Much Ado About First Love, Second Love

I’ve seen the movie but had never before now read the novel, Rebecca. I’m up to chapter six, and I’m not sure I like the mode of the narrative. The retrospective approach, interspersed with moments of the present, leaves so much mysterious because the narrator knows but does not include the reader in her knowledge. Mystery is the point. I know. And then the character of the narrator—she reminds me of how much more interesting is Jane Eyre, who in similar circumstances proves to have a real spine. Oh—and Max de Winter is worse than Rochester.

 

At any rate, the narrator, middle aged now but barely twenty-one in the past, is what one would call a wimp. She sets my teeth on edge. She also passes judgments that leave me wondering. At the start of the fifth chapter, for instance, the narrator says that she is “glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.” I think she is right about the fever and the burden, although not about the cause of those sentiments. Flaccid and malleable as she is, she says they derive from “little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word.”

 

Yes indeed in the fierce tumult of first love one does bruise and wound very easily. But for me it was not the “barbed word” that raised the bruise, inflicted the wound. It was something more complex than a word meant to wound—indeed by the time such a word came to be exchanged the love would have been gone, or at least deeply compromised.

 

The groundwork for the troubles of first love is more like what Shakespeare suggests in Much Ado, not a sharp or piercing word but rather the fear that in the exchange of self and self that makes love love the identity of the lover, the very personhood will be lost. That is a fearsome reality for anyone, but especially for youngsters finding themselves in real love for the first time. First love, real first love, for people just coming into a full sense of who and what they are, is more than difficult to navigate.

 

Claudio seems to be a young man in the first blush of finding himself. His sense of relationship comes from that delicate stage of self identity. Because that is the case, I do not believe that Claudio is in love, at least not in the sort of love that produces a true merging of selves. To be sure,  Benedick is astonished at the apparent transformation of his hail-fellow friend. Claudio, who now he seems in love has, seems to Benedick to have become an entirely changed man: “I have known when he would have walked ten mile a-foot to see a good armour; and now will he lie ten nights awake, carving the fashion of a new doublet.” But those changes are superficial at best, a “fashion,” mere posturing as is conventionally expected from a young man “in love.” Still, they provoke Benedick to consider his own condition. He wonders whether “love may transform me to an oyster,” and concludes that “till he have made an oyster of me, he shall never make me such a fool.”

 

Unwilling at that moment to contemplate the truth of the matter, that he is already in love with Beatrice, Benedick throws love under the bus, so to speak, making his conversion into lover as improbable as his being turned into an oyster. But under the oyster joke lies the reality of his fear, that love has the power to convert a person from one to another identity. By the end of the scene in question, and falsely assured by Don Pedro’s plot to catch him that Beatrice already loves him so he cannot lose face, he affirms that he “will be horribly in love with her.” The language here works in the same humorous way that he had used earlier to throw love under the bus. But in fact he has already lost himself, his identity, his personhood. He may not be an oyster, but he certainly is not the Benedick who enters in the first scene of the play.

 

Benedick’s transformation comes, it seems, at at a time when he is old enough to know who and what he is, and so is able and willing, though hesitant,  to forego his own identity and allow love to transform him into something new, if perhaps not something rich and strange. The love is strong, powerful—so much so that he is willing to abandon Don Pedro, his prince, the prince’s patronage, and the expectation of a bright future that such patronage enables.

 

Claudio’s “love,” properly in quotation marks, is of a different order. It leads to the posturing that Benedick has already noted. Claudio is really purely conventional. He behaves exactly as his social world supposes natural for a lover. He has “turned orthography”; “his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes.” Claudio adopts the “fantastical” and “strange” language of convention—Rosaline Love's Labours Lost might urge him, “sans sans.”

 

Shakespeare details the difference between the two men. Claudio’s exchanging the martial “fife and drum” for “the tabour and the pipe” of the lover depends on externalities. When Benedick comes to seek Leonato’s approval for his seeking Beatrice’s hand, on the other hand, although there are surface differences that prove he has been careful about his appearance, the change also addresses the man himself, who now speaks to Leonato seriously: “I have studied eightor nine wise words to speak to you, which these hobby-horses must not hear.” This is not the jokesters whose first words in the play are a bad, even indecent joke, one of the many references to cuckoldry that made G. B Shaw dislike the play so much. Benedick’s final cuckold joke, in the last part of the last scene of the play, echoes his first entrance—but with a difference: “there is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn.” There is no reverence in the initial jokes. Claudio at the end of the play, meanwhile, remains the same socially conscious, self-advancing kind of man he was at the beginning.

 

The focus of Claudio’s love is obvious in his first question to Don Pedro about Hero as a possible bride: “Hath Leonato,” Hero’s dad, “any son, my lord?” Don Pedro understands perfectly well the point of the question, and responds, “No child but Hero; she's his only heir.” I don’t want to put too heavy a burden on the word that Don Pedro uses to ascertain Claudio’s purpose, but it is suggestive: “Dost thou affect her, Claudio?”

 

An affectation is not the same thing as love. It does suggest that the “love” for Hero is really about something else, as Don Pedro’s comment about Leonato’r heir already implies. The same self-interested venality remains in place when in the denouement of the comedy Claudio agrees to marry Hero’s supposed cousin because Hero, he is made to think, has died. Leonato has promised Claudio that the cousin “alone is heir to both of us,” of his brother and himself. Hurray for a double inheritance, although, alas and alack, at the cost of one dead Hero. Claudio doesn’t mind the cost. Certainly the elegiac verse that he inscribes on a scroll to be hung on Hero’s supposed tomb is, at best, conventional. It never acknowledges Claudio’s culpability in what has happened, and ends with what amounts to a cutting off of grief and a washing away of responsibility: “Hang thou [the scroll] there upon the tomb, / Praising her when I am dumb.”

 

As the marriages of Claudio and the “cousin” and of Beatrice and Benedick are about to take place, several women enter masked. Among them is Beatrice and the “cousin” to be given in marriage to Claudio. Claudio’s reaction as he sees the “cousin” for the first time is “Here come other reckonings.” Not exactly words of love, but certainly in line with what seems to underlie Claudio’s “love,” a matter of contract between families. The contractual basis for Claudio’s “love” explains why Claudio had all but asked Don Pedro to woo Hero on his behalf. Amused by his courtier's transparent purpose, Don Pedro agrees to be the mouthpiece for Claudio’s wooing:

 

If thou dost love fair Hero, cherish it,

And I will break with her and with her father,

And thou shalt have her. Was't not to this end

That thou began'st to twist so fine a story?

 

Nothing quite like a prince to act as go-between, in effect a godfather to the proposed marriage, and so to assure Claudio a brilliant future. Conventional as Claudio’s contract-seeking marriage is, Don Pedro approves: such ambition forms the groundwork for social success, exactly what is expected of an up-and-coming courtier.

 

By contrast, while Claudio is willing to marry “other reckonings” sight unseen, Benedick is much more circumspect. When the friar urges the gathered company to move quickly to the chapel so that the wedding ceremonies can take place, Benedick stops him. “Soft and fair, friar. Which is Beatrice?” Benedick is not contracting marriage with a woman. He is wedding Beatrice in particular, a companion whom he loves so deeply that he is willing, happy even, to be made an oyster. The companionship is fraught, as is demonstrated in the constant bickering that the two aim at each other. But that bickering really expresses the fear they have in encountering another person who compels a transformation of the self into something new. 

 

In Benedick’s case, that fear of being transformation into something that leaves aside his own personhood, is what he must overcome, must fight so as to live the true love he has for Beatrice. The transformation is the real bruise and wound that makes first love so very difficult to navigate. Beatrice too has to overcome her fear of being dominated by Benedick and so converting herself into someone new. Falling again into the bickering mode, Benedick is compelled to ask “Then you do not love me?” Beatrice replies, “No, truly, but in friendly recompense.” One more nudge from Leonato and Claudio overwhelms the bickering. Both are sufficiently assured of their self to make a leap into the mutual bond. The bickering, it turns out, is the irritant that makes the oyster produce a pearl.

 

First love comes at a particularly fraught moment in the development of a person’s identity and personhood. I was eighteen, perhaps a tad older than Claudio seems to be and so 

a late bloomer in the reality of love, when it happened. Like all kids, I had spent a great deal of my life up to that point in separating my self out from the Great Grimpen Mire of family. The rules imposed. The expectations asserted. The identity given. Finally in college, without the bat-eared stepfather and doting mother to appease, I could set about discovering that self, the person that I really was. Not quite the same as Claudio’s finding himself a leading figure on a battlefield, but in the same ballpark.

The first steps towards that self-definition took place in the context of very powerful peer pressure. It was not malevolent in any way, any more really than the pressures on Claudio to be the successful courtier and rising aristocrat. But there’s no doubt that in moving away from the morass of family expectations I was absorbed into a different, even more powerful world of peer expectation. And at the beginning of my college life I adapted myself very well to those expectations much as Claudio adapts to the role of soldier and courtier. I was, if not a shining star in the cinema firmament, then at least an ember in the hippiedom of 1970.

 

In the vacuous words of some kid with whom I had a random conversation one evening, I knew where it was at. To be honest, I knew very little of what “it” was, let alone of what “I” was outside the conventions of hippiedom. I had no clue at all about what sort of person I really was or what a relationship with another person would demand of me and my identity. I was cool for the first time in my life, and I thought that coolness defined the person I actually was. My encounter with the universe of college was not as clear cut a contract as Claudio’s relation to Hero’s family and Don Pedro’s power and authority, but it surely was a socially embedded, deeply embedded, phenomenon.

 

And then I met my first love.

 

I was not pure Claudio. I saw the challenge that love presented to my new-found identity. My dilemma was like Benedick’s, then, because I recognized that, were that love to subsume me, I would have lost my coolness in the companionship of the beloved—me-you/you-me would erase the “I” that I’d developed. In the language of “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” “I” would be subsumed completely, and she and I would defy all convention, reason itself. We'd become “Two distincts, division none: / Number there in love was slain.” I would not be transformed into an oyster, but definitely altered from the “cool” that I then enjoyed into something entirely new, entirely unknown.

My first love was a lovely young woman, and not only or even primarily because she was beautiful, although beautiful she certainly was. As kids in high school say, she was way out of my league. More importantly, she was also a serious human being, someone whom I could admire, esteem, adore. In retrospect it’s clear to me that I would have been fortunate to lose the facile, conventional personhood that I’d just cobbled together in accepting her and the power of that first love to convert me.

 

She would have been less fortunate, let’s say.

 

Lucky for her, I was not ready to be Benedick. I feared the loss of my identity. I placed my engagement with buddies, that silly coolness, above engagement with love. I wish I could have been Benedick. But I was Claudio, too absorbed in the construction of a separate personhood, the last phase of adolescence, to understand what my first love could have built.

 

And then there was my second love. By that point I had long passed the self-construction part of life and was ready, more than ready, to engage in making the pearl that oysters produce. That second love was—rather, is as beautiful, if not more so as my first love. She has a character so strong, so admirable, that after forty-five years of marriage it still astonishes me. She is principled. She is sharp. She is straightforward. She is wonderful.

 

Our first year together was maybe a little like what Shakespeare gives us in the initial relationship of Beatrice and Benedick. We did not indulge in a “merry war of wits,” to be sure, but we did rub up against each other in sometimes uncomfortable ways. The discomfort seems to me inevitable. Two fully-formed characters facing each other front to front will necessarily frown from time to time. The result? Bruises and wounds. They were not fatal nor long-lasting. In the long term, on the contrary, we wore away the rough edges that caused the bruises and the wounds. In the end? A merging together of selves so that she and I together have become “a single cherry, double-parted.”

Stephen Miller

When I hear Stephen Miller spout his Nazi line (maybe even cribbing directly from speeches given by German Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels) I’m reminded of Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life. In his memoir, Wolff tells us about his time with the two Terrys, Terry Taylor and Terry Silver, when they were just turning adolescent in the late 50s.

The three of them would watch all the TV shows on Nazis—“TV was very big on Nazis then,” Wolff tells us. The kids were enthralled by all the violence of the war, naturally, and saw through the pretense, as they thought, of the shows. They were supposed to be about the victory of good over evil, but for the boys “the real point was to celebrate snappy uniforms and racy Mercedes staff cars. . . . These shows instructed us . . . that victims are contemptible, no matter how much people pretend otherwise; that it is more fun to be inside than outside, to be arrogant than to be kind, to be with a crowd than to be alone.”

And so Silver made a Nazi armband for himself and strutted around wearing it. He consulted the phone book for people with “Jewish sounding names,” called them, and then “screamed at them in pig German.” In the final scene of the chapter the three of them climbed to the roof of Silver's apartment building and threw eggs at a flashy Thunderbird passing by below. As the driver finally went off, defeated because he couldn’t see where the eggs were coming from, “‘Yid!’ Silver screamed, and again, ‘Yid!’”

Earlier in the chapter, as Wolff introduces the reader to the two Terrys, we learn that both of the Terrys, and Wolff himself for that matter, were not exactly the cool kids on the block. They were outsiders in the extreme, losers as we might say nowadays.

Wolff also comments in passing that Silver’s father was a cantor.

And therefore I think of Stephen Miller.

Predestination Are Us

On January 6^th of 1696—1695, old style—Betty Sewall, daughter of Samuel Sewall, one of the judges in the Salem witch trials, “surprised,” as Samuel puts it in his Diary, the whole family. Samuel explains what led to that surprise:

 

It seems Betty Sewall had given some signs of dejection and sorrow; but a little after diner she burst out into an amazing cry, which caus'd all the family to cry too; Her Mother ask'd the reason; she gave none ; at last said she was afraid she should goe to Hell, her Sins were not pardon'd.

 

Betty’s “dejection” derived immediately from a sermon by John Norton that Samuel had read to the family, where the preacher used John 7.34 as his text, “Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me,” followed by John 8.21, where Jesus says, “ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sins.” Those texts “ran in her mind, and terrified her greatly,” says Samuel, especially when she then read one of Cotton Mather’s sermons where Mather asked, “Why hath Satan filled thy heart.” When her mother asked her “whether she pray'd,” Betty answered “Yes; but feared her prayers were not heard because her Sins not pardon'd.”

 

I say that the “dejection” came immediately from Norton’s sermon because that sermon, indeed a great deal of the theological underpinnings of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, itself derived from the Calvinistic idea of predestination, double predestination. The idea of double predestination is that from the beginning of time itself God had already determined, predestined, not only that some people would be saved, but also that some people—the bulk of humanity, in fact—would be damned.

 

Betty’s dejection, what nowadays you might call her nervous breakdown, stemmed from her sense that, despite all her desire, all her prayer, all her faith, god did not respond to her. She did not feel within her the justification, her acceptance into the bosom of Jesus, that would signify her predestined to salvation. Whatever she could willingly do to exercise her faith, whatever work that the spirit might perform to move her to assert her faith, a process called sanctification, there was no way that god would change his mind. Without such the inward conviction of justification, the only other option available to her was damnation. Good, faithful, innocent as she might be, god had predestined her to hell.

 

Betty Sewall’s response to double predestination is one possible outcome of Calvin’s theology. The good person, praying desperately for some sign of god’s having chosen her for salvation, will try and try and try again to perfect the sanctification that will clarify her justification and union with the divine pleroma. With no inkling of divine preference, however, dejection, depression, and despair might well follow.

 

There is an alternative path for the subjects of predestination, however. Convinced that justification will never come, that the inevitable end of one’s existence is damnation, surely it follows, for some at any rate, that the whole house of cards comes crashing down. Why work towards something that can never be accomplished? Why not simply enjoy the pleasures of the here and now, and to hell with salvation, since in any case hell certainly will engulf the ones rejected by god. And god has determined the fate of every person from before the beginning of time itself.

 

That alternative approach to double predestination motivates the actions of Dr. Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s play. Certain of damnation, in fact so skeptical of religion itself that he does not hear Mephistopheles’s assertion of his own damned condition, Faustus signs away his soul for the pleasures of the moment. “I count religion but a childish toy, / And hold there is no sin but ignorance.” To be sure, Faustus had higher ambitions than mere pleasure. He assumes that from knowledge he can come to wealth and power. Finally he is satisfied with pleasure, the illusory presence of Helen of Troy, whose spectacular beauty “launched a thousand ships,” as he says. Certain that he is not justified before god, Faustus does away with future sanctification and opts for the instant.

 

I gave Faustus, a fictional human, as example of the way double predestination can work on those who accept that they are not and will never be among the chosen few. I did so because the fiction covers a multitude of real persons who, sure that they will never lie down beside green pastures, simply assume the right to break all bounds of law and decency. I could point to a certain president of the United States who seems to have accepted that power is the only thing that matters, for instance, and damn the torpedoes of an impossible salvation.

 

Ancient as her travails are, Betty Sewall could be considered fictional as well—certainly very different from a twenty-first century human. And yet her doubt about the prospect of justification, which produces a constant effort at sanctification, has its contemporary counterpart as well. For her as for the modern worker, if there’s no sign of paradise, or fortune for the worker, then one keeps trying; and if there’s conviction of spiritual or economic wealth, then one rests in the bosom of the Abrahams. Or Benjamins, perhaps. The failed worker’s hopelessness in poverty parallels Betty’s spiritual dejection. For Betty a continued state of dejection might lead to madness; for the worker poverty might lead to suicide.

 

Betty and Faustus. The two of them limn out modern American reality.

Heinlein Once Again

Once upon a time, pretty long ago as it happens, I contemplated writing a book on Robert Heinlein’s novels. My take on them was easy to state: the man’s perspective on almost everything in the world was vicious and rotten to the core.

 

I gave up on the project because I really didn’t fancy writing a philippic—and that’s what it would have been. It wasn’t just the outrageously condescending perspective on women that oozed from every single book, although that was sickening enough. It was also the corrosive attitude towards any established government, derived from what seemed to me the hopelessly misguided notion that the American wild west was the best time for men to be men. Kissing cousin to that point of view was Heinlein’s obvious politics of solipsism, which on a good day I could call libertarian, although it so often crossed the line into sovereign citizen idiocy—and so back to the attitude towards government.

 

But the presentation of women remained a central concern for me. Poor teen-aged Podkayne of Mars, whose only crime was her determination to be intelligent and active, gets blamed for causing the first interplanetary war. No reason, really, beyond the fact that Podkayne is a female.

 

Despite my misgivings, I decided to reread Stranger in a Strange Land. The why is kind of embarrassing, but in the interest of full disclosure I have to acknowledge that in my younger day—much much younger day, alas—I loved that book. It seemed to reflect everything that was good and proper. Suspicion of government chimed with my deep distrust of a government intent on pursuing the neo-colonial war in Vietnam. The casual disregard for conventional sexual morality struck me as just what the doctor ordered for an adolescent boy. I deeply grokked the idea that transcendence came through cultivation of the inner self, be that via Martian wisdom or, for me, via psychedelic drugs.

 

So I hoped that this book, which I had deliberately not reread when I outlined my plans for a philippic contra Heinlein, might serve as a cordial against the current Trump-induced malaise.

 

I had forgotten what an incredible windbag Jubal Harshaw is—a palimpsest for Heinlein himself. I had forgotten that the wind issuing from Jubal’s mouth traced point by point all the attitudes that I found so dismaying in his other books. I had forgotten in particular that the free sex that I had found so alluring in my adolescent years reduced itself to contempt for women, whose only redeeming quality was their willingness to be sex objects.

 

Some of that objectification is casual. For instance, when Mike, the Man from Mars, begins to understand the utility of money, “Jubal encouraged him to spend money and Mike did so, with the timid eagerness of a bride being brought to bed.” On its own such a statement doesn’t broadcast the insignificance of women, although it does hint that sexual submission, eager or not, timid or experienced, limns out the function of women.

 

But then there are passages that underscore that hint. So, one of the space voyagers who returns to Earth with Mike, is

 

pleased . . . that these women did not chatter, did not intrude into sober talk of men, but were quick with food and drink in warm hospitality. He had been shocked at Miriam’s disrespect toward her master—then recognized it: a liberty permitted cats and favorite children in the privacy of the home.

 

The women in question are Harshaw’s assistants—Anne, Dorcas, Miriam, and the new addition who comes to Harshaw’s residence with Mike, Jill—all of whom are impressive human beings, competent, self-assured, gutsy. At least they don’t chatter. But when they do, as Jill does when Mike begins to understand the human condition, they often speak as if they were Heinlein himself: “Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it’s partly her fault.”

 

A final observation about the passage on chatter, which may make it even more disturbing. The statement, really a dip into the mind of the character, comes from Dr. Mahmoud, who has no first name, apparently, although he's called "Stinky." He is the cultural anthropologist on the voyage to and from Mars, if “anthropology” is the right term for a study of Martians. Mahmoud is a lapsed but constantly repentant Muslim. The perspective on women that Heinlein attributes to him stands for a general sense of what Islam says about women.

 

Whether or not that attribution is correct presents an interesting matter to study. But the point that makes the whole thing stink to high heaven is that Mahmoud articulates precisely the perspective that Harshaw, and by implication Heinlein himself have on women. When it comes to the clear contempt of women that Mahmoud thinks is proper, however, brave and straightforward Heinlein ducks behind the cover of Islam.

 

I may finish rereading the book. I am curious about why it seemed so necessary to me back in the 1960s, indeed why it resonated so loudly with the mind set of those years. I am hoping that Mike, the Man from Mars himself, will redeem the novel.

Slang

One of the important uses of slang is to divide in-groups from out-groups. The ones inside are those who know the slang, which is entirely obscure to those in the outside. Slang also works to disguise meaning, and so it’s a regular feature of outlaws of all sorts. The proliferation of slang words for drugs and the drug trade is a case in point.

 

Here’s a passage of slang, from one of the coney-catching pamphlets published in London in the late mid-sixteenth century:

 

We will filch some duds off the ruffmans, or mill the ken for a lag of duds. So may we happen on the harmans, and cly the jerk, or to the queer-ken and scour queer cramp-rings, and so to trining on the chats.

 

A"coney" is a bunny, and to "catch" a coney is to trap it, so "coney-catching" is slang for thieving from idiots. A translation, provided by Stephen Greenblatt in his Dark Renaissance:

 

We will steal some clothes from the hedges or rob a house for a basket of clothes. But we could be set in the stocks and be whipped or taken to prison, there to be shackled with fetters, and then hanged on the gallows.

 

It’s thieves’ cant, the slang of folks too poor to get along without filching whatever came to hand—there’s a version of that need in Shakespeare’s _The Winter’s Tale_, which introduces Autolycus in 4.3 as follows:

 

The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,

With heigh! the sweet birds, O, how they sing!

Doth set my pugging tooth on edge;

For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.

 

“Pugging” is a slang word. It translates to “thieving.”

 

And translation is the name of the game for slang. It is deliberately obscure for anyone outside the in-group. To make any slang statement clear to an outsider requires the same process that makes a foreign language intelligible.

 

Besides translation, a necessary consequence of slang is that it must always, but always change, and do so pretty rapidly. As soon as the slang terms becomes transparent, especially to the forces of law and order, new terms must come into being. Heroin is dope, smack, junk, H, hero, horse, boy, skag, mud, thunder. . . .

 

But even when slang isn’t associated with something illegal, the terms change as soon as their meaning gets spread enough so that they no longer separate in- from out-group. So “groovy” becomes "fire," "dope," "boss," "rad," "sleek.” There’s an obvious cross-fertilization from drug terms in the move from being in the groove to being dope, but the more general direction is obscurity or meaning. No sleek dude wants to make the mistake of using the wrong term and making meaning clear to everyone.

 

Being now an old man, I’ve noticed that the older I get the less slang is in my common discourse. I’m not sure why that is other than the obvious fact that age and grooviness are worlds apart. But I suspect there’s a smidgeon of social reality that creeps in. The in-group/out-group dynamic disappears when, as a result of the inevitable need to make money, I have to make what had been a narrowly defined in-group as large and comprehensive as possible. I can’t convince someone to buy my product, listen to my lecture, send money to my cause if I try to do it with language that is simply too obscure to convey meaning.

 

And so the standard language comes to the rescue. It may still be dope to celebrate being inside the orbit of the cool and boss. But, as they say, follow the money to a mutually understood lingo.

Runners, Guns, and Bobbies

There’s a show on Acorn, City of Vice, that presents the establishment and early development of the first police force in London, the Bow Street Runners, sanctioned by Parliament and sponsored in 1749 by my favorite 18th century novelist, Henry Fielding, who gave up on writing in order to become a magistrate in Westminster. In one of the shows Fielding is trying to convince one of the parliamentary leaders, the Duke of Newcastle, that a police force was essential to the safety of everyone in the city. Newcastle’s first response is that a police force runs counter to the tradition of freedom among the British.

 

The same argument makes the Second Amendment an absolute basis for the tradition of freedom among the Americans. And so just as from Newcastle’s point of view, freedom from police control is worth the death, theft, and mayhem endured by citizens of London, so too, as Charlie Kirk said, the unrestrained ownership of firearms is worth the deaths of random people in the streets, schools, churches, synagogues, stadia, theaters, nightclubs, etc. etc. of the US. The Bow Street Runners ultimately receive permission to organize, however, according to the show because Fielding arranges for some of his supporters, disguised as thieves and murderers, to assault Newcastle as he is leaving his preferred whorehouse. The good duke is so frightened by his experience that, within days, he compels Parliament to fund the Runners.

 

The lesson I learned from the show is that 18th century British aristocrats have a great deal more sense than 21st century American politicians. Survey after survey shows that the citizenry of the US supports the idea of gun laws, in particular gun laws that restrict the sale and ownership of assault weapons. But despite all the deaths by gunfire that the country suffers, assaults that include attempts on the lives of the politicians themselves, the Congress of the United States refuses to constrain, if that’s what it is, the “freedom” of Americans by passing any such law.

 

Once upon a time the US did have an assault weapons ban. From 1994 to 2004 the ban resulted in a drop from 19 to 4 deaths from mass shootings by such weapons. When the ban ended the numbers rose, from the 4 in 2004 to 79 in 2019. Similar results no doubt came from the institution of the Bow Street Runners. The difference, though, is that British folk decided that it made a lot of sense to have a police force. It was not for another 80 years, in 1829, that Sir Robert Peele organized the various competing police and watch forces in London and founded the Metropolitan Police, the Bobbies. But there was no doubt that, despite Newcastle’s fear, the freedom of the British public was not infringed by the police. Oddly enough, neither was the freedom of the American public from 1994 to 2004.

"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.”

Who's the Bully?

            In 1898, the US intervened in the Cuban war of independence, and after the defeat of the Spanish Empire and the passage in the US of the Platt Amendment, which in effect gave the US veto power over Cuban legislation, supported government after government that served American interests and the interests of the upper bourgeoisie that dominated the Cuban economy at the expense of the average citizen and the poor. Sixty years later, the Cuban Revolution did away with that sequence of US-supported governments and installed the Castros and their epigones as presidents and supreme leaders. Elections? A joke. Relations with the US? Abysmal.

            In 1953, the US instigated, supported, and funded the coup that removed the elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh and firmly established the direct, authoritarian rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi. Twenty-six years later, in 1979, the Islamic Revolution overthrew Pahlavi, and from then till now Iran has been ruled by supreme leaders, ayatollahs, who come to their power by divine intervention, so it seems. The elected prime minister? A figurehead at best. Relations with the US? Abysmal.

            In 1984, the US became dissatisfied with the results of an election in Nicaragua that brought Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista party into the presidency. Despite a Congressional law prohibiting aid to resistance aimed at overthrowing Ortega, Ronald Reagan and his regime funded rebellion on the part of so-called Contras. In subsequent elections US-supported candidates won the presidency, until in 2006 Ortega was reelected to the presidency, where he has been in power since then.

            In 2003, the US invaded Iraq, defeated and had its president, Sadam Hussein, executed by the government that the US installed in power. After the US abandoned Iraq, a sequence of governments, each more inimical to American interests, succeeded. Elections? Sure. Relations with the US? From bad to worse.

            There are many many many many other instances of the US attacking countries, either covertly via CIA intervention or overtly via military incursion. Almost invariably all those instances have led to less-than-ideal relations between the given country and the US. To be sure, not all results have been as fraught as those I’ve suggested. But also almost invariably the reason why the results have not been so fraught has to do with what amounts to economic bullying by the US. Vietnam is a good instance, as are almost all the countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean. El Salvador is, at this point, an exception to the rule. The repeated interventions by the US in the elections and the governments of El Salvador have yielded benefit for the US in the government of Nayib Bukele. So far.

            But keep in mind that the US had peachy keen relations with Iran from 1953 to 1979. It’s the long run that is fraught.

Masculinity

            What then is this thing called “masculinity”?

            I could have started with an assertion instead of a question—the search for, not the certainty about “masculinity.”

            Between the question and the statement lies one of the major fault lines in the culture wars of the twenty-first century. A query puts the other person, the interlocutor of this imaginary dialogue, in the position of knowing and so of controlling the discourse. The questioner is therefore subordinating the self to that other, making the self a provider of service—here the question itself, which provokes the interlocutor to the assertion of a point of view. It is, in short, not a very masculine way of starting off this essay because to be masculine is always to be assertive, always to know, always to control.

            Or so they say, those people who take what I’ll call the masculinist side in the culture wars. From that perspective, to grant primacy to another is to feminize oneself, on the understanding that “femininity” is passivity. A little stroll through the index of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents underscores the point of view. The reader who looks up “feminine” in the index will be directed to the lemma, “masculine and feminine.” Already “feminine” is made passive, subservient to the index power of “masculine.” Under that heading, then, the reader will be further directed to consider as well “active and passive.” Go to the page indicated for “masculine and feminine” in the index, and Freud pulls the other finger, as our British friends might say: “For psychology the contrast between the sexes fades away into one between activity and passivity, in which we far too readily identify activity with maleness and passivity with femaleness.”

            Freud doesn’t only pull the other one. He also seems to pull his punches a bit when he adds that the characteristics of activity and passivity that he has just associated with “maleness” and “femaleness” is “a view which is by no means universally confirmed in the animal kingdom.” Apparently “maleness” and “femaleness” do not trace activity and passivity “in the animal kingdom.”

            To make the punch-pulling even more definitive, Freud adds that “every human being displays both male and female instinctual impulses, needs and attributes.” Psychology and biology are simply not commensurate.

            It follows therefore that the lemmas in the index do not quite match the terms of Freud’s discussion. What he calls “maleness” and “femaleness” is ultimately the “anatomy,” as he says, the biology of male and female. But the “instinctual impulses, needs and attributes” of every human evidently do not coincide with the anatomy of the sexes. The psychology expressed in the notions of passivity/femininity and activity/masculinity does not coincide with biology/anatomy, maleness and femaleness.

            Passivity and activity are, as Freud explicitly says, a matter of psychology. Those characteristics may well incorporate questions of anatomy as one element of masculinity and femininity, but biological/anatomical sex is simply one aspect of gender, masculinity and femininity. Although the index subsumes gender into sex, the analysis of male/female and of masculine/feminine in fact radically distinguishes between the two categories. Reading Freud’s comments carefully suggests that he is uncomfortable, at least, with distinguishing sex from gender. Nonetheless, it is also the case that psychology leads to questions of gender, of masculinity and femininity, and not of sex, “maleness” and “femaleness.”

            What seems to be a pulling of punches, in other words, is Freud’s constant, uncomfortable elision of sex and gender. It’s an essential element of that troubling chapter four of Civilization and Its Discontents, in which Freud establishes the origins of male supremacy and activity—gendered categories—in the biology of sexual difference. In that chapter he concludes with what to him is an inevitably female subordination and passivity within cultural practices—the “civilization” of the books title. In biology we have sex; in cultural practice we have gender. But then Freud essentializes gender, making it essentially indistinguishable from sex.

            It turns out, then, that in the current culture wars that we endure thanks to the desire on the part of some people to make America great again, which amounts taking the country back to the social realities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the right-wing essentialists are taking a Freudian approach to sex and gender. Without exception, over and over and over again, people in the right-wing camp conflate sex and gender. The conflation is omnipresent. The reporter who asks if there are more than two genders really means to ask whether there are more than two sexes. But the question is couched in terms of gender, and the respondent answers also in terms of gender: No, of course not—there are only two genders. And then the doubling down with the observation that one has either XX, “female,” chromosomes, or XY, “male,” chromosomes. The erroneous, reductive account of genetic variability aside, as with Freud, the right wing subsumes the psychology of gender into the biology of sex.

            The conflation then takes the same direction as does the index of Civilization and Its Discontents. The male/masculine dyad is assertive, aggressive, dominant; the female/feminine dyad is passive, docile, subordinate. And to finish off the right-wing fantasy, that’s the way God planned it—Adam and Eve, you know.

            What follows from those conflations is the assumption that culturally determined behaviors and attitudes are assumed to be the inevitable result of sexual rather than psychological differences. Male assertion/aggression/dominance means that men love weapons and violence and powerful cars and relations in which acquisition rather than relation is important. Historical practices in the marriage markets of the past demonstrate the point. Marriage is a matter of alliance—“Hey ho for alliance,” as Beatrice says in Much Ado About Nothing—and not of love or affection. Love, in fact, weakens the man, who then demonstrates that weakness much as Benedick does, also in Much Ado, by shaving himself so his cheeks are as smooth as a girl’s, and perfuming himself, and washing himself, and painting himself—with all of which Benedick’s friends, Claudio and Don Pedro, mock him when he comes to seek permission to woo Beatrice.

            Before he falls in love, Benedick maintains the excellence of masculinity by observing how love has transformed Claudio himself:

I have known when there was no music with him [Claudio] but the drum and the fife; and now had herather hear the tabour and the pipe: I have known when he would have walked ten mile a-foot to see agood armour; and now will he lie ten nights awake, carving the fashion of a new doublet. He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier; and now is he turned orthography; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes.

Clearly love is dangerous to male assertion/aggression/dominance. The transformation is so radical that Benedick cannot conceive that he will ever be overcome with love—"love may transform me to an oyster; but I'll take my oath on it, till he have made an oyster of me, he shall never make me such a fool.”

            It’s easy to miss in all this, but the transformations that Benedick ultimately exhibits—shaven, perfumed, washed, and painted—as well as what he perceives as Claudio’s transformations are in effect the feminization of the male. In point of a male’s behavior, love transforms the men, not into oysters but into feminine men. In other words, the play demonstrates repeatedly that sex, the maleness of Benedick and Claudio, is not the same thing as the gender that the men exhibit in their behavior and attitudes—in their psychology, in short.

            The same thing works in relation to Beatrice. After the falling out of Claudio and his wife-to-be, Hero, caused by the very assertive, masculine manipulations of Don John, Beatrice expresses precisely the intersection of sex and gender:

O that I were a man for his [Don John’s] sake! or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake! Butmanhood is melted into courtesies, valour into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, andtrim ones too: he is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie and swears it. I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.

In the language of our current century, “manhood” has become feminized while “womanhood” remains bound by the gendered rules of behavior.

            The feminization of men that Beatrice underscores is, perhaps, an effect of what Freud would call “civilization.” There is no doubt that the assertion/aggression/dominance of men has become increasingly less acceptable. At the same time, “feminine” behaviors have become more and more acceptable, even required for men. Benedick scorns Claudio’s love of “the tabour and the pipe,” but in the court of Louis XIV, just some fifty or sixty years after Shakespeare wrote his play, a shaven, perfumed, washed, and painted king, in his high heels, would dance to music of Lully, Couperin, Charpentier, all more refined than the tune of a tabour and a pipe.

            Men retain their social power, of course, from which stems the real basis for masculine assertion/aggression/dominance. As Mary Wollstonecraft points out in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the impetus of social training and expectations works to support the conflation of sex and gender. Even though Benedick and Claudio, Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin, and all the other “feminized” men of the past might be rendered weak by love, as Benedick puts it, or by the refinements of civilization, at the same time social practices recuperate masculine assertion/aggression/dominance.

            Focused on the realities of how female behavior and attitudes are gendered “feminine,” Wollstonecraft writes,

I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.

In short, the curriculum of female education forces a gendered femininity on the women who otherwise would be as capable of “masculine” behavior and attitudes as the men.

            Wollstonecraft goes on to argue that some men “who are, like them [i. e. women], sent into the world before their minds have been stored with knowledge or fortified by principles,” end up, like women, “practic[ing] the minor virtues with punctilious politeness.” The men Wollstonecraft has in mind, paradoxically from a twenty-first century perspective, are soldiers, who

from continually mixing with society . . . gain, what is termed a knowledge of the world; and this acquaintance with manners and customs has frequently been confounded with a knowledge of the human heart.”

Wollstonecraft is describing the peculiar education of an aristocratic soldiery in late 18^th and 19^th century Britain. The younger sons of aristocrats, absent any hope of inheriting title and property, bought their way into the officer class and, with no training, no preparation, and no education to speak of, spent most of their time in the sitting rooms and ballrooms of high society, mixing with women, finding themselves “civilized” by their encounter with women. The result, then, is the feminization of the officer class that Wollstonecraft underscores. Wollstonecraft’s point is that social practice produces the psychology associated with femininity even though the sex/biology is male. Social practices in education work to construct gendered behavior.

            Oddly, right wingers recognize the point that Wollstonecraft makes. They regularly mock feminine males and masculine women. That has been the case for a long long long time. One example, published in 1620: Hic Mulier: or, The Man-Woman. I’m attaching an image of the title page, both to get the full title in here as well as to highlight the frontispiece that substitutes for a colophon, showing a woman about to be shorn of all her hair and so made to look like the an in the portrait held by the woman on the right.

The title plays on the “false Latine” that combines the masculine demonstrative article hic, “this,” with the feminine pronoun, mulier, “woman.” The point is to demonstrate that

since the daies of Adam women were never so Masculine [as they now are]; Masculine in their genders and whole generations, from the Mother, to the youngest daughter; Masculine in Number, from one to multitudes; Masculine in Case [i .e clothing], even from the head to the foot; Masculine in Moode, from bold speech, to impudent action; and Masculine in Tense: for (without redresse) they were, are, and will be still most Masculine, most mankinde, and most monstrous.

The text goes on to mock women who take on  masculine gender behavior and identities. As always with texts like this the implication is that the man who wrote it feels that his own masculine authority is undermined by such women, and that he is addressing an audience of men who feel similarly threatened. Think the bro-sphere of our modern world.

            At the same time, the writer explicitly acknowledges that sex and gender are two different things. The woman is sexed female, as Jeannette Winterson might say in Sexing the Cherry, but their “case,” their clothing, their behavior, their attitudes—all of those are couched in terms of masculine identity.

            I’ll point out in passing that Moll Cutpurse, the hero of The Roaring Girl, one of Thomas Middleton’s and Thomas Dekker’s city comedies, is masculine in exactly the same way as the pamphlet describes the “man-woman” that it mocks. But Moll is not mocked. She is a good human being, a woman who prefers to enact masculine attitudes and behaviors. And here she is, from the title page of the 1611 edition.

Not all men, it seems, felt as threatened by such women as is the pamphleteer.

            At any rate, what our current right wingers don’t understand is that their mockery in effect acknowledges that sex and gender are two different things. In the end, then, the right wingers undermine their own reductive conflation of sex and gender.

            And so I come back to the initial question: what is masculinity? From what I gather in Freud, Shakespeare, Wollstonecraft, Hic Mulier, and Middleton and Dekker, it is exactly parallel to femininity—a set of attitudes and behaviors imposed and policed by social discourses from which psychological identities derive.

            What attitudes and behaviors fall in which category changes as discourses and practices change. Once upon a time childbirth was a quintessentially feminine activity, undertaken by women obviously, but overseen by midwives, aunties, gossips—all the women who might be of use. And then childbirth became a masculine activity, not because men gave birth but because male doctors arrogated the practice to themselves and made it a matter of domination and control. And now childbirth is swinging back—not so much to a feminine activity but to an ungendered one, over which women more than men have influence. So too so many other practices. Attending to the tabour and pipe is feminine until the king begins to do so, and then it's masculine—and eventually also ungendered. Cooking is feminine so long as it involves hearth and home, but when it intersects commerce and status it becomes a masculine endeavor undertaking by male chefs—until now, when in the orbit of commerce and status cooking too is a neutral activity.

            So gender is infinitely malleable, and perhaps the binary of masculine and feminine is slowly dissolving under the influence of new discourses and new practices. In that context, of course male and female sex represent a discourse associated with gender. But not to make a mystery of things, sex and gender are not the same thing, not by a long shot.