The Juntoo

Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”award has become, in the absence of the publication’s effort to produce anything like the incisive articles and thoughtful opinions for which, originally, it was widely loved, or to craft those elegant columns and delicious exposes by which, on a monthly basis, the intellect of its readership was completely dazzled, the one feature by which its fading relevance is still preserved.

To the great disappointment of those few, devout readers for whom the prestige of Time’s lofty name still retains some nostalgic meaning, and that frustrated audience to whom, despite the surfeit of other news outlets and media alternatives, its borrowed esteem continues to be catered, the magazine is no longer widely respected. In recent years, most noticeably in the past few months, the quality of its writing has diminished, as has the breadth of the views to which it permits expression. Its unwavering fixation on the vices of forty-fifth American President, and its unveiled contempt for those by whom he’s supported, has made it, and so many like it, petty, monomaniacal, redundant, captious, and stale. It’s predictable and unedifying, and, as such, undeserving of one’s time.

Its only source of freshness, the only place to which it can repair for an invigoration of life, is its “Person of the Year” award, to which we now turn.

This venerable prize, bestowed on an annual basis since its inauguration nearly a century ago, recognizes not the best person to whom, with innocent adulation, a team of editors—bound by the constraints of the calendar’s twelve months—can point, but merely the most influential. That influence might be benign, or it might not. To highlight this important point, Time twice “honored” Josef Stalin, architect of the Soviet Union’s murderous regime, and once Adolf Hitler, the very symbol of evil by whom six million Jews, and six million “others”, were systematically gathered and killed. More recently, it welcomed into its amoral pantheon our very own President Donald J. Trump, who’s often listed among the aforementioned two. Such a grouping together, astonishingly frequently heard, is the result rather of histrionics than of history, and of personal enmity than of reason.

But Time’s excuse for choosing the recently-defeated incumbent, upon whom, every month of its publication for the past four years, it’s unloaded nothing but its most heartfelt vituperation, acrimony, and scorn, was that he was, inarguably, the year’s most influential person—though doubtless not its best. Some would agree with its conclusion. Others, vociferously, would protest.

This year, upon Trump’s departure and the accession of a new regime, Time has chosen for its award the two people by whom, henceforth, the federal government will be headed: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Without belittling the massive success of their electoral performance, by which, in a surprisingly close contest, President Trump’s bid to retain his seat atop the Executive Branch has been frustrated and his ambitions slowed, it is a bewildering choice.

In examining the strangeness of the magazine’s decision, a scratch of the head is first provoked by its selection of Harris. As the successor to the role of the Vice President, a position from which, with the first sign of Biden’s senility or ineptitude, she’ll be only too eager to leap, Kamala Harris’ year has been uniquely underwhelming. She captured, if only briefly, the country’s attention when she declared her aim to run for the Democrat Party’s presidential nomination. Her efforts proved vain, her attraction ephemeral, and her enthusiasm sorely inadequate, as she was one of the first figures of any real prominence, in a staggeringly cluttered field, to exit the very race over which she was presumed to be the definitive leader. So desultory was her campaign, and unpalatable her person, that she abandoned the race before her own state of California could cast its vote.

It was only with the victory of her current boss, Joe Biden, that her political fortunes were revived. He chose her, not with some fidelity to the grand concept of merit, by which any serious job in this land ought to be conferred, but with a pliant fealty to the dictates of wokeness, to be his running mate. The qualifications overtly listed for the role of vice president were but two: that she be non-white, and that she be a female. By a mere accident of birth, and a cosmic convenience for which she mustn’t accept any credit, Harris just so happened to be both. That she was unabashedly rejected by her own party, from whose diversity of constituents, she succeeded in acquiring exiguous support, and that her wider appeal to the public-at-large, to whom, in a tight election season, she’d have to ingratiate herself, mattered little.

All that mattered, really was her sex and her skin, a combination of factors by which every American, regardless his color or her genitalia, should be deeply offended. This, after all, is supposed to be a land founded on the sturdy pillars of a meritocratic base, not a caste system atop which biology sits supreme, and our lordly “intersectionality” presides.

Almost as though an afterthought, Time thought it prudent that its prestigious award be shared. The “other-half” of the duo upon whom its award was conferred was the former vice president and longtime senator, Joe Biden. His candidacy for that same office for which Harris so feebly vied, into which he was ultimately elevated, was, at its outset, similarly inauspicious. He conducted himself poorly in debates, responded inarticulately to simple questions, raised paltry sums from spendthrift donors, and failed repeatedly to state with any degree of accuracy just where he was, at the moment, in this wide expanse of earth we call America.

His prospects seemed, at this early stage, to be as rachitic as his posture, a body valiantly fighting against the gravity of neigh eight decades. His likelihood of securing the nomination looked, at least from afar, as slight as his control over his temper and his tongue. In the initial states in which the primaries were held, he was roundly defeated. Bernie Sanders, bête noire of the neo-liberal establishment class, as well as the conservative right, demonstrated a popularity with which old, ideologically dusty candidates like Biden simply couldn’t compete. Sanders, for all intents and purposes, was the rousing frontrunner, the harbinger of the progress to come, while Biden, with a passive yawn, was the idle second-thought.

It wasn’t until the merciful arrival of South Carolina’s primary that his trajectory changed. There, as it’s known, the esteemed, octogenarian representative James Clyburn is to be observed exercising his divine power of nominating kings. If it’s political success that these heads of state want, Clyburn’s the one before whom they must prostrate themselves in the chill of the snow. To borrow an image from the pages of history, by which the lagging confidence of every pious Christian is still enflamed, he’s like Pope Gregory VII to a groveling Henry IV. He, and he alone, was responsible for mobilizing a hesitant South to support Joe Biden, an occasionally racist old white man by whom only few Black Americans were genuinely excited. Could they be blamed?

Biden then proceeded to run the least interesting campaign in recent American history. From the basement of a Delaware mansion in which he was confined, he communicated to the public little of lasting import. Every day, he read from the illuminated script of a tireless teleprompter, a blurred but blatant screen into whose hazy reflection we all gazed, but weren’t intended to see. He fielded no meaningful questions by which the propriety of his positions, and the acuity of his mind, might be more thoroughly gauged. He simply uttered platitudes, misidentified the person (hint: his wife) by whom he was occasionally joined, mumbled through his pre-chewed messages, all while directing a wearied nation to fix its gaze and maintain its scrutiny on the tweets and tirades of a less-than-palatable President Trump.

If this were a year, unique in the annals of time, during which nothing especially remarkable happened, it might be understandable that the victor an American presidential election would win Time’s award for the “Person of the Year”. As it stands, however, this has been no such year. It hardly needs my telling, but this year has borne witness to two of modern science’s, and recent history’s, most noteworthy events: first, the escape of a deadly, novel virus born of a Wuhan Chinese lab, and, second, the Occidental remedy by which it’ll soon be quelled. We’ve seen, in less than one complete turn of the calendar, the triumph of Western science over an unknown, Asiatic pathogen by which so many innocents have been killed.  

The fact that so complex a vaccine was not only conceived, but tested, refined, and distributed as quickly as it was, is an achievement before which every hat should be removed, and every gratitude placed. Every award, including that issued by Time, should be heaped upon it. Marveling at the speed with which it’s come into being, I can’t help but reflect on the original, doubtful efforts of the father of immunology and vaccination, the great Englishman, Edward Jenner.

There was one distressingly urgent question with which the ceaseless toils of Jenner’s professional life in medicine were consumed: how might a man alleviate his fellow creature of the scourge of smallpox, that terribly disfiguring blight by which so many youthful visages were scarred, to which so many of his poor countrymen so painfully succumbed? How might those nasty excrescences be softened, and those bursting pustules calmed? How might he tame a disease responsible for, by some estimates, nearly twenty-percent of his nation’s deaths?

It was a question by which, prior to the advent of Jenner’s ingenuity and daring, every other prominent scientist of his age was baffled. Only some of the afflicted peasants, among whom he set himself to live, intimated the remedy to an illness to which the best science still lacked a satisfying answer. Innocent of the scientific jargon in which Jenner’s colleagues were so eloquently versed, and without an ability to describe with sophistication the strange phenomenon to which they played audience, they recognized an incommunicable truth: those who came into contact with cowpox were often protected against the deadly human variant to which it was so similar: smallpox. 

Through the course of many years, and with the examination of many victims, Jenner came to the belief that, once exposed to a strain of cowpox, one could be inoculated to smallpox. Eager to prove his hypothesis in the laboratory of the world, as opposed to the diagrams in his head in which every peculiarity and whim made sense, he applied his theory to a local boy, not yet ten years of age, upon whom all subsequent achievements in immunology hinged. To Jenner’s everlasting credit, he first intuited, and later solved this fundamental puzzle of the vaccine. The boy was protected from contracting smallpox, and Jenner was, forevermore and for all mankind, an absolute hero among his species.

The companies Pfizer and Moderna, upon whom ourown return to normality hinges, solved a variant of the puzzle by which Jenner was so rudely confronted. Offspring of the English Jenner, these proudly American companies shared in his sedulous nature, and adopted his atypical genius, to do something so revolutionary, it was thought inconceivable in its own day. Yet, unlike their father, they achieved their task in less than a year, a timeframe unthinkably swift, if one pauses to consider the complexity of the job against which they were set.

Perhaps then, having reflected on the enormousness of “Big Pharma’s” astonishing feat, Time’s “Person of the Year” award wasn’t wrongly bestowed upon Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The scientists by whom this great vaccine was made, toward whose salvific promise, a desperate world now turns, are deserving of a grander decoration, still. “Person of the Decade” might be too small. I propose, “Person of the Century”. Their achievement is thus deserving. Time’s inability to see this, I fear, is a disease of ideology for which not even Jenner himself could offer an adequate cure.

So far as I can tell, the average resident of South Florida, whether she be of distant birth or native rearing, autochthonous to this peculiar state or recently arrived, tolerates very poorly, and endures very gracelessly, the slightest downward shift in the weather. Its smallest climatic dip, as brought about by an early December’s chilly surprise, marks a change at which, with cool contempt, those situated in more northerly climes understandably sneer. Having once lived among them, and shivered with them, I can feel their contempt. They direct it southward as we Floridians, bundled in our strange assortment of jackets, yoga pants, sunglasses, and flip-flops, collectively suffer. What those hardy people residing in northern latitudes consider a fresh, invigorating late-spring day’s afternoon, we here in Florida perceive to be nothing short of a frigorific descent into a hell-scape of ice.

So mundane an observation, of course, has no claim to be shocking. The fact that Floridians quite passionately dislike the cold weather isn’t the type of explosive revelation by which the young anthropologist’s career will be launched, nor the kind of remarkable finding by which the anxious environmentalist’s curiosity will be piqued. The eager journalist won’t soon deign to note it in the pad through which he flips, nor will the old historian add it to the countless books by which his shelves are weighed. Indeed, the fact that Floridians regard as completely intolerable any temperature less than seventy-five degrees is as universally-acknowledged a truth as a cat’s violent detestation of water, or an elephant’s crippling fear when confronted with a mouse. If only the two could, in a temporary escape from the ancient chains of their respective maxims, switch places and face the troubles by which the other is vexed: how well would the feline eat, and how exuberantly might the elephant bathe behind the ears. 

It’s during these trying and inhospitable times, when the state is burdened by obstinate clouds and less than sixty degrees, that most Floridians retreat to the warmth of their poorly-insulated houses. Hurricanes and floods, the majority of these buildings can handle, but not the gentle intrusion of an unfamiliar frost. There, behind these walls, as if groundhogs unequal to challenge of a brisk winter’s day, we Floridians await the re-emergence of the sun. From our weather-proof lanais and firmly-clamped windows, we cast longing glances toward that ever-sociable star, that great ball of gas beneath whose constant radiance and undying attention, we hope, in the very near future, to resume our outdoor activities and play. For now, though, we’ll simply sit by an imagined fireside with a steamed beverage in hand, counting the increase of the temperature as we hasten the passage of the days.

This, at least, is the normal conduct of an average Floridian who might find himself caught, as if an animal removed from the element to which he naturally belongs, in the unexpected embrace of the cold. Indeed, it’s the posture I’ve shamefacedly adopted. It’s for this reason that I’m so utterly shocked, night after night and irrespective of the recent decline of the weather, to see a group of a dozen or more people, massed on a very busy street corner in a very busy town, dancing to the blast of music and singing in support of their favorite politician, the fallen incumbent, the Republican standard-bearer, Donald J. Trump.

These people, bundled in jackets but simmering with verve, wrapped in scarves but bursting with heat, display an enthusiasm that not only hasn’t abated since the results of the election were announced, but actually seems to have grown. Flanked by two roads down which, at their most cautious, motorists speed at a minimum of fifty miles per hour, these people play loud music, dance in half-studied coordination, and brandish spectacularly hand-made signs. As for the music, the YMCA has recently yielded to Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, and the Rocky theme to the snowman Frosty. This, as the vivacity of the disco prepares for the arrival of Noel, and people surfeit themselves with holiday cheer. Either way, be the tune secular or religious, festive or fun, everyone’s hips are shaking.

The signs beneath which they gyrate and groove, of which their mitten-clad hands are full, by which a curious drivers’ eyes are involuntarily allured, are fantastically diverse. On them, while waiting with no great hurry the changing of the light, or the divine opportunity to execute a right-turn “on red”, one might read such messages as “Women for Trump”; “Latinos for Trump”; “Cuban-Americans for Trump”; “Hispanics for Trump”; “CNN Sucks”; “Four More Years”; “Don’t Trust the Fake News”, etc. Above them, “Trump-Pence” and “Make America Great Again” flags are whipped into action by the constant stimulus of this beach town’s wind.

These intersection revelries, these roadside parties of which even the most unwaveringly focused driver can’t fail to take note, began as soon as the results of the presidential election appeared to be moving away from the conclusion for which they’d hoped. The temperature was then warm, much like their ebullient spirits, but, since that time, as the former’s waned, the latter has grown.

As the cold weather descended, I expected these people to pull down their flags, pack up their signs, turn off their music, and desist from further exhausting themselves with fruitless limb-thrusting and desultory dance. I thought they’d instantly reveal themselves to be what a true sportsman most dislikes: “fair-weather” fans, summer soldiers, a group of bandwagon riders from whom loyalty is never assured. I expected them, the moment the discomfort of the weather urged them otherwise, to abandon a candidate by whom, as a consequence of his many indiscretions and painful shortcomings, they were so deeply disappointed, and an electoral system in which they no longer had faith.

By all evidence, they’ve opted to proceed in doing one of these two things. As is clear from their continued and increasingly animated presence, they’ve lost none of their infatuation for and worship of the president whose term is promptly set to expire. What they’ve done, rather, is reject the system by which that man, their champion, was so unmistakably cheated. They’ve retained their love, and likely forever will, of that ever-peculiar President Trump, the man against whom, in their mind, the whole game was rigged.

Like us, they’ve undoubtedly heard the allegations by which the aforementioned idea, that the election was stolen, has been enflamed. Unlike us, I fear, they’ve blinded themselves to the paucity of evidence with which, thus far, they have to work.

In each of this year’s most contentious states, those in the Midwest and South, those by whose incredibly thin vote margins, the forty-sixth president was ultimately decided, accusations have been levied of chicanery, deception, and every variety of fraud. The machines by which the ballots were processed are said to have been rigged, and the people by whom said computers are operated are accused of the highest treasons and the most underhanded crimes. Guile, untrustworthiness, disdain for our suffrage, and disregard for our laws don’t even begin to exhaust the charges to which those looking with suspicion expect an answer.

Such is the case in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia, in which litigation is, at the time of this writing, yet ongoing. Proof of the improprieties of which these states and their workers are said to be guilty hasn’t yet been revealed. If it exists, we must admit that it’s terribly shy. All the while, Democrat leaders and the sycophantic media by whom they’re rather disgustingly massaged have given reason for those inclined toward conspiracy theories to view them with an eyebrow raised and a posture of practiced disbelief.

And so, they’ve taken this disbelief to the streets. It’s difficult to see, however, the thin line by which delusion, on the one hand, and enthusiasm on the other, are separated. In one sense, that this diverse coalition of Republican voters (young, old, Latino, female, and Caucasian) is demonstrating so high, so genuine, and so indomitable an amount of energy is encouraging. It shows, if only through the window of a small subset along a busy street, the kind of excitement on which a renewed, Trumpified Republican Party can depend. This, of course, is itself dependent on the Party’s ability further to cultivate this zeal and make contagious that which was never previously felt.

Alternatively, it might show a quixotic group of people misguided by their political fantasies (with President Trump playing the role of the homely Dulcinea). It might be a growing population upon whom the weight of reality simply can’t be impressed, by whom all references to rationality will be, save those with which their opinions already accord, rejected. Beneath the levity of their spirits, and the slogans on their signs, this could a people uniquely pervious to the wiles of propaganda and susceptible to the hair-raising rhetoric of the demagogue.

Seated at this light, I know not which is the direction down which these entertaining people will go. All I know is that they must be crazy to be out in this weather.

Though I’m struck, nearly to the point of a paralysis induced by shame, in having to admit it, logic is the one field of study with which I’m embarrassingly uncomfortable and only distantly acquainted. It’s that one among many subjects—the enduring fascination of Medieval academics and pedantic Christian scholars—on which I’ve but the feeblest grasp, and I fear, without the forthcoming aid of some divine instruction or, less preferably, the jarring blow of a Damascene fit, it’ll remain one in which I’m destined to be unschooled.

Incriminate not, however, the many valiant professors by whom I was once instructed, or those countless teachers from whom, in so many other ways, I took such practical wisdom and useful guidance. The party responsible for the gaps in my understanding, for the depth of my deficiency as it pertains to this particular field, is not theirs, but my own. It was not the weakness of their lessons or the incomprehensibility of their chalkboard scribblings that led me to this regrettable state, but the impotence of my own brain. This lump of anatomy, with great frustration I’ve learned, is nothing better than an obstinate mass of white and grey, a bundle of stubborn neurons through which their every effort failed to penetrate, around which a billowing cloud of dust still swirls.

I’ve come to the honest conclusion, so may years removed from the fruitless efforts of their craft, that I’m more poetical than logical, more aesthete than Schoolman, more beauty than science. In this regard, and perhaps in many others, I’m a follower, if I might be so bold as to reveal the nature of my allegiance, of Plato rather than Aristotle. Of course, I voice this proud affinity with the fragile, and perhaps misplaced assumption that either man would warmly embrace me into the ranks of his respective school. Into the olive-strewn grove of the Academy, or the musty den of the Lyceum, I might as easily by stopped at the door and brusquely removed. Should so devastating an event befall me, I might become, at least in the modern sense, a road-weary, unaccompanied peripatetic—not the type who bears with honor a capitalized “P” in acknowledgement of the pacing Aristotle as his leader, but an unwelcomed wanderer to whom every house of genius is closed.

And though Plato, student of Socrates, sought to ban from his imagined republic every poet of whom an infallible and sage-like group of censors disapproved, he couldn’t himself avoid being that for which he professed to have no tolerance. In his bones, as in his youth, Plato was a poet, forever crafting dialogues with Homer as his muse. And though he might openly profess a desire for his utopia to be cleansed of this particular class of artists, a class, mind you, into whose elegant and lofty membership, he—in the creative vigor and blossoming spring of his adolescence—tried so strenuously to gain admittance, he’s hardly to be believed. Plato, the poet, is only thinly-veiled by Plato the puritan. The latter was a mask, the former, his true self.

For me, Aristotle’s logic is a vast and lonesome desert, a land inhospitable to creativity, intrigue, art, and mirth. If, alongside the Stagirite, it’s a landscape that need be traversed, I’d nominate for the task someone unsusceptible to fun. It is, maybe purposefully, dreadfully academic and fatally dry. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. said of his famous son’s pursuit of the law as his chosen field, logic, for my taste, is like eating cardboard for breakfast without the redeeming accompaniment of milk. On so dense and bland a substance, one can literally chew all day, though never, sadly, with the distant guarantee of satiation. Despite the heavy totalitarianism of Plato’s frightful Republic, one’s at least assured that the circulation of certain poetic samizdat would not only be available in his streets, but quietly encouraged in home and forum alike. While undemocratic, the town wouldn’t be so insufferably dry as to fully replace Ovid with the Organon, or Aeschylus with Aquinas, as Aristotle’s logicians might press him to do.

Syllogisms, fallacies, corollaries, scholia–all these things, and quite a few more, escape the humble capacity of my mind. As I said, I’m highly unaccomplished when it comes to grasping logic and understanding all it tries to convey. It’s for this reason, then, that I haven’t a clue as to what to make of the actress Ellen Page’s recent announcement that she is, henceforth, to be considered a man. Her metamorphosis, we’re told, is complete. In a flash, she’s shed one sex for another, as a snake would his skin, opting instead to continue her marvelous flight not as a female, but as a newly-established man.

It’s my enduring hope that, in the days ahead, or the first months of an enlightened political administration to come, someone better schooled in the subtleties of logic, or a distinguished reader of the tracts of Aristotle, will come to my aid and relieve me of this terrible ignorance by which I’m presently burdened. I read this account of Page and think it illogical, but I know I must be wrong.

Last week, the Oscar-nominated actress, to whose earlier work in such films as Juno and Inception, every theater-goer’s plaudit is due, announced to a curious world the amendment to her biological sex. Having lived her young adult life with what appears to have been, at least so far as her announcement might lead one to believe, incomplete sincerity and profound unease, she declared her transition from female to male. With the mere utterance of this claim, despite the quiet protestation of her many startled genes, she exchanged her membership to the gentler sex, for that which is barbarous and bearded.

No longer would she be known as “Ellen” Page, that celebrated name upon which so many cinematic accolades once were poured. Now, she’s to be called “Elliot” Page, and the failure to observe this change is to be considered a damnable sin upon which all enlightened members of society will frown. If one’s so incautious as to lapse and err in calling her by a name now deemed dead, she’s to risk excommunication from the church of the woke. Her talk of science, among these congregants, is to be shouted down and labeled “heresy”. She’s to become persona non grata in this oddly-religious worldview in which, frankly, so very many things have lately become non grata.

Innocent of logic, in my attempt to understand this situation, I admit to being in need of help. Ellen Page, if all the empirical evidence with which I’ve come into contact hasn’t wholly betrayed me, was, for almost all of her life, a homosexual white woman. She currently has a wife, a professional dancer and choreographer, to whom she’s faithfully wed, and a career that’s likely profited by their shared progressive credentials. She’s now declared herself a man and said wife, admirably, has nodded in agreement and stood by her side. It seems, though, that some of Page’s attributes have undergone an unlikely transmutation beyond which the ever-logical woke crowd continue to look.

The attribute of being white, much to her misfortune and intersectional-Hollywood’s scorn, persists. This, unfortunately, has proven itself an attribute of which even the most unscrupulous racial-chameleons (i.e., Rachel Dolezal) can’t so easily disrobe oneself. Despite the culture’s rather offensive disdain for a color by which, if I’m made to confess, my own skin is so copiously suffused, white she shall remain.

But what are we to make of her characterization as a homosexual woman? Assuming there’s no forthcoming breach in her marital relations, by which, should so undesirable an outcome come to pass, I’d be terribly saddened, we’re led to the conclusion that Page is now, what, a heterosexual white man? Does this mean, contrary to what we’ve been repeatedly told, one’s sexual orientation is not at all fixed, but perfectly mutable with the changing of the wind? Is it now prone, under the influence of the vagaries of life, to so drastic and permanent a change as this? Might we then be inclined to say that one’s sexual orientation has the markings less of an ineffaceable biologic truth, by which the very marrow of one’s bones is marked, but of a fleeting preference?

Were we not recently scolded for our use of the word preference, as it pertained to the individual to whom one’s love is directed?

It seems to me that either sexual orientation is biologically predetermined, or gender is. There isn’t yet a world, so far as one can be imagined, in which both can make that claim. One can’t simultaneously state that Page, consistent with her recently professed identity, was since the time of her birth, always a male, however masterfully concealed, and that she was able to change her sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual. We’re told you’re either one or the other, and, despite the pious efforts of the conversion therapist, this simply cannot change. Likewise, it can’t be maintained that she was always truly a homosexual, if there was no time that she wasn’t a male. Boring though it may be, a predetermined male in love with and married to a female is just about as traditional a relationship as there can be.

Obviously, I’m ill-equipped to confront the intricacies of so delicate and entangled a web of logic. Aristotle, on this point, is unavailing, and I’ve already passed too much time with Plato. If I might recruit one further teacher to my cause, one to whom my meandering thoughts aren’t utterly repugnant, I might yet acquire the trophy of logic. Until then, I’ll trudge along this desert of gender incomprehensibility.

Among those minds over which the more outlandish claims of the religious haven’t had their intended sway, and those by whom the fervid pleas of the Apocalypticist, and the urgent warnings of the Millennialist, have been, by and large, rejected or ignored, every last one cringed after hearing the comments made by the late Jerry Falwell—first of a name that’s since been disgraced. In September of 2001, in the wake of Al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks, Falwell joined his co-religionist, the esteemed Pat Robertson, on the latter’s namesake show.

The eponymous host, little-noted for his impartiality and tact, engaged his guest in a conversation by which, nearly two decades removed, we’re still startled. Like most Americans at the time, whether religiously-inclined or faithlessly-aloof, the two men were attempting to grasp the enormity of what had just taken place. They sought in each other, and in the shared interpretation of their evangelical creed, a rationale by which so extraordinary an event might be better explained. Expanding the culpability for the deaths of those three thousand Americans from whom the promise of a natural life was prematurely stripped, Falwell attributed their fate not just to the terrorists by whom those diverted planes were flown, but to a variety of other causes we might not have otherwise assumed.

With far less subtlety than that by which so striking a proclamation is normally joined, Falwell declared, in so many words, that the attacks of the terrorists, and the thousands of deaths for which their efforts were responsible, were the consequence not solely of radical jihadists and Islamic malcontents, but of God’s wrath. It was, in so many words, a swift and terrible divine response, an answer of which our ongoing impiety and decadence was clearly deserving. Sensitive to the changing emotional state of the Creator, and the human nettles by which his lofty anger might be provoked, Falwell confidently stated that, “God will not be mocked”.

No? Certainly, a close reading of the Old Testament wouldn’t lead a man away from so obvious a theological truth. What was witnessed on the 11^th of September, he said, could be “miniscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve”. The italics, of course, are my humble addition to his inflammatory quote. We invite God’s wrath, he maintained, when we tolerate the legal killing of unborn children and permit the “pagans, abortionists, homosexuals, and feminists”—by which, in his thinking, our population is corrupted—to go unpunished as they dance along their merry secular way.

A few years later, now in the wake of a veritable force majeure, a catastrophe of nature by which the great city of New Orleans was doused, ravaged, and almost wiped away, Robertson expanded on Falwell’s earlier theme. Hurricane Katrina had recently razed that bourbon-soaked, bead-laden city to the ground and, again, the televangelist sought explanations outside the merely blind destruction at which hurricanes, through all ages, have proven themselves so menacingly adept. He looked for reasons beyond the absent foresight of local politicians and the engineering incompetence of well-paid urban planners in hopes of understanding the storm’s distant origin and its acutely painful impact.

As it turns out, Robertson wasn’t forced to look very far. At the time, the distinguished John Roberts—now the apostate “conservative” Chief Justice of the Supreme Court—was embarking upon his confirmation hearing. The political, as well as the religious world was consumed with that delicate subject by which all such hearings, at least since the mid-1970s, have been contentiously defined: the Constitutional legitimacy of the right of a woman legally to obtain an abortion. The fact that our society, at least at the time of his comments, held so permissive a view when it came said woman’s choice to terminate that bothersome clump of cells by whom her uterus was so rudely inconvenienced, angered Robertson in no small way. In his flight of passion, carried on the wings of his faith, he blamed the issue as having contributed to Hurricane Katrina.

Both men, first Falwell and then Robertson, were widely, if not unanimously criticized for the untimeliness and audacity of their claims. In fact, the rejection of their statements was one of the closest things to a bipartisan event. This, in an age when such a concept was admittedly rare, but not yet completely unknown, as it might be deemed today. The Right, long accustomed to offering them considerable defense, blushed at having once entertained their zeal. President Bush recoiled at the sentiment, and was eager to put distance between himself and them. The Left, increasingly irreligious, took particular pleasure in chastising their tactless theological points of view. These evangelical Christian conservatives, who were to be heard spouting filth about our culpability for radical terrorist attacks, or suggesting our deserts for a deadly weather event, delivered themselves over to the tender mercy of their contempt. And it was contempt they rightfully received. 

Lately, especially within the span of the past six months, claims reminiscent of those made by Falwell and Robertson—the same type upon which such criticism was poured and disgust emptied—have found utterance yet again. Yet this time, the public figures by whom so similar a cast sentiments have been given voice aren’t the devout Christian conservatives and kindred fellows of the GOP, but the woke symbols of progressivism and political celebrity of the radical Left.

As historic wildfires burned through California, that golden state toward which countless dreams still turn, Nancy Pelosi—congresswoman from San Francisco and Speaker of the House—reflected on how so terrible a situation might’ve come to be. While ignoring the inconvenient fact that there were, at least at the hour of the conflagration, nearly sixty-seven million dead trees protected from controlled-burning and careful removal, a veritable heap of tinder in the parched heat of the late summer in and atop which so many precious bugs and critters had established little homes, and while looking beyond the glaring truth that this is, and shall continue to be, a problem for which the ingenuity of forest management, endowed with the divine gift of combustion for which the great Titan-humanitarian, Prometheus, was so mercilessly punished, is uniquely well-equipped, she claimed that the source of our misfortune was Mother Nature’s wrath.

Ah yes. Mother Nature, unbound.

“Mother Earth”, she asserted, “is angry”. How fortunate of the Catholic daughter of Baltimore to enjoy so direct a line of correspondence to the varied moods and changing passions of a remote Olympian goddess. Countless others have wasted their years in trying to penetrate the mystery of her pagan whim. Pelosi seems to have succeeded where they all failed. She appears to have communed with the mind of Gaia, the primordial, maternal Grecian deity with whom her Roman Church’s founding doctors might have taken serious issue. Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, and even Gregory the Great (to say nothing of the current pope) would’ve failed to see the charm in Pelosi’s strange appeal to a pagan god.

More than simply sensing Gaia’s anger, however, Pelosi elaborated on the nature and the source of her ire. “She’s telling us”, Pelosi divined, “whether she’s telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the west, whatever it is, that the climate crisis is real and has an impact”. One might expect a Greek to state her feelings with greater eloquence, poetry, and meter. Of an octogenarian, power-hungry politician, this might be too large a task.

From the queen of the American Congress, to Great Britain’s prodigal prince, a similar sentiment was echoed by his royal highness, Harry.

During an interview with the executives of WaterBear, a new, online-streaming platform to which every anxious environmentalist can now retreat, the expatriate prince stated that “Somebody said to me at the beginning of the pandemic…it’s almost as though Mother Nature has sent us to our rooms for bad behavior…to really take a moment and think about what we’ve done”. He went on to say that this pandemic reminded him, “About how interconnected we all are, not just as people, but through nature”. He further waxed poetic, stricken, doubtless, by the spirit of Whitman and Thoreau (as all newly-arrived Americans are) when he wondered, “What if every single one of us was a raindrop? And if every single one of us cared, which we do, because we have to care because at the end of the day nature is our life source”. In our collective moisture, and the fullness of our heavy precipitation, we might join, selflessly, in a shared effort to relieve the parched ground above which, in haughty clouds, we’d otherwise rest.

The empiricism of his countrymen, from Locke, to Hume, to Mill, to Russell, seems entirely to be lost in him. A Pelosi-style “Mother Nature” paganism seems to have taken its lofty place.

Should he retain, however, even a spark of that seemingly dead philosophy to which his nation once gave birth, burdened, though it is, by the annoying use of such old and heavy tools as sense perception, induction, science, and the gathering of facts, he’d sooner realize that Mother Nature’s involvement with this current pandemic isn’t quite so manifestly clear.

Is not Wuhan a word with which, by this point in time, the Eton alumnus has been fully acquainted, that quiet city from whose supposedly pristine virology institute, this novel disease first leaked?  Does he not realize that this disease attributes its origins not to the punitive wrath of Gaia, capable and fertile mother though she is, but to the malign experimentations of man, by whom every type of destructive novelty for the past few millennia has been conceived? And who, on his account, is being sent to his or her room for having provoked Gaia’s displeasure—the Chinese Communist Party officials by whom the outbreak and dissemination of this virus was both exacerbated and concealed, or those who disagree with his particular take on the perilous state of the climate?

Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Nancy Pelosi, and Prince Harry—however disparate in their politics, and incongruous in their faiths, when it comes to their treatment of natural disasters or blights instigated by man, they’ll forever be, in my opinion, joined together. I think that, and that alone, is the extent of their interconnectedness. For the rest of us, may we look upon the world with sobriety, not as zealots with an agenda, but as seekers after truth.

To ignore the omens issued by our beloved pets, in whom, on most every other occasion, we entrust such great quantities of confidence and blind faith, or to overlook those fearsome messages to which, outside the protection of our fence, wild animals deign to make us privy, would be an act of both immense impiety and grave unwisdom. For centuries prior to our own, through which the dancing rivers of guiltless superstition and crude belief more freely flowed, this was a fact widely acknowledged and strictly observed. The pronouncements to which so many beasts gave voice, communicated not by words intelligible to human ears, but by a natural impulse and a letterless tongue, were not only compelling, but deeply meaningful and consequential.

The movements of animal limbs, the curiosities of their behavior and the braying of their lips, the alacrity or slowness of their migration and the conduct of their flock, the folds of their entrails and the billowing smoke of their sacrifice, all counted as phenomena by which we humans, a species uniquely observant and delightfully suggestible, might be influenced, warned, or helped. The answers to our life’s most difficult questions, those problems to which, distressingly, good solutions are so often hesitant or unforthcoming, as well as the portents and promises of our future to come, were, more often than not, made readily evident in the gait of an ox, or the flight of a bird. The task was ours, simply, to pay attention to their display and to interpret the insight of their meaning, as nature might’ve intended.

The founding of Rome, still the greatest of all European cities to which, irrespective of the season, both cheerless monk and merry aesthete jointly repair, was in many ways dependent on the presence of birds. More specifically, it was an augury that was responsible for its origin. Romulus, the town’s eponymous and, in the opinion of some, legendary founder was assured of his choice of the hill atop which he sought to build the empire that would bear his name. Mind you, at the time, his choice wasn’t at all constrained; there wasn’t just one, but an inviting seven hills among which he might’ve chosen his home, by which that glorious region and ancient terrain continues, to this day, to be sumptuously dotted. Enticed by its natural fortifications and its easy access to trade, Romulus chose the Palatine Hill.

His brother, however, was of a different mind. Remus, with whom our impatient Romulus had endured so many trying hardships in his youth, thought the Aventine Hill the best. With the eye of a real estate surveyor, and the confidence of a settler desperate for a claim on new land, he thought the Aventine to be the most conducive to his fledgling nation’s success. He chose it as his preferred location, and each held his own hill as that position from which he wouldn’t budge, of which he’d not dare yield a single inch.

Identical in appearance (they were twins), Romulus and Remus were equally intransigent. Such is the plight of twin boys—never are they to get along, at least not so well as their tired mother might expect or hope. Frustrated, they sought the mediation of an unbiased third-party, a disinterested figure by whom this troublesome situation might be arbitrated and resolved. They chose for their purpose their regal grandfather, Numitor, an Italian king of Alba Longa to whom they’d previously committed not only their filial devotion, for what else could they do, but their military allegiance as well.

He, in his copious years and pious wisdom, with all his political experience and grandfatherly tact, stumbled upon a solution to the awful standstill in which the two brothers were enmeshed. He advised them both to perform a sacrifice to the gods, that borrowed group of Grecian deities by whose Olympian grandeur and lofty prowess, all Italians, much like all Greeks, were still convinced and overwhelmed. Having secured their attention with the burnt aroma of the recent kill, the brothers would then await the arrival of birds, be they one or many, to whose airy flight, a well-appeased Jupiter would surely give wind. The brother to whom the greater number of birds flew would be the one most favored by the gods, and thus permitted to establish his titular city on his preferred hill.

The brothers did as instructed, and received with unbridled excitement the arrival of their feather-coated friends. Remus, first to welcome the arrival of the birds, counted among them six. An undoubtedly propitious sign, he rejoiced at the thought that, given this half-dozen, the victory was his. Romulus, however, wasn’t yet willing to submit. Playing for time, he lied about the number of birds by whom he was visited, claiming there to have been not six, merely, but an astonishing twelve—double that of his more honest brother. Unconvinced by Romulus’ incredible report, Remus went to the Palatine Hill to confirm that which he was told. But, as it happens, upon mounting the Palatine and facing a brother whose mendacity was on the verge of being revealed, Remus noticed the presence of what he most feared: twelve birds. Statuesque in their posture, and stoic in their gaze, they stood as if they’d been there the entire time.

The rest follows a history with which every Westerner, perhaps every inhabitant of this earth, is already acquainted. A fight ensued, which ultimately erupted into a fratricidal war. Brother bludgeoned brother, as the center of Italy—never an especially sturdy boot—quivered at its knee. Countless partisans of each side joined in the mêlée, and, at long last, a victor was decided. With but a glance at the name of the city which yet survives, it’s no mystery whom that might’ve been. There was but one brother upon whom the spoils of this terrible victory flowed, to whom the right of choosing a location for his youthful nation was granted. Romulus killed Remus, and, in the process, watered the soil of his nascent empire, forevermore named Rome, with a slain brother’s blood.

The story of Romulus and Remus and the founding of the former’s namesake city is rife with important lessons, but we mustn’t neglect that one, in particular, which reveals to us the importance of the messages of animals. Here, we speak of the birds. Their behavior was studied by the augurs, a priestly class of ancient divines on whose subtlety and interpretative expertise, countless fortunes hinged. Auguries were taken very seriously at that time and they could, more often than not, predict the future success or failure of administrations of kings and endeavors of states. When animals spoke, in other words, it would be well worth everyone’s time to listen.

That being said, I think it not only appropriate, but necessary to listen to the message proclaimed by president-elect Joe Biden’s lovable dog, whether it be his German Shepherd “Major” or “Champ” over whom he recently tripped. The incident resulted in the minute or hairline fracture of two of the elder statesman’s foot bones, the lateral and intermediate cuneiform bones around which, for at least the next few weeks, a walking boot will be placed. There’s no indication, much to our national comfort and collective relief, that this fall was anything more than an unhappy accident. We’re told it was the kind of tumble to which even the most athletic among us might just as easily succumb. Certainly, the likelihood of his injury wasn’t heightened by the number of his years, the fragility of his bones, or the unsteadiness of his tread. We’ve been assured, as his convalescence begins, that nothing of the sort should concern us. We’re told, time and again, of the resilient nature of his youthful vigor, and the juvenescent strength of his hoary form.

Yet based on the speed (or lack thereof) at which a near-octogenarian’s bones tend to heal, he might be in that boot for a duration of time longer than the optimistic podiatrist might expect and the cheering partisan might hope. And, based on the general neglect with which unflattering stories about the former vice president are treated, the media might never make known exactly how severe or debilitating the injury really is. With an unevenness of gait, if only to match the unpredictability of his thinking and the ineloquence of his speech, we might witness the aged Biden proceed awkwardly through his pre-inauguration duties into the first month of the new year.

Perhaps this “dog-tripping” incident, though seemingly trivial and easily dismissed, will carry with it some later import. Maybe Champ and Major, dutiful dogs as they may yet prove themselves, were trying to provide the country with a sign, a frightening indication of an inauspicious tenure to come. It’s possible that this event was a canine’s useful omen, a pooch-produced portent of which we all should take more careful note. After all, throughout this previous year’s campaign, we willfully ignored the daily signs of Biden’s mental infirmity and cognitive decline. We excused his inarticulate mutterings, behavioral swings, and geriatric gaffes as attributes characteristic of a passionate man simply ailed by a chronic impediment of speech. We ignored the obvious signs of a man ill-suited for the position to which he’ll soon ascend. Will we be so thoughtless as to ignore the omens of his dogs?

Let us take from antiquity a useful lesson, by which our current moment might be better informed. Ignore not the numbers of birds to which great cities, like Rome, still owe their distant founding. Romulus and Remus, and all those to whom the former’s majesty gave birth, would never do so irreverent a thing. We must regard the actions of our animals as not only significant, but prescient. That lesson in mind, we shouldn’t look beyond the clear proclamations of Joe Biden’s cherished dogs, a prophetic pair of canines by which an inauspicious future might just have been predicted.