However there was one day of the year when all was forgiven. Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. England does not have Mardi Gras like they do in New Orleans – I think we would all have found that rather vulgar and (to be honest) Roman Catholic. But there are traditions associated with that day and above all pancakes have a starring role.

I don’t know what the English today consider to be a pancake. Perhaps Betty Crocker has triumphed there too. But in my day, it was much more a crepe than a full-blooded pancake. And in various parts of the country there were, and I assume still are, races where people – always women – have to run a set distance carrying a frying pan with a pancake in it, flipping it a set number of times along the way.

We at school on that happy day used to have pancakes, many of them. Served as is the English way with corn syrup – Tate and Lyle’s Golden Syrup — or Demerara sugar and lemon juice. Then the senior master would, to our delight, tell us that this was a school tradition and that even during the War people had saved eggs so that the boys of the school could have their Shrove Tuesday pancakes.

At which point we would bang on the tables our knives and forks in unison and demand to see the cook. She would finally appear and huge roars of appreciation would ring out. Tradition was satisfied for another year. All was forgiven. Even the heart.

I have always had a bit of nostalgia for those happy Tuesdays and every now and then I impose on my family the ritual of eating pancakes – English-style pancakes with golden syrup and lemon juice. And by and large my family take it very well and indulge me, pretending even to like them.

And so we come to this year, when I imposed the ritual on poor Lizzie and on a couple of friends rounded up for the occasion. All went well until the end of the meal and I cleared off and let them do the dishes. After all, fair is fair. I heard whispering going on and finally some poor victim drew the short straw. Through she came. They had indeed enjoyed the pancakes, but was I aware — pagan that I am — that today is Wednesday not Tuesday and I had imposed my traditional ritual on family and friends on the wrong day! Instead of doing that which was pleasing in the eyes of God, I had really cheesed him off.

They were good pancakes though!

Then in 1962 – 50 years ago this year – along came Thomas Kuhn and his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He drove a horse and four through the distinction, arguing that unless you know something of how and why a scientist gets his or her ideas, even as a philosopher you are missing something very important. Origins do matter, all of the time. Not that I think that Kuhn was a relativist, thinking that only origins matter. Some have taken him this way, or at least have used his authority to go down that path. His point rather was that to understand the present, you must understand the past.

That was one of the most important insights I have ever grasped. In a way, as an evolutionist, it was an easy one. If evolution tells you anything, it is that you had better not forget the past. But I don’t want to dwell too much on that. I am talking about culture (including science) not organisms, and I for one am not overly keen on simple analogies between biological change and cultural change. Richard Dawkins’s theory of memes, for instance, seeing units of culture akin to units of heredity, seems to me (shall we say) rather less than helpful. At most it puts in fancy language what we know already.

What I do want to dwell on is how this last weekend – at a small workshop in Paris on evolution and economics – the staggering importance of Kuhn’s thinking came home again to me. I was talking on a topic that obsesses evolutionists like David Barash. At what level does natural selection act? Is natural selection something that works always for and only for the individual – are we all ultimately nothing but selfish genes – or can it sometimes (often?) work for the benefit of the group, even the species? In other words, if one organism does something for another organism, does it always have to be enlightened self-interest, or can it be true, disinterested altruism? Giving and not counting the cost?

Most evolutionists think the former. They are not meanies – even with his obsession about female orgasms, I don’t think anyone would say that about David – but they worry about the problem of cheating. If I give to you but you don’t reciprocate, then I am losing resources and you are gaining them, and natural selection will favor you. In the long run, real altruism doesn’t stand a chance.

However there has always been a subgroup of evolutionists – the distinguished Harvard ant specialist and sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson is the latest representative – who think that selection can indeed favor the group. The benefits of hanging together rather than hanging separately, even if you yourself don’t gain, are so great that selection can promote genuine niceness. Needless to say, humankind is always a subtheme – not so “sub” actually – and a great attraction of “group selection” is that it seems to make for the possibility of genuine goodness evolving in humankind. We are not just out for Number One.

Our little workshop brought home to me how engrained this difference is in evolutionary thinking, dividing the two great discoverers of natural selection – Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin, a very rich man, was a beneficiary of the Industrial Revolution – his maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgwood, the founder of the pottery works – and the economic philosophy of Adam Smith was (to use a phrase) gospel. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” This is absolutely and totally Darwin’s take on natural selection.

Wallace by contrary was about as low and unsuccessful a member of the middle classes as it was possible to be – he remarked of his father that he achieved peace of mind by knowing that he could fall no further – and from his youth Wallace was an ardent socialist. As a young teenager, he had heard the socialist mill owner Robert Owen, and always through his very long life looked upon Owen as his greatest inspiration. For him, natural selection had to be at times a group phenomenon. Later he bound this all up with a belief in spiritualism, but the latter was an add-on to the more fundamental belief that selection can work for good and not just for self.

The division persists. Don’t take me as saying that the empirical evidence is irrelevant. It isn’t, and most evolutionists – and I am one – think the evidence points to selection for and only for the individual. But in respects, scientists are a bit like the religious. Once they have a bee in their bonnet, they can always find something to support their position. And if all else fails, there is always statistics. Universal flood, sacred golden plates, group selection, adaptive female orgasms – something can be found to support them. Nothing stops a believer on the roll. (Ha Ha! You knew I was going to say something before I finished to upset David Barash. In a way, it is a bit mean, like taking candy from a kiddie.)

Teasing apart, there is a serious point here. History counts, in science as elsewhere. And if for that reason and for no other, that is why I am profoundly grateful for the influence that Thomas Kuhn’s great The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has had on my life as a philosopher.

Priest Freddy started the interview off with the bold claim that he suspected President Obama might not be a true Pagan. “We Pagans are pretty darn good at sussing out whether people are true Pagans or not,” he told me, adding, “Mr. Obama has said he’s a Pagan, so I just have to assume that he is. All I know is, I’m a pretty good goat-entrails reader, and the gods have been darn clear in telling me that Mr. Obama’s faith is questionable. I can’t really tell if he’s one of us or not. I mean, you have to ask every person, and I’m just not willing to say for sure that President Obama is indeed of the Pagan faith.”

I wondered how in the world Priest Freddy could ever tell such a thing.  “Isn’t being a Pagan or not something only the gods know?” I asked him

“You’ve got us all wrong on that one,” Priest Freddy replied, leaning back in his chair as he sipped slowly from his cup of steaming hot goat blood. “That interior stuff? Having to know what people truly think inside? That’s monotheism. For us Pagans, figuring out if  someone’s a Pagan or not isn’t that hard.” He set his cup of blood in its saucer. “We figure it out by reading entrails.”

I was, to say the least, dumbfounded. Plus my own cup of goat blood that Priest Freddy had put in front of me at the start of the interview had already started to congeal, and I was feeling a little nauseous. I looked up at Priest Freddy and said, “OK, so we’re in the middle of a presidential election year in 21^st-century America, and you’re telling me you can tell whether President Obama is a true Pagan or not by reading goat entrails”

“Yup, that’s right. I’ve sacrificed a lot of goats over the course of my life, and I’m pretty much an expert at this. Fact is, I’ve offered three goats since the Republican presidential primary season got underway, and each time, the entrails fell in a way that strongly pointed to the President not being a true Pagan. Not much I can do about it. That’s the reading.” Priest Freddy smiled beatifically at me.

“How about Rick Santorum?” I asked. “Is he a true Pagan?”

Priest Freddy hesitated. “I think so,” he said. “His values are so clear on moral issues. No question about it… I think he’s a man of Paganism.”

“Newt Gingrich?” I asked. Priest Freddy’s eyes gleamed. “Now Newt, what with his three wives and whatnot, well, I think Newt is a Pagan. At least he told me he is. Plus the entrails fell his way.”

“Romney?” I asked.

“Well, look. We Pagans are a cheerful lot. We love the whole of life! We live without shame, and we love women.  Although we obviously accept as Pagans any Mormons who are polygamous, monogamous Mormons like Romney are another story. Most Pagans would not recognize Mormonism as part of the Pagan faith.”

“Back to President Obama,” I said. “I know you’ve suggested previously that the President was not born in the United States.” Priest Freddy made the sign of the Pagan, clearly indicating he didn’t want to discuss that topic during my interview with him. I decided to push him on another issue.

“In fact,” I said, “in an earlier interview you said that Mr. Obama’s actions and values didn’t match up with his identification as a Pagan, and that there’s a debate over what’s a Pagan, and that for you the definition of a Pagan is whether the person has given his life over to goat-entrails readings.” I paused before adding, “Anything more you want to add to that?”

“Well, yes. I cannot be sure that Mr. Obama is not a Muslim.” This seemed a pretty big worry, but it also seemed a bit far-fetched.  I mean, haven’t we all seen pictures of the President gobbling greasy burgers and hot dogs at a gazillion fast-food restaurants–especially in Washington? Don’t all those sacrificed cows and pigs (pigs no less!) indicate Mr. Obama is a true and devout Pagan?

Priest Freddy shook his head. “All I know is under Obama, President Obama, the Muslims of the world, he seems to be more concerned about them than the Pagans that are being murdered in the Muslim countries,” he said.

I stared at Priest Freddy, trying to think how to respond.

“One thing’s for certain,” he continued. “I’ve seen this show up in the goat-entrails readings. Islam sees him as a son of Islam… I can’t say categorically that [Obama is not Muslim] because Islam has gotten a free pass under Obama.”

I was ready to wrap up the interview, but I couldn’t resist one final question. “What about me?” I asked. “Do you have any take on me?”

Priest Freddy paused for a few moments before answering. I got the feeling he was sincerely worried about me. “Laurie,” he finally said, “I’m just not sure. My Pagan hunch is that you might not be one of us.” He looked at his watch. “Look, I’m in a bit of a rush now, but if you want, I’ll grab a goat from over in Brooklyn and we can do an entrails reading in front of your building later this afternoon. It’s a little bloody, but I always manage a clean kill. The two of us can mop up the mess on the sidewalk after I do your reading. Wanna do that?”

Afraid I might not get the results I wanted, I politely declined.

Yet the only thing they know about movie history is that The Lion King is really cool and that Pacino’s Scarface contains the line, “Say ‘hello’ to my little friend.”

And even the ones who are not currently writing screenplays consider themselves film buffs although–since “buff” is not a word a lot of them use except when discussing the male physique–they often just say, “I really, really like films. I know quite a bit about them, actually.”

What that means, as it turns out, is that they all saw Star Wars, The Little Mermaid, Babe, The Notebook, Titanic and Pretty Woman, but pretty much nothing before that.

But I’ve come to realize that I can no longer count on my students knowing anything about the following films (some great, some not, but all what I once considered common currency) that I had assumed they would have seen, or at least heard enough about in order to fake passing familiarity:

1. Casablanca
2. Citizen Kane
3. Gone With The Wind
4. Rebel Without a Cause
5. The Wild One
6. Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid
7. 400 Blows
8. All About Eve
9. Some Like It Hot
10. Psycho (the Tony Perkins one)
11. Do The Right Thing
12. Saturday Night Fever
13. Dracula
14. Frankenstein (not as in “Young” although that’s a great one, too)
15. My Fair Lady
16. Rosemary’s Baby
17. Birth of A Nation
18. The Seventh Seal
19. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
20. North By Northwest
21. It’s a Wonderful Life
22. Gaslight
23. Lolita (the one with Sue Lyon and James Mason)
24. Breakfast at Tiffany’s
25. Bringing Up Baby
26. Dr. Strangelove
27. Rashomon
28. It Happened One Night
29. His Girl Friday
30. To Kill A Mockingbird
31. Miracle on 34^th Street
32. Annie Hall
33. Harold and Maude
34. Animal House
35. The Deer Hunter
36. All the President’s Men
37. Amadeus
38. Thelma & Louise
39. Swept Away (not the Madonna version, the Wertmüller’s version)
40. Sunset Boulevard

What about your tribe? Are they more well-versed, or well-viewed? Are you sure?

We Love Pharma, courtesy of CDM Worldwide

The pharmaceutical industry gets a bad rap.  To listen to the critics you’d think pharmaceutical companies are in the same sleazy category as oil, finance and tobacco companies.  But pharmaceutical companies invent life-saving medications, not to mention countless other psychoactive products that many of us enjoy on a recreational basis.  Pharmaceutical companies get blamed for fraud, kickbacks, and research deaths, but they never get the credit for oxycontin.

That is why I was thrilled to see that GlaxoSmithKline is sponsoring the prize for the British Medical Journal‘s annual Research Paper of the Year. Sure, the pharma-bashers will whine like infants at the BMJ’s decision to brand a medical research prize with the name of multinational drug company, just as they’re whining about an American editor’s decision to re-locate a leading bioethics journal to the Texas headquarters of a stem cell tourism clinic. These people just don’t get it.  This is not about propaganda or corruption.  It is about developing innovative medications for diseases that we didn’t even know existed.

In that spirit, my nomination for the GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Research Paper of the Year goes to a ground-breaking article about GSK’s very own antidepressant, Paxil, which was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.  The title of the article is “Efficacy of Paroxetine in the Treatment of Adolescent Major Depression,” but seasoned pharma-watchers know it better as Study 329. The data behind Study 329 showed that Paxil didn’t actually work in adolescents – that, in fact, it was no better than a sugar pill. However, as any marketer understands, bad data cannot be allowed to interfere with a good paper.  By the time Study 329 appeared in print, GSK had used the magic of biostatistics to transform the raw data into a gleaming advertisement for Paxil.  As a result, when FDA eventually decided that Paxil had a few minor side-effects, such as suicide, Study 329 had already done its work: getting a GSK product into the hands of troubled teenagers.  And wait, here’s the beauty part: although the published version of Study 329 was “authored” by leading academic psychiatrists, it was actually written by a GSK ghostwriter.

Of course, the pharma-bashers have been complaining about Study 329 for years.  Some of them even want the journal to retract it.  The lead “author” who signed the paper, Martin Keller of Brown University, has been beaten up by the Senate Finance Committee, harassed by the New York attorney general, and vilified in the press, all because he put his name on a ghosted article and forgot to report half a million dollars in pharmaceutical income.  To which I say: stand strong, GSK.  Ignore the naysayers and the nitpickers.  It’s about time you gave these good people some public recognition.  Yes, it’s true that Study 329 is eleven years old, but you’re paying the BMJ over $47,000 to sponsor this prize. Surely they can bend the rules, just this once.

Above is an interview I conducted for the Faith Complex series with Mr. Chaim Levin. Entitled “Davven the Gay Away?” (A Jewish play on the phrase “pray the gay away” heard in some Christian circles) the episode calls attention to Mr. Levin’s struggles to maintain a gay and Orthodox Jewish identity.

He had chronicled the intense psychic duress this created for him in an It Gets Better Video for frum Jews. Subsequently, he was criticized in an Op-Ed piece in the Jewish Press by Elliot Resnick, a doctoral student at Yeshiva University.

Resnick, who was acquainted with Levin personally (though did not mention him by name in the original article), accused him of self-indulgence. Resnick wondered:

By and large, though, unmarried heterosexual Orthodox Jews suffer in solitude. But do those Jews complain? Do Catholic priests, the overwhelming majority of whom remain celibate their entire lives, complain? No. They wage their internal battles quietly, recognizing that not every topic need be discussed openly and not every feeling need be publicized and validated.. . . But many Orthodox homosexuals seem uninterested in attaining spiritual greatness or in struggling with their feelings like so many of their brethren. Instead, they declare that we must recognize them. We must acknowledge their desires. We must affirm their feelings.

As I read the article, Resnick was arguing that there was a place for gay people in Orthodoxy. That place, however, was to suffer in silence while contemplating their sinfulness. In so doing, Resnick argued, they would attain, a heightened state of holiness.

Levin for his part responded with his own piece own piece identifying himself as the anonymous subject of Resnick’s broadside. There he mentioned his experiences with “reparative therapy” in something called the JONAH program.

That’s the backdrop to the interview above. I asked Mr. Levin if he might not be more comfortable in those many non-Orthodox Jewish denominations which are welcoming and affirming of gay people. His response to this query is quite intriguing and, in my opinion, quite brave.

As I spoke to Mr. Levin he made one thing very clear to me: how important it was for him to go to college. A liberal-arts education, he pointed out, was a near impossibility for many members of his community most of whom lack the basic skills to pursue traditional college degrees.

A comment Santorum made this weekend has made the rounds, and if you are addicted to Sunday morning news shows or CNN you now know it by heart. In a discussion about Obama’s environmentalist policies, Santorum lamented: “It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.”

Santorum spent Sunday walking that one back, sort of. Yet as the Washington Post article mentioned above demonstrated, the former senator is not unacquainted with the dark arts of faith-based disparagement.

Anathematizing is how I refer to this type of negative religious campaigning, and I want to stress that no competent handler in a presidential election would let his/her candidate take this too far.

Wanna be Mondalized or McGovernized come Election Day? Then, by all means, start making pointed religious barbs left and right (but mostly Left) as you stampede for the moral high ground. Scowl. Scowl a lot. Throw your liberal co-religionists under the bus while you’re at it. Sin big, baby. You’re gonna lose 35 states anyway!

Why is that? There are a variety of reasons why Santorum ought to pivot away from his newfound role as Anathematizer-in-Chief:

Americans prefer “Civil Religion” or “Civic Republican*” models: These approaches stress the positive role that God and faith play in American public life. Persnickety secularists aside, most Americans have no difficulty with this. Of course, “God” here is a non-denominational God, almost Deistic in His unwillingness to sign on with any one faith tradition.

This God loves America and hates drawing religious distinctions among us. With the exception of atheists, few citizens find this rhetoric objectionable (though it would be nice if Americans tried to understand why atheists are troubled by this).

For proponents of this approach think Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan (mostly), Clinton, George W. Bush (for the most part) and Obama (for the most part).

Americans are rendered queasy by religious sectarianism in politics:  The opposite of the Civic Republican model is a kind of scowling Puritan-inflected worldview. The Debbie-Downer of church-state accommodations, this model decries a sinful America, whoremongeringly headed down the path to perdition. Unless, of course, proper prayerful steps are taken.

The Puritan-inflected approaches are saturated in the gloomiest strains of Calvinist theology and have little compunction about calling (all) other theologies “phony.” The default mode of this public theology is divisiveness. Think Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Pastors Parsley and Hagee (who nearly blew out John McCain’s Faith and Values operation in 2008), Robert Jeffress (who Mormon-baited in support of Rick Perry a few months back), and so many more.

How a Catholic such as Rick Santorum came to embrace the Puritan model (which is not, I would add, a big fan of Rome) is a peculiarity meriting much more detailed exposition.

The MSM hates this stuff: Watching CNN’s Soledad O’Brien  interrogate a Santorum spokesperson this morning about the “phony theology” comment was reminiscent of  Bob Schieffer’s incredulous prompt to Santorum: “So Senator, I’ve got to ask you–what in the world were you talking about, Sir?” Journalists get their own scowl on when it comes to this type of rhetoric: an Anathematizer runs against the media as well.

Americans are too religiously diverse for old-school anathematizing: Until a majority of Americans belong to one religious denomination, Anathematizing will always be a losing proposition. Recall the backlash that ensued when Jerry Falwell blamed 9/11 on the interventions of homosexuals and feminists. Or ponder how much damage control has to be performed with the Jewish community when a hint of anti-Semitism is detected in the oratory of a politician. Herman Cain’s (2011) and John McCain’s (2007) musings on Muslims kept them on the defensive for weeks. Simply put, there are so many different types of religious Americans that any effort to foist a particular theological perspective upon all of them is doomed to fail. If you’re going to talk about religion on the stump, you had better stay positive–and vague.

Remarkably, Santorum’s anathematizing appeals to a decent chunk of the GOP base. He is winning by getting to the right of Mitt Romney (who, incidentally, never anathematizes). If some in GOP circles are calling for a new candidate then chalk it up, in part, to the realization that Anathematizers like Santorum are unelectable.

***

* “Civic Republicanism,” among other categories, is discussed in John Witte Jr.’s “The Essential Rights and Liberties of Religion in the American Constitutional Experiment,” in Notre Dame Law Review 71 (1995-1996) pp. 371-446).

Bill Maher has on occasion made trenchant objections to orthodoxies of the moment, and last fall did herald the rightly-heralded Occupy movement, but a couple of weeks ago he let pure negativity get away with him. On February 4 he said this about Occupy Wall Street:

Similar to Afghanistan in a way, whenever you occupy something for too long, people do get pissed off. And as I watch them on the news now, I find myself almost agreeing with Newt Gingrich, like, ‘You know what?  Get a job.”

He broke up laughing and went on:

Only because, you know, the people who originally started, I think they went home, and now it’s just these anarchist stragglers. And this is the problem when your movement involves sleeping over in the park. You wind up attracting the people who were sleeping in the park anyway. [Heavy applause from the audience.] And I think it’s where we are with the Occupy movement. They did a great job bringing the issue of income inequality to the fore, but now it’s just a bunch of douchebags who think that throwing a chair through the Starbucks window is gonna bring on the revolution. [More applause.]

I suppose it’s the prerogative of comedians to get cheap laughs when they can’t rouse themselves to get the more expensive kind, but it’s a pity that Mr. Maher resorted to this concatenation of inaccurate, misleading, and nasty cliches. He didn’t do his homework.

First of all, he assumed that news images are whole truths. As he would recognize in other contexts, they’re not. When the Occupy encampments, most of them, were evicted, most of their automatic coverage vanished. The occupations had been “the story,” in media eyes, so “the story” had now vanished. This left the way open for the few people who felt like smashing windows to seize the spotlight by doing so. This is how people in an officially leaderless movement occupy the center of attention.

I don’t know if anyone actually threw a chair through a Starbucks window anywhere but if so that was an outlying incident. There certainly was a yahoo who burned an American flag in front of Oakland’s City Hall a few weeks back while a handful of others cheered them on (while one woman screamed “Stop!” and tried to smother the flames). In an earlier property-damage breakout in Oakland, on November 2, perhaps 100 masked window-smashers did break windows of one establishment or another—100 out of many thousands who demonstrated peacefully that day. But even as the movement frays over whether to keep to nonviolent discipline in the future, those who actually resort to property damage (as distinguished from those, badly mistaken in my view, who wish to honor those who choose to do so) remain a tiny minority.

Secondly, in a time of rampant unemployment, I can think of funnier things than telling people who don’t have jobs to get them.

Third, I can also think of funnier subjects than people who sleep in parks. Some of them are addicts, some are disturbed, and a lot of them lost their jobs and their homes and fell into downward spirals. Some are, as people used to say, down on their luck. That many millions of foreclosures have taken place in recent years, many of them predicated on fraudulent mortgages, is surely not irrelevant to the number of people who sleep in parks, or wish to.

As for “anarchist stragglers,” anarchists were certainly instrumental in launching Occupy. [Self-promotional note: my book, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street, will be published by HarperCollins on May 1. Lots of details therein.] More power to them. They ignited a long-overdue flame while a lot of more conventional people were busy grousing.  Some were in some sense “stragglers.” In any event, a lot of homeless people eventually did straggle into the occupied parks. They posed lots of problems for the encampments. Arguments raged about how to treat them and how to treat the way some of them treated others. Not believing in the legitimacy of police, much of the movement was unable to figure out how to police itself. That incapacity made for serious trouble. But none of this means that “now it’s just a bunch of douchebags.”

Much of Occupy is hibernating and planning. It’s dispersed. Most of its activities are not so photogenic, and the numbers are certainly much smaller since the fall came to an end and the mayors shut down the major encampments. But in recent weeks, there have been lots of demonstrations against predator banks.  (One of the more entertaining can be seen here.)  Just this month, Occupy activists in Detroit and Nashville saved homes from unjust foreclosures. There will be lots more actions of this sort in the coming months. There will also, mostly likely, be upsurges of self-regarding militancy on the part of some who think that a “general strike” can be created by people who don’t work at the establishments being struck.

There surely are people in the movement who harbor fantastical ideas about “bringing on the revolution” (though hardly by smashing windows with one implement or another), but there are many, many thousands of times more who are thoughtful, intelligent people striving to make this a more decent country by peaceably assembling and petitioning the authorities for the redress of grievances. Orthodox or heterodox, this is true. In a time clouded by easy dismissals, the true heterodoxy is to look beneath surfaces.

Stutterer

Trained never to forget the all
-importance of control, his face
remembers always to suppress
each unintended syllable

and can’t.  Hence the expressionless
expression he maintains, a dead
-pan scowl where umbrage shadows rage.
He hurts.  It is his privilege,

or was:  the ones who mocked or stared
grew into people of good will
who, patient, notice nothing as
the hard words flare and sting his eyes.

The Prayer Rope Knot

Each time the monk who learned this knot
had tied his own, a devil came
& loosened it.  Eventually
the monk, just as the devil hoped,
got pissed; he couldn’t pray at all.
That night his angel wakened him
& taught him how to interweave
double strands into a web
of 7 crosses.  Pulled tight,
they closed into this perfect knot
whereby the devil’s silently
upbraided, and the heart sings whole.

© by William Thompson.  Printed by permission of the author.

William Thompson teaches at Troy University, where he edits the Alabama Literary Review.

Lisa Russ Spaar notes:  A friend of mine, a writer who stammers in stressful situations, often begins a public reading from one of his books by singing, his clear, lusty baritone never failing to call to my mind Emily Dickinson’s note to her grieving Norcross cousins:  “Let Emily sing for you because she cannot pray.”  Surely singing, writing, and prayer all relate, in one way or another, to ways in which our tongues can slip up, betray us, become knotted—by fear, nerves, (dis)belief, psychic trauma, physical impediment, delight, or sheer astonishment.

These two poems by William Thompson concern themselves with fluency and its obstacles.  “Stutterer” makes powerful use of its established formal expectations and deployment of rhythmic and syntactic surprise to enact for and in the reader a palpable sense of the tremendous strain and control the stammerer must at all times sustain.  At key points, a deft enjambment revealing a hastily compounded word or the full stop of a mid-tetrameter line caesura imitates the blocks, prolongations, and other therapeutic ruses by which stutterers learn to mask if not master their unwanted repetition or curtailment of speech sounds:

Trained never to forget the all
-importance of control, his face
remembers always to suppress
each unintended syllable

and can’t.  Hence the expressionless
expression he maintains . . . .

For all its undeniable physicality, the poem is also deeply psychological, presciently suggesting a double betrayal, paradoxically wrought by public kindness.  As the stutterer outgrows his childhood of taunting and misunderstood otherness, he must, in adulthood, give up the compensating “privilege” of feeling righteously wronged as a consequence of his own increased “control”:

He hurts.  It is his privilege,

or was:  the ones who mocked or stared
grew into people of good will
who, patient, notice nothing as
the hard words flare and sting his eyes.

It is interesting to consider how many stammerers were or are also writers—Virgil, Aesop, Borges, Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, Lewis Carroll.  Clearly Thompson means for us not to forget what others might take for granted:  our human birthright of wielding language, and the great obstacles, often unseen and underappreciated, to articulation.  “Stutterer” reminds us, as well, to recognize the ways in which our most powerful utterances, especially in poetry, are haunted and even typified by disordered speech.

“The Prayer Rope Knot” recounts the story of St. Anthony the Great, the father of Eastern Orthodox monasticism, who, it is said, attempted to tie a simple knot into a leather rope every time he uttered a ritual prayer but was impeded in the process by the Devil, who invariably followed up behind him and undid his knots in order to sabotage his devotions.

Each time the monk who learned this knot
had tied his own, a devil came
& loosened it.  Eventually
the monk, just as the devil hoped,
got pissed; he couldn’t pray at all.

Inspired by a vision of the Mother of God, St. Anthony devises a way to tie the knots that confounds the Devil:

That night his angel wakened him
& taught him how to interweave
double strands into a web
of 7 crosses.  Pulled tight,
they closed into this perfect knot
whereby  the devil’s silently
upbraided, and the heart sings whole.

A genuine pleasure of this poem of forthright spiritual vexing and unalloyed joy is, again, Thompson’s intelligent and intuitive use of form.  The four-stress, predominantly iambic lines convey a sense of the shuttling of weaving and unweaving, of tying and untying.  Yet as the monk masters his divinely inspired complex knot, the sword of spirit by which he will defeat the Devil’s trickery, the line itself pauses and a spondee (“pulled tight”) assures us of the invincibility of this “perfect knot.”  The Devil is outwitted, his unbraiding is “upbraided,” and the monk’s restoration to prayer is emphasized by the clarion-call spondees that close the poem:  “the heart sings whole.”

In their exploration of the various and complicated, intricate ways in which acts of courage and receptivity can overcome hindrances of the voice and spirit, Thompson’s poems also reveal the eloquent power of silence.  When the “hard words flare and sting” within or the “heart sings whole,” the hush that surrounds these experiences is as articulate as anything that might be spoken aloud.  In The Roots of Christian Mysticism, Olivier Clement relates the story of the desert father Abba Agathon, who “carried pebbles in his mouth for three years, not to become an orator but to learn to keep silence.”  The impediments, the pebbles in the mouth, for Thompson’s stammerer and his monk, serve to open his subjects and his readers to a receptivity that has as much or more to do with fluid attentiveness as it does with speaking aloud.

(Image by Flickr/CC user Syntopia)

But “you’re on your own” isn’t necessarily a statement of cruelty.  Given a little background in American classics, we can open it to the opposite interpretation.  In this version, which comes out of classical liberalism (which is closer to today’s libertarian conservatism than to today’s liberalism), to be on your own is to be freed from social and biological ties of fate, as well as state restrictions.  It isn’t an abandonment of people, but rather an empowerment of them.  People are not forever defined by class or birth, and they don’t depend on the government for sustenance.  Other qualities count more: Protestant work ethic, entrepreneurship, delayed gratification, civic virtue, a spirit of competitiveness and fair play.

One finds these qualities imparted in many of the canonical works of American literature.

• Ben Franklin, Autobiography
• Hawthorne, Preface to The Scarlet Letter
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
• Henry David Thoreau, Walden
• Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery
• Willa Cather, O Pioneers

as well as in lesser expressions of rugged individualism and the self-made man (or woman), and in rags-to-riches biographies both real and fictional (Horatio Alger).  They have inspired generations and formed the moral grounds of U.S. citizenship.  To highlight “on your own” as a condition of deprivation is to expel a core element of our civic tradition.

There are two arguments against the self-made man story, one a hard academic one and the other a soft political one.  The first comes down to the point that the self-made man is, precisely, a myth.  Circumstance and social condition readily triumph over individual merit, the content of one’s character all too often eclipsed by skin color, gender, class origin, etc.  In this view, to hold up self-reliance as an effectual belief is to reinforce that basic mystification of classical liberalism, that is, the individual freed from group identity and historical setting.  In its bitter version, the argument casts the myth as a cynical rationale of the status quo, a case of certain individuals blessed with privileged identities and resources who justify their social and political status as an achievement based upon their own (spurious) moral standing.  Think of the comment about George W. Bush as a man who was born on third base but who believed he had hit a triple.

The soft political argument doesn’t renounce the self-made man myth so much as ignore it.  It emphasizes charity and compassion.  It has a target—rich people who don’t play fair and pay their fair share, who got where they are by exploiting the rest of us—but the moral basis lies in the ones laid off, foreclosed-upon, crushed by medical bills, and hit hard by the 2008 collapse of their retirement funds.  In this rhetoric, to highlight self-reliance is to ignore the debilitating effects of unemployment, the cost of an emergency-room visit, student loan debt, and housing prices.  It is either unfeeling or unrealistic to talk about individualism at such a time.

The counter-arguments against these positions vary as well.  Critics of the safety net claim that it produces a dependency mind-set, while self-reliance creates an “initiative” mind set (see the first and most recent books by Charles Murray).  Historians note that the American myth was, in fact, embraced by leaders of historically-disadvantaged groups (for instance, Frederick Douglass, the Bookerites, early Du Bois, Martin Luther King at times).

It is important to keep the self-reliant tradition alive, not in order to explode the social Darwinist variant of “you’re on your own,” but to maintain self-reliance as a factor of American character and real historical impact.  One might consider the emotional effect as well.  It is depressing to listen to President Obama’s speeches, or to Elizabeth Warren’s, or to commentators on Occupy Wall Street grievances.  It is uplifting to read Emerson’s provocations, to follow Franklin’s ascent, and Alexandra Bergson’s progress.  With the former stressing so much the helplessness of citizens, one begins to think it is not so much a historical description as an expression of ressentiment.  Voices of self-reliance are the antidote.  One can believe in self-reliance while also recognizing the plight of people without jobs, decent health care, good schools for their children, and climbing debt.