"Christian" Nationalism

In the first book of Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to Lilliput,” published in 1726, Jonathan Swift details the great controversy that agitated the peace and quiet of the inhabitants of that tiny land. The controverted issue is deeply important to the adherents of either side of the question. It involved the breaking of eggs. As Swift ways, “the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end.” Because of an accidental injury suffered by the current emperor’s grandfather as he broke his egg in that “primitive” way, that grandfather’s father, the then-emperor, issued a command for “all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs.” The imperial edict led to resistance from the “Big-enders” so powerful that “there have been six rebellions raised on that account.” Serious rebellions indeed, since in their violence “one emperor lost his life, and another his crown.” Naturally the emperor of Blefuscu, Lilliput’s inveterate enemy, took advantage of the unrest. He received the Lilliputian exiles, using them to foment more unrest in Lilliput. The result? “It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.”

 

For folks with some sense of history it doesn’t take a lot of thought to understand what Swift was mocking with the Big-Endian controversy. For some two hundred and fifty years before the publication of Gulliver’s Travels Europe had been awash in blood as a result of questions not too distant from those that agitated the Lilliputians. During divine services, was the bread and wine transubstantiated into the actual flesh and blood of Christ, as Catholics and the Orthodox held? Or was there only a sort of spiritual shadow of flesh and blood, a consubstantiation of the bread and wine, as Martin Luther had it? Or were the Baptists right that there was no real or imagined magic involved at all, and the ceremony was simply a memorial of what the Gospels said happened way back when?

 

Alas the failure of historical memory is a well-known disease in America, where there’s no dismissal more trenchant that to say that something is history. In any case, there seem to be a number of Americans who are all for declaring the US a “Christian nation.” What they mean by that remains something of a mystery. What variety of “Christian” do they have in mind? I suspect that they haven’t given much thought to the confessional sense of “Christian.” I suspect they mean a nation where people, especially white heterosexual people, go around reading the Ten Commandments on every street corner, behave “modestly,” and scorn anyone who doesn’t adhere to “family values.” Even at that very basic level, however, there are confessional differences that they need to consider. Which version of the Ten Commandments should sprout on those street corners? Does “modestly” mean that women should be chaste, silent, and obedient? Do “family values” assign all power to men who command it over their chaste, silent, and obedient women? Is the condition of being born again the ultimate goal? Or are works as well as faith required? And how does one judge the spiritual condition of anyone?

 

Given the sorts of differences that “Christianity” as a plain vanilla term obscures, I think it might be very important for those “Christian” nationalists to pay attention to the history of explicitly “Christian” states. Even before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the doors of the Wittenberg Castle Church in 1517 Europe suffered from religious wars. Wikipedia lists forty-seven wars waged in the name of religion, from the Hussite Wars in Bohemia to the War in the Cevennes in France. I’m not counting the War of the Spanish Succession because, religious overtones though that war had, its major focus was dynastic. So too the French Revolution, whose anticlericalism was an important but subordinate aspect of the war.

 

The poor eleven thousand Lilliputians who died in the Big-Endian controversy are a pale shadow of the hecatombs of European dead in those wars. How many people died in them? The total is hard to figure, but again Wikipedia estimates anywhere from seven to eighteen million people over the two centuries or so centuries of “Christian” fervor.

 

The so-called “Puritans”—they were really separatists, not Puritans—who travelled to the New World to establish that much-celebrated city on the hill in the Massachusetts Bay Colony did so specifically to escape the deadly persecution of another “Christian” sect, the Anglicans. Of course, as soon as those “Puritans” became established over on the west side of the Atlantic, they returned the favor, fatally persecuting Quakers, for instance, as well as Baptists. There’s nothing quite like the assurance that God loves you and hates your neighbor to fuel persecution and slaughter.

 

A third of the way into the 18^th century, and things had more or less quieted down when it came to wars motivated by religious differences. Clearly That’s not to say that toleration reigned supreme, but rather that the lines of religious division had merged with the political landscape of European nations. Denmark was Lutheran, France was Catholic. England was Anglican, Spain was Catholic. And there, in its mountain fastness, was good old Calvinist Switzerland, cheek by jowl with the various Catholic Italian states.

 

That did not mean that religious differences were tolerated within those countries. Certainly Swift knew very well that the Irish, among whom he resided, were screwed by their Protestant overlords. Indeed, English law prohibited Catholics from holding office well into the nineteenth century. To this day, English monarchs are prohibited from being or becoming Catholics. The same sorts of limitations applied in almost every nation state, varying only according to the official religion practiced in the region. It wasn’t active persecution, necessarily, but a constant infringement of people’s liberty and prerogatives much like what applied—applies, I should say, to people of color in the US.

 

I suspect that none of this is of interest to the “Christian nationalists” who plague the US at this point. Their interest is not religious but sociopolitical. They want to conquer, to reestablish the white supremacy that existed when “America was great,” back before all the progressive movements of the twentieth century took place. Perhaps a return to the ante-bellum condition of the first half of the nineteenth century would be even better.

It’s not Christianity that these folks want. It is dominion.

Performing Reality, from Hamlet to Trump

I think everyone knows, or at least everyone of a certain age who went to public school somewhere in the US (and probably the UK as well) knows that Shakespeare’s plays are full of plays within the plays. Maybe the most famous one is “The Mousetrap,” as the play staged in Hamlet is called. What perhaps is less well known is the idea that a great many of Shakespeare’s plays are centrally about performance itself.

Consider a little further the scenario that we encounter in Hamlet, for instance. Claudius is performing the role of the good, competent monarch—and in fact does a damned good job of it except for the minor point of his having murdered his own brother. Ultimately that catches up to him, so to speak, in his response to the performances that Hamlet himself puts on. Before he puts on his “antic disposition” Hamlet tries out a costume or two—his inky cloak, let’s say—and afterwards another costume, with “doublet all unbraced” and all the accoutrements of the madness he’s performing. At any rate, the antic disposition engages almost every one of Hamlet’s actions—acts?—from his treatment of Polonius to his treatment of Ophelia, poor young woman.

 

And then there are the comparatively minor performances. There’s Polonius’s advice to Reynaldo on how to catch the truth of Laertes’s behavior in Paris, to use “indirection,” which is to say to perform, so as to “find direction out.” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fall into the same thematic frame, although their acting abilities are so poor that Hamlet susses them out within five minutes of their arrival. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead riffs on their performative incapacity. Only Ophelia, poor young woman, and perhaps Laertes, seem not to perform. Certainly Ophelia’s actual madness is meant to contrast Hamlet’s performative madness. And although Laertes at the outset may be performing the dutiful son and brother, when he returns from Paris there is no performance in his anguish at his father’s and then his sister's death. Even that peacock, Osric, performs, although his act is so stereotypical a role that Hamlet mocks him from the moment he enters to the moment he exits the scene.

 

But Hamlet is not unique in the thematic focus on performance. Henry V is one performance after another, a concern beautifully captured in Kenneth Branagh’s film of the play, in which it becomes difficult to determine where actual behavior begins and performance stops. Performance is the heart and soul of As You Like It, of Twelfth Night, of Measure for Measure, of Timon of Athens, of The Winter’s Tale—and so on.

 

The serious, crucial corollary of the plays’ concern with performance is deciphering those moments and those characters that are authentic. My favorite conundrum in that regard involves Horatio. Is he really what he seems to be? Or is he just a better actor than Hamlet’s old buddies, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? If Horatio is indeed Hamlet’s buddy, then how does he end up being a flunky in Claudius’s court?

 

I’ve worked through these points regarding Shakespeare’s plays because our current world is so full of performance that I find it more than difficult to distinguish what is real from what is not, so that, a bit like Macbeth, my “function / Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is / But what is not.” Take a trivial example that is currently in every Swiftie fan’s mind. Isn’t it wonderful that finally Taylor and Travis have agreed to tie the knot! And those pictures of Travis kneeling at Taylor’s feet are just so . . . so . . . so . . . practiced? I’m not doubting that the two people are really in love and are really getting married. But I am definitely doubting that the scene with the kneeling groom is an authentic moment. To my mind, it’s clearly a made-for-the-web opportunity.

 

More serious in many ways are all those fake pictures, videos, texts, written and peopled by artificial “intelligence” rather than by actual human beings. The danger those phenomena represent can’t be overestimated. I can envision a moment when a deep fake is so provocative that it provokes indeed, even to the point of causing a war to break out.

 

Even more crucial, I think, is the everyday performance that everyday people enact in every minute of their lives. Is the clip on TikTok of little Susie and little Johny disporting themselves on the beach or sharing a lovely breakfast in a fancy restaurant or passionately embracing in the shadow of the Tour Eifel a moment of real joy? Or is it joy performed for the ever-focused eye of the iPhone camera and the every-watching eyes of Susie and Johny’s online followers? And can Susie and Johny tell the difference?

 

Is there a difference? Aristotle says that one is what one does. Althusser agrees. Taking that idea to its logical conclusion, then, Susie and Johny’s performance is not merely a performance. If not an actuality, it is a reality in the making. The performative joy becomes the grounds for the eventual actual wedding. So too Hamlet, putting on his antic disposition, becomes an antic in fact. Hearing a noise behind the arras, in a moment of antic madness he kills Polonius.

 

Is authenticity itself a performance? Laertes and Hamlet, coming to the point of fisticuffs at Ophelia’s grave—an authentic moment that grows from performance? The Beatles’ solution to the question is a bit nihilistic—“nothing is real; there’s nothing to get hung about.” My worry, though, is that every performance is or becomes real. So Donald Trump performing the tough guy on TV becomes Donald Trump performing the tough guy in the Oval Office becomes Donald Trump being the tough guy who sends the Marines to pacify American cities.

 

That seems to me something definitely to be hung about.

Orientation Back Then

Seeing the incoming college newbies, both here and at PSU via online pics, I try to remember my arrival on campus back in 1970. These are the things I recall, although I will not swear to them because memory, many splendored though it is, often fails me.

 

First thing I remember is meeting my roomie, Sandy C, who seemed a nice guy, although in the long run that turned out to be not as accurate as it could have been.  And then, second thing, I couldn’t wait for the parental unit to disappear. As soon as they did I found my way to another kid, Dave C, whom I asked where I could find some pot or hash. It was kind of a dumb thing to do because I had no idea who or what Dave C was. But Dave C said his roomie, Bruce L, could satisfy my needs. So I went to Bruce L, who was equally dumb because, not knowing me from Adam, he immediately told me I could score some wonderful red Lebanese hash from him. So I did.

 

Third thing I remember is hearing that there was some sort of welcoming speech by the president, also a newbie on campus as it happened. Together with a couple of other kids we agreed that on the whole we’d rather skip that BS. So we did.

 

Fourth thing I remember is the “house” meeting in the dorm, when the RA, Tom E, gave us all sorts of interesting things to think about, especially two things. First, he told us about something called “jammies,” which were outdoor music/dance parties sponsored by the various dormitory areas on campus, and that there’d be one that very evening, down at Pollock Halls. That evening, then, a group of us went down to Pollock Halls for a nifty evening. And Tom E told us of the party that he himself was going to host, in the study lounge in the “house,” that weekend, when he would be supplying us with two or three tubs of alcoholic entertainment. I’d never had any alcohol at all, pot being my drug of choice. But that weekend I got drunk for the first and last time. Why? Well, I woke up the next morning in a bathroom stall, with puke all over me. Did I need that to happen ever again? Nah.

 

As I recall, there was absolutely nothing of the cheerfully welcoming hand-holding that seems to be the default mode nowadays. No team building. No introduction to the campus and the mysteries of how to register for classes or how to do anything at all. The only “welcome” was my fifth memory, an announcement that we would all have to endure a swimming test to demonstrate that we wouldn’t drown as we walked across campus in the rain. And that we would also have to endure a “fitness” test, which entailed running a mile around the track in Rec Hall in seven minutes or less.

 

The swimming test was not a problem for me. I’d been swimming for longer than I’d been walking, so swimming across the pool was a doddle. What they didn’t tell us was that we were required to bring our own swimsuits. I walked over to the Natatorium in my trunks, so that was no big deal either. But a lot of kids didn’t do so, and didn’t have swimsuits with them. So they had to do the test naked. The tests were sex-segregated, so there was that. But I suspect that approach to things would not fly nowadays.

 

The “fitness” test, on the other hand, I failed miserably. I’d been smoking cigarettes from age thirteen, and was up to about two or three packs a day by the time I came to campus. There was no way I would run a mile, not in seven minutes, and maybe not even in seven hours. That meant that I was condemned to take remedial phys ed. Along with the other losers, though, I had a great time since the “remediation” entailed hanging around the indoor track in Rec Hall, making believe we were really trying to improve our stamina. I’ll admit that that “class,” which was actually graded, as were all the phys ed classes we were required to take in order to graduate, and single credit though it was, brought down my GPA. Instead of a 4.0 at the end of my first year, I ended up with a 3.98. That meant that I missed out on getting the President’s Freshman Award that year—although I did get it the next year, for some reason.

 

Somewhere in there, maybe at that first jammie in Pollock Halls, I met the young woman who would be my first love. To begin with she dated my roommate, but he blew it with her, and I was fortunate to have her accept me—how that happened I cannot remember. She must have been extra kind to me since I was, and still am, a dead loss in the dating game. We lasted together for about five months, and then I also blew it.

 

But that was long after my introduction to the university and the “orientation” that, for better or worse, none of us had.

Education

I've an angle on college, for obvious reasons, having spent some 50 or so years teaching at one or another of them. And I agree completely with the idea that not everyone in the world needs to go to college. I also think it's completely true that a college degree ≠ a job or a career, although there's no doubt that some degrees that go in that direction pretty readily.

 

The point of education, IMHO, has nothing to do with a job or with an income or with some social status. I'll be etymological and point out that “education” comes from the Latin for “lead away from.” That's what an education does, as far as I'm concerned. And yes, there's no doubt that, all on my own, I could have read the same list of books that I read as an undergraduate. But the reading would have been bounded by my own self. I would not have been led from myself, but rather I would have been blithefully stuck in myself—in my family, in my experience, in my little room over the garage, not knowing that there's another room with a different view.

 

That’s why to my mind home schooling is a danger. Even with the most expansive of parental units guiding the curriculum, it tends to reinforce what’s already there. It’s not simply or only the instructor who offers a different viewpoint. It’s the other kids in the classes, in the labs, in the dorms, in the dining halls, at random on campus. The guest lecturers, the world-famous violinist, the physicist who sets out to explain string theory to the great unwashed.

 

All of that works together to form what’s offhandedly called “the college experience.” The key term there, it seems to me, is “experience.” That can’t really be duplicated in a private setting. And the more variety there is in the student body, the better the experience becomes. So-called “affirmative action,” now execrated as DEI, is good for the marginalized who get a chance to work out of their marginalization, but just as good for the privileged who get to see a world they’ve never experienced before.

 

That's not to say that the leading from self need be permanent. I've seen it many many times that a kid goes to college, takes the fast track to another universe, and then after they graduate circles back to where they came from.

 

But that return is hedged about with new perspectives and ideas that, for most of us, would not have been encountered without college. It's a little bit like real geographical travel. As Candide says when he comes across El Dorado, "This is vastly different from Westphalia and the Baron's castle. Had our friend Pangloss seen El Dorado he would no longer have said that the castle of Thunder-ten-Tronckh was the finest upon earth. It is evident that one must travel." College is El Dorado.

Photography

My friends and I would laugh when I was young

because those natives—Asian, African,

half-naked some, and some without a stitch—

cringed when the Geographic's magic man

trapped their souls in photographing their flesh.

 

Or so the text said, with a nod and wink

to us sophisticated ten-year-olds

who knew enough to know that photographs

were simply tarnished silver, not juju,

not sacrament, not abomination.

 

I wonder now as I watch the silver-

haired senator congressman president

preen before the lens, nudging ideas,

            adjusting the smile

Ahab and Cockwomble Trump

 I’ve been rereading _Moby Dick_, or rather reading it really for the first time because I last went through that tome back when I was a wee tyke in HS, and that sort of doesn’t count some 55 years after the fact. Anyway, I came across this passage in the chapter 41, titled “Moby Dick”:

certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were ben on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.

 

The passage made me immediately think of cockwomble, raging away in his cockwombly way. And then it made me wonder what cockwomble’s White Whale might be. What is it in his history that led to the “unabated rage” that makes him “intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge”?

 

To be sure, cockwomble’s is not a “supernatural revenge.” All too natural, alas. But to pursue the parallel, it must be America itself that is the source of that “unabated rage,” since it’s America itself that cockwomble is voyaging to destroy, as Ahab the whale. Is the revenge fueled by his New York billionaire peers' refusal to take him seriously? To see him as anything more than a bloviating cockwomble, rich to be sure, but rich by naked chicanery and deceit? Is it their disdain that leads to his monomania?

 

But then, America is not just the whale. It’s also the Pequod that cockwomble navigates to destruction. And those idiotic “old acquaintances on shore,” eager to make profit on cockwomble’s mad scramble for revenge, will be destroyed along with him and the nation.

Intergenerational Elasticitiy

             I've discovered a new term, intergenerational elasticity, IGE. IGE is “a measure of how strongly a parent’s economic status is linked to their child’s economic status. . . . A higher IGE indicates a stronger link between generations, suggesting lower social mobility, while a lower IGE suggests greater social mobility.” In turn, greater social mobility suggests a “better” life, presumably in economic terms, for the offspring.

            I looked up the term because I was curious about how accurate it is to say that “every American generation has done better than its parents’ generation.” That’s the story we tell ourselves, anyway. And certainly for us lucky SOBs born into the Baby Boom, it’s absolutely the case. We certainly benefitted from the fact that, having destroyed the world economy in the course of WW II, humanity was obliged to rebuild it. The US was ideally situated to benefit from the rebuilding simply because its economic infrastructure had not been destroyed during the war. So we happy few, we band of Boomers did much much better than our parental units.

            But then I wondered if that was always the case, as the story we tell ourselves has it. I thought, for one thing, that the “greatest generation,” the one that endured the Great Depression and then fought in WW II, probably didn’t have it so good.

            So I looked. And I found a study, “In the Name of the Son (and the Daughter): Intergenerational Mobility in the United States, 1850-1930,” by Claudia Olivetti and M. Daniele Paserman, which argues that, with the exception of the Boomer generation, the story we tell ourselves is entirely mythic, sort of like the myth that all it takes to succeed economically is to keep a clean nose and watch the plain clothes—I mean, keep the nose to the grindstone.

            A key finding: “Our results indicate that the intergenerational elasticity between fathers and sons increased by 30% between 1870 and 1930, with most of the increase occurring after the turn of the century.” Earlier in the 19th century it’s quite likely that IGE had decreased, simply because the nation had been inventing itself. From the Civil War onwards, on the other hand, the reverse seems to have been the case.

            Boomers lucked out. But the luck seems to underscore the reality of how the capitalist universe we inhabit in this country wags its finger at us. Work hard, we’re told, and you’ll succeed because that’s the way the history of the country has always gone. Sure. Uh-huh. Yeppers. Belief in the myth produces a powerful incentive to keep the rich richer and everyone else bound to the grindstone and a high IGE.

            Meanwhile, say Olivetti and Paserman, in those nasty socialist countries, “Recent research reveals that today intergenerational mobility in the U.S. is lower than in most other developed countries.”

            To quote a famous dead white man, “So it goes.”