Pride

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 Escape (2007)

  A man has spirit wives in heaven, where he fathers spirit children. (Becoming a spirit child is the first step on the journey in coming to earth.) We also held fast to the belief that our father was once a spirit and then came to earth to get a body and try to prove that he is worthy enough to become a god. Grandma said that the prophet had to be very careful about whom he shared this information with because several men had turned against him when he introduced them to this holy covenant of marriage. So with deep feeling she told me how my great-great-great-grandfather became one of the first men to live the principle of celestial marriage, which is only given to God’s most chosen. It was not for everyone. The prophet Joseph Smith said that this one principle would condemn more men than it would save. But it worked for my great-great-great-great-grandfather, who had seven wives. His sons had many wives, too, and according to Grandma, the principle of celestial marriage had been a blessing to all in our family who practiced it. I felt like the luckiest little girl to be one of God’s elite and a spirit who was the most chosen of all his spirits before I came to earth. Proof of that was that I had been born into a faithful bloodline. I was FLDS royalty. The culture really believes in the value of bloodlines. Only a spirit who was strong and worthy would be selected to be born into one of the royal lines. Understand that we were taught to believe we were better than everyone else in the entire world because of our beliefs. Since I had been selected to come to such a royal bloodline, my grandmother told me that I had the chance to become a goddess if I lived polygamy and proved worthy. It was our own version of the Cinderella story. Just having the opportunity to live in a plural marriage was sold to me as a special blessing that few would ever have. Grandma explained that our family always held fast to the principle of celestial marriage, especially after the Mormon Church issued a manifesto against it in the 1890s. Fearing prosecution, her family fled to Mexico with other Mormons who were devoted to polygamy and determined to keep practicing it. When she was ten years old her family came back to the United States. The official policy of the Mormon Church became, and still is, that those who practice polygamy are not in harmony with God. But the adherents who believed polygamy was a requirement for their salvation began a fundamentalist movement in the early years of the twentieth century. The grassroots movement slowly gained strength, and it was several years before it became an actual organization, complete with a prophet.

• From Escape (2007)

  Uncle Roy traveled to Phoenix and began doggedly tracking down all the children and their mothers. He forbade the women to testify about their marriages and started court proceedings of his own to counter Arizona’s action. In a move that perplexed everyone except those who believed Uncle Roy was getting messages from God, Uncle Roy told his lawyers to find the law that said children couldn’t be taken from their families without a parent’s consent. His attorneys scoffed at the notion that such a law existed. Uncle Roy said it did. Sure enough, a law on the books said just that, and the court case ended. The Short Creek raid actually turned out to be a boon to the FLDS. It generated monumental sympathy for the cult. Once the court case was thrown out, everyone returned home and the practice of polygamy thrived. But the sect became more secretive. People were afraid of the government and became much more guarded about their activities. The dress style became more conservative. No one could show any part of their bodies below the neck. Women were forbidden to wear pants. Marriage also changed. Before the Short Creek raid, women were allowed to choose the men they wanted to marry. The problem was that when women had a say in choosing their own husbands, they chose men close to their own ages. Young women wanted to marry young men. That was bad news for an older man seeking younger wives to enhance his favor with God. The powerful men in the FLDS were older. They knew something had to change because when forced to compete with younger men, they routinely lost out. They also feared that young men from outside the community would entice young women to live outside once they fell in love with them. The future of polygamy was in jeopardy before the Short Creek raid. Several women were thinking of leaving. Back then many women had family on the outside, so leaving was not frightening. Women had some choice. The men in power didn’t like it. The Short Creek raid sabotaged the trust women had in the outside world. They now felt everyone was against them. They’d seen their terrified babies ripped from their arms. Uncle Roy stood up to the state of Arizona and won. He credited the victory in part to the faithfulness of women who would not turn against the system. The women then believed that they must be even more obedient to the prophet in the future. They were thinking of the terror of losing their children, not of surrendering their human rights, which is precisely what happened.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  The ultimate value-truth-makes old priorities dissolve. I thought for a moment that I should use victimized here, for which Roget listed "cheated, swindled, deceived, duped, (and my personal favorite) bamboozled." But as an ex-cult member, I am already familiar with this bamboozlement thing and I truly don't want it hanging around on my recover mobile! The sixth letter, another E, brings two important concepts. The first is educate. We must educate ourselves if we are to educate others about the cult phenomenon. In orderto keep movingforward, I continue to learn and gain more understanding about issues of thought reform and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). You may think that PTSD applies only to Vietnam veterans; well, it doesn't. However, through Vietnam vets' severe difficulty with this disorder, PTSD is recognized as the long-term shadow it can be. The symptoms of PTSD, such as nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, sleeplessness, and fear, are identical to symptoms that occur in postcult survival. Along with this education, I must edit, continually edit my life, my choices, and my decisions. I must update and improve my day-to-day life, my career, and my relationships. Under the last letter, R, I choose to hang respect. I have survived this experience and I continue to regain my independent thought and reconstruct my life; that deserves respect. And with respect comes compassion for those who are still mesmerized by false truths and power-hungry, manipulative, selfordained gods. I have respect and compassion for other now-free minds struggling to discover their real potential, strengths, and talents. And I have respect and compassion for myself. The human element of fallibility will raise its head occasionally. There is no "perfect." There is no "normal." There is only "cut to the chase and give it my best shot!" My father quoted an old Native American adage to me when I was quite little: "Do not judge a person until you have walked a mile in his moccasins." I've learned to apply this not only to others but to myself as well. Think back, and imagine walking a mile in the moccasins you wore then. Give yourself respect and judge yourself gently for the distances you covered. To summarize: R: RECONSTRUCTION E: ENDURANCE C: CUT TO THE CHASE O; ORCHESTRATE, Operate, Oppose V: VALUES E: EDUCATE, Edit R: RESPECT My imaginary mobile has expanded sufficiently for the moment. The irony is that this mobile will never be finished, never be complete. It is only a foundation for more and more parts to interact. As it hangs out there in its precarious, delicate balance, I realize that there is no way to box up my cult experience and store it away somewhere. It will not disappear; it will always be a part of my life. And through this experience I have gained expanded knowledge, the courage to question, compassion, self-respect and a deeper trust in myself. PART THREEFamilies and Children in CultsIf our way of life fails the child, it fails us all. -PEARL S.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  So I guess I won't be stocking my restaurant's larder with exclusively Hudson Valley products anytime soon. When my customers want strawberries, I'll have them flown in from warmer climes. Though I use the New York foie gras for pan-seared, I will continue to order the French for terrine. My Arborio rice will come from Italy, my beans for cassoulet from Tarbes. Because they're better. When those cute little baby eels from Portugal are available again, I'll be ordering them; who cares if there'll be none left for the Portuguese? I will continue to occasionally drink caipirinhas with my sashimi at Sushi Samba in New York—and I'll try to not feel silly about it. Perhaps the best thing chefs can do is to cook, whenever possible, with heart. Where poorer nations have a tradition of cooking well because they have to, we have choices. If we can take something lasting from the Blood cause, it is that it is always better to make the most of what's available, to cook well. If a chef's unique vision and identity is associated closely with a particular area or local culture, great. He's doing God's work. If there is good, local skate available, then there is no reason to fly in the endangered, mushy, and oft-frozen Chilean sea bass. A good chef imports an ingredient from the other side of the globe because it makes sense—not for its novelty value or its rarity. Why bother to make Mexican food in London if the end result is nothing but soulless sour-tasting caulking compound? Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating a fashionable ersatz dim-sum emporium and then bleed out all the happy sloppy informality that makes the dim-sum experience so much fun? However horrifying it might be to see some young, fresh-out-of-culinary-school novice bombarding his guests with dende oil, Thai basil, yuzu, and chipotles, it's nice to know that others for whom those ingredients are more familiar can find them at will. But I'm not giving up my white Italian truffles until the last one is gone. Show me a bootleg ortolan and I'm there, crunching bones with only a minimum of guilt. I'll just be sure to not overcook it. VIVA MEXICO! VIVA ECUADOR! Let's be honest, let's be really, painfully honest: Who is cooking? Who is the backbone of the American restaurant business? Whose sudden departure could shut down nearly every good restaurant, nightclub, and banquet facility in every major city in the country? Whose sweat and toil allows annoyingly well-known white-boy chefs like me to go around the country flogging books, appearing on TV, writing obnoxious magazine articles, and baiting their peers? Who, pound for pound, are the best French and Italian cooks in New York?

• From Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  1. If critical dialogue is conducted in the spirit of Socrates then reasoned disagreement is a form of respect for the other. 2. Such dialogue preserves mutuality with the other by putting the self at risk: if I criticize other people’s views, it is only fair to listen to their criticisms of my views. 3. Openness to other views involves the risk of what may be called Socratic or cognitive repentance: the recognition that my beliefs are based on ignorance or error. 4. This risk does not lessen one’s commitment to one’s own religion, but is simply a consequence of the adventure of life, in which it is always possible to find one is mistaken. 5. I would propose such a dialogical approach to the diversity of religious traditions, in the conviction that it “does justice to difference”: i.e., pays respect to otherness of other people’s views and the possibility that their religion really does mean something fundamentally different from mine. 6. All this is a reason to be glad that the religious traditions of the West have a long history of learning from the philosophical tradition. Essential Reading: Hick, “A Philosophy of Religious Pluralism” in Hick, chapter 3. Mitchell in “Theology and Falsification.” Supplemental Reading: Cary, “Believing the Word: A Proposal about Knowing Other Persons” (my philosophical argument in favor of the view that knowledge of other persons is always dependent on their authority). Evans, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith, chapters 7 and 8 (on critical historiography and belief in miracles) and chapters 9 and 11 (on the “externalism” of Reformed Epistemology). James, The Variety of Religious Experience, chapters 16–20. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapters 10–36 (contains what is in my judgment the deepest attempt to address the problem of theodicy ever written by a Christian). ©1999 The Teaching Company. 165 Questions to Consider: 1. Do you think there is a role for authority in religion? 2. Do you think it is possible to disagree with other people’s religions without disrespect? ©1999 The Teaching Company. 166 Timeline

• From Augustine: Philosopher and Saint (2005)

  56 doG fo ytiC ehT :21 erutceL • This provides Augustine with a philosophical analysis of the nature of paganism. Paganism is not just belief in many gods (for Christians too believe in many immortal beings: the angels, who are just like what pagans call gods). Paganism is the inward worship of many gods, i.e., seeking one’s ultimate happiness from them. • This means that the interesting challenges Augustine must face are from non-Christians who seek their happiness from the one Supreme God, i.e., Platonists and Jews. • The Platonists (in the City of God as in the Confessions) are blamed for their intellectual pride, their participation in pagan worship, and their refusal to embrace the humility of Christ (cf. books 8–10). • Augustine blames the Jews too for not believing in Christ, but he also retells their history in the Old Testament as signifying the eternal life brought by Christ (in books 15–18). The Jews of the Old Testament were the primary members of the City of God at that time. The Roman virtue so admired by the pagans consisted of the lust for domination and the desire for praise or earthly glory (5:12–20)—that was the common love that united Rome as “the capital of the Earthly City” (15:5). The peace of the Earthly City (City of God, book 19): • Peace is the ultimate goal of war, of all politics, indeed of all life (19:10–13): the ordered harmony of body and soul and of mind with mind. • Con(cid:192) ict, wars, and violence inevitably arise in the Earthly City because it is a community in which everybody loves private goods that cannot be shared (15:3–5), as opposed to loving God, who can be shared by all with no loss to any. • The heavenly city seeks the peace of the Earthly City as a real but not ultimate good, promoting “the compromise of human wills concerning things pertaining to this mortal life” (19:17). Hence Christians are good citizens. • The City of God is a sojourner in its pilgrimage on earth, seeking eternal peace, being happy in its hope, not in present reality (19:16).

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

  1732, women provided habits of cleanliness and “wholesome food,” and remained on hand to nurse the sick. Unlike others before him, Oglethorpe felt the disadvantaged could be reclaimed if they were given a fair chance. Far more radical was his calculation that a working wife and eldest son could replace the labor of indentured servants and slaves. He claimed that a wife and one son equaled the labor value of an adult male. He was clearly not fond of the practice of indenture, considering it the same as making “slaves for years.” While Georgia’s trustees did not prohibit the use of white servants, Oglethorpe made sure their tenures were limited. Oddly, it turned out that the colonists best suited to the Georgia experiment were not English but Swiss, German, French Huguenot, and Scottish Highlander, all of whom seemed prepared for lives of hardship, arriving as whole communities of farming families. 45 Slavery, however, could not be kept apart from future projections in Georgia. After allowing South Carolina to send over slaves to fell trees and clear the land for the town of Savannah, Oglethorpe came to regret the decision. He made a brief trip to Charles Town, and returned to discover that in the interim the white settlers had grown “impatient of Labour and Discipline.” Some had sold good food for rum punch. With drunkeness came disease. And so, Oglethorpe wrote, the “Negroes who sawed for us” and encouraged white “Idleness” were sent back. 46 Many contemporaries connected slavery to English idleness. William Byrd weighed in on the ban against slavery in Georgia in a letter to a Georgia trustee. He saw how slavery had sparked discontent among poor whites in Virginia, who routinely refused to “dirty their hands with Labour of any kind,” preferring to steal or starve rather than work in the fields. Slavery ruined the “industry of our White People,” he confessed, for they saw a “Rank of Poor Creatures below them,” and detested the thought of work out of a perverse pride, lest they might “look like slaves.” A North Carolina proprietor, John Colleton, observed in Barbados that poor whites were called “white slaves” by black slaves; it struck him that the same contempt for white field hands prevailed in the southern colonies in North America. 47 A fair number of Georgians were less high-minded, and envious of their South Carolina neighbors. As soon as the slavery ban (it was not part of the original charter) was adopted in Georgia, petitions were sent to the trustees seeking permission to purchase slaves. Oglethorpe waged a war of words with proslavery settlers, whom he called “Malcontents.” At the height of the controversy, in 1739, he argued that African slavery should never be introduced

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

  • • • As the literary canon took on a new dimension with the rise of a talented generation of white trash writers, Americans returned another southerner to the White House in 1993. With Bill Clinton, the national spotlight focused once more on the uneasy relationship between class identity and American democracy. The boy from modest beginnings in Hope, Arkansas, had won a Rhodes Scholarship, was a Yale Law School graduate, and served as the governor of his state—in short, the American dream. William Jefferson Clinton was a perfect example of what his namesake, the man from Monticello, had formulated in 1779: raking from the rubbish a deserving youth who could eventually join the nation’s aristocracy of talent. In his Fourth of July speech in his first year as president, Clinton recounted the story of how thirty years earlier he had met President Kennedy in the Rose Garden of the White House, shaking his hand, standing in awe as a “boy from a small town in Arkansas, with no money and no political connections.” 17 The Clinton saga was a blend of Charles Dickens and Dorothy Allison. He did not grow up in a financially secure middle-class nuclear family of the fifties. Rather, his father had died three months before he was born, and his mother left him in the care of grandparents and great-grandparents while she attended nursing school. “The strength of our family could not be measured by the weight of our wallets,” he proudly declared on Independence Day in 1993. But as the public learned from his mother, Virginia, there was a darker side to Bill’s childhood. In the biographical film shown during the Democratic National Convention, Clinton’s fractured roots were exposed. He may have taken the name of his stepfather, but as a fourteen-year-old found he had to stand up to him. Roger Clinton was a car dealer and a gambler; he drank too much, and he became violent. One day, Bill quietly told him, “Don’t ever, ever lay your hands on my mother again.” But like Chute’s and Allison’s treatment of their male characters, he was not without compassion, saying of his stepfather’s problem, “He didn’t think enough of himself.” He had internalized that sense of white trash shame. 18 On the campaign trail, Clinton quoted Jefferson, and staged his ceremonial inaugural journey to Washington from the top of Jefferson’s “little mountain.” At the Republican convention, ex-president Reagan had taken the opportunity to question the pretensions of the boy from Hope, dismissing the idea that Clinton was the heir of either Kennedy or Jefferson. In a classic quip, he modified lines

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

  Dickey’s story had its giant appeal because the search he described found expression elsewhere in American society. NASCAR offered the same kind of allure, as Tom Wolfe wrote in Esquire . Men without inhibitions who lived for the momentary pleasure of danger had no fear of the consequences of their actions. North Carolinian driver Junior Johnson was not just a “hero a whole people or class can identify with,” he was a “rare breed” who had gone from whiskey running in the isolated hills and hollows of his home state to stock car racing. He had it all: money, a split-level house, a poultry business. He might have exchanged his overalls for a windbreaker with the collar up, and “Slim Jim” white pants, but this “breed of old boy” proved something major by driving at 175 miles per hour with a kind of madness that was “raw and hillbilly.” That was the appeal. 23 The macho star of Deliverance, Burt Reynolds, went on to make a southern- accented film that was an homage to the stock car racer’s way of life. In Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Reynolds’s character lived for the chase and ran from the law, while his female companion (played by Sally Field) was a runaway bride— both of them rejecting civilization’s restraints. The Reynolds of this film was a modern-day squatter like good old Sug, respected because he refused to knuckle down and join the daily grind of working to get ahead. Smokey and the Bandit was the second highest grossing film in 1977, but most of its popularity was in the South and Midwest. Adding to the mix, in 1979, CBS launched The Dukes of Hazzard, the plots of which revolved around rebel moonshiners decked out in a bright red racing car, and a sexy kissing cousin named Daisy, whose trademark was her high-cut jean shorts. Denver Pyle was cast as Uncle Jesse, known for his overalls and countrified homilies; Pyle had previously played Briscoe Darling Jr., the surly father of a musical hillbilly clan in The Andy Griffith Show . 24 Wannabe bandits were among the thousands of spectators at NASCAR who launched into rebel yells, drank too much, and ogled the floozy on the float with her “big blonde hair and blossomy breasts” and cheap Dallas Cowgirl outfit. They embraced a certain species of freedom—the freedom to be a boor, out in the open and without regrets. The “upscale rednecks,” the rising white trash middle class, identified with these hillbilly racers, men who had escaped the overalls and gained as much respect as could be had in accepting wads of cash from Detroit. Class structure had not changed appreciably for the rural poor: money may have made a hillbilly or two reputable, but those left in the hills were not reaping any social benefits. “Upscale rednecks” had no trouble spotting those below them in their rearview mirrors. 25

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  As I've said many times, I can teach people to cook. I can't teach character. And my comrades from Mexico and Ecuador have been some of the finest characters I've known in twenty eight years as a cook and as a chef. I am privileged, made better, by having known and worked with many of them. I am honored by their hard work, their toil, and their loyalty. I am enriched by their sense of humor, their music, their food, their not-so-nice names for me behind my back, their kindness, and their strength. They have shown me what real character is. They have made this business—the "Hospitality Industry"—what it is, and they keep its wheels grinding forward. It was once said that this is the land of the free. There is, I believe, a statue out there in the harbor, with something written on it about "Give me your hungry . . . your oppressed . . . give me pretty much everybody"—that's the way I remember it, anyway. The idea of America is a mutt-culture, isn't it? Who the hell is America if not everybody else? We are—and should be—a big, messy, anarchistic polyglot of dialects and accents and different skin tones. Like our kitchens. We need more Latinos to come here. And they should, whenever possible, impregnate our women. Lately, things have changed . . . a little. The off-the-books, below-minimum-wage illegal has to some extent disappeared from view, at least in the good restaurants I worked in. The strata of Latino labor has enlarged to include saute, grill, and even sous-chef positions. But you don't see too many chefs of French or Italian or even "New American" restaurants with a last name like Hernandez or Perez or Garcia. Owners, it seems, still shrink from having a mestizo-looking chef swanning about the dining room of their two- or three-star French eatery—even if the candidate richly deserves the job. Language skills are not the issue. Chances are, Mexicans or Ecuadorans speak English a hell of a lot better than most Americans speak Spanish (or French for that matter). It's . . . well . . . we know what it is, don't we? It's racism, pure and simple. I'd go on, more than happy to open the next can of worms—the How come I don't see many African Americans in good restaurant kitchens? question—but I'll leave that to another, more reasoned advocate, hopefully one with better answers than I have. What's the number-one complaint from chefs and managers in our industry? I can tell you what I hear in every major city I visit, and I've been visiting a lot of them lately: "I'm having a hard time finding good help!"

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

  Jimmy Carter’s presidency seemed to offer a break from past southern politicians. He was a born-again Christian and navy officer (with training in nuclear physics) who predicated his 1976 campaign on his refusal to lie to the voters. In the early days of the campaign, he gave an unusual stump speech to elementary school children in New Hampshire, proclaiming that the United States could have a “government as good and as honest and as decent and as competent and as compassionate and as filled with love as the American people.” Here was a sentimental democrat, a gospel-infused Christian populist, leaps and bounds from the anger-fueled populism of the old (redneck) South. 26 Of all his predecessors, Carter probably came closest to Frank Clement’s clean-cut demeanor, but he mostly kept his religious views to personal statements. He was no gyrating entertainer like Clement, nor (at five foot seven) was he a giant-sized jokester like “Big Jim” Folsom. He preferred to compare himself to Yale graduate and Tennessee liberal Estes Kefauver. The campaign rhetoric contained a “log cabin” story that captured the family’s rise, but it left out the fact that Jimmy grew up with a tennis court in the backyard. He did express southern pride, though, gaining the support of country rock groups such as the Allman Brothers. His political handlers were sure to fashion a radio ad for the pickup truck crowd: “We’ve been the butt of every bad joke for a hundred years. Don’t let the Washington politicians keep one of us out of the White House.” The closest Carter came to acknowledging cracker roots was when he quoted the words of his supporter (his future United Nations ambassador) Andrew Young that he was “white trash made good.” That made the peanut farmer Jimmy Carter “reformed” white trash. As a black congressman from Georgia, Young was suggesting that it was possible for the old hostility between poor blacks and whites to be overcome. 27 As much as he rose above the dirty politics of the Nixon years, Carter’s Sunday school teacher persona could go only so far. His image problem was cleverly summed up by fellow Georgian Roy Blount Jr. in the book Crackers (1980). Rather than find his inner redneck as James Dickey had, Carter ran on everything he wasn’t: “He wasn’t a racist, an elitist, a sexist, a Washingtonian, a dimwit, a liar, a lawyer . . . an ideologue, a paranoid, a crook.” He was always in denial. By taking the “meanness and hambone out of the redneck,” Blount reasoned, Carter was left without “force or framework.” And no matter how liberal, how tolerant and accommodating he appeared, Carter’s redneck shadow followed him. In that shadow the media lay in wait, preoccupied with Jimmy’s

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

  associated with an ethnic identity. To be a Bubba was to adopt a leisure self, a thing put on and worn like a pair of dungarees or a trucker’s cap. Take off your suit and tie and dress down à la redneck—one might call it white trash slumming. It was just one more attempt to downplay class by anointing (and electing) Bubba as the new common man. Or so innovators in democratic parlance preferred as the Clinton era took shape. 22 Clinton acquired other, less folksy nicknames, of course. “Slick Willie” was a slur that dogged him all the way from Arkansas to the White House. Of the issues that attached to him—smoking marijuana (with or without inhalation), dodging the draft, an alleged affair—Clinton issued denials, offered earnest- seeming explanations, but always came across as somewhat less than forthright. Here he was portrayed as a smooth talker, even a con man—“Slick Willie” was a name with southern and rural flavor. There was in Clinton’s rise the backdrop of a tawdry southern novel, as Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat discovered: Clinton’s finesse at verbal dodges suggested a man ducking into all the available rabbit holes. It was Greenberg who first bestowed the ignominious title on the boy from Hope back in 1980. Another syndicated columnist saw something deeply southern in the moniker: it suggested the liberal politician’s reflex—in the South, honesty could derail a career. 23 Clinton could not help but be defined by his origins. Even with his gift for gab, he was never as polished or, well, as slick as Reagan, who was known as the “Teflon-coated president.” In his first year in office, when Clinton appeared momentarily to fumble, an editorialist wrote that Slick Willie was looking more like Sheriff Andy Griffith’s sidekick Barney Fife. Image was everything, and politicians were always fair game, no matter how shallow, fleeting, or obnoxious the label pasted on them in print or cartoon was. The game in the 1990s was to find an image that placed Bill Clinton in a more favorable light and brushed the dirt from his jeans. What might be Clinton’s “Old Hickory” moment? As it turned out, he was saved by Elvis. 24 Clinton was not in the least reticent about cultivating the Elvis image. He sang one of the King’s songs on a New York City news program, and during an interview with Charlie Rose jokingly appealed to the press, “Don’t Be Cruel.” What really did it for him, though, was an appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show playing his saxophone rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel.” Clinton had revived the old southern political strategy—as Jimmy Carter could not do—of singing and swinging his way into office. His vice president, Al Gore of Tennessee, regaled the Democratic National Convention by confessing that the moment at hand

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  I keep talking about the prostitute as a woman. This is both because the image of “prostitute” with which I was raised was always a woman, and because when I think of prostitution, I inevitably think of myself in that role, compare my responses to what I see and hear. But there are a lot of men working out there, and they’re not being hired by women. Samantha Miller told me that just as there is a great deal more prostitution going on than most people suspect, there is a great deal more prostitution between men going on. Most of these “call guys,” as it were, seem to be white, young, good-looking, healthy, fairly well-educated, and gay. “Seventy-five percent of the men that they see are married,” says Samantha. “There’s this huge thing going on all over the world; men are having sex with men all over the place and not talking about it. That’s where heterosexual transmission of AIDS is. I wish all married men would see male prostitutes, because I know they’re doing safe sex. But when men are doing it with each other, they’re not.” Prostitutes are sometimes beautiful women, sometimes not; they are young and old; thin and heavy; buxom and flat-chested. They are comfortable with their bodies. I asked Jackie Daniels, a nom de plume for a longtime prostitute who happens to be well known by another name in another field, about the high-maintenance chores of the profession. “When I first started, I had this idea that I had to be perfect,” she answered. Jackie is an attractively tousled, almost maternally curvaceous woman in her late thirties. “I thought I had to have my legs completely waxed and my pussy shaved just so, and if I had a broken fingernail, I wouldn’t make appointments. But there’s just some men who love women, and they just want to see all kinds of women. They just love women. It doesn’t matter what size, shape, smell, color, anything, they just love women. Then there are men who have a certain type they want—they want busty, or they want petite, or they want young. I have this one guy who I just adore, and he and I are just about the same age, and he wants someone older. He wants to fuck his mother.” Even now, when she’s semiretired and in a relationship with one wealthy man, Jackie finds it hard to give up the idea of prostitution. The possibilities—the easy money, the no-consequences open-natured exchange—are always there, inviting. She knows it could happen right now, tonight, easy as pie, and she knows she’s good at the job. She knows that the doorman and elevator operator and garageman at her penthouse apartment over the marina know what she does for a living, and seem to approve. “I want to show this apartment to people and go, ‘See? I am really good in bed! Look at this apartment! Look at what my pussy got me!”

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  Alex is a twenty-five-year-old prostitute. She grew up in the Bronx in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, the eldest daughter of a working-class family. She is a beautiful woman with pale skin, dark hair, a slender, athletic body, and a serene manner. Alex is bisexual. Alex left home at fourteen of her own accord, came to California, began doing telephone sex at nineteen, and became a prostitute at twenty-three. She has a bachelor’s degree in community studies and funded her college tuition largely through sex work. “I’d been thinking about doing this kind of work forever—at least, since I was fourteen years old,” she told me. I interviewed Alex in the near-empty back bedroom of a friend’s apartment in San Francisco. One of the first things she wanted me to know was that she’d given a lot of thought to prostitution before she started. “I was aware of having this sexual power that people wanted, and that I could use it to my advantage to get things I wanted. I was so sick of being poor all my life, and I wasn’t looking forward to a whole life of being poor like my parents and grandparents had been.” Alex works largely out of the contact sheets that are sold cheaply through coin boxes or simply given away free in any urban area. Alex advertises as a “model or escort.” Men call her, and before she’ll meet them she asks them to talk about themselves a little, about their personal lives and work. “I need some form of human connection,” she says, adding that she has “never, ever, not at all” had an abusive or even frightening client. For a time Alex worked for a small “house,” but the madam was busted. She would be scheduled for a three-day stretch, make a lot of money, and then take an extended period of time off work. She liked the schedule, the companionship of other women, and the ease of not having to screen her own clients. “Would you agree to a single relationship?” I asked. “Being ‘kept’?” “Hell, no. I’ve never wanted anyone to own me. I would never be someone’s little wifey. Sure, I’ll be your whore for an hour, and when I leave, I go back to my own life. I’m not stuck with you for the rest of my life! I’d much rather be a whore than a wife.”

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

  Baker’s plight was not of her own doing. She wanted to be married; she wanted to display the “Industry, Frugality, Fertility, and Skill in Oeconomy, appertaining to a good Wife’s Character.” Was it her fault that bachelors abounded? she pleaded. How could her action be considered sinful when one gazed on the “admirable workmanship” of God in creating her beautiful children? Had she not fulfilled her higher duty, “the first and great Command of Nature, and of Nature’s God, Encrease and Multiply ?” As Franklin saw it, God and nature were on the side of Miss Baker, and foolish laws and outdated church sanctions on the other. To make his point, he added a humorous coda: the judge who heard her speech was convinced and he married her himself the next day. 9 Franklin’s offbeat story touched on all the points that he was trying to prove by demographic calculations and point-by-point reasoning in his “Observations.” The two essays should be read side by side. Nor was it an accident that he named his character Baker, a sly reference to the womb as an oven, a popular jest among English writers at the time. For Franklin, a man of both science and commerce, reproductive labor was work and should be valued as such. By adding to the “numbers of the King’s subjects,” reproductive labor was an imperial asset. It also made sense for Franklin to target bachelors in his tale. In the American colonies and in England, the unmarried man of means was a scandalous figure. He was ridiculed as a hermaphrodite, as half man, half woman; his prescribed punishment, as one New York newspaper demanded, should be to have half of his beard shaved from his face to indicate his diminished manliness. Others felt he should lose his inheritance. In the same way that land could be left fallow, human fertility could be wasted. Having no children, wasting their seed, bachelors indulged in the worst kind of reproductive idleness. 10 On the other hand, bastards added to the population and increased the wealth of the empire. Franklin’s own circumstances reinforced his view. His son William (later royal governor of New Jersey) was a bastard. William, too, fathered a bastard son, William Temple Franklin, and Temple, as he was known, added two known illegitimate children to the family tree. Bastards were a Franklin family tradition. 11 Like John Locke, Franklin was certain that healthy children were the “riches of every country.” Yet his promotion of natural increase in the 1750s had more to do with colonial politics than strictly scientific curiosity. More than anywhere else, he asserted unambiguously, fit and fertile children were the special assets of British North America. In “Observations,” he sought to convince British policy

• From Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (1994)

  When I ask Alex to tell me what she likes and doesn’t like about the sex itself, she quickly makes a list: “I love doing couples together. S/M, totally. I will not let a client fuck me in the butt. I do that with friends, and it’s one of the few things I save for friends only. Number one, it’s too dangerous, and number two, it’s just too intimate. And one of my favorite things sexually is being fisted, getting fist-fucked, and a couple of clients ask to do that. I have one regular client who I do it to, rectally, and that’s fine, I love it. He has the whole setup in his house, a sling. But I wouldn’t let a client do that for me, it’s too personal and too close to who I really am. I’ve had clients who want to watch me masturbate, but when they want me to come, too, it’s really tedious, because I generally don’t. I guess I could fake it if I had to. I would love to do women alone, but so far there’ve been only a few who called, and they chickened out. Most of the women who do call are in a couple. I tried advertising in a gay paper, but mostly what I got was gay men curious about trying something with a woman. “When I first started doing this, I was seeing a woman. I’d been involved with her for two and a half years, we were living together, and she was really upset. It was hard for her to understand that this was about business for me and not pleasure, and it wasn’t like fucking other people. We split up for other reasons in the end. There’s a guy I’m seeing now, and I told him right at the outset and he has a really hard time with it. If I’m going to be involved with someone, they’ve got to know. I’m not in the closet about anything. “I think it’s totally ridiculous that it’s illegal. Totally ridiculous that it be regulated at all. Adults have bodies and some of us have money, and if we want to negotiate to use what we’ve got—I just don’t understand why anything between consenting adults should be illegal. What business is it of the government? It’s somebody pushing their morals on me, based on their belief system, which is totally different from mine. Totally ridiculous. “I really believe there are some people who truly, truly love the work, a hundred percent of the time, and there’s nothing they’d rather do. And then there’s some people like me—sometimes I like it, sometimes I don’t. I can tolerate it because the money’s good, and I’m not going to make that kind of money anywhere else. And then I think there’s people who just could not handle it at all.

• From Christian Saints

  9. Margaret of Cortona: Midwife and Mystic When he was about 12, she sent him to the Franciscans of Arezzo as a novice. It is unclear whether they ever met again or what her son’s impressions of his mother were. Emphasizing this aspect of their relationship furthered Giunta’s efforts to portray Margaret as desperately penitent for her sins and eager to shed her former life, son included. The connections Margaret had built with wealthy Cortonese families benefited many of her later projects and raised her status in the community. Even as her fame as a holy woman and ascetic grew, Margaret proved herself a savvy manager of people and resources. She leveraged her contacts to become an able fundraiser and administrator. As her charitable efforts became well known, she inspired the wealthy families of her circle to greater acts of charity themselves. One Lady Diabella dedicated her own home as a hospice of mercy, which Margaret ran as an infirmary for the local Franciscans. She built the small hospice into a thriving charity. In 1286, she convinced one of the most powerful noblemen of Cortona, Uguccio Casali, to support the foundation of a hospital. She became the driving force behind the foundation and administration of Spedale di Santa Maria della Misericordia, also founding an organization of pious laypeople (known as a confraternity) to run the hospital. 67 9. Margaret of Cortona: Midwife and Mystic Margaret’s Rising Status While Margaret’s embrace of poverty and good works benefitted her reputation in Cortona, it was her mystical visions that attracted followers and elevated her authority above that of priests and bishops. Margaret became a local celebrity. She was asked to perform baptisms, healings, and even exorcisms so often that she began to refuse, fearing that she was spending too much time on these worldly things. But Margaret also wondered if, by refusing to attend, she would lose favor with Christ. She was constantly on the alert for signs of weakness in herself, and the Legenda is full of passages in which she castigates herself for not being ascetic enough—devout enough—to atone for her past sins. She was devoted to prayer and frequently overcome with contrition. She would give away all her possessions, and paupers clustered around her cell in expectation of alms. Margaret’s devoted followers tried to tempt her with good food, but she reprimanded them and rejected their offerings—though apparently, she had a weakness for figs, which she ate but later bemoaned as a temptation. Margaret also became the holy defender of Cortona. A miracle describes her prayers as forming a wall around the city. This was not a hypothetical attack she envisioned. Arezzo and Cortona had been at war for some time and only reached a fragile peace in 1277. They had a difficult relationship for decades afterward. The holy woman’s defense of her city was held up as an example of Cortonese independence. 68

• From Christian Saints

  10. Thomas Aquinas: The Saintly Scholar Thomas’s Early Scholarship We don’t know precisely where Thomas was between 1245 and 1248. He may have spent some years studying in Paris before following his chosen master, Albert the Great, to Cologne. We next find him there in 1248, having risen to the post of Albert’s assistant. At this point, the evidence starts to yield up more detail about Thomas’s appearance, habits, and personality. He was tall, fat, and balding, often lost in thought and distracted from his immediate surroundings. But Thomas’s writings were beginning to show the scope and clarity of his great intellect. In 1252, Thomas returned to Paris and took up a position as a teacher and scholar of Peter Lombard’s Four Books of Sentences. Thomas’s commentary on the Sentences became the first of an enormous volume of treatises, syntheses, dialectics, and commentaries that flowed unceasingly from his pen Thomas’s ability to for some 20 years. His writing, which rapidly compose involved multiple revisions, shows a man who was deeply concerned with his works was aided clear communication of his ideas. by his phenomenal And it was in Paris that Thomas found memory—possibly his first true forum for those ideas. photographic— The preachers and scholars were joined in a newfangled institution called a that enabled him university, which had grown out of the to quote at length cathedral school at Paris only a few decades earlier, around 1200. Degrees from thousands of were granted in only a few areas, texts with ease. mainly theology, law, and, at some universities, medicine. When Thomas arrived at the university, it was divided into two camps: the so-called secular masters and the masters from the new mendicant orders, whom the seculars regarded as unwelcome interlopers. Secular in this context refers to clergy who did not live under a monastic rule that governed their diet, prayer, and other customs. The rhetoric flew fast and hot, and friars were attacked in the streets. The king posted archers to defend the mendicants’ convents. 73

• From Christian Saints

  10. Thomas Aquinas: The Saintly Scholar Amid this turbulent atmosphere, Thomas settled into the Dominican convent of Saint-Jacques and quickly made a name for himself. He excelled at both his studies and teaching. He also preached, laying out his topic clearly in ways that were easy for the audience to grasp. By 1255, he was qualified to become a Master of the Bible, one of perhaps a dozen of the most highly qualified theologians in Paris, or indeed in Europe. Thomas spent 3 years as one of two regent masters of the Dominican house in Paris before he was called back to Italy around 1260. During this period, he began to write extensively on a variety of biblical and philosophical topics. Thomas’s Scholarly Career The next decade would be the most prolific of his life, even as he was launched into the upper echelons of his order, papal service, and royal courts. He spent 4 years, from 1261 to 1265, as a reader of theology at the Dominican priory in Orvieto. But his daily teaching work was far more basic than his subjects in Paris. Rather than training future theologians, he was training friars in their pastoral duties. It may have been this experience, and his participation in a commission on Dominican schools, that inspired him to begin his greatest work, the Summa theologiae, some years later to address gaps in the training of future preachers and confessors. At Orvieto, Thomas wrote a variety of works, including the Truth of the Catholic Faith against the Errors of Unbelievers, in which he demonstrated how theology could make use of philosophy in investigating matters of religion such as the Trinity. 74 10. Thomas Aquinas: The Saintly Scholar After Pope Urban’s death in late 1264, Thomas was sent to organize a school at the Dominican headquarters: the convent of Santa Sabina atop the Aventine hill in Rome. One theory is that it was intended to be a unique school, where handpicked students would be subjected to an experimental program of study crafted by Thomas. It may be that this atmosphere is what enabled him to begin work on the Summa theologiae. 75

• From Christian Saints

  12. Saints and the Protestant Reformation She left the Carmelites to found her own order, one open to women of all social spheres. The Discalced Carmelites, as they came to be called, were the first recipients of her guide to prayer, titled The Way of Perfection. Her order spread rapidly despite significant challenges along the way. She founded at least 17 convents and influenced the foundation of reformed men’s communities as well. She died in 1582, and her feast day is celebrated on October 15. While Teresa shaped her communities across Spain, both the Reformation and Counter-Reformation expanded apace, leaping from Europe to other continents. European invasion and colonization of the Americas, Africa, and South Asia were rapidly underway, as monarchs and business interests moved aggressively to control resources and trade routes abroad. The Catholic Church is still struggling to come to terms with the often-brutal policies used by missionaries and religious orders to convert and supposedly “civilize” indigenous peoples; revelations are ongoing about abuses at boarding schools, forced separation of families, and Catholic support for slavery. Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier The Jesuit order began with a small group of college roommates living in Paris at the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. Ignatius, the eldest of the group, had already had a colorful career as a soldier and a dandy. He famously had a conversion experience while healing from a badly broken leg, and once healed, he took to living as a beggar and hermit in Catalonia. After a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he embarked on a new career as a student and preacher at age 33. After years of study in Spain and then Paris, he met Francis Xavier in 1529. Though Francis initially resisted Ignatius, who was intent on converting their fellow students, over time, he came to appreciate Ignatius’s calling. In 1534, they joined several other students in making vows to one of their comrades, Peter Faber, who had recently been ordained a priest. The Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits, was born. 91