprisingly comfortable.  I deduce from the popular press that one regards a half-empty glass in a philosophical light much dimmer from that in which one views a glass half-full.  But so far as airplane flights are concerned, half-full and half-empty are equally excellent categories.  I want to report on the second half of our English tour before its golden memories become overwhelmed by the fierce urgency of now—a phrase I hope I can recycle as our President moves on to the less fierce indifference of whenever.  The actual pretext of our trip to England was an annual Oxford reunion.  It was splendid, even if for constraint of time I can say nothing more than that about it.  The real high points of the trip were a series of reconnections with several old friends.

          

I left off my last post after the first of two days in the Cambridge area.  Our second night was spent in the nearby village of Linton with Hilary (Joan’s niece) and Alan Crooks and their two delightful young boys Ivor and George.  On Wednesday, after a pleasant lunch in beautiful Saffron Walden (Essex), Hilary drove us to the Cambridge railway station where we caught a train to Stowmarket in Suffolk, there to be met by our friends and hosts for the next two nights, Michael and Heather Nicholas.

 The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, London

            We had actually already seen Michael and Heather on Monday, between Oxford and Cambridge.  He had organized for a group of old college friends a very elegant lunch at his London club, the Athenaeum.  This was my first visit to those sacred precincts, the ne plus ultra of British intellectual exclusivity.   In lieu of a visitors’ book they have an album featuring the photographs of the fifty Nobelists who are past or current members.  I know people at the Century Club in New York who have wangled their way into that comparatively plebeian institution primarily with the view of exploiting its reciprocal privileges with the London Athenaeum.  The plaice was excellent, though there was nary a gaitered bishop in sight.

           

A word or two more about our host.  Many married people, of whom I am one, naturally attach a special importance to the person through whom they came to know a future spouse.  I first encountered my spouse in church.  All the best medievals first spotted their girlfriends in church.  Why should that not be true of medievalists as well?  Think of Troilus.  He’s wandering around the Trojan Athenaeum, ogles Criseyde, and gets shot through the eyeball by Cupid.  Think of Petrarch.  There he is in the church of Saint Claire in Avignon.  He looks up from his distracted prayers, and there she is.  The rest is history—history, deployed in approximately 317,421 European sonnets.  Well, fifty years ago in Oxford there were no female students in Jesus College and no male students in Saint Anne’s.  Under these circumstances it proved decisive to my personal fate that there was an organization called the “Jesus-Saint Anne’s Musical Society,” which offered occasional concerts in the beautiful seventeenth-century chapel of Jesus College.  The impresario of the Jesus-Saint Anne’s Musical Society, and for all I know its inventor, was Michael B.Nicholas.  So in a sense I owe him the debt of my life-long indebtedness.

 

The Lord Lyon King of Arms and the

Chief Marshal of the University

          

or

Real and Phoney Ceremonial Grandeur

 with Real and Phoney Georgian Royalty

 

Furthermore, though jealousy hardly features in my lengthy catalogue of imperfections, I must confess that Michael excited in me an intense “title envy”.  I eventually became the “Louis W. Fairchild Professor of English, and Professor of Comparative Literature,” which should satisfy the vanity of any man; but I still find myself lusting after the glory of two titles I can never possess.  The first, once held by the early Scottish poet David Lindsay of the Mount, is “the Lord Lyon King of Arms”.  The Lyon King of Arms is the chief ceremonial officer of Scotland.  The other and even more enviable title was that held by Michael Nicholas when I first met him: the Organ Scholar of Jesus.  The Organ Scholar of Jesus! With that beginning, his subsequent fame as a church musician was virtually guaranteed.

            Michael and Heather now live in the beautiful Suffolk village of Rattlesden, in a glorious old thatched farmhouse, the “new wing” of which considerably antedates the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock.  Heavy oak beams, many of them fully exposed and transformed by age to the texture of iron, hold its spacious rooms together with impressive conviction.  Heather, one of the mainstays of the local history society, pointed out to me faint apotropaic graffiti incised by some pre-Elizabethan in the fire-place beam: a petaled wheel, and the sign of the Virgin (V.V., virgo virginum).

            Thursday, blessed by glorious weather, was devoted to a day-long church-crawl in the general direction of the eastern coast.  In the Middle Ages and early modern period much of Suffolk enjoyed a protracted agricultural and mercantile prosperity, and many of the area’s parish churches are mini-cathedrals.  We ended at Aldeburgh, the home of the greatest of modern British composers, Benjamin Britten, who is naturally one of Michael’s musical heroes.  We visited Britten’s gravesite in the beautiful churchyard at Aldeburgh, and admired the “Britten window” in the church itself.  We wandered along the shingle beach of the old town in an early autumn twilight.. 

 The Britten memorial window by John Piper, Aldeburgh parish church, with detail of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace

 

Even the most mellow of days must end, and this one ended memorably, with a splendid supper at the Swan Inn in Woolpit.  This was a timely visit, for I had just about decided that the wonderful old pubs of my youth were as dead as Chesterton and Belloc.  If you get far enough out in the country you lose the pinball machines and the braying hordes of inebriated yuppies, but partridge is still on the menu.  Old wood, old books, old wine—but best of all, old friends.

The spectacular beamed ceiling of Woolpit parish church

Let the Deed Shaw

 

          Oxford failed me, but not Cambridge.  We are now with the wonderful Dignam family (Elizabeth being Joan's niece), a more wired group than which it would not be possible to find on two continents.  I am thus able to tell you about our arrival in Britain--now a week out of date, of course, but any port in a storm.           

          We flew to London on September 11, a date thoughtlessly chosen months ago.  I expected to find Newark Airport in a state of lockdown gridlock.  In fact, there were few people there, and no lines at all at the security barriers.  Even the flight seemed relatively uncrowded and pleasant, and with but a minimum of our usual comic misadventures we made our way From Heathrow to Waterloo and thence by suburban train to Sevenoaks in Kent, where Joan’s brother and sister-in-law, John and Margaret Newman, live.  I managed to stay awake, sort of, through the rest of the day, which included a stroll through the extensive grounds of Knoll House, seat of the Sackvilles, one of the great architectural and historical ornaments of this fine old town.

            Our one full day with my inlaws, Tuesday, began with a practically motivated walk through Sevenoaks.  Money magically appeared when I pushed some buttons on an ATM.  That was a relief because I wasn’t sure I remembered the right buttons for my English account.  Among the first necessities of international travel these days is getting your hands on a mobile phone that works.  There are two ways of doing this.  The first is to be already in possession of a very costly hyperphone of the kind that most twelve-year-olds of my acquaintance already have but that I am too stingy to buy and too dumb to use.  The other is to seek out the cheapest Samsung on offer at the electronic junk bazaar.  In today’s Britain that would be the garish Phones 4U shop (I kid you not) that is now one of the less picturesque features of the High Streets of picturesque British market towns.  We found our quarry within three minutes.

            We also discovered the following interesting fact of Nine-Eleven relevance.  The phone we wanted costs £30 if you pay cash and £20 if you use a bank card.  I naively sought an explanation of what seemed to me a  curiously counter-indicative pricing policy.  It s all about helping Big Brother keep track of the phones.  The security authorities are willing to invest ten quid in what they can learn from a swipe of your credit card.

            Even a brief tour of a town in the British counties involves for me some indispensable ritual stops.  One of these is the charity shops, where my usual purchase is an old suitcase in which I can cart about the old books I buy in other shops.  But we are already overloaded, and my book-buying days, if not quite over, are painfully shortened.  Having little time, I stepped into the first rummage shop that presented itself: the Children’s Trust.  I cased the place swiftly, decided I had done it justice, and was making my exit virtuously empty handed, when my spouse drew my attention to an item hanging on the wall among other hideous decorations: to wit, a shield-shaped pseudo-heraldic plaque with the Fleming coat of arms and motto.  Neither the device (the belted head of a billygoat) nor the motto (“Let the deed shaw”) was previously known to this particular Fleming, but when God gives you a sign, sign up.  When again would a measly £3.50 allow me to shaw a spurious nobility documented by wood-burning set?  This treasure will be a Christmas gift for a certain immediate lineal descendant who, as he never reads my blog, is in no danger of having the surprise compromised.

The afternoon’s more worthy occupations included a lovely walk along the River Medway near Tonbridge, where many years ago my brother-in-law had rowed.  We walked about a mile and back without seeing another soul.  Indeed for most of the walk no signs of human habitation were in sight, and the only signs of human industry were the anciently cultivated fields and the numbered riparian fishing posts, maintained by a ferociously exclusive angling club, at the water’s edge.  One might have been in Montana rather than densely populated southern England.

            Before beginning our walk w had made a visit to the lovely old village of Tudeley.  All Saints’ church in Tudeley is a kind of beautiful architectural palimpsest, an anthology of architectural styles and enthusiasms.  From a distance it seems to be a fine exemplar of the chaste and elegant brickwork of the Georgian period.  In fact, the church’s foundations are pre-Norman, and from the inside it is obvious  that the chancel is late medieval.

            This ancient Christian church owes its modern prosperity to the bounty of two Jewish benefactors.  In the nineteenth century the wealthy and civic minded Goldsmid family took possession of the large estate at Tudeley.  “Squire” Goldsmid took an active interest in the physical and cultural health of the parish, including the upkeep of the church fabric.

            The much more famous beautification of the church dates from the second half of the twentieth century, when through a munificent bequest the church wardens were able to install a series of remarkable stained glass windows designed by Marc Chagall, some of them actually donated by the artist, who was then over ninety years old.  We can assume the Gothic church will have had a pictorial window, though we cannot know its iconographic subjects.  The old glass had perished even before the eighteenth century, replaced by clear lights.  But now one sees above the altar a huge, hauntingly blue hassidic vision of the Crucifixion of Christ.

O Mores, O Temporizing

Your stymied bloguiste finds himself in a rather seedy Internet Cafe near Victoria Station, unable to transfer the very elegant essay composed with great labor on his flash disk to the slightly verminous machine beneath his fingers.  He may try again from Oxford, after disinfecting the flash disk.  Then again, he may not.  Regular dispatches will resume no later than September 24.

Annals of Political Discourse

 

Infrastructure challenge in Detroit

"We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face: The war on workers. And you see it everywhere, it is the Tea Party. And you know, there is only one way to beat and win that war. The one thing about working people is we like a good fight. And you know what? They've got a war, they got a war with us and there's only going to be one winner. It's going to be the workers of Michigan, and America. We're going to win that war," Jimmy Hoffa said to a heavily union crowd. "President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let's take these son of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong," Hoffa added.
                                                   James Hoffa (as quoted in the American press)

I have in the past expressed my admiration for the great Doctor Samuel Johnson, one of the first and best of bloguistes, and especially for his utter unflappability with regard to writing deadlines. He frequently would not even begin writing his required periodical essay until the printer’s boy appeared at his door urgently demanding copy. What Johnson achieved through sangfroid can be achieved also through mere oblivion and distraction. Tuesday offered a most pleasant distraction: an exhilarating doctoral defense by a brilliant young scholar of my acquaintance. The experience was so tonic that I went home and wrote a few scholarly paragraphs of my own. And though Wednesdays have been following fast upon the heels of Tuesdays even since my earliest youth, it was only latish on Tuesday that the significance of the time-tested sequence dawned upon me, blog-wise. Now what has dawned upon me is Wednesday itself.

Though I try to avoid current events, the week’s political developments have been importunate. First there was the flap over the President’s really pathetic attempt to upstage the orgy of self-promotion, posturing, and pandering that the Republican presidential candidates are pleased to call a “debate.” Hardly had this battle of titans achieved its uneasy resolution than alarums sounded on a new front: Detroit, where the president had gone to preview his speech (now scheduled for Thursday) before a friendly audience of “working Americans”. Among the friendliest of all (as in Johnny Friendly) was James Hoffa, whose office it was on this occasion to welcome the President to the podium. His introductory remarks, which according to Rush Limbaugh and numerous others included a generalized incitement to violence against members of the Tea Party, have become the object of journalistic--and now bloguistic—scrutinty.

My treatment of Mr. Hoffa’s remarks, though perforce censorious, will also be dispassionate. I have no animus against Jimmy Hoffa. In fact, I find Jimmy Hoffa rather reassuring. He is the living proof of the greatness of our democracy. For in this country it is not merely the presidency of the Republic that can be passed from father to son like the lordship of a thirteenth-century manor. The same is true of the Teamsters’ union. Nonetheless I must agree with Hoffa’s critics that the “Detroit remarks” crossed a line.

Johnny Friendly                                                                and                                                         Friendly Jimmy

But what line? You undoubtedly have heard the academic Q and A joke about the Mafioso and the Deconstructionist. The small degree of cultural literacy required for its appreciation—a passing familiarity with the Godfather movies—will be child’s play for my erudite readership.
     Q: What is the difference between the Mafia Don and the Deconstructionist?
     A: The Deconstructionist makes you an offer you can’t understand.
I had long since recognized the Mafioso style in the American labor union bureaucracy, but only now do I fully appreciate the more subtle influence of Deconstructionist style. In a stirring medley of striking but utterly indeterminate martial images Mr. Hoffa seemed to posit a “war” between “workers” and the “Tea Party,” a war in which the former must triumph. His specific and vigorous encouragement was this: “Let's take these son of bitches out.” The phrase “take out,” even when not being used of fast food, is I suppose sufficiently slippery that we must give Hoffa a pass. Take me out to the ball game. My husband never takes me out. That sort of thing. “Son of bitches” is another matter.

Even in American politics, where almost anything goes, this is entirely unacceptable. The term son of a bitch, a term of opprobrium dear to such great twentieth-century politicians as Roosevelt, Truman, and Nixon, is nearly as venerable as the eighteenth-century English whoreson, which in America it replaced. Its vernacular variant forms esohbee and sumbich are also amply recorded in our political discourse. But you simply cannot say what Hoffa said. You would never talk about “Knight Templars” or “mother-in-laws”. The proper plural is sons of bitches, with sons of a bitch being at least theoretically possible, if somewhat stilted. The English professors of America demand an apology. As for beating the war and giving America back to an America, those sound like sensible bipartisan suggestions.

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A note for regular readers.  Travels in England for the next two weeks may disturb the wonted schedule of postings.