Fart Freely

I will not subscribe to baby-blue-eyed Ben’s adjuration to fart proudly. But I do think there is a magical point in the life of any wedded, or at any rate inveterately connected couple when it becomes a thing of course to fart freely in each other’s company. The moment steals upon the couple as the fog does, on little cat feet, unexpected and unforseen. I have no doubt that it occurs by accident. It would be a quite arrogant person who thinks their farts so redolent of self-assurance that they can issue forth without concern for whatsoever malodorous consequences the farts might have. By accident, then, the fart comes, and the other of the pair giggles aloud or perhaps expresses their own airy agreement that unexpressed wind will give “great present Pain” and may also occasion “future Diseases, such as habitual Cholics, Ruptures, Tympanies, &c., often destructive of the Constitution, & sometimes of Life itself.” Such wisdom does baby-blue-eyed Ben himself deliver freely to the unfastidious reader! And then the symphony of farts can proceed until, firm in the knowledge that the other person accepts the reciprocity of exchange, farting freely becomes the final effect of wedded bliss.

Writing a Memoir

About five years ago I started to write something that I’ll call a memoir because there’s no other genre that comes close to what I’m doing. I went great guns and finished what I took to be a first chapter. I was happy with it, more or less. It skipped from point to point and didn’t really have a time-wise progression. But that was ok. I bunched together things and events that seemed to me bunchable and didn’t worry about anything like a plot. Despite all that mess, I thought there was coherence and direction.

 

And then I got bored. To vary Hamlet’s wisdom, when boredom comes it comes not a single spy. I put the thing aside.

 

Then a few weeks ago I thought I’d take it up again. I wrote. And I wrote. And I wrote. I whizzed through five more chapters, almost without pause. Not making a judgment as to the quality of what I wrote, I felt great about it all. It reminded me of the writing of my dissertation, when after years, literally years of collecting sources and weighing them and thinking about my primary objective and reading some more source material and weighing some more, I sat down and wrote the damned thing in a rush. Writing this sequence of chapters was as exhilarating.

 

I especially enjoyed coming up with titles, for the memoir as well as for each chapter. The whole I’ve called Still Don’t Know What I’ve Been Searching For: A Life. And then the chapters, in sequence: Paradise Mislaid; North of Eden; North by Northeast; Journey to the Centre of the State; Errand into the Hub; Midwestward Ho!; Albert Redux.

 

I think that I’ll make that final title the last chapter. But writing it is giving me conniptions. For one thing, the number of years that it represents is much larger than any of the previous chapters. The first chapter takes up all of eight years. The chapters other than “Errand into the Hub,” which occupies eleven years, take up no more than four years each. That final chapter goes on for thirty-seven years and counting. How to deal with all that time and all the events and changes and surprises and losses and gains . . . it’s imponderable.

 

I’m thinking of stopping right now, with the final chapter just barely begun, and letting the project lie fallow, maybe for another five years. To be sure, five years may see me dead, so I don’t know that it’s the smartest of strategies. On the other hand, what I want to get out of the memoir is not so much completion as the satisfaction of remembering. I don’t have a madeleine to help me recover the lost past. Indeed I have some huge, major lacunae in what I do remember that not even a madeleine would help fill in. What took ages of reading to tease out in writing my dissertation has become the teasing out of memories as best I can. That teasing takes time and effort and it is exhausting in its own way.

 

If I die before I finish the task, so be it.

Full Constant Light

In “A Lecture upon the Shadow,” John Donne affirms that “Love is a growing, or full constant light, / And his first minute, after noon, is night.” I think that’s true. In the main. There are moments when a quarrel shades the light, and moments when the quarrel, turned to outright battle, quenches it entirely. For a minute or an hour, perhaps. Quarrels aren’t the same thing as jealousy, however. When jealousy has substance to invigorate it, then love has entered its post meridian phase and gone to full night.

 

That’s what happens to Othello. As he says to Iago,

 

Think'st thou I'ld make a lie of jealousy,

To follow still the changes of the moon

With fresh suspicions? No; to be once in doubt

Is once to be resolved: exchange me for a goat,

When I shall turn the business of my soul

To such exsufflicate and blown surmises. . . .

 

Othello mistakes doubt for certainty and immediately implements the shift to resolution, full midnight. People who encounter Othello’s rage blame him for not taking what should be the intermediate step, verification of the doubt. Donne may explain one aspect of Othello’s change—that one minute after noon destroys him.

 

Still, I do want to give Othello a break. He does verify, in some sense, via the “witness” of Iago himself. Recall that Othello comes to the habits and mores of Venetian social interaction from the “tented field,” the field of battle, where he has lived ever since he was seven years old. He has lived in Venice for only “nine moons,” a phrase that suggests that in the intricacies of Venice, Othello is a new-born baby. He knows very little, almost nothing about how Venice comports itself. And what he does know about women he has learned on that same “tented field,” where camp followers were no doubt legion. Those are the women, primarily women, that the Union army during the US Civil War called hookers after General Joseph Hooker.

 

When Iago tells Othello that “In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands; their best conscience / Is not to leave't undone, but keep't unknown,” Othello responds, “Dost say so?” He concedes even before Iago pours the full dose of poison into his ear. Sure, Othello then demands “ocular proof” of what Iago has told him, but the substance that invigorates his jealousy is the auditory “proof” that Iago, an old hand at Venetian mores after all, has given him.

 

Doubt about the fidelity of one’s partner in life is to me an imponderable phenomenon. I have never doubted my wife. I can’t conceive of any betrayal that would warrant any such doubt. It’s not that it would be impossible for a partner to find someone else so attractive that she or he would transgress that minute before noon and convert all love to night. But it would be impossible for my wife, I think, as it would for me. In our case the appropriate passage is not from Othello but from Hamlet, in the letter from Hamlet to Ophelia that begins with that “vile phrase; ‘beautified’”:

 

Doubt thou the stars are fire;

Doubt that the sun doth move;

Doubt truth to be a liar;

But never doubt I love.

 

I should not and so shall not speak for my wife, although I know that she is more trustable than the “fire” of the stars, which Arthur Eddington would later prove not fire, or the movement of the sun, which Copernicus had already proven wrong. But I will speak for myself. I could never betray the forty-six years of marriage that have entangled her in me so profoundly that were I to sever the tangle I’d cease to exist.

For me there can be no minute after noon. 

Bare and Bare-ish

Contemporary attitudes to bare and bare-ish bodies puzzle me. On the one hand showing off body parts when they’re almost uncovered but do display bulk and size and girth and cup-size albeit not das ding an sich, is as common as chicken feathers in a poultry yard. On the other hand, nakedness of any sort comes under the judgement of a prurient puritanism the strictness of which would challenge the goodies and gaffers of 17^th century New England.

 

A vignette from the distant past. As part of my first term in college all kids were obliged to take a swimming test. Boys and girls were put in separate groups, each group showing up at the indoor pool at different hours, even different days. The reason for the separation became apparent when we discovered that the school would not provide swim suits, so that if a kid didn’t come wearing one, he or she was obliged to take the test naked.

 

Back in the olden days of yore, no one thought much about it. It just happened. Big whoop. Think about it happening in 2026. And then follow the trail of law suits that would ensue from the non-suit swimming.

 

On the other hand, in 2026 it’s almost impossible to avoid seeing barely clothed bodies all over the place, whether on the red carpet or on the poster advertising the latest modification of some underwear brand. Think about that happening in the olden days of  yore when barely baring the little kid’s butt in the suntan lotion billboard was a scandal.

 

Which is it? Do we like bodies or not? Is it the shadow of a smile that titillates or the smile full-on?

Grok

I’ve known since it first became a thing that Twitter’s “Grok” AI bot is named after the word invented by Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land. In the book, “grok” means understanding something so thoroughly that it and the thinker become as one. Presumably the Musk-rat wants us to think that his Grok functions much the same way as the bot comprehends the user’s perspective so deeply that its response is exactly what the user’s little heart would desire.

 

What I just grokked, however, is just how much Musk-rat’s use of the term reveals about his own demigod mentality. To get at the danger that connection represents, I need to think through a little bit more about Heinlein’s book.

 

“Grok” is a word that the main character of the book, Valentine Michael Smith, usually called Mike, imports to Earth from the language of the Martians. Mike had been born on Mars, the only child begotten by the first human colony of Mars, which had then disappeared, leaving Mike to be raised by the Martians. But that’s not the only thing that Mike imports from Mars.

 

Martians are very sophisticated people, but their outstanding characteristic is that, in the meditative states that they enter as they work towards grokking things in the universe, they access a degree of power and control over the thing that they grok that, simply by willing it, they can convert that thing into something else entirely. For instance, the Martians had spent some time grokking that the planet that existed between Mars and Jupiter represented a profound danger to the solar system, and so they willed the planet to destroy itself. The asteroid belt represents the leftovers of that planet.

 

Mike is a plain old human being—hence the last name that Heinlein gives him, Smith—not a Martian. But one doesn’t have to be Martian to achieve the power that the Martians have by dint of inheriting their culture. Once he acclimates to Earth, then, Mike goes around grokking things so thoroughly that he does to them the same kind of things that the Martians did to that destroyed planet. When the federal authorities send a bunch of armed officers to confront Jubal Harshaw, the lawyer-philosopher-savant who has become Mike’s mentor, almost in loco parentis for him, Mike groks that they mean nothing good for Jubal and so he . . . he makes the officers disappear.

 

It’s not the only destruction of others that Mike accomplishes during his life on earth, but grokking does not necessarily entail destruction. Two of his many female companions, recognizing what it is that Mike likes in a woman, grok together to reshape themselves into a closer likeness to what he likes, for instance. Those women are key members, priestesses in fact, of a new church that Mike creates, deliberately intended to teach Martian ways to human beings. Ultimately all of the members of the church, at least the ones who are part of the highly selective inner sanctum, develop their grokking skills to the point that they are as adept as Mike himself.

 

The theology of Mike’s church collaborates with the power that grokking engenders. At its base is the notion that all creatures are divine, a fact unfortunately hidden away from humans by the mere fact that they are human—Martians are born into a culture that understands, fosters, and develops the divine potential of every individual. It is also part of the theology that living beings are simply a temporary expression of the infinite divinity that every individual can become. In practice that means that to die is not to end existence. The idea is a bit like the notion of reincarnation that makes a subsequent embodiment of a particular soul an expression of just how “pure” that soul has been.

 

What Mike wants to accomplish, then, is to make all humans as capable of such divinity as Martians are. Of course, Martians are also not only capable but more than willing to snuff out the life of any young Martian that does not take the divinity as a serious responsibility. On the theory that killing the young Martian does not put an end to that particular soul, the practice is thought to produce an increasingly more divine population of living Martians. So too on Earth, Mike sifts out all the non-responsible people who want to join his church. Only the most select of the most select achieve the potential of divinity. The adepts do not always kill the impure souls that want to join the church, but in the long run those who do reach the highest level of the church will be able to control every aspect of existence, and so the impure will simply die off on their own until in the future at some point all living humans will be like the Martians.

 

I know that the summary of the novel is too long to tolerate. But it’s essential to understand that what Heinlein imagines is a race of human beings who have divine power, who can control every aspect of existence, who have the power of life and death and are entirely immune to any law or practice that inhibits or proscribes that power. When the state tries to intervene against Jubal, then, the state is deemed impure and so destroyed. Jubal himself is something like what has come to be called a sovereign citizen. He uses his mastery of the law, human law, to assert for himself such a grand prerogative of authority that he might as well not be subject to any law at all. So where Mike handles the “theological” side of absolute personal power, Jubal does the same for the social and cultural side of such power.

 

The combination of theology, law, sociology, and culture is irresistible. It is also what undergirds Musk-rat’s and, it seems, a great many of the tech bros’ attitude and approach to existence on this planet. They are above the law because they control the law. They want to be immortal, and so fund research into how to extend human life, their life, maybe into infinity. They are semi-divine because they control almost every aspect of human existence in this AI-benighted world we live in. They are a threat, a dire threat, to anyone who is not “pure” enough—which is to say too poor, too technologically unsavvy, too much underlings. It’s not that Musk-rat has the power to grok people into non-existence. Instead he uses his power to create a “department” of the government, DOGE, that sets out to erase people indirectly. How many have died because DOGE eliminated foreign aid, for instance? And Musk-rat doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the damage.

 

What I grokked, in short, is that the use of “grok” as the name for Musk-rat’s AI bot is not an accident. It is quite intentional. It should be taken as a warning. 

Health Care As It Should Be

When I went to vote in the PA primary yesterday, I was wearing my Harvard t-shirt. I have one or more t-shirt for every institution that I’ve been associated with, and this one came up in the rotation. Anyway, the nice lady behind the desk asked if I’d been there, and I said yes, and she said her granddaughter had just been admitted to the dental school. So I congratulated her and said that I had fond memories of the dental school.

 

I didn’t go into the reason why I had such memories. There was the serious business of being # 44 to vote that day—it was around 2 p.m., so pathetic turnout is the name of the game. But the memories of the dental school are interwoven with memories of the health services offered to students and faculty at Harvard, at least back in the last millennium: I don’t know what they’re like nowadays.

 

Three experiences there.

 

One day I was sitting at my desk intent on taking notes to prepare to write a paper, and I carelessly inserted the back end of a Bic pen into my ear. Being a lucky kind of guy, I immediately felt the little rubber cap that seals the end come out and nestle itself lovingly into my ear canal. I went to the health services. The receptionist did not mock me. The nurse who carefully removed the cap did not mock me. I walked out chagrined but un-mocked.

 

A while later a physical exam suggested I had a heart murmur. The health services sent me to a specialist facility where the good doctors and technicians spent some two or three hours trying one test and then another and another trying to figure out what was going on with the ol’ ticker. It turned out that nothing was going on, and happily I trotted back home.

 

And then came the dental experience. I went to have my teeth checked and cleaned. The dentist looked at the results of both procedures and said, “Your teeth are fine, but your gums have got to go.” What a joker! And so the health services provided me with a periodontist who considered my mouth and decided that the dentist had been right. He, the periodontist, was affiliated with the dental school, and it happened that he had a student who was about to finish her training—a nice Iranian woman, as it turned out. The student would do the surgery, which took place over the course of a month or so, one segment of the mouth at a time while the periodontist supervised. I was the student’s final project. Everything worked out fine.

 

So from blush-causing idiocy to oral surgery, the health services were there to help.

 

And you know how much I paid for all of that? Nothing. Zero. Zilch.

 

That’s the way health services should function across the country, for everyone.

Memory vs. Journals

I came across some old—some more than half a century old, in fact—journals that I’d kept, off and on, since back in college days. Also some prose and “poems” from HS days, starting back in 10^th grade, but those are far too embarrassing even to read.

 

Anyway, the journals are proof positive that memory isn’t a reliable adjunct of being human.

 

I mean, the general picture that I have in memory, mostly that I was* at best a callow youth and at worst a self-absorbed asshole, is pretty accurate. It’s the details that on the one hand flesh out that sense of self and on the other hand illustrate that what I thought, memorially speaking, to have been the case was not the case at all. F’rinstace, important friendships that I thought had disappeared by sophomore year had indeed diminished but had not disappeared as I remember them to have done. Nonetheless there are a lot of friendships lost and never found again—although I have to say that FB has helped me to reconnect with people who otherwise would have been lost to time.

 

Some things I just do not remember at all at all. At some point in the spring of 1973 I went to Philly to see the Grateful Dead in concert. What I say about that experience is neat—the best concert ever and so on. But I have not a single memory trace of the event, nor of the trip to Philly nor of what I did besides go see the Dead. Similarly I write of getting drunk, or near drunk, several times, but my recollection is that I really did not drink a great deal. My preference by far was for vaporous sorts of mood-altering substances. That is borne out in the journals for sure, but I guess alcohol played some role as well.

 

And to top it all off, as I sometimes do for gits and shiggles, I asked Word’s copilot AI to structure and refine this, and the damned app tells me that “Copilot can’t generate high-quality content here.”

 

I choose to take that as a compliment to my scintillating prose.

*Here's hoping the tense is correct.

Sin

I’ll take your theologically loaded term, sin, rather than crime. As I understand things, some laws, the violation of which leads to crime, are well worth violating—for instance the “If thou art Black thou shalt sit at the back of the bus.” I hadn’t thought about it, but I suspect that a great many laws that begin with “if” are worth violating. So sin is the violation of some rule, prohibition, behavior that does not adhere to a general truth—for instance the truth that “All men [by which one is to understand humans as a whole, I presume, at least nowadays if not in 1776] are created equal.” No “if” there, and of course it stands exactly against the “if” of Jim Crow.

 

In the biblical tradition it stands to reason that the first sin is the violation of the edict that A&E should not violate the prohibition against eating of the fruit of moral knowledge, good and evil. I’ve always thought that the fruit itself is irrelevant since the will knowingly to violate the prohibition is itself acknowledgement of the distinction between good and evil. But if one’s going to be dramatic then some action, the taking, the eating, the savoring, the dawning awareness of guilt, and so on—all of that is necessary for a good story. And the continuation in the loving self-sacrifice of god in the guise of a human follows as further drama.

 

In the Catholic tradition, kids before the age of reason, as they call it, before age seven in the conventional accounting, are not capable of making the distinction between good and evil and so kids are not, indeed cannot be “sinful.” They can break rules to be sure, but such behavior is not a sin per se. At any rate, I think the most general of truths is not the avoiding of moral knowledge. If it were we’d all be running around like kids breaking rules but not sinning. I realize it’s kinda low-brow to say, but nonetheless it seems likely that the most general of rules, the most truly sin-producing as well as law-breaking, is the plain old golden rule.

 

If I’m supposed to treat others as I’d wish to be treated myself, and if I fail to do so, then I’ve committed a sin. By the way, I’d extend the “other” here to all creatures great and small, although I acknowledge fully that were a mosquito or a flea or a chigger to molest me, I’d retaliate lethally if I could. And I suppose I’d be obliged to go to confession. Forgive me father for I have sinned.

 

In the great scheme of things, then, how would I consider an all-powerful being who allows or, depending on the flavor of the theologian’s notions, creates a world in which some critters can exist only at the expense of violating the golden rule. I’m not considering the mosquito or flea or chigger as moral agents, mind you, but rather conceiving of the stance of an all-powerful being who creates a world where such critters can exist only in such a way—or for that matter a gorgeous tiger who must kill to subsist, or a beautiful hawk who must snatch the baby rabbit from its hutch so it can eat. And so on. I hear already the line from Paradise Lost, “and without thorn the rose,” which points to the innocuousness of a prelapsarian creation. Presumably mosquitos and fleas and chiggers had an alternative lifestyle back then.

 

But what am I to think of such an all-powerful being? Ah, of course—one cannot plumb the mysterious ways of god. Sort of the theological version of shut up and eat your oatmeal. My take on such all-powerful being is slightly different. The golden rule does not depend on some such being to articulate it. It’s an emergent truth, palpable in every human interaction, although not always on a short-term basis.

 

Just think what the US would think (if a country can be said to think) were some foreign power to intervene to get rid of cockwomble for us. We would certainly not like that done to us. And  yet we did it to Iran in 1953, and to . . . add however many countries you want, and you will note that the outcome of such interventions has always been the opposite of what we wanted. In Iran it took a couple of decades for the consequences to become obvious, but we didn’t treat others the way we would want to be treated, and the sin was ultimately punished.

 

So experience leads to the emergent truth of the golden rule. No need to invent a middle man, whom the theologians would call god, no doubt, to articulate the law that separates the good from the evil.

 

So sure, I’ll use the word sin to denote those actions that violate the transcendent, if I may use that term, rules of human behavior. But as far as I’m concerned sin does not depend on the dictum of some all-powerful being. No need for a god that transgresses the most comprehensive of such rules, at any rate.

US : Iran :: Japan : US

The attack on Iran made me think of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that made me think of how Japan may well have considered the US for the hundred or so years before 1941.

Consider the American 19^th century from the perspective of the Japanese Empire, then—leaving aside Perry’s forcible opening of Japan to “trade” in 1853.

 

From just before the Civil War, the US had expanded tremendously from its east coast origins. It swept away nation after nation as it moved to the west. In the 1840s, having had its citizens infiltrate the territory, it annexed Texas. In treaty with the UK, it acquired what are now the states of Oregon and Washington. As a demand after the Mexican American War, it acquired California, Nevada, and Utah. Right after the Civil War, the US purchased Alaska. OK—all of that is territorially part of North America.

 

And then came the Spanish-American War, when the US quite deliberately attacked the weakest of the European Empires in order to show that it was more powerful than that empire and in order to establish its expansionist agenda beyond North America. In the Caribbean, it acquired Puerto Rico and, for all intents and purposes, Cuba. In the Pacific, where no doubt the Japanese had a much much more focused interest, it acquired the Hawai’ian islands in the same way that it had acquired Texas, by infiltration. And then there were the war prizes—Guam, Wake Atoll, and the Philippines. Guam, Wake, and the Philippines are all about two thousand miles from Japan.

 

Between Guam, the Philippines, and Japan there are the Micronesian islands, an archipelago of small islands that is small in land area but covers a vast area of the western Pacific. And then there’s Okinawa, only 400 miles from the main Japanese islands.

 

Japan annexed Okinawa in 1879. After WW I the League of Nations mandated most of the Marianas islands to Japan. Buffers, perhaps.

 

And there it stood between the end of WW I and the start of WW II. US territories on one side, Japanese territories on the other side, divided not by fruited plains or purple mountain majesties, but by the Pacific Ocean.

 

Again, between the founding of the US and the beginning of the 20^th century, the US had swept away nation after nation in asserting its manifest destiny. It had warred with Mexico to cement its annexation of Texas, and in the aftermath of that war had acquired great swaths of western lands. It had purchased more lands, both from Mexico and from Russia, and acquired more by treaty.

 

Was Japan to think that the US would stop its westward expansion with Guam, the Philippines, and Wake Atoll?

Dickinson, Faith, Doubt

In Our Time this time was on Emily Dickinson. It was a good, solid reminder of just how deeply religious the poems are. For me it was a corrective because on the whole I tend to focus on the doubts that hedge the faith rather than the faith itself. But yes indeed, the poems are both religious and full of doubt. One of my favorites, which underscores that duality, is this one:

 

I know that He exists.

Somewhere – in silence –

He has hid his rare life

From our gross eyes.

 

’Tis an instant’s play –

’Tis a fond Ambush –

Just to make Bliss

Earn her own surprise!

 

But – should the play

Prove piercing earnest –

Should the glee – glaze –

In Death’s – stiff – stare –

 

Would not the fun

Look too expensive!

Would not the jest –

Have crawled too far!

 

The faith, indeed the certainty of a divine presence, is obvious in the first line (I’m reminded of a student who once upon a time said she thought the poem was about a potential lover . . . sure, why not). But so is the doubt—the “silence,” the “hid” if the first stanza point in that direction, but then so does the “should” and the “would” of the third and fourth stanzas.

 

And even more importantly, the poem emphasizes a profoundly critical stance on the nature of the divinity that, without doubt for the speaker, shapes our ends. From the divine perspective, it’s all “play,” a “fond Ambush,” a “surprise”—a bit of fun. From the human perspective, on the contrary, there’s “piercing earnest,” “glaz[ing],” a “stiff stare,” so that the “fun” becomes something else entirely.

 

That “He,” then—not just a good guy, not just a benevolent, jolly hidden giant. It’s more like one of the several conjectures in King Lear. “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. / They kill us for their sport.”

Cancel Culture

The easy irony today is that those folks who bitched and moaned about “leftist” cancel culture are the ones who, without thought of a blush, cancel anyone who does not take their point of view as gospel truth. The obvious case is Liz Cheyney, but there are so many many others that the MAGAverse has taken to heart the old 1990s invention—RINO, Republican In Name Only—and used it to smear anyone from their own party who deviates from the Trump line. Ask Chris Christie, Mitt Romney, Dubya . . . “so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.”

 

Let me take a step backwards, though. What exactly is cancel culture? How does cancel culture function? Who enforces cancel culture?

 

In a low-stakes kind of way, we all know that cancel culture is the silencing of voices and perspectives that disagree in some way from an accepted, received, standard idea of what is true or what should and should not be done. There’s a group of some sort, identifiable because its members see themselves as different from others and so unique. But while the group sees itself as different, it rejects being identified as different with terminology imposes an outsider’s denigratory perspective on the difference. Members of the group then express their outrage at the terms and the perspectives that they find offensive, and seek to silence those outsiders regardless of their wishes. What makes the phenomenon expressly cancel culture rather than merely good manners is the involuntary silencing.

 

I’d give examples from the culturally “leftist” perspective—“leftist” in this context means something like “sympathetic to the voices of those who see themselves as marginalized”—but to do so is to invite opprobrium because I’d be obliged to use the offensive terms in order to make the example concrete. So let me invent an example. There is a group of people who are ambidextrous. They call themselves the “even-handed.” But outsiders mock them as the “namby-pambies,” implying by that term that the ambidextrous are so indecisive that they can’t even tie their own shoelaces. Not surprisingly, the ambidextrous among us take umbrage at the term and inveigh against it at every opportunity.

 

Once upon a time, in the long-ago days when there was no social media, such inveighing would almost necessarily be self-limiting. There might be a local campaign against the users of “namby-pamby,” which might become public enough to reach the letters to the editor of the local newspaper. But it would be unlikely that the effort to cancel “namby-pamby” would grow much beyond the borders of the group of ambidextrous folks who resent the term.

 

To be sure, if there were enough force behind the campaign, the local might grow to be national and develop a life of its own—think of how the terms by which minorities were designated changed in the US from the 1950s to the 1960s to the 1970s and beyond. I have in mind here what Michel Foucault says about the development of culturally significant discourses. The more a given discourse intersects with other, culturally significant discourses, then the more powerful will the given discourse become. I have no doubt that such development could happen to the terms “even-handed” vs. “namby-pamby,” but again, for that to happen the phenomenon of ambidexterity would have to intersect a great many other weighty, culturally central concerns. In short, the effort would require a great deal of social capital, social force, and social power.

 

Social media bypasses the need for such force and power. Even the least significant of concerns could grow to be tremendously powerful simply because the members of such a socially marginal group can multiply its voice almost infinitely via social media. Without social media, I think, there could be no such thing as cancel culture. To rewrite the first sentence of this paragraph, then: social media is now the mechanism by which social force and power is elaborated.

 

Social media do not just elaborate a particular cancelation. They also enforce the dictates of cancel culture. Multiply the voice of even the smallest of groups sufficiently—multiple accounts sourced to a small cadre of posters, for instance—and the persons who use the offensive term might easily find themselves subject to constant attack, which if it becomes vitriolic enough can lead to the persons being fired from their jobs, harassed in their neighborhoods, ultimately forced to withdraw from the world as much as possible.

 

I know that right-wing attackers of cancel culture assert that such a result is incompatible with the principle of free speech guaranteed to us Americans in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But I think that such a take on things is just wrong. In the first place, the First Amendment forbids Congress, which is to say the Federal Government, from infringing on the right of free speech. Individuals and groups are free to tell others to shut up, or to use whatever language they wish, short of libeling or calling for violence, of course. The general flow of cancel culture to which the right wingers object does not impose governmental sanctions on speech.

 

In the second place, free speech works both ways. If I use “namby-pamby” to mock the ambidextrous, then I must be willing to face a vociferous response to my usage from those who would rather speak of the “even-handed.” Again, short of calling for violence against me, the “even-handed” have as much right to inveigh against me as I have to use the objectionable term. If I don’t like the response and feel myself oppressed by it, then I have three options: fight back against the response; stop using “namby-pamby”; withdraw from the verbal field of battle. That’s the way that free speech works.

 

Up until Mr. Trump was elected president for the second time, cancel culture was a matter of person vs. person, of social group vs. social group, the free-for-all that free speech engenders and expects. Free speech produces “the wars of Truth,” as John Milton calls it in his essay of 1644, “Areopagitica.” Mr. Trump has introduced an unfortunate imbalance in those wars. Specifically, he has thrown the weight, power, majesty, threat of state authority behind the side of the wars that he favors. Quite literally, it turns out, not to agree with Mr. Trump can get you not just fired, not just mocked and vilified, but killed. Under Mr. Trump’s leadership, the wars of Truth have become the war of state power over the individual.

 

With every post, every statement, every threat that Mr. Trump makes, he violates the First Amendment.

State of Nature

Folks on MSNOW are talking about the comment from Peewee German, aka Stephen Miller, that power is all that matters, and drawing analogies to Hobbes’s Leviathan. What’s lacking from the discussions is the central issue of Hobbes’s book, namely that it’s the agreement of the people, or for my purposes of nations, that they will cede their power to do whatever they want, and hand that power over to the “leviathan,” “that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence.”

 

The agreement is a contract among the people/nations to cede their own authority and power to the leviathan. But the contract is not between the people/nations and the leviathan. That means that the leviathan is not bound by the terms of the contract, by the law, and so can exercise its power without any limitation at all. From the perspective of the people/nations, the contract binds them absolutely not to exercise any power that they have ceded to the leviathan. If any person/nation does so, the consequence is to suffer the exercise of leviathan’s power.

 

In theory, at any rate, the US is a Hobbesian nation in the sense that there is a contract, the Constitution, that assigns power to the federal government in more or less clearly stated terms. To challenge those terms is to provoke the power of the federal government and suffer the consequences. Obviously Hobbes’s notion that the leviathan is not part of the contract and therefore not subject to the terms of the contract doesn’t apply to the US—at least so far.

 

In effect, thanks to Marbury v. Madison, the SCOTUS functions as a sort of Hobbesian leviathan in the sense that it’s the SCOTUS that determines to what extent the federal government, in its legislative and executive guises, is bound by the law. The SCOTUS itself, it seems, is unbound by any law. Whatever the court decides is absolutely within its power to determine, but there is no obverse to that—in other words, short of impeachment of individual members of the court, no one can tell the SCOTUS how to behave or what to decide.

 

The problem that the world faces is that there is no global counterpart to the SCOTUS. There is no leviathan whose power can be exercised without restraint in order to maintain the contract among the people/nations. Presumably there is a sort of contract—say the charter of the UN, or of the International Court of Justice. But there is no agency that can impose consequences for violating the terms of that contract. In the absence of such a leviathan, then, Hobbes tells us that we actually live in what he calls a state of nature, in which there is a constant and perpetual war of each against all. Peewee German—I mean Stephen Miller is therefore right when he says that the only thing that matters is power.

 

Unfortunately Peewee does not contemplate what Hobbes says are the consequences of living in a state of nature. Such a life, says Hobbes, is “nasty, brutish, and short.” That is the world we live in. From the perspective of the rest of the world, that miserable existence has been obvious all along. Thanks to the cockwomble now in the White House, we in the US are now seeing that we are not exempt.

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.