Sentiment and, and vs. Morality: In Praise of the Triage Nurse

WORKING

            If you have to have your dissertation topic “anticipated,” it’s nice if it’s done by a really classic old essay; maybe not so nice if it’s anticipated rather casually as a kind of side-chapter in a book in, mostly, another field. In any event, my original topic for a dissertation in English was on “The Fool in King Lear,” which is more or less the title of a chapter in a classic work on Fools generally, by the major scholar, Enid Welsford, in 1935.

            Still, the Fool in Lear remained the heart of my dissertation, and the upshot of my reading of Lear was that it’s a rigorously, almost militantly logical play coming to the sentimental conclusion that human morality and ethics rest in compassion, in suffering — if necessary — with other people, in learning to see the world “feelingly.” 

            So I argued in 1970-71, so I still believe about King Lear and about the real world. If God is dead or never existed or doesn’t get involved much in human affairs; or if God is a hard-ass Christian God who’ll damn you to eternal Hell for getting your theology wrong — and definitely if you're a heathen like all the people in the play — or a Calvinist God who’ll save or damn you as He damn well pleases. Or if “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods./ They kill us for their sport”. If Nature is not a compassionate Mother Goddess but indifferent, or favoring as fittest the strongest and most cruel; if social ranks and law and rules and customs, if respect for old age and condemnation of cruelty are just human conventions and unreliable — If the world is pretty much as a naturalistic, materialistic, thoroughly modern vision sees it; then pity exists if people feel it; morality, too, exists only if its restraints are felt.

            That’s not very respectable philosophy — it’s “Intuitionism” or something equally disreputable — but that sort of stress on feeling (with) is one logical reaction if you want to drop a moral God and maintain a modern but moral approach to life. It’s a position, though, that nowadays, must be balanced.

            The first Age of Sentiment in the West was roughly 18^thcentury, between the Enlightenment and the Romantics; we live in a second one. «Trust your feelings, Luke» does not actually occur in the STAR WARS saga, at least not that I can find on line, but it’s a good statement of the “ethos” of the movies, and of our era.

            I’m suspicious of the idea, starting with me and some of my feelings but going on to more general and ultimately appalling possibilities: “The devout,” Eric Hoffer asserted in 1951, “are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not their minds. […]Rudolph Hess, when swearing in the entire Nazi party in 1934, exhorted his hearers: ‘Do not seek Adolph Hitler with your brains; all of you will find him with the strength of your hearts’” (The True Believer §57). And closer to home and far less sensationally, Barry Goldwater campaigned in 1964 on the slogan "In your heart, you know he's right" — and Goldwater scared me enough that I worked on the local campaign for Lyndon Johnson, a man I didn’t really trust. 

 (Take away his crudeness, and you can get a tragic figure out of LBJ: serial mass murder can go with a tragedy — Macbeth — but not, the folklore has it, humiliating high-ranking underlings by making them confer with him while he took a shit, or showing his penis and asking if Ho Chi Minh had a dick like that.)

            Now an emergency-room nurse once told me to fill out a form when I was in there for what turned out to be bilateral corneal abrasion — the top layer of cells ripped off of my corneas by my contact lenses — and couldn’t open my eyes without severe pain (the cops had given me a lift to the hospital); so I know this can go too far. Still, my most-excellent introduction to an ethical imperative to suppress feelings was when I regularly stopped by the emergency room at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago.

            In college, I was a summer worker at Reese in the Microbiology Department, and being low-person in seniority I got the job of walking a route in the hospital first thing in the morning and collecting blood-agar plates from various other departments, including my first stop, the ER.

            There had to be some exceptions, but there was remarkable consistency: Every Monday, there’d be a trail of blood leading to the ER, and most days there was a cop car in front. And I’d walk in, and wait while the receptionist-nurse talked to a couple of parents trying to suppress hysteria and getting “Father’s Name / Mother’s Name / Address …” and with barely looking up and not missing a beat motioning with her head at the keys hung behind her. I’d get the keys and unlock the small refrigerator where they kept the narcotics and the petri dishes, and I’d pick up whatever needed to be picked up and drop off new plates as needed.

            And I’d go out, and replace the keys, with the receptionist still not missing any beats, watching me to be sure I replaced the keys and hadn't stolen any narcotics, and nodding at me her thanks. 

            She did that every day, and the folklore was that ER nurses got terminally bored with just about every other job at the hospital. Anyway, I got to watch the receptionist carefully and every day got glimpses of the work of the rest of the staff and later in life learned more.

            In I and Thou, Martin Buber celebrates the “encounter” and the I-You relationship; but our usual interaction with the world and our fellow beings is I-It. And part of my take-away from the book is that it is the potential for an I-Thou relationship that is crucial and not to get too hung up if most of my interactions with people are just, well, interactions, transactional. Later this got clarified when my relationship with bank clerks got usually replaced by my relationship with ATMs. Earlier, and relevant here, was coming to understand that for the ER personnel especially, but many medical people, the I-Thou potential was indeed crucial, but more immediately important was the ability to tamp down feeling and deal with injured people, often people in great distress, dispassionately: I-It. 

            This is very clear with the Triage nurse and what we can call “Triage situations” — which you should do your best to avoid and to try to prevent. However, in a Triage situation, there’s an ethical imperative to perform Triage: roughly, to establish priorities of treatment by dividing the incoming wounded, injured or whatever into those likely to die no matter what care they receive; those likely to live even if not treated or barely treated; and “Those for whom immediate care might make a positive difference in outcome” (to lift a phrase from the linked Wikipedia article). If resources are limited, this is definitely not “Women and children first” or any other sentimental association: a strong man who might live with treatment gets preference over a child whose injuries could break your heart, but are going to be soon fatal. If you’ve got morphine or something more modern, you shoot the kid up and move on.

            A “Triage situation” burned into my memory just reading a report years ago concerned a UNESCO or similar group responding to a famine and having to deal with a starving village. The relief workers were doing “Women and children first” until the young men of the village confronted them and told them to give the food to them and to young women: they’d make more babies later. Some self-preservation was involved here for the relief workers (many of the young men were armed), but they decided to give the food to the strongest of the young and to the strongest of the skilled elders and village leaders. In that desperate situation, the best they could do was to save the village as a functioning social unit, and the young children could indeed be replaced. 

            As I said, Lesson One: Try to prevent “Triage situations.” When in one, however, the ethical duty is to choose the least evil and maybe least downright horrific choice, while recognizing that choosing the lesser of two or least of several evils is still evil — and that failure to choose or refusal to choose is also a choice.

            And in such extreme contexts, «Trust your feelings, Luke» or «Following your heart» could lead to terrible, immoral choices.

            Sometimes also in less extreme situations. 

            I’m confident if you’ve gotten this far in the blog, you’re way ahead of me on this: The ideal, maybe of course, is someone like the character Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear, who is compassionate and strong and rational for as long as reason can work. 

            On the way to such an ideal, though, we need to first keep in mind that King Lear is a play, make-believe, and relevant for my point here reconsider the soft spot in the American heart and head for the person of correct feelings.

            So look, when a great politician like Bill Clinton says, “I feel your pain,” tell him, thanks for the effort, but if you felt all of our pain it would destroy you, and that now that he’s considered our pain enough to throw out a properly sensitive comment what does he intend to do for us? 

            Or consider this thought experiment on sensitivity and feelings’ variation: attitudes. Politician Boll Weevil tells you that he don’t (sic) much like Colored folk, but his family owned a number and he and the rest of White America have inherited wealth stolen from slaves. “Guilt ain’t inherited,” he says, “but the loot is; and we who are recipients of stolen goods have to discuss how we’re going to make restitution.” He doesn’t much like African-Americans, but he wants to discuss what would be the most rational and ethical way to do the honorable thing and pay reparations. Politician Tear Duct — and as a male writer I’ll make both my stereotypes male — politician Tear Duct just loves members of the African Diaspora, and loves and likes and respects them/you so much he won’t insult you with re-establishing condescending, dependent, subordinate, subaltern relationships … and no way is he going to discuss reparations.

            Most of us have problems dealing with snobs who dislike us, but if Boll Weevil’s sense of family and national — hell, even racial — honor gets him to start negotiating reparations, support him and vote for him even if he’s not feeling your pain and has no intention of having a beer with you, ever. 

            Boll Weevil is not trusting his feelings, and if you dislike him, feel that, treasure your dislike, and deal with him if, when, and as long as it’s to your advantage to do so.

            Ursula K. Le Guin has a political saying on a planet nicknamed Winter that would translate into our terms as “You don’t have to be lovers to haul a sled together.” And sometimes you — I, we — can form effective coalitions with people you dislike and who may really dislike you. 

            So have feelings, Luke, and consider them and be capable of caring relationships. Be compassionate and sensitive. But get into the habit of critical thinking and hard-headed, sometimes hard-hearted ethics. That paradoxical injunction by the Prophet Micah (6.8) — that ethical parallel to the paradox of “Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!”: it’s like that. “Do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly”: combine logic with compassion and have the humility to understand that you’re dealing with contradictions much of the time, and there’s really no right answer here.

            But in our time, another age of passion, let’s stress that reason and logic. 

Like Lives, Words Matter (And — in non-Racial Contexts — Some More than Others)

In our local newspaper, The Ventura County Star for 18 September 2018, there was what turned out to be a nice letter to the editor calling for people to help other people, with the title (possibly requested by the letter-writer) and final line "All Life Matters."

There's a problem with that line other than its subtext if applied to the US politics of race.

A snarky but important comment goes, "Don't say 'All life is sacred' while eating a hamburger," to which I add "Or a carrot." The great mass of life on Earth, the dominant forms of life through the history of life on this planet have been microbial: what are currently called archaea and bacteria; and if bacterial life is sacred, in the time I worked in microbiology labs, I was a mass murderer.

I don't feel guilty about the billions of bacteria I killed; I do feel some guilt about the rats, dogs, and other mammals I killed, and that is one of the reasons I don't eat mammal meat.

Even if you're a scrupulous practitioner of Jainism or a rigorous Vegan, your immune system kills other organisms, and most of us squash cockroaches, spray mosquitoes, spritz disinfectants, gargle mouth wash that "kills bacteria on contact," and eat organisms more closely related to us than insects and bugs, and/or, with octopuses, arguably of high intelligence (squid I guess I can eat).

When people say "life is sacred" they usually mean to say "human life is sacred," and they really do need to go to the trouble to add the two syllables of "human" or prepare to argue for a definition of "life" that excludes so much that is clearly alive. And they might do better to make that, "Human life is sacred, and all life should be respected, even when we kill." (Peoples who ask an animal’s forgiveness before killing, or recite a blessing implying that even culturally permitted or valued killing is in some way problematic and needs sanction — may be on to something.)

Words matter, and some more than others. To use some key words and say that "There’s a death in every abortion" is correct. There’s also a death with every hamburger you prepare or carrot pulled from the ground and eaten. The question is what’s being killed and from there its or his or her ethical status and from there the status of that organism under the law. "Abortion is murder," always and necessarily, if, but only if, we’re dealing with human beings from the zygote (fertilized egg) through the stages of a developing embryo to a fetus and then on to a human being with "the breath of life." Personally, I have trouble seeing a single-cell organism as human or even a ball of human cells; potentially human, yes, and a human individual — with "monozygotic siblings" (so-called identical twins and triplets and all) as a limiting case on individual, but not a contradiction. ("Identical" twins aren’t literally identical.)

It may turn out that on abortion and related issues we American would do best to remain vague and contradictory and muddle through with muddled reasoning. Maybe. That hasn’t worked too well so far, though at least we haven’t gotten resorted to heavy weaponry yet. We might try clarity. 

Words matter, and some matter a great deal: "human being"/"person under the law," life are among those that matter a lot. In America, we fought a Civil War to recognize that Black people are fully human and as much as anyone full citizens under the law.

Red-Teaming & Rhetoric (and Arguments Like that on Abortion)

Apropos of little — for a long time it was and apparently remains conventional for US forces in war-games, at least of the table-top varieties, to be the Blue Team and the opponents the Red Team. So there's the handy expression and concept, "red-teaming it": for working out strategies from the point of view of one's opponent(s). Sort of "walk a mile in his shoes," but maybe while heavily armed. 

We asked students to do something similar when writing argument papers in Rhet 101, when they got to the "Refutation" part of the argument and needed to respond to "obvious objections." Well, "obvious to whom?" and "how obvious?" (you don't want to raise objections that are just silly — or are pretty powerful, but easily overlooked).

More Americans need more experience "red-teaming" (also reading more literature and "mindful" game-playing) and working through the logic of situations, including logic using premises we don't share, even premises we abhor.

For one thing, we'd get fewer references to "senseless violence" when the mayhem is probably evil but is, if anything, too logical. The leadership of your rebel army wants peace talks with the Imperial government, and your subgroup doesn't? Some "naked infants spitted upon pikes" from a nursery for the kids of government officials will stop those talks. Fast. And invite reprisals that will keep the war going strong for months to come. You believe that human beings are essentially a human soul, that each soul is of infinite value, and that your job as an agent of the Inquisition of Holy Mother Church is to save souls by any means necessary? Then effective means up to an including the destruction of the world — mere  finite matter — can be justified, and the torture of a heretic arguably an act of love. 

We'd also get "logical" being used less as a kind of Vulcan compliment word and get it back to a neutral meaning. «All men are green; Socrates was a man; therefore Socrates was green» — is logical but you can safely bet untrue. 

Being able to "red-team" an argument is even more important when we're not talking about enemies but just opponents on some political issues who might be our allies on others. It's a way to learn (to use another old expression) "where they're coming from" and understand the logic of their arguments — even when they might not understand the logic because, like most of us, most of the time, they haven't worked through "where they're coming from" and how the hell they got to where they are, taking positions that look obvious to them and — in bad cases — just "senseless" to you.

So let's get to an argument where we need such thinking 'cause currently it keeps going around in circles, when it doesn't "spiral out of control." Abortion.

Consider some descendants of an Inquisitor and of a rebel willing to make good on a government terror threat — the line on spitted infants is from that " mirror of all Christian kings" (II.Cho.6), Shakespeare's Henry V — and how they might be arguing.

One, and it might be either, sees humans as essentially a soul, with a human soul entering matter at the moment a human child is conceived. So a human zygote — a fertilized human egg — is essentially a soul to be saved or damned, a soul of infinite value, and as yet unbaptized and unborn the first time, let alone "born again." (I'm conflating some belief systems here, but "'good enough' is good enough.") To kill intentionally that zygote, embryo, fetus, and, eventually, soon-to-be-born child is murder to start with plus, far worse, damning an innocent soul perhaps to limbo or, perhaps, "the easiest room in hell," as the estimable Rev. Mr. Michael Wigglesworth puts it in his "Day of Doom" (see lines 345-60, or don't; even if you agree with the theology, it's a really, really, really awful poem). 

The other can cite the doctrine of the sovereignty of free people over their bodies and the right of women not to have to go through a pregnancy they don't want. And go on to cite how enforced pregnancy has fit into the history of men keeping women unfree. 

Now the pro-choice person here can say s/he doesn't believe in souls, and the anti-abortion person can argue s/he accepts the history but that the emphatically finite Earthly rights of pregnant women are outweighed by the right to life — not just physical life, but a chance at "life eternal." 

And the figurative "game" — the argument — doesn't really even get started. In a minimum of two games, there are two winners in their own terms, and nothing has gotten settled.

"Red-teaming" the abortion argument is important to show both logical, hence "extreme," sides how serious and seriously dangerous the abortion argument is. 

Many pro-choice people might just say, and will say if pressed, "Well, we don't believe in souls and ensoulment and all that." Now red-team it. If humans are just meat, what then? If there's no problem killing a zygote or embryo or even a fetus, when does the problem enter in? It's a leap into the absurd to believe in a God and a God moreover who cares — in the midst of a massive universe — cares about human beings, period; but in that objective view of things it's just an assertion contrary to fact (as in, probably, "a lie") that the human species, as meat, has any significant value, let alone any individual human being. 

To which the pro-choice person can say, "Well, I believe in human value; I feel the value of the child in my arms; I sense it when I talk to people" and, with that confession of faith — that absurd leap of faith if you know humans and our history — there may be a reduction of contempt for one's opponent who starts with another leap of faith; and reductions of contempt are frequently useful.

And for the anti-abortion person to be "pro human life," with human value and dignity — that person must think through the situations of individual women forced to have babies they don't want, and the history of women kept in subjugation. 

And where do we go from there?

And then, I suggest, from there we think through what happens if that damn Red Team and our fine and pure Blue Team press our points to a philosophically pure, radically, essentially, totally-pure pure conclusion. What should be done with people who'd continue the millennia-long persecution of women — who'd enslave women to the making of babies? What should be done with murderers of infants and souls? 

Shall we, say, fight to the death? Or exhaustion of resources? 

There is precedent.

Let he who is without sin, she who is most rigorous, cast the first molotov cocktail.

There are lots of precedents.

My own suggestion is for backing off: agree that maybe literal fighting has never been such a great idea, and a really bad one given the current range and availability of weapons. My own suggestion is for pragmatic, messy, political thinking: sometimes in the manner of Machiavelli, sometimes in the manner of the compassionate, practical saint or holy fool. 

Eventually, we can get a "technological quick fix" for the abortion issue. Our fairly near descendants can declare a human embryo a person under the law from implantation on — and remove the embryo to storage and, in another "eventually," the womb of a woman who wants a baby. Or, eventually, an artificial womb. Such actions would be too expensive to be done frequently, so we should do what we should be doing anyway — the Church gets the nature part of "Natural Law" wrong here — and coming up with really effective contraception: i.e., implants or whatever so that women and girls, men and boys are sterile until they desire children. Until then: working full-tilt on a male contraceptive, on making contraception readily available, and, starting, say, ten years ago, inventive and shameless "Wrap that Willy!" campaigns to encourage condom use.

The logically and morally rigorous probably can't go along, but the rest of us can do fairly well seeing things from the points of view of others. And since we probably can't exterminate our opponents and damn well shouldn't try; since even as we wouldn't like to be silenced, we shouldn't even try to silence others ... Well, we can muddle through on our disagreements, and agree and cooperate where we can. 

As I said, it's messy, but necessary for that social life, civilization experiment thing.  

America Needs More A**holes Like Me (3 March 2013)

      I shall assert, with all due modesty, that America, perhaps the world, needs more assholes like me.

     I will now clarify that assertion.

     First, I cast no aspersions upon the anus, neither that of humans nor more generally. The anus in itself is an innocent orifice, of great importance in evolutionary history and to be appreciated by all of us organisms organized around a digestive tube.

     Second, America and the planet do not need assholes not like me, for example and especially macho assholes. Nor does the world need more assholes like me in my curmudgeon aspect (with curmudgeons as aged or, to be generous, vintage assholes). As Boomers move into the twilight years, America will undoubtedly have more than enough curmudgeons — at least until younger people realize how much their elders have messed them over with resource depletion, debt, environmental degradation, and transferring money from them to us, and we get a crash in the curmudgeon population when we're recycled as Soylent Grey.™

     No, what we need more of is me as an inner-directed person strong on integrity, and willing to be obnoxious in the process. We need more people like me in my mode of (arguably) a narcissistic, insensitive asshole.

     Actually, I care a lot about what people think of me; but at 5'2" tall (157.48 cm), the initial reaction I'm going to get from most Americans is what I experience as a mild, casual contempt: disregard. They won't actively dislike me — probably — before I open my mouth, but they will kind of ignore me. (I have, after all, needed to call out "Hey, I exist!" on more than one occasion.)

     After I open my mouth, then people can dislike me on more solid grounds.

     Anyway, I overcompensate a lot and tend to be inner-directed, which is a very complimentary way of talking about someone who does what he (usually he) thinks is right without caring a whole lot what other people think or will react.

     Let's start with a harmless example from a simulation game, a variation on "The Prisoners' Dilemma."

     In the variation I played, the prisoners got to talk to each other, and the simulation situation was this: Pairs of prisoners have been arrested; the charges were not revealed to us and would not be revealed — I asked; if both prisoners remained silent, there was a chance we'd both be freed, eventually; but there was a better chance that we'd go to jail for a year. If one simulated prisoner ratted out the other, saying the other was guilty … of something — the accused prisoner would go to jail for at least X years (with X significantly greater than 1), and the betraying prisoner would go free. If each ratted out the other, we'd both go to jail for Y years.

     I didn't pay much attention to those "X" and "Y" details because I, of course, remained true to my fellow prisoner.

     My fellow prisoner — a professor in the Business School if I recall correctly — ratted me out consistently. He betrayed me even after I pointed out to him the Kafkaesque situation we were in — not even told the charges! —and how all we had to depend on was loyalty and integrity.

     Every time, I remained loyal, and he betrayed me.

     Now, if I had my brain in higher gear, on the third or fourth repetition I'd have interrupted the script by telling the game-runners that my fellow prisoner couldn't talk to them because he'd died mysteriously overnight from blood loss and trauma when someone pushed a shiv several times into his ratfink guts.

     Actually, I think that a lot of simulation games and psychology experiments should have their scripts disrupted. E.g., if you know the great Stanley Milgram "shock" experiments on obedience to authority — someone should have snuck a shill into the pool of test subjects, and have the shill blithely deliver all the electric shocks to the supposed victim in the next room, finally saying to the "Experimenter," something like, "Why, why, I've killed him; and you're the only witness …."

     But that's going off on a tangent, though an instructive one for my point.

     At least in a game, a simulation like "The Prisoner's Dilemma," I'm going to stick to my integrity and not allow the actions or probable actions and reactions of another player to determine my behavior.

     It's a control thing.

     I'm not a cynical asshole — although I was introduced to my adviser at Cornell as "a cynical little bastard from Chicago" — I'm not lower-case cynical but try to be something of an upper-case Cynic, with some of the Stoic and the "Job-ic" (as in the Biblical Book of Job) thrown in.
     "What do I have control over?" such people asked; and the answer is "my behavior": even when told, possibly correctly, "Agree with God and be at peace," Job insists "till I die I will not put away my integrity […]. / I hold fast my righteousness and will not let it go […]" (22.21, 27.5-6).

     Capital "C" Cynics say, "Virtue is its own reward" 'cause virtue is not likely to get any other reward — as Job learns, certainly not inevitably get rewarded; but all we have is our integrity and should hold onto it up to, if not including, being told off by God, personally, face-to-face (Job 31, 37 f.).

     So, okay, I'm a wannabe capital "C" Cynical little bastard from Chicago who can be damnably self-righteous.

     And we need more people like me; not a lot more, but more.

     When people sneer at my recycling, they can say, correctly, that I may feel good about recycling but it doesn't do much for the environment.

     And I can say back, "Screw you! I'm following Kant's 'Categorical Imperative' and acting so the principle of my action — here, preserving the environment, responsible citizenship — can be a law for all people. And if nobody else goes along, that's too bad for the environment and for the younger among that 'nobody else,' but screw them, too."

     In other modes and moods, I care a lot about influencing others and about consequences, but in inner-directed, Cynical asshole mode, I don't.

     I write letters to the editor that I know few people will read — and I can look up hard numbers on how few people have read my blogs. I continue to write, but in part in the manner of the Hebrew Prophets or satirists. I.e., I write such things mostly because I have to vent the words and partly because of an archaic belief that if the Word "goes forth" (as a mashal) it will do some work in the world. Similarly, as a teacher I strongly encouraged my students to read my comments and revise their papers, but I suspected from the beginning and was damn sure after a few years that many, perhaps most, of my comments were ignored. I continued to write comments: critique is part of teaching, teaching was my job, "teacher" was in large part who I was and remains a significant part of who I am.

     Push varieties of such "inner-direction" too far, and one gets to sociopath, but the mode is useful for avoiding "group think," at least when "group think" is more like "group feel."
     Feelings are important; empathy is central to responsible morality. Still, sentimentality is not — emphatically not — compassion, and sentimentality can get in the way of ethics; too much squishy feeling for others can stop you from doing the right thing.

     Obviously with squeamishness if, for example, we're hiking together and you get bit by a rattlesnake and I'm too sensitive to cut into the wound and way to fastidious to try to suck out the poison. Not so obviously, consider a scenario where you're an emergency-room nurse in the midst of a major and wide-spread disaster. If that's your assignment, you had better be willing to perform triage on incoming wounded. And as an effective and ethical triage nurse you have to be willing to condemn a probably mortally wounded cute little girl to certain death, if limited resources could be directed to probably saving a severely-wounded, ugly, adult male.

     Indeed, there's a story about emergency food-aid workers in a village who acquiesced to the demands of the village's armed men that they and their starving wives and girlfriends should be given the very limited amount of food available rather than giving it to the young children and infants. "We'll make more babies," the adults said. The doctrine of "Save the Children" and "Women and Children First" might have the aid worker fight to the death against the armed men. The insensitive asshole view might defend the workers from a charge of mere cowardice by noting that the best of a bad situation might be acting to save the village, not individuals, and allowing as legitimate here the adults' argument that, indeed, the younger the children the more quickly they can be replaced, and the weaker the young victims the more likely they would be to die even if fed.

     (For a quick aside I'll supply an infallible law of ethics: Thou shalt strive with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might to minimize the instances in the world where the dilemmas are brutal and triage becomes an ethical imperative.)

     Quite unobviously but more relevantly for most of us, we need more cold-blooded, cold-eyed assholes like me as citizens and politicians: as decision-makers who ask to see the numbers before getting carried away by pathetic images and stories about victims of Disease of the Month or the Disaster of the Week.

     Breast cancer and prostate cancer are horrible diseases and have afflicted family and friends of mine, prostate cancer killing a favorite uncle, and a close friend; but breast and prostate cancer are primarily diseases of the old, and we should refrain from unnecessarily scaring young people about such cancers and putting more resources into combatting obesity, diabetes, and asthma, plus putting more money into foreign aid to combat malaria and enteric diseases, and finally stamp out polio. (And if you seriously want to decrease "excess mortality," a few bucks more invested in anti-smoking campaigns would be money well spent.)

     Kids' getting murdered at school is horrific, but rare. Concern and sensible precautions are appropriate, but we need more assholes (like me) to stress that schools are very safe places for kids and should be made less, not more, like prisons. If SOMETHING MUST BE DONE about school shootings — and this is an imperative regardless of the numbers — it should be SOMETHING involving minor Second Amendment sacrifices by adults, not placing more restrictions on kids. A Sarah-Connor style pump-action shotgun (and a heavy door) should be all even the most nervous grownups need for home defense, and really serious shooters really ought to stick to bolt-action rifles for the personal touch appropriate for civilian weapons.

     Beyond that, as with terrorists on airplanes, we need more non-macho but also non-neutered, nasty folk to say that groups of grownups should have the adrenals and gonads to rush a shooter and bring him down, even if that means some of us will die.

     We're all supposed to do the right thing, and kids shouldn't have to take classes in an armed camp because American adults have timidity issues.

     (For another solid rule to follow no matter what others are doing: Don't allow kids to die unless it's really, really, clearly the least bad alternative.)

     I've grown impatient — feeling kind of disgusted — with an American culture where feelings get in the way of moral judgment, starting with the emotion of fear. Americans are afraid of crime and afraid for their kids and occasionally terrified by rare horrors from obscure diseases to shark attacks. And fearful people do bad things, as is clear from America's overcrowded, budget-busting prisons to dangerous arguments for encouraging fire-fights in schools to more dangerous campaigns against vaccinations.

     Come on people, feel less, think more. Follow the crowd only if they're going some place sensible. Hold fast to your integrity.


     A lot of people you know may think you're acting like an asshole, but odds are you'll be a useful asshole.

My Favorite Anti-Hero: Jonah (25 July 2013)

         My favorite anti-hero is Jonah, "the son of Amittai," the title character in the one comic book in the Bible. Now, in its full-scale historical sweep, the Christian Bible is a "Divine Comedy" of a rather bloody sort: the tragedy of The Fall of Man leading through an eventful but largely sad and violent history of humankind to the Incarnation and Sacrifice by torture of the Son of God, then moving on the rebirth of the Resurrection and then, for a conclusion, "a new and better world coalescing around a central couple" of Christ in glory, and the saved — the Church, the Bride of Christ — at the end of The Book of Revelation. 

  But looking at the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is getting technical, and technical in the fairly limited sense of Rich Erlich's correcting Northrop Frye's chemical imagery in talking about the conclusion of a comedy (in Anatomy of Criticism, 1954). So I'm using a technical usage of comedy with the Christian Bible and one I've applied to a pretty vast narrative arc — covering human history, as Bible Christians see it — and getting me into dangerous territory: the prejudice against comedy is sufficient that many English-speakers habitually contrast "comic" with "serious," as if you can't have serious comedy; and a fair number of Christians get pissed off if you tell them they have a comic religion. Many of them were taught in school that Dante Alighieri ca. 1302 called his major work La Commédia, with the Divina added later, but that doesn't stop them from seeing "comic" as a put-down.

            The opinions of at least one of my scholarly betters notwithstanding — Rabbi Ken Ehrlich, the former Dean of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati sees the Book of Jonah as tragic; that expert opinion respectfully noted, I'll stick with the reading of Jonah as comic. The book starts in alienation, with the great City of Nineveh all sinful and (therefore) separated from God, and ends in reconciliation and integration, with a reformed Nineveh reconciled to God. And along the way Jonah converts a boatload of sailors and he himself goes from misery in the depths to release and freedom and pulling off the greatest Prophetic success of all time in saving Nineveh.

            (That "depths" part is literal. Jonah isn't swallowed by a whale but by a "huge fish." Whales are air-breathing mammals and have to surface; fish don't. That fish goes to the bottom and stays there until Jonah at least mouths the proper formulas about the lesson in mercy that God is going to pretty great lengths to teach him.)

            Anyway, the Book of Jonah has a classic comic happy ending, just not for Jonah, in Jonah's view of things. Jonah is kind of dense, the object of a satire.

            And in addition to his Book's propagandizing for a universalist view of a merciful God (with a sense of humor), that's what I like about Jonah, that he's such a nebbish — and a bit of an alazon and, in a useful word that has not gone into scholarly vocabulary, a putz.

            Jonah is a nebbish as an unholy fool, and he's the alazon of a festive comedy: the curmudgeon who excludes himself from the celebrations at the end of a comedy, like Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or Shylock in a simplistic reading of The Merchant of Venice.

            In the synagog, Jonah's story caps the High Holidays: it's the last reading from Scriptures, on the afternoon on Yom Kippur: it's the stressed book in synagog liturgy, elevated even beyond the great respect it holds among Christians.

            Anyway, Jonah is up there with the biggies of the tradition. His story ends a Days of Awe cycle that begins with God's remembering Sarah in her old age and giving her and Abraham a son, Isaac: thus giving the Jewish version of how the Arabs are blood relatives to Jews, but we get the better land (Genesis 21). The story of Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael is followed by The Binding of Isaac, with Abraham's reaching out his hand to slay his son, his favorite son, whom he truly loves: either the act of a murderous fanatic or (if Søren Kierkegaard is right), the leap into the absurd of a Knight of Faith. However you see Abraham here, he's a big-time figure, as are the others in the High Holy Day readings: Hannah and the great prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah, and recounting the Day of Atonement ceremony of the High Priest, plus a major Martyrology from the Roman persecutions.

            "Heavy matters! Heavy matters!", as a Shakespeare character says in a very different tragi-comic context.

            And then Jonah shuffles in.

            The word of the Lord comes to Jonah and in the standard summons to prophecy commands him to go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim against it. And Jonah immediately sets forth — hauling ass in more or less in the opposite direction to Tarshish, which was probably near the Straits of Gibraltar: in any event, in the opposite direction to pretty much the end of the earth.

            Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrians, the enemy city for a while, and Jonah wants nothing to do with it: a Hebrew prophet may be without honor in his own country, but he's dead meat in a place like Nineveh. Worst that can happen, the Ninevites kill him, horribly; second worst: by some miracle his mission is successful and the goddamn Ninevites don't get the destruction they deserve.

            So Jonah runs away, and we get the storm at sea and Jonah going down and sleeping in the figurative bowels of the ship, a womb with no view, so to speak. The brave pagan sailors try to save the ship — throwing off cargo and calling to their gods — but the Lord keeps the storm raging and they throw lots to determine the cause and, of course, "the lot fell upon Jonah" (1.7).

            To a degree hard to believe nowadays, the ancients believed in divination and omens and portents and all; more important, Jonah is a story, and it's rare in a well-made story that you'd get a divination scene like this where the lot falls wrong, unless, of course, that's the point of the story.

            In any event, the bones or dice or straw-pulling or whatever points out Jonah, and the sailors throw questions at him trying to find out who he is, all of which he answers with " I am a Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land," which is kind of a strange answer. As a student of mine elegantly if flippantly put it, for all Jonah's use of orthodox and cliché answers about Yahweh as planetary Creator and Ruler, Jonah acts as if God were "back in Jerusalem, in a box in the Temple" (1.1-10).

            The sailors try to save the boat, but the storm gets worse, and Jonah tells them to throw him overboard: Jonah has a thing about giving up. The sailors decline to sacrifice Jonah; but when the storm gets still worse they very reluctantly "took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the Lord, and made vows" (1.13-16). Note the spelling there: Lord, as in "Adonai," as in the traditional replacement for Yahweh: the sailors, at least for now, have given up their gods and gone over to Jonah's.

            From Jonah's point of view, his trip toward Tarshish has been a disaster: going from bad to awful, and leading to his isolation from human society and a symbolic death. From the point of view of God, angels, and people listening to the story, though, this is typically cruel comedy, but with a touch of pathos as Jonah sinks into the sea.

            But then — ta-dum! — comes the most famous part of the story, for "[…] the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights" (1.17)— an important point in the Christian reading of Scripture, prefiguring (in this reading) the death, burial, and resurrection of the Christ, and maybe "the Harrowing of Hell," which is a neat bit of doctrine — and must have made a great Medieval mystery play — if no longer fashionable.

            A prefiguration of the Christ or not, in Jonah's story we definitely have The Descent of the Hero, twice over. Going into The Belly of the Beast is a substitute for descent into the Underworld; and, in Jonah's experience, that great fish dives and dives deep (2.1 f.). From Odysseus in The Odyssey to Christ in The Descent of Christ into Hell and The Apostles' Creed to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back to Ellen Ripley in Aliens, heroes and (of late) heras have descended; and Jonah descends, if not exactly in a heroic exercise of choice.

             Jonah combines images nicely — we're in a poetic section of the Book — and says that from the belly of the fish and "from the belly of hell," or Sheol, he cried out, and "When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple" (2.7). Okay, he's learning: Yahweh the cultic deity may be back in that box in the Temple — in and around the Ark in the Holy of Holies — but God is, pretty obviously to the audience, also the God Jonah told the sailors he worshiped, the creator of sea and land, and firmly in charge of sea, sky, storms, and the occasional really big fish. And if that is the case?

            If that is the case, the Lord God might well also be the God of the Ninevites, and the Revised Standard Version translates the difficult next verse of the Hebrew with the strongly universalist, "Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their true loyalty." And a couple lines later God "spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land" (2.10).

            And here I need to pay a debt to a literalist, Fundamentalist, propagandizer for hearing the Word — and a guy who taught this literary critic and eventual film critic a crucial lesson about seeing a text.

            A couple students invited me in to teach Jonah (and later Ecclesiastes) to their BASIC group: "Brothers and Sisters in Christ," associated with the local Campus Crusade for Christ. Their minister wasn't about to let a non-Christian infidel such as I in with his flock so he stayed and — the Spirit coming upon him — kind of broke into my shtick here at Jonah's, let's say, landfall, and described in detail what someone would look like if he'd just been puked up after three days in the guts of some humongous fish.

            I was about to jump to the second part of the story and the story's theological and philosophical significance as a mashal, here, a parable and satire. But in the world of the story there is that moment when Jonah was vomited up, and on theological, philosophical, moral, and LitCrit grounds the minister was right: we owe Jonah a look.

            The dude just had one really rotten experience, and part of the genius of the story is the balance between what should be our sympathy for Jonah from a human point of view balanced by an objective view of this poor dumb schmuck from a god-like, audience point of view. (Authors and audiences are to fictional characters as God is to humans: potentially omniscient, e.g., in reading characters' thoughts, omnipotent in being able to, say, move them faster than the speed of light.)

            So look down on Jonah standing there getting the call for the second time, "Arise, go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it what I tell you" (3.2). And Jonah trudges off dripping slime and arrives at Nineveh and walks a third of the way into the city — it's a three-days walk across, that's how big Nineveh is — and speaks his oracle to the Ninevites: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." And that is it: "Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown" — the collected prophecies of Jonah. You don't have to believe the Prophets or like them (here and there they say some awful things), but the major Prophets did know their poetry. Jeremiah on exile, imaged as a resurrected Rachel wordlessly mourning: "A cry is heard in Ramah — / Wailing, bitter weeping — Rachel weeping for her children" (31.15). Isaiah on proper repentance: "To loose the fetters of wickedness, / To undo the bands of the yoke, / And to let the oppressed go free" (58.6). Even by much lower standards, Jonah's line is really lame.

            Maybe the idea here is like a bit in Paddy Chayefsky's play, Gideon, where the Lord intentionally chooses a loser like Gideon for a general and intentionally commands him to use battle tactics even Gideon knows are stupid; God wants everyone to be very sure that if the Hebrews won, it had to be a miracle, literally a miracle.

            And, oh, there is a kind of miracle at Nineveh. One line from Jonah, and the Ninevites repent, from the king and his nobles all the way down the Assyrian social hierarchy. Sackcloth, fasting, sitting in ashes, tears, turning away from evil — the whole moral conversion, repentance routine. "And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not" (3.5-10).

            Yay! The greatest prophetic triumph in the Bible. And Jonah's reaction? "But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil" (4:2).

            Now the Jewish tradition of story-telling from The Binding of Isaac story to Stanley Kubrick's version of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is to just hit the high points, so maybe the Narrator here just left out Jonah's saying back in Judah what he says here he said; or Jonah's lying to God. For sure, Jonah repeats here a very important cultic creed. In Exodus 34.6, at Sinai in the renewal of the Covenant, the Lord "descended in a cloud and stood there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. The Lord passed before him [Moses] and proclaimed 'The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin […]'" — with the ellipsis marking the "but" part often stressed in arguments for an Old Testament God of Judgment: that God will punish the guilty unto the third and fourth generation. (And if the Revelation to John gets it right, a New Testament God who will punish the wicked forever.) Jonah, though, quotes only the part on grace, mercy, and kindness. He knows the cultic line but even now he doesn't really believe it. Or, he believes and doesn't approve: not if mercy extends to Assyria and the Ninevites.

            If I were scripting this moment as a shot in film, I'd put a "beat" here, a pause in which God's answer to Job's little outburst is silence. Jonah continues, with a word from logic: "therefore." "Therefore now, O Lord, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live" (4.3) Again with the giving up! Identifying with Jonah, we'd find this very sad; looking down on him as a satiric anti-hero, it's just pathetic, and there's much to be said for God's answering question — hey, it's a Jewish God; He's going to answer your question with questions — God answers with the rhetorical question, "Doest thou do well to be angry?" or, "Are you that deeply grieved?" (4.4).

            Jonah doesn't answer but cuts out and sits, we are told explicitly "on the east side of the city" and makes a booth there "and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city." My Bible-as-Lit teacher, Lloyd E. Berry, noted that back in mythic times, city-killing fire and brimstone come out of the east, so maybe Jonah sits on the east side just in case God overshoots. In Berry's (comic) reading — I'm not saying anything original here — Jonah still has hope that God will destroy Nineveh and the Ninevites (4.4). Then God prepares a gourd, or some sort of plant (the God of the Universe does plants as well as storms and fish) and has it grow over Jonah as a kind of umbrella, for which Jonah, gracious for once, is grateful (4.6).

            So then God comes up with a worm that kills the plant, arguably carrying micro-management of the cosmos to an extreme, but moving toward teaching Jonah a lesson, and the world a lesson about what Jonah represents. "And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, 'It is better for me to die than to live.'" Again we see God doing weather and Jonah doing despair, and parody. Jonah under the plant, after the greatest prophetic feat in history, despairs. Elijah, having defeated and, by our standards, murdered, the priests of Baal, is pursued by the forces of Queen Jezebel, finally (about 130 miles later) ending up under a broom tree. "Enough!" Elijah cries out. "Now, O Lord, take my life […]" (1 Kings 19.1-4). It's not great parody, but it's a nice little touch for those who know First Kings: Jonah is no Elijah.

            "And God said to Jonah, 'Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd?' And Jonah said, 'I do well to be angry, even unto death.' Then said the Lord, 'Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not labored, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more then six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?" (4.9-11).

            Ken Ehrlich declined to read "and also much cattle" at a service, but the annotators in Tanakh — a fairly recent Jewish translation (5746, 1985 C.E.) — and in the Oxford Revised Standard Version (1962), call attention to it.

            The Tanakh editors note that "Infants and beasts are not held responsible for their actions." The Oxford editors say, "The point of the book is that God loves every creature in his universe, even the cattle."

            I used to follow that assertion by the Oxford editors by asking my class "What do you see as 'The point of the book'?" and add, "It should have one." Jonah "is read in the Church as part of Holy Week," and, again, it has a place of high honor in the Synagog. "If the Book of Jonah is a mashal in the sense of 'satire,' what's being satirized? If Jonah is the butt — target —what does Jonah represent?"

            To help my students answer that question I added, in the manner of a Jewish God or parent — or fairly typical teacher — more questions, starting with, Is it wrong to look forward to the Day of the Lord as the day the Ninevites get it, when all your enemies get it? How about the enemies of God? John tells us in The Book of Revelation, climaxing the Christian Bible: "But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, as for murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death" (21.8) — is it OK to want them not just to die horribly but to die "the second death"? Or, if that's a matter of Divine Justice, how about getting back to the Assyrians and how one should feel about conquerors? Should you forgive foreign oppressors who have killed your children? Or try to repay them "in kind"?

                             Fair Babylon, you predator,
                             a blessing on him who repays you in kind
                             what you have inflicted on us;
                             a blessing on him who seizes your babies
                             and dashes them against the rocks! (Psalm 137.8)

Jonah is the anti-hero of a Divine Comedy that is also a profound satire. Jonah is nobody special (as prophets go), the average human being as Hebrew, a "synecdoche" for Israel: God's chosen who should be bearer of the Word of mercy and grace, a light to the world. Instead Jonah is a run-of-the-mill believer, whose values are tribal and just starting to move into nationalism, a guy (or gal) who mouths formulas that are the product of a logic he really won't follow: One God, one Loving Parent, one humankind, — and therefore those bloody Assyrian (or whatever) pig fellators are our kin. Even the Assyrians might have a call on God's mercy and can demand our compassion: inclusion within the circle of humanity The Book of Jonah makes some serious satiric demands on us, calling us to high ethics and a kind of nobility.

            Unlike Jonah, whom we should find so laughable.


            So the competition is tough, but as anti-heroes go, Jonah is my favorite. 

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.


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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."