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 Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  You need a messenger, Western Union! You need a messenger! And get off that silly Jewish throne of yours! Send out a man with a good pair of legs on him. Send a boy if you can’t get a man. Send a woman if you can’t get a boy. The old maestro’s dead! Don’t grieve over it. Don’t thump a hole in the bottom of the boat! Find another maestro! Find him while there’s time. Find him! Find him! Find him! Find him! Find him! Find the son of a bitch and then send him to a Western Union and dispatch a messenger fleet of foot—not a cripple or an octogenarian, but a young one! Ask him to find the great work and bring it back. We need it. We have a brand-new museum ready waiting to house it—and cellophane and the Dewey decimal system to file it. All we need is the name of the author. Even if he has no name, even if it is an anonymous work, we won’t kick. Even if it has a little mustard gas in it we won’t mind. Bring it back dead or alive—there’s a twenty-five thousand dollar reward for the man who fetches it.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The finer the caliber the worse off the man. Men were walking the streets of New York in that bloody, degrading outfit, the despised, the lowest of the low, walking around like auks, like penguins, like oxen, like trained seals, like patient donkeys, like big jackasses, like crazy gorillas, like docile maniacs nibbling at the dangling bait, like waltzing mice, like guinea pigs, like squirrels, like rabbits, and many and many a one was fit to govern the world, to write the greatest book ever written. When I think of some of the Persians, the Hindus, the Arabs I knew, when I think of the character they revealed, their grace, their tenderness, their intelligence, their holiness , I spit on the white conquerors of the world, the degenerate British, the pigheaded Germans, the smug, self-satisfied French. The earth is one great sentient being, a planet saturated through and through with man, a live planet expressing itself falteringly and stutteringly; it is not the home of the white race or the black race or the yellow race or the lost blue race, but the home of man and all men are equal before God and will have their chance, if not now then a million years hence. The little brown brothers of the Philippines may bloom again one day and the murdered Indians of America north and south may also come alive one day to ride the plains where now the cities stand belching fire and pestilence. Who has the last say? Man! The earth is his because he is the earth, its fire, its water, its air, its mineral and vegetable matter, its spirit which is cosmic, which is imperishable, which is the spirit of all the planets, which transforms itself through him, through endless signs and symbols, through endless manifestations. Wait, you cosmococcic telegraphic shits, you demons on high waiting for the plumbing to be repaired, wait, you dirty white conquerors who have sullied the earth with your cloven hoofs, your instruments, your weapons, your disease germs, wait, all you who are sitting in clover and counting your coppers, it is not the end. The last man will have his say before it is finished. Down to the last sentient molecule justice must be done—and will be done! Nobody is getting away with anything, least of all the cosmococcic shits of North America. When it came time for my vacation—I hadn’t taken one for three years, I was so eager to make the company a success!—I took three weeks instead of two and I wrote the book about the twelve little men. I wrote it straight off, five, seven, sometimes eight thousand words a day. I thought that a man, to be a writer, must do at least five thousand words a day. I thought he must say everything all at once—in one book—and collapse afterwards. I didn’t know a thing about writing. I was scared shitless.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The homiletic corpus of the late fourth and early fifth centuries provides abundant and vivid testimony to the intense war on fornication that trailed the mainstreaming of Christianity. The sermons of Chrysostom were heard by rich and poor, powerful and powerless, free and slave, men and women. He truly hoped that he might transform Antioch or Constantinople into a Christian city through the diligent reform of one household at a time. But prostitution was a particularly formidable challenge to this agenda, even in the late empire. A fourth-century catalog of the urban amenities of Rome still included some forty-five public brothels (listed between the public grain mills and the public latrines); it is telling that prostitution remained part of the official, public face of civic life in the early phases of the Christian empire. It is not surprising, then, that prostitution became a particular preoccupation of leaders like John Chrysostom, and that through his eyes we can see the anger and despair of a Christian preacher working amid a society where prostitution remained a vibrant part of the sexual economy.46 Chrysostom’s sermon is only the tip of the iceberg in his own extensive homiletic corpus and those of his contemporaries. In the moment of Christian triumph, the leadership of the church began to recognize that prostitution was part of an entrenched social system that encouraged the sexual use of dishonored women. The bishops of the later fourth century articulated with unprecedented clarity the structural mechanics of the Greco-Roman sexual economy. Asterius of Amasea could see that the double standard of sexual behavior was rooted in a society where property and legitimacy were transmitted through monogamy: “If men consort with many women, they do no harm to their own hearth, but if women commit sexual sin, they introduce alien heirs into their house and their line.” John Chrysostom was hardly the only bishop to appreciate the role of Roman law in solidifying an alternative set of sexual norms. Augustine explicitly rejected the “law of the forum” in favor of the “law of heaven.” Salvian of Marseilles summarized Greco-Roman sexual policy in the pithiest, and most accurate, formulation on record: forbidding adulteries, building brothels. Prostitution was not simply tolerated—it was viewed as a way of protecting the honor of decent women. Ambrose despaired that his Christians could visit the brothel “as though it were a law of nature.” Christian leaders became desperately aware of the double standard, and the braver among them were perfectly willing to identify its origins. “The laws were made by men, and they are disposed against women.” The acerbic Jerome offered a penetrating reflection on the fundamentally distinct logics of classical and Christian sexual boundaries. “Among them [the Romans], the bridles of sexual restraint are unloosed for men. The Romans condemn only stuprum and adulterium, letting lust run wild through whorehouses and slave girls, as though social status makes an offense, and not sexual desire.”47

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  In late antiquity the discourse of nature was harnessed by movement with a highly motivated opposition to same-sex love. The early stirrings of such a concept of nature should not be allowed to obscure the fact that in the late classical world this change in quantity becomes a change in quality. Setting matters. Musonius spoke to a circle of Young Turks, children of the establishment enchanted for a season by the eccentric philosopher’s moral authenticity. In late antiquity we are in the basilica, where men and women of startlingly divergent status gathered to receive moral lectures. And rather than the passing glances of an eccentric philosopher, we find same-sex love the object of dedicated pastoral ire. Christian preachers like John Chrysostom might dilate on the sinfulness of same-sex desire, indifferent to any distinctions between pederasty, the exploitation of slaves, or even durable forms of companionship. Rooted in Pauline scripture, Chrysostom’s own preaching on same-sex eros is such a spasm of hatred that its logic is not always recoverable. His caustic fourth homily on the Letter to the Romans, possibly a specimen of extemporaneous moralizing, evokes the atmosphere of intense hostility that prevailed in late antique churches. “Look how vividly he [Paul] chooses his words. He did not say they desired or lusted after one another, but burned in their longing for each other. Now, is not all desire born of greed which fails to adhere to its own limits? For all desire exceeding the laws set down by God is desire for what is strange, and not what has been allowed.” The reach of Chrysostom’s claims are startling. Musonius fixed on same-sex “intercourse” as an act against nature; so would most Christian moralists. But on occasion a sense of illicit, abnormal desire begins to find expression. Pre-Christian ideologies treated sexual deviance, even deviance involving same-sex attraction, as a matter of excessive desire and insufficient manliness; there was no “queer desire,” only desire overflowing its proper bounds. In Chrysostom we see how the logic of excess begins to give way to a sense that this excessive desire was, in its very essence, strange.17

• From Untrue (2018)

  Along with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the sexual double standard is one our country’s foundational concepts. In The Times of Their Lives, a history of Plymouth Colony, Patricia Scott Deetz and James Deetz tell us that in that place and others where pilgrims first carved out their hardscrabble, pious lives, sanctions against adultery were severe—and severely skewed. In the first codification of the law in 1636, they note, adultery was a capital crime, punishable by death (no one was executed for adultery in Plymouth, but the Massachusetts Bay Colony took a harder line, and three people there were put to death for the offense). In 1658, it was decreed that adulterers could count on at least being whipped and compelled to wear the capital letters AD sewn onto their garments. The Deetzes tell us that when Mary Mendame of Duxbury, wife of Robert Mendame, was accused of having sex with an “Indian” named Tinsin in 1639, she was whipped, compelled to wear an AD on her garments, and told that if she failed to comply, she would get her face branded. (Tinsin was, like Mary, “whipped at the cart’s tail.”) Had Mary been Mark, how differently things would have gone. For in the colonies of this period of the seventeenth century, a man, even if he were married, could have relations with an unmarried woman and be accused of the lesser crime of fornication. This was punishable by either a whipping or three days in prison and a ten pound fine. But having sex with a married woman was adultery: “adultery was viewed as the breaking of the marriage bond by the fact that the woman was married. The husband was not bound by the same constraints.” Having sexual relations with another man’s wife violated not just moral beliefs but his property rights, the Deetzes explain. (While some historians suggest this belief originated in medieval Europe, as we will see, it was much, much older.) As property, women like Mary Mendame were not only their husbands’ concern but wards of the entire community. Their trespass was a trespass against their husbands, God, and law and order itself. And a man trespassing with such a woman was violating more than his individual vow to goodness and to his own wife, if he had one—he was tramping all over his neighbor’s possession while demeaning a social contract. But whether he was married or not, he was somewhat freer to indulge. Mary would have gotten off in more ways than one had there been no double standard.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He had been born on the Fourth of July, he had been their Yankee Doodle Dandy, their all-American boy. He had given them almost his whole being in the war and now, after all that, they weren’t satisfied with three-quarters being gone, they wanted to take the rest of him. It was crazy but he knew that’s what they wanted. They wanted his head and his mind, the numb legs and the wheelchair, they wanted everything. It had all been one big dirty trick and he didn’t know what to think anymore. All he had tried to do was tell the truth about the war. But now he just wanted it to be quiet, to be where they weren’t cursing at him and beating him and jailing him, lying and calling him a traitor. He had never been anything but a thing to them, a thing to put a uniform on and train to kill, a young thing to run through the meatgrinder, a cheap small nothing thing to make mincemeat out of. And somewhere along the way he had forgotten to be polite anymore, and how to be a nice person. Somewhere through it all they had taken even that and he wanted it back so much, so very desperately, he would give almost anything to be able to be kind to people again, but the big machine, the one that had given him the number and the rifle, had sucked it out of him forever. They had made him confused and uncertain and blind with hate. They wanted to make him hide like he was hiding now. How many more, he thought, how many more like him were out there hiding on a thousand other Hurricane Streets? He was a living reminder of something terrible and awful. No matter what they said to him, no matter how much they tried to twist and bend things, he held on to what he knew and all the terrible things he had seen and done for them. They had buried the corporal and the children he had killed in the ground, but he was still sitting and breathing in his wheelchair, and now the last thing he could do for them if he wasn’t going to die was to disappear. He knew too much about them. He knew, goddamn it, like no one else would ever know. They were small men with small ideas, gamblers and hustlers who had gambled with his life and hustled him off to the war. They were smooth talkers, men who wore suits and smiled and were polite, men who wore watches and sat behind big desks sticking pins in maps in rooms he had never seen, men who had long-winded telephone conversations and went home to their wives and children.

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

  248The History of Christianity II õIn 1905, Lenin published an essay describing religion as “spiritual booze” that taught people “to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward.” But he called for religion to be treated as a “private affair,” and said people should be able to choose any religion, or none at all. õHowever, the Orthodox Church was an obvious rival to the Bolsheviks for the loyalties of the people. And the Bolsheviks took aim almost immediately. They didn’t officially ban the church, but they seized church property and rounded up any priest or bishop who didn’t profess total loyalty to the Russian Revolution—and even some who did. õSome clergy ended up in prison camps and mental hospitals—and those were the lucky ones. Others were tortured and executed as enemies of the revolution. In the 1920s, as the chaos in the provinces led to widespread famine, the Bolsheviks whipped up resentment against the church by charging that priests and bishops had refused to turn over their valuables to be sold to help feed the people. They capitalized on that long history of church privilege at the expense of ordinary believers. õAs for the dissenters who got a break after the 1905 law on religious toleration: The Bolsheviks put an end to that and turned out to be just as zealous in persecuting religious minorities as the tsars had ever been. Religious minorities f led where they could. RELIGION UNDER STALIN õIn 1929, five years after Lenin died and his successor Joseph Stalin took power, the government enacted the Law on Religious Associations, which set the rules for all religious worship, Orthodox or otherwise. õTo form a religious organization, a group of at least 20 adults had to come together and seek permission from the local magistrate to perform their “cult” in an approved building, and only in that space. No religious festivals, evangelizing, religious education, charity work, or anything else outside the registered building was allowed. 249Lecture 25—The Church and the Russian Revolution õMeanwhile, the Soviet government tried to lure believers away from traditional churches by establishing a rival organization called the Living Church. Clergy of this temple of propaganda preached that the Bolshevik program was essentially the fulfillment of Christianity. The message appealed to some Christian socialists, but the Living Church was so obviously an arm of the state that it failed to win many sincere believers.

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  Money is being stolen left and right. Money is being moved around. The aura of success that these people are putting on, it's a fraud. People who try to leave start being tracked by people, and even worse, people who are still in it realize that Keith is basically sleeping with everybody. He has all these books in his "executive library". He comes off like he's this intellectual person, but it's the library he uses to also have sex with dozens of women. [Narrator] And that's not all the Forbes article lays bare. People close to Keith Raniere will tell you he's pretty lazy. He's a guy that sleeps in during the day. So if you wanna get close to Keith, you have to attend midnight volleyball games, 'cause that's where Keith's gonna be. At the volleyball game, Raniere was the person of power. He's the king. He gets to sit there like the fat lion in the-- you know, in the jungle. At the end of the day, it was his world, and they were all gonna live in it whether they liked it or not. The article starts raising a lot of red flags. Maybe this group that so many people have been a part of... maybe it's a cult. [Robert] Edgar Bronfman's quoted where he says, "I think it's a cult." And that statement absolutely infuriated Keith Raniere. [Narrator] But the most damaging attacks target the validity of the company's classes and methodology. There's very little time to talk to your loved ones. There's very little time to eat enough food, let alone, you know, use the bathroom. It isolates the students from a husband or a loved one. Calling them and saying, I haven't heard from you all day. Are you okay? Is this a cult? Oh, no, no, no, it's not a cult, it's not a cult. We're just really, really busy, you know? We're just so busy. The idea that it was a cult never crossed my mind, because in my head, a cult was Charles Manson, dead chickens and things like that. There's a saying that nobody joins a cult because initially, cults do not present themselves as being cult like. Initially, they will seem very warm, and they have these ideals where they talk about changing the world. And they entice followers to join something that could change humanity. [Dr. Lauch] Yes, it's isolation, it's alienation from people you knew before, because the more and more and more you get enveloped in it, you feel very trapped. And that's when it gets even more difficult to leave, because you--you can't imagine life away from that. [Narrator] While the article turns an ugly spotlight on the group, the damage is limited. [Paige] The world wasn't ready to hear it yet. People viewed it as them voluntarily giving this money. And I'm sorry that you gave your money to a scam, but how is that our problem?

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Their power and privilege are justified as something earned purely through the sweat of their brow. This rationalization can take the form of ideology. For example, in capitalism the ideology of “the survival of the fittest” dismisses those who reside in the underside of capitalism as not being fit to survive. Their poverty becomes proof of their deserved marginality. The success of the center is attributed to its ingenuity and hard work. If the disenfranchised were not so lazy or were smarter, then they too could earn a slice of the American pie. Ideologies provide simple answers to inequalities by laying the blame of marginality upon the victims of oppressive structures. This type of ideology also contributes to the rise of stereotyping. If the exclusive neighborhoods are predominantly white while the economically deprived areas are mainly composed of people of color, if those who occupy positions in top management and U.S. corporate boardrooms are white males while those who occupy the menial positions are women and people on the margins, and if our prison systems remain disproportionately composed of nonwhite males, the center can only conclude that people on the margins are lazy and so live in the ghettos and barrios , that women and minorities are less intelligent and so occupy servile jobs, and that nonwhite males are dangerous and wicked creatures deserving incarceration. While disenfranchised groups see unjust social structures, those who benefit from those structures fail or refuse to recognize the status quo as oppressive; here lies a major division between U.S. citizens. Yet, when those who benefit from unjust structures are able to make their perspectives normative due to the power of the center, they create a worldview that demands biblical justification in order to avoid any incongruency between what they believe and what they do. The unchecked power of the dominant culture that resides in the center of society provides the privilege of defining and determining how the Bible is read and interpreted. Hence, what develops is an attempt to read the Bible to redefine or to justify the unjust privileges of the center. Reading the Bible to justify one's social location imprisons the text by spiritualizing reality and thus obscuring or hiding it. This results in a culture of silence prevailing where the interpretation of the center is neither questioned nor challenged. The danger for those on the margins is that they will read the Bible through the eyes of elite white males and convince themselves of the justice of their own oppression. Unaware of the reasons for their marginalization, those who are disenfranchised often accept the order of things that relegates them to be exploited. Yet, as those on the margins begin to claim the biblical text as their own, their reading shifts to a social location of the margins. Such a reading threatens what has been constructed by the center as the normative interpretation and threatens the very social structures that create oppression.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Fearful that her son's inheritance could be jeopardized by Abraham's firstborn, Ishmael, she connived to have him and his mother, Hagar, forced into exile. Again Hagar found herself in the desert facing death, thrown out as an old used object no longer needed by its owner, a familiar scenario for most domestic servants today. Homeless because of the unwillingness of the father of her child to shoulder his responsibility, she was abandoned, like so many women of color today. Alone in the desert, facing death, and questioning the promise God previously uttered about the multitude of her descendants, she must have wondered about the blindness of the God who sees. Yet, this time, God heard the cry of her son and rescued them. Hagar suffered from classism (a slave), racism (an Egyptian foreigner), and sexism (a woman raped by Abraham). Because of her status, Hagar becomes a lens by which the biblical text can be read, a reading that focuses on the struggle for liberation and survival with dignity. This story of the used and abused woman is a motif that resonates with many women of color. Even natural allies, women of the dominant culture like Sarah, capitalize on her body. Nevertheless, God is found in the midst of the struggle of those relegated to the margins, even when these religious patriarchs of the faith have participated in their marginalization! Because God chooses to accompany those who are disenfranchised, Hagar and her child Ishmael complicated the history of salvation by becoming part of God's promise to make a nation by using Abraham's seed. Women of color continue to “complicate” how the dominant culture interprets God's promises.4 JUSTIFYING HOMOPHOBIA The sin of Sodom is an abomination before God. It is a prevalent sin within our society and undermines Christianity. Its constant practice contributes to the downfall of civilization and leads nations toward barbarism. It is the responsibility of all who call themselves Christian to root out this sin from society and dedicate themselves to abolishing this defiled practice. Because the elimination of this sin is crucial for participating in the abundant life, it is important that we correctly define what the sin of Sodom is. Regardless of how the dominant culture interprets the Genesis story of God's wrath falling upon Sodom and Gomorrah, the Bible's definition of the sin of Sodom is vastly different from what is usually preached from most pulpits throughout the land. According to Genesis 19, two angels sent to Sodom found hospitality in the house of Lot (Abraham's nephew). Later in the evening, the men of the town went to Lot's house, demanding that the two strangers be handed over to them so that they could know them (“to know” being a euphemism for having a sexual relationship). Lot refused, but he offered his two virgin daughters, as discussed above. When the men attempted to take the two strangers by force, the angels struck them with blindness.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Mitchell gave it to them. The smokers turned into brawls. He matched up the hardest cases he could find, and he did not trouble himself overmuch with questions of height and weight. A mismatch could be just as much fun as an even match. More fun. You couldn’t help but be interested in watching some jiggling fatty like Bull Slatter—Full Bladder, as he was known—defend his farflung borders against the malice of a brutal pygmy like Huff. Style wasn’t the issue here. The folks wanted action, and the best action of the night happened in the grudge fights. The grudge fights came last. Mr. Mitchell announced them as such to raise the temperature in the gym, and to remind the fighters that they were honor-bound to try and kill each other. Most of these boys weren’t real enemies. Maybe they’d ragged each other too hard, like Arthur and me, or tried to muscle in front of each other in the cafeteria, or just happened to feel ornery on the same day. The only thing they had in common was the bad luck of getting caught by Mr. Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell kept his eyes peeled for grudge fighters, and when he found a couple of likely candidates he signed them up on the spot. It made no difference how slight their disagreement was, or how long a time remained until the next smoker. Arthur and I were lucky; we had to wait only three weeks. There were boys in the lists who’d been waiting since September, and who would’ve had trouble remembering just what their grudge was supposed to be. But none of them ever refused to fight—it wasn’t conceivable. They kept their enmity alive for as long as they had to, and when the time came they fought as they were expected to fight, viciously, hatefully, as if to erase one another from the earth. Arthur and I steered clear of each other when we could, gave each other evil looks when we couldn’t. It would have been indecorous and unwise for a pair of grudge fighters to let themselves get friendly. We needed to keep our hostility intact for the smoker. I had no trouble doing this. Now that the situation called for ill will, I found I had large stores of it to draw on. We had been close. Whatever it is that makes closeness possible between people also puts them in the way of hard feelings if that closeness ends. Arthur and I were moving apart, and had been ever since we started high school. Arthur was trying to be a citizen. He stayed out of trouble and earned high grades. He played bass guitar with the Deltones, a pretty good band for which I had once tried out as drummer and been haughtily dismissed. The guys he ran around with at Concrete were all straight-arrows and strivers, what few of them there were in our class. He even had a girlfriend.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  She still hoped this marriage would work, was ready to put up with almost anything to make it work. The idea of another failure was abhorrent to her. But she may also have dreamed of flight and freedom—unencumbered, solitary freedom, freedom even from me. Like anyone else, she must have wanted different things at the same time. The human heart is a dark forest. After a week or so I announced at dinner that I had decided not to go to Paris. “The hell you aren’t,” Dwight said. “You’re going.” “He gets to choose,” Pearl said, on my side for once. “Doesn’t he, Rosemary?” My mother nodded. “That was the deal.” “The books aren’t closed on this one,” Dwight said. “Not yet they aren’t.” He looked at me. “Why do you think you aren’t going?” “I don’t want to change my name.” “You don’t want to change your name?” “No sir.” He put his fork down. His nostrils were flaring. “Why not?” “I don’t know. I just don’t.” “Well that’s a lot of crap, because you’ve already changed your name once. Right?” “Yes sir.” “Then you might as well change the other name too, make a clean sweep.” “But it’s my last name.” “Oh, for Christ’s sake. You think anybody cares what you call yourself?” I shrugged. “Don’t badger him,” my mother said. “He’s already made up his mind.” “We’re talking about Paris!” Dwight shouted. “It was his choice,” she said. Dwight jabbed his finger at me. “You’re going.” “Only if he wants to,” my mother said. “You’re going,” he repeated. EXCEPT FOR ARTHUR , people didn’t say much about my not going to Paris. They’d probably thought all along that it was just one of my stories. Arthur called me Frenchy for a while, then lost interest as I seemed to lose interest, while in secret I went on thinking of cobbled streets and green roofs, and cafés where fast, smoky-voiced women sang songs about their absolute lack of remorse. Dwight said that he had once seen Lawrence Welk in the dining car of a train. Dwight said that he’d walked right up to him and told him that he was his favorite conductor, and he probably did, for it was true that he loved the champagne music of Lawrence Welk better than any other music. Dwight had a large collection of Lawrence Welk records. When the Lawrence Welk show came on TV we were expected to watch it with him, and be quiet, and get up only during commercials. Dwight pulled his chair up close to the set. He leaned forward as the bubbles rose over the Champagne Orchestra and Lawrence Welk came onstage salaaming in every direction, crying out declarations of humility in his unctuous, brain-scalding Swedish kazoo of a voice. Dwight’s eyes widened at the virtuosity of Big Tiny Little Junior, who played ragtime piano while looking over his shoulder at the camera.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  The anger and frustration would build up inside me and I remember several times screaming into my pillow as I lay on my gurney until I was exhausted. I felt so helpless, so lost. During the entire time, in that depressing place, Carol never called or came down to visit me once. I felt abandoned, betrayed, and soon stopped shaving and began to let my hair grow long. I remember looking in the mirror one morning thinking how much I resembled Jesus Christ hanging from the cross. I thought back again to the Bronx VA when I had been stuck in that chest cast for nearly six months after breaking my femur, and how as I had lain on a gurney on my stomach I would paint pictures of the crucifixion with myself as Christ, and how they’d sent the psychiatrist down from the psych ward because they were concerned and I immediately stopped painting, afraid they would have me committed just like my Uncle Paul who had been beaten to death in a mental hospital years before. The weeks and months in the Long Beach VA hospital passed, and I slowly began to adjust to my surroundings. Each morning the aides would lift me out of bed and place me on a gurney, stuffing a pillow under my chest to keep my testicles from squishing and my hips from getting red. They would do the same thing with my legs, placing another pillow under my kneecaps, making sure my bed bag was hooked up, then handing me my two wooden canes. Lying on the gurney on my stomach I’d push around the wards, then down to the cafeteria where I’d get something to eat. I would then go outside on the grass where I’d throw bits of crackers to the sparrows. This became a daily routine for me. In the weeks that followed I began to make new friends. Many, like myself, had been paralyzed in Vietnam, guys like Marty Stetson and Willy Jefferson, Woody and Nick, Danny Prince and Jake Jacobs, or Jafu as he liked to be called, who used to be a bodybuilder before he joined the marines. Jafu, I learned from Marty, was wounded in Operation Starlite on August 23, 1965, while participating in America’s first major offensive of the Vietnam War. He was shot in the chest, paralyzing him from his waist down. From what Marty told me, Jafu’s squad got caught in a horseshoe ambush, and though gravely wounded, Jafu continued to return fire with his M60 machine gun until reinforcements arrived. For this he was awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart. Nick Enders shares a completely different story, though, telling me Jafu was actually paralyzed while on R&R in Hawaii. Some guy caught him sleeping with his wife and in a jealous rage threw him out of the sixth-floor window of his hotel room, paralyzing Jafu for life.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “Thank God you weren’t able to have any kids—now we know for sure how you would have raised them!” I pause, for effect. Then I say, “Nick.” “I am your uncle, goddammit!” he howls. “Uncle Nick! You should respect your elders!” His cragged forehead’s broken out in sweat. “Nick,” I tell him calmly, “you have to earn respect. It’s not just given to you. You never did a thing to help us. You only made it worse by siding with Cookie. You, like her, do not deserve my respect.” “Get the fuck out of my house, you lying whore.” “Nope,” I tell him. “If Rosie’s here, then I’m here.” Nick stares at me. Then he stares at Cherie. Cherie stares down at the floor, reminding us all she has a custody fight for her child to worry about. “You’re staying here tonight,” he says. “And tomorrow, the kid goes with me to the airport.” “So do we,” I tell him. Nick wraps his hand into a fist so hard the knuckles crack. “Jennifer, take these sluts to the back room,” he says. With her eyes, his wife begs us to save her. She points us down the hall, into the room next to theirs. “It smells like slime in here,” I tell my sisters. Rosie’s gaze is fixed in worry on the bed, where scattered about are pictures of hairy, naked women. “I’m not sleeping on that thing.” “You think the floor is much better?” Cherie says. “Cherie, help me put the sheets on the floor. We’ll sleep on top of them with Rosie in the middle. We can cover up with our coats.” The next morning, after we leave the sheets in a heap on the floor, we walk out to the driveway where Nick’s leaning against his rusted Camaro. “What the fuck took so long to get ready? You three dyking it out in there?” We march past him, toward Cherie’s car. “What the hell—you two don’t actually expect me to believe you’re going to drive this kid to the airport.” Cherie opens her car door. “Rosie’s riding with us, Nick. If you want to be there to see it, you’ll have to follow.” “You cunts—” I swing around. “Shut the fuck up, Nick, you fucking ignorant, stupid prick!” I walk up to him and get in his face. “She’s riding with us, you got it? You Calcaterras are nothing but a bunch of lowlife scumbags!” “And you’re one of us,” he says. I wrap my arms around Rosie’s shoulders. “In name only.” I use my body to nudge Rosie inside the car, resisting my instinct to tackle Nick and beat him senseless. In the backseat I keep Rosie cloaked, as though trying to protect her now could still do some good. Even deeper inside the airport with the March chill left outside, I feel Rosie shivering. We escort her all the way to security, where she glances back at Nick and takes off her coat.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Washington was a madhouse with buses and trucks and cars coming in from all directions. We got a parking space and I gave up my tie and sweater for no shirt and a big red bandana around my head. Skip pushed the wheelchair for what seemed a mile or so. We could feel the tremendous tension. People were handing out leaflets reminding everyone that this was a nonviolent demonstration, and that no purpose would be served in violent confrontation. I remember feeling a little scared, the way I did before a firefight. After reading the leaflet I felt content that no one was going to get hurt. Skip and I moved as close to the speakers’ platform as we could and Skip lifted me out of my chair and laid me on my cushion. People were streaming into the Ellipse from all around us—an army of everyday people. There was a guy with a stereo tape deck blasting out music, and dogs running after Frisbees on the lawn. The Hari Krishna people started to dance and the whole thing seemed like a weird carnival. But there was a warmth to it, a feeling that we were all together in a very important place. A young girl sat down next to me and handed me a canteen of cool water. “Here,” she said, “have a drink.” I drank it down and passed it to Skip who passed it to someone else. That was the feeling that day. We all seemed to be sharing everything. We listened as the speakers one after another denounced the invasion of Cambodia and the slaying of the students at Kent State. The sun was getting very hot and Skip and I decided to move around. We wanted to get to the White House where Nixon was holed up, probably watching television. We were in a great sea of people, thousands and thousands all around us. We finally made it to Lafayette Park. On the other side of the avenue the government had lined up thirty or forty buses, making a huge wall between the people and the White House. I remember wondering back then why they had to put all those buses in front of the president. Was the government so afraid of its own people that it needed such a gigantic barricade? I’ll always remember those buses lined up that day and not being able to see the White House from my wheelchair. We went back to the rally for a while, then went on down to the Reflecting Pool. Hundreds of people had taken off their clothes. They were jumping up and down to the beat of bongo drums and metal cans. A man in his fifties had stripped completely naked. Wearing only a crazy-looking hat and a pair of enormous black glasses, he was dancing on a platform in the middle of hundreds of naked people. The crowd was clapping wildly.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Skip hesitated for a moment, then stripped all his clothes off, jumping into the pool and joining the rest of the people. I didn’t know what all of this had to do with the invasion of Cambodia or the students slain at Kent State, but it was total freedom. As I sat there in my wheelchair at the edge of the Reflecting Pool with everyone running naked all around me and the clapping and the drums resounding in my ears, I wanted to join them. I wanted to take off my clothes like Skip and the rest of them and wade into the pool and rub my body with all those others. Everything seemed to be hitting me all at once. One part of me was upset that people were swimming naked in the national monument and the other part of me completely understood that now it was their pool, and what good is a pool if you can’t swim in it. I remember how the police came later that day, very suddenly, when we were watching the sun go down—a blue legion of police in cars and on motorcycles and others with angry faces on big horses. A tall cop walked into the crowd near the Reflecting Pool and read something into a bullhorn no one could make out. The drums stopped and a few of the naked people began to put their clothes back on. It was almost evening and with most of the invading army’s forces heading back along the Jersey Turnpike, the blue legion had decided to attack. And they did—wading their horses into the pool, flailing their clubs, smashing skulls. People were running everywhere as gas canisters began to pop. I couldn’t understand why this was happening, why the police would attack the people, running them into the grass with their horses and beating them with their clubs. Two or three horses charged into the crowd at full gallop, driving the invading army into retreat toward the Lincoln Memorial. A girl was crying and screaming, trying to help her bleeding friend. She was yelling something about the pigs and kept stepping backward away from the horses and the flying clubs. For the first time that day I felt anger surge up inside me. I was no longer an observer, sitting in my car at the edge of a demonstration. I was right in the middle of it and it was ugly. Skip started pushing the chair as fast as he could up the path toward the Lincoln Memorial. I kept turning, looking back. I wanted to shout back at the charging police, tell them I was a veteran. When we got to the memorial, I remember looking at Lincoln’s face and reading the words carved on the walls in back of him. I felt certain that if he were alive he would be there with us. I told Skip that I was never going to be the same.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  all of them, but he had always tried very hard not to. He wished he could be sure they understood that he and the men were there because they were trying to help all of them save their country from the Communists. They were on a rice dike that bordered the graveyard. The voices from the huts nearby seemed quite loud. He looked up ahead to where the lieutenant who had come along with them that night was standing. The lieutenant had sent one of the men, Molina, on across the rice dikes almost to the edge of the village. The cold rain was still coming down very hard and the men behind him were standing like a line of statues waiting for the next command. But now something was wrong up ahead. He could see Molina waving his hands excitedly trying to tell the lieutenant something. Stumbling over the dikes, almost crawling, Molina came back toward the lieutenant. He saw him whisper something in his ear. And now the lieutenant turned and looked at him. “Sergeant,” he said, “Molina and I are going to get a look up ahead. Stay here with the team.” Balancing on the dike, he turned around slowly after the lieutenant had gone, motioning with his rifle for all of the men in back of him to get down. Each one, carefully, one after the other, squatted along the dike on one knee, waiting in the rain to move out again. They were all shivering from the cold. They waited for what seemed a long time and then the lieutenant and Molina appeared suddenly through the darkness. He could tell from their faces that they had seen something. They had seen something up ahead, he was sure, and they were going to tell him what they had just seen. He stood up, too excited to stay kneeling down on the dike. “What is it?” he cried. “Be quiet,” whispered the lieutenant sharply, grabbing his arm, almost throwing him into the paddy. He began talking very quickly and much louder than he should have. “I think we found them. I think we found them,” he repeated, almost shouting. He didn’t know what the lieutenant meant. “What?” he said. “The sappers, the sappers! Let’s go!” The lieutenant was taking over now. He seemed very sure of himself, he was acting very confident. “Let’s go, goddamn it!” He clicked his rifle off safety and got his men up quickly, urging them forward, following the lieutenant and Molina toward the edge of the village. They ran through the paddy, splashing like a family of ducks. This time he hoped and prayed it would be the real enemy. He would be ready for them this

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  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. In the morning I was up bright and early, shaved, put on my best clothes and hotfooted it to the subway. I went immediately to the main offices of the telegraph company . . . up to the twenty-fifth floor or wherever it was that the president and the vice-presidents had their cubicles. I asked to see the president. Of course the president was either out of town or too busy to see me, but wouldn’t I care to see the vice-president, or his secretary rather. I saw the vice-president’s secretary, an intelligent, considerate sort of chap, and I gave him an earful.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It’s as though my mother fed me a poison, and though I was weaned young the poison never left my system. Even when she weaned me it seemed that I was completely indifferent; most children rebel, or make a pretense of rebelling, but I didn’t give a damn. I was a philosopher when still in swaddling clothes. I was against life, on principle. What principle? The principle of futility. Everybody around me was struggling. I myself never made an effort. If I appeared to be making an effort it was only to please someone else; at bottom I didn’t give a rap. And if you can tell me why this should have been so I will deny it, because I was born with a cussed streak in me and nothing can eliminate it. I heard later, when I had grown up, that they had a hell of a time bringing me out of the womb. I can understand that perfectly. Why budge? Why come out of a nice warm place, a cosy retreat in which everything is offered you gratis? The earliest remembrance I have is of the cold, the snow and ice in the gutter, the frost on the window panes, the chill of the sweaty green walls in the kitchen. Why do people live in outlandish climates in the temperate zones, as they are miscalled? Because people are naturally idiots, naturally sluggards, naturally cowards. Until I was about ten years old I never realized that there were “warm” countries, places where you didn’t have to sweat for a living, nor shiver and pretend that it was tonic and exhilarating. Wherever there is cold there are people who work themselves to the bone and when they produce young they preach to the young the gospel of work—which is nothing, at bottom, but the doctrine of inertia. My people were entirely Nordic, which is to say idiots . Every wrong idea which has ever been expounded was theirs. Among them was the doctrine of cleanliness, to say nothing of righteousness. They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank. Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark. After dinner the dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read it was neatly folded and laid away on a shelf; after the clothes were washed they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge. In my bitterness I often search for reasons to condemn them, the better to condemn myself. For I am like them too, in many ways.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  He truly hoped that he might transform Antioch or Constantinople into a Christian city through the diligent reform of one household at a time. But prostitution was a particularly formidable challenge to this agenda, even in the late empire. A fourth-century catalog of the urban amenities of Rome still included some forty-five public brothels (listed between the public grain mills and the public latrines); it is telling that prostitution remained part of the official, public face of civic life in the early phases of the Christian empire. It is not surprising, then, that prostitution became a particular preoccupation of leaders like John Chrysostom, and that through his eyes we can see the anger and despair of a Christian preacher working amid a society where prostitution remained a vibrant part of the sexual economy. 46 Chrysostom’s sermon is only the tip of the iceberg in his own extensive homiletic corpus and those of his contemporaries. In the moment of Christian triumph, the leadership of the church began to recognize that prostitution was part of an entrenched social system that encouraged the sexual use of dishonored women. The bishops of the later fourth century articulated with unprecedented clarity the structural mechanics of the Greco-Roman sexual economy. Asterius of Amasea could see that the double standard of sexual behavior was rooted in a society where property and legitimacy were transmitted through monogamy: “If men consort with many women, they do no harm to their own hearth, but if women commit sexual sin, they introduce alien heirs into their house and their line.” John Chrysostom was hardly the only bishop to appreciate the role of Roman law in solidifying an alternative set of sexual norms. Augustine explicitly rejected the “law of the forum” in favor of the “law of heaven.” Salvian of Marseilles summarized Greco-Roman sexual policy in the pithiest, and most accurate, formulation on record: forbidding adulteries, building brothels. Prostitution was not simply tolerated—it was viewed as a way of protecting the honor of decent women. Ambrose despaired that his Christians could visit the brothel “as though it were a law of nature.” Christian leaders became desperately aware of the double standard, and the braver among them were perfectly willing to identify its origins. “The laws were made by men, and they are disposed against women.” The acerbic Jerome offered a penetrating reflection on the fundamentally distinct logics of classical and Christian sexual boundaries. “Among them [the Romans], the bridles of sexual restraint are unloosed for men. The Romans condemn only stuprum and adulterium, letting lust run wild through whorehouses and slave girls, as though social status makes an offense, and not sexual desire.”