Or, The Current Absence of Reference to Sports
When Debating the Future of Our Country
I recall:
But it is the frequent error of those men (otherwise very commendable for their labours) to make excursions beyond their talent and their office, by pretending to point out the beauties and the faults; which is no part of their trade, which they always fail in, which the world never expected from them, nor gave them any thanks for endeavouring at.
These two books, both alike in dignity, in fair view of what this reader has seen, deserve the following analysis:
Dreher writes to his own generation and, it seems, his elders.
Coates writes to his own generation as well as to his son, and, it seems, his son’s generation.
Dreher is adamantly orthodox in his Christianity.
Coates is adamantly atheist.
Dreher believes the United States of the Future (and much of it Today) will not protect the body of Christ (i.e. the Church).
Coates believes the United States of the Future (and much of it Today) will not protect the bodies of its citizens who happen to be designated “black,†(i.e. their literal, physical bodies).
Because I overdosed on sports as a child, and remain in rehab as an adult, perhaps I have “a strange Effect of narrow principles and short views,â€[2]–for after reading these two authors it occurred to me that their books contain very little about sports other than:
Dreher’s book does contain a hunting episode, told more elaborately in his previous book).
Coates’ book does contain one reference to an athlete, Jackie Robinson.
So one can naturally conclude:
In the mind of Coates, sports will not protect the physical bodies of black Americans from discrimination.
In the mind of Dreher, sports will not protect the body of Christ in America from discrimination.
When they see the world around them and render their particular points of view into words, sports speak neither to Dreher nor to Coates as either a cultural affirmation that the authors can participate in, or have their kids participate in, or merely to watch as entertainment. Sports are not a part of the cultural assessments of these books. They are not relevant to the points Coates and Dreher want to make.
“Fear and hope are the two greatest natural motives of all men’s actions.â€
Of all the reviews I’ve read thus far, only Joshua Rothman’s profile in The New Yorker last month of Rod Dreher and his latest book The Benedict Option: a Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (2017, NY: Sentinel) explained the context of the book in its relation to his previous ones.
There has been much criticism, most of it unfair, about the book. Perhaps because:
“It is the talent of our age and nation to turn things of the greatest importance into ridicule.â€
So there is no need for me to engage in a typical book review, which I have no habit and little experience of doing anyway, because, in  general, I believe:
“Every man, as a member of the commonwealth, ought to be content with the possession of his own opinion in private, without perplexing his neighbour or disturbing the public.â€
Instead I can only compare Dreher’s book to thing’s I’ve recently read, including the above-mentioned criticism.
In his summary of Christian history in the West, Dreher mentions:
“The [Protestant] Reformers quickly discovered that casting off Rome’s authority solved one problem but created another.” [6]
And I wonder: if the Benedict Option does indeed solve the problem it states in its subtitle, will solving that problem simply create other problems? For often when we think we’ve solved one of society’s problems, all we’ve done is pass the buck and given ourselves a new set of problems. Perhaps we’re enchanted by the novelty of new problems, but on the other hand, there is no such thing as a problem-free life. So an arresting question begins to emerge early in the book and it is a question of balance. It has something to do with Emersonian compensation:
For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something….
There is always some levelling circumstance that puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all others….
There is a crack in every thing God has made. It would seem, there is always this vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares, even into the wild poesy in which the human fancy attempted to make bold holiday, and to shake itself free of the old laws, — this back-stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal; that in nature nothing can be given, all things are sold….
We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the new.[7]
If the Benedict Option succeeds in rebelling against modernity[8] (something daring, audacious, and ambitious enough for at least some non-Christians to perhaps champion for their own interests), what will the counterbalance be? Resentment? Respect? Utter apathy? Intrigue?
[1] Swift, Jonathan. “Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff.†1709. Jonathan Swift – Major Works. NY: Oxford World Classics. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Angus Ross and David Woolley. 1984. p. 216.
[2] Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 1756–1767. NY: Oxford World Classics. Edited by Ian Campbell Ross. 1983. 1998.  VIII, xxvii, p. 468.
[3] Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. The Consolation of Philosophy 524 A.D. Translated by David R. Slavitt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 2008. Â II, iv, prose, (2008) p. 40.
[4] Murray, Gilbert. The Classical Tradition in Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1927. p. 61.
[5] Swift, Apothegms and Maxims [from Journal to Stella] Jonathan Swift – Major Works. p. 185.
[6] Dreher, Rod. The Benedict Option: a Strategy for Christian in a Post-Christian Nation. NY: Sentinel. 2017. p. 32.
[7] Emerson, “Compensation,†Essays: First Series. Boston, MA. 1841.
Young men taking up a tradition of prayer, liturgy, and ascetic communal life that dates back to the early church—and doing so with such evident joy? It’s not supposed to happen in these times. But here they are: a sin of contradiction to modernity. (The Benedict Option p. 76)
The other day I was driving to a friend’s home, and, while I was in line at a stop sign I saw a flat-bed trailer and two teenage girls and an older man, probably their father, dragging cut limbs of brush and tree trimmings and tossing them onto the trailer.
Such a mundane scene would not have stayed in my memory except that I noticed the girls were not wearing any gloves, which I prefer to wear when I do that kind of work, but perhaps the things cut down contained no thorns, perhaps the bark and the rest of the biomatter was smooth and could be handled in a carefree way.
Amid getting carried away in these carefree thoughts on tree trimmings, the ghost of Jonathan Swift (who has been haunting me since my return from Ireland, and, in particular my strolling through Swift’s old stomping grounds in Trim, County Meath) urged me to meditate on the brush piled on the trailer in Austin, Texas–and I tried to do what the ghost told me, but I felt inept.
But then I remembered that the best way to think about something is to try and forget about it. So I tried that, and after a while I began to realize: what are my bookshelves at home but a collection of trees dismembered and re-glued together into a Frankenstein-forest?–one that furnishes me with knowledge and escape, wisdom and entertainment, answers as well as questions?
Nothing hath humbled me so much or shown a greater disposition to a contemptuous treatment of Ireland in some Ministers, than that high style of several speeches from the throne, delivered, as usual, after the royalassent, in someperiods of the two last reigns. Such high exaggerations of the prodigious condescensions in the prince, to pass those good laws, would have but an odd sound at Westminster….
From whence it is clear, that some ministries in those times were apt, from their high elevation, to look down upon this kingdom as if it had been one of their colonies of outcasts in America….
Whoever travels in this country, and observes the face of nature or the faces, and habits, and dwellings of the natives, will hardly think himself in a land where either law, religion, or common humanity is professed….[1]
For suppose you go to an ALEHOUSE with that base money, and the landlord gives you a quart for four of these HALFPENCE, what must the victualler do? His BREWER will not be paid in that coin, or if the BREWER should be such a fool, the farmers will not take it from them for their bere, because they are bound by their leases to pay their rents in good and lawful money of England, which this is not, nor of Ireland neither, and the ’squire their landlord will never be so bewitched to take such trash for his land; so that it must certainly stop somewhere or other, and wherever it stops it is the same thing, and we are all undone.[2]
To me, the Esau reference below makes no sense unless Swift is being hyper-ironic:
A people long used to hardships lose by degrees the very notions of liberty; they look upon themselves as creatures at mercy, and that all impositions laid on them by a stronger hand, are, in the phrase of the Report, legal and obligatory. Hence proceeds that poverty and lowness of spirit, to which a kingdom may be subject as well as a particular person. And when Esau came fainting from the field at the point to die, it is no wonder that he sold his birthright for a mess of pottage….
I entreat you, my dear countrymen, not to be under the least concern upon these and like rumours, which are no more than the last howls of a dog dissected alive, as I hope he hath sufficiently been….[3]
The gentleman they have lately made primate would never quit his seat in an English House of Lords, and his preferments at Oxford and Bristol, worth twelves hundred pounds a year, for four times the denomination here, but not half the value; therefore I expect to hear he will be as good an Irishman, upon this article, as any of his brethren, or even of us who have had the misfortune to be born in this island….[4]
This is an Irish Holyday when our Scoundrels will not work, else perhaps my Letter would have been shorter. [5]
As when some writer in a public cause
His pen, to save a sinking nation, draws,
While all is calm, his arguments prevail;
The people’s voice expand his paper sail:
Till pow’r, discharging all her stormy bags,
Flutters the feeble pamphlet into rags.
The nation scared, the author doom’d to death,
Who fondly put his trust in pop’lar breath….
Beware, and when you hear the surges roar,
Avoid the rocks on Britain’s angry shore.
They lie, alas, too easy to be found;
For thee alone they lie the island round.[6]
A generation after the 1720s on finds remarks on traveling in Ireland from Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) in James Boswell’s (1740-1795) Life of Johnson (1791):
Boswell. “Pray, Mr. Dilly, how does Dr. Leland’s History of Ireland sell?” Johnson (bursting forth with a generous indignation). “The Irish are in a most unnatural state; for we see there the minority prevailing over the majority. There is no instance, even in the ten persecutions, of such severity as that which the protestants of Ireland have exercised against the Catholicks. Did we tell them we have conquered them, it would be above board: to punish them by confiscation and other penalties, as rebels, was monstrous injustice. King William was not their lawful sovereign: he had not been acknowledged by the parliament of Ireland when they appeared in arms against him….”[7]
He [Johnson], I know not why, shewed upon all occasions an aversion to go to Ireland, where I proposed to him that we should make a tour. JOHNSON. ‘It is the last place where I should wish to travel.’ BOSWELL. ‘Should you not like to see Dublin, Sir?’ JOHNSON. ‘No, Sir. Dublin is only a worse capital.’ Boswell. ‘Is not the Giant’s-Causeway worth seeing?’ JOHNSON. ‘Worth seeing? yes; but not worth going to see.’
Yet he had a kindness for the Irish nation, and thus generously expressed himself to a gentleman from that country, on the subject of an UNION which artful Politicians have often had in view—‘Do not make an union with us, Sir. We should unite with you, only to rob you. We should have robbed the Scotch, if they had had any thing of which we could have robbed them….’[8]
[Johnson said] ‘Hospitality to strangers and foreigners in our country is now almost at an end, since, from the increase of them that come to us, there have been a sufficient number of people that have found an interest in providing inns and proper accommodations, which is in general a more expedient method for the entertainment of travellers. Where the travellers and strangers are few, more of that hospitality subsists, as it has not been worth while to provide places of accommodation. In Ireland there is still hospitality to strangers, in some degree; in Hungary and Poland probably more.’[9]
And from Joseph Le Fanu (1814-1873) on traveling in Ireland in the 1860s:
I don’t apologise to my readers, English-born and bred, for assuming them to be acquainted with the chief features of the ‘PhÅ“nix Park, near Dublin. Irish scenery is now as accessible as Welsh. Let them study the old problem, not in blue books, but in the green and brown ones of our fields and heaths, and mountains. If Ireland be no more than a great capability and a beautiful landscape, faintly visible in the blue haze, even from your own headlands, and separated by hardly four hours of water, and a ten-shilling fare, from your jetties, it is your own shame, not ours, if a nation of bold speculators and indefatigable tourists leave it unexplored. [10]
NOTES
[1] Swift, Jonathan. “A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, in Clothes and Furniture of Houses, &c.†1720? Edited with an introduction and notes by Angus Ross and David Woolley. Oxford World Classics.1984. Revised 2003. pp. 404–05.
bere: (OE or ME) clamour, outcry, shouting, roaring; the noise of voices of men or animals.
victualler: a purveyor of victuals or provisions; spec. one who makes a business of providing food and drink for payment; a keeper of an eating-house, inn, or tavern; a licensed victualler.
[2] Swift, “[Drapier’s Letters I] A Letter to the Shop-Keepers, Tradesmen, Farmers, and Common-People in General, of the Kingdom of Ireland.†1724. Jonathan Swift – Major Works. 424–25.
[3] Swift, “[Drapier’s Letters IV] A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland.†1724. Jonathan Swift – Major Works. 434–35.
[4] Swift, “[Drapier’s Letters IV] A Letter to the Whole People of Ireland.†1724. Jonathan Swift – Major Works. 434–35.
[5] Swift, “Swift to Charles Ford, August 16, 1725.†Jonathan Swift – Major Works. 467.
[6] Swift, “Horace, Book I, Ode xvi, Paraphrased and Inscribed to Ireland.†1724. Jonathan Swift – Major Works. 461, 462.
[7] Boswell, Life of Johnson, ÆTAT 64, May 1773, p. 397.
[8] Boswell, Life of Johnson, ÆTAT 70, October 1779, p. 744.
[9] Boswell, Life of Johnson, ÆTAT 71, 1780, p. 772.
[10] Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. The House by the Churchyard. London: Tinsley, Brothers. 1863. Reprint. Dublin: James Duffey. 1904. “Chapter XVI – The Ordeal by Battle,†74.
I don’t know whether Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) would’ve endorsed Rod Dreher’s proposals (which I have yet to read in book form), but one of Swift’s quips seems relevant:
Lastly, ’tis proposed as a singular advantage that the abolishing of Christianity will very much contribute to the uniting of Protestants. [1]
It’s a kind of backhanded, reverse-psychology, move–Swift seems to say the best way to build disciples is to discipline them. For as Swift observes:
There is one darling inclination of mankind which usually affects to be a retainer to religion, though she be neither its parent, its godmother, nor its friend. I mean the spirit of opposition, that lived long before Christianity, and can easily subsist without it. [2]
Swift might’ve agreed with Dreher that Moral Therapeutic Deism is milquetoast Christianity:
The two principal qualifications of a fanatic preacher are his inward light, and his head full of maggots; and the two different fates of his writings are to be burnt, or worm-eaten.[3]
And:
Why should any clergyman of our church be angry to see the follies of fanaticism and superstition exposed, through in the most ridiculous manner; since that is perhaps the most probable way to cure them, or at least to hinder them from farther spreading? [4]
Dreher’s diagnosis on his blog (and most likely in his latest book) seems to agree with Swift’s character of Gulliver who confesses to readers amid his travels that: “I was chiefly disgusted with modern History.†[5]
I too am disgusted with modern History when I see things like this on my morning commute:
A post shared by Christopher Landrum (@bookbread2) on
Dreher’s book The Benedict Option is a remedy for this diagnosis of disgust; it seeks, to harmonize the community, something (I think) Swift yearned for:
And I think the reason is easy to be assigned, for there is a peculiar string in the harmony of human understanding, which in several individuals is exactly of the same tuning. This, if you can dexterously screw up to its right key, and then strike gently upon it whenever you have the good fortune to light among those of the same pitch, they will by a secret necessary sympathy strike exactly at the same time. [6]
Recall that Nietzsche’s hammer was but a tuning fork.[7]
NOTES
[1] Swift, “An Argument to Prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England May, as Things Now Stand, be Attended with some Inconveniences, and Perhaps Not Produce those Many Good Effects Proposed Thereby.†1708.
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1791.
Gantz, Jeffrey. Early Irish Myths and Sagas. NY: Penguin. 1981.
Graves, Robert. Oxford Addresses on Poetry. NY: Garden City. 1962.
—–. The White Goddess – A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. 1948. NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Second Edition. 1975.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1914. Penguin Classics with Notes by Terence Brown. 1992.
—–. Ulysses. 1922. Random House: NY. 1946.
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. The House by the Churchyard. London: Tinsley, Brothers. 1863. Reprint. Dublin: James Duffey. 1904.
Lewis, Clive Stapes. “The Inner Ring.†They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses. London, G. Bles, 1962.
—–. “De Descriptione Temporum,†They Asked for a Paper.
—–. “Correspondence: Spenser’s Irish Experiences and The Faerie Queene.†Review of English Studies. Vol. 7. No. 25. (January 1931.) 83–85.
—–. “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages.†Chapter 3 from The Discarded Image: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge UP. 1966.
—–. The Allegory of Love. Clarendon: Oxford UP. 1936. Second Edition. 1946.
—–. A Preface to Paradise Lost. 1942. Oxford UP – A Galaxy Book. 1961.
—–. The Great Divorce: a Dream. London: Geoffrey Bles. 1946.
—–. The Four Loves. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1960.
—–. Studies in Words. Cambridge UP. 1960.
—–. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge UP. 1962.
—–. Mere Christianity. 1944. Macmillan, NY. 1952.
Patrick (Saint). Il Confessio. (Declaration of Patrick.) From St. Patrick – His Writings and Muirchu’s Life. Edited and Translated by A. B. E. Hood. Phillimore & Co. London. 1978.
Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 1756–1767. NY: Oxford World Classics. Edited by Ian Campbell Ross. 1983. 1998.
Thompson, E. A.. “Introduction†Who was Saint Patrick? Rochester, NY Boydell & Brewer Ltd. 1982. Electronic Edition 1999.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels: Jonathan Swift. Edited by Albert J. Rivero. NY: Norton Critical Edition. 2002.
—–. Jonathan Swift – Major Works. Oxford World Classics. 2008.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. 1890. Barnes & Noble Classics Edition. 2003.
—–. “The Critic As Artist” Parts I & II (1891)
—–. “The Decay of Lying†in Intentions (Volume 7 of The Complete Writings of Oscar Wilde). New York: The Nottingham Society, 1909.
Books Read for the First Time
Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. 1938. NY: First Grove Press Edition 1957. First Printing, Collected Works. 1970.
Boswell, James. Life of Johnson (1791)
Read all passages regarding: Burke, Goldsmith, Sterne, and Swift.
Carleton, William. The Black Prophet: a Tale of Irish Famine. Belfast: Simm and McIntyre. 1847.
Davis, B. E. C. Edmund Spenser: a Critical Study. Cambridge UP. 1933.
Dillon, Martin. The Shankill Butchers: a Case Study of Mass Murder. London: Arrow Books. 1990.
Doyle, Roddy. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. London: Secker & Warburg. 1993.
—–.Bullfighting. NY: Viking. 2011.
Goldsmith, Oliver. The Vicar of Wakefield. 1766.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. NY: Penguin. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Seamus Deane. 1993.
O’Brien, Edna. The Country Girls. 1960. NY: Penguin. 1963. 1975.
O’Casey, Sean. Shadow of a Gunman. 1923. Two Plays. NY: Macmillan Co. 1925.
—–Juno and the Paycock (1924).
O’Connor, Frank. A Short History of Irish Literature: a Backward Look. NY: Viking. 1967.
O’Hara, Maureen with John Nicoletti. ‘Tis Herself. NY: Simon and Schuster. 2004.
Spenser, Edmund. A View of the State of Ireland. 1596. 1633. Edited by Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley. Blackwell, Oxford. 1997.
Shaw, George Bernard. The Doctor’s Dilemma. NY: Brentano’s. 1909. [and “Preface”]
—–Major Barbara. 1907. Bernard Shaw’s Plays. NY: Norton. Edited by Warren Sylvester Smith. 1970. [and “Preface”]
—–St. Joan (1923) [and “Preface”]
State, Paul. F. A Brief History of Ireland. NY: Facts on File Inc. 2009.
Yeats, William Butler. The Celtic Twilight. 1893.
Articles Read
Abravanel, Genevieve. “American Encounters in Dubliners and Ulysses.†Journal of Modern Literature. Vol. 33. No. 4. (Summer 2010.) 153–66.
Bierman, Joseph. “What The Quiet Man Said: Shifting Contexts and the Polysemy of the Text.†Journal of Film and Video. Vol. 63. No. 3. (Fall 2011.) 30–44.
Cremin, Kathy. “The Dispersed and Dismissed: the World of Irish Women’s Best-sellers.†Critical Survey. Vol. 15. No. 1. (2003.) 60–76.
Dobson, Henry Austin. “IX Oliver Goldsmith,†The Cambridge Encyclopedia of English Literature. 1909–1919.
Haliday, Charles. “On the Ancient Name of Dublin.†The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy. Vol. 22 (1849.) 437–51.
Kirk, Robin. “Belfast: City of Walls.†The American Scholar. Vol. 80. No. 4 (Autumn 2011.) 7–11.
Kirkland, Richard. “The Spectacle of Terrorism in Northern Irish Culture.†Critical Survey. Vol. 15. No. 1. (2003.) 77–90.
Kittredge, George Lyman . “III.––Sir Orfeo.†American Journal of Philology. Vol. 7. No. 2. (1886.) 176–202 at 195–97.
Lysaght, Patricia. “Visible Death: Attitudes to the Dying in Ireland.â€Â Merveilles & contes. Vol. 9. No. 1. (May 1995.) 27–60.
Markwick, Marion. “Marketing Myths and the Cultural Commodification of Ireland: Where the Grass is Always Greener.†Geography. 86:1. (January 2001.) 37–49.
O’Brien, Peggy. “The Silly and the Serious: an Assessment of Edna O’Brien.†The Massachusetts Review. Vol. 28. No. 3. (Autumn 1987.) 474–88.
Pierse, Michael. “The Shadow of Seán: O’Casey, commitment and writing Dublin’s working class.†Saothar. Vol. 35. (2010.) 69–85.
Rapuano, Deborah and Jessica R. Fernandez. “Remembering and Living Irishness: Tourism, Place and Memory.†International Review of Modern Sociology. Vol. 36. No. 1. (Spring 2010.) 1–21.
Townshend, Charles. “The Making of Modern Irish Public Culture.â€Â Journal of Modern History. Vol. 61. No. 3. (September 1989.) 535–54.
Weston, Elizabeth. “Constitutive Trauma in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy: the Romance of Reenactment.†Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Vol. 29. No. 1. (Spring 2010.) 83–105.
Writing Advice from the Anglo-Irish of the 18th Century
Like Swift does, I need to get outside my own point-of-view (and socioeconomic context) and ridicule it with a fictional character. To use writers whom I detest, and use them in a favorable light to make whatever-it-is point I’m making—that is what Walter Kaufmann does!
“It grieved me to the heart when I saw my labours, which had cost me so much thought and watching, bawled about by the common hawkers of Grub Street, which I only intended for the weighty consideration of the gravest persons. This prejudiced the world so much at first, that several of my friends had the assurance to ask me whether I were in jest; to which I only answered coldly, ‘that the event would show’. But it is the talent of our age and nation to turn things of the greatest importance into ridicule.â€[1]
“‘Now, therefore, I began to associate with none but disappointed authors, like myself, who praised, deplored, and despised each other. The satisfaction we found in every celebrated writer’s attempts, was inversely as their merits. I found that no genius in another could please me. My unfortunate paradoxes had entirely dried up that source of comfort. I could neither read nor write with satisfaction; for excellence in another was my aversion, and writing was my trade.â€[2]
“We have just religion enough to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.â€[3]
Don’t go beyond your doorway, your threshold:
“Every man, as a member of the commonwealth, ought to be content with the possession of his own opinion in private, without perplexing his neighbour or disturbing the public.†[R6] [4]
But if you must go beyond your doorway:
“There are but three ways for a man to revenge himself of a censorious world. To despise it; to return the like; or to endeavour to live so as to avoid it. The first of these is usually pretended; the last is almost impossible; the universal practice is the second.â€[29] [5]
A little superstition goes a long way:
“There is a portion of enthusiasm assigned to every nation, which, if it hath not proper objects to work on, will burst out and set all into a flame. If the quiet of a state can be bought by only flinging men a few ceremonies to devour, it is a purchase no wise man would refuse. Let the mastiffs amuse themselves about a sheepskin stuffed with hay, provided it will keep them from worrying the flock.â€[6]
AÂ little superstition quells the motives:
“fear and hope are the two greatest natural motives of all men’s actions.â€[7]
NOTES
[1] Swift, “Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff†1709. Jonathan Swift – Major Works. 216.
[2] Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, “20. The history of a philosophic vagabond, pursuing novelty, but losing context.â€
[3] Swift, Apothegms and Maxims [from Journal to Stella] Jonathan Swift – Major Works. [‘Various Thoughts Moral and Diverting’, in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, 1711] [1] 181.
[4] Swift, Apothegms and Maxims [from Journal to Stella] Jonathan Swift – Major Works. 185.
[5] Swift, Apothegms and Maxims [from Journal to Stella] Jonathan Swift – Major Works. 181.
[6] Swift, “An Argument to Prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England May, as Things Now Stand, be Attended with some Inconveniences, and Perhaps Not Produce those Many Good Effects Proposed Thereby.†1708. Jonathan Swift – Major Works. 224.
[7] Swift, “The Testimony of Conscience [a Sermon].†1714. Jonathan Swift – Major Works. 383.
1.0 All books of power are made from prior books of power. A few of these books are elaborate tapestries, however, most are patchwork quilts. All books are literally scrapbooks: books made from the scraps of other books.[1]
1.1 These scraps, or parts of prior books, are also the prior parts of dead peoples’ thoughts, ideas, and memories—so these book-parts are no different than the lifeless limbs of dead men and women.
1.2 A writer reassembles, reanimates the dead parts of people to make a book, therefore: any book of power is a “Frankenstein†monster, a kind of zombie text.
2.0 The doubts expressed by a writer stimulate, reanimate the parts, and quicken the book to breathe before the reader.[2]
3.0 A library is a cemetery[3]––the writer is a ghoul, a grave robber, hence the truism: “All writers steal.â€
“Each poem is an evasion not only of another poem, but also of itself, which is to say that every poem is a misinterpretation of what it might have been.†(Anxiety of Influence. 1975. Oxford UP. p. 120.)
Bloom bestows a schematic, but Robert Graves gives writers a method:
The method may be called “analeptic mimesisâ€: one slowly copies out the poem by hand, as if it were a first draft of one’s own. When the pen checks at a word or a phrase, one becomes intuitively aware of laziness, doubt, stupidity, or some compromise with moral principle.
Now, if it be asked what is meant by communicating power, I, in my turn, would ask by what name a man would designate the case in which I should be made to feel vividly, and with a vital consciousness, emotions which ordinary life rarely or never supplies occasions for exciting, and which had previously lain unwakened, and hardly within the dawn of consciousness— as myriads of modes of feeling are at this moment in every human mind for want of a poet to organize them. I say, when these inert and sleeping forms are organized, when these possibilities are actualized, is this conscious and living possession of mine power, or what is it?
 [3] See Jonathan Swift, Battle of the Books (1704), Samuel Johnson Rambler 02 (1750).
Recently the Texas State Board of Education [SBOE] voted to approve changes to the social studies textbooks of the state’s schoolchildren. These changes will now task students to read several Things-That-Are-Not [TITANs].[01] For example, instead of calling capitalism capitalism, it will now be known as something that it is not, so that the textbooks of Texas will print “free enterprise system†instead of “capitalismâ€.[02]
The Board also approved revisions that would skew the historical context of the phrase “separation of church and state,†substituting it also with a TITAN, perhaps a “unity of church and state.â€[03] After all, the integration of church and state carries benefits aplenty—what could possibly go wrong in suggesting the merger of those who are exempt from taxes with those who collect them?
I am frankly appalled at the language spewed forth as a result of the Board’s new policies.[04] Why tote such loaded words? Already the students of Texas are adapted to high levels of TITAN exposure through journalism, advertising, other forms of mass media, and professional sports.[05] Surely kids can handle a few more TITANs in their lives—why shouldn’t their textbooks be infiltrated as well?
This is not to suggest that the SBOE’s new policy will transmit any kind of reason to its students. For reason (wisdom, logic) is always good, otherwise it would always be good to always be unreasonable—yes, this occurs hourly on cable news, but thankfully no reasonable American watches it)[06]—but to advocate children to believe in TITANs cannot be called reasonable. It instead cloaks the Board’s will to increase the ignorance of the Texas public student populous.
But just because the SBOE’s policy prevents the promotion of reason does not mean that a lack of reason can be blamed for its policy. The SBOE’s underlying reason for approving its new book policy emerges easily to any onlooker: by nurturing Texas schoolchildren with standards of the past, such students might further be inspired to rise up, radicalize, and protest—the same way their hippy grandparents did in the 1960s.[07] Only by spotlighting Phyllis Schlafly, the Moral Majority, the Contract With America, or the NRA can the SBOE point the schoolchildren of Texas towards their proper twenty-first century scapegoats.
It is truly conservative to preserve a textbook tradition that provokes radical protest. The Board has seen the results. They know these methods work, and it is time to apply them again, particularly when there is no fear of this tradition spreading to other states.[08] One should thank God for blessing Texas with such a bureaucracy as the SBOE and its TITAN-ic policies.
Notes
[01] The source for this terminology comes from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Part IV, Chapter V.But there is also Plato’s Cratylus which tells us:
Nor can we reasonably say [that] there is knowledge at all, if everything is in a state of transition and there is nothing abiding; for knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always to abide and exist. But if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the change occurs there will be no knowledge; and if the transition is always going on, there will always be no knowledge, and, according to this view, there will be no one to know and nothing to be known. [Plato. Cratylus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Dialogues of Plato Translated into English. (1892). Vol. 1. Third Edition. Oxford, UP. p. 388. on Google Books.]
So we may take it that the very nature of the knowledge of capitalism will change when it is no longer called such. Compare also Plato’s Meno:
For this is what our discussion is really about—not if there are or have been good men here, but if virtue can be taught—that is what we have been considering for so long. And the point we are considering is just this: whether the good men of these times and of former times knew how to hand on to another that virtue in which they were good, or whether it cannot be handed on from one man to another, or received by one man from another. [Plato. Meno. In Great Dialogues of Plato. Translated by W.H.D. Rouse, Twelfth Printing, (1956) New American Library. (92B–93E) p. 59.]
One generation cannot handoff to the next any knowledge of capitalismor a “separation of church and state†if the nature of the knowledge of these things has already changed. Hence these things (capitalism and the separation of church and state) become Things-That-They-Are-Not [TITANs].
[02]Coverage on the “free enterprise†/ “capitalism†distinction for the textbooks of Texas is wide and varied:
[SBOE chairman] Lowe’s most fraught vote came when she supported the move by Board Member Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio, to remove references to “capitalism†in the standards, using instead the phrase “free enterprise.â€
Last summer, a compromise had been struck with the group of teachers writing the economics standards about how to refer to the country’s economic system. The challenge was finding a term that conformed both with common academic language and the state law, which calls for the use of “free enterprise.†The result was the phrase “U.S. free enterprise (capitalist, free market) system.
Cumbersome, indeed. But Mercer’s objection was not about the economy of language. It was ideological.
The word “capitalism†has a negative connotation and the standards should not apologize for the nation’s free enterprise system, he said.
And Board member Terri Leo, R-Spring, agreed.
“I do think that words means things,†Leo said. “I see no need, frankly, to compromise with liberal professors from academia,†who have written “distorted and liberal textbooks.â€Â [“SBOE chairwoman tips balance for conservative votes†by Kate Alexander of the Austin American Statesman’s politics and government blog Postcards (03/11/10).]
A majority of the State Board of Education decided Texas students should be shielded from exposure to the perfectly good word “capitalism†— one frequently heard in college-level economics classes. Why? Because member Terri Leo, R-Spring, doesn’t like the sound of it. [“When God was handing out brains…†an op-ed in the (03/27/10) Austin American Statesman.]
When [the SBOE] instructs textbook writers to always use the term “free-enterprise†and never the term “capitalism,†it isn’t doing so because it feels solicitude for imperialists or the big-money set.
Heavens no. Board members are doing it to vindicate the little guy, to wrest the language away from an intellectual elite. As Don McLeroy, one of the leaders of the board’s conservative faction, put it in last year’s debate over evolution, “somebody’s got to stand up to experts.â€Â [“Don’t mess with the Texas Board of Ed†an op-ed by Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal political blog Opinion Journal (03/17/10).]
[03] Coverage over the outcry of the phrase “separation of church and state†also runs plentiful:
“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,†Board member David Bradley said. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.â€Â [“Conservatives on Texas Panel Carry the Day on Curriculum Change†by James C. McKinley Jr., New York Times. 03/13/10. Section A; Column 0; National Desk; p. 10.]
SBOE chairman Gail Lowe insists:
“A critical priority of the State Board of Education in our revision of the curriculum standards has been to emphasize the founding documents, such as the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution. We believe students need a stronger grasp of the freedoms guaranteed in these documents. The First Amendment very clearly prevents Congress from establishing a national church, but it also promotes the free exercise of religion. Students need to understand that this is what the founders intended.
“It is inaccurate to say the founding fathers were neutral about religion; most were strong proponents of religious faith but did not believe in a national church controlled by the federal government.â€Â [“Q&A: Texas Board of Education Chairman†from in The Baptist Press, by Jerry Pierce of the Southern Baptist Texan (03/29/10).]
Yet Lowe’s comments would not rule out the possibility for teaching through textbooks an advocacy for state churches, county churches, school district churches etc. And because of things like—
“The conservative faction handily defeated an amendment that would have required children to learn the significance of the separation of church and state and rejected several attempts to include more minorities in the curriculum.â€Â [“Education board OKs changes†by Zahira Torres of the El Paso Times (03/13/10).]
Board members defeated an amendment by member Mavis Knight, D-Dallas, that would have required students to examine the reasons the Founding Fathers “protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others.â€
The seven social conservatives on the panel—several of whom openly question the legal precedents affirming the separation of church and state—were joined by the three moderate Republicans in voting no. [“Texas education board refuses to require religious-freedom lesson†by Terrence Stutz of the Dallas Morning News (03/12/10).]
—it can be reasonably concluded that the SBOE “have deleted [references] to church-state separation.â€Â [“Analysis: Texas influence on national textbook market is small and shrinking†from the Texas on the Potomac blog of the Houston Chronicle, analysis provided by Brian Thevenot of the Texas Tribune (03/29/10).]
[04] Examples of such appalling language appear endless, beginning with mild exaggeration such as Mike Chapman’s post “Stop the schoolyard bullies of the SBOE†on Burnt Orange Blog (03/26/10): “the SBOE are systematically engaging in an extreme ideological agenda in an effort to skew history,†to the slightly silly title for Robert McHenry’s post “The Creedalists†at American.com, (03/25/10).
Yet fiercer language abounds. Take for instance the op-ed “When God was handing out brains...†in the Austin American Statesman (03/27/10) and its use of phrases like, “a jihad against knowledge†and “handicapping Texas students.†Or “Don’t mess with the Texas Board of Ed,†an op-ed by Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal’s political blog Opinion Journal (03/17/10) that spews: “the proceedings appear like a sort of Texas inquisition.â€
[05] In journalism, take Jason Blair, the Balloon Boy saga, or the yet-to-be-found (though thoroughly reported on) WMDs of Iraq. Even so, the public students of Texas are completely used to TITANs in other forms of mass media such as the fake violence of some video games, or the false sense of creativity felt when playing Guitar Hero, or reality’s clash with Disney’s aesthetics and ethics via the pretended powers of characters and superheroes in movies and comic books. In professional sports, take not only the steroids scandals throughout the Olympics and Major League Baseball, but the fact that some ballplayers perjured themselves before Congress and with no apparent consequence. Kids in the twenty-first century are inundated with Things-That-Are-Not (TITANs) so why should the content of their textbooks be any different?
[06] Terry McDermott’s “Dumb Like a Fox.†Columbia Journalism Review for March/April 2010 recently notes:
Cable news is not literally a broadcast business, but a narrowcast. At any given moment, there are a relative handful of people (in peak hours less than five million and in non-prime hours half that, out of the U.S. population of 320 million) watching all of these networks combined. American Idol, in contrast, routinely draws 30 million.
One need only look at the recent example of CNN’s audience decline for further support of McDermott’s observations.
[07] Robert McHenry makes this point in his post “The Creedalists†at American.com, a magazine published by the American Enterprise Institute:
Does the Texas board member pause to reflect that those radicals of the ’60s were schooled on the textbooks of the Eisenhower years? Perhaps not. That they then went off to college, discovered that a few facts had been omitted from their schooling, and promptly made a fetish of them? Does [SBOE member Don McLeroy] stop for just a moment to wonder if what he is doing now is likely to have the desired effect?
