Being Strong of Body Brave and Noble…And SUPER Complicated: Bouchard and Chivalry and Incorrect History

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"Strange women lying in ponds", Academic Book, Book Review, Chivalry, Constance Brittain Bouchard, Dennis was right, Education, Feudalism, France, history, Knights, Knights in culture, Literature, Medieval Europe, Medieval France, Middle Ages, Military history, Strong of Body, Strong of Body Brave and Noble: Chivalry and Society in Medieval France, The Sword in the Stone

Perception is a tricky damn thing, and can lead you to ignore obvious facts. 

For example it is a plain fact that Assassin’s Creed Unity was just unwarranted garbage, whereas Assassin’s Creed Revelations was arguably one of the finest ends of any trilogy I’ve ever read, watched or played.  Ezio Auditore da Firenze is without doubt one of the most interesting and complex characters I’ve ever encountered in the wide varieties of media I consume and yet, for some reason, Assassin’s Creed Revelations is consistently ignored or else disparaged.  This makes no sense to me since Revelations contains Suleiman the Magnificent, fights with actual janissaries, and the Hagia Sophia, and Unity literally, didn’t, work.  In the latter game’s defense, it did at least throw in an interesting segment where you played during the final dissolution of the Templar order of knights, but one gold flake on a mountain of turds does not a masterpiece make.

This is my perception, not simply because it’s an opinion I’ve formulated after directly playing this games and forming an opinion about them, but also because I’ve encountered other people who share this opinion and that collected sentiment builds towards larger understanding of the video-game series overall. 

And I recognize that none of this really seems to have much relevance to Constance Brittain Bouchard’s academic book Strong of Body, Brave, and Noble: chivalry & Society in Medieval France, but come on dear reader did you really expect me not to take a pot-shot at Assassin’s Creed Unity?  I mean, Ubisoft was just asking for it.  Moving on.

Hopping back into appreciating history, or, far more accurately, continuing my love of history just with more passion, direction, and book purchases, has been delightful and eye-opening at the same time.  While my passion is more geared towards Ancient Greece, I’ve been reading more and more materials about Medieval Europe.  This is largely because I’m auditing a graduate level history course at my alma mater, and, since starting it, my perceptions of the Medieval Period in Europe have undergone a pronounced transformation.  Bouchard’s book is partially responsible.

Strong of Body Brave and Noble is a book that, while it is most definitely academic, is still pretty accessible to the common reader, or at least a semi-informed reader who has an interest in the period.  Though before I say anything else it is important to recognize that Bouchard’s book is not so much a history of Medieval France, but rather a history of the history of Medieval France.  I know that sounds odd, but stay with me.  Bouchard’s book is about understand the conversations and pedagogy which has defined the history of the Medieval period, specifically France, and in the first pages of her introduction she lays out a pretty clear thesis:

In this study of the nobility in high Medieval France I hope to tie together many of these recent findings (including some of my own work) and to provide an introduction to medieval nobility and chivalry in a form accessible both to scholars and to students of medieval history and literature.  (x).

And she continues on the next page saying:

Because this book is meant to be an introduction, I have for the most part done no more than suggest the complex historiographical debates that swirl around many of the topics I am addressing.  I have made no attempt to be exhaustive in citing extensive scholarly literature.  (xi).

I recognize this quote doesn’t seem to have a lot of dynamism to it, but it’s important moving forward for my reader to understand exactly what Bouchard is trying to accomplish.   When talking about this book recently in class many complained that Bouchard frequently didn’t dig into much of the actual detail of the Medieval structures of society as much as they would have liked.  Another student, and myself if I can have a moment of heroism, did our best to argue that that really wasn’t a weakness at all.  Bouchard said in her introduction that she wasn’t trying do anything like that, and that instead she wanted to discuss the development of the nobility in France, while focusing on the larger conversation itself.

Throughout her book Bouchard touches upon aspects of Medieval society while trying to create an introduction to the period and addressing persistent problems in language.  Perhaps the best example of this is the problem of the word “feudalism.”

Bouchard notes the issue at the beginning of chapter two when she says:

Recently a great deal of scholarly effort has gone into disproving certain very persistent myths about medieval social structures, which continue to appear everywhere from high school textbooks to Time magazine to scholarly monographs by those whose own areas of specialization is not medieval social history.  It seems wise, in view of this persistence, to begin by saying what medieval society was not.  Most important, it was not neatly divided into “three orders,” however appealing it may be to visualize a society made up of praying churchmen, fighting warriors, and working workers.  (28).

This argument is further clarified a few pages over when she notes:

The word “feudalism” might at first glance appear valid, inasmuch as it comes from a genuine medieval Latin word, feud.  A feud, usually translated as “fief,” was a piece of property which one aristocrat, called the vassal, held for his lifetime from another, his lord, in return for his loyal support.  Fiefs were given, in return for fidelity, not for a monetary rent, and fief holding involved only the aristocracy, not the great mass of society.  (35)

And, look, I know it’s probably derailing the conversation by doing this, but immediately upon finishing this quote I feel compelled to provide a link to this video which perfectly seems to manifest and deconstruct the perception of feudalism in Medieval society:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng

While the matter of divine providence and strange women lying in ponds is a matter for another essay, Bouchard’s previous quote is important because it’s most likely the perception that many casual readers have experienced.  Part of the annoying realities of grade school education, and sometimes even college educations lets be real, is that too often educators have to follow what has come before rather than what is constantly being discussed and debated.  Teachers have hard jobs, especially in the United States where they’re labeled as “losers and whiners” rather than the people who are shaping the minds of the next generation, and rather than provide them with the money and training they need to do their jobs, teachers often have to acquire a general knowledge and hop into the profession before they time out for getting a good pension.

This is just my way of saying one of the problems of the real history of Medieval Europe is that too often teachers provide their students with a psuedo-pseudo-history that has been repeated over and over despite the steadily growing libraries of scholars and historians who have come to the realization that feudalism, as a concept, is rather misguided and largely incorrect.

Bouchard points this out when she notes:

But over the last three centuries the word has been loaded with a multitude of other meanings.  Scholars and the popular press alike have used the term in so many different ways—many of them mutually exclusive and even contradictory—that it is often impossible to carry out a productive discussion about the various institutions that might be described as “feudalism.”  Everyone who uses the term seems to have his or her own definition.  (35).

Bouchard then later says plainly that most Medieval European scholars have largely abandoned the term when writing about the period.  And at this point Bouchard more or less blew my mind.

I noted to my reader in a previous essay about The Knight in History by Frances Gies, that growing up one of my favorite films was The Sword in the Stone.  Whether it was Merlin defeated Mad Madam Mim by turning into a germ, Archimedes saving Wart from a giant gar in the moat, or Arthur being chased by the obviously horny red-headed squirrel the film was simply magical but it was the knights that made me fall in love wit the film.  The Sword in the Stone established the foundation for a love of the Medieval period and so I began to ingest books and media which reinforced that opinion, but, with the exception of Gies’s book, I didn’t read into the actual history of the period and in fact I only took one college level course over it.

I didn’t challenge my knowledge or what I thought I knew about Medieval Europe.  Instead I let myself grow comfortable into the cartoon image because that was far more fun.

There’s a great deal more in Bouchard’s book that’s worth exploring as her primary focus is the misconceptions of the Medieval period and the aristocracy.  Her arguments explore the misconceptions of Feudalism, the development of Chivalry and the troublesome nature of that word as well, the role and function of Knights in Medieval society, Noble families, and finally the function and role of the church.  Each of these points are written about effectively and by the end I head learned more about the period, but I wanted to focus on the trouble of Feudalism largely because it’s in this chapter and section that Bouchard feels the most passionate.

In fact to be honest by the end of the book I feel that she had lost a certain energy.  It’s not that the final chapters aren’t good, anything but.  It’s just that she is clearly far more invested in these early chapters where she’s clearing up the misconceptions of Medieval Europe, so it seemed best to focus my attention there.  The development of a class of nobility was a developing system, and by focusing on the trappings of the Medieval period which have become cultural icons and cartoons rather than realistic structures, the real story of the Medieval period has largely been lost beneath the colorful heralds and glittery armor-clad knights in courtly love dramas.

Bouchard notes this herself when she elaborates a point made about the institution of chivalry:

An understanding of twelfth-century Chivalry is made substantially simpler when one realizes that there was no single standard (or “code”) which people of the time always meant then they referred to chivalrous (or courteous) behavior, and that modern scholars need not, therefore, seek a comprehensive definition.  For a long time scholars assumed that in the twelfth century—if not indeed in the eleventh—there was a unitary knightly class, composed both of the descendants of the serving knights of the year 1000 and of the descendants of the great nobles who had ruled western Europe for centuries, and that they shared a single code of conduct called chivalry.  As the concept of a unitary knightly class has been rejected, however, so has the need to discover some monolithic ideal with clear rules that all knights and nobles followed.  (104).

Before I can continue my contester interrupts.  Well so what?  We talked about this already: there’s a lot of bullshit about the Medieval Period in Europe and a lot of people don’t know what actually happened during the period.  But who cares?  I go years without ever even thinking about the Medieval period in Europe, so what relevance is a book like Strong of Body Brave and Noble have for me?

The plainest answer is very likely none at all.  If the reader does not give any shits about the Medieval Period in Europe then this book is almost definitely not going to interest them in any way whatsoever.  That’s just honesty. 

But even if the reader gives zero shits, they should at least consider the idea behind this book, and the implications it has for education and educators.  While digging into the development of a Noble class of people’s in France during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Bouchard is able to address the issue that often narratives about a time period take hold in people’s mind and remain there despite the evidence to the contrary. 

Human beings, as I’ve noted over and over again in these essays, are ego-driven creatures who like narratives.  That’s largely because narratives are easy to digest and use to assume meaning.  The narratives of the American Civil War as a states rights rather than slavery issue is an easy narrative to digest because it assumes less responsibility.  The narrative that the founding fathers of the United States believed in Freedom for all is an easy narrative to digest because recognizing that several of them were unapologetic slave-holders makes things complicated.  The story that Columbus “discovered” the American continents is an easy narrative because trying to explain that Vikings and “North-men” had discovered the continents 500 years earlier, and that even Africans and Chinese sailors were said to have discovered the regions even before that, is far more complicated and doesn’t rhyme with “ocean-blue.”  These are some of the more potent examples that are used in historical discussions, and there are plenty more I could supply but each reader probably has their own narratives that they can imagine or remember that lends weight to the issue.

The collapse of the Roman Empire and the development of new bodies of government and societal structures are complicated and nuanced narratives, and the fact of the matter is most people simply don’t have time, or else they do not perceive that they have the time.  And so pretty stories about knights and princesses and chivalry and feudalism provide people and educators a quick easy story to peddle to children while they’re trying to instill basic civic virtues and real-world knowledge.  The disservice is not simply to the history but also to the larger structure of education.

Easy narratives are easy to tell and digest.  Bouchard’s book is relevant then because it offers the chance to show the reader that the details are far more nuanced, and therefore more interesting to learn about.  History, as a discourse, works when people are willing and able to use the facts and records to challenge established ideas and write new stories that are far more accurate to the reader.

Knights of the eleventh-century may not always have been “Chivalrous” men clad in armor, composed entirely of virtue, but many of them were probably at least good men trying to find their way in this new world and order.  It’s far more complicated story, but one that’s definitely worth telling nonetheless.

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from Strong of Body Brave & Noble: Chivalry & Society in Medieval France were quoted from the paperback Cornell University Press edition.

 

 

**Writer’s Quote**

In case the reader is interested I’ve provided below a few links related to Bouchard and her work.  The first is a pdf of her professional CV, followed by links to her books.  I would have provided a few reviews of the book itself, however as this book is an academic work most reviews available are going to be found behind paywalls in databases I don’t have access to.  At some point I intend to write an essay and do a podcast about my personal opinion about this.  The short version is that while I understand that academic periodicals do cost a great amount to operate and publish, these paywalls do a disservice to humanity at large because there are a great number of people who are interested in reading the arguments of scholars and academics to deepen their understanding of certain issues, or else because they’re independent researchers who want, and need to know what the current research about their topics are.  The struggle is real people.

Nevertheless, hope you enjoy:

https://www.uakron.edu/dotAsset/2178927

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140102182140&fa=author&person_id=1319

 

***Writer’s Note***

The above photograph doesn’t really have anything to do with Bouchard’s book, or Chivalry, or Medieval Europe.  But when I typed the word “knight” into my media library there were several photos of Kiera Knightly and I thought to myself: “Sure, why not?”  SO please enjoy this lovely image of a lovely and talented actress who I think is awesome.

 

 

****Writer’s Note****

I actually review this book on my podcast “Jammer Talks About” which can be found on Soundcloud.  You can go to the “Jammer Podcasts” page at the top of the screen, or follow the link below to listen in:

Lay Lady Lady, Lay Across this Big Brass Bed…and “Cause” the “Fall” of Rome: Cleopatra, Stacey Schiff, and the Dangers of Literate Women

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"potent female sexuality", Ancient Egypt, biography, Birdbox is about Birds in Boxes...I'm sure it is, Cicero, Cleopatra, Cleopatra VII, Cleopatra's sexuality, Cleopatra: A Life, Dio, Educated Women, Education, Egypt, Female Sexuality, Feminism, Greek, Historical Discourse, history, Julius Caesar, Library of Alexandria, Mark Antony, Octavian Caesar, Pharaoh, Plutarch, Ptolemy, Second Triumvirate, Sexual identity, Sexual politics, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, Stacey Schiff, Women in History

She was conspicuously absent which is especially insulting when you consider I had the time and space to find worksheets and National Geographic articles about Ahmenhotep and his weird Sun cult.  I mean I respect Sun worshippers more than any of the established religions in this world, but even I have to admit that Ahmenhotep was a weird dude, and kinda of a prick when you consider the fact he just threw out gods like Thoth, Bast, Isis, Set, and Ptah in favor of this weird sun-disc with hands.  Ptah was a god of craftsmen and a cool dude who always brought over beer and Doritos whenever we played Smash Bros at Chuck’s place. 

You don’t just throw that dude out with the broken toaster.  You ass.

As I’ve started digging back into history and ingesting as many history-centered YouTube channels I can get my hands on, I’ve been spending more and more time reading actual history.  This has translated into the start of something that I hope becomes an eventual podcast or YouTube channel, but for the time being I’m just enjoying reading actual history and learning more and more about people and events that I thought I had a clear conception about.  This development actually makes a fair amount of sense to my friends and family given the fact that I’ve always appreciated history as a discourse, an institution, a practice, and as a means of nerding-the-fuck-out.  The most obvious example of this of course was the “Egypt-Folder.”

Sometime during sixth-grade ancient Egypt entered my life and totally consumed me.  I think it had a lot to do with the release of a PC game entitled Pharaoh.  It was an isometric city-building game that, as opposed to Sim-City or ROME, was actually quite enjoyable to play.  Whether it was building hunting lodges, chickpea farms, potter studios, or setting up bazaars in just the right place so as not to reduce adjacent property values, I spent hours just building cities in ancient Egypt trying to appease the gods.  In hindsight the game probably wasn’t that great, but I will defend the time I spent on it because it lead me to books and materials about Ancient Egypt.  It didn’t matter what it was actually about, as long as it had something to do with the myths, culture, history, or art of ancient Egypt I wanted it.  So much so that I eventually collected all the worksheets, magazine articles, and occasional sticker-books about the subject I could find and access into a blue three-ring binder that I carried everywhere.

This is all just a way of saying that ancient Egypt was my jam. 

Yet despite my devotion to Egyptian history, Cleopatra remained conspicuously absent.  I don’t have an explanation for this really, the woman just never had much appeal to me for some reason.  And what I did learn from teachers and writers was not particularly flattering either.  Cleopatra was, according to most history I was taught, a slut who brought about the end of the Roman republic and the downfall of men like Mark Antony and Julius Caesar.  Rather than an interesting character, Cleopatra was more of an idea or force who was largely responsible for the end of Egypt as an autonomous country.  And, I suspect, this was the perception many readers were also raised on should they have received any education about ancient Egypt.

Fortunately my aforementioned obsession with Overly Sarcastic Productions changed all of this as Blue made an entire video about Cleopatra which lead to me Stacey Schiff’s biography Cleopatra: A Life.

Cleopatra is a monumental effort and not simply because Schiff places herself between men such as Plutarch, Dio, Livy, and Octavian Caesar.  Schiff’s biography is more than just an effort to clear the charges against Cleopatra of being a seducer and destroyer of “great men,” rather it’s an effort to point out to her reader of the bias of the men who’ve written Cleopatra VII’s history.  Bias is something that is inescapable, and any reader of history has to recognize the fact that the person writing it will always be plagued by some personal, political, and philosophical bias.  Looking then at Cleopatra, Schiff is attempting to demonstrate the fact that the only records that come to us about the life of Cleopatra VII were all written by men, and Roman men at that, and Roman men who had something to gain by portraying her as a seducer and harlot.  The implications for her ability as a ruler were then entirely forgotten, and her capacity as an intellectual are also completely lost to the reader because who cares about her abilities in language, diplomacy, poetry, and philosophy when it’s far more important to know which roman general was banging her on a regular basis?

I’m sorry, do I sound salty?  Because that’s what this book does, it makes you salty, which is not a bad thing.

Schiff addresses the issue with our sources for Cleopatra in the first chapter of her book, aptly titled “That Egyptian Woman”:

History is written not only by posterity, but for posterity as well.  Our most comprehensive sources never met Cleopatra.  Plutarch was born seventy-six years after she died. […]. Appian wrote at a remove of more than a century; Dio of well over two.  Cleopatra’s story differs from most women’s stories in that the men who shaped it—for their own reasons—enlarged rather than erased her role.  Her relationship with Mark Antony was the longest of her life, but her relationship with his rival, Augustus, was the most enduring.  He would defeat Antony and Cleopatra.  To Rome, to enhance the glory, he delivered up the tabloid version of an Egyptian queen, insatiable, treacherous, bloodthirsty, power-crazed.  He magnified Cleopatra to hyperbolic proportions so as to do the same with his victory—and so as to smuggle his real enemy, his former brother-in-law, out of the picture.  The end result is a nineteenth-century British life of Napoleon or a twentieth century history of America, were it to have been written by Chairman Mao.  (6)

Schiff then provides a beautiful summation of our current historical knowledge on the next page:

Affairs of the state have fallen away, leaving us with affairs of the heart.  A commanding woman versed in politics, diplomacy, and governance; fluent in nine languages, silver-tongued and charismatic, Cleopatra nonetheless seems the joint creations of Roman propagandists and Hollywood directors.  She is left to put a vintage label on something we have always known existed: potent female sexuality.  (7).

The topic of “potent female sexuality” is its own essay, though I note with great shame that it’s something I should have already dedicated a seven-part essay series to at this point.  I do have a reputation to maintain after all.  But after reading this quote I hope my reader has the same reaction that I did, which was a combination of shock, intrigue, and then outright anger.  Cleopatra VII is a woman who has had her story written solely by men who had something to gain by discrediting her, and while I don’t want to suggest the woman was the working definition of virtue, it does speak a greater trend in human history where a woman’s sexuality is often used against her to write someone else’s story.

Perhaps the finest example of this was Octavian Caesar, the adopted-adopted-nephew of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra’s first famous lover.  Octavian quickly established himself as the leader of the Republic following Julius’s assassination by members of the Roman senate, and in no short time he established, along with Mark Antony, the Second Triumvirate which sought to hunt down and destroy the assassin’s of his uncle.  This was all partly for show, and Octavian’s wiles in establishing powers will be the stuff of later essays and podcasts (I hope), but for the time being Octavian is important because no figure appears in such contrast to Cleopatra in Schiff’s wonderful biography than Octavian.  Throughout his efforts to acquire power Cleopatra was a constant source of useful distraction largely because of her sheer personality and reputation in the minds of the roman political establishment as well as the common people.  It was not enough that Cleopatra was a woman, nor was she just an Eastern woman, she was a woman that posed a real philosophical threat to Rome.

Schiff elaborates:

Octavian seems to have been the one who decided that Cleopatra plotted to make Rome a province of Egypt, an idea very unlikely to have crossed her quick mind.  He had on his side the familiar type, the scheming, spendthrift wife, for whom no diamond is large enough, no house spacious enough.  As Eutropius put it centuries later, Antony began a war at the urging of the queen of Egypt, who “longed with womanly desire to reign in the city as well.”  Already it was acknowledged “that the greatest wars have taken place on account of women.”  Whole families had been ruined on their account.  And already—the fault as ever of the sultry, sinuous, overtly subversive East—Egyptian women had caused their share of trouble.  They were snowed with insatiable ardor and phenomenal sexual energy,  One husband was not enough for them.  They attracted and ruined men.  Octavian only corralled the evidence.  (257).

Cleopatra appears often in Schiff’s biography from an increasingly Western and Roman perspective and this at times made the book somewhat frustrating.  As I noted before, Schiff is trying to show her reader how our perspective of Cleopatra VII was largely created by Romans and therefore it’s going to be incredibly biased.  It just became frustrating as a reader that so much time was spent with aforementioned romans.  Whether it was passage after passage of Julius Caesar’s ambitions, Mark Antony’s attempted and failed military conquests in the East, or Octavian’s endless schemings and manipulations, a fair amount of the biography is actually about the men who determined Cleopatra’s future. 

Now this could be, in and of itself, a revealing method.  Since our knowledge of Cleopatra VII largely comes from Roman voices, focusing on these roman men as a way of revealing Cleopatra does work.  Julius Caesar appears to the reader less a brilliant military master as a sort of bumbling and often simply lucky man who was saved thanks to the graces of an intelligent and politically savvy Cleopatra.  Mark Antony is revealed, less a military genius, as a sort of bumbling baboon who managed to acquire a significant position because of Cleopatra’s personal political gains as well as her fortune.  And as for Octavian he appears less a grand and epic leader of the roman populace, as a scheming jerk who only attained the power he did because he had the benefit of a perfect scapegoat in the form of a well establish foreign monarch.  These three men were all intertwined with Cleopatra VII, and it’s because of her associations and connections to them that we begin to observe, not a crafty seducer of “great men,” but in fact a great woman brought down by three selfish and ambitious clowns.

I think it’s safe to say that Schiff is trying to show that Cleopatra VII shines for the woman she actually was when you take a step back and really observe the true character and achievements of these men when set in contrast to Cleopatra herself.

And Schiff’s book is not simply an endless encomium and defense, she does perform a great amount of actual historical analysis revealing Cleopatra VII as not just the arm candy of great men, but as an effective ruler.  In one such passage she notes Cleopatra’s approach to the economics of her country:

In economic affairs she took a determined hand, immediately devaluing the currency by a third.  She issued no new gold coins and debased the silver, as her father had done shortly before his death.  For the most part hers was a bronze age.  She instituted large-scale production in that metal, which had been halted for some time.  And she ushered in a great innovation: Cleopatra introduced coins of different denominations to Egypt.  For the first time the markings determined the value of a coin.  Regardless of its weight, it was to be accepted at face value, a great profit to her.  (103).

Creating a central standardized currency created a dramatic upsurge of wealth which helped Cleopatra tremendously during her reign as Pharaoh, and this decision is presented as an informed choice brought about by the fundamental strength of Cleopatra’s personality: her intellect.

Schiff repeatedly reminds her reader that Cleopatra VII was a woman above everything else, educated, and that was in part because of her upbringing.  Schiff observes early in the text how Cleopatra was taught:

And from an early age she enjoyed the best education available in the Hellenistic world, at the hands of the most gifted scholars, in what was incontestably the greatest center of learning in existence: The library of Alexandria and its attached museum were literally in her backyard.  The most prestigious of its scholars were her tutors, its men of science her doctors.  She did not have to venture far for a prescription, a eulogy, a mechanical toy, a map.  (29-30).

And Schiff continues this passage observing just a few such exercises she might have had to practice:

When Cleopatra graduated to syllables it was to a body of abstruse, unpronounceable words, the equally esoteric; the theory appears to have been that the student who could decode these could decode anything.  Maxims and verse came next, based on fables and myths.  A student might be called upon to render a tale of Aesop’s in his own words, in simplest form, a second time with grandiloquence.  More complex impersonations came later.  She might write as Achilles, on the verge of being killed, or be called upon to restate a plot of Euripides.  The lessons were neither easy nor meant to be.  Learning was a serious business, involving endless drills, infinite rules, long hours.  (30).

Though perhaps most important of all, Schiff notes that CLeopatra’s education has one unique aspect that was unlike any of her former predecessors:

While Egyptian speakers learned Greek, it was rare that anyone ventured in the opposite direction.  To the punishing study of Egyptian however, Cleopatra applied herself.  She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.  (35).

This last quote is worth emphasizing the most because, as is often forgotten it seems, Cleopatra was not actually Egyptian, she was Greek.  After Alexander the Great died, his generals broke his empire up into three pieces, his general Ptolemy taking the region that included Egypt where he established his base of operations and began a dynasty largely defined by endless incest.  The Ptolemaic dynasty was Greek in nature, but Cleopatra performed an incredible personal and political task by breaking from the tradition of her family and learning the language of the people she was ruling over.

I recognize that I hit my reader with three long quotes back-to-back-to-back in a short amount of time, but that’s only because I wanted to convey how much Schiff’s book effected me and my perception of Cleopatra.  By the end of Cleopatra: A Life the woman had become more than the soap-opera queen she had always been taught to me.  Instead the figure that emerged in this book was a charismatic, politically savy, and high educated woman of authority and power and I find that inspiring.  It might just be because I work for, and alongside, and a group of amazing women who are revolutionizing the public library I work for, but strong women are valuable in our society because they bring insight and new ideas for bettering our society.  And so Schiff argues in this book that the lasting image of Cleopatra should not be one solely defined by who she slept with.

Cleopatra: A Life is about revision, but it’s also a book about discovery.  By the end of this book the reader should hopefully have discovered the figure of Cleopatra VII beneath the mountains of scathing and scandalous documents which have attempted to hide her virtues and strengths in favor of painting her with a salacious sexual history that inspires endless steamy paperback novels and really uncomfortable history lectures in high school.  Cleopatra’s achievements were her own, but because she, if I can quote Blue from Overly Sarcastic Productions, “had boobs and did the sex sometimes” became so connected with the affairs of Rome, and the “great men” who were shaping that empire for their own ambitions she was ultimately reduced the figure of the Jezebel who “ruined everything.”

In this way I think Schiff’s book is a defense of Cleopatra, and, in effect, women throughout history who have been screwed by men’s fear of female sexuality.  Cleopatra did employ her sexuality for political purposes, but Schiff observes that even these choices were for the posterity of her kingdom rather than for personal ambition.  So even in the face of the cartoon-slut that Cleopatra can sometimes be there is an element of inspiration.  The reader who finishes Schiff’s biography will find a developed and interesting human being defined principally by her intelligence and charm rather than simply who was regularly visiting her vagina.

There is so much in Schiff’s book worth exploring but I’ve already written enough here, so much so my reader is probably hoping I’ll finish soon so that they can go watch Birdbox (I know what people like…sometimes), so I’ll end with a thought and hope my reader recognizes the importance of this work.

The tradition of men writing histories and rhetorics about the downfall of great men and societies because of one beautiful seductress is a corrupt narrative and one that has been allowed over and over again.  It’s an incredible woman who’s willing to stand between the overwhelming tides of records and stand to defend the qualities of another Great woman who’s qualities were, like so many temples of the ancient world, lost to the harsh and unforgiving sands that wear the resolve of posterity.

It’s also a point to remember that Cleopatra was willing and able to learn nine different languages, and I can’t even get off my ass to spend 10 minutes a day on that damn Duolingo app I downloaded to my iPad.  Such is the measure of a brilliant mind, and an impressive woman.

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from Cleopatra: A Life were quoted from the paperback Back Bay Books edition.

 

**Writer’s Note**

I’ve provided links within the essay but I’ll post them here as well.  Here are the two videos I discussed before, both Blue’s review of Cleopatra:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eGPBX7gY44

As well as the Genealogy of the Ptolemaic Dynasty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3vAKRa0f5I

 

***Writer’s Note***

While watching Blue’s review of Cleopatra, near the end he mentioned an archeologist who is currently digging for the tomb of Cleopatra.  In the description of the video he provides a link and so I thought I would also share it here since, let’s be real, discovering the tomb and body of Cleopatra would be like the coolest thing ever.  Feel free to nerd-out, care of National Geographic.  Enjoy:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2011/07/Cleopatra/

 

****Writer’s Note****

I’m also providing a few links to other reviews about Schiff’s biography.  I’m sure you respect. appreciate, and trust my learned (pronounced “learnd” according to Homer Simpson) opinion, but it’s always good to get as many different opinions as possible.  Hope you enjoy:

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131018363

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/stacy-schiff/cleopatra-a-life/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/01/AR2010110105907.html?noredirect=on

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/22/cleopatra-life-stacy-schiff-review

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/22/cleopatra-life-stacy-schiff-review

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8191028/Cleopatra-A-Life-by-Stacy-Schiff-review.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/books/review/Harrison-t.html

http://www.historybookreviews.com/book_reviews/cleopatra.html

 

*****Writer’s Note*****

In case the reader was curious, I included the “California Girls” Katy Perry image at the start of this essay instead of the one where’s she’s decked out like an Ancient Egyptian because Katy Perry ain’t Egyptian.  She’s a sweet white girl from the Midwest so I thought that if I absolutely had to include her I should do one that’s actually flattering and way less racist.

For example I have that image of her wearing red velvet and I didn’t use that…that…

I’m just gonna hand in my Feminism gun and badge because clearly I have no self control. But at least I don’t have to worry about Plutarch writing mean histories about me being a slut at least.  Could you imagine how awful that would be?

 

******Writer’s Note******

I’ve actually recorded a podcast for Schiff’s book.  You can follow the link below to my SoundCloud channel, or you can go to the Jammer’s Podcasts link at the top of the page.

I Love Lucy by the Stars

Tags

Art, astrophysics, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, bell, Cosmos, Education, glasses, I Love Lucy, Joshua Jammer Smith, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Original Drawing, Philosophy, Science, Space, still life, tea, universe

I Love Lucy By the Stars

June 9 2017

“He Wishes to Think!”…and Maybe Dance with Mr. Kelly: Inherit the Wind A White Tower Review

Tags

"He wishees to think!", Charles Darwin, Christianity, Courtroom Narrative, Dick York, Donna Anderson, Education, evolution, Evolution is not JUST a theory, Film, film review, Frederic March, Gene Kelly, Harry Morgan, Henry Drummond, history, Human evolution, Human Ideas are Grander than any Religion, humanity, Idealism, Individual Will, Inherit the Wind, Jerome Lawrence, John Thomas Scopes, Philosophy, Play, Political Discourse, Politics, Public Education, Public speech, religion, religious corruption, Robert E. Lee, Robert Osborne, Scopes Trial, Spencer Tracey, Spencer Tracy, Stanley Kramer, Turner Classic Movies

Honestly the most disappointing part of the film is the fact that Gene Kelly doesn’t tap dance.  The man shines as a wisecracking journalist who always has something clever or witty to say, but after a while I kept wondering what was keeping the man from dancing right in the middle of the courtroom.  I recognize that Inherit the Wind is based on an actual play and that drama typically avoids frivolities like dancing, singing, and general merriment, but I mean, it’s Gene Kelly.

One of the greatest pains about living with the cable package that I do is that I don’t get Turner Classic Movies.  Though I get plenty of other channels I usually wind up watching only PBS or Cartoon Network for Adult Swim, although I will admit without shame that Steven Universe and Adventure Time are also some of my favorites.  But I miss TCM because so much of my childhood was my parents turning the station on and then taking care of chores or other household tasks leaving me alone with Robert Osbourne who would introduce film after film with his encyclopedic knowledge of cinema history.  On one side note when Robert Osbourne passed away earlier this year it the first celebrity death which really made me cry because so much of my childhood was tied with that man.  TCM always promised wonderful movies, and it’s because of that channel that I eventually discovered films like Annie Hall, Spirited Away, The Seventh Seal, the original Scarface, The Great Dictator, and eventually Inherit the Wind.

Growing up in a private Christian school it’s nothing short of a miracle (though I despise using that poor word) that I ever came away knowing what evolution was, let alone what it argued.  Fortunately, I had a biology teacher who was a scientist as much as he was a Christian and so he taught us the scientific theory without remorse or shame.  When I got to college I eventually wound up tutoring biology and more or less teaching it for four years to freshmen and so in that time I managed to learn a great deal about the scientific principle, being able to argue against anyone who argued that it was “just a theory.”  During that time I met my wife, who herself is a biologist, and so recently when I discovered that the library had a copy of Inherit the Wind on DVD, I checked it out and showed it to her.

To be honest, she didn’t really respond much to it, and this is probably because I forgot that Inherit the Wind is more of a film about lawyers and philosophy than it is about the principle of evolution.

Based on the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (no not the Civil War Era general, unless that man had a secret past historians
don’t know about) Inherit the Wind is based upon the Scopes Trial, sometimes referred to as the “Monkey Trial,” which took place in the early 1920s.  The case in question centered around a man named John Thomas Scopes who dared to teach his high school students about the theory of evolution despite there being a state law which prohibited the practice.  Inherit the Wind rewrites the case but insofar as it changes the names of the characters involves and loads the court proceedings with grand speeches about individual will and human initiative.

Most of these come from Henry Drummond the Clarence Darrow substitute played by Tracey in one of his most iconic roles.  Tracey shines continually during the film offering one beautiful statement after the other about the human race.  During one exchange he speaks with Matthew Harrison Brady whom he has called to the witness stand, and during his interrogation he offers this gem:

[challenged to say if he considers anything holy]

Henry Drummond: Yes. The individual human mind. In a child’s power to master the multiplication table, there is more sanctity than in all your shouted “amens” and “holy holies” and “hosannas.” An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man’s knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters.

I regularly read the early essays that I wrote for White Tower Musings, and with some embarrassment, but not much, I recognize this exact sentiment dominates most of my writing.  I was reading a lot of Christopher Hitchens at the time and so the humanism just infected my prose.  But even after the embarrassing grammar errors have been corrected and I’m left with that rough early material I still find in my early arguments this exact position to be true in my heart.  I’ve written regularly about atheism, but never outright about my humanism.

I’ve developed into my own self and am now comfortable with who I am and what I believe.  My life is a godless one, and while there are some that would pity me for that I stand firm by the conviction that ideas are a far greater testament to humanity than any church or sermons preached therein.  The ideas of Marx, Freud, Hobbes, Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, Voltaire, Steinem, Trotsky, Bradbury, McCloud, Nietzsche, and yes even Darwin constitute a greater monument to the capacities of human beings.  These ideas inspire and drive more personal ambition, innovation, discovery, and insight than any god could possibly do.  Ideas offer up new visions of reality, and this to me has always been far more interesting than any Psalm or Prophet.

The ultimate conflict with religion, and this comes from having grown up in it and reflecting upon the experience, is that it offers only one vision of reality: god is the source of everything.  Once one has accepted this worldview the achievements or discoveries of mankind becomes secondary.  What is the origin of life, god.  How did DNA develop, god.  Why should man be benevolent to his fellow creatures, god.  I could go on with this but I’m supposed to be writing about a film.  I’ll settle on the fact that religion as an ideology is constricting because it limits the ultimate potential of man into one single reality rather than leaving him open to new ideas, and when Christianity festers into the realm of politics it has a limiting effect on free will or free thought.

Drummond’s regular speeches note this when he further questions Brady about Cates and faith:

Matthew Harrison Brady: We must not abandon faith! Faith is the most important thing!

Henry Drummond: Then why did God plague us with the capacity to think? Mr. Brady, why do you deny the one faculty of man that raises him above the other creatures of the earth? The power of his brain to reason. What other merit have we? The elephant is larger; the horse is swifter and stronger; the butterfly is far more beautiful; the mosquito is more prolific. Even the simple sponge is more durable. But does a sponge think?

Matthew Harrison Brady: I don’t know. I’m a man, not a sponge!

Henry Drummond: But do you think a sponge thinks?

Matthew Harrison Brady: If the Lord wishes a sponge to think, it thinks!

Henry Drummond: Do you think a man should have the same privilege as a sponge?

Matthew Harrison Brady: Of course!

Henry Drummond: [Gesturing towards the defendant, Bertram Cates] Then this man wishes to have the same privilege of a sponge, he wishes to think!

This line alone has become its own sort of icon in terms of the legacy of the film.  Most of the “commercials” that saw on TCM would always have this one line, with Spencer Tracey making his grand and dramatic gestures.  And the word “grand” seems the most fitting in describing much of the approach of Inherit the Wind because so often the film feels like one speech after the other.  This can sometimes come at the expense of the narrative, but at the same time this doesn’t kill the film.

Ultimately Inherit the Wind is a courtroom narrative, and such stories tend to be limiting in terms of what a director can do in terms of narrative.  Within such narratives the viewer is given a lawyer, maybe two if the director wants to develop both sides of the case, and so the viewer is usually left becoming a member of the jury as they try to decide who’s side is right.  The exception to this would be To Kill a Mockingbird where the viewer is given no chance to see the opposing lawyer’s arguments because they know already that Atticus Finch is the “right” lawyer.  But the courtroom narrative is classic in that its origin are in antiquity.  The ancient Greeks are attributed with establishing most of the traditions  and foundations of Western civilization, and the use of the courts and rhetoric is perhaps one of the most crucial developments of their culture.  Though each city state was different in their application of the law, a policy existed in ancient Greece where, if a man found himself compelled to go to trial, he would be forced to act in his own defense or else serve as the prosecution.  As such a study of rhetoric wasn’t just something for leisure, it was of paramount importance to the individual citizen.  A man (because it was ancient Greece, don’t forget that) had to know how to arrange words so that he could defend himself.  The setting of the courtroom is one as old as recognizable civilization, and so while Inherit the Wind can feel like one long series of speeches, in the film’s defense, that’s exactly what a courtroom is.

Stanley Kramer who directs the film would only a year later direct the movie Judgement at Nuremberg which also starred Spencer Tracey and as in both films he manages to construct real characters outside of the courtroom so that the viewer isn’t left simply listening to speech after speech that are devoid of personal character.  The strength of Inherit the Wind isn’t just that it constantly sings the praises of humanism in defense of Darwinism, it is instead a film about a strained friendship that climaxes in a courtroom.

Henry Drummond and Matthew Harrison Brady are two old friends who have had a falling out because of their difference of opinion about religion.  In one scene the pair of them are rocking on the front porch of their hotel and discussing the nature of faith when Brady asks his friend a question:

Matthew Harrison Brady: Why is it, my old friend, that you’ve moved so far away from me?

Henry Drummond: All motion is relative, Matt. Maybe it’s you who’ve moved away by standing still.

The success of this scene is largely on Tracey, but then again, I’m biased in this capacity.  Tracey as an actor manages to convey a down-to-earth man who has ingested and processed the humanities and knowledge of mankind but not gone so far up his own ass that he’s lost the ability to shoot straight or be humble.  Inherit the Wind as a film is often a film about Henry Drummond and his attempt to level the people around him who have gotten so concerned with the religious abstract and one quote in particular seems the best demonstration of this.

Matthew Harrison Brady: [to Henry Drummond] They’re looking for something that’s more perfect than what they already have. Why do you want to take that away from them when it’s all they have?

Henry Drummond: As long as the prerequisite for that shining paradise is ignorance, bigotry and hate, I say the hell with it.

I’ve written, some would say too much, about my upbringing in East Texas and my observation of religious people so I won’t go back over stories that are beginning to become adages rather than accurate memory, but I will defend this line because I’ve heard this argument before.  “Even if god doesn’t exist it gives people hope,” is a line that reeks of false conviction and is in fact one of the most pathetic arguments I have ever heard.  If I can stay on topic, the film Inherit the Wind portrays Christianity often as an antithesis to reason and moral virtue and so the reader who believes in god may shout harrumph and not bother seeing the film.

I would hope they would consider the opposite.

Rather than being a film that does nothing but damn Christianity, the film in fact is a call for sanity.  I’ve seen by the example of a small handful, what can happen when those who are religiously inclined, open their minds and hearts to new ideas and allow their faith to deepen because of the challenges of science, technology, and discovery, and while I will continue to debate them about the foundation of their reality I will always respect their level head.  Inherit the Wind is not a film that damns Christianity, it only damns those who would prostitute religion for political gain.

The Christianity that is on display in the film is not a sane ideology, it is a bullying, stunted cancer that eats away at the people of Tennessee by leaving them terrified and in a place where progress is associated with the devil.

Drummond answers this in what is quite possible the most beautiful lines of the film:

Henry Drummond: Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, “All right, you can have a telephone but you lose privacy and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.”

There’s a great number of reasons for watching a film like Inherit the Wind, the largest being that it’s a film that helped establish the courtroom drama as a narrative structure.  But for my opinion Inherit the Wind is a beautiful film about humanism overcoming bigotry and the importance of individual integrity.  Even if the reader disagrees with the theory of Evolution and what it argues about the origin of human life, they would hopefully agree that an individual person has the right to believe what they want to believe and think what they want to think.  I believe that flat-earthers are idiots, but if they believe that the earth is flat and they have come to that decision on their own that I have no business telling them how to think.

It is when one uses violence or intimidation to justify their world view that action is necessary.  Hiring lawyers and going to court will not provide the satisfaction that might come from punching somebody right back in the nose, but it will keep more violence and bigotry from occurring.  The courtroom is a space where philosophy can be argued and defended against the cruel and fanatics.  It is a space where the ideas and progress of humanity can be argued and defended and where a man can stand up and say firmly, “I think.”

This year will mark 92 years since the original Scopes “Monkey” Trial, and a film like Inherit the Wind is wonderful reminder that even close to a century later we’re still having the discussion of evolution, and whether or not teachers should be allowed to teach it.  The clouds smell a little more like Gasoline, but there are far more people willing to stand up and say without shame or fear, that “I think.”

There’s also people like me who are still waiting for Gene Kelly to start tapdancing.  But you can’t always get what you want.

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

Having more or less taught biology for four years it’s important to make sure the reader knows this: Evolution is not JUST a Theory.  This unfortunate, bullshit line has been crafted by critics of evolution, however it demonstrates their ignorance of what a scientific theory actually is.  In the humanities a “theory” is just an idea about reality than can be easily accepted or rejected.  The reason for this is that in the humanities you are dealing with subjectivity of human experience.  What I see and believe is different from what the reader sees and believes and so we could look at the same painting by Rembrandt and come to different conclusions about what it means or what its origins were.

The humanities are SUBJECTIVE, while science and mathematics are OBJECTIVE.

If something is a Scientific Theory that means it has been tested literally millions of times by scientists all over the world who are trying to refute the conclusions of the original hypothesis.  This constant testing is not just an effort to disprove other people, it’s an effort to make sure that the facts that are being expressed by science are accurate.  Human beings can observe evolution in lab settings as well as the wild, and the mountains of evidence in the fossil record only further demonstrate the fact of evolution.  If something is a “theory” in science it is because scientists are firm in their conviction that it is a fact.  There is a “chance” that it could be refuted by new evidence, but it is a “chance” the way there’s a “chance” that I could go out on a date with Matthew Lewis.  It’s not that it isn’t possible, it’s just probably probably probably not going to happen, but, I can dream.

 

If the reader would like a more nuanced explanation of the difference between a scientific Law and Theory they can follow the link below to an article my wife found for me when I asked her about the difference:

https://www.livescience.com/21457-what-is-a-law-in-science-definition-of-scientific-law.html

The Working Press: News Matters, but Only when Readers Trust the Papers

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All the President's Men, Blogging, Blogs and Ethos, David Simon, Democracy, Derek Thompson, Does the News Matter to Anyone Anymore?, Education, Essay, free speech, Free Working Press, Freedom, Full Frontal, Halcyon, John Oliver, journalism, Last Week Tonight, News, Newspapers, NPR, patriotism, Politics, Reporters, Republic, Satire, television, The Atlantic, The Daily Show, The Nightly Show, The Wire, Walter Cronkite, Watergate, We Are Mired in Stalemate, Why Do Americans Distrust the Media, Writing

 

I believe in newspapers and the power of a free working press.

That sentence sounds like it should be immediately followed by “Journalists of the World UNITE” which itself is then followed by a fanfair of trumpets and people dancing in revelry while waving the banners of revolution, but in fact the only response I should, and would hope for, is for the reader to nod their head and agree.  Such is the dream, yet not always the reality, and in fact, it seems the last real refuge for real reporting seems to be in cinema or “parody” news programs like The Daily Show, Full Frontal, or Last Week Tonight.  On one side note The Nightly Show is no longer running which is unfortunate because it seems every time Comedy Central puts up a show that tries to present news and information from a black perspective it only ever lasts a few episodes before it gets canceled.  That’s an entire article or online lecture by itself, but I’ll have to get to that later.

A few weeks back Last Week Tonight did a piece about the state of Journalism, specifically the Newspaper industry in the United States and the sentiment expressed by John Oliver mirrored Gerald Ford’s now classic statement during his first State of the Union Address.  The State of Newspapers in the United States is “not good.”  That’s a simple way of saying print news in America is either dying or plagued by bias.  The complex way is saying that newspapers in America are on the decline due to the rise of digital news, low sales of printed newspapers, lack of trust by the readers, and the general apathy of readers due to the fact that most people get their “news” via Facebook or Google.  There isn’t much, if any money, going into newspapers and this a conflict because a free media is responsible for monitoring for corruption and ensuring that the public of a democracy are informed to what is actually going on in their government.

I recognize immediately that my position can immediately become one of obnoxious preaching or else a nauseating mourning of an industry that possesses an “inherent nobility” and so I’m going to try and maintain a professional distance from emotion.  My point in bringing this topic up is not to wail and bemoan the tragedies that are taking place in the journalism industry, but instead to allow these tragedies to illuminate the importance of the media and two articles which shed an revealing light on this subject.

In September of this year, The Atlantic put out an article by Derek Thompson titled Why Do Americans Distrust the Media, and while it’s a short essay it manages to point out several of the reasons why Journalism in general is becoming so suspect to citizens of the United States.  Early on in the essay Thompson explains what is happening to that trust:

With these enormous caveats out of the way, the fact remains that Americans’ “trust” in “the media” is falling steadily, according to Gallup. Even if the precise definitions of these terms is debatable, the overall decline is clear and noteworthy.

This collapse in trust is not evenly spread across all demographics. The drop has been most dramatic among young and middle-aged respondents and, most recently, within the GOP. Together, it seems reasonable to conclude that the recent decline in media trust has been concentrated among middle-aged Republicans, a key part of the Trump constituency.

It should be made clear that the article is not Anti-Trump, it simply relies regularly on Trump and Trump supporters denying the legitimacy of newspapers when scandals appear which tends to happen a lot.  Still the facts remain that more and more citizens are beginning to recognize or perceive flaws in reporting, and when you take into account that perception tends to create reality far more often than facts it begins to become clearer why so many Americans distrust news.  Thompson’s article goes on to list out five reasons why this distrust exists, and the fourth reason, that it’s easier to find news that confirms bias rather than challenging it, he manages to make an important point about how this distrust forms:

Today’s journalists are more comfortable taking strong positions on partisan issues than they used to be. This is often a good thing. But the increased partisanship of large news outlets might feed a public perception that neutral objectivity doesn’t exist, and therefore, people are entitled to scream “partisanship!” about any viewpoint that they disagree with. The Pittsburgh-Tribune Review recently asked Donald Trump Jr., how he felt that the Pulitzer Prize-winning team at PolitiFact found that 70 percent of his father’s claims were false, more than twice the ratio of Hillary Clinton. Trump’s response: “I would argue that PolitiFact is a very liberal organization.” The shocking thing about this claim is that it’s not shocking, at all. It has become acceptably normal for a politician to call a Pulitzer-Prize winning organization “very biased” if it disagrees with him. There is also no risk in saying so.

Several weeks back I wrote about the speech Walter Cronkite gave on CBS news entitled We Are Mired in Stalemate.  Part of the ongoing appeal and interest of this speech is that it was one of the first times a newsman like Cronkite allowed his personal opinions or assessments to come through in his reporting.  This is not so uncommon today, in fact it’s so common it borders on obnoxious.  Watching programs like Hannity, The O’Reily Factor, Legal View with B & B, or even anything involving Keith Olberman that isn’t about sports, one becomes buried beneath the weight of personal opinions of newscasters that it becomes so nauseating one has to change the channel or turn off the T.V. and meditate to Stomp to reclaim one’s sense of composure.  Watching these shows in bulk is about the equivalent of a years’ worth of self-inflicted papercuts to the webs between the fingers, yet despite this I still find myself watching the news and reading the newspaper.

At the core of this is always my romantic patriotism.

I worry sometimes that I wrap myself up in the American flag, and that despite my supposed dedication to pure, unfettered reason I am actually an emotional gerrymanderer.  In my own defense I tend to read a lot of Walt Whitman a man who also had a rather large hard-on for liberty and the inherent nobility of the American populace, identity, and territory.  But if I can strip everything down though, and find the purest kernel of honesty to explain the reason why I believe so much in the importance and dedication to a free press is because I really do believe democracy is the best we, as a human species, have got philosophically.

The ages of man have been a constant effort and experiment to co-exist as peacefully as humanly possible and in our time we have constructed governmental-philosophies which have ranged in form from totalitarianism to a level of republic bordering on hippie communes.  At the end of this democracy is the one system that, while it doesn’t make everyone happy, leaves at least a modicum of equilibrium.  Before I start to sound like fucking NPR, which I appreciate as a news media source, my point is that by studying history it becomes clear that if human beings want a society in which people are equally protected by the law and from the government which is supposed to execute the law, the republic and democracy have been the most successful in accommodating that environment.

But in order for that to exists there has to be a system which monitors government because, to use an old platitude, power corrupts absolutely, or to put it another way, politicians are butt-fucking cowards and thieves and they need to be monitored and transparent because corruption is easily acquired and can quickly become a comfortable vice.

While I was considering this idea, and watching the Journalism episode of Last Week Tonight, I remembered a consistent impression, one moment in the video which kept gnawing at me because it seemed as best as I could describe as “right.”  In the video John Oliver introduces a clip from CSPAN which appeared to be some panel or news coverage over the state and future of newspapers and in the clip a man by the name of David Simon explained that the next decade will be a “Halcyon Error” for local and state political corruption due to the pronounced lack of journalism covering simple governmental activities likes zoning board meetings.  It wasn’t the diction that sold me on Simon as an important figure in this particular argument however, it was his level of confidence.  Interested in the man I did a little digging, starting on Wikipedia.  I know I’m supposed to hate that website because it’s the scourge of academic integrity but in reality it has helped me discover sources I never would have.  Including the article David Simon wrote for The Washington Post entitled Does the News Matter to Anyone Anymore?

I read the article in one sitting, it’s not that difficult to finish in one session due largely to the fact that Simon is a fantastic writer for his ability to weave gorgeous prose without going up his own ass.  Simon begins his article with a personal and effective opening:

Is there a separate elegy to be written for that generation of newspapermen and women who came of age after Vietnam, after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate? For us starry-eyed acolytes of a glorious new church, all of us secular and cynical and dedicated to the notion that though we would still be stained with ink, we were no longer quite wretches? Where is our special requiem?

Bright and shiny we were in the late 1970s, packed into our bursting journalism schools, dog-eared paperback copies of “All the President’s Men” and “The Powers That Be” atop our Associated Press stylebooks. No business school called to us, no engineering lab, no information-age computer degree — we had seen a future of substance in bylines and column inches. Immortality lay in a five-part series with sidebars in the Tribune, the Sun, the Register, the Post, the Express.

What the hell happened?

It’s an honest question and after reading Thompson’s article I’m tempted to answer it quickly.  The simple answer is the American public became disenfranchised with newspapers and news organizations.    While on some level this is largely attributed to people simply believing the news is boring or else just really depressing (for the record I’m almost quoting verbatim a friend of mine here) perhaps the largest reason is because journalism has become subject to the pitfalls of capitalism, or really hyper-capitalism.  John Oliver expresses and analyzes this far better than I ever could, and so I would recommend my reader actually take the time to find the video on YouTube, but the simplest explanation is that because newspapers are looked on more and more as, and Simon even calls them such in his articles, an anachronism people are looking more to digital content for information and that’s a problem because anyone can contribute to digital media.  And I mean Anyone.

I’m an example of this.  The reason I began White Tower Musings was because nobody would publish my creative work and so I began writing “essays,” really a charitable word for my early diatribes about power and freedom and Orwell, and publishing them here on WordPress for free.  I pay nothing to host my site apart from internet provider, and my wife pays that bill so in fact I really do pay nothing.  I can write whatever I want, when I want, and publish it, and while I personally try to make sure each article is well thought out and well researched and written to the best of my ability the real unbiased truth is I’m just some jackass with a blog.  And with that knowledge in hand I remember that there are dozens of jackasses with blogs who can write and say whatever they want about current events without having to worry about any kind of oversight or editorial board to make sure their writings are supported by solid sources and facts.

This isn’t meant to be morbid self-loathing, which is my usual same old song and dance, but instead just an honest reflection upon the institution of the news as a force in this country and how a writer like Simon makes it seem not just important but necessary even as it’s dying.  Simon offers a glimpse at the contemporary position:

In Baltimore, the newspaper now has 300 newsroom staffers, and it is run by some fellows in Chicago who think that number sufficient to the task. And the locally run company that was once willing to pay for a 500-reporter newsroom, to moderate its own profits in some basic regard and put money back into the product? Turns out it wasn’t willing to do so to build a great newspaper, but merely to clear the field of rivals, to make Baltimore safe for Gremlins and Pacers. And at no point in the transition from one to the other did anyone seriously consider the true cost of building something comprehensive, essential and great.

And now, no profits. No advertising. No new readers. Now, the great gray ladies are reduced to throwing what’s left of their best stuff out there on the Web, unable to charge enough for online advertising, or anything at all for the journalism itself.

Simon wrote Does the News Matter to Anyone Anymore? in 2008, and I can already sense the reader’s objection.  This seems like a moaning diatribe of whining about American Newspapers that doesn’t reflect reality.  Plenty of newspapers are writing material old-school journalists would be proud of.  And this is a fair objection which Simon actually acknowledges in his article before pointing out the flaw:

Is there still high-end journalism? Of course. A lot of fine journalists are still laboring in the vineyard, some of them in Baltimore. But at even the more serious newspapers in most markets, high-end journalism doesn’t take the form of consistent and sophisticated coverage of issues, but of special projects and five-part series on selected topics — a distraction designed not to convince readers that a newspaper aggressively brings the world to them each day, but to convince a prize committee that someone, somewhere, deserves a plaque.

Newspapers are not just about heroism and I recognize how I sound writing that out after preaching about their inherent necessity and nobility.  Newspapers are first and foremost about community.  Simon points out that often newspapers are in the market for young, hungry, and most importantly cheap employees to produce media content and the conflict with this position is the divorce from their reality.  If you don’t have any history with a town, it’s going to be difficult to understand the dynamic and history of the city when you have to report on it.  There is a local paper in my own home city but I never read preferring instead to read articles on NPR or else the Washington Post and this in itself reveals the larger bad habit of certain readers.  I should not say that I represent a microcosm, but I do believe it’s fair to admit that a portion of news readers in this country take a rather abstract view of news because the news that we do receive tends to concern the larger national or international events, and while these most certainly possess real relevance the problem is that the real impact of such occurrences is always felt at the local level and manifests in different ways.

A question emerges and Simon writes it out plainly and perfectly:

What I don’t understand is this:

Isn’t the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium — isn’t an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?

It’s hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all of us pretended to regard as a viable commodity — indeed, as the source of all that was purposeful and heroic — was, in fact, an intellectual vanity.

Newsprint itself is an anachronism. But was there a moment before the deluge of the Internet when news organizations might have better protected themselves and their product? When they might have — as one, industry-wide — declared that their online advertising would be profitable, that their Web sites would, in fact, charge for providing a rare and worthy service?

This final point is reiterated by John Oliver in the Last Week Tonight Special, and echoes in my own summation of the “service” I provide my readers for this site (the difference being that what journalist provide possesses a more immediate utilitarian purpose than my intellectual musings).  Freedom of the press is not just a given by the first amendment because the individuals who provide the information citizens need to be informed do not work for free.  Reporters are working people who need food, living space, and entertainment commodities the same as every and any citizen of the United States and the problem is their line of work is increasingly being dwindled by the hyper-capitalist system in which media too often given away for free.

The reason people enjoy free internet pornography is because people have grown accustomed to having it at their fingertips, but beneath that is a deeper understanding that the media they’re consuming isn’t worth their money.  The conflict with the internet is that too often the content being generated is rarely designed to be a valuable physical commodity from which the consumer can acquire some kind of emotional or personal investment.  It’s something to be consumed and then abandoned.  My reader may argue that newspapers, even when they weren’t purely digital, existed in the same way for after all a newspaper is produced for one day and then would often be thrown away and in fairness that is a fair criticism.

However even before newspapers moved to a digital market, consumers and readers were willing to pay for the paper.  Some of them, and I include myself in this crowd, simply read the paper for the comics or the sports pages, but there are consistent readers who are genuinely concerned and should be genuinely concerned about what is taking place in their local government: whether public money is being used for nefarious purposes, whether or not public projects have actually benefitted their community, and simply to figure out whether their elected officials are crooks.

Simon, Oliver, and Thompson have all offered me a chance to decide whether or not my local newspaper matters or not.  In all honesty my local paper probably doesn’t because anyone willing to actually write anything negative about local politics or history would either be silenced or exiled, but that shouldn’t be the norm.  It may be my clinging to the romanticism of the Watergate-era, but I do believe the news, whether it’s digital or paper-bound, does matter, and should be trusted, and does play a crucial role in our democracy.

I am just some asshole with a blog, but like Simon I know a great newspaper from a good one.  And those few gems are worth reading, and more importantly worth paying for.

 

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

Below the reader can find links to the sources for this article.  The first is Thompson’s article published in the Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/why-do-americans-distrust-the-media/500252/

The second is the Last Week Tonight special over journalism:

And finally here is the article Does the News Matter to Anyone Anymore? Published originally in The Washington Post on January 20, 2008.  I hope you enjoy:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/18/AR2008011802874.html

 

Why Libraries Matter: Neil Gaiman’s Human Political Position

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authorial freedom, Book Review, Bootsy Barker Bites, Coffee With Jammer, Coraline, Democracy, Education, Essay, Freedom, freedom of information, imagination, Individual Will, Joshua Jammer Smith, Libraries, Library, Literature, Neil Gaiman, Non-Fiction, Political Apathy, Politics, Sandman, Speech, Stranger Things, The Graveyard Book, The Tragical comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch, The View From the Cheap Seats, Where the Wild Things Are, Why Libraries Matter, Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming, Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming: The Reading Agency Lecture, 2013, Writing

It’s not just because I want to work at a library.  It’s because I hate Neil Gaiman.  I hate the man because he is everything that I want to be.  Not just an accomplished author with a few books under my belt, but a writer who has really altered the creative landscape for being nothing else but what they truly are.  An author who creates, not simply for creation, good creation, is never simple it just looks like it, but an author who creates purely in their own style so that it is impossible to picture it presented any other way.  Gaiman is a writer who, no matter what he is doing, always manages to make the work his own.

I should stop kissing ass and actually get to the library essay.  Speech actually.

I try once a week to have coffee with one of my friends who hasn’t left Tyler yet and just talk about everything and anything and these coffee dates have become a weekly series I refer to as “Coffee with Jammer.”  I’m currently in talks with PBS about turning this into a series but they keep telling me there isn’t enough gratuitous nudity or shit blowing up.  That and Charlie Rose is starting to call me and leave threatening messages.  I keep this standing appointment because, even though I do consider myself an introvert and am often far happier sitting at home reading my books and writing these essays, social interaction is important.  Keeps the voices at bay.  Talking with my friends, who will deny it vociferously, I find they are often far more intelligent than me and they often have interesting things to talk about which in turn inspires new ideas for the work I produce for White Tower Musings, so you might also say that there is some selfishness on my part.

Still the most recent “Coffee with Jammer,” which was interrupted only three times by Mr. Rose’s violent text messages, took place with my fellow gentleman scholar Seth Wilson who actually has contributed an article for WTM.  The coffee was lovely, and between the jokes about “Roll a D20” and “Alan Moore’s hilarious/tragic psychosis” we managed to talk a great deal about Stranger Things and writing in general.  When we parted I decided to hang back and look around because “Coffee with Jammer” always takes place at the local Barnes & Noble and so after the long conversations where I’m usually intellectually stimulated I try to calm down by looking at the books.  This unusually backfires because I wind becoming more and more excited by all the new books and old books and books period, and while I was passing by one table I literally swung on one foot and looked down.

The name Neil Gaiman is always enough to capture my attention because he has a consistent track record of reminding me that he’s not just talented but exceptional.  With books like Sandman, Coraline, American Gods, The Tragical comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch, and The Graveyard Book Gaiman isn’t just a writer that you read and then drop his books back beside the can.  His books have a real soul and power that just so completely absorbs you that it’s impossible to simply put them down.  The book on the table wasn’t even all that eye catching.  It was just Gaiman sitting in the back of a movie theater.  In script that mimicked old abandoned typewriters it read The View from the Cheap Seats.

The title didn’t catch me as much as the subtitle: Selected Nonfiction.

Over the last two years I’ve found myself reading more and more nonfiction and, because I’m finding myself comfortable with the title of essayist, I’ve been trying to see what others have done with the form.  This wasn’t enough to sell me on the book though, it was when I opened it and read the title of the first work in the collection that I snapped it shut and headed for the cashier.

Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming: The Reading Agency Lecture, 2013 has rather long title and so I’ll just shorten it to Why Our Future Depends on Libraries.  I’ve mentioned it at the start but to say it once again I’ve recently begun to realize that I would like to work in a library.  While part of this is just some childish romanticism thanks to The Pagemaster, the realist in me has begun to read books about libraries, watch TED talks from librarians, and actually dig into firsthand testimony by librarians about what the job entails, and after all this research I still want to work at one.  Libraries are not simply book depositories and long shelves full of dusty books tended to by sexless grandmothers and men who wear sweater vests.  They are in fact real cultural hubs where communities can find free and available resources for everything and anything.

This was part of the appeal of reading Gaiman’s essay, but by the end some of that romanticism I cautioned myself against had come back, and in my defense it’s difficult to avoid this when the man writes passages like the following:

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. (7).

I’ve never read or watched a speech delivered by a real person that actually made me cry.  The only actual speeches that have brought me to tears were those delivered by President Bartlet on West Wing, and let’s be fair here that man had the benefit of pre-cocaine Aaron Sorkin to help him out.  I can honestly admit without shame however that Why Our Future Depends on Libraries had me in tears by the end because it reminded me what words can actually do.  Words and ideas can summon emotions, memories, feelings, passions, and dreams that have long been left buried in our hearts either because they were inconvenient, or else because we were afraid to simply speak them out or write them down lest be perceived as a fool.  My emotional reaction to Gaiman’s beautiful speech is not the important idea that’s worth exploring here, although a bit of my past may help to offer some insight.

When I was a child my mother would regularly take me to the Library because every Saturday was “Book time” when one of the librarians would sit before a clustering of children and read out loud a randomly selected book, or books, to the kids, and once this activity was done there would be fun exercises involving coloring or drawing, but often what would occur is that the kids would scatter to the nearby shelves, pull out a book, sit in the big fluffy couches, and disappear into their selected paper-back tomes.  I still remember the sensation of trailing my finger over the spines of books reading the titles until I found something I wanted.  I remember the George and Martha, Frog & Toad, Jumanji, The Teacher from the Black Lagoon, Where the Wild Things Are, but mostly I remember a book called Bootsy Barker Bites.  I must have checked this book out at least thirty times but it didn’t matter how many times I read this book I couldn’t get enough of it.  Those Saturdays at the Library when I would gather whole piles of books to read at home, or have my Mom or Dad read them to me, remain so much a part of who I eventually became.

The Library fostered in me the idea that reading wasn’t just something you had to do for school, it could be fun.  Once that idea was established, reading and books in general became more than just assignments, they became to learn more about other people as well as myself, and while I did have a brief period where my reading slagged off a bit, I never lost the idea that reading was an important skill not just for individual amusement, but also for the larger issue of citizenship.

Gaiman’s speech is not political in the sense of partisanship; it is only political in the fact that it declares it’s sentiments openly and without regard for criticism.  Later on in the speech he exerts why he stands on the position that he does:

According to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the “only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account.”

Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.  And while politicians blame the other party for these results, the truth is, we need to teach our children to read and enjoy reading.

We need libraries.  We need books.  We need literature citizens.

I do not care—I do not believe it matters—whether these books are paper or digital, whether you are reading a scroll or scrolling on a screen.  The content is the important thing.

But a book is also content, and that’s important.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us – as readers, as writers, as citizens: we have obligations. I thought I’d try and spell out some of these obligations here. (12-3).

The idea that literacy matters to a republic is not novel, but it’s still a vital idea nevertheless, and one that I try to impart to students and friends who often admit freely that they don’t care about politics.  I understand the sentiment completely when it is expressed, and given the current political climate it’s any wonder that the people who care about politics are able to still find something worth talking about at this point, but after the flash and pop of the superficial campaigns and the passionate shit-storm that is discussing President Obama at Thanksgiving, politics is something vital and important and literacy is at the heart of that idea.  Governments can only rule by the consent of the governed, but if the citizenry of a republic cannot even read the law for themselves then how can they make an informed decision about whether to support said laws or the politicians writing them.  I recognize that I run the risk of sounding like a first year political science student who’s just read Common Sense for the first time, but I hope the reader is able to look past this.

Libraries are at the core of the idea that a democracy can only work if everyone, regardless of race, religion, class, or ethnicity can have access to reading and writing and thus offer up their own voice.  Gaiman offers a more eloquent explanation than I could in a rather long quote.  He talks at first about being a young man who was often “left” at a library, which for the record parents shouldn’t do because librarians are not babysitters, but it was because of these librarians that he was able to discover the importance of literacy.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader – nothing less or more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

Libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

I worry that here in the twenty-first century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to fundamentally miss the point.

I think it has to do with nature of information.

Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories – they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.

In the last few years, we’ve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization until 2003. That’s about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before – books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content. A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It’s a community space. It’s a place of safety, a haven from the world. It’s a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.  Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.  (9-11).

We’re living in a different age than our fathers and mothers.  A former professor of mine would remark to us that we had no idea how easy our jobs as students were.  In the past, and he admitted this freely, he wouldn’t actually try to find articles for papers because there was just no way to do it without spending hours in the library digging through journals trying to find one quote to validate an argument.  Now whole volumes of journals from a wide variety of subjects, fields, and specifications are available by selecting the right options in a drop-box.  Rather than mourn this bounty of information as the death of the local library, more than ever it’s important to relish in this freedom of information and to trust libraries to provide access to it.

Despite appearances libraries are political institutions, they are often spared the partisan bullshit (though there are some horror stories) and in it’s place is a philosophical politics.  As long as a society holds to the idea that everyone deserves the same opportunity to learn and participate then libraries will exist to ensure that a citizenry has access, not only to books, but to the internet, adult education, children books, books clubs, local archives, access to microfiche and local histories, and if nothing else, a space in the community where they may enjoy a few moments of quiet comfort reading a book.

Why our Future depends on Libraries is a speech that is too important not to be read, because our future really does depend on the freedom of information.  The way to ensure that the next generation of readers, writers, and citizens contribute to their culture and society is by making sure there is a space that fosters intellectual curiosity and growth.  Neil Gaiman growing up had a library that helped him grow as a reader, and because the UK is seeing a dramatic reduction of the number of small libraries, and as the United States drifts more and more towards a reality where libraries are seen as backwards, provincial, and useless the vital question becomes: Why do libraries matter?

Hopefully that question has been answered by now, but Gaiman’s speech offers up the only answer that leaves one satisfied.

Libraries matter because they inspire.  Reading a book is a political act, it is a personal act.  Once a child recognizes that they can read a book, it’s only a matter of time before they realize that they can write a book.  And once that thought is implanted a voice is created which will alter the discourse of a community, or country, in ways that cannot possibly be explained except by the writer who dares to do so.

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

If you’re interested in reading the entire speech I managed to find a website which transcribed it and published, it online.  I should forewarn the reader that it is an edited version so it may be different than the version published in The View from the Cheap Seats.  If you’re interested just follow the link below:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming

Jammer Talks About: Fahrenheit 451 and Banned Books

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Banned Book Week, Banned Books, Book Review, Catalyst University, censorship, Education, Fahrenheit 451, ignorance, Jammer Talks About, Joshua Jammer Smith, Libraries, literary education, Novel, Politics, Ray Bradbury, science fiction, The Illustrated Man, Video lecture, YouTube

It was recently Banned Books Week and so I thought I would do my part to cover a novel which I’m rather partial to.  Fahrenheit 451 is a novel I was exposed to because one of the best teachers I’ve ever had assigned the book The Illustrated Man for class.  Ray Bradbury, along with Stephen King, became an author I adored and so I picked up Something Wicked This Way Comes and Fahrenheit 451 on her recommendation. 

This novel is a science fiction masterpiece, but also one of the most misunderstood books in my opinion because everyone likes to focus on the book burning aspect of the plot rather than the deeper theme of combatting ignorance. Bradbury isn’t just writing about censorship in order to say censorship is bad.  The problem with censoring books is not just that it stops people from reading a book, the problem with censorship is that it stops people from reading a book and then thinking about it and the questions it asks. 

Banned Books week is more than just an opportunity to read naughty books in order to feel rebellious, it’s far more personal and political.  Reading Banned Books is a chance to counter ignorance because the only way to become smarter is to admit to ignorance so that someone can help you learn more. 

I’ll leave it at that and let my reader see the video for themselves and come up with their own opinion.  Because, after all, that’s the point of reading in the first place. 

Thank you for reading, and thank you for watching. 

 

TO WATCH THE VIDEO FOLLOW THE LINK BELOW:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acXZx5gzHeU

 

 

 

 

 

I Am…Nowhere Near as Cool as Malala

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Au Revoir Mes Enfants, Ayatollah Khomeini, Azar Nafisi, biography, Book Review, Breaking Bad, Comics, Education, Feminism, Girls Education, Islam, Lolita, Malala Yousafzai, Marjane Satrapi, Muslim Women, Pakistan, Persepolis, Politics, Public Education, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, The Girl Who Was Shot by the Taliban, The Washington Post, Ziauddin Yousafzai

 

Two of my co-workers in the Writing Center had a code.  I use the word code because the English language is poor and I don’t have any other word for inside reference between two people who share a friendship or relationship.  The code was simple.  B would usually complain that she was tired or anxious and didn’t feel up to going to class that day, and so she thought about going out to grab some food instead.  S, her friend, would look at her and utter one word: Malala.  Upon utterance of said word B would groan and usually say “you’re right, you’re right.”  At this point S didn’t necessary have to continue for often the code word Malala would be enough to remind B or her responsibility as a student, but on occasion she would follow the code with “what would Malala do B?  Malala wanted to go to school.”  B would usually tell S to shut the fuck up, but she would still smile, nod, and eventually go ahead and go to class.

This may at first sound like a bad parody of stereotypical white women or a sketch you might see on Amy Schumer, but my co-workers were genuine in their affection and adoration of Malala, and this affection demonstrated the influence of the woman who, while I had yet to actually read her book, I still respected tremendously for her passion and mission in life which was to help girls all across the world receive access to an education.  My little sister, who happened to be friends with B and S, which I just realized makes my entire opening sound like a bluff, would usually do nothing but sing Malala’s praises and often point to her copy of I am Malala and utter the same phrase over and over again: “you need to read that book.”  Much like people who told me that I needed to watch Breaking Bad, I trusted them and fully recognized that the book was not only worth my time but would be enormously satisfying, but for whatever reason I decided to hold off.  Hype can be a deterrent as much as it can be a help and so I waited till sometime after finishing Breaking Bad before I actually picked up Malala’s book and read it.

I’ll begin by noting that there was a pronounced lack of meth, but I suppose that was the post-afterglow of finishing Breaking Bad, and now I’ll shut the hell up about Breaking Bad and give Malala the attention she deserves.  Though you should definitely get around to watching Breaking Bad when you get the chance.

Malala Yousafzai was fifteen when she was shot in the head by a member of the Taliban.  She and a group of students were on their way to school when a squad stopped the truck, demanded to see her, and when she openly admitted to her identity she was shot.  She managed to receive proper medical care before she and her family received political asylum in England where she was given expert medical aid and from there began a new career as quite possibly the most important feminists since Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan.  Men, women, and children the world over flocked to her giving up their prayers, thoughts, money, and time so that she might become well, and in the mass rhetoric which surrounded the story of Malala an important figure was largely cut out of the picture: her father.

I Am Malala is a book about Yousafzai’s life, but I was surprised when I was reading the book to discover how much of the actual memoir was not actually about Malala but about her father Ziauddin Yousafzai.

She describes in one passage her villages reaction to The Satanic Verses and the Fatwah.

My father’s college held a heated debate in a packed room.  Many students argued that the book should be banned and burned and the fatwa upheld.  My father also saw the book as offensive to Islam but believes strongly in freedom of speech.  “First, let’s read the book and then why not respond with our own book,” he suggested.  He ended by asking in a thundering voice my grandfather would have been proud of, “Is Islam such a weak religion that it cannot tolerate a book written against it?  Not my Islam!”  (46).

This passage immediately struck me because I have just such a parent.  It’s almost laughable now that people were, and still are in some small pockets of the United States, outraged by Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.  As the series was continually published this fervor over young children performing magic in a seemingly religious-absent world only grew and book burnings were a popular spectacle on the evening news.  In my own state and county, I remember hearing whispers of this mysterious book Harry Potter, and one evening the local news even interviewed a man who spoke to a reporter honestly when he said he would refuse to let his children read the book lest they become enticed by devil worship and witchcraft.  There was passion all over Texas about Harry Potter and in the midst of the ballyhoo my mother, being the amazing woman that she is, looked at me and said, “Why don’t we actually buy the book, read it, and then decide for ourselves whether the book is evil or not?”

Like Malala, I was blessed with a rational level headed parent who taught me the most important lesson of my life, and from there every summer until The Deathly Hallows was published, my mother would buy the new Harry Potter book and read it to us.  Malala’s story is often the story of her father, for while Malala spends time narrating the details of her life, the dramas that take place between her and her school chums and family and friends, there is a great deal of attention payed to her father, specifically his efforts to build a girl’s school.

While Yousafzai’s struggles tend to occupy a significant amount of the book, Malala’s memoir is just as much a reflection on her cultures, sometimes noting the detrimental aspects it had on its people particularly women:

I am very proud to be a Pashtun, but sometimes I think out code of conduct has a lot to answer for, particularly where the treatment of women is concerned.  A woman named Shahida who worked for us ad had three small daughters told me that when she was only ten years old her father had sold her to an old man who already had a wife but wanted a younger one.  When girls disappeared it was not always because they had been married off.  (66).

She goes on to note:

We have another custom called swara by which a girl can be given to another tribe to resolve a feud.  It is officially banned but still continues.  In our village there was a widow called Soraya who married a widower from another clan which had a feud with her family.  Nobody can marry a widow without the permission of her family.  When Soraya’s family found out about the union they were furious.  They threatened the widower’s family until a Jirga of village elders was called to resolve the dispute.  The jirge decided that the widower’s family should be punished by handing over their most beautiful girl to be married to the least eligible man of the rival clan.  The boy was a good-for-nothing, so poor that the girl’s father had to pay all their expenses.  Why should a girl’s life be ruined to settle a dispute she had nothing to do with?  (67).

A fair question, though I note the irony in the sentence for in a few years Malala herself would become just such a victim, not in a local domestic dispute, but in fact a philosophical and multi-national conflict.  Since September 11^th, an event which she actually describes the perspective in her home country, the United States has undergone a profound paradigm shift in terms of foreign policy and this has influenced seemingly every aspect of society.  Looking over just a few recent contemporary events is enough to see this, though perhaps the best example is the Muhammed Cartoon contest that took place in Garland, Texas last year.  The coordinator of the events, a woman by the name of Pamella Geller, continues to defend her position and action of hosting such an event because for her it was a reaffirmation of American civil liberties, rather than a baiting action against Muslims.  I wish I could say events like this were few and far between, but since that wretched day(and even before it) this has only been the most recent and most publicized example.  It’s not uncommon to read or hear of Church gatherings in the United States where copies of the Quran are burned to mass applause.  Baiting and protests of Mosques is not uncommon, and the other day I even read of an instructional comic strip about helping people suffering from public instances of racism.  It’s telling that the young woman in the cartoon who plays the recipient of the abused is in fact a Muslim woman.  While this obvious reactionary behavior has manifested in my country, a nation that prides itself in its rhetoric of being open minded and accepting of all people, I’ve observed as well a pernicious rhetoric:

Muslim women and girls need to be saved from the despicable society and culture which persecutes them without impunity.

The Reader may object instantly, wondering if I am about to negate the testimony and actual film evidence that women in Muslim societies tend to suffer under patriarchy and bullshit sexism.  I am not.  Malala herself notes in the book that young women in her society tend to suffer greatly from fundamentalist Islam, and she’s not the only one.

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis came into my life when my little sister showed me the film Au Revoir Mes Enfants.  It’s a French film; a period piece about a boy’s school operated by priests during World War II where two young boys meet and become friends before it’s discovered that one of them is Jewish.  Before the film even began a black and white advertisement came on in which a woman was singing along to the song Eye of the Tiger in Arabic, and when the title Persepolis followed I knew that I had to see it.  The film in turn eventually led me to the graphic novel.  Persepolis as a book is not just an autobiography of a woman living during 1979, for it moves past this period into the reverberations of the war and way life changed for individual people living in Iran at this time.

Perhaps the best panel, in my estimation, is the one that explains the rise of “the veil” and Satrapi’s attitude towards it:

Like Satrapi’s memoir, the book Reading Lolita in Tehran explores this repressive environment.  I discovered this book about the same time that I found Persepolis, though to be honest, I can’t remember how that book came into my life.  All at once it was there and I was reading the book and enjoying it tremendously and not only for the fact that it gave me yet another argument to employ when defending the novel Lolita from half-assed critics.  The book is written as a kind of memoir by Azar Nafisi about a secret book club she formed with a group of students that she taught at Tehran university.  The book is divided into four main chapters with smaller sub-chapters, each main chapter is centralized around one particular author.  This division, which I note follows the same rhetorical pattern as Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, allows for Nafisi to construct her own personal narrative of the events around her while she and the group of all female students discuss the works.  The first chapter begins after the new regime of Ayatollah Khomeini has assumed power and Nafisi notes her personal reaction:

Teaching in the Islamic Republic, like any other vocation was subservient to politics and subject to arbitrary rules.  Always, the joy of teaching was marred by diversions and considerations forced on us by the regime—how well could one teach when the main concern of university officials was not the quality of one’s work but the color of one’s lips, the subversive potential of a single strand of hair?  Could one really concentrate on one’s job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Bronte because she appeared to condone adultery.  (10-11).

The idea that totalitarian repression dwells on the superficial rather than the substantial isn’t anything new and Satrapi herself presents just such a moment of this idiocy:

Both of these books provide enough first hand testimony to make the argument that fundamentalist Islam, when combined with unfettered political power, is nothing but a repressive totalitarian madhouse where murder, rape, sexism, and torture are allowed free reign, but it’s important to recognize that these elements are only one element in these women’s lives.  True they may steer the direction their lives and mundane actions take, but in the second half of Persepolis Satrapi notes that really is but one answer to this oppression of the individual:

All of these books speak to the fact that Muslim women don’t need to be “saved,” they need to be afforded opportunity to make their life whatever they want it to be.  The attitude that Westerners can “save” Muslim women from their homelands reeks of White Savior Complex and a desire to appear morally and intellectually superior, when the evidence is clear that Muslim women can stand as intellectual equals alongside Western women.

Malala herself says this outright when she writes:

But I said, “Education is education.  We should learn everything and then choose which path to follow.”  Education is neither Eastern nor Western, it is human.  (162).

Human is a nice touch there.  I wish I had written that sentence.  My admiration for Malala’s diction here is really just to point out the most important facet of I am Malala, for while the world took comfort in the fact that Malala had survived the ruthlessness of the Taliban and enjoyed telling her story to show everyone that terrorism is bad, the real woman Malala appeared in the pages she had written I came to know.

I am Malala is not just a book about damning terrorism because the book is about more than that.  It’s about demonstrating the idea that education is fundamental to the success and health of civilization.  After Malala is shot, and she describes the political drama that created a conflict in ensuring she survived, she talks about her attacker in such a way that is admirable and almost unbelievable:

I felt nothing, maybe just a bit satisfied.  “So they did it.”  My only regret was that I hadn’t had a chance to speak to them before they shot me.  Now they’d never hear what I had to say.  I didn’t even think a single bad thought about the man who shot me—I had no thoughts of revenge—I just wanted to go back to Swat.  I wanted to go home.  (282).

Revenge is rooted in impulse in the human species and so when we are slighted, offended, hurt, or damaged by others there is an initial impulse to bring harm to someone else, to validate the pain one has experienced.  That’s why Malala’s reaction to be shot in the head is almost unbelievable.  But in fact it demonstrates the very idea that courses its way through the body of this memoir and that is that education can lift people from the base impulse and remind them of their own humanity and find reason.  Education is what can alter the course of a life, and looking to my own experience I know this is just the case.  My parents reading to me every night before bed, buying me books, paying for my education; it was these gifts that helped me become the person I am.

Education also reminds me of the dangers of stereotyping.  About a year ago the graphic novel book club I’m a part of read the new Ms. Marvel comic book in which the main character was a young Muslim woman.  The series was beautifully drawn, and the characters were fun to read and learn about.  When it came time to give our opinions most everyone at the table agreed the book was charming and enjoyable, but one of my friends explained that he couldn’t enjoy it.  His argument was that the characters were Muslims, people like ISIS who were killing Americans and from there the people at the table began either to stare at the table or try to mumble under their breath.  I interrupted him, asking about the character’s costume and the scene was averted, but that moment lives on.  Terrorists like the Talbian, and ISIS, and Hezbollah, have come to be the faces of Islam rather than the exceptions, and this is conflict because this creates the idea that all Muslims are despicable repressed psychopaths.

I am Malala challenges this position.  Evil individuals will always exist in human society, and while some will seek educations and use what they learn to harm their fellow human beings, most will spurn the idea of learning because it is far easier to squeeze a trigger and kill someone.  Likewise, the survivors of evil run the similar trap of becoming the very forces they despise, for revenge, or the desire for it, is an easy impulse that can story good people.  Malala Yousafzai is an extraordinary young woman because she has faced such a force, suffered for her bravery and integrity, and written her narrative to inspire others.  Education is a powerful institution because it can revolutionize the way people live their life.

In a later passage, before her family leaves Pakistan, there is a brief moment that reveals the character of Malala:

When I heard they would be in Birmingham in two days, I had only one request.  “Bring my school bag,” I pleaded to my father.  “If you can’t go to Swat to fetch it, no matter—buy new books for me, because in March it’s my board examination.”  Of course I wanted to come first in class.  I especially wanted my physics book because physics is difficult for me, and I needed to practice numericals, as my math is not so good and they are hard for me to solve.

I thought I’d be back home by November.  (285).

There is a sweet charm in this, but there’s also room for inspiration.  Malala is a girl, not an idealistic hero, just a girl who wants to learn.  Some would try to make her into some kind of icon, and in many ways she is, but her memoir serves the function of balancing this public icon with the real living breathing young woman who is driven by a passion to discover, succeed, and learn and in turn take what she has acquired in knowledge and ensure that other young women have the same opportunity.  Too often the stories of the Middle East are tragedies, but in the case of I am Malala, there is a narrative of hope and determination.

A book of this caliber is sure to leave its mark on society.  B. and S. being my first and final example it’s clear already that I am Malala has done just that.

 

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

I’ve mentioned Breaking Bad throughout this essay but only because it became a running gag and also because I really haven’t seen a television show that has left me so satisfied apart maybe from Stranger Things on Netflix.  My constant reference to it is in some small way a subconscious effort to indicate that Malala’s book is tied to greatness.  One final Breaking Bad reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIom3LSbB0I

 

**Writer’s Note**

I like moments in which personality of people appears, rather than the ideals people want them to be.  This can manifest sometimes in character failings, and other times as little eccentricities.  Whether it’s her love of the TV show Ugly betty or her loves of books, Malala appears throughout her memoir as a real human being and one passage which I didn’t get a chance to incorporate reveals this:

I liked doing my hair in different styles and would spend ages in the bathroom in front of the mirror trying out looks I had seen in movies.  Until I was eight or nine my mother used to cut my hair short like my brothers’ because of lice and also make it easier to wash and brush, as it would get messed up under my shawl.  But finally, I had persuaded her to let me grow it to my shoulders.  Unlike Moniba’s, which is straight, my hair is wavy, and I liked to twist it into curls or tie it into plaits.  “What are you doing in there pisho? my mother would shout.  “Out guests need the bathroom and everyone is having to wait for you.”  (145).

 

 

***Writer’s Note***

While I was touching up this essay I found this article from The Washington Post about I Am Malala.  Hope you enjoy:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2015/10/08/what-were-reading-i-am-malala/