Uncivil Discourse

Walking the Labyrinth—August 14, 2009—Eastern Christians today celebrate the martyrdom of St Markellos, Bishop of Apamea in central Syria. The bishop was an eloquent preacher and after hearing one of his sermons about the evils of paganism, some of his overenthusiastic flock went down the street from the bishop’s church and torched the local Temple of Zeus. When a mob of irate pagans learned the conflagration was ignited through Bishop Markellos' incendiary sermonizing, they marched down the same street, pulled the bishop from his throne, dragged him to their burning temple and tossed him into the flames. This was on August 14, 389. Markellos' martyrdom elevated him to sainthood, but none of the succeeding bishops of Apamea sought to make reputations for themselves as firey preachers. All through the night of August 13-14, 1814, Francis Scott Key and two friends watched the bombardment of Fort McHenry from the deck of the British warship HMS Tonnant, anchored outside Chesapeake Bay. After a continual, 25 hour bombardment, the British gave up the assault. As dawn broke, Key and his friends marveled at the sight of the American flag waving above the fort. Well they should have. When the commander of the garrison, Major George Armistead, learned of the impending British assault, he hired Mary Young Pickersgill, a well-known Baltimore seamstress, to sew a flag “so large that the British will have no difficulty seeing it from a distance." She did. With the help of her daughter, two nieces, and two African servants, they made a flag thirty feet high and forty-two feet long. Each stripe was two feet wide and each of the fifteen stars measured twenty-six inches across. The result was a flag which could be seen several miles from the fort. Later that year, Key published the “Star-Spangled Banner,” inspired by Mary’s nimble sewing and Armistead’s stalwart defense. The flag is now on display at the Smithsonian; it is still big. One hundred and sixteen years ago, the city of Paris became the first European metropolis to issue drivers’ licenses to owners of automobiles. Drivers had to register their names, residences and next-of-kin (in case the horseless carriages “combusted”—like a certain Syrian bishop we know), and pass a test proving they knew how to “operate the carriage so as to leave others unharmed and unthreatened.” One might wish the last phrase was incorporated into the California Driver's Handbook today. Henry Sweet matriculated at Balliol College in Oxford, England on August 14, 1869. He devoted himself to the study of Old English and Old Norse, and published his first book of Anglo-Saxon medieval texts while still an undergraduate. The vanished tongue of the Anglo-Saxons would remain a passion for the rest of his life, and he published texts and grammars of the language till his death in 1912. But Sweet is most remembered as the real-life model George Bernard Shaw used for the character of Dr Henry Higgins, eventually immortalized by Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. He wrote several groundwork studies on phonetics and was often introduced as “the man who taught Europe phonetics” on the lecture circuit. Like Higgins, he was blunt and had a reputation—particularly among fellow teachers of phonetics—of being hard to get along with. He long-wanted, but never obtained, a professorship at Oxford, despite the many academic honors awarded him through his lifetime. One of the Masters of Balliol explained it plainly: “He was an irascible young man and is an irascible man now in his middle years. There is no doubt he will be an irascible old man, and nobody likes irascible old men.” On August 14, 1945, five days after Nagasaki was devastated by an atomic bomb, Emperor Hirohito said in a radio broadcast “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage” and announced Japan’s surrender, ending World War II. That morning, after President Truman read the news to America, Alfred Eisenstaedt went out into Times Square intending to make photographs of people as they learned the news. He spotted a sailor “running along the street grabbing and kissing any and every woman in sight, whether she was a grandmother, stout, thin, old, young, didn't make a difference . . . Then suddenly I saw something white being grabbed. I turned around and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse." The picture made him famous; it was printed on a full page in the next edition of Life Magazine. The nurse was Edith Cullen Shain, but the sailor has never been identified. Ninety-nine years before, to the day, Henry David Thoreau was jailed as a tax resister. Thoreau, the author of Walden Pond, (almost as popular with American high school students as Melville’s Moby Dick), believed the Mexican War was unjust and being fought at the behest of American slaveholders. The only practical way he could see to oppose it was to refuse to pay his $1 poll tax—this was before the days of federal income taxes, Medicare taxes, Social Security taxes, state income taxes, state and city sales taxes, property taxes, federal and state excise taxes, transfer taxes and our soon-to-be-introduced Value Added Tax. Thoreau hoped a stay in jail would bring attention to his protest against the War, but his friends and relatives paid his overdue taxes (he hadn’t paid for several years) and all the attendant fines before he’d languished more than 12 hours. He reluctantly accepted his freedom after a single night in jail when the jailer refused to let him remain. The evening of his imprisonment, Thoreau was visited by his close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson asked him, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, the question is, what are you doing out there?” On August 14, 1880, the great Cathedral in Cologne, Germany was completed. Work had begun on the Cathedral of St Peter and St Mary on August 14, 1248. For a variety of reasons the work was abandoned in 1473 and not begun again until 1842. During the intervening four centuries, a large crane, perched atop an uncompleted bell-tower, sat unused. The crane was visible from all parts of the city and is depicted in many paintings and even a few photographs of the cathedral until work was taken up again. This is the 226th day of the year, 139 days remain till we welcome 2010. The Romans reckoned this day as ante diem XIX Kal. Sept.; in 1957, Debbie Reynolds topped America’s music charts with her song Tammy. By order of the United States Congress this is “National Kool Aid Day”; today is the first day of Mae West Week.

MOST OF THE WEEK, if you turn to the news—print or broadcast—you’ve read about or heard played the excitable Town Hall Meetings, angry people shouting at politicians come home for a vacation. Depending on your political disposition, these people are either hirelings or patriots. That’s where most of the media attention is focused—who are these people and why are they being so rude to our elected officials? I’m not so interested in who they are—time will tell—as in what they’re doing. Videos of some of these events show politicians who seem genuinely hurt by the public voice of disdain and distrust they’re encountering. Senator Claire Macaskill asked an angry crowd “Don’t you trust me?” She got a resounding “no!” back. It reminded me of the wisdom of the old political adage “don’t ask a question unless you know what the answer will be first.” She was crest-fallen. One politician after another this week faced crowds which gave truth to the polls that members of Congress today are less popular than George Bush is with 9/11 Conspiracy theorists. Political pundits, so used to playing coy with the politicians who are their guest stars, are scratching their heads and lamenting the deterioration of public discourse in America. That’s because nobody learns American history anymore. Angry confrontations of political figures is nothing new; we could truly say it's one of the oldest of American traditions. If this was early 18th century America, politicians would be less worried about somebody shouting at them than they would about a bunch of people appearing with a barrel of hot tar and a big bag of feathers. John Edwards or Larry Craig wouldn’t be wringing their hands and hoping to get absolution from Oprah, they’d be afraid an outraged crowd would break into their house, bust it up and steal their stuff.

On May 22, 1856, a Congressman from South Carolina, Preston Brooks, entered the senate chamber just as the day’s business was concluded. He approached the desk of Senator Charles Sumner and calmly told him he objected to a speech Sumner had delivered two days earlier. The speech had been a vicious personal attack on Brooks’ uncle, an aging Senator, and against the entire slave-holding South. Brooks took his cane and beat Sumner with it until he broke it over the Senator’s back and head. It took Sumner three years to recover. Brooks survived an expulsion vote from the House; over the next few months he received hundreds of gifts—canes—from Southern admirers.

Throughout the 1960’s, 70’sand 80’s American politicians, left, right and middle, faced angry demonstrators: Johnson was a warmonger, Nixon was a crook, Carter was soft on communism, Reagan was a fascist. But these weren't the first American Presidents to hear the shouting. George Washington was hooted down as a pawn of the British, John Adams was pilloried as "King John the First," and Thomas Jefferson was ridiculed as a man "who loves some certain of his Monticello slaves overmuch." Politics in America has been a tough business since the Mayflower bumped into these shores. The were many British glad to see those ships full of malcontents head west to the New World.

How does all this ruckus sound in the labyrinth? It's noise. Noise from the left and noise from the right, it's all noise: it may make frustrated and angry people think they feel better for a day or two, it may temporarily disturb the cozy slumber of a few politicians, but shouting changes neither the hearts nor the minds of the people being shouted at, nor does it truly relieve the hearts and minds of the shouters. If the country ever changes for the better, it will be when Americans enter into reasoned discourse. When we listen and try to understand what others are afraid of, what they hope for, what they aspire to. The labyrinth teaches us first to listen, then to reflect, and last of all to speak. That would bring genuine hope and change. But it's hoping for a change which will never come. It can't. Because each of us, from the President of the United States to the local dog-catcher, is afraid. We can't tell each other the truth because we so rarely tell it to ourselves. We tell ourselves the truth in broken bits and pieces because that's how we are. Every great religion, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, all acknowledge the truth of St Paul's cry: "I know what I'm supposed to do, but I don't do it!" Political systems always fall short of their aspirations, it doesn't matter who is in charge, and that's because it's always us--one of us, a batch of us, or, as we try to convince ourselves here, all of us--who are in charge. If I become perfect, there's always--you--and you're not.

So what are we labyrinthine plodders to do? Do we chuck it all with a "a plague on both your houses?" Not if you've taken more than a single step on your way. One of the things you discover the first time you walk an actual labyrinth is how narrow its curves and walkways are. You can't avoid other people who are walking it. Your spiritual journey is continually interrupted by others--almost, we might say, by design. No politics on this planet can satisfy the heart that beats in any of us. Those who imagine themselves thus satisfied will discover--too late!--that they've set their sights too low. The magnificent ocean vista they've been admiring is merely a wall-painting. "No man is an island." Nor do we wish to be--but we walk the labyrinth, broken as we are, knowing Washington and Sacramento--and even the Texan's Austin--are merely steps on a journey that take us Elsewhere.


FROM MY BOOKSTACK this week, a book I actually added to the pile for the occasion. When I saw last week that today was the anniversary of Thoreau’s jailing, I pulled my old Signet paperback edition of Thoreau from the shelf and put a bookmark in his essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau wrote the essay after his jailing, but it summarizes the thoughts which caused him to go there in the first place. I haven’t read the essay for many years, but remember, even back in high school, when I (was forced first to) read it, how challenging it is. Thoreau cuts straight to the bone in the essay’s first sentence: “I heartily accept the motto, — ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.” He is one with Tom Paine, a revolutionary to the core, though unlike Paine, he has no truck with the pike or the guillotine. In Thoreau’s view, everything the State involves itself in becomes tainted because the power of the State is ultimately based, not on reason or truth but compulsion. The State can take away a person’s possessions and even their life; but the one thing the State cannot compel, he insists, is the conscience. “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? …we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right…Law never made men a whit more just…” These were dangerous words when they were written and they remain as dangerous today. America has a strong tradition of law and its place in defining our society. That tradition stretches back to the field of Runnymede and the Magna Carta. But we have another tradition, equally ancient, running deep in the American marrow, calling us to “do justice,” in words ringing through the Testaments. Thoreau gives most eloquent voice to this tradition. If you want to stretch taut the strings of your mind and heart, find a copy of this old essay and read it. But be careful: it’s not for the sunshine patriot or curious antiquarian. You will chaff at the headlines in every day’s paper. A Signet paperback copy of Thoreau can be had for less than a dollar on Amazon.

QUOTES OF THE PRINCIPALS:

“Then, in that hour of deliverance, my heart spoke. Does not such a country, and such defenders of their country, deserve a song?”—Francis Scott Key

“Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will follow it.”—Henry David Thoreau

“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.”—Henry David Thoreau

“Whatever insults my State insults me.”— Preston Brooks

“The age of chivalry has gone; the age of humanity has come.”—Charles Sumner

“Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur.”— Alfred Eisenstaedt

“I discovered freedom for the first time in England.”— Emperor Hirohito