Generations

Boomers are guilty of inventing “generational difference” as a valid way of dividing people from people.  Well, maybe Boomers were not the first inventors because there are signs of such nonsense in the 18^th century habit of denoting “the last age” as so different from the wonders of the Enlightenment that the two “ages” simply had nothing in common.  Still, it’s the Boomers who invented the generational cry, “don’t trust anyone over thirty” meme—or what would have been a meme had there been such a thing back in those antique days of yore.

 

But even back then generational differences were just so much nonsense.  I remember lots of people my age who were as aggressively pro-Vietnam War as “we” who were definitely against it; as many go-get’em protocapitalists among my peers as among the “over thirty” crowd; as many folks in my age group who cared nothing at all about the ecosystem as folks who were all for the first Earth Day and beyond.  By the same token, as I think back to the “Jews will not replace us” crowd at Charlottesville, I note that almost none of them seemed to be anywhere close to being Boomers—and the same for the crowd at the Jan. 6^th event, for that matter—whereas the arguments against the Charlottesville rednecks and the Jan. 6^th insurrectionists include many Boomers.

 

I have no basis for thinking as I do, but nonetheless I will assert that there are jerks and assholes as well as wise and compassionate people in every generation.

 

That’s not to say that generational differences are null and void as ways of analyzing how people behave.  Shared experiences produce shared perspectives and behaviors.  People who were faced with the challenges of the 1940s shared a commitment that people who grew up in the 1960s simply did not have.  That difference in experience no doubt produced differences in behavior.

 

At the same time, the scarcities of the Great Depression and WW II compared to the foison plenty of the 1960s did not necessarily produce predictable outcomes.  My stepfather, one of the generation raised in the 1930s during the Great Depression and gone to war in the 1940s, scrimped and saved throughout his entire life.  But then, I, raised during the great times of the 1960s and gone to college in the 1970s, scrimped and saved throughout my entire life as well.

 

Scarcity vs. plenty did not produce difference in behavior.

 

On the other hand, my stepfather was much into command and control, whereas I am absolutely not at all in that ballpark—even in that game, for that matter.  Is that difference a product of the difference between being raised in the 1930s as opposed to the 1960s?  Maybe.  Maybe not.

 

At any rate, I think that any generational truism, about any generation at all, must absolutely be undermined.  Are Boomers selfish?  Sure.  They are also quite generous.  Are Gen Xers grumpy?  Sure.  They are also quite sweet.  Are Millennials lazy?  Sure.  They are also quite driven by values.  And so on.  Similarly, some Boomers are grumpy and lazy, and some Gen Xers are selfish and lazy, and some Millennials are . . . .

 

The only thing that the blanket application of generational notions accomplishes is to divide—and as the very old generation of Romans used to say, divide et impera, divide and conquer.  In each historical period, for each generation, it’s always the same category of people who cherish such divisions.  You can see who they are at a glance.  Without exception, they chortle their way to the bank.

Empire

 It’s undeniable that Britain had the largest empire of the last round of empires in the history of the world.  And it’s also undeniable that the cost of empire was borne by the subordinated peoples, wherever those people might find themselves.  For me it’s also self-evident that the idea of empire and of monarchy are irrelevant in the modern world, not just because empire produces misery for the subordinated and because monarchy produces ridiculous ideas of genealogical superiority, but also because both empire and monarchy make it hard, if not impossible for equality to flourish.

At the same time, it seems to me that the past can’t be judged on the basis of the present.  That’s the latest academic fashion, presentism, that sees the whole of the past from the perspective of what is currently accepted as true and undeniable.  When I was a young whippersnapper, the academic fashion was exactly the opposite.  We set about estranging the past, as we called it, in recognition that things back then were just absolutely different from things nowadays.  That was not intended to excuse horrible behavior in the past, but rather to recognize that the horrible behavior was the product of complicated social interactions.

 

Some of my favorite passages in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me are what he says about Queen Nzinga, whom he initially admires because of the power she exercised in response to the insults directed towards her by Dutch traders.  Later he reconsiders the admiration when he recognizes that she exercises her power by making one of her retainers into a human chair so that she, “heir to everything she’d ever seen, could sit.”

 

I love those references in two different ways.  First because Coates finds a source of pride in his past.  That seems to me pretty important for everyone.  Second, though, I love the references because they also point to the idea that the past is different from the present, and that it’s also important, maybe crucial, to understand the difference.

 

So was Britain—indeed, all of Europe from 1492 to the present, which continues to express European hegemony—horrible in exercising imperial control over the whole of the world?  Yes indeed.  Can, or rather should we judge that horror from the perspective of the present?

 

Yes and no, I think.

 

The yes depends on recognizing that folks in the past are as ethically engaged as we are.  In Notes on the State of Virginia, for instance, Thomas Jefferson lays out pretty clearly just how evil slavery is, for the slaves as well as for the slave owners.  He knows that the practice of slavery from which he benefits is horrible.  But he continues to own his slaves and to rape his slave mistress and then enslave his own children.  In terms of his own ethical framework, he’s positively evil.

 

The no depends on recognizing that folks in the past contend with relations among each other that dictate behavior.  I don’t know enough about Queen Nzinga to say that her own ethical framework condemns her behavior.  But how else is Nzinga going to demonstrate her power to the Dutch?  How else is Jefferson going to demonstrate his social standing to the other plantation owners of Virginia?  Again, I don’t think that recognizing those differences from the past mean that I excuse Nzinga’s objectification of her subjects or Jefferson’s commodification of human beings.  But Nzinga’s royal standing makes it possible for her to reject the Dutch insolence and Jefferson’s patrician privilege makes it possible for him to write the Declaration of Independence.

 

So too the European imperial framework, I think, albeit more complexly and more fraught with a mixture of evil and “good.”

Free Speech

I have an embarrassing confession to make.  On weekday nights at 11 I turn on MeTV and watch the bits and pieces of The Carol Burnett Show that the channel broadcasts before it turns to the serious business of Perry Mason.  Watching these old shows is informative and educational in a whole bunch of different directions.  Mason’s more or less in-house detective, Paul Drake, smokes and smokes and smokes again, with nary a trigger warning to the equally smoky audience of the early 1960s.  The cars that the people on the show drive are the boats that we Boomers grew up with.  Mileage?  Maybe ten miles a gallon?  I honestly can’t imagine navigating the streets of Reading, PA, in those automobiles.

 

But on a recent evening, the Burnett Show handed me a real winner.  The skit took place in a take-off on Beni Hana restaurants, here called Beni Haha.  As the skit began, we saw a Japanese chef doing the kinds of culinary sleights of hand for which Beni Hana is famous—the flashing knives, the sudden flames, the portions masterfully landed on the customers’ dishes.

 

The careful modern observers may have done a double take when they noted that although the chef himself was East Asian, the restaurant manager gleefully watching the performance was . . . Harvey Korman.  Korman was a very funny man, a great actor, whose Hedley Lamarr on Blazing Saddles raises him to the heights of the cinema firmament.

 

But Harvey Korman was not Asian.

 

And then the shtick of the piece fell into place.  The other chef, it turns out, was too sick to work, so Korman-as-manager had to scramble around to get someone to replace him.  Enter the substitute, then, Tim Conway.  Janitor for the restaurant, Conway convinces Korman that he has all the skills necessary to be a Beni Haha chef.

 

Conway was playing his usual bumbling, cack-handed self, so the idea that he was competent to twirl knives, etc. was part of the humor of the scene.  The contrast to the Asian cook we had just seen was obviously going to be hilarious.

 

But again from the perspective of the careful modern observer there were other problems for the scenario.  First, Conway is as Asian as Korman.  To be sure, he did put on a slit-eyed guise intended to suggest an East Asian background.  That was obviously intended as part of the humor of the scene.  Second, Korman and Conway communicated in something that I guess was meant to pass as Japanese.  The conversation was also part of the humor of the scene since the “language” that the two deployed was of course very very badly faked Japanese—gobbledygook, in other words.  Third, as Conway began his failing efforts to imitate a Beni Hana chef, he and Korman yelled back and forth at each other, Korman evidently questioning Conway’s abilities while Conway evidently reassuring Korman that despite the disaster taking place at the table, he could manage the task.

 

I say “evidently” about the conversation between Conway and Korman because they were still speaking gobbledygook.  And I say about the whole shtick that the various moments were part of the humor because, without exception, the audience—a real live audience, as was the standard for The Carol Burnett Show—the audience roared with laughter, first at Korman’s passing as Asian, then at Conway’s slit-eyed bumbling, then at the very badly faked Japanese conversation and then at the mutual harangue between Conway and Korman.

 

Like Paul Drake’s smoking and the boat-sized automobiles of Perry Mason, the skit was a revelation—for those of us old enough to have seen the shows when they first aired, a recollection—of just how different the past was from the present.  I cannot imagine any show in 2022 presenting two European Americans as Asians without commentary in the twitterverse that would have excoriated the actors.  I cannot imagine any show in 2022 giving us a dialogue, over the course of the ten or so minutes of the skit, in which the speakers exchanged fake Japanese with each other in order to provoke gales of laughter from the audience.  Again, the twitterverse would have exploded in condemnation.  The result, no doubt, would have been shutting down the whole of The Carol Burnett Show and the exclusion of Korman, Conway, and Burnett herself from any further employment in the world of acting—to my mind, an unfortunate result because silencing should not be the goal of free speech

 

Dearleader’s minions would call such a response “cancel culture,” and demand that the censorship stop.  I would call the excoriation and explosion in the twitterverse something else:  good manners.  Good manners dictate that you do your best not to offend other people.  Good manners might lead some to attempt to silence the actors, but in and of themselves good manners are not cancel culture.  I associate good manners with what in the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson calls “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”  It is not censorship to ask that bad manners be considered offensive.  Rather it is simply the case that free speech provokes free speech in response—or, in a more contentious kind of way, that free speech has and absolutely should have consequences.  Removing the offenders from public life, “cancelling” them as happens all the time nowadays, is a step too far, as I see it:  but strenuously arguing against what is by its very nature a breach of good manners is absolutely essential.

 

Why not simply silence offensive speech?  John Milton says in “Areopagitica” that the goal of free speech is truth.  The progress towards that goal, he says, amounts to “the wars of Truth.”  In an ideal form, the point and counterpoint of debate in free speech moves humanity along towards truth:  “Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.” Silencing the other side precludes such “wars.”

 

As is so often the case, the modifying initial clause of Milton’s sentence bears a great deal of attention.  Silencing, for instance, does not reflect a desire to learn.  But then neither does the erasure of the present in order to return to a past that no longer exists.  Dearleader’s minions want the present moment to be a carbon copy of the past, so that jokes at the expense of Asian people, for instance, are fine and dandy because they provoke laughter in the majority—the majority in the Euro-American universe, at any rate, since in point of fact Asians constitute the majority of the planet’s human inhabitants.  But regardless of the wishes of dearleader and his minions, the present is not the past.  It’s simply not possible to make America great “again” by returning to the status quo of the 1960s and before.  America is just not the same nation as it was back then.

 

Just think about what restaurants were available back then as opposed to now.  I graduated from high school in 1970, and there was indeed a Beni Hana restaurant in Harrisburg, where a few of us went to dine before the senior prom.  There was one.  There were a couple of Chinese and Italian restaurants—I’m not counting pizza parlors—but no Mexican or Korean or Jamaican or Thai or Ethiopian or Vietnamese or Indian or . . . .  To say the least, it was a very very limited smorgasbord of cuisines that we ate from.  That kind of limitation may not seem important, but it really is.  It points to the equally limited variety in the human population of the city.  And as was Harrisburg, so was the nation in the 1960s and before.  Indeed it was quite possible then to speak about “minorities” because the majority was an obvious, clearly marked set of people.

 

There were exceptions to that rule, to be sure.  New York City, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago were as multifaceted then as now.  But the nation as a whole did not consider such variety as in any way shape or form normative.  The evidence?  Consider the way in which the large African American community was treated back then, restricted to specific neighborhoods and excluded from the mainline world of getting and spending, from board rooms to green rooms, that constitutes the heart of our social existences.  The same kind of limitations existed for other groups, where such groups were numerous enough to constitute a noticeable percentage of the populations.  Harrisburg did not have a China town—but Los Angeles did, as did New York and Chicago.  Miami had its Cuban ghetto.  Houston had its Mexican neighborhoods.

 

Boston strikes me as the outstanding instance of such limitations, across the board—North Boston for the Italians, South Boston for the Irish, Roxbury for the African Americans, the Back Bay for the WASPS and passing Catholics.  No wonder there was a bussing crisis in Boston!

 

To make America great “again” would mean returning to that status quo.  We would have to reject and obscure the ethnic and racial diversity that has become standard in almost all of the country, even in rural America, return to the domination of social and economic life by a “majority” that has or will soon be an actual “minority” of the population, and impoverish our dining experiences.

 

That last item is not there for fun.  The variety of restaurants that are now available to us is a serious index of just how multifarious America has become.  It would not be simply that our appetites for baba ganoush would go unfulfilled, but that the life and blood of a Middle Eastern world would at best be relegated to obscurity.  America would be “great” at the cost of losing what makes it America.

 

And what would we gain?  Well, we could securely laugh at Beni Haha skits.  What a tradeoff.

Past is Prologue

 The insanity of the English Civil Wars (1642-51, although I’d fold the Bishops’s Wars, starting 1639, into the mix) among the “visible saints,” as they conceived of themselves, is notable for merging the present of the 17^th century with the biblical past, both Old Testamentary and New Testamentary.  John Saltmarsh, one of the leading preachers to the New Model Army, which had been formed by Parliament in 1645, asserted that the “Kingdom of Christ” was, concretely and in the present,

 

“a company of godly gathered by his owne Spirit, having their Lord and Saviour in the midst, confederated by an holy and sacramental paction, ruled by the law of his Will and Spirit; obeying his commands, whether in silent inspirations, or louder exhortations”

 

Within their gatherings, each believer was in effect the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies that pointed to Christ.

 

The language that Saltmarsh and others like him use is about typology.  Old Testament figures are understood to be types of Christ, who is the antitype, or fulfillment.  In practice almost every “good guy” in the Hebrew Scriptures is understood to be a type of Christ in the Christian Scriptures.  So Adam was a type of Christ (Christ was often called “second Adam”), as was Noah, and Moses, and David, and . . . .

 

But the New Testament itself points to a further spiritual development, indicated by the second coming at the end times.  That further spirituality is what Saltmarsh means by the “Kingdom of Christ.”  For Saltmarsh the gathered communities of believers existed in a localized post-second-coming world, as if the New Jerusalem had already arrived—not globally, but within the gathered community.  They were quite literally “visible saints,” already living in the pure spirituality of the New Jerusalem.

 

This is the way that another preacher, Samuel Mather, puts it:

 

“Look whatever Glory was in any of these Persons [i. e. Old Testament types of Christ] by way of Prefiguration of Jesus Christ:  it is and should be found in every Believer by way of Participation from Christ and Imitation of him.”

 

Living in such spiritual bliss, the visible saint could do no wrong.  Every action, every statement, every thought, was holy, inspired directly by God.  Indeed, oftentimes the distinction between the individual and God tended to disappear, so it wasn’t necessarily divine inspiration that moved the “saints,” but rather they acted as if they were gods themselves.  Although the relatively less extreme folks would balk at such an assertion, the radicals would not find the statement problematic at all.  Equivocating on the issue, as seems to be his usual mode (so discovered Anne Hutchinson, much to her cost), that New England worthy, John Cotton, asserts that “the Holy Ghost was united with the person of a believer so that one who was so blessed was more than a man.”  He doesn’t specify what the “more” amounts to, of course.

 

Almost needless to say:  England became ungovernable under the notions of those “saints.”  Ultimately Cromwell was obliged to control them forcibly.

 

And here’s why I’m thinking of those “visible saints.”

 

It’s not an exact parallel, but some of the current insanity, attributing a biblical identity to dearleader, for instance (apparently he’s David—no doubt because like David, he lusted for the alien woman), reminds me of those “visible saints.”  There may not be a whole lot of those nuts, but the “visible saints,” also a minority, indicate the danger they pose.  I’d urge the Republican leaders to become a bit more conversant with the history of the English Civil Wars, which underlies their revulsion at mixing church and state.  But by this point it seems to me pointless to try to bring our own “visible saints” under the control of any authority.  They are, and will make the nation as a whole, ungovernable.

Eighteenth-century Democracy

 The founders of this great nation were 18th century types. What that means is that they had 18th century kinds of expectations about what was right and what wasn't.

Abigail Adams petitioned her hubby not to forget the ladies, but you know how that went. Ladies in the 18th century had no independence to speak of. Their agency was circumscribed by the tremendous power and authority of men. To be sure, there are individual cases of pretty independent women, but their independence was always contingent. It could end at any moment.

Dred Scott is a horrible expression of what the 18th century assumed as more or less a matter of fact. By the time that decision came down from the heights of SCOTUS, attitudes among northerners, some northerners, had changed. But the decision reflects 18th century assumptions. If those assumptions hadn't been in place, the three-fifths compromise would never have been contemplated.

Native Americans were savages, to be slaughtered, shunted off, contained, repressed, and self-evidently nugatory. The Trail of Tears, in the 1830s, isn't so unique a phenomenon. After all, it was the manifest destiny—the imperial ideology that masquerades as divine mandate—of white folks to dominate from sea to shining sea, and the Natives were just in the way. God didn't want them there, clearly.

The politics of the 18th century, as those politics were practiced in England, undergird the entire phenomenon of the founding of the country. The founders created a democracy, to be sure, but an 18th century one along the lines already established in England. Voting was restricted, not only to white men, but to white men of a certain level of society. Land owners, moneyed guys—sons of bankers, sons of lawyers, as Elton John sings it—had political authority. No one else did. It was that class of people who elected representatives, who represented them and no one else, and presidents. The presidents and the representatives then appointed judges, who judged from the seat of power that gave them political status.

Even the English practice of rotten and pocket boroughs is duplicated in the arrangement of political power that the founders gave us. A democracy traces the will of the people. In the founders' framework, "the people" meant that restricted and restrictive group of well-off white men; but the framework also gave to owners of land the same sort of privileged position of political authority that English practice gave to aristocrats. It's a bit disguised in the founders' arrangement, to be sure, but in early practice not so hidden away after all. If every state gets two senators, and in a new "western" state only a very tiny slice of the population has the wherewithal to count as having political authority, then it follows as night does day that that tiny slice of the population of the state controls the vote of the two senators from that state. The parallel to rotten and pocket boroughs is not exact, but the effect is the same. In both cases political power is absolutely no reflection of the will of the majority. If elections went to the winners of the popular vote, dear leader would never have been president.

The union has no doubt become "more perfect" since the late 18th century. Amendment after amendment has expanded the meaning of "the people," so that now "the people" means anyone 18 years of age or older regardless of wealth, race, creed, sex, national origin. That's why in some places election laws are geared to reducing the participation of the whole of the electorate in those states. We can't repeal all of those amendments that led to the "perfection" of the union, but paring is all that's necessary to maintain the privilege of the privileged.

And because the privilege of the privileged is so securely entrenched, the SCOTUS has become, essentially, a Taney court. Women do not own their own bodies now. The poor and/or ill-educated need not know they have a right to be represented by a lawyer and to remain silent unless so represented and advised. The rich have pluripotent voices because money is speech and speech can't be curtailed. We'll see what happens to people of color, to those of us who are gendered differently. For the time being I suspect that Loving v. VA won't be overturned because, after all, there's Ginni to keep in mind.

So we live in an 18th-century democracy. Keep that in mind as well.

Insurrection

The insurrection in DC in January of 2021 puts an American myth, sanctified in Scalia's misreading of the Second Amendment, into sharp conflict with the reality of American history.  The myth is that each citizen, alone or as part of a group, a "militia," as the myth would no doubt put it, has the right to bear arms, not only of primarily in defense of self and household but rather to protect the citizen from the government.  That's the idea that underlies the "sovereign citizen" idiocy, the "militia" movements, and the insurrection of last January.

History says otherwise.  I don't know of any nation or state in the history of the world that said it's ok for each citizen to assert individual sovereignty over the self, and therefore to assume immunity from the laws and customs of the nation.  In the US it's almost impossible to resist invoking the Gettysburg Address in this context:  "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure."  The idea of "liberty" here is entirely contained within the continuing existence of the nation.

When they rebelled, which is to say, when they participated in an insurrection, the southern states were taking the myth quite literally.  Lincoln, on the contrary, understood that no nation can endure if it is subject to subversion by individuals, militias, or states.  The "new birth of freedom" that Lincoln goes on to predict is therefore contingent on the survival of the nation.

There are a whole bunch of highfaluting religious, philosophical, and political frameworks that assert more or less the same thing that Lincoln suggests.  But it doesn't take a St. Paul or a Hobbes to see that if every individual is literally sovereign, a law unto him/her/theirself, then we are in a state of nature where, in Hobbes's phrase, life is nasty, brutish, and short.  Without civilization, the collective enterprise of nations, there can be no civility.

The myth that Scalia made into a shibboleth of American manhood—and I choose that word with malice aforethought—is in practice the destruction of this thing we call America.  It undermines our civilization.  I understand full well that to participate in a civilization requires subordinating our own sovereignty to the supremacy of the nation.  Sometimes such supremacy produces injustice.  Consider the history of Black Americans.  But the genius of democracy is that there are methods for undoing such injustices that to do not entail insurrection.  The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States expresses that possibility in the idea that we are constructing "a more perfect union."  Article V provides a method by which such perfecting can be accomplished—within the terms of the Constitution itself.

Outside of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Constitution refers to insurrection, the "sovereign citizen" way of seeking the redress of grievance, only once.  Section I, Article 8 specifies that Congress has the power "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions."  Insurrection and "invasion," the domestic and the foreign threats to the nation, are made equivalent here.

As a relevant tangent to Scalia's dangerous reading of the Second Amendment, note as well that here is the first mention in the Constitution of the "militia," not as a body of "sovereign citizens," but as a arm of the government.  The Constitution reiterates the point in Article II, section 2, in which we are told that "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Nave of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States."  Pace Scalia what the Second Amendment guarantees is the right of citizens to bear arms ae elements of the militia, which is to say as part of a state-organized, sanction, and trained band of citizen soldiers.

Militia

 

Past and Present, take two

 L. P. Hartley is not a name that resounds in the historical temple of British fiction.  Maybe some people remember his The Go-Between, probably because of the movie of the novel made in the early 70s.  But one of his sentences is so true that it has outlived the novel and the film.  "The past," says Hartley, "is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

 

It's a dangerous sentence, for reasons that resonate in the present moment of American history.  But to tiptoe around the controversies that such a frame of reference would produce, I want to go back in time and space, from the resonance of the founding documents of America in the world of the 21^st century to a poem that I had not read for a long time, La chanson de Roland.

 

I last read that poem when I was in eleventh grade.  Back then I knew so very little about anything that the heroism of Roland seemed to me self-evident, an unquestionable aspect of the poem.  When Roland's bestie, Olivier, sees the hundred thousand Sarrasins and païens, the "Saracens and pagans" who surround the twenty-thousand barons in the French rear guard led by Roland, he urges Roland, "sonnez votre cor," blow your horn, the olifant that Roland has with him.  "Charles l'lentendra et l'armée reviendra"—Charles, leading the main force of the French, will hear it and return.

 

But Roland rejects the advice:  "Ce serait folie!"  That would be foolish.  "En douce France j'y perdrais mon renom," in sweet France I would lose all renown were I to do so.  Instead I will ride on the field, "sur-le-champ," to "frapper," lay about me with Durendal, my great sword, until "la lame en sera sanglante jusqu'à l'or de la garde," until the blade is bloodied up to its golden hilt.  To sound the horn would be "tel reproche à mes parents," such a reproach to my parents, that they would never live it down.  When Olivier insists that no one could accuse Roland of cowardice because, after all, "Grande est l'armée de la gent étrangere," huge is the strangers' army whereas we have but a tiny group, "une bien petite troupe," Roland roars back that his fierceness is made greater therefore, "Mon ardeur s'en augmente."  There is more value in death, "Mieux vaut la mort," than in shame, "que la honte."

 

What a Mensch, I thought!  Clearly Roland is the hero, and Olivier's advice a shameful retreat from chivalric honor.  Olivier preserves his honor only by the courage of his really hopeless battling the enemies of la douce France.

 

I honestly did not remember from that first reading the reconsideration of the debate between Roland and Olivier when, faced with the disaster of the battle, Roland decides to sound the olifant so that "Charles l'entendra," Charles will hear it and then "les Français reviendront," the main force of the French will return.  Olivier now repeats what Roland had said earlier, that "Ce serait grande honte et grand opprobre pour vos parents"—that would be great shame and opprobrium for your parents—because now to sound the horn "ne serait pas agir en brave," would not be to act bravely.

 

I am not a medievalist, and certainly not a French medievalist.  But now I can't help but hear Olivier here as mocking Roland.

 

More straightforwardly, Olivier finally affirms that "Si le roi avait été ici," had the king been here, "nous n'aurions pas subi désastre," we would not have suffered a disaster.  "Par ma barbe," by my beard—a mighty oath in the period—he continues, "Si je peux revoir Aude, ma gente soeur, vous ne serez jamais dans ses bras!"  The statement here is enormously dismissive of Roland.  Olivier recognizes that he will never again see his sister, Aude, who is promised in marriage to Roland, but were he able to see her again, he says, Roland would never be held in her arms.  Roland wonders why Olivier is so angry with him, and Olivier's response is definitive:  "Compagnon, c'est votre faute.  It is your fault, companion:  "La bravoure sensée," a sensible bravery, "n'a rien à voir avec la folie" has nothing to do with foolishness.  Roland's refusal to recall the main force of the French army by blowing his olifant is outrageously foolish.  So foolish, then, is Roland that Olivier, were it possible for him to see his sister again, would prevent Roland's marriage to Aude.  And Olivier concludes, "Votre prouesse," your prowess, Roland, "aura fait notre malheur," will have caused our misfortune.

 

The bloody Archbishop Turpin intervenes at that point and reminds the two companions that they have pressing business, namely the force of enemies that is about to kill them all, to contend with.  And of course Olivier leaves aside the argument, reaffirms his valiant courage, and engages the enemy.  Soon enough he is killed in battle, but his death is glorious and the poem underscores the value of prouesse and bravoure.

 

And the poem on the whole recurs to the value of chivalric bravoure.  To be sure, Charles grieves the loss of Olivier, Roland, Turpin, and all the other French barons. But the loss is grand, redounds to the honor of la douce France, and ultimately is certified by God himself, who sends angels and ministers of grace to celebrate the ultimate grand defeat of the Sarassins et païens.

 

In short, the direction of the poem coincides with my high-school sense of what should be done, what constitutes the manly honor of chivalric courage.  Olivier's sarcastic mockery of Roland's chivalry disappears under the weight of Roland's having done what the brave, the preux man must do to persevere in his bravoure and vaillance.

 

Now much much older at this second reading, I hear Olivier's mockery with an ear attuned to the truth of what he says.  I'm also alive to the way in which my historical moment coincides with that reconsideration of the argument that Olivier raises.  Judged from the perspective of the current day, Roland is quite simply a fool, as Olivier insinuates.  He is so full of the notion of masculine prouesse, prowess, that he sacrifices not only himself—a sort of suicide that he seems not only to seek but to deserve—but also the flower of French chivalry.

 

Can I judge Roland by our own sense of right and wrong?  Of course I can do so—let me rephrase the question:  shouldI judge Roland from my modern perspective?  Would doing so be fair to Roland? to the poem itself? to the entirety of what the poem presents as the way things were done in the French middle ages?