Contempt

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 Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  They do understand their physical instincts and allow themselves to be governed by them as irrational animals do (verse io). They are like Cain, the cynical, selfish murderer; they are like Balaam, whose one desire was for gain and who led the people into sin; they are like Korah, who rebelled against the legitimate authority of Moses and was swallowed up by the earth for his arrogant disobedience (verse They are like the hidden rocks on which a ship may come to grief; they have their own in-group in which they mix with people like themselves, and thus destroy Christian fellowship; they deceive others with their promises, like clouds which promise the longed-for rain and then pass over the sky; they are like fruitless and rootless trees, which have no harvest of good fruit; as the foaming spray of the waves casts the seaweed and the wreckage on the beaches, they cast up shameless deeds like foam; they are like disobedient stars which refuse to keep their appointed orbit and are doomed to darkness (verse 13). Long ago, the prophet Enoch had described these people and had prophesied their divine destruction (verses 1415). They grumble and speak against all true authority and discipline as the children of Israel murmured against Moses in the desert; they are discontented with the lot which God has appointed to them; they are dictated to by their lusts; their speech is arrogant and proud; they pander to and flatter the great for the sake of gain (verse 16). Words to the Faithful Having made clear his disapproval of the evil intruders in this torrent of invective, Jude turns to the faithful. They could have expected all this to happen, for the apostles of Jesus Christ had foretold the rise of evil people (verses i8-i9). But the duty of all true Christians is to build their lives on the foundation of the most holy faith, to learn to pray in the power of the Holy Spirit, to remember the conditions of the covenant into which the love of God has called them, and to wait for the mercy of Jesus Christ (verses 20-I). As for the false thinkers and those who indulge in loose living, some of them may be saved with pity while they are still hesitating on the brink of their evil ways; others have to be snatched like pieces of burning wood from the fire; and, in all this rescue work, Christians must have that godly fear which will love the sinner but hate the sin, and must avoid contamination from those they seek to save (verses 22-3).

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

  She was called an “American Jezebel,” “weak and vulgar,” and a “dirty black wench,” all of which pointed to her questionable backwoods upbringing. It was pro-Adams editor James G. Dana of Kentucky who luridly painted her as a whore. She could no more pass in polite company, he said with racist outrage, than a gentleman’s black mistress, even if the black wench wore a white mask. Her stain of impurity would never be tolerated among Washington’s better sort. Another unpoliced critic made a similar argument. Her crude conduct might belong in “every cabin beyond the mountains,” he wrote, but not in the President’s House. 64 Even without the marriage scandal, Rachel Jackson had the look of a lower- class woman. One visitor to the Jacksons’ home in Tennessee thought she might be mistaken for an old washerwoman. Another described her as fat and her skin tanned, which may explain the “black wench” slur. Whiteness was a badge of class privilege denied to poor cracker gals who worked under the sun. Critics laughed at Mrs. Jackson’s backcountry pronunciation; they made fun of her favorite song, “Possum Up a Gum Tree.” She smoked a pipe. Alas, Rachel Jackson succumbed to heart disease shortly before she was meant to accompany her husband to Washington and take up her duties as First Lady. Her death only intensified the incoming president’s hatred for his political enemies. 65 • • • To be sure, even beyond class issues, Jackson’s candidacy changed the nature of democratic politics. One political commentator noted that Jackson’s reign ushered in the “game of brag.” Jacksonians routinely exaggerated their man’s credentials, saying he was not just the “Knight of New Orleans,” the country’s “deliverer,” but also the greatest general in all human history. Another observer concluded that a new kind of “talkative country politician” had arisen, who could speak for hours before having finally “exhausted the fountain of his panegyric on General Jackson.” 66 Bragging had a distinctive class dimension in the 1820s and 1830s. In a satire published in Tennessee, a writer took note of the strange adaptations of the code of chivalry in defense of honor. The story involved a duel between one Kentucky “Knight of the Red Rag” and a “great and mighty Walnut cracker” of Tennessee. The nutcracker gave himself an exalted title: “duke of Wild Cat Cove, little and big Hog Thief Creek, Short Mountain, Big Bore Cave and Cuwell’s Bridge.” So what did this kind of posturing mean? Like certain masters of gangsta rap in the twenty-first century, crackers had to make up for their lowly status by dressing themselves up in a boisterous verbal garb. In the Crockett manner, lying and boasting made up for the absence of class pedigree. This, too, was Andrew Jackson.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  To the Christians at Smyrna, he wrote: `For he suffered all these things for us that we might attain salvation, and he truly suffered even as he also truly raised himself, not as some unbelievers say that his passion was merely in semblance' (To the Smyrnaeans, 2). Polycarp, writing to the Philippians, used John's very words: `For everyone who does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is an anti-Christ' (To the Philippians, This teaching of Cerinthus is also rebuked in i John. John writes of Jesus: `This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood' (i John 5:6). The point of that verse is that the Gnostic teachers would have agreed that the divine Christ came by water, that is, at the baptism of Jesus; but they would have denied that he came by blood, that is, by the cross, for they insisted that the divine Christ left the human Jesus before his crucifixion. The great danger of this heresy is that it comes from what can only be called a mistaken reverence. It is afraid to ascribe to Jesus full humanity. It regards it as irreverent to think that he had a truly physical body. It is a heresy which is by no means dead but is still held today, usually quite unconsciously, by many devout Christians. But it must be remembered, as John so clearly saw, that our salvation was dependent on the full identification of Jesus Christ with us. As one of the great early Church fathers unforgettably put it, `He became what we are to make us what he is.' This Gnostic belief had certain practical consequences in the lives of those who held it. (i) The Gnostic attitude to matter and to all created things produced a certain attitude to the body and the things to do with the body. That attitude might take any one of three different forms. (a) It might take the form of self-denial, with fasting and celibacy and rigid control, even deliberate ill-treatment, of the body. The view that celibacy is better than marriage and that sex is sinful goes back to Gnostic influence and belief - and this is a view which still lingers on in certain quarters. There is no trace of that view in this letter. (b) It might take the form of an assertion that the body did not matter and that, therefore, its appetites might be satisfied without restraint. Since the body was in any event evil, it made no difference what was done with it. There are echoes of this in this letter. John condemns as liars all who say that they know God and yet do not keep God's commandments; those who say that they abide in Christ ought to walk as Christ walked (i John r:6, 2:4-6).

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

  Nicholson, M.D., and Watson S. Rankin, M.D., “Uncinariasis as Seen in North Carolina,” Medical News (November 19, 1904): 978–87; H. F. Harris, “Uncinariasis; Its Frequency and Importance in the Southern States,” Atlanta Journal-Record of Medicine, June 1, 1903; “Uncinariasis, the Cause of Laziness,” Zion’s Herald, December 10, 1902; “The Passing of the Po’ ‘White Trash’: The Rockefeller Commission’s Successful Fight Against Hookworm Disease,” Hampton-Columbia Magazine, November 1, 1911. On white trash diseases, see James O. Breeden, “Disease as a Factor in Southern Distinctiveness,” and Elizabeth W. Etheridge, “Pellagra: An Unappreciated Reminder of Southern Distinctiveness,” in Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South, eds. Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 1–28, 100–19, esp. 14–15, 104. On the army’s discovery that southern recruits had a “poorer degree of physical development,” see Natalie J. Ring, The Problem of the South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 79. 64. See S. A. Hamilton, “The New Race Question in the South,” Arena 27, no. 4 (April 1902): 352–58; also see “Science and Discovery: The Coming War on Hookworm,” Current Literature 17, no. 6 (December 1909): 676–80; E. J. Edwards, “The Fight to Save 2,000,000 Lives from Hookworm,” New York Times, August 28, 1910; John Ettling, The Germ of Laziness: Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Andrew Sledd, “Illiteracy in the South,” Independent, October 17, 1901, 2471–74; Richard Edmonds, “The South’s Industrial Task: A Plea for Technical Training of Poor White Boys,” an address before the Annual Convention of Southern Cotton Spinners’ Association at Atlanta, November 14, 1901 (Atlanta, 1901). On education and reforming poor whites, see Bruce Clayton, The Savage Ideal: Intolerance and Intellectual Leadership in the South, 1890–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 114–15, 119, 140. On millwork endangering white women and children, see Elbert Hubbard, “White Slavery in the South,” Philistine (May 1902): 161–78; “Child Labor in the South,” Ohio Farmer (February 3, 1906): 121; Louise Markscheffel, “The Right of the Child Not to Be Born,” Arena 36, no. 201 (August 1906): 125–27; Owen R. Lovejoy, assistant secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, “Child Labor and Family Disintegration,” Independent (September 27, 1906): 748–50. On tenant farmers as the new vagrants, see Frank Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South (New York, 1924), 131–35; also see Ring, The Problem of the South, 25–26, 62–63, 121, 125–26, 135–36. The poor whites were also a greater target because blacks had been disenfranchised in many southern states. The uneducated cracker still had political power, which many elite southerners found troubling. See Charles H. Holden, In the Great Maelstrom: Conservatives in Post–Civil War South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 65, 80. 65. Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 122–23, 129, 132; Paul Lombardo, “Three Generations, No Imbeciles: New Light on Buck v. Bell,” New York University Law Review 60, no.

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

  The oestrum was the state of female animals in heat, and provided the capacity for sexual arousal; in Notes, he wrote that “love was the peculiar oestrum of poets.” Sexual desire, in this way, would produce what Jefferson called a “fortuitous concourse of breeders.” He meant that desire was the real engine of breeding, and according to the law of averages, unconscious lust would outflank even unbridled greed. 45 Jefferson’s model of breeding generated an “accidental aristocracy” of talent. Class divisions would form through natural selection. Men would marry women for more than money; they would consciously and unconsciously choose mates with other favorable traits. It was all a matter of probability: some would marry out of sheer lust, others for property, but the “good and wise” would marry for beauty, health, virtue, and talents. If Americans had enough native intelligence to distinguish the natural aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi in choosing political leaders, then they had reasonable instincts for selecting spouses. A “fortuitous concourse of breeders” would produce a leadership class—one that would sort out the genuinely talented from the ambitious men on the make. 46 The question that Jefferson never answered was this: What happened to those who were not part of the talented elite? How would one describe the “concourse of breeders” living on the bottom layer of society? No matter how one finessed it, rubbish produced more rubbish, even if a select few might be salvaged. If the fortuitous breeders naturally rose up the social ladder, the unfortunate, the degenerate remained mired in the morass of meaner sorts. In all of his musings on class, Jefferson rarely used the word “yeoman.” He preferred “cultivator” or “husbandman.” One time that he did use the term was in an 1815 letter to William Wirt. Born to a Maryland tavernkeeper, Wirt was one of Jefferson’s apprentices whom he took under his wing, and he rose to become a noted attorney. He was one of the natural aristocracy of talent, and one of the beneficiaries of Jefferson’s patronage. In 1815, Wirt was putting the finishing touches on the biography of Patrick Henry, and he asked Jefferson to paint a social picture of eighteenth-century Virginia. Conjuring a potent topographical metaphor, Jefferson contended that the colony had had a stagnant class system, whose social order resembled a slice of earth on an archeological dig. The classes were separated into “strata,” which shaded off “imperceptibly, from top to bottom, nothing disturbing the order of their repose.” Jefferson divided the top tier of supposed social betters into “Aristocrats, half breeds, pretenders.” Below them was the “solid independent yeomanry, looking askance at those above, yet not ventured to jostle them.” On the bottom rung he put “the lowest feculum of beings called Overseers, the most abject, degraded and unprincipled race.”

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Most of our choice writers, from Plato to Havelock Ellis, from Aristophanes to Shaw, from Catullus and Ovid to Shakespeare, Shelley and Swinburne, together with the Bible, to be sure, have been the target of those who are forever in search of what is impure, indecent and immoral. In an article called “Freedom of Expression in Literature,”2 Huntington Cairns, one of the most broad-minded and clear-sighted of all the censors, stresses the need for the re-education of officials charged with law enforcement. “In general,” he states, “such men have had little or no contact with science or art, have had no knowledge of the liberty of expression tacitly granted to men of letters since the beginnings of English literature, and have been, from the point of view of expert opinion, altogether incompetent to handle the subject. Administrative officials, not the populace who in the main have only a negligible contact with art, stand first in need of re-education.” Perhaps it should be noted here, in passing, that though our Federal government exercises no censorship over works of art originating in the country, it does permit the Treasury Department to pass judgments upon importations from abroad. In 1930, the Tariff Act was revised to permit the Secretary of the Treasury, in his discretion, to admit the classics or books of recognized and established literary or scientific merit, even if obscene. What is meant by “books of recognized and established literary merit?” Mr. Cairns gives us the following interpretation: “books which have behind them a substantial and reputable body of American critical opinion indicating that the works are of meritorious quality.” This would seem to represent a fairly liberal attitude, but when it comes to a test, when a book or other work of art is capable of creating a furore, this seeming liberality collapses. It has been said with regard to the sonnets of Aretino that they were condemned for four hundred years. How long we shall have to wait for the ban to be lifted on certain famous contemporary works no one can predict. In the article alluded to above, Mr. Cairns admits that “there is no likelihood whatever that the present obscenity statutes will be repealed.” “None of the statutes,” he goes on to say, “defines the word ‘obscenity’ and there is thus a wide latitude of discretion in the meaning to be attributed to the term.” Those who imagine that the Ulysses decision established a precedent should realize by now that they were overoptimistic. Nothing has been established where books of a disturbing nature are concerned. After years of wrestling with prudes, bigots and other psychopaths who determine what we may or may not read, Theodore Schroeder is of the opinion that “it is not the inherent quality of the book which counts, but its hypothetical influence upon some hypothetical person, who at some problematical time in the future may hypothetically read the book.”

• From Another Country (1962)

  He knocked on the door and walked in without waiting for an answer. Straight ahead of them, in the large living room which ended in open French doors and a balcony, more than a hundred people milled about, some in evening dress, some in slacks and sweaters. High above their heads hung an enormous silver ball which reflected unexpected parts of the room and managed its own unloving comment on the people in it. The room was so active with coming and going, so bright with jewelry and glasses and cigarettes, that the heavy ball seemed almost to be alive. His host—whom he did not really know very well—was nowhere in sight. To the right of them were three rooms, the first of which was piled high with wraps and overcoats. The horn of Charlie Parker, coming over the hi-fi, dominated all the voices in the room. “Put your coat down,” he told Leona, “and I’ll try to find out if I know anybody in this joint.” “Oh,” she said, “I’m sure you know them all.” “Go on, now,” he said, smiling, and pushing her gently into the room, “do like I tell you.” While she was putting away her coat—and powdering her nose, probably—he remembered that he had promised to call Vivaldo. He wandered through the house, looking for a relatively isolated telephone, and found one in the kitchen. He dialed Vivaldo’s number. “Hello, baby. How’re you?” “Oh, all right, I guess. What’s happening? I thought you were going to call me sooner. I’d just about given you up.” “Well, I only just made it up here.” He dropped his voice, for a couple had entered the kitchen, a blonde girl with a disarrayed Dutch bob and a tall Negro. The girl leaned against the sink, the boy stood before her, rubbing his hands slowly along the outside of her thighs. They barely glanced at Rufus. “A whole lot of elegant squares around, you dig?” “Yeah,” said Vivaldo. There was a pause. “You think it’s worthwhile making it up there?” “Well, hell, I don’t know. If you got something better to do——” “Jane’s here,” Vivaldo said, quickly. Rufus realized that Jane was probably lying on the bed, listening. “Oh, you got your grandmother with you, you don’t need nothing up here then.” He did not like Jane, who was somewhat older than Vivaldo, with prematurely gray hair. “Ain’t nothing up here old enough for you.” “That’s enough, you bastard.” He heard Jane’s voice and Vivaldo’s, murmuring; he could not make out what was being said. Then Vivaldo’s voice was at his ear again. “I think I’ll skip it.” “I guess you better. I’ll see you tomorrow.” “Maybe I’ll come by your pad—?” “Okay. Don’t let grandma wear you out now; they tell me women get real ferocious when they get as old as she is.” “They can’t get too ferocious for me, dad!”

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

  In 1696, the powerful minister Cotton Mather published A Good Master Well Served, which was an unambiguous attempt to regulate the Bay Colony’s disorderly servant population. Directing his words toward those who served, he insisted, “You are the Animate, Separate, Active Instruments of other men.” In language that is impossible to misunderstand, he reaffirmed, “Servants, your Tongues, your Hands, your Feet, are your Masters, and they should move according to the Will of your Masters.” Those of mean descent would learn from a sharp tongue or a ready whip that submission was expected of them. 48 Puritan wariness did not end there. Among servants, and those of “meane condition” above them, were men and women of enlarged ambition who were deemed undeserving. At least according to anxious oligarchs. Puritans never opposed commerce or the acquisition of wealth, but they were clearly conflicted when it came to social mobility. The government enacted sumptuary laws, penalizing those who wore rich silks or gold buttons in an attempt to rise above their class station. Overly prosperous people aroused envy, and Puritan orthodoxy dictated against such exhibition of arrogance, pride, and insolence. In the 1592 tract On the Right, Lawful, and Holy Use of Apparel, the English Puritan clergyman William Perkins had shown how appearance demarcated one’s standing in the Great Chain of Being, God’s class hierarchy. Unsanctioned displays of finery were disruptive, an infraction on the same order as masters who treated servants too leniently. Both were perceived as early indicators of a society falling from grace. 49 One had to know his or her place in Puritan Massachusetts. Church membership added a layer of privilege before the courts and elsewhere to an already hierarchical regime. Expulsion from the church carried a powerful stigma. Heretics such as Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer were physically banished, cut off and ostracized. Only those who begged forgiveness and humbled themselves before the dual authority of court and church returned to the community. Dyer returned unrepentant, determined to challenge the ruling order. Between 1659 and 1661, she and three other Quakers were charged with “presumptuous & incorrigible contempt” of civil authority. After trial, they were summarily hanged. 50 Anne Hutchinson was excommunicated from the Boston congregation and expelled from the Bay Colony in 1638 for refusing to bend to the authority of the town fathers. She was sternly advised: “You have rather been a Husband than a Wife and a preacher than a Hearer, and a Magistrate than a Subject.” Hutchinson had held religious classes in her home, and had acquired a large following.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  JEROME. But as this has no Scripture authority, it is as readily despised as offered. Others will have it to be that Zacharias who was killed by Joas, king of Judah, between the temple and the altar, that is, in the court of the temple. (2 Chron. 24:21.) But that Zacharias was not the son of Barachias, but of Jehoiada the Priest. But Barachias in our language is interpreted ‘Blessed of the Lord,’ so that the righteousness of Joiada the Priest is expressed by this Hebrew word. But in the Gospel which the Nazarenes use, we find written ‘son of Joiada’ instead of son of Barachias. REMIGIUS. It should be enquired too how He says, to the blood of Zacharias, since the blood of many more saints was afterwards shed. This is thus explained. Abel a keeper of sheep was killed in the field, Zacharias a priest was slain in the court of the temple. The Lord therefore names these two, because by these all holy martyrs are denoted, both of lay and priestly order. CHRYSOSTOM. Moreover, He names Abel, to shew that it would be out of envy that they would kill Christ and His disciples. He names Zacharias, because there was a twofold resemblance in his case, the sacred place, as well as the sacred person. ORIGEN. Zacharias is interpreted ‘The memory of God.’ Whosoever then hastes to obliterate the memory of God, seems to those to whom he gives offence to shed the blood of Zacharias the son of Barachias. For it is by the blessing of God that we retain the memory of God. Also the memory of God is slain by the wicked, when the Temple of God is polluted by the lustful, and His altar defiled by the carelessness of prayers. Abel is interpreted ‘mourning.’ He then who does not receive that, Blessed are they that mourn, sheds the blood of Abel, that is, puts away the truth of wholesome mourning. Some also shed, as it were, the blood of the Scriptures by putting aside their truth, for all Scripture, if it is not understood according to its truth, is dead. CHRYSOSTOM. And to take away all excuse from them that they might not say, Because you sent them to the Gentiles thereat were we offended, He foretels that His disciples should be sent to them, and it is of their punishment that He adds, Verily I say unto you, all these things shall come upon this generation. GLOSS. (ord.) He means not only those there present, but the whole generation before and after, for all were one city and one body of the Devil.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  There are about fifty patients here right now, and about fifteen doctors, as well as some visiting doctors and medical trainees from different countries. The calm directness with which everyone seems to deal with the idea and reality of disease is quite unlike anything I’ve experienced in hospitals in the U.S., given that all the patients here either have cancer or are suspected of having cancer. At its best, the effect of this directness is very calming and reassuring, very centering. At its worst, it feels like Mann’s Magic Mountain. Because at the same time, nobody believes in talking about feelings, even the strong expression of which is considered to be harmful, or at least too stressful to be beneficial. In the private room next door to me, there is a pretty young Swiss woman of no more than twenty, with a gold wedding band on and very expensive clothes and too much make-up. She appears terribly depressed all the time. Evidently she goes to church in town every morning, because I see her passing through the grounds early each day wearing a church cap. Her family seems very rich or very influential. They came to visit yesterday, and I saw them in the dining room—mother, father, and a young man who was either brother or husband. They sure looked rich, and everyone here bowed and scraped to them. (The social hierarchy is quite strongly observed.) It seems to me that anyone that young who has cancer must be filled with rage and should at least be able to talk about her feelings with someone. But that’s not considered necessary or beneficial here. There is an elderly woman schoolteacher from Hamburg who wears a beautifully carved rhodonite necklace to lunch every day. We have had an interesting conversation about rocks and minerals, which are considered to be very important and powerful in anthroposophy. She speaks English quite well and tries to be friendly. She has been an anthroposoph for many years, she says, and this is her second stay at the Klinik. The most frequent question from English-speaking patients and medical trainees, couched in different ways, is: how does an american—and a Black one at that, although the latter is only inferred because everyone here is much too well-bred and polite to ever let on they notice, although Sister Maria did tell me yesterday that her brother is a missionary in South Africa so she understands why I like to eat raw vegetables—how does an american come to be at the Lukas Klinik in Switzerland? americans are known for being quite provincial.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  James Baldwin 48 one of his interminable anecdotes, anecdotes which invariably pivoted on the hazards of business or the hazards of love, and Jacques' mouth was stretched in a rather painful grin. I knew that he was dying to get back to the bar. Giovanni placed himself before me again and began wiping the bar with a damp cloth. The Americans are funny. You have a funny sense of time—or perhaps you have no sense of time at all, I can't tell. Time always sounds like a parade chez vous— a triumphant parade, like armies with banners entering a town. As though, with enough time, and that would not need to be so very much for Americans, n'est-ce pas?' and he smiled, giving me a mocking look, but I said nothing. Well then,' he continued, *as though with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything v^l be settled, solved, put in its place. And when I say everything,' he added, grimly, 1 mean all the serious, dreadful things, like pain and death and love, in which you Americans do not believe.' What makes you think we don't? And what do you beheve?' 1 don't believe in this nonsense about time. Time is just common, it's like water for a fish. Everybody's in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. That's all. The big fish eat GIOVANNI'S ROOM the little fish and the ocean doesn't care/ 49 *0h, please/ I said. 1 don't believe that. Time's hot water and we're not fish and you can choose to be eaten and also not to eat—not to eat/ I added quickly, turning a little red before his delighted and sardonic smile, *the little fish, of course/ T© choose!' cried Giovanni, turning his face away from me and speaking, it appeared, to an invisible ally who had been eavesdropping on this conversation all along. To choose I' He turned to me again. 'Ah, you are really an American. J'adore voire enthousiasmel' 1 adore yours,' I said, pohtely, 'though it seems to be a blacker brand than mine.' 'Anyway/ he said mildly, 1 don't see vv^hat you can do v^th little fish except eat them. What else are they good for?' In my country/ I said, feeling a subtle war within me as I said it, 'the Uttle fish seem to have gotten together and are nibbling at the body of the whale/ That will not make them whales/ said Gio- vanni. The only result of all that nibbling will be that there will no longer be any grandeur anywhere, not even at the bottom of the sea.' not grand?'

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  40 JamesBaldwin atthecrowd.It was asthoughhis station were a promontory and we were thesea. Jacques wasimmediately attracted. I felt him, sotospeak,preparing himself for con- quest.Ifelt thenecessity for tolerance. Tm sure,' Isaid, 'that you'll wantto getto knowthebarman. So111vanish anytime you like.' Therewas,in this tolerance of mind, afund, by nomeans meagre, ofmalicious knowledge — I had drawn on it when Icalledhimup to borrow money.Iknewthat Jacquescouldonly hopeto conquer theboybefore us iftheboy was, in effect, forsale;andifhe stood with such arroganceon an auction block hecould certainly findbiddersricher and more attrac- tive than Jacques.I knewthat Jacques knew this. I knewsomethingelse:that Jacques' vaunted affectionfor mewas involved with desire, thedesire,infact, to berid of me, to be able, soon, todespisemeashenowdespised that armyof boys who had come, without love, to his bed. I heldmy own againstthis desire by pretendingthat Jacques andIwerefriends, by forcing Jacques, on painof humiliation, to pretend this.I pretended not tosee, although I exploited it, the lust not quitesleepingin his bright, bittereyesand,bymeansof the rough, male candorwithwhich I conveyedto himhis case was hopeless, I compelled him, endlessly, to hope. AndIknew, finally, thatinbarssuch as these I was Jacques' protection.As long as I was there the world couldsee andhecould GIOVANNI'S ROOM41 believethat he wasout withme,hisfriend,he was notthereout of desperation, he wasnotat the mercyof whatever adventurerchance, cruelty, or the laws ofactualand emotional poverty mightthrowhis way. Toustayright here'said Jacques. Ill look at him fromtime totime and talktoyou and that wayTilsavemoney — and stayhappy, too.' 1 wonderwhereGuillaume found him,' I said. For he wasso exactlythekind of boythat Guillaume alwaysdreamedofthatitscarcely seemed possiblethatGuUlaume couldhave found him. 'Whatwillyou have?' he now askedus. His toneconveyed that, thoughhespokenoEng- lish,heknewthat we hadbeen speaking about him and hoped we werethrough. *Une fine a Veau* Isaid;and *uncognac sec* said Jacques, bothspeaking too quickly,so that I blushed andrealized by a faint merriment on Giovanni's faceasheserved usthathehad seen it. Jacques, wilfullymisinterpreting Giovanni's nuance ofa smile, made ofit an opportunity. *You'renewhere?' heasked ui English. Giovanni almost certainlyunderstoodthe question, butitsuited himbetter to look blankly from Jacques tomeandthenback again at Jacques.Jacquestranslatedhisquestion. Giovannishrugged. 1havebeen here a month,' hesaid. Iknew where theconversationwas going andI kept myeyesdownand sippedmydrink. 42 JamesBaldwin Itmust/ Jacques suggested,with a sortof bludgeoninginsistence onthe light touch,*seem very strangetoyou/ 'Strange?'asked Giovanni.'Why?' And Jacques giggled. Iwas suddenly ashamed thatI waswithhim. 'All these men' — and I knewthat voice,breathless,insinuating, high asnogirl's had everbeen,andhot, suggesting, somehow, the absolutelymotionless, deadly heat which hangsoverswamp ground in July — 'allthesemen/he gasped,'andso fewwomen. Doesn't that seemstrangeto you?' 'Ah/said Giovanni,and turnedaway to serve another customer, 'no doubtthe womenare waitingat home.* Tmsure one'swaitingforyou/ insisted Jacques, towhichGiovanni did notrespond. Well. Thatdidn'ttake long/said Jacques, half tome, halfto thespace which had just heldGiovanni.'Aren't you gladyou stayed? You've got meallto yourself/ 'Oh, you're handlingitall wrong,' I said, lie's mad for you.He justdoesn'twant to seem tooanxious.Orderhim a drink. Find out where helikes to buy his clothes. Tellhim aboutthatcunninghttle AHaRomeo you're just dying togiveaway to somedeserving bartender.' *Very funny/said Jacques. 'Well/ I said, 'faintheartneverwonfair athlete,that's forsure.' 'Anyway,I'm sure hesleeps withgirls.They always do, youknow/

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

  One only need consider a few of the other popular shows of those halcyon years to prove the point: Petticoat Junction (1963), which chronicled rural life at the Shady Rest Hotel and contrasted a simpler people with their savvier city relations; The Farmer’s Daughter (1963), featuring a Swedish American maid from the farm who goes to work for a U.S. congressman; Green Acres (1965), where Arnold the pig is the smartest resident of the hick town of Hooterville; and, finally, that classic satire of social mobility, The Beverly Hillbillies (1962), whose mountain-bred oil millionaires seem like evolutionary throwbacks in the eyes of city folk. And lest we forget, Ozzie and Harriet began its long run at the same time as The Honeymooners, a brilliant send-up of a bus driver, a sewer worker, and their poor working-class wives. Everyone who tuned in understood perfectly well that Ozzie and Harriet’s world bore no resemblance to Ralph and Alice Kramden’s. Parody was one way Americans safely digested their class politics. Selective memory allows us to romanticize a golden age that functions as a timeless talisman of American identity. For Charles Murray, who ignores the country’s long history, the golden age is 1963, when the essence of the American creed was somehow captured in a Gallup poll in which respondents refused to self-identify as either poor or rich: approximately half said that they were working class, while the other half perceived themselves as middle class. As if a single statistic could possibly tell a comprehensive story, the social scientist writes, “Those refusals reflected a national conceit that had prevailed from the beginning of the nation: America didn’t have classes, or, to the extent that it did, Americans should act as if we didn’t” (emphasis added). Murray’s fable of class denial can only exist by erasing a wealth of historical evidence that proves otherwise. The problem is, the evidence has never been effectively laid out, allowing gross misrepresentations to stand. 2 By gaining first a better understanding of the colonial context and, next, charting the steps by which modern definitions of class were established, we will be able to see how ideas and ideals combined over time. By acknowledging the ongoing influence of older English definitions of poverty and class, we will come to recognize that class identity was apparent in America—profoundly so— long before George Gallup saw it as a creature of public opinion; indeed, class resonated long before waves of immigrants swept ashore in the nineteenth century and an awkward, often heated process of acculturation ensued. Above all, we must stop declaring what is patently untrue, that Americans, through some rare good fortune, escaped the burden of class that prevailed in the mother country of England.

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

  When that was not enough, the developers added one final touch: a five-foot-high wall around the entire complex. As one city administrator observed, “We don’t even know they’re there.” Another local resident, without any apparent shame, admitted, “We call them ‘the people inside the wall,’ and we’re ‘the people outside the wall.’” Was there any better symbol of an undisguised belief in class stratification than the construction of a wall? 37 But the Yorba Linda trailer community hardly fit the typical profile. Further down the scale, of course, were the many low-down trailer parks that dotted the map of America. By 1968, only 13 percent of mobile homeowners held white- collar jobs, and a sizable percentage of those who lived in the poorer trailer parks came from rural, mainly southern areas. Families that could not afford to buy a new trailer were buying or renting depreciated—that is, secondhand, possibly thirdhand––trailers. A new used market emerged, fueling what two sociologists called “Hillbilly Havens” that cropped up on the periphery of cities in the Sunbelt, the Midwest, and elsewhere. Scattered along highways, often near the railroad tracks, run-down trailer parks were barely distinguishable from junkyards. Trailer trash had become America’s untouchables. 38 To make matters worse, poor and working-class trailer communities were believed to be dens of iniquity. The charge actually went back to the World War II “defense centers,” to which prostitutes migrated, in a scattering of whorehouses on wheels. By the fifties, pulp fiction, with such titles as Trailer Tramp and The Trailer Park Girls, told stories of casual sexual encounters and voyeurism. In the parlance of the day, the female trailer tramp “moved from town to town—from man to man.” Alongside such tales was Cracker Girl (1953), soft-porn pulp that titillated readers and capitalized on the thrill of crossing the tracks and getting sex on the lowdown. Tramps and trailer nomadism, like drugs and gambling, identified social disorder on the edge of town. 39 The poor dominated the mobile home picture. In 1969, the thirteen Appalachian states were on the receiving end of 40 percent of mobile home shipments, and, not surprisingly, the cheapest models (under $5,000) headed for the hills. In 1971, New York City approved its first trailer park, after Mayor John Lindsay found support for a policy of housing the homeless in trailers. These were not Bowery bums, but people who were being uprooted as a result of urban renewal—yet somehow the solution was to stow them away in a most nonurban sort of accommodation.

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

  Either nature would reduce the burden of the poor through food shortages, starvation, and disease, or, drawn into crime, they might end up on the gallows. Finally, some would be impressed by force or lured by bounties to fight and die in foreign wars, or else be shipped off to the colonies. Such worthless drones as these could be removed to colonial outposts that were in short supply of able-bodied laborers and, lest we forget, young “fruitful” females. Once there, it was hoped, the drones would be energized as worker bees. The bee was the favorite insect of the English, a creature seen as chaste but, more important, highly productive. 18 The colonists were a mixed lot. On the bottom of the heap were men and women of the poor and criminal classes. Among these unheroic transplants were roguish highwaymen, mean vagrants, Irish rebels, known whores, and an assortment of convicts shipped to the colonies for grand larceny or other property crimes, as a reprieve of sorts, to escape the gallows. Not much better were those who filled the ranks of indentured servants, who ranged in class position from lowly street urchins to former artisans burdened with overwhelming debts. They had taken a chance in the colonies, having been impressed into service and then choosing exile over possible incarceration within the walls of an overcrowded, disease-ridden English prison. Labor shortages led some ship captains and agents to round up children from the streets of London and other towns to sell to planters across the ocean—this was known as “spiriting.” Young children were shipped off for petty crimes. One such case is that of Elizabeth “Little Bess” Armstrong, sent to Virginia for stealing two spoons. Large numbers of poor adults and fatherless boys gave up their freedom, selling themselves into indentured servitude, whereby their passage was paid in return for contracting to anywhere from four to nine years of labor. Their contracts might be sold, and often were, upon their arrival. Unable to marry or choose another master, they could be punished or whipped at will. Owing to the harsh working conditions they had to endure, one critic compared their lot to “Egyptian bondage.” 19 Discharged soldiers, also of the lower classes, were shipped off to the colonies. For a variety of reasons, single men and women, and families of the lower gentry, and those of artisan or yeoman classes joined the mass migratory swarm. Some left their homes to evade debts that might well have landed them in prison; others (a fair number coming from Germany and France) viewed the colonies as an asylum from persecution for their religious faith; just as often, resettlement was their escape from economic restrictions imposed upon their trades.

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

  In 1986, Ernest Matthew Mickler’s White Trash Cooking was published, celebrating low-down lingo and rural recipes. When Mickler, a country singer as well as a caterer, gave his book to his seventy-two-year-old aunt, she remarked, “Well, that’s what they call us, ain’t it?” 14 The transition to white trash acceptance or accommodation was not as smooth as it might seem. While Dolly Parton made over-the-top “floozydom” fashionable, and combined the burlesque of blonde bombshells Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield with Daisy Mae of Li’l Abner fame, her public identity did not escape the taint of white trash degradation. “You have no idea how much it costs to make someone look this cheap,” Parton told a reporter in 1986. The Hollywood blockbuster Deliverance lacked even an ounce of delicacy, but offered up instead one of the most devastating portraits of rude hillbillies since the eugenics movement faded from view. White middle-class readers of the novel and film audiences wrote fan mail to author James Dickey, praising the four intrepid Atlanta adventurers as if they were old-time pioneers overcoming wilderness dangers while escaping the clutches of white trash savages. A former student of Dickey’s wrote fawningly to his mentor, apparently oblivious to the dehumanizing tone of his letter. He was an ardent backwoods hiker, he said, “though I carry no bow and there are no rednecks awaiting me at the top for me to stalk and kill.” He could not differentiate, in moral terms, between the thrill of taking on the mountains and the thrill of sending mountain men to their deaths. 15 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.

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

  Texas was to be rescued to strengthen America’s pedigree, but the admission of too many Mexicans into an expanded Union could undermine America’s racial stock. Georgia representative Alexander Hamilton Stephens, future vice president of the Confederacy, asserted that the great majority of Texans were from good stock—the right kind of people, worthy of breeding and mixing with other Americans. He employed a familiar marital metaphor from the book of Genesis to make his point: as heirs of the “Americo-Anglo-Saxon race,” Texans were “from us and of us; bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh.” Opponents of the Mexican–American War used the same race-specific language in an effort to limit the amount of territory to be taken into the United States. 19 Breeding was expected to be an increasingly important weapon in America’s imperial arsenal during the one-sided war. Yankee soldiers were expected to settle in occupied territory, marry “beautiful señoritas,” and achieve a new kind of “annexation.” This was what had happened in California, as illustrated by the remarkable career of a young Tennessee officer, Cave Johnson Couts, a close friend of President Polk. He married a daughter of a wealthy Mexican rancher, received a large tract of land from his brother-in-law, and built a grandiose home, which he filled with his ten children. By the 1860s he owned over twenty- three thousand acres and had established himself as one of the ruling patriarchs of the new state. 20 Yet California’s early history had been as grim as that of Texas. Both of these extensive territories were overrun with runaway debtors, criminal outcasts, rogue gamblers, and ruthless adventurers who thrived in the chaotic atmosphere of western sprawl. The California gold rush attracted not only grizzled gold diggers but also prostitutes, fortune hunters, and con men selling fraudulent land titles. Among the Texas and California cutthroats who captured the American imagination was the “half-breed Mexican and white.” He was known for his “mongrel dandyism,” loud jewelry, and flamboyant clothing. 21 In a certain sense, California reverted to older British colonial patterns. Though it entered the Union as a free state, prohibiting slavery, the legislature soon passed a series of byzantine laws permitting the indentured servitude of Native Americans. Between 1850 and 1854, nearly twenty thousand Indian men, women, and children were exploited as bound servants. It was John Smith’s Jamestown all over again, even to its out-of-balance male-to-female ratio. The popular presses back east appealed for white women to move out west. Some of these were earnest requests, while others satirized Californians’ desperate pleas for good breeders.

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

  If all of this isn’t improbable enough, Joe has a mulatto daughter, whom he welcomes into his home with his wife’s blessing. 34 Convenient distinctions were drawn. In the 1890s, third-generation abolitionist William Goodell Frost, president of the integrated Berea College of Kentucky, redefined his mountain neighbors: “The ‘poor white’ is actually degraded; the mountain white is a person not yet graded up.” The latter had preserved a unique lineage for centuries, and in this important way had not lost the battle for the survival of the fittest. Frost saw the mountaineer as a modern- day Saxon, with the “flavor of Chaucer” in his speech, and a clear “Saxon temper.” He was, the college president wrote, “our contemporary ancestor!” What made this isolated white the best of America’s past was his “vigorous, unjaded nerve, prolific, patriotic—full of the blood of spirit of seventy-six.” Mountain folk formed the very trunk of the American family tree. Frost tried. For many who did not buy what he was selling, however, mountain whites were still strange-looking moonshine hillbillies, prone to clannish feuds. 35 It was at about this time that the term “redneck” came into wider use. It well defined the rowdy and racist followers of the New South’s high-profile Democratic demagogues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: South Carolina’s Ben Tillman, Arkansas’s Jeff Davis, and the most interesting of the bunch, Mississippi’s James Vardaman. The “redneck” could be found in the swamps. He could be found in the mill towns. He was the man in overalls, the heckler at political rallies, and was periodically elected to the state legislature. He was Guy Rencher, a Vardaman ally, who supposedly claimed the name for himself, railing on the floor of the Mississippi House about his “long red neck.” One other possible explanation deserves mention: “redneck” came into vogue in the 1890s, at the same time Afrikaners were calling English soldiers “rednecks” in the Boer War in South Africa, highlighting the contrast between the Brit’s sun-scored skin and his pale white complexion. Such terminology was also a staple of the sharecropper’s rhythmic chant (circa 1917): “I’d druther be a Nigger, an’ plow ole Beck, Dan a white Hill Billy wid his long red neck.” 36 • • • This was the world of W. E. B. Du Bois. This was also the world of Theodore Roosevelt. The two men agreed on very little—and obviously not on evolutionary theory or the science of eugenics, to which Roosevelt was a complete convert. Certainly Du Bois found no comfort in the president’s militarism or his glorification of the white settler’s savagery in the Old West. But they were in total agreement on one thing: the menace of redneck politics. Roosevelt unexpectedly became president in 1901, upon the assassination of William McKinley. Only forty-two at the time, he was known for daring military exploits during the Spanish–American War, which had earned him a place on the Republican ticket.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  There are indications that these intellectuals set themselves on a level above ordinary Christians; in fact, they may well have said that complete salvation was outside the grasp of the ordinary man or woman and open only to them. At times, the Pastoral Epistles stress the word all in a most significant way. The grace of God, which brings salvation, has appeared to all (Titus 2:11). It is God's will that all should be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth (i Timothy 2:4). The intellectuals tried to make the greatest blessings of Christianity the exclusive possession of a chosen few; and, in complete contrast, the true faith stresses the all-embracing love of God. There were within that heresy two opposite tendencies. There was a tendency to self-denial. The heretics tried to lay down special food laws, forgetting that everything God has made is good (i Timothy 4:4-5). They listed many things as impure, forgetting that to the pure all things are pure (Titus 1:15). It is not impossible that they regarded sex as something unclean and belittled marriage, and even tried to persuade those who were married to renounce it, for in Titus 2:4 the simple duties of married life are stressed as being binding on Christians. But this heresy also resulted in immorality. The heretics even went into private houses and led away weak and foolish women who were swayed by all kinds of desires (2 Timothy 3:6). They claimed to know God, but denied him by their actions (Titus 1:16). They were out to impose upon people and to make money out of their false teaching. To them, gain was godliness (i Timothy 6:5); they taught and deceived for sordid gain (Titus is i i). On the one hand, this heresy produced an un-Christian self-denial, and on the other it produced an equally un Christian immorality. It was characterized, too, by words and tales and genealogies. It was full of godless chatter and useless controversies (i Timothy 6:20). It produced endless genealogies (I Timothy r:4; Titus 3:9). It produced myths and fables (I Timothy 1:4; Titus 1:14). It was at least in some way and to some extent tied up with Jewish legalism. Among its devotees were those `of the circumcision' (Titus I: io). The aim of the heretics was to be teachers of the law (i Timothy r:7). It pressed on people Jewish myths and the commandments of those who reject the truth (Titus 1: 14). Finally, these heretics denied the resurrection of the body. They said that any resurrection that a Christian was going to experience had been experienced already (2 Timothy 2:18). This is probably a reference to those who held that the only resurrection Christians experienced was a spiritual one when they died with Christ and rose again with him in the experience of baptism (Romans 6:4). The Beginnings of Gnosticism Is there any heresy which fits all this material?

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  They bring the Christian faith into disrepute (2:2). They are greedy and seek personal gain, and they exploit others (2:3, 2:14-15). They are doomed and will share the fate of the sinning angels (2:4), the world before the Flood (2:5), the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah (2:6) and the false prophet Balaam (2:15). They are irrational and sensual creatures, ruled by their animal instincts (2:12) and dominated by their lusts (2:10, 2:18). Their eyes are full of adultery (2:14). They are presumptuous, self-willed and arrogant (2:10, 2:18). They spend even the daylight hours in abandoned and luxurious revelry (2:13). They speak of liberty; but what they call liberty is unrestrained licence, and they themselves are the slaves of their own lusts (2:19). Not only are they deluded, they also delude others and lead them astray (2:14, 2:18). They are worse than those who never knew the right, because they knew what goodness is and have lapsed into evil, like a dog returning to its vomit and a sow returning to the mud after it has been washed (2:20-2). It is clear that Peter is describing antinomians, those who used God's grace as a justification for sinning. In all probability they were Gnostics, who said that only spirit was good and that matter was essentially evil and that, therefore, what we did with the body was not important and that we could follow physical appetites to excess and it made no difference. They lived the most immoral lives and encouraged others to do so, and they justified their actions by distorting grace and interpreting Scripture to suit themselves. The Denial of the Second Coming Further, these evil people denied the second coming (3:3-4). They argued that this was a stable world in which things remained unalterably the same, and that God was so slow to act that it was possible to assume that the second coming was never going to happen at all. The answer of 2 Peter is that this is not a stable world; that it has, in fact, been destroyed by water in the Flood and that it will be destroyed by fire in the final conflagration (3:5-7). What they regard as unnecessary delay is in fact God withholding his hand in patience to give men and women another chance to repent (3:8-9). But the day of destruction is coming (3:1o). A new heaven and a new earth are on the way; therefore, goodness is an absolute necessity if people are to be saved in the day of judgment (3:11-14). With this Paul agrees, however difficult his letters may be to understand, and however false teachers deliberately misinterpret them (3:15-16).