How God Works

I should get back to Luther, I suppose, if only to have a bit of discipline in my writing, if not my life. But another man’s madness (and Luther was just a bit off, if I may say, as well as being a horrible anti-Semite) holds little interest for me, since my own madness is closer to hand. And I’m busy trying to shake this annoying atheist—Britt Hartley—from my brain.

 

She’s annoying because she’s right, of course. She got me involved in a Mormon woman who apparently fell into full religious psychosis and killed her family. The rationale was completely nutso. Anybody could see that, but there was a little problem…

 

…it was also in The Book of Mormon.

 

The woman, whose name I still don’t know, was convicted by a jury of her peers in Idaho (I think—anyways, it was a place where her peers were likely to be Mormon, and to have read the same book). The jury knew she was nuts and knew she belonged in prison. She had almost literally reenacted the story of Nephi (or someone who didn’t exist except to the Mormons) or the sons of Nephi or the enemies of the sons of Nephi. So they threw her in jail, breathed a sigh of relief, and then went to their temple on Sunday morning to hear the story of…

 

…I know you’re expecting this...

 

…the sons of the tribes of Nephi.

 

It’s easy to laugh at religion, as long as it’s not my own. I freely admit that I think the story of Mohammed flying on a winged horse to the moon and back all in one night is crazy. I will admit (if circumstances permit) that the story of a virgin impregnated by an angel bearing the word of God is…

 

…circumstances don’t permit.

 

Hartley makes the gentle point that, despite what we say, none of us really believe in our religion. I have thought this often, since I sit in rooms where people talk tirelessly about God. Very early in my eight years of sitting in the rooms, I began asking the people talking most passionately about God, ‘well, what are you doing here? If God is central to your life, and if this life is but a tiny sliver of your eternal life with Christ—you shouldn’t be in an AA meeting before you go to work to make a living to buy shit at Marshalls. You should be praying or working with lepers or preaching the second coming in a Burger King parking lot.’

 

I take her inventory—another atheist habit. I call it “engaging in critical thinking” which I refuse to leave at the door. Until they shout FUCK YOU at me.

 

Hartley, being a true critical thinker, doesn’t operate on this personal and petty (though pleasurable) scale. She makes the point that what makes us call a person a religious-crazy is not that the person is saying crazy stuff. They’re just quoting scripture. What makes a religious-crazy crazy is that the other persons who believe-but-not-quite-believe-to-the-point-of-action say that the person is crazy.

 

We need the pots to call the kettle black, in other words.

 

It settles the question of why I really, really want my god to enter my world via the Village vicar, who rides his black Raleigh three-speed out of a BBC historical series and into my cottage, where we discuss the weather and the church fund and walking tours of Ireland next summer, perhaps, but never God. The vicar toddles off to the next cottage, the chaffinch sings in the bough, and morning has broken.

 

I do not want the vicar to tell me about the sinning sons of the tribe of Nephi, or the sinning tribe of the sons of Nephi, or anyone else. The dew is on the rose, the vicar has just left, and I really don’t want to have to get out the AK-45 to go slay the iniquitous this morning.

 

But how do I know that’s not what God wants me to do?

 

It’s a curious thing—suppose a true believer acted according to his beliefs, and committed that most foul of sins, as described in Leviticus: 

 

 

 

It couldn’t be clearer, and the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Did the store manager of Chick-fil-A go running around the restaurant in the parking lot of Plaza del Sol and pay all his workers each day before sunset?

 

Didn’t God make it perfectly clear?

 

You can make the case—weakly—that this is normal behavior. This is what adolescence was all about, for me, which was to stand around and criticize with perfect logic what my parents were doing.

 

They were doing the absolute right thing, despite professing exactly the opposite. They were saving money, perhaps, instead of distributing loaves and fishes to the poor. They were going to work but never considering the lilies of the field.

 

We call this “nuanced thinking,” and we smile tolerantly (after seething a few hours beforehand) at the teenager.

 

Britt comes clean about her own motivations, more than most of us can. She’s really, really trying to find that baby there in the bathwater. So am I, which is why it’s hard for me to admit this.

 

God—that sneaky bastard—is out there and he’s got his eye on me. He’s also smarter than me, which means that he’s not going to get to me through words, or through my thoughts (which are the words I tell myself).

 

God is gonna get me through a sunset, through a smile from a stranger, or through a young guitarist playing Biber. He could get me through the vicar on his Raleigh, if any were about. But at the moment, he’s just got Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber .

 

That’s good enough. 

 

 

 

       

 

 

The Work Never Stops!

It was hysterical laughter, I could tell you, and really can be excused on those grounds. Or I could claim, with perfect justice, that it was certainly a normal reaction to stress. Times have been a little rough lately, what with losing my marriage and my country and all in the same year. True, I’m responsible for a lot of that, but not all, nor has it been a cakewalk. Anyway, I got up on stage last week and told John Roberts where to get off, and I protested last Saturday. The rage had shifted about, and when I saw what you can see below, I burst into giggles, which revved into gales of laughter.

 

Here it is:

 

 

Yes, it’s the East Wing, which has had a “VACANCY” sign brightly lit in neon outside on Pennsylvania Avenue for the last nine months. True, Melania isn’t there, but was that any reason to destroy it?

 

Usually I have to dig around in a story to get the rich lode that always lies beneath the surface. I mostly have to follow links endlessly, create underground burrows branching out of the rabbit hole, try to figure out when the Russians are openly putting their fingers on the scales of public opinion or have switched out the scale entirely, in the dead of night. It would take me a couple of hours to realize the enormity of the corruption as contrasted with the foolishness of the execution. I would have to tell you which corporations sold out and became “sponsors” of Trump’s Big Bawdy Ballroom. I would investigate if any legal authority existed in any possible world that justified a US president tearing down a part of the White House that is well over 100 years old and beloved, at least by some. I would be doing pearl-clutching, JD Vance would be chortling up his sleeve, and you, beloved reader, would be well-served.

 

I sat on the sofa and laughed.

 

It didn’t help that they were showing me this:

 

 

This is the White House?

 

Apparently so. But wait, here it all is, from another angle:

 

 

These are all screen shots, by the way, since the new recommendation is that anything that you don’t want AI (and its nefarious masters) to know, you should avoid trying to find on Google. It makes no sense, but nothing else does either, so that’s perfectly fine.

 

I could clutch the pearls until they burst, telling you that Trump had promised not to touch a single cubic centimeter of the existing White House. I could bewail the fact that what is a simple, quiet, unpretentious mansion (because it is that) has become an eyesore now that will become a national disgrace / joke later.

 

I’ve only seen the White House a couple of times, but both times I came away struck by how small it was, how gracefully it places itself in the landscape, how quiet and authoritative its voice was. It’s a voice that knows that to be heard in the riot of a ballroom, you must whisper. It’s the home of a country sure enough of itself that it didn’t need to impress.

 

Good God, the time I could have saved myself, having read obsessively about the crimes (real and imagined, current and historical) of Donald Trump, the atrocities of his administration, the wasteland of his soul! I could have skipped the last decade—during which I was only trying to alert you, Dear Reader, to the dangers ahead—and gone directly to the ball, like Cinderella. Yesterday, when the real news might have been that Venezuela and Colombia are getting a bit tired, really, of having their fishermen get blown out of their boats by United States military pretending to see drug smugglers in front of their eyes—well, what was I doing?

 

Laughing on the sofa!

 

Very occasionally, it all gets too much for me, as it did years ago, when the beloved mayor of Cataño got it into his head to go buy some art for his little community—a nice place with a rum factory (Barcardí—have you heard of it?) and a great view of the harbor and the old city. Well, Amolao (the mayor of Cataño) went off to Russia, perhaps having heard of the Hermitage, and the vast treasures it contains. There, he was an early advocate against DEI (“you don’t see any niggers there,” he said, and if he used the word why can’t I?) but did manage to meet a guy who believed, sensibly, that more is more. He was a sculptor, and he had made this, on the occasion of the 500^th year of Columbus’s journey.

 

Aesthetics aside (since we can all agree it’s striking), there were other problems that arose, since the FAA got it into their foolish little heads that pilots might not be able to fly their planes around it. Ridiculous, but there it was, and this lovely statue, which had cost the citizens nothing, since it was perfectly free except for shipping and handling….

 

…which came to around 100 million or so…

 

…the lovely statue, as I was saying, had to be moved to out in the boonies. 

 

It’s languished there, doing nothing more than causing the west side of the island of Puerto Rico to settle 10 millimeters or so every year.

 

Fortunately, Trump has better friends (or toadies) than Amolao, and our own governor (who is, by the way, a governess by the name of Jenniffer [yup, double “n’s” and double “f’s”] González) is a Republican of a very Trumpian stripe. It should be no problem to move the monstrosity to the White House lawn, where moguls can enjoy the site / sight while sipping Veuve Cliquot on the White House lawn. 

 

Since I don’t know how to make AI draw for me, I leave it up to your fevered imagination to supply the picture.

 

It was all too much, and then I was not on the sofa but somehow in Nydia’s car, which is where she was first privileged to hear news of the ballroom, on the way to Costco.

 

“Trump got up on the roof yesterday to oversee the future site of the ballroom,” I was telling her.

 

“Were people shouting jump?”

 

“Only internally,” I told her. “But it’s a great idea, since of course Trump will never have a Presidential Library.”

 

“Of course not. The dude can’t read….”

 

“And we are going to have to put him somewhere, poor dear, close to medical facilities and with enough security to keep him wandering off and getting lost.”

 

Nydia’s eyes glazed with pleasure.

 

“Terrible,” she murmured, and patted my hand.

 

“It can be house arrest,” I told her, “in the ballroom, which should hold all of Trump’s most ardent and fervent supporters. We can put them there, behind the ornamental fake gold bars, and they can all look at each other. Their vocal chords having been surgically removed, of course, for all of our protection…”

 

“Wonderful,” said Nydia, “and when will that be?”

 

We turned into the parking lot at Costco, and I never had to answer.

 

 

 

 

Out of Control

A Monday morning—the beginning of a week. I’m 68 and haven’t needed to get up and do a workweek in years, but the habit is ingrained. By the end of this week, I want to have a website, since I’ve found a way to make notebooks faster than Lady can sell them at the Passage. It’s an opportunity, not a problem.

 

The big news is that over the weekend, seven million people got out into the streets and protested Trump and his allies. Trump responded by releasing an AI generated video of him wearing a crown and flying a plane and dumping shit on the protesters.

 

I am so down with this. 

 

I am so ready for this.

 

It may be the sour mood that comes from sitting in a room (as I have just done) of people talking about God. That’s what we do in AA, or rather, it’s what they do. Two years ago, a guy shouted “FUCK YOU” at me after a meeting, during which I had apparently offended him. He offered a formulaic apology; I accepted it politely but gracelessly.

 

I no longer engage with religious people. 

 

I sat in silence while others spoke of their relationship with God. I enjoyed the silences in the meeting more than the shares. I did not hold hands and pray the serenity prayer, which is how we end the meetings.

 

I’m there out of fear, because a “slip” could for me very easily return to the nightmare that brought me into AA in the first place. I stay quiet because I have to: I am in the void, and the void seems to hold nothing. In fact, for me there is anger, confusion, rage, desire, hope, despair—the entire world of emotions, especially the negative ones. I spoke from the void on the day the guy shouted “fuck you” at me, and I learned again what I had forgotten, so immersed was I in exploring the void.

 

I went back to the meeting the next day, because even though I was enraged, I’m still a drunk. My first job—really, my only job—is to get through the day without drinking. I tried to do it without AA—no luck. With AA, I can do it. It costs me nothing to be silent for an hour.

 

And it costs me nothing to admit that nobody wants to hear what I think. In fact, I don’t want to hear what YOU think, though I did it for an hour. It was a bit trickier to admit that maybe I don’t know the truth, and that if I thought I did, that might be a real indication that I was off the beam. There was a book called If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him when I was a kid, and getting into Buddhist meditation. I never read the book, but I wondered about the title. I never knew what it meant, and still don’t. It may be, however, that I’ve been rigorously executing every Buddha I met on the road. The road is, in fact, pretty littered with dead gods.

 

I kill gods, and when I met alcoholism on the road, I was travelling alone. The road littered with gods had led me to a bed perched awkwardly over a bottle of Scotch. The road to sobriety offered me the god of my childhood, since Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, was more than physically a dead ringer for my Uncle Bill. In fact, Uncle Bill and Bill Wilson were just as alike spiritually as they were physically. They both told me that God loved me, and shouted FUCK YOU at me later on.

 

So sorry—you don’t get to talk to me about God, none of you.

 

I was bitter and may still be so. In fact, I am on much better terms with God (since I have created him in my image, inevitably so) than I am with any of his children. God has been incredibly good to me: wonderful parents, great schools, talent, intelligence, even charm (occasionally). God showered his gifts on me, and I turned into a drunk.

 

And now I am in the void.

 

I accept that there is a god out of intellectual honesty: I couldn’t get sober by myself, but I could with God. I’m grateful, and if God worked through the AA group or through the lousy coffee or through the FUCK YOU that inevitably went along with it—well, I’m grateful for it. My silence, as you talk about God, is a small part of that gratitude.

 

I’m in the void, now, partly thanks to another person talking about God, whom I met on YouTube the other day, and who told me her story. Britt was a good Mormon girl, raised in a good Mormon family, who met (I presume) a good Mormon. So good a Mormon was she that she went to theology school, which was her undoing.

 

She’s now an atheist.

 

She also has been telling me about the void, which is another word for Nihilism. And she dropped the news that the chaplain for Harvard University is also an atheist. Both of these atheists, in fact, have spiritual lives, as do I. I get down on my knees and pray at least once a day. I ask a God who does not speak to me (or whom I cannot hear) for wisdom and strength. I don’t tell him what to do, nor do I trust myself to believe that what I think is God telling me is in fact God. It may be, and I will have to act on it, as it pertains to my life alone. When you walk into the room, the conversation stops.

 

Britt has also been telling me that I don’t have free will, and she’s impossible to argue with, because she’s right. The neurological studies that use fMRI to look at brain activation point to the fact that we make decisions before we have to become aware of them, act on them, explain them or (later) defend them.

 

It explains why so many of the things that have happened in my alleged sobriety have happened seemingly unwittingly. I know that at a certain day, eight years ago, I got out of bed, found the phone, and called my brother. Five hours later, I was in detox.

 

I know that I struggled for several months, went back to rehab, and then found myself, in 2017, standing in front of a doorway under a sign reading Caribbean Twelve Step. I walked in, and have been walking in every morning since then.

 

I walk in, and since I am entering from the void, I cannot claim much knowledge or wisdom. But I sit with people who very much know God, and are happy to share it with everybody. Their gods don’t look like much to me, but who am I to speak? 

 

I’m alone in this void, and the decision to stay in it is mine—perhaps, if I still have free will over my thoughts. I stay in it for the baby, Sobriety, who is being bathed in sludge. I hold my nose, and try to pour the bathwater water / sludge out carefully. 

 

I arrive at the meeting a minute late and leave a minute early. I listen carefully, smile, and leave. The founders of AA were part of the Oxford Group, and Wilson’ “spiritual plan of action,” hasn’t been changed / revised / updated since 1937. I hear nothing about god that would not have put a blissful smile on my Uncle’s face, had I told him such things late at night on the sun porch of his Illinois farm.

 

I say nothing to the people of AA who are offering me what they cannot give: the love of God. I say nothing to Britt, who is busy being spiritual and atheistic. But I do wonder, in fact, if it’s not a better thing to be in a void, if the alternative is an illusion. 

 

I wonder, too, if I am not acting on free will, then who’s calling the shots? Who got me to the telephone and to detox? Who got me standing, that morning, in front of the door that lead to my sobriety? Robertson Davies once wrote about a car going “out of control,” and posed the question: was the car “out of control” or “into someone else’s control?”

 

At any rate, I have killed every god I met on the road. I’ve killed the Buddha, too.

 

But I’ve spent some fruitful time in the Ashram.    

 

     

Blue-Remembered Hills

Well, David French is worried about the state of American Christianity, but should I be? I’m not a Christian, and even though I know some very good Christians, I dislike the church. I am not welcome in many Christian churches, and the feeling has become mutual.

 

French, who’s a columnist in The New York Times, is worried because a bunch of aimless, misdirected young men have found a convenient way to express their hate through religion. These are the people who celebrated the death of reproductive freedom a couple of years ago by shouting, “Your body, my choice.”

 

So the young conservative Christians are filling up 2900 pages (that have been released) of Telegram chats about venerating Hitler, sending liberals to death camps, and raping women on their way home. JD Vance is on the situation, fortunately, and tells us it’s nothing to worry about. 

 

“I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence,” he wrote, in a post a couple of days ago. 

 

It’s a gauntlet, but am I going to pick it up?

 

I could, and have in the past. I struggle with bitterness, which isn’t attractive at any age, let alone old age. I suffer, too, from the absolute conviction that I’m right (fortunately, I am!), and I tell myself that subscribing to the theory of intolerance is a dangerous first step on a very slippery slope.

 

The theory of intolerance (if I get it right) is that we can, we must, and we get to be tolerant to absolutely everybody in the world…

 

…except…

 

…intolerant people.

 

Intolerant people? Like, the people who disagree with me?

 

Or is it that we really shouldn’t be giving coffee and donuts to Nazis? 

 

I’m fighting with myself, even now, to remain dispassionate. Actually, I’m struggling to be humane, since I am human instead and feeling exactly about them as they are feeling about me.

 

Let’s hate each other.

 

Let’s get it over with. I will burn down your churches and you will put me in the cattle cars. 

 

Let the best man win.

 

Let nobody win.

 

What!?

 

Where did that come from? True, I guess, that in every system besides capitalism, nobody wins if somebody loses (well, there’s also evolution, and a few other things, but you get my point.) Anyway, at some point I will not have to walk past your churches and you will not have to listen to me. We can drop the polite smiles and the clutched pearls and reach for the AK-47’s, or whatever they are.

 

We can live in armed camps, and we’ll all be happy. I hate you—you hate me. It’s a trade-off we can live with. Actually, we’ll all benefit in the end. My thoughts are poison to you, as yours are to me.

 

Unfortunately, we have to share the same land, and that’s a shame, because I really love that land. The walk down the road from my mother’s house in rural Wisconsin is one I haven’t taken in a decade and a half, and will never take again.

 

I can’t go back there.

 

You guys won.

 

It’s in me, of course, since I walk that road with everything except my feet quite a lot. I remember the walnut tree that killed the drunk driver, as he careened down Wisconsin’s second biggest hill. I remember my mother’s neighbor, a farmer, telling me that a walnut tree could take out a full acre of usable land, it sucks up so much water. I remember the white frame house that was so well nestled next to the verdant hill that it looked like an Andrew Wyeth painting. 

 

         Into my heart an air that chills,

         From yon, far country blows

         What are those blue-remembered hills?

         What farms, what spires are those?

 

Sorry—poetry.

 

Bad habit.

 

So I’ll burn your churches and you’ll put me in the cattle car. The train will take me past my blue-remembered hills and past your burning church, and that will be enough. The orange flames leaping into the blue sky, the acrid smoke choking our lungs—we’ll feel the beauty of destruction.

 

Nor will we miss it, what is gone.

 

Your church, my life.

 

         That is the land of lost content,

         I see it shining plain        

         The happy highways where I went,

         And cannot come again.    

(Thanks to A. E. Housman and the Shropshire Lad….) 

Truth to Power?

Well, I guess that’s one way of looking at it. The power in question is the United States government, currently run by a madman who has installed TV hosts to “run” little departments like War, Health, Economic Affairs. The TV hosts look good but are a bit lacking in the policy department. That’s not a problem, because policy is no concern of the guy they answer to. Retribution, yes. Revenge? Of course! Policy can be achieved—or not—on the fly.

 

I went to the poetry slam and told the story of meeting Rabbi Swarsensky as a young man. I posed the question that we all grapple with, at some point in our lives: what would I have done or said in Nazi Germany? Then I read the letter to John Roberts, retrieved my phone from Nels (who was recording me), and went home to Espresso Chip ice cream and bed.

 

It was no big deal, in short, and there are times I wonder if that hasn’t been the story of my life. It took me forty years (and a YouTube video) for me to get this, if indeed I have. But I remember watching an interview with Martha Argerich, when someone asked if she hated practicing.

 

Argerich considered the question, before responding, “No, but I hate the idea of practicing.”

 

Exactly—and I have spent my entire life thinking about what I had to do, thinking about how much I dreaded the idea of doing it, and inventing really good justifications for why I really, really cannot and should not do whatever it is. Then I do it, always at the last minute and usually badly, and I discover once again what every adult except for me knows.

 

My mother certainly knew it: “You’ll feel better once it’s over,” was a constant refrain in the house. 

 

No matter how many times I heard it, and no matter how consistently I had proven it to be true, it never helped. In the end, I had to be mechanistic about the whole thing: I will never do what others do easily. I will procrastinate, justify, involve myself in other worthy projects, learn the use of the iota subscript in Ancient Greek. At the last minute I will fly into action, and it will get done. Barely and badly, but done.

 

“If you do your studying every night after class,” my mother once told me, “you really won’t have to study much for the final exam.”

 

Well, yeah!

 

Other people are smarter than me about the things that matter. It took me years to figure out what I had to do in the morning, which is essentially to get through it. And so I am Pavlov’s favorite dog—my phone wakes me up at 6:30, and then it’s the same routine, day after day. Anselmo comes first—food and litter box. Bathroom is second. Prayer comes third, as the coffee is brewing. Then I lie down on the sofa at 6:43 or 6:44 and gather wool until the alarm clock goes off again at 7:05.

 

I get up and I go to the club, and the meeting that I would go to, if I were anonymous and went (or not) to meetings.

 

I don’t think about it at all, of course, because what sense would that make? And yesterday, at last, I did the same thing about going to the poetry slam. Things conspired against me, of course—the printer that is always reliable decided to hang out with the printer that’s a diva. 

 

Fine—I’ll write the damn letter out in long-hand.

 

There were six people in the Passage when I started to speak.

 

No problem—the video can still go viral.

 

Preaching to the choir, are we, little Marc?

 

Yup—and if they sing in tune, it’ll have been worth it.

 

So I did it, and learned the flip side of being an automaton.

 

It feels just great.

 

Not only did I do it, but I posted it on YouTube.

 

Now I’m off to the beach.

 

 

On Making History

Four days ago, it seemed like a good idea to think about Martin Luther, and what he might have meant by that phrase, “Sin Boldly.” Four days ago, I had pulled out the telescope far enough so that I could look at our troubled world dispassionately, from a very great distance. Four days ago, an exploration into the thinking of Martin Luther did not seem like an indulgence. 

 

It seemed normal.

 

I’m getting through this period of Trump’s eternal presence by pulling that telescope out. I bind books because I need to get out of my mind and into my fingers. I bind books because other guys have done it, in worse situations than I am in. I tell myself that the barbarians are tearing down the walls of the monastery, but that is not my affair. I am in the scriptorium and they are outside, at least for the present. 

 

In fact, most monks working at their desks were dealing with a lot more than I have to deal with, and they probably did it with more grace and humility than I can muster. For no reason at all, I’m trying to remember if it was Luther who had to be “kidnapped” by the duke or the elector or whatever feudal overlord ruled his part of Germany. Luther had pissed off the wrong people, and they were on the roads, disguised as footpads or whatever. The riches they wanted to steal (or at least prevent Luther from enjoying and spreading about) were solely intellectual. So the burgermeeister, or whoever-he-was, kidnapped Luther, shut him up in a room in his castle, and gave him quill and parchment.

 

As I remember it, Luther used the enforced captivity (or hospitality) to translate the Bible from Latin or Greek into German. To us, that seems like an interesting intellectual exercise. But to Luther, it was putting his soul to the test. A hailstorm hurled ice balls onto the metal roof of the room where Luther was working. He thought the devil was throwing rocks at him, for his grievous sins.

 

It's a difficult story, for me, at least. I want to believe what they never told me in Midvale Elementary School, since the most important things always go unsaid. Men like Luther were made of finer stuff than the rest of us. They got up, thought deep thoughts, wrote them down, and then retired to bed, assured that posterity would revere them as sages. They were not anxious, violent men who feared the dark and the devil.

 

I don’t have any connection to Luther, beyond having spent lots of time in the basements of plain-timbered Lutheran churches in my childhood. They all smell the same, by the way, and that was as endlessly reassuring as the inevitability of the service taking place above me. These were not places that could have spawned from a brilliant, terrified, terrible madman. 

 

Which Luther probably was.

 

So—no connection to Luther, and the stones-throwing devil that tormented him.

 

But I do have a connection to a guy named Henry Herrick, who was a magistrate and a juror in the trial of Rebecca Nurse in Salem, 1692. The devil, for Herrick, was not throwing stones at his roof but stalking the pious homes of Colonial (or rather Pilgrim) Massachusetts. Herrick sent Nurse to her death, for being afflicted with (or perhaps cozening to) the devil. He was slightly more lenient to himself and his fellow jurors, when he confessed that he had himself been as afflicted by the devil as had been Rebecca Nurse. The same devil that had possessed Nurse so badly had also caused him to fall into the sin of believing that the devil…

 

…had possessed Nurse.

 

You will say that’s crazy, and I’ll agree. In fact, that’s the whole point. I am crazy, since I believed both that the men and women who had gone thinking and writing before me were doing it far better than I or we ever could, AND that human history was a rosy ascent into rationality and clear-thinking.

 

Luther was not a terrified man committing a disgusting sin. Henry Herrick could not have condemned Nurse (as well, apparently, as Sarah Good) to her death for being ensnared by the devil, and then excused himself for…being ensnared by the devil.

 

They were giants in the earth, who by definition had dealt better with worse shit than I would ever have to cope with. Herrick gets a pass in my mind because he was living in the 17^th century, and somehow that gives him a patina of respectability and probity. But he was also 21 years old at the time of his deposition, and even in a society that had no real adolescence and in which adulthood started very early, that’s still young. I’m 68, and shudder at what I might have done in Herrick’s situation at Herrick’s age.

 

I thought of history, if I thought of it at all, as something that Luther and Henry Herrick had done and taken care of. I was born 11 years after World War II, and I grew up thinking that we had taken on fascism and won. The horrors of anti-Semitism would never be repeated. I would not see white men carrying torches through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.” All of that was over, having been ended by the giants in the earth.

 

I didn’t think of history as a burden, something that I would have to get up every morning and do something about. I would skate by, taking the bus to work every morning, and coming home to comfort and ease at the end of the day.

 

History was over—obviously, since it was in the past, and I was living in the untroubled (might I suggest complacent?) present. History was violent and brutal, as well as terminally unforgiving, but it was over. That was the point. I was not supposed to have to get up each morning, and make history (in whatever tiny way it was my lot to endure). I was never going to be the bystander standing next to Rabbi Swarsensky, watching with quiet satisfaction as the synagogue burned down.

 

Indeed, Swarsensky and Herrick and Luther were all safely in the past, making no claims on me. I could go tonight to a poetry slam two blocks from my house and bind Thomas Mann, whom I’m currently interested in. I wouldn’t have to ask myself if I had the moral courage at least to offer comfort to the rabbi as we watched his synagogue burn down. I wouldn’t have to wonder if I, at age 21 in Salem in 1692, would be any less confused and hypocritical about my affairs with the devil. And nothing I did would ever amount to much—certainly nothing that would warrant the devil throwing stones at the roof of the room in which I had had to be kidnapped.

 

I could write a scathing letter to a judge—a guy named John Roberts, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, and let it lie in obscurity in a blog that I write. I wouldn’t have to read it, aloud, and in front of a camera. I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about wondering what list of “domestic terrorists” I might find myself on, or where on that list I might fall. 

 

History was over, so I was Scot-free. I could look with detachment on my ancestors and owed no explanation to my descendants.

 

We were done with that, and we would never have to answer that hypothetical and kind of stupid rhetorical question—what would I have done, as a decent German living in the 1930’s? Would I have spoken out?

 

We weren’t done with that—not by a long shot. So now, on Tuesday, October 14, 2025, I have to answer the question.

 

Will I speak out?

 

If I say yes, then I’ll walk to the poetry slam and read the letter to Roberts. It won’t matter that raising my voice won’t make a difference, that the venue is too small and utterly insignificant, that poetry slams rarely turn violent.

 

None of that will matter.

 

It will only matter if I don’t do it.