Prejudice and Ignorance

     I was reading the news in The Washington Post, recently and I came upon a news story about antisemitism.  In the first paragraph, the report cited an incident in which someone had graffitied the words, "Jews Not Welcome," over the entrance sign of the Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland.  I had recently seen stories reporting increasing antisemitism in the U.S. and was angered by what I read.  As I read down two paragraphs further, I encountered Rachel Barold, who is fourteen and a freshman at the high school.  While being interviewed, she told the reporter that she was not surprised by the graffiti.  She said, "We're ridiculed constantly," by other students who make fun of "a Jewish person's nose," or mention how "they are glad not to be Jewish."  

    Like Rachel, I wasn't surprised by the antisemitism graffitied on the high school sign; but I was by the naked bigotry her classmates cavalierly tossed in her face.  Bethesda is a very wealthy and well-educated community, and its schools are among the best in the state of Maryland.  In such a community, I would have thought the bigotry of her classmates would have been cloaked or more subtle than that.  After all, it's 2022, not the 1960s or 1970s.  Her experience made me think about where I grew up and the schools I attended.  

    When I was young, I lived in a middle-class neighborhood on Long Island, New York, and attended a local Catholic grammar school in the 1960s and early 1970s. My classmates were a mix of average Italian and Irish kids.  While there, we learned our lessons in grammar, spelling, reading and arithmetic.  We also learned that Protestants, though Christians, were "outside" the true religion, but even worse, that Jews had rejected the "true savior" of the world and consequently were damned to an eternity in hell.  For us, reviling Jews was a matter of religion, encouraged by eminent figures we aspired to emulate.

    After I finished Catholic grammar school, I had to attend the free public junior and senior schools, since my parents couldn't afford the tuition charged by the Catholic high schools.  While there, I encountered teachers who said that it was wrong to be prejudice against other races and religions; that we should not judge people by their appearance; that we should respect all people regardless of who they were or where they came from.  Their words and ideas were liberating and inspiring; they made me recognize and reject the bigotry that Catholic school had imparted.  Antisemitism became ugly and vile, an evil to be condemned without hesitation.  

    But not all teachers in that public school were beyond bigotry.  One fall afternoon, during high school football practice a teammate missed a tackle.  The boy happened to be Jewish, and the head coach thought it clever to motivate him to do better by yelling "K_____, what the hell is wrong with you!  Guns for the Arabs, damnit!"  Some of the players cringed at the racist rant of the coach; others laughed and joked about it afterwards.  It's interestingly to note, the coach's teaching responsibilities included 10th grade European history, which one would think included a unit and lessons on the Holocaust.  However, at that time, New York State social studies teachers weren't mandated to teach about the Holocaust.  That requirement finally did come into effect in 1994.   Even so, I suspect he wouldn't have been terribly effective in communicating the horrors of the Nazi's systematic attempt to exterminate all European Jews.   

    The antisemitism observable in the friends I had in high school fluctuated between blunt outbursts and whispered remarks.  Some friends openly expressed their antisemitism with racist slurs, while some tried to camouflage it by a warped attempt at logic.  The latter would say, "I'm not prejudice.  I just don't like anyone who is too Jewish."  (These individuals would apply the same characterization to African Americans who acted "too black.")  Forty years later, I wonder how some of them would react to what Rachel Barold has been experiencing.  I am confident that some would feel the same anger and disgust I feel.  But some might feel what they felt back then and find those feelings validated by influential individuals such as Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson and the like who condone antisemitism from platforms. 

    Clearly there was something wrong with the educational system when I was a student. Being formally taught about prejudice was rather hit or miss.  If we had a teacher who enabled us to get rid of our prejudices, we were lucky.  Today, educators should be above any prejudice and bigotry against Jews, black and brown people, Asian, or LGBTQ, since they are trained to prepare and teach lessons about prejudice.  As mentors and role models, these teachers should foster in students the decency and respect all human beings deserve regardless of who they are or where they come from.  

A Brief Christmas Thought

    Christmas is the season of getting and spending, of the hurly-burly of Black Friday and Cyber-Monday commercialism.  It can be the best of times and it can be the worst of times.  From Thanksgiving to the 24^th of December, the rounds of shopping roll on unabated.  Yet, beyond the all-consuming materialism, which magnifies the gap between the haves and the have-nots, there resides a certain something that matters as much as anything I can think of. 

    I don’t think it’s a belief in Jesus’ birth as a manifestation of God, which, anyway, continues its steady slide from religious belief into the realm of mythology, that offers us what really should matter most.  I do believe, however, some of his teachings are still essential currency for the season.  The idea of putting others, including strangers, first; of giving to the poor; of not envying the wealthy.  

    It's clear people give more generously to those who are poor at Christmas time than any other time of year.  It’s perhaps not so clear that our envy of the rich diminishes all that much during this season.  Yet, it seems true that we are genuinely motivated to focus on what matters most in this life, which is our affection, commitment and love for one another.

    As we move through the season, it would be apt to recall the words of Scrooge in Dickens' A Christmas Carol, after he has been chastened by the Ghosts of the past, the present, and the future: "I will honour Christmas in my heart and try to keep it alive all the year.  I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.  The spirits of all Three shall strive within me."

First Day Of December

    Tomorrow comes December first, and once again the lights of Christmas begin to decorate neighborhood homes.  Along the roads, the odd car carries atop its roof a Christmas tree.  Tonight, at Rockefeller Center the Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony will once again take place when someone flips a switch and electrifies 50,000  multicolored lights strung around an eighty-two foot tall Norway spruce. 

    Perhaps we're sentimental, but each year the lighting of the tree stirs in us a renewed belief that human beings can be kind, generous and peaceful.  But 4775 mile east of New York,  day and night Russian missiles pummel Ukraine, indiscriminately killing men, women and children.  Day and night Russian missiles blast the Ukrainian power grid.  Putin has an obvious objective: to terrorize and freeze the Ukrainians into submission and surrender.  

    While living under this barrage, the Ukrainians have fought bravely and in several instances have repelled the Russian invaders.  Their determination and courage and their fighting spirit radiates through the darkness spreading west from Moscow.  As we enjoy and celebrate this December, let's think of those inspiring Ukrainians and let's continue to pressure Washington to provide them with all they require to defeat the purely evil and rapacious villain who rules Russia.

This poem by Claude McKay expresses the Ukrainian resistance:

        If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

The Flaw of the Current English Major Today

    In his Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, (1998), Harold Bloom wrote "no other writer, before or since Shakespeare, has accomplished so well the virtual miracle of creating utterly different yet self-consistent voices for his more than one hundred characters and many hundreds of highly distinctive minor personages."  Ten years later (2008), Maggi Trapp expressed a similar observation: 

    "Shakespeare’s plays and poems still matter to us because his plots still resonate, his characters still leave their mark, his language still moves and startles,” says Trapp. "His characters are ones we identify with. We understand Hamlet’s despondency; we recognize Othello’s envy; we feel Lear’s decline. These characters are, at once, types and revelations. Shakespeare’s characters are familiar, and at the same time they surprise us out of our complacency—and in this way they are endlessly fascinating."

    

    Yet Shakespeare, the "quintessence" of English literature, isn't required for English majors at most colleges and universities.  According to one statistic, only 8% of the country's top universities require their English majors to enroll in a Shakespeare class.

    Over the past thirty years, those who have worked to eliminate the traditional Shakespeare requirement have offered consistent reasons for dropping him:

• the plays of literature are antiquated and politically irrelevant;
• the plays of literature are racist and misogynistic;
• the plays privilege the hierarchal white/male power structure.

    The first reason is obviously the most absurd.  Everything from the past is old, but not automatically "antiquated."  If that were the case, then reading history, watching old films, listening to classical music, and visiting museums to see Old Masters or Impressionists paintings would be a waste of time.  

    Arguing that Shakespeare's plays are racist and misogynistic condemns those works for accurately depicting the world as Shakespeare knew it: a world that had not yet evolved to recognize the equality of all human beings (and frankly, something we still are struggling to achieve.).  

    Shakespeare's plays do not in fact perpetuate sexist or racist ideas.  They neither affirm nor deny any beliefs, doctrines, or attitudes.  To take offense at his depiction of  women, or other minority groups, is to narrowly read his works through an anachronistic lens.  What they do is explore and reveal as wide a variety of human nature as possible in the most verbally expansive language poets and authors of English have ever produced.  That variety, for example, does include characters who are racist, misogynistic, and malevolent; but also characters who are compassionate, loving, loyal, benevolent, heroic, tragic, and profound.  

    All English majors should read at least the five great tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar.  To not read these plays is to deprive oneself of experiencing characters whose linguistic and psychological depth and range exceed anyone we will encounter in this life.  For example, read what Hamlet has to say about life:

   

    "There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

(This quotation needs no explanation.)

    "What a piece of work is a man!  How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable!  in action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!  And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" Hamlet

(How modern this speech is.  How often have we felt the grandeur of our species, only to have the actions of others erode our belief in the good of humanity.)

Or Macbeth, who after his crime, suffers the effects of a guilty conscience on sleep:

"Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more!/Macbeth does murder sleep," the innocent sleep,/Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,"

Or the villain Iago, on Jealousy as he manipulates Othello:

"Beware, my lord, of jealousy;? It is the green-eye'd monster which doth mock/The meat it feeds on,"

Or King Lear on the consequences of foolish actions and the ravages of age:

"I am a very foolish fond old man,/Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less,/And, to deal plainly,/I fear I am not in my perfect mind."

And of course, there is Julius Caesar.  The political lessons from the play resonate even today.  Like Trump, Caesar wished to be a dictator and loved to be flattered: 

"But when I tell him he hates flatterers,/He says he does, being then most flattered." 

    There is no denying that Shakespeare will continue to occupy the center of western culture.  Disagreeable as that may be to those who want to "decolonize" what is taught in colleges and K-12 schools, there is no escaping the fact that, as Majorie Garber noted, "Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare."  

    Those who eagerly dismiss Shakespeare's plays as irrelevant often failed to see the influence his works continue to have on our everyday thoughts and speech:

"A wild goose chase." Romeo and Juliet

"For goodness sake." Henry VIII

"One fell swoop." Macbeth

"Mums the word." Henry VI, part 2

"Knock knock! Who's there?" Macbeth 

"It's Greek to me." Julius Caesar

"Break the ice." Taming of the Shrew

"Such stuff as dreams are made of." The Tempest

"I will wear my heart upon my sleeve." Othello

"Truth will out." The Merchant of Venice

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in it." Hamlet

"Full circle" King Lear

"Neither rhyme nor reason." The Comedy of Errors

"Not slept one wink." Cymbeline

    It is perhaps ironic that these expressions, and many of the words Shakespeare himself coined, still flow naturally through our daily language (even the language of those who would eliminate him from secondary schools and colleges).  Reading his plays are considerably more difficult than reading the contemporary works that students find "more relevant,"  but with a moderate amount of mental exertion students will acquire a substantially richer command of English and a deeper intimacy with the complexities of the human mind.  

    Of course, English majors should go on taking classes in contemporary, and multicultural literature as they pursue their degrees.  If they do attend a college that does not require a Shakespeare course, then they should exercise intellectual independence, ignore those who anachronistically apply contemporary standards to pre-contemporary works of art, and take at least a course on his major tragedies.  They will never regret reading his plays and they won't say someday in the future that "the fault, dear [students] lies not within  the stars, but within ourselves" that we have missed what is most extraordinary and essential in all of literature.   

There's Got To Be A Morning After; and There Was.

    On election day, visions of a Republican "red wave" sweeping through Congress depressed me.  Like many, I believed that a Republican landslide would augur an inevitable return of Trump to the White House in 2024.  My mood might be best expressed by this Robert Frost poem:

                            Once By The Pacific

                    The shattered water made a misty din.

                    Great waves looked over others coming in,

                    And thought of doing something to the shore

                    That the water water never did to land before.

                    The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,

                    Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.

                    You could not tell, and yet it looked as if 

                    The shore was lucky in being baked by cliff,

                    The cliff in being backed by continent;

                    It looked as if an night of dark intent

                    Was coming, and not only a night, an age.

                    Someone had better be prepared  for rage.

                    There would be more than ocean-water broken

                    Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.

   

The next morning I woke to surprising news.  The red wave turned out to be a ripple.  Best of all, many of Trump supported lying election deniers lost their races.  Perhaps lying isn't the best way to attract voters after all.  That's not a lesson Trump will ever learn.  When asked if he is responsible for the election results, Trump said he deserved credit if his supported candidates won, but not blame if they lost.  As for Mehmet Oz's defeat, he simply blamed his wife.

Eve of Mid-term Elections

     It's the eve of the mid-term election and I sit here believing the democrats are going to lose both house of congress.  Such a prospect ordinarily wouldn't bother me too much as I know from experience that the cycle of elections swaps out parties quite consistently.  But this election seems to forebode real troubles ahead.  Among the Republicans seeking office are loyal Trumpists who stoutly defend his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him.  If elected, these men and women could undermine the integrity of the 2024 presidential election by refusing to certify the electoral vote count scheduled for November 5, 2025.  As Bill Maher and others have repeated, whether Trump wins or loses the 2024 presidential election, he will not concede and he will most certainly call on those election deniers he helped elect to reject electors from battleground states he needs to claim victory.  Who can say what will follow when/if the "nays" cascade through the halls of congress?  

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    In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

"On entering the House of Representatives of Washington one is struck by the vulgar demeanor of that great assembly.  The eye frequently does not discover a man of celebrity with it walls.  Its members are almost all obscure individuals  whose names present no associations to the mind: they mostly village lawyers, men in trade, or even persons belonging to the lower classes of society.  In a country in which education is very general, it is said that the representatives of the people do not always know how to write correctly."  

How prescient Tocqueville was when one thinks of Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert.  His view of the Senate was considerably more flattering:

"Scarcely an individual is to be perceived in it who does not recall the idea of an active and illustrious career: the Senate is composed of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose language would at all times do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debated of Europe."

No doubt Tocqueville exaggerated  the qualities of the Senate.  What would he have thought of Senator Preston Brooks beating Senator Charles Sumner with his cane?  While the current Senate races have remained peaceful, though hardly polite, the assaults perpetrated against the English Language by Hershel Walker seem hardly less violent than his collisions with those NFL linebackers.  Like Tom Buchanan, Walker reached "an acute limited excellence" no where except on the football field.  It would be best for the country if he rested on those accomplishments