Tom’s Big Picture

After all, they’re only musicians and even though they criticized Bush for the wrong reasons, we can’t expect them to get the details right in their pretty little heads.  This column says that to defend Bush these days, you have to be willing to defend throw ing border agents in jail for shooting smugglers, blowing CIA agents’ cover for political gain and getting thousands of GIs killed to create an Islamic republic.

Brilliant realpolitik from a promising young state legislator, Stacey Campfield, in Tennessee- he proposes death certificates for aborted babies, creating a public record of who gets an abortion.  This would reduce abortions among yuppie women and their teenage daughters who would (and should) instead choose adoption if they wanted to maintain their anonymity.   He also attempted to join the black caucus.  Read his blog here.

In my high school, and I assume most high schools, the final study of literature is divided into a two-year course, the first covering American literature and the second in the senior year covering British literature. I enjoyed British literature; I suffered through American literature.

Is this really fair to our country? I don’t think so, given the inordinate amount of time spent on Northeastern “transcendentalist” literature. Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, etc. From what I could tell, a bunch of universalist Gnostic Yankees walking around the woods barefoot pondering the meaning of life and navel-gazing their emotional states like a 7th grade girl’s diary. There was only one transcendentalist I kind of liked, and that was Nathaniel Hawthorne- but I think I liked him because he was a contrarian to the transcendentalist belief in the fundamental goodness of man, and presented man’s dark and evil nature as a reality in his works (of course, his anti-heroes were often historical Christians, see The Scarlet Letter, etc, as Hawthorne was very eager to malign his Puritan ancestors). Nevertheless, there was more real literature to Hawthorne than any of the other authors- and to his credit, he was a Copperhead, with one of his short stories, The Birthmark, being an allegory for the sectional struggle (this dark short story concerns an obsessive scientist who marries a beautiful woman name Georgiana- Hawthorne’s stories are pretty transparent in their symbolism- who has a birthmark on her face; the physician becomes obsessed with the birthmark to the point of being unable to appreciate her otherwise beautiful appearance- and then proceeds with stronger and stronger “treatments” to “cure” the birthmark- until he kills her).

Hawthorne aside, most of the rest was unbearable. Case in point was Emily Dickinson- this was a lady that needed Prozac more than a publisher. But this promotion of abnormalcy, of spiritual defectiveness, as the measure of true art, continues to this day. You are only qualified to be a poet if you’ve been through some horribly traumatic experience and want to share the entrails of your subconscious with the world; or else, write about unspeakable obscenity and aggression towards the majority culture. The art, the craft of verse has been cast aside- a Kipling in our day would be writing lyrics for country music instead of published poetry.

This analysis, of course, ignores the vast riches of Southern literature, including 19th century contemporaries of the transcendentalists. Men like William Gilmore Simms and Henry Timrod- normal men who married and had children, and generally loved their neighbors and the society into which they were born. Men who didn’t scorn the better in pursuit of the perfect, and thus approached closer to truth in this fallen world.

Of course, I was never exposed to this kind of American literature in high school- the best American writers don’t fit neatly into the mythology of political correctness. 

Before moving into the “heavier” political poems of Timrod, it being Valentine’s Day and all, I thought I would share this one, a piece written from the perspective of a mother upon her daughter’s wedding:

A Mother Gazes Upon Her Daughter by Henry Timrod

Is she not lovely! Oh! when, long ago,
My own dead mother gazed upon my face,
As I stood blushing near in bridal snow,
I had not half her beauty and her grace.

Yet that fond mother praised, the world caressed,
And ONE adored me — how shall HE who soon
Shall wear my gentle flower upon his breast,
Prize to its utmost worth the priceless boon?

Shall he not gird her, guard her, make her rich,
(Not as the world is rich, in outward show,)
With all the love and watchful kindness which
A wise and tender manhood may bestow?

Oh! I shall part from her with many tears,
My earthly treasure, pure and undefiled!
And not without a weight of anxious fears
For the new future of my darling child.

And yet — for well I know that virgin heart –
No wifely duty will she leave undone;
Nor will her love neglect that woman’s art
Which courts and keeps a love already won.

In no light girlish levity she goes
Unto the altar where they wait her now,
But with a thoughtful, prayerful heart that knows
The solemn purport of a marriage vow.

And she will keep, with all her soul’s deep truth,
The lightest pledge which binds her love and life;
And she will be — no less in age than youth
My noble child will be — a noble wife.

And he, her lover! husband! what of him?
Yes, he will shield, I think, my bud from blight!
Yet griefs will come — enough! my eyes are dim
With tears I must not shed — at least, to-night.

Bless thee, my daughter! — Oh! she is so fair! –
Heaven bend above thee with its starriest skies!
And make thee truly all thou dost appear
Unto a lover’s and thy mother’s eyes!