Book Review: Veeps

Happy Veterans Day! Here's a snarky collection of fun facts that may appeal to your favorite veteran.

Title: Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance

Author: Bill Kelter with Wayne Shellabarger

Publisher: Top Shelf Productions

Date: 2008

ISBN: 1603090037

Length: 296 pages

If you don't like Joe Biden, consider the company he's joined...

These fun facts are taken from Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance, a new collection of fun facts collected by Bill Kelter and Wayne Shellabarger. The book contains two to six pages of fun facts about each of our first forty-six Vice-Presidents; this article contains just one fact each, plus bonus chapters about a few memorable vice-presidential candidates.

1. John Adams: Despite a distinguished career before and after his term as George Washington’s vice-president, during those years he was remembered mainly for proposing fancy titles for the President. Adams was plump, and another senator proposed giving him the appellation “His Rotundity.”

2. Thomas Jefferson: Became vice-president by finishing in second place to John Adams. His achievement during this time was A Manual of Parliamentary Practice, the official book of Senate etiquette.

3. Aaron Burr: When this lifelong malcontent and sore loser lost hope of becoming President in his own right, he was charged with treason, and acquitted, but he fled the United States anyway...to avoid creditors.

4. George Clinton: Jefferson’s second vice-president, and James Madison’s first one, died in office. How he was ever nominated or elected was unclear. He was described as “old, feeble & altogether uncapable of the duty of presiding in the Senate.”

5. Elbridge Gerry: As governor, he did not personally redraw the voting district map of Massachusetts to create the original “gerrymander.” His supporters did that. As vice-president, he was the second vice-president to die of old age during the Madison Administration.

6. Daniel Tompkins: Monroe’s vice-president was young enough to survive his term, but drank so heavily that he didn’t survive it long. He died “old” just short of age 51.

7. John C. Calhoun: The presidential election seemed to be a four-way race between William Crawford, Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson. Calhoun offered his support to both Adams and Jackson, in hopes that an electoral college run-off would allow him to finish ahead of both. Incredible in this day of party politics, Calhoun never got close to a majority of the presidential vote and was obliged to serve as vice-president to both of the successful contenders, in turn. (He is remembered for worse things than that. He was one of the tiny minority of American politicians who actually claimed to favor slavery.)

8. Martin Van Buren: As President he was remembered for “heartless injustice” toward the Cherokee Nation. As Vice-President he was remembered for shameless sycophancy, beginning when he befriended a profoundly unpopular woman, who was married to someone else.

9. Richard Johnson: President Van Buren was a small, plump, fussy man. Thinking the White House needed to retain some macho element, Andrew Jackson proposed a running mate for “Little Van” whose vulgarity went far beyond the usual definition of “redneck.” It wasn’t that his marriage to African-American slave Julia Chinn lacked legal recognition, so much as that, when Ms. Chinn died of cholera, Johnson ordered another slave woman to become his new common-law wife. When this woman maintained that she preferred her existing common-law husband, Johnson sold her down the river and bedded down with a third slave. To be fair, Johnson, a liquor seller, was probably drunk during at least some of these brutalities.

10. John Tyler: When notified that William Henry Harrison had died, making Tyler the first Vice-President actually to inherit the presidency, John Tyler was found on his hands and knees, playing marbles with his children.

11. George Dallas: Other places were named for Polk’s Vice-President, but historians suspect that the city in Texas may have been named for some other member of his family. George hadn’t even been elected to the Senate when Dallas, Texas, was founded and named.

12. Millard Fillmore: Reading the menu of Zachary Taylor’s final, fatal meal (iced milk, pickles, and cherries) has always seemed sufficient, to most people, to explain why Zachary Taylor died and allowed Fillmore to become our second accidental President. Conspiracy theorists continue to suspect that Fillmore added something nastier to the menu.

13. William King: Franklin Pierce’s Vice-President was definitely known to his contemporaries as “gay.” They meant that the 60-something Vice President clung to older, showier fashions than the rest of American manhood had adopted, but King did live with James Buchanan for several years.

14. John Breckinridge: As a younger, more attractive man of unquestioned heterosexuality (though more recent historians think he could have been "gay" too), Breckinridge might have been remembered mainly for having been continuously and conspicuously snubbed by President Buchanan. Later, however, he joined the Confederacy and had to flee to Cuba.

15. Hannibal Hamlin: Lincoln’s first Vice-President wanted to serve in the Civil War but, having no particular skills or qualifications, spent his tour of duty mostly cooking for the Maine Coast Guard.

16. Andrew Johnson: Still fighting typhoid fever, Lincoln’s second Vice-President credited whiskey with allowing him to survive the inaugural events. Later, drinking whiskey at a hotel bar definitely helped Johnson escape his intended assassination by a fellow conspirator of John Wilkes Booth’s.

17. Schuyler Colfax: U.S. Grant’s first Vice-President was threatened with impeachment for his involvement with a railroad stock scandal.

18. Henry Wilson: Grant’s second Vice-President was involved in the railroad stock scandal too. (And we’re asked to believe Grant didn’t know.)

19. William Wheeler: Rutherford B. Hayes was elected by the inaugural college despite losing the popular vote. His running mate’s main achievement was being a party member who was not involved with the railroad stock scandal.

20. Chester A. Arthur: He was not charged with conspiracy in the murder of President Garfield because the disappointed office seeker who shot Garfield was blatantly insane.

21. Thomas Hendricks: He had tried, and failed, to run for President for seventeen years before Grover Cleveland accepted him as a running mate. He died just nine months after they were inugurated.

22. Levi Morton: He declined the chance to be Vice-President under James Garfield, then gave up hope of being elected President in his own right and became Vice-President under Benjamin Harrison.

23. Adlai Stevenson: Grover Cleveland’s second Vice-President was the grandfather of the Adlai Stevenson who lost to Dwight David Eisenhower.

24. Gus Hobart: He died less than halfway through William McKinley’s first term. Mrs. Hobart, however, remained a close friend, assistant, and sometimes deputy for the epileptic Ida McKinley.

25. Theodore Roosevelt: Despite his many successes, before and after, as boxer, rancher, writer, scientist, sheriff, police commissioner,governor, Army officer, and later President, TR described himself as “the poorest presiding officer the Senate has ever had.”

26. Charles Fairbanks: Although the city in Alaska was named for him, and he wanted more attention than that, trying to distract public attention from Teddy Roosevelt was a job only TR’s daughter Alice could ever do. Fairbanks was ridiculed for trying.

27. James Sherman: Dying (“old”) less than a week before Election Day, Vice-President Sherman was not replaced on the ticket. Though Taft lost the election anyway, over three million Americans found themselves voting for a candidate who was, in fact, dead.

28. Thomas Marshall: Woodrow Wilson’s Vice-President complained bitterly of not having enough to do. After Wilson’s stroke, some thought Marshall qualified to step up and act as President, but Mrs. Wilson, who was still unable to vote legally, took it out of the country by acting as President instead.

29. Calvin Coolidge: Warren G. Harding’s Vice-President seemed chosen to balance the ticket by not doing anything disgraceful.

30. Charles Dawes: Coolidge’s Vice-President was best known for having composed a tune that later became the top-pop song, “It’s All in the Game.”

31. Charles Curtis: No doubt encouraged by Will Rogers, Herbert Hoover’s Vice-President was the first politician to boast shamelessly about having one Native American great-grandparent.

32. John Garner: FDR’s first Vice-President died just short of age 99. FDR was not in office all that long, so how Garner was ever elected...

33. Henry Wallace: FDR’s second Vice-President was most easily discredited for his support of a wacky mystic’s “Great White Brotherhood,” but probably most unpopular because he encouraged farmers to “improve the market” by destroying crops.

34. Harry Truman: Picked to replace Wallace because FDR’s death was anticipated and nobody wanted Wallace as President, Truman’s position on World War II was actually similar to Pat Buchanan’s: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.” His accidental presidency was cited as proof that anybody can become President of the United States, but several things he said and did are remembered with affection...apart from his deploying The Bomb.

35. Alben Barkley: He became our first official “Veep” when he said that “Vice-President of the United States” was too long a title. The circumstances of his death were also memorable...enough that your parents or grandparents probably remember the story.

36. Richard Nixon: Believe it or not, he was young once, and what he did was serve as Vice-President under Eisenhower. When asked to describe the contributions Nixon had made to the Eisenhower Administration, thus boosting Nixon’s own campaign, Eisenhower said, “Give me a week, I might think of one.”

37. Lyndon Baines Johnson: His election to the Senate hinged on the mysterious last-minute appearance of precisely the 200 votes he had said he needed. A supporter doubted that these votes were fraudulent, on the grounds that LBJ “was much more devious than that.”

38. Hubert Humphrey: Though not necessarily in either Bill Clinton’s or Richard Nixon’s class when it came to tackiness, LBJ was no gentleman either, and liked to demonstrate his tackiness toward his Vice-President. He once ordered Humphrey, a short man, to put on large-sized cowboy gear and try to ride a large, nervous horse...on camera.

39. Spiro Agnew: He edged out Governors Reagan and Rockefeller, Mayor Lindsay, and Senator Howard Baker, for the vice-presidential nomination, because Nixon openly required a running mate who could be considered life insurance. For Nixon.

40. Gerald Ford: The other thing he had in common with Agnew was that both of them hit spectators with the ball while playing golf.

41. Nelson Rockefeller: Although serious right-wing conspiracy theorists claimed that he’d set both Agnew and Nixon up in order to have a chance at becoming Vice-President, Governor Rockefeller had turned down two chances to be nominated before he finally agreed to be Vice-President. If Agnew or Nixon needed setting up, there had to have been a more plausible suspect. I don't know. I was too young to be paying attention. If you remember, please share.

42. Walter Mondale: Kelter and Shellabarger characterize him as “benign, boring, unglam­orous.” He hadn’t always been benign or boring, though. He had once proposed legislation that, if not soundly defeated, would have made day care mandatory for all toddlers at least after age two; the avowed purpose of this lunacy was to keep young children from being influenced by conservative parents. Mondale did leave behind some admirers who will say, "That's not what the bill actually SAID!" No--but it's what, under the applicable laws at the time, it would have done.

43. George Bush: Despite his blond complexion and high voice, he was taller than Ronald Reagan, worked out harder, had a more heroic war record, and had worked for the CIA when Reagan was an actor...but there was that silver foot in his mouth. Among other things he once told reporters and TV audiences that he and Reagan had had “sex...er...setbacks.”

44. J. Danforth Quayle: When suspected of participation in a golf-and-adultery spree, he was defended by his loyal wife thusly: “Anyone who knows Dan Quayle knows that he would rather play golf than have sex, any day.” And so far no younger woman has stepped forward to say "Oh but he's not like that with me!," either.

45. Albert Gore: Despite his adoption of a working-class accent and vague claims to have once worked on a farm in Tennessee, Gore was arguably a more “dynastic” candidate than W Bush. His father had been a senator before George Bush went into politics.

46. Richard Cheney: Why Kelter and Shellabarger assert that “his icy, silent glares and his snarling denunciations” exuded a “palpable, if unfounded, sense that he has either killed men with his bare hands or hired shadowy others to do it” is unclear to me; I always thought this Vice-President looked like a generic hypertensive geriatric patient. Let’s just say that those of us who didn’t hate him thought he was too old and ill to last eight years in office, but somehow he did.

Readers are expected to add their own selections of the funniest facts about Joe Biden, Mike Pence, Kamala Harris, and J.D. Vance. My favorite Biden fun fact is that in 2016 he said he was too old to seek election as President, but then in 2020, being even older and more confused, he proved it. For the others, what are your favorites?

Book Review: Midnight Rising

Book Title: Midnight Rising

Author: Tony Horwitz

Author's web page: http://tonyhorwitz.com/

Publisher: Henry Holt & Company

Date: 2011

Length: 290 pages of text, 55 pages of endnotes, 3 pages of image credits, 15-page index

Illustrations: maps, old photos and drawings

ISBN: 080509153X

Quote: "Viewed through the lens of 9/11, Harpers Ferry seems an al-Qaeda prequel: a long-bearded fundamentalist, consumed by hatred of the U.S. government, launches nineteen men in a suicidal strike on a symbol of American power. A shocked nation plunges into war."

As all Washingtonians know, Harpers Ferry is a picturesque, slightly touristy but mostly unspoiled, mountain town whose distinguishing features include a quaint old railroad that still runs passenger trains to and from D.C. While waiting for the train back to the city, you may read, talk, or knit, but you can't not notice the dramatic mountain and river view. To some people, including Horwitz, it seems "spooky." If a place has the right to be haunted, Harpers Ferry has...

Fair disclosure: my primary reason for reading this book was to find out how many of the nineteenth-century images of Harpers Ferry were drawn from the railroad station (several) and how much the view has changed (not terribly much). For me, the scenery is enough of an attraction, apart from the history of this town.

However, Harpers Ferry's big tourist attraction has been the history of the act of "Northern Aggression" that, as all Southerners know, really started the Civil War. Our ancestors wouldn't have fired on Fort Sumter if a megalomaniac, but not legally insane, Yankee hadn't attacked Harpers Ferry.

After 150 years, although the issues over which people were fighting even before 1860 seem surprisingly current, it's hard to take the old war rhetoric seriously. Horwitz has a good time at the expense of both sides. Many things people said and wrote even in the early nineteenth century can be clearly identified as either Green or Greedhead, and Horwitz shares some choice expressions of Greedhead thinking in the Old South. Not only did Southerners suffer from their own form of collective megalomania, or empire-building, as they envisioned a future in which their descendants would continue to exhaust the land and move on; while the best thinkers in the South understood that slavery was self-doomed, there were idiots who blithered in public about the need to evangelize and spread the benefits of slavery...

Meanwhile, in the North, several people who were indeed the best writers in their communities, if not the best thinkers, fell under the spell of John Brown's charismatic megalomania. Frederick Douglass kept some sensible reservations about Brown and his scheme. Amos Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson did not. (For those who've been wondering what possessed Emily Dickinson to call a writer so inferior as Higginson her "master," it seems likely that his freedom to act as well as write may have been his attraction.) Alcott called Brown "the manliest man" he ever saw, a "Christian brave and true"; Thoreau raged against his sentencing that Brown "could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist," and Louisa May Alcott effused, "Living, he made life beautiful,--Dying, made death divine."

Midnight Rising offers other glimpses of historical figures. Those acquainted with Wise County, Virginia, may particularly appreciate the mini-biography of then-Governor Henry Wise incorporated into this book. The story also has walk-on parts for James Buchanan, Herman Melville, Robert E. Lee, T.J. "Stonewall" Jackson, William Lloyd Garrison, and many more people whose names readers should know.

John Brown seems to have considered himself a Christian; it was just that Christ's warning that "those who take the sword will perish by the sword" seems not to have meant much to him...Horwitz tries to avoid passing moral judgment on Brown's act, to remain objective and simply trace its connections to other events in history. He hands over the job of concluding the story to Langston Hughes, whose poem ends, "Perhaps / You will recall / John Brown." You will, indeed.

Dozens of books had already been written about the Harpers Ferry raid, including a memoir by Osborne Anderson (a survivor) and a biography of Brown by W.E.B. Dubois. Did the world, or even the Harpers Ferry tourist business, really need another one? Well...adding Horwitz's talent to the body of existing books on the topic couldn't hurt anything. If you're going to read only one book about Harpers Ferry, I can't claim to have read enough of the others to say that Midnight Rising is "better" than they are, but it's a good read--written clearly and cleanly enough to make a challenging book for a bright middle school student, while still holding the interest of adults.

Book Review: The Great Controversy

Book Title: The Great Controversy

Author: Ellen G. White

Date: 1884, 1998

Publisher: Harvestime Books

ISBN: none

Length: 424 pages of text with indices

Quote: "Wherever they sought refuge, the followers of Christ were hunted like beasts."

The Great Controversy was Ellen White's summary of the history of the Christian church. Three editions were published. The 1911 edition, The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan, is the one Seventh-Day Adventist students often distribute door-to-door to explain how the different Christian denominations came to exist and how theirs is like and different from the others. Although the 1911 edition contains a much higher proportion of factual details to rhetorical flourishes than this 1884 edition does, that's because it contains all those long quotes that (acceptably by contemporary standards) were identified as quotes only by the use of quotation marks--no credits. This is the book Ellen White wrote, before she instructed assistants to go back and pad it with long unattributed quotations from other books.

Some say you can tell the unattributed quotations in any White book by the sudden improvement in writing style...Like many Victorian writers, Ellen White helped herself to generous portions of other people's writing; attributing a multi-page quote only to "an early historian" was thought of as flattering the audience with the suggestion that they'd know which historian the author meant, rather than as sloppy research. Ellen White was almost entirely self-taught. Her self-education was rigorous but did not include any noticeable attention to the ideas of shortening sentences or choosing telling details instead of piling up generalizations. And unfortunately for readers, some of the better educated authors she quoted had had some glimmer of those ideas; more had none. 

This edition is shorter than the familiar one by a few hundred pages. Substantial parts of the historical facts are printed in the form of terse charts and tables of data, rather than narrative. Some readers feel that the charts and tables provide valuable resting places in a long slog through Victorian prose. On the other hand, some readers complain that the effect of the text is less like a history book and more like a sermon than the 1911 edition.

If you're not familiar with any edition of The Great Controversy, there's another thing you need to know about it: Victorian Christians were incredibly insensitive, monstrously politically incorrect. I've not found another book from this period that compared different denominations without bashing all but the author's own. Ellen White wrote about other denominations the way people did at the time. It wasn't that she disliked Jews or Catholics; it was that she didn't know any of them well enough to anticipate that their feelings might be hurt by long expositions on themes like, "Prophets had wept over the apostasy of Israel," or "Corrupt and blasphemous priests and popes were doing the work which Satan applointed them."

When I first read The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan, which was given to me for my tenth birthday, I remember that the dominant impression I picked up was of harsh condemnation. (I don't recommend this book for ten-year-olds, no matter how advanced their reading skills may be.) On our last long road trip we'd visited some Catholic relatives; I wondered whether, if my parents kept going to that Adventist church, I'd ever be allowed to see them again. Duh. I would probably have been encouraged to visit them...but that's the way The Great Controversy comes across to people who read it without a mature historical perspective.

To my surprise, later on, the Adventists I met did not seem to have a problem dissociating Ellen White's condemnations of the corrupt priests and popes from the idea of good will toward, and even cooperation with, their Catholic neighbors. While attending an Adventist college I volunteered at Catholic-run missions and went to classes with guest students from a nearby Catholic college. I observed no phobia of other denominations.

Adventists who attend church meetings get guidance on how to dissociate historical judgments from present-time relationships there. For non-Adventists, I recommend The Great Controversy to those who are sincerely liberal (as I use the word) enough to read it with tolerance for a previous generation's intolerant language.

Even the subtitle of the 1911 edition has been controversial. C.S. Lewis later wrote, much more patiently (to suit his historical period), that Satan was usually understood to be the opposite not to Christ but to Michael as chief of the good angels. Ellen White seems to have made less study of the evil angels than, say, Martin Luther did, so perhaps she can be forgiven for seeming to promote Satan a little higher in the scheme of things than he ought to be.

During the twentieth century I read a couple of other books outlining the way the major denominations in the United States were, but I don't remember another book giving as complete a history of how they came to exist. If you want a less biased historical study of this topic, it's possible that you'll have to go back to the primary texts and write one...and I say the sooner the better.

New Book Review: The Cyrene Conspiracy

Title: The Cyrene Conspiracy 

Author: Ali Kaden

Date: 2026

Publisher: Third Culture Soul Publishing

ISBN: 979-8-9976635-0-6 

Quote: "She claimed to have something connected to Jesus and ancient Christianity that she wanted me to investigate."

Amir Zane, a young Egyptian-American writer, is asked to investigate an old parchment on which is written, among other things, "not him but another." 

If you remember Holy Blood Holy Grail or The Da Vinci Code you may now have some idea what to expect Amir is about to learn. There were, in the ancient world, a lot of ideas about who Jesus was and what had become of him. 

What became the orthodox Roman Catholic view, derived from the epistles of Paul in our New Testament, was that the Holy One is a unity of (probably an infinite number of Persons actually, but Three that we think we know about for sure) Three Persons, and Jesus was the one of those Persons who chose to exist in human form for thirty-some years. He didn't exactly look forward to crucifixion, but chose to take human form at a period when publicly doing and saying even the nice things our Gospels record would offend enough "higher-up" people to result in crucifixion. In some cosmic way this willing self-sacrifice of a perfect man atoned for the sinfulness of humankind and allowed those who followed Him to be saved from the eternal destruction our sinfulness deserved. 

Many people find this hard to believe. How could the Holy One have created a universe where some part of God's self would need to be killed by torture to show love for humankind? Couldn't the real story have been something simpler? Maybe Jesus came to show people how to lead a virtuous life, was murdered in the ordinary way, and came back to tell us that the resurrection will set all of our inherently immortal souls free from really ceasing to exist, which some people seem to fear more than they fear the pain of death. Maybe he wasn't even murdered. A theory that the apostle Thomas, whose name means "twin," was Jesus' twin is hard to reconcile with the Gospels. Some people theorized that Jesus had a secret twin who either was the one who walked around Jerusalem after Jesus died, or died in Jesus' place. Maybe even the apostles didn't know about this twin...

Relatively few churches try to reenact the full "Passion" drama. "Passion" does not merely mean the emotional outburst Victorian writers meant by saying someone "flew into a passion" and presumably yelled or cried, nor does it merely mean the physical feelings modern writers usually have in mind. It means "suffering." Before being crucified the Gospels make it clear that Jesus chose to endure some additional torture. The crucificarii, an ancient Roman term of abuse meaning "men about to be crucified" and used as a general term of contempt, were forced to drag their crosses through the streets before they were hanged on them. All of them were thus displayed to the public as sweating, bleeding, miserable messes. Jesus, we are told, had been beaten thoroughly and lost a fair bit of blood before the crucifixion, and the people who came out to taunt and throw things at the crucificarii felt sorry for him. Along the way he collapsed on the ground. Some say the Roman soldiers dragooned someone else into carrying his cross, so that the mob could watch Jesus' final agony on the cross; some say a kind man  volunteered to do it, to spare Jesus some small part of the suffering he had chosen. Some have imagined that Jesus was given an extra-large cross that was meant for Barabbas and had been built by a relative of someone Barabbas had murdered. In any case, all the Gospel writers say about the man who actually carried the cross for the last part of the way was that he was called Simon of Cyrene. 

About the given name, what we know is that "Simon" was one of those names that become popular in multiethnic societies because they seem traditional in more than one language. Two of the apostles were called Simon, at least until Jesus gave one of them the nickname Peter. Many other men used the same name. It does not tell us whether this man was Greek or Jewish.

About the place he came from, history tells us a little more. Cyrene was in Libya but it was built into a city by Greeks; they might have moved away from one of the islands because of renewed volcanic activity. The official leader of the Greeks who settled there was their princess, the daughter of the king they had lost, and the place was named after her. It was dedicated to the sun god Apollo, who was said to be the father of a child to whom the princess gave birth. Several Jews settled there. Later many people in the city became Christians; it had a church, and bishops who are still on the list of obscure saints. Mark, the Gospel writer, was said to have been a Jew from Cyrene who became the city's first bishop. 

Photo of what's left of part of ancient Cyrene from Wikipedia. 

Photo posted on Facebook by Grigol Pheradze. At least the rich people who had their portraits painted or sculpted in ancient Cyrene look more like modern southern Europeans than like modern Africans. Then again, northern Africans don't look all that different from southern Europeans. Nevertheless, when Passion dramas are enacted, any Black man who attends the church is likely to be cast as Simon of Cyrene. Simon of Cyrene may have been Black but, even if he was, he would have been in Jerusalem to trade or to visit relatives, as a well-off gentleman from a wealthy city. He was not a fugitive slave, or if he was one he hadn't been enslaved in Cyrene; ex-slaves didn't claim the places they'd fled from as home. He might have been Jewish. He might have looked remarkably similar to Jesus. He might have been crucified in Jesus' place, while Jesus faded out of mortal view and, as some old texts say, laughed at the idea of mere men thinking they could crucify the Prophet who had become so virtuous as to be allowed to embody God. 

For all Muslims, Jesus is remembered as a prophet, sometimes called the greatest of prophets, a sinless teacher of peace and mercy. "We don't say 'Son of God,'" a Muslim once explained to me, "but 'Soul of God'. Anyone could choose to embody the Soul of God, but only Jesus did." Was he crucified because his enemies said he had claimed to be a Son of God, which Jews and Muslims agreed would have been blasphemy...or did it only appear that he was? Did he travel on to other places and teach peace and mercy to, e.g., the Persians, who had their own monotheistic religion in which he might have been seen as a fulfilment of prophecy? Could Mary Magdalene have received more ink in the Gospels than even Mother Mary, not because she was much older than the other women disciples, but because she was Jesus' wife; could they have had a child? 

If Christians seriously study the history of the Church, these ideas are familiar to them; they are some of the major heresies. In the Christian tradition the idea that Jesus was a natural man who earned the title "Son of God" by abstaining from all sin and fully embodying the Will of God is known as the Arian Heresy, which, as preached by Bishop Arius, annoyed Bishop Nicholas to the point of "slapping" Arius--whether literally, or with a book or sermon so scathing that it got Nicholas banned from the council of bishops voting whether or not to excommunicate Arius, as unable to hear the debate and vote with an unbiased mind. But most Christians don't bother studying these things, and to them The Cyrene Conspiracy, which is about Amir's discovery of the theory that Simon of Cyrene not only carried Jesus' cross but was crucified on it, may be new and shocking.

It is fiction but, as Kaden explains, it's written in aid of the people of Gaza. In order to investigate the parchment Amir doesn't go to a church or university library and study its history; he takes the parchment right back to the Middle East, where he meets some kind Christian priests and rescue workers, and a liberated modern Arab young lady whose fiance left her because he couldn't distract her from relief work in Gaza. He meets a woman who's been trying to nurse a baby, but her milk has failed due to starvation, and people with arms and legs blown off, and the familiar gallery of casualties of Modern War. He feels left out of conversations among Palestinians because they all introduce themselves to new acquaintances with tallies of the relatives they've lost, many of whom were women and children.

And he finds a ruined church where an heretical Christian sect seem to have met, centuries ago. He recognizes artistic motifs that lead him to begin to research the Manichaean Christian sect, of which the most thorough surviving descriptions were written by Augustine of Hippo after he left the group, and may have been written with prejudice. Exactly who the prophet Mani was, when and where he lived or died, and what he taught, may never be known but the woman Amir starts to fall in love with seems to see him as an intermediary link between Christian and Muslim thinking. In the ruined church his name appears under those of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Could he have been their son--or "spiritual son," a student--or in either sense their descendant? 

Muslims, like Christians, belong to different denominations. From the news media most Americans have heard that Sunnis were seen as more liberal than Shiites in some ways, but Sunnis persecuted Shiites, which doesn't sound so liberal. (That was only in Iran. The Sunni Muslims from India whom I've known were not inclined to persecute anybody, though they did accept that their leaders had a right to punish heretics against their religion: "Oh yes, if Salman Rushdie really did blaspheme and defame the Prophet, then of course he will have to die.") More recently we've heard of hard-line Wahhabis who take various phrases from the Koran more literally than most Muslims do. 

Relatively few Americans have heard of the Sufis, a liberal Muslim group who seemed to me, when I met them in Washington, to be trying to bridge the gaps between Islam and other religions toward the goal of converting everyone to a liberal, freethinking, New Agey form of Islam. In The Cyrene Conspiracy the heroine doesn't identify as a Sufi in so many words, but she seems close to being one. Sufis are, in my experience, profoundly likable people; they hate nobody, they invite Jews as well as Christians and Buddhists to chant and pray with them, they do not noticeably even disparage women even to the extent the Koran does. Some now say that their niceness is deployed by the evil, power-seeking Muslim political machine as a form of taqiyya, legitimized lying to gain social acceptability as a step toward political power. Those people probably also think the kind old priest in your neighborhood, the nice ladies at the Catholic school fundraising events, and President Kennedy were mere tools being used to restore the Papacy in the United States. Nice people and the nice things they do are sometimes exploited, but they are nice. 

The kind Christians Amir meets in Gaza are, of course, liberal and humanitarian people too. The Jews, on the other hand...There have been, in historical fact, Jews who volunteered to serve as bodyguards, blockades, and even hostages for their Palestinian neighbors in some past conflicts between Gaza and Israel. They said that human beings are human beings, however misguided, even hateful, some of them may be. That was before October 2022.

I did not write the Bible and have wondered, myself, why even before Moses' time people in the Old Testament treated rape as worse than murder. I can see why people emotionally feel that killing a baby is worse than killing a man, and I completely agree that a rapist has no reason to live, but if killing the murderer himself was enough of a deterrent to murder, why was it felt necessary to kill all the men in a rapist's tribe or town? Of course, Susan Brownmiller theorized that the perversion of sexuality that makes rape possible has to be a societal evil. That argument was credible and well argued, though not everyone is convinced that it's true. It does not sound like an argument Semitic tribesmen before Moses' time would have made. They seem to have seen rape as a peculiarly evil sin, not even so much against the victim as against the God of Life itself, that needed to be "put away from among you." Moses limited victims' families to demanding the execution of the rapist himself, Deborah celebrated that a woman was willing to stop with killing a war chief who was known to allow his army to rape other tribes' women, and David certainly had cause to encourage Absalom to stop with killing Ammon, but in the only other instance recorded in the Bible, where a gang of Benjamite youths raped a nameless and status-less woman, the other tribes joined in the slaughter of all the then able-bodied male adults in the tribe of Benjamin. Why? Because, as a crime, rape was seen as going beyond murder and needing to be punished accordingly. Murder can be, in the ancient world it probably often was, a crime of carelessness or emotionality. Rape has a blasphemous quality that some murders share, but most do not.

In October 2022 the men in the ruling party Gaza chose for itself raped Jewish women and murdered Jewish babies, and a great number of people, worldwide, said: "Let Gaza suffer whatever anyone in Israel cares to do to them," at least "...until the men who committed this crime are dead, buried under layers of dung and carrion, disowned by as many of their families as want to live." The result was Modern War. Even supporters of Israel asked, as did this web site: Really, Mr. Netanyahu, primary schools? And were told: Gazans have built their primary schools above tunnels where the evildoers are known to hide; therefore. That's Modern War. The only way to win a war against things that long ago ceased to be human is not to treat them like human beings again, even if they have taken human beings as hostages.

I believe there are alternatives, difficult and costly as they may be. Afghanistan had already been reduced to a desert before the US went in, but we could have gone as policemen and killed only known terrorists. (Actually I think, mostly, our army tried to do that.) The whole Middle East is already pretty much a desert, but Israel could have limited its violence to the Hamas goons. Maybe they tried. I am not the judge. I am a Christian reflecting on recent events from a religious and philosophical point of view.

Legitimate police work, finding and punishing violent criminals, can sometimes do a certain amount of collateral damage. In the US our big news story for this whole year has been how we had an unsustainable number of illegal immigrants who were contributing nothing good to society, from fraudulent recipients of business grants (who made a good snarky news story) to the usual drug dealers and violent fugitives from justice, and we as a nation said to all these people: Go home! And despite all the publicity given to armed federal agents arresting and deporting these immigrants, masses of them just peaceably recognized that their time was up, and left the US. And others chose to force our government to send armed men after them, and certain people who hardly deserved to be US citizens got in the way, and we had cases like that wretched woman screaming to her driver to run the car over a federal agent who, feeling threatened, shot the woman; and nobody who walks on US streets can blame him. In the same way, if Gazans support Hamas and interfere with the legitimate effort to punish the violence of October 2022, even most Arabs seem to think that missing legs and hungry babies are inevitable.

In The Cyrene Conspiracy, Amir realizes that he's going to have a very hard time staying near the woman he obviously wants to be near. He sympathizes too much with Palestinians. As an American he can't resist yelling "Leave them alone!" and otherwise interfering with Israeli military police who swagger around putting Palestinians in their place. He tries to tell himself that these Israelis--all the Israelis he meets seem hostile--are dealing with their own war zone emotional issues, but then he hears one with an American accent, determines that this particular Israeli soldier comes from Brooklyn, and tells the man off as if they were back in New York City. He realizes that the Israeli police are likely to leave an American visitor alone and then punish his local friends. He can't help it. Amir is a rich young man who grew up in the US. Self-control has not been a major subject in his education, as it has for his friends in the Middle East.

So, back in the US (readers will find out for themselves how the characters' relationships go), Amir writes a novel in which the characters conclude that Simon of Cyrene died in Jesus' place, and Jesus and Mary Magdalene became not the teachers or even the great-great-grandparents but the parents of Mani. It sells well. It seems to remind some American Christians that good relations with the children of Abraham involves good relations with the children of Ishmael too. Then a quiet, fanatical scholar he's met a few times in the course of his research breaks into his apartment and his computer, babbling about sacrificing red heifers to bring about the ultimate conflict with the Muslim world...There will be a sequel. Probably a series.

The Old Testament itself tells us that it's a mistake to take prophetic texts too literally. In Hebrew more than in other languages, most words may suggest visual images, which may or may not literally have anything to do with the fulfilment of the prophecy. Jesus is the Lion of Judah, the greatest and strongest of all the leaders foretold to come out of that tribe; he is not a wild animal with claws and a tail and a foul odor. Abraham's "children" are like the sands of the sea in number; not in size or color or consistency. A red heifer without white spots, like the virgin bride who was to conceive (people would have imagined) in the moment of losing her virginity, is rare but natural; whether God promised to do anything special when a red heifer was literally sacrificed, or when people's dedication reached a level that is rare but natural, remains to be learned. 

The Bible does not promise that Christians will never be forced into war, or forced to choose between warfare and abuse. It does teach us that we are not to choose war with any child of Abraham. For all practical purposes we might as well read "with any one." The children of Abraham include Jews who trace their physical descent to Isaac, Christians who are adoptive heirs of Isaac, Arabs who trace their physical descent to Ishmael, non-Arab Muslims who are adoptive heirs of Ishmael, and the descendants of Keturah, which seems to include most of Africa and India. Cases have been made for the claim that "Red" Russians, who rejected Christianity, were also physical descendants of Isaac through "Red" Esau/Edom and that at least some northern European and indigenous American groups were physical descendants of the scattered tribes of Israel. The Bible does say that God will bless those who bless a child of Abraham, and curse those who curse one. This is probably best interpreted as telling us that we should bless rather than curse all nations.  Egyptians were not Ishmaelites in Bible days but now, having become Muslims, they too should be blessed and not cursed.

What may come as surprising news to some American Christians is that Christianity did not originate in Rome or Ireland. Christianity came from the Middle East. The first Christians were Jews; the Christian message reached other Semitic tribes before it reached European tribes. There were and there still are Christian groups that never had much contact with Rome, that understand the teachings of Moses and Jesus differently due to not having had them filtered through the teachings of Augustine or Aquinas or, in some cases, even Paul. There are Christians who understand resurrection in terms of reincarnation, and accept some of those Lost Books of the  Bible as sacred scriptures, and imagine Jesus laughing at the idea that people thought they were crucifying him rather than weeping for the suffering of someone else who was crucified in his place, and all kinds of things that mainstream churches teach us not to  believe. There are schools of Christian thought that are close to Muslim thought on some points. 

Are these minority Christian groups right? Well...most of the major heresies and Lost Books of the Bible were pushed out of the mainstream, not by war, but by a consensus of people who had studied the Law and the Prophets and the Gospels, discussed these books and ideas, and found them incompatible with the canonical scriptures. Do they have a right to their beliefs? Of course they have.

Islam has been called, by Christian scholars and thinkers no less than C.S. Lewis, the greatest of all the Christian heresies. In the Quran and Hadith the difficult and mysterious parts of Christian doctrine are replaced with ideas easier to understand, and the complexities of ideas like "In Christ is neither male nor female" are replaced with ideas more popular at the time like "Since you [mortals] agree that some of you are of more value than others..." And also some teachings that Christians might want to forget have been preserved, even spelled out in detail: To prevent employers from delaying payment, taking risks with the money, and perhaps not paying employees at all, Muslim employers are specifically told to pay employees "while the sweat is on their faces." To prevent quibbling about a certain level of interest on debt, like the two-figure interest on credit card debt, being defined as usury, Muslims are told not to charge interest on debts at all; there can be flat fees on loans, but creditors are not allowed to make more money by making it harder for debtors to pay off debts. Every American has undoubtedly heard false friends warble that "A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you"; Muslims are told to defend their friends in battle and support their businesses in times of peace. We in the US have the right and duty to identify ourselves as a majority-Christian nation, enshrine Christian practices in our law, and deport anyone who wants to replace our constitutional system with sharia law. Nevertheless there are things we could benefit from learning from Muslims. 

We should not tolerate either the efforts some Muslims have made to impose sharia law over and above our own law, or the efforts some of their (weak and temporary) political allies have made to cover up those efforts. We should recognize that, if the Israelis deserve support and protection as children of Abraham, so do the Arabs, and most other nations; for the prophecy has been fulfilled that Abraham's heirs would be like the sands of the seas in numbers. Muslims who seek reconciliation with Christians should also seek reconciliation  with Jews...and I say the sooner the better. 

Not everyone has experienced the peace and good will of a Sufi prayer meeting. I have; The Cyrene Conspiracy recalled it to my mind, and I hope the book can bring something similar to all of your minds. May that peace and good will be with all of you, Gentle Readers.

Where Were You on This Day in 2001?

I was in "gorgeous" Prince Georges County, Maryland. It was a Tuesday. We had a Tuesday routine: drive up Route 1 to Laurel, stop and see a massage client, stop at some favorite stores, drive on to Columbia, change the library books, buy take-out meals on the mall, eat and walk around the Centennial Lake Park, stop at other favorite stores. It was an absolutely gorgeous day and I was looking forward to it. I called the massage client and heard, "I think I should cancel. I don't think you should come out today. Did you see the news? Somebody just crashed a plane into the World Trade Center."

"Was someone youall knew on the plane?" 

"I don't think so but they think it might have been some kind of act of war. We're all watching the news. We might want to get out of here."

I put down the phone and turned to my husband. "They don't even know who was on the plane, but they're all in mourning because a plane crashed in New York. Do you want to watch that on the news?"

"It'll be in the Post tomorrow. Let's go on as usual." I spent a lot of time at the library in Columbia because on Tuesdays my husband either took a continuing education course for tutors of disabled children, or tutored one of them, for a good part of the day. We loaded up the books we were taking back. It was not one of the days when I took the Practically Perfect Toshiba laptop. We stopped at the Amvets charity store, a very large store with a furniture showroom and some pay phones. In those days a local phone call cost a quarter, and long-distance calls could be made from a pay phone if you had a lot of coins to feed into it, by ones, or if you had a prepaid "calling card." I had a few of those cards in my pocket along with library cards and store membership cards and my Metrorail Farecard. I went into the store and browsed my way to the aisle where the yarn was, if they had any. They didn't. Behind that aisle was a glass pane enclosing the room with the TV, radio, and stereo sets. All of them were tuned to the news. 

By that time the second plane had hit the second tower and the third one had hit the Pentagon. The Pentagon was designed and built for security rather than as a show of hubris; the section of it that could be hit by the plane was a little-used storage section, but of course people had been on the plane, including Barbara Olson, an emerging author who'd become popular. 

I looked around and saw that I was one of a row of people staring at the row of TV sets. Some of them were making cell phone calls. English was not most of their first language--the Amvets store employed a lot of foreign-born military wives, and was the store where you couldn't always count on finding anyone who spoke even Spanish, but that was the attraction for other immigrants who spoke the other languages the staff used. I didn't yet have a cell phone so I power-walked to the front wall of the store and punched in the numbers from a "calling card." Mother needed to know that I was safe in rural Maryland and wouldn't come home unless civilians were evacuated, as in the Gulf War. So did Aunt Dotty. I didn't use up a lot of minutes but quite a long line had formed behind me when I put down the phone. I didn't buy anything.

"There were two more planes," I told my husband. "One of them hit the Pentagon. They think it's war."

"Don't panic," my husband said. People were rushing out of the store, with or without purchases, heading home to pack in case they had to evacuate. Since we had our separate homes outside the city, we didn't feel that urgent need to pack; I'd take the laptop, my knitting, and the new batch of library books I intended to check out, but clothes and toothbrushes were waiting at home. "We can go on with the day and hear the news tonight."

The library was closed; we dropped the books into the chute. We bought food, ate, and started walking around the lake as usual. About halfway around we met a couple of park rangers in an ATV. "We're sorry, but there was a fourth plane that crashed into a field. We don't know how many more planes these people may have hijacked. We're closing the park. Could you walk out with us please."

All the stores were closed. Outside a store a teenager was leaning on a wall, fiddling with a cell phone. "When I woke up," he felt a need to tell us, "I thought this was going to be the best day in America. I did not know it was going to be the worst day in America."

We went home and turned on the television. Months went by when nobody turned it on. That afternoon we sat in front of it, hoping for fresh news and not seeing any. "I see Stephanopoulos landed on his feet," my husband said, and I said, "Good for him. That takes care of the list of people I know in New York. You?"I was wrong, of course. A few friends and relatives had been there, and I hadn't heard. At least none of them was hurt in the fire. Everybody always knows a few people in New York City.

"I used to know lots of people in New York," my husband said. 

"Well that's the fifth time they've shown us that woman in the orange jacket, coughing," I said. "We can't do anything for those people but we could at least not watch them." 

"I can watch the little TV set upstairs," my husband said. "In case they start releasing names. I know it's early but I'd like to see the names."

I was starting to feel manipulated. The television set wasn't telling people anything new; only blaring fear, rage, and war. I thought the emotion might have been worth sitting through if the screen had been running a list of people known to have survived or not survived, but that was days away. The coughing woman was flashed on the screen in between images of children dancing in some Middle Eastern desert town. Could even Arabs have trained children to dance joyously, rather than angrily, in celebration of war? (Later we heard that they couldn't; what the children were celebrating was an annual town festival.) People who were normally in favor of peace were suddenly in favor of war. I did not want to be manipulated into supporting war, as were the people who'd always seemed civilized who were out on the streets, the next day, waving signs saying "Reduce Kabul to rubble." Clearly there would have to be some sort of reprisals. I hoped they could be done efficiently. Didn't we have firepower several hundred times greater than the Al-Qaeda fools had? Go in, get them out, and hang them high as Haman, I was praying our troops would do. No modern war. No blowing up hospitals, no incendiary bombs  dropped on babies. In 2001 baby-boomers' mental pictures of modern war included an old video of a little girl in Vietnam, running and screaming, her clothes burned away. She had survived, we'd been told. Not the kind of thing we wanted the young to see on the news.

News highlights of that evening included that generous Washingtonians had asked where to send the money, and embarrassed New Yorkers had declined offers of cash or blood, saying their city could take care of its own. I was glad. People would say awkwardly, off and on all winter, that they felt that "we were all New Yorkers or Washingtonians now," and I'd feel embarrassed for them. A lot of people had died; a lot of people were genuinely mourning. I felt something for them but I didn't think it would help to pretend that I, as a stranger, was feeling anything like their pain. I already knew what grief felt like. It was nice that people outside the family missed the person too, but trying to pretend they felt what the family felt merely made them sound stupid. 

Introverts do feel empathy, but those of us who haven't been taught that the empathy we feel is the "wrong" kind feel empathy for other introverts and express empathy as to other introverts. I felt no urge to hug strangers. I murmured soothingly, a few times, when massage clients found that relaxation released tears of real grief. 

Bland rich-boy W Bush suddenly became a trigger for intense emotions. In Washington we heard some things people in "the heartland" didn't hear. I heard W proclaiming that "they hate us because we are free," saw him signing the loathsome "P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act" (a law that violates everyone's right to privacy), thought he was a hypocrite in the service of the Evil Principle. I went home and heard people saying that he certainly had become a target but they thought he was coping rather well. Yes, Sir. Yes, Ma'am. Whatever. Saying what I thought of W Bush at the time would have been treason. Twenty-five years later I don't know what W was thinking or why he let enemies of the people have the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, but I still want to see it extirpated from our law. I don't think Trump, or Cruz, or Vance, or Rubio, is the man to do that. Musk has the courage but not the ability to understand why it needs to be done. Massie, DeSantis, and Kennedy together might have enough fortitude and intelligence to do it. Maybe.

My husband listened to the "they hate us because we are free" speech and growled, "Yes, and there's a little matter of our support for Israel against the Palestinians. What about that?" I had no foreign policy. I said, "Hasn't he got the 'blond' act down, though!" 

I'll say this, now, with hindsight. If you or your family are involved with the oil industry, you know Arab-type people and you know Israeli-type people. You might know a few young ones as nephews, nieces, or cousins, on both sides. This causes acute ambivalence when conflicts among the Semitic nations are mentioned. I think W Bush  sincerely felt, as I did, that sense of "I hope this war won't harm my Arab-type friends who really are people of peace--not even defining peace as  'our nation dominant over yours'." It was not a question of loyalty. Bin Laden obviously needed what he eventually got, only maybe in an even more humiliating way; his goons needed to be locked up with a metal key, have the key recycled, and find out whether anybody cared to kick a bottle of water under the door. That had nothing to do with Halla or Feitan or Farouk or anyone else we knew. Most people in Washington in 2001, if they weren't bigots, had Muslim friends. I had an adoptive brother who had rallied the whole Islamic Centre crowd to support my business, and had often said, when asked why I didn't attend any church regularly, that the kind of fellowship that would justify attending church on a day of rest was something I'd only found among Muslims--their sex-phobic culture has encouraged them to take sex-free friendship very seriously--but I was still a Christian.

Anyway...nobody was asked to flee the city, as in the Gulf War, and I was glad. "Show no fear" was the order of the day. Tourists, however, did stop coming to Washington. The city seemed oddly vacant without them. You did not, in fact, hear a visitor squeal with surprise the first time the farecard machine sucked the card out of their hands, scanned it, and stamped the remaining value on it, every day. You did not think of that as something you'd ever miss...but early in the spring, when I finally heard that sound again, I was surprised by how much I'd missed it. 

W Bush had proposed, unsatisfactorily, that we could "be tourists in our own town," which showed it wasn't his town. His money came from oil. A lot of people's money came from our city's very own economy, which dived down in 2001. Cartoonists, at least, had fun with the idea of spending money to boost the economy. "What did you do in the Gulf War, Daddy?"--"I charged!"I paid cash, and that winter I didn't have much of it.

Scattered through the city were people going through real grief. Everyone was trying to respect those people and their feelings. I suppose I still am. I shed a few tears when I met the people who'd lost parents or children on those planes. Mostly I felt tired of the endless emoting in what passed for the news media, and the way it was being manipulated to drum up support for "modern war," and the grief piled on grief as the Post started to report young people being injured or killed in the war.

What I lost twenty-five years ago, what all of us lost, was a substantial chunk of our natural pre-constitutional right to privacy. We need to be demanding that back, while we still can.

The fire fighters running into the burning, crumbling buildings, to remove injured people if they found any alive...I think the best thing W said about the whole war was that we could direct some of the emotion toward supporting and encouraging fire fighters. That, at least, is a good thing. Most people are not built to be professional firemen or police officers but all of us could benefit from some training to be able to cope with emergencies when they are not available. All of us could appreciate the special skills and training the professionals have. 

Where were you on this day in 2001?

Bad Poetry: Douglass Howard

A prompt at dVerse this week was a quote from the late Gloria Steinem: "When you're lucky enough to have lived a long life, as I have done, your role is to remind us how far we have come."

I thought of one of those ancestors people traditionally used to spend a lot of time and money to find out they can claim, and then even more to try to avoid having to claim. Talk about awful women...women who had the excuse of being denied legitimate opportunities to reach positions of power, but probably would have used illegitimate ones if they'd had legitimate ones, because they were awful. At one point, when her awfulness had been discovered, Douglass Howard pled insanity and spent a short time in a hospital; she was not insane, at least not in the legal sense, and soon got out again. What she had was the kind of tunnel vision that shut out considerations of ethics, or proprieties, or the possibility of getting caught, when she had devised a plan for getting what she wanted. 

Drawing from Wikipedia. 

Despite having a mannish name, apparently a mannish look, and a mannish thought process that got her into trouble, Douglass Howard was the mother of five children.

When she was only seventeen

She went to court to serve the Queen,

As, in that unenlightened day,

Was quite the most accepted way

For sons and daughters of the wealthy

To find mates who at least looked healthy.

Within a year fair Douglass wed

John, Baron Sheffield; shared his bed,

And, just five summers later on,

They had the necessary son.

But Douglass still hung round the court,

Apparently to be a sort 

Of  chaperone to her shameless sister,

And stole the young man who had kissed her.

His wife had died. So soon? The answer

May have involved a case of cancer,

But likely she was pushed--she fell

Down just an ordinary stairwell

And broke not hip, not even knee,

But neck. The husband was ambitious.

A richer prospect he could see.

Some said the wife's death looked suspicious,

Like many others, some did say--

But he'd always been far away

When "what really happened" did.

Douglass, bored with her spouse and kid,

Wrote to the man her sister chased

That it would suit her noble taste

If Baron Sheffield were to meet

The sort of accident, complete,

Though fatal, that had swept away

Those others, out of Leicester's way.

(Cut-off point for tired eyes--although the Bad Baroness is only warming up.)

This awful letter then was seen

And brought to court before the Queen.

"I must have been out of my mind!"

Douglass screamed. "Memory cannot find

Any basis for such a letter!

Send me to Bedlam till I'm better!"

And there, indeed, she found a room.

But not even postpartum gloom

Suggested she'd ever gone mad,

And so I doubt she ever had.

She had no conscience. Was she crazy?

No more than she was ever lazy...

Though languid luxury might have served

Her better than the schemes she nerved

Herself up to. Sheffield, meanwhile,

Drank water dirty folk defile,

Caught dysentery, passed away

While staying many and many a mile

Out of the Earl of Leicester's way.

Fair Douglass, widowed, hardly'd play

At mourning, but threw all her charms

(Such as they were) at Leicester's arms.

"I cannot marry you," he wrote,

"It would strike a discordant note

In my romance with England's Queen!"

No shame on either face was seen.

Douglass sighed, "Just a chance there may be

That you and I could have a baby."

So, Leicester: "All think it befits

The king to have his share of fitz,

But 'illegitimate' sons of others

Are persecuted, and their mothers.

I'll do the honorable thing,

A secret midnight marriage bring

To friends' house. Don't tell anyone!

Then you and I can have our fun,

But if the Queen will have me, I

The marriage publicly deny;

As king, I'll do right by my fitz,

And you, too, custom then acquits."

Likely they were a well matched pair,

Except their times were more unfair

To women. Douglass faced more shame

Though both were equally to blame.

The secret wedding, all benighted,

Produced a son. Both were delighted.

At christening, the little cuddly

Child was recorded "Robert Dudley,"

The same name Leicester had at birth.

Like every child of wealth and worth,

The boy called Robin was cared for

Mostly by servants, but given more

Advantages than other boys.

The Earl, whom Oxford now employs,

Made sure that Oxford took young Robin,

His heart with navigation throbbing.

Quite uninclined to leave her throne

For childbirth's hazards, so well known,

Elizabeth knew what her friends 

Were up to, though, for her own ends,

She seems to have tactfully ignored

Behavior otherwise deplored.

In any case, a rich knight offered;

Douglass ditched Leicester for Stafford.

He was Ambassador to France,

Where she was free to party, dance,

Spend Stafford's money as she'd like,

And Leicester's--though their little tyke

Lived in his father's house, adored

And pampered like a little lord,

And always absolutely free,

When she'd let him, to go and see

Douglass wherever she was staying,

Though she preferred to spend time playing

With Catherine de Medici.

Some ask: how horrible was she?

She was consort, not ruling Queen.

The Medici-Valois machine

Did its worst work before the hours

When Catherine had gained real powers,

But she had hardly taught her son

To do better than his father'd done.

In any case, Douglass's role

Was to encourage and console

The "Italian Serpent's" last few days;

Some say, in wicked witches' ways.

Back in England, Elizabeth,

Who feared childbirth as certain death,

Left Leicester to her plump cousin,

Set England's gossip mills to buzzing.

Now Robin's hurried off to college,

Quite young, though quick at gaining knowledge,

To hide him from the Countess Leicester.

From France now Douglass writes: "At Esher,

A house in Surrey, wintertide,

There Leicester made me his bride,

Though it was never my idea.

I only said yes out of fear..." 

Elizabeth and court all shout,

"Throw this liar and her letter out!"

At Oxford Robin had been styled

As Robert Leicester, the Earl's child;

Now, thanks to Douglass, ruled a bastard,

The art of navigation mastered.

He travelled, wrote, was married twice,

And found Italy's climate nice,

Compared with England's. He lived long

And well. The Stafford babes died young.

So did the Queen's first cousin's child,

Named Robert Leicester, from birth styled

The Earl of Denbigh, prone to fits

And never thought quite in right wits.

Catherine died old. Stafford confessed

Douglass always loved Leicester best.

The French sent Douglass back to Britain

To die. In Douglass' will was written:

Robin, "mine honourable son."

If he was, he's the only one

In this lot. Stafford also lied;

In England's court he testified

That Robin terrorized his mother

Into writing a statement other

Than all the facts they all knew well.

How Queen Bess managed not to yell,

"Ye pack of liars! Out the door

And never see my face, no more!"

Is unrecorded. She was strong.

And if this tale's run on too long,

So did the lives of all these rats

That England had for aristocrats.

(Cut-off point for those who duon't think poems should end in "morals")

Always prepared to fight and quarrel,

They seem to've hardly had one moral

Among them all. But if you want

A moral, have one: Women aren't

Improved by injustice and oppression,

Except they need not claim "depression"

As a pretext for awfulness;

We might as well have our redress--

Responsibilities and rights,

To use, as men do, by such lights

As conscience may give. If not all

Have consciences, then let them fall.

Some do have conscience; let those stand

As fittest to rule o'er the land.

As witch, as conspirator, liar,

Douglass prepared for judgment's fire.

If she'd lived when young women heard

They might stand out above the herd

By accomplishments instead of schemes,

She might have chased ambitious dreams

As diplomat, as  president,

In her own right and government,

Rather than using all those men

And children with them. She might then

Have done her job, and done it well;

Bigotry fitted her for Hell.

(I don't claim to know whether Douglass Howard really was a Christian, or repented of her sins, or may go to Heaven. But it would be a great surprise to all who knew her.)

Book Announcement: The Lost Books of the Bible

Title: The Lost Books of the Bible

Author/translator credited on the cover: R.H. Charles

Author/editor: Joel Fotinos

Date of original publication of most content: 1894

Date of publication of this book: August 18, 2026'

Publisher: St Martin's

Quote: "And Josias held the feast of the passover in Jerusalem..."

Fotinos doesn't add a lot of explanation to this book--or collection of books. It begins with "And Josias held the feast..." What else had come before the feast? You need to know your study Bible, the one with the Apocrypha in it. Most English translations emphasize the difference between the two Hebrew books ascribed to Ezra, and the two apocryphal books written in Greek and ascribed to Esdras, by spelling the names differently; there are 1 and 2 Ezra, and then there are 1 and 2 Esdras. Spanish and some other translations of the Bible emphasize their intended continuity. Ezra and Esdras are the same name. The books may not have been written by the same man, but the author of 1 Esdras wanted people to believe they were. The narrative in 1 Esdras picks up where 2 Ezra leaves off. Before reading The Lost Books of the Bible you need to know the actual Bible well enough to know what a lot of obscure Jewish and Christian writers, between 1500 and 2500 years ago, were adding their words to. 

It looks like fraud to us, and even ancient writers sometimes felt called to condemn anyone who changed their words, but in this period of history it was commonplace for secretaries and students to write in the names of their masters and teachers. Of course beginning writers sometimes selected as masters the books of writers who had been dead for a long time. Their goal was not to produce "original" work but to imitate their masters' work well enough that people would not know which were the master's own works and which were the student's. There is thus no real way of knowing whether the "real" Ezra suddenly switched to writing in Greek, which his Hebrew books don't sound as if he was likely to have done, or whether someone who worked for him felt moved to write the part of his autobiography he never had time to write, or whether--which seems more likely--some random Greek-speaker wrote down some fragments of history as 1 Esdras and the person's own vision as 2 Esdras. 

Historical perspective makes some aspects of these ancient books laugh-out-loud funny today. The author of the outrageous fiction called the Book of Adam and Eve claimed that God had told Adam, repeatedly, that this mortal world would end after 5500 years--500 years after Christ's time, according to the widespread belief that humankind had been created just 4000 years before Abraham's time. A little further along in the history of the early Church, we find Barnabas (was he the same Barnabas who travelled with Paul? Who knows?) explaining that as the world had been made in six days, so it would end in 6000 years. In the tale of Tobit a demon is exorcised, and a woman healed, by a bit of traditional magic involving a dead fish. In the wildly improbable Acts of Peter a talking dog plays a prominent role; we might want to read this "dog" as a priest in a sex cult, so we are specifically told that he is "a dumb animal," though he has a lot to say. 

The Book of the Twelve Patriarchs looks like what some early Christian writers defended as a "pious fiction," in which a Christian writer retells the stories of Jacob and his sons, emphasizing that each of the founders of the tribes of Israel supposedly had a Christian vision just before he died. The Book of Adam and Eve betrays a lack of familiarity with Old Testament history, but may redeem itself by a careful observation of a parent's interactions with a whiny, entitled, manipulative three-year-old, prone to tantrums, and his quiet enabler, his two-year-old sister. Adam and Eve are characterized as that kind of children. The author of this book should only have written a proper novel about an ordinary family...

Nevertheless, each of these books contains enough real religious thought that some people thought it ought to be printed in copies of the Bible. Some of the apocryphal Christian books clearly reflect the beliefs and personalities of real Christians. Barnabas, whoever he was, may have been omitted from the New Testament because he was more anti-Jewish than Paul's colleague could credibly have been. The Bible does not directly oppose abortion, although it existed; some of the apocryphal Christian writers condemn it in harsh and graphic language. The Old Testament never explains why rape seems to have been more severely punished than murder; the apocryphal writer lets Joseph, the son of Jacob who was sexually harassed by his master's wife, explain why sexual violation is not merely a violation of the victim, of the victim's family, or of social order generally, but a sin against Life itself. 

The Gospel of Thomas is particularly interesting to many baby-boomers. According to European and Indian literary tradition, Thomas was the apostle who went to India. He had known Jesus personally; he was the apostle who wanted to examine His scars. Did Jesus say all the things Thomas claims Jesus said, which neither Matthew, Mark, Luke, nor John ever mentioned? Was the author the same Thomas, or was he quoting the same Jesus? We may never know, but we can see clearly that this Thomas has been influenced by much study of both Christian and Buddhist thought. His book appeals to all of us who felt "seduced," to whatever extent, by "New Age" ideas in the 1980s. 

If you feel up to the challenge of spending time in fellowship with these long-ago writers, even though they were imperfect people, some of them bad writers, and some of them probably dishonest people, you may appreciate the work of the late, great Irish scholar R.H. Charles, who was best known for his translations of ancient literature, and his contemporary admirer Joel Fotinos.

This book is recommended only to people who know their Bibles well. To those interested in the history of the early church, however, it may be a real treasure.

Do you already have all of these books? Here is the complete list of the thirty books in this one-volume library:

1. 1 Esdras

2. 2 Esdras

3. Tobit

4. Judith

5. Wisdom of Solomon

6. Sirach

7. Baruch

8. Letter of Jeremy

9. Prayer of Manasseh

10. Additions to Daniel

11. Additions to Esther

12. Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs

13. Ascension of Isaiah

14. Apocalypse of Abraham

15. Baruch (Syriac)

16. Book of Adam and Eve

17. Gospel of Tomas

18. Gospel of Peter

19. Infancy Gospel of James

20. Infancy Gospel of Peter

21. Gospel of Nicodemus

22. Gospel of Mary

23. Acts of Paul and Thecla

24. Shepherd of Hermas

25. Didache

26. Epistle of Barnabas

27. Apocalypse of Peter

28. Odes of Solomon

29. Epistle to the Laodiceans

30. Acts of Peter

Book Review: To Be Real

Title: To Be Real

Editor: Rebecca Walker

Date: 1995

Publisher: Anchor / Doubleday

ISBN: 0-385-47262-5

Length: 290 pages text, 40 pages introduction

Quote: “The greatest gift we can give one another is the power to make a choice.”

Rebecca Walker’s first contribution to American feminist thought was this collection of essays by young people who are still concerned about gender parity, but don’t fit the stereotype of the yuppie feminists of the 1980s. One reason they don’t fit the stereotype is that they came along too late to be yuppies. A few ambitious teachers and lawyers contributed essays to this book, but there’s also a model, a stripper, a rodeo showgirl.

There are also some men and some lesbians. Too many to suit me. Gloria Steinem used to cite a dictionary definition of “feminist” as meaning “anyone who thinks women are equally as valuable as men.” By that definition, these days, anyone who is reasonably in touch with reality qualifies as a feminist. If I were collecting a book about the female experience, however, I’d select writing by people who were unequivocally female and had lived an unequivocally female experience. Jeannine Delombard’s explanation of how her ambition to be as totally feminine as possible, too different from the boys even to want to kiss one, shaped her life of lesbian “Femmenism,” is an interesting story but not one the majority of women can really identify with.

I’d also try to include some viewpoints that are conspicuously missing from To Be Real. This book is supposed to be about the diversity of contemporary feminism but all the writers, without exception, are pretty far out on the left wing of twentieth-century politics. As Eleanor Burkitt observed, this is not an accurate representation of feminist thinking and action in the 1990s, which were also the decade when Republicans were begging Elizabeth Hanford Dole to run for President, when Laura Ingraham and Laura Schlessinger became media stars. Any historical study of the 1990s will need to balance this book with Burkitt’s book, The Right Women, a study of the diverse and sometimes baffling manifestations of right-wing feminism.

It might have been hard to persuade Laura Ingraham to write anything that would appear in an anthology along with a piece by Angela Davis, or vice versa, but that would have been the sort of anthology of 1990s feminist diversity that I would have accepted as “being real.”

Most of the contributors to To Be Real were not, and have not become, celebrity authors, although the book opens with Steinem and closes with Davis and includes pieces by Bell Hooks and Naomi Wolf. Most of them were in their early twenties when they wrote these essays, and it shows. The only way to describe the topics some of these writers chose, and the passionate intensity with which they made points they probably prefer to forget having argued now, is to say—as one had to say to some of what was collected in Sisterhood Is Powerful, years ago—“They are so young.” Anna Bondoc writes about being estranged from her conservative Catholic family by her activism on behalf of a left-wing group, or groups, that certainly don’t seem to have filled her life with joy. When she shares with a left-wing group the very personal story of how she’s given up her home and allowance to fight for their cause, a slightly older woman rejects her display of self-abnegation, complaining that Bondoc seems to have cut herself off from her roots...and Bondoc is so upset, you’d think she’d never even heard of the Queen Bee Syndrome. This is a teenage experience, even if Bondoc managed to postpone it into her twenties.

Then there’s Wolf’s essay, “Brideland,” which is remarkably revealing if you (a) are conversant with historical costumes and (b) have already read Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress. Wolf has absorbed a feeling that a wedding gown ought to resemble a “milkmaid” dress with “an eigh­teenth-century bodice, three-quarter-length sleeves, and an an­kle-length skirt with voluminous panniers.” (If you’ve never studied period costumes these descriptive words may not mean much, but you’ve seen the style—it’s in all the color illustrations of all the Mother Goose books.) Wolf has also absorbed the belief that a woman who wears this type of dress “is essen­tially dressing up like Queen Victoria.” In historical fact, Queen Victoria approved, more than created, several different fashion looks, but the “milkmaid” dress wasn’t one of them; the “milkmaid” dress was a late eighteenth century style, fondly recalled but not really repeated in nineteenth century fashions. There was a high fashion version of the “milkmaid” look, affected by Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette, and then there was the downscale version real milkmaids might have worn. The downscale version was preserved in many parts of Europe during the nineteenth century’s craze for distinctive “local costumes,” like the Austrian costumes in The Sound of Music. So is the modern woman who wants to put on a pouffy dress trying to feel like Queen Victoria, or like a European peasant...or is she just discovering that the basic idea of the pouffy dress, the fitted waist and full skirt, is remarkably comfortable and flattering to women who don’t fit so well into styles designed for men or children? Regardless of which historical period or village “uniform” might have inspired the details?

Bell Hooks had written several books before To Be Real. She’d even raised a point I consider very important—the need for women to raise our consciousness of the way some of us displace anger at “societal oppression” onto our children and students. Her contribution to To Be Real, however, will probably strike moderate to right-wing readers as surreal. In “Beauty Laid Bare,” Hooks addresses the Far Left: “Militant black power movement...did not encourage a reclamation of atti­tudes about beauty common in traditional black folk culture,” she complains. “All too often...living simply was made synonymous with...living without attention to beauty.” Her solution: “[W]e need to be vigilant in creating an ethical approach to consumerism that sustains and affirms radical agendas for social change. Rather than surrendering our passion for the beautiful, for luxury, we need to envision ways those passions can be fulfilled that do not reinforce the structures of domination we seek to change.” For middle-of-the-road feminists who were and still are likely to connect with each other mainly at arts, crafts, and music festivals, Hooks is probably preaching to the choir, but she is preaching to an “English Only” choir in Sanskrit.

Then there’s the weird effect created by placing Veena Cabreros-Sud’s call for toughness (“don’t ever not fight”) immediately before Elizabeth Mitchell’s whimper of tenderness (“It’s not that I did my dolls wrong,but that I secretly resented them. They made me a mother too soon...Through dolls, the heart muscles of females are strengthened, ensuring that they will be ruled by compassion and, trough that compassion, by others, for the rest of their lives”). Both of these young women have, it seems, been exposed to yuppie feminists who still think altruism is a good thing, who don’t want to hit a mugger because that would lower them to his level. Neither of them has thought seriously about the very radical Christian idea that “God’s will,” or the Highest Good, for two or more seemingly opposed people may be different from and better than either having their own way or giving up their own way. One in an aggressive way (Cabreros-Sud suggests that every undesirable thing in life be seen as “violence” not “limited to the physical” plane, and fought against with “ugly, angry, cuss-ridden mouths”) and one in a passive way (Mitchell talks about the healing benefit of selfishness, but what she seems to mean is that she wants to travel more before she has a baby), they’re still speaking the truth of early adolescence. Neither seems to have thought much about the empowering benefits of responsibility or of genuine, rather than altruistic, love.

For whom was this book written? Who could have learned something from it? I’m not sure. If To Be Real was meant to encourage more young people to think of themselves as feminists, I’ve seen little evidence that it succeeded. Of course, this cannot be attributed entirely to the book’s merits; pressure on public libraries to discard even excellent books to make room for ephemeral electronic junk kept practically any book that wasn’t a computer manual and didn’t feature Harry Potter from being as successful as it would have been ten years earlier, and then the mass media decided to publicize war, foreign policy, and the continuous fall of “the economy” to the exclusion of everything else. I don’t know of any feminists who’ve either abandoned our goals or seriously decided that we’ve met them, but I do know that not nearly as much is being published about feminists as was being published ten years ago.

If To Be Real was meant to persuade people like Alice Walker that people like Rebecca Walker were Real Feminists too, I’m not sure how well it succeeded in that goal either. It does conclusively prove that, although even China had admitted that Marxism or Maoism couldn’t work in the real world, the people for whom left-wing ideology had been a substitute for religious faith were still clinging to their faith in 1995. At the time one could hope that they’d outgrow it. The behavior of some people in the current administration suggests otherwise. The authors in this book were still left-wingers, and probably several of them still are. But “left-wing” and “feminist” are entirely different things.

For whom could this book be useful today? Future historians may want it as a study of the 1990s, but is anyone writing a book or even a paper about the 1990s yet? Well...in the meantime, this is a book of short stories about young people coming of age. Each contributor was asked to write about her or his personal growth through a personal experience of feminism, so although the stories are memoirs rather than polished pieces of literary symbolism, each story can still be enjoyed for its plot and characters. If, like me, you find fact-based short stories more interesting than the ones that are altogether fictional, you will enjoy reading the stories of 21 twenty-somethings.