Dr. Metablog

The Damnation of Theron Ware

A few of us were in a coffee shop talking about Ted Haggard, Darlene Bishop and other right-wing Christianistas. One of the guys thought that I could gain some perspective and also stoke my outrage by reading Harold Frederic's 1896 novel The Damnation of Theron Ware. I recognized the title -- it had appeared on reading lists when I was a student in the 1950s and 1960s  -- but I'd never turned a single page. Well, better late than never; Theron Ware is a truly splendid book. 

Here's a sample of its satirical spirit. Youthful, ignorant Theron Ware meets the governing elders when he arrives to take up his ministry at the Octavius Methodist Church: 

"We are a plain sort o'folks up in these parts," said Brother Pierce....  We walk here... in a meek and humble spirit, in the straight an' narrow way which leadeth unto life. We ain't gone traipsin' after strange gods, like some people that call themselves Methodists in other places. We stick by the Discipline an' the ways of our fathers in Israel. No new-fangled notions can go down here.  Your wife'd better take them flowers out of her bunnit afore next Sunday."

It's a wonderful speech, especially that last oppressive sentence, set without pause or punctuation against flimsy pretenses to meekness. Harold Frederic leaves us in no doubt that Brother Pierce and his Methodist co-religionists worship only at the altars of joylessness and petty tyranny. Theron Ware would like to rebel against these sour Puritanisms, but he's devoid of the necessary intellectual resources. He's backwoods ignorant. He does after a while acquire and read Renan's Life of Jesus and for a few chapters it seems as though he's going to tread the familiar nineteenth-century path from narrow sectarianism toward a less restrictive spirituality. But the author has many surprises in store. Ware encounters Father Forbes, an intelligent, informed and (gasp!) Roman Catholic priest and he also develops a painful crush on a dashing rich free-spirited young and (horrors!) Irish-American beauty named Celia Madden. Ware is unable to grasp that these two sophisticates treat him not as an equal, but as a kind of mascot puppy. Wonderful and embarrassing complications ensue. 

Frederic creates some full and rich and modern characters. Father Forbes is a 1890s decadent with roots in Pater and perhaps even in Huysmans, while Sister Soulsby is a practical, energetic no-nonsense entrepreneur whose trade just happens to be promoting Methodism. Most interesting of all is Celia Madden, who plays Chopin and admires George Sand, and who is as up-to-the-moment as anyone in The Woman Who Did (and who would have been perfectly at home discussing aesthetics in Bloomsbury). Theron Ware's encounters with her are painfully amusing. It's as if Frank Merriwell had somehow blundered into Madam Merle's drawing-room.

The town of Octavius is modeled on Utica, New York, where Harold Frederic was born and spent his young manhood. Utica is a place I know very well, but I don't believe I've ever come across a Frederic monument or a "Harold Frederic lived here" plaque. Perhaps the city fathers aren't eager to remind us that Utica is portrayed as gossipy, narrow, ignorant, and exceedingly philistine.   

Friend Indeed or Nosey Parker?

At a community meeting a few days ago, the question of alcohol consumption came up (as it frequently does in our adjacent-to-a-university neighborhood). One young man complained that when local bars (where over-serving is -- in theory -- proscribed) shut down, the students then take their drinking to "house parties" where there is no adult present to oversee how much can be consumed. "They just go and get themselves totally wasted," said the student. Our local police sergeant challenged him. "What do you do," she asked, "when your friends make plans to get drunk? Do you try to stop them?" Her question took the student aback. I don't think that the idea that someone his age could or should intervene had occurred to him until that moment.   

I was surprised that the sergeant asked the young man to look after his friends. It was as though she asked him to become that dreaded folk-figure, the busybody. 

What are the rules in such cases? Isn't the notion that each person is responsible for only his own welfare a contemporary American dogma? "You can't help people; they have to help themselves."

Some score or so years ago, I had a friend (I'll call him Vincent) who was a two-(or three) pack-a-day smoker. He was an intimate enough friend that I crossed the invisible busybody barrier. I'd argue with him about the health risks of using tobacco; I'd send him articles to read. He was not impressed or persuaded, but he was often irritated. Once he said, scornfully, "you are trying to be your brother's keeper." Vincent was angry when I asked him not to smoke when he visited my house. His conviction was that when you have a friend, you don't try to change him or to regulate his habits; you accept him with all his foibles. Perhaps he was right, but nevertheless, for several years I didn't invite him home, which was a great loss, because he was smart and informed and charming and sociable. 

Then came the lung cancer, the surgery, the chemo, the false remissions, the swings between hope and despair, and eventually, the premature death. In an interview in the local newspaper a few weeks before he died, Vincent said, "I have simply lost twenty years of my life to smoking." To me he said, once, very quietly, "you were right."  Did he mean, "you were right that smoking was dangerous," or did he mean, "you were right to try to change me?" I don't know.

I may have been right, but what good did I do? I alienated a friend and I didn't add a day to his life. 

When I look back now after so many years have passed, my regret is not that I intervened but that intervened so ineffectively. It haunts me that I didn't I do a better job. 

In our neighborhood, we lose a local student to alcohol poisoning each and every year. Can there be a sadder or more useless death?  Mom and dad nurture a child for eighteen years, send him or her off to college, and a week later receive a phone call that their child has choked to death on his own vomit.

Who is the responsible party?  Friends, teachers, police, family, liquor-purveyors? Or only the individual?    

Sub-Nadir Brainlessness

Evangelicals all over American can relax. The crisis has passed. The Reverend Ted Haggard has been cured!

It took three long weeks, but the four ministers who were appointed to counsel the disgraced former New Life minister report that Haggard is now "completely heterosexual." 

How do they know? Did he pass a test? Did they make him look at pictures of a) muscular male prostitutes, and b) fancy ladies -- and then check his arousal rate?  Did the Reverend Ted buy a new gun rack for his truck? Has he started watching NASCAR? Is Gayle pregnant again? What gives?

The Reverend Tim Ralph, one of the gang of four, produced the following thoroughly incoherent analysis. "It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing." I construe "things took place" to refer to whatever Ted did with the brawny masseur. I construe Reverend Tim's sentences to mean: "Things took place when they took place. At other times, they didn't take place." Very insightful, very reassuring. But since Reverend Tim and his friends have succeeded so well and so rapidly with Haggard, don't they owe something to all the other struggling-against-their-own-gayness evangelicals (and Roman Catholic priests) out there. Shouldn't they franchise this cure? There's a huge market.

Some questions. A) Do the four ministers truly believe that Haggard is "completely heterosexual?" If they do, their knowledge of human life is shallow beyond belief. If they don't, they're frauds of a high order of fraudulence. B) Do the ministers think that we regular walking-round non-evangelicals swallow their stories? Do they care?  C) Do they think that New Life congregants believe them?  D) Are New Life congregants completely brainwashed? 

A skeptical note. It's reported that the Reverend Ted settled with the New Life Church for a sum of money. By the terms of the agreement, neither he nor the church are allowed to say exactly how much treasure is involved. Moreover, Reverend Ted has agreed to leave Colorado Springs. Cynical old me thinks that it's nothing more than an old-fashioned payoff: you get out of town and never darken our doorstep again, and here's a bunch of cash. Stick around and we can do nothing for you. Dollars to donuts there's a no-litigation-on-either-side agreement as well. It's all so very uplifting, so very spiritual. 

February 17.  I received this jaundiced e-mail from my friend and correspondent Spike S. "You're entirely too easy on these clowns. Ted's clearly bi-sexual, and he'll always be. But here's the deal they made: the ministers said, we'll declare that you're heterosexual, but only if you get out of Colorado. Their only agenda is to make sure that the mega-million dollar New Life church stays solvent, and they can't manage it if Ted's around. They'll pay for Reverend Ted's master's in psychology -- no doubt from some off-brand bible college -- and he'll take up a new career re-programming and therefore screwing up young gay fundamentalists. And what about the Reverend's drug problem?  Wasn't he a member of, what do they call it, the First Methedrine Church, or is he a Crystal Methodist? How long, anyone want to guess, before Ted falls off either or both of these wagons? I'll give him a year and a half, max." 

What We Read in the Fifties: "I, the Jury" and "The Kid from Tompkinsville"

Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury (1947) is a loathsome novel. It makes me gag to remember that it was wildly popular in the P.S. 217 schoolyard -- passed from hand to hand in lurid 25-cent paperback editions. Spillane's hero, the crudely-monikered private investigator Mike Hammer, lives in a world in which guns are "rods," bullets are "slugs," cars are "heaps," a policeman is a "flatfoot," gays are "queers" and "pansies," and people of any color other than white are "jigs," "bogies," or "darkies." His is a horrible, amoral universe of bigotry and violence. Mike Hammer, nominally an officer of the law, makes no effort to bring criminals to justice -- he prefers to kill them. "I'm going to enjoy putting a bullet into that crazy son of a bitch more than I enjoy eating. I'd sooner work him over with a knife first." He's a sadistic vigilante who beats up suspects and bystanders indifferently: "my fist went in up to the wrist in his stomach."

Charlotte Manning, the beautiful uptown "dame" whom he thinks he loves, tells him what he wants to hear (and what the novel endorses) -- that he's a "a real man -- no inhibitions." Of course, he doesn't go to bed with Charlotte Manning -- he only traffics with women who are those he derides as "nymphos." At the climax of the novel, Hammer discovers -- a surprise to no one but himself! -- that the killer for whom he's searching is Charlotte herself. As he fingers his .45 caliber pistol, she slowly disrobes. When she's entirely naked, Hammer shoots her in the stomach. "'H-how could you,' she gasps. Hammer: "It was easy." Was it difficult, even in 1953, to understand such perverse, misogynistic symbolism?

Mickey Spillane left his native Brooklyn to go to serve as a soldier; what a shame that he returned as a fascist.

For all I know, I might have read I, the Jury during the same week that I read John R. Tunis's The Kid from Tompkinsville. As degraded as is the one novel, so the other is otherworldly and pure. The "kid" is Roy Tucker, a simple country boy who tries out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, wins a place on the team, and is pitching shutout after shutout when he trips in the shower and injures his throwing arm.  A few weeks later, mirabile dictu, he returns as an outfielder and leads his team to a pennant with his hitting. It's a heckuva lot of drama for one short season, but Tunis makes it credible  -- well, at least, it seemed credible to youthful me back in 1953.

Tunis takes his baseball seriously and he never patronizes his young readership. Like most of Tunis's novels (The Kid Comes Back, Young Razzle, Iron Duke), all of which I swallowed in single gulps, The Kid from Tompkinsville extols the virtues of integrity, effort, and teamwork. Was I astute enough to notice that there was no drinking, no staying out late, and not a hint of desire for women in Roy Tucker's life? I don't believe I was.   

While nasty old Mike Hammer asked us to wallow in a swinish world, upstanding Roy Tucker lifted us from the mire. There could hardly be a better illustration of Shakespeare's observation that "the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together." I'd like to believe that Tunis was a greater influence on me (as he was certainly a greater source of pleasure) than Spillane -- even though, as I recently discovered, Mickey Spillane (Frank Morrison Spillane) was a fellow graduate of "good-and-ill-together" Erasmus Hall High School.

My Favorite Criminal Athletes

Here are some that come immediately to mind:   

Riddick Bowe. Heavyweight boxing champion who served 18 months for kidnapping.

Tonya Harding. The first American woman figure skater to land a triple axel in competition, she is most famous for arranging to have her competitor Nancy Kerrigan smacked on the knee. She later dabbled in pornography, boxing, and boyfriend-beating.

Denny McLain. Baseball's last 30-game winner and an inveterate gambler, McLain was imprisoned for drug trafficking, embezzlement, racketeering.

Jack Molinas. Columbia and NBA forward famous for fixing college and NBA games. Banned from basketball, Molinas spent five years in jail for bookmaking. After his release, he took up a new career in pornography. His murder in 1975 was probably mob-related.

Gerry Priddy. 1940s-1950s American League Infielder, convicted and jailed for extortion (he claimed to have left a bomb on a ship).

O.J. Simpson. Nicole Brown Simpson, Ronald Goldman, r.i.p.

Darryl Strawberry. Numerous counts of wife and girlfriend-beating; tax evasion, DUI's.

Mike Tyson. Rape, earbiting, various drug and DUI charges.

Jayson Williams. New Jersey Nets star rebounder acquitted of murder, but when the jury deadlocked on manslaughter, settled with the family of the dead man for $2.5 million. 

March 30, 2007.  Bulletin:  "Former Major League pitcher Ugueth Urbina yesterday was sentenced to 14 years in prison in Venezuela for the attempted murder of five workers on his family's ranch."

Where a Day is Longer than a Year

A Venusian day, strange to say, is longer than a Venusian year. How can such an apparent paradox be allowed?  It's easy: Venus rotates on its axis once every 243 earth-days, but it revolves around the sun in 225 earth-days. How appallingly counter-intuitive!  If I had any gift at all for thinking in the abstract, I'm sure that I wouldn't find the idea that a day can be longer than a year so disorienting. But I do;  for me, the word "day" has a metaphorical as well as a scientific dimension: "days" are short, "years" are long.  I'm consoled by thinking that my counterpart, a philosophically-handicapped Venusian visiting the earth, would find our speedy days and our disproportionately long year quite incredible. On Venus, the lazy old sun takes 116 days to rise in the west and set in the east (Venus, ever the contrarian, rotates, so to speak, "backwards").  So much for Ovid's swift horses; on Venus, they're all glue and molasses, their forward progress barely perceptible.  There's a mythological corollary that might please the poets. Randy Jupiter would be happy on Venus: the venereal night is truly a megala nux.

I suppose that the example of Venus teaches us that days and years are not things but concepts. For me, this is a hard lesson. I recognize that it's earthocentric to measure the long Venusian day in terms of earth-days, but I can't seem to reason my way around doing so -- the only day that I've ever experienced is 24 hours long and the only year with which I'm familiar has 365 and a bit days. It's alarming to realize how short-sighted it is to assume that a day, a month, a year, tied in, as they are, to astronomical reality are natural, when, in fact, they're only artifacts of our earthly orbit.

Other measurements of time are less "natural" and therefore even more troublesome.  How entirely arbitrary to divide the day into 24 parts!  Since everything else is going metric, why shouldn't we divide the day into ten or a hundred parts -- decidays or centidays?  And minutes and seconds -- why sixty of them, when decihours and centihours makes so much more sense?  (The ancients, incidentally, struggled mightily with hours -- read all about it here.)  And the week?  No natural reason at all for the week. The Romans, as is well known, were weekless.

Venus, having no moons, has no months. Mars has two moons -- would a Martian calendar, if there were such a thing, have had months, or demi-months, or monthettes, or what?

When I was a boy, I was a diligent if uncritical reader of science fiction.  In those days, it was not uncommon for entire fanciful Venusian civilizations to rise, peak, and fall and the course of a novel. But in the 1950s, almost no data was available to us about the mysterious planet. Now, I'm afraid, the glamour is long gone. The surface temperature of Venus averages 869F, the atmospheric pressure is 90 times that of the earth, the atmosphere is 97 per cent carbon dioxide and contains no oxygen, and the pretty swirling clouds are entirely composed of hot, concentrated sulfuric acid. It's hardly a place in which an advanced culture would be likely to thrive nor a place from which we would expect much in the way of sophisticated calendrical theory.