Bad Karma

It isn't easy to understand this statute.  For me, at least.

Just what is Teddy Roosevelt supposed to be doing (besides riding a horse)?  Is he going somewhere?  If so, where? Why are an African and a Native American walking beside him?  Why would three such persons and a horse come together in the manner portrayed?

Obviously they wouldn't.  I suppose it would be possible they could meet together in some fantasy novel or movie (I think of Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series, where everyone who has ever died comes back to life on the banks of an incredibly long river and must interact).  But it's unlikely that's what the sculptor had in mind.

From what I read, the standing or walking figures are intended to represent continents, presumably North America and Africa.  That TR as he was called has a connection with North America, indeed with both American continents, is obvious.  It isn't clear to me what he had to do with Africa, however, unless he visited it to kill large animals with guns as I assume he did, or perhaps visit the Pyramids.  Personally, I don't think that merits a statute.  

The use of figures to represent continents or cities or peoples was once fairly common in art, and that was the case for a long time.  The Romans were inclined to do this.  Coins or reliefs showing figures representing Britannia, Germania, Judea etc., in chains or kneeling before an emperor or Rome personified were produced in response to many conquests.

Assume these figures with TR represent continents.  What then?  Why is TR riding a horse between Africa and, say, North America?  Is he supposed to unite them in some sense, or lead them?  Is he a bridge between them?

Probably not.  As I confessed, I don't really know what was intended.  I can't speak to the intent of the sculptor or whoever commissioned the statue.  I can merely speak to my impression of it and my impression of it is first that it is weird, and second that it seems to depict the standing or walking figures as lesser than the figure riding a horse between them for God knows what reason.  Indeed, subservient to the rider, in the sense that anyone on foot next to someone on horseback feels at a disadvantage; whenever one sees a person on foot and one on a horse in some movie, the person on foot is in most cases subordinate to the one on the horse.

I would have no objection to the removal of the statue solely because I think it's weird.  But the depiction of a white man riding a horse between a Native American and an African is of course particularly disturbing at this time.

At this time.  It should, of course, be disturbing at all times.  But if what is happening now in the form of protests and statue removal and the reaction to them is any indication, we can hope that this time many if not most of us are offended when others demean or oppress people merely because they exist and are not caucasian, or white.

No rational person, I think, can claim that this nation's treatment of the indigenous peoples and those taken from Africa to be sold and treated as property was not extraordinarily terrible, and remains immoral.  The reasons given for the extermination, oppression and discrimination in the past were always self-serving and incredible, and are being given less and less credence as time passes.  Read John Calhoun's defense of slavery, if you can, and, as they say, weep.

What will happen, this time?  One wonders if there's truth in the doctrine of karma.  As I understand it, karma is the belief that the sum of a person's actions in this and previous existences decides a person's fate in the future.  If karma may be applied to nations, we have much to worry about.  Other nations would as well, of course.  But we're here, and this is now.

Thoughts on "Muscular Christianity"

The Victorian Era is famous, or infamous, for a number of peculiarities.  What's been called--rather uneasily, I think--"Muscular Christianity" is one of them, or so I believe.

"Muscular Christianity" is the name of a movement of sorts which associates Christianity with physical exercise, physical health, team sports and such, not of humans generally but of men specifically.  It's a very if not exclusively manly Christianity.  Ostentatiously manly, in fact. 

It's said to have had its genesis, as it were, in British authors like Charles Kingsely and Thomas Hughes.  Hughes, it may be remembered, was the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, a kind of celebration of the life experienced by boys in the English public schools of the time.  Hughes, his book and his hero were spoofed by George MacDonald Fraser in his wonderful series of books which were the supposed memoirs of Harry Flashman, a rogue and scoundrel who, in Hughes' book, also attended Rugby when Tom Brown was there until expelled for drunkenness.  Frasier's Flashman manages to be present at virtually all significant event of the era and though he's a coward and reprobate also thrives, and is in fact honored.

In the U.S., this form of pious muscularity has been associated with Teddy Roosevelt (called "The Great American Sissy" by Gore Vidal, by the way) and the YMCA.  It's adherents seem to maintain that this kind or brand of Christianity looks back to medieval chivalry in that it champions protection of the weak by the strong, and it's been claimed that it has a basis in Scripture.

This seems dubious.  From what I've read, the story of Jesus' anger at the money changers is considered scriptural authority or sanction for "Muscular Christianity."  It's beyond dispute that muscles were required to tip over the tables of the money changers (unless Jesus, being God after all, and so not required to make use of muscles, threw them about by other means).  However, Jesus presumably used his muscles for most everything he did as a man, and that's the case with normal men as well.  So the use of muscles in and of itself would not seem to be peculiarly Christian or Christ-like.

It would seem then that what is considered important by Muscular Christians is the manner in which Jesus used his muscles in this case; that is to say, violently.  But if violent conduct, even righteous violent conduct, is what's being touted there are difficulties with contending that this is what Christianity is or should be.  According to the Gospels, Jesus was a great fan of nonviolence, as in turning the other cheek for example.  Paul's references to athletic events are also referred to, but the ancient pagans often used such events as analogies even when philosophizing, e.g. Epictetus.

If ancient times or early Christianity are to be considered, it's much easier to find evidence of Muscular Pagans than Muscular Christians.  Most Christians refused to even serve in the Roman military, at least until Christians began to become prevalent in the imperial administration.  They condemned the Roman games.  The early Christians could hardly be said to have emphasized the perfection and beauty of the human body.  They were more likely to complain of it and damn it as sinful.  Ascetics were idolized by early Christians, not athletes.

Of course, in the 19th century it would have been difficult for most in England and America to think of physical exercise of any kind as being anything but a manly pursuit.  Women who engaged in it were likely considered odd, abnormal in a particularly disturbing way.  So to the extent physical activity of the kind involved in sports, hunting or war were deemed religious activities or thought to be activities which could be engaged in for religious reasons, it's unsurprising that it was taken for granted that the actors would be men.

But the idea of manly Christianity as a special, better kind of Christianity, or of Christianity as being a manly religion, seems rather odd these days; even risible, in fact.  For someone like me, alas, the old SNL skit about the good ship The Raging Queen and the manly ports at which it called comes to mind whenever the word "manly" is used.  The relationship between Muscular Christianity and idealization of  English public schools (and the YMCA at least as portrayed in a certain popular song) similarly encourages association with a particular kind of manliness, one which may be seen now and then when the female and the feminine are absent from the life being lived.  It was arguably very much on display in ancient Greece, where women simply had no place in social life.  But perhaps I'm too inclined to mockery.

Assuming I am too much so inclined, though, I still think the idea of a Muscular Jesus, exercising regularly, engaged in roughhousing and wrestling or whatever sports were popular at the time in Palestine, to be untenable.  Romans of the time, at least of a particular age, regularly patronized the public baths in which it was common for these activities to take place, but Christians weren't known to frequent the baths any more than they did the ludi.

Muscular Christianity, then, has nothing to do with early Christianity.  I think it likely it has much to do with Victorian values, instead, certain of which remain significant to some even in these times.  I suspect that there is behind it a belief that certain kinds of physical exertion serve to keep the mind occupied and so incapable of erring in other ways; the idle mind being the Devil's playground.  It may also be thought to channel physical exertions away from our base sexual urges and into something more desirable, something which requires discipline and conformity, like sports or, if appropriate, war. 

The Ceremony of Innocence

It seems I have Yeats on my mind, these days.   This is well and good, as he was a great poet in the Modernist manner, and it is the Modernists I find most interesting.  Yeats ranks up there with Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, for me; among the greatest of them.  I was never fond of Carl Sandburg and others who it seems tried to construct a peculiarly American poetry, and never thought much of anything of e.e. cummings, whistling far and wee. 

Most everyone knows of The Second Coming, or knows at least a word or two of that poem, either by virtue of being compelled to read it in school, or running across snatches of it in print or on the screen, or perhaps even by reading it out of interest and while at leisure to do so.  In the last case, it may be even that the poem is understood, or if not understood then known to be powerful and evocative (perhaps that's being understood in the case of a poem).

"The ceremony of innocence is drowned."  That's one of many striking phrases in the poem, but it's the one that keeps coming back to me right now.  Why "ceremony"?  No doubt many learned professors have expounded on this, but I haven't read them and in all honesty don't care to read them, though I'm sure to be enlightened if I did.  Or perhaps not.  It's hard to accept expertise of any kind these days.  Experts are always in front of us, on display by the media and used as kinds of fillers between commercials.  Familiarity does indeed breed contempt, and so a dismissive contempt seems to pervade among us, regardless of the qualifications of those who are strapped on horseback like El Cid to ride the satellite waves for our enlightenment.

Left then to my own devices I wonder why "ceremony" was used by the poet.  It would appear to refer to something formal, something religious or in the nature of a ritual.    Is that what innocence was to the poet; did he think that's what innocence had become?  Innocence is generally a lack of sophistication, earnest, unfiltered observation of the world and reaction to what the innocent encounter.  And why "drowned"?  By the blood-dimmed tide, presumably.

The poem was written in 1919, so there was certainly quite a bit of blood being shed shortly before.  Probably enough to make a tide.  It's been claimed often enough and by many that the Great War, which we Yankees call World War One, was an end to innocence, and there would seem to be support for that claim.  Certainly it brought to an end any "innocent" view of war as glorious and fulfilling, though one is compelled to wonder how any innocence would have survived the American Civil War or the Boer War if not others.  Even the juvenile and romantic view of war held by such as Teddy Roosevelt was dimmed by the blood-dimmed tide.  And of course much that was new and unusual, and less than "innocent" as commonly defined, seemed to follow the war inexorably in politics and in the arts.  It's hard to believe that ascribing such things to the war is merely a case of  the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

But a ceremony is something that's existed for a good amount of time.  A ceremony is seldom created anew, and when it is it's not considered a ceremony for some years.  So it would seem that the ceremony of innocence for Yeats would have been something that was existent and known long before the Great War--known in fact as a ceremony.  Innocence as a ceremony is not spontaneous or uncontrived.

Had we, even then, made of innocence a ceremony?  If so it is even more of a ceremony now, if indeed it still exists.  Who can we consider innocent in this age?  Young children, perhaps, but they're encountering an end to innocence more quickly now than in the past.  Communication is relentless and innocence can only be maintained by the cultivation of ignorance.  Innocent isn't necessarily good, but at least for now it remains something we prize.  Perhaps that's why it's become a ceremony for us.

Perhaps too much of a ceremony--too much that is of something not merely significant but to be extended if not perpetuated.  Parents now are said to be notably protective of their children (when they're not abusing or ignoring them, that is; parents like everyone these days are extremists of one kind or another) and described as "helicopter" parents, shielding them and controlling them and maintaining their innocence, or trying to do so, which in itself is dangerous.

The danger of innocence is that it may generate gullibility.  The innocent are subject to being fooled because they're unaware of what those who are no longer innocent desire and the lengths they'll go to satisfy their desires, or if they are aware believe this to be a concern of others.  In a very odd way, I think we remain innocent even now, and that we want to be innocent, unthinking, perhaps more than ever.  Unfortunately, though, there are those who take advantage of the innocent and the simple, and today they are omnipresent. 

As they were in Yeats time, as I think of it.  Did he think it unfortunate that the ceremony of innocence was drowned, or did he welcome it?  How could he welcome it when the best lacked all conviction and the worst were full of passionate intensity?  Did he think that was due to the drowning of the ceremony?

There are too many full of passionate intensity here in the Kingdom of Fear, and proud of it.  No ceremony will save us from them.  They seem eager for ceremony; they thrive on it.  Perhaps it's time to grow up at last.