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 Between the World and Me (2015)

  Do you remember standing with me and your mother, during one of our visits to Gettysburg, outside the home of Abraham Brian? We were with a young man who’d educated himself on the history of black people in Gettysburg. He explained that Brian Farm was the far end of the line that was charged by George Pickett on the final day of Gettysburg. He told us that Brian was a black man, that Gettysburg was home to a free black community, that Brian and his family fled their home for fear of losing their bodies to the advancing army of enslavement, led by the honored and holy Confederate general Robert E. Lee, whose army was then stealing black people from themselves and selling them south. George Pickett and his troops were repulsed by the Union Army. Standing there, a century and a half later, I thought of one of Faulkner’s characters famously recalling how this failure tantalized the minds of all “Southern” boys—“It’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun….” All of Faulkner’s Southern boys were white. But I, standing on the farm of a black man who fled with his family to stay free of the South, saw Pickett’s soldiers charging through history, in wild pursuit of their strange birthright—the right to beat, rape, rob, and pillage the black body. That is all of what was “in the balance,” the nostalgic moment’s corrupt and unspeakable core. But American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream. Historians conjured the Dream. Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories. John Carter flees the broken Confederacy for Mars. We are not supposed to ask what, precisely, he was running from. I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “Uh, Steve?” He was looking really nervous and tried to cover it by fiddling with the salt shaker. “Um, I had a little problem with the bank today. Nothing serious,” he said quickly, like he was trying to reassure me. “I took care of it already. But I figured I’d better tell you. You’re busy. We can talk about it later.” Eric was nodding a lot as he talked. As he finished he turned like he was going to walk back into the other room. He froze in midstep when I turned the sauce off and said, “I’m not busy at all. What’s up?” I think he recognized the chill in my voice. I was trying to keep my temper under control, even though I was relieved he was being man enough to admit having screwed up. Honesty is important to me, especially now that we have a home life together. But damn, I was mad at that boy. The week before he’d bought another fancy new video game. I was willing to bet money he hadn’t recorded the transaction, at least until it was too late. Eric hemmed and hawed around the topic, but he finally confessed to writing a bad check for the car payment because—you guessed it—he hadn’t recorded the other debit and a couple more besides. He’d suddenly remembered that morning, but by then it was too late. “I transferred the money from savings though,” he said, still nodding vigorously. “The bank said the payment is credited as of today, so it’s all taken care of. There’s nothing for you to worry about.” “But my credit record still shows a late payment on a loan I cosigned for,” I said coldly. “Well, yeah,” he blushed. “But like I said, I took care of it.” “Then there’s something else we need to take care of,” I said sternly. “What did I tell you would happen if you were late?” “Now Steve, th-there’s no cause to be hasty,” he stammered. His eyes were big as an owl’s. I could tell he was nervous, but I wasn’t in the mood to put up with any of his guff. Times like this, I really wish his father had done his job. “I’m not being hasty, boy,” I said. “I’m angry. And you’re going to get what’s coming to you. Go downstairs and get a switch from the poplar tree.” “Dammit, Steve! It’s just a car payment!” he fumed. “Yes, it is.” I said coldly. “One that you purchased using my credit, and now I’ve got a late payment on my record. I warned you, Eric. I told you what I’d do if this happened, but you didn’t pay one lick of attention. Now you go downstairs and get a switch, or so help me, boy, if I have get it myself, I’ll break it over your butt!”

• From Little Women (1868)

  How do you like it?" She thought it would annoy him, but he only folded his arms under his head, with an imperturbable, "That's not bad. Thank you, ladies." "Do you want to know what I honestly think of you?" "Pining to be told." "Well, I despise you." If she had even said 'I hate you' in a petulant or coquettish tone, he would have laughed and rather liked it, but the grave, almost sad, accent in her voice made him open his eyes, and ask quickly... "Why, if you please?" "Because, with every chance for being good, useful, and happy, you are faulty, lazy, and miserable." "Strong language, mademoiselle." "If you like it, I'll go on." "Pray do, it's quite interesting." "I thought you'd find it so. Selfish people always like to talk about themselves." "Am I selfish?" the question slipped out involuntarily and in a tone of surprise, for the one virtue on which he prided himself was generosity. "Yes, very selfish," continued Amy, in a calm, cool voice, twice as effective just then as an angry one. "I'll show you how, for I've studied you while we were frolicking, and I'm not at all satisfied with you. Here you have been abroad nearly six months, and done nothing but waste time and money and disappoint your friends." "Isn't a fellow to have any pleasure after a four-year grind?" "You don't look as if you'd had much. At any rate, you are none the better for it, as far as I can see. I said when we first met that you had improved. Now I take it all back, for I don't think you half so nice as when I left you at home. You have grown abominably lazy, you like gossip, and waste time on frivolous things, you are contented to be petted and admired by silly people, instead of being loved and respected by wise ones. With money, talent, position, health, and beauty, ah you like that old Vanity! But it's the truth, so I can't help saying it, with all these splendid things to use and enjoy, you can find nothing to do but dawdle, and instead of being the man you ought to be, you are only..." there she stopped, with a look that had both pain and pity in it. "Saint Laurence on a gridiron," added Laurie, blandly finishing the sentence. But the lecture began to take effect, for there was a wide-awake sparkle in his eyes now and a half-angry, half-injured expression replaced the former indifference. "I supposed you'd take it so. You men tell us we are angels, and say we can make you what we will, but the instant we honestly try to do you good, you laugh at us and won't listen, which proves how much your flattery is worth." Amy spoke bitterly, and turned her back on the exasperating martyr at her feet.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  I’ve heard that, back in the day, Rita Mae Brown once tried to convince fellow lesbians to abandon their children in order to join the movement. But generally speaking, even in the most radical feminist and/or lesbian separatist circles, there have always been children around (Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Karen Finley, Pussy Riot … the list could go on and on). Yet rather than fade away with the rise of queer parenthood of all stripes, the tired binary that places femininity, reproduction, and normativity on one side and masculinity, sexuality, and queer resistance on the other has lately reached a kind of apotheosis, often posing as a last, desperate stand against homo- and heteronormativity, both. In his polemic No Future, Lee Edelman argues that “queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.” Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital Is and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. Or, to use a queer artist friend’s more succinct slogan, Don’t produce and don’t reproduce. I know that Edelman is talking about the Child, not children per se, and that my artist friend is likely more concerned with jamming the capitalist status quo than with prohibiting the act of childbirth. And I too feel like jamming a stick in someone’s eye every time I hear “protecting the children” as a rationale for all kinds of nefarious agendas, from arming kindergarten teachers to dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran to gutting all social safety nets to extracting and burning through what’s left of the world’s fossil fuel supply. But why bother fucking this Child when we could be fucking the specific forces that mobilize and crouch behind its image? Reproductive futurism needs no more disciples. But basking in the punk allure of “no future” won’t suffice, either, as if all that’s left for us to do is sit back and watch while the gratuitously wealthy and greedy shred our economy and our climate and our planet, crowing all the while about how lucky the jealous roaches are to get the crumbs that fall from their banquet. Fuck them, I say.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  I remember, around age ten, beholding the scene in The Shining in which the hot young woman whom Jack Nicholson is lewdly embracing in the haunted hotel bathroom ages rapidly in his arms, screeching from nubile chick to putrefying corpse within seconds. I understood that the scene was supposed to represent some kind of primal horror. This was The Shining, after all. But the image of that decaying, cackling crone, her arms outstretched in desire toward the man who is backing away, has stayed with me for three decades, as a type of friend. She’s part baths-ghost, part mad-Naomi. She didn’t get the memo about being beyond wanting or being wanted. Or perhaps she just means to scare the shit out of him, which she does. At one point in her book The Buddhist, Dodie Bellamy takes Jonathan Franzen to task for the following description of a middle-aged woman found in his novel Freedom: “Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence—the drama of being her—was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation. Katz had encountered, practically verbatim, the same provocation a hundred times before, which put him in the ridiculous position now of feeling bad for being unable to pretend to be provoked: of pitying Lucy’s doughty little ego, its flotation on a sea of aging-female insecurity.” Bellamy responds: “Due to all the stagy point of view switches the novel apparently employs, I’d thought of assigning it to students, but after reading the above passage I was like, not in 100 fucking years…. Middle aged women are such easy prey, like they’re supposed to walk around with eyes averted, hanging their heads in shame at their wreckage.” She then offers “a sappy image of a crone to wipe out the evil Franzen-view.”

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  You and I, my son, are that “below.” That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. But because they believe themselves to be white, they would rather countenance a man choked to death on film under their laws. And they would rather subscribe to the myth of Trayvon Martin, slight teenager, hands full of candy and soft drinks, transforming into a murderous juggernaut. And they would rather see Prince Jones followed by a bad cop through three jurisdictions and shot down for acting like a human. And they would rather reach out, in all their sanity, and push my four-year-old son as though he were merely an obstacle in the path of their too-important day. I was there, Samori. No. I was back in Baltimore surrounded by them boys. I was on my parents’ living room floor, staring out at that distant world, impenetrable to me. I was in all the anger of my years. I was where Eric Garner must have been in his last moments—“This stops today,” he said and was killed. I felt the cosmic injustice, even though I did not fully understand it. I had not yet been to Gettysburg. I had not read Thavolia Glymph. All I had was the feeling, the weight. I did not yet know, and I do not fully know now. But part of what I know is that there is the burden of living among Dreamers, and there is the extra burden of your country telling you the Dream is just, noble, and real, and you are crazy for seeing the corruption and smelling the sulfur. For their innocence, they nullify your anger, your fear, until you are coming and going, and you find yourself inveighing against yourself—“Black people are the only people who…”—really inveighing against your own humanity and raging against the crime in your ghetto, because you are powerless before the great crime of history that brought the ghettos to be.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Tell him his old mum had two sons last she checked, and it’s been weeks since she’s heard from the one she carried.” He said, “We love you, Teresa.” —It was the absolute middle of the night, Yale could tell without rolling toward the clock, when he heard the door and then the refrigerator, when he saw the hall light through his eyelids. He said, “Charlie?” There was no answer, so he sat up, swung his feet off the bed. And there was Charlie’s silhouette, leaning against the doorframe. Drunk. Yale would have shouted if he were more awake, but he could just barely manage to speak. “What the fuck happened?” “I could ask the same.” “No, you couldn’t. No, you could not. I go—I go upstairs for five minutes. What the hell time is it?” He grabbed his alarm clock, turned the red numbers toward himself: 3:52 a.m. “What happened to you?” “I went out after.” “After what ?” “The raid.” “There—the cops came?” It was the first thing he’d considered, but he’d dismissed it so quickly. “What? No. After we went to Nico’s.” Yale looked around the room, made sure he was awake. Charlie said, “Look, I don’t know when you vanished, but by the time we went to Nico’s, you were missing. I hope you had a brilliant time. I hope it was splendid.” Yale said, idiotically, “You went to Nico’s.” “We raided his apartment.” “Oh.” “We went— You know how his parents weren’t going to let Terrence back in. But Terrence had a key, and he was—were you gone by then?” Charlie hadn’t moved from the doorway. It seemed to take him great effort to assemble a sentence, even to form consonants. “He had the key and he showed it to Richard, and Richard said we should all go there straightaway. And we did. And Fiona’s going to cover for us. And we got his stuff. Look.” He started unwrapping something from his own neck. Backlit as Charlie was, Yale could only see the long untwisting of it. “Is that Nico’s scarf?” He was trying to piece it together. That everyone had abandoned their drinks en masse and walked to Clark to divvy up Nico’s belongings. That they had pillaged, in the best possible way. And he hadn’t been there. Nico wore that stripy orange scarf everywhere. It was how you’d recognize him from across a winter street. “What about the servers? The boys with the food?” “I imagine they took off. We just moved the party. But you were already doing lord knows what.” “Charlie, I was lying down . For like five minutes, upstairs.” Maybe it had been half an hour, but wasn’t it basically the same? “I know where you were. It was a great topic of conversation.” “And no one came to get me?” “We didn’t want to interrupt you.” Charlie seemed furious—seething, barely holding something in. “From lying down with an upset stomach?” “Everyone saw you go up with Teddy.” “Teddy?

• From Like Family

  She was a foster parent—I’d heard her talking about it at break to a woman named Raylene who called all her patients her “babies.” There I was, microwaving chicken noodle soup, trying to act like I wasn’t listening while Lupe went on about it, selling the idea to Raylene as if it were a piece of questionable real estate. “It’s easy,” she said, “not bad at all, and you can’t beat the money.” Her husband wanted to buy a hot tub, and if they took in one more foster kid, they’d probably be able to swing it. The microwave whined and spun my bowl, which had gone volcanic, salty broth bubbling over the sides, adhering to the ceramic like a chicken-colored membrane. I had ruined it, cooked it to death. There was nothing to do but chuck the whole thing, bowl and all, into the trash—or dump it over Lupe’s head to watch the noodles burn worm tracks down her face and swim in her ears. That was the other way to go. I chose the trash and a long spell in the closet where we kept the underwear of patients who had died or been transferred, or whose families simply forgot to label their clothes. Floor to ceiling, there were shelves of disintegrating camisoles, no-elastic granny panties and sad, stained Jockey shorts. I sat in there with the homeless underwear and thought about what Lupe had said, and what it meant for the foster kids she had at home who were surely clueless about their role in the family. And what about my sisters and me? Had the Spinozas been hoping to pave their drive with welfare checks? Is that how Bub helped pay for his endless projects and toys? Maybe so. It certainly was more plausible than philanthropy. And what about the Clapps, who clearly had plenty? We wouldn’t have been useful even as pin money, so what, then? Why were we there? As fresh meat? Something for Mrs. Clapp to wrap in plastic? Something for Mr. Clapp to do with his evenings? Break was over, but I sat for a while longer. I let myself imagine, in pointed detail, a horrible disease that would make Lupe lose her teeth and hair and grow oozing warts on her lips; imagined how long it would take her to bleed to death if I went at her spleen with a spoon. And then I got up and went to work. [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] AFTER BERRY AND I both shifted to nights, we slid into a routine of sneaking cookies and Kool-Aid from the med room and going down to Jerry Kovitch’s private room to watch Star Search on his twenty-seven-inch TV. Berry wasn’t working the night I found Eleanor Pierce in the med room. It was late, maybe ten o’clock, and all the patients were down. I made my rounds slowly, walking past folded wheelchairs, pleasantly aware of how quiet even my own steps were.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  “Judy Blume had this beautiful opportunity to teach kids a lesson, if she’d just given an example of suffering or punishment. But the girl doesn’t get pregnant or have a nervous breakdown,” Worrall said. Some of the other moms were less incensed, but still wary of Blume’s latest. One noted that although she didn’t like the book, she hoped that if her daughter Christiane were to have premarital sex, she would take a cue from Katherine and use birth control. Another mother, named Ellie Griffith, took a different stance. “She has the right to publish what she wants,” Griffith said about Blume. “But when she comes out with a book like ‘Forever’ she should use a pen name.” Despite their mothers’ objections, the girls all seemed well acquainted with the book’s contents, so much so that “mention of [certain] page numbers alone is enough to set off shrieks,” Maynard wrote. (This was the analog precursor to BookTok, where among more literary-minded chatter, young influencers point their followers toward reads with particularly spicy sex scenes.) And even though the girls were fluent in Forever ’s juiciest passages, not one of them was actually having sex or planning to do so anytime soon. Most of the girls were thirteen years old, and to them, the boys at school were still “weird” and “gross.” “How could you look them in the eye afterward?” Christiane said about doing the deed. Maynard interviewed Blume for the article, and the author defended Forever the same way she would stand up for all her most controversial titles in the years to come. She said that children are not immune to life’s harshest realities, and silence from adults doesn’t help. “I hate the idea that you should always protect children,” she said. “Sexuality and death—those are the two big secrets we try to keep from children, partly because the adult world isn’t comfortable with them either. But it certainly hasn’t kept kids from being frightened of those things.” She also maintained that despite the notoriety of certain passages, sex was not why kids were voraciously reading Forever , or any of her novels. “I can’t entirely explain why they do, myself,” Blume said. “I know I’m no great literary figure. But it has something to do with my feeling about kids.” More likely it was a mixture of both. This was long before the internet and iPhones dropped the virtual Kama Sutra into everybody’s pockets. Judy was offering up information kids couldn’t find anywhere else and she was doing it in an accessible, entertaining way. Schools weren’t telling adolescent girls that they’d have to practice at sex in order for it to be pleasurable. Parents, for the most part, weren’t volunteering information about birth control, or about being “mentally ready,” or what it might feel like to have intercourse and then fall disappointingly out of love. Without access to this kind of nuanced education—beyond the birds and the bees—children turned to Blume.

• From Action (2014)

  Consent includes accounting for and protecting your physical health. You should always use some kind of barrier method that prevents STIs, like a condom, if you’re having sex without also looking to conceive a kiddo. To be extra-safe throughout your encounter, you should also periodically check to make sure that barrier method stays in place. People can be surprisingly and infuriatingly boneheaded about this! Once upon a night that started out promisingly, I caught someone I was with trying to remove a condom without telling me. What a nightmare, right? When he explained that he assumed I’d be “chill about it,” I freaked. How dare anyone treat anyone else with complete disregard for their health or personhood—and then be an idiot bro who tries to project his grossness onto me BY USING THE WORD “CHILL” AS AN ADJECTIVE. Yo, I became a banshee. I fucking hate that guy, and I wish I could tell the world his name so that he could see exactly how chill I am. On the other end of the consensual spectrum, a recent hookup asked me if I’d gotten the Gardasil shot (an HPV vaccine). This sounds a lot less charming than it was, but trust me! I was kissing this person for the first time, and, even though it was unclear whether things would go further, he wanted to let me know before they did that he carried the virus, so any decisions I made that evening would be informed ones. “That’s admirable of you to tell me,” I said, feeling a little too impressed. His response was even better: “It’s not! I just think you have the right to know whether I could potentially be giving you something like that.” That is exactly how to be! In case anyone tries to tell you that pausing an experience to ask questions, provide information, and/or make sure all of the proceedings are cool with your partner “kills the mood,” let me tell you, his honesty made me like him even more, which is usually the case with any kind of sexual encounter—or every brand of life encounter. It doesn’t make me want to have sex with a person less if they let me know they want me to like it, including after we split ways. That’s just bad logic. Sex, like any way of relating to another person, is at its very greatest when you and the cohort you’ve chosen to hang around with listen to each other and generally make a point of keeping kindness and respect at the forefronts of your minds. I know that part won’t be hard for you. Even though hooking up with other people can be unpredictable, I hope you go into every situation knowing and trusting that whatever your sexual parameters are, they’re exactly the right ones to work inside of. You know what you want—and so should anyone on the other end of whatever that means for you. Go get it. Gender, Neutrally

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “You are required by law to attend the emancipation hearing of Regina M. Calcaterra,” she recites. “What are you, fucking Queen Elizabeth? I got friends, you know. I know what emancipation means.” Camille slides to sit on the bed next to me. Cookie lights another cigarette. “There’s been a lot of confusion,” my sister says. “But Regina and I are always talking about how we miss being a family.” “What the fuck do you two want?” “We want to see you. And Norman and Rosie.” I pipe in. “And you know, it won’t be long before I’m eighteen.” I remember how Ms. Harvey suggested I try to maintain contact with Cookie in the event I need a place to go when I age out of foster care. I tell Cookie: “I’ll have the choice of who I want to live with. Who knows, maybe we’ll want to be a family again. Maybe things could be normal.” “Regina, you’ve been running away from me since the day you sprouted legs,” she says. “If you think for half a second that I’ll support you when you’re an adult, then you better quit whatever it is you’re smokin’ now.” “We just want you in our life . . . Mom.” The word tastes like vinegar in my mouth. “Well, you little assholes should have thought of that before the county asked me to RSVP to the Regina Calcaterra Independence Day Parade.” She takes a drag off her cigarette. “Is Cherie waiting for you in the car? Get the fuck out of here.” Camille and I exchange a glance, rise, and approach the kids to hug them good-bye. When Camille takes off outside, I follow, slamming the door to Cookie’s motel room so hard the windows shake. IN APRIL , CAMILLE is watching me closely. I’m not eating again, thanks to the nerves the emancipation hearing is kicking up in my stomach. “You don’t even have to go,” Camille says. “Ms. Harvey is your court-appointed guardian, she’ll be doing all the talking.” With how poorly she’s protected the kids these last few months, unfortunately that information is zero comfort. The afternoon of the hearing, when Camille and I arrive home from school, Addie’s in the kitchen tapping her finger on a cup of coffee. “What?” I ask her. “The news isn’t good?” “It’s good for you,” Addie says. “You won by default.” “Default?” “Your mother didn’t show up to the hearing. The judge made a default judgment against her.” “Regina!” Camille says. “You did it!” “Wait,” I ask Addie, pulling back from Camille’s hug. “Rosie and Norm: They’re free from her, too?” “Regina, that’s the bittersweet part,” Addie says. “You don’t have any control over what happens to your brother and sister. For now, the court decided to leave them with your mother.” I stare at her, indignant. I don’t have any control? I look at Camille, whose eyes are welling with tears.

• From Action (2014)

  [image file=image_161.jpg] Treating sex as an unsavory, improper, or inappropriate topic is one of the most oppressive forces grinding down our individual and collective happiness. You know how anything more revelatory than stony opacity about money—talking about one’s salary, expenditures, et cetera—is considered gauche? Clock how the richest people continue to remain the only segment of the population with access to the wildly complex specifics of how becoming wealthy functionally happens while the poor are stuck with “secrets” that nobody wants to know and that everyone already knows anyway, aka that being broke sucks, life is too expensive, debt is meant to fuck you not help you, and money is everything. Sex is similar, except in this case, the stigmatized are people who cop to being interested in it who aren’t straight men. (And then straight men are left working inside a system where they are supposed to believe that they’re the only people who enjoy, or are being served by, sex, which, in addition to being morally and ethically backward—plus interpersonally alienating—makes them garbage lays, and advises them to police some of the people they’d benefit from allowing sexual autonomy. All of that is far less pressing than what precedes this parenthetical, though.) The ettiquette in play here works the same way as shushing salary talk: things stay the same for those reaping the paver, and vice versa. I suspect that many of our internal panic-hurricanes that keep us from talking about sex come from whether we’re convincingly puppeteering the gendered costumes we’re wearing—whether we know that that’s the cause of our anxieties or not. As with so many of life’s dumbest facets, shyness surrounding sex can stem in part from how masculine and feminine norms are expressed on a cultural level, which is to say immaculately. THEY’RE THE BEST, JUST LOVE ’EM, LUV BEING A “GIRL” WITH MY “PURSE” OF “HAIRSTYLES.” No, of course gender roles necessitate feelings of inadequacy in their very being. That is their point. It’s absurd, but who among us hasn’t felt like shit based on observing the twinkling heteronormatoné casts of toothpaste commercials, or by uneasily taking in comedy routines about the uproarious and irreconcilable differences between the sexes as conveyed by our attitudes about Valentine’s Day/parents-in-law/the color or yeastiness of the alcoholic beverages we like (followed by the equally boring commentary about just how downright condemnable those aforementioned yuk-yuk jokes are for assuming broad tropes of nuanced people—aka this sentence)? We are made to feel rude for our difference.

• From Controversies of the Early Christian History (2013)

  64 Lecture 10: Was Pontius Pilate a Secret Christian? image of Caesar was thought to be a violation of the Ten Commandments, according to which no images were to be worshiped by Jews. o Pilate initially ordered his soldiers to kill a group of Jewish protesters who had refused to move from the palace grounds but then relented and had the standards removed.  In another story, Josephus tells us that Pilate raided the sacred treasury of the Temple to fund the building of aqueducts for Jerusalem. Outraged, many Jews fl ocked to Pilate’s presence in protest. Pilate ordered his soldiers to mix in with the crowd, concealing themselves in civilian clothing. They were then to beat the Jews who were protesting. Many Jews died from the beatings they received, and others were trampled in the ensuing riot. Pilate in the Gospel of Mark  The earliest account we have of Pontius Pilate in a Christian source is in the Gospel of Mark, the fi rst gospel to be written. Pilate appears, of course, at the end, when Jesus has been handed over to him by the Jewish authorities, and Pilate puts Jesus on trial. o Jesus appears before Pilate, and Pilate asks him: Are you the king of the Jews? Jesus gives an ambiguous response: “You say so.” The chief priest of the Jews levels many accusations against Jesus, and Pilate is surprised that Jesus has no answer. o We’re told then that Pilate had a custom at the festival of the Passover to release a prisoner chosen by the Jewish crowds. The crowds cry for the release of Barabbas, a rebel who had been involved in political insurrection and had committed murder. When Pilate asks what he should do with Jesus, the crowd cries out, “Crucify him!”  Some historians have questioned whether this episode ever actually took place. The trial of Jesus before Pilate likely occurred in private, not before a Jewish crowd. Further, Pilate had a reputation for being ruthless, yet in this account, to satisfy the crowd, he releases a

• From Controversies of the Early Christian History (2013)

  136 Lecture 21: Is the Old Testament a Christian Book? Paul’s Letter to the Galatians  Not everyone agreed with Paul on the subject of Gentiles and the Law. He had heated debates on this issue with other Christian leaders and missionaries. Nowhere is Paul’s anger on this subject more evident than in his Letter to the Galatians, written to Christians in a community who had become convinced that in order to be followers of Jesus, they had to keep the Jewish Law.  In following the Law, Paul notes that the Galatians are “turning to a different gospel.” The idea that a Gentile must follow the Jewish Law to be a follower of Jesus is not simply an alternative way of understanding Christianity but a completely different—and unacceptable—gospel.  Paul goes on to give a brief account of his life, explaining that he was once a zealous Jew keeping the Law, but he came to realize that Christ was God’s solution to the human dilemma and that it was Christ’s death, not the Jewish Law, that mattered.  Toward the end of the letter, Paul takes on the problem of circumcision. Men in the Galatian community have gotten circumcised because they thought that’s what the Law demanded of the people of God. Paul tells these men that if all they had to do to be right with God was to get circumcised, then there would be no reason for Christ to have come. o Paul says, “You who want to be justi fi ed by the Law have cut yourselves off from Christ. You have fallen away from grace.” o This statement is kind of a play on words; instead of cutting off the foreskin, these men have cut themselves off from Christ. o This wordplay becomes more sarcastic when Paul speaks about the Jewish Christian missionaries who were trying to get the Galatians to convert to follow Judaism while being Christian (5:12): “I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves.”

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  162 Lecture 22: The Court of Justinian and Byzantine Christianity position by decree in 533 and secured the approval of Pope John II in 534. o In the affair of the Three Chapters, Justinian sought to appease the monophysite party by condemning, in 543, three 4 th-century writers as guilty of Nestorianism. The West and Pope Vigilius at first refused to accept this condemnation, but through isolation and privation, Justinian pressured the pope to do so. The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 condemned the Three Chapters and, by implication, Vigilius, though it continued to declare communion with Rome. o These incidents reveal a growing chasm between the western (Chalcedonian) and eastern (monophysite) churches. We shall see how the rift will grow ever greater until a final schism occurs in the 11 th century. • Justinian’s strong patronage of Christianity had as its dark side the active suppression of other religious traditions. o His Codex proscribed paganism, even in private life, and the remnants of pagan observance were actively suppressed. o The civil rights of Jews were further restricted, and religious privileges were threatened. Adding insult to injury, Justinian wanted Jews to read Torah in the Greek Septuagint translation rather than in Hebrew! o Against the Samaritans, Justinian leveled severe edicts because they resisted conversion to Christianity, and many Manichaeans were persecuted and killed during his reign. • Such interventions reveal a situation that would later be termed caesaropapism, in which the state exercises total authority over the church. o The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 declared that the church could affirm nothing contrary to the emperor’s will.

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  170 Lecture 23: The Rise of Islam and the Threat of Iconoclasm • Despite the popularity of icons, especially among monks, there were several factors in Byzantine Christianity that were hostile to their use. o Monophysitism (and its nephew monotheletism) diminished an appreciation of the humanity of Jesus in favor of his divinity; for those holding such a view, an artistic representation of the “son of God” might appear to be close to pagan idolatry. o In the 7 th century, a Byzantine sect called the Paulicians held a radically dualistic view of reality and denied the Incarnation altogether—what was important were the teachings of Christ. Material things are evil; only Spirit is good. o A final factor was the insistence of Islam on what might be termed a “naked monotheism”—Allah is singular and can have no partners—and its refusal of all artistic representations of Allah. o These perspectives combined as an immovable object (icon veneration) and irresistible force (resistance to idols), and Byzantine Christianity was thrown into its final theological paroxysm. • The controversy began when the emperor Leo the Isaurian (717– 741) argued that the practice of venerating icons kept both Jews and Muslims from converting to Christianity and, in 726, issued an edict forbidding the use of icons as idols and ordering their destruction. o Germanus, the patriarch of Constantinople, appealed to Rome to settle the issue but was deposed by Leo in 730. o Monks throughout the empire supported the use of icons and were, in turn, persecuted by the emperor. o Pope Gregory III held two synods in Rome in 731, condemning the followers of Leo and his iconoclastic program.

• From The History of Christianity I: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation

  171 • In 753, the son of Leo, Constantine V , intensified the imperial rejection of icons, identifying them as idols and aligning them with both monophysitism and Nestorianism. o Tarasius, the patriarch of Constantinople, appealed to Pope Hadrian I, and under Leo IV (775–780), the imperial policy was reversed. o In 787, the seventh ecumenical council (the Second Council of Nicaea) condemned iconoclasm and carefully defined the proper degrees of veneration due icons. • Despite these decisions, iconoclasm remained a strong movement, especially in the army, and in 814, a second iconoclastic controversy erupted under Leo V , “the Armenian” (775–820), involving the direct and violent persecution of monks who maintained devotion to icons and the installation of patriarchs who were iconoclastic. • The persecution continued until the death of the iconoclastic emperor Theophilus in 842. His widow, acting as regent, installed Methodius as the patriarch and ended the iconoclastic terror. • Although iconoclasm was a distinctively Eastern issue, it had an indirect and significant impact on Western Christianity. o A mistranslation of the acts of the Second Council of Nicaea led Frankish bishops to think that the “worship” of idols had been sanctioned, and they eventually condemned the council at the synod of Frankfurt in 794 and at a meeting of bishops in Paris in 828. o Only the work of several Latin theologians and the steadfast stance of the papacy led to a gradual acceptance of the Second Council of Nicaea in the West. o This misunderstanding, however, is usually taken to be one of the decisive elements in the eventual schism between Greek and Latin Christianity—along with the object lesson learned from the rampant caesaropapism revealed in the iconoclasm controversy. 172 Lecture 23: The Rise of Islam and the Threat of Iconoclasm Barber, Figure and Likeness. Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests. 1. Discuss the ways Islam both threatened the Byzantine Empire politically and influenced it religiously. 2. How does the iconoclastic controversy reveal the deep tensions within Byzantine Christianity? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  among welfare recipients who only occasionally took government assistance; but there were others, less deserving, whom they saw as permanently trapped in a cycle of dependence. Critics of welfare tended to see the issue as a racial one, but the reality was different. Among the “forgotten masses” were an estimated 17.4 million poor whites, and the majority of them lived in the South. In 1969, women took the lead in the welfare rights movement when a group of the disaffected in Beaufort, South Carolina, refused to be silent over delays in receiving their food stamps. One Mrs. Frazier, who had organized a day care program, led the “welfare mothers” in a visually powerful protest. At the same time as a group of wealthy women were holding their annual Beaufort historic homes and gardens tour, she organized a tour of poor homes. In the larger national debate, though, Nixon’s supporters were seen angrily complaining about how welfare “breeds weak people.” Poverty was once again being blamed on questionable breeding, and hard work was proclaimed as the means through which strong families put down solid roots and achieved upward mobility. To Frazier, welfare and day care were necessary if one were to be able to hold a job and feed a family. Starvation was a real danger—indeed the poor in South Carolina were still battling parasites like hookworm. 12 During the ethnic revival that urbanites celebrated in the 1970s, hardworking Greeks and Italians and Chinese propped up family tradition, as neighborhood restaurants in Chinatowns grew in popularity. The celebratory impulse over ethnic cooking was a middle-class phenomenon, and poverty was softened when it could be seen through the hazy glow of times gone by. The ethic of hard work itself was now engrafted onto ethnic and family genealogical trees. Past poverty was no encumbrance; roots, whatever they were, were not a stain upon the present. In summing up Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers (1976), an affectionate story of the ethnic life of Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one reviewer concluded, “Everybody wants a ghetto to look back on.” 13 When it led to social mobility, ethnic identity was seen as a positive attribute. Unappealing (or un-American) idiosyncracies were cleaned up; the food, literature, music, and dress promoted; and the whole ethnicity set apart from the diseased and dirty huddled masses who came through Ellis Island. Heritage, like historic memory itself, is always selective. Ethnics and poor folk can be admired from afar, or from a temporal distance, as long as doing so ensures the supremacy of the middle class in the narrative. People can choose to treasure

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  We can’t be happy for my freedom while there’s any ounce of possibility that our younger siblings will be forced to suffer with Cookie. I flee from the kitchen and slam my bedroom door. I grab everything I can get my hands on and throw it: the only outlet I’ve ever found effective when I’m in a blind rage. ONE MORNING IN May, Addie and Camille exchange a knowing glance when I come out to the kitchen with stomach pains so bad I think I might throw up. “Maybe you should stay home from school,” Addie says. Camille knocks on the bathroom door just as I’m discovering a spot of blood on my leg. “Honey,” she calls, “why don’t you let me help?” She inconspicuously edges inside the bathroom and shows me how to adhere a maxi pad. “And here’s where Addie keeps our stashes. Always make sure you have extras in your bag . . . especially if you visit Cookie.” “Why?” “Because she doesn’t buy these. She’d rather spend the food stamps on beer and cigarettes. Remember the bloody washcloths she used to leave around the house?” I grimace. “Oh, Camille!” “Yeah. I know. It was gross.” In the kitchen, Addie’s looking through the phone book. “I’m going to make you an appointment at the doctor,” she says. “The doctor? I’m not sick, I just got my period.” “Well, there are precautions certain young women should take when their bodies grow capable of bearing children.” Oh, that’s what this is about: Addie’s afraid she’ll be raising a foster grandchild if she doesn’t get me on the pill. “Birth control helps regulate a woman’s cycle,” she says. I want to tell her to cut the crap. I could teach sex education at my school better than any teacher who actually studied it. At the age of eight, I learned how one gives a blow job thanks to Cookie’s demonstration on one of her boyfriends when she thought we were all asleep. At twelve, I walked into my mother’s bedroom to find a huge pink dildo and a magazine called High Society laying open to a letter from a man detailing his one-night stand with a female gymnast so skilled that when she swung from the chandelier, she landed in a split, directly on his erect penis. Thanks to my mother’s graphic language and her casual displays around the house (like how she would grab Karl between his legs in front of us), when you grow up witness to such sexual behavior, nothing about it is very fascinating. In fact, it shuts out any desire whatsoever. Still, with Addie’s incessant urging, I make a trip to the gynecologist. The county bus system is so infrequent and confusing that I arrive late, alone, and even more stressed out than I’d prepared myself for. When the nurse calls me into the sterile gray room, I follow her instruction to lie on the table.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Class hostility persisted. Many southern suburbanites had no sympathy for the white trash underclass in their section. They drew a sharp class line between the lower-class rednecks and the “upscale rednecks.” Lillian Smith, a Southern novelist and civil rights activist, identified the places where these toxic feelings stewed. Like the blue-collar ethnics in northern cities who switched their allegiance to the Republican Party, marginally middle-class southerners hated the “weak, lazy, good-for-nothing ones who whine all month until the relief check comes in.” Seeing themselves as hardworking and self-reliant, the upwardly mobile sons of white trash parents believed, as Smith put it, that “he is responsible for himself and himself alone.” The same self-made man who looked down on white trash others had conveniently chosen to forget that his own parents escaped the tar-paper shack only with the help of the federal government. But now that he had been lifted to respectability, he would pull up the social ladder behind him. So suburban white animosity toward blacks was repeated in the treatment of poor whites. Smith found that the formerly poor southern white and the upwardly mobile immigrant population had something in common: “What everyone has always wanted in this country, what most came here for, was to get away from all those others who smell bad, are sleeping in a shanty, and are eating fatback and are going to loaf tomorrow because there is no job to go to.” Moving up meant staying ahead of those still trapped in the “poverty ditch.” But rather than help others escape destitution, this new addition to the middle class deeply resented a government that wasted money on the poor. 16 Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia fit this mold. Newly elected as the Senate whip in 1971 by beating the patrician Edward Kennedy, he was, as the New York Times Magazine quoted, the “po white kid that could climb to the seat of the mighty and whip millionaires.” An orphan, a former butcher and grocer who boasted having Lyndon Johnson as his patron, Byrd made his mark by attacking welfare, rioters, and communism. He hired investigators to kick cheaters off the welfare rolls in Washington, DC. Rioters, he declared with marked callousness, deserved to be mowed down, and looters shot on sight “swiftly and mercilessly.” Byrd made himself one of the most hated men in the Senate, where he was compared to Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, and Uriah Heep— the obsequious, greedy, upwardly mobile clerk in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield . After Byrd became whip, one top Senate aide remarked that Democrats would now have to look up at the “pinched Mephistophelian features of a redneck who made good.”