Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I went for a walk and ended up on a bus headed to the amusement park. I wanted to win one of those big stuffed bears that Theresa always loved. First I thought I needed mote beer. The two young women behind the concession counter whispered and giggled as I approached. “Can I help you, sir?” The dark- haired woman asked me. “A beet.” I pulled out my wallet. The red-haired woman nudged her and gigeled. “Tell him.” “Tell me what?” I asked. “She thinks you’re cute.” The dark-haired woman pushed her. “T do not. She’s just a jerk.” My face flushed. I walked away from the counter without the beer. A powerful rage rose inside me. Why was I so angry? This was what I wanted, wasn’t it? To be able to be myself and yet live without fear? It just didn’t seem fair. All my life P’'d been told everything about me was really twisted and sick. But if I was a man, I was “cute.” Acceptance of me as a he felt like an ongoing indictment of me as a he-she. I obsessed about winning the bear for Theresa. As I threw the baseballs at those dolls on the shelf I could feel a few stitches on my chest tear, but I didn’t cate. I pitched in a frenzy. I kept putting money down on the counter, and the man kept taking it. A small crowd formed. The prizes I won got a little bigger each time, but I couldn’t seem to knock down a couple of those dolls. “Sorry pal,” the guy behind the counter told me. His teeth were clenched on a cigar. I handed him five dollars. “Here,” I said real loud. “You take my money and [’ll show the people here which dolls are weighted.” He swung around and handed me a giant pink bear. “I want the blue one,’ I told him. “Fuck you,” he muttered, but he exchanged it. As I bolted up Theresa’s stairs that night I felt excited. By the time I knocked, I was scared. A young woman with a soft butch exterior answered the door. I stood there with the big blue bear in my arms. She called Theresa. Theresa stood outside her door to talk to me, but she left it ajar. “How are your” I asked her. She shrugged. I beckoned with my chin toward the door. “Housekeeping butch?” It was a mean-spirited thing to say. I was glad she didn’t respond. There was a long silence, then Theresa turned to go.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  She returned to her office in a mildly muddled state that was both combative and uncertain. She stopped in the ladies’ room to look at herself in the mirror and saw with an unhappy loss of confidence that one side of her face had fallen into a jowly state of despair and that her eyes looked terribly tired and sad. She put on more makeup and entered the office. Luckily, there were only three people there, two assistants and an associate whom she liked. On her desk was a copy of a story being considered for publication. She read it twice and took it into the associate editor’s office. “Steve,” she said, “do you like this?” “What’s wrong with your mouth?” “Ignore it. I look spastic, but I’m not, I just went to the dentist. Do you like this?” “Yeah, I do. It’s—” “No, I mean really. Tell me the truth. Do you like this?” Steve looked provoked, then cornered, then he marshaled himself. “Yes, Connie, I like it. It’s terse, it’s quirky, it tricks you into thinking you’re safe, and then you find yourself on the edge of a cliff.” “Yeah, so does everything else we publish here.” “Connie, what do you want me to say? I know you feel frustrated about what we’re publishing, but this is what Fulford likes. I don’t have a problem with it.” “But I thought you liked the thing I showed you a few weeks ago.” “I did like it! I liked it a lot! But Fulford didn’t.” “He never likes anything I like. I don’t know why he hired me.” “You don’t like many things. If you did blurbs for novels they’d read ‘Mediocre! raves Constance Weymouth.’ ” “You like everything.” “I’m ready to like things. That’s true.” He leaned back in his chair and tipped his head backward as if he were on a talk show hosted by an obnoxious crank. Then he banged his chair forward again and smiled.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  We don’t want to hear about the logic of events—or any kind of logic. “Je ne parle pas logique,” said Montherlant, “je parle générosité.” I don’t think you heard it very well, since it was in French. I’ll repeat it for you, in the Queen’s own language: “I’m not talking logic, I’m talking generosity.” That’s bad English, as the Queen herself might speak it, but it’s clear. Generosity —do you hear? You never practice it, any of you, either in peace or in war. You don’t know the meaning of the word. You think to supply guns and ammunition to the winning side is generosity; you think sending Red Cross nurses to the front, or the Salvation Army, is generosity. You think a bonus twenty years too late is generosity; you think a little pension and a wheel chair is generosity; you think if you give a man his old job back it’s generosity. You don’t know what the fucking word means, you bastards! To be generous is to say Yes before the man even opens his mouth. To say Yes you have to be first a surrealist or a Dadaist, because you have understood what it means to say No. You can even say Yes and No at the same time, provided you do more than is expected of you. Be a stevedore in the daytime and a Beau Brummel in the nighttime. Wear any uniform so long as it’s not yours. When you write your mother ask her to cough up a little dough so that you may have a clean rag to wipe your ass with. Don’t be disturbed if you see your neighbor going after his wife with a knife: he probably has good reason to go after her, and if he kills her you may be sure he had the satisfaction of knowing why he did it. If you’re trying to improve your mind, stop it! There’s no improving the mind. Look to your heart and gizzard—the brain is in the heart. Ah yes, if I had known then that these birds existed—Cendrars, Vaché, Grosz, Ernst, Apollinaire—if I had known that then, if I had known that in their own way they were thinking exactly the same things as I was, I think I’d have blown up. Yes, I think I’d have gone off like a bomb. But I was ignorant. Ignorant of the fact that almost fifty years previously a crazy Jew in South America had given birth to such startlingly marvelous phrases as “doubt’s duck with the vermouth lips” or “I have seen a fig eat an onager”—that about the same time a Frenchman, who was only a boy, was saying: “Find flowers that are chairs” . . . “my hunger is the black air’s bits” . . .

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  When we got back the ambulance was there in front of the door and they were lifting him in on the stretcher, his face and neck covered with a sheet. Sometimes it happened that Father Carroll’s pet choirboy strolled by the house just as I was hitting the air. This was an event of primary importance. The boy was older than any of us and he was a sissy, a fairy in the making. His very walk used to enrage us. As soon as he was spotted the news went out in every direction and before he had reached the corner he was surrounded by a gang of boys all much smaller than himself who taunted him and mimicked him until he burst into tears. Then we would pounce on him, like a pack of wolves, pull him to the ground and tear the clothes off his back. It was a disgraceful performance but it made us feel good. Nobody knew yet what a fairy was, but whatever it was we were against it. In the same way we were against the Chinamen. There was one Chinaman, from the laundry up the street, who used to pass frequently and, like the sissy from Father Carroll’s church, he too had to run the gantlet. He looked exactly like the picture of a coolie which one sees in the schoolbooks. He wore a sort of black alpaca coat with braided button holes, slippers without heels, and a pigtail. Usually he walked with his hands in his sleeves. It was his walk which I remember best, a sort of sly, mincing, feminine walk which was utterly foreign and menacing to us. We were in mortal dread of him and we hated him because he was absolutely indifferent to our gibes. We thought he was too ignorant to notice our insults. Then one day when we entered the laundry he gave us a little surprise. First he handed us the package of laundry; then he reached down below the counter and gathered a handful of lichee nuts from the big bag. He was smiling as he came from behind the counter to open the door. He was still smiling as he caught hold of Alfie Betcha and pulled his ears; he caught hold of each of us in turn and pulled our ears, still smiling. Then he made a ferocious grimace and, swift as a cat, he ran behind the counter and picked up a long, ugly-looking knife which he brandished at us. We fell over ourselves getting out of the place. When we got to the corner and looked around we saw him standing in the doorway with an iron in his hand looking very calm and peaceful.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I had plenty of intelligence but I inspired distrust. Wherever I went I fomented discord—not because I was idealistic but because I was like a searchlight exposing the stupidity and futility of everything. Besides, I wasn’t a good ass licker. That marked me, no doubt. People could tell at once when I asked for a job that I really didn’t give a damn whether I got it or not. And of course I generally didn’t get it. But after a time the mere looking for a job became an activity, a pastime, so to speak. I would go in and ask for most anything. It was a way of killing time—no worse, as far as I could see, than work itself. I was my own boss and I had my own hours, but unlike other bosses I entrained only my own ruin, my own bankruptcy. I was not a corporation or a trust or a state or a federation or a polity of nations—I was more like God, if anything. This went on from about the middle of the war until . . . well, until one day I was trapped. Finally the day came when I did desperately want a job. I needed it. Not having another minute to lose, I decided that I would take the last job on earth, that of messenger boy. I walked into the employment bureau of the telegraph company—the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of North America —toward the close of the day, prepared to go through with it. I had just come from the public library and I had under my arm some fat books on economics and metaphysics. To my great amazement I was refused the job. The guy who turned me down was a little runt who ran the switchboard. He seemed to take me for a college student, though it was clear enough from my application that I had long left school. I had even honored myself on the application with a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University. Apparently that passed unnoticed, or else was suspiciously regarded by this runt who had turned me down. I was furious, the more so because for once in my life I was in earnest. Not only that, but I had swallowed my pride, which in certain peculiar ways is rather large. My wife of course gave me the usual leer and sneer. I had done it as a gesture, she said. I went to bed thinking about it, still smarting, getting angrier and angrier as the night wore on. The fact that I had a wife and child to support didn’t bother me so much; people didn’t offer you jobs because you had a family to support, that much I understood only too well. No, what rankled was that they had rejected me, Henry V. Miller, a competent, superior individual who had asked for the lowest job in the world. That burned me up. I couldn’t get over it.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  You’re very airy.” Again, his eyes showed alarm. “Sometimes when I look at you, I feel like I’m seeing a tank of small, quick fish, the bright darting kind that go every which way.” He paused, stunned and dangle-forked over his pinched, curled-up steak. “I’m beginning to think you’re out of your fucking mind.” Her happy expression collapsed. “Why can’t you talk to me in a half-normal fucking way?” he continued. “Like the way we talked on the plane. I liked that. That was a conversation.” In fact, he hadn’t liked the conversation on the plane either, but compared to this one, it seemed quite all right. — When they got back to the apartment, they sat on the floor and drank more alcohol. “I want you to drink a lot,” he said. “I want to make you do things you don’t want to do.” “But I won’t do anything I don’t want to do. You have to make me want it.” He lay on his back in silent frustration. “What are your parents like?” she asked. “What?” “Your parents. What are they like?” “I don’t know. I don’t have that much to do with them. My mother is nice. My father’s a prick. That’s what they’re like.” He put one hand over his face; a square-shaped album-style view of his family presented itself. They were all at the breakfast table, talking and reaching for things. His mother moved in the background, a slim, worried shadow in her pink robe. His sister sat next to him, tall, blond and arrogant, talking and flicking at toast crumbs in the corners of her mouth. His father sat at the head of the table, his big arms spread over everything, leaning over his plate as if he had to defend it, gnawing his breakfast. He felt unhappy and then angry. He thought of a little Italian girl he had met in a go-go bar a while back, and comforted himself with the memory of her slim haunches and pretty high-heeled feet on either side of his head as she squatted over him. “It seems that way with my parents when you first look at them. But in fact my mother is much more aggressive and, I would say, more cruel than my father, even though she’s more passive and soft on the surface.” She began a lengthy and, in his view, incredible and unnecessary history of her family life, including descriptions of her brother and sister. Her entire family seemed to have a collectively disturbed personality characterized by long brooding silences, unpleasing compulsive sloppiness (unflushed toilets, used Kleenex abandoned everywhere, dirty underwear on the floor) and outbursts of irrational, violent anger. It was horrible. He wanted to go home. He poked himself up on his elbows. “Are you a liar?” he asked. “Do you lie often?” She stopped in midsentence and looked at him.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  One morning the foreman replaced me on the line. “Goldberg, come on,” Jack commanded. I followed him into the shipping department. “Wait here,” he said. Tommy made a face behind Jack’s back. “I hate that guy,” he told me after Jack left. “He reminds me of this officer I had in the Navy, always ragging me. I hated his guts.” I nodded, but I didn’t speak. Tommy was OK, but I didn’t know if he’d repeat anything I said. Tommy looked at the clock. “Almost break time,” he said. “God, I hated the Navy. Two years of my life they stole from me. I used to watch the clock all day. They could force me to do anything, but they couldn’t stop time. Sooner or later they had to let me out.” I shrugged. “So why’d you join?” “Are you kidding?” he asked me. “So I wouldn’t get drafted into the Army. LBJ’s sending any guy who can walk over to "Nam.” Jack came around the corner with Kevin, his assistant, and Jim Boney. Damn, I hated Jim Boney. 86 Leslie Feinberg “Hey, Tommy, you makin’ a real woman out of Jess?” Boney taunted. Tommy leered and grabbed his own crotch. “C’mon,” Jack ordered me to follow him. I looked back at Tommy. He mouthed the words I'm sorry. I mouthed the words, Fuck you. Jack led me to a giant folding machine that > was idle. I watched as he took out his tools. “Now watch,” he ordered as he began to set the machine for a different-size fold. I couldn’t believe it. This was an apprentice job. No one else was allowed to learn the mysteries of setting up a job or repairing the machines. Apprenticing led to a journeyman’s card. My hopes fluttered. “You set the vertical, same way,’ Jack said. He grabbed a rag and wiped oil off his hands as I tried to set the vertical folds. “No, like this,’ he corrected. The lunch whistle interrupted us. “After lunch,” he said. I flew up to the cafeteria. Why do triumphant moments have to be so fleeting? Just when all the congratulations had died down, Duffy, the chief shop steward, approached our table. “Goldberg, can I talk to you a minute?” I motioned to the chair next to me, “Sute.” He gestured toward the door. By the time we got out in the hall, I had a feeling I knew what this was about. “Duffy, don’t tell me there’s some fucking reason why I can’t bust the barrier to a number five grade.” He folded his arms and looked at the floor. “Listen, Goldberg, I know you want that grade, and you deserve it. No woman in this plant has ever gone higher than a four, and none of the guys, except one, have ever worked lower than a five. It ain’t right.” I narrowed my eyes. “So?”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  As a matter of fact, he hated the Germans, this Nietzsche. He claimed he was a Pole or something like that. He had them dead right, too. He said they were stupid and swinish, and by God, he knew what he was talking about. Anyway, he showed them up. He said they were full of shit, to make it brief, and by God, wasn’t he right though? Did you see the way those bastards turned tail when they got a dose of their own medicine? “Listen, I know a guy who cleaned out a nestful of them in the Argonne region—he said they were so goddamned low he wouldn’t shit on them. He said he wouldn’t even waste a bullet on them—he just bashed their brains in with a club. I forget this guy’s name now, but anyway he told me he saw aplenty in the few months he was there. He said the best fun he got out of the whole fucking business was to pop off his own major. Not that he had any special grievance against him—he just didn’t like his mug. He didn’t like the way the guy gave orders. Most of the officers that were killed got it in the back, he said. Served them right, too, the pricks! He was just a lad from the North Side. I think he runs a poolroom now down near Wallabout Market. A quiet fellow, minds his own business. But if you start talking to him about the war he goes off the handle. He says he’d assassinate the President of the United States if they ever tried to start another war. Yeah, and he’d do it too, I’m telling you. . . . But shit, what was that I wanted to tell you about Plato? Oh yeah. . . .” When the others were gone he’d suddenly shift gears. “You don’t believe in talking like that, do you?,” he’d begin. I had to admit I didn’t. “You’re wrong,” he’d continue. “You’ve got to keep in with people, you don’t know when you may need one of these guys. You act on the assumption that you’re free, independent! You act as though you were superior to these people. Well, that’s where you make a big mistake. How do you know where you’ll be five years from now, or even six months from now? You might be blind, you might be run over by a truck, you might be put in the bughouse; you can’t tell what’s going to happen to you. Nobody can. You might be as helpless as a baby. . . .” “So what?” I would say. “Well, don’t you think it would be good to have a friend when you need one?

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I was back in Trenton, at the grave, and the sister of the girl I loved was sitting beside me. She said it couldn’t go on that way much longer, that I would go mad. I thought to myself that I really was mad and to prove it to myself I decided to do something mad and so I said to her it isn’t her I love, it’s you, and I pulled her over me and we lay there kissing each other and finally I screwed her, right beside the grave. And I think that cured me because I never went back there again and I never thought about her any more—until yesterday when I was standing at the door. If I could have gotten hold of you yesterday I would have strangled you. I don’t know why I felt that way but it seemed to me that you had opened up a tomb, that you were violating the dead body of the girl I loved. That’s crazy, isn’t it? And why did I come to see you tonight? Maybe it’s because you’re absolutely indifferent to me . . . because you’re not a Jew and I can talk to you . . . because you don’t give a damn, and you’re right. . . . Did you ever read The Revolt of the Angels?” We had just arrived at the bicycle path which encircles the park. The lights of the boulevard were swimming in the mist. I took a good look at him and I saw that he was out of his head. I wondered if I could make him laugh. I was afraid, too, that if he once got started laughing he would never stop. So I began to talk at random, about Anatole France at first, and then about other writers, and finally, when I felt that I was losing him, I suddenly switched to General Ivolgin, and with that he began to laugh, not a laugh either, but a cackle, a hideous cackle, like a rooster with its head on the block. It got him so badly that he had to stop and hold his guts; the tears were streaming down his eyes and between the cackles he let out the most terrible, heartrending sobs. “I knew you would do me good,” he blurted out, as the last outbreak died away. “I always said you were a crazy son of a bitch. . . . You’re a Jew bastard yourself, only you don’t know it. . . . Now tell me, you bastard, how was it yesterday? Did you get your end in? Didn’t I tell you she was a good lay? And do you know who she’s living with? Jesus, you were lucky you didn’t get caught. She’s living with a Russian poet—you know the guy, too.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  We had a hot discussion and finally I lost my temper and I clouted her and she fell on the floor and began to weep and sob and then the kid woke up and hearing the wife bawling she got frightened and began to scream at the top of her lungs. The girl upstairs came running down to see what was the matter. She was in her kimono and her hair was hanging down her back. In the excitement she got close to me and things happened without either of us intending anything to happen. We put the wife to bed with a wet towel around her forehead and while the girl upstairs was bending over her I stood behind her and lifting her kimono I got it into her and she stood there a long time talking a lot of foolish, soothing nonsense. Finally I climbed into bed with the wife and to my utter amazement she began to cuddle up to me and without saying a word we locked horns and we stayed that way until dawn. I should have been worn out, but instead I was wide-awake, and I lay there beside her planning to take the day off and look up the whore with the beautiful fur whom I was talking to earlier in the day. After that I began to think about another woman, the wife of one of my friends who always twitted me about my indifference. And then I began to think about one after the other—all those whom I had passed up for one reason or another—until finally I fell sound asleep and in the midst of it I had a wet dream. At seven-thirty the alarm went off as usual and as usual I looked at my torn shirt hanging over the chair and I said to myself what’s the use and I turned over. At eight o’clock the telephone rang and it was Hymie. Better get over quickly, he said, because there’s a strike on. And that’s how it went, day after day, and there was no reason for it, except that the whole country was cockeyed and what I relate was going on everywhere, either on a smaller scale or a larger scale, but the same thing everywhere, because it was all chaos and all meaningless. It went on and on that way, day in and day out for almost five solid years. The continent itself perpetually wracked by cyclones, tornadoes, tidal waves, floods, droughts, blizzards, heat waves, pests, strikes, hold-ups, assassinations, suicides . . . a continuous fever and torment, an eruption, a whirlpool. I was like a man sitting in a lighthouse: below me the wild waves, the rocks, the reefs, the debris of shipwrecked fleets.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Every other word from Grover’s lips was an oath, his favorite expression being —“I can’t get the fucking thing right!” Sometimes he grew so annoyed that he would take his fists and pound the piano like a madman. It was his genius coming out the wrong way. His mother, in fact, used to attach a great deal of importance to these fits of anger; they convinced her that he had something in him. Other people simply said that Grover was impossible. Much was forgiven, however, because of his clubfoot. Grover was sly enough to exploit this bad foot; whenever he wanted anything badly he developed pains in the foot. Only the piano seemed to have no respect for this maimed member. The piano therefore was an object to be cursed and kicked and pounded to bits. If he were in good form, on the other hand, Grover would remain at the piano for hours on end; in fact, you couldn’t drag him away. On such occasions his mother would go stand in the grass plot in front of the house and waylay the neighbors in order to squeeze a few words of praise out of them. She would be so carried away by her son’s “divine” playing that she would forget to cook the evening meal. The old man, who worked in the sewers, usually came home grumpy and famished. Sometimes he would march directly upstairs to the parlor and yank Grover off the piano stool. He had a rather foul vocabulary himself and when he let loose on his genius of a son there wasn’t much left for Grover to say. In the old man’s opinion Grover was just a lazy son of a bitch who could make a lot of noise. Now and then he threatened to chuck the fucking piano out of the window—and Grover with it. If the mother were rash enough to interfere during these scenes he would give her a clout and tell her to go piss up the end of a rope. He had his moments of weakness too, of course, and in such a mood he might ask Grover what the hell he was rattling away at, and if the latter said, for example, “why the Sonata Pathétique,” the old buzzard would say—“What the hell does that mean? Why in Christ’s name don’t they put it down in plain English?” The old man’s ignorance was even harder for Grover to bear than his brutality. He was heartily ashamed of his old man and when the latter was out of sight he would ridicule him unmercifully. When he got a little older he used to insinuate that he wouldn’t have been born with a clubfoot if the old man hadn’t been such a mean bastard. He said that the old man must have kicked his mother in the belly when she was pregnant.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The sight of the officer enraged him. He was a sergeant himself and he probably had good reason to be sore. Anyway, the sight of the officer enraged him so that he got up from his seat and began to bawl the shit out of the government, the army, the civilians, the passengers in the car, everybody and everything. He said if there was ever another war they couldn’t drag him to it with a twenty-mule team. He said he’d see every son of a bitch killed before he’d go again himself; he said he didn’t give a fuck about the medals they had decorated him with and to show that he meant it he ripped them off and threw them out the window; he said if he was ever in a trench with an officer again he’d shoot him in the back like a dirty dog, and that held good for General Pershing or any other general. He said a lot more, with some fancy cuss words that he’d picked up over there, and nobody opened his trap to gainsay him. And when he got through I felt for the first time that there had really been a war and that the man I was listening to had been in it and that despite his bravery the war had made him a coward and that if he did any more killing it would be wide-awake and in cold blood, and nobody would have the guts to send him to the electric chair because he had performed his duty toward his fellow men, which was to deny his own sacred instincts and so everything was just and fair because one crime washes away the other in the name of God, country and humanity, peace be with you all. And the second time I experienced the reality of war was when ex-sergeant Griswold, one of our night messengers, flew off the handle one day and smashed the office to bits at one of the railway stations.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  157Lecture 16—Religion and Revolution in the 18 th Century õFinally, the revolutionary government closed the churches altogether to convert them into buildings like stables and warehouses. And they didn’t stop there—if a street was named for a Christian saint, it got a new republican name. The revolutionaries even ditched the seven-day week, with its Christian day of rest on Sunday, for a new 10-day week. They were really trying to scrub every last trace of Catholicism from t he cou nt r y. õThe approach of the left-wing leader Maximilien Robespierre was an interesting case. Robespierre was happy to guillotine any Catholic priest in the interest of his cause, but he didn’t want France to become a godless country. Like the American Founding Fathers, he believed religion had a social purpose. The people of France, whose lives had revolved around Catholic rituals and holidays for centuries, needed something to take the church’s place. õRobespierre’s solution was to found a new official state religion: the Cult of the Supreme Being. This religion stressed the immortality of the soul, because Robespierre was convinced that people are more likely to behave themselves when they believe they’ll face consequences after death. õThe Cult of the Supreme Being also offered the French people a God who supported the revolution and hated the king. As Robespierre himself put it:“[God] did not create priests to harness us, like vile animals, to the chariots of kings and to give to the world examples of baseness, pride, perfidy, avarice, debauchery, and falsehood.” 158The History of Christianity II õBut Robespierre fell from power in the summer of 1794, and his cult never quite caught on. Despite all that popular resentment against the church, extinguishing the Catholic faith was easier said than done. SUGGESTED READING Ellis, American Sphinx. Noll, America’s God. Schama, Citizens. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äHow do 21 st -century Americans understand “religious freedom,” and how do their ideas compare to those of the 18 th century? äCould a political alliance between evangelicals and secular liberal politicians happen in America today? äWhat is at stake in debates about “secularism” and “religious freedom” in America and France? 159 LECTURE 17 THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING T he Second Great Awakening was a wave of revivals that swept North America and Britain from the turn of the 19 th century. They f lamed up, died down, and f lamed up again for about 50 years. Evangelists who were brave enough to leave the more settled areas along the North American coast and travel inland learned that it was not easy to get pioneers to focus on worship and holy living when they were worried about just surviving. But the most talented and charismatic preachers found that if they were good at what they did, their revivals would be the only form of mass entertainment and social life available on the frontier.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Jarold was out of town on business. Daniel and Charles had bought her a deck of tarot cards and a pair of earrings. There was a boxed cake in the refrigerator. Virginia was going to ask Lily what she wanted for dinner, but when Lily came home she was too high to answer the question. She tried to act normal, but she couldn’t. She said weird things and giggled. Lily almost never giggled; it was a strangely unpleasant sound. Virginia sent the boys to visit their friends next door. Then she turned to Lily. “You are a constant irritant,” she said. “I’ll never forgive Anne for dumping you on me, although the poor woman was probably desperate to get rid of you.” She didn’t remember what she said after that. She was furious, so it probably wasn’t very nice. She recalled that Lily said nothing, that she seemed to shrink and become concave. She kept pulling her hair in front of her mouth and holding it there. It was very different from the way Magdalen had acted when Virginia would catch her on drugs. Virginia could scream at Magdalen, and call her anything she liked. Magdalen would follow her around, her long legs working in big strides, eyes blazing, she’d yell, “Mom! Mom, you know that’s a bunch of shit. What about the time you…” But Lily just sat there, becoming more and more expressionless. Virginia slept with Lily that night. She went into her room, no longer angry but with a sense of duty, concerned that Lily know she was cared for, that she wouldn’t go through the drug experience alone. She found her lying on the bed with all her clothes on, staring. Virginia made her change into her nightgown and get under the blankets. She turned out the light and got into bed with her. Lily went into a tight curl and turned her face to the wall. Virginia got the impression that she didn’t understand why Virginia was there. Virginia said, “Well? Don’t you want to talk?” Lily didn’t answer for a long time. Then she said, “About what?” “Whatever’s on your mind.” Another long pause. “There’s nothing on my mind.” Her words sounded disconnected, not only from her but from each other. Virginia suddenly wanted her to go home, back to Michigan. It would be easy. All she had to do was tell Jarold that she’d been taking drugs. “Well, that’s funny. Magdalen was a talker.” “About what? What did she talk about?” She sounded genuinely interested. “Oh, about boys. There was one in particular. David. I remember the name because she kept moaning it over and over.” She hadn’t meant to sound sarcastic, but it was hard not to. Lily didn’t say anything. They lay there in silence, not even scratching or shifting. Every time one of them swallowed, it was obvious that she was trying to do it quietly.

• From Best Erotic Romance

  She played it over and over. Usually at night. Always too loud. John ground his teeth so hard his jaw hurt. He glared at the glowing numbers on his bedside alarm clock. 3:10. Late enough to make him weep. He pressed his face into the mattress and moaned. Tears brimmed in Jane’s eyes as she sang along to the crackling LP. God, this song made her feel inside out. She played it loud with the window open, and the night air streamed into her studio flat, the dark breeze catching papers and spilling the unopened letters over the table, ruffling the edges of fabric, lifting the hem of the dresses hanging from the clothes rail, making the candles flicker and splutter with black, sooty flames. She screwed up the volume another notch and walked to the open window. “God, can you hear that?” she said, into the night. “Isn’t it beautiful? Doesn’t it make you want to fucking cry?” John’s suit hung over the back of his bedroom door. It wasn’t pressed, but as a well-cut suit it would pass if he left it undisturbed until morning to let gravity pull out the creases. It was not worth putting it on to go and visit his fiendish neighbor. It was not a good time for visiting. Nor, he thought bleakly, was it a good time for her to dig out her Mexican rock-and-roll LPs. Which she was in the process of doing, by the sound of it. He listened to her clunk and clatter. He sighed. There was little else in his room apart from his bed, the suit, and the alarm clock. John preferred to live with as few possessions, as few distractions as possible. He’d spent a great deal of time stripping back and reducing and simplifying. His life should be—would be—empty of clutter and open to the fabulous array of small, quotidian noises that he so loved, were it not for the amplified car crash below him. His nights were stuffed full, ripped apart and crammed with overbearing noise. Not just the music, either. The histrionics in between disturbed him greatly. She shook things loose in his head—distracting things like anger and resentment and a dumbstruck, confounded desire to saw his own ears off. These unpleasant emotional stirrings kicked around in his head like the hated bass beat. Four hours, he thought. If he could make it through another four hours, he could get up and snort coffee and escape to the peaceful cell of his office. Only now he was angry. The monstrous hormone-riddled hysteric downstairs was howling, with her throaty, rough-honey voice, and bombs were going off inside John’s head. He imagined drilling holes in the floor, shooting a fire extinguisher through her letterbox, tying her up and forcing her to listen to Brahms at 100 decibels.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I told him the story, the names they called me, the way they attacked me. My mother kept laughing it off, telling me to get over it, that it was kids being kids, no big deal. She was trying to defuse the situation, but I couldn’t see that. I was just mad at her. “You think it’s a joke, but it’s not funny! It’s not funny!” Abel wasn’t laughing. As I told him what the bullies had done, I could see the anger building up inside him. With Abel’s anger, there was no ranting and raving, no clenched fists. He sat there on the couch listening to me, not saying a word. Then, very calm and deliberate, he stood up. “Take me to these boys,” he said. Yes, I thought, this is it. Big brother is going to get my revenge for me. We got into his car and drove up the road, stopping a few houses down from the tree. It was dark now except for the light from the streetlamps, but we could see the boys were still there, playing under the tree. I pointed to the ringleader. “That one. He was the main one.” Abel slammed his foot on the gas and shot up onto the grass and straight toward the bottom of the tree. He jumped out. I jumped out. As soon as the kids saw me they knew exactly what was happening. They scattered and ran like hell. Abel was quick. Good Lord, he was fast. The ringleader had made a dash for it and was trying to climb over a wall. Abel grabbed him, pulled him down, and dragged him back. Then he stripped a branch off the tree, a switch, and started whipping him. He whipped the shit out of him, and I loved it. I have never enjoyed anything as much as I enjoyed that moment. Revenge truly is sweet. It takes you to a dark place, but, man, it satisfies a thirst. Then there was the strangest moment where it flipped. I caught a glimpse of the look of terror in the boy’s face, and I realized that Abel had gone past getting revenge for me. He wasn’t doing this to teach the kid a lesson. He was just beating him. He was a grown man venting his rage on a twelve-year-old boy. In an instant I went from Yes, I got my revenge to No, no, no. Too much. Too much. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Dear God, what have I done?

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  She dropped her eyes. “I’ve done something terrible. Jess, I was just trying to help. I let myself in next door and found the name of the company where you work on the check stubs you keep on the kitchen table. I thought if I called you in sick, you might be able to keep your job. I told them you got mugged and you’d be out for a week or two. Jess, I referred to you as she. I wasn’t thinking. They heard it. ’m so sorry. I know it means I lost that job for you.” 288 = Leslie Feinberg Ruth touched my face. “I know you must be really mad at me.” I shook my head. It was a mistake, that’s all. I thought about Duffy, the union organizer who'd done the same thing, and I forgave him in retrospect. I fluttered my hand to ask for something to write with. Ruth came back with a pen and paper. My right hand was stiff and sore, but the words I wrote were legible—the message life had given me another chance to deliver. Ruth read the words out loud: Thank _you for your love. And then we cried together. I visited the graphic arts employment agency in person and wrote down that I was looking for work. I started a new job the same night. That’s when I realized ’'d become a valuable typesetter. Christmas was a month and a half away and the third shift could hardly handle the volume of work the ad agencies were sending over. I took all the overtime they offered. I wanted a chunk of money, fast. At night I lived inside the coding strings, my face illuminated by the ghostly light of the terminal. The code phrases became my poetry. The curves of type against space sang to me: the melody meant everything, the words meant very little. At dawn I worked out at the gym, pausing only when the throbbing in my head frightened me. I moved my will to live down deeper into my body. Since my rage and frustration couldn’t escape through my clamped jaws, I screamed through my muscles. I thought I might explode with rage. At first working out at the gym reduced the pressure, but after a while the frenzied workouts became part of it. I was a time bomb, ticking, ticking, moments away from detonation. I didn’t sleep very much, just a few hours in the morning and late afternoon. I feared losing consciousness, afraid ’'d never find my way back. Ruth seemed worried about how much time I spent away from the apartment. I could tell by the relief on her face every day when I knocked on her door to check in with her. “Where do you go?” she’d sigh as she poured me a protein shake. I could tell she didn’t expect an answer.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  The next morning I called up all the butches from the plant so we could go to the meeting Tuesday night as a group. When I called Grant, she had big news. “The steel plant has to hire fifty women,” she told me. ““They’re accepting applications Wednesday morning. I don’t know about you, but I'll be camping out on the line Tuesday night. By late that night the line will stretch from Lackawanna to Tonawanda.” It was a slight exaggeration, but her point was well taken. I called Jan. “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think we should do?” “T was kind of hoping you'd tell me what we should do,” I told her. I called Duffy on Tuesday afternoon. I told him all the butches wanted the chance to get into the steel plant. There was a long silence on the line. “It’s a mistake,” he said. “You don’t understand,” I shouted. “You don’t Stone Butch Blues 107 know what it means to us to get into a big plant like that.” He tried to argue with me. “If the vote passes, at least punch in Wednesday morning or else you'll be automatically fired.” He didn’t seem to realize I was already gone. “You don’t understand what it would mean to work in the steel mill, do your” He shouted back at me. “What the hell is this about, looking tough?”’ “Yeah,” I yelled, “in a way. But not like you’re saying it. All we got is the clothes we wear, the bikes we tide, and where we work, you know? You can ride a Honda and work in a bindery or you can ride a Harley and work at the steel plant. The other butches are gonna leave sooner or later, and I don’t want to get stuck in that sweatshop with that rinky-dink union.” I knew Id hurt him, but I couldn’t find a way to retreat. “If you don’t understand that, I can’t explain it to you,” I told him. “Well, I think it’s stupid.” He sounded like a kid. That’s when I knew I had really hurt him. “The company was ordered to hire fifty women, but they don’t have to keep them. If five of you last the ninety days to get into the union I’ll eat Jim Boney’s baseball mitt.” 108 = Leslie Feinberg I was riled. “It’s my baseball mitt,’ I reminded him and hung up the phone. Tuesday night was bitter cold. We huddled around the flames leaping out of metal barrels. It was a long, long night. My stomach tightened every time I thought about the contract ratification meeting. “You think we made a mistake?” Jan asked me. I didn’t answer. Fuck Duffy, | thought to myself. He doesnt understand us.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  129Lecture 13—The Enlightenment Quest for Reasonable Faith õThey demanded the right to question everything, even their society’s most sacred authorities, the crown and the church. Here’s how Diderot put it in his famous work, the Encyclopédie: “Facts may be distributed into three classes: the acts of divinity, the phenomena of nature, and the actions of men. The first belong to theology, the second to philosophy, and the last to history properly speaking. All are equally subject to criticism.” õThe French radicals believed the Church had kept Europe in chains. Its bishops had a long history of muzzling geniuses like Galileo and serving as willing pawns in the hands of power-hungry and bloodthirsty kings. õIt’s probably best to call Voltaire a Deist, but he was far more critical of Christianity than most English Deists were. He told Frederick the Great that it was “the most absurd and bloody religion which has ever infected this world.” He published The Bible Finally Explained in 1776, in which he argued scripture was irrational and cruel. The book hit a nerve. It went through nine editions in two years. A NEW MORAL FOUNDATION õThe radical philosophes devoted their careers to searching for alternatives to Christianity as a moral foundation for society. Some found solace in ancient philosophy and believed that the self-denying morality of Greek and Roman Stoicism held the key to peaceful society. õMany Enlightenment thinkers— from iconoclasts like Diderot and Rousseau to radicals like David Hume—also wrote reams and reams about the role of sympathy. Hume gave us a helpful definition of what they meant by sympathy: 130The History of Christianity II He said sympathy is “the propensity to ... receive by communication [the] inclinations and sentiments” of other people, “however different from, or even contrary to our own” those sentiments might be. õIn other words, Hume noted our remarkable ability to step into another person’s shoes, even if that person sees the world in a very different way, and to understand what they think and feel. This capacity, many philosophes believed, lays the groundwork for our moral imagination. Sympathy binds humans together and provides a non-theological basis for treating each other in ethical ways. SUGGESTED READING Pagden, The Enlightenment. Pincus, 1688. Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äHow does national politics inf luence the work and attitudes of intellectuals? äWhy were so many theologians so keen to prove that Christianity is “reasonable”? äIs the philosophes’ notion of “sympathy” a viable substitute for the moral law of traditional religions?

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  õ After the Mexican Revolution—essentially, a civil war between 1910 and 1920—the liberals emerged victorious and revised the constitution to impose more rules on the Catholic Church. The new constitution banned religious schools to make all education secular. õ Public religious celebrations could only happen under close government supervision, and any religious school or newly built church became government property. Churches couldn’t run public charities, and clergy couldn’t run for public office. The government set a quota on how many clergy could serve any region of the country, so every priest had to register with the state. THE CRISTERO REBELLION õ In 1926, tension between the church and the liberal regime came to a head. The Archbishop of Mexico, José Mora y del Río, announced that all good Catholics ought to reject the Constitution. The liberal president, General Plutarco Elías Calles, retaliated by closing religious houses and schools, banning public religious celebrations, and booting any foreign priests out of the country. õ The archbishop told the priests of Mexico City to go on strike—no public masses, marriages, or baptisms. This strike lasted for three years. Some priests called for laypeople to rise up in violent rebellion. õ Rebels answered this call and became known as Cristeros. Soon, there were tens of thousands of them, including at least 25,000 women. They operated through guerrilla warfare and terrorism: blowing up trains, murdering teachers at government schools, and setting fire to government buildings. President Calles told his supporters to murder a priest in revenge for every state employee killed. õ The violence went on until 1929. More than 30,000 rebels and about 57,000 federal soldiers died in the fighting. Finally, the two sides arrived at a compromise that restored some rights to the church. Lecture 27—Rebellion and Reform in Latin America 267 They were allowed to resume teaching religious ideas, although not in schools. Confiscated property stayed in government hands. The bishops decided to accept this and call off the strike, but some of the restrictions on religious freedom persisted into the 1990s. THE ARGENTINIAN CHURCH õ This violent tangle between the Catholic Church and the state was not unique to Mexico. An example is how the 20th century played out in Argentina. The story of the Argentinian priest Jorge Bergoglio, who eventually became Pope Francis, illustrates this. 268 The History of Christianity II