Calvin and Hobbes on City of Man Podcast

Every once in a while my friend Coyle at The City of Man Podcast drops an episode we had recorded and archived so long ago that I had forgotten about it—which is a treat, because I get to listen to the discussion as a listener with no idea what we’re going to say. Well, today is one of those days, and this episode is a particular treat.

Coyle invited me and Joshua Herring on to talk about “Calvin and Hobbes,” Bill Watterson’s great comic strip that ran from 1985-95, which for me at least were some formative years. We talk about Calvin and Hobbes’s relationships to work, school, imagination, enchantment, the environment, whether or not it’s appropriate for kids (spoiler: we think so), and whether it’s possible to have any joy in your life if you don’t love Calvin and Hobbes (spoiler: we don’t think so). We also hit on a lot of other topics and favorite tidbits—the Transmogrifier, the wagon, macabre snowmen, Spaceman Spiff and Tremendous Man, Susie Derkins and Miss Wormwood, Watterson’s artwork itself, and many more—along the way.

This was a really fun and freewheeling discussion and I’ve enjoyed listening to it again almost for the first time.

You can listen to The City of Man by subscribing on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. You can look at this episode’s page on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Subscribe to the show—and the other shows on the CHRN—so you can catch up on previous episodes and won’t miss future episodes.

Thanks for listening!

Writing updates

One of the things I started this blog to do was to provide updates on my writing, especially my books, and I’m glad to say I have a few things to bring y’all up to date on.

The Wanderer

My latest novel’s working title is The Wanderer. It’s set in 6th-century Britain and was inspired by movies like Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, Miller’s Crossing, and Last Man Standing; as well as the work of writers I admire like Cormac McCarthy, particularly Blood Meridian; and, most important of all, what remains us of Anglo-Saxon literature—obviously things like Beowulf, but also shorter works like “Waldere,” “Deor,” “The Sea-Farer,” and, of course, “The Wanderer,” which inspired the whole book. I’ve joked that this novel is a Western, just not set in the West you usually think of. I’m pretty excited about this story.

I began the rough draft in June 2019 and finished it a few months later, in October. In the new year, 2020, I spent a few months reading through the rough draft and marking it up in red pen and highlighter, and that summer, during all the shutdowns and the travel my family did, I began making changes based on my first read-through and markup.

Those corrections moved very slowly—with mostly myself to blame—but I’m glad to say I completed those manuscript corrections earlier this week.

I’ve now got the manuscript in the hands of a few early readers who are going to give me feedback, upon which I’ll base my next round of rereading and revision. After that stage of revision, I’ll hand out a hopefully improved manuscript to a new round of readers and repeat. These stages are especially crucial, since, as the writer, you get into your own story up to the eyeballs and need people who aren’t privy to the inside of your mind to tell you if what you were doing worked and made sense—or not. The Wanderer is in many ways the most ambitious novel I’ve written, so I’m both hopeful and not a little anxious.

The goal is to get the book out soon, but also to get the book out in the best shape it can possibly be. While I don’t have a set-in-stone timeline, I am trying to step up my efforts now.

More to come, but like I said—I’m excited about this one.

Other stuff

My primary creative attention has been on The Wanderer for several years now, but I have been preparing a lot of other stuff, including whatever I’m going to write after I’ve finally finished (or simply prayed over and released) The Wanderer. These include some short stories and novellas and three or four novel-length projects (out of approximately twenty pretty detailed ideas I have in my notebooks) that I think are in enough of a state of preparedness to go ahead with soon. But the less said about those projects the better.

One I will mention is a project adjacent to The Wanderer but in a different medium, one that I hope to present to y’all in the future as an appetizer for the novel. Stay tuned!

The blog

After some incredibly fertile months on the blog this winter and spring I let it cool off a bit from the last week of June onward. This was precisely to devote the last mad burst of energy needed to get my first corrections on The Wanderer across the finish line. Now that I’ve accomplished that, I’ll be returning to the blog. I have several book reviews I’ve been meaning to write, and plenty of opinions I’ve been trying to work out in writing.

Again—stay tuned.

Happy Independence Day!

I hope y’all have all had a good Fourth of July week and a pleasant weekend. I return to work from vacation Monday but still have some traveling to do before the end of the summer, and I’m glad to say the last week has been great.

Thanks as always for reading!

Animaling verbs

There’s a well-known “Calvin & Hobbes” strip in which Calvin declaims on the joy of “verbing words.”

Calvin: I like to verb words

Hobbes: What?

Calvin: I take nouns and adjectives and use them as verbs. Remember when “access” was a thing? Now it’s something you do. It got verbed.

Calvin goes on to reflect that “verbing weirds language.”

But this is by no means original to Calvin; English words have been verbed from the beginning, and a post I wrote last week left me thinking in particular of the way the characteristic traits and foibles of animals have given us not just a zoo’s worth of adjectives (perhaps my favorite is mulish), but many verbs that are simply the names of the animals themselves.

Here are a few I thought of immediately, along with a grab bag of observations and reflections about the origins, use, and most especially the many fine shades of connotation and meaning of each.

cow

This is the one, which I used in my post last week about attempts to “cancel” specific lines of text in recent novels, that got me thinking about these words, and it’s probably the one I use most often.

Unlike some of these other verbs, the metaphor behind cow, the mental image I’m supposed to get from the word, isn’t particularly clear to me. Cowing someone suggests intimidation—a coercive, overbearing persuasion. Someone who has been cowed has fearfully, submissively given in. Beyond the fear that plays a role here, I’m not sure what this has to do with cows, which are generally unflappable unless spooked en masse. Where I grew up, when teenaged morons amused themselves by trying to frighten or chase cows, the animals usually just began a phlegmatic retreat that ended no farther away than it had to.

But in reading about this verb I learned that it’s possible cow, in this sense, came into English from the Old Norse kúga, a word meaning to force, tyrannize, or oppress. The Online Etymology Dictionary speculates that this word in turn developed from the standard Old Norse word for cow, kýr, the idea being that cows are “easily herded.” A tantalizing possibility, but I doubt we can know for sure. There’s clearly a lot of figurative work going on here.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting that this is yet another of the many English loanwords from Old Norse that—like knife, die, outlaw, ransack, berserk, and slaughter—has forceful and potentially violent implications.

badger

Badger as a verb is interesting because it vividly evokes a specific animal—an animal that doesn’t actually behave the way the verb would imply. This has to do with the idiom’s origin in early modern gambling and bloodsport. Badger-baiting, akin to cockfighting, bear-baiting, and dogfighting, involved putting a badger in a box or barrel and sending dogs in after it. Though “normally quite docile” and shy, badgers put up a ferocious defense when cornered, and apparently a single badger could last through multiple bouts with the dogs in a badger-baiting contest. These were timed events, with dogs going into the badger’s artificial den many times and the spectators wagering on the dogs’ speed and tenacity, and so badgering is actually what the dog does in this scenario—repeatedly attacking in an attempt to draw the prey out.

With the decline of badger-baiting as a sport this meaning apparently transferred to the badger itself, giving it an outsized reputation for ferocity. The word has also weakened in meaning, I think, as its normal use implies pestering, merely annoying harassment—but nothing lethal for either badger or dog.

ferret and squirrel

Both of these verbs usually take on a preposition (about which more below), often out or away, as in: The guard ferreted out the entrance to the tunnel or He squirreled away the snack for later. I pair these because while one implies searching and the other implies hoarding, both suggest a feverish, jittery quality. There’s a smallness to these images that suggests petty but hyper concern, the kind that can cause problems. Someone ferreting something out is searching too eagerly and minutely for anyone’s good; someone squirreling something away is fussy and anxious, or at least overcautious in preparing for the lean times.

Unlike the actual animal, ferret can take on sinister connotations. As the example I came up with above makes clear, I associate ferret very strongly with The Great Escape, in which the German guards at Stalag Luft III are called “ferrets” and do plenty of ferreting, with sometimes fatal results.

dog and hound

Dogs today are ersatz children and treated as such; there is no more repulsive set of slang terms to me than those built around dogs-as-kids: “fur babies,” “granddogs,” “dog mamas,” etc. These represent a nauseating and poisonous sentimentality.

Dog and hound as verbs, however—The bank is dogging him about his mortgage payment and My boss is hounding me about that expense report—are clearly hunting metaphors. Hound has been in use in this figurative sense for at least 400 years, and dog for at least 500. Both convey continuous, close, unwavering pursuit, with hound carrying a further connotation of nagging or harassment, possibly unjustified. There’s also a neat elaboration on these with the verb bird-dog, in which one pursues a target on behalf of someone else.

The closer we get to the world that first used these words in these senses the better.

wolf

Often with down, as in: He wolfed down his supper and fell asleep on the couch. Another canine metaphor, and I imagine a pretty ancient one, though the Online Etymology Dictionary only records its use in this sense from 1862. As sinister as wolves are in European tradition and folklore, it’s interesting to me that wolfing down one’s food suggests little more than a lack of manners rather than something potentially more wicked.

parrot and ape

Here’s a case study in subtle differences. Both of these are commonly used to mean “imitate” or “mimic,” but note the connotation of each. Parroting someone suggests a mindless, lockstep repetition, as in: He’s just parroting what everyone else is saying about the new Star Wars movie. But aping someone suggests clumsy or offputtingly crude imitation; it carries much more contempt than the other. (Compare monkey below.)

An effect of the uncanny valley, the creepiness of not-quite-human primates doing human things? Maybe, maybe not—but I think it’s an interesting subtlety.

monkey

If aping someone suggests a contemptible attempt at imitation, to monkey around or monkey with something suggests purely foolish, probably childish, and, in the worst case, aimless and destructive tinkering. What all three have in common is a deadly combination of ingenuity and lack of intelligence. Based on my handful of visits to the primate exhibits in zoos, this is apt.

rat

As the above entries make clear, I’m interested in the way some of these verbs take prepositions and others don’t. Rat can take a couple: you can rat on somebody, which is bad enough, but ratting them out is even worse—a total betrayal. Why rats, highly social animals that take good care of each other, should suggest this kind of disloyalty and dishonesty is unclear to me; I reckon it has more to do with rats’ ancient association with darkness, decay, and disease than anything about their behavior.

chicken out and pig out

If you’ve studied German at all you are familiar with the dreaded separable-prefix verb. This is a verb that has a base or root, which is always a recognizable verb, the meaning of which is changed by a preposition that is a prefix in the infinitive form but moves to the end of the sentence when used. These bedevil new students of the language not least because there’s not always a clear logic to which preposition results in which meaning. (Here’s a game effort at explaining some of them, though Mark Twain’s observations on the “rules” of German grammar should always be kept in mind.)

Something similar happens with certain idiomatic expressions in English, as the way we use the verbs chicken and pig shows. Why does one chicken out under pressure rather than chicken up or chicken around? My only guess is that it’s purely intuitive—it just feels right. And we’ve said it this way for so long that saying it any other way feels unnatural.

Regardless, with chicken out and pig out we have two barnyard animals acting on vices—cowardice and gluttony. And not just acting on them; these expressions hint at indulgence. One could be a chicken but still hang on when danger comes, thus proving oneself and building a little character, but to chicken out in the crisis is unforgivable. The sense of indulgence is especially clear with pig out, a verb no American who has ever been to Golden Corral needs to have explained.

hog

Unlike pig above, hog needs no preposition, just an object—one simply hogs something. This was a common complaint when and where I grew up, as in: Quit hogging the couch! or Clint is hogging the crayons! or Don’t hog all the pork rinds! Succinct and potentially vivid—especially if, like us, you accompanied your accusation with snorting—I think it’s been used so much it’s probably lost most of its original power.

buffalo

I began with the verbed animal that I most commonly invoke; here’s one I have less occasion for, but that always amuses me when I run across it. Journalist Kevin D Williamson is particularly fond of it, not only in writing, as here:

They’re hoping that conservatives can be buffaloed with a bit of cheap free-market rhetoric into not noticing that something is excruciatingly amiss here.

but in speech, as in various interviews and podcasts I’ve heard him on, as here:

[T]hey are fools and self-interested, and they know that people are easily scared and easily misled and easily buffaloed into doing whatever it is you want them to do, which is why they become politicians in the first place.

As it happens, these illustrate the two related but different things that may have happened to someone who has been buffaloed: either baffled, confused, or outright hoodwinked, or overawed and intimidated—a sense probably derived from the animal’s real-world effect. You’ll notice that there’s an overlap between these two senses both in definition and in the way they are used in the examples above.

But what I especially love about buffalo as a verb is the faint air of ridiculousness that hangs around it. To be buffaloed is not only unfortunate but preposterous, and I’m glad we have a word for precisely that occasion. We should get a lot of use out of it nowadays.

Conclusion

Merriam-Webster has a longer, more detailed “Words at Play” post on some of these here. I suspect there are plenty more—I can think of goose, beetle, bitch, fox and outfox, and horse (as in horsing around) offhand—especially in more recent or subcultural slang.

At any rate, English is fun, and I hope it stays that way. Try using one of these in writing or conversation this week—just don’t let all my grammatical mumbo jumbo cow you.

More notes on history and presentism

17th century portrait of Clio, muse of history

Today, via my Facebook memories, I revisited this line from the great Herbert Butterfield’s great study The Whig Interpretation of History:

[T]he chief aim of the historian is the elucidation of the unlikenesses between past and present . . . It is not for him to stress and magnify the similarities between one age and another, and he is riding after a whole flock of misapprehensions if he goes to hunt for the present in the past.

A serendipitous quotation to run across, as yesterday I read this post from Alan Jacobs’s blog, an extract from the longer Substack essay “On Compassion” by philosopher Justin EH Smith. (The full essay is, unfortunately for me, paywalled.) Smith, as quoted by Jacobs:

History in general is easily manipulable, and can always be applied for the pursuit of present goals, whatever these may be. It has long seemed to me that one of the more noble uses of history is to help us convince ourselves of the contingency of our present categories and practices. And it is for this reason, principally, that I am not satisfied with seeing history-of-philosophy curricula and conferences “diversified” as if seventeenth-century Europe were itself subject to our current DEI directives.

One particularly undesirable consequence of such use of history for the present is that it invites and encourages your political opponents likewise to marshall it for their own present ends. And in this way history becomes just another forked node of presentist Discourse—the foreign and unassimilable lives of all of those who actually lived in 1619 or 1776 are covered over. But history, when done most rigorously and imaginatively, gives breath back to the dead, and honors them in their humanity, not least by acknowledging and respecting the things they cared about, rather than imposing our own fleeting cares on them. 

Compare with this from Niall Ferguson, whom I quoted here two years ago in another post against presentism (having begun that post with the same Butterfield quotation):

In my view, applied history, making history, as it were, useful, is all about trying to learn from the past, to understand the experience of the dead, and see how it can illuminate our own predicament. The exact opposite approach is to say “Let’s take our norms and let’s export them to the past and wander around the early seventeenth century going ‘Tut-tut, wicked white supremacists’ at all the people we encounter.” But that’s become the mode in history departments all over this country to the point that they are deeply dull places that don’t in fact illuminate the past, they just import an anachronistic set of values and rather arrogantly condescend to the past.

(Side note: I’m struck that both Smith and Ferguson, in dramatically different contexts, used the seventeenth century as examples.)

All of this falls under the concept, which I borrowed from Chesterton, of “the inside of history”—a concern never far from my mind. (So maybe the above coincidence wasn’t so serendipitous after all.) I’ve written about getting at the inside of history, the charitable attempt to understand our dead forebears from the inside out, in more detail here.

What can we get out of history when we try to do it this way? A final line from Smith:

[A] thorough and comprehensive survey of the many expressions of otherness of which human cultures are capable in turn enables us, to speak with Seamus Heaney in his elegant translation of Beowulf, to “assay the hoard”: that is, to take stock of the full range of the human, and to begin to discern the commonalities behind the differences.

Bloody big ship

Bond looking at JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire in Skyfall (2012)

One of the underappreciated aspects of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels is their elegiac tone—a rich vein of reflection and melancholy, a sense of the passing of things, that runs through all of them but thickens considerably in the final few.

Consider this seemingly minor passage from the tenth full-length novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which I just finished for the second time this morning. The scene is not M’s office at the beginning of the story but M’s private home on Christmas day:

They had coffee in M.’s study and smoked the thin black cheroots of which M. allowed himself two a day. Bond burnt his tongue on his. M. continued with his stories about the Navy which Bond could listen to all day—stories of battles, tornadoes, bizarre happenings, narrow shaves, courts martial, eccentric officers, neatly-worded signals, as when Admiral Somerville, commanding the battleship Queen Elizabeth, had passed the liner Queen Elizabeth in mid-Atlantic and had signalled the one word ‘SNAP’! Perhaps it was all just the stuff of boys’ adventure books, but it was all true and it was about a great navy that was no more and a great breed of officers and seamen that would never be seen again.

The comfortable personal setting, the father-son, veteran-rookie dynamic, the Christmas at a Regency manor house—this is a world rooted strongly in the past, a vanishing world. The note of mourning in the final sentence is palpable.

And this is in a novel that begins with Bond seriously considering—and not for the first time—resignation and retirement and, most famously, ends with his half-day marriage to Tracy, who, after a drive-by shooting on the final page of the book, lies dead in his arms. In the penultimate paragraph Bond, concussed and in shock, says to a young German patrolman who has stopped to help:

‘It’s all right,’ he said in a clear voice as if explaining something to a child. ‘It’s quite all right. She’s having a rest. We’ll be going on soon. There’s no hurry. You see—’ Bond’s head sank down against hers and he whispered into her hair—‘you see, we’ve got all the time in the world.’

This note of elegy, of ubi sunt, is perhaps the most English thing about Bond, and is both personal and professional. As Jeremy Black outlines in his book The Politics of James Bond, Bond’s experience as a veteran of World War II, of the British Empire at the height of its powers fighting its coldest, most dastardly, and most obvious enemy, colors all of his subsequent adventures—that is, makes them look gray and tedious by comparison. Throughout, as the Empire declines in both geographic terms and reputation, Bond and others speculate grimly about what will happen to both Britain and her colonies as they come unmoored from one another, and many, many of Bond’s nemeses go out of their way to mock the diminution and meaninglessness of the Empire. For Bond, whose worth is bound up in his work in defense of Her Majesty’s realm, this decline is also his own, and he spends at least half the series nearly buckling under the weight of his job, struggling to find a purpose in it, deciding to quit and then finding himself unable to shirk his duty. The Royal Navy proves a profoundly meaningful symbol for all of this. Recall that Bond is officially Commander James Bond.

The movies mostly lose this sense of passing. It’s there a bit in the film version of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but the faithful adaptation of the book’s downer ending doesn’t mesh well with the more carefree earlier portions, which lack the reflective tone of passages like the one in M’s study above. There’s a bit more in GoldenEye, in which Bond has to adjust to the post-Cold War world, and Daniel Craig’s first outing in Casino Royale captures a great deal of that novel’s sense of tragedy and loss at the end.

But so far the only film to fully mine that vein is Skyfall, which not only establishes and maintains a Fleming-esque tone of the long defeat from beginning to end but also makes the passing of things the overt subject of one of its quietest but greatest scenes.

Sitting in the National Gallery before JMW Turner’s famous painting The Fighting Temeraire, Bond has this exchange with Q:

Q: Always makes me feel a little melancholy—grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap. [sighs] The inevitability of time, don’t you think? What do you see?

Bond: A bloody big ship. Excuse me.

Perfect. And in keeping with Fleming’s Bond, the dismissive quip is a tell. It’s Bond reorienting, shaking off a melancholy he can do nothing about but put his nose back to the grindstone and work.

I don’t know whether No Time to Die, which concludes Craig’s run as Bond, will bring more of this to the fore—it’s certainly a good opportunity to do so—but I hope it will. Fleming’s Bond has always been a more fully rounded, complete and realistic man than even the best film versions (and I am a fan of the films), and I think a lot of that is down not only to grit of the stories, but to the melancholy that grows in him and that he wrestles with over those fourteen original novels—a sense of the loss of the good things to which one has dedicated one’s life, and the sense of the unknown approaching out of the murk.

Lewis and Orwell on bad words

Or, that is, words for things we want to label as bad.

George Orwell, under the heading “Meaningless words” in his essay, written in 1945 but published in Horizon in 1946, “Politics and the English Language”:

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.

CS Lewis in his 1944 Spectator essay “The Death of Words”:

The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition. As old horses go to the knacker’s yard, or old ships to the breakers, so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad.

Let the reader understand.

Some years ago I wrote in more detail about carelessness with language and thinking, with reference to Orwell and GK Chesterton. You can read that here.

Line-item censorship

It’s not every day that you see writers at Slate and National Review on the same wavelength. And yet here are Laura Miller at the former and Kyle Smith at the latter reporting on the same story: two novelists who have recently been cowed by internet mobs into deleting not entire passages, characters, or plotlines, but individual lines from already published novels.

The novelists are Elin Hilderbrand and Casey McQuiston, and the novels are, respectively, Golden Girl, a “beach read” about a recently deceased author of beach reads trying to help people from beyond the grave, and Red, White, & Royal Blue, a gay romance in which the President’s son falls in love with one of the princes of the UK’s royal family. A mob of online readers attacked the first for an offhand comment by a teenaged character who compares hiding from her family to Anne Frank hiding from the Nazis in an attic. The second took similar flak for a line in which the President complains about having to make a groveling phone call to the Prime Minister of Israel for political reasons. One was criticized as “anti-Semitic,” the other as “Zionist.” You really can’t win.

And I should quote some of this criticism in more detail. According to one online commenter, the single line about the phone call to Israel in McQuiston’s book “normalizes the genocide & war crimes done by Israel that will always be backed up & unashamedly supported by America.” And, on Goodreads, I find someone who thought the other book’s offhand comparison to Anne Frank was (in bold) “one of the most terrible things I read in a book in my entire life.” (Said reviewer also admits to reading the book only because of the controversy.)

You can read more about both incidents in the Miller and Smith pieces above. Both Hilderbrand and McQuiston apologized and both promised that these lines would be cut from future editions of the book.

Note: these lines would be cut.

Social media is doing some weird things to publishing and storytelling, some of the most high-profile examples being YA books that have been un-published before they were even released based on the perceptions of Twitter mobs. Furthermore, we’ve seen increasing pressure to “cancel,” in the sloppy but commonplace term, books that fall afoul of modern sensibilities, including popular bestsellers like the Harry Potter series and classics as diverse as Gone With the Wind and the Iliad. But here we have precision-bombing attacks on particular lines of text and the authors and publishers caving to the mob’s demands. Here outraged online critics have arrogated to themselves the job of editor.

Perhaps this is an attempt to find a compromise, to save face and avoid total “cancelation” while throwing a bone to small but vocal mobs online. I’m not sure—but the trend worries me, because it has no inherent limiting principle (see the Bradbury piece I link to below) and because the people demanding such changes or cuts are never satisfied. The grave, and the barren womb, the earth that is not filled with water, fire—and Twitter mobs.

The character of the people driving these cuts matters. I wrote “small but vocal” above, and these are small groups. Look up Hilderbrand and McQuiston’s books on Amazon or Goodreads or some other service and, despite the controversy, they still have good ratings. Both currently have 4.6 out of five stars on Amazon, with a whopping 2,600 and 13,000 reviews and ratings, respectively. This suggests that the overwhelming majority of the people who read these books have no problem with them. It’s also telling that, in both cases, the objects of the mob’s ire were throwaway lines of humor or wry, ironic commentary—and obviously so. People who don’t get jokes, who have no sense of humor, or who are too simple or willfully ignorant to understand that a fictional character’s opinions are not the author’s—a point raised by both Miller and Smith—are not worth listening to. More about that below.

But my primary concern with incidents like this is as an author. How can writers protect themselves from the mob and, more importantly, stay true to their craft, not compromising even a line of their work? I have a few ideas:

• Get off Twitter. Seriously. All social media are part of the problem (note that some of the criticism mentioned in Miller and Smith’s articles originated on Instagram, in my experience the cheeriest of social media networks), but Twitter is a cesspool, as if all ten bolgia of Dante’s eighth circle were upended into one pit of rage, dishonesty, grandstanding, and bad faith assertion. It’s full of glib, self-assured, vindictive liars who can only think in labels and slogans and who make sure they’re always on the winning side (see below). In a word, it’s full of Fillmors. If you’re on Twitter you’re asking for it sooner or later, and opting out means you don’t have to be present when the mob arrives. And when the mob’s target isn’t present, it loses focus (mobs, like all democratic bodies, being small-minded and fickle) and dissipates faster.

• Ignore the mobs. Based on the examples I’ve seen, I’m not sure which is worse—attempting to explain yourself or abjectly apologizing. The former feeds the mob’s outrage; the latter invites the mob to demand more and more specific groveling (about which more below). Woke social media mobs don’t offer good faith criticism or actually want that hoariest of self-serving clichés, “a conversation,” and refusing to participate is the only answer. (Well, perhaps not the only answer: mockery would be best, the devil being unable to tolerate scorn, but I can’t fathom the bravery that would take. I don’t think I have it.)

• Don’t make decisions based on idiots. Lie down with dogs, wrestle with pigs, etc. This should be common sense. Overlaps generously with the first two points above.

• Don’t play games you can’t win. As children, we all knew someone who tried to manipulate our playground games so that they could come out on top every time, and that’s precisely what’s going on with all of these controversies. The only differences are the artificially heightened stakes and po-faced moralism—and the attending fear of wrongdoing—that come along with it. This is still a game, and it’s childish. Witness Tom Hanks, who seems to me a genuinely intelligent, decent, and well-intentioned man, and who recently jumped on the Tulsa Riots bandwagon to reflect on the “whiteness” of the history he learned growing up. Not good enough, his critics were quick to aver, because it’s never good enough. See also Lin-Manuel Miranda. And American Dirt. And, graphically, this. There’s always something more and more granular to acknowledge, “educate yourself” on, or “do better” about, and attempting to explain yourself or admitting guilt means you lose. Automatically. Those kids who did this on the playground eventually learned to play by coherent, ironclad, finite rules comprehensible and applicable to everyone—or they played by themselves. Again: refuse to participate.

• On a final, more positive note—Be yourself. This is a truism from those painful years of learning to date, but nothing is more attractive than a person doing what they like to do because they like to do it. Write the stories you want to write the best way you see fit, and don’t adapt or apologize to appease some offended party, real or imagined. This is an honest way to work, based on love, and it builds genuine community with people who love the same things you do. And, as a bonus, you’ll produce art you can be proud of.

Even with those observations and admonitions out of my system (and I’m preaching to myself as much as anyone there), I look at these two incidents and am still left with questions. There are questions with obvious answers, questions about why the authors or publishers would so cravenly knuckle under to such baseless criticism, but the one I keep asking and have been asking a long time has to do with the members of the mob:

Why do these people bother reading novels?

Why even pick up the book in the first place? What’s the point? Why live this way? Why not write your own stories if those crafted by others are so problematic? Why not just give up fiction altogether and stand in front of the mirror, cooing over your own enlightenment?

I’m not sure I have any insight into this beyond the obvious—the sense of superiority offered by woke ideology, the addictive high of bringing writers and publishers to their knees and making them do things. And control, making others do things, is what this is ultimately all about.

At any rate, this kind of thought policing, to use Smith’s term, is illiterate, incurious, and fatal to the imagination. It sees representation where we should see characters, messaging where we should see themes, and the pieces of a vast game of power and politics where we should see stories. Rather than going out of oneself into strange, wonderful, and terrible new worlds, it demands conformity to the reader’s standards. It is anti-art. Even the much-vaunted empathy that reading fiction is supposed to build finds no purchase in the barren, pride-withered souls of these readers.

But we shouldn’t expect this kind of behavior to correct itself soon. As John Gardner noted in On Becoming a Novelist: “Character defects fed by self-congratulation are the hardest to shed.” In the meantime, authors should stay true to their calling—carry the fire, in an evocative phrase from one of my favorite books—and refuse to compromise even a line.

More if you’re interested

For a striking presentiment of the damage readers with ideological axes to grind can do, read Ray Bradbury’s 1979 coda to Fahrenheit 451, available here. I’ve gotten irritated about the ideological demands made on good storytellers before, which you can read more about here.

Jünger's mountain range of narrow-mindedness

This morning I happened across the social media profile of someone I had “hidden” from view but hadn’t remembered hiding. Now why did I do that? I wondered. Ten seconds of scrolling and five glib, dismissive, cocksure, and plainly stupid political memes later: Oh, yeah—that’s why.

I’m currently reading The Glass Bees, a 1957 science-fiction novel by the great German soldier, writer, and thinker Ernst Jünger. The novel’s narrator, Richard, an unemployed former soldier, is offered a shady job by Zapparoni, a titan of the robotics industry—what we would now call a tech billionaire in a field we would now call nanotechnology.

When they meet, Zapparoni has questions for Richard about the memoirs of one of Richard’s old army comrades who has risen to high rank, a man named Fillmor, “who always knows what is possible” and so “doesn’t occupy himself with the absurd or the impossible.” That is, “a man without any imagination.”

My evil star, however, had fated me to be born in times when only the sharply demarcated and precisely calculable were in fashion. There were many days when I had the impression of meeting only prison wardens—wardens, moreover, who voluntarily crowd to these positions, are satisfied with them and enjoy them. “Of course, I am on the Right, on the Left, in the Middle; I descend from the monkey; I believe only what I see; the universe is going to explode at this or that speed”—we hear such remarks after the first words we exchange, from people whom we would not have expected to introduce themselves as idiots. If one is unfortunate enough to meet them again after five years, everything is different except their authoritative and mostly brutal assuredness. Now they wear a different badge in their buttonhole and mention their relationship to another monster; and the universe now shrinks at such a speed that your hair stands on end. In this mountain range of narrow-mindedness, Fillmor was one of the highest peaks.

Both authoritative and changeable, possessed of a “briskly disposing intelligence” that shunts everything immediately into “sharply demarcated” categories, given to cant and platitudes and displays of right thinking, and, above all, hubristically self-assured—this should be a familiar type.

Let us call this the Age of Fillmor.

Chesterton on love

Chesterton at work, 1905

GK Chesterton died 85 years ago today, aged 62. Chesterton has long been one of my favorite writers, a witty and topsy-turvy guide to literally everything. To commemorate the anniversary of his passing I was looking through my books and notes and even quotations I had shared as Facebook statuses going back as far as 2009. It was in these statuses that I noticed a recurring theme—love. And I decided that there was no better tribute I could pay him than simply to share his thoughts on six different facets of love.

I use the metaphor of facets deliberately, because, like a finely cut gemstone, while each of these quotations comes at the topic from a different angle they are all of a piece, part of a carefully shaped whole, and it’s that whole vision of Christian love that I believe animated everything Chesterton did and that we can stand to learn from. I know I can.

On love of one’s work:

From Chesterton’s 1903 biography Robert Browning:

The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. . . . A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.

One of these days I’ll finally write about my years-long struggle to understand and live out one of Chesterton’s most famous dicta, that “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” But the above quotation gets at why even failing at something is worth it.

On love of home:

“I think God has given us the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.”

“I dare say,” I said. “What reason?”

“Because otherwise,” he said, pointing his pole out at the sky and the abyss, “we might worship that.”

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

“Eternity,” he said in his harsh voice, “the largest of the idols—the mightiest of the rivals of God.”

“You mean pantheism and infinity and all that,” I suggested.

“I mean,” he said with increasing vehemence, “that if there be a house for me in heaven it will either have a green lamp-post and a hedge, or something quite as positive and personal as a green lamp-post and a hedge. I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be a witness against all the infinities and sophistries, that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything. And I would not be so very much surprised if the house in heaven had a real green lamp-post after all.”

The above is from his underappreciated novel Manalive, which I read at a very important time in my life and you can read here.

On love of country:

A celebrated passage from “A Defence of Patriotism” in his very first essay collection, The Defendant:

On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk, like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not realize what the word “love” means, that they mean by the love of country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only his son. Here clearly the word “love” is used unmeaningly. It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. . . . “My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.” No doubt if a decent man's mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.

On love of neighbor:

One of Chesterton’s most famous one-liners comes from a 1910 column for the Illustrated London News:

The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

You can read more from the same column here.

On love of others:

From Orthodoxy, chapter VIII, “The Romance of Orthodoxy.” Compare this insistence on the particularity of love with the passage from Manalive above.

A short time ago Mrs. Besant, in an interesting essay, announced that there was only one religion in the world, that all faiths were only versions or perversions of it, and that she was quite prepared to say what it was. According to Mrs. Besant this universal Church is simply the universal self. It is the doctrine that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of individuality between man and man. If I may put it so, she does not tell us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be our neighbours. That is Mrs. Besant's thoughtful and suggestive description of the religion in which all men must find themselves in agreement. And I never heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more violently disagree. I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self, but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different. If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous courtship. If the world is full of real selves, they can be really unselfish selves. . . . Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces.

On unconditional love:

From a meditation on soldiers, the use of force, and defeat in his 1915 essay collection All Things Considered:

To love anything is to see it at once under lowering skies of danger. Loyalty implies loyalty in misfortune.

Conclusion

Devoted attachment to real, particular things and people, unswerving but not uncritical, and always wanting and hoping the best—this is a model of love I hope to live up to, and one we could all certainly use more of. And a good place to look for it not only described but acted out is in the work of Chesterton. Thankful for his memory today, 85 years on, and all that his work has meant to me and many thousands of others.

GK Chesterton, RIP.

George III: Majesty and Madness

Detail of George III in Coronation Robes, a 1765 portrait by Allan Ramsay

King George III was born on this day in 1738. To the extent that he is remembered in America today, it either as the bloody tyrant who tried to oppress the freedom-loving Thirteen Colonies or as an insane weakling, good evidence of the foolishness of royal families and hereditary monarchy. One of these is glib, one is propaganda—both are inaccurate, as made clear by Jeremy Black’s excellent entry in the Penguin Monarchs series, George III: Majesty and Madness.

George’s reign

One thing that is often lost in the caricature versions of George is how long he reigned. He ascended the throne at the height of the French and Indian/Seven Years War and lived five years past the Battle of Waterloo—almost sixty years. Only Victoria and Elizabeth II have ruled England longer.

George rose to the throne relatively young, succeeding his grandfather George II at the age of twenty-two, in the midst of a global war. Over the course of this book’s 115 pages, Black concisely outlines George’s reign, from the crises facing George immediately upon his ascent (whom to marry, how to conclude the Seven Years War) and thereafter (how to recover the cost of the war, how to deal with unrest and rebellion in North America, how to deal with the threat of the French Revolution and, even later, Napoleon), to the ups and downs of George’s popularity among the people, the rising and falling tensions within the governments he formed, and the mental health problems that occasionally cropped up from about the middle of his reign to the Regency, when he was finally and totally overcome by them.

Owing to the length of George’s reign, the intricacy of some of the political questions raised during that time, and the brevity imposed by the Penguin Monarchs series, Black can only briefly treat many of these issues, such as the ongoing debate over the international slave trade at the time. Black also assumes you will know who certain important figures and factions are—Lord North, Pitt the Elder, Pitt the Younger, the Whigs, the Rockingham Whigs, the Wilkesites—so some familiarity with the period will help. But considering the vast time covered, Black does a good job presenting a concise, focused, and comprehensible account of the events of George’s reign.

Naturally, given the way hindsight reorders the importance of events, the American Revolution looms large in this book. Black presents the story well, showing both what motivated the colonials as well as George and his government, and how misunderstandings and mismatched expectations deepened the divide between the two sides.

Black also explodes the American myth of the Mad Tyrant King George, outlining the reasonableness of colonial taxation given the wildly successful but expensive Seven Years’ War—a war that started in the colonies, was fought to defend the colonies, and resulted in the opening of vast new territories for the colonies. Mismanagement of imperial policy, the passage of unpopular acts followed swiftly by their revocation—most famously the Stamp Act—created uncertainty and mistrust about the way the colonies would be run:

Indeed, the revolution occurred not because of a general desire to fight for liberty, but rather as a hesitant, if not unwilling, response on the part of many to the confused tergiversations of British policy, policy changes that apparently pointed the way to new forms of imperial governance. This concern led the colonies to a depth of alienation that was underrated in Britain, at least by the government, or that was misleadingly seen as restricted to a few troublemakers. Separation was a last resort for most of the colonists.

That George took the blame for mismanaged taxation policies is down to American propaganda—especially the Declaration of Independence, a laundry list “of charges thrown incontinently at George by Thomas Jefferson” and bearing only tenuous relation to reality and almost none to George’s role in the crisis.

But another part in the outbreak of revolution was played by George’s personality, and this presents us with some of the greatest ironies of George’s life, reign, and the empire’s loss of America. He saw monarchy not as a privilege to be exploited and enjoyed, but a divinely ordained office with immense responsibilities and obligations. The words “duty” and “conscientiousness” recur over and over in Black’s account. George’s sense of duty, his assumption that good men would cross party lines to cooperate and do the right thing, and his prickliness and disdain for those who refused or avoided their responsibilities or caved in to base instincts all played a role in his leadership before and during the Revolution. What the rebels who vandalized the East India Company’s tea in Boston Harbor needed was a firm line, a reminder that they were part of a whole and had duties incumbent upon them just as George did. Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

George’s character

One of the ironies of accusing George of tyranny is precisely that sense of duty, which caused him to observe limits to his own power. He worked scrupulously to defend and uphold what had been entrusted to him. As Black puts it, “far from having unconstitutional tendencies, George saw himself as the constitution’s defender; but his determination to deploy the full powers that could be presented as his appeared to critics to be unconstitutional.” Much of the time he succeeded, but transatlantic miscommunication and misunderstanding frustrated George’s attempts to hold the empire together.

George’s observation of propriety and limitation was not only political but personal. Consider this telling anecdote from Black’s description of George’s lifestyle:

George’s first country residence, Richmond Lodge, was to be demolished, having been judged too small for his rapidly growing family. He turned to the White House in Kew, the country home of his parents, but wanted a new palace in the area; initially at Richmond, for which, in 1765, [architect William] Chambers produced a design for a major neo-classical work in accordance with the traditions of country-house (i.e. rural-palace) building[.] . . . The main façade was to be 328 feet long, but this was never built because, in contradiction to the Declaration of Independence, George was no tyrant: the cost was too great for the modest royal finances. Also, he was unable to purchase some land adjacent to his property which he saw as necessary for the palace, and certainly could not expropriate it as he very much regarded himself as under the law.

Here Black presents us with a king striving to live within his means and refusing to take advantage of his position to confiscate private property for his own use. Recent American presidents have been considerably less scrupulous about running up debt or the use of eminent domain for personal projects.

That’s the low-hanging fruit that first came to mind when I read that passage, but there’s much more, and this is the bitterest irony of all—George was a good man. He married well, to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and never took a mistress or was otherwise unfaithful to his wife at a time when infidelity among monarchs was commonplace. Indeed, his open and public affection toward Charlotte was the subject of approving comment by contemporaries, and his vigorous outdoor walks with her were a customary part of his routine. They had fifteen children in nineteen years and he strove to inculcate in them the same senses of piety and responsibility that had been imparted to him by his mother.

George had a keen interest in and generously patronized the arts and sciences. He helped lead a revival of Handel’s religious oratorios and played several instruments himself, as well as promoting the historical paintings and portraiture of artists like Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West and taking a personal interest—both through study in his own extensive library or conversation with experts—in everything from architecture and engineering to new farming techniques and astronomy. Visitors to court, including John Adams as ambassador of the young American republic, found George approachable and even friendly, talkative, and well-informed on a huge array of subjects.

And he was devoutly and sincerely religious, another trait atypical of monarchs at the time. His faith, indeed, undergirds everything else. “This commitment,” Black notes, “is apt to be downplayed in a secular age, but it was fundamental to George’s life, character and policies, and contemporaries noted the energy with which he said his amens.” George’s senses of duty and even patriotism were religious ones, and his reign was a religious mission to uphold and strengthen what he, by providential accident, had inherited. He only partially succeeded, though not for insincerity or lack of effort.

That George’s memory is denigrated while we excuse, ignore, or personally disavow the failings and evils of the strivers, would-be dictators, and tyrants that have paraded through the office of President simply because they are elected is and should be a judgement on us.

Culture and George’s reputation

So why does this reputation, all these years after the grievances of the Revolution should have faded, still cling to him?

This brings me to one of the most distinctive parts of this volume. Black is not the most elegant writer I’ve read, but he writes capably, commands an astonishing array of sources, and pays careful attention to two things it is easy to neglect in political history—the roles of personality and culture. In the final chapter of George III: Majesty and Madness, Black treats the reader to a tour of George by way of Jane Austen, Hamilton, and others. About Hamilton he doesn’t have much to say, nor should he: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s George, a figure both “comic relief” and “sinister,” is “wildly inaccurate.” Period. The earlier play and film The Madness of King George gets more right, particularly about the treatments endured by George during his bouts of insanity, but raised George’s late-life mental health to such visibility that this problem, along with the loss of the North American colonies, has come to define him. That George’s reputation has suffered under the smears and imbalances of depictions in popular culture is clear—and it continues.

But the window into George’s life and reign offered by the works of Jane Austen—a woman whose interests, beliefs, and priorities overlapped a great deal with her king’s—is fascinating, and Black’s examination of George’s reign through her writing is one of the best parts of the book. Black also includes an interesting comparison of George III with George Washington, a man the king—who respected strength of duty and character—was humble enough to praise when Washington turned down dictatorial power.

Conclusion

George III: Madness and Majesty, with its sweeping scope balanced by careful but concise examination of key political events, and most especially in its attention to its subject’s personal life and character, is a very good short biography and a good introduction to a much-maligned and misunderstood man. I highly recommend it.

More if you’re interested

Black has also written a full-scale biography of George III subtitled America’s Last King, which I intend to read soon. Andrew Roberts also has a biography of George coming out this fall; read the description on Amazon and you’ll see that it’s designed precisely to be a corrective. For an extended, fair, and beautifully illustrated kids’ version of the George III/George Washington comparison, let me recommend Rosalyn Schanzer’s George vs. George: The American Revolution As Seen from Both Sides. You can read my old Amazon review here. I’ve previously reviewed another excellent entry in the Penguin Monarchs series, Elizabeth I: A Study in Insecurity, by Helen Castor, here.