I was recently invited to take part in an online ´book club´ which three of my college friends and one of their sons had been doing for much of the past year. They were just finishing up Moby Dick when I joined in, then we read some C.R.L. James (his book about Moby Dick and his book about the Haitian Revolution). We have just now begun ready Thomas Carlyle´s The French Revolution. The following is something I wrote to my book buddies after this past weekend´s session.

_______________________________

Dita and I will be spending a few days on the shoulder of Mt. Pisgah, on the Blue Ridge Parkway, up the mountain from Asheville. We´ll celebrate her birthday at a restaurant on the main square in Asheville, my brother coming from Los Angeles and my sister from Boulder to help us celebrate. Kipp, my basic  reaction to your ¨We’ve gotta have hope,¨ is to disagree kindly forcefully. (´Kindly´, up here in the Georgia hills, means ´fairly´.) But I´ve got to admit: we would not be celebrating Dita´s birthday were we not, each of us, hopeful in some way somehow. But, agreeing with Danny, how?

     The restaurant sits at the northwest corner of Asheville´s main square, Pack Square. In 1887, at the southeast corner of Pack Square, a man named William Oliver Wolfe, a stone cutter, set up a cemetery monument business. He soon married and the Wolfes proceeded to have several children, the last of whom was named Thomas.

     W.O. Wolfe embraced things with abandon, including whisky bottles. It seems his default mood was rage, which he often enough let manifest as beatings of Ms. Wolfe. She, in turn, was obsessed with making successful real estate investments and could put up with the chaos at home as long as her investments played out well. Generally put, it was what we today would call a ´dysfunctional family´ (few terms I dislike more!). 

     In 1904 Julia Wolfe moved to St. Louis, taking the children with her but leaving W.O. behind. It was the year of the St. Louis World’s Fair, aka The Louisiana Purchase Exhibition (Take Me to St. Louis, Louis! became a theme song for the fair). She thought she could make a killing by opening a boarding house there and renting rooms to Ashevillians visiting the fair. It also gave her welcome distance from W.O. and the drunken beatings. She turned a little profit, but not much. Late that summer, as the fair was wrapping up, one of Thomas´ older brothers caught typhoid, and died. W.O. came out to St. Louis to help Julia return the dead boy and the living others back to Asheville.

     All of this and more is related in Thomas Wolfe´s first novel, Look Homeward Angel. In preparation for our little Asheville trip, Dita and I have been reading the book, which, like Moby Dick, I had read decades ago and never until now revisited.

     So, here´s a passage from that book, a passage which speaks authoritatively to me, and which speaks about hope(lessness). And don´t be surprised if the passage almost seems like Melville. Struck by the echoes of Melville in Wolfe´s prose, I googled a bit and found this at ncpedia.com: ¨Thomas Wolfe spent most of his young life attempting to find normalcy. He found respite in the library where he read for hours. Tom devoured the writings of Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens and Herman Melville.¨ Roundabouts 1910, when no one else read Melville!

     Now for the passage. It comes just as the Gant family (the pseudonym for the Wolfes in the book) is about to return home (Thomas Wolfe later famously coined the phrase You Can’t Go Home Again, the title of another of his novels). Eliza is the book name for Julia Wolfe. Gant, of course, is W.O. Eugene is Thomas, age six. Helen is one of his older sisters. Ben an older brother, Grover´s twin. Grover is the dead boy.

     Eugene was deep in midnight slumber. Some one shook him, loosening him slowly from his drowsiness. Presently he found himself in the arms of Helen, who sat on the bed holding him, her morbid stricken little face fastened on him. She spoke to him distinctly and slowly in a subdued voice, charged somehow with a terrible eagerness:

     ¨Do you want to see Grover?¨ she whispered. ¨He’s on the cooling board.¨

     He wondered what a cooling board was; the house was full of menace. She bore him out into the dimly lighted hall, and carried him to the rooms at the front of the house. Behind the door he heard low voices. Quietly she opened it; the light blazed brightly on the bed. Eugene looked, horror swarmed like poison through his blood. Behind the little wasted shell that lay there he remembered suddenly the warm brown face, the soft eyes, that once had peered down at him: like one who has been mad, and suddenly recovers reason, he remembered that forgotten face he had not seen in weeks, that strange bright loneliness that would not return. O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

     Eliza sat heavily on a chair, her face bent sideways on her rested hand. She was weeping, her face contorted by the comical and ugly grimace that is far more terrible than any quiet beatitude of sorrow. Gant comforted her awkwardly but, looking at the boy from time to time, he went out into the hall and cast his arms forth in agony, in bewilderment.

     The undertakers put the body in a basket and took it away.

     ¨He was just twelve years and twenty days old,¨ said Eliza over and over, and this fact seemed to trouble her more than any other.

     ¨You children go and get some sleep now,¨ she commanded suddenly and, as she spoke, her eye fell on Ben who stood puzzled and scowling, gazing in with his curious old-man´s look. She thought of the severance of the twins; they had entered life within twenty minutes of each other; her heart was gripped with pity at the thought of the boy´s loneliness. She wept anew. The children went to bed. For a time Eliza and Gant continued to sit alone in the room. Gant leaned his face in his powerful hands. ¨The best boy I had,¨ he muttered. ¨By God, he was the best of the lot.¨

     And in the tickling silence they recalled him, and in the heart of each was fear and remorse, because he had been a quiet boy, and there were many, and he had gone unnoticed.

     ¨I´ll never be able to forget his birthmark,¨ Eliza whispered. ¨Never, never.¨

     Then presently each thought of the other; they felt suddenly the horror and strangeness of their surroundings. They thought of the vine-wound house in the distant mountains, of the roaring fires, the tumult, the cursing, the pain, of their blind and tangled lives, and of blundering destiny which brought them here now in this distant place, with death, after the carnival´s close.

     Eliza wondered why she had come: she sought back through the hot desperate mazes for the answer:

     ¨If I had known,¨ she began presently, ¨if I had known how it would turn out —¨

     ¨Never mind,¨ he said, and he stroked her awkwardly. ¨By God!¨ he added dumbly after a moment. ¨It’s pretty strange when you come to think about it.¨

     And as they sat there more quietly now, swarming pity rose in them — not for themselves, but for each other, and for the waste, the confusion, the groping accident of life.

     Gant thought briefly of his four and fifty years, his vanished youth, his diminishing strength, the ugliness and badness of so much of it; and he had the very quiet despair of a man who knows the gored chain may not be unlinked, the threaded design unwound, the done undone.

     ¨Ïf I had known. If I had known,¨ said Eliza. And then, ¨I´m sorry.¨ But he knew that her sorrow at that moment was not for him or for herself, or even for the boy whom idiot chance had thrust in the way of pestilence, but that, with a sudden inner flaming of her clairvoyant Scotch soul, she had looked cleanly, without pretense for the first time, upon inexorable tides of Necessity, and that she was sorry for all who had lived, were living, or would live, fanning with their prayers the useless altar flames, suppliant with their hopes to an unwitting spirit, casting the tiny rockets of their belief against remote eternity, and hoping for grace, and delivery upon the spinning and forgotten cinder of this earth. O lost.

     There you have it! Danny´s (and my) despair, alongside Kipp´s hopes, albeit suppliant to an unwitting spirit, but hopes all the same. And guess what? The Gant/Wolfe family lived on, heartily and even sometimes happily.

     Hope is an interesting word. Here’s the etymology: Old English hopian “have the theological virtue of Hope; hope for (salvation, mercy), trust in (God’s word),” also “to have trust, have confidence; assume confidently or trust” (that something is or will be so), a word of unknown origin. Not the usual Germanic term for this, but in use in North Sea Germanic languages (cognates: Old Frisian hopia, Middle Low German, Middle Dutch, Dutch hopen; Middle High German hoffen “to hope,” which is borrowed from Low German). From early 13c. as “to wish for” (something), “desire.” Related: Hoped; hoping. To hope against hope (1610s) “hold to hope in the absence of any justification for hope” echoes Romans iv.18: Who against hope, beleeued in hope, that hee might become the father of many nations: according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seede bee. [King James Version, 1611] The Wycliffite Bible (c. 1384) has this as “Abraham agens hope bileuede that he schulde be maad fadir of manye folkis.” (from etymonline)

     So the idea of hope is fully rooted in theology. But even with pre-Philosophes, in the 13th Century, as the etymology tells us, the idea of hope took on a God-lessness by shapeshifting into ´desire´, from the Latin de sidere, from the stars: hope, as desire, is ¨await what the stars will bring.¨ (again, etymonline) But the stars don’t always bring good stuff. For that matter, God didn’t either, when he was still in business. Not much different, then, from Eliza´s ¨inexorable tides of Necessity.¨

     So you were right to ask, Danny, what are we to do? And why are we doing now what we´re doing, if it all seems so hopeless? The questions which led Bartleby to declare that he preferred not to, and led Gregor Samsa to decide one fine morning to simply stay in bed.

     But if we as yet prefer not to prefer not to, we need some kind of hope, somehow.

     Or we get up out of bed in the morning and just do things, as Nike of course would have us do. The pride of pre-revolutionary France, for example, was just doing things. People in the Age of Reason needed no reason, no grounds, to do what they did; they just did it. They were ungrounded.

     Bartleby and Samsa realized they, along with all around them, had been ungrounded, and on those grounds preferred not to. They were grounded; but hopelessly so. First step taken; will they take another, and another? 

     For that they need to find their hope, or their belief. When you guys had me stammering and stuttering about Nietzsche, I said something like ¨Nietzsche was searching for something new to believe.¨ Since belief and hope are almost the same things, maybe I could say it better: he was looking for something new to hope for. He knew the old (and present) hopes were dead hopes. ¨What?¨ he wrote somewhere, ¨two thousand years, and no new gods?¨ Within the first few pages of Zarathustra (Zarathustra is an alternative name for Zoroaster; Fedallah was Zorastrian), Nietzsche has Zarathustra list the various types who could be what he called ¨the bridge to the overman¨. One on the list: ¨I love the great scorners, because they are the great worshipers and arrows of yearning for the other shore.¨ Worshipers? Believers. Yearning? Hopeful desire. The other shore? The transcendental you asked me about, Kirk. Bartleby and Samsa were great scorners of this shore, but were missing the belief and hope for another shore.

     Sometimes, but not often, I do the right thing. Tonight I did the right thing by asking Dita to tell me what she thought hope is and means. ¨Hope,¨ she said, ¨means believing that things will get better.¨ Perfect in its simplicity. And perfectly expresses why Dita and I and you, Danny, depending on what rotation or Ixion’s wheel you find yourself, find it so hard to hope/believe: we don’t see things getting better. Speaking only for Dita and me: to the contrary, very, very much to the contrary.

     Which means, Brad, (I truly am sorry!)I just cannot believe in your revolution. That revolution, for me, is just that: yet another revolution of Ixion’s wheel. We end up where we started (if we’re lucky), then are doomed to do it all over again, and again and again. Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same. Likely too, Carlyle´s take on the French Revolution.

     But Dita didn’t leave it at that alone. She added: ¨The only hope I have is to do what I can to make things better for what’s around me.¨ What did you say Kirk? ¨Think local(ly).¨ Morning Joe this morning played a clip of a speech made by Robert Kennedy this day decades ago (and two years to the day before his own hopes were quashed by a bullet), in which Kennedy spoke about the need for us to hold on to our ¨tiny ripples of hope¨ which can merge with other ¨tiny ripples of hope¨ and become a great current of hope.

     Brad, speaking for myself but not for your dad, your uncle, or your uncle of another father and mother (who, they must admit, are my age, at least almost), I´m not yet too old for a tiny ripple of hope or two but am way too old for great currents of hope. But I do remember that, when we were young and in college, we, along with all our peers, lived by the motto: ¨Don´t trust (i.e., believe in or have hope for) anyone over thirty.¨ I reckon you´re over thirty, but still a lot closer to thirty than to sixty or seventy. Besides, surely forty is the new thirty anyway. Please proceed to trust your dad, your uncle, and your other-uncle; exceptions to every rule! I already know I don´t need to urge you not to trust me, or all the rest of us geezers.

     Instead of a minimum voting age, I think there should be a maximum voting age.

     Take my resistance to your revolution as an accidental endorsement of that revolution. And fricken just do it!

Goodness gracious, sakes alive! Here we are, Election Day! With two bottles still up on the shelf. Also a bottle of bubbly. Also a bottle of whiskey. If Joe wins, the bubbly comes down. If not, whiskey shots from here to eternity.

     Looking like it will be bubbly. Even Georgia just might do the right thing!

     The Biden campaign has been nearly perfect, the only stumble maybe his sloppiness talking about fracking at the end of the final debate (which will cost him a little in Pennsylvania). Watching him give speeches the past few days has been like watching Jimmy Stewart play Mr. Smith, corny through and through. Boy a good dose of corniness is just the medicine we need right now! And Obama´s jabbing rhetoric has dovetailed so beautifully. Very good campaign ads (though nothing compared to the Lincoln Project´s work, which will be sorely missed). A fully disciplined campaign, top to bottom. Biden was supposed to make gaffe after gaffe, right? Not a one. If the Biden bunch doesn’t win, it will not at all be their fault. They did their job.

     If Biden doesn’t win, if Trump wins, it’s on us. We can blame this and that and him and her for Trump having somehow won last time. Truth is, we have only ourselves to blame for that one too. If we don’t now rectify that failure, we deserve our fate, which will be horrendous.

     Even if Biden wins and we find a way to drag Trump out of the White House in time to disinfect properly, there will be hard times ahead. Here’s A link to Eugene Robinson´s latest piece in the Washington Post, which clarifies what will need yet to be done. Getting rid of Trump, Robinson writes, is only the first step, a necessary step but only a first step. Because, Robinson says, Trump is not the cause but only the symptom. Treating the cause will not be easy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/defeating-trump-is-only-the-first-step-in-our-national-recovery/2020/11/02/9dd3016e-1d4c-11eb-ba21-f2f001f0554b_story.html

     It looks like Biden will win. If so, what do the Trumpers do? Will they join the effort to heal and reconcile? If not, what then do we do?

     On the other hand, if Trump somehow wins or (much more likely) somehow cheats his way to ´victory´, what then do we do? I so much prefer the first ´what do we do?´ to the second one.

     Two final bottles of beer on the wall, along with prosecco and whiskey. We´re taking that beer down now, drinking with lunch. Please have this be a night for prosecco!

A twelve-pack of Schlitz (at Dartmouth we called it ¨Shits¨) on the wall and only two days until the militias are activated.

ROMAE NOVAE

AUSPICIUM PROSPERITATIS

ET GLORIAE

LUPAM CAPITOLINAM SIGNUM

ROMA AETERNA

CONSULE BENITO MUSSOLINI MISIT ANNO MCMXXIX

Translation: “This statue of the Capitoline Wolf, as a forecast of prosperity and glory, has been sent from Ancient Rome to New Rome, during the consulship of Benito Mussolini, in the year 1929”.

     This statue, a replica of the original Roman statue of the infants Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome, suckling at their she-wolf step-mothers tits, the original believed to be Etruscan (the wolf alone) with the infants added during the Renaissance and today placed at the base of the steps up into the Roman Capoltine, was a gift in 1929 to Rome, Georgia from Benito Mussolini. This replica to this day stands on Rome, Georgia´s Main Street, in front of the Municipal Building.

     As I write this, Donald Trump is getting ready to speak to a crowd of supplicants in Rome, Georgia. Mere minutes away.

     A little earlier I heard Ted Cruz on TV stating that the Republican Party needs to be ¨the party of jobs.¨ My step-father, who I at times have called ¨the last Nazi¨, who indeed served in the German army as a sixteen year-old in 1944/45, stationed in Berchtesgaden of all places, has told me to my face: ¨Jim, Hitler was not so bad! He put us to work! Everyone had a job!¨

     The past couple days, while I´ve been silent due to Tropical Storm Zeta (knocked out our electrical power, which brings us, in these woods of ours, not just light but also internet and cell service), I have shared Skip´s cautious optimism. Lights are back. Optimism greatly diminished.

     I still think the oddś of our navigating life under fascism are greater than the odds of continued democratic fumbling around.  We will soon know.

     A twelve-pack of Shits on the wall. Two days until November 3. Take ten down, pass them around. Get used to Shits, because it will only get worse.

     Two days left guys. Two days to summon your best inner John Lewis.

Sixteen bottles of beer on the wall. Only twelve days until Election Day! Yep! I myself will be voting day after tomorrow, with early voting in Georgia cranking up this week.

     I´m going to kindly cheat (that´s Georgia mountain talk for ´kind of¨) by leaning on an extended quote from Ortega here. Again, it’s from his Meditations on Don Quixote. The quote is his assessment of the sad state of the Spain he loved, a Spain which only a few years later would devolve into civil war followed by fascist rule. It is very easy to read ¨America¨ in place of ¨Spain¨ throughout the quote. Here´s Ortega:

     ¨I suspect that, owing to unknown causes, the inner dwelling of the Spaniards was captured long ago by hate, which remains entrenched there, waging war against the world. Now, hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values. When we hate something, we place between it and ourselves a strong spring of steel which prevents even the fleeting fusion of the object with our spirit. The only part of the thing which exists for us is the point touched by the spring of our hatred; all the rest is either unknown to us or is gradually forgotten, making it alien to us. Each moment the object is shrinking away, losing value. In this way the universe has become for the Spaniard something rigid, dry, sordid and deserted. Our souls go through life scowling at it, suspicious and fugitive, like lean, hungry dogs. Among the pages symbolic of a whole Spanish epoch one will always have to include those terrible pages in which Mateo Alemán sketches the allegory of Discontent.¨ 

     The historian Jon Meacham (author of the recent book about John Lewis, His Truth Is Marching On) was on the news show Morning Joe this morning, and asked what he considers a central question: How is it possible that, at a minimum, 46% of Americans believe that Donald Trump should continue being president of the United States of America? We have a good piece of an answer when we go to Ortega´s depiction of the Spanish soul and substitute ´Americans´ and ´American´ for ´Spaniards´, ´Spaniard´ and ´Spanish´. Not all Americans, but at least 46%. Which is, afterall, nearly half. 

     Actually, we need to add to that 46%. To borrow a turn of phrase from none other than Trump, there are ´bad´ people on both sides (when bad=hateful). Add this bunch to the 46%´ers and we have well over a majority. More haters than lovers. More Trumpers than John Lewises. More strong springs of steel preventing fusion of the object with our spirit. More hatred, resentment, hostility. Less love.

     Love? What the heck am I talking about? A hint: if it’s easy, it isn´t love, or at best is a diminished love. Sorry, Mr. Kristofferson. Want easy? Then hate. Hate is so easy because it is nearly self-sufficient (as Ortega explains above), while love strives for fullness, completion. Nothing less suffices.

     Could it be that we have, as a people, become so hateful simply because we´ve let ourselves be lazy, simply because being hateful is the easy way out?

     Want a way forward, not a way out? We find one in His Truth Is Marching On. It’s John Lewis talking about sitting in a jail in Americus, Georgia. He had been beaten on the bridge, then sat in the White House with the President of the United States, then felt called back southward. First Meacham´s words: ¨He´d been to the mountaintop. Selma had changed America; he’d talked things over with the president; he was a national figure. Yet here he was, back in jail, back among the least of these. And he was at peace.¨ Now Lewis´ own words: ¨Along the way I had what I call an executive session with myself. I said, ´I´m not going to hate. I´m not going to become bitter. I´m not going to live a hostile life. I´m going to treat my fellow human being as a human being.´ So when I was being beaten on the Freedom Rides or in a march, I never hated. I respected the dignity and the worth of that person. Because we all are human and we must be human toward each other and love each other.¨ Meacham´s next sentence: ¨Lewis´s Christian vision was at once inexhaustible and exhausting.¨ Love is hard.

     But we still don’t really have an answer to Meacham´s question. If so many of us (and almost all of us at least some to the time) are lazy and hateful, why? Even Ortega admits ¨owing to unknown causes¨. Well, if we can’t pinpoint the cause, can it be fixed? Lewis, I believe, would say yes, we don’t need to know the cause as long as we commit to the cause of love, that inexhaustible yet exhausting cause.

     How did John Lewis not hate the man who beat him on the Edmund Pettus Bridge? Or the man who beat him during a Freedom Ride stop-over in Rock HIll, South Carolina? How did he manage to grant these people their dignity, their value as human beings? How did he love them?

     The man who beat him in the bus terminal in Rock Hill came to him decades later, to apologize. That too was an act of love.

     Here´s the deal. If we cannot find it in ourselves to love the minimum 46% of voters who want Trump to continue to be President of the United States of America, then our love is diminished love. Ready for the next challenge? If we cannot find it in ourselves to love Donald J. Trump, then our love is diminished love. And don’t try pulling that trick many (Christian) people pull when they say about (for example) gays, ¨I don’t love what they do but I love them.¨ That´s cheating. They know it and we know it. We are, in part, in large part, what we do. If you can´t love that, you can´t love us. So we can´t say we don´t love what Trump does but find it in our heart to love him. All or none. Impossible? Not for John Lewis.

     Sixteen bottles of beer on the wall. A twelve-pack till the election. Take four down, pass them around. That twelve-pack remains on the wall.

Seventeen bottles of beer on the wall; sixteen days of waiting, and waiting.

Want to know the first line of Trump´s concession speech, if he gives a concession speech the night of November 3rd?

Of course, that´s a very big If. If he loses, and he still might not lose! If, in losing, he doesn´t lie and cheat and steal his way to ´victory´, and we all know this could be. If, while losing, he refuses to give a concession speech. Lots of if´s.

So, here´s the first line of that speech: ¨I, Donald J. Trump, declare my candidacy for the Republican Party nomination as President of the United States in 2024!¨

He ain´t going away.

Seventeen bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it around! Sixteen days till Election Day 2020.

Thirty bottles of beer on the wall and only seventeen days until votes start being tallied! I voted already this week, so all I can do now is drink! And I need to drink and drink so by midnight November 3 I can drink and drink. If he loses, celebration inebriation! If he wins, or, not winning, is still in my face, pure and endless inebriation!

Biden has, surprise to me, run a great campaign. Polls look really good. People are voting like crazy. All signs point to good prevailing over evil.

But wait a minute; hold your horses. Hit on this web link and scroll down to the third cartoon, Darwin on the H.M.S. Beagle.

https://www.thefarside.com/comic-collections/184/history-shmistory-oct2020

And you still think Trump won´t win?

Thirty bottles of beer on the wall and only seventeen days before the last vote is cast. Take thirteen down, pass them around! Then please let us sober up in a good way!

Thirty-eight bottles of beer on the wall. Thirty days until Election Day. Yep! A month. Wow!

     Not too long ago I quoted the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gassett. Ortega is a dominant voice in philosophy circles in the Spanish-speaking world and an influential voice in Europe, Germany in particular, but English-speaking philosophers generally regard him as an unimportant lightweight. Too bad for them.

     The cornerstone to Ortega´s thought is so simple that it can seem lightweight. But then we should note that his contemporary and in ways fellow traveler Martin Heidegger more than once stated: ¨The simplest is the hardest.¨

     Ortega´s simple principle is ¨I am myself plus my circumstance.¨ He introduces this principle in his first published book, Meditations on Don Quixote, and rests upon it for the rest of his long career.

     Ortega saw it as his mission and the mission of his generation to overcome what he called the overweening realism of Greek philosophy as well as the overweening idealism of modern (beginning with DesCartes) philosophy. In Hegelian fashion he believed to have achieved this by synthesizing both: I am myself (subject, idea, thought, cogito) and my circumstances (object, matter, things, the other).

     I don’t intend here to lecture about Ortega, but instead want to use him to meditate about monuments. Who knows? Maybe, just maybe, we can have one or two monumental thoughts?

     Skip, until you wrote about Aunt Fanny’s Cabin I had forgotten about that place. Or, not really. I hadn’t forgotten, I´d simply not thought about it for ever and ever. Not even when I found myself fantasizing (we vegetarians do such sometimes) about eating fried chicken, I´d always think back to Dillard House chicken and not Aunt Fanny´s (though at the time we considered it the fried chicken supreme). Memory is a strange critter. For what it’s worth (and Darwin would say it’s worth a lot), the Dillard House is still dishing out its chicken while Aunt Fanny´s is not.  

     Maybe, even probably, my forgetfulness about Aunt Fanny’s wasn’t so simple. Now, Skip, that you’ve reminded me, what I most vividly remember about the place is my discomfort when the menu ´boy´ (they were boys, same age as we, or a bit younger, likely so we could legitimately call them, silently if not out loud, ´boy´) came to our table, head poked through a hole in the menu board as if it were a plow harness, to recite the menu, then flash a horribly stereotypical smile and hold out a hand for his ´handout´ tip. The first words of the act were always: ¨Aunt Fanny sez hey …¨ 

     Each time, excepting the shock of the first time, my personal little dilemma was always: what do I do? I don’t want to watch this! But if I don’t watch, am I being rude? The boy´s script was, thankfully, brief (How long does it take to present a menu with, as I recall, only chicken, fried steak, and country ham on it? Maybe catfish too.). Still, it seemed endless to me and I was always relieved when it ended and the boy walked away, a couple quarters in hand.

     What would we hear were we able to sit down now with some of the ´boys´ and listen to what it was like for them to play out this role? How in the world could we even try to apologize?

     I am myself and my circumstances, and Sunday evening family trips to Aunt Fanny’s Cabin is one of those circumstances which I am. If I deny that this circumstance is very much what I am, I deny myself. If, though, I deny the ´I am´ and give weight only to the circumstance, I equally deny myself.

     Being alive means making choices. Everything I am is due to the choices I make. With one exception: I have no choice about ´I am myself´. I can be myself and myself only. There is no other self I can be. ᾗθος άηθρόπῳ δαίμων, said the great Heraclitus, ethos anthropoi daimon, man’s character is his daimon, his demon, his destiny.

     Our circumstances are manifold, changeable and changing. They can be physical (including and pretty much beginning with our own bodies), spatial, temporal and/or familial and/or social and/or historical (Skip rightfully urges us to take into consideration, when we presume to stand in judgement of people like George Washington or Robert E. Lee, that some of their beliefs and actions, while unacceptable today, were not at all so in their own day), linguistic (language can be both a clear window open to a new world outside and an opaque window closed to a new world outside), and more.

     Ortega, sitting in Madrid, writes: ¨My natural exit toward the universe is through the mountain passes of the Guadarrama or the plain of Ontígola. This sector of circumstantial reality forms the other half of my person, only through it can I integrate myself and be fully myself … I am myself and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I cannot save myself. Benefac loco illi quo natus es, as we read in the Bible (Google tells me that this can be translated as: Be good to the place where you were born). And in the Platonic school the task of all culture is given as ´to save the appearances,´ the phenomena; that is to say, to look for the meaning of what surrounds us.¨ (Meditations on Quixote, pages 45 and 46)

     Monuments are some of the things we find surrounding us, calling on us, per Ortega, to understand. There are at least two clear ways to fail to understand: (1) accept them as if at face value, and (2) topple them.

     There are two types of monument. Etymology helps us understand how. Etymonline gives us the Latin original: ¨monumentum “a monument, memorial structure, statue; votive offering; tomb; memorial record,” literally “something that reminds,” a derivative of monere “to remind, bring to (one’s) recollection, tell (of),” from PIE *moneie- “to make think of, remind,” suffixed (causative) form of root *men- (1) “to think.” Meaning “any enduring evidence or example” is from 1520s; sense of “structure or edifice to commemorate a notable person, action, period, or event” is attested from c. 1600.¨ At its core a monument is a reminder, something which leads us to think about a thing or things from the past. Only in the 16th Century did monuments begin taking on the extra meaning of ¨enduring evidence or example.¨ With this shift in meaning, a monument is less something to cause thoughtfulness (a gravestone may be the purest example of this) and more an expression of power. Statues become the preferred monumental form. Statues are expressions of status, stability, firmly established power. Again from Etymonline: ¨Latin statua “image, statue, monumental figure, representation in metal,” properly “that which is set up,” back-formation from statuere “to cause to stand, set up,” from status “a standing, position,” from past participle stem of stare “to stand,” from PIE *ste-tu-, from root *sta- “to stand, make or be firm.”

     So one type of monument is intended as a thought-provoking reminder of things past, and the other type, even when representing things past, is intended to be something which establishes the power status of things present. This latter type has been set up by someone or some group in order to convey a message, to impose a prescription and a proscription. All prescription is also proscription: do this, don´t do that; think this, don´t think that.

     Consider two statues of Robert E. Lee, both with Lee mounted on his horse Traveller, one being the recently famous one in Charlottesville, the focal point of the ´Unite the Right´ rally in 2017, the other, bearing the name ´Virginia Monument´, standing over one end of Pickett´s Field at Gettysburg, facing across the field toward a statue of George Meade, commander of the Union Army at Gettysburg, atop Cemetery Ridge. The Charlottesville and Gettysburg monuments are so similar and so different. The one is a memorial. The other is a statue. The one calls us to remember. The other calls us to arms and/or obeisance.

     Add to this the memorial to General Lee Skip knows so well, the ¨Recumbent Statue¨ of Lee ¨asleep on the battlefield¨ set in place of the altar in the chapel at Washington & Lee University. Recumbent statue! Our etymology friends have already shown us that a statue stands. At W & L it lies asleep, a statue which does not stand. Until 2014 two Confederate battle flags hung above Lee, which were then removed due to student demands. The students were right to make that demand and, in doing so, enhanced the meaning of the memorial. It depicts, afterall, Lee asleep on the battlefield, Lee no longer at war, Lee at peace, the old warrior finally at peace.

     There´s another memorial on the campus of Washington & Lee, the gravesite of Lee’s horse Traveller. Traveller bore Lee throughout the war, then trailed Lee´s casket at Lee´s funeral. Just months after Lee´s death, Traveller stepped on a nail, contracted tetanus, and died. He was buried at the college but soon thereafter his bones were removed and sent to Rochester, New York, of all places, bleached and put on exhibition. Such is man! Even after the bones were returned years later to W & L, they continued to be a display piece, until in 1971 they were given the honor of reburial. So long did it take before Traveller too could lie asleep on the battlefield. Skip, you were a student at W & L in 1971. Were you there for the end of Traveller´s travels?

     Do we allow the Recumbent Statue and the Virginia Memorial to remain, while removing Lee from Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, consigned to some museum or simply destroyed? Let’s agree that the Charlottesville statue is less about Lee and more about ¨the cause¨ and keeping that cause alive. Does removal help us keep the lost cause lost? Or does it, by virtue of answering one prescription/proscription with a countering prescription/proscription, only incite that cause?

     Since even these questionable monuments are some of our circumstances, would it not be better to respond to them as such? If they are questionable, then let’s ask those questions. There is no more effective way to counter a prescription than to question it, probe it, learn from it. Children understand this naturally. Just as Ortega says, ¨My natural exit toward the universe is through the mountain passes of the Guadarrama or the plain of Ontígola,¨ I can say, ¨My natural exit toward the universe through, among so many other things, Aunt Fanny´ś Cabin and the Lee statue in Charlottesville. Those things might want me not to pass through them and onward toward the universe, but they have the power to prevent me only if I grant them that power.¨

     The Greeks did so many things in their own special way, so it´s not surprising that they had a kind of monument very peculiar to themselves, herms. The following about herms and the god Hermes is from my 9/3/2017 blog post A Meditation on Emerson´s ¨Nature¨; the citations are from Walter Burkert´s Greek Religion, Archaic and Classical.

     “Hermes, the divine trickster, is a figure of ever-changing colours, but his name,  which is explained with fair certainty, points to one single phenomenon: herma is a heap of stones, a monument set up as an elementary form of demarcation.  Everyone who passes by adds a stone to the pile and so announces his presence.  In this way territories are proclaimed and demarcated.”¹  As these herms demarcate boundaries, Hermes is the god of boundaries, both the protection of and transgression of boundaries.  Since taboos are a cultural form of boundary, he is also the god of taboos, the protection of, transgression of and atonement for the transgression of taboos.  He is the patron god of herdsmen, for whom boundaries are so important.  He is also the patron god of thieves and himself performed the theft of Apollo’s sacred cattle (cattle thieves are herdsmen in need of a herd).  As the god of boundaries, he is free to cross any and all boundaries, which makes him the ideal messenger between the rest of the gods and mankind.  “The most uncanny of the boundaries which Hermes crosses is the boundary between the living and the dead … The idea of the river of the underworld with Charon’s ferry was later combined with this, so the Attic lekythoi show Hermes leading souls to Charon.”²  Only Hermes knows the pathway back from Hades to the realm of the living and no one can escape Hades without him as a guide.  Since a gravestone marks the boundary between the living and the dead, Hermes is also the patron god of graves, a gravestone being a special type of herm.  “Successful communication with enemies and strangers is the work of Hermes [the patron of heralds], and the interpreter, hermaneus, owes his name to the god.  The allegorical equation of Hermes with speech tout court, logos, is reflected in our word hermeneutics.”

     Boundary as taboo: prescription and proscription, but at the same time transgression. Boundary as order, as in law and order. Above all boundary between man and world, man and gods; boundary between mortal and immortal, the living mortal and the dead mortal.

     Being alive means making choices. The boundary demarcated by a monument forces choice: stop here! or proceed, if you dare. It turns out that each and every one of our circumstances, large and small, is such a boundary, such a demarcation. 

     William Blake begins his great poem Auguries of Innocence: ¨To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your Hand, and Eternity in an Hour¨. The movement is in both directions at once: from grain of sand to world, and world to sand; from flower to heaven and heaven to flower; from palm of hand to infinity and back; from hour to eternity and back. For Ortega it was from Madrid up over the Guadarramas to the rest of Spain and rest of Europe and much else in the world, but also then back. We set our sights on the big stuff, the important stuff, disregarding the fact that there is really no difference between big and small, important and insignificant. Because nothing is truly important since everything is significant.

     Including the Lee monument in Charlottesville. Remove it and you remove something of significance. Not the intended significance, the prescription/proscription in support of the lost cause, but a significance each of us finds on our own by asking it questions and letting it ask us questions back.

     Let’s take another monument as an example: the Edmund Pettus bridge. There are many who argue the Pettus name should be removed from such a place of honor, Pettus having been a Confederate general and, worse yet, Ku Klux Klan leader. The bridge, they say, should be renamed in honor of John Lewis, who was beaten almost to death while trying to cross the bridge on a voting rights march. Wouldn’t taking Pettus´ name away diminish the story? Lewis himself expressed disagreement with renaming the bridge. I had intended to selectively quote from an editorial he co-wrote with Alabama State Senator Terri Sewell in 2015, but the entire statement deserves to be read:

   ¨The Edmund Pettus Bridge is an iconic symbol of the struggle for voting rights in America, and its name is as significant as its imposing structure. The historical irony is an integral part of the complicated history of Selma — a city known for its pivotal role in the Civil War and the civil rights movement. 

     The Edmund Pettus Bridge symbolizes both who we once were, and who we have become today.  The name reflects the fact that this bridge was built in the cradle of the old Confederacy and that Edmund Pettus was a very significant man of his era—Confederate general, U.S. Senator—and yes, a member of the Klu Klux Klan. 

     Renaming the Bridge will never erase its history. Instead of hiding our history behind a new name we must embrace it —the good and the bad.  The historical context of the Edmund Pettus Bridge makes the events of 1965 even more profound.  The irony is that a bridge named after a man who inflamed racial hatred is now known worldwide as a symbol of equality and justice.  It is biblical—what was meant for evil, God uses for good.

     The landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 was born from the injustices suffered on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the Bridge itself represents the portal to which America marched towards a brighter, more unified future. The name of the Bridge will forever be associated with “Blood Sunday” and the marches from Selma to Montgomery, not the man for whom it was named.

     America is not a perfect union. Rather our democracy is constantly evolving as each generation challenges its ideals and values, pushing us forward to greater equality and inclusion. From the fight for racial equality, to the struggle for gender equality and to our current quest to end discrimination based on sexual orientation – the history of America has been a journey from struggle to redemption. With each new generation, we are given new opportunities to eliminate the divisions that separate us.

     We can no more rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge than we can erase this nation’s history of racial intolerance and gender bias. Changing the name of the Bridge would compromise the historical integrity of the voting rights movement.

     We must tell our story fully rather than hide the chapters we wish did not exist for without adversity there can be no redemption. Children should be taught the context of the events that unfolded on the Bridge, and why its name is emblematic of the fight for the very soul of this nation– the democratic values of equality and justice.

     Symbols are indeed powerful. Keeping the name of the Bridge is not an endorsement of the man who bears its name but rather an acknowledgement that the name of the Bridge today is synonymous with the Voting Rights Movement which changed the face of this nation and the world.

     We must resist the temptation to revise history. The Edmund Pettus name represents the truth of the American story. You can change the name but you cannot change the facts of history. As Americans we need to learn the unvarnished truth about what happened in Selma. In the end, it is the lessons learned from our past that will instruct our future. We should never forget that ordinary people can collectively achieve social change through the discipline and philosophy of nonviolence.¨

     Nota bene: ¨We must tell our story fully rather than hide the chapters we wish did not exist…¨

Freud and others have taught us that memory is selective. Nietzsche and others have taught us that perception is selective. Quantum physics teaches us that things are not things but rather events and that there is no event unless it is at least potentially perceptible (quantifiable) and, yes, all perception is selective.

     Do we then shrug our shoulders and say, if everything is subject to selective perception, of which selective memory is a subset, then why the effort to be inclusive instead of selective? If Ortega had been satisfied with being a provincial Madridleňo, he would not have expanded his horizons beyond the Guadarrama mountains or the Ontígola plain. Since Richard Spencer does not want to fully embrace the world he lives in, he dedicates himself to serving the lost cause. If we in turn demand the removal of the Lee monument in Charlottesville, we too then, like Richard Spencer, deny ourselves full contact with the world which is ours.

     Why don’t we call it the Pettus/Lewis Bridge? Something tells me that John Lewis would have loved that and Edmund Pettus would have hated it.

     Thirty-eight bottles of beer on the wall and only thirty days before voting wraps up! Take eight down, pass them around! Who knows what´s soon to happen?