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 My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I was asked once whether I thought that “Shaddy”, as we called the House-master, had ever had a woman. The idea of “Shaddy” as a virgin filled us with laughter; but when one spoke of him as a lover, it was funnier still. He was a man about forty, tall and fairly strong: he had a degree from some college in Manchester, but to us little snobs he was a bounder because he had not been to either Oxford or Cambridge. He was fairly capable, however. But for some reason or other he had a down on me and I grew to hate him, and was always thinking of how I might hurt him. My new habit of forcing myself to watch and observe everything came to my aid. There were five or six polished oak-steps up to the big bedroom where fourteen of us slept. “Shaddy” used to give us half an hour to get into bed and then would come up, and standing just inside the door under the gas-light would ask us, “Have you all said your prayers?” We all answered: “Yes, sir”, then would come his “Goodnight, boys”, and our stereotyped reply: “Good night, Sir.” He would then turn out the light and go downstairs to his room. The oak-steps outside were worn in the middle and I had noticed that as one goes downstairs one treads on the very edge of each step. One day “Shaddy” had maddened me by giving me one hundred lines of Vergil to learn by heart for some trifling peccadillo. That night, having provided myself with a cake of brown Windsor soap, I ran upstairs before the other boys and rubbed the soap freely on the edge of the two top steps, and then went on to undress. When “Shaddy” put out the light and stepped down to the second step, there was a slip and then a great thud as he half slid, half fell to the bottom. In a moment, for my bed was nearest the door, I had sprung up, opened the door and made incoherent exclamations of sympathy as I helped him to get up. “I’ve hurt my hip”, he said, putting his hand on it. He couldn’t account for his fall. Grinning to myself as I went back, I rubbed the soap off the top step with my handkerchief and got into bed again, where I chuckled over the success of my stratagem. He had only got what he richly deserved, I said to myself. At length the long term wore to its end; the Exam was held and after consulting Stackpole I was very sure of the second prize. “I believe”, he said one day, “that you’d rather have the second prize than the first.” “Indeed I would”, I replied without thinking.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Meaningfullessness is not a word, but should be. There’s an art to this kind of horseshit, and Benioff is its Michelangelo. More depressing is that Benioff represents a threat to HubSpot, and while he may be ridiculous, he’s not someone you want to have as an enemy. Salesforce used to be HubSpot’s biggest ally, investing in HubSpot and even selling HubSpot software to its customers. Halligan loved Benioff so much that he named the company’s biggest conference room after him. That happy relationship ended six months ago when Salesforce acquired one of HubSpot’s rivals, ExactTarget. Supposedly Benioff first tried to buy HubSpot, but Halligan rejected his offer. At the keynote I’m sitting next to one of our sales reps, who tells me that Salesforce.com has been calling our customers, urging them to dump HubSpot and switch to ExactTarget, which has been renamed Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Salesforce.com claims that its marketing software is better than HubSpot and works seamlessly with Salesforce.com’s core CRM software. These claims may or may not be true, but Salesforce.com makes a compelling sales pitch. A lot of our customers use Salesforce.com. They bought HubSpot as a kind of add-on to their CRM software. Why keep paying extra for HubSpot when they can buy their marketing software from the same company that makes their CRM software? No doubt Salesforce.com also offers an attractive price if you buy the bundle. “So what do you say when your customers tell you that Salesforce.com is trying to poach them away?” I ask the sales rep. “What story can we tell our customers to counter the story they’re getting from Salesforce?” The sales rep just shrugs. Halligan has decided that if Salesforce.com is going to enter our market space, then we will enter theirs. In secret, HubSpot’s engineers have started developing a CRM program to compete against Salesforce.com, but we haven’t announced it yet. Cranium has become obsessed with Salesforce.com. He hates these guys! He wants to kill them! He’s like Ahab stalking the whale. Before the ExactTarget deal, Cranium loved Salesforce.com. He used to spend a fortune buying booth space at Dreamforce. In 2011 he made forty HubSpot employees dress up in orange cheerleader tracksuits and run around handing out tiny stuffed unicorns. He still thinks this was a brilliant marketing scheme. I cringe when I look at the photos. I wonder if anyone refused to wear a tracksuit, and if so, what happened to that person. I’m relieved that this year we can all just wear regular clothes, so I don’t have to find out. We’re here in part to steal ideas—we’ll see what these guys do to create a spectacle and copy that for our Inbound conference in Boston. We’re also here to gather competitive intelligence, to see how Benioff talks about his new marketing software and what the audience makes of his pitch. We want to find out what we’re up against.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  By that time, Dobson had set aside any qualms about direct political engagement. A year after arriving in Colorado, he helped mobilize support for an amendment to the state constitution that would block the passage of gay rights laws. His forces succeeded, at the time. His Citizen magazine and his Family News in Focus kept followers informed on the latest political events. Meanwhile, with Gary Bauer at its helm, the Family Research Council grew into the most powerful organization of the Christian Right in the nation’s capital.3 From his base in Colorado Springs, Dobson continued to step up his political activism. In 2003 he came to the defense of Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore, an evangelical Christian who had refused to abide by a federal order to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments that he had installed in the Alabama Supreme Court. Speaking in Montgomery, Dobson compared Moore’s civil disobedience to that of Rosa Parks: “We as people of faith are also being sent to the back of the bus.” It was then that Dobson sensed “a new level of disgust among the country’s seventy million white evangelical Christians,” and a new willingness to fight. Even at age sixty-seven, this was not a battle he was going to sit out. In order to protect Focus on the Family’s tax exemption, Dobson retired from his position as CEO of the organization so he could take up political organizing directly.4 Dobson quickly moved from the symbolic battlefield to the electoral one. His first target was Tom Daschle, the Democratic Senate minority leader from South Dakota, for the role Daschle had played in blocking ten of George W. Bush’s nominees to the US courts of appeals. In 2004, Dobson threw his support behind John Thune, an evangelical Republican who was an anti-abortion, anti-same-sex marriage candidate. To drum up support for Thune, Dobson organized Focus on the Family–sponsored “Stand for Family” rallies, spoke at a massive Christian music festival, and published “An Important Message from Dr. James C. Dobson” on Thune’s behalf in full-page newspaper ads around the state. All told, Dobson reached around one tenth of South Dakota’s population. Thune won by a margin of 4508 votes, and he knew what Dobson’s endorsement meant: “There is literally a generation of Americans who have grown up with Dr. Dobson,” he reflected after his victory. “His voice is golden out there, particularly among Americans who had a conservative value system or worldview. He could speak to them like nobody else could, absent somebody like Billy Graham.”5 Dobson wielded enormous political power, yet it was nearly invisible outside evangelical circles. “The average person in the establishment is not aware of what Dobson is saying to five or ten million people every week,” remarked Richard Viguerie, the GOP’s direct-mail mastermind. “That has served us beautifully.” Dobson’s power was all too apparent to evangelicals themselves, for better and for worse.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  camo on his face as if it had been put on in Hollywood, two bandoliers of ammo strapped across and three pouches, four weapons and three knives. . . . Ollie was popular with the studs because he was their image of what the Marine Corps was about. . . . He invented Rambo before Rambo made the movie. He was the creator of his own myth.7 A soldier’s soldier, North grew increasingly frustrated with Americans who didn’t buy into this myth, and he didn’t just mean antiwar protestors. He also blamed the media. In the summer of 1971, just months after William Calley was convicted on twenty-two counts of murder in the My Lai massacre, North and two other marine captains addressed a letter to the three major television networks, and to conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr., criticizing reporting on “alleged” atrocities and war crimes and rejecting any implication of broader complicity. “None of us have ever witnessed, participated in, or been cognizant of, a single instance wherein any Vietnamese noncombatant, North or South, was treated in anything less than a humane fashion,” they attested. American soldiers were the good guys, and the public needed to know this. The networks ignored the letter, but Buckley invited the authors to join him on his show on Public Broadcasting, Firing Line . North was eager to have his say. Families shouldn’t be made to feel that sons and husbands were coming home as war criminals. Marines had in fact shown remarkable restraint. North “believed in America and the sanctity of its commitments,” and he was furious that politicians and peaceniks were getting in the way of the military doing what needed to be done.8 In 1978, North experienced a personal religious transformation. His commanding officer at the time, Lt. Col. John S. Grinalds, was a born-again Christian, and he convinced North to leave behind the Catholicism of his youth and embrace charismatic Protestantism. (The fact that North’s priest was a leading proponent of disarmament might have played into this decision.) This wasn’t North’s first exposure to evangelical Protestantism. In the mid-1970s, his wife Betsy, “tired of living with a headstrong military leader” who was absent as a husband and father, had asked for a divorce. The two agreed to marital counseling, and while waiting in the lobby for their first appointment, North picked up a book: James Dobson’s Dare to Discipline . He credited it with saving his marriage. After his conversion, North joined a predominantly white, charismatic congregation of the Episcopal church that seamlessly blended patriotism and Christianity. An American flag graced the front of the sanctuary, and from the pulpit North was instructed, “Wherever we are, the Lord has put us there to make the difference for Him.” It was all part of God’s plan.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  You fucking pervert. I catch you, you’re dead. I waited in the woods until I was sure Gerry had given up and gone back home, back to his slut-bitch. It was her fault. She made him so hot he couldn’t control himself. And when he gets that way, I can’t stop myself. I want her to get what she has coming to her. But tonight was different. I’ve never felt it so intensely. The storm was perfect. The scene was perfect, best ever. But it was too much Only When it Rains = Mil) for me tonight. I got carried away. I’ve never done that before; made noise. I’ve always managed to remain silent, dead silent. But he couldn’t have seen me clearly. Not my face, or else the police would already have been here pounding on my door, and I’d be under arrest. If Gerry knew who it was, I wouldn’t be sitting here wondering how this could have happened. But I can’t take the chance anymore. Now they know. Now they know someone watches them. They’ll be cautious. They won’t let themselves be seen any more and they’ll be looking out from now on. Will they tell their neighbours to be on the lookout, too, or just keep quiet about it? I can’t be certain. Supposing they lie in wait, set a trap? Fuck them. They’ve spoiled it. They’ve spoiled it all. And Gerry calling me a pervert. Fucking bastard. He always was a snotty prick. Thought he was so cool just because he was good- looking and the girls threw themselves at him. Stupid bitches. And now he’s worse, the prick. And calling mea pervert. What about him? Him and sweet, prim little Pammy? He was the one getting a hard-on whipping his wife’s fat dss. And her pretending she’s some trained pony, dancing around and shoving her cunt at him. Not exactly Ward and June Cleaver, now, are they? All that fresh- faced innocence they show the world is a lie, a filthy lie. Pamela all wide-eyed and honey-blond sweet, and she’s nothing more than a whore parading her wares for that cocksucker, Gerry. I'd feel sorry for him, except he isn’t worth it. I was wrong thinking he was special. He’s the pervert, not me. I take another sip of brandy. The rain has tapered off. My window is open. I can hear everything dripping; there’s no other sound, now, except a few crickets chirping, and a dog barks in the distance. The calm after the storm. A light breeze wafts in like a sigh in the wake of a tumultuous orgasm. I start feeling comfortable in the glow of the single lamp beside me. The storm has passed and I’m feeling more in control again. But everything’s changed now. It won’t be safe any more. They’ve ruined it. Gerry and Pamela Barker, Mr and Mrs Perfect Suburbanite in their neat little stick house, have spoiled all my fun.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  I put my head down and write my two articles a week. But everything I write has to pass muster with Marcia and Jan as well as other people in the marketing department, and soon I start running into roadblocks. Kim, a 25-year-old who buys ads on Facebook and Twitter, spikes stories that she fears might upset those companies. Spinner, the PR woman, kills posts that she considers controversial. I argue that a little bit of controversy is good, especially for a small company that nobody has heard of. Isn’t that partly why Halligan hired me—to stir things up, and get HubSpot some attention? It turns out I have failed to understand the mission of the blog. The blog as it turns out has nothing to do with the things Halligan talked to me about. The blog, as Zack explains to me, has one main goal, which is to generate leads for the sales department. Just like a salesperson, Jan has a monthly quota to hit, a certain number of leads that she is required to produce. Her quota is insane. The blog is supposed to generate 14,000 new leads every month. Leads are defined as people who fill out a form and hand over their name and email address. The blog gets leads by putting a little box at the end of every blog post inviting the reader to download a free e-book and “learn more.” To get the e-book, people need to fill out a form. Hardly anyone goes to all that trouble. For Jan to generate 14,000 leads, the blog has to attract about 1 million visitors a month. At the end of the month the blog team sends the fresh leads to the sales department, where telemarketers start “nurturing” them, asking them to try a demo of the product. The prospects who look at a demo are handed off to other sales reps who try to get them to buy a subscription. This process is what’s known as the funnel. The blog team sits at the top of the funnel, drawing in new visitors, generating new leads, and starting people off on their “buyer’s journey” —the lovable, nurturing trip down the funnel that we hope will end with them becoming paying customers. Our ideal reader is a small-business owner who is trying to learn about marketing, or a low-level person inside a marketing department. “Mary the Marketer” is the “buyer persona” HubSpot uses to describe this bread-and-butter target customer. We also have Ollie the Owner, who operates a small business, and Enterprise Erin, a marketing person in a big company, but Mary is our main customer. (The name of Shah’s teddy bear, Molly, is a blend of Mary and Ollie.) We have conversations about Mary all the time.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  I’ve given dozens of speeches all around the world, and nobody has ever asked me to pay for my own travel. Booking a room and a plane ticket seems like the least you can do when you ask someone to come give a talk at your event. But this is HubSpot. We do things our own way. Our company is so cool that people will pay to get coveted speaking spots at our conference. I tell Monica and Eileen that I’ll just pass word to Julia that she will have to pay for her own airfare. If she needs a place to stay, I will offer to put her up in the guest room at my house. Julia is appalled and cancels. She sends an email saying we seem to have gotten our wires crossed, and she wishes everyone the best and hopes they have a great conference. Monica and Eileen have started cc’ing Spinner and Trotsky on our messages. Spinner leaps in and says she will try to make things right with Julia. Then Trotsky jumps in, too, commenting in the thread that we’re all on. Separately, he writes an email just to me, telling me I’m being hostile and aggressive, and that I need to cool down. He says my email messages have deeply offended Monica and Eileen. They’ve been working really hard on the conference, and now I’ve started berating them. I think Trotsky’s assessment of the situation is way off, but I nonetheless send a fawning, groveling email to Monica and Eileen, saying I’m sorry if I have caused them problems and I know how hard they are working on the show, and I’m sure we can make things right. I send a copy of the apology to Trotsky so he can see what I wrote. He throws the apology back in my face. It’s no good, he says. No apology will ever make up for how I have behaved toward these women. What else can I do, I ask Trotsky. He says there’s nothing. “That ship has sailed,” he says. “You’ve alienated them. There’s no way you’re ever going to make things right with them.” Trotsky is making a big deal out of nothing, just like the thing with my little comment on Facebook about Spinner demanding a correction. He goes on and on, telling me that I’m a lousy person, that now I have dug myself into an even deeper hole. Instead of earning my way back into the good graces of the company, I’m making things worse. I show these emails—my own and Trotsky’s—to a friend who has been a C- level executive at a tech company. I ask her to be honest. I know I can be blunt sometimes, and even rude. Maybe I used a tone with Monica and Eileen that’s not appropriate in a corporate setting. My friend assures me that my emails were fine. But she is shocked by the harangues I’m getting from Trotsky.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  “Say, mate, can you help a man to a meal?” The fellow was evidently a tramp: his clothes shabby and dirty: his manner servile with a backing of truculence. I was kindly and not critical. Without a thought, I took my roll of bills out of my pocket. I meant to take off a dollar bill. As the money came to view the tramp with a pounce grabbed at it, but caught my hand as well. Instinctively I held on to my roll like grim Death, but while I was still under the shock of surprise the hobo hit me viciously in the face and plucked at the bills again. I hung on all the tighter, and angry now, struck the man in the face with my left fist. The next moment we had clenched and fallen. As luck and youth would have it, I fell on top. At once I put out all my strength, struck the fellow hard in the face and at the same time tore my bills away. The next moment I was on my feet with my roll deep in my pocket and both fists ready for the next assault. To my astonishment the hobo picked himself up and said confidingly: “I’m hungry, weak, or you wouldn’t have downed me so easy.” And then he went on with what to me seemed incredible impudence: “You should peel me off a dollar at least for hittin’ me like that,” and he stroked his jaw as if to ease the pain. “I’ve a good mind to give you in charge,” said I, suddenly realizing that I had the law on my side. “If you don’t cash up,” barked the hobo, “I’ll call the cops and say you’ve grabbed my wad.” “Call away,” I cried: “we’ll see who’ll be believed.” But the hobo knew a better trick. In a familiar wheedling voice he began again: “Come, young fellow, you’ll never miss one dollar and I’ll put you wise to a good many things here in Chicago. You had no business to pull out a wad like that, in a lonely place to tempt a hungry man....” “I was going to help you,” I said hesitatingly. “I know,” replied my weird acquaintance, “but I prefer to help myself,” and he grinned. “Take me to a hash-house: I’m hungry and I’ll put you wise to many things; you’re a tenderfoot and show it.” Clearly the hobo was the master of the situation and somehow or other his whole attitude stirred my curiosity. “Where are we to go!” I asked. “I don’t know any restaurant near here except the Fremont House.” “Hell,” cried the hobo, “only millionaires and fools go to hotels. I follow my nose for grub,” and he turned on his heel and led the way without another word down a side street and into a German dive set out with bare wooden tables and sanded floor.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Now he has a chance to tell people—and by people, I mean investors—what HubSpot does. Most people have never heard of HubSpot. Even people who have heard of HubSpot sometimes think it is a marketing agency or a consulting firm. Halligan should have a very simple brief: HubSpot is a cloud software company, selling marketing automation software and run by people from MIT. HubSpot is a leading player in a very hot market space, and the company is growing like crazy. That’s it. That’s all he needs to do. Talk about naps and plug the company. But during the interview Halligan starts rambling and talking about how HubSpot likes to hire really young people. Maybe he sees the interview as a recruiting opportunity, a way to reach Millennials. If so, he’s wrong. The Times media kit says the median age of a Times subscriber is fifty. According to the Pew Research Center, people under thirty make up only one-third of the paper’s audience. The college kids Halligan wants to hire get their news on Facebook and BuzzFeed. That’s where you go to talk about your fun-loving, youth- oriented culture. Halligan tells the Times that HubSpot is trying to “build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y’ers.” Yikes. I understand what he is trying to say, but he is getting a bit too close to saying that he would rather hire young people than old people, which is something you definitely don’t want to say in public, even if it’s true. Still, if he leaves things there, he might be okay. I read on. Next, Halligan explains that young people make better employees, especially in the technology industry, where everything is changing so fast that older people just can’t keep up. Then comes the money quote: “In the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated.” Only an imbecile would say this. Halligan is essentially admitting that Hubspot discriminates on the basis of age. Age discrimination has become a huge issue in Silicon Valley. Halligan is not the only tech CEO who prefers to hire young people; he’s just the only one dumb enough to admit it. Halligan has not just put his foot in his mouth—he has taken his foot out of his mouth and stepped on a land mine. I don’t know if Adam Bryant included these comments on purpose, knowing how incendiary they might be. Surely Halligan talked about all sorts of things in the interview, and Bryant cherry-picked which comments to publish. That’s why doing an interview is always risky. That’s also why CEOs need media training. For me, Halligan’s comments strike a nerve.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Thomas Metzinger made a similar point, emphasising the divergence of two completely different ways of thinking or experiencing: an ‘inner’ account (a ‘first-person perspective’) and an ‘outside’ account (a ‘third-person perspective’). 26 I often feel that some atheist critiques of religion are based on uninterrogated external assumptions about what religion must be and how religion must feel , lacking any sense of intellectual curiosity or cultural empathy that might motivate them to understand what religious people think and mean by words such as ‘faith’ or ‘belief’. Terry Eagleton is one of many cultural critics to make this point: ‘imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds , and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.’ 27 Philip Pullman is much more alert to the complexities of faith than Dawkins, highlighting the importance of a ‘sense that there is a power bigger than us’ which is ‘deserving of attention and respect’, while at the same time rightly expressing concerns about the entanglements of organised religion with money and political influence. 28 This tendency to misunderstand or misread religious terms may help us understand why atheist critics of religious faith often focus on purely propositional understandings of belief, or interpret God in terms of imagined teapots orbiting distant planets, or ‘sky fairies’ that do not match up with either the self-understanding or experience of religious believers. As has often been pointed out, ‘what the atheist rejects is seldom what the theologian or believer professes.’ 29 The outcome is inevitable: the dialogue partners misunderstand each other, shooting past each other rather than engaging in a meaningful conversation. Thinking of religious beliefs in terms of ‘cosmic teapots’ suggests that they are essentially a form of ‘knowledge through description’, along the same lines as scientific statements, making no personal claims on the person who holds these views. This view of religion as a misguided and outdated form of science, set out originally in James Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890), misses the point completely. 30 As Wittgenstein reminds us, we need to listen to how people use key words, and appreciate that they may understand them in ways that differ from our own intuitive sense of what they ought to mean. In discussing beliefs in public debate, I often find that my opponents present a mangled and muddled account of Christianity, sometimes derived from a somewhat uncritical reading of oracular atheistic writers (Christopher Hitchens seems to be a favourite) – not, I think, because they deliberately misrepresent it for polemical reasons, but because they don’t quite grasp what it is all about in the first place, or assume that it is so obviously deficient that no further investigation is needed. Most religions don’t have any form of creeds – formal statements of the main points of faith.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  205 her breasts — her smell drifting beyond the air and straight to his skin. He placed in her hand the tie from the dressing gown. “Blindfold me.” She felt her lips flush with new warmth and her heart beat faster. What was his strategy? A faked defensive? A blinded victim-come-villain? She didn’t pause though, feeling each gain she made could easily be lost by another interruption. So she walked behind him and brought the tie around his eyes and knotted it behind his head. She saw him shudder slightly as her fingernails dug lightly into his neck. The iPod track moved on and he.closed his eyes, feeling her presence as she moved in front again and took his hand. He felt her fingers trace the inside of his palm then move up his wrist between his skin and the sleeve. When she got as far as the seams would allow, he felt her move closer; her tongue licking from the base of his hand right up to his elbow. “You taste good.” He said nothing and stood still. Already though he was feeling his pants get tighter, as before when he had splayed her legs open on the poker table. Then he heard a noise he cquidn’t figure out; it sounded like two marble chess pieces clacking’against each another. Then he understood, just as he heard his shirt tear from the cut she had made with her teeth. She saw him bite his lip when the tear reached all the way to his left shoulder and she traced the outline of a scar, deep and ragged, stitched badly. She let her lips brush over the raised skin and breathed a kiss. “Why do you do it?” she whispered in his ear. He reached for her hand to pull it away from his scar and whispered back in her ear, his hand pressing against the faint scar on the other side of her neck. “Why do you?” She yanked his grasp from her wrist and felt the rage inside her boil over. How dare he question her life? It’s not like she had a choice. But then, it seemed neither did he. Both of them were prisoners without any freedom except for the moment. She tore the front of his shirt and the buttons scattered across the wooden floor. Enough, she thought. And with that, she launched her attack. Her fingers moved against his abdominal muscles that flinched when she lightened her touch. Even he can be ticklish. She walked around his back and pulled the rest of the shirt off, tracing his ribs, kissing them one at a time and she could hear his heart beating like tribal drums. She opened her mouth and scraped her front teeth over his back along his shoulder blades, mocking bites. * * * 206 Fett Zandersen

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Young men dodged the draft, shirking their duty to protect American interests in the face of global communism. Antiwar protesters shunned authority, advising their generation to make love, not war. Sporting long hair and flowered shirts, the young men and women of this generation seemed nearly indistinguishable, at least according to conservative critics. The failure of American soldiers to defeat a ragtag enemy testified to serious problems of American manhood, and no group felt this crisis more keenly than American evangelicals.38 For evangelicals, the problem of American manhood was at its heart a religious one, properly addressed within the Christian family. Fundamentalist megachurch pastor Jack Hyles made this case in his 1972 book How to Rear Children . The son of a distant, alcoholic father, Hyles had grown up in Texas, served in the 82nd Airborne Division in the Second World War, and later turned to ministry. In 1959, the “skinny, charismatic Bible thumper with a Southern-fried drawl and a couple of cheap suits” showed up in Hammond, Indiana, and took charge of its First Baptist Church. He quickly built the church into one of the largest Independent Fundamental Baptist churches in the nation, boasting an attendance of over 20,000 and housing “the world’s largest Sunday School.”39 Hyles’s book included a section on “How to Make a Man Out of a Boy.” Boys needed to be taught to be winners: “This is how we get our General MacArthurs. This is how Billy Sundays are made.” Teaching boys how to be good losers left you with a generation of young men who didn’t want to fight for their country and were instead “willing to let the strongest nation on earth bow down in shame before a little nation like North Vietnam.” It was up to Christian parents to rear a new generation of men, and to this end they should make boys “play with boys and with boys’ toys and games,” with “guns, cars, baseballs, basketballs, and footballs.” Boys who engaged in “feminine activities,” he warned, often ended up as “homosexuals.” A boy must be taught to fight, to “be rugged enough” to defend his home and those he loved. Hyles bought his own son a pair of boxing gloves when he was five, an air rifle at thirteen, and a .22 at fifteen. When a neighbor boy insulted Hyles’s daughter, he encouraged his son to “let him have it” and walked away as his son beat the boy bloody. Such violence was sanctified: “God pity this weak-kneed generation which stands for nothing, fights for nothing, and dies for nothing.”40 Hyles prefigured a style of militant masculinity that other evangelical pastors would perfect. Known for angry outbursts and a nasty temper, Hyles had “a penchant for ironfisted control” over his growing religious empire.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The Epic of Gilgamesh, set toward the mid-third millennium, when Sumer was militarizing, presents martial violence as the hallmark of civilization. 34 When the people beg the gods for help, Anu attempts to alleviate their suffering by giving Gilgamesh someone of his own size to fight with and siphon off some of his excessive aggression. So the Mother Goddess creates Enkidu, primeval man. He is huge, hairy, and has prodigious strength but is a gentle, kindly soul, wandering happily with the herbivores and protecting them from predators. But to fulfill Anu’s plan, Enkidu has to make the transition from peaceable barbarian to aggressive civilized man. The priestess Shamhat is given the task of educating him, and under her tutelage, Enkidu learns to reason, understand speech, and eat human food; his hair is cut, sweet oil is rubbed into his skin, and finally “he turned into a man. He put on a garment, became like a warrior. ” 35 Civilized man was essentially a man of war, full of testosterone. When Shamhat mentions Gilgamesh’s military prowess, Enkidu becomes pale with anger. “Take me to Gilgamesh!” he cries, pounding his chest. “I will shout in his face: I am the mightiest! I am the man who can make the world tremble! I am supreme!” 36 No sooner do these two alpha males set eyes on each other than they begin wrestling, careening through the streets of Uruk, thrashing limbs entwined in a near-erotic embrace, until finally, satiated, they “kissed each other and formed a friendship.” 37 By this period, the Mesopotamian aristocracy had begun to supplement its income with warfare, so in the very next episode Gilgamesh announces that he is about to lead a military expedition of fifty men to the Cedar Forest, guarded by the fearsome dragon Humbaba, to bring this precious wood back to Sumer. It was probably by such acquisition raids that the Mesopotamian cities came to dominate the northern highlands, which were rich in the luxury goods favored by the aristocracy. 38 Merchants had long been dispatched to Afghanistan, the Indus Valley, and Turkey to bring back timber, rare and base metals, and precious and semiprecious stones. 39 But for an aristocrat like Gilgamesh, the only noble way to acquire these scarce resources was by force. In all future agrarian states, aristocrats would be distinguished from the rest of the population by their ability to live without working.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Liberation priests were dubbed “ communists” and, like Iranian clerics, were imprisoned, tortured, and executed because they made it clear that the economic order imposed on the “Third World” by the colonial West was inherently violent: For centuries, Latin America has been a region of violence. We are talking of the violence that a privileged minority has been using, since the colonial period, to exploit the vast majority of the people. We are talking of the violence of hunger, of helplessness, of underdevelopment … of illegal but existing slavery, of social, intellectual, and economic discrimination. 82 They insisted that because the world was now so economically interdependent, a North American individual was able to live a comfortable life only because other people, living perhaps in a Brazilian slum, were impoverished; they could purchase goods cheaply because others had been exploited in their production. 83 In the United States too, religion acquired a revolutionary edge and for the first time in the twentieth century opposed the policies of the American government. While presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were careful to keep religion out of politics, liberal Catholics, Protestants, and Jews campaigned in the name of their faith against the structural and military violence of the United States. Like Iranian Shii Muslims, they took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War and joined Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement against racial discrimination at home. In 1962 the National Council of Churches asked Kennedy to commit the nation to “an all-out effort to abolish [poverty], both at home and abroad.” 84 Khomeini, often thought in the West to be a rabble-rouser, was not advocating violence. The crowds who protested on the streets were unarmed, and their deaths laid bare the ruthless ferocity of the shah’s secular regime. The assassination of Martin Luther King, who had insisted that a nonviolent response to injury was “an absolute necessity for our survival … the key to the solution of the problems of our world,” 85 also revealed the latent violence of American society. King would have agreed with Khomeini’s demand for global justice. He had lamented Kennedy’s disastrous colonial misadventure in the Bay of Pigs (1961), and even though Johnson had given African Americans more than any previous president, he refused to support his war in Vietnam. But in the late 1970s, when the Iranian revolution broke out, the mood in the West had changed.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  I hold my hands in front of me, these fingers, the things they’ve done. They cannot guess at the person standing next to them. I glance up at the old white granny with the funny white gloves. Her brittle bones. Once alone, an easy kill. Old blood is like old wine. But what would her grandchildren say? “Tf the bank has got a hold of you, and it’s got your house, and it’s got your car and it — it has broken your heart, the Lord wants to heal you. If your boyfriend or your husband has left you, or your wife has left you, the Lord wants to heal you. If-if-if-if you had some drugs in the past, and-and-and you’re burning up for drugs, but you say to yourself ‘this is not God’ and your heart is broken and you’re alone, somebody help me, God wants to heal your broken heart. ‘I may tell all my bones’ the Bible says right here, ‘I may tell all my bones, they look and they stare at me, they part my garments among them and cast lots—’ ” “Shut up!” I murmur at him. “Stupid bastard! With your fucking fake language! You don’t know anything about the Devil. Not like me! I’ll bite your dick off in pieces and play with your guts!” Ruby looks at me shocked, no one else seems to have heard. A gob of pink foam drops from my lips to the floor. I give her a look and she moves away from me. “ “Be thou not far from me’ — hallelujah! —- ‘Oh, Lord, Oh my strength, haste thee to help me— ” “Shut up! Pll fucking kill you!” I yell again, this time for real. “Ill cut your dick off and fuck your skull with it!” Eddie has been standing next to me with his hands in the air as though being arrested, weeping his little heart out and going babababa. But he stops and looks at me shocked. “What do you think you’re looking at, you big nigger bastard? Are you looking at my tits? Do you want to fuck me?”’ I yell at him, holding out my breasts. “You buck nigger bastard? Is that it? I’m the devil! ’'m the demon! I can tear your throat out and not give a fucking damn about any of you! I’m the devil!” He’s staring at me, but no one seems to notice yet. I fling my hands up over my ears. “Stop!” I am turning in circles now with my arms over my head. “Go away!” “ “Deliver my soul O Lord, ” says the preacher man, “ ‘deliver my soul from the sword— ” “Get away from me! I'll hurt you. I’ve killed so many people. More than everybody! I want blood! So much blood! So many people!” “ “— and my darling from the power of the dog. Save me from the lion’s mouth— ” The Lady and the Unicorn 509

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  be lost on other monarchs; some modern historians have termed this system in early medieval Europe ‘resource polygyny’. [70] In Irish society both before and after its adoption of Christianity, marital strategies more obviously tipped into polygyny, though the early legal texts do not in any case seem as preoccupied as those elsewhere by what constituted a legal marriage. [71] Nevertheless, the Irish recognized clear gradations of marital status, so an institution equivalent to concubinage was widespread: alongside marriage to a principal wife (cétmuinter), a prominent man might sustain relationships with an adaltrach (spouse), or maybe more than one, who would benefit from his financial support and protection, while he could enjoy the same potential genealogical benefits as in Merovingian practice. [72] Similar systems can be recognized in pre-Christian Viking-age Scandinavia, though here concubinage was linked to slavery, which became such a feature of Scandinavian raids right across Europe, and it was coupled with a much more flexible attitude to inheritance than elsewhere, including children from casual liaisons. [73] The Scandinavian conversion to Christianity was piecemeal and late – a process gradually extending from the ninth century – and most of the literature that describes these arrangements, both sagas and lawcodes, postdates official Christian arrival. Nevertheless, it shows that polygyny effectively survived. Looking northward from the German coast, the eleventh-century clerical chronicler Adam of Bremen observed that in contemporary Sweden men had several women each, and that all their children were treated as legitimate. [74] Twelfth-century Norwegian laws drafted under the influence of the Church prohibit plural marriages, a sure indication that they were still common at the time. It is significant that the lawcode also lays down differential fines to be paid to the local bishop for keeping a slave woman or concubine, or for having plural wives: the latter fine was twice the former. [75] The further out the territory in a society that had adopted Christian faith, the later was the survival of a discrepancy between official Christian views on marriage, divorce and clerical celibacy and the actual practice: in the case of Iceland, it was right into the thirteenth century, regardless of the personal esteem in which Icelanders held those among their bishops who were attempting reform. [76] For Churchmen at the end of the Carolingian age, amid many initiatives of reform, there was therefore much to ponder and deplore. One can savour the frustration and anger of Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, writing around 1074 to the most prominent Irish king of his day, Toirdelbach Úa Briain of Munster. He raged against various disgraceful and improper practices in Ireland, including Irish customs around marriage, divorce and concubinage contrary to canon law; around the same time he also badgered Guthric, subordinate king to Toirdelbach in Dublin, on that theme. It would have been frustrating to Lanfranc that he had little power to interfere across the water on an island where Christians might cheerfully turn to the Old Testament, as alert polygynists have always been able to do. As an eighth-century Irish lawcode commented, ‘there is a dispute in Irish law as to which is more proper, whether many sexual unions or a single one: for the chosen people of God [that is, the Israelites] lived in a plurality of unions, so that it is not easier to condemn it than to praise it.’ [77] It would take both time and thought to persuade the rulers of western Europe to conform to what the Church hierarchy wanted – indeed, first the Church had to decide exactly what it did want. Lanfranc was a voice from a new world, which from the eleventh century onwards built on what we have surveyed, but which also represented a new and unprecedented formation of a Christian society. From the previous five or six centuries, the new programme inherited campaigns to impose Benedictine standards on monastic life, to move even non-monastic clergy away from marriage and towards celibacy, and to persuade the laity that their marriages should reflect the form of monogamy that the Church had set as the sole standard in marital partnership. None of these campaigns remained anywhere near completion in 1000, but the developing parochial structure and the growing practice of individual penance provided a framework in which they could continue. Additionally, Western Christians had meditated on a new place for Mary in the Christian dispensation and had come to a new understanding of what they were doing when they came to the Eucharist. Around these existing elements, eleventh-century Latin Churchmen promoted what can only be described as a revolution in sexuality. Part Four TWO WESTERN REVOLUTIONS

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Indeed so: Theodore’s penitential provisions for his English flock, carefully setting out circumstances in which second marriages were allowable, contrast starkly with any other contemporary or future Western regulations. It is significant that, despite Theodore’s golden long-term reputation in Anglo-Saxon memory and the lasting effect of many of his legal provisions, his views on marriage were thrust aside in the general hardening of Western Latin attitudes against divorce. [20] The contrast between traditions on marriage stemming respectively from Augustine and Basil underlines the fact that, otherwise, our marital journey from Jovinian via Ambrose and Jerome on to Augustine has been our first sexual adventure experienced almost exclusively within Latin Western Christianity. Augustine, so crucial in shaping the life and thought of the West, himself spoke little Greek and was not greatly aware of what his distinguished Greek theological contemporaries were saying. Even his knowledge of ancient Greek philosophy, the ocean in which Greek theologians unselfconsciously swam, was mostly at one remove, through the writings of ‘Neo-Platonist’ philosophers of the second and third centuries CE. That did not stop Augustine praising Plato and commenting in his mammoth discussion of God’s purposes in The City of God that Platonists were esteemed among Christians ‘above the rest of the philosophers’. Perhaps surprisingly, it was his Platonism that opened another gulf between West and East. [21] Augustine’s affirmation of Plato was part of his classically Platonic description of God: utterly transcendent, perfect and remote from contact with his human creation, despite the puzzling biblical contrary that we are created in God’s image. That view of God alone might have propelled Augustine towards his proposition that God’s perfection could never be swayed into changing the divine purpose for every individual human, which therefore encompassed not merely salvation but eternal damnation: a ‘double’ predestination, therefore. Yet, in the latter half of Augustine’s career, theological conflicts further propelled him into peculiarly pitiless versions of that thought, just as Jovinian’s bold statements on baptism had weaponized Jerome’s attitude to sex. The result was a distinctively Western insistence on predestination as a framework for human destiny, coupled with a connection between sex and sin which was peculiarly North African in origin, and which Eastern theology did not make. As in the case of Jovinian, the cockpit of conflict was in Rome. Jerome’s abrupt and enforced leave-taking of the city in 385 (above, Chapter 8) left opportunities for other aspiring spiritual consultants to the Roman aristocracy, notably the British monk Pelagius. Pelagius’s campaign to instil a strenuous genuine devotional practice in his wealthy clientele led to a theology emphasizing individual human responsibility in striving for salvation. This is what provoked Augustine’s fury, especially because Pelagius had rashly taken his name in vain, criticizing a prayer in Confessions: ‘you command me to be continent.

• From The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Volume 10 (2011)

  “Tm sorry?” Laura stormed off. She knew as well as Harry that he wasn’t sorry. He’d been fucking the laundry for years. Her footfalls in the kitchen came fast and loud, but Harry would be damned if he didn’t finish. He was still a man with principles, no matter the work or fetish. With a few sudsy pumps, he emptied his load into the wad of fabric, then tossed it back into the machine. Laura wasn’t in the kitchen by the time he made it upstairs, his belt loose and dangling. flaurar: Since the children had gone, the need for discretion had dissipated as far as Harry was concerned. Laura might not agree, but she’d grown cold ever since menopause, which in turn fueled Harry’s thread lust. “Fuck it,” he said to himself. Harry looked out the window. Laura’s car was absent from the driveway, the space offering a loud, prophetic echo of things to come. Shaking his head, he noticed his neighbor, Marla Johnson, hanging laundry on the clothesline. With his belt already undone, getting his pants off was a snap. He jacked himself dry on to the window pane while watching her shake and clip, shake and clip, soppy jeans and white brassieres, her fingers _ well versed, her lipstick red. When Harry was spent, he slunk off to the bedroom and lay down, thoughts of stretched socks and ratty nylon ushering him to a peaceful mid-morning slumber. * * * 488 Mel Bosworth “Wake up, Harry. I’m leaving you.” It was past noon, and Laura stood at the foot of the bed clutching a suitcase. Harry flopped around, cock caught in a soiled pillowcase, balls tucked into the sleeve of a T-shirt. Laura looked away as he gathered himself. “Where are you going?” “I’m going to stay with Heather for now. [’ll be gone for two weeks, Harry. I don’t want to see even a trace of you when I get back.” Harry sat up, absently pawing a pair of boxer briefs. He brought them to his nose, and sniffed. His cock stirred, rose, then whapped against his naked stomach. Laura’s face twisted like a sheet in a tornado. “This is exactly what I’m talking about, Harry. You and your fetish. It’s taken over. I thought I could handle it, I thought I might one day be a part of it, but you’re not interested in me anymore. You’re only interested in fucking baseball caps and fleece jackets.” “T never really got into baseball caps, Laura.” Harry’s attempt to defend himself only incited Laura’s rage. She swung the suitcase wildly, the hard nubs on the bottom grazing Harry’s forehead. He fell back, a girlish scream slipping from his lips. Laura laughed. “You’re such a bitch, Harry. If only the children could see you now.”

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  The break did not surprise me: I had taught her that youth was the first requisite in a lover for a woman of her type: she had doubtless put my precepts into practice: Mr. Wilson was probably as near the ideal as I was and very much nearer to hand. The passions of the senses demand propinquity and satisfaction and nothing is more forgetful than pleasures of the flesh. If Mrs. Mayhew had given me little, I had given her even less of my better self. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ HARD TIMES AND NEW LOVES Chapter XII. So far I had had more good fortune than falls to the lot of most youths starting in life; now I was to taste ill-luck and be tried as with fire. I had been so taken up with my own concerns that I had hardly given a thought to public affairs; now I was forced to take a wider view. One day Kate told me that Willie was heavily in arrears: he had gone back to Deacon Conkling’s to live on the other side of the Kaw River and I had naturally supposed that he had paid up everything before leaving. Now I found that he owed the Gregorys sixty dollars on his own account and more than that on mine. I went across to him really enraged. If he had warned me, I should not have minded so much; but to leave the Gregorys to tell me, made me positively dislike him and I did not know then the full extent of his selfishness. Years later my sister told me that he had written time and again to my father and got money from him, alleging that it was for me and that I was studying and couldn’t earn anything: “Willie kept us poor, Frank”, she said, and I could only bow my head; but if I had known this fact at the time, it would have changed all my relations with Willie. As it was, I found him in the depths. Carried away by his optimism, he had bought real estate in 1871 and 1872, mortgaged it for more than he gave and as the boom continued, he had repeated this game time and again till on paper and in paper he reckoned he had made a hundred thousand dollars. This he had told me and I was glad of it for his sake, unfeignedly glad.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  W. L. George in “A Novelist on Novels” writes: “If a novelist were to develop his characters evenly the three hundred page novel might extend to five hundred, the additional two hundred pages would be made up entirely of the sex preoccupations of the characters. There would be as many scenes in the bedroom as in the drawing-room, probably more, as more time is passed in the sleeping apartment. The additional two hundred pages would offer pictures of the sex side of the characters and would compel them to become alive: at present they often fail to come to life because they only develop, say five sides out of six.... Our literary characters are lop-sided because their ordinary traits are fully portrayed while their sex-life is cloaked, minimized or left out.... Therefore the characters in modern novels are all false. They are megalocephalous and emasculate. English women speak a great deal about sex.... It is a cruel position for the English novel. The novelist may discuss anything but the main preoccupation of life.... we are compelled to pad out with murder, theft and arson which as everybody knows, are perfectly moral things to write about.” Pure is the snow—till mixed with mire— But never half so pure as fire. There are graver reasons than any I have yet given why the truth should be told boldly. The time has come when those who are, as Shakespeare called them, “God’s Spies” having learned the mystery of things, should be called to counsel, for the ordinary political guides have led mankind to disaster: blind leaders of the blind! Over Niagara we have plunged, as Carlyle predicted, and as every one with vision must have foreseen and now like driftwood we move round and round the whirlpool impotently without knowing whither or why. One thing certain: we deserve the misery into which we have fallen. The laws of this world are inexorable and don’t cheat! Where, when, how have we gone astray? The malady is as wide as civilization which fortunately narrows the enquiry to time. Ever since our conquest of natural forces began, towards the end of the eighteenth century, and material wealth increased by leaps and bounds, our conduct has deteriorated. Up to that time we had done the gospel of Christ mouth-honor at least; and had to some slight extent shown consideration if not love to our fellowmen: we did not give tithes to charity; but we did give petty doles till suddenly science appeared to reinforce our selfishness with a new message: progress comes through the blotting out of the unfit, we were told, and self-assertion was preached as a duty: the idea of the Superman came into life and the Will to Power and thereby Christ’s teaching of love and pity and gentleness was thrust into the background. At once we men gave ourselves over to wrong doing and our iniquity took monstrous forms.