The New Pantagruel
Hymns in the Whorehouse
1.4
Fall 2004


Correspondence

First Impressions • Not Voting • Victimism
Dialogue


A Dialogue on the Presidential Election
by The Editors of The New Pantagruel


Articles

Thoughts on a Seussentenial
by John Fea

On Being Contrary for its Own Sake
by James V. Schall, S. J.

Further Scandal: Christian College Professor Doesn’t Teach from a Christian Worldview
by Jack Heller


Readings

The Buried City: A Meditation on History and Place
by Jack D. Elliott, Jr.

Practicing the Discipline of Place
by Caleb Stegall

Empire and Its Discontents
by Eric Voegelin


Review Essays

Revolutionary War, Revolutionary Peace?
by Kevin J. Jones

Nazis in the White House, Job in New Jersey
by Randy Boyagoda


Interviews

Raising Hell
by Annie Young Frisbie with Scott Derrickson

Folly, Prophecy and Piggishness
by John Knauss with Scott Kolbo
Personal Essays

My Africa Problem ... and Ours
by Gideon Strauss


Poetry

Leaf • Lace • Reinventing the Wheel
by Aaron Belz

Possessed by Angels • Ordinary Matins • Arm & Hammer
by Mark Stevick

From a Dry Land • You Can See God Going to the Islands • Hymn from the Mojave • Singing the Old Songs
by Amy Unsworth


Fiction

Brave New Wanda
by Lynda Rutledge


Contributors




The NEW PANTAGRUEL, published by Pantagruel Press, a 501(c)(3) non-profit company, is a quarterly journal run by a cadre of intemperate but friendly Catholics and Protestants who have seen other journals run by Christians, and thought that while they might not be able to do better, they could certainly do no worse.


EDITORIAL BOARD
Caleb Stegall, Editor
Dan Knauss, Associate & Design Editor
J. Clayton Johnson, Managing Editor
Christi A. Foist, Managing Editor
Annie Young Frisbie, Managing Editor
Fr. Gassalasca Jape, S. J., Inquisitor, Expectorator & Director of Polemics

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Jeremy Beer, Bruce R. Berglund, Randy Boyagoda, Patton Dodd, Thomas Heilke, Jack Heller, Joshua P. Hochschild, Zachry O. Kincaid, Eugene McCarraher, Eric Miller, Scott H. Moore, Read Mercer Schuchardt, Christopher Shannon, Gideon Strauss, David Wright


© 2004 Pantagruel Press, Inc. * cum priuilegio Regis * Website: www.newpantagruel.com * Email: editors@newpantagruel.com * SnailMail: 11448 39th Street, Perry, Kansas, 66073



Victimism

On Victimism

A reply to Gassalasca Jape, S.J.'s "On the Spread of Victimism."

Notwithstanding the general lack of manners, there is thought and analysis going on today.  But it's easier and more fun to fight than listen and discuss.  Slinging shit is real fun, and if you've got the money to do it on TV, radio, the Internet, it's greater fun!  We play politics like we play sports --- we yell, insult, criticize, cheer, etc., from our living rooms, offices and classrooms.

Trying to suppress the fight by blaming both sides, or pointing out the mistakes and hypocrisies found on both sides, is Pecksniffian.  It's not as if we don't know that we're hypocritical when we accuse the other side of being pure evil.  We know that, nobody needs to point it out to us.  We like fighting, because fighting is a part of playing, a part of working, a part of living.  Having to be told that we are hypocrites is a diversion; it's like kids yelling and fighting on the playground during a ballgame, only to be interrupted by a teacher who's reminding us to "play fair!"  Oh, we will, you can count on it, after we kick the crap out of this guy or that guy.

It will never be otherwise.  And for those who are just beyond or outside the fray, they might try finding a hobby, read more Albert Jay Nock, and seek holiness. 

Bob Sale
San Diego

Fr. Jape replies...

Mr. Sale---

In my view, there is a place for intelligent satire and polemic which is not antithetical to analysis. I know for a fact that such stuff has cured many a soul. The young, brought up amid the dysfunctions you describe, are often ripe for "something more." Indeed, this is the whole strategy of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, is it not? ISI sponsors a hideously Limbaugh-like agitprop machine for college students and subsequently offers them contact with much more refined conservatism modeled by great men, both dead and living, such as your Mr. Nock. And it is no mere intellectual conversion that is sought; indeed, many of my evangelical friends believe that ISI is a Catholic conspiracy to steal away their young. Perusing the ISI book catalog, I am hard pressed to deny the evidence.

My best & finest regards�

+G.J.


Not Voting



The follow letters were received in reponse to Fr. Gassalasca Jape, S.J.'s irregular column, "The Japery."

Fr. Jape,

I greatly enjoyed today's entry. [Arguments Against Single-Issue Voting Lack Nuance, Honesty, and Guts 10/29] This paragraph in particular:

"Abortion, properly understood by pagans and religionists alike, pertains to end of life 'issues,' like euthanasia; genetic meddling on all kinds of life; economic and 'social' justice--and more. How we regard and treat life, especially human life, and the health of the family (the fundamental ordering structure of society) is a basic, foundational political concern that rightly precedes all others. One can vote on it as a 'single-issue' or litmus test because it impacts all issues profoundly. A person's views on 'abortion' always tell you a great deal about that person."

However, as much as I agree with this, I also regard Pres. Bush's war policy as terribly misguided from the standpoint of both jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria, which is just as much an issue of how we regard and treat life. While I was never seriously tempted to pull the lever for Kerry, I think to endorse the current war policy (and I have a hard time seeing a vote for Bush as anything but a de facto endorsement) is to undermine respect for life in much the same way.

One could also mention the widely-publicized execution of Karla Faye Tucker (a born-again Christian if I recall correctly) who's pleas for clemency were mocked by then-Governor Bush in an interview with journalist Tucker Carlson. Whatever you think about the death penalty, that kind of callousness does not speak well of the President's character or reverence for life.

Whether opting out of voting for a major-party candidate bespeaks apathy or some other vice I'm not sure. But I don't think it's as clear as we would like who's on the side of "life."

Regards,
Lee McCracken

Fr. Jape replies...

Dear Lee--

I'm always happy to be appreciated--or objectionable, as the case may be. I agree with you completely. Nothing I have written should imply such unqualified support for the present neocon junto as one may read in the pages of certain journals of religion and public life. It is definitely a bad situation, with a choice between different kinds of free-wheeling death-dealers. My colleagues are divided on this election, and I am not all of one mind myself.

Best regards,
+G.J.



It seems to me that the question is really what responsibility we (as voters) have for the candidates for whom we vote.  Specifically, when candidates take positions that are morally evil, are we (as Archbishop Chaput would say) morally obligated not to vote for them?  And what happens if there are only two candidates, and both take evil positions?

With Mr. Kerry, obviously his stance on abortion is evil, and I would say the same for his stance on homosexual unions.

With Mr. Bush, his stance in favor of Aggressive War clearly violates Church "Just War" teaching, and the Church also condemns the willful use of torture (which Mr. Bush publicly opposes, but privately condones).  Detaining people without trial (be they US citizens or foreigners) seems to me not a per se evil, but in its application these past 3 years, I would say that it has become so, because it has been excessive and erroneous.  Particularly in a world where the USA is the preeminent power, the effects of these evils are grave indeed.

If one so concludes (as I believe a faithful Catholic must), one then faces a choice: to vote for him who is perceived as embodying the lesser evil, or not to choose between the candidates.  Not choosing can mean voting for a third party or not voting at all.  If Archbishop Chaput is correct, then we are obliged not to support politicians who advocate a known evil. But even assuming a more moderate position, we're still obligated to make a prudential judgment as to the likely efficacy of a given vote -- we could only cooperate with a material evil for grave reasons.

If I had to vote for one of the two candidates, I believe I'd vote for Mr. Kerry (largely because I don't think it likely that enough pro-life justices will be confirmed to overturn Roe v. Wade, whereas I see the evils from a continued Bush presidency as unavoidable).  But in my case, there is no need to make that judgment.  I live in a solid "blue" state, it will go for Kerry regardless.  Why should I take an act which may be morally wrong, when taking any such step is unnecessary?  That is how I arrived at a decision to abstain.

I cannot speak for others who have reached this conclusion, but I believe such a position is clearly logical (and having Alisdair MacIntyre say so bolsters my confidence!).  You may disagree with my conclusion that Bush's advocacy of wrong acts implicates Bush voters in the same kind of cooperation with evil as Kerry's advocacy of abortion.  You may believe that the sin of abortion is more morally wrong than the sin of aggressive war, or the sin of wilful torture.  I don't know how to weigh these evils, except to ask whether they involve grave matter.  I think I agree that failure to help the poor, etc., implies more negligence than intent, and would probably not be grave matter -- so I agree that one cannot assume equivalence between that and abortion -- but is this also the case with Aggressive War and torture?  I would think not.

Regards,
Chuck Roth
Chicago, IL

Fr. Jape replies...

Dear Mr Roth--
 
There is nothing wrong with your thinking here; it is very admirable, but it is the wrong kind of thinking. What is called for, I think, is a willingness to ">sin boldly. Archbishop Chaput has put his finger on it: vote for Bush (or whomever) and then to confession. We're all complicit in the structures of power in which politicians rise. If you're not going to vote, why not stop using money, get out of the stock market, cancel your insurance, stop using fossil fuels?
 
Yours--
+G.J.


First Impressions

The following letters were received from readers immediately following the coverage that tNP received in The New York Times (July 17, 2004: 1A) this summer. 







Thank you, thank you, thank you for finally arriving.
Tami Hughes





It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. 
     After reading the new pantagruel.
congrats!
Tony Carnes
Senior News Writer
Christianity Today





Came across you via today's New York Times "Post Buckley" article.
I'll cram my reaction to your "Welcome to the New Pantagruel" essay into one short sentence.
Christianity will continue imploding inexorably as long as there are hungry wretches living in squalor, sparkling young theoreticians with unlimited time to philosophise about America's grossly overrated view of herself and a vast, vast majority, sadly in the first instance, mercifully in the second, who, frankly, don't give a damn.
Regards,
David Marsden
Baruba W.I.





Dear Mr. Stegall,
Once upon a time, I read Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, and every copy of First Things -- and reached for the kind of wit and wisdom you seem to be bringing together at The New Pantagruel. I'm glad to have been reminded. And I admire your "back page" piece on human-scaled sin. Thank you and best wishes.
Sincerely,
Ien Cheng




The definition of conservative was never more a problem than today when an officially 'conservative' government is in office that turns out to be anything but, tending as it does more towards the authoritarian or neo-fascist, interventionary style, hugely costly and insensitive to the environment and human rights.

From the time I read both Aristotle and Burke in the same term in graduate school, I have thought of conservative as meaning concern with the individual.  The identification and realization of the qualities of the individual, the useful application and fulfillment of an individual's nature and worth in society are the bedrock of responsible conservative thought, it seems to me, whether in the context of ancient Greece or 18th-Century England.

If we had a clear definition of the philosophical and practical under- pinnings of the conservative view, there would be more clarity in politics today, and more effective function of our Democracy. Perhaps one way to approach this is to say what 'conservative' is not.

Let's look at some ideas, perhaps disabuse some illusions, on what the conservative movement, by its original definition, is not.  First, it is not an obstacle to change.  It nurtures and cohabits with change, manages it, uses it. Man is a rational animal, and if we do not use our heads to absorb and implement knowledge and insight learnt over the ages by the combined mental efforts of mankind in science, social politics, technology, psychology - then we are not being ourselves.  Ideas cannot be resisted; they can only be delayed. In political terms, "conservative" has come to mean for many "reactionary." Hold to the status quo. Never learn but never forget. Isolationism. All these terms are thrice-familiar throughout the centuries, and if there is one thing we have learnt, or should have, it is that resistance to change only leads to a big bang in the end, whether it is the French Revolution, World War, or economic depression and disaster or the music of Arnold Schoenberg.

Another thing conservatism is not is greed, or narcissism -- though it often presents itself as such. One thinks immediately of the present US administration, which in the most shockingly obvious way is being first and foremost run for the betterment of it's ministers and their business interests. One also thinks of Ayn Rand (1905-1982), the novelist (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) and proponent of Objectivism philosophy who was, incidentally, a close friend and mentor to Allen Greenspan when he was first starting his career. These entities are always tagged 'conservative.' They could not be further from it!   The conservative citizen is at his best a caring person, a person who in one religious or ethical belief or another, recognizes an obligation to care of his neighbor and regard the integrity of context, i. e. Nature and environment.  He is thrifty, but not foolishly so; he abides by the law, he thinks for himself and works for what he thinks is right. Liberals also do these things, but the classical conservative practitioner is a person who looks at man as a sacred entity and his realization as a sacred, and practically desirable, duty. His starting point is the individual, one might say, to the liberal view, which has a starting point of the group, just to differentiate -- admittedly with a simplification. The conservative does not approach education as a matter of "testing," rather as a matter of challenge, opportunity and support. And he regards as one of conservatism's principle well springs the worth of Nature over that of the New York Stock Exchange or The First National Bank. He knows that Nature abounds in art forms and crafts of all kinds, and he equates the mind as equal to the body. He would, at least in theory, champion an Olympics of the mind, something the ancient Greeks should have established but never got round to. They were good thinkers and formulators but, alas, got overly involved with matters corporeal.

In the end, I suppose, there is no great difference between liberals and conservatives for we are all human beings who want the best outcome to our lives. Disparity comes in the process of getting there. The two Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin, are good symbols for what I am saying here -- T. the quintessential proponent of healthy and I would say "true" conservatism, and F. the pragmatic liberal at its best, the man with a view towards doing a great deal to realize the potential of the individual, yet practical and not a socialist.  I also like the late Senator Henry Jackson of Washington State who was wont to say: "Yes I am a liberal, but I'm not a damn fool!"  More of these gentlemen, please.

James A. Van Sant
Santa Fe, New Mexico





A Dialogue on the Presidential Election
by The Editors of The New Pantagruel
Editorial Introduction
On election eve, "discerning" Christians are awash with unsolicited advice and testimonies on the subject of voting.  A growing chorus of Christian notables, now including Mark Noll, Alisdair MacIntyre, and Paul Griffiths, find things so decidedly unsatisfactory that they aren't voting at all.  Meanwhile, veterans of the culture wars such as Charles Colson and Jim Wallis continue to invoke the moral duties of the Church in favor of one side or the other, while the sophisticated folks at Christianity Today don't endorse any particular candidate but do encourage the faithful not to succumb to the temptation of being a "one issue" voter.


"Ahab #3" by Scott KolboHand Colored Lithography

Our own Fr. Jape has opined on these subjects at length, arguing in less than kind terms against the foolishness of pining for an ideologically acceptable politics in which a Christian can comfortably rest, knowing that no evil is being done on his behalf.  To the contrary, history is replete with the tragic lesson that political power is inherently corrupting of principle, yet the truth of principles cannot get any traction in the world without being in and of it.  A moral man may choose sectarian withdrawal, itself a kind of politics by other means, or the tragedy of engagement on the edge of risk and ever-compromised necessities.  But it is the immaturity of double-mindedness to choose one and pine for the other, and such a divided mind produces only instability where order is required.

The double-mindedness which produces electoral withdrawal as a kind of fortification against compromised engagement in the rest of one's life is a symptom of the troubling trend among Christians to cocoon themselves in the "misunderstood minority" identity and abdicate any responsibility for power while simultaneously refusing to give up what power they have.  We have become exemplars of the tendency to develop a mind so principled that it succumbs to either ideologism or an idealistic paralysis that comes from seeing through all the false choices.

Institutional power is what it is---always.  If a system passes through revolution to the establishment of a new regime, it will merely play its own variation on the same old problems.  Or as Pete Townsend put it, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."  The best of our Christian political tradition teaches us, therefore, to align ourselves radically with the particular and the individual without actually believing that the institutional regime must be overthrown.  One can thus work to mitigate and contain institutional power; living in love with the frail limits of existence---family, friends, community, and place---in service of truth, goodness, and beauty, yet knowing that even if good can be done, evil will be done too.

That said, the pathological death-wish of our current social and political order can hardly be understated.  Our society---its businesses, schools, governments, families, communities, and even churches---has staked its economic and spiritual stability on the shifting sand of grand consumption and its exemplars: a young, single adulthood to and beyond the age of 30; childless or near-childless, "dual income," "professional" couples; the managerial home in which children are shuttled from one structured consumption to the next, until they are finally released to "freedom" in an institution of higher learning; and retired or pining-to-be-retired "empty-nesters."  Our economy, media, and pop-culture worship these "lifestyle" demographics and encourage and reward their aimlessly selfish carousing.  This means the propagation of a culture that at every level is oriented toward the most nihilistic individualism possible; the fetishization of self and one's "personal freedom" that led Sartre to define hell as "other people"---i.e., people who coerce and constrain us with needs and desires that can be legally circumvented.

Abortion is the jewel of this culture, and is the "single issue" in which all other issues are subsumed.  It remains the worst manifestation and keystone of our gospel of self-service; a gospel which is preached and propounded by exploiters across the political spectrum, everywhere from leftist campuses to comfortably "conservative" suburbia.  The metaphor is apt: the false, exploitative freedom of the self-serve soda machine in fast food restaurants is the mechanism of choice in our poisonous soup of late liberalism and consumptive capitalism.  The libido seeking freedom and pleasure "chooses," pays for, and feeds itself at a trough filled with waste and ruin.

In light of these complexities, and the vexingly inadequate political leaders we are given to choose from, The New Pantagruel asked four of its Contributing Editors to discuss the upcoming election, their participation in it, and their thoughts on the general substance of Christian writing on the subject.  As you can see from the ensuing dialogue, there is by no means a consensus of opinion beyond a deep antiliberalism.  Our broader hope for this conversation, as for tNP, remains that it would foster a discourse that does not minimize differences to "spare feelings" because ultimately we believe life is tragicomic and eucatastrophic.  While we are engaged with the crises and catastrophes, a serious, taxing and often debilitating business, we can always look at ourselves and our situation from an imagined eternity where it is, if not farcical, a tragic agon tempered by the comic finish of the marriage feast. In less elevated language, we think the matter debated here is very important stuff, so we refuse to trivialize it by treating it with an ultimacy of meaning or our associates with an unbreakable earnestness.

--Caleb Stegall and Dan Knauss



The following dialogue took place by email in October 2004 among four of The New Pantagruel's contributing editors: Eugene McCarraher, Assistant Professor of Humanities and History at Villanova University; Bruce Berglund, Assistant Professor of History at Calvin College; Scott Moore,  Assistant Professor of Philosophy and director of the Great Texts Program at Baylor University; and Eric Miller, Assistant Professor of History and director of the Humanities program at Geneva College.




"Camping Out Waiting for the End of the World" by Scott KolboInk Jet Print and Mixed Media



__MTPAGINATE_PAGE_BREAK__

Eugene McCarraher: Well, I'll be the first out of the gate. I'm not going to vote in this election, even though I'd like to repeat my support for Nader in 2000. For me, my vote not to vote is based on two considerations, one specific and one general. If one opposed the invasion of Iraq and wants a clear idea of how and when we're getting out, one does not have a candidate in this race. If one wants a genuinely pro-life agenda -- in other words, one which opposes, not just abortion, but the whole culture and economy of death which is corporate capitalism -- one does not have a candidate in this race. The choice, as I see it, is between Imperialism, Plutocracy, and Capital Punishment vs. Imperialism, Plutocracy, and Abortion. Nader, as usual, is the supreme diagnostician of our corrupt and comatose political culture, and many of his proposals are meritorious and visionary. But his one-man band of a candidacy marks a triumph of egotism over good sense, and his support for abortion rights, while not, I think, a completely debilitating stance (that's a prudential judgment), gives me pause.

Drawing by a Guantanamo Bay Prisoner
And yet, strangely, I feel hopeful. Things, I think, just can't go on like this, and a lot of people, not just Christians, feel this in the marrow of their bones. To quote the old 60s canard, perhaps it's darkest just before the dawn.


Bruce Berglund: I also recognize the dilemma that [Mark] Noll faces: I did not push a lever for president in 1996, although not for the reasons he offers. I was distressed in that campaign by (in addition to the failings of the major candidates) the absence of any substance in the candidates' exchange, in the way they skirted fundamental problems in society. I did not see any serious or creative thinking from either side; instead, they were trapped in phraseology, trading poll-tested but timid proposals.

I also voted for Nader in 2000. Leading up to that election, I was frustrated by a primary process that sidelined two people (Bradley and McCain) who recognized and addressed deeper issues in the country and presented instead to the electorate two demagogues. I saw Nader as a candidate who offered a serious critique to the standard practices of American politics and advocated policies outside the limited realm of options in which the major parties constrain themselves. After listening to Nader recently, though, I've judged, like Gene, that the valid points he can make have become drowned out by his ego.

It appears that, in the current campaign, the superficiality of American politics has only increased. The deep problems in society and in the conduct of politics are avoided, as the candidates exchange band-aid proposals on tax cuts and new programs. This lack of creativity in addressing serious issues and formulating responses is what I find disappointing in contemporary politics.

That said, I will be voting in November--for a candidate from one of the major party candidates. I judge the current administration a failure in many ways, and I will not stand aside to allow that administration another four years.


Scott Moore: This is the first presidential election in a number of years in which I haven't felt some deep anxiety (or guilt) about how I'll cast my vote.  That's not because I'm pleased with the options before me.  In 2000, I too voted for Nader, but not because I had any affection for him or because I believed he would make a good president.  I was exercising my constitutional right to self-deception by convincing myself that I was helping make third parties more viable in Texas.  But who was I kidding?  We live ten minutes from Crawford.  It wasn't even close.  I should have saved the gas.

I'm approaching this election year with less anxiety because I'm finally coming to terms with the end of my Constantinian Christianity.  Though I've known for years that this epoch was over, I haven't been able to shake a deep desire to find a candidate who approximated my beliefs, and who would, finally, "turn this country around and cure its ills."  Yes, I still believe that a pro-life, anti-war, universal health care democrat could win a national election, but it's finally coming home to me that the problem isn't just that these sorts of people don't exist (or won't run).  The problem is that our country really does want the kinds of candidates that we get because these are the sorts of guys who will attempt what we have deemed "realistic" solutions to the problems we really want solved.  This is a mindset which assumes that security--be it national, financial, or emotional--is not only the highest good but also to be achieved through a (kinder, gentler?) will to power.  We Christians must never think that "security" is the highest good, and we must not give in to a culture of death which celebrates the ubiquity of war: the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illiteracy, etc.


At some point I've come to realize that I'm not just "disenchanted" by the political process; I'm really a citizen of another city.  Hauerwas and Willimon popularized the theme of "resident aliens" almost ten years ago, but it is really the oldest of concepts.  Its most beautiful expression is found in Philippians 3.  This doesn't mean that we have to withdraw from the political process altogether.  St. Augustine, after all, encouraged us to make good use of the peace and resources of the earthly city; we just should not place our hope on that city bringing about a lasting peace because it is essentially predicated on the "inevitability" and centrality of war.  Thus, I'll probably vote, but not for Kerry or Bush.  There are some local races that I'm interested in, but even here I must always be reminded of the delusion of the Constantinian and Utopian impulse.   The Church's political goal in a post-christian age is the development of a faithful, subversive counterculture.


Eric Miller: What I'm seeing this fall is the American story playing out in diabolical farce.  If it were just a farce, it would be good at least for an occasional chuckle.  But since this particular story involves a cultural behemoth with imperial might, too much is at stake to make laughter easy.

How's this for farce: of the two parties, the GOP is the one that retains at least some willful connection to the language that could expose most fully our own folly and evil: orthodox, Christian theology.  Yet who has any confidence that this sorry "party" would ever allow the fluent speakers of that language to have significant authority---the sort of authority that could, say, provoke a re-thinking of its historic stances on health care, consumerism, or war?  On the other side, the Democrats are the legatees of a tradition that makes possible keen vision in many crucial areas of our common life---including matters ecological, public health concerns, and wariness of the corporation.  Yet over the past half-century it has energetically excluded (or, shall we say, aborted) any significant recourse to the language that had much to do with calling the party into being--again, Christian theology--and has in turn led us on a death march on "issue" after "issue."  Is this not farcical?  And given the dimensions of the nation these parties lead, is it not diabolical?

I too went the Nader route in 2000, in the hope that a strengthened Green party might at least force the other two parties to take some turns, however minor, in their direction.  But this time that possibility is gone.  I don't believe Bush deserves re-election.  I don't believe Kerry deserves election.  I can't see myself pulling a lever (or poking out a chad) for either.


Bruce Berglund: I appreciated the connection that Scott draws between our shared sense of political homelessness and our citizenship in another city. Presumably then, we should take joy in our inability to find a party with which to place our allegiance.

But I am reluctant to choose the option of not voting, while congratulating myself that my political frustration verifies my status as a citizen of the heavenly city. Moreover, I am reluctant to cast a ballot that will be ineffectual. In 2000, I voted for Nader with the thought that he would gain a substantial share of the vote, enough to give pause to the major parties and, perhaps, to build a foundation for a viable third party. Well, it appears that he succeeded in capturing the vote of disaffected Christian academics who serve as contributing editors for this online journal (a journal which, oddly enough, was spotlighted by The New York Times in a survey of new trends in "conservative" thought). But I was sincerely disappointed by Nader's overall showing in the last election.

In this election, the pressing question is: should the sitting president be entrusted with another four years? Absolutely not, I say. Although the stances of Kerry (whatever they may be) and the Democratic Party do not correspond to my own thinking on issues, I know that, by not voting for him, I concede to four more years of Bush.

Drawing by a Guantanamo Bay Prisoner
I make this choice not simply due to my opposition to the current administration's policies and my judgment that it has failed in the task of leading the country (I do agree wholly with Kerry that this is the "excuse presidency"). I am voting against the revival of Constantinianism that the Bush administration and the Republican Party represents, and too many Christians endorse: the stew of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld bowing their heads in prayer at the start of cabinet meetings, TV preachers telling me that a vote for Bush will save Christians in Uzbekistan from the oppression of their government, and political/religious organizations putting leaflets on my car, in the parking lot at church on Sunday morning, that rate candidates based on their "proper Christian" views on the Second Amendment and tax cuts.

There's a letter to the editor in this month's edition of Harper's in which the writer laments about the progressives' "ceding of God" to the Republican Party. By voting to defeat Bush, I wish to send the message that I will not allow the Republican Party or the administration to claim God's side as their own (or, as it most often seems, the other way around). To do that, I recognize, I have to vote for Kerry.

Eric Miller: I find myself agreeing with every particular point Bruce has made.  Was it Kristof, Dionne, or some other columnist who wrote about the Cheneys' Christmas card of last year?  According to the column, it featured a Benjamin Franklin quotation to the effect that the course of this great nation was obviously being blessed and guided by providence, etc etc etc.  This is enough to make one flee into the arms of any alternative, which is (almost) what I hear in Bruce's decision.  It brings to mind Christopher Lasch as a socialist in the fall of 1968 urging the readers of the New York Review to vote for Nixon--anything to repudiate and castigate the follies and evils of the Johnson/Humphrey-guided Democratic Party.


For all of the resonance I feel with Bruce's points, I still come back to the basic fact that when electing a President, we cast votes for a political tradition as much as we choose a particular constellation of political figures.  And to vote for Kerry is to side with a political tradition that has given itself over to enshrining a way of thinking about life that imperils life (daily), all in the name of "choice."  For me, this would make a vote for Kerry a very difficult one to cast, to say the least.  To be sure, the very starkness of the practice of abortion (and the nexus of related and unfolding bioethical issues) has had the unfortunate effect of dimming the ability of many Christians to see the critical importance of other social, moral, and ecological concerns (many represented far better by the Democratic party than by the GOP).

Still, which party (and tradition) has the best chance in the long run of helping the country turn toward a more life-engendering way of seeing?  Put this way, I would have to place more hope in the party that grants some epistemic authority to Christian perspectives.  And that, it seems to me, is the GOP--despite the fact that I, as I said before, have no real confidence that it will in the coming years become more Christian rather than less Christian.  Given the unpredictable nature of history, it might well be that in another fifty years the Democrats will have become reacquainted in some significant measure with their Christian heritage.  At any rate, neither party today is interested in provoking a national discussion on the nature of freedom.  I can't think of a more damning thing to say about our present political moment.

But back to Bruce: it may truly be best, at this particular moment, to, for the sake of the Kingdom of Christ, be rid of Bush, precisely because of the "Constantinianism" that he represents.  We need (and the world needs), it seems clear to me, a far more effective and sophisticated form of Christian politics than what we've seen from Bush and company.

When I ended my last remarks, I wrote that I couldn't see myself voting for either ticket.  I meant that literally.  I very well could end up voting for one or the other.  I just can't see which one (if either), as of today.  If nothing else, the equivocating nature of these comments gives further evidence why.   For obvious reasons, I'm looking forward to hearing the rest of you out on all of this.


Eugene McCarraher: I urge Eric, with a twist on the Bard, to screw his courage to the sticking place, and not vote.  My only difference with him regards his assertion that the GOP affords Christian perspectives "epistemic authority."  Rhetorical status, yes -- epistemic authority, no way.  I was listening to Tom DeLay the other day using the phrase "culture of life," and I almost put my foot through the set.  That little snivel, and the mean-spirited forces he represents, are the very embodiments of a culture of death, in my view.

I speak from some experience when I say that Christians with our concerns are better off trying to establish connections with the secular left -- I mean the real left of socialists, anarchists, etc., not the suburban liberals who want Anybody But Bush.  Their opposition to Bush amounts, I think, to a narcissism of small differences, and I don't think they're at all sympathetic to anything that's going to undermine their conception of life as a menu of "choices" and "options."  There's at least a modicum of interest in Christian theology among people like Terry Eagleton or Slavoj Zizek, and I think we should cultivate this interest as much as we can.  We should also be making connections with the labor movement -- Christians, or at least Catholics, did in the 1930's, and it's one of the most remarkable derelictions of political duty that the churches have let these ties go attenuated.


Bruce Berglund: Yes, I agree completely that Christians need to rethink their alliances. For the last two decades, too many Christian voters have chosen the same side as the gun lobby, Enron execs, and the raving acolytes of Michael Savage and his ilk. I was there myself at one time. But the need for new alliances is why I will choose to vote for Kerry. Call it Anybody-but-Bushism (just don't lump me with the suburban liberals), but I don't see how Christians and Republicans will be shaken out of their current alliance, or at least compelled to rethink the foundations of that alliance, unless the sitting president loses the election. In watching the debates, I was struck by Bush's smugness (clearly, his scowls on night one reflected a sense that he, as President, should not be questioned) and by the thinly veiled motivation of his whole campaign: let's send up some balloons to keep people happy and then we'll coast for the next four years.

Drawing by a Guantanamo Bay Prisoner
I am compelled to go back to Eric's explanation for his hesitation about voting for Kerry, which presumably hinges on the parties' stances on abortion. I must challenge the suggestion that the Republican Party "has the best chance in the long run of helping the country turn toward a more life-engendering way of seeing." As Gene indicated at the very start, can we call the party that stands resolutely for capital punishment as the life-affirming party? Beyond the issue of capital punishment (which many Democrats support), I look to the Republicans as the party that allows the assault-weapons ban to expire and obstructs any attempt at gun control, the party that obstructs a rise in the minimum wage (at its current point, a full-time, minimum-wage worker makes $10,712/yr), the party that has done nothing (and likely will do nothing in the next four years) to address the health-care crisis in this country. That last issue is, to me a life-and-death issue.

But I challenge Eric not only on the suggestion that one party's stance on a single issue makes it the party that promotes a "life-engendering way of seeing." I reject the reduction of politics to that single issue and the suggestion that one party is "life-affirming," which implies that the other is not. One of our colleagues on the editorial board offered a post in one of the online forums, suggesting that "that certain Republicans have a vested interest in NOT overturning Roe v. Wade." I think there is some truth to that. As long as Republicans can galvanize Christians on the abortion issue, they can count on their votes. The Republican Party has been tarring its opponents on the abortion issue since when? We can go back at least to the 1984 contest between Reagan and Mondale. So, it has now been 20 years. For 12 of those years Republicans have controlled the White House. In how many more elections will Republicans play this trump card to gain the votes of Christians? 

And if the upper level of the Republican leadership truly does wish to overturn Roe v. Wade, is it possible? Judges openly opposed to the 1972 decision can be Borked in the Senate. And the politics of court appointments means that considerations other than abortion often come to the fore. In 1981, the Reagan Administration clouded Sandra Day O'Connor's pro-choice stance in order to get her past the conservatives. Twelve years later, O'Connor was an author of the opinion on Planned Parenthood v. Casey that affirmed the Roe decision.


Eric Miller: Bruce makes several strong points against a position that I (allegedly) hold.  Without devolving to a blow-by-blow reply, suffice it to say that I did not intend to imply that it is the GOP's position on abortion that caused me to suggest that it promotes a more "life-engendering way of seeing."  What I did say (which Gene properly responded to) was that what hope I have for the GOP lies in the fact that it "grants some epistemic authority to Christian perspectives"--unlike the Democratic party, which is committed fundamentally to a liberalism that makes no place for religious authority (think Bob Casey).  Put differently, the GOP holds open the door to a way of seeing (and to the people who promote and practice it) that might actually enable it at some point to correct the sorts of troubling inconsistencies that Bruce has underscored, and that I in the main affirm.

Is this sort of self-correction likely?  As I said before, no.  But to the extent that the battle is pitched on the field of language, I believe Christians have an obligation to seek to strengthen those groups and communities that continue speak their native tongue.  This is why, I take it, people like Hauwerwas, and earlier, Christopher Lasch, were willing to associate with First Things, despite Neuhaus's neo-conservatism, which to them is repugnant.  Differences on political economy, and other policy issues, at some point must give way to the even more basic imperative of keeping the language alive and relevant for the day.

Drawing by a Guantanamo Bay Prisoner
As to the matter of rethinking alliances: I couldn't agree more.  The great promise of the New Pantagruel, I think, is that it is actually creating space where Christians and others can freely draw from diverging political traditions in order to construct a way to meet the challenge of our day.  And I don't think we need to all agree on which traditions (liberal, conservative, radical, anarchist, agrarian, et al) are most salient for the moment; in fact, it is precisely this sort of discussing and disagreeing about these traditions that I see as most capable of animating an endeavor such as this.

With this in view, I'll throw the question out there to Gene (or anyone else) -- what is the reason for your hope in the secular left?

I would also like to hear a rebuttal to Bruce's earlier argument (as well as the argument of one "Jape") that sitting-out the election is itself an immoral choice.  You who are choosing not to vote: how do you respond to those who say that we have a moral obligation to support the lesser of the two evils?


Eugene McCarraher:  Let me respond to two points.  I don't have any "hope" in the secular left.  My remarks about making alliances with unbelieving socialists, anarchists, etc. amount to a tactical suggestion.  Unlike the GOP, these groups keep alive that part of the Christian language which affirms social justice and solidarity.  In Augustinian terms, the secular left affirms a perversion of the heavenly city -- and if a perversion is a predatory, inadequate, but nonetheless dimly perceived version of a real good, then we should work with, converse with, and even seek to convert those forces.  Besides, the secular left still has claim to a treasure trove of social and economic analysis which is indispensable in understanding capitalist modernity.  We're all indebted to this treasure ourselves, so an honest accounting of our own intellectual debts would be salutary.

Second, as to the morality of not voting.  Voting for the "lesser of two evils" always leaves you with the evil of two lessers.  It doesn't even necessarily give you the lesser of the evils:  voting against Hitler in 1933 didn't prevent the triumph of fascism, mainly, one could argue, because the anti-fascist left didn't get its act together to pose a real alternative to reaction.  In the absence of such a clear and compelling alternative in this much less dire moment, not voting is itself a political act:  it's a way of saying that I refuse to countenance the current political culture.  In effect, I'm voting -- with my feet -- against the system.  Only if you accept the fundamental legitimacy of the system can you see that position as immoral or irresponsible.  Again, I take an Augustinian position:  I participate in the politics of the earthly city, but only in such a way as is consonant, in my judgment, with faith and morals.  I'm cheerfully and unapologetically parasitic on the empire's laws:  I abide by them, but only because and to the extent that they further the work of the gospel.

When and if they don't, so much the worse for them.  So my not-voting is tactical, not principled:  I'm not Mike Baxter or Mike Budde, both of whom refuse to vote on principle.  (Even Hauerwas votes.)


Bruce Berglund: My apologies to Eric for misrepresenting his stance. I had been chewing on your corrective to my remarks--and your point about the GOP holding the door open to a way of seeing that might lead to a resolution of the party's inconsistencies. Then I turned through the channels on the way to the ballgame and came across the TV-preacher network's news program. Here was all the vitriol and insolence of Fox News, wrapped in the cloak of religious certitude. I have to spit out any notion of "life-engendering ways of seeing" or granting "epistemic authority to Christian sources," and turn back to my first position: this is a bad version of the Constantinian alliance. What is worse for the church, siding with the secular Left or the Constantinian Right? The latter, I say. And that is why I vote to defeat that alliance.


Scott Moore: I have found this exchange to be quite helpful and I hope we've given our readers some new perspectives on which to reflect as we head toward next week's vote.  I too have learned a lot.  I must admit however that, despite deep sympathy for the issues and questions Bruce raises, I am not persuaded by his eloquent arguments for Kerry and against Bush.  However frustrated I am by the Constantinian Right (and I am very frustrated indeed), I do not believe that I can legitimize Kerry's secular Left by supporting it.  Yes, abortion is the principal obstacle there for me, but it's also the case that for Christians, abortion is much more than simply "single issue politics."  It is about the nature of moral justification.  Though I remain a registered Democrat, Kerry and the Democratic party have continued to offer not only moral justification but "normalization" for a culture of convenience and consumption versus a culture of hospitality and life.  A world in which the private use of lethal force is not just morally justified but becomes the normal state of affairs is a world which Christians can never legitimize and a world in which our alienation comes to be written in ever larger and ever bolder script.

I will vote on Tuesday for some local candidates but I have decided not to vote for president.  Neither one of these men and neither one of these parties does sufficient justice to the basic Christian commitment to the culture of life.  I am deeply grateful that TNP exists and I hope it will continue to provide a forum where thoughtful Christians can reflect and argue about those matters that matter most.

Eric Miller: Looking back on this exchange, and on many other similar conversations and debates, I realize that I've never seen such a broad, quietly bitter hopelessness during an election season.  It's no surprise that anxiety, anger, and confusion are the dominant states of mind among people I know, of whatever party.  

Drawing by a Guantanamo Bay Prisoner
1968 must have felt like this to many.  Then, some on the left thought that the Democrats had so botched things up and compromised the nation's soul that they must go at any cost.  That cost, needless to say, was high.  How might a Humphrey administration have altered the past three decades?  Four days from election day, I'm still not convinced not-voting is not irresponsible.

Neither am I convinced that if I vote for either party I won't leave a portion of my soul in the ballot box, for reasons I've already stated.  The question that lingers with me is this: Is there one single issue that is so pliable and so consequential that at this moment it requires one particular party over the other?  For many, this single issue is Iraq, and foreign affairs in general.  For others, it is Bush's Constantinian mode of governance.  I find myself compelled by varying degrees by each.  But what I'm wondering is this: might that single, hugely decisive issue of this moment be what Bill McClay, in the current issue of First Things, calls the "manufacturing of human being strictly for medical and quasi-medical uses," as we continue on the futile, diabolical quest of, in his troubling phrase, "comprehensively remaking ourselves?"  This is the question that haunts me as we move toward election day, and that may lead me to cast a vote for Bush.

Eugene McCarraher: I'm anxious, angry, and confused, but I'm not bitter or hopeless.  I like Gramsci's advice: "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will."  The only way to really hold those two things together, however, is not through faith in dialectical historical development, but through faith in Christ.

My analogy wouldn't be to 1968 and Humphrey, but to 1960.  Then, we had two candidates whom Dwight Macdonald dubbed "Burroughs vs. IBM."  In the same year, C. Wright Mills wrote "A Letter to the New Left."  What happened within five years?  A new left, a new sense of possibility, both of which drew on thinking from the previous two decades.  Could we be at the precipice of, or spark, yet another such moment?  I'm enough of a believer in the cunning of the Spirit to think that we haven't seen the last episode yet.








Thoughts on a Seussentenial
by John Fea

"It's a great day for UP."
-Dr. Seuss

"'Up' may be the wrong direction."
--Wendell Berry

I.
When it comes to learning how to read, American children have had plenty of tutors. In 1690, the New England Primer schooled Puritan young people in the Calvinist belief: "In Adam's fall, we sinned all."  William Holmes McGuffey sold millions of his McGuffey Readers and held a virtual monopoly on the way nineteenth-century young people were taught their ABCs.  By the 1930s, elementary school students were "having fun" with Dick, Jane, and Spot.  But as important as all of these developments are to the history of education in this country, they pale in comparison to the impact that Theodor Geisel has had in classrooms, libraries, and living rooms across America.

PM July 16, 1941 :: Dr. Seuss Collection,Mandeville Special Collections Library, UC San Diego

While most of us have probably never heard of Theodor Geisel, we are all familiar with his work. Writing under the name "Dr. Seuss," Geisel helped millions of kids become literate and, in the process, exposed them to a set of ideas that have long defined America.  His sheer commercial success (over 200 million books sold), the impressionable nature of his young audience, and his multi-generational staying power demands that we give him his due as one of the most important cultural figures in the post-war era.  In a clever attempt to sell more of his books and extend his legacy into the twenty-first century (probably in that order), Random House has decided to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of Geisel's birth by declaring 2004 the "Seussentenial."

Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, Geisel spent most of his life living and writing from his home in a remodeled naval observation tower in LaJolla, California.  He and his first wife Helen did not have any children (Geisel once said that he did not particularly enjoy being around children), but his books--loaded with strange characters and outlandish story lines--made him, without competitor, the most popular and best-selling children's author in American history. Dr. Seuss expanded our imagination, encouraged our sense of self-worth, and challenged us to make the world a better place.

Giesel had a subtle, unintended, but yet irresistibly strong influence on the way children understood America.  He was not politically active, seldom lent his name or his time to social causes, and claimed consistently throughout his career that he rarely wrote with a particular agenda in mind (anyone familiar with the whimsical absurdity of works like Green Eggs and Ham or There's a Wocket in My Pocket would certainly agree). In fact, twenty-seven publishers rejected his first book, To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, because it did not provide readers with a clear moral message.

Yet even as he tried to avoid writing morality tales, much of Geisel's work reflects his deep and lifelong commitment to liberal individualism.  Seuss's books, through their celebration of opportunity, cosmopolitanism, and human rights, read like childhood primers on the American values.  But at the same time, they remind us that the ideals of freedom, self-interest, and liberty have always existed in tension with the pursuit of a common life and the personal sacrifices that such a life requires.  Dr. Seuss remains a window into the deepest convictions and paradoxes of American culture.  

II.

Theodor's Geisel's commitment to liberalism began well before he became the national icon that he is today.  During World War Two, Geisel wrote editorial cartoons from the pages of the left-leaning New York newspaper PM that scathingly criticized Naziism, Fascism, American isolationism (Charles Lindbergh was a favorite target on this front), and racial discrimination in the hiring of defense workers.  PM and Geisel seemed to be a perfect match.  At the time he began his work for the paper, he had gained only modest critical and commercial success with his first four children's books, making the offer to write for PM an ideal way to introduce its 150,000 readers to the quirky style of Dr. Seuss. Drawing for PM also provided Geisel with a regular outlet for his emerging political sensibilities.  "PM was against people who pushed other people around," Geisel told his biographers shortly before his death, "I liked that."  Between 1941 and 1943, he published over two hundred cartoons on the pages of this crusading voice for America's popular front.

Geisel's PM cartoons foreshadowed the flavor of much of his post-war work. Until his death in 1991, he wrote and illustrated books for young people that addressed nearly every major concern of the American left. For example, Yertle the Turtle, the story of a turtle named Mack who topples a tyrannical turtle-king, mirrors much of the spirit of the American Revolution, the workers movement, and the Allied assault on Hitler.  "The Sneetches," from The Sneetches and Other Stories, offers a lesson against discrimination.  Some Sneetches have stars (of David?) on their bellies and some Sneetches do not, but in the end both races of Sneetches put their differences aside and learn that "...Sneetches are Sneetches / And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches."



The Cat in the Hat, the book that catapulted Geisel to international fame, is an outright assault on the conforming tendencies of 1950s suburbia.  A six-foot tall cat and his mischievous friends, "Thing One" and "Thing Two," teach two middle-class children how to play more creatively, even if such rambunctiousness occurs in clear violation of their mother's wishes.  The Cat in the Hat not only replaced Fun With Dick and Jane as America's preferred primer for young readers, but it also anticipated the general mood of the 1960's counterculture.

In The Butter Battle Book, Seuss offers a stinging criticism of the nuclear arms race through the story of two nations---the Yooks and the Zooks---that find themselves on the brink of Armageddon over something as silly as how bread gets buttered.  In one of his most controversial, chilling, and un-Suesslike endings, Geisel does not resolve the conflict on the final page of the book.  Instead, he leaves the military representatives of both nations standing on a wall wondering who will be the first to drop their doomsday device (a "Big Boy Boomeroo") and destroy the world. 

Most prominent in Geisel's work are the liberal Enlightenment values of progress, self-improvement, and cosmopolitanism.  Perhaps more than anything else, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a movement defined by the principles of human potential and the advancement of society.  The best citizens of the Enlightenment's "republic of letters" were those individuals who maintained primary loyalty, not to family, friends, faith, or nature, but to an international commonwealth of humankind.  Such citizens of the world were rational creatures and thus had little tolerance for those who were unable to rid themselves of parochial passions or who remained too committed to traditional ways of thinking, knowing, and living.  Such a progressive mindset found a happy home in the United States and came to define much of twentieth-century American liberalism.  As a political and cultural offspring of the Enlightenment, the liberal democratic tradition---as evidenced in both major political parties---has exalted the ability of the autonomous person who, through exercising freedom of choice, can shape his or her own destiny. Liberalism, particularly in its elite and academic manifestations, has also fought against all forms of provincialism and anything it deems to be "backward" in nature.



As a child of this liberal tradition, Dr. Seuss encouraged his readers to achieve the impossible, to overcome limits, and to rise above the troubles of life.  His books celebrate mobility---both social and geographic.  Kids should not be held down by the places they live, the social circumstances in which they find themselves, or the ideas to which they have been exposed.  They should instead imagine what is possible and then go out and make it happen.  This, for Geisel, was the essence of the American dream.  And he taught it to children well.

In On Beyond Zebra, for example, Seuss challenges children to push the margins of received knowledge.  The book begins in a classroom where Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell has just learned all twenty-six letters of the alphabet, prompting him to declare triumphantly: "So now I know everything anyone knows / from beginning to end, from start to close / because Z is as far as the alphabet goes."  But Conrad's nameless friend, the narrator of the story, quickly informs him that his triumph is not complete.  Didn't Conrad know that there were letters in the alphabet that came after 'Z?'  If he could only exceed the boundaries of traditional knowledge he could export himself to far away lands and encounter exotic creatures such as Glikkers, Sneedles, and even Floob-Boober-Bab-Boober-Bubs.  By going "Beyond Zebra," Conrad becomes a child of the modern era.  He learns that knowledge is progressive, not fixed, and as a result can serve a variety of cosmopolitan ends.  The moral of the story is summed up best in Seussian rhyme:  "Oh the things you can find / If you don't stay behind."

This challenge to question authority and the received intelligence that often comes with it is also evident in McElligot's Pool, the story of a young boy named Marco who spends his day fishing in a tiny self-contained pond. When a farmer informs him that no one has ever caught anything other than an old boot or can in this pool, the boy begins to weave a tale of possibility in order to counter such dour prospects.  The farmer, carrying a pitchfork and wearing worn-out overalls and a rumpled old hat, represents the classic Jeffersonian yeoman.  He is familiar with the landscape, knows from history and tradition that the pool is fishless, and tries to impart this local knowledge to Marco.  But in the progressive spirit that defines many of Seuss's stories, Marco rejects this agrarian wisdom and even implies that perhaps the farmer is the one who is the real "fool."  What if McElligot's pool was not self-contained; but linked through underground tributaries to other bodies of water that, in turn, would connect it to the Tropics, the Arctic, or even Tibet?  If this were true, it is possible that Marco could easily pull a "cow-fish," a "2 headed eel," or an "Australian kangaroo fish" out of the pool.   

Marco's tale is more than just a whopper of a fish story.  It reflects the way many Americans have understood Enlightenment improvement.  As the political party of progress, the nineteenth-century Whigs adopted an economic and cultural vision for America that encouraged people to move beyond the confines of their local places by building turnpikes, bridges, railroads, and canals that would unite them in a common national embrace.  While the idea of such a national culture was first articulated by Alexander Hamilton and defended most vigorously by Henry Clay, it triumphed with Abraham Lincoln and the Northern victory in the American Civil War.  The Union success secured a Whig nation and struck the deathblow to an older, decentralized, landed, and decidedly Jeffersonian understanding of America.  Marco thus echoes Whig values when he constructs an imaginative infrastructure of waterways that allows him to overcome the parochialism of McElligot's pool.  In the end, Marco's tale of possibility, fictitious as it is, has convinced the populist farmer (if the expression on his face is any indication) of the limited scope of his own agrarian world-view. 

The book that perhaps best exemplifies Geisel's cosmopolitan individualism is, fittingly, the last book he wrote.  Oh the Places You'll Go, published shortly before his death, reads like a Horatio Alger tale of self-improvement.  It glorifies the individual right of choice in shaping one's future ("You can steer yourself any direction you choose").  "You're on your own / And you know what you know," says the narrator, "And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go."  Even when troubles come (and they do) Seuss tells his young readers to expect to face them alone ("All Alone / whether you like it or not / Alone will be something you'll be quite a lot"). Self-improvement can be an isolating endeavor.

Oh the Places You'll Go is an American sermon.  It draws upon an older, but still powerful, historiographical tradition that celebrated the making of Americans through the courage of the first colonists, the rugged individualism of Westward migration, and the self-determination of immigrants.  Like nineteenth-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner's provocative and controversial interpretation of the American frontier, Oh the Places You'll Go preaches that personal happiness comes through leaving home for more liberating spaces. If life does not yield the level of self-satisfaction that we might expect, then the narrator exhorts us to "head straight out of town / It's opener there, in the wide open air."  For Seuss (and Turner) "Out there" is where liberated individuals are made This is a lesson in social Darwinism that Seuss probably learned from his own parents---German immigrants who settled in Springfield, gained moderate success as brewers, and were able to send their son to Dartmouth.

Midway through Oh the Places You'll Go, Seuss describes the most dreadful of all places for Americans---"The Waiting Place."  It is here where people on the move get stuck. They stop being mobile and become confined to a specific locale where the pace of life is much slower.  Patience, however, is not a virtue for those who are "off to great places."  If, for whatever reason, a "high flyer" is forced to land, he or she should not stay grounded for long.  "NO!," the narrator proclaims, waiting is "not for you."  "Somehow you'll escape / all that waiting and staying / You'll find the bright places / where Boom Bands are playing."  The sermon closes with the promise of America: "And will you succeed? / Yes, you will indeed! / 98 and ¾ percent guaranteed."

Precisely because of its uplifting message of self-esteem and mobility, Oh the Places You"ll Go has enjoyed much commercial success.  It has made annual appearances on best-selling book lists--especially during May and June when it has become a popular graduation gift.  A quick look at the customer comments on the web pages of on-line booksellers like Barnes and Noble and Amazon reveal its continuing popularity.  The praise for the therapeutic philosophy behind the book is astounding.  One customer wrote: "Dr. Seuss acknowledges in this book that sometimes when all options are unattractive, we need to head right out of town.  And how right he is."  Another reader noted that Oh the Places You'll Go would help people "escape those unhappy times for good times to come."  Yet another enthusiastic commentator concluded:  "Next to the Bible this is my all time favorite book."  And one reviewer reaped the scorn of Amazon customers when he or she dared to call the premise behind the book "flawed" and criticized it for teaching his or her son that "if you don't like where you are, get up and leave it all behind for great adventure...." Needless to say, only 2 of 15 people found her review to be "helpful."

III.

Oh the Places You'll Go raises some interesting paradoxes in Geisel's thought when compared with The Lorax, perhaps his most straightforward piece of social commentary. The Lorax addresses the environmental consequences of capitalism.  The story begins on a dark and clearly post-industrial landscape. A young boy is walking down "The Street of the Lifted Lorax" in search of the "Once-ler," a reclusive hermit who lives in a rickety shack at the end of the street.  The boy wants to know more about the creature for whom the street is named.  Who was the Lorax and why did he leave?  These are questions that only the Once-ler can answer.



The Once-ler begins by explaining to the boy that the area surrounding the Street of the Lifted Lorax used to be a utopian-like countryside full of bright-blue lakes, green grass, and colorful "Truffula Trees."  Swomee Swans, Bar-ba-loot bears, and Humming Fish all lived happily within this Edenic habitat. But all of that quickly changed when the Once-ler (he describes himself to the boy in the third person) arrived and began chopping down trees in order to make "Thneeds," an odd-looking piece of clothing made from the Truffula's silky-soft tufts.  While the Once-ler never quite tells us what one might do with a Thneed, he is sure about the fact that a Thneed is something "That-All-People-Need."  Enter the Lorax: a short, stumpy, orange creature with a thick mustache and a cranky personality who emerges from the stump of a Truffula and announces that he speaks "for the trees."  He demands that the Once-ler stop chopping Truffula trees and accuses him of being "crazy with greed," since no one in his or her right mind would ever actually purchase a Thneed.

But the Lorax underestimates both consumer desire and the capitalist's need to satisfy it.  After a man in a business suit buys the first Thneed for $3.98, the Once-ler calls all of his relatives to come to this new land and join him in the Thneed-making business. Before long, the Once-ler has built machines to cut down Truffula trees and factories to manufacture them into Thneeds.  The Lorax continues to protest, even to the point of sending the birds, bears, and fish elsewhere so that they can find food and clean air.  The Once-ler, though saddened a bit by the havoc he is wreaking on the environment, remains ever the capitalist, affirming that "business is business / And business must grow...." Despite the prophetic words of the persistent Lorax he claims to have a "right" to expand his company in the way he sees fit. 

Eventually, due to all the smoke in the air and the "glump" in the lakes, the Lorax exits his utopia, lifted away through the last "hole in the smog."  He does, however, leave a monument to himself and his message---a circular brick platform inscribed with the word, "UNLESS."  Seuss then takes us back to the conversation between the Once-ler and the boy on the now depressed landscape.  The Once-ler, who has clearly repented of his environmental crimes by this point, claims that the boy's arrival has enabled him to decipher the meaning of the Lorax's inscription.  "Unless" someone acts, he concludes, other places around the world will suffer a similar fate at the hands of industrial capitalism.  The Once-ler gives the boy the last remaining Truffula seed and tells him to plant a new forest.  Perhaps then, he hopes, the Lorax and his friends will return.

At first glance, Oh the Places You Go and The Lorax seem to be cut out of the same political mold.  Post-war liberals from Harry Truman to John Kerry have defended both social mobility rooted in individual choice and the protection of environmental resources from the extremes of corporate capitalism.  But when read together, these two stories shed more light on the paradoxes in the Seussian canon than they do on the ideological consistency of his work.  They suggest that belief in personal self-betterment, as exalted in Oh the Places You'll Go, can easily degenerate into crass self-indulgence.  The "Once-ler," who travels in a covered wagon reminiscent of the ones used by settlers of the American West, leaves home to find pastures suitable to his pursuit of personal happiness. The result of his move to the "wide open air," however, is an environmental holocaust.  

Similarly, when we are "off to great places... off and away...," we are often doing so at the expense of the communities we leave behind.  It should probably not surprise us that Seuss's phrase, "Oh the Places You'll Go," has been used by Entrepreneur Magazine to promote the use of cell phones, laptops, and other technological gadgets that make up every businessperson's "mobile arsenal."  The magazine informs its readers that "with the latest and greatest in mobile toys, you'll be ahead of the other girls and boys.  And wherever you are, you will succeed. (98 and ¾ percent guaranteed)."  One has to wonder what the Lorax, that stubborn critic of the corporate world's role in the destruction of place, would think of it all. When self-improvement and pursuits of happiness are defined entirely by social and geographic mobility, it makes it increasingly more difficult to care for natural and human places in the ways that the Lorax challenges us to do.  Responsible conservation requires a care and love for places that can only come from staying put and obtaining an intimate knowledge of a particular landscape and its history.  It demands the practice of virtues such as patience, neighborliness, and loyalty---character traits that run counter to the flow modern life.

These paradoxes in Geisel's work have been part of the American experiment for over two hundred years. Thomas Paine's defense of common sense rights has always been at odds with John Adams' commitment to the public good. Such tensions have become the lifeblood of American historical and political interpretation.  For some scholars, America was built on a Lockean foundation of individual rights, democratic choice, and the potential for economic and social improvement.  Others have argued that the founders were civic humanists who, in the classical republican tradition, asked citizens to suppress self-interest (in exchange for virtue) and welcome a world defined by limits. More recent scholarship seems to suggest that indeed both sides of this historiographical tussle are correct.  Americans in the past sought to creatively balance these two ideals.   While Dr. Seuss was devoted to the belief that liberal individualism was essential to any democratic society, he also realized that it was often not sufficient to sustain the kind of communities needed for a republic to survive.  

Geisel regularly used communitarian or classical republican themes to show that liberalism did have its limits.  The popular How the Grinch Stole Christmas tells the story of the sinister Grinch who believes he can steal happiness from the "Whos down in Whoville" by depriving them of their Christmas presents.  Though the Grinch's master plan---to swoop down from Mt. Crumpet disguised as Santa Claus and quietly pilfer all the Who's earthly possessions---has no moral grounding whatsoever, it is possible, at least early in the story, to sympathize with the Grinch's critique of Who society.  The Whos are clearly a people of material abundance.  They bask in a host of luxuries, from the latest toys and noise-makers to the obscenely large feast of which they partake each Christmas.  But we soon realize that there is more to the Whos than meets the eye.  While the Whos certainly have a right as citizens and individuals to fulfill their holiday wants and desires with consumer products, and absolutely have the right to be disgruntled by the theft of virtually all that they own, their most important connections are not to their goods, but to each other. In the end they teach the Grinch (and us) that true happiness comes from being part of something larger than one's self.  

And who can forget the adventures of Horton, the kindly elephant who confronts the selfishness of the world around him by displaying traditional virtues amid difficult trials? In Horton Hatches the Egg, Horton must face the ridicule of the entire jungle when he agrees to protect the egg of a lazy bird named Mayzie who would rather sun bathe in Palm Beach than nurture her incubating offspring.  Horton's loyalty, patience, and trustworthiness are evident in his mantra: "I meant what I said / And I said what I meant... / An elephant's faithful / One hundred percent."  In Horton Hears a Who, the heroic elephant comes to the aid of a microscopic civilization that he discovers on a speck of dust.  When the Wickersham Brothers, a gang of rascally monkeys, threaten to boil the speck in Beezle-Nut oil, Horton goes to extraordinary measures to keep this newfound civilization safe. Even as Horton persistently informs us "a person's a person no matter how small," his actions remind us that the individual rights of personhood are often secured by the sacrifice of others.  

In one of his lesser-known works, I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, Geisel cautions his young readers that cosmopolitan ambitions do not always yield a more comfortable life.  This is the tale of a young boy who was living a "happy" and "carefree" existence in the "Valley of Vung" before he encounters a series of personal mishaps---from stubbing his toe on a rock to getting bit by something called a Quilligan Quail---that prompts him, in the words of Oh the Places You'll Go, to "head straight out of town." The moment his problems start to overwhelm him, a "chap" arrives driving a "One-Wheeler Wubble" and asks him if he would like a ride to the City of Solla Sollew, "where they never have troubles, at least very few."   

The boy takes the Wubble-driver up on his offer, but along the way encounters a host of other, more difficult, tribulations. The driver, for example, exploits the boy's labor by forcing him to pull the Wubble across rocky and steep terrain.  He finally manages to shake his oppressor, but the trials do not abate.  In the course of his journey the boy misses a bus to Solla Sollew, gets caught in a "flubbulous flood" that almost kills him, is recruited into an army engaged in a military battle it cannot win, and falls into a traffic-laden underground tunnel full of birds.  When he finally does make it to Solla Sollew, he finds no celestial city, but rather a place that is permanently closed to outsiders.  It is at this point that the message of Solla Sollew departs decidedly from that of Oh the Places You'll Go. Realizing the futility of his quest, the boy decides to abandon his dream of cosmopolitan happiness and return to the Valley of Vung to face up to his original problems.  Sometimes the way of improvement leads home.

The progressive commitments behind what historian Michael Kazin has called "the Seussian Left" have done much good for America.  They informed a foreign policy that toppled Hitler and contained communist totalitarianism (a lesson that left-wing critiques of George Bush's intervention on behalf of democracy in Iraq often fail to remember).  Progressives (including the liberal Republican Teddy Roosevelt) "conserved" our environment amid the devastating destructiveness of Onceler-like industrialization.  And liberals like FDR and LBJ fought for the rights of ethnic immigrants seeking American freedom even as these newcomers clung tenaciously to their Old World traditions and communities in a way that some believed was un-American.

But the contradictions in Seuss's canon between individualism and community, cosmopolitanism and local attachments, and self-interest and self-sacrifice reveal the inability of the left to inspire us---to offer any hope for those longing for a different kind of human flourishing.   Can liberalism prompt us to get out of bed with voices of praise on Christmas morning even when all of our gifts have been stolen?  Does it give us strength to risk our lives for the preservation of others---whether it is Horton's Whoville or those in the crumbling towers of the World Trade Center?  What motivates one to surrender cosmopolitan ambition and return home to face, sin, suffering, and trial?  Where do we find the courage to defend creation against those seeking to destroy it?

The paradoxes and tensions in Seuss's work offer a window into one of the twentieth-century's most influential liberals searching---maybe unconsciously---for answers to questions that his liberalism, even on its best days, cannot seem to provide.  For all of his true brilliance, one wonders if Seuss really grasped the limits of his own optimistic faith in ambition and progress.  In many ways, his books read more like an author trying to come to terms with the liberalism of his youthful days at PM and less like an uncritical celebration of that leftist legacy.  Perhaps it is this very struggle---one that we all must face while living in a country that was founded as a great Enlightenment experiment---which has allowed the writings of Theodor Geisel to have such an enduring appeal.





On Being Contrary for its Own Sake
by James V. Schall, S. J.
"The mind of man is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it...."
--Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, March 24, 1750
THE INITIAL choice that each of us has to make in life is whether we think the world and ourselves already exist with some intelligible content to define what we are or whether there is nothing there but what we put there. The former position, it would seem, is rather demanding on us. It suggests that we are not our own self-creators, that what we are is something for us to discover, not make out of our own imaginary resources. But we are seemingly freer if there is nothing there in the first place, if we are solely responsible for our world and our own being. The trouble with being so absolutely free that nothing is presupposed, however, is that what is finally put there is also only ourselves. In such a view, everyone's world is identical, full of only themselves, with their own laws enforced by no one but themselves. On this premise, no reason can be found not to be something else tomorrow.  A world full of nothing but Schall, it strikes me, as utterly boring. A world in which Schall is never the same is even worse.

"Adolescent Love #4" by Scott KolboPolyester Plate Lithography

A student recently sent me a copy of Being a Dog Is a Full-Time Job (Andrews and McMeel, 1994). Charlie Brown and Linus are on a teeter-totter. As he rises to its height, Charlie, rather panic-stricken, yells, "It's her!" A confused Linus responds, "Her who?" Up again, Charlie, smitten, explains, "Look, it's the little red-haired girl!" They both get off the teeter-totter. Charlie makes a deal with Linus, "Do me a favor. Go over and talk to her. Say you know me.  Try to find out if she likes me." This is the great question -- "Does someone else like us?" Do they "know that we exist or care?" We next see Linus determinedly walking towards the girl as Charlie cunningly tells him, "I'll hide here behind this trash thing and listen."

In the next scene, we see a pleased Charlie duly hidden but listening. "Hi there. My name is Linus. I believe we have a friend in common." Charlie's mood suddenly becomes more sober as Linus tries to describe him to the little red-haired girl, who evidently has never heard of him. "His name is Charlie Brown. He sits across the room from you in school.... No, by the windows, near the pencil sharpener. No, in the last row." Charlie's face droops even lower as Linus continues his description of him. "Well, kind of blond, I guess. No, you're thinking of Mike. No, not as tall."

By this time Charlie has slumped down into a kind of stupor, but he still hopelessly listens for some spark of encouragement. "A shirt with sort of a jagged stripe. No, not John, John is a lot bigger." Finally, Charlie is flat on his back as he helplessly hears the final words that prove that the little red-haired girl has no clue about who he is, has never so much as noticed him, and does not "like" him.

"Sort of a round face," Linus continues. "Doesn't ring a bell, huh? No, Brown. Like in town. Just doesn't ring a bell, huh? Nothing, huh?" In the end, we only hear Charlie, now reduced to "nothing," muttering forlornly to himself, "I can't stand it!"

That may be the saddest piece of modern literature I ever read. I cannot stand it either.

No one has to love us, not even the little red-haired girl. Love does not really use the form "has to" but "wants to," "chooses to." And because of this undetermined freedom, because Charlie is not even noticed, there can be romance and risk and excitement in the world. Some day she might choose to notice. The story of Charlie Brown and the red-haired girl would be even more poignant if the girl did not exist. But Charlie did not give her being. She is just there, in the school room. Created being does not cause itself to be. It is seen, encountered, across crowded rooms, even school rooms.

Josef Pieper remarked someplace that we cannot know that we are loveable unless we are first loved. He meant loved "unconditionally," not for something we have or possess. And no one can see anyone as loveable who is concerned only with himself. In the beginning, we must suddenly discover that what is not ourselves also exists and is there before us. We are struck by it. Something unknown comes crashing into our world. Suddenly our world includes a newness that we did not imagine, could not imagine. Yet, like the little red-haired girl, many wonderful things pass our notice. We are beings not given to know everyone intimately but only some few, as Aristotle told us. The friend of everyone is the friend of no one, as the ancients also knew.

"Adolescent Love #5" by Scott KolboPolyester Plate Lithography

The most important thing in the world to know is whether we can freely give a gift to someone. Behind the gift lies the question of sacrifice: whether we can give ourselves and yet remain ourselves. We never just "give" gifts either. No gift is simply a gift. It is an effort to give the giver. But we do not want the giver, in his giving, to cease being the one who gives. Love does not consume but preserves the beloved as other. The what is of the other we want to remain, for that is what astounds us and opens us to more than ourselves.

I have entitled these brief reflections, "on being contrary for its own sake." There is a certain romance to the word "contrary" -- Mary, Mary, quite contrary. The word itself is reminiscent of St. Thomas's sed contra by which he thinks it necessary to state accurately what he does not hold. He wants to see what truth there is in what seems not true, for there is always something. We cannot be wrong without also having something right. It is not possible to hold something in which there is absolutely no truth.  This is why falsity and error are worth pursuing. We better know the truth, Aristotle told us, when we can explain why an error about it is possible.

But we ought not to be contrary for its own sake, that is, just to be contrary. We should be contrary to examine the truth of things. That is what our contrariness seeks. And it is not futile to seek the truth of things, including the truth of the claim that there is no truth, only contrariness, only our own free constructs presupposed to nothing but ourselves.

Aristotle also tells us that there are two very different kinds of things: those which exist for their own sakes, which cannot be "otherwise" and those which can be otherwise. Everything that we do or make in our lives can be otherwise, yet when we do something, it happens. We are not determined beings until we determine ourselves, until what we do has been permanently finished.

The great Samuel Johnson two and a half centuries ago told us told us that we are "never satisfied with the objects before us." "Why is this?" we wonder. Plato's excursions into the highest things always had about them a sense of soaring, that we find the best only by finding first what is less than the best. Yet, we begin from what is, from what is clearly less than the best. It is all right that less than the best also exists. Yet, the best can sometimes, often, prevent us from seeing that what is not the best still really is good. The best is not apart from the least, even in the least.

What indeed are "the objects before us?" Do we notice that they are there, before us? Our minds wonder if it is all right not to be "all things." Is it all right that I am I and not someone else, the problem of the irreducible being of substance? But surely what I am is finite, clearly not the wholeness of being. By being myself, am I deprived of what is not myself?

We are given the power to know what is not ourselves so that we do not, in being ourselves, miss out on all that is not ourselves. It is all right to be a human being, a finite human being, because we, by being ourselves, know what is not ourselves. Yet, we want to know things "for their own sakes." We have a power that simply wants to know what is, to know that it is, to delight in it. We become what we are not and remain what we are in so doing.

To be "contrary" means that we are aware of the inadequacy of our knowing, without doubting that we do know or that what we know is true. A limited knowledge is not no knowledge. It is only false if we affirm something that is not so.

"Adolescent Love #6" by Scott KolboPolyester Plate Lithography

The strangest part of our being is rooted in a certain unsettlement that reaches its most poignant stage when we are closest to real being and real knowing. We sense that our alternative is not being and nothingness but what is and everything else. We cannot begin in nothingness. To know nothing, as it were, we have first to know something and deny it. We have to be "contrary" even to imagine nothingness.

Is it, after all, all right to be a finite human being? If we are made, are we poorly made? If we make ourselves, what are we but ourselves? Is this enough? We know that we did not cause ourselves to stand outside of nothingness. We begin in medias res, amidst things that already are in spite of us. Our mode of being is discovery and gift. If it were necessary that we existed, we would not wonder why we exist. But if we wonder why we exist, we seem to be asking a question. Why would we ask a question if we make ourselves to be what we are?

The little red-haired girl did not see Charlie Brown in the classroom or in the world. His very existence was upset because she not only did not "like him" but, even worse, she did not even notice him. What does this suggest to us? It suggests that the completion of our being is not simply that we exist. Being is not complete unless it is acknowledged. And it cannot be acknowledged if what is is only ourselves. We know we do not give the being of things to themselves. As Eric Voegelin asked so often, "Why is there something, not nothing?" "Why is this thing not that thing?" If this thing were that thing, there can be no order in the world for contradiction does not hold things in place if this thing can be that thing.

What is it about our existence that we cannot "stand?" We cannot stand that it is unknown to others. "No one, "Aristotle tells us, "would be happy if he had all the goods and riches of the world but lacked friends." Why not? Because the highest things of which we are capable exist in conversation with others about what is true and about how we live in this world. But conversation is not simply conversation for its own sake--chatter and contrariness just to be contrary. 

We exist so that what is true can be affirmed. We affirm what is true best when we affirm it among friends on the basis of what is in fact true for them irrespective of our own self-made worlds. Descartes once suggested that we can imagine that what is is merely an illusion of the devil. He thought that he had to prove the existence of God in order to disprove the illusion. But we do not start in illusion. We can only be "illuded" if we first encounter something that we cannot doubt. We do not begin in theories, but in what is. But beginning there, we are "not wholly satisfied with the objects immediately before us," as Dr. Johnson said.

Were we "contrary for its own sake," we could never discover the world in which we exist. We would, like the sophists, imagine that we did not exist for the simple reason that we can imagine it. What calls us out of ourselves is our infinite perplexity that we are not the only things that exist. What calls for our gratitude is that what exists is there and that it is more admirable than anything we could make ourselves. If we are struck in amazement by what is, no matter how small, even "a little red-haired girl," we can begin the only adventure that is worthwhile. This is the adventure that begins by our first wondering whether we are first loved and then come to be, or whether we are by ourselves to find a world containing only ourselves, our own imaginations and illusions.

We all need to send out a Linus to see if we are noticed. It is, as I say, the saddest story in our literature to find out that we are not liked or even acknowledged. Nothing tells us more about our own being than this upsetting experience of awaiting the recognition and love of someone else. But this is not a tractate in despair. Quite the contrary, we are loveable because we are first loved. That is what constitutes our being. Our freedom does not make the world, but allows us to accept it as already what it is, because what it is already is so much more than anything we could ourselves imagine or make.



Song of Childhood :: Lied vom Kindsein
by Peter Handke


When the child was a child
It walked with its arms swinging.
It wanted the stream to be a river
the river a torrent
and this puddle to be the sea.

When the child was a child
It didn't know it was a child.
Everything was full of life,
and all life was one.

When the child was a child
It had no opinions about anything.
It had no habits.
It sat cross-legged,
took off running,
had a cowlick in its hair
and didn't make a face when photographed.

When the child was a child
it was the time of these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin, and where does space end?
Isn't life under the sun just a dream?
Isn't what I see, hear and smell
only the illusion of a world before the world?
Does evil actually exist,
and are there people who are really evil?
How can it be that I, who am I,
didn't exist before I came to be
and that someday the one who I am
will no longer be the one I am?

When the child was a child
it choked on spinach, peas, rice pudding
and on steamed cauliflower.
Not it eats all of those
and not just because it has to.

When the child was a child
it once woke up in a strange bed
and now it does so time and time again.
Many people seemed beautiful then
and now only a few, if it's lucky.
It had a precise picture of Paradise
and now it can only guess at it.
It could not conceive of nothingness
and today it shudders at the idea.

When the child was a child
it played with enthusiasm
and now it gets equally excited
but only when it concerns its work.

When the child was a child
It was satisfied with an apple and bread;
it was enough then and still is.

When the child was a child
berries fell into its hand as only berries do
and they still do now.
Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw
and they still do now.
On every mountaintop it had a longing
for yet a higher mountain.
And in each city it had a longing
for yet a bigger city.
And it is still that way.
It reached for the cherries in the treetop
with the elation
it still feels today.
It was shy with all strangers
and it still is.
It awaited the first snow
and it still waits that way.

When the child was a child
it threw a stick into a tree like a lance,
and it still quivers there today.


Als das Kind Kind war,
ging es mit hängenden Armen,
wollte der Bach sei ein Fluß,
der Fluß sei ein Strom,
und diese Pfütze das Meer.

Als das Kind Kind war,
wußte es nicht, daß es Kind war,
alles war ihm beseelt,
und alle Seelen waren eins.

Als das Kind Kind war,
hatte es von nichts eine Meinung,
hatte keine Gewohnheit,
saß oft im Schneidersitz,
lief aus dem Stand,
hatte einen Wirbel im Haar
und machte kein Gesicht beim fotografieren.

Als das Kind Kind war,
war es die Zeit der folgenden Fragen:
Warum bin ich ich und warum nicht du?
Warum bin ich hier und warum nicht dort?
Wann begann die Zeit und wo endet der Raum?
Ist das Leben unter der Sonne nicht bloß ein Traum?
Ist was ich sehe und höre und rieche
nicht bloß der Schein einer Welt vor der Welt?
Gibt es tatsächlich das Böse und Leute,
die wirklich die Bösen sind?
Wie kann es sein, daß ich, der ich bin,
bevor ich wurde, nicht war,
und daß einmal ich, der ich bin,
nicht mehr der ich bin, sein werde?

Als das Kind Kind war,
würgte es am Spinat, an den Erbsen, am Milchreis,
und am gedünsteten Blumenkohl.
und ißt jetzt das alles
und nicht nur zur Not.

Als das Kind Kind war,
erwachte es einmal in einem fremden Bett
und jetzt immer wieder,
erschienen ihm viele Menschen schön
und jetzt nur noch im Glücksfall,
stellte es sich klar ein Paradies vor
und kann es jetzt höchstens ahnen,
konnte es sich Nichts nicht denken
und schaudert heute davor.

Als das Kind Kind war,
spielte es mit Begeisterung
und jetzt, so ganz bei der Sache wie damals, nur noch,
wenn diese Sache seine Arbeit ist.

Als das Kind Kind war,
genügten ihm als Nahrung Apfel, Brot,
und so ist es immer noch.

Als das Kind Kind war,
fielen ihm die Beeren wie nur Beeren in die Hand
und jetzt immer noch,
machten ihm die frischen Walnüsse eine rauhe Zunge
und jetzt immer noch,
hatte es auf jedem Berg
die Sehnsucht nach dem immer höheren Berg,
und in jeden Stadt
die Sehnsucht nach der noch größeren Stadt,
und das ist immer noch so,
griff im Wipfel eines Baums nach dem Kirschen in einem Hochgefühl
wie auch heute noch,
eine Scheu vor jedem Fremden
und hat sie immer noch,
wartete es auf den ersten Schnee,
und wartet so immer noch.

Als das Kind Kind war,
warf es einen Stock als Lanze gegen den Baum,
und sie zittert da heute noch.







Further Scandal: Christian College Professor Doesn't Teach from a Christian Worldview
by Jack Heller
The following essay reprises the author's earlier contribution, "Christian College Professor Flunks Christian Worldview Tests."
I am now into my third year of teaching English at Huntington College, a member institution of the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities. Because of where I teach, students, parents, and administrators take it for granted that I will teach from a Christian worldview. But what does teaching from a Christian worldview mean? Is it my task to critique every work of literature from some doctrinal perspective? Do I say of Edith Wharton's novella Ethan Frome that it presents from a naturalistic worldview the struggles of a man against his social isolation through his desires for his wife's cousin? Do I then contrast naturalism to biblical theism and say that Wharton, for her naturalism (or her secular humanism, if one prefers), falls short of Christian belief, and therefore a proper response is a rejection of her ethos? I am very disinclined to let students evade the issues the text raises by dismissing it as stemming from a naturalistic worldview. I am more inclined to discuss how Wharton creates her fictional world and let students process for themselves how truthful they find that world to be. Worldview criticism too often depends on facile labeling that makes a work's artistry mere window-dressing for amateur philosophizing.

My approach to teaching does not conform to some descriptions of a Christian college professor's job. Claude O. Pressnell, president of the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, complains that "Tragically, a number of faculty within our own Christian colleges and universities struggle with how to think Christianly about their disciplines. We have lost the unification of knowledge under the lordship of Jesus Christ." Pressnell defines the task of Christian college professors:

Christian scholars are charged with the task of teaching their academic disciplines with a well-informed knowledge base and from a distinctly Christian worldview perspective. The task requires rigorous study and a growing and intimate relationship with Christ. The need for attention to the sanctifying process of Christ is of utmost importance when we are dealing in the arena of ideas. Because of the fallenness of our intellect, we must always be kept in check by the standard of God's Word and the community of fellow believers.

I have a confession to make: I don't feel a connection with that description of my task. It splits apart for me in several directions. First, I do believe in the fallenness of the intellect, so much so that I don't think it can be separated from that which is labeled as my Christian worldview. How does a person gain a sense of confidence in his worldview if, in fact, the intellect from which it proceeds is fallen?

On the other hand, I am not convinced that my teaching Shakespeare or Wharton successfully depends upon my having an intimate relationship with Christ. I certainly had no such expectation of my professors in graduate school, only two or three of which would have identified themselves as Christians and none as evangelicals. One professor I had who asserted the need to attend to Shakespeare's Christian faith was gay and not a Christian. While I hope that I develop in my Christian faith, I don't believe that the merit of my teaching should be measured by my faith.

Pressnell evades a question that his description of the Christian scholar's task begs to have answered: What does he mean by "a distinctly Christian worldview?" As his reader and putative audience, I don't take on the responsibility of defining this phrase for him. Pressnell sets up an incomplete contrast; at some point I am asking questions that he would find tragic. Why? What version of a Christian worldview should prevent my having these questions? The catch-22 for Pressnell is, of course, that if he defines his term, he moves from "a distinctly Christian worldview" to "the distinctly Christian worldview." That might clarify whether or not my questions remain tragic, but it would also open the definition to critique from historical, sociological, theological, and other perspectives.

Pressnell's essay appears in a collection entitled The Future of Christian Higher Education (Broadman and Holman, 1999). I was given this book for the orientation to my first year as a professor at Huntington. Its contributors include the presidents, provosts, and deans of such Christian institutions as Baylor University, Calvin College, Westmont College, Union University, and Beeson Divinity School, and such writers as Arthur Holmes and Millard Erickson. With varying degrees of nuance and qualification, most of the contributors speak of the Christian professor's responsibility to teach from a Christian worldview while ducking the question of what that means. However, one of the volume's editors, David Dockery, president of Union University in Tennessee, has no reticence specifying what a Christian worldview excludes:

Throughout education and culture, the very existence of objective truth is being challenged. We observe this in the academy in the poststructuralism of Lyotard, the deconstructionism of Derrida, the radical subjectivism of Foucault, the reader-focused hermeneutic of Stanley Fish; it is even found in popular culture, exemplified in the lyrics of country music artists like Diamond Rio singing that "it's all interpretation, if you want to know the truth you have to read between the lines." A normative view of truth and a Christian worldview are rejected or devalued, seemingly lost in our contemporary culture.

Recently, a high profile culture watcher [George Barna] observed this impact on Christians, noting that "an unbelievably small proportion of believers have what is called a Christian worldview ... and because [most Christians] don't think like Christians, they can't act like Christians. Because they don't act like Christians, they can't have much impact on the world in which they live."

This is utter rubbish. If Christians are not thinking or acting like Christians, it is not because of all the Lyotard and Derrida they are reading. There are many more likely candidates for blame than poststructuralist literary theorists-such as the weakness or sheer lack of teaching in many churches, insipid or pathological Christian bestsellers, and apologists for nationalism in the guise of faith. Or has there been a clandestine substitution of Of Grammatology into the covers of Glorious Appearing without anyone noticing?

Yet Dockery's assessment is a good example of one of the inevitable problems with worldview discussions: the term is so fluid that sooner or later one must ask what is to be included and excluded from a Christian worldview. For all the references to a Christian worldview in The Future of Christian Higher Education, Pressnell and Dockery intuitively believe that something must be excluded, specifically anything that undermines a modernist, objectivist, Christian version of Truth.

I wrote previously about two accounts of that Truth that sound suspiciously like the Republican Party Platform. But for all of their faults, at least the Nehemiah Institute and Worldview Weekend specify their versions of worldview. The definition of "biblical worldview" used by the Nehemiah Institute to assess their test makes only one reference to the Christian faith: "Moral standards are seen as objective rather than subjective, typically from the Judeo-Christian tradition, and quite static." No mention is made of the Bible itself or to any theological traditions. Evangelical worldview theorists might like to scorn these unreflective politically conservative cousins, but on what basis? Their definitions of "worldview" itself, not to mention "Christian worldview," also leave the details up for grabs, so the politically motivated will of course seize the opportunity.

What really goes into the composition of one's worldview? James Sire defines a worldview as "a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic makeup of our world." James Olthuis says that a worldview "is the integrative and interpretative framework by which order and disorder are judged, the standard by which reality is managed and pursued. It is the set of hinges on which all our everyday thinking and doing turns." More recently, David Naugle has claimed that worldview is a semiotic phenomenon: "I ... propose that a worldview as a semiotic structure consists primarily of a network of narrative signs that offers an interpretation of reality and establishes and overarching framework for life." These three theorists of worldview, spanning four decades of thinking on the subject, reveal some of the changes in the concept-from presuppositions to a focus on narrative. Certainly a focus on narrative, in which a Christian would identify her role in a divinely-oriented story, opens up the concept of worldview to broader possibilities than those identified by Worldview Weekend.

In fact, there is a nascent liberalism in how broadly some worldview theorists want to stretch the concept. David Naugle affirms,

I would like to go on record as clearly affirming ... the value of Christian worldview pluralism, just like Arthur Holmes does in his Contours of a Worldview (Eerdmans, 1984). I see great value in the fact that different Christian traditions have contributed remarkable insights into the nature and practice of the faith, and that these insights need to be appreciated, harvested, and applied.

But with a concept this elastic, at some point the question must be asked: Is it helpful? Can it tell us anything about the formative influences that go into making mature Christians? I have yet to find a worldview theorist who describes a specific confluence of influences that go into a Christian worldview. Many, like James Sire in The Universe Next Door, limit the discussion of worldview to religious and philosophical perspectives. Naugle considers what Sigmund Freud has to say about Weltanschauung, but he does not consider how a person's mental, emotional, and behavioral processes shape his or her worldview. Does one's psychological state precede the formation of her worldview, or is it shaped by one's worldview?

These questions could go on. Surely, our cultures shape our worldviews. People from New Orleans, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, from Bogotá, from Calcutta, and from Lagos are likely, I think, to have very different worldviews. Geography may shape a worldview; urban and rural residents of one culture are likely to have different values. Language itself may determine some of the parameters of one's worldview.  Other influences on one's worldview may be historical, sociological, scientific, related to gender, related to economic class, related to age, even related to the sins one has engaged in. Are all these influences equally hospitable to the development of a "Christian worldview?" If there is a Christian worldview, could we say that such a concept unites such historically, culturally diverse writers as the Beowulf poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Edmund Spenser, Martin Luther, Lady Mary Sidney, John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift, Olaudah Equiano, Phyllis Wheatley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, W.H. Auden, Graham Greene, and Flannery O'Connor? Would Coleridge's opium addiction, Auden's homosexuality, Bunyan's imprisonment, Dostoyevsky's compulsive gambling, Kierkegaard's Danish language, and Graham Greene's frequent adulteries color their worldviews?

More than other worldview theorists, Naugle anticipates the direction of these questions; he examines the concept of worldview as it appears in psychology (Freud and Jung), anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and theology. But this works in a direction quite opposite from the common use of worldview in criticism and the creative arts. After seeing how Weltanschauung appears in sociological theory, shouldn't Christian worldview theorists and critics and Worldview Weekend types have to ask how sociological issues, rather than just issues of faith, affect one's worldview? The fact that such questioning so seldom happens, at least in the literature on worldview, should cause Christian academics to pause.

If we identify all of the writers listed above as having Christian worldviews, we have gone no further than to note that they were Christians. Proper criticism of these writers needs to emphasize the religious, cultural, psychological, aesthetic, and all other particularities in their expressions of faith, those parts of their Christian lives that show they weren't all twentieth century evangelicals. A better way to honor the particularities of any Christian life or community of practice without the reductionism of "mere Christianity" worldviewism is to speak of "habits of thought." This phrase-used as a critical term by Christian literary theorist Debora Shuger--acknowledges that individuals and societies (or better, individuals within societies) organize their thinking around certain dominant tropes. During the English Renaissance, those tropes were religious:

Religion during this period supplies the primary language of analysis. It is the cultural matrix for explorations of virtually every topic: kingship, selfhood, rationality, language, marriage, ethics, and so forth. Such subjects are, again, not masked by religious discourse but articulated in it; they are considered in relation to God and the human soul. That is what it means to say that the English Renaissance was a religious culture, not simply a culture whose members generally were religious.

The point of this isn't that there was a Christian worldview on the issue of kingship or of marriage in the seventeenth century, but that people habitually turned to Christian language to express their contradictory multiplicity of ideas, fears, hopes, and desires about those subjects. Habits of thought do not lead to one thought, one definitive Christian worldview. Certainly not in an era when the major disputes were religious.

"Habits of thought" impresses me intuitively. It seems more true to my experience to be able to identify my habits, some of which may be good and some of which need changing. "Habits of thought" fits well with the various biblical injunctions to examine our thoughts. "Worldview," on the other hand, coming as it does out of the German Enlightenment, brings with it the secularizing insistence that the search for truth can terminate on proper positions and principles. A worldview can be true, but has an inherently reductive nature that butts up against the classic recognition that theory and theology are analogical approximations of divine truth. Perhaps that is why the Apostle Paul himself does not think much of his own current view of the world: "For now we see through a glass, darkly" (I Corinthians 13:12). Rather than imparting to my students the abstracted and naïve certainty of a worldview, I would rather leave them with strong, mature habits of thought to which they may have recourse in all that their lives will bring them.








The Buried City:  A Meditation on History and Place
by Jack D. Elliott, Jr. 
A longer version of this article was published in the Journal of Mississippi History 66 (2004): 106-50 and was recently awarded the Willie Hallsell prize for the best article in the Journal of Mississippi History for 2004.



Look now at the city of which these most glorious things were spoken. On earth it is destroyed: it has fallen to the ground before its enemies; now it is not what it once was.  It has delineated an image: this shadow has passed its meaning on to somewhere else.
--St. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos

History…subsumes and transcends the otherwise somewhat paltry present. Yet at every moment also human life subsumes and transcends history, or what for the mundane secularist passes for history: the movement of things and of ourselves through time. To be a human person is to live in the complicated intersection between the eternal, as it is sometimes called, and time-and-place: between the infinite, more or less dimly perceived, and the moving stream of the mundane....  
--Wilfred Cantwell Smith

I.
IN NORTHEAST Mississippi, tributary streams cut through Cretaceous-period geological formations before joining to form the main channel of the Tombigbee River, which then meanders southward toward the Gulf of Mexico. For millennia the river has served as a highway, and human activity still converges at cities located at old river crossings. Along the river are relics of abandoned settlements such as Indian village sites, mounds, and extinct river towns. These sites go unrecognized by most people, but for some they recall a distant immensity of time and existence. One of the extinct towns, Cotton Gin Port, was located below the confluence of two major channels of the river at an old crossing that probably dated to prehistory. Today there is little physical evidence that a settlement existed there over a century ago.

My first visit to the town site was on December 5, 1975, when Jack Wynne, then assistant professor of anthropology at Mississippi State University, and I unloaded my wooden canoe at the landing on Highway 278 and set out downriver the mile or so to the site. Along the way we passed—or so we thought—within the shadow of an eighteenth-century French fort site and paused briefly at the “cannon hole,” a deep bend where a number of guns were supposedly abandoned by a retreating French force.  Staring into the water, we could see nothing beneath its muddy, swirling surface, and we passed on. Shortly after we crossed the old Gaines Trace, we saw two pairs of concrete piers towering over the river like enormous columns of a forgotten ruin, the only sign of the town visible from the river. They once supported a large truss bridge that was built in 1914, then abandoned and demolished in 1937 with the construction of a modern highway bridge. The river crossing at Cotton Gin Port was far older than the bridge; long before the bridge there had been a ferry, and before the ferry, a ford—to what era the ford dated, no one knows.

We climbed up the riverbank and found the site covered in forest growth, with no trace of buildings or roads, but a desultory walk revealed sporadic traces: a street bed, scattered potsherds, bottle fragments, and rusty nails, along with a few piles of brick rubble from collapsed chimneys. A lone granite monument was conspicuous—erected decades ago to commemorate Cotton Gin Port. These remains provided fodder for the imagination; history has the power to open a dimension of mystery in such an otherwise everyday landscape.

During the nineteenth century, the small town had prospered on river commerce until the building of a nearby railroad shifted trade away from the river, leading to the town’s demise and the birth of the nearby railroad town of Amory. Cotton Gin Port’s inhabitants and businesses moved away almost overnight; its yards and streets, desolate, were soon turned into cotton fields and later abandoned to forest. But the place lived on in stories recalled by a few relics and by the monuments erected to its memory. The town retained an exceptional sense of antiquity within its matrix of earlier associations, including prehistoric earthworks, Chickasaw Indians, the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, frontiersmen, a French fort, and lost cannons on the bottom of the river.
Cotton Gin Port’s story is a complex interweaving of history, place, and memory.  The “facts” of history are not merely mirror-like descriptions produced by detached, “objective” individuals; the world is known only through the filters of our minds. Consequently, phenomenologists speak of the “life world,” the world as we know it, made up of not only the things that we perceive but also their deeper meanings. Cotton Gin Port, and especially two of its associations—the cannon hole and the monument—illustrate well the strong personal and social dimensions of this interplay.

The first association—the cannon hole—is, as noted, a deep bend in the river upstream from the town site, where cannons had purportedly been found during the nineteenth century. The discovery of cannons spawned a flurry of imaginative speculation, linking the guns to a legendary fort from whence, it was claimed, the cannons had been pushed into the river by French troops after a battle with the Chickasaws. Others, looking for a more ancient origin, associated the cannons with the ill-fated sixteenth-century expedition of Hernando de Soto.  

"Voices" by Scott KolboLithograph"If you have voices you'd better listen to them..."--Flannery O'Connor

On a cold, overcast day in March 1977, I set out with two colleagues—Jim Atkinson and Susan Boyd—to find the cannons. When we arrived at the cannon hole in an aluminum johnboat, we found the water high, cold, and, as always, muddy. We had brought a long steel rod with which to probe the river bottom for cannon barrels and, given a considerable area to cover, we had devised a method for consistently probing every square foot of bottom. We proceeded to probe at relatively small, regular intervals along straight lines.

Controlling a twelve-foot rod in a slow but inexorable current was more easily conceived than accomplished, and when we occasionally struck an object, we found it impossible to determine its size, shape, or material composition. Holding the boat stationary in the current while trying to move it along precise lines was also difficult. Aware that the river channel had probably changed, we knew that, if there were any cannons, they might very well have been buried deeply under silt at the bottom of the river if not entirely under dry land. We decided that the search was futile; the waters would not give up their secrets that day. 

If we had found the cannons, they might have contributed some information to scholarly history.  But I knew that our trip to that secluded bend in the river was more than a mere quest for data about phenomena. Those opaque waters evoked dimensions of existence that cannot be described in ordinary discursive speech.

The other significant site is the Cotton Gin Port monument, the granite monolith resembling a large tombstone that stands on the edge of an abandoned street, accessible to only those willing to tramp through the woods to reach it. On the face of the stone is an inscription identifying the site as “The earliest permanent white settlement in North Miss.” and then linking it to the cannon hole and fort by describing it as the “Landing place of Bienville’s Expedition 1736 & De Vaudreuil’s Expedition 1752, against the Chickasaws.” The monument was erected in 1924 by the Amory chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) —significantly named the “Cotton Gin Port Chapter”— and had been dedicated in an elaborate ceremony that also featured heavily the patriotic and religious values of those dedicating it. That monument, a solid presence on the deserted landscape, evokes multiple layers of history that most scholarship disregards.

II.

AN understanding of such layered experience and its symbols is especially important today, when some governmental agencies and private organizations promoting the “preservation” of “culture,” “history,” and “heritage” display a kind of naïveté concerning them. Traditional humanities were associated with personal cultivation, or personal transformation through broadened understanding, but today, with increased specialization this broader vision has been lost to the production of specialized knowledge through methodologies—“cognitive procedures…that aim to secure knowledge.” Their success in producing a body of knowledge transformed the university and the way in which education was conceived; but the reliance on methodologies meant the exclusion of considerable realms of reality. Methodologies stipulate what is and what is not accepted as evidence, channeling our understanding of truth into narrow categories, largely empirical ones, over which we seem to have control. As the pursuit of objective knowledge increasingly marginalized the pursuit of wisdom, it was virtually foreordained that the “cultural resources” once associated with personal transformation and transcendence would ultimately be understood as little more than mere objects of scholarly study.

The inadequacies of this education were extended into the very organizations that promote history and culture because of their “significance” or “meaning,” but with little comprehension as to what these terms mean.  As Frits Pannekoek noted, we have subsequently seen the rise and dominance of “heritage professionals,” whose university education reflects rather narrow disciplinary interests, so that “heritage…is now a commodity that can be bought and sold.” Emphasis shifted away from the “spiritual” aspects of preservation to the “informational” and “material” aspects, leaving a nihilistic aura in its wake. The doyen of cultural commentary, Jacques Barzun, has observed that, although there is “more and more cultural stuff to house, classify, docket, consult, and teach…in the qualitative, honorific sense, culture—cultivation—is declining.  It is doing so virtually in proportion as the various cultural endeavors—all this collecting and exhibiting and performing and encouraging—grow and spread with well-meant public and private support.”   Even a standard textbook on archaeological method recognizes that “the time has come to address much wider questions: Why, beyond reasons of scientific curiosity, do we want to know about the past? What does the past mean to us?”  These questions demand an acquaintance with broader horizons of human experience.

The complex interplay of experience and symbolization, according to philosopher of history Eric Voegelin, arises from the nature of history—both a process in which our lives are intertwined and the narration or symbolization of that process. In the latter regard, we often think of history as objective description by detached observers; but because we are not only observers but participants in history, our symbolizations reflect much more about the historical process than we realize. For Voegelin, ideas, concepts, and narratives are reflections of our life worlds and of deeper levels of experience, of a dynamic search for order and meaning in a common reality.

This kind of “deep examination” of the history of Cotton Gin Port can take us beyond the limitations of specialized historical methods to grapple with the nature of the underlying experience of history and place. In other words, we can embark on a quest for the true meaning of the past, which is, after all, the concern at the heart of public calls for the preservation and promotion of culture and history.  To recognize that the dimensions of meaning are at the convergence of the objective and subjective, past and future, fact and mystery, the immanent and transcendent  requires, as Voegelin often pointed out, more than merely assembling and interpreting  facts;  it requires a deep, meditative penetration into the multidimensional nature of reality as we experience it.

III.

WHILE at face value the history of Cotton Gin Port is the history of a lost town, it also includes a string of events and places, some of which are related to the town only by virtue of their falling within the scope of the place Cotton Gin Port, a spatial construct predating many of these events and locations. The beginning of the story is thus rather open-ended, as various events, landscape features, and finds of early artifacts are linked so that the story emerges from a hazy antiquity.

The landscape of Cotton Gin Port is the product of the forces that have shaped it; it is full of “fossil remains” of these formative processes, and these remains serve as symbols, pointing to ancient origins. In this regard Geographer Philip Wagner has observed that the environment has “larger relevance as a momentary coexistence among varied presences” through which “a person may experience vicarious exposure to people, things, and places that are distant or remote in time. Environment at any instant is participation in a multitude of histories.” Consequently, for those with eyes to see, any landscape is suffused with weighty significance.

The foundations of the Cotton Gin Port landscape are geological formations, the accumulation of sediments on the floor of a shallow sea approximately seventy million years ago, later uplifted to form the Gulf Coastal Plain.  Emerging from the ocean, the land was carved by erosion into valleys, hills, and streams. The convergence of two channels at Cotton Gin Port to form a larger channel created a natural landing and crossing place.  East of the Tombigbee are relatively level fluvial landforms—bottomlands and terraces—that extend for miles. To the west, a narrow strip of bottom and terrace lies between the river and a high escarpment or bluff, above which are the uplands of the Black Prairie, a crescent of fertile calcareous soil that extends through Alabama and Mississippi.

Thousands of years ago Indians appeared in the area and continued to live there until the beginnings of recorded history. They left settlement remains—now archaeological sites—usually near streams. The most prominent of their remains is the Cotton Gin Port mound, located on the west side of the Tombigbee and dating to the Mississippian period (ca. 1200–1500 AD). The mound was once surrounded by a circular earthwork—probably part of an aboriginal fortification, although many later believed it to have been part of the fabled French fort.

These geological formations, land forms, and Indian artifacts provided the basis for narratives that occasionally acquired mythic dimensions because they articulated a sense of local and national identity or served as a link to our mysterious beginnings. 

The earliest documented historical event that can be associated with the general region was the ill-fated De Soto expedition. In May 1539, an expedition of about 600 Spaniards under the leadership of Hernando de Soto, then governor of Cuba, landed on the western coast of the Florida peninsula. Over the course of the next four years the expedition wandered throughout the Southeast searching for mineral deposits and making life difficult for the Indians by demanding of them supplies and bearers. In December 1540 the Spaniards crossed a river called “Chicaça,” which might have been the Tombigbee, and spent most of the winter in a small village also named Chicaça. Because of the ambiguity of the contemporary narratives and a lack of contemporary maps, the location of the expedition’s route remains vague, the crossing place of the Tombigbee unknown, and so numerous places throughout the South, Cotton Gin Port included could later lay claim to being on De Soto’s route—in order to link themselves to a historically remote event.

The name Chicaça, mentioned by De Soto chroniclers, can almost certainly be correlated with Chickasaw, the name of the Indian tribal group that dominated the upper reaches of the Tombigbee during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Although the 1540 location of the Chickasaw villages is unknown, by the early eighteenth century the Chickasaws were located in a cluster of prairies known as the “Chickasaw Old Fields,” located about twenty-five miles northwest of Cotton Gin Port. By that time a trail crossed the Tombigbee at Cotton Gin Port that led to the Chickasaw’s Old Fields; this trail/crossing set the geographical stage for Cotton Gin Port’s beginnings as a river ford and landing, a frontier crossroad. As contacts between Chickasaws and Europeans increased, so did activity at the river crossing.

The first documented event at the crossing was the landing of a French military expedition and the construction of a temporary fort. This fort—or the memory of it—was to have a tremendous impact on the place’s history, for it inspired a variety of legends, many associated with the cannon hole and the Indian mound. On May 22, 1736, the silence of the Tombigbee was interrupted by the splashing of oars as a flotilla bearing hundreds of French troops arrived at a crossing on the west bank of the river, which they knew as the “upper portage” but which was probably in the Cotton Gin Port area. Under the direct command of the governor of the Louisiana colony Jean Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville (1680–1768), the expedition constituted one of two forces sent to beat the pro-British Chickasaws into submission. At the landing, Bienville’s troops rendezvoused with six or seven hundred Choctaw warriors. The following day a small fort was hurriedly constructed, using about 600 posts, for the purpose of guarding the supplies and boats. On May 24 the force departed overland for the Chickasaw villages, leaving behind approximately fifteen boatmen and twenty soldiers. On May 29, six days after the construction of the fort, the force returned to the portage in disarray following its defeat at the Battle of Ackia and hurriedly disembarked. In most historical accounts of this event, the emphasis is on the overall campaign against the Chickasaws, its objectives and accomplishments. But in the tales about Cotton Gin Port, the campaign pales in comparison to the small, temporary fort—which became the inspiration of legends.

The site of the old fort might have been forgotten altogether if not for the English explorer Bernard Romans, who descended the Tombigbee in 1771-72 and reported passing a bluff “where the French formerly had a fortified trading house.” His hazy awareness that a French structure had been there may well have been based upon what the Chickasaws had told him; after thirty-five years of decay and vegetation growth, it is unlikely that there were many remains visible from the river. Nevertheless, his map identified the location as the “Old French Fort.” Influenced by his cartography, subsequent maps continued to identify the purported location of the fort. Consequently, the rather inauspicious site became a fairly well known landmark. When Anglo-Americans came to settle during the early nineteenth century, some knew that a French fort had been somewhere in the vicinity of Cotton Gin Port. This small piece of information must have conveyed an aura of antiquity to those who were curious about such matters.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the river crossing had become the site of sporadic shipping activities associated with the Chickasaw trade, an event occurred that was of considerable importance for the site—the building of the short-lived cotton gin, which gave rise to  the name “Cotton Gin Port.” The gin was constructed in 1801 under the supervision of Indian agent John McKee as a part of the federal government’s policy of encouraging the Indians to adopt commercial agriculture as an alternative to their traditional combination of horticulture, hunting, and gathering. Gin components were purchased in Natchez and hauled for hundreds of miles to the river crossing, which was accessible to the Chickasaw settlements and provided a means of shipping the ginned fiber downstream to Mobile. A gin house was built, and the gin began its operation.  The Chickasaws were not able to use it for long, however. Possibly angered at not receiving a gin themselves, a group of Choctaws set fire to the gin house, reducing it to ashes within minutes and retarding plans for encouraging cotton culture among the Chickasaws.

In many ways the gin—like the fort—was a blip in the history of the region, with few long-term consequences. Yet consequences there were.  The gin provided another historical association that would later be grafted onto the story of Cotton Gin Port and, more importantly, it provided a name for the area around the river crossing and the beginning of the place Cotton Gin Port (displacing the only other name that might have competed—“Old French Fort”). Far more than most place names, Cotton Gin Port is illustrative of the interplay between time and space with its overt linkage of a historical association—the cotton gin—and the place’s geographical focus—the port, or river crossing.  Places—as opposed to empirical objects or abstract space—are “center[s] of meaning constructed by experience,” in the middle range between location in space, on one hand, and “visceral feeling,” on the other. Similarly, the place Cotton Gin Port arose as a concept from the flux of historical experience, providing a conceptual framework that bound together the various associations of that “place”—or those near it—into a coherent unit.  Associations predating the emergence of the place were also anachronistically lumped into the conceptual category of Cotton Gin Port; for example, the fort—built decades earlier with its exact location unknown—was  nevertheless readily integrated into the Cotton Gin Port story. The same could also be said of earlier associations: the mound and other Indian connections, along with speculations about where Hernando de Soto’s expedition’s crossed the Tombigbee.

A few years after the construction of the cotton gin, a frontier road—the Gaines Trace—opened, crossing the river at Cotton Gin Port. There was a growing demand for the federal government to open roads to connect areas of settlement in the state of Tennessee and on the lower Tombigbee in the Mississippi Territory, areas separated by several hundred miles of Indian territory. At the October 1805 Treaty of Tellico Blockhouse, the Cherokees authorized the construction of a road to connect the Tennessee and the Tombigbee Rivers. Two years later the United States War Department began to implement this plan; from December 1807 through January 1808 Captain Edmund P. Gaines (1777–1849), commandant at Fort Stoddert on the Mobile River, surveyed the route for a road connecting Melton’s Bluff on the Tennessee with Cotton Gin Port on the Tombigbee. The latter place was chosen for the southern terminus because of its status as an established crossing place. After departing from Melton’s Bluff at the upper end of the Muscle Shoals, the survey party proceeded southwestwardly and in January arrived at the place on the Tombigbee that Gaines called “Cotton-Gin Port,” or “Gin Port,” the earliest documented usage of the name. The only sign of human activity was a path crossing the river at a ford. Gaines found the site to be “a most eligible crossing place for a road—as well as a very suitable place for a commercial seat,” an appraisal that proved prophetic.

Although the Gaines Trace served only briefly as an interregional road, during the first years of its existence activity increased at Cotton Gin Port. During the War of 1812, the road was used to transport troops from Tennessee to the Gulf Coast, and in 1814, Chickasaw Chief Levi Colbert established a two-story log house on the high bluff west of the Tombigbee that came to be known as “Colbert’s Hill.” He presumably intended to capitalize off projected traffic on the Gaines Trace by establishing a ferry on the Tombigbee and opening his house as an inn. The son of the Scot James Colbert and a Chickasaw mother, Levi Colbert was probably the most powerful leader among the Chickasaws during the years that he resided at Cotton Gin Port. 

The most important consequence of the Gaines Trace was the formation of the settlement and town that provided the crucible for the story of Cotton Gin Port. On September 20, 1816, the Chickasaws ceded to the United States all of their land claims east of the Tombigbee River and south of the Gaines Trace. These two landmarks then became the boundaries of settlement between the Chickasaws on one side and Americans on the other. By the end of 1816 a few Euro-Americans began to move into the newly ceded area to settle and farm, and eventually a town formed on the east bank where the Gaines Trace crossed the river. The relatively early beginnings of this settlement would later be used as the basis for the claim that Cotton Gin Port was the earliest permanent white settlement in North Mississippi.

The town never achieved a size of consequence; during most of its existence it usually had only about 100 people, with perhaps 200 at the peak of its development during the 1850s. Its greatest prominence (although not its greatest size) was in the 1820s and 1830s, when it served as a trade center for the Chickasaw Indians. However, with the removal of the Chickasaws during the 1830s, the growth of a plantation economy, and the establishment of other towns that eventually surpassed it in population and trade, Cotton Gin Port was left as only a secondary trade center compared to its neighbors, Aberdeen and Columbus--both Tombigbee River towns with populations of a few thousand each. However small, a developed town at Cotton Gin Port increased the site’s distinctive sense of place.  Stores, offices, and other businesses were located on Jackson Street, the main thoroughfare, while a number of houses and other structures clustered around, all visually contributing to the sense of place.  
For the architectural theoretician Christian Norberg-Schulz, the importance of a town as a center is integral to the spatial dimension of human existence, a dimension structured on the basis of paths and goals, or in the language of geography, of routes and nodes. Here people interact and exchange goods and ideas. Cities and other settlements are “place[s] of discovery” where people dwell in the sense of “experiencing the richness of a world,” that is, experiencing the urban space as a place of “primary self-identification” because it represents the “totality in which we take part.”

Geographer Yi-fu Tuan observed that people and architectural fabric constitute cities and towns as “places and centers of meaning par excellence.”  The dimension of meaning arises from the interplay of human activity, the physical characteristics of the built environment, and the conscious or internal dimensions of the society.  Voegelin describes the relationship this way:  
Human society is not merely a fact, or an event, in the external world to be studied by an observer like a natural phenomenon.  Though it has externality as one of its important components, it is as a whole a little world, a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by the human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their self-realization.  It is illuminated through an elaborate symbolism, in various degrees of compactness and differentiation—from rite, through myth, to theory. . . . 

Society and its “elaborate symbolism” intermesh with history. A community is born, develops, and dies within the horizon of history. As sociologist Robert Bellah and his associates have noted: “Communities . . . have a history—in an important sense they are constituted by their past—and for this reason we can speak of a real community as a ‘community of memory,’ one that does not forget its past.”

Awareness of a community may often be subliminal until individuals, moved to wonder and reflection, begin to articulate it in narrative form. In the case of Cotton Gin Port, in the inner dimension of the community a growing awareness of history was articulated in stories that eventually gave the place considerable fame in the region. Shortly after the town’s beginnings, intimations of a relatively remote past surfaced when artifacts and aboriginal earthworks were found; oral traditions concerning Bienville’s fort and the De Soto expedition also contributed. These traces from the past inspired stories, from which emerged a complex and growing phantasmagoria of lore. Because the storytellers had little scholarly training, the resulting stories were somewhat naïve, but they reflected an aura of history and its mystery with which few other places in the area could compare. Most notable in the collection of lore was the cannon hole site.

IV.

OF ALL of the cannon hole stories that developed, only a small percentage were recorded, and then often not until many years after they originated. Some of the earliest were recalled by the frontiersman Gideon Lincecum (1793–1874), who settled in Cotton Gin Port during the 1820s to engage in the Indian trade. Curious about everything from natural history to Indian culture, Lincecum was drawn to the antiquities and lore. He had heard the story of the French fort in a radically garbled version based on local legend, purported artifact finds, and relic landscape features. He described a site visit led by Levi Colbert, whom he referred to by his Chickasaw name—Itawamba:

I found by the assistance of my old friend Itewaumba [sic]...the site of the old fortification. There were sufficient signs yet remaining to show that there had been a defense made there. Pits and embankments, and rank weeds, etc. My guide informed me, that when he was a blow gun boy, he frequently visited the place and that he found bullets, scraps of iron, and the surface of the ground where the fort stood was covered with scales and splinters of burnt bone. His mother’s father told him that when they destroyed the fort, they took all the cannon they could carry, and rolled the big heavy brass guns into the river, in thirty feet of which on a low bluff, the fort was placed, and that some things thought to be useful, were buried by the claimants at various points on the banks of the river, such as spades, big chains and much lead, some boxes full of musket balls, etc.  That a great number of the Indian warriors had been killed in the siege, and that they had been deposited in a mound two miles above the fort, on the bank of the river.

Lincecum decided to look for the cannons, using a method that anticipated my 1977 “expedition:”

I procured a spike pole, and in my boat, went up to the fort, intending to make a search for the brass cannons . . . . But on a careful examination of the premises found that the river had moved westwardly a little more than its entire width, and that what was then the bed of the river now underlay a bank of sand overgrown with birch and willow.  So I didn’t sound for the guns.

Despite his own lack of success in finding cannons in the river, he concluded his story with other artifactual evidence to support its veracity:

That the old chief’s statement is true, is abundantly proven by the number of small cannon found in the Chickasaw country after they had sold their lands—their country—to the United States. I saw seven of their guns, with plenty of their balls, and some twelve pound shot, which was the cause of my attempt to search for the brass guns said to be rolled into the river. The 500 pounds of musket balls found buried in the bank of the river just below the fort, is additional testimony in favor of the statement of the chief . . . . The number of cannon found, and balls suited to larger guns not found, and the amount of surplus musket balls, with pits, embankments, and other signs of heavy works that were still to be seen, all go to establish the authenticity of the account given by the Chief Itewaumba.

Although Lincecum failed to find any cannons in the river at Cotton Gin Port, an 1881 correspondent of the New Orleans Times Democrat claimed that in 1835 an iron six-pounder cannon had been found in the Tombigbee River in the “gun hole (near Old French Fort),” while 900 pounds of musket balls and a silver cross were uncovered near the river bank. The cannon was purportedly removed from the river and taken to the town, where it exploded during an attempted fire. However, if the cannon ever existed, it has vanished.   In 1974, a six-pound cannon ball was found at the base of the bluff west of the river.  Whether or not it was connected to the cannons in the river is unknown; however, its finder—a “Civil War enthusiast” —immediately attributed a Civil War origin to the ball.

The story took an even more fanciful turn when an anonymous correspondent of the New York Herald—obviously someone familiar with the area—reported in 1880 that “Bienville’s beaten army” had deposited “cannons and [an “iron-bound”] treasure chest, containing much gold and silver” in a deep hole in the Tombigbee, clearly referring to the cannon hole.  The writer recalled having been informed in about 1840 that fishermen had discovered and removed “two small brass field pieces” from the cannon hole, and he claimed that at intervals over the previous fifty years “earnest looking and mysteriously silent strangers from France [had] ascended the Tombigbee and sought the great ‘round hole’” in vain attempts to recover the treasure.

The stories of finding cannons in the river served as fodder for speculation;  A. J. Pickett reported in his 1851 History of Alabama that cannons had been found in the Tombigbee “at or near Cotton Gin Port, and it has been supposed that they were left there by De Soto.” However, Pickett attempted to disassociate the cannons from the De Soto expedition, which had no cannons, while the same could also be said of the Bienville expedition. Instead, he suggested that the cannons had belonged to the 1752 expedition of the French governor Vaudreuil. According to that story, Vaudreuil had conducted a campaign similar to Bienville’s, traveling up the Tombigbee by boat, landing at Cotton Gin Port, and marching overland to the Chickasaw Old Fields, where the French army was again defeated. After hurriedly returning to Cotton Gin Port, Vaudreuil purportedly found that the level of the Tombigbee had dropped, and, Pickett hypothesized,  “it is probable he threw these cannon into the river to lighten his boats.”  This explanation satisfied many and consequently passed into the lore. Over a century later Dawson Phelps, historian for the Natchez Trace Parkway, proved that the Vaudreuil expedition had never even occurred; the story, developed out of these erroneous inferences, had been absorbed into succeeding texts and accepted. With the Vaudreuil hypothesis discredited, the origin of the cannons in the river—if in fact they ever existed—remains unknown, but the “Vaudreuil expedition” continues to be associated with Cotton Gin Port and the mysterious cannons.

V.

Because of the proliferation of these and other such stories, the otherwise inconspicuous town had gained considerable notoriety by the latter half of the nineteenth century, as indicated by a contemporary historian who observed that “at no spot [on the Tombigbee River] do more of those [historical] traditions center than at Cotton Gin Port.” That the stories ranged from the likely to the wildly improbable is beside the point; what is pertinent is that the place and community of Cotton Gin Port became increasingly linked to numerous historical associations that lent it the ambience of antiquity. Just as the place and community had found their conceptual origin in the cognitive ordering of the people who lived there, these historical associations became part of the same cognitive order.  As E. V. Walter has pointed out, the notion of “place” is inextricably related to the experience of space and time; the qualities of a place, indeed its very definition, are “shaped by memories and expectations, by stories of real and imagined events—that is, by the historical experience located there.”

The earliest known attempt at gathering the stories into a coherent narrative was triggered by a national celebration—the American Centennial of 1876.  Before the centennial, America had been primarily concerned with progress—Manifest Destiny and the building of new settlements across the continent. Yet even while the population pushed westward, historic places such as Mount Vernon and Plymouth Rock were quickly becoming part of the national identity. Although the centennial celebration looked more to the future than to the past, the national Centennial Exhibition was intentionally held in a symbolic place—Philadelphia, “the birthplace of the nation”—where the festivities were initiated by the ringing of the bell in Independence Hall, giving history and place prominent roles.  In the long term, the centennial inclined the “celebrants to self-conscious awareness of their own role in history” so that in the following decades, America saw a rise of interest in its past; by the end of the century most of the major patriotic and genealogical societies had been founded.
Reflection on history played a distinctive role in the centennial celebration at Cotton Gin Port, where the key figure was Aberdeen surveyor James A. Bailey (1818-1895), who composed a speech on the town’s history for the occasion. Little is known about him; however, as a surveyor he undoubtedly knew the county well and had many opportunities to have his curiosity aroused by prehistoric artifacts, landscape features, and reminiscences of the elderly.
In preparation for the Centennial, Bailey began to delve into the stories about Cotton Gin Port. On one occasion he interviewed a pioneer of the area, Dorcas Weaver Hollingsworth, and tersely recorded her memories of traveling the Gaines Trace as a child with her family to settle at Cotton Gin Port in late 1816.  It was perhaps her testimony that popularized the site’s claim of being the first permanent white settlement in north Mississippi. She also related other lore, including the story of the cotton gin, which she merged with the French fort and the Indian mound stories, claiming that the gin was located within “the breast work of a fort built about 1740 [sic] by the French army under Bienville.” However, the “breastwork” was almost certainly the remnant of a prehistoric earthwork that had encircled the Indian mound—apparently neither the site of the fort nor the cotton gin.

For the Fourth of July, 1876, Bailey traveled from Aberdeen to Cotton Gin Port to deliver his “Centennial Address.” Obviously he had reasons for selecting Cotton Gin Port. Aberdeen, with a population of over 2,000, was the county seat of Monroe County and one of the largest cities in the state, while Cotton Gin had a population of only about 100.  But this selection has to be seen in terms of the symbolic importance of the smaller town; as the nation turned to its birthplace, Philadelphia, Monroe County focused on Cotton Gin Port, its own “historic shrine.”  Although the text does not survive, Bailey almost certainly emphasized the role of the town as the oldest settlement in the area, pushing its origins back into antiquity through links to early events and to relics, all set against the backdrop of the birth of the nation.  The speech thereby confirmed to the attendees that theirs was indeed a special community by virtue of its history, its story a variant on the emerging national myth of westward expansion and the transition from wilderness to settled community, echoing mythic themes of the emergence of order from chaos.

Cotton Gin Port’s existence as a town came to an abrupt end in 1887, when the construction of the Kansas City, Memphis, and Birmingham Railroad, a major trunk line, bypassed it, resulting in the founding of the new town of Amory only three miles away.  The town of Cotton Gin Port—that cluster of people and buildings that defined the community—was abandoned as its inhabitants relocated primarily to Amory, bringing with them several buildings, including houses, stores, and the Christian Church. Even the post office was moved, its name changed to “Amory.”  Only a few clues were left at the site to recall that there had ever been a town: a scattering of houses that gradually disappeared with the passage of years, street beds, and some artifacts.  

Because of its ties with Amory and other nearby communities, Cotton Gin Port was not forgotten; instead it made a transition from living community to mythic memory, fading from the world of everyday human activity but surviving in memory and imagination through a web of stories linked through the spatial framework of place. In the process of translation into folk memory, the town grew to a prominence that it had never possessed in actuality; its population, about 100 during its decades of existence, by the 1930s, retrospective estimates had elevated to 500.

With the growing popularity of the Daughters of the American Revolution during the early twentieth century, the women of Amory established a chapter in 1921. Standard practice was that a new chapter took the name of a person or place associated with national origins, so it was not surprising that the women took the name “Cotton Gin Port Chapter.” The image of the extinct town linked them and their relatively new hometown to a much more remote past, and one of their first projects was the erection of the monument. The thought behind the monument is described in a 1936 essay by an Amory school teacher, John Alexander Farmer:

Amory and Monroe county have in Cotton Gin Port one of the most important places of historical interest in Mississippi. It is the oldest historic shrine in North Mississippi, though now long abandoned and neglected. Many unusual events, uncommon to other localities, make this site a shrine to loyal Mississippians; a shrine that should be preserved, and its story made known to patriotic Americans…. Only a few Mississippians know of Cotton Gin Port, and a majority of the citizens of Monroe county scarcely know of its importance as a place of historic interest. It is our duty to foster and promote the building up of this shrine, and to create interest in its development.

Such images were surely in the minds of the DAR members when they contracted with the Amory Marble Works to produce a commemorative monument for Cotton Gin Port. In conjunction with the approaching marker dedication, DAR vice-regent Mrs. E. W. Flinn sought out the oldest living former resident of Cotton Gin Port—Mrs. Nancy Williamson Dilworth—and interviewed her, recording her memories of everyday life in the dead town, which were interspersed with allusions to memorable landmarks:

When I was 13, [my family] came to Old Cotton Gin Port to live.  They travelled across the country in wagons, bringing their household effects with them, camped in the woods at night, lived in the wagons in the day.
The Indians had all left Cotton Gin Port by that time, and it was a nice little town, with a number of families living there, and several stores . . . . The lovely old magnolia tree still growing on the site of the village was on the Knowles place.

We often crossed the river and went to the Colbert Hill. I’ve seen the Council Tree many a time . . . .

An elaborate dedication ceremony was planned for November 14, 1924. On that day, a crowd gathered on the grounds of the Amory City Hall, the political and symbolic center of the municipality, for an elaborate ritual with nationalistic and transcendental overtones.  On the platform sat aged Confederate veterans in uniform and representatives of Amory’s patriotic and literary societies.  This “inspiring occasion,” where “the fire of patriotism illuminated the large gathering,” as the newspaper account related, opened with an invocation by the Reverend W. R. Lott, a local Methodist minister, followed by the singing of “America.” The DAR regent then welcomed guests to the ceremony, noting that the erection of the monument “on one of the land marks of our fathers, was the fulfillment of a cherished dream that had stimulated the Chapter for the last two years.” George Leftwich then came to the podium and related the history of Cotton Gin Port, transporting the assembled guests back to the town’s early beginnings and then on to its decline and fall. When the tale came to its end, the crowd reaffirmed its significance by singing the national anthem, bringing to a close the first phase of the commemorative ritual. The attendees departed in automobiles, trailing dust on the unpaved road leading west from Amory toward the river bridge and the monument.

Upon arriving at the old town site, largely covered with cultivated fields, they found the monument waiting but concealed under an American flag and masses of flowers and evergreens. There Amory attorney Talmadge Tubb addressed the crowd, reminding them that “history is not always a matter of distant dates and places, but that it had been made on this neglected spot,” implying that their presence at the place connected them to the larger continuum of history. After Tubb’s remarks came the culminating moment of the ritual, featuring two women and two young girls, chosen because of their personal links to the past: two former residents of the extinct town and descendants of, respectively, an early settler of Cotton Gin Port and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. They removed the flag from the monument, revealing it for all to see. Afterwards photographs were made with various participants gathered around the garlanded marker—“an honored silent sentinel, keeping guard over the memories and records of the past.”  The ritual expressed the symbolic apotheosis of Cotton Gin Port; James Bailey in his centennial address saluted the town as a living community notable for its legendary and even mythic past. With the 1924 commemoration the abandoned town itself had become the mythical past. Troy, fabled Ilium, reduced to a mound of rubble by the Greek alliance, was yet for the classical world a sacred place of origins. Similarly, Amory and Monroe County traced their origins to Cotton Gin Port.

VI.

FROM the cannon hole and the monument, and all the details in between, the whole story of the place is told and recalls other such experiences and memorials of heroes and wars and the places where gods communed with men. Two trends are clearly evident: 1) the linking of associations through spatial proximity to the town, which serves as the center of the story, a center emphasized through the erection of the monument on the abandoned town site, and 2) the extension of the story backwards to include ancient origins. Two key mythical themes are the center and the origin (or beginning) pertaining to space and time, respectively.

Human beings have always used stories and images, often associated with ritual, to describe events but also to convey a sense of order within an often bewilderingly complex existence. These stories—myths—link them to a greater whole that transcends their own existence, offering a sense of a higher purpose and identity. As Voegelin scholar Glenn Hughes has observed, “the myth tells a story that makes sense of our experiences of purpose and struggle, risk and failure, desire and achievement.  In short, it unites the individual and social dramas of our lives within a supervening drama of being.”

Thus myth is linked to temporal understanding: the present and future are given meaning by reference to a mythical past, the time of beginnings. Myths about beginning are symbolic forms linking us to images of worlds above the flux of the present, uniting our lives “within a supervening drama of being” and providing a sense of purpose within the change of history. Such myths used images of gods and heroes to express awareness of a transcendental ground, and these images serve as analogs for that which transcends comprehension. Similarly, the linkage to early events, places, and persons at Cotton Gin Port contains an intuition of something more—that would lead to the creation of myths and rituals and to the erection of a commemorative monument.  Such an intuition led Paul Ricoeur to rhetorically ask,

Is it simply a residual phenomenon, or an existential protest arising out of the depth of our being, that sends us in search of privileged places, be they our birthplace, the scene of our first love, or the theater of some important historical occurrence—a battle, a revolution, the execution ground of patriots?  We return to such places because there a more than everyday reality erupted and because the memory attached to what took place there preserves us from being simply errant vagrants in the world.

Cotton Gin Port had, at least for a time, served as a complex mythic symbol linked to the symbol of a vanished city. Its story was not merely a linear sequence of events in time but a web of crisscrossing lines and symbolic associations. Through its social and personal linkages it had connections to the residents of neighboring communities, yet it possessed the strangeness and mystery of that which has vanished and is beyond everyday reach, providing a sense of continuity and identity with the mythical Beginning, an identification that involved an imaginative and ethical response. In its lifetime it was the center of human activities and meanings. In death it faded from familiarity while simultaneously arising as a symbol of longing and aspiration.

VII.

WHEN the crowd dispersed after the monument dedication, “the silent sentinel” was left alone beside the road. It remained visible to the public for years as traffic passed by headed for the bridge on the main road between Amory and Okolona. However, during the mid-1930s the Mississippi Highway Department constructed a new highway (now Highway 278) that provided a more direct route between the two towns. It crossed the Tombigbee about a mile upstream on a new and more substantial bridge, and the old bridge was demolished soon afterwards. Consequently, the road to the old bridge was closed, leaving the monument and the town site inaccessible.

Despite the increased remoteness of the town site, calls to commemorate it continued. Following the 1948 creation of the State Historical Commission, one of the first markers the commission erected was for Cotton Gin Port. Because such markers were intended to be placed on state highways, this one could not be placed at the town site itself, and it was erected alongside Highway 278 north of the town site. The passer-by could see the memorial but not the increasingly remote original site. 

The most ambitious commemorative proposal was produced in 1969, when the Tombigbee River Valley Water Management District published a feasibility study for developing a historical park at Cotton Gin Port, a project that would use both the town site and the mound site. Reflecting the misconceptions in the local lore, historian James H. Stone proposed that a replica of the French fort be constructed surrounding the mound, with a model of an early cotton gin placed on the mound’s summit. The museum was to be located on the town site beside the monument, underscoring the marker’s role as symbolic center. Exhibits were to incorporate a wide variety of artifacts illustrating the history of the area to prehistoric times. Stone placed special emphasis on finding and recovering the legendary cannons for museum display; the best technology was to be used to probe the cannon hole in the event that any still remained. The proposal failed, and the park was never built.

More recently, the state erected two new historical markers commemorating both the old French fort and the town of Cotton Gin Port. Because of my long association with the Tombigbee River, I was invited to be a guest speaker at the dedication ceremony on February 1, 1998.  Due to inclement weather, the event was held in the Amory Regional Museum, a former hospital now used to interpret local history. This ceremony invoked the past far less than the 1924 ceremony, reflecting the trend toward emphasizing “just the facts.”  I attempted to remedy this somewhat in my remarks by recalling that history is far more than facts, that it is something that engages us personally, calling us toward transcendent horizons. After the ceremony some of the attendees and I drove out to the river to view the markers. I walked out onto the bridge; far to the south where the river turned toward the east, I could see the cannon hole, and I recalled James Bailey. Like him, I lived in the area and knew the people. I had walked the abandoned streets, visited the mound and the Council Tree site, and plumbed the depths of the cannon hole, and, like him, I wove my impressions into a narrative that was presented at a commemorative ceremony. In sum, I found my life was being woven into the story.

Gabriel Marcel’s distinction between problem and mystery is pertinent here: A problem is a question that may or may not be solved, whereas a mystery is a quality of unknowability that is inherent in human existence itself.  At the surface, or literal level, the cannon hole may be seen as only a problem to be solved using the appropriate research methods and techniques. But such investigations are often driven by more than a simple concern with problem solving, for we are driven by a quest to understand the larger and transcendental contexts of existence. Both Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan have emphasized that humans are questioners or searchers after meaning, with the capacity to “out-question the finite and the knowable and thereby to encounter transcendent meaning.” This human sense of wonder and curiosity can lead us into all types of investigation—eventually into the nature of our own existence, carrying us “from sense experience through the play of imagination to understanding and all the uses of understanding” to the revelation that “the essence of existence” is “participation in a process whose ultimate meaning transcends human comprehension.”

These questions cannot be answered in terms of material objects and causes, for as things symbolically point to their origins, that is, to the origins of their existence and the mystery of being, or, as G. W. von Leibniz put it, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” This mystery that grounds our existence is often overlooked, or as the poet Shelley stated, “The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being.” Hughes calls this mystery a “[depth] of meaning whose hiddenness is apparent, and which could be known fully only if reality as a whole were known, while the human knower remains a participant in reality with a limited perspective, unable to fully penetrate the meanings that constitute human existence.”

For most of human history, life has been conceived as an interplay between the visible and the invisible, the concrete and the mysterious. Western thought, from Plato to St. Thomas Aquinas, was based on the cognizance of invisible aspects of reality.  Reality could not be reduced to mere empirical descriptions—there was always more. Much could be comprehended only using metaphorical or analogical language. The basic facts were “regarded as surrounded by a penumbra of mystery which tends to uphold the sense that creation and history disclose, however obliquely, the depths of God himself.”
However, as modernism carved out an autonomous “secular” realm of thought, it marginalized that which did not fall within the realm of its methods, focusing on what Descartes termed the “clear” and “distinct” –those objects of which we have a seemingly clear and certain cognition. In so doing, as Catherine Pickstock notes, modernism departed from the understanding that being has an “unknowable and unanalysable depth” and led to “an epistemological circuit whereby knowledge is based entirely on objects whose ‘being’ does not exceed the extent to which they are known.” Knowledge of reality was thereby restricted to a surface level of perceived objects, and reality itself was reduced to the empirical and material, resulting in an implicit, socially sanctioned nihilism.

VIII.

WITH its echoes of ancient and legendary cities, the story of Cotton Gin Port implies that there is much more to culture and heritage, history and place, than the modern mind recognizes. Allen Tate, a onetime member of the Fugitives literary circle and of the Vanderbilt Agrarians, universalized such imagery in what he called “the buried city,” a symbol of the cultural achievements of the past. Heavily influenced by the thought of St. Augustine, who wrote The City of God in the aftermath of the fall of Rome to the Visigoths in AD 410, Tate explored the relationship between the accumulation of images from the past and human ideals. The City of God was Augustine’s answer to those who linked their aspirations to the earthly city of Rome, which in its misfortunes seemed far less than eternal. Both Augustine and Tate avoided reducing images of the past into merely empirical events or elevating them into symbols of a perfect golden age, while they simultaneously avoided the rejection of the past for a similarly naïve expectation of a future utopia. Instead, to them, human experience inherently involved both past and future, fact and mystery, the immanent and the transcendent. For the two men, the past provided imperfect images of a more transcendent goal; Tate’s buried city became the model for the eternal city just as Augustine’s City of Man was an anticipation of the City of God. As Robert S. Dupree observed, “The shards of the past are both remembrances and foreshadows of the community that resides in human hope and the spirit, the ‘sacrament’ of communion in a society.”

The image of the buried city recalls the depths of our inheritance from the past that are obscured by an exclusive emphasis upon the empirical. Yet today the very organizations devoted to preserving and promoting history don’t fully comprehend why we preserve and promote culture. Traditional cultivation of individuals by introducing them to higher standards of knowing and acting—the pursuit of wisdom—today is replaced with simply saving and studying old stuff, thereby undercutting the very reason for its existence.  The entire foundational dimension of meaning has been lost, dimensions of mystery and the sacred are forgotten, and the pursuit of wisdom abandoned, while culture has been reduced to a naïve antiquarianism that is promoted to an unsuspecting public.  As David Walsh noted,

What remains is to find the means of making the profound intimations that come to us from the past as well as from our own inner longing transparent for contemporary civilization.  That is the challenge that defines the moment in which we live.  Within the fragmentation of the modern world we have failed to construct our own meaning, and we are inclined to reexamine more respectfully the fragments of meaning we are left.  Can the dried bones be made to live again?

I spent much of my career attempting to understand and articulate this meaning. I had grown up on the site of an extinct town near Cotton Gin Port, Palo Alto—which had been founded by my ancestors—and I had spent considerable time on the Tombigbee, canoeing with my Boy Scout troop and camping on the riverbank.  

These landscapes of my boyhood were transformed as I became aware of traces from the past—relics, memories, and written records—and the place’s unseen history came to life. Although I later studied history formally, I recognized a critical omission in education offered by institutions, that reducing history to a disembodied narrative about events obscured the personal dimensions of history. I came to see the world as a surface of shifting and mysterious symbols, insights reinforced through visits to Cotton Gin Port, which became for me a meditative exploration of history and place.

In particular the cannon hole, where the surface of the water beckons with the prospect of an unseen depth, was a potent symbol, exemplifying that “enormous weight of representation, or symbolism” inherent in the landscape that, according to Philip Wagner, provides “vicarious exposure to people, things, and places that are distant or remote in time.” If the search for cannons was at one level merely a search for material objects that may or may not exist, at another level the cannon hole said much about our relationship to history, pointing to that which is beyond the empirical and the discursive—to the realm of mystery.





Practicing the Discipline of Place
by Caleb Stegall
This article first appeared -- along with an accompanying essay, "Epistemology of the Supermarket" -- in what became the final issue of re:generation quarterly (Spring 2003).  In the years preceding RQ's demise, the New Pantagruel's founding editors first encountered each other at RQ's online discussion forum.  There, in the crucible of many arguments, the basic ideas and aesthetics behind tNP were developed.  With the termination of RQ, tNP was conceived and established online in August 2003. Drawing a slate of like-minded contributing editors and writers, it began operating as a quarterly online journal, its first issue debuting in January 2004.  tNP received attention in The New York Times just a few months later as a voice for a new kind of conservatism, although tNP is best described as a new voice for old ideas, such as those discussed here in "Practicing the Discipline of Place." :: Eds.
COMMENCEMENT speakers sum up the wisdom of the age, and last May, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anna Quindlen did so with particular clarity. "I have seen your salvation, and it is you," she told the graduating seniors of Sarah Lawrence College. "Custody of your life belongs in full to you and you alone. Do not cede it to anyone else," she warned. "Why should you march to any lockstep? Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse . . . because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its tympani is saying." For Quindlen, conformity of any kind is our original sin, and salvation comes when we discover and express an authentic self unencumbered by the demands of others.

"One Flesh" by Scott Kolbo :: Mixed Media Drawing

But there is plenty of evidence that the more intensely and dogmatically our culture has embraced the freedom to march wherever our hammering hearts take us, the less free we have become. John Adams wrote that should the citizens of this country surrender "for any course of time to any one passion, they may depend upon finding it, in the end, a usurping, domineering, cruel tyrant." For most of Quindlen's audience, the realization may dawn too late that they are not, in fact, a triumphant phalanx marching together for their rights, but a confused assortment of individuals cut off from family, community, and every other meaningful connection.

In fact, one has to wonder why Quindlen herself has not noticed that unrestrained individualism is on the defensive. Alarmed by individualism's less appealing fruits--corporate fraud, sensationalist television, sexual licentiousness, voter apathy, to name a few--everyone from communitarian activists on the left to family-values proponents on the right is taking up the call for "civil society."

Civil society--a ubiquitous phrase these days--generally refers to some conglomeration of voluntary associations, from family and church to PTAs and community volunteer programs to Little League and book clubs. These "mediating structures," as they have been called, negotiate between the two competing freedoms of a liberal democracy: the freedom of the individual and the freedom of the community. Only the structures of civil society, it is said, can nurture what Fletcher Moulton called "obedience to the unenforceable"--the consensus that restrains individual freedom enough to make a community livable, while still honoring individual particularity in a way that government and the marketplace cannot.

It is now conventional wisdom that civil society is failing. Robert Putnam's article "Bowling Alone," which catalogued America's declining stock of "social capital," was in the vanguard, followed more recently by the essay collection Community Works: The Revival of Civil Society in America and Putnam's own book-length follow-up. Putnam and others warn that the decline in voluntary association in American society is symptomatic of a deeper sickness, which could imperil democracy itself.

Hard on Putnam's heels are a plethora of forthcoming books with names like Civil Society in the Information Age; Global Civil Society; Church, State and Civil Society; and The Civil Society Reader. If the established pattern holds, these books will be filled with a variety of proposals for increasing volunteerism, or encouraging voters, or cleaning up neighborhoods, or returning to community-based education. To be sure, these are good things. But let's pause for a moment and apply a bit of skepticism. Chances are, when so many are so enthusiastic for something, it is either not a good thing, or its proponents have not fully calculated its cost.

HISTORIAN Gertrude Himmelfarb sounds just such a skeptical note in Community Works. In Himmelfarb's view, our society's mediating structures are actually part of the problem. She notes that "the institutions of civil society--private schools and universities, unions and nonprofit foundations, civic and cultural organizations--are stronger and more influential than ever." In fact, the mediating structures of our lives "have been complicitous in fostering the very evils that civil society is supposed to mitigate." They have promoted the "ideology of rights" that ends up being the cause of their dissolution, or worse, their transformation into "bureaucratic quasi-public institutions." Himmelfarb argues, for example, that efforts to force deadbeat dads to pay child support have backfired. Rather than promoting genuine community, focusing on child support reduces fatherhood to a "cash-nexus" between the father, mother, and children whereby all are freed from real responsibility to one another. The groups that promote child support will not acknowledge that "money itself is not the problem; the real problem is the absence of the father."

Far from providing a check on individualism, the institutions Himmelfarb cites perpetuate it, because they are the fruit of one of moderrnity's most corrosive features: mobility. "The existence . . . of strong and enduring voluntary associations," historian Wilfred McClay has observed, "depends upon the existence of strong involuntary associations." It was easier for civil society to flourish when people were stuck--with a family, a job, a church, or a community. But in the modern world, people are rarely stuck anywhere, or with anyone. We moderns are mobile partly because it is easier and cheaper than ever to seek greener pastures in the next state or on the other side of the globe. But we are also mobile because civil society itself has taught us to be. One need look no farther than higher education, site of Anna Quindlen's paean to radical individualism. Civil society itself now instructs us in the fine art of following our own hammering hearts. As Karl Kraus said of psychology, it has become "the disease from which it pretends to be the cure."

Restoring civil society, then, may be far more difficult than we have imagined. It may no longer be sufficient simply to encourage volunteerism or community spirit. We have not yet considered changing how we think and how we know; which is another way of saying that we have not attempted to change what we love.

WHY does the mindset of individualists make it nearly impossible for them, even when advocating an invigorated civil society, to stigmatize divorce rather than to stigmatize deadbeat dads? The answer lies deep in the roots of our democracy itself, which is, in the broadest and best sense of the word, liberal. Liberalism in this sense, characterized by individual freedom in markets and politics, is triumphant at "the end of history." It is unquestionably the single greatest means human beings have developed of producing economic prosperity and political security. But liberalism's successes naturally run downhill: safety and full stomachs, yes, but also consumption over charity; technology over art; and license over self-control. The great weakness of liberalism is that it cannot support the soul. Reflecting on what he called the "the wild gas" of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke wrote that the "effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints."

Burke understood that individual liberty is no friend of civil society. Individual freedom alone cannot shape what individuals may please to do. And freedom without responsibility is eventually not freedom at all. It becomes, rather, just another kind of mastery, subjecting people to the one thing liberalism cannot negate--the ever present I want. In a completely liberalized society, there is nothing left but appetite.

So liberalism rests on what the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott called the "politics of the felt need." Oakeshott used the heading of "Rationalism" to describe this temperament:

That anything should be allowed to stand between a society and the satisfaction of the felt needs of each moment in its history must appear to the Rationalist a piece of mysticism and nonsense. . . . [The Rationalist sees unrolled before him] the blank sheet of infinite possibility. And if by chance this tabula rasa has been defaced by the irrational scribblings of tradition-ridden ancestors, then the first task of the Rationalist must be to scrub it clean.

The Rationalist, says Oakeshott, has a "deep distrust of time," owing to his "impatient hunger for eternity." Likewise, "his mind has no atmosphere, no changes of season and temperature; his intellectual processes, so far as possible, are insulated from all external influence and go on in the void." The flaw in the liberal temperament is its deep distrust of place owing to its impatient hunger for the eternity of the void. Both time and place restrict our ability to be whatever we choose, to find our "salvation," as Quindlen would have it, in the actualization of our rootless selves. But particular times and places are, in fact, the essence of civil society, anchoring us to the real and the concrete instead of allowing our appetites to soar through the infinite expanse of possible desires.

So the restoration of civil society will require disciplining ourselves to this other temperament, one which draws its moods and tones from the "season and temperature" of its atmosphere. It is the temperament, or discipline, of place. And this discipline brings with it a concrete way of thinking. Instead of seeing through things, those who embrace the discipline of place see out from within them.

T. S. Eliot meditated on these themes in the fourth of his Four Quartets, a poem called "Little Gidding," which charts modern man's struggle to know the infinite reaches of both history and the universe. In this liberal search for timeless, placeless knowledge, "From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit proceeds." But when the poem's pilgrim ponders death--"the constitution of silence"--he begins to approach humility, and recognizes that "love of a country / Begins as an attachment to our own field," that "History is now." Towards the end Eliot offers this benediction for those who embrace the discipline of place:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Eliot is summing up the wisdom of Western history: from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey to the parable of the Prodigal Son to the history of the American frontier, we inherit a continuing dance between exploration and homecoming. We cannot "know the place for the first time" unless we have first left it; but in leaving, our end must be to return back home. Wendell Berry writes that the reader of the Odyssey knows --"as Odysseus undoubtedly does also--the extent of his love for Penelope because he can return to her only by choosing her, at the price of death." The good human life does not end with individual liberty, but proceeds on to responsibility.

WE moderns are defined by constant motion rather than by sitting still. We can be anywhere in a second, but rarely stay somewhere longer than that. We have developed an aversion to fixing things--and to fixed things. We would rather discard and replace than care for and renew.

It is more and more difficult for us to imagine making Odysseus's choice to forsake eternity for home. Liberalism's ideas have consequences--from widespread divorce to mass marketing to spaghetti interchanges--but those consequences also shape ideas, reinforcing the frame of mind that gave birth to them. They break our ties to imagination, to craft, to the land, and to the shop, so that our cities and pastures alike are blighted. Because we have repeatedly bowed at the altar of convenience, we are isolated from the very things that would feed and nourish our imagination. It should be no wonder that civil society has largely lost its ability to mediate between the individual and society at large. It should be no wonder that people live with a vague sense of lostness. We have become a people without a place.

The good news is that while we have abandoned place, it has not (yet) abandoned us. Place is still all around us, to be picked up, dusted off, repaired, and used again. To be sure, doing this is hard. The discipline of place is sacrificial, and it is often seen as foolishness in a liberalized world. But as with all sacrifice, it can be redemptive.

What might this look like? In his 1986 book The Horse in the Furrow, George Ewart Evans quotes an old English farmhand, Harry Groom, on the difference between farming "today" and farming in an older time.

It's all rush today. . . . You see it when a farmer takes over a new farm: he goes in and plants straight-way, right out of the book. But if one of the old farmers took a new farm, and you walked round the land with him and asked him: "What are you going to plant here and here?" he'd look at you queer; because he wouldn't plant nothing much at first. He'd wait a bit and see what the land was like: he'd prove the land first. A good practical man would hold on for a few weeks, and get the feel of the land under his feet. He'd walk on it and feel it through his boots and see if it was in good heart, before he planted anything: he'd sow only when he knew what the land was fit for.

One man sees "from above"; he quantifies things and measures his time in number of acres plowed. The other man, however, sees things "from within"; he values things and measures his time by the meaning of what he has done. The first man is merely at work; the second is at home.

"This world has a spiritual life possible in it," wrote George Santayana, "which looks not to another world but to the beauty and perfection that this world suggests, approaches, and misses." This is the only spiritual life possible; and it is possible only by placing oneself in time and place. Not only is this life possible, it is necessary. Civil society is ultimately about protecting the vulnerable--but to protect the vulnerable places and people around us, we must not just know them rationally, we must love them.

This is an agricultural model of renewal. It is about making a way of life closer to home, more becoming our better natures--attached to the soil, as it were. But the renewal of civil society is certainly not restricted to the farm. It can occur anywhere people are willing to begin to try to see out from within things rather than always trying to see through them. But the discipline of place must always involve real places and real things. If modernity is an exercise in un-sticking ourselves from family, job, and home, the discipline of place is an exercise in re-sticking.

Anna Quindlen is wrong. The good life, and the good society, begins only when we unhitch our hearts from radical individualism. Civil society will only be worthy of the name when people begin to make Odysseus's choice: to step out of the void, gather together the permanent things scattered and strewn throughout their lives, and begin the hard work of cherishing.





Empire and Its Discontents
by Eric Voegelin
Excerpted from chapter 3, "The Process of History," of
Eric Voegelin's Order and History, vol. 4: "The Ecumenic Age" (Louisiana University Press, 1974).



Order and History, Eric Voegelin's five-volume study of how human and divine order are intertwined and manifested in history, has been widely acclaimed as one of the great intellectual achievements of our age.

In the fourth volume, The Ecumenic Age, Voegelin breaks with the course he originally charted for the series, in which human existence in society and the corresponding symbolism of order were to be presented in historical succession. The analyses in the three previous volumes remain valid as far as they go, Voegelin explains, but the original conception proved "untenable because it had not taken proper account of the important lines of meaning in history that did not run along lines of time."

The Ecumenic Age treats history not as a stream of human beings and their actions in time, but as the process of man's participation in a flux of divine presence that has eschatological direction. "The process of history, and such order as can be discerned in it," Voegelin writes, "is not a story to be told from the beginning to its happy, or unhappy, end; it is a mystery in process of revelation."

In the present volume, Voegelin applies his revised conception of historical analysis to the "Ecumenic Age," a pivotal period that extends roughly from the rise of the Persian Empire to the fall of the Roman. The age is marked by the advent of a new type of political unit--the ecumenic empire--achieved at the cost of unprecedented destruction. Yet the pragmatic destructiveness of the age is paralleled by equally unprecedented spiritual creativity, born from the need to make sense of existence in the wake of imperial conquest. These spiritual outbursts gave rise to the great ecumenic religions and raised fundamental questions for human self-understanding that extend into our historical present.

The men living in the Ecumenic Age were forced by the events into reflections on the meaning of their course. ...

The Process of Reality
The issue that appeared to take precedence over all others was the problem of identity. A process has to be the process of something, but the something of which the Ecumenic Age was the process proved elusive. ... If the something could not be found, could history possibly be the history of nothing? Could there be such a thing as the historical process of history? ... During the Ecumenic Age ... the violent diminution, destruction, and disappearance of older societies, as well as the embarrassing search, by the conquering powers, for the identity of their foundations, was the bewildering experience that engendered the "ecumene" as the hitherto unsuspected subject of the historical process.

This new symbol, however, was plagued with ontological difficulties. For the ecumene was not a society in concretely organized existence, but the telos of a conquest to be perpetrated. In the pursuit of the telos, then, the ecumene in the cultural sense turned out to be much larger than expected, and the conquest never reached its goal. Moreover, one could not conquer the nonexistent ecumene without destroying the existent societies, and one could not destroy them without becoming aware that the new imperial society, established by destructive conquest, was just as destructible as the societies now conquered; the whole process seemed devoid of sense. When finally enough contemporarily living humans were coralled into an empire to support the fiction of an ecumene, the collected humanity turned out to be not much of a mankind, unless their universal status as human beings under God was recognized. And when universal humanity was understood as deriving from man's existence in presence under God, the symbolism of an ecumenic mankind under an imperial government suffered a serious diminution of status. Philosophically, the ecumene was a miserable symbol.

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The Subject of History

The problem of identity just adumbrated was never completely thought through during the Ecumenic Age itself. The high point of its penetration was reached by St. Augustine when he discerned the movement of amore Dei as the existential exodus from the pragmatic world of power--incipit exire, qui incipit amare1--and, consequently, conceived the "intermingling" of the civitas Dei with the civitas terrena as the In-Between reality of history. In the construction of his Civitas Dei, however, he subordinated these great insights to a historiogenetic pattern whose unilinear history came to its meaningful end in the dual ecumenism of the Church and Roman Empire. Beyond the dual ecumenism of his present, history had no meaning but the waiting for the eschatological events. ...St. Augustine tried to solve the mystery of meaning by attributing to certain events and societies an eschatological ultimacy beyond the meaning of their existence in the historical metaxy, and this attempt as a type recurs frequently in the construction of identities for the subject of history.

In the long course of Western history since St. Augustine, the problem has changed its appearance but not its structure. The contents of the Augustinian historiogenesis, it is true, have crumbled under the pressure of a vastly enlarged knowledge of history, but the symbolic form itself has survived the demise of its Christian-imperial substance; for the speculative thinkers of the Enlightenment and Romanticism continued to use the form for the construction of unilinear histories that would lead up to the imperial present of their respective choice, i.e., one or the other variety of ideological ecumenism, endowed like the Augustinian dual ecumenism with eschatological ultimacy of meaning. As for the Augustinian insights concerning the historical metaxy, they did not fare too well. Rather than being further developed, they were badly deformed by what Hegel has called the "Protestant Principle" of relocating the world of divine intellect (die Intellektual-Welt) in the mind of man, so that "one can see, know, and feel in one's own consciousness everything that formerly was beyond."2 That is to say, the historical metaxy was perverted into a dialectical movement in the intellectual's consciousness. As a consequence of the fate that has befallen the Civitas Dei, we are today still in suspense between the assumption that history must be the history of something--empires, city-states, nation-states, civilizations, or ecumenic mankind--and the uneasy suspicion that the process of history cannot be predicated on societies which appear and disappear in its course. Each of the supposed subjects of the process has become suspect of being an hypostasis. ...

The temptation to hypostatize historically passing societies into ultimate subjects of history is strongly motivated. At its core lies the tension, emotionally dificult to bear, between the meaning a society has in its historical existence and the never quite repressible knowledge that all things that come into being will come to an end. ...The dreamers of a society that will live happily forever after once it has come into existence are reluctant to face the insight of Anaximander's dictum (A9; B1): "The origin (arche) of things is the Apeiron. . . . It is necessary for things to perish into that from which they were born; for they pay one another penalty for their injustice (adikia) according to the ordinance of Time."

Anaximander's Truth of the Process

In their exposed position of Hellenic city-states neighboring on Asiatic empires, the Ionians had ample opportunity to experience the violence of the Ecumenic Age. The Anaximandrian fragment happens to be the earliest extant pronouncement by a philosopher on the process of reality and its structure. Moreover, Anaximander's compact experience and symbolization of the cosmic process has informed the understanding of the process down to Polybius. The fragment, thus, has become the key symbolism for what may be called the tragic experience of history. ...

Reality was experienced by Anaximander (fl. 560 B.C.) as a cosmic process in which things emerge from, and disappear into, the non-existence of the Apeiron. Things do not exist out of themselves, all at once and forever; they exist out of the ground to which they return. Hence, to exist means to participate in two modes of reality: (1) In the Apeiron as the timeless arche of things and (2) in the ordered succession of things as the manifestations of the Apeiron in time. This dual participation of things in reality has been expressed by Heraclitus (fl. 500 B.C.) in the terse language of the mysteries (B 62):

Immortals mortals
mortals immortals
live the others' death
the others' life die.

Reality in the mode of existence is experienced as immersed in reality in the mode of non-existence and, inversely, non-existence reaches into existence. The process has the character of an In-Between reality, governed by the tension of life and death. ...





The Dialogue of Mankind

Herodotus

Conquest is exodus, for one must leave behind what one has in order to conquer; and this expansion of existence beyond the order of existence achieved arouses the envy of the gods. This is the moral of the story. Herodotus, it appears, has shrewdly discerned the problem of a concupiscential exodus from reality under the apparently realistic surface of ecumenic conquest.

Thucydides

In the Histories [of Herodotus], the mystery of the process is eclipsed by the imagery of a power game played by gods and men. Man's humanity has been contracted to his libidinous self, and the gods have shared his fate. Still, the Herodotean figures are not quite insensitive to the mystery. They know enough about right and wrong to know that something is wrong with the success (eutychia) of expanding power; whatever it is, this wrong attracts the disastrous intervention of the gods. Herodotus, then, has discerned the nature of the wrong as the concupiscential exodus from reality. Of the mystery, thus, at least a shudder is left.

No shudder is left in the Melian dialogue of Thucydides. The eclipsing imagery is elevated to the rank of reality itself (V, 105):

“Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessity of nature they rule wherever they can. We neither made this law nor were the first to act on it; we found it to exist before us and shall leave it to exist forever after us; we only make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, if you were as strong as we are, would act as we do.”

The Anaximandrian process in which the "things" participate has become the law by which the power-self acts. Even more, the process hypostatized into a law is a necessity of nature operative in the very man who commits the hypostasis: a fictitious identity of conquest with reality can be achieved by identifying reality with humanity contracted to its libidinous self. By the game of transforming reality in the image of deformed existence, history has found the subject who can master it -- at least until Aegospotami. Those who are not the subject, in this case the Melians, have the choice between submission and massacre.

The games by which the power-self makes itself the fictitious master of history are still played today. The modern parallel of political situations in which the subject of history has identified itself come easily to mind. What needs emphasis is rather the difference of spiritual and intellectual rank. For the Athenian negotiators admit, and even stress, the horror in its starkness; they do not make the slightest attempt at smearing it over with idealisms, ideological verities, or speculative systems. It is true, they have deformed their existence and created an imaginary reality that will allow them "to do their thing," but in the background of this imaginary reality there still is the tragic consciousness of the process. They have not sunk to the untragic vileness of the ideologist who cannot commit the murder he wants to commit in order to gain an "identity" in place of the self he has lost, without moralistically appealing to a dogma of ultimate truth. ...
 
The modern obsession with deforming reality through the contraction of man's humanity into the libidinous self, through the murder of God, and through the refusal to participate in the dialogue of mankind in which God in the partner, can hardly be realized in its full violence, unless it is contrasted with the great openness of the classic philosophers. Aristotle, it is true, did not accept the gods of the myth as the arche of things, but from his last years there is extant the fragment of a letter: "The more I am by myself and alone, the more I have come to love myths." A "modern age" in which the thinkers who ought to be philosophers prefer the role of imperial entrepreneurs will have to go through many convulsions before it has got rid of itself, together with the arrogance of its revolt, and found the way back to the dialogue of mankind with its humility.





Jacob Burckhardt on the Process of History

When the process of reality becomes luminous, a line of meaning appears in history. But no more than that. Noetic consciousness does not stop the process in which it is an event. The process goes on; and the new luminosity, if anything, makes its mystery more tantalizing than ever. Hence, the fire exceeding bright must not be used to obscure the darkness that comprehended it not.

These observations would have appeared all too obvious to the people of the Ecumenic Age, especially to the philosophers who differentiated noetic consciousness. In our time they need emphasis, for the lights of the various speculative systems which dominate the public unconscious are used precisely for the purpose of obscuring the reality of the process and of pretending that it can be stopped. It will be apposite, therefore, to refer to Jacob Burckhardt, one of the rare modern historians who has faced the issue and analyzed it.

In his 1868 lectures On the Study of History, Burckhardt reflected on the conventional judgments that weigh progress in history against the price to be paid for it in human misery. "The greatest example is the Roman Empire … accomplished through the subjection of Orient and Occident with immeasurable rivers of blood. Here we discern, on a large scale, a world-historical purpose, obvious at least to us: The creation of a common world-culture, making possible the expansion of a new world-religion, both to be passed on to the Germanic barbarians as the future cohesive force of a new Europe." (263). Such weighing, he decides, though suggestive, is not permissible, because it rests on the fallacy that world-history is performed for the benefit of the person who indulges in the weighing. "Everybody considers his own time to be, not one of the many passing waves, but the fulfilment of time. . . . All things, however, and we are no exception, exist not for their own sake but for the whole and the whole future. . . . The life of mankind is a whole; its temporal and local vicissitudes appear as an up and down, a fortune and misfortune, only to the weakness of our understanding; in truth they belong to an higher necessity" (159f). The formulation is deceptively mild, but behind it stands Burckhardt's hard insight into the existential motivations of such weighing: It is "our profound and most ridiculous selfishness" (259). The suffering of the many is treated as a "passing misfortune;" one refers to the undeniable fact that periods of lasting order are, in most cases, the sequel to atrocious struggles for power; and one belongs, by one's own existence, to an historical present that has been gained from the suffering of others (259). The profound methodological debates about the history that has to be written anew by every generation from the position of its own present, and about the "values" of historians which determine different conceptions of history, are wiped out by Burckhardt's insight into their existential root in "our most profound and most ridiculous selfishness." The suffering is real and so are the violators who inflict it on the victims. This violence is evil; and it does not become less evil, if a power situation that has been created by such evil is taken into care by better men, so that in the end mere power "is transformed into order and law." ...

Burckhardt's uncompromising stance was necessary in opposition to a climate of opinion in which nonsense, both hypocritical and illiterate, on the issue abounded; and today it is even more necessary than it was a hundred years ago. And yet, if this were to be the last word on the matter, it would reduce the mystery of the process to the alternatives of stagnant goodness and criminal progress, something like the Platonic alternatives of a polis for pigs and the feverish polis. Moreover, it would create the illusion of a choice where no choice exists and, thus, foster precisely the vulgarity of moralistic egoism which Burckhardt detested most. Here, one must distinguish with some care between the two lines of thought that in his reflections intersect.

There is, first, the line of attack on the "egoists" who want to appropriate history and its meaning to a situation of their preference. All speculative constructions of "world-history," whether of St. Augustine, or Hegel, or of the progressivist thinkers, are brushed aside as "impertinent anticipations." For "Eternal Wisdom" has not informed us about its purposes. The "philosophers of history" which pretend to a knowledge of the "world-plan" are not unprejudiced but "colored by ideas which the philosophers absorbed when they were three or four years old." (5). ...

In his second line of thought Burckhardt is concerned with the reality of the process as it presents itself to the thinker once the deforming constructions of meaning are removed. In his attempt, however, he encounters certain difficulties. For the deformations of reality through speculative "philosophies of history" cannot simply be thrown out. They are also events in the process; and any categorization of historical phenomena will have to be general enough to include the deformations as intelligible events. Burckhardt was aware of this problem; as the passages quoted have shown, he uses the category of "egoism" or "selfishness" to characterize both the violent conqueror and the violent constructor of world-historical meaning. But "egoism" as an existential category, though it carries conviction because of its generally correct intent, does not have sufficient analytical weight as a concept. "Egoism," like "optimism," "pessimism," "nihilism," "altruism," and so forth, belongs to the newspeak of the Enlightenment; and while it makes good sense in the self-articulation of a subjectively deformed existence, one hesitates to use it in critical language. To dispose of Napoleon's conquest and of Hegel's system as two manifestations of "egoism" is not quite satisfactory, even if the characterization is not all wrong. ...

...Conquest is not merely “evil,” is not merely a manifestation of “aggressiveness.” While the most obvious strain in conquering expansion is the “violence” and “selfishness” which Burckhardt stresses, there is also the strain of “boredom” and “discontent” with every achievement and of imaginative enterprise that will assuage the unrest. The release of the tension on the line of ecumenic conquest and mass murder, though it is a derailment from existential order, is still an act of imaginative transcendence. The concupiscential exodus of the conqueror is a deformation of humanity, but it bears the mark of man’s existential tension just as much as the philosopher’s, or the prophet’s, or the saint’s exodus. The structure of the Metaxy reaches, beyond noetic consciousness, down into the concupiscential roots of action.

Notes


Ennarrationes in Pslamos 64.2.
Hegel, Vorlesungen ueber die Geschichte der Philosophie (Stuttgart, 1965), Vol. 3, (Jubilaeumsausgabe, ed. Hermann Glockner, Vol. 19), 300.









Revolutionary War, Revolutionary Peace?
by Kevin J. Jones

America is divided. One hears this constantly either in the rhetoric of an opportunistic politician's "Two Americas" stump speeches or in the petty dualisms created by journalists in search of a thesis, like the metrosexual/retrosexual split. And who can forget the Red State/Blue State rift that will be featured once again in our national election coverage? American demographics are bisected like so many green peppers in a Ginsu knife infomercial.

To reconcile these divisions, some have put forward the Declaration of Independence--specifically its second paragraph--as a source of national unity: in their eyes, the Declaration is a veritable kerygma of the American credo. Following Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, they view America as a nation fundamentally dedicated to a proposition. This advocacy of the "propositional nation," with its attendant establishment of an American orthodoxy, echoes G.K. Chesterton's cautionary description of the United States as "a nation with the soul of a church." Whether or not one grants the position that America is primarily defined by the beliefs of her people, this means that the civil religion of the United States is likewise vulnerable to the political equivalent of the theological liberalism that has so weakened confessional religious discourse. It is not politically feasible to reinterpret the "articles of faith" of the American creed to mean mere articles of peace, as Samuel Johnson did with the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. For, as it happens, opposition to any traditional American understanding of political concepts takes a familiar form: the same words are affirmed, but not the same meaning. In view of such ambiguity, Claes G. Ryn's recent book, America the Virtuous, has done us the great service of recovering traditional understandings of American politics and clarifying the revolutionary essence lurking beneath so many rhetorical invocations of American ideals.

America the Virtuous:The Crisis of Democracyand the Quest for Empireby Claes G. RynTransaction Publishers,October 1, 2003Hardcover: 400 pagesISBN 0765802198Professor Ryn thinks that revolutionaries are indeed among us, and not only on the political left. In his view, the arguments found on the lips of many influential conservatives resemble not staples of traditional American rhetoric, but instead the tenets of the Jacobin ideology of the French Revolution. While emphasizing that he is delineating a tendency of thought and not necessarily a unified system with an established orthodoxy, Ryn sees certain characteristics as typical of the new strain of American opinion: (1) an "ideology of virtuous empire" that, rather than humbling American leaders, instead goads them on in reconstructing the world; (2) devotion to American principles in the abstract, which both downplays the importance of the "unwritten constitution" of the culture and encourages Americans to view their system of government as universally applicable; and finally, (3) a contempt for traditional societies not based on America-approved abstract principles. Partisans of this ideology of virtuous empire claim to be defending America and the West against postmodern and premodern nihilists, but by America and the West they mean not the concrete civilizations of history, but the philosophical abstractions such civilizations produced in the thought of the Enlightenment. Terms like "democracy" and "liberty," are understood purely in the ideal sense, and not as the results of the interaction between particular culture and universal concepts. Nor is this outlook only limited to our foreign wars of revolution: the neo-Jacobin ideology, Ryn claims, "envisions the remaking not only of the world but of America." (p. 8) He portrays this putative neo-Jacobinism as a movement that derives much of its energy from equivocation. Consciously or not, its adherents mask their new vision for both the United States and the world in the language of the American past.

Not surprisingly, America the Virtuous is a book set on exploring a split within American culture. To use the taxonomy of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, there is an Old America and a New America, that is to say, an older kind of conservatism and neo-Jacobin neoconservatism. Both assert that virtue, democracy, and the free market are to be desired, defended, and promoted. But Ryn argues that the interpretation of typical American values radically differs between the "old" Americans and the neo-Jacobins, with the latter in the ascendant.

Take virtue, for example. For Old America, virtue is made manifest in concrete practices like love of neighbor, humility, and self-restraint. By looking after oneself and one's own and leading by example, one can influence one's own community and indirectly the world. This modest aspiration was given voice by John Winthrop in his speech to the nascent Puritan colony in New England: "We will be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world." 

Against this older vision, Ryn sees the Jacobin conception of virtue as primarily emotivist in character. Jacobin virtue is not a matter of conduct but instead a matter of holding the right humanitarian opinions: "Their putative virtue is that they entertain benevolent sentiments towards various abstract entities, such as "the people," "mankind," "the proletariat," "the poor," "the downtrodden," "the starving third world," or the like--entities that are all diffuse and distant from the emoting person and which therefore impose on the individual no concrete and personally demanding obligations. (p. 56) Nor does the influence of the virtuecrats of the Christian Right serve to limit neoconservative hubris: "In its practical effects on United States foreign policy, this religious triumphalism puts a religious gloss on neo-Jacobinism. It does not Christianize United States foreign policy, but makes it less humble and more belligerent." (p. 138) And as for our city upon a hill? Prominent neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan have belittled this image, writing "A policy of sitting atop a hill and leading by example in practice is a policy of cowardice and dishonor." ("Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs, July/August, 1996. quoted by Ryn, p. 6)

"Democracy" is another term that, to use Professor Ryn's awkward but accurate terminology, needs to be "dichotomized." There is a vital distinction to be made between constitutional democracy and plebiscitary democracy. The former means decentralized government and a popular will mediated through all the little platoons of life, like family, church, the rotary club, and the town hall--the institutions which help cultivate the virtues necessary for living freely. Plebiscitary democracy, on the contrary, sees the popular will as a simple aggregate of individual wills and does not see these wills as needing formative institutions of any kind other than the centralized bureaucracy produced by plebiscite. For, as Ryn writes, "the political dynamic of plebiscitary democracy is to mobilize, expand, and centralize government. The effect is to erode local and private autonomy and initiative and to efface what is locally and regionally distinctive." (p. 53) 

Ryn's section on the free market, a chapter titled "Jacobin Capitalism," is perhaps the most provocative, and least satisfying, of his analyses of ambiguous terms. One standard conservative description of the free market defines it as an efficient mechanism for price discovery. Against this mundane standby of the economics textbook, Ryn writes: 

"It should be carefully noted that there is a sense in which a free market would become a reality only if the movement of goods and services were wholly unrestricted, unfettered not only by "external," legal, or institutional checks but by "inner" restraints, such as the inhibitions and tastes of civilized persons.

A Rousseauistic, Jacobin desire to destroy traditional moral and cultural restraints and corresponding sociopolitical structures can thus be said to aid in the creation of a truly free market. It is not far-fetched but entirely consistent to be a moral, intellectual, and cultural radical and a strong proponent of the free market by a certain definition of "free market." (p. 147)

This is a striking passage. First, Ryn's insight reveals the deep--and perhaps heretofore unexpected--inner consistency that lies at the heart of the slogan of the libertarian journal Reason, "Free Minds and Free Markets." Furthermore, once one overcomes the minor shock of a non-ironical reference to civilized tastes, one is forced to consider just how many Jacobin capitalists are found among our corporate leaders, not to mention among their influential employees in the marketing department. Yet well aware of the suspicions that will be raised by this critique of the market, Ryn follows up by describing how capitalism could function in a decentralized society where self-restraint checks uncontrolled self-interest. Citing Wilhelm Röpke, he argues that the market simply reflects the values we bring to it. In a civilized society, the market reflects civilized tastes, and conversely a market in a degenerating society reflects degenerating tastes--as the classic programming adage goes, "garbage in, garbage out."

This attempt to salvage the market doesn't quite convince. Though Professor Ryn, in the spirit of Edmund Burke, warns us that the market does not exist in the abstract, here, it seems, some abstraction is in order. To wit, no matter its cultural situation, the market has no inherent capacity to limit itself. If even a small minority of society views the capacities of the market as the only constraint, the market will tend to reward them, granting them an economic and cultural base from which the "civilized tastes" of men can be further undermined.

Besides this point, Ryn's work also suffers from an undersupply of sources. Ryn makes several arguments that go against contemporary conventional wisdom. For instance, he argues against describing the beginnings of the United States Federal Government as a "founding," contrary to the Straussians and high school civics teachers everywhere. He prefers the term "framing," which suggests less novelty. Ryn also holds that it is misleading to define the rebellion that separated the colonies from British rule as the "American Revolution;" rather, it should be conceived of as a "War of Independence." In many ways, the war was counterrevolutionary, leaving most of society untouched and keeping in place many of the traditions of British government in particular and Western government in general. These are defensible arguments, but Ryn doesn't take much space for their detailed defense. A few more endnotes would suffice to redirect skepticism towards more robust material.

There is a more crucial flaw in Ryn's failure to provide better support for his attack on putative neo-Jacobinism--to invert a phrase, "the covers of this book are too close together." For instance, in his description of plebiscitary democracy, Ryn fails to cite even one conservative or liberal who tends towards pebiscitarianism. Not one contemporary person is mentioned as an example of a Jacobin capitalist. Ryn cites only Marx as an example of how Jacobin capitalism might reason, and though anyone even vaguely familiar with the neoconservative movement knows that many of its leaders have lamented squandering their formative years in Marxist foolishness, Ryn should have backed up his argument with concrete contemporary examples. To be fair, he does cites Michael Ledeen's gleeful invocation of the modern American tendency towards what Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction," but too much of his case rests upon insinuation and abstract descriptions. Though these descriptions ring true in the ears of this reviewer, they are not enough to give full credence to Ryn's wide-ranging accusations of neo-Jacobinism.

The foregoing is not to imply that this book is one long accusation. Ryn makes some subtle analyses of the interaction between universal principles and particular actions, as well as of the differences between nationalism, internationalism, and Ryn's favored view of a "rooted cosmopolitanism" which is open to other cultures but refuses to disparage the mother country. His reflections on responsible nationhood are as welcome as they are timely, and his lengthy list of critical problems facing America in the chapter "Democracy in Peril" will garner the praise of any culture warrior worthy of the name.

Having diagnosed American troubles, Ryn's solution will not charm those enamored of governmental activism. He has nothing but disdain for those who campaign not "for a revival of character but for more laws and regulations." (p. 102) As he states, "The crux of the problem with neo-Jacobinism is not particular individuals, however great their power, but the moral, cultural, and intellectual trends in the West that have made persons like them appear insightful and worthy of influence in the first place." (p. 201) Still, Ryn does not propose a popular movement to sweep away the corrupted elites. In his mind, "the people" in general are docile, and any current disagreement they may have with the neo-Jacobins simply means that they are slow to grasp what the current elite expects from them. Instead of an ideological populism of outrage, which is unlikely to produce much besides hot air and a new elite just as committed to augmenting its own power, Ryn proposes the decentralization and diversification of our nationalized and homogenous contemporary American culture--that is, the creation of new, locally grounded elites closer to human concerns and further away from the "New York-Hollywood" and the "Boston-Berkeley" axes. Immediate national political action on such a program is largely futile, so we must concentrate on the little things, like improving ourselves and helping our neighbors, until such actions can have their effect on a larger scale.

Such pleas for decentralized action are rare enough. Rarer still is a book that so keenly connects a major strain of modern political life to its ideological sources. Though Professor Ryn is not optimistic about the prospects for renewal, his America the Virtuous provides a very valuable starting point to help turn back the tide of abstract revolution, and for that he deserves our gratitude.





Nazis in the White House, Job in New Jersey
by Randy Boyagoda

The Plot Against America: A Novelby Philip RothWake up one morning as a 155-pound breast, or watch your President rub shoulders with Adolf Hitler: In Philip Roth's caustic imagination, these are equally plausible. His new novel, The Plot Against America, offers perhaps his most phantasmagoric proposal since the transformation of poor David Kapesh into a whopping mammary gland. Roth re-conceives American life during the early stages of World War II through the experiences of an average Jewish family in Newark whose members lead average American lives, until Charles Lindbergh --- aviation celebrity, anti-Semite, and vocal isolationist --- defeats FDR in his second reelection bid. He rapidly moves a smitten country off the path to war in Europe alongside the Allies, and onto an assiduously non-interventionist track in sympathy with Germany and Japan. Simultaneously, his administration enacts a series of domestic programs that betray an ominously friendly interest in America's Jewish population. Kafka's spirit governs over The Plot, just as it presided over The Breast, only we've moved from the absurd tragedy of The Metamorphosis to the numb dystopia of The Trial.

The Plot Against Americaby Philip RothHoughton Mifflin, August 2004400 pages.ISBN 0-618-50928-3.$26.00 (cloth)

We learn of Lindbergh's ascent from narrator Philip Roth, a young Jewish kid growing up amidst the ethnic jumble of 1930's East Coast America, whose parents' and older brother's identities match those of the author's own. This is not the first time Roth has involved "Roth" in his fiction; we are invited again to enter into a post-modern game of determining authenticity, autobiography, and authorial presence, as in The Facts and Operation Shylock. But the frisson of discovering deeper parallels between Philip-the-author and Philip-the-narrator fades fast; this dimension of the novel will be of lasting interest only to future dissertation writers.

The Plot sounds strongest against Roth's recent "American trilogy." In its third volume, The Human Stain, Roth skewered the fruity sensitivities of academic culture while tracing out the persistent complexities of "passing," against the splotchy backdrop of the Lewinsky scandal. As in its predecessors (American Pastoral and I Married a Communist), historical forces enter the novel through the private lives of ordinary men and women whose distance from very American spectacles closes off dramatically, unexpectedly, and suddenly. Roth's protagonists and their families, like their neighborhoods and their nation after HUAAC, after Vietnam, and now, after Lindbergh, are left to make sense of much emotional, physical, and political wreckage, if only in advance of history's next convulsion.

Ultimately, Roth's dispassionate treatment of America's strident and clumsy march through the twentieth century is defined by his unforgiving fixation on the muddiest corners of American Jewish experience, from Goodbye, Columbus through Portnoy's Complaint, and now, reaching a Sinai summit of hysteria, with The Plot. With unprecedented tenderness this time around, Roth treats of a young boy entering into fuller knowledge of himself, his family, and the history that roars around him, sweeping up questions of what it means to be Jewish, and what it means to be American. While this softer key provides some lovely moments, The Plot ultimately lacks the fullness of intellectual, political, and cultural inquisition that we've come to expect from Philip Roth, and that we'd want in a novel of such paranoiac nation-dreaming. 

Initially, the Roth family leads an innocently American life, equally proud of its ethnic heritage and national character, while naturally, if distantly worried about developments overseas. Then, in 1940, Lindbergh wins the Presidency, capitalizing on his celebrity status and "twentieth century Americans weary of confronting a new crisis in every decade." The Roths are suddenly faced with a very immediate crisis of their own, as their new President and Hitler sign "an understanding guaranteeing peaceful relations between the United States and Germany." One of the finest stretches of the novel follows immediately out of this grim parallel universe. Philip's father packs the family off to DC to remind them of America's greatness, and, implicitly, to diagnose the nation's altered state. While the episode leads to some ugly moments of now confidently open Jew baiting and provokes resilient responses from Philip's parents, the section's fineness comes out of its excruciating build-up. We're waiting for something truly awful to happen, in direct sympathy with the main characters as they patriotically, if gingerly, amble from monument to monument. And just when we relax, going with the family "off to have a drink in the cafeteria" after a mild day of sightseeing, Philip reports, 

a low-flying plane in the distance came zooming our way. As the roar grew louder, people shouted "It's the president! It's Lindy!" ... It was the same Lockheed fighter we'd seen in the air over the city the previous afternoon, and we had no choice but to stand there like patriots and watch with the rest of them.

This passage very nearly encapsulates the novel's predicament: To the young narrator, it feels like a fighter jet is inexorably bearing down upon his family; and not only are they frozen in place with fear; not only is the plane flown by an anti-Semitic child-prince of a President; but to be "good Americans," the Roths have to cheer along with their dazzled brethren.

The symbolic resonance of this moment sounds throughout the novel, and one hopes that present-day readers will exercise their imaginations beyond the small beer of substituting a Muslim family, F-18's circling DC, and a boyish, geared-up President grinning to adoring crowds. It would be difficult to press for any substantial parallels between the novel's wartime hysteria and our present, brittle moment, but in a subtly postmodern key, where all is fragment and irony, some images and character arrangements will encourage readers to see more than a long-ago, phantom limb America emerging from Roth's pages.

Undoubtedly, much conversation about the novel will pounce on just such matters. Leaving aside this cat scratch criticism, one discovers that The Plot offers a steady and heated meditation on the private crises that come out of building pandemonium. Philip's family divides over the central issue facing Jews in Lindbergh's America: are they targets and, if so, when and how will the pogroms come? Because this is Roth, intense emotions crash around the kitchen table. An orphaned cousin, inspired by his uncle's passionate denunciations of the Nazis but also rebelling against his authority, runs away to join the Canadian army, and loses his leg in the European theater. Alvin returns to Jersey only to descend into nihilism and number running; he embodies the bitter pointlessness of seemingly any private action intended to defeat, reject, or avoid the American Pharaoh, which the novel gives in to in its darkest moments. Meanwhile, Philip's older brother and his aunt become proud supporters of Lindbergh and rise from lower middle-class anonymity to local celebrity status by immersing themselves in programs meant to "assimilate" Jews into wider America. Philip's mother, perhaps Roth's finest female character, worries over their chances to escape to Canada like their neighbors have done, and tries to maintain a normal home-life for her family. Philip's father, a passionate and nearly indefatigable critic of Lindbergh and his duped Jews, eventually becomes a caricature of doomsday predictions and angry castigation, spiraling into failure and defeat before making good at novel's end. 

Even though we cannot grasp this history in advance, and despite Roth's best efforts at maintaining uncertainty through the continual clash of contradictory voices, the novel's set up makes for easy odds. We sense that the "Office of American Absorption," which tries to move the family from Newark to Kentucky for "exciting new opportunities to expand their horizons and to strengthen their country," is a cultural pogrom wrapped up in bureaucratic platitudes. Similarly, the "Just Folks" service that sends Philip's brother Sandy off to a southern farm suggests a chipper reeducation labor camp for young Jewish men. Pushing through the month-by-month chapters, we start to drown out Herman Roth's Job-like lamentations. We know he will be proven right about the State's well-groomed anti-Semitism and fascist ambitions, and we grow impatient for Events, amid much prediction, warning, and bald-treaded argument between father and son, father and sister-in-law, father and nephew, father and Rabbi, father and radio, father and burgeoning fatherland.

The novel manages to overcome this lulling din because it approaches its historical and political landscapes through the experiences of a boy just breaching adult knowledge. Philip Roth, narrator, is more endearing than the mid-life crises who usually tell Roth's stories, and the author maintains perfect pitch in tracing out Philip's responses to his warring family; to the always-odd and now perhaps dangerous Christians around them; to an unlikable boyhood friend foisted upon him; and to the competing claims of youthful pursuit and historical awareness that define the novel's most affecting passages. When, for example, a key character is assassinated, the news comes through a radio report that interrupts the decisive game of the 1942 World Series. Philip's response is archetypal American boy: "I heard shouting in the street, then a scream from a nearby house, but the game had come back on and the suspense was tremendous." When Philip eventually emerges, and a local tough announces "'Go get your bats! The war is on!'" Roth layers cool irony onto the coincidence of national tragedy and boyhood glory.

When the expected pogroms do start, however, Roth fumbles. We are told that in Detroit's "biggest Jewish neighborhoods, shops were looted and windows broken, Jews trapped outdoors were set upon and beaten, and kerosene crosses were ignited on the lawns." Before we can contemplate this startling, Kristallnacht, U.S.A., Roth drops in a tutorial explaining the actual event in professorial detail, betraying meager faith in his readers' historical awareness and in their imaginative abilities. He thereby denudes a key moment of its subtle horror. The historical appendix that follows the novel proves helpful, especially in regards to lesser known figures from this period that assume major roles, such as Burton K. Wheeler and Joachim Von Ribbentrop. Its very existence renders pointless Roth's narrative excursions into History; these chunks clank and thud at inopportune moments throughout The Plot.           

The novel's most telling flaw, however, is that its main focus blurs when it could be sharpest. Roth has devoted 45 years, and thousands of pages, to tearing down simplistic ideas about Jewish identity, taking on all comers at all times with muscular style and a cutthroat intellect. In testing the Jewish claim to the American experiment in the most difficult context he can imagine, however, The Plot plops. Halfway through the novel, we come across a classic Philip Roth phenomenon: a two-page single paragraph meditation on the double meaning of Americans "being Jews." Through punishing prose, Roth rejects God, rejects synagogue, rejects race, rejects ancient language, rejects schmaltzy ethnic pride --- rejects most every imaginable source and standard for a people's self-definition, save one. At the end of this streaking comet of a passage, this is where we land: "Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American."

Is this Philip Roth, or Dr. Phil?

To be Jewish is to be yourself? To be American is to be yourself? No further commitments, obligations, virtues, histories, traditions needed? Just be yourself? At the core of this moving, horrifying book, the intellectual formulation of Jewish and American identity proves to be a puddle of drippy, 21st century identity-speak. In vain does one search this late fiction from a great American writer, from perhaps the great Jewish American writer, for finer knowledge of what American Jews drew on when they were expelled from their innocent Garden State, into a stars-and-stripes-and-swastikas desert.








Raising Hell
by Annie Young FrisbiewithScott Derrickson

Hellraiser: Inferno (2000), the fifth installment in the immensely popular film series created by novelist Clive Barker, tells the story of Detective Joseph Thorne, a man cut from the same bad cop cloth as Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant.  He neglects his wife and daughter, has a penchant for nose candy, and, when he wakes up after a one night stand in the same room as a dead and dismembered prostitute, tries to pin it on his loyal partner.  At a crime scene, he discovers a puzzle box, the solving of which, in the Hellraiser universe, summons Pinhead, the Cenobite who lures and ushers humans into hell.  Once Joseph solves the box, all those around him begin to die in elaborate ways, and Joseph himself begins to be haunted by strange apparitions and visions.  In his quest to discover the murderer, he comes face to face with the inescapable truth -- Joseph has gone to hell and is now doomed to be torn apart by his sins, over and over, for the rest of eternity.

Scott Derrickson

The New Pantagruel’s Annie Frisbie fell in love with horror films while working at Kim’s Underground video store while pursuing an MA in Cinema Studies from NYU. She had the opportunity to do an email interview with the writer/director of Hellraiser: Inferno, Scott Derrickson. Derrickson is the writer (with Paul Harris Boardman) of Urban Legends: Final Cut and soon-to-be-released The Exorcism of Annaliese Michele (starring Laura Linney and Tom Wilkinson), both of which Derrickson also directed.  Earlier this year Derrickson wrote the story for Wim Wenders' Land of Plenty. Derrickson is a graduate Biola University where he took bachelor's degrees in Humanities and Communications, and from the University of Southern California's School of Cinema and Television, where he received his master's degree in film production. (Readers of tNP may be interested in Derrickson's article, "Behind the lens - A Christian filmmaker in Hollywood," Christian Century, January 30, 2002.)






The New Pantagruel: To start off, could you give us the brief rundown on your background and how you got into filmmaking?

Scott Derrickson: I grew up in a family that watched a lot of movies, but as I got older, I grew increasingly more interested in literature and the arts.  Movies for me were entertainment, but books, music, theater, and painting were art.  Then when I was in college, I discovered foreign cinema, and that's when I realized that movies can be art as well as entertainment.  I started experimenting with shooting things on both film and video, and I began to understand that cinema is really the combination of the four art forms I just mentioned -- it has the structure and thematic import of literature; the experience of music; the blocking, acting, dialogue writing of theater; and the visual compositions of painting and photography.  This revelation is what made me want to be a filmmaker -- that cinema is the blending of all great art forms into a medium that is inherently entertaining.


"Good Country People #11" by Scott KolboIntaglio

After college, I went to graduate film school at USC, and then went on to become a writer and director.  For the last nine years, I've written about a dozen studio screenplays, and I'm now directing my second feature.

The New Pantagruel: It was a bit of a thrill to find out that someone like you exists -- a Christian filmmaker with a penchant for horror -- and not the old-fashioned kind or the über-hip kind, but the gory, bloody, scary kind.  Have you gotten much negative attention in the evangelical Christian community for your work?

Scott Derrickson: I have gotten some negative attention, but mostly from Christians over 30.  Younger Christians typically seem to get it -- even if they're not fans of the genre, they seem to understand why I do what I do.  I think I've confused a lot of older Christians.  There's definitely a generational gap in the church now -- much more so than when I was in my teens and twenties -- and the difference between generations can really been seen in their differing attitudes toward art and entertainment.

The New Pantagruel: In the same vein, how much do you care about what mainstream Christians think about you?

Scott Derrickson: I care less about criticism as I get older.  I've accepted the fact that I'm a part of the American church community, but I'm also its critic and a bit of an iconoclast, and that means I'll be criticized.  One of the roles of the artist, I think, is to shine the light of truth into the dark corners of human life.  What's difficult for me is hearing criticism and condemnation second-hand -- when you hear that others are gossiping about you.  I appreciate it when someone who doesn't understand or like my work has the courage and integrity to question me directly -- that usually results in a philosophical conversation, which is a good thing.  I suppose that since younger Christians now seem to be appreciating my endeavors, I have to beware of liking their compliments too much. Hopefully, I'm working toward that balance where neither compliments or criticisms mean too much to me.  What matters is if I'm living the life I ought to be living.

"Good Country People #6" by Scott KolboIntaglio

The New Pantagruel: Have you already gotten sick of answering questions like this?

Scott Derrickson: No, it's a subject that matters to me.

The New Pantagruel: Hellraiser: Inferno reminded me of a medieval morality play, and I found your comments about it in the lecture you gave at Biola fascinating.  I believe that you accomplished what you set out to do, and that your message is very clear.  I'm curious to know how you came to write and direct the fifth Hellraiser movie.  Were you seeking specifically to direct a Hellraiser film?  Or were you offered Hellraiser and saw in it an opportunity to tell a story that meant something to you?  Or is it something else entirely?

Scott Derrickson: When the job was first offered to me, I turned it down.  Then, without really trying, I thought of a way to do the film that would be personally fulfilling.  I remember exactly where I was at the time -- I was standing in a hotel room in Indianapolis, and the idea came to me that the movie could end with a character confronting the two sides of himself -- his spirit and his flesh.  Then I thought, "That's great, but the studio would never let me do that".  Obviously, I was wrong.

The New Pantagruel: It seems to me that Hellraiser: Inferno undercuts some of the traditional pleasures associated with the horror genre.  In fact, you could almost say that the moral message of the film creates a site of resistance to the enjoyment of the scenes dismemberment and violence.  What are your thoughts on the relationship between the horror genre and pleasure?

Scott Derrickson: I respect the fact that people are drawn to observe horrific images and situations, but I also think it's important for an artist to typically make evil acts and violent images repulsive.  To do otherwise can easily lead to a dynamic that's a bit pornographic, I think.  I care deeply about good and evil, and "woe to those who call evil good, and good evil."  I intend for my work to reinforce definitions of good and evil rather than confuse them.  The exception to this rule of making violence and evil repulsive, of course, is when trying to illuminate the seductive power of evil.  In that case, you want the audience to experience the pleasure of evil, but only so that they can then come to understand evil better.  When I watch [Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda documentary] Triumph of the Will (a true horror film!) I do not experience repulsion, but seduction.  I really feel the allure of the power of a culture fully enamored with and empowered by evil ideas.  That film helps me understand the power of a wicked community and why it can exist.  I also think the seductive visual beauty of David Lynch's Blue Velvet services that film wonderfully.  It's a film about the horror that often lies beneath beautiful surfaces.  His film The Elephant Man is the opposite:  it's about the beauty that can exist underneath horrific surfaces.  I think that most often, though, the goal is to make violence repulsive, rather than entertaining or attractive.

The New Pantagruel: Did you grapple with audience/fan expectations?  How was your  film received in the context of the other Hellraiser films?

Scott Derrickson: I really didn't worry about the other films.  It was a dead franchise, and I knew that my approach was a bit subversive.  Clive Barker wasn't happy with what I did, but if he wanted to protect the franchise, he shouldn't have sold it to Dimension.  They owned it, and they asked me to reinvent it, so that's what I did.  The fans of the franchise are split about it -- some love it, and some hate it.  No one seems to be neutral about it, which I think is great.

The New Pantagruel: Hellraiser: Inferno could have been a Twilight Zone episode, with Pinhead in the Rod Serling role.  Whose story is this?

"Good Country People #12" by Scott KolboIntaglio

Scott Derrickson: It's Joseph Thorne's story, not Pinhead's.  It's the story about a man who is hell and he doesn't know it.  It's about a man who practices the everyday sins of our culture -- infidelity, disloyalty, chemical indulgence, etc.  And I don't judge him, because I relate to him.  I wrote a character who has gone further with his evil behavior than I have, but I'm still guilty of all the same sins.

The New Pantagruel: Horror has gone quite mainstream in the last 5-10 years, which  has caused a growing interest in Japanese horror.  Japanese horror has historically been much more explicit than American or European horror, and certain films or scenes have gone to greatly creative lengths to  depict torture and sadism.  Some would say that there are lines that  should not be crossed, even within a fictional environment.  What responsibility do you think filmmakers have towards notions of decency, if any?

Scott Derrickson: The lines that shouldn't be crossed have to do with intentions, not content.  I believe that any act of violence that is shown for the purely cynical purpose of feeding the audiences appetite for increasingly graphic material has most likely crossed the line. But if the violent material is illuminating (like Seven), or serves a real dramatic purpose (like Silence of the Lambs), or even a comedic purpose (like Shaun of the Dead or Dead Alive), then I think it's still serves a noble purpose.  What I don't want to contribute to is a thoughtless and ever-increasing appetite for more excessively graphic images.  I think that even torture and sadism are fair game for the artist, as long as the filmmaker's intention is for the audience to identify with the victims of such violence and not the perpetrators.  If the idea is to thrill the audience with the vicarious experience of such inhuman behavior, then it's not only indecent, it's reprehensible.  The torture scene in The Deer Hunter, for example, is hard to watch but it says a lot about the inhumanity of war.

The New Pantagruel: Mainstream Christian culture, for the most part, can't seem to accept movies as what they are, especially now that most Christian  accept that movies, even R-rated ones, aren't going to send them straight to hell.  And Christians aren't much different from the rest of America in their consumption of films as product. Additionally, there's been a wave of support for edgy, dark, violent films, The Matrix and Magnolia being especial favorites among Christians, and for the most part, this just seems like reactionary hipster posing.  Do you think that there's another way for Christians to understand films?  Is this even necessary?

Scott Derrickson: Yes, and I think it has to do with fully appreciating excellence in style as well as meaning and content.  The Christian culture has begun to embrace certain movies, but only if their content services the Christian world view.  Movies like The Matrix and Magnolia are embraced because Christian meaning can be extracted from them like it's a biblical text that contains sacred meaning.  Christians will elevate those films, but they won't elevate The Godfather the same way -- even though it's a superior film.

Christians are not yet ready to elevate a film purely for it's excellence in craft and subsequent entertainment value.  Somehow, it's still got to have content that services our Christian point of view, or it's not worthy of our stamp of approval.  It's like we're fans of Renaissance paintings with all of their stories, moral lessons, and religious iconography, but we're stuck in the Picasso museum.  So we stare at those images and talk about how we can learn about narcissism and adultery from Picasso's work.  Sure he was a narcissist and adulterer, but so what?  What we should be saying is, "What form!  What color!  What mysterious imagery and inventive style!" Yes, there is some content there, but the content doesn't have to be the point.  With many movies, the style and craft and sheer emotion is much more important than the thematic ideas.  My wish is that more Christians were free to feel justified in loving something for it's style, craft, and emotion alone.  I loved Kill Bill not so much for it's content (which could be considered morally questionable with it's ruthless revenge ethic) but its form and style are so exquisite that I must deem it a beautiful work of art.  For most Christians, to love a film on those terms is unacceptable.

"Good Country People #18" by Scott KolboIntaglio

The New Pantagruel: There's a fascinating history of religion within film history itself - I'm thinking of filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman- even Woody Allen.  These filmmakers compose a spectrum of religious engagement, from external criticism to contemplative meditation, but in recent years there's been a movement of "Christian" filmmakers coming from the explicitly Evangelical Protestant denominations.  Clearly, you've made a conscious choice to stay away from the ghetto.  What kind of Christian are you?  By that, I guess I'm asking about denomination, but I'd also like to know a little bit about where you see yourself as a filmmaker concerned with religious issues like those named above.

Scott Derrickson: I am a member of a Presbyterian church, but I have no loyalty or particular affinity for the denomination itself.  The truth is, I attend church to give -- the churchgoing experience for me is one of total discipline.  On any given Sunday, I would rather stay home and read the New York Times.  But I still regard myself as a member of the community of faith, a practitioner of Christian disciplines, and in short, a disciple of Christ.  The difference between myself and those Evangelicals you mentioned is that I don't feel obliged to propagate my point of view through cinema. I'm not interested in winning converts through film -- because the gospel is foolishness, and foolishness makes for bad filmmaking.  But I can't ignore the fact that issues of faith and spirituality interest me more than anything else, so I'm not going to avoid them, especially when those issues are important to so many other people.  I think that my work is usually an attempt to explore issues of faith from a unique perspective. When writing a script, I don't set out with an agenda to push, but rather with questions to explore.  And I must be willing to let the film take me someplace I hadn't expected.  If I really have faith that God may be involved in the creative process, then I shouldn't be surprised when the work itself challenges what I think and believe.  If I'm so arrogant as to think that I have a superior perspective that the world should share, or if I lack the humility to change my mind about spiritual issues in the course of creating, then I am destined to fail as both a Christian and as an artist.

The New Pantagruel: What can you tell us about your upcoming film, The Exorcism of Annaliese Michele?  The title is fantastic--makes me think of those great 70s films like The Possession of Joel Delaney and The Reincarnation of Peter Proud.  And with Laura
Linney!

Scott Derrickson: It's about a girl who dies during an exorcism and the priest is put on trial for negligent homicide. It's a real hybrid -- both a courtroom movie and a horror  film.  I'm really feeling good about the whole project, and it should be coming out about a year from now.

"Good Country People #22" by Scott KolboIntaglio

The New Pantagruel: Thank you so much for your time- I hope you enjoyed the questions, and  if you have anything else you'd like to add, I'd welcome it.

Scott Derickson: My pleasure.  I think I've said enough.




Folly, Prophecy and Piggishness
by John KnausswithScott Kolbo

Scott Kolbo studied drawing, painting, and printmaking at Boise State University and then at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Today he teaches these crafts at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington. Some of Scott's work can be seen throughout this issue of The New Pantagruel, and here he answers a few questions from John Knauss for tNP.





"St. Jeremiah Preaching #8" by Scott KolboInk jet print and mixed media

The New Pantagruel: How early did your interest in these particular styles emerge?

Scott Kolbo: I started drawing because I was bored in church. We went at least 4 times a week, and since my dad was the pastor I was there early, and went home late. Drawing was a great way to pass the time. I tried to do a lot of other things to escape the clutches of the art world, but I wasn't good at any of them. All I really like doing is making marks on flat surfaces. I got into printmaking because I used to go through all the art books I could get my hands on and I really loved the prints. I had no idea what "printmaking" was - I just knew that these satirical images of grotesque little people doing strange and humorous things was exactly what I wanted to do with my own work. When I got to art school I found my way into a printmaking class and I never looked back. 

I like to think that my artwork is a continuation of the preoccupation printmakers have always had with satire and social commentary. The history of printmaking is filled with artists who use their medium to mock the powerful and corrupt -- and to fight against injustice. The emphasis on grotesque humor and irreverent symbolism in my work has been inspired by this tradition. Classic artists from this genre -- Goya, Hogarth, Daumier, George Grosz, and Käthe Kollwitz -- have been extremely important for me as I think about the content of my work. All of them rely on the qualities of the drawn mark to illuminate the folly and self-deceptions of their time. In addition to raucous drawing and challenging symbolism I am excited by narrative. I also don't know how to be a relevant artist without somehow dealing with our visually overstimulated society. I appropriate pop cultural images and try to use them in a way that feels both familiar and yet disquieting. Contemporary artists like the South African Political artist William Kentridge have also been influential as I attempt to work with a set of reoccurring characters doing odd things in an exaggerated alternative universe.

The New Pantagruel: What other forms or artists have influenced your work over time?  Is there a particular direction you are moving in at present?
 
Scott Kolbo: I am currently working on some ideas for video installation and temporary wall drawing.
 
The New Pantagruel: The final sentence of your Artist's Statement reads, "My ultimate goal is to lead the viewer to recognize the fundamental foolishness of human nature and to make visible the discrepancies that exist between what we pretend to be and what we really are."  What is the relationship between this statement and the departure from classical forms in your work?
 
Scott Kolbo: I think that what you are getting at in your question is why I don't glorify the human form the way they did in the more classical periods of Art History? I have always loved that sort of art, but I felt that my own particular gift is for satire and humor. There is way too much evidence of our ridiculousness in the world for me to be able to take anything we do too seriously. I want to explore the serious beauty that is revealed when we are weak and foolish -- and acknowledge it -- not pompous displays of idealized power or perfection. I think you need to have a lot of confidence in the human condition to make "classical" forms, I'm afraid I'm a bit skeptical of all that...
 
The New Pantagruel: Having grown up reading a lot of comic books and graphic novels, I'm quick to see something of the latter in your work... is there any accuracy in this?
 
Scott Kolbo: Comics and Graphic Novels are a huge influence for me. Books like Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid On Earth, or Blankets are really awe-inspiring for me. I would love for contemporary art to be fun and exciting the way that the best comics (and movies for that matter) can be. I have also been warped by reading a lot of Jack Chick tracts as a kid (comics were sort of off limits for a lot of years).

The New Pantagruel: What would you say is the relationship between the Prophet and the Artist?

"St. Jeremiah Preaching #9" by Scott KolboInk jet print and mixed media
 
Scott Kolbo: I think that the arts can provide a powerful prophetic voice in the contemporary world. Evangelicals are always mistakenly talking about using culture as a tool (we can really get the gospel out there if we can just IMPACT the movie business) when I believe that culture is something we create. Creating an authentic culture requires us to look at all of our flaws and injustices, and the arts reveal all of it in an embodied way. So the arts should have an prophetic element to them. Having said that I also think that its a huge mistake to act like ALL artists need to be prophetic. One of the things I love doing with my work is to poke fun at people who think they are prophets -- but might not be. The issue of self delusion is never far away from the "prophetic."
 
The New Pantagruel: If we are living in a culture whose economy feeds primarily off the Fear of its consumers, what might happen if those consumers were free from such Fear?  How might this happen?
 
Scott Kolbo: The problem of consumerism in our culture is a tough one. How do you escape the cycle? Does anyone really want to get out? I think that in some ways the power we have as consumers is to re-direct the marketers' attention. The big question for our age is if we can control ourselves. Are we constrained or unconstrained in our nature? Can we control our desires or not? I think our culture is conflicted about the answer, and we tend to shift our beliefs about all of it depending on our own self interest. So I think we could all be free from these fears if there was a mass movement to stop buying crap we don't really need -- to sacrifice something for justice and equity -- and to recognize that we need to exercise some wisdom and regulate the options available to all of us -- because we really can't control ourselves as a consuming society.
 
The New Pantagruel: What kind of communities are you a part of, and how have those communities responded to your work?
 
Scott Kolbo: I teach at a Presbyterian college and have always been a part of evangelical faith communities. I also think that I am a part of the art world, particularly on the local level. My faith community has always been polite. As long as people know you and like you, they are pretty hesitant to condemn your work or the whole enterprise of the arts. I would say that there is far more interest in the arts among evangelicals in the last 5 years, but they all seem to think it would be a great trick for outreach or worship -- again I'd categorize it as attempting to use culture as a tool rather than create something authentic. I honestly feel most at home among the common sense art people I have met over the years. There is an openness in the pluralism of contemporary art and a willingness to listen to different voices that I find refreshing and renewing. I have had a hard time seeing the value in talking about art with evangelicals -- I mostly try to make small talk.

The New Pantagruel: Thinking of Leon Bloy's assertion, "Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig," Frederick Buechner called himself a "part-time novelist who happens to be a part-time Christian." Was there a point in your life where you recognized your own piggishness in a way that informed your work in a new way, or were your concerns as an artist always running along this vein?

Scott Kolbo: I think that Buechner is an incredible hero. Along with Flannery O'Connor, etc. The writers are the ones I have found a sense of community with. I'm afraid that my own piggishness is evident all around me. I caught a quick glimpse of what a pretentious ass I am in high school. I was writing a bunch of opinionated tripe for the school newspaper and I realized that I thought I was smarter and cooler than everyone else. In reality I was just a fool who was faking it in every aspect of life -- and that everyone else was doing the same. My life and work have sort of mulled that revelation over since. The lack of grace and humility I found in myself as a young man is something I'm always afraid will bounce up to the surface. I try to be on guard against pride and power plays in all aspects of the world because I know that this is what motivates me at my worst. I believe that all the great artists I've looked at who work in the tradition I'd like to place myself have the same outlook from the personal to the outside world, but it's pretty presumptuous of me to pretend that I belong in the same league with them.









My Africa Problem ... and Ours
by Gideon Strauss
This essay was selected for inclusion in The Best Christian Writing 2006.

"Africa makes a mockery of what we say, at least what I say, about equality and questions our pieties and our commitments because there's no way to look at what's happening over there and it's effect on all of us and conclude that we actually consider Africans as our equals before God. There is no chance."

--Bono of U2, Commencement Address at the University of Pennsylvania, May 17, 2004.
I ARRIVED in Canada on January 1, 1998, having flown as far from Johannesburg in South Africa as it is possible to fly before turning back around the curve of the globe. I came to Canada because I was broken and needed a break, but the way in which I was broken were as nothing compared to those that I had spoken on behalf of others in the previous two years.

I had worked for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by a saint with the foibles of a saint, Desmond Tutu. The Arch, as we all called him, would hug us as we came out of our booths at the end of the day, and once, in a red-dirt town where an angry mob danced their vengeful anguish, surging hurricane-like around the hall in which the hearings were being held, he prayed through the noon hour in my booth, seeking and finding guidance to bring peace -- or at least calm -- to the situation. My job was not a lofty one; I was not a commissioner or a lawyer or an investigator; I was a simultaneous interpreter.


"St. Jeremiah Preaching #1" by Scott KolboInk jet print and mixed media

We interpreters were a small but dedicated crew. We bounced three or four languages among one another to enable an audience to hear the testimony of a survivor or a perpetrator of gross human rights violations -- abduction, torture, murder -- in their own language within two to four seconds after it was spoken in the language of the witness or applicant for amnesty. Many of us drank hard; some of us found harder ways of numbing the pain and horror we spoke every day. For me the worst was the phone calls late at night between me in my hotel room and my young wife at home, when, exhausted -- she after a day in the valley of the shadow of the diapers and I after a day of a woman telling of relentless violation or a man telling of testicles and bare electric wire or a mother telling of the sweaters of her infants scarlet with gunshot or a father telling of finding only a scrap of skin after three days of looking in the place where a mine shredded his son -- we would curse and slam down the phone, too tired to listen and too worn out to care.

When I came to Canada I thought I would be going back. Soon. Maybe after four or five years, with another academic degree certifying me for the ministry of word and sacrament in my home church. Eighteen months later the strange configuration of calling and debt moved me into the work I do now with delight and an assurance that it is what I should be doing. Africa faded, slowly. Asked some months later if I would not help found a leadership school back in South Africa, I collapsed into a profound vocational crisis -- perhaps the most profound yet. What are my duties to Africa? Should I abandon the work I do here in North America -- holy work, as far as I can tell -- and turn to the cries of the beloved country? Should I return with my wife and young daughters to a country that at the time had the highest incidence of rape as reported to the police of any Interpol member country?

My Africa problem is not whether there is something wrong with Africa, or whether something should be done about it if there is. Both reliable research and my own direct experience assures me that something is indeed very wrong with Africa, and I have no doubt that something should be done about it. My problem has to do with what should be done, and by whom. More particularly, what is my own personal responsibility toward Africa, and how does that responsibility weigh up against my other responsibilities?

I grew up in an all-white residential neighbourhood where I was told during my childhood that black people could only live in the outbuildings if they had an employment document as a house servant or a gardener, and that a sunset to sunrise curfew for black people kept our streets safe. I was told that people in my neighbourhood enjoyed a quality of life unequaled in the world, except perhaps in Sweden. Health care was excellent by the standards of the time. The streets were paved, and regular watering kept the parks green and filled with flowers, even though our city was on the edge of an arid semi-desert. Schools did a fairly good job, and music lessons -- if you wanted them -- were virtually free, because they were offered as a normal, albeit optional, part of the education system. (I learned to play the viola, poorly.)


"St. Jeremiah Preaching #2" by Scott KolboInk jet print and mixed media

In my teens, after my cataclysmic conversion to biblical Christianity (as distinct from the racist pseudo-Christian heresy of my childhood and the Buddhism Lite of my early teens), I became involved with an avowedly apolitical youth evangelism group in my home town that for all its intended denial of politics nonetheless had an enormous political influence on me and my friends. This group was the only inter-racial Christian youth group we could find in the city, and its evangelistic outreaches and youth camps brought me face-to-face with people of my own age who lived in very different circumstances from my own.

My black teen friends lived not ten minutes by car from where I lived. Their neighbourhood had no electricity and only cold running water made available at public water taps, each shared by four residential blocks. Their streets were not paved, and night waste was removed by a truck that came by every few days. The schools were poorly supplied with books and hardly supplied with anything else. As one of the architects of this racially based political system -- Hendrik Verwoerd -- had explained some years before I was born:

"When I have control of Native education I will reform it so that Natives will be taught from childhood to realize that equality with Europeans is not for them . . . People who believe in equality are not desirable teachers for Natives. When my Department controls Native education it will know for what class of higher education a Native is fitted, and whether he will have a chance in life to use his knowledge."

Many of my black friends, but especially their parents, managed to strain considerable dignity and a simple beauty of life out of the sordid circumstances into which they had been pressed. But to my young eyes the inequality between them and us was obvious, and obviously a grave injustice.

I remember discovering -- with shock that turned into deep conviction -- the prophecy of Isaiah 58.

"... day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways, as if they were a nation that does what is right and has not forsaken the commands of its God. They ask me for just decisions and seem eager for God to come near them. ... Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for a man to humble himself? ... Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?"

My friends and I poured ourselves into the resistance against the apartheid regime. Our involvement in that resistance was no great shakes -- we were very young, we had no idea what we were doing, and our connections into the existing resistance movements were very weak -- but it was enough to get us into tepid water. I was invited to go and discuss my activities with the security police a few times, where it became clear that they had reliable information from one of my good friends, and my parents were reminded by someone or other that my activities might have negative repercussions for their careers. But nothing like the hot water that the black teens in our circle endured: 90-day detentions without trial, beatings with sand-filled nylon-stoking tubes, disappearances, and as we discovered years later, worse.

We thought we would spend our lives on resistance against a racist tyranny. We struggled terrifically to understand the connection between our deepest loves (for God, for one another) and our duties as citizens. We read -- Ron Sider and John Howard Yoder, at first; later Francis Schaeffer and Bob Goudzwaard; eventually Herman Dooyeweerd, Abraham Kuyper, John Calvin, and Augustine of Hippo. We argued. We prayed. At first we became pacifists and therefore understood our political duties to demand non-violence. I served three and a half years of a six-year community service assignment as a religious objector against military conscription. Later, toward the end of the 1980s, some of us turned to Just War doctrine and tried to figure out an understanding of just resistance against a tyrant. We never got very far theoretically, but we persuaded ourselves that the ever more vigorous violent oppression practiced by the then Botha government demanded from us as Christians armed resistance.

"St. Jeremiah Preaching #5" by Scott KolboInk jet print and mixed media

We never got around to doing something about that conviction, because just as we stopped being pacifists the new De Klerk government announced that it would release all political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, unban all banned political movements, and begin a process of negotiation towards a Democratic South Africa. That all happened what is now almost half my life ago, but it remains perhaps the most decisive historical event to have a direct impact on my life. Suddenly I had no idea what my life was supposed to be about. If I was not to expend my life in the struggle against apartheid, then into what would I invest myself?

I floundered. I wrote an MA dissertation (on "Christian philosophy and the transformation of African culture") and a PhD thesis (on "The Ethics of Public Welfare") in an effort to try to figure out what I should do in the aftermath of apartheid. I joined political movements, and with a friend, Mark Manley, I tried to put together a network of evangelical Christians active in post-apartheid South Africa. I worked on language policy and the constitutional rights of language groups with another friend, Theo du Plessis. I worked for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and I went slightly crazy. But I still had no idea what to do with my life now that I had nothing big and evil and obvious to be against.

The first democratic elections of 1994 were astonishing, with the nation teetering at the edge of the abyss of civil war (not white vs. black, but something complex that could be over-simplified into Zulu vs. Xhoza) and then pulling back -- a peaceful result partly due to nation-wide prayer, it seemed to many of us. Standing for hours in the long line snaking into a school hall to cast our ballots next to people of all tongues and races was perhaps the highest point in my political life. South Africa's victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup tournament provoked a surge of shared patriotism that drew the people of the country together into a moment of common celebration the likes of which were not seen before, or since.

But post-apartheid South Africa was a disappointment. Along with my other work, I spent a few days every month interpreting for the provincial parliament of what was once known as the Orange Free State province. It was a dismal affair. The plenary sessions were displays of the small-minded mediocrity of the provincial politicians of all parties. The committee sessions were displays of venality and petty power games. A tinge of backlash racism marked the operations of the new provincial government. A friend of mine, the finest development economist in the province and a long-time opponent of apartheid, raised funding internationally for the research and design of an economic development approach in the province, but because he was white the provincial government mocked and ignored the potential of his contribution. Hints of corruption and self-enrichment were everywhere -- the new provincial cabinet members drove shiny Mercedes Benzes or BMWs, while the common people sank into ever greater poverty. Many of my most idealistic friends sank, not into poverty, but into a sour and depressed cynicism and pessimism about the future of the beloved country.

The political efforts in which I involved myself were bearing little or no fruit. Most Christians involved in politics did not want to think christianly about their political duties, prefering instead a simplistic para-marxism or a vulgar nationalism. Those Christians who were willing to think christianly about their politics tended to fall for a triumphalistic imported version of the politics of the American religious Right -- but since their numbers were small, their efforts were ineffectual. Networking Christians who were biblically thoughtful about political life in South Africa in the mid-1990s foundered on the rocks of non-biblical ideology, simplistic biblicism, and a general lack of interest.

"St. Jeremiah Preaching #7" by Scott KolboInk jet print and mixed media

Increasingly I became persuaded that South African Christians were not ready for political responsibility because we lacked a thoroughly Christian understanding, not just of politics, but of culture in general. The ground in which my friends and I were trying to sow the seeds of Christian political action lacked compost and had not been plowed over. For a Christian politics to flourish in South Africa, Christian political activists needed to take a step back. The soil needed to be tilled, and compost needed to be worked into the fields. The most important political work in South Africa, I came to believe, was that of proclaiming the gospel. The proclamation of the gospel of the creation and redemption of all things in Christ was needed before Christian political action could become viable.

With that in mind I began to consider the ministry of Word and sacraments in my home denomination, then the Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa. If a Christian politics in South Africa was for the time being impossible -- or at least limited to education -- then perhaps my calling was to do the work of preparing Christians for a Christian politics in the generations to come? Perhaps I could preach the Word and serve the sacraments in ways that would help cultivate discernment and conviction with regard to the duties of citizenship, Biblically understood?

Things did not turn out that way. I spent 18 months in Vancouver, British Columbia, thinking that I was preparing for the Presbyterian ministry in South Africa. Our family went through its own little post-traumatic stress episode, whacked on top of consumer culture shock of the first degree, ameliorated by living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world (ah, the float planes drifting in over the bay against a gilt and russet sunset) and being embraced by Regent College, which turned out to serve us more as a therapeutic community than as a place of professional advancement. And then I was offered work with the two organizations in which I still find myself following the call of God today. We left Vancouver for Toronto, and with that decided that if we were to return to live and work in Africa, it would be after our children went to college, if ever.

But is this the right thing to do? What Would Bono Do? Consider Africa today. While South Africa has not collapsed into failed statehood, as many people feared, it is one of the most criminally violent places in the world. In contrast, the neighbouring Botswana has relatively little crime -- but it suffers from one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world. Zimbabwe is governed by a caricature dictator whose comic ridiculousness is rivaled only by his malevolence. Further up, in the Sudan, another genocide looms, perhaps on the same scale as that achieved in Rwanda. Everywhere Africa is plagued by disease, poverty, crime, and political situations that seem to allow a choice only between tyranny and anarchy. And yet this is a continent where people continue to choose the Christian faith over their native paganisms, where churches thrive and grow, where despite an ecstatic strain of piety among the mass of people, church leaders seem to have a bent for sound doctrine. Ever so slowly -- as at the outer fringes of the Roman Empire from the fifth century to the twelfth century -- Christianity seems to be working itself into the soil of African culture. The Christian transformation of African culture seems likely to be a 500-year project. What can I do to help it along?

Writing this meandering memoir has brought me no closer to a personal vocational answer than the nights of prayer and tears of a few years ago. The comfort of my present sense of calling has never been so cozy that it requires an exercise of this kind to be shaken. A few weeks ago I sat next to a philosopher and a new friend, who quietly but passionately asked me, "But how can you be here and not there?" For now my retort is, that is not only my problem. It is ours.








Leaf • Lace • Reinventing the Wheel
by Aaron Belz


Leaf
It is not sad, this invented leaf,
Because it does bend in the wind
The way daisies do in a sweet shower,
Because it stains, as it breaks
In the pressure of my thumb, my thumb;
Or rather it is invisibly sad,
Because it is invisible to the eye
And no more of an invention than a word,
This leaf, here forever, the last email
Sent by one who swore never again,
Once in the inbox, now deleted, 
A whole branch full of words
That had grown, if not out of love
Or sweet, false, virtuous showers,
Out of each of our desperation to know
And to be known by one another.



Lace
Somewhere there is a place in words
Inhabited by a man described by words.
That man desires you to join him
By sharing with him your deepest words
Or even your most superficial ones
Such as �smart� and �classy.� 
You are a smart and classy woman,
Just as he is a tall and clumsy man.
Go on, he wants to know what�s next.
Say them; he will type them in.
Length of the brow�the shadowless shirt�
The white and winding cord of thought
That knits into a dog this ferrous dirt�
That bays at hours and sleeps sometimes�
But after he hits return and presses shift
To start another string of you,
You�re gone into the lettered drift�
Somewhere there is an act in time
That doesn�t end. But you�re not there.
Your words were spoken in the air.



Reinventing the Wheel
I tried to reinvent the wheel, and it was fun,
Because I did. It came out better than before,
Rounder, quicker, and with less friction.
The mistake I made was trying to reinvent you:
You came out taller and less confident,
With a shopkeeper�s eye and shiny skin.
You got me back by reinventing me,
Turning me into what I had wanted to be,
A pensive, slightly overweight woman
With a knack for arcane geography.
Will we be happy as our new selves? 
I ask myself as we lean back with brandies 
On a moonlit night; I think we will,
I think to myself, though I�m thinking it as you,
And you�re looking down on me as I would,
As if at any minute I might steal something,
But still not knowing what is in my mind--
A peninsula where it rains but never snows. 
The wind picks up; we head inside.
We sleep in a place where we both reside.


Possessed by Angels • Ordinary Matins • Arm & Hammer
by Mark Stevick


Possessed by Angels
for Jeanne Walker

I believe in them, wherever you say they are,
folded into handkerchiefs, crowding under the beds
of children, eyes bright as water.  And where else
they might be�hurrying along your words
holding up planes of glass and lights, their wings.
I don�t mean vowels, I don�t mean anything
but the words come like lines of import,
accompanied, and I almost hear those
syllables get up and walk.



Ordinary Matins
No, I will not yearn
for what I lack;
now that the sun is up
and in my lap
and my fingers hold a cup
that brims with more than morning�
I'll not despise.

No, I will not burn
for other lives;
a simple slice of bread
can testify
that hours behind and hours ahead
will turn with more than toiling�
and will surprise.



Arm & Hammer
Pure Baking Soda
The Standard of Purity and Quality for over 150 Years

And in the time of cakes and pies
When the kneaded day would rise
Miraculous as dough in the blue-rimmed heaven,
When every kitchen was a home
Where the Arm & Hammer stayed
And the grateful prayer was made
And the daily bread was given

I believed without a doubt
When the orange box came out
(Its bullseye was the arm of a white John Henry)
That as the mixing bowl grew warm
With the spilling of that sun,
Every day would be well done
And would taste as great as any.

In every kitchen I could think
Of where I'd gone to get a drink,
While searching for a glass I'd find baking soda;
And that was just the way it was
For the hammer in the hand
And the funny ampersand--
That every home must have its quota.

I guess our faith began to fail
As our homemade day grew stale,
So we turned to buying pie in a pre-wrapped package,
Then all the aprons fell away	
And in a calendar of weeks
Flour sifters were antiques:
Arm & Hammer lost its magic.

Oh everybody knows its name
And its logo's still the same
But it's hardly been beseeched since the old gas oven,
Except as grit for cleaning teeth 
Or a box absorbing smells
On refrigerator shelves--
Work that has no use for leaven.

Now in the time of pies and cakes
Made by Hostess and by Drakes,
I spread my Smuckers on a slice of split-top Wonder;
The day of rising bread is gone
When the Hammer & the Arm
Was no quaint, nostalgic charm
But our pure and baking standard.



From a Dry Land • You Can See God Going to the Islands • Hymn from the Mojave • Singing the Old Songs
by Amy Unsworth


From a Dry Land
Sunrise from On High
(Luke 1:78)

In the morning shadow of the peak,
basalt lies dark on the slope, the earth barren:
only dust, sand, the scraggy creosote.

The sun rises above the crest- the mountain
suddenly enveloped by blinding radiance-
all faults obscured by the blaze of light.


El Sali: My Rock
(Psalms 48:3)

Old Blackie  rises, boulder strewn,
each pocket of stone, each hollow
and crevice-a perch for raven,
cranny for lizard, for jackrabbits a warren,
harbor for coyote-sheltering all from winter's wind.


Firstborn from the Dead:
(Revelation 1:5)

In bitter winds
the first green
buds on almond branches



You Can See God Going to the Islands

Where else but walking on sand and water
the last splinter of perfection, the crescent
edge of Bunut Bay, flip-flops in hand?

Or in Bolivia waiting patiently on the boardwalk
at Calacala, to see the paintings on the rising rocks,
one white llama surrounded by the red herds?

Farther South the next week, among chinstrap penguins,
stepping gingerly over the clutches tucked in the rocks.
He smiles as they dive, bodies suddenly lissome, into the sea.

A day or two in Turkey visiting the springs at Pamukkale,
resting his feet in the thermal pools, touring the ruins and
recollecting the pillared architecture of Rome.

Maybe then, a few stops to admire the streaked and spotted
gazelle, giraffe, hyena and the scrawny cattle of the savanna;
to wade the Nile winding its way across the continent.

No place but then to return to the hillside gardens,
to inhale the once familiar scent of night air in Jerusalem,
the first almonds hastening to bloom.



Hymn from the Mojave

Praise be for desert jackrabbits
raising  black tipped young
among boulders and creosote.

Glory for the tortoise
all leather and claw-
for rattlesnake,
fang, scale, and buzz,

for the horned toad in sun
atop his barren hill
and geckos exploding
from the sand at footfall.

Praise be for black rock
and raven in a landscape of brown.
For mountains
rising above valleys of dust,

for dry washes and
the smooth edges of rocks
a certain testament to rain.



Singing the Old Songs
Mojave Desert

On television, the Pope winds through Poland.
Lining the street, the people sing hymns and spirituals
familiar in any language. The songs, my grandmother
hummed in her Hoosier  kitchen as she pressed
leaves & holly into  springerlees'  thick pale dough. 

I bake bread and biscotti and there is no one alive
who can recall the brot her grandmother 
once had kneaded. Still, these are her hymns
I sing softly in my borrowed kitchen and her
blue pottery on the counter, farther from home than I. 






Brave New Wanda
by Lynda Rutledge
This is an excerpt taken from Brave New Wanda (WordFarm, 2004) by Lynda Rutledge. Copyright (c) 2004 by Lynda Rutledge. Used by permission of WordFarm: http://www.wordfarm.net.

Lynda Rutledge's first novel, Brave New Wanda, follows 13 year old Wanda Louise Ledbetter in the aftermath of her mother's death and stepfather's abuse as she, her grandmother, her dog, and her mama's old Cadillac take to the road to figure out just who Wanda is. Wanda learns that her father was not the source of her conception. Swiftly paced and punctuated by moments of biting humor,  Rutledge's story deftly investigates the medicine, the ethical implications, and the human effects of our advancing technology of birth. From Wanda's point of view, it's clear that such medical advances are not without consequence, for all the parties involved.
Sitting in the glow of the motel desk lamp, Wanda poised her pencil over a small, spiral-bound notebook:
Dear D---
“Whatcha writing?” Granny asked, leaning over her shoulder. “Always scribbling in that little book of yours.”
Wanda slammed the book shut.
Granny stepped back. “Well, excuse me. Didn’t know it was private.” The old woman went back to examining a pile of change on the desk, pushing it around with a wrinkled finger.
Pulling the small notebook to her chest, Wanda watched her granny as she raised her eyes from the coins, straightened the big hairnet that held her beauty parlor hairdo in nightly place, then moved stiff and slow as sorghum toward the bed. Wanda worried a little. “Granny, do you need anything?”
“I need a certain young lady to keep her promises,” she answered. “And a bigger bed.”
“I don’t like sleeping with you either, you know.”
Granny looked around. “You used to not mind. ‘Course you weren’t more than about 40 pounds back then.” Wanda’s grandmother plumped the pillow with a couple of jabs and eased her big self under the covers. “All I want is for you to take me to the Poetry Cemetery like you said, and then I want us to go home. My chickens are going to miss a feeding.”
Wanda felt a lump in her throat. Her granny wasn’t getting worse.... She wasn’t. “You don’t have chickens anymore. Please? Okay?”
Granny’s face went a little blank, confused, then straightened out. “Of course I don’t. Isn’t that funny?” She frowned. “Well, good riddance.”
Wanda put the pencil and notebook down and came over to the bed, stepping around Wild Thing, who’d plopped down on the floor, one leg high, licking her privates, to straighten the covers under Granny’s flabby arms. Her fingers lingered on the old woman’s hand.
Granny grabbed Wanda’s hand suddenly, urgently. “And good riddance to Harley Dean! Until that no-good came around, your mama was a decent, church-going woman. Your mama loved your daddy. I don’t deny they had a hard time having you, lots of trips up here to this hospital. But they had you, didn’t they?”
Then she let go of Wanda’s hand just as suddenly as she’d grabbed it, and lay back, spent. Wanda sat down heavily on the edge of the bed and pulled Wild Thing’s furry head close, stroking, squeezing her near.
Wild Thing moaned with delight.
“Your daddy loved you, baby.” Granny murmured.
“I don’t want to talk about him,” Wanda said. “I never knew him and I don’t want to talk about him.”
“You don’t talk about people, they go away, baby. I don’t know anything about my people. All I got of them are headstones and hand-me-down names and this big German honker. Your mama never talked about her side of the family, as if they had the plague. But your daddy’s and granddaddy’s side, the Ledbetters, they were talkers. And even though they’re gone too, I know all about them.”
Wanda headed toward the sink, pulling off her cut-offs and boots as she went, her granny’s voice following behind: “You are your daddy’s girl and your daddy was the manager of the J.C. Penney catalog store and his daddy was a soldier and his granddaddy was a sheriff and his grandmama was a mail-order bride. From Boston, Massachusetts. And oh. There was this Texas patriot they were just real proud of, swore he rode into the Battle of San Jacinto with Sam Houston remembering the Alamo. Before that, it’s for sure they all got off a boat somewhere, sometime, but they quit talking about ‘em and they disappeared. So you talk about ’em, Wanda Louise. Because you are your daddy’s girl. A Ledbetter.” The old woman paused, sighing sad and full of memory, her big breasts heaving. “From the day you popped outta your mama, and your daddy bought that brand-new Cadillac, he loved you. And your mama loved him. And your mama loved you.”
“And they all died happily ever after,” Wanda snapped. “The end.”
The old woman grunted. “Goodness, you’ve always been a tough one.” And then the old woman added sweetly, quiet enough to make Wanda glance around: “I used to listen to you in the night. Little cries that wouldn’t wake up a flea.”

"Lucy the Showgirl #3" by Scott Kolbo

Wanda turned sullenly back to the sink, but listening, listening.
“I said to myself, no one was going to have a hold on this one. This baby was singular.”
Wanda fumed, self-conscious, fighting to stay mean. “You’re rambling again, Granny. Changing subjects faster than a bumblebee farts---like Mama used to...” She bit off the end of the sentence.
Her grandmother crossed her big arms over the bedspread. “You’re mad at your mama, ain’t you, baby? You got a right to be. Maybe she’d have done better if she hadn’t had to move you two in with me. But she’d get so melancholy, hugging that Bible, living like a chain-smoking Baptist nun. No wonder she went with Harley when he came tomcatting around. Going without loving for ten years’ll make anyone that young melt like butter at the first sign of heat. She dropped that Bible, I tell you that.”
Wanda cringed. “I don’t want to talk about it. Geez!” She flipped on the faucet.
“Nothing wrong with talking about it. Not talking about it’s what gets you into trouble. I suppose you think you know all about sex, too.”
“I know enough, okay? I know where babies come from and all that crap.” Wanda began brushing her teeth. Loudly. 
“Who’s talking about babies? We used to have ’em because we couldn’t stop ’em. Now they can stop ’em and they’re raising Cain about having ’em. Baby girl, there’s more to loving than what gets left inside you.”
Wanda swallowed a mouth of toothpaste spit.
“If that’s all it is, there’s something missing no baby’s going to fill. I loved your daddy, but I’d never trade having him inside me for having your granddaddy inside me.”
Wanda gagged and coughed. “Gawd! Granny---!”
“Inside me. Beside me. Made no difference. And you watch taking the Lord’s name in vain.” She eyed Wanda. “There’s a world of things you don’t know on this topic, Miss Smarty.”
“Well, I don’t want to hear it from my grandmother!” Wanda whined.
“It’s my ovaries that are dried up, not my heart,” Granny went on. “And if my ovaries were more important than my heart, then they wouldn’t be what’s dried up, would they?”
“Can we talk about this tomorrow?” Wanda begged. “Please?”
“Like Wild Thing here. She’s a woman.” Granny nodded at Wild Thing going around and around in circles making herself a bed on the carpet. “It’s the most natural thing at certain times in her life to just offer herself up, but if she ain’t choosy, she’s stuck with a whole litter of Heinz 57 mutts uglier than sin.”
“Boy, I sure am sleepy---Aren’t you sleepy?” Wanda tried desperately. “We’re getting up real early.”
“You don’t know what early is. On the farm, we’d get up at 4 a.m. I’ve been talking to Johnny ‘bout this and he agrees with me now.”
Wanda turned out the overhead light and felt her way over to her side of the bed in the small sift of moonlight coming in the window. She had hoped she could stop her grandmother talking before she got to talking to the dead again. “He always agrees with you,” Wanda sighed. “I don’t think your reception’s so good. And you promised you wouldn’t talk about talking to dead people.”
Granny’s voice faded almost transparent. “What we had, death can’t just up and break. Love like that doesn’t die just because one of you quits living.”
“I know, Granny. True love.” 
“Don’t make fun, sister,” her grandmother warned, swatting at her under the covers.
Wanda jerked away. “Research says it’s all just chemical, anyway!” she grumbled. “Preprogrammed by our genes to perpetuate the species. Lasts just long enough to mate and bear children.”
“Stop talking nonsense! You ain’t got the slightest notion what I’m talking about.”
“I didn’t say it! Scientists did.”
Granny snorted. “Chemicals. Hmph. Those scientists should be making themselves useful curing cancer or my hemorrhoids. I’m talking about something special between two people. Most women think it’s just gonna come riding by. Well, you can wait all your life, even marry what does come riding by and still be waiting. Such a link’s a gift of grace from God. Stronger than the grave.”
“Stronger than all your other dead husbands?” Wanda snapped.
There was a pause in the dark on that one. “Child. You are itching for a switching.”
“Why’d you keep getting married, if you loved Johnny such a big deal?”
“I had to survive, didn’t I?” Granny shot back. “I had your daddy to raise. That was how it was done then. You think I had a choice? Women today, they don’t know what it was like back then. But I ain’t talking about need. I’m talking about a little piece of God-love that makes a moment a true treasure, buried deep, rich enough for a whole lifetime.” An old, full sigh filled the dark.

"Lucy in the Corset" by Scott Kolbo :: Ink Jet & Mixed Media

“Everybody dies,” Wanda muttered. “So what’s the use?” 
Granny paused. The silence hung over the bed. It made the night air seem hollow, used up, personal. “Some pain’s worth it.” She fidgeted. “Now I’m feeling melancholy. Tell me about the swans again from that big library book of yours.”
Wanda rolled her eyes. “I already told you a thousand times.”
“I could be gone by the morning and then how would you feel? Tell me.”
Wanda fidgeted. “Geese, Granny, not swans.” Then she repeated it all quickly: “Greylag geese mate for life, sometimes half a century. He runs all the other males away and begins his dance, squawking and calling, stretching his neck to the sky. Until she joins in. And they live happily goosy ever after. Okay?”
“It’s a rare thing.”
Granny’s voice had dropped so low, it drew Wanda’s face toward her in the shadows. The old woman’s eyes reflected in the moonlight were more clear and straight and intelligent than Wanda had seen in weeks. And it made Wanda very nervous.
“Baby,” her granny murmured low and serious, “your mama and Harley---I know what they were planning. But lately my mind and my heart, they keep finding Johnny. And I want you to know my world, baby, before I die. And I want to go back and see my cemetery tree. You said you’d take me.”
Wanda turned toward the window, to the broken piece of moon hanging there. “Don’t talk about dying.” The yellow dog came up and nuzzled under her hand.
The creaky old voice floated through the dark. “Latch the back screen door before you come to bed now. You hear?”
Wanda swallowed down a rising bit of fear that always threatened to take her over when her granny went off somewhere like that. But soon she heard her begin to snore.
As the moments passed and her granny was deep into snorting sleep, Wanda watched the piece of moon out the window and listened to the sounds of laughter coming through the wall, sounds like her mama and Harley used to make, quiet giggling, murmuring. She flipped on the table lamp, and, with an eye back toward her sleeping granny, reached for her pencil and little book and began to write:

Dear Daddy,
     Whoever you are, I’m going to call you that over Dear Biological Paternal Unit or Dear Genetic Donor or even Dear Father, because I choose to. Because I didn’t ever get to call anyone that. Because I think everybody ought to have someone to call Daddy sometime. Even if the person doesn’t deserve it.

Wanda eased off the lamp, nestled back into the cool sheets, and opened the book in her mind: Dear Daddy. Dear Doctor Daddy. Goodnight. And as she floated toward slumber, up bobbed another of the library book facts she’d stored away...








Contributors

Aaron Belz

Aaron Belz lives in St. Louis where he curates Readings @ The Contemporary (formerly Readings @ City Museum) and teaches high school English. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Fine Madness, Fence, and many other places.

Randy Boyagoda

Randy Boyagoda is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Boston University who writes frequently on literature, religion, and culture. His academic articles, literary essays, reviews, opinion pieces and fiction have appeared in publications such as First Things, Crisis, The Human Life Review, Religion and Literature, The American Enterprise, Mississippi Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review, World and I, Descant, Queen Street Quarterly, and Postcolonial Text.

Scott Derrickson

Scott Derrickson is the writer (with Paul Harris Boardman) of Urban Legends: Final Cut, as well as Hellraiser: Inferno and the upcoming The Exorcism of Annaliese Michele (starring Laura Linney and Tom Wilkinson), both of which he also directed. He is a graduate of the USC School of Cinema and Television.

Jack D. Elliott, Jr.

Jack D. Elliott, Jr. is a historical archaeologist with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. With Mary Ann Wells he is co-author of Cotton Gin Port: A Frontier Settlement on the Upper Tombigbee (Quail Ridge Press, 2003). Mr. Elliott also operates the Radical Preservation website.

John Fea

John Fea is Assistant Professor of History at Messiah College. He specializes in early American History and is currently writing a book on the relationship between Protestantism and the Enlightenment in Fenwick's Colony--the first permanent English settlement in the Delaware Valley.
Kevin J. Jones

Kevin Jones reviews political philosophy, theology, and current events with a bit of literary commentary thrown in at Philokalia Republic.

John Knauss

John Knauss is an MFA student in Acting at the University of Delaware's Professional Theatre Training Program. He studied art and began working on set design and then acting at Wheaton College. He has performed and directed many plays and was most recently a member of the Warehouse Theatre's Journeyman company in Greenville, South Carolina.

Scott Kolbo

Scott Kolbo is Assistant Professor of Art. He teaches printmaking, drawing, digital imaging, sesign, and contemporary art history at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington. Kolbo's print, "Naaman Dirty," was named Best of Show in Printmaking at the 28th annual Bradley National Print and Drawing Exhibition in 2002. His work reflects his belief "that despite our best efforts to look important, rational, and dignified, we all make fools of ourselves in the end. Human nature is corrupted by folly, and even our best intentions are subverted by our mixed motivations."

Lynda Rutledge

A professional writer and journalist, Lynda Rutledge has published book-length work (as Lynda Rutledge Stephenson), including Give Us A Child (HarperCollins/Zondervan, 1992), the Complete Idiot's Guide on Writing Your Family History (Macmillan/Alpha, 2000), and a two-volume History of the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park (ZSSD, 2005). Her articles have appeared in a variety of magazines and newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Tribune Magazine, Memphis Commercial-Appeal, Houston Post, San Diego Union-Tribune and Poets and Writers. Excerpted in this issue of The New Pantagruel, Brave New Wanda is her first novel.

James V. Schall, S. J.

Rev. James V. Schall, S.J., is a professor of government at Georgetown University. He is a columnist for Crisis magazine and the author of numerous books and articles, the latest of which include Roman Catholic Political Philosophy (Lexington, 2004), The Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing. (ISI, 2001), Reason, Revelation, and Human Affairs: Selected Writings of James V. Schall (Lexington, 2001), and Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes. (Catholic University, 2000).

Mark Stevick

Mark Stevick teaches creative writing at Gordon College and has written and published both poetry and plays. In The Language of Objects, poems converse across the page with a correlated set of still-lives and landscapes by the painter George Wingate. His poems have appeared in literary journals such as Christianity & Literature, Christianity and the Arts, Mars Hill Review, and Poet's Market. He has written or adapted twelve plays, including several which continue to run in Salem, Massachusetts, and several which have toured with Gordon students.

Amy Unsworth

Amy Unsworth is a Contributing Editor for Poems Niederngasse. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including The Hogtown Creek Review, Miller's Pond, The Briar Cliff Review, and in The Alsop Review Anthology. Her CD In the Breaking Light was released in September 2004 as part of the Alsop Review Press Spoken Word series. A graduate of Eastern Michigan University's English Department, she lives in Manhattan, Kansas with her husband and three sons.

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985)

Eric Voegelin's work has had a substantial impact on the thinking of some of The New Pantagruel's founding editors. Voegelin was a philosopher of politics, history and consciousness. He taught political theory and sociology at the University of Vienna from 1928 until reactions to two of his books criticizing Naziism and racism forced him to flee. He then taught at several American universities and settled at Louisiana State University's Department of Government in 1942, becoming a US citizen in 1944. In 1958 he took Max Weber's former chair in political science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitüt in Munich where he founded the Institut für Politische Wissenschaft. In 1969 he joined Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace where he worked until his death.