The Golden Ass

Features

June, July 2002

The Evil in the Beholder's Eye I
The Evil in the Beholder's Eye II, Rob Boston: "The Wizard of Oz" 
The Evil in the Beholder's Eye III, Rob Boston: "Harry Potter"
Dark Ages
Dark ages of Antiquity
Methods of Literary Criticism
John Milton: "To the Pure all Things are pure"
Stephens & Ottaway, "The Seed of Hypocrisy - from U.S., the ABC's of Jihad"
Tolstoy, a chapter from "Peace and War"
What Goethe couldn't know

that's how it is done
a chapter from Tolstoy's "Peace & War"

I.
In the tavern, before which stood the doctor's covered cart, there were already some five officers. Mary Hendrikhovna, a plump little blonde German, in a dressing jacket and nightcap, was sitting on a broad bench in the front corner. Her husband, the doctor, lay asleep behind her. Rostov and Ilyin, on entering the room, were welcomed with merry shouts and laughter.

"Dear me, how jolly we are!" said Rostov laughing.

"And why do you stand there gaping?"

"What swells they are! Why, the water streams from them! Don't make our drawing room so wet."

"Don't mess Mary Hendrikhovna's dress!" cried other voices.

Rostov and Ilyin hastened to find a corner where they could change into dry clothes without offending Mary Hendrikhovna's modesty. They were going into a tiny recess behind a partition to change, but found it completely filled by three officers who sat playing cards by the light of a solitary candle on an empty box, and these officers would on no account yield their position. Mary Hendrikhovna obliged them with the loan of a petticoat to be used as a curtain, and behind that screen Rostov and Ilyin, helped by Lavrushka who had brought their kits, changed their wet things for dry ones.

A fire was made up in the dilapidated brick stove. A board was found, fixed on two saddles and covered with a horsecloth, a small samovar was produced and a cellaret and half a bottle of rum, and having asked Mary Hendrikhovna to preside, they all crowded round her. One offered her a clean handkerchief to wipe her charming hands, another spread a jacket under her little feet to keep them from the damp, another hung his coat over the window to keep out the draft, and yet another waved the flies off her husband's face, lest he should wake up.

"Leave him alone," said Mary Hendrikhovna, smiling timidly and happily. "He is sleeping well as it is, after a sleepless night."

"Oh, no, Mary Hendrikhovna," replied the officer, "one must look after the doctor. Perhaps he'll take pity on me someday, when it comes to cutting off a leg or an arm for me."

There were only three tumblers, the water was so muddy that one could not make out whether the tea was strong or weak, and the samovar held only six tumblers of water, but this made it all the pleasanter to take turns in order of seniority to receive one's tumbler from Mary Hendrikhovna's plump little hands with their short and not overclean nails. All the officers appeared to be, and really were, in love with her that evening. Even those playing cards behind the partition soon left their game and came over to the samovar, yielding to the general mood of courting Mary Hendrikhovna. She, seeing herself surrounded by such brilliant and polite young men, beamed with satisfaction, try as she might to hide it, and perturbed as she evidently was each time her husband moved in his sleep behind her.

There was only one spoon, sugar was more plentiful than anything else, but it took too long to dissolve, so it was decided that Mary Hendrikhovna should stir the sugar for everyone in turn. Rostov received his tumbler, and adding some rum to it asked Mary Hendrikhovna to stir it.

"But you take it without sugar?" she said, smiling all the time, as if everything she said and everything the others said was very amusing and had a double meaning.

"It is not the sugar I want, but only that your little hand should stir my tea."

Mary Hendrikhovna assented and began looking for the spoon which someone meanwhile had pounced on.

"Use your finger, Mary Hendrikhovna, it will be still nicer," said Rostov.

"Too hot!" she replied, blushing with pleasure.

Ilyin put a few drops of rum into the bucket of water and brought it to Mary Hendrikhovna, asking her to stir it with her finger.

"This is my cup," said he. "Only dip your finger in it and I'll drink it all up."

When they had emptied the samovar, Rostov took a pack of cards and proposed that they should play "Kings" with Mary Hendrikhovna. They drew lots to settle who should make up her set. At Rostov's suggestion it was agreed that whoever became "King" should have the right to kiss Mary Hendrikhovna's hand, and that the "Booby" should go to refill and reheat the samovar for the doctor when the latter awoke.

"Well, but supposing Mary Hendrikhovna is 'King'?" asked Ilyin.

"As it is, she is Queen, and her word is law!"

They had hardly begun to play before the doctor's disheveled head suddenly appeared from behind Mary Hendrikhovna. He had been awake for some time, listening to what was being said, and evidently found nothing entertaining or amusing in what was going on. His face was sad and depressed. Without greeting the officers, he scratched himself and asked to be allowed to pass as they were blocking the way. As soon as he had left the room all the officers burst into loud laughter and Mary Hendrikhovna blushed till her eyes filled with tears and thereby became still more attractive to them. Returning from the yard, the doctor told his wife (who had ceased to smile so happily, and looked at him in alarm, awaiting her sentence) that the rain had ceased and they must go to sleep in their covered cart, or everything in it would be stolen.

"But I'll send an orderly.... Two of them!" said Rostov. "What an idea, doctor!"

"I'll stand guard on it myself!" said Ilyin.

"No, gentlemen, you have had your sleep, but I have not slept for two nights," replied the doctor, and he sat down morosely beside his wife, waiting for the game to end.

Seeing his gloomy face as he frowned at his wife, the officers grew still merrier, and some of them could not refrain from laughter, for which they hurriedly sought plausible pretexts. When he had gone, taking his wife with him, and had settled down with her in their covered cart, the officers lay down in the tavern, covering themselves with their wet cloaks, but they did not sleep for a long time; now they exchanged remarks, recalling the doctor's uneasiness and his wife's delight, now they ran out into the porch and reported what was taking place in the covered trap. Several times Rostov, covering his head, tried to go to sleep, but some remark would arouse him and conversation would be resumed, to the accompaniment of unreasoning, merry, childlike laughter.
Tolstoy "Peace & War" Book 9, Chapter XIII - the Louise & Aylmer Maude translation

II.
A benchmark for how these things are to be done: the smells, the atmosphere, the tensions between rich, three dimensional characters, the dim light - it is all there; the sensual details bring the scene to life. Take note, that there is no message crap, but it doesn't impair human concern - on the contrary! Also notice the complete absence of smart-ass one-liners and slick sound bites. And yet the little gem is more than merely bare bone narrative. We learn a great deal about Mary Hendrikhovna's marriage.

Ok, it is a translation, and probably a translation with nothing to write home about, but the original was written by a man of genius. Not every writer has talent, much fewer have nurtured the child in them to the point that it lifts talent to the heights of genuine creation. So comparisons might appear a tat unfair. But the discerning reader (a dying race?) has a right to demand from the newest author nothing less than living up to the best accomplishment of a past master. Why should I waste my life on anything less?

Perhaps aspiring authors are so narcissistic and in love with the slosh of their own intellectual brilliance, that they can't help spewing non-stop one-liners on the meaning of life, and monger in messages and profundity for the half- and three-quarter-twits who love nothing better than the thrill of camaraderie in one of the abundant social "causes," or even more abundant therapy sessions for the "spiritually" afflicted? Well I have news for you: this is art, not a hospice or revival-meeting for the disenfranchised.

There is also a difference between art and artistry. A novel is not a marathon for the Cleo-award - which to achieve may require considerable artistry - still: a smart-ass is not yet a Golden Ass. It takes years of silence and listening to eventually see Isis rising from the waves and pronounce redemption. Art is not tuned to 30 second attention spans - attention spans either tune to art or better stay out of the esthetic realm altogether. Does this mean Art is without philosophy and knows no transcendence?

Of course not. In fact, in this our blessed age, Art (with a capital "A") is the only bridge left to carry us to the realm of the platonic unseen, because religion, my friend, religion is the big hocus-pocus for the mentally undernourished infantile. It belongs to the rich heritage of physical and mental substance abuse. The quick fix without genuine insight in the nature of things, without knowledge, participation, harmonies, and specific empathy, just the raw craving for more woolly "faith" and homespun message.

Authors are not different from the rest of us: they suffer from trauma after moving house, crave for junk-food, know how to enchant their readers but not how to answer their sweetheart when she checks through the credit card bills. They can be irate and a pain in the neck. They pray when it thunders. They have hangovers. They have families that go to church on Sunday. Wisdom is not their trade. Beauty is. Beauty and sensitive thought. Which is neither philosophical nor religious.

dark ages

This is not a doomsday prophesy, nor a prayer for the apocalypse. I am not bewailing decadence and decline, because for the moment there is no decline, and as far as I am concerned, things could be a tat more decadent than they are. It is a good time to be around. However, there also can be not even the shadow of a doubt, that things are bound to go wrong at some point. For all sorts of reasons - each probably very trivial. At some point a straw will break the camel's back. It has been seen before.

1914 however would be a bad example. Many artists and intellectuals sensed the coming horrors and prophesied impending doom, but what came was WW1. What came - at great costs, no doubt - was the push into the modern era. WW2 continued the trend. Both wars led to the recruitment of human resources on an unprecedented scale with the inevitable result of liberating the masses on an equally unprecedented scale - from despotism, from hunger, from sickness, bad housing, and social bias.

None of this would have been possible without those wars. This was not it. "It" meaning the decay from inside, a ruined economy, the decline of political liberties. So when is the bubble going to burst and leave the old corroding steel frames of ancient shopping malls bend under the thatched roofs of a new barbarism? Because it will happen. We don't like to think so, but the coming of the next Dark Ages is inevitable. Whether kicked off by a new Ice-age or by our own stupidity, it is already scheduled.

And as on previous occasions, a privileged class of the happy few will cruise through the misery in comparable luxury and with the assistance of a precariously thin elite of specialists.

We have three options:

(1) We play ostrich and hope that in our own lifetime the shit isn't going to hit the fan. Which for my own generation could turn out to be true, if the Islamic block gives it a rest.

(2) Or we don our safe-the-world cape, and in the process accelerate the disaster: this too has been seen before.

(3) The last option touches the realm of the unthinkable: we prepare ourselves to make the life of the happy few as comfortable as possible. I know they don't deserve it. They are just a bunch of ignorant baboons with pretty faces and custom tailored clothes who profit from the misery of the rest of us. But they are also the crew of a time capsule that will bring through the darkness what is left of a decent way of life. Though personally probably devoid of any kind of vision - they are, they embody this vision of a better life in matter and spirit. And you, yes you Sir, better stop grinning, or I change my mind.

What is it going to be? Oh I know how things will go eventually. We will water it down in compromises and "realpolitik." And of course the absolute wrong people will lay their paws on Noah's Ark. And what will be the result of all this? We will salvage less than we could, perhaps even nothing at all.

the evil in the beholders eye I

"Some of you young people, should take a look at where you're going. Hell is a very bad place."
a minister from Portland

I was surprised to learn that the most common targets for censorship in America over the period from 1990-2000 include "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain, John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men," "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Witches" by Roald Dahl and "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle. I also didn't know that further down the list we find William Shakespeare and "The Wizard of Oz", but I do know that "Harry Potter" has come to top the lot.

Though not exactly enchanted by Harry Potter and the Wizard of Oz - it is the enchanting factor or rather the lack of it, not the sorcery that makes me squirm, but then I am a bit too old for this sort of thing, I guess - I decided to valiantly do my bit for the first amendment and the freedom of speech and wrote the following essay. But to play it fair I submitted it to the undersigned for comments and approval. In fact I encouraged to use a red pen and actually mark what seems to be disagreeable.

It was a good essay before the ladies and gents from the American kitchen sink reached for scissors and red pencil - some even used liquid paper. I gave a brief of censorship since Gutenberg had invented print, mentioned Plato who is on record of actually having burned in public the philosophical treatises of colleagues who happened to disagree with him, and also provided the layout for organized censorship in his own writings, mentioned Roman libel laws, in short, produced as scholarly a piece as I possibly could.

I also mentioned Hollywood and their history of written agreements to serial self-castration and bedroom scenes where couples were allowed to do their marital thing only if he has one foot on the ground, and gradually shifted the focus to the votaries for prohibitions of independent thoughts of the modern religious right and provincial school boards as well as the American tradition of puritan narrow-mindedness since Rev. Cotton Mather (1663-1728), John Endicott (1588-1665), and Richard Bellingham (1581-1672).

A final flourish would recall all the recent cases of burning books - even of Shakespeare's works, which so far had even escaped the Nazis. What came back to my mailbox was an absolutely astonishing testimony to the state of affairs in the Land of the Free. Below the text in full after it had passed approval. The editor of the "Golden Ass" contemplates to create two annual awards: (1) a golden lemon for the worst bestseller, (2) a matchbox with the "Golden Ass" logo for the most asinine piece of censorship.
Michael Sympson

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(imprimatur by James Dobson's "Focus on the Family," Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, "Traditional Values Coalition," Pastor Jack Brock of the Christ Community Church, the Rev. Doug Taylor from Lewiston, Maine, "Club 700," and the fire department of Penryn, Pa. The Catholic Church's imprimatur is still pending, the Ayatollahs assured the editor that they do not consider a 'fatwa' at this point of time. I think I better wear bullet proof.)

what Goethe couldn't know

The preview section carries an essay by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) on the subject of the biblical exodus. Goethe's wide panoramic view and political perspective are admirable. He presents Moses as a child of the real world, as a man who had found support by a nomadic nation of military might to which he had established dynastic bonds. Of course Goethe depended on his references; since then scholarship has made considerable progress.

If Moses had been in any sense a character of history, he probably was a polytheist - as everybody else in his time - who either made a treaty with Jethro's Mideanite deity (my friend's friend is my friend) or struck an alliance with the evil Egyptian God Seth (your enemy's enemy is my friend). Seth after his emigration may have changed his name in a poll deed and henceforth registered as Yahweh whereas Jethro's genie could be figuring in our records as the Elohim, which is a plural.

Be that as it may, Moses merely struck a deal of preferring one deity over the others without explicitly denying existence to the rest of the lot and occasionally had recourse to a forerunner of Asclepius the Healer (Num. 21:9). There is not a shred of archaeological evidence for the exodus in the Sinai, which should be impossible if the figures given in Exodus and Leviticus are even remotely correct. And if these figures have nothing to do with Exodus itself then what is the meaning of these numbers?

Population statistics from such remote periods are always guess-work. Even for the exilic author himself. So from where did he get his census figures? Probably from the entire Diasporah during exile. While collecting the temple tax from every person at home and abroad the collecting institution got a good idea about the number of contributors. This continued even during the Babylonian exile, when the temple's income went straight into the Babylonian coffers. And when did all this happen?

Rameses II, (1184-1153 BC or if David Rohl's re-dating is correct, between 940-920 BC), cannot be the Pharaoh in exodus because his data neither tally with Joshua's campaign, nor make any sense in political terms. Secular archeologists and Biblical scholars agree on 1410 BC as the date for Joshua's first campaign without ever considering that it is at least by two centuries out of sync with Rameses II's data. Besides Rameses was completely in control on the Sinai and would not allow a tribal chief to piss into his own backyard.

The actual Pharaoh apparently was a memeber of the 15th dynasty - perhaps Khamudi or rather his assailant Ahmose I - which tallies well with reported migratory patterns and military actions in the Sinai, but not with great building projects, as Egypt was just recuperating from a century of occupation by a foreign power. Rohls considered Amenemhet III (Nimaatre) 1817-1772 BC the son of Senwosret III and Queen Sebekshedty-Neferu to be the Pharaoh in Joseph's story.*)

Goethe already pointed to the completely jumbled up geography; as a matter of fact the maps in my Oxford Bible indicate two different locations for Mount Sinai: 400 miles apart! Actually for a relatively small group of people the prolonged sojourn over a period of say 8 to 10 years makes perfect sense: in the real world the actual exodus may have been a local incident involving barely more than a few hundred or a thousand individuals at most.

In other words: the incident was of more symbolic significance than actually a notable migration. However due to their initially small number the Israelites negotiated their nomadic neighbors with caution, because any attempt to press the issue by force despite of the occasional success (Ex. 17:8) eventually was repulsed (Num. 13:30). So it looks as if Moses' and Caleb's band of guerrilla fighters provocatively patrolled the border as an invitation to the tribesmen who had stayed behind in Egypt.

Gradually this demonstration may have swelled the ranks of the terrorists and this eventually caused the Pharaoh to send a brigade of chariots after them which may have happened only many years after the initial incident. The expedition turned out to be disastrous, which must have drawn even more lost souls to Moses' colors and ultimately enabled the Israelite avant-garde to take possession of territories beyond the Jordan. All this makes perfect sense once we dismiss the fantastic census figures.

Of course I am speculating here. There is simply no tangible evidence either way. So what is left of the "historical kernel" if we strip the literature to its bare bone of oral traditions? I have a strong suspicion that we are dealing here with a folktale, a cycle of terse little stories and sayings concerning Moses the fox, who defied kings and made gods dance to his tune, which is quite different from the picture the exilic editors later developed in the books. Ex. 4:24 is an example for such pericope ending in a pithy saying.

No matter how we look at it: Ex. 12:29; 12:35 tells the grim story of the earliest act of sheer terrorism on record. Goethe draws a comparison to the Sicilian Vesper and one really has to ask, what is the feast of atonement meant to atone for? Surely, if Passover commemorates the escape from Egyptian bondage, it also commemorates how this was accomplished. The blood of the lambs on the lintel was a sign for the angel of death to pass by the house. Angels know their own, terrorists need directions.

And yet it may have nothing to do with history at all! It may very well have been a pre-Maccabeean fantasy of the exilic author who dreamed up a scheme to escape the Babylonian overlord and used the old folktale to lay out what he thought to be a viable blueprint for action. The census figures - based on figures for the voluntary temple tax which had been redirected to Babylon - the author would draw from current conditions among the population in exile and voluntary Diasporah before the edict of Cyrus (538 BC).

*) This sixth king of the 12th Dynasty was to be the most remarkable king of that era. He completed the building of the great waterwheels of the Faiyum, thus diverting the flood waters of the Nile into Lake Moeris. The irrigation system and an overflow canal, was used to drain the marshes. An estimated 153,600 acres of fertile land was reclaimed from the water. Amenemhet raised two colossal statues of himself nearby to celebrate this feat. Amenemhet mined copper from the Sinai and local mines, and had many quarries. He provided the workers with housing and protection from the Bedouins.

methods of literary criticism

I. Longinus (1st. century AD)
It is one of the ironies, that literary criticism and the appreciation of artistry derived from the methods developed by people of the cloth who had always opposed the idea of autonomous art. For the modern reader it all began with an unknown critic, whose defective manuscript comes under the name of a nebulous Longinus. The references in the text indicate an author from the first century, perhaps a contemporary of Petronius (c.25-65 AD) and St. Paul.

Longinus' essay "On the Sublime" for us is the first document of genuine literary criticism - not Aristotle (384-322 BC) who in the typical academic fashion of mutual masturbation and creative impotence concerned himself entirely with pigeonholing. Unfortunately later generations would take as gospel his observations on the structure of antique stage productions, which, not unlike the impact of Aristotelean philosophy on the sciences, had a stifling effect on the creative spark, especially for lesser talents.

Based on a psychology of responses to specific rhetorical patterns, Longinus analyzes the syntactic effect of constructions and of metaphorical expressions. With all its limitations Longinus' work still sets a standard, but of course Longinus has very little to say about the overall structure, the subterranean interplay of motifs, echos and mirror effects that tie together a great work of art. Probably the old author had something to say about this too, but it didn't survive.

Of course Longinus represents only the tip of an iceberg, which in all likelihood will remain invisible for ever: for us Longinus looks outstanding, but as a critic and educated representative of his class, he was firmly rooted in a long tradition of rhetorical training and cultured sensitivity for the linguistic nuance that had preceded him by at least 600 years. What came down to us from this rich tradition is largely the theory of utilitarian forensics. Plato's (c.427-c.347) vicious attack on autonomous art had taken its toll.

II. "higher criticism"
I grew up in the era of "new criticism." The academic shibboleth of the period demanded to concentrate on the text and the text alone as an autonomous entity. This certainly has its merits and shaped my whole outlook. However I soon realized that the methodology has its appropriate and inappropriate applications. Not every work of art is conceptualized as an autonomous entity, and many aspects in Nabokov's criticism of "Don Quixote" struck me as beside the point.

However Nabokov was right on the money with works from a certain period onward: it is not a new idea, but we credit Edgar Allan Poe with the invention of modern literature.

"The material in an epic is not the sort of thing that of itself would yield a climactic linear plot. Why is it that the lengthy climactic plot comes into being only with writing, first in the drama, where there is no narrator, yet does not make its way into lengthy narrative until more than 2000 years later with the novels of the age of Jane Austin?

Why was all lengthy narrative before the early 1800s more or less episodic, so far as we know all over the world? Why had no one written a tidy detective story before E.A. Poes "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841, which creates the climactic linear plot in its plenary form? Until print appeared and took full effect, the oral allegiance to the episodical always remained in command. But in print the story is not for listeners but for readers, each one alone in his or her world.

Writing too, is very reflective and slow and the sense of isolation and closure imposed on the author by the printed word encourages the analytical consciousness to take charge. In the ideal detective story, ascending action, climactic recognition, reversal and dénouement give significance to every single detail in the story and before reaching the climax are used effectively to mislead." (Walter J. Ong "Orality & Literacy" p.144; 149-151.)

All this is very true. But Poe did not anticipate the most important propellant of a good story: the rounded character that has the "incalculability of life" about it. An element that has the potential to transcend plot strictures as well as a strictly text focussed criticism. But by and large the method of "New Criticism" works when we apply it to the literature produced since Jane Austen (1775-1817). In other words, authors too, matured in their critical faculties, acquiring their acumen on the job at hand.

Then came Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) whose "The Decay of Lying, a Protest" created a manifesto for things to come. However, his Russian colleagues like Alexander Blok (1880-1921), followed by Roman Osipovich Jacobson (1896-1982) under arcane labels like "symbolists," "acmeists," "futurists" had already set standards of genuine scientific research in linguistic patterns and substructures - standards to which the West would be catching up only much later, during the thirties, when the firma Lenin & Stalin Inc. was beating the hell out of progressive Russian artists.

However the methodology for this new way of analyzing and appreciating an artistic text on a deeper level actually had been developed on the chairs of protestant theology in Bonn, Tübingen and Marburg, Germany, by Bruno Bauer (1809-1882) and David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) and their numerous successors to which Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) added the finishing touch. The intent was to demythologize the texts of scripture and to establish their true context on the base of "form-criticism."

It was not quite as robust as Bishop J.W. Colenso's way of shouldering baloney off the wagon in "The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined" (1862). Colenso was so unspeakably rude actually to examine scriptural statements with stopwatch and yardstick. After investigating the details, as presented in Exodus, of camp life, of sacrifice, of numbers of men and animals - details all of which, according to contemporary ecclesiastic law, had to be literally true - the Bishop was led to conclude:

"... that the Pentateuch, as a whole, cannot personally have been written by Moses, or by anyone acquainted personally with the facts which it professes to describe, and, further, that the (so-called) Mosaic narrative, by whomsoever written, ... cannot be regarded as historically true." *)

If assisted by "form-criticism" Colenso would have been a steam-roller. However " higher criticism" turned out to be a more useful instrument for text analysis in general.

Over the last century it has refined its methodology and through several channels, which obscured its academic pedigree, the old form-criticism became the legitimate method of "New Criticism." Whether the Russians had developed their methods independently is an open question. They probably did. What made form-criticism so useful beyond the biblical circles, stems from the autonomous and self-reliant editorial premise behind the scripture. External referents are deliberately cut off. **)

So if archaeological evidence is not available or a scriptual or artistic text appears as an isolated entity we have to investigate in depth its rhetorical structure, lay bare the editorial layers, their premises and motives, identify the function of the various narratives, poetical, and rhetorical ploys, the shifts in formal and informal speech, the recurrence of motifs and echoes mirrored and repeated in various transformations. And only after we have seen the inner works we reassemble it to grasp the overall artistic unity.

III. "applied criticism"
I am not going to waste my and the reader's time with "deconstructionist" and "postmodern" baloney - in the good old days this sort of thing went under the labels of "syncretism" and "confusion." But it is quite interesting to see where constructive criticism is able to lead us to: It is like reading the score, before listening to the music - and art is all about music. If properly applied it helps us actually to appreciate the craft of an author who took such immense trouble to conceal its traces in the text.

It turns the inner music from a mere ear-wash to a communication of the artists temperament and sensitivity. The benefit for biblical criticism is not so clear. If history and archeology remain silent, then the inner picture formed through form-criticism has to provide the answers. In a situation where truth - truth as in veracity - is the crucial issue, this can lead to all sorts of errors. Just imagine, we would have no historical testimony for Napoleon's period except for the novels of Jane Austen.

No matter how acute we are in our application of form-criticism in this case, we will never be able to create anything better than an extremely vague understanding of the actual historical events. In Austen's case of course we are helped by our unhampered awareness that her novels are conceived and executed as fiction. If a text has been canonized as an imposition of "scripture," the search for historical truth faces an almost insurmountable obstacle.

Which is to say, that in both cases an external referent has its uses. A purely artistic text is still rooted in an underlying temperament which projects itself in a public persona. This persona may either give a showing as a character in the artist's work, or simply be the preferred form of the artist's public appearance. It shapes the attitude, the way an artist likes to see himself at work. It is all make-belief, but it transcends textual autonomy and points to a reality which surrounds and nourishes the facts of fiction.

*) "My own knowledge of some branches of science, of Geology in particular, had been much increased since I left England; and I now knew for certain, on geological grounds, a fact, of which I had only had misgivings before, viz., that a Universal Deluge, such as the Bible manifestly speaks of, could not possibly have taken place in the way described in the Book of Genesis, not to mention other difficulties which the story contains. I refer especially to the circumstance, well known to all geologists, . . . that volcanic hills exist of immense extent in Auvergne and Languedoc, which must have been formed ages before the Noachian Deluge, and which are covered with light and loose substances, pumice-stone &c., that must have been swept away by a Flood, but do not exhibit the slightest sign of having ever been so disturbed." John William Colenso (1814-1883)

**) (With a few exceptions, see: Nu. 21:14; 2 Kings 22:8; Jn 7:38, Lk. 24:46, 1 Cor. 15:3-4, Mt. 27:9-10 and Mt. 2:23).

the evil in the beholder's eye II
"The Campaign To Ban The Wizard Of Oz" by Rob Boston

Efforts by fundamentalist religious groups to ban books for allegedly promoting "witchcraft" are nothing new in the United States. About 100 years ago, a battle similar to the current attacks on the Harry Potter series raged nationwide. Its unlikely target: L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz.

Most Americans today know the Land of Oz from the famous 1939 Metro Goldwyn Mayer musical starring Judy Garland. But the book, published in 1900, is substantially different from the film it inspired. Unlike the movie, Baum's Oz is a real fairyland, not just the product of a Kansas farm girl's dream.

The first Oz book was so successful that Baum produced 13 sequels, most of which recount the further adventures of Dorothy and an ever-growing cast of characters. Oz is populated with fantastic denizens, including good and bad witches, wizards, man-sized talking insects, enchanted rag dolls that come to life and dancing fairies, to name just a few.

Some ministers and even educators of the day were not happy with the series and blasted it for promoting witchcraft or for being too fanciful. Others said the books were ungodly for their strong depictions of female characters. Surprisingly, many librarians agreed.

These attacks continued well into the 20th century. In 1999, Hana S. Field, then a high school student in Chicago, researched the history of efforts to censor The Wizard of Oz. The parallels to today's attempt to ban the Harry Potter series are striking.

Field found that opposition to The Wizard of Oz was so strong that as late as 1928 the Chicago Public Library refused to put the book on its shelves. Field reports that one patron asked for the Oz books but was told they were not there. The man got the impression that the librarians believed that the books were "not literature, but, somehow evil for children."

In the1950s, Florida's state librarian, Dorothy Dodd, sent a memo to all librarians in the state calling The Wizard of Oz "unwholesome for children in your community" and cautioned that it was on a list of books that they must avoid. The Oz books, Dodd asserted, were "not be purchased, not to be accepted as gifts, not to be processed and not be circulated."

In a prize-winning 1999 essay, "Triumph and Tragedy on the Yellow Brick Road: Censorship of The Wizard of Oz in America," which appears in The Concord Review, Field notes that Dodd's broadside had an unusual effect. "When children heard news of the ban," she wrote, "they eagerly ran to local used bookstores and a local women's club hoping they could buy the book."

A more recent attempt to ban The Wizard of Oz occurred in 1986, when fundamentalist parents in Hawkins County, Tenn., challenged several books used in local public schools, asserting that they promoted witchcraft and "secular humanism." The Wizard of Oz was among the works challenged. The lead plaintiff, Vicki Frost, said Baum's story depicted some witches as good, when in fact witches are always bad.

A federal court handed Frost a limited victory by holding that the public school system would have to allow parents who objected to "opt out" of lessons featuring the offending literature. The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling in 1987, and the U.S. Supreme Court later refused to hear the case. That action led Religious Right attorney Michael Farris, who represented Frost, to call on "every born-again Christian to get their children out of public schools."

That statement returned to haunt Farris in 1993 when he ran for lieutenant governor of Virginia. In a year when other Republicans did very well in the state, Farris lost in part because his opponent, Don Beyer, ran television ads featuring a clip from the film version of "The Wizard of Oz" that blasted Farris as an extremist who wanted to ban books.

Today, The Wizard of Oz is considered a classic and is often called the first "American fairy tale." Although it does not appear on the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Censored Titles, The Wizard of Oz is still occasionally lumped in with the Harry Potter series by outraged fundamentalists determined to purge "witchcraft" from public schools and libraries.

Field, now a junior political science major at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told Church & State there are lessons to be learned from the efforts to ban The Wizard of Oz. "We don't seem to learn," she said. "If you start censoring books because they have witches in them, where do you stop? A small group of people ends up making decisions for a lot of people. That's just not democracy."
Rob Boston

dark ages of antiquity
Plato on dark ages, written 360 BC, translated by Benjamin Jowett

"There were of old, great and marvellous actions of the Athenian city, which have passed into oblivion through lapse of time and the destruction of mankind, and one in particular, greater than all the rest. I will tell an old-world story which I heard from an aged man; who at the time of telling it, was as he said, nearly ninety years of age, and I was about ten. In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Sais.

To this city came Solon, and he asked the priests about antiquity, and wishing to draw them on to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the world - about Phoroneus, who is called "the first man," and about Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the events of which he was speaking happened.

Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes.

There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Paethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals.

At such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us. When, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea.

The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer does not prevent, mankind exist, sometimes in greater, sometimes in lesser numbers. But just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education.

And so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. As for those genealogies of yours, they are no better than the tales of children. In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones and this was unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors died, leaving no written word.

There was a time, Solon, before the great deluge of all, when the city which now is Athens was first in war and in every way the best governed of all cities, is said to have performed the noblest deeds and to have had the fairest constitution of any of which tradition tells, under the face of heaven. The goddess who is the common patron and parent and educator of both our cities founded yours a thousand years before ours, receiving from the Earth and Hephaestus the seed of your race.

Afterwards she founded ours, of which the constitution is recorded in our sacred registers to be eight thousand years old. As touching your citizens of nine thousand years ago, many great and wonderful deeds are recorded in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end.

This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great empire which had rule over the whole island and several others.

Furthermore, Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits. But there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea."

from Timaeus, by Plato (428/7-348/7)

the evil in the beholder's eye III
"Why The Religious Right Is Crusading To Exorcise Harry Potter Books From Public Schools And Libraries:" by Rob Boston

Robert Fichthorn had decided to take a stand.

Fichthorn, captain of the Penryn, Pa., "fire police," a volunteer body that provides traffic control services during fires, auto accidents and civic events, declared in late January that his officers would not help cordon off streets during a YMCA-sponsored triathlon scheduled for this September.

Fichthorn's reason surprised many in the community. Despite its Christian roots, Fichthorn asserted, the YMCA is in fact supporting witchcraft by allowing students taking part in an after-school program to read the popular "Harry Potter" books. The fire police would do nothing, he insisted, to aid this nefarious behavior.

"I don't feel right taking our children's minds and teaching them [witchcraft]," Fichthorn hold the Lancaster New Era. "As long as we don't stand up, it won't stop."

Fichthorn's declaration hit the local papers and promptly sparked an uproar in the tiny central Pennsylvania community. But things really got interesting after the story was circulated nationally by the Associated Press and spread worldwide over the Internet. Irate residents squared off in letters to the editor. YMCA officials were swamped with messages from all over the country and even overseas as people offered to stand in for the fire police.

Newspaper columnists blasted Fichthorn and the rest of his department as narrow-minded and silly. Sports Illustrated cited the flap as "This Week's Sign of the Apocalypse." The Denver Post gave Fichthorn its "Doofus of the Month" award.

Many in the community and surrounding area were not pleased with the attention. "Yes, all across the country, people are reading about the Penryn Fire Police decision to spurn the triathlon because Harry Potter goes against their Christian morals," groused Gil Smart, a columnist with the Lancaster Sunday News. "And all across the country, people are thinking: What bumpkins."

But if the Penryn Fire Police are bumpkins for hating Harry Potter, they are not the only ones. All over the country, Religious Right groups and local activists have put the Potter series in their theological crosshairs. The Penryn incident captured national headlines, but it is in no way an aberration.

According to the American Library Association (ALA), the Potter series, authored by Scottish writer J.K. Rowling, now holds the dubious distinction of being the most censored book in America. Public schools and libraries in many communities are under siege as far-right forces demand that the books be removed outright or placed on restricted access.

At first glance, the books look like unlikely candidates for all this fuss. Designed for pre- and early teens, the series recounts the adventures of Harry Potter, an orphan growing up in London. Verbally abused and forced to live in a dingy space at his domineering uncle's house, Potter's fortunes take a dramatic turn for the better when he learns he is descended from a long line of wizards and is invited to attend Hogwarts, a private academy for wizards in training.

The series is phenomenally popular, and the four books so far have sold in the millions worldwide. Late last year, a movie based on the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, opened to long lines and generally favorable reviews.

But not everyone is wild about Harry. Religious Right forces, including TV preacher Pat Robertson's "700 Club," James Dobson's Focus on the Family, the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon's Traditional Values Coalition and a host of far-right lesser lights are convinced that the books promote evil and the occult and they are spurring local activists to drive the books from public schools and libraries.

A sampling of recent incidents includes:

· York, Pa.: Led by a local pastor who is also an elementary school teacher, a handful of parents demanded that the Harry Potter books be removed from the Eastern York schools, asserting that the tomes promote witchcraft. "It's against my daughter's constitution, it's evil and it promotes witchcraft," parent Deb Eugenio told reporters. "I'm not paying taxes to teach my child witchcraft."

The school board voted 7-2 in January to allow teachers to continue to use the Potter books provided that parents first sign permission slips. Sixth-grade teacher Ed Althouse had been using the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, during a unit on fantasy literature. The parents of four students declined to sign the permission slips, and their children were given an alternate assignment.

· Alamogordo, N.M.: In an incident that captured headlines worldwide, Pastor Jack Brock of the Christ Community Church led a mass burning of Harry Potter books Dec. 30. Brock told reporters that the books "encourage our youth to learn more about witches, warlocks and sorcerers, and those things are an abomination to God and to me." For good measure, Brock also tossed a copy of The Collected Works of William Shakespeare on the bonfire.

· Duvall County, Fla.: Parent Mendy Robinson challenged the Potter books at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School, insisting that they are "turning children to lies & falsehoods of this present world." A committee of teachers, parents and libraries in October spurned a request that the Potter books be removed from school library shelves. Students had to get parental permission to read the books while the committee deliberated the matter.

· Oskaloosa, Kan.: The board of directors of the local public library voted to cancel a Harry Potter-themed event after some fundamentalists complained. The library had planned a reading program in June for "aspiring young witches and wizards" featuring a storyteller who had appeared at other Kansas libraries. The board voted to cancel the program after a handful of residents complained that the program promoted witchcraft.

· Fargo, N.D.: Officials at Agassiz Middle School in November cancelled a planned field trip to the Harry Potter movie after a few parents, backed by a local right-wing radio talk-show host, denounced the outing. School officials took the action even though all of the students, aged between 12 and 15, had received parental permission.

"It's a little bizarre," Fargo School Superintendent David Flowers said. "We believe that we were on firm ground in letting the kids go, but [the school] made the decisionthat they would just as soon not be embroiled in controversy."

· Copley Township, Ohio: Library Coordinator Cathy Hall of the Copley-Fairlawn School District recommend in January that the district stop buying books in the Potter series. The system's library currently has two of the four Potter books, and Hall said she believes no more titles from the series should be added.

Hall told the Akron Beacon Journal that she made the recommendation primarily on the basis of financial concerns but then went on to say she was "also keeping in mind those things that are being said about the book."

· Modesto, Calif.: The Rev. B. Joseph Mannion has called on "religious parents" to keep the Potter books out of local public schools. In a Dec. 29 letter to the Modesto Bee, Mannion wrote, "The Harry Potter books are evil. They are based on evil: witchcraft, wizardry and the occult."

· Lewiston, Maine: The Rev. Doug Taylor announced plans to hold a book burning of the Potter tomes in a community park in November. Taylor, head of a local organization called the Jesus Party, applied for a permit to hold a bonfire in the park but was turned down by the Lewiston Fire Department. Instead, he cut up a Potter book with a pair of scissors and tossed it into a trashcan.

Maine newspapers reported that a minister from Portland who attended the event to support Taylor confronted members of a pro-Potter contingent mounting a counter-protest. "Some of you young people," the minister said, "should take a look at where you're going. Hell is a very bad place."

· Jacksonville, Fla.: Officials with the city's public library system dropped a plan to distribute "Hogwarts certificates" to encourage youngsters to read after a local resident, John Miesburg, complained that the books promoted "the evil of witchcraft." Librarians at the Regency Library did distribute some of the certificates in July of 2000 but stopped after attorneys with the Liberty Counsel, a Religious Right legal group affiliated with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, threatened to sue. Mathew Staver, head of the Liberty Counsel, insisted that the library's plan violated church-state separation.

· Zeeland, Mich.: A long-running dispute over the Potter books has culminated in the resignation of a school board president. Tom Bock stepped down after repeatedly butting heads with Mary Dana, a middle school teacher who protested a 1999 vote by the board to ban the Potter books.

The restrictions were later lifted, but Bock and Dana continued sparring over the matter. Bock resigned after school administrators turned down his demands that Dana be removed from her position as a mentor to new teachers, reported the Grand Rapids Press.

These incidents are just a few of the recent challenges to the Potter books. According to the ALA, which tracks incidents of censorship nationwide, Rowling's books have been the most challenged works in public school libraries and public libraries for three years running.

Beverly Becker, associate director of the ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom, has noticed a common theme among the complaints. "It's always witchcraft," Becker told Church & State. "Occasionally they throw something else in, but ultimately these challenges are all about witchcraft."

Becker points out that the ALA noted a dramatic upswing in the challenges in October of 1999, when Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was published. Becker said this was probably due to increased media attention.

"When the third book came out," she said, "the publicity went crazy. I think that's when every adult heard about the books, not just the ones who had a 10- or 12-year-old at home." Becker notes that more public schools began using the books at that time as well.

As sales climbed, Religious Right groups went into a frenzy. Some of the charges they have lobbed against the books seem too fantastic to believe, but millions of Religious Right activists around the country are now apparently convinced that the Potter series is part of a plot to lure youngsters into Wiccan groups.

High-profile TV preacher Robertson launched a full-scale assault on the Potter books late last year. On the Dec. 5 "700 Club," cohost Terry Meeuwsen interviewed Caryl Matrisciana, identified as an "expert on the occult" and producer of a video titled "Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged."

In fact, Matrisciana is the wife of Pat Matrisciana, a long-time far-right political operative who made his living during much of the 1990s peddling conspiracy-theory videos attacking President Bill Clinton, most notably "The Clinton Chronicles." During the CBN interview, Caryl Matrisciana asserted that Rowling based the books on "the religions of Celtic, druidic, Satanic, Wiccan and pagan roots and written them into her fiction books for children."

Asserted Matrisciana, "The harm is first of all that witchcraft is being normalized to our children. For the first time in the history of the world, witchcraft is being given to children in a children's format, and children are seeing other children practicing it and say it's all right."

Following the interview, Robertson felt moved to offer his own comments. Glaring sternly into the cameras, Robertson told the audience that God will turn his back on nations that tolerate witchcraft with dire consequences.

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, we have been talking about God lifting his anointing and his mantle from the United States of America," Robertson said. "And if you read in Deuteronomy or Leviticus, actually, the eighteenth chapter, there's certain things that he says that is going to cause the Lord, or the land, to vomit you out. At the head of the list is witchcraft.Now we're welcoming this and teaching our children. And what we're doing is asking for the wrath of God to come on this country.And if there's ever a time we need God's blessing it's now. We don't need to be bringing in heathen, pagan practices to the United States of America."

Strangely enough, a series of anti-Potter articles on the CBN website disappeared not long after Robertson's outburst. This may be due to the fact that ABC/Disney, which now owns the cable channel that carries the "700 Club," recently purchased the rights to broadcast the first Potter movie on television.

Other Religious Right groups were quick to join the anti-Potter bandwagon.

"Is Harry Potter a Harmless Fantasy or a Wicca Training Program?" blared a recent press released issued by Sheldon's Traditional Values Coalition. Sheldon, one of the Religious Right's most vociferous gay bashers, even tried to link the Potter series to homosexuality, writing, "While the themes in Harry Potter books do not expressly advocate homosexuality or abortion, these are the philosophical beliefs deeply embedded in Wicca. The child who is seduced into Wicca witchcraft through Harry Potter books will eventually be introduced to these other concepts."

TV preacher D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries is also promoting the alleged Potter-Wicca connection. In late October, Kennedy interviewed Richard Abanes, a self-proclaimed "expert on the occult" and author of the anti-Potter tome Harry Potter and the Bible.

Appearing on Kennedy's "Truths That Transform" radio show, Abanes asserted that as a result of the Potter books, Wiccan groups in England are flooded with new members. The leading Wiccan group in the United Kingdom, Abanes told Kennedy, has had to hire a youth minister.

Series author Rowling, Abanes asserted, "has had a fascination with the occult and witchcraft and wizardry every since she was a little girl. And so, her creativity, her talent, when she wrote something, that came out on the page I'm not sure she actually meant to draw kids into the occult, but that's indeed what's already happening, especially in England."

The Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association has also attacked Rowling's books and the film version of the first volume. In November the AFA's website (www.afa.net) posted an article by "contributing columnist" Berit Kjos, whose ministry has made attacking Potter into a cottage industry. The article, titled "Twelve Reasons Not to See the Harry Potter Movie," asserted that the film presents witchcraft as an appealing alternative lifestyle.

Wrote Kjos, "This pagan ideology comes complete with trading cards, computer and other wizardly games, clothes and decorations stamped with [Harry Potter] symbols, action figures and cuddly dolls and audio cassettes that could keep the child's minds (sic) focused on the occult all day and into night. But in God's eyes, such paraphernalia become little more than lures and doorways to deeper involvement with the occult."

(Wildmon, whose AFA is based in Tupelo, Miss., is best known for attempting to censor television programs. Last month he joined 14 other groups in petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to demand the removal of an award-winning drama series, "Boston Public," from the Fox Network.)

Falwell has also recommended caution. Falwell's National Liberty Journal noted late last year "that there does appear to be a legitimate reason to be cautious in regard to Harry Potter" and asserted, "Even if the author's intent is anything but evil, the attractive presentation of witchcraft and wizardry both ultimately godless pursuits may desensitize children to important spiritual issues."

The unbylined piece, however, does note that some conservative Christians see no danger in the Potter books and adds, "Harry Potter is not worth causing a major schism within the church." (Falwell may have good reasons for not launching a full-scale assault on the Potter series. In 1999, he became the target of international ridicule after warning parents that a character named Tinky Winky from the PBS children's series "Teletubbies," is gay.)

Rowling, who wrote the first Potter book while struggling to keep her head above water as a single mom, has called the assertions that her books seek to lure youngsters into the occult "absurd." In one interview she observed, "I have met thousands of children now, and not even one time has a child come up to me and said, 'Ms. Rowling, I'm so glad I've read these books because now I want to be a witch.'"

Many experts on education and children's literature agree that the books are unlikely to draw children into the occult. They note that witches, fairies, dragons and other mythical beasts have a long lineage in stories aimed at young readers. Witches are a staple in Grimm's Fairy Tales, which date back to the Middle Ages and remain popular today. In the Grimm Brothers' tales, as in the Potter books today, good triumphs over evil in the end. Such stories usually end up teaching simple moral lessons that youngsters can readily understand.

None of this has slowed down the censors one iota. And, with three more books in the Potter series on the horizon and more film adaptions on the way anti-censorship activists expect to see more efforts to ban the Potter series and others. (According to the ALA, the most common targets of censorship in America for the period 1990-2000 include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, The Witches by Roald Dahl and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.)

Officials at the ALA recommend that both public school libraries and public libraries have clear policies in place for dealing with censorship attempts. They advocate review committees that can examine challenged books and say it's essential that everyone involved in the committee and the larger effort actually read the book under challenge. These policies, ALA staffers say, can avoid a rush to judgment.

"That allows for a fair hearing, so everyone can cool down," says the ALA's Becker. "The decision is not made in such an emotional moment."

Given time, many censorship efforts collapse in the face of counter mobilization by concerned community members or just fail because the charges against a book are preposterous. This was often the case 100 years ago when efforts were made to censor another children's book featuring witches L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. Outraged Oz fans stepped forward to defend the book, turning back some censorship efforts. (See "Lions And Tigers And Censors Oh, My!," page 11.)

An echo of that long-ago struggle was heard in central Pennsylvania recently during the incident in Penryn. Laura Montgomery Rutt, director of the Alliance for Tolerance and Freedom in Lancaster, which keeps tabs on the Religious Right locally, said community sentiment is running solidly against the fire police. Many people in the area, she said, think the fire police are being silly.

"People here are not supporting the decision of the fire police," she said. "And their actions have helped the YMCA. People are volunteering and saying they want to help. No one knew about the triathlon before this happened. Now they are volunteering to help run it even people from other states."

Lancaster County is a conservative area, Rutt said, but that doesn't mean residents support censorship. "The community has seen and learned that extremism is not going to win," Rutt told Church & State. "This shows that even the guys in the fire police are going beyond what Lancaster County is willing to put up with. We've also seen that the community is willing to rally when an organization shows it is intolerant. So many have spoken out on behalf of the Potter books. A lot of people have a tendency to stay in their shells, but this was just too much. All in all, this was kind of a good thing. It really rallied the troops."

The following speaks for itself. The "Golden Ass" is a literary magazine - politics occur only as a sideshow. So I see this as a sample for literature in action, and the consequences of misguided education. I don't make any secret of my slightly elitist snobbery, when it comes to literature and learning. The article below shows why, and gives ample testimony that education for the masses invariably leads to mass-education.
Michael Sympson

the seed of hypocrisy - from U.S., the ABC's of Jihad
Violent Soviet-Era Textbooks Complicate Afghan Education Efforts
By Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 23, 2002; Page A01

In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.

As Afghan schools reopen today, the United States is back in the business of providing schoolbooks. But now it is wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism. What seemed like a good idea in the context of the Cold War is being criticized by humanitarian workers as a crude tool that steeped a generation in violence.

Last month, a U.S. foreign aid official said, workers launched a "scrubbing" operation in neighboring Pakistan to purge from the books all references to rifles and killing. Many of the 4 million texts being trucked into Afghanistan, and millions more on the way, still feature Koranic verses and teach Muslim tenets.

The White House defends the religious content, saying that Islamic principles permeate Afghan culture and that the books "are fully in compliance with U.S. law and policy." Legal experts, however, question whether the books violate a constitutional ban on using tax dollars to promote religion.

Organizations accepting funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development must certify that tax dollars will not be used to advance religion. The certification states that AID "will finance only programs that have a secular purpose. . . . AID-financed activities cannot result in religious indoctrination of the ultimate beneficiaries."

The issue of textbook content reflects growing concern among U.S. policymakers about school teachings in some Muslim countries in which Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism are on the rise. A number of government agencies are discussing what can be done to counter these trends.

President Bush and first lady Laura Bush have repeatedly spotlighted the Afghan textbooks in recent weeks. Last Saturday, Bush announced during his weekly radio address that the 10 million U.S.-supplied books being trucked to Afghan schools would teach "respect for human dignity, instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry."

The first lady stood alongside Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai on Jan. 29 to announce that AID would give the University of Nebraska at Omaha $6.5 million to provide textbooks and teacher training kits.

AID officials said in interviews that they left the Islamic materials intact because they feared Afghan educators would reject books lacking a strong dose of Muslim thought. The agency removed its logo and any mention of the U.S. government from the religious texts, AID spokeswoman Kathryn Stratos said.

"It's not AID's policy to support religious instruction," Stratos said. "But we went ahead with this project because the primary purpose . . . is to educate children, which is predominantly a secular activity."

Some legal experts disagreed. A 1991 federal appeals court ruling against AID's former director established that taxpayers' funds may not pay for religious instruction overseas, said Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law expert at American University, who litigated the case for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Ayesha Khan, legal director of the nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the White House has "not a legal leg to stand on" in distributing the books.

"Taxpayer dollars cannot be used to supply materials that are religious," she said.

Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $51 million on the university's education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994.

During that time of Soviet occupation, regional military leaders in Afghanistan helped the U.S. smuggle books into the country. They demanded that the primers contain anti-Soviet passages. Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines, agency officials said. They acknowledged that at the time it also suited U.S. interests to stoke hatred of foreign invaders.

"I think we were perfectly happy to see these books trashing the Soviet Union," said Chris Brown, head of book revision for AID's Central Asia Task Force.

AID dropped funding of Afghan programs in 1994. But the textbooks continued to circulate in various versions, even after the Taliban seized power in 1996.

Officials said private humanitarian groups paid for continued reprintings during the Taliban years. Today, the books remain widely available in schools and shops, to the chagrin of international aid workers.

"The pictures [in] the texts are horrendous to school students, but the texts are even much worse," said Ahmad Fahim Hakim, an Afghan educator who is a program coordinator for Cooperation for Peace and Unity, a Pakistan-based nonprofit.

An aid worker in the region reviewed an unrevised 100-page book and counted 43 pages containing violent images or passages.

The military content was included to "stimulate resistance against invasion," explained Yaquib Roshan of Nebraska's Afghanistan center. "Even in January, the books were absolutely the same . . . pictures of bullets and Kalashnikovs and you name it."

During the Taliban era, censors purged human images from the books. One page from the texts of that period shows a resistance fighter with a bandolier and a Kalashnikov slung from his shoulder. The soldier's head is missing.

Above the soldier is a verse from the Koran. Below is a Pashtu tribute to the mujaheddin, who are described as obedient to Allah. Such men will sacrifice their wealth and life itself to impose Islamic law on the government, the text says.

"We were quite shocked," said Doug Pritchard, who reviewed the primers in December while visiting Pakistan on behalf of a Canada-based Christian nonprofit group. "The constant image of Afghans being natural warriors is wrong. Warriors are created. If you want a different kind of society, you have to create it."

After the United States launched a military campaign last year, the United Nations' education agency, UNICEF, began preparing to reopen Afghanistan's schools, using new books developed with 70 Afghan educators and 24 private aid groups. In early January, UNICEF began printing new texts for many subjects but arranged to supply copies of the old, unrevised U.S. books for other subjects, including Islamic instruction.

Within days, the Afghan interim government announced that it would use the old AID-produced texts for its core school curriculum. UNICEF's new texts could be used only as supplements.

Earlier this year, the United States tapped into its $296 million aid package for rebuilding Afghanistan to reprint the old books, but decided to purge the violent references.

About 18 of the 200 titles the United States is republishing are primarily Islamic instructional books, which agency officials refer to as "civics" courses. Some books teach how to live according to the Koran, Brown said, and "how to be a good Muslim."

UNICEF is left with 500,000 copies of the old "militarized" books, a $200,000 investment that it has decided to destroy, according to U.N. officials.

On Feb. 4, Brown arrived in Peshawar, the Pakistani border town in which the textbooks were to be printed, to oversee hasty revisions to the printing plates. Ten Afghan educators labored night and day, scrambling to replace rough drawings of weapons with sketches of pomegranates and oranges, Brown said.

"We turned it from a wartime curriculum to a peacetime curriculum," he said.

to the pure all things are pure
Areopagitica (1644) by John Milton (1608-1674)

A speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the parliament of England

This is true liberty, when free-born men,
Having to advise the public, may speak free,
Which he who can, and will, deserves high praise;
Who neither can, nor will, may hold his peace:
What can be juster in a state than this?

Euripid. Hicetid.

... Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse.

We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.

But lest I should be condemned of introducing license, while I oppose licensing, I refuse not the pains to be so much historical, as will serve to show what hath been done by ancient and famous commonwealths against this disorder, till the very time that this project of licensing crept out of the Inquisition, was catched up by our prelates, and hath caught some of our presbyters. Martin V., by his bull, not only prohibited, but was the first that excommunicated the reading of heretical books.

For about that time Wickliffe and Huss, growing terrible, were they who first drove the Papal Court to a stricter policy of prohibiting. Which course Leo X. and his successors followed, until the Council of Trent and the Spanish Inquisition engendering together brought forth, or perfected, those Catalogues and expurging Indexes, that rake through the entrails of many an old good author, with a violation worse than any could be offered to his tomb.

Nor did they stay in matters heretical, but any subject that was not to their palate, they either condemned in a Prohibition, or had it straight into the new purgatory of an index.To fill up the measure of encroachment, their last invention was to ordain that no book, pamphlet, or paper should be printed (as if St. Peter had bequeathed them the keys of the press also out of Paradise) unless it were approved and licensed under the hands of two or three glutton friars. For example:

Let the Chancellor Cini be pleased to see if in this present work be contained aught that may withstand the printing.
Vincent Rabbatta, Vicar of Florence.

I have seen this present work, and find nothing athwart the Catholic faith and good manners: in witness whereof I have given, etc.
Nicolini Gini, Chancellor of Florence.

Attending the precedent relation, it is allowed that this present work of Davanzati may be printed.
Vincent Rabbatta, etc.

It may be printed, July 15.
Friar Simon Mompei D'Amelia, Chancellor of the Holy Office in Florence.

Sure they have a conceit, if he of the bottomless pit had not long since broke prison, that this quadruple exorcism would bar him down. I fear their next design will be to get into their custody the licensing of that which they say Claudius intended, but went not through with. Vouchsafe to see another of their forms, the Roman stamp:

Imprimatur, If it seem good to the reverend Master of the Holy Palace.
Belcastro, Vicegerent.

Imprimatur, Friar Nicolo Rodolphi, Master of the Holy Palace.

Sometimes five Imprimaturs are seen together dialogue-wise in the piazza of one title-page, complimenting and ducking each to other with their shaven reverences, whether the author, who stands by in perplexity at the foot of his epistle, shall to the press or to the sponge.

These are the pretty responsories, these are the dear antiphonies, that so bewitched of late our prelates and their chaplains with the goodly echo they made; and besotted us to the gay imitation of a lordly Imprimatur, one from Lambeth House, another from the west end of Paul's; so apishly Romanizing, that the word of command still was set down in Latin; as if the learned grammatical pen that wrote it would cast no ink without Latin.

Or perhaps, as they thought, because no vulgar tongue was worthy to express the pure conceit of an Imprimatur, but rather, as I hope, for that our English, the language of men ever famous and foremost in the achievements of liberty, will not easily find servile letters enow to spell such a dictatory presumption English. And thus ye have the inventors and the original of book-licensing ripped up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree.

We have it not, that can be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity or church; nor by any statute left us by our ancestors elder or later; nor from the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad, but from the most anti-christian council and the most tyrannous inquisition that ever inquired. Till then books were ever as freely admitted into the world as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifled than the issue of the womb.

That a book, in worse condition than a peccant soul, should be to stand before a jury ere it be born to the world, and undergo yet in darkness the judgment of Radamanth and his colleagues, ere it can pass the ferry backward into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity, provoked and troubled at the first entrance of Reformation, sought out new limbos and new hells wherein they might include our books also within the number of their damned.

And this was the rare morsel so officiously snatched up, and so ill-favouredly imitated by our inquisiturient bishops, and the attendant minorites their chaplains. But some will say, what though the inventors were bad, the thing for all that may be good? It may so; yet if that thing be no such deep invention, but obvious, and easy for any man to light on, and yet best and wisest commonwealths through all ages and occasions have forborne to use it.

Falsest seducers and oppressors of men were the first who took it up, and to no other purpose but to obstruct and hinder the first approach of Reformation. I am of those who believe it will be a harder alchemy than Lullius ever knew, to sublimate any good use out of such an invention. Yet this only is what I request to gain from this reason, that it may be held a dangerous and suspicious fruit, as certainly it deserves, for the tree that bore it, until I can dissect one by one the properties it has.

... when Julian the Apostate and subtlest enemy to our faith made a decree forbidding Christians the study of heathen learning: for, said he, they wound us with our own weapons, and with our own arts and sciences they overcome us ... so great an injury they then held it to be deprived of Hellenic learning, they thought it a persecution more undermining, and secretly decaying the Church, than the open cruelty of Decius or Diocletian.

"To the pure, all things are pure;" (Titus 1:15) not only meats and drinks, but all kind of knowledge whether of good or evil; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled. For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evil substance; and yet God, in that unapocryphal vision, said without exception, "rise, Peter, kill and eat," leaving the choice to each man's discretion.

Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unappliable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. How great a virtue is temperance, how much of moment through the whole life of man!

God uses not to captivate man under a perpetual childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his own chooser; there were but little work left for preaching, if law and compulsion should grow so fast upon those things which heretofore were governed only by exhortation. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

Of the harm that may result first, is feared the infection that may spread; but then all human learning and controversy in religious points must remove out of the world, yea the Bible itself; for that ofttimes relates blasphemy not nicely, it describes the carnal sense of wicked men not unelegantly, it brings in holiest men passionately murmuring against Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus: in other great disputes it answers dubiously and darkly to the common reader.

Petronius whom Nero called his Arbiter, the master of his revels; I name not him for posterity's sake, whom Henry VIII. named in merriment his vicar of hell. By which compendious way all the contagion that foreign books can infuse will find a passage to the people far easier and shorter than an Indian voyage, though it could be sailed either by the north of Cataio eastward, or of Canada westward, while our Spanish licensing gags the English press never so severely.

Those books, and those in great abundance, which are likeliest to taint both life and doctrine, cannot be suppressed without the fall of learning and of all ability in disputation, and books of either sort are most and soonest catching to the learned, from whom to the common people whatever is heretical or dissolute may quickly be conveyed. Evil manners are as perfectly learnt without books in a thousand other ways which cannot be stopped.

Evil doctrine not with books still can propagate, guided by a teacher, which he might also do without writing, and so beyond prohibiting. I am not able to unfold, how this cautelous enterprise of licensing can be exempted from the number of vain and impossible attempts. And he who were pleasantly disposed could not well avoid to liken it to the exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his park gate.

If learned men be the first receivers out of books and dispreaders both of vice and error, how shall the licensers themselves be confided in, unless we can confer upon them, or they assume to themselves above all others in the land, the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness?

If it be true that a wise man, like a good refiner, can gather gold out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the best book, yea or without book; there is no reason that we should deprive a wise man of any advantage to his wisdom, while we seek to restrain from a fool, that which being restrained will be no hindrance to his folly.

For if there should be so much exactness always used to keep that from him which is unfit for his reading, we should in the judgment of Aristotle not only, but of Solomon and of our Saviour, not vouchsafe him good precepts, and by consequence not willingly admit him to good books; as being certain that a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet, than a fool will do of sacred Scripture.

'Tis next alleged we must not expose ourselves to temptations without necessity, and next to that, not employ our time in vain things. To both these objections one answer will serve, out of the grounds already laid, that to all men such books are not temptations, nor vanities, but useful drugs and materials wherewith to temper and compose effective and strong medicines, which man's life cannot want.

The rest, as children and childish men, who have not the art to qualify and prepare these working minerals, well may be exhorted to forbear, but hindered forcibly they cannot be by all the licensing that Sainted Inquisition could ever yet contrive. And albeit whatever thing we hear or see, sitting, walking, travelling, or conversing, may be fitly called our book, and is of the same effect that writings are, yet grant the thing to be prohibited were only books, it appears that this Order hitherto is far insufficient to the end which it intends.

Do we not see, not once or oftener, but weekly, that continued court-libel against the Parliament and City, printed, as the wet sheets can witness, and dispersed among us, for all that licensing can do? Yet this is the prime service a man would think, wherein this Order should give proof of itself. If it were executed, you'll say. But certain, if execution be remiss or blindfold now, and in this particular, what will it be hereafter and in other books?

If then the Order shall not be vain and frustrate, behold a new labour, Lords and Commons, ye must repeal and proscribe all scandalous and unlicensed books already printed and divulged; after ye have drawn them up into a list, that all may know which are condemned, and which not; and ordain that no foreign books be delivered out of custody, till they have been read over. This office will require the whole time of not a few overseers, and those no vulgar men.

There be also books which are partly useful and excellent, partly culpable and pernicious; this work will ask as many more officials, to make expurgations and expunctions, that the commonwealth of learning be not damnified. In fine, when the multitude of books increase upon their hands, ye must be fain to catalogue all those printers who are found frequently offending, and forbid the importation of their whole suspected typography.

If the amendment of manners be aimed at, look into Italy and Spain, whether those places be one scruple the better, the honester, the wiser, the chaster, since all the inquisitional rigour that hath been executed upon books. It cannot be denied but that he who is made judge to sit upon the birth or death of books, whether they may be wafted into this world or not, had need to be a man above the common measure, both studious, learned, and judicious.

There cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing journey-work, a greater loss of time levied upon his head, than to be made the perpetual reader of unchosen books and pamphlets, ofttimes huge volumes. To be enjoined the reading of that at all times, and in a hand scarce legible, whereof three pages would not down at any time in the fairest print, is an imposition which I cannot believe how he that values time and his own studies, or is but of a sensible nostril, should be able to endure.

In this one thing I crave leave of the present licensers to be pardoned for so thinking; who doubtless took this office up, looking on it through their obedience to the Parliament, whose command perhaps made all things seem easy and unlaborious to them; but that this short trial hath wearied them out already, their own expressions and excuses to them who make so many journeys to solicit their licence are testimony enough.

Seeing therefore those who now possess the employment by all evident signs wish themselves well rid of it; and that no man of worth, none that is not a plain unthrift of his own hours, is ever likely to succeed them, except he mean to put himself to the salary of a press corrector; we may easily foresee what kind of licensers we are to expect hereafter, either ignorant, imperious, and remiss, or basely pecuniary.

I lastly proceed from the no good it can do, to the manifest hurt it causes; in being first the greatest discouragement and affront that can be offered to learning, and to learned men. What advantage is it to be a man, over it is to be a boy at school, if we have only escaped the ferula to come under the fescue of an Imprimatur; if serious and elaborate writings, as if they were no more than the theme of a grammar-lad under his pedagogue, must not be uttered without the cursory eyes of a temporizing and extemporizing licenser?

He who is not trusted with his own actions, his drift not being known to be evil, and standing to the hazard of law and penalty, has no great argument to think himself reputed in the Commonwealth wherein he was born for other than a fool or a foreigner. When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditates, is industrious, and takes himself to be informed in what he writes, as well as any that writ before him.

If, in this the most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness, no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities can bring him to that state of maturity, as not to be still mistrusted and suspected, unless he carry all his considerate diligence, all his midnight watchings and expense of Palladian oil, to the hasty view of an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps his inferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the labour of bookwriting.

And if be not repulsed or slighted, he must appear in print like a puny with his guardian, and his censor's hand on the back of his title to be his bail and surety that he is no idiot or seducer, it cannot be but a dishonour and derogation to the author, to the book, to the privilege and dignity of learning. And what if the author shall be one so copious of fancy, as to have many things well worth the adding come into his mind after licensing, while the book is yet under the press, which happens to the best of writers?

And that perhaps a dozen times in one book? The printer dares not go beyond his licensed copy; so often then must the author trudge to his leave- giver, that those his new insertions may be viewed; and many a jaunt will be made, ere that licenser, for it must be the same man, can either be found, or found at leisure; meanwhile either the press must stand still, which is no small damage, or the author send the book forth worse than he had made it, which is the greatest melancholy and vexation that can befall.

And how can a man teach with authority, which is the life of teaching; how can he be a doctor in his book as he ought to be, or else had better be silent, whenas all he teaches, all he delivers, is but under the tuition, under the correction of his patriarchal licenser to blot or alter what precisely accords not with the hidebound humour which he calls his judgment? When every acute reader, upon the first sight of a pedantic licence, will be ready with these like words to ding the book a quoit's distance from him:

I hate a pupil teacher, I endure not an instructor that comes to me under the wardship of an overseeing fist. I know nothing of the licenser, but that I have his own hand here for his arrogance; who shall warrant me his judgment? The State, sir, replies the stationer, but has a quick return: The State shall be my governors, but not my critics; they may be mistaken in the choice of a licenser, as easily as this licenser may be mistaken in an author.

For though a licenser should happen to be judicious more than ordinary, which will be a great jeopardy of the next succession, yet his very office and his commission enjoins him to let pass nothing but what is vulgarly received already. To me it seems an undervaluing and vilifying of the whole nation. I cannot set so light by all the invention, the art, the wit, the grave and solid judgment which is in England, as that it can be comprehended in any twenty capacities how good soever.

Much less that it should not pass except their superintendence be over it, except it be sifted and strained with their strainers, that it should be uncurrent without their manual stamp. ... What is it but a servitude like that imposed by the Philistines, not to be allowed the sharpening of our own axes and coulters, but we must repair from all quarters to twenty licensing forges? ... debtors and delinquents may walk abroad without a keeper, but unoffensive books must not stir forth without a visible jailer in their title?

Nor is it to the common people less than a reproach; for if we be so jealous over them, as that we dare not trust them with an English pamphlet, what do we but censure them for a giddy, vicious, and ungrounded people; in such a sick and weak state of faith and discretion, as to be able to take nothing down but through the pipe of a licenser? Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

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