Fair Is Foul, And Foul Is Fair

July 22nd, 2015  |   

Fair is foul, and foul is fair.  “Macbeth” William Shakespeare

Rewriting History—Of Course

I have heard it repeated enough times over the past few weeks, so I figure I’d better pay attention to what’s being said“They are trying to rewrite history.”

They are people who want to run the Confederate flag down the flagpole; the history of course is the Civil War narrative represented in monuments, public places, and institutions that bear names like Lee, Jackson, Calhoun, and other Johnny Reb figures.

I’m just back from the Washington & Lee University Alumni College, after a weeklong study of Shakespeare. I drove home with a head full of Henry IV, Macbeth, and Anthony and Cleopatra. Hey, I didn’t even lose my head, have to dodge a dagger, or fend off an asp in search of a breast to suckle.

I am able to report that Robert E. Lee is still buried in Lee Chapel; the ghost of Traveler, his horse, has not galloped away from his burial site; and the university has not reverted to its previous name, Washington College.

No Southerner I know is a member of the Klan, wears a Confederate belt buckle, or thinks slavery was a good idea. Some of them do believe, however, that their history is being rewritten, taken away from them. Thus, the comment, “They are trying to rewrite history.”

My response to that comment is simple: History is always being rewritten. History is no fly fossilized in Baltic amber. It is always in flight, more like an allusive butterfly with no desire to be pinned to a board as a lifeless display. There is no one, certified, chiseled-into-stone history, except in lands where dictators and fascists control canonical history devoid of critical interpretation.

As the old church hymn says, we can pray that God will “purge this land of bitter things,” like racism, but there is no way we can write slavery out of our history, or the evil that surrounded it. There is no way to deny that General Lee led the Confederate Army after having turned down an invitation to command the Union Army. No way, I like to say, that both the northern states and the southern states profited by slavery.

The 21-Year-Old Man-Boy With No Name

Prior to my rendezvous on campus with Prince Hal, I scarf down a bowl of granola and a glass of orange juice, hardly a Falstaffian meal, and read the newspaper. 

I can’t pick up the Roanoke Times without remembering a Sunday morning when I found myself on the sports page of that newspaper. The photographer had frozen me in a midair catch as two opposing players were tackling me. Interestingly enough, it was the very play that caused me to leave two broken teeth in the W&L end zone.

Best of all, I remember Judy accompanying me to the dentist. Her willingness that night to kiss me felt like a sign that she might be on her way to loving me.

This 2015 edition of the paper contains a syndicated column by Kathleen Parker, “The South Carolinians We Will Remember.” It begins: “In South Carolina these days, no one speaks his name. The 21-year-old man-boy, who allegedly murdered nine people and incited unity instead of the race war he hoped for, has been condemned to an eternal slog not toward fame but to ignominy.”

The article concludes: “He is no one.”

Sam Sacks’ recent New Yorker article, “The Rise of the Nameless Narrator,” comes to mind. He calls attention to the many unnamed characters in literature. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man are two characters mentioned. “Namelessness,” writes Sacks, “is a social as well as a metaphysical disease, one that tends to afflict women, minorities, the poor, the outcast—those treated as background extras in the primary story line of history.”

That no one knows a person’s name is a sad commentary. Being cast into oblivion without a name is tragic. 

Parker lionizes, as she should, the nine people slaughtered at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Governor Nikki Haley. They are the primary story line in this bloody murder in Charleston, South Carolina.

But nowhere is the 21-year-old man-boy who pulled the trigger mentioned by name. The final words in Kathleen Parker’s article fall off a cliff. In times to come history will remember and “talk about the Emanuel Nine. Not him whose name no one wants to say.”

I feel compelled to name this man-boy because there is no value to be found in casting anyone into oblivion, there to be written out of history. He is a human being, no matter what. He is one of us, for better or for worse.

Dylann Storm Roof.

The Role Of The Messenger

Diving into Shakespeare, last week I swam with Macbeth, Prince Hal, Falstaff, Lady Macbeth, Antony, and Cleopatra. These impressive luminaries mouth Shakespeare’s choice lines and, therefore, demand the audience’s attention. They sure did get mine.

What I discovered, however, was the importance of the messengers, those folks who arrived on stage with a message. A message, I might add, not always well received.

When the messenger tells Cleopatra that Anthony, away from her while in Rome, has married Octavia, the stage explodes. The poor messenger bears the brunt of Cleopatra’s rage. In desperation he cries, “Gracious madam, I that do bring the news made not the match.”

Watching Donald Trump trip over his lip is like watching slapstick comedy where characters fall after having stepped on a banana peel. But a more appropriate image might be to see him as a messenger. Rather than shoot the messenger, or try to banish him from the political scene, I would suggest that we pay attention to his message, because he really does have something to say. He is telling the truth, a truth held by many Americans.

Supporters love to say that Mr. Trump is saying what a lot of people think but are reluctant to say. That is certainly true when it comes to the ugly racist things he says about immigrants who process the chicken he eats, pick his fruits and vegetables, and build the casinos he owns.  

Donald Trump is one of us. We’ve heard him at family dinner tables, at work, in conversations with neighbors, maybe even in comments we ourselves have made about immigrants, African Americans, and people from countries we are fighting yet don’t know the very people we are killing. It’s beyond conservative and liberal labels.

Having worked with the immigrant population in North Carolina and the Delmarva Peninsula, I have heard townspeople say the very same things that Trump says. It is the dirty side of our nation’s psyche that’s being revealed and appealed to by this bloviating politician.

Yes, Donald Trump is telling their truth. It is certainly not, as we often say, “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Give him credit; he is a brilliant spokesman for the ugly, dark side of our life together, the dark and shadowy side of racism that we must acknowledge, if we are to exorcise it from our life together as Americans. Denial will take us nowhere.

As I write, Trump has put John McCain back on center stage again, this time as a wartime hero. Shakespeare created foils, opposing characters, to articulate the ambiguous and contradictory nature of truth. Donald Trump and John McCain are perfect foils for one another, particularly seen in this brouhaha over the question of what constitutes a hero.

I want to venture out into this murky subject of heroism and hope you will not kill the messenger bringing truth I believe must be spoken.

Fair Is Foul, And Foul Is Fair

Macbeth’s opening line in the play that bares his name is, “So foul and fair a day I have not yet seen.” Is this merely weather-talk offered his friend Banquo on their way home from the slaughter in the battle they have just won?

Fair victory, yes, but at what foul cost? His words mirror the words spoken by the three witches: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair/Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

What is fair to one person is foul to another. What is foul in one person’s mind is fair in someone else’s mind. That is particularly true when we begin to talk about American heroes, as Donald Trump has us doing these days.

Is John McCain a hero—the fairest hero of them all?

Donald Trump would have us reexamine his iconic image.

It may seem like a waste of precious time to consider such matters when serious social and political issues beg for our attention. But cut Trump some slack. Anything that causes us to define and redefine the status of hero can’t be too threatening, particularly when the term hero is tossed around and applied so loosely.

If you think it’s a piece of cake to engage the subject of heroes, try this on.

Is it possible to be a hero fighting in a war that your country should never have entered or precipitated, like Iraq and Afghanistan?

Are people who refused to go to Vietnam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan heroes for not having fought the wars we now call mistakes?

Can someone be labeled a hero who burned his draft card, or fled to Canada rather than kill people in a war that his conscience could not support?

Can men, who threw their Vietnam medals away, lamenting their involvement in the barbarity of a war in which they came to understand was immoral, be called heroes?

Is everyone who puts on a military uniform a hero?

Can pacifists be heroes? If they can, where are the statues honoring them?

Perhaps we should give the word hero a rest, until we can define what a hero really is in this complicated world where fair and foul are intertwined, not so easy to nail down.

At least we’d do well to remember that there is more than one way to define words and write history.

A Man With No Limited Warranty

John Kerry seems to have no shelf life; no expiration date stamped on his brow; no limited warranty; no old soldier in him that is fading away; no appointment with a rocking chair; he just keeps on keepin’ on.

I voted for him, as better than the rest, when he ran for president, and have come to admire him more and more in his diplomatic role in bringing the treaty with Iran into fruition.

I have just recently reread his April 22, 1971 statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the Vietnam War. Kerry, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War spokesman, had served in Vietnam.

He told the senators about the statements taken from more than one hundred fifty honorably discharged veterans depicting war crimes they had committed in Vietnam. Today the list of those crimes would match ISIS violent acts— beheadings, rape, torture, and the violent destruction of towns and villages.

Kerry ceremoniously threw his medals won in Vietnam (Bronze Star, Silver Star, and three Purple Hearts) on the ground. That action inaugurated a week of protest and a gathering of at least two hundred thousand marchers in Washington.

A portion of his statement is worth resurrecting.

Criticized for speaking out, he was told to be quiet while “American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese…the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam…so that the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say that we have made a mistake.”

In Macbeth, as the bloody murders continue to pile up, an anguished Macbeth says, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?”

The answer of course is what Lady Macbeth discovers when she goes mad in her failure to wash the blood from her hand—“Out damned spot.”

Living as I do in an empire, the United States, even more powerful than the Roman Empire, I know that it is impossible to wash away all the bloodshed we have caused in wars that should not have been fought.

When I look at the destruction we have caused in Southeast Asia, Central America, and the Middle East, I weep over our bloody history. It cannot be sanitized or washed away, and we must be prepared to understand why we are now paying the price for our nation’s violence, around the world, now being felt right here at home.

Having delivered that ominous message, I cannot turn away from a belief that has sustained me since I was very young, and which has driven my social justice work in the church. I pray that I may die still holding fast to the belief that a reconciling peace is possible in a world so often addicted to violence.

Like the planting of seeds and the harvesting of crops, a reconciling peace demands hard work. God will not do it for us; the work is entrusted to us, here and now.

The spiritual power that I am speaking about is available only if we own up to our violent history, and then commit to doing the hard reconciling work with countries like Iran and Cuba, which is what we are in the process of accomplishing.

The path is certainly not an easy one; old animosity salted with deep prejudices, misunderstandings, and fear, erode a fragile trust. A nation that finally knows how to rewrite its own history in a more honest way can do great things, like remake history.

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