Politics and Those Confederate Statues

  

Peace and Justice members of "the reality-based community" should take very seriously the title in "The Plum" line article in THE WASHINGTON POST for 17 August 2017, "Steve Bannon: Post-Charlottesville racial strife is a political winner for Trump" and the finding that on removing Confederate monuments, "A poll released Wednesday suggests that, on this at least, Americans generally agree with Trump. The survey from NPR, PBS NewsHour and Marist found that 62 percent of Americans think that memorials to Confederate leaders should remain in place, while a bit over a quarter of the population thinks they should be removed. Among Democrats, that percentage is lower, but even on the left, views are about split. Remarkably, 44 percent of black respondents said they should remain, versus 40 percent who said they should go."

Let me go full-bore pedant on this — or you can stop reading this post — and suggest thinking through the issue by starting with instances without a lot of emotional charge for most of us.

Let's start by noting that public/monumental art has been political since early antiquity. This is clearer when you add the knowledge that trying to separate religion from politics is a recent idea and WEIRD: common (only) among people(s) who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic — and, largely, also American. Ozymandias, King of Kings, knew what he was doing when he built great monuments to himself as did anyone who tore them down. Displaying icons and smashing them are both politically-charged actions, as was destroying stained-glass windows during the English Puritan Revolution or blowing up statues of the Buddha by the Taliban or destroying statues of Saddam Hussein or building them to Genghis Khan as founder of the Mongolian nation and state.

So: Would you tear down statues of Stalin and, in spite of its fame for a crucial battle in world history, rename Stalingrad whatever the hell the Russians renamed it? I would, reluctantly: by Matthew White's estimate, Stalin was responsible for 20 million human deaths. But I'd keep Leningrad Leningrad: in terms of body counts, Lenin isn't in Stalin's league. Genghis Khan and Mao, though, outdid Stalin and pretty much everyone else, depending on how much you want to blame Hitler for World War II: some 40 million apiece for Genghis Khan and Mao. Should modern Mongols cut the shit with statues to Genghis Khan and the Chinese put into museums the artistic tributes to Mao? I'd have them do so.

I'd be cautious in arguing with the Mongolians and Chinese, though, since — for one reason — I've written on and taught Christopher Marlowe's 1587 play Tamburlaine the Great, Part I: a celebration of Amir Timur (flourished ca. 1400), #9 on Matt White's "Ranking: the One Hundred Deadliest Multicides" in world history, with hero credited with the deaths of some 17 million people.

The Atlantic Slave Trade is #10 on White's list, with 16 million dead — and that's deaths, not counting the kidnapping and torture, nor the function of the trade in selling human beings into slavery.

Unlike the clear, present, and infinite danger to souls of the idolatry of statues of the Buddha or Eastern rites icons or Papist stained glass — in the doctrines of the Taliban, iconoclasts, or revolutionary Puritans — the CSA (Confederate) memorials do their work more indirectly, and are a symbolic issue, symbols serving politically potent narratives, but still symbols.

What's to be done with them — US public art celebrations of the heroes of the CSA?

I taught and would have many more people teach Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1 and Part 2. It is important that the first English blockbuster drama celebrated a serial mass murderer called "the Great." In a course in propaganda, I dealt with D. W. Griffith's THE BIRTH OF A NATION (a k a THE CLANSMAN, 1915): technical film stuff aside, it is important that people know that a seminal film mourns The Lost Cause of the Confederacy and celebrates the "invisible nation" of the Ku Klux Klan.

So I would put the movable CSA statuary in appropriate museums, where they can be contextualized and their politics made explicit. With the really big monuments, especially any of esthetic value, I just don't know. But as a practical matter, moving toward the elections of 2018 and 2020 where this issue might be prominent — Yo, decent Americans! We need to talk.

Censors to the Right of Them, Censors to the Left Volley and Thunder

      I've participated lately in some ListServ and Facebook discussions of what a professor can get into trouble for teaching nowadays, and two closely related works that came to mind were Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Stanley Kubrick's 1971 CLOCKWORK ORANGE film, at least as I taught them at conservative Miami University at Oxford (Ohio) — in John Boehner's Congressional District, alma mater for Paul Ryan — in the late 20th and very early 21st centuries.

      They are interesting works to teach.

      In my classes, the film was much more controversial than the novel even though Burgess cheerfully admits in his preface to the reprint we used that his novel is heretical in Christian terms and most of my students were pretty orthodox Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants (with a few theologically radical evangelicals thrown in). The 21-chapter British version of the novel — unlike the initial 20-chapter US edition and the film — is "Pelagian," Burgess says, claiming for human beings an essential goodness and the freedom to choose the good. St. Augustine of Hippo would not have approved, and Augustinian views on Original Sin and a variety of innate, essential depravity are orthodox in Christian tradition — and my generally pious students didn't give a rat's ass. What concerned those who disapproved were the images of sex and violence in the film, and Burgess's once damnable, burn-at-the-stake heresy was no big deal.

      As I said: interesting.

      Also interesting and highly instructive were my students' fairly typical perceptions of the sex and violence in the film.

      To start with something memorable, the Rape Scene in the film and how my students remembered the rape but sometimes forgot that this is also the Crippling Scene. Kubrick's camera pays a lot of attention to the rape of Mrs. Alexander, a woman in young middle age, but it also shows in graphic detail the beating of Mr. Alexander, a man entering a vigorous old age — until that crippling beating and being forced to watch the rape. (Adding to the trauma, Mr. Alexander tells us that the rape killed his wife, but we only have his word for that, plus the problematic trope of rape being lethal to virtuous women. We can be confident, however, that Mrs. Alexander has died.)

     My students' attenuated concern for Mr. Alexander got me asking myself for A CLOCKWORK ORANGE a question from studies of Christopher Marlowe's plays on how audience's perceive violence. So I sat down with a stopwatch and timed the on-screen violence in the film and asked my students for their estimates of how much time we got to see violence against various characters.

      One of the reasons I'd probably get into trouble teaching Kubrick's film is that I think it ethical for a critic to sit with a stopwatch and get some numbers on who on screen is messing over whom and to what degree and for how long. Period. However much in Trumpian times the Left has endorsed fact-base studies, there were academic attacks on Empiricism in the late 20th/early 21st, and I suspect some of that ill-will toward number-crunching horrors still remains.

      It depends on how you evaluate such things, but the major victim of violence in A Clockwork Orange (novel and film) is its nasty antihero, Alex. My students were surprised with this because (I would argue),
            * In the tradition of audiences going back to that of the first English theatrical blockbuster, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, my students judged violence to a large degree in terms of the victims' worth, and Alex was an attractive but still violent, dangerous, and misogynistic little shit who had it coming. Except with Tamburlaine most of the audience apparently identified with a noble superman, the serial mass murderer Tamburlaine, and not his banal victims.
            * My students sometimes didn't see violence committed by the State and other authorities as violence. I told them that the State's claim was a monopoly on legitimate violence, but that the traditional idea was to allow that violence is violence, and they didn't argue the point; still, they didn't see justified violence as violence. Alex's acts of violence were violence; the violence of State authorities against him were in some sort of unnamed limbo.
            * Etc.

      My students' attitude was something like that mocked in the 1960s with the joke, "I hate violence and them violent demonstrators. Violent people should be taken out and shot!"

      Returning to A Clockwork Orange as novel and film would be interesting nowadays for how different groups would value the value put upon freedom by the story and the question of how much freedom should be restricted to protect decent folk from young monsters like Alex and his drugs. Not to mention how much young readers should identify with decent older people as opposed to guys nearer their age, however despicable those guys — or how much old teens and 20-somethings should be on the lookout for, and push back against, youth-bashing. And it would be fascinating in terms of victims.

      US President Donald J. Trump at least claimed to be appalled by the violence of killing babies with poison gas in Syria, so he blew up property and (enemy) people with Tomahawk missiles, and then went on to use in a related battle the MOAB ordnance: a very large explosive device. Justified or not we can argue about; what I find downright fascinating is the many Americans would not see Mr. Trump's actions as violent. It's unlikely Americans generally could have a rational argument about the actions of the all-too-real Mr. Trump; it's possible we could have one about Burgess's and Kubrick's fictional Alex.

      Or not: I'm not sure one could nowadays — or at least not this off-White male "one" — could teach A Clockwork Orange; and that would be unfortunate.  

Heroes, Hubris, & Honor: Job & Tamburlaine (2 March 2014)

            I am a great admirer of Job of the Biblical Poem of Job: not so much the pious sufferer from the Prolog or the rewarded .000001-Percenter of the Epilog but the wounded lover and tragic hero of the middle of the Book.

            You can complain if you like that Job wimps out in the end, but his final lines to God are

I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees You;
therefore I despise myself,
                and repent in dust and ashes. (42.5-6)

 Not while hearing sanctimonious lies from his "Comforters," not one instant before Job sees God does he repent, and in his repentance he uses that key word of human logic, therefore.

            Job gets the Beatific Vision and sees God in the whirlwind and, within human limitations, sees the real reality of things and, in terms of that expanded vision, repents. Or, if you like, Job sees God as a putz of infinite power and "therefore" wimps out in the face of infinite intimidation.

            Still — if you've ever knuckled under to a spouse or parent or boss or drill instructor or teacher, show some respect for Job standing up as long as he does to the God he's heard about and whose power to fuck over an individual human being he has excruciatingly felt.

            Job holds fast to his integrity, and for that we should admire him greatly.

            Integrity, though, has its limitations.

            The Book of Job is ultimately a kind of divine comedy — Job is restored: happy ending — if a comedy with a significant body count and unhappy endings for Job's extended family. Still, Richard B. Sewell knew what he was doing in using Job's story to begin his study of The Vision of Tragedy and having Job a theological variation on the theme of the tragic hero.

            Tragic heroes frequently have integrity up the whazoo, and moralist drama critics have accused them of Pride as a "tragic flaw."

            Maybe.

            In The Poetics, Aristotle has tragic heroes with hamartia, but that probably means a "tragic," as in really bad, mistake. But in a nicely coherent drama that mistake should flow from the protagonist's character, and that character always and necessarily takes himself or herself — Antigone, Juliet, Cleopatra — very seriously. Tragic characters' integrity, viewed theologically, is the sort of Pride of which God accuses Job: what the Catholic Church calls Superbia, the sin of Satan, numero uno of the Seven Deadly sins and root of all evils: Radix malorum superbia est.

            From a god-like point of view, such Pride is ludicrous, and it doesn't take much to push superbia, the sin that goeth before a fall, and The Fall, into dumb-ass chutzpah: the pride that goeth before a pratfall, falling on your ass, while your friends point and laugh.

            Necessarily, tragic protagonists take themselves and their lives seriously enough to be guilty of hubris: in any realistic view of things, humans are not significant. That's humans, as in our species, to say nothing of any of us individually. To paraphrase the God of Paddy Chayefsky's Gideon (1961): Hey, you weren't here ten million years ago; you won't be here ten million years from now; what's the big deal with your dying now?

            Outside of "The Vision of Tragedy," tragic protagonists are guilty of sinful superbia or comic chutzpah; if the tragedy is working, though, we identify with the tragic protagonist and feel his — usually his — hubris as central to human dignity or self respect, while at the same time keeping our distance and viewing the character somewhat objectively. That is an actor up there on stage, the object of our vision and hearing, plus we know not to identify too much: in most tragedies there's going to be blood on the stage pretty soon — gore brings in the crowds — and a fair amount of that blood will probably come from the protagonist.

            But not always: and one hulking exception leads me into a problem with integrity as demonstrated by the first superstar, superhero of the English Renaissance stage — Ta Da! — Tamburlaine the Great, as depicted by that most excellent of English playwrights ca. 1590, Christopher Marlowe. Or, as the title page of the 1590 printing of Tamburlaine ("Deuided into two Tragicall Di∫cour∫es") put it

Tamburlaine

the Great.

Who, from a Scythian Shephearde,

by his rare and woonderfull Conqueƒts,

became a most puissant and migh-

tye Monarque,

And (for his tyranny, and terrour in

Warre) was tearmed,

The Scourge of God.

Actually, Tamburlaine is only one "Tragicall Discourse," and maybe not even one. Part II is a sequel following the commercial success of Part I, and Part II does end with Tamburlaine's death, so it's sort of "tragical." But just sort of: Tamburlaine dies at the height of his conquests, fairly old for his time and profession (full-time warrior) — and dies very quickly of natural causes. Now it would have been prudent to console Tamburlaine's family with a reference to "their tragic loss," or something like that, but — come on! — his death isn't even all that sad.

            Still, the rule is "kill 'em off or marry them off" and on the Elizabethan stage plays usually moved toward an "exeunt" with a funeral march (tragedy) or pairing off to dance away — sometimes literally — to a wedding (comedy). So Part II is, that, far, tragic: It begins with a funeral and ends with a funeral. Part I, though, is, like the full Book of Job, technically a comedy, in the case of Tamburlaine 1, a romantic comedy, ending with a new and … different world, one more purely noble and promising peace, finally coalescing around a central heterosexual and fertile couple exiting to get married.

            Significant here is that the new world of most comedies is marked as more flexible than the old world: minimally, a romantic comedy is flexible enough to allow one or more formerly "blocked" couples to pair off and marry. Marlowe's Tamburlaine is minutely more flexible at the end of Tamburlaine, Part 1, but only minutely: flexibility isn't in his character; integrity is: being true to himself, true to his sense of honor.

            This is important because Tamburlaine says of himself, in what we might call «the third-person Narcissistic» that, "His honour […] consists in shedding blood / When men presume to manage arms with him" (see 5.2.407-15). Except not just men, and not necessarily armed men. Shortly before this comment on his "honour," we have seen Tamburlaine order the murders of a delegation of girls from the City of Damascus who've come out to plead with him for the city — and then order the massacre of everyone in Damascus, relenting only to spare his near-future father-in-law. And in Part II we will see Tamburlaine's first on-stage, do-it-yourself atrocity in killing his own son, Calyphas, for being AWOL from a battle (Part II, 4.2.36-54).

            Hey, martial law is martial law, and if Tamburlaine's kid could skip a battle, then everyone might skip a battle, except that in the world of Marlowe's Tamburlaine just about every male except Calyphas and a relatively minor ruler is bloodthirsty.

            More important than martial law and tradition, though, is Tamburlaine's honor as integrity and sticking to his rules. If a city submits to him on the first day he and his troops set down before it, he's satisfied "with spoil," and "refuseth blood," i.e., he just robs everybody without killing them. If they hold out to the second day, when he takes the city — and Tamburlaine always wins — "Then must his kindled wrath be quenched with blood, / Not sparing any that can manage arms"; and if the enemy hold out into the third day, "Without respect of sex, degree, or age, / He razeth all his foes with fire and sword": i.e., he kills every human in town: men, women, and children (end of 4.1).

            Tamburlaine is a test case, or a reduction to the grotesque, of one vision of tragedy, and an important one. In "Tragedy and the Common Man" (1949), Arthur Miller says, "In the tragic view the need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it is ripe for attack and examination."

            The fine Shakespeare scholar Lawrence Lerner once asked if a couple hundred years in the future some author might apply Miller's idea and write a tragedy of Adolf Hitler.

            Marlowe was writing in the 1580s; the historical Timur Lang did his thing 1370-1405, and the historical Timur ranks #9 on Matthew White's "[…] One Hundred Deadliest Multicides" in world history, with a body count of some 17 million, putting Timur just behind the Mideast slave trade, 7^th-19^th centuries, but ahead, of the Atlantic slave trade, 1452-1807. In thirty-five years, in a rampage less than two centuries before Marlowe's time, the historical Timur made himself competitive, atrocity-wise, with two of the worst, long-running crimes in human history.

            But Tamburlaine has integrity — at least in Marlowe's version — and follows his idea of honor and pursues a major ideal of honor in his time, and for much of human history: He is, after all "Tamburlaine the Great."

            His most trusted officers beg Tamburlaine not to kill his own son; Tamburlaine kills the kid before our eyes. Tamburlaine declines to rape Zenocrate, the captured daughter of a Sultan, and honorably woos her and pledges himself to her — but he won't go against his customs and spare her city in spite of her pleas. He spares her father, finally, and ends Part I with a promise of peace and fertility, but the incredible climax of that play, not all that long before the conclusion, is the death in battle of Zenocrate's now-former fiancé and the massacre of the inhabitants of Damascus.

            Desiring to teach two works I really like, and perhaps too fond of alliteration, I taught together Tamburlaine and The Terminator (1984) for their examination of focus of purpose and just how we should define heroism and "manly men doing manly things." In Terminator, the ultimate macho-man turns out not to be not a man at all but a machine; Marlowe's Tamburlaine, at least in Part I, starts out and remains — our hero is nothing if not consistent — and increasingly reveals himself as a superman. Tamburlaine whups the asses of, as in kills, all the competing Alpha-, Beta-, and Gamma-males, and, since he's anachronistically a Renaissance superman, he's also a lover.

            The climax of Part I features that Massacre at Damascus, but the slaughter is off-stage. What is on-stage is Tamburlaine's first soliloquy, his "apostrophe" — here, a hymn of praise — to his beloved "divine Zenocrate."

            I used to ask my students what, if anything, they'd use for "noises off" while Tamburlaine was pronouncing his arguably fulsome praise of Zenocrate in what was, unarguably, some of the most impressive poetry in English up to that moment. Some blood-chilling screams from the dying, raped, and/or maimed might undermine Tamburlaine's eloquence here, but the speech doesn't have to be played that way, and it's highly unlikely that it was.

                  Tamburlaine said his "customs are as peremptory / As wrathful planets, death, or destiny" (5.2.64-65). If "A lie is worse than murder," as the Gentleman's Code used to teach, then wouldn't Tamburlaine be right to murder rather than break his word? Including murder every living thing — future father-in-law excepted — in Damascus? Tamburlaine is a modern, complete hero so a fighter and a lover, but in case of a conflict between the two roles — no contest: the implacable fighter wins.

            Tamburlaine Part I was enough of a hit to justify a sequel, as was The Terminator; and it is instructive that it was Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 that went into US pop culture and made Schwarzenegger a star, not Michael Biehn's human, humane, and humanistic Kyle Reese. (Remember Michael Biehn? He's still getting work, and he's rumored to have made good money; Arnold Schwarzenegger went on to marry a Kennedy, become governor of the State of California, and made a shitload of money.) In spite of the obvious intentions of James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, T-800 steals the show in The Terminator, and the T-800 "Macho Creed" version of heroism and perversion of integrity is the take-away message from the film for a fair number of viewers, at least those of the seriously-dense, immature male persuasion.

            At least in Part I, I'm sure Christopher Marlowe wants us to admire Tamburlaine, and there is something admirable about the spirit of Tamburlaine in Part II when he defies the god — or God — he thinks is striking him down.

            Tamburlaine is admirable, sort of, in not going gently into death, but he's delusional in thinking his death is some sort of cosmic event. All men are mortal; Tamburlaine is a man — deal with it, "T".

            I am a great admirer of Job and the principle of integrity: of consistency and honesty, being true to oneself and possessing a keen sense of honor. But a lie is not worse than murder; Kyle Reese and (more so) Sarah Connor are the heroes and proper humans of Terminator; and Tamburlaine is a macho asshole on a world-historical scale, but still a macho asshole. In his integrity and honor Tamburlaine can be wondered at, even admired — but admired the way I admire a great white shark. Except that even the shark that rips me apart is innocent and relatively harmless; the Timur Lang of history was phenomenally dangerous and, after his fashion, Marlowe's Tamburlaine is dangerous and, finally, by the end of Part II, ridiculous.


======================
Update (from a post by the BBC):

          Since independence in 1991 Uzbekistan has been restoring the legacy of its great 14th Century conqueror Tamerlane the Great - Amir Timur.
The current Uzbek leadership has eradicated most of the traces of the former Soviet Union's domination.
          Invoking the Timurid spirit in a televised address to the nation earlier this year, President Islam Karimov said: "You are descendants of a great people - you have in your hands the might of Tamerlane".

The Mongolian leadership has been rehabilitating Temujin, "The Great Khan" (1206-27), Timur's model. Matthew White estimates Genghis Khan's body count at 40 million, tying him with Mao Zedong (1949-76) for the second biggest mass slaughter in human history, exceeded only by World War II (66 million). Given the relative populations, Genghis Khan is likely the greatest mass killer in recorded human history, and Tamburlaine the Great competitive for number 2. To repeat a kind of cliché of English Renaissance political thought — you can find it in Shakespeare's Richard II — "Great" is different from "good."