The Bright, Swampy South Where I Come From

Lewis Nordan, Wolf Whistle: a Novel

A young Black boy in a small Mississippi town is accused of crossing a stark line: he speaks with unforgivable freshness to a well-off White woman. The woman’s husband, rich but damaged from fighting in Korea, can’t let that stand. So he hires a representative of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi’s vast White trash community to make it right. But like vengeful husbands everywhere, he can’t control what he’s put in motion.

There’s two ways to write about America’s largest nation within a nation, the Solid South. Flannery O’Connor and Nobel Prize-winner William Faulkner wrote while living in the South, describing their neighbors in terms those neighbors might’ve described themselves, even if the product was often unflattering. Erskine Caldwell and Harper Lee fled the South, resettling elsewhere and writing for a primarily Northern audience who didn’t share their expectations.

Lewis Nordan, a critical darling who nevertheless escaped a commercial breakthrough and toiled in anonymity, takes the second approach. Though born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, which he thinly camouflaged as Arrow Catcher, he spent his career teaching, mostly in Pittsburgh. Like Harper Lee, he presents a South populated by stereotypes and authorial sock puppets, who enact a plot largely designed to reassure Northerners that they could never stoop this low.

A Chicago teenager, identified only as Bobo, is visiting kinfolk in Arrow Catcher. Being a Northerner, Bobo doesn’t understand Mississippi’s intricate rules for how “colored” youth should comport themselves in mixed company. His boasting and strutting gets perceived as a sexual advance on a married White woman: witnesses accuse him of directing the titular Wolf Whistle at Sally Anne Montberclair. Soon the story travels throughout town.

History readers will recognize this premise. Yes, Nordan has created a fictionalized retelling of the Emmett Till lynching. To his credit, Nordan avoids low-hanging fruit, staying away from maudlin depictions of the actual events; he cares more about the soap-operatic inner torment of the characters surrounding the violence. But that doesn’t absolve Nordan of responsibility for a major misinterpretation: he depicts lynching as a crime, like a Northerner would.

Lewis Nordan

People who don’t read racial history might mistake my meaning when I call lynching something other than a crime. But Nordan, like Harper Lee, depicts lynching happening in the heat of anger, under the cover of darkness. Most important, though Nordan says the lynching happens at the instigation of Arrow Catcher’s richest man, that’s as persuasive as a fishnet condom, since a walking Po’ White Trash stereotype does the killing.

Lynchings usually happened in broad daylight; killers often photographed themselves with the corpse, and printed the pictures as penny postcards. Because the entire point of lynching was to remind survivors that the perpetrators didn’t fear consequences. Emmett Till’s lynching was an unusually private affair, but it wasn’t secret. His killers admitted their actions, because they knew no Mississippi jury would hold them culpable. And they were right; they were acquitted.

Nordan, like Harper Lee, paints lynching as impetuous, drunken, and hasty. Not something undertaken with forethought, Bobo’s murder is fraught with a tragicomic level of infighting and slapstick incompetence. (Randall Kenan’s back-cover blurb compares Nordan’s writing to Shakespearean comedy, which isn’t unfair.) By contrast, Emmett Till’s lynching was planned for three days in advance. In real life, lynchings were grotesquely ritualized affairs.

I struggle while reading this book. Because I’ve just spent several paragraphs describing how Nordan misrepresents lynching, in ways presumably designed to reassure Northern readers that only hickish trailer trash would do something so horrible. I keep mentioning Harper Lee, who did something similar. These authors want audiences to understand that their White Trash protagonists are different, are outliers. You and I could never do something this disgusting.

But despite this historical slovenliness, Nordan presents interesting characters. They express the kinds of rambling, morally contradictory inner monologues for which O’Connor and Faulkner became famous, creating justifications for their own awfulness. These inner struggles are moving and frequently, yes, comical, as they can’t see past their own noses. I might’ve appreciated these characters, and Nordan’s writing, in a different story, one that didn’t try to score political points.

Simply, I wanted to like Nordan’s book, but I couldn’t ignore how he’d anchored his entire story to historical self-justification. By falsifying how lynchings happened, Nordan assures readers that we couldn’t possibly participate in something so revolting. Equally importantly, he assures readers that Lewis Nordan couldn’t possibly participate. He holds his story’s central event at arm’s length, trying not to get the stain of responsibility on us, or himself.

Britney Spears, Fathers, and Womanhood Deferred

Britney Spears

Perhaps the most appalling news from Britney Spears’ testimony against her court-appointed conservatorship this week concerns her IUD. The revelation that her conservators—mainly her dad—are forcing her to consume pharmaceutical lithium against her will, probably says more about her long-term health and the harm being forced upon her. But audiences probably had more gut-level revulsion to learn that she can’t make her own reproductive health decisions.

With the vantage of hindsight, it’s difficult to consider Spears without her semi-rural Southern origins. Born in McComb, Mississippi, and raised in nearby Kentwood, Louisiana, she started in America’s Bible Belt, was baptized Southern Baptist, and first sang publicly in church. Though she left the Bible Belt, aged eight, to pursue her entertainment career, that upbringing cannot help but loom large in considering the tribulations she currently faces.

Reading the transcript of Spears’ testimony, I’m seized most immediately by how explicitly sexual her father’s control is. He makes decisions about her reproductive health, although she’s thirty-nine years old, because he perceives controlling her sexual decisions as an economic instrument. Britney’s body has become a commodity which her father markets, like he’d market her clothing if she designed fashion. Jamie Spears’ management of his daughter’s career is painfully sexual.

This testimony occurred just days after Spears’ family church, the Southern Baptists, shared a cringe-inducing “Modest Is Hottest” music video at a denominational gathering. I’m somewhat more forgiving of singer-songwriter Matthew West, who sings from a father’s viewpoint, because parents do frequently have to make decisions about appropriate wardrobe and comportment for minor children, who by definition can’t make such decisions for themselves. But that forgiveness only goes so far.

My problem is, Matthew West, like Jamie Spears, frames appropriate behavior in terms of being “hot.” That is, while the commercial forces that often dominate American life value women according to their ability to get naked, West values his daughters according to their ability to resist this appeal. Yet he openly frames this resistance in terms of sexual appeal and attractiveness. Like Spears, West dominates and commodifies his daughters’ sexuality.

The Purity Culture of the 1990s, which dominated—and frequently still dominates—Bible Belt Christianity, sees adolescent girls as entirely sexual beings, defined by their ability to tempt and entice men. Britney Spears and Matthew West express the extremes of this definition. From her beginnings, when Britney tied her shirttails above her navel in her “Baby One More Time” video, fresh-faced adolescent sexuality has occupied the core of her message.

Britney with Paris Hilton, ca. 2008

Yet Britney’s sexuality, sure as the West daughters, was controlled by her father and other surrounding adults. Jamie Spears made decisions about how to sell her:, for instance, letting Max Martin pitch her a debut song written for a vocalist ten years older than her. Jamie Spears made marketing and image decisions which were entirely, outwardly sexual. Before she turned eighteen, he made his daughter’s body into a commodity.

This tension between seeing one’s daughter as your little girl, and acknowledging her nascent sexuality, probably plagues fathers worldwide. I can’t imagine what frustration it must cause fathers to give advice and guidance about sex, knowing daughters will ignore some or all advice until it’s too late. Yet 1990s Purity Culture, and the opposite number embodied in Britney’s in-your-face exhibitionism, made girls into completely sexual beings, then entrusted that sexuality to fathers.

Readers old enough, like me, to remember the emergence of “purity balls,” know what I mean. These weird virginity proms spotlighted fathers and daughters in relationship. These girls were presented as already women, but per the arrangement, they consciously abnegated their own sexuality, entrusting it altogether to their fathers. These bizarre, frequently disturbing events turn adolescent girls into childlike dependents and also Jezebels at the same time.

In fairness, discordant events like this aren’t exactly inexplicable. As traditional gender roles have proved unsatisfactory, and have receded, without anything prepared to take their place; as sexual mores have evolved, reflecting the fact that most families don’t need to breed their own workforce anymore, older people feel dislocated. Rapid change, venturing into unknown territory, is scary. Some people seek comfort in extreme forms of nostalgia.

But as Britney’s testimony reveals, an iron paternal grip on youthful sexuality doesn’t prevent dangerous consequences; it just changes one unknown outcome for another. Britney’s expertly managed teenage sexuality and Christian Purity Culture couldn’t have existed without one another. Both saw teenaged girls as essentially sexual, and both entrusted that sexuality to heavy-handed dads. And now we’re paying for both.

The Speculative Bubble and the Birth of Modern Capitalism

Thomas Levenson, Money For Nothing: the Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich

The South Sea Bubble, an economic surge that helped solidify nascent capitalism in 1720, maybe isn’t as sexy as, say, Holland’s Tulip Mania of 1637. It hasn’t captured popular imagination the same way. Yet by helping invent mature bond markets and consolidating the power of the finance industry in modern politics, it ushered in the industrial “ownership society” we live with today. And it feels chillingly familiar.

Thomas Levenson, MIT Professor of Science Writing, seems an unlikely historian of Great Britain’s newly invented bond markets. His prior works for general audiences have focused on science icons like Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. Yet during the early Eighteenth Century, many British scientists, including Newton, reinvented themselves as financiers and civil servants. Their faith in mathematics and empiricism helped create a “scientific” approach to early modern economics.

This book covers roughly the period from 1693, when Parliament struck a deal with William of Orange to nationalize the public purse, to 1722, when the South Seas Bubble nearly bankrupted Britain. Before 1693, the public purse was basically the monarch’s personal resources, available to boost the crown’s personal glory. Taxes could supplement public funds, but decisions were tied to the monarch personally, making futures trades on public funds virtually impossible.

Once Britain’s national funds belonged to Parliament, it became possible to organize and sell derivatives. London had two markets then: the official Exchange, and the unofficial, unregulated coffee shops of Exchange Alley. Laws creating joint-stock corporations were more restrictive then, meaning fewer companies existed, and trades often occurred informally. Without standards, buyers often didn’t know what futures were really worth; stock-jobbing was a casino.

Into this unregulated market swaggered Parliament, and its new invention, the Bank of England. Britain needed cheap money to support ongoing wars with its traditional rivals, France and Spain. So Parliament began floating derivatives on the Exchange: annuities, pensions, and even lotteries. These derivatives had recently been invented by government mathematicians, including Newton and Edmond Halley (of comet fame), and the market was really an experiment. Failure was always a possibility.

Thomas Levenson

Alongside the government’s gambling, the South Sea Company emerged, willing to take another huge gamble, hoping to establish trade between London, and Spain’s Caribbean colonies. One problem: Britain and Spain were at war, again. While waiting for traditional enemies to resolve their differences, South Sea executives derived elaborate business plans based on Newton and Halley’s actuarial tables. Those plans looked so good, Exchange Alley began salivating.

Soon, the South Sea Company began seeing lucrative stock valuations, based not on anything they’d actually manufactured or sold, but upon the putative value of their future plans. Company principals used this valuation as leverage for their own borrowing. In so doing, they invented a rudimentary form of modern credit swap, creating actual monetary prices for promises. South Sea money wasn’t based on gold or land; it was based on futures.

Anyone familiar with the Great Recession will anticipate where this is headed. Because early government attempts to borrow on credit involved annuities with absurdly long payouts, Parliament was saddled with old debt when it needed to finance new. The Bank of England saw a convergence of Parliament’s needs with the South Sea Company, and devised an idea entirely new in Western finance: privatizing the public debt.

Through a Parliamentary action too complex to summarize, the South Sea Company began hoovering up public debt and translating it into common stock. Stockholders began receiving dividends based on government obligations, while the company continued conspicuously doing nothing. To untrained eyes (which included most of Exchange Alley), this looked like free money. Jealous investors began buying in, and stock prices soared. Many people became rich… on paper.

Levenson includes an epilog comparing the South Sea Bubble to the Great Recession, but not extensively. He trusts informed readers to recognize the parallels. What happened on Exchange Alley in 1720 looks rudimentary compared to today’s credit-default swaps and other derivatives, but in principle, they’re basically identical. And when the crash came, London had two choices: repair this newly discovered system, or return to the old ways.

To their credit, Britain’s investors chose wisely.

Alongside this new economy came a new government. As Levenson relates, the monarch becomes increasingly irrelevant, while an eager young politician, Robert Walpole, consolidates power, and becomes something new: a Prime Minister. The rise of early-modern economics helps create the early-modern government. Though Levenson says it’s risky to suggest our world was birthed around 1720, that implication clearly exists.

We’re living in the South Sea’s shadow.

The End of the Ends of the World

N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth 1)

Essun, a humble schoolteacher and mother, returns home one fateful afternoon to find her toddler son murdered, presumably by his father. Her world, as she knows it, has ended. The grief leaves her so shocked and paralyzed that she fails to notice when the literal end of the world begins around her: earthquakes, volcanoes, ashfall from the sky. Only latterly does she realize she has to venture out into Armageddon.

N.K. Jemisin had written several critically acclaimed science fiction and fantasy novels before beginning this, her breakout success. This volume addresses the circularity of time, how past events form our present in ways we can’t shake. Essun wants to establish herself, but doesn’t know herself. She’s been molded by a system of fears and doubts, a terrifying bureaucracy which has taught her to fit in or be, literally, struck down.

This novel belongs to a science fiction subgenre called “Dying Earth.” This subgenre deals with civilizations so far into the future, our present isn’t even a historical oddity. Technology has become so advanced that, as Clarke posited, it’s indistinguishable from magic. Yet entropy has become widespread, the Earth is used up, and the Sun is dying. Characters can’t fight for the future, because there barely is any future.

From childhood, society has taught Essun to fear certain people. Then she discovers she’s one of the feared. This novel addresses three stages in Essun’s life: Jemisin doesn’t state this directly until late, we could be reading about three different women, but experienced readers will recognize early that we’re witnessing Essun’s Maiden, Mother, and Crone stages, sort of. The ways she learns to love and hate.

Lifted from her provincial childhood and taken to the Empire’s greatest academy, young Damaya is taught the ways of orogeny, a sort of plate-tectonic wizardry. She’s immensely powerful, but the Empire fears her powers, and molds her through intensive conditioning. She isn’t permitted to pick her own career, or even her spouse; her life is about compliance with unquestionable authority. This authority is paternalistic, even loving, but always autocratic.

As a child, Damaya simply asks questions and wants to better understand her world. She seeks knowledge, but the bureaucracy deems certain knowledge too dangerous. Instead, she’s channeled to public service. Her career is chosen, and her sexuality becomes a matter of semi-public spectacle. She could’ve been a scientist, but the state deems science dangerous. When she rebels against social order, it literally kills people.

N.K. Jemisin

In young womanhood, renamed Syenite, the Empire uses her abilities to preserve its own ideals. This concept of Empire matters greatly. Jemisin’s characters discuss power, conquest, and the instruments of control. The Empire, we learn early, is moribund and decrepit, the Emperor a prisoner, and the bureaucracy marches on. Nothing new gets invented, because to the Empire, the only meaningful truth is continuity.

Finally, in adulthood, Essun wants what everyone wants, love and relationship and community. She becomes a wife and mother; but the secrets she’s spent decades burying reveal themselves in her children. She has to pay for the secrets she’s kept, because even amidst the End of Days, powerful people out there still see her as an enemy who needs to be crushed. And somewhere, she still has one surviving child.

Jemisin’s system, reflecting the three stages of woman in pre-Christian religion, suggests that Essun might be a nascent goddess. She faces systems of control and, in different ways at different times, decides whether to comply or resist. This may include malicious compliance, near the end: on one level she’s broken, but on another, she becomes independent where the world abandons her, and she transcends the world’s fight-or-obey dichotomy.

Essun’s maturation reflects ours, as all literature is about its audience. Throughout the story, she faces the reality of her dead child, or children; she exists without a real future. Environmental decay, technological bloat, and alienation from herself: Essun is the modern adult woman, adrift in a world that perceives her as inherently dangerous, even before she’s actually done anything. Sadly she lives up to, or down to, the world’s expectations.

Jemisin combines several existing tropes: pre-Christian stages of womanhood, or Freud’s belief that civilization causes neurosis, to name just two. But she sees these tropes through a lens that is particularly modern, American, and Black. She offers a literature of rebellion, of anti-imperialism, even when breaking the empire could have grim ramifications. This isn’t a manifesto, don’t misinterpret me; it’s simply a book about not complying with evil, dying systems.

Look What They've Done To Juneteenth, Ma

The Juneteenth Flag, designed by Ben Haith and Lisa Jeanne Graf, per the Boston Globe

This week’s completed legislation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday leaves me with distinctly mixed feelings. I appreciate the desire to federally recognize the day Black Americans in Galveston, Texas, received word of the Emancipation Proclamation. It not only recognizes those formerly enslaved Americans’ liberation, it also recognizes liberation didn’t come all at once. Word needed to travel, and in some American regions, still needs to travel.

However, I feel squeamish about giving the event official calendar recognition. Consider other federal holidays. Labor day recognizes America’s labor movement, while we retain laws making labor organizing difficult, and limiting collective bargaining. We have Martin Luther King, Jr., day, which has basically become another scheduled day off school. We officially recognize what these days mean, but practically, they’ve become intellectual clutter.

In creating another holiday, the state does largely what the church does by making somebody a saint: it incorporates them into the structure. Their uniqueness gets subsumed, they stop challenging the status quo, and the system chooses which aspects get celebrated. Distinct qualities disappear, especially if those qualities are impolitic, because the individual or event becomes part of the superstructure. Dr. King or Samuel Gompers get reduced to bromides.

Most important, though, the institution gets to clothe itself in somebody else’s virtue. In retelling the narrative of Galveston’s liberation, the state innately implies: we did this. State power brought liberation to Galveston’s enslaved population. This narrative will, almost inevitably, minimize both Galveston’s slavemasters, who concealed the Emancipation Proclamation for over two years, and Galveston’s enslaved workers, and the resistance they offered to the Peculiar Institution.

The state’s hagiography, represented in national holidays, creates a particular narrative. July 4th, for instance, becomes about “We Hold These Truths,” while omitting, say, the “Merciless Indian Savages.” MLK Day becomes about triumphs accomplished, not justice delayed, and certainly not about any backsliding we’ve suffered since then. Based on history, I fear Juneteenth will become about White liberators, not Black resistance.

Juneteenth certainly happened, don’t mistake me. Major General Gordon Granger’s troops definitely occupied Galveston on June 19th, 1866. But by creating a holiday, with the accompanying justificatory narrative, that becomes the most important fact: the act of state. The Great White Father signing General Order Number 3 trumps the suffering imposed by powerful people, or the acts of resistance, great or small, performed by the masses.

A Juneteenth celebration at the Lincoln Memorial in 2020, per ABC News

In decreeing the celebration, the state clothes itself in vestments of virtue, and claims: we brought your freedom. The state claims itself an air of goodness which, in practice, it still lacks. It takes credit for motivating history, although at present, it continues minimizing attempts to remedy the broken system. It purports that the state relieves the oppressed, and therefore, whatever the state does—or wants to do—must perforce be good.

When citizens press the state to actually provide material benefits, that becomes a problem. When asked to lift the poor from poverty, especially generational or racialized poverty, the state pleads poverty and claims there’s nothing it can do. But it performs signs that involve no actual commitment, like decreeing a holiday, because that grants the outward appearance of virtue. Like a teenager cosplaying Captain America, the state looks heroic, but does nothing.

Far worse, I think, than the inevitable descent into barbecues and chain-store sales, this process represents how creating holidays damages the core. Federal holidays have turned Dr. King, the labor movement, and Jesus Christ become stand-ins for the establishment, their orphaned quotes reduced to slogans for the status quo, as historian Kevin M. Kruse writes. Holidays make dissidents into federal employees.

Consequently, today’s powerful people get to feel virtuous. They feel like they’ve contributed something to the discourse. What they’ve contributed doesn’t actually improve anything, or make anyone’s situation better, certainly, but that doesn’t much matter. They feel good, reassured that they aren’t historic villains for holding power. They clothe themselves in virtuous robes, while exempting themselves from the difficult work of making change.

But individuals aren’t pressed down by holidays, they’re held down by power. Granting federal imprimatur to Juneteenth, without helping the generational victims of redlining (for instance), does nothing about the problems which exist. Holidays are, frankly, easy, and cost little. Remedying the problems which our government, economy, and history have created, requires will and money, resources the state notoriously loathes to spend.<

A Juneteenth holiday at least officially provides recognition to slavery and its legacy, long overdue. But it doesn’t fix the problem, and provides justification to keep deferring any remedy.

On Needing To Be There For My Father

Left to right: my father, me, my mother, and my sister, on my parents' 50th wedding anniversary

I’m the kind of nerd who finds connections between whatever I’m doing right now, and something I saw while watching Doctor Who. The show’s looming presence in my life colors my values, interests, and ability to process experiences. This weekend, I spent copious time contemplating the episode “Twice Upon a Time,” in which a digital reconstruction of the Doctor’s comapanion, Bill Potts, says: “I am the real Bill! A life is just memories. I'm all her memories, so I'm her.”

My father admitted aloud on Saturday something his family had long suspected: his memory is going. His doctor screened him and declared his memory loss only moderate, nothing worse than men his age regularly face. His doctor cleared him to continue driving, though his ability to recognize landmarks is diminishing, and he needs his wife there to remind him where everything is.  He’s still my dad, but maybe a little less so.

If Bill Potts is right, if memories make us ourselves, where does that leave my father? Which memories are, precisely, “him”? At present, he hasn’t forgotten anybody’s names or faces, important life events, or major history. However, he’s sketchy on making new memories, which means having long conversations with him—as I learned this weekend—is becoming difficult. He needs my mother around to maintain his focus and remind him where he is.

I haven’t always been receptive to my father and his memories. Because he frequently had little interest in the present, and often wanted to live, morally, in the pastoral recollections of his youth, his memories often didn’t seem relevant to me. Now that they’re fading, I realize those memories have nobody left to keep them alive. He hasn’t recorded his thoughts, like mine in this blog; when his memories leave him, they will vanish forever.

Someday, maybe soon, he’ll start losing meaningful experiences from his past. What happens when, for instance, Dad gets restless and reaches for a cigarette, forgetting he quit smoking nearly ten years ago? Will that experience jar him? More important, will it jar him enough to make new memories? Or will it become something he has to experience time and again, because for him, the event is fleeting and momentary? When will it start changing him?

The science fiction I enjoy often romanticizes nonlinear beings, who experience all time simultaneously. Yet watching my father struggle this weekend, I thought: such creatures would be incapable of growth and development. When all meaningful reality exists right now, we have no ability to have new experiences, or put old experiences into context. We can’t grow. We can’t be better people than yesterday, nor have hope of being better people tomorrow. We just exist.

In my youth, as I’ve written before, I wanted to stop history in some beatified past, which happened to correspond with my father’s youth, though I favored the hippie culture he rejected. I wanted all change to halt. So did he, for different reasons. Yet watching him this weekend, struggling to drive around town without guidance, or have sustained conversations, I realized (and I think he did too) that halting change has horrific consequences.

Yet for him, that decision is made. Therapeutic memory treatments, he tells me, have made little impact. The present, for him, is dwindling, and the future with it; soon, this diminution will start squeezing his past, too. That means the burden falls on me, someone whose faculties remain intact, to experience past and future for both of us. Put another way, I have to take responsibility for being present with him, because for him, every moment will be this moment.

He’s losing the ability to change, but I’m not. My ability to respond, to adapt to his requirements, gives me new opportunities to incorporate his experiences into my own. While he’s losing the ability to grow individually, we can grow together, which means I have a rare opportunity to be there for him. I can help him exist outside the moment. I can be present for him, just as, in my childhood, he was present for me.

Because I think Bill Potts was ultimately wrong. We aren’t built from our individual memories; that’s arrogant and egotistical. Our experiences matter, but we require other people to put our experiences into context. Western individualism and neoliberal economics forget that we only exist together, collectively; my family, friends, and community give me context and meaning. Now, as his present retreats and his future shrinks, I can be my dad’s context.

Romeo and Juliet in the Dying Old World

Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet

What, an acquaintance recently asked, is Juliet’s fatal flaw? We know Romeo is impetuous and overly emotional, driven by sentimental whimsy, but what about Juliet? The traditional attributions, like pride, avarice, or jealousy, don’t apply. Some friends and I got to discussing this question, and though we’re no closer to reaching a conclusion, the debate did generate some meaningful suggestions.

Aristotle postulates a “fatal flaw” as a humane virtue that becomes so extreme and disproportionate, that it distorts and becomes a vice. Oedipus wanted to investigate the truth because he considered the truth a straightforward moral good, and didn’t realise the truth would implicate him. Orestes wanted vengeance to rebalance the scales of justice, but in order to do that he had to kill his own mother, which upset the scales again.

Using that standard, what virtues do we see in Juliet? She loves deeply, and she rejects her parents’ conformist attitudes. In today’s individualistic society, we perceive these attitudes as good, as triumphant, as reasons to consider her a good human being. But in Verona's tightly controlled aristocratic society, they are deviations from systems of control. The desire to love deeply, contradicts the ways a late-feudal society holds itself together.

This concept of Verona as “late-feudal” matters. Shakespeare wrote while conservative aristocratic precepts were giving way to nascent capitalism. Though Shakespeare wrote in praise of kings and of history, and often appears conservative in his own writings, he did so in no small part because he was hamstrung by the attitudes of official state censors. He needed to satisfy the bureaucracy, which he achieved by flattering the Queen’s regime.

Shakespeare lawfully had to praise kings and priests, during the twilight of monarchs and ecclesiastics. The old ways of seeing and being in the world were winding down, gradually being supplanted by the ways of money and discovery, the power of nominally self-made individuals. Shakespeare was a rough contemporary of Sir Francis Drake and other national heroes; he could probably see the old systems growing threadbare.

Verona, as depicted, isn’t an actual Italian city-state. Juliet’s romantic forwardness reflects this; her behavior in vetting suitors and participating in family masquerades reflects this. Reading this play with historical hindsight, clearly Shakespeare presents Verona as a distant Neverland, a nation of ideological exploration, where the author manipulates character and events to underline his symbolism. Like Othello or Twelfth Night, this Italy is distinctly English.

Clare Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet

The Montagues and Capulets support the old systems, because they have to. Their aristocratic system no longer supports the people, lumbering on simply because the powerful fear change. The rising sense of individualism among Tudor England matters: the sense that one could circumnavigate the world and make a sort of conquest for themselves, the values of budding colonialism, the sense that we could remake ourselves in the New World.

These attitudes were probably new and dangerous, and Shakespeare maybe didn’t believe them himself. He presents the undiscovered world as dangerous in plays like The Tempest. But simultaneously, he needs to accommodate this New World, because the Old World was surely unravelling. The sense of wounded honor that dominates Verona’s aristocracy, becomes something different in the New World, the savagery of backcountry Hatfields and McCoys.

Because the old way is usually violence. Dedicated history readers know that war often marks the old edifices falling away: as we’re seeing right now, with threats of violent insurrection from people who perceive their privilege undercut by changes in society which they find scary. The Montagues and Capulets would have more in common with the January 6th mutineers than we might like to admit.

Violence recognizes that we’re bound to the past, that the dying order owns us, and we have nothing else to sustain us. Romeo and Juliet have something positive, something nonviolent, by which they survive. They’re naïve, of course, pummeled by their emotions, and had they survived the moment, they probably would have descended into something different and unglamorous. But in the moment, they have a world that isn’t defined oppositionally.

Viewed thus, I propose, Juliet has no “fatal flaw.” Young and morally unformed, she cannot possess either virtues enough to turn vicious, nor vices enough to condemn her. Instead, she simply is, in a world grown weary and gangrenous. The fault, expressed in the Prince’s final stiff scolding of Old Montague and Old Capulet, belongs not to the children; it belongs to Verona’s elders, for clinging to a dying way.

Romeo & Juliet is, beneath the surface, the Tragedy of Verona.

See Also: Romeo and Juliet in the Kingdom of Politics

What If the 1950s, But Sillier?

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 44
Walter Hill (writer-director), Streets of Fire

Glamorous rock star Ellen Aim has returned to her hometown to play a benefit gig before an adoring local crowd. But jealous biker Raven, leader of the Bombers, has other goals: his black-clad greasers rush the stage, overpower Ellen’s entourage, and carry her away like a trophy. Thousands watch helplessly, but one local woman contacts her secret weapon, her brother, the mercenary Tom Cody.

Director and co-writer Walter Hill produced this picture, an epitome of 1980s values, in the immediate wake of his runaway hit 48 Hrs. A slick package of highly choreographed fight scenes, teenage love revisited, and rock aesthetics, everyone involved anticipated another smash. It was dead on arrival, losing millions. Recent trends, however, have led critics to reevaluate this movie, reclassifying it as an ahead-of-its-time beauty of Reagan-era excess.

Tom Cody declares he doesn’t care to rescue Ellen Aim. Why get involved in local gangs and police politics? Some banter with his sister reveals Tom and Ellen were involved, years prior, but when her singing career became lucrative, they drifted apart. Tom carries a grudge. But Ellen’s nebbishy boyfriend, also her manager, offers a brick of cash, and Tom becomes interested. He buys some black-market guns and ventures into the darkest part of town.

Despite its dark premise, this movie’s defining trait is silliness. It presents all action with the depth and complexity of a Looney Tune. Its outdoor sets and streetscapes are so close-in and narrow that you never forget it’s a soundstage. Characters are exactly as deep as the plot requires, letting the script carry them from scene to scene, because they don’t have deep inner motivations; things simply happen because it’s time.

Yet somehow, we viewers feel yoked to the story’s potential. The silliness becomes downright operatic, with its tendency towards Grand Guignol and its elaborate, Tim Burton-like design. Like vintage melodrama, the characters are having enough fun that they see no reason to interrupt the proceedings. They want things to reach their inevitable conclusion because they enjoy being slick, commercial, and drenched in early-MTV sumptuousness.

In essence, this movie is a designer’s vehicle; even the rococo sets remind us we’re participating in conscious art. The nameless city’s streets have an Edward Hopper depth, very close and angular, with bare concrete under painted steel facades (which are clearly plastic and Styrofoam). Like in a dream, or myth, everything is very close together: the city’s worst street is around the corner from its best.

Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) and Tom Cody (Michael Paré) in Streets of Fire

A 1950s aesthetic pervades this film, but not deeply. Shark-fin cars and greaser boots are everywhere, but so are upswept 1980s hairdos and oversaturated music-video colors. An early title card tells us this story happens in “Another time, another place.” That time and place is clearly inside somebody’s head, because this isn’t historic; it's a Reagan-era dreamscape fueled by Top-40 skifflebop and anti-juvenile delinquent PSA’s.

Then we have the fight scenes, for which this movie was written. Unnamed characters fall off motorcycles, get whanged with sledgehammers, and tumble out of moving cars, but nobody is ever really hurt. Like I said, it’s a Looney Tune, a Bugs Bunny caper. We don’t expect realistic consequences for cartoon violence, we expect people’s heads to bounce off pavement like it’s made of rubber. Violence is slapstick, not horrific.

This pervasive silliness is underscored by the movie’s rock-and-roll soundtrack, which almost never stops. Its rockabilly vibes remind us we’re watching somebody’s nostalgic fantasy. (This is the same era when the Stray Cats and the Cramps updated Fifties vibes for a more commercial age.) This movie pines for fast guitars, slick cars, and back-alley rumbles. Like much of its era, it yearns for a simplicity that probably never really existed.

This movie plays out a Reaganite wistfulness for a simplified 1950s, divided between obvious heroes and villains. It pits calm, big-shouldered Tom Cody, the ex-soldier, against greaser Raven and his gangsters; but it also pits Tom’s demonstrative manfulness against Billy Fish, Ellen’s geeky manager and new boyfriend. Tom’s violence works, but it’s also outdated; even he admits the future belongs to people like Billy, not himself.

As stated, this movie landed with a quiet thud. This didn’t bother writer-director Hill, who was massively prolific and moved onto another project. Nearly forty years later, though, fans have reevaluated its legacy. It has more in common with mythologies like Lord of the Rings than the semi-realistic action flicks which dominated 1980s cinema, while also embodying its era’s pining for lost moral simplicity. And it’s also just silly fun.

Hard At Work in Post-Labor America

It’s that time in the crisis cycle again: time for the self-righteous and wealthy to remind everyone how disconnected they really are. As America re-opens, and we have to make painful choices about how to rebuild the wreckage of our former economy, some people start boasting their privilege by whining about the injustice of it all. I just got accustomed to lockdown, whimper, why start back up again now?

First, cartoonist and essayist Tim Kreider imposed upon Atlantic readers with “I’m Not Scared to Reenter Society. I’m Just Not Sure I Want To.” Despite its promising title, it doesn’t address the implied theme of whether returning to our prior corporatist hellscape lives were worth it; Kreider instead mewls about how a lifestyle of “solitude, idleness, and nihilism” has become more appealing than work. Kreider needs less Pfizer, more Prozac.

Then a survey report emerged, saying that “64% of workers would pass up a $30k raise to work from home.” As big-tech and financial-services companies, which let millions of workers telecommute during the pandemic, desire a return to normality, many workers aren’t interested. They prefer work-from-home conditions, which allows them liberty to task-shift. Bored writing code or handling customer-service emails? Take fifteen to do laundry or heat a frozen burrito!

Both these voices sound superficially familiar. Who hasn’t yearned, periodically, to shirk work and malinger indoors, watching Netflix? And anybody who’s done white-collar work knows the eight-hour jive is moral rather than practical; we can’t focus that long on tasks for somebody else’s reward. Both the desire to jettison employment altogether, and the desire to work under home conditions, suggest a desire to refocus employment on workers, not bosses.

But.

Both stories bespeak mostly unexamined levels of privilege. Tim Kreider admits early that he doesn’t require an income, particularly; he crashes with friends. And the survey reports that supposed $30K refusal mainly among “Zillow, Twitter, and Microsoft employees.” We aren’t talking about people making sandwiches or scrubbing toilets, work that can’t be done remotely. Millions of Americans kept working through the pandemic, or didn’t get paid.

While Kreider didn’t need to work, and Microsoft restructured its work requirements, I and millions of others fell into a third category. Our jobs, declared “essential” for America’s thriving economy, kept going, and we needed to show up. These jobs weren’t without price, either; many low-paying service jobs became superspreader events. The media called grocery clerks “heroes” for doing their jobs, like they had a choice.

My construction labor was considered “essential.” But the things I worked to achieve, participation in community arts or amateur sports or just hanging out with friends, became suddenly lethal. Without a family, I moved from my apartment to my job and back like a convict on work-release. I had neither the luxury for chrysalis-like oblivion, like Kreider, nor liberty to schedule my own day, like the statistical Microsoft workers.

This leaves me a seemingly inevitable conclusion. I don’t need work tweaked, neither through a raise (though one would be nice), nor through telecommuting options. Rather, I question the structure of employment altogether. These sixteen months have made literal what Marx and Lenin considered metaphorically, that the ownership economy steals all meaning from work, while the rewards go to those who merely own things.

Fast-food franchisees complain that workers refuse employment because the government offers a pitiful stipend. ($300 per month amortizes to $15,600 per year—or approximately what Elon Musk makes every three seconds.) Others claim workers will return when they have other perquisites, like affordable child care, universal health insurance, and paid family leave. All these arguments assume people want rewards which have a detectable price tag.

But I’d contend workers want some meaningful connection between work and reward. Not a specific reward; they want control. The pandemic gave Tim Kreider the justification to indulge the moody self-abnegation inherent in his cartoons. It gave the abstract tech-industry workers freedom from being chained to the desk. It gave hourly workers freedom from… having anything to do or anywhere to go after hours. Not exactly the best trade-off for some.

These stories, and the traction they’ve received in the last several days, reflect the relative privilege held by the American punditocracy. The fact that cube farmers don’t want to return to the cube isn’t news; did they ever want to be there? Yet the existential rootlessness which the working class had amplified over the last sixteen months remains ignored. Unless, of course, it stops editors from getting their three-martini lunch.

Some Thoughts on Mary Magdalene

Mary Magdalene painted by Titian

Mary Magdalene, one of the few figures identified by name in all four canonical Gospels, wasn’t identified as a prostitute. Let’s start with that. Yes, Luke’s Gospel calls her “Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils,” so she had a past. But nobody considered her a prostitute until Pope Gregory I, who syncretized several widely spaced references to simplify doctrine. This happened in the Sixth Century CE.

Yet I’ve been considering Mary recently, and I suggest, considering her a prostitute makes theological sense. The fact she has a past, and a past which her time and ours often consider irredeemable, carries important weight. We now know, as public moralists in Jesus’ time didn’t, that women enter prostitution mainly because of economic desperation. To First Century moralists, prostitutes didn’t just sell sex, they sold their identities as women.

“The Virgin-Whore Dichotomy” has become a widespread critical buzzword for the moral roles enforced upon women. It’s important to remember, though, that at one time, this wasn’t metaphorical. Women were wholly commodities; their virginity made them valuable as wives and mothers, like prize heifers. If they didn’t possess their virginity, they became something men could rent, like a Buick, but never really own. Bought or rented, never independent.

In either case, women (and by implication everyone) are defined wholly by their past. Prostitution became, not something a woman did, pressed by poverty and need, but something a woman was. Consider all the identity roles enforced on people today: race, gender, nationality, immigration status, economic class. Even your name, assigned at birth and changeable only by court order. Every identity marker binds you entirely to your past.

If Mary was a prostitute, she would’ve understood this intimately. Once the world recognized her as sexually “unclean,” she would’ve had no route back; she was beyond redemption. This attitude isn’t millennia old, either; “purity culture,” which dominated sectors of White Christianity for the last thirty years, preaches the same message. You’re either pure or fallen, and once fallen, that condition lasts forever. Impurity is beyond redemption.

By contrast, Jesus says we, like Mary, aren’t yoked to the past. A repentant heart has freedom to move, because it abjures its past, and faces the future. The world chains us to mistakes we made previously, maybe years ago, a posture that comforts the powerful by making everyone fixed and controllable. But Jesus says other people don’t own you, can’t define you by choices made in your past.

Mary Magdalene painted by Guido Reni

Worldly authorities love creating categories of control. Consider the pundits who love reminding everyone that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used to work as a bartender. Such moralists want to define her entirely according to a job they consider menial; power, they imply (like the Romans and Pharisees before us) belongs to people of means and leisure. If you’ve ever needed to accept a derided job, they’ll define you by that forever.

Throughout history, powerful people have attempted to yoke the poor, the despised, and women to their pasts. In Second Temple Judaism, the punishment for crimes of desperation, like prostitution or petty theft, was maiming or death: punishments that cannot be rescinded. You became, forever, the “worst” thing you ever did. Nor did Christians improve things; from medieval flagellants to modern Evangelicalism, sexual indiscretions have tainted women for life, and beyond.

Rather than the comforting, but damning, certainty of the past, Jesus offers a dangerous, uncertain future. That sounds terrifying to people who prefer certainty, and not without reason; remember, eleven of the twelve male Apostles died violently. But the alternative to this living, risky future, is the fixity of the past. You can race headlong, giddy, into the future, encountering it on Jesus’ terms; or you can be static and dead.

I admit, I’m frequently bad at embracing this. The past is knowable, to the extent that humans can know anything, because it doesn’t change. Sure, it gets reframed, our understanding changes, but the past itself stands. The future may sucker-punch us, and frequently does. The desire to reduce risk makes us hug the chains connecting us to the past, dragging our guilt, resentment, and fear everywhere.

Yet I consider the prospect that we aren’t beholden to our past liberating. Worldly powers continue defining us according to our past: dragging the punishment for nonviolent drug offenses out for decades, for instance, or insisting on deadnaming us. To the hierarchy, prostitution is the epitome of this. But the Gospel says: you’re defined by where you’re going, not where you’ve been.

Racism, Ellie Kemper, and History

Ellie Kemper

Twitter, which is frequently vulnerable to the worst forms of swarming behavior, apparently remembered that Ellie Kemper existed yesterday. The Kimmie Schmidt actress netted attention she probably didn’t want when someone discovered she once won a lite-beer “beauty pageant” organized by a St. Louis civic group with racist ties. The usual responses poured forth like a fountain: Kimmie Schmidt is a Nazi agent! Back off Kimmie, she was only nineteen!

The weird unfolding drama (Kemper hasn’t commented as I write) swirled around questions of exactly how culpable social media should hold Kemper, for having ever been involved with such an organization. Twitter’s short character count excises all nuance, of course, so the controversy devolves into painting Kemper, and the organization that rewarded her, with a broad brush. Everything descends, though, to a simple dichotomy: Kemper is, or isn’t, guilty.

I propose this misses the point. Faced with evidence that a historically racist organization controls one of St. Louis’s major annual summer festivals, tweeters are apparently casting around for someone to blame, individually. Put another way, this news presents evidence that systemic racism continues to exist, and picks society’s winners, in a major American city, and instead of decrying the system, tweeters seek a high-profile individual to blame.

Double-checking sources doesn’t make things any easier. Nearly every accusation cites this Atlantic article from 2014, which never mentions Kemper’s name. Moreover, this source says the formerly segregated organization that awarded Kemper this “pageant” (which, apparently, wasn’t competitive) isn’t nearly so bigoted as her accusers suggest. The article suggests its organizers have struggled, somewhat, with the group’s clearly racist past.

Judging from the source, the Fair Saint Louis, formerly the Veiled Prophet Fair, definitely had its roots in the desire to preserve racial and economic privilege. Author Scott Beauchamp describes how founders wanted to exclude the city’s Black population, poor whites, and trade unionists from power. However, Beauchamp also describes how the organization desegregated twenty years before Kemper was crowned, a year before she was even born.

Saying the group officially desegregated itself only says so much, of course. As journalist Sarah Kendzior writes, St. Louis today is a majority-Black city, but economic might and political authority remain concentrated in White hands. If Fair Saint Louis preserves its role in keeping the wealthy connected, nominally letting Black Missourians through the door doesn’t fix anything. I can’t address that; I prefer Kansas City myself.

St. Louis, Missouri

Several years ago, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book Strangers In Their Own Land described the experience of mostly White people living in chronically poor parts of America. Hochschild chose her subjects for their poverty, but also because their regions traditionally supported a conservative political agenda that willfully punished the poor. Why, she wondered, do poor Whites seem to vote for their own continued impoverishment?

Ever the scientist, Hochschild avoided assigning explanations to her subjects’ behavior. She simply observed that people conformed themselves to their environments; even transplants from left-leaning areas, many of them registered Democrats, took on the political and religious leanings of their region. Humans, ever the consummate social animals, came to resemble the places they chose as home. Possibly because doing otherwise was like fighting the tide.

(Matthew Desmond wrote something similar: nobody blames the poor for their plight more than other poor people.)

Therefore, I have difficulty blaming Kemper for what happened when she was nineteen. Already an aspiring actress, she showed up in public and participated in a cheapjack attention grab, hoping it would kick-start her career. (As a trained actor myself, one of the reasons my career stalled at the gate was my unwillingness to participate in such displays.) She was part of her community, and comported herself accordingly.

Whether Fair Saint Louis remains racist, despite desegregating over forty years ago, is irrelevant. So is whether Kemper, at nineteen, had enough individual agency to make decisions about history. What matters is that twenty-two years later, Twitter, a notorious engine of self-righteous dogpiling, decided that blaming Ellie Kemper for the persistence of racism in America would fix… well… anything. Because we still think assigning blame equals solving the problem.

Fair Saint Louis was certainly founded in racism and classism. Then it survived its time because people go along to get along. Now, decades later, the exact same conformist mob mentality seeks to blame Ellie Kemper because America’s racist legacy hasn’t gone away yet. The mob can’t handle that individuals can’t sway systems (ironically enough). The Twitter mob wants an individual to blame. The system just laughs.