The Population Bomb Turned Out To Be a Dud

The state of the planet scares me. It really does. I don’t just believe in global climate change—I know it’s real, and my family is trying, in our own small way, to be more or less green and more environmentally responsible.

We recycle. We have a composter. It doesn’t really compost, but I’ll get around to figuring that out one of these times. We use those super-efficient halogen bulbs in all our lamps. We installed energy-saving windows on our house. My wife drives a Prius. I recently installed rainwater-catching barrels to my downspouts. We grow a ton of our own food and just got a couple of chickens for eggs.

But—and it may just be the contrarian in me—the one thing I absolutely refuse to get worked up over is overpopulation. I don’t think it’s a big deal.

People get angry if you say this out loud. Overpopulation is an absolutely sacred shibboleth of the environmental movement. I’ve had people look at me, dumbfounded, and say things along the lines of, “But you’re an intelligent human being! How in the world can you not be worried about overpopulation?” as if I’d said something really crazy, like I believe in the Immaculate Conception or creationism or supply-side economics.

But it’s true. I genuinely don’t believe population growth is a problem. And I have good reasons for doubting it.

The overpopulation scare isn’t a new one. Way back in the 18^th century, a particularly gloomy (even for a Calvinist) English pastor and amateur economist, Thomas Malthus, postulated that humanity was, very soon, going to reach the point beyond which it could feed itself, and his prediction was, admittedly, based on sound reasoning.  

Malthus pointed out that the human population increases geometrically. Two people can have ten kids. Each of those ten kids could, theoretically, have another ten kids, and so on and so on. Every generation, the population increased exponentially. Whereas, on the other hand, food production can only grow arithmetically. One acre of land can only yield 100 bushels of corn. If you want to grow more food, you need to cultivate another acre. As the human population increases, land cultivation may keep up for a while, but eventually, it’s going to catch up—and then we’ll all be screwed.

But Malthus turned out to be wrong. Almost embarrassingly so. He was wrong for two reasons: first, because he didn’t take into account human ingenuity, and our ability to improve crop yield. Through selective breeding for hardier plants that yield more produce, improved fertilization and irrigation, and other clever improvements we’ve made to the soil and to the plants that grow on it, we’ve also been able to increase our crop yield exponentially as well.

Malthus isn’t the only one to make this prediction. It was famously revisited in the 70’s by Paul Ehrlich in his extremely influential book The Population Bomb. And, like Malthus, many of Ehrlich’s predictions haven’t come true, either. But still, the spectre of overpopulation terrifies us. Ehrlich himself advocates zero-population growth, and people still take him seriously.

But I don’t.

No one is debating that the planet is seriously strained, that there are a lot of hungry people, and that we could be reaching unsustainable levels of consumption. But that’s the key concept right there: consumption. The problem isn’t too many people. The problem is the misallocation of resources.

My country is, without question, the worst offender. Americans aren’t humans, they’re locusts. We gobble up way more than our fair share of the world’s resources. We’re not the biggest per capita meat-eaters on the planet (that distinction, oddly enough, belongs to Luxembourg), but as a country, we do consume the most meat. And meat consumption is a disaster for the environment. It’s incredibly wasteful. It takes more than 2500 gallons of water to put a pound of meat on a cow, and the amount of land it takes to grow enough feed to put a pound of meat on an animal could feed 16 people for a year. The Amazon valley is being deforested largely for use as cattle ranches, all to feed the American appetite for meat.

Likewise with oil. The United States, with 4% of the world’s population, consumes 25% of all the oil produced worldwide. And fossil fuel consumption is, again, a disaster for the environment. And it’s like that for nearly every other commodity on the planet. Americans gobble up far more of their fair share and then they wonder where the planet's resources are going. 

There’s something deeply disturbing about this picture, and something almost racist about it. Essentially, when Americans rail about overpopulation, what they’re saying to the rest of the world is, “You need to quit producing people so that we can continue to consume way more than our fair share of the world’s resources.”

Resource allocation aside, the other reason I don’t lose too much sleep over overpopulation is historical demographics.

One of the things that concerned Malthus was that improvements in medical science were saving way too many lives. Far fewer children were dying in childbirth—far too many of them were living to adulthood. And it’s true, the European population did spike like crazy in the early 19^th century thanks to pretty basic advances in medicine. Like, you know, washing your hands.

But then something happened that Malthus didn’t foresee. The European population actually started going down, and has continued to do so. Most European countries are now not only at zero population growth, they’re at negative population growth, and the only ones that haven’t experienced negative population growth are those which have grown due to immigration.

What happened? Industrialization happened, that’s what happened. When people leave the farms and go to the city, their families shrink. You need lots of kids to work the family farm when you live in the country. You don’t when you live in a tenement apartment in the city. Matter of fact, all those mouths to feed become a liability, not an asset.

I can point to an example from my own family. My great-great grandparents had eleven children, all of whom lived to adulthood. Oscar, Wolf, Ida, Lena, George, Louis, Maude, Pearl, and who can remember all the rest of them. This was from about 1870 to 1890. Although they weren’t farmers, their livelihood was closely related to agriculture. They owned grocery stores, and I suppose they needed the extra help, much like farmers needed the extra help in the fields. But my great-grandmother, Pearl, only had two kids in her family. Her daughter, my grandmother, likewise had only two children. And so did my mother. And so do I. And my brother doesn’t have any children at all.

That’s a pretty precipitous drop over the course of three or four generations.

That pattern fits not only Europe and the United States, it fits the rest of the world as well. India and China, the two largest populations in the world, are rapidly industrializing. In fact, they’re doing so at a much more rapid rate than Europe and the States did. China’s got its own set of unique and self-inflicted problems. Thanks to its draconian one-family, one-child rule and the rather predictable resulting mass abortions of girls, China is facing a major demographic crisis in the next generation, so watch for their population to take a rather precipitous dip.

Malaysia, Indonesia, and other major population hot spots will also most likely level off and then decline as their populations move from rural, subsistence-farming model to the urban, industrial model as well.

Moreover, more and more girls worldwide are being educated. That’s a good thing, not only for the girls themselves and for the societies in which they live, but for humanity. There's a strong correlation between the number of educated girls and a drop in birthrates. And increasing numbers of educated girls worldwide is inevitable. For every young girl the Taliban shoots in the face for the unforgivable sin against Allah of wanting to be smarter, thirty or forty will take her place. And when they’re studying, and working, and taking their rightful place in the world, suddenly the prospect of having ten or more children is far less attractive.

Overpopulation, like so much else that we worry about, is an oversimplification of the problem. It’s another example of looking for a silver bullet to a complicated problem. Yes, there’s a shortage of resources in the world. But too many people isn’t the cause of it. And as long as we keep ignoring the underlying causes of the resource crisis, it won’t get any better. 

England Ascendant

About a year ago, I wrote a script for a graphic novel called “Doctor Falk,” which I’m trying to talk a pal of mine into drawing. It’s about a scientist of the supernatural who lives in London.

The story is loosely based on the life of a real person. There actually was a guy named Chaim Samuel Jacob Falk. He was born somewhere in Eastern Europe (opinions differ as to where), fled (for various supposed reasons) to London in the 18^th century, and set up shop as a magician, sorcerer, and wonder-worker—a “practical Kabbalist.” Sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it’s not. The fact that it isn’t is sort of the kernel of the story.

That’s where the resemblance between the real guy and the character I made up end. Beyond that, I’m proud to say I did absolutely no research whatsoever.

I let another friend of mine (I do have more than one) read it for his opinion. After he finished it, he looked at me and said, “Boy, you really have a thing for England, don’t you?”

Here's a sketch I did of Doctor Falk with a proper Holmesian pipe. 

His reaction surprised me, because that genuinely wasn’t what was in my mind when I wrote it. Dr. Falk—the real Dr. Falk, and, by extension, my character—actually did flee his shadowy origins in Eastern Europe to live in London. Consciously, I didn’t think of England as anything more than a backdrop, a setting, the place where Falk does his weird stuff. So I re-read my own script (which I hate doing. Benjamin Disraeli once said he had a horror of reading his own books: “It is worse than masturbation”) in light of his comment. Turns out he was right. I do have a thing for England. It’s as obvious as the nose on my face.

Unwittingly, I’d peppered “Doctor Falk” with all kinds of quotes, allusions, references, and homages to England and the English imagination. Falk himself veers perilously close to being a pastiche of that most English of characters, Sherlock Holmes: the cold, tweedy, sexless, emotionally-deficient, quirky, yet heroically patriotic and morally upstanding wizard of Baker Street. The central conceit of my story—a brilliant eccentric living in the center of London whom desperate people consult for help—would not have been possible without having read Conan Doyle’s. Matter of fact, I actually ripped off a few lines verbatim from Holmes (“This looks like one of those tiresome social summonses that calls upon a man either to be bored or lie,” and “[I am going] To smoke. It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you will not disturb me until morning’) and stuck them in Falk’s mouth.

Here's a sketch I did of Doctor Falk in his study, a
subterranean chamber underneath his shop.

And along the way, I shoehorned in bits and pieces from Shakespeare, Disraeli (like I did a few paragraphs above. Did you notice?), The Lion in Winter, Dickens, Smollett, Thackeray, Tintin (not technically English, actually—created by Herge, a Belgian, but lots of the stories take place in and around Tintin’s friend Captain Haddock’s country-home of Marlinspike Hall. Come on. Does it get any Englisher than that?) and Robert Louis Stevenson. Falk goes to Stonehenge, hobnobs with British aristocrats with names like Lord Aethelthwaite, the butchers of Hogbristle Square (okay, I made that place up, but it sounds an awful lot like the kind of place you’d find in England), and is finally rescued by the brave sailors of the Royal Navy.

Even more revealing is a squib of a paragraph I stuck in the creative brief, to give a bit of a visual guide to the artist:

The London where he lives is a gloomy, foggy, dark, Gothic place with tons of weird little details half-hidden in the fog and darkness. It’s exaggeratedly English, Dickensian—quirky and eccentric, full of grotesque people and stone buildings leaning over at crazy, dangerous angles; silhouettes of castles and cathedrals against the moon. Signs advertising the kinds of shops and places that people THINK might exist, but don’t really; streets with ridiculous Englishy-sounding names like Dunwhistle on Tyne, Old Baptist’ry, High Harlotry, Hogbristle Market, etc. A decent amount of ravens and the kinds of places where ravens might live.

In other words, England as imagined by someone who’s never actually been to England.

Essentially, this script that I wrote about a profoundly non-English guy—a (probably) Ukrainian Jew—is a paean to Great Britain. A tribute to England. Why I was so struck by this, I don’t know. It should have been obvious.

I once had a professor, Fred Stopsky, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland, who said that the first time he went to England, it felt like home. It struck me, because here was a guy who had not a dash of England in his background. His family’s trajectory had been a straight shot from the shtetl to Brooklyn. And yet, England felt like home to him. And I remembered his remark as I reconsidered my funnybook script, because he’s right. Even if we’ve never been there, somehow, for most Americans, England is home.

I could pontificate on the power of a shared language (although the English might debate whether we actually share a language at all), on the cultural bonds between Brits and Americans, or on the idea that Great Britain and the United States constitute one great Anglo-American commonwealth, irrespective of different governments and the ocean and centuries that separate us, the central thesis of Kevin Phillips’ book The Cousins’ Wars. I could mention the interesting hypothesis that the American Civil War was merely the last battle of the English Civil War, that epic struggle between the industrious, middle-class Roundheads and the aristocratic Cavaliers.

But all that aside, there’s no denying how deeply and profoundly the English imagination has influenced, and continues to influence, the American one.

The typical bookish American child, as I was myself some millennia hence, spends very little time in mythical America and a hell of a lot of time in mythical England. Sure, we’ve got Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and cowboys and Indians—all red-blooded American kid stuff. But we spend far less time rafting down the Mississippi of legend than we do in the England of legend.

Instead, we travel with the Pevensie children through the wardrobe door to Narnia or join the Fellowship of the Ring in Middle-Earth which, while, admittedly, are non-existent countries, are still about as British as it gets. Or we travel with Alice down the rabbit hole or though the looking-glass. Or we picture ourselves standing on Platform 9 ¾ , donning black robes and attending Potions, Care of Magical Creatures, and Herbology with Harry, Hermoine, Ron, and Neville at Hogwarts, that perfectly idealized version of an English public schools. Or we check each candy bar we open for a golden ticket that’ll let us tour the Chocolate Factory with Charlie.

When we get a little older, we move up to Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe (whose characters we identify with as fellow-Brits marooned on distant islands, and, with them, we dream of returning to the Blessed Plot) and Sherlock Holmes and John Galsworthy. We wish there really was a Drones Club where we could hang out with Bertie Wooster and have Jeeves sort out the disasters of our own making and pick out our clothes for us. We wander the dusty, crumbling hallways of Gormenghast with Titus Groan. And we take Neil Gaiman’s hand, and let him guide us across the vistas of his imagination, a world that may initially appear as terrifyingly phantasmagoric as any we’ve ever seen, but which, at its foundation, remains as comfortingly and as unalterably English as Surrey.

The truly geeky among us graduate to Doctor Who—not even human, but nonetheless about as quirkily, and stereotypically, English as a guy from Gallifrey with two hearts can be, what with his long scarves, tweedy coats, bow ties, and cricket gear. Our sense of humor derives, almost in totality, from Monty Python, part of that great old British music-hall tradition. And we remain glued to our screens to see who dies next on Downton Abbey.

I suppose that’s why, when, as a high school graduation present, my grandmother (whose own family history mirrored that of Professor Stopsky) took me to England for a week, it hardly felt like I was in a foreign country at all. I felt as though I was coming home, back to the very place that had spawned the imaginary landscape in which I’d spent my childhood.

This is not to say that we love the place unreservedly. There’s a lot about English history and culture—and current policy—for progressives like myself to despise. We can detest what was done in the name of King and country during the colonial period. We can mock their outdated class system and deride them for being a bunch of effete crumpet-monkeys. We can blame them, with some justification, for how they handled their custodianship of Palestine, resulting in many of the headaches the Israelis and Palestinians now suffer. We can discern, in the New Atheists’ (like Dawkins and Hitchens) disdain for the religious tendencies of the less advanced peoples of the world, echoes of the same arrogance and certainty of British superiority of colonial times. And we can excoriate the cowardice and hypocrisy of Tony Blair and his servile second-fiddle role in Dubya’s sacred mission to stamp out terrorism in the wrong country. And those of us of Irish descent have a hell of a lot to hate the Brits for.

But regardless of the tragedies of national histories,  if you’re an American kid who likes to read, you simply won’t be able to escape become a citizen of the England of the imagination. Even if you’re from one of the countries and peoples who suffered under the colonial boot, eventually it’ll suck you in. Ask Salman Rushdie who, his Muslim Indian roots notwithstanding, is about as properly British as a guy can get, from his posh BBC accent to his penchant for two-tone Oxford shoes he mentioned in his memoir Joseph Anton—a strangely revealing choice of footwear, if one puts any stock into semiotics at all.   

As justified as our anti-England vitriol may be, we simply can’t help but be Anglophiles at our core. How can you hate, in any consistent and thoroughgoing fashion, the place that spawned you, that gave form and landscape to your imagination, that informed your sense of story, and peopled it with the best characters ever created?

Peter S. Beagle, in his foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring, wrote, “We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers—thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.” Maybe that’s England’s final triumph, its most fully-realized colonization. It may be a second-rate power in the temporal world, reminiscing about the day when Victoria Regis et Imperatrix ruled an empire on which the sun never set, but “Rule Britannia” never stopped playing in the empire of the imagination, and probably never will so long as the species survives.

Now you’ll pardon me as I reflect on this with a spot of tea.

Calling King David Gay Is Kind of Silly.

Although I’m a nonbeliever, I still enjoy reading the Bible. Why this is I don’t know. It may be the connection I feel with people whom I like to imagine are distant ancestors. It may be for the same reason that Simon Dubnov, the great historian of Russian Jewry and a nonbeliever like me, kept a Bible on his bedside table: as a talisman, a symbol. 

It may be just because it’s a cool text: a breathtakingly ambitious collection of old legends, half-remembered stories, snatches and bits and pieces of God only knows how many old tales and songs from forgotten kingdoms and families and people, all massaged into a more or less cohesive whole. How this book came to be is a fascinating story in and of itself. In recent years, I’ve enjoyed fewer books more than Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman’s Unearthing the Bible and David and Solomon, which compare the Biblical record with the archaeological one. Not surprisingly, there are some pretty serious discrepancies. But finding out that much of the Biblical record is baloney doesn’t lessen its import for me. Instead, it deepens my appreciation for the nameless writers and editors at the court of King Josiah who compiled the thing. As a writer of fiction, I appreciate the talents of other writers of fiction, and whatever else those guys (or possibly women) were, they were talented.

Or maybe it’s just that the Good Book, whether or not one believes in its divine origins, has some good stories.And the best of them is the David story. 

I'm not the only one who says so. The David story has inspired geniuses from Michelangelo to Joseph Heller to take a stab at it. The story has inspired artists in every generation, and so universal that everyone on earth can identify with some aspect of David.

I get this. People like to see, in stories and characters, aspects of themselves. It makes us feel less alone. But one thing that irritates me is when people claim that David was gay.

This is a pretty old and prevalent theory. Lots of people do this for lots of different reasons. Liberal Christians and Jews make the claim, most likely, to emphasize the welcoming, nonjudgmental, big-tent nature of their congregations. Biblical detractors, on the other hand, throw it like rocks at more traditional believers as an insult to one of the Bible's most sacred heroes. 

More serious thinkers also fall into the same trap. Jonathan Kirsch, the author of King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel, certainly thinks David and Jonathan had a thing, going so far as to cite homosexual relationships between bandits (as David became, after fleeing Saul) in other cultural contexts as an indicator of David’s own proclivities and behavior. 

But for whatever reason people do so, they’re wrong to do it. I don’t say this out of homophobia. Far from it. I don't care who’s gay, bisexual, or straight. Our society’s current obsession with the topic strikes me as nothing more than prurience, and an invasion of people’s, living or dead, privacy. I object to gayifying David because I believe, strongly, in historical accuracy and in respecting the text. 

First off, there is absolutely nothing in the text suggesting King David was gay. Yes, he was close friends with Saul’s son Jonathan. And okay, there is that one line in David’s famous elegy to Saul and Jonathan after their deaths (Saul’s by suicide) in battle: “Very pleasant has thy love been to me, Jonathan, surpassing the love of women”). Okay, sounds gay by our lights, but then again, we live in a post-Freudian age.

You could parse the whole David story, line by line, or scrutinize David’s own words, in search of evidence of his homosexuality. Maybe you could make a compelling or even convincing case for it, based on what’s written about, and purportedly by, him. 

But it would be a complete and utter waste of time, for one simple reason: the Good Book is, as I mentioned above, largely malarkey.

The fact is that we know precisely one fact about King David. One. One fact. That fact is that he existed.

We know this because of a stone fragment of a victory arch—the “Tel Dan Stele,” so named because it was found at an archaeological dig at Tel Dan in Israel—erected by the Aramaean king Hazael, boasting about his victory over “The House of David.”

That is the extent of extrabiblical documentation for David. (There’s another busted-up old piece of rock, from a victory arch erected by King Mesha of Moab, which may or may not refer to the House of David. So okay, there’s maybe two. But there’s only one concrete, universally-accepted piece of evidence that doesn’t occur in the Bible for David.) And it doesn’t even refer to him specifically, but rather to his descendants, his “House.”

That’s it. We know he existed. Period. We don’t know anything else. We don’t know if any of the Bible’s claims about him—that he was red-haired, that he was a shepherd, the son of a guy named Jesse, a crack-shot with a sling, or a songwriter of Bob Dylan-esque ability—are true or not. We don’t know if he actually killed a giant named Goliath (the Bible itself is a little confused on this score. There’s a verse claiming that someone named Elchonon killed Goliath. So much for Biblical inerrancy) in the service of King Saul. We don’t even know if there was a King Saul.

But we do know that a lot of what the Bible says about him is false. Thanks to archaeology, we know that there actually was no great United Empire under David. The region of Judah was, in David’s time, a sparsely-populated scrub country, inhabited by semi-nomadic tribespeople who lived in villages which rarely exceeded 50 people. Jerusalem, in the time of David and Solomon, was no magnificent capital of an empire the size of Maine. It was a tiny hamlet of no importance to anyone whatsoever. It barely existed.

In the absence, then, of any trustworthy evidence, we are forced to treat King David the same way we treat King Arthur: as a fictional character who may or may not have been based on a real person. Thus, in order to judge whether claims of David’s homosexuality have any merit, we need to consider the author’s intent.

I’m always half irritated and half amused by people who write long, scholarly essays purporting to have detected a homosexual subtext in Frodo and Sam’s relationship, or in that between Holmes and Watson, or that between Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, because I have little to no doubt that neither J.R.R. Tolkien nor Arthur Conan Doyle nor Bob Kane intended their creations to be gay. Nor, for that matter, do I believe that the anonymous author(s), or compiler(s), or redactor(s), of the David story did. 

Finkelstein and Silberman make a convincing argument that the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, was largely slapped into its present configuration during the realm of King Josiah of Judah. And yes, there was definite authorial intent there. But it wasn’t sexual. It was political. The Bible was crafted to give legitimacy to, and justification for, Josiah’s territorial ambitions: he wanted all of Israel, northern and southern kingdoms both.  

Thus, Israel—the northern kingdom—is portrayed in the Bible as a renegade, rebel state, ruled over by asshats like Omri, Ahab and Jezebel, the descendents of the illegitimate dynasty of Jeroboam. Judah, the southern kingdom, on the other hand, was ruled by Josiah, a good and Godly man, the descendent of God’s own anointed king, to whom God had promised an everlasting kingdom.

Which pretty much worked out like all of God’s other promises. But that’s another topic.  

At any rate, in that light, the friendship between David and Jonathan takes on a completely different character. David also married Saul’s daughter Michal. And took over his kingdom. Which indicates that the authorial intent was not a homosexual relationship between David and Jonathan, but rather a progression of Saul losing everything to David: his daughter, the loyalty of his own son, and eventually, his kingdom.

Considering, moreover, that homosexuality was already considered an abomination punishable by death in Josiah’s time, it’s hard to believe that a gay relationship between David and Jonathan was really what the author intended.

Me personally, I could care less if David, the actual person, was gay or not. Wouldn’t bother me if he was.  He might also have been fat or thin, tall or short, hunchbacked or upright. He might also have had one eye, twelve fingers, a vestigial tail, or a twenty-two inch shmeckel. Sure, they all sound ridiculous, but there’s as much reason to believe any of those as there is to believe he was gay—which is none at all.

He may very well have been gay. Plenty of people have been, are, and will be. But to claim that he was on the basis of what’s written about him is nothing more than pushing an agenda, and an abuse of the text. The chances are that we’re never going to know anything more about the historical person of David than that he existed.

And frankly, it’s better that way. Pablo Picasso once said that “Art is a lie which tells the truth.” David’s story, even if it never took place (or did so in a fashion radically different from what the Good Book tells us) is a perfect example of this. As per what we know about Judah and its inhabitants in the time of David, he was, most likely, a minor tribal chieftain—just one of the innumerable, ten-for-a-dollar petty Bedouin sheikhs who’ve been crisscrossing that region since time immemorial. It’s the imaginary David, the legendary David, whose story moves us, inspires us, captivates us, and whose universality speaks to all of us. His story is one of courage, love, betrayal, tragedy, and redemption. It’s a testament to the power of fiction and of art.  

The Minute Progress Becomes Political, You Can Kiss Your Country Good-bye.

Right after the Civil War, St. Louis was the place to be. There was a victory mood in the air. The city’s staunchly anti-slavery and pro-Union Germans had kept it, and the rest of Missouri, out of the Confederacy, and their side had won. Progress was ascendant. The town was booming—all kinds of stuff was flowing down the river to rebuild the South, people were going west in greater numbers than ever before and passing through the Gateway City on their way to do it, and all that commerce was generating unheard of amounts of wealth. The city was the fourth largest in the United States. There was serious talk of moving the U.S. capital from DC to St. Louis. City boosters like Logan Reavis wrote books like, “St. Louis—The Future Great City of the World,” in which he predicted that St. Louis, the great city at the very center of the greatest country in the world, would quite possibly grow into the greatest city in the history of the species. The future was so bright you had to wear shades. St. Louis had nowhere to go but up.

Or so it thought. But something happened. The mood of the city changed, a shift in mindset best expressed by St. Louis’ postwar mayor, German-born Henry Overstolz, who shot down a proposal to install streetlights by saying, “Vell, ve got a moon, ain’t it?”

What happened? Complacency and politics set in. St. Louis turned up its nose at the railroads—no one could imagine that the river, the original source of the city’s wealth, could ever be superseded by the Iron Horse—and let Chicago take the lead on that one. Things were good enough, weren’t they? Why change anything? Why install streetlights? Ve got a moon, ain’t it?

The city became conservative and rigid, with predictable results. The 1880 census revealed that St. Louis’s hated rival to the north, Chicago, had overtaken St. Louis in population. It was a body blow to city’s collective ego. Chicago continued to blow its doors off in every conceivable way. And my city began the long, slow decline to where it is now—a second-tier Midwestern city with nothing particularly remarkable about it. The city, once flush and vibrant with immigrants—in 1860, over half the adult population was foreign-born—ceased to become a destination for new Americans. Right now, it’s got the lowest percentage of foreign-born residents of any major metro area in the U.S. And it shrank. The City of St. Louis has lost population in every census since 1950, and the metro area is now 19^th in terms of population.

And as went St. Louis, I fear, so goes the United States.

There have been prophets of doom foretelling the country’s downfall since before the country even existed, and it’s possible that, at the age of 42, I’m falling into the thought patterns of the elderly, insisting that things used to be better, but they suck now. Could be. But I just can’t shake the feeling that the U.S. has peaked, and that the long, slow decline has now set in.

I’m starkly reminded of this every time I read another article about how Denmark, Germany, Norway, and China and India are passing us by in alternate energy research and implementation. Twenty-two percent of Germany’s energy now comes from renewables—a quarter of that comes from solar power. The country is the leading photovoltaics installer in the world. The Germans have even more ambitious plans: 50% of their energy will come from solar power by 2020, and 100% by 2050.

The Danes are right there with them. They have also set themselves the goal of being completely independent of oil by 2050. India’s not far behind, either. The country is a leader in wind power as well as solar—its growth rate for wind-generated energy use is the fastest in the world. China’s also kicking our asses. Seventeen percent of China’s energy comes from renewable resources, and it has the world’s largest number of hydroelectric generators.

Watching the rest of the world move this direction should be deeply embarrassing to every American. Especially when we find ourselves still mired in two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, which have precisely dick to do with our national security, and everything to do with controlling Mideast oil reserves. Especially when we’re still convulsing ourselves over whether the Keystone XL pipeline should be built, even after a disastrous Exxon pipeline leak in Arkansas shows that oil pipelines are nothing more than environmental disasters waiting to happen. Especially when the Gulf is still recovering from the catastrophic BP oil spill. Especially when we’re so desperate for oil that we’re now reduced to squeezing the shit, drop by drop, out of tar sands and seriously considering “fracking”—pumping high-pressure caustic chemicals (including lead, mercury, hydrochloric acid, and a bitches’ brew of other toxins) into our groundwater in hopes of busting open the shale to get the natural gas inside.

And while the rest of the developed world blows our doors off in science and math education, we in the United States continue to wrestle with whether or not we should give horseshit nonsense like “Creationism” and “Intelligent Design,” which is unmitigated nonsense for numbskulls, equal time in public schools along with the Theory of Evolution. Essentially, we’re arguing over whether we should make ourselves stupider than ever.

I genuinely don’t know why this is the case. I don’t know what turned the country of entrepreneurialism and innovation into a country where adherence to outmoded, worn-out, and frankly ridiculous modes of thought is almost religious. I don’t know what turned the country of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Jonas Salk into the country of Donald Trump.

It’s possible complacency and smug self-satisfaction had something to do with it. Maybe we just drank our own Kool-Aid about being the biggest, the fastest, the richest, the toughest, and the coolest for so long that we figured the rest of the world would never catch up, and we could sit on our laurels. But I suspect the real cause is more pernicious than that.

Money gets into politics, and then suddenly, somehow, things that just shouldn’t be political got politicized.

Take energy, for example. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why oil is a political issue. But it is. Conservatives love it, liberals hate it. But I see no good reason why energy should be a right-left divide. If you’re using something that’s toxic, causes cancer, takes zillions to get out of the ground, involves your country in fatal adventures overseas, and which you’re running out of, then looking around for another energy source shouldn’t be a political issue. It should be common sense. It is the height of stupidity to remain dependent upon oil. But oil producers got involved in conservative politics, and suddenly, oil fetishizing became identified with conservatism. Conservatives abandoned common sense, adopted oil dependence as one of their shibboleths, and now viciously attack anything that calls oil production or consumption into question. Drill, baby, drill! Build that pipeline! Or else you hate America.

How about eating healthy? Not eating pink slime—ground-up, shit-containing, ammonia-treated meat—shouldn’t be a political issue. This should be an issue on which every American can agree. It’s utterly disgusting, as well as dangerous. We shouldn’t be eating it. We shouldn’t allow this abomination against our bodies to even be produced.

But food production is big money, and you can use big money to buy off elected officials. Once again, something utterly vile and stupid became identified with conservatism, and conservatives, once again, abandoned common sense and now scorn and deride those of us who’d prefer our hamburgers to be shit- and ammonia-free as a bunch of latte-drinking, effete elitists.

The problem is that the powers that be—the corporations that control American politics—have a vested interest in keeping things just the way they are. They don’t want change. They’re doing just fine. And they can afford to buy off our parties and our politicians, who have now turned the engines of their donors’ profits into sacred articles of conservative faith.

I can't, however, through all the blame on conservatives. Those of us on the left have done important causes--causes that should not be political issues--a great disservice by turning them into political issues. We've claimed the monopoly on environmentalism, sensible gun control, healthy eating, healthcare, GMO labeling, and a myriad of other issues. These shouldn't be liberal issues. These should be issues that all Americans should care about, and about which all Americans should be able to reach consensus. But by painting these issues with the "liberal" brush--or by allowing them to have become liberal issues--we've pushed tons of potential supporters away. 

The end result is that the idea of progress itself has become political. Instead of leading the world in innovation, big chunks of America now actively hold it back. Now the very idea of moving forward is under attack. Science is either discredited or ignored, innovation is viewed as suspect, and anything that could possibly lead to the betterment of the species is attacked with all the ferocity of a pit bull on HGH. Far too many Americans are terrified of progress. We used to delight in discovery. Now we’re afraid of it. It’s a pathetic thing to see the country that used to set the standard for the rest of the world in technological achievement become a bunch of sniveling cowards, terrified of the future and doing our best to keep it at bay.

Throw this phenomenon into the mix along with a healthy dose of complacency and smugness about your incontestable, eternal “We’re Number One” status, and you have a recipe for decline. Which is what America is doing.

I suppose there’s an odd comfort to be taken, though. I suppose as the lights dim over what used to be the greatest country in the world, we can take refuge in the fact that “Vell, we still got a moon, ain’t it?”

Death and How To Deal With It.

I’m a huge fan of Groucho Marx. It’s not just that he makes me laugh like a crazy person (though he does)—I identify with him. His view of the world and its inhabitants—equal parts acid and anarchy—resonates with me. His inability to leave any pomposity unpunctured and his propensity to insult anyone and anything (and get away with it) remind me of myself. Groucho's example allows me to rationalize those parts of my personality that have led lots of people to describe me as an asshole. 

I can spout Groucho anecdotes and one-liners ‘til the cows come home. The time he said, “I didn’t know you guys were allowed to have mothers,” to a priest who'd mentioned his mother. The time he snarled at an annoying drunk, “I never forget a face, but in your case, I’ll be glad to make an exception.” The time he told a woman who explained her 21 children by saying, "I just love my husband," “Madam, I like my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.”

But none of those lines, funny as they are, touches me like the ones from his final days: how, when his old friend George Fenneman lifted him under his arms and carried him, face to face, from his armchair to his bed, he growled, “You were always a lousy dancer, Fenneman.” Or how, when a nurse came to his room to see if he hand a temperature, he said, “Don’t be silly. Everyone has a temperature.”

I envy that quality that allows a man who’s facing death to crack wise. I’m not entirely sure what it is. It’s not courage, quite. Call it irrepressibility. Whatever it was, Groucho had it. So did my grandfather.

Since I’ve already written about my grandmothers and aunt on this blog, I beg the (most likely nonexistent) reader’s forgiveness as I slip once again into the self-indulgent slough of memoir. But death seems to be on my mind, and nostalgia is a cheap and easy refuge from the thought of the last stop on the track.

Billy Palmer was what was called in his time and place a character. He was a good-looking man, with a head of thick, curly hair and broad, sly grin. He wasn’t tall, but by the time I knew him, he’d acquired enough bulk to give him physical presence to match his personal charisma, a quality of which he had enough to make him intimidating, scary even, to a small and somewhat insecure boy growing up in a family of larger-than-life personalities.

The ancestral Palmers. Bill Palmer, my grandfather, is second row,
directly behind the middle child in the front row. 

He was born dirt poor in the tiny north-central Indiana town of Macy, one of seven children, four of whom succumbed to alcoholism and one of whom took her own life. His father was a mild but none too ambitious day laborer. His mother probably had a good enough brain, but stunted circumstances had made her mean and shrewish. 

His quick wit manifested itself early. When he was five or so, his mother barked that those who didn’t work didn’t eat, and set her small son to hoeing the garden. A sister who’d somehow escaped their mother’s baleful attention sauntered by and asked snidely, “Whatcha doing, Billy?” “Oh, just hoein’ myself up a little dinner,” Billy replied.

Times were brutal for most rural folk in the 1920’s, and people reacted in one of two ways: they either became crusty, hardbitten, taciturn, narrow of eye and tight of mouth, like most of the old Indiana men of his generation whom I knew—or you let your ebullience become the source of your resilience. Billy Palmer chose the latter route. 

He had a congenital and aggressive kind of charm, a natural magnetism that drew all eyes to him when he walked into a room. He augmented it with snappy clothes, big diamond rings, and Lincoln Continentals as big as his personality. He liked attention—it was his medium, he worked in it like other artists work in clay or oils, and he knew how to get it, hold it, mold it, and use it like a master.  

He was a natural salesman. He didn’t inspire trust, exactly. He was a little too glib, a little too quick, a little too overpowering for that. What he inspired was the fierce desire to please him. You wanted to be Billy’s friend—you didn’t want to be left out in the cold. And you got into his good graces by buying what he was selling.

What he sold was cattle. If you ever drove between Indianapolis and South Bend on Indiana 31, you probably saw a big white billboard trumpeting, “W.V. Palmer, Stocker and Feeder Cattle, Indiana’s Largest Selection, since 1950”—a claim as grandiose as the man who made it. I have no idea if he really WAS Indiana’s biggest cattle broker, but he sure acted like it. He bought and sold cattle when lots of farmers kept a small herd of twenty, thirty, or forty head. He loved the business, and he did pretty well at it. In his later years, he sold cattle to bigger outfits like Armour, Iowa Beef (he claimed to have been a personal friend of Armand Hammer), and McDonalds.

My father says he was the best salesman he’d ever seen. “Wuh, hell, you’re right,” he’d say to some farmer who’d thought he’d try to negotiate. It was a mistake. Billy would come in close, loom over you, and start poking his finger in your chest. “You’re right. You saw right through me. I was trying to rob you blind, and you saw right through me. Shit, those animals aren’t worth a damn. Why, I tell you what, I tell you what I’ll do right now, I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you turn around right now and DON’T buy these animals. I’ll do it right now,” and he’d reach into his pocket, pull out a thick wad of cash, and start peeling off twenties.

Billy cut a hell of a dash, although my father, more restrained and better with figures, knew the real story. “He rode the ragged edge of financial disaster for most of my childhood,” my pop says, shaking his head and smiling a little ruefully. “But he knew how to make it look good.”

He could make it look good, all right. Eventually, it actually was good. He died a rich man. But as much as he loved trading cattle—and as good as he was at it—cattle were not, at the end of the day, the source of his prosperity. Land was.

My father knows the tax codes better, but Billy was no slouch at number-crunching himself. He figured it was cheaper to grow feed than to buy it in the 50’s and 60’s, when Indiana farmland was so cheap you couldn’t give it away. Bit by bit, farm by farm, bank loan by bank loan, he came to own a good chunk of Miami County.

Naturally, the Federal Government farm subsidy program paid him not to grow feed. But Billy pocketed Uncle Sam’s largesse with a wide grin, kept growing, and went to Vegas three or four times a year with his good pal, the Miami Country Farm Commissioner, who looked the other way. And when land prices shot up, the old boy began to buy and sell whole farms the way he sold cattle. 

Billy enjoyed the high life, and he felt right at home in Vegas--a hustler’s town, a shrewd and gaudy place that invented itself and created its own legend. He liked to drink (he was an alcoholic, but, like his finances, he hid it well) and he liked to gamble. He’d show us grandchildren the fat stack of bills he’d come back with—the big time high roller just back from cleaning out Vegas. “I’ll go back when they’ve got more money,” he’d say. "And I'll clean 'em out again."

As with so much else in his life, this was largely invention, too. After he died, a very nice letter of condolence from Caesar’s arrived, asking if the heirs wouldn’t mind honoring that $10,000 marker left outstanding by Mr. Palmer’s sad death.

A lifelong Democrat, he was a two-time delegate to the National Convention (’64 and ’68), about which he was very proud. My father occasionally snorts that it wasn’t much of an accomplishment (“Hell, there’re only six Democrats in the whole damn state”), but Billy liked being a big shot. He also liked meeting Lyndon Johnson, the one guy whose powers of persuasion matched his own.

Unless it was a good-looking lady, Billy never seemed too interested in anyone else. Why bother? He was  the most interesting person in the room. This disinterest extended to his progeny—he never seemed too enamored of his grandchildren, although he liked to call me “Perfesser,” and he dutifully attended my brother's and cousin's baseball and football games. It was part of his mystique to turn the dynamics of any relationship to his advantage: people fell over themselves to pay him attention. No one minded that he paid very little to anyone else.

A long slow decline would have been out of character. Mercifully, his final illness didn’t last more than a month or two. I drove up to Indiana from St. Louis to say goodbye the day of the Farm Sale, at which all his equipment—the tractors, harvesters, combines, manure spreaders, etc—were sold at auction. Moments after I arrived at my grandparents' house (they lived in a big rambling house nowhere near any of the farms themselves), my father drove up in the Lincoln, with a shrunken, emaciated withered, hunched-over, and rheumy-eyed shadow of Bill Palmer in the passenger seat.

“Sad day, huh, Grandpa?” was all I could think to stammer. He looked nothing like the big and vibrant man I remembered. 

“Well, Billy’s not in much shape to do a whole lot more farming, are ya, Billy?” said my father, lifting the old man into his wheelchair. My grandfather raised his quivering head from the folds of his bathrobe and flannel pajamas and rasped, “Ooohhh... maybe just light work.”

They’d set up a hospital bed where his big blue leather recliner had been. Hospice nurses tended to him, giggling apologetically as they did it. To the end, Billy kept his lightning wit. He refused his pain medication, telling one nurse, "I'm afraid it might be habit-forming.” When another complimented his full head of curly white hair and said he was still a good-looking man, he leered at her and croaked, “Isn’t Betty [his wife, my grandmother] lucky?”

Those might have been his last words, come to think of it.

I don’t know if you can call it courage. The quips, the one-liners, might have been a distraction from the inevitable. Maybe it's easier to face death when you don’t think about it, because you’ve still got an audience to entertain. Whatever it is, though, whatever let Groucho and Grandpa greet the Reaper with a wisecrack, I hope I’ve got it. Bill Palmer was no saint. He was a drinker, a gambler, a womanizer, a sharp dealer—you better believe he had his dark side. In fact, he was more or less defined by it. But when we remember him now, it’s with laughter. His humor both softened the blow of his death and gilded his memory. There are worse ways to go. 

The March of Regress--A Cautionary Tale

Inasmuch as I am a person who grew up with a lot of religion and subsequently lost it, I think—and, on this blog, write—a lot about the process of ditching one’s faith and the benefits of doing so. A lot of secularists do this. We get smug about our lack of faith, and, from our post-God perspective, look down on those who still thrash in the coils of organized religion with a mixture of self-congratulation and pity. We tend to look upon believers as somehow less advanced, less evolved, than we are. But given enough time, they, or their descendants, will, we hope, wake the hell up, break out of the shackles, and join us in an optimistic, humanistic, and brighter future.

What we all too frequently ignore is that the process often goes the other way.

I realized this while I was shuffling about online, pretending to do some research on Joseph Pulitzer, and ran across a website for a nonprofit organization on whose board Michael Pulitzer, Jr., his great-grandson, serves. The biographical blurb under his picture said that he was active in his Mennonite church.

It shook me. Joseph, the progenitor of the American Pulitzers, was a deeply irreligious man. He abandoned his ancestral Judaism and, although nominally Episcopalian after his marriage, never paid much attention to it. He appears to have been thoroughly secular, an assertion supported by one of his employees’ statement that that he ascribed to what was then called the “Higher Agnosticism,” a philosophy about which I’m going to have to learn more one of these days.

But, some generations hence, his great-grandson is now an active churchgoer. I find that odd, and, if I’m honest, a bit dispiriting. But the process of moving from secularism to religion can be quicker than that, and I’ve got an example a good deal closer to home.

My maternal aunt is an interesting example. Actually, she’s an interesting person, period. She was a bright kid—she got her undergraduate degree in French, studied for a year at the University of Caen in France, got her master’s in math, and became a schoolteacher, and later on, a principal. But it was her politics that interests me most.

By all accounts, she was passionately committed to racial equality from a very early age. I’m not sure where a girl from an upper-middle-class, socially-striving family in (what was then) a wealthy neighborhood picked that up. It might have been an atavism, some genetic memory of her mother’s family’s tough times in Russian Poland, whence the Tsars chased them in 1889. It might have been from my grandmother herself, who, as a teenager, brought home a little Mexican kid she found begging for change on Cherokee Street. His name was Frankie Lopez. I don’t know what had happened to his parents, but she dragged him back to Idaho Street, gave him a bath (“which, I can tell you, he desperately needed. Poor little thing”), and sat him down at the dinner table, where he remained a regular fixture—in fact, a sort of unofficial adoptee—for years. He and my uncle, egged on by my great-grandfather, would wrestle like Lou Thesz and Strangler Lewis. Later on, he went to work in my great-grandfather’s auto parts supply business on South Broadway, and eventually became an auto mechanic and owned his own garage. Fifty years later, he wept like a baby at my great-grandfather’s funeral.

At any rate, she got deeply involved in the civil rights movement in the 60’s. She marched at both Birmingham and Selma, hustled my staunchly Republican grandfather into giving her all his old office equipment for use at the NAACP office in Denver (where her then-husband, an Englishman whom she met in France, was getting his PhD in French literature), and, when it turned out she and her husband couldn’t have children, adopted four African-American children who were “wards of the state”—the unadoptables. The kids no one else wanted.

I don’t think I’ll be telling any tales out of school, or saying anything she wouldn’t agree with, if I say that my aunt is neither the warmest, nor the most nurturing, nor the most maternal of people. Some people are cut out to be moms, some weren’t. Some of my cousins are doing okay, some less so. But even if she was no great shakes as a mother, I always thought that was a pretty noble thing to do.

My self-consciously haute bourgeois grandparents were appalled. My grandmother, who had assiduously shlepped her daughters to finishing school, dance lessons, piano and violin lessons, horseback riding lessons, and a host of other activities designed to distance her progeny from the cold-water tenement flat where she’d spent her earliest years, was, simultaneously, both affectionately condescending and bewildered.

“Can you imagine,” she said to me years later, “what it was like for me to get off of that plane in my mink and my jewelry—people dressed up to get on airplanes in those days, not shlubby like you do—and to be met in the airport by this girl in this peasant dress down to her feet, and sandals, for God’s sake, with these two huge hippie braids and all these black children climbing all over her? I thought I’d have a heart attack. I was mortified.”

My grandfather, who maintained an air of chilly reserve to his dying day, never went much farther than a shrug and a quirk of his right eyebrow, but it was pretty obvious how he felt.

She was, however, a big favorite of my Russian-born great-grandfather, the Communist. My mother was blonde, pretty, demure, popular at school, a cheerleader, and, in college, a sorority girl. She took to my grandmother’s relentless agenda like a fish to water. She was the perfect daughter for a family clawing its way to moneyed middle-class respectability. My great-grandfather hated her guts. He used to make her cry on purpose. My aunt—small, dark, sharp-featured, intense, edgy, scornfully dismissive of her mother’s ambitions and blazing with that peculiar righteous indignation of the far left—well, now, her he liked just fine.

I’m not sure if civil rights was a sort of gateway drug into broader counterculture activism or not, but she was, throughout most of my childhood, a raving leftie. My brother and I still laugh about some of the presents Aunt Lynne and Uncle John got us. One year, it was “Ban the Bomb” tote bags made out of real hemp. If we’d hung on to them until we were old enough to know what hemp was, we probably would have smoked them as teenagers. Another year, it was the “Save the Whales” board game. That one was actually kind of fun. I remember being the only kid in fourth grade who knew what “baleen” meant, even if I still giggled at “sperm whale.” And she was, unsurprisingly, vocally anti-religious and openly derisive of my mother’s Christianity, about which I’ve blogged elsewhere and which she came to after seven miscarriages and a child who died two days after his birth.

But somewhere along the way, she reversed course. Completely. She is now a right-wing Republican conservative Christian who believes, absolutely and unapologetically, in the literal death and resurrection, supply-side economics, and the six-day account of Creation.

I’m genuinely not sure what occasioned the change, which, while not overnight and not completely without process (she went through a short spell of liberal Quakerism) nonetheless happened remarkably quickly. But there are, I suppose, a few watershed events that may have moved the process along.

The first was, in all probability, political.

My cousins’ formal adoption was held up for years by the fierce resistance of a Philadelphia-based organization of African-American social workers, who were ferociously opposed to the idea of white families adopting black children. To take black children out of their culture and raise them as “white” children amounted to, they argued, was “cultural genocide.” Their words, not mine. “White adoption of black children erases their heritage and will lead to the final extinguishing of our people.” Again, their words, not mine. This group—the name of which escapes me and doesn’t matter anyhow, since it no longer exists—filed legal injunctions to block the adoptions from going through, excoriated my aunt and uncle, accused them of racism, harassed them with threatening phone calls, and eventually gave up.

They were fighting a dragon that was already dead. My aunt and uncle went to great lengths to ensure that their children’s cultural heritage was honored. Their house was full of books by authors like Don Freeman and Ezra Jack Keats—books by, and about, people who looked like them. A picture of Rosa Parks was prominently displayed in the entrance to their house. She did her homework, knew not to wash the kids’ hair too often, learned what to do about ash, and even learned how to do African braiding at an Afrocentric salon in Philadelphia.

But it was immensely wounding. She genuinely wanted to work tangible and lasting change. And her treatment by people whose side she thought she was on must have felt like a betrayal, and probably estranged her from the fringes of the American left, and from activism.  

The second event was when she broke her arm.

She took a pretty bad spill while roller-skating with her kids and fractured both her radius and her ulna. It took quite a few surgeries to put her back together again, and she’s still got a serious scar running up and down the length of her inner arm. Her reaction to the experience was interesting. Instead of bemoaning her bad luck, she became fascinated by healthcare and by the human body, and when she was recovered, she ditched teaching and school administration, went to nursing school, and became a neonatal nurse, devoting the rest of her career to taking care of preemies.

To hear her tell it, that’s what turned her around on God. The more she learned about how bodies work, the more convinced she became that it didn’t all happen by accident. And with every tiny life that she helped save, and then cared for, the more convinced she became that this God had a plan for each life.

She was also going through a divorce at the same time she was in nursing school. It was pretty amicable. I suppose she and my uncle both realized that she was a difficult person to be married to, and they remain friends. But as amicable as any divorce can be, the process is still a pretty big upheaval—particularly so when you’ve got four smallish kids at home. That may also have had something to do with it, and doubtless, my mother’s proselytizing—as indefatigable as her own mother’s attempts to civilize her daughters—in all likelihood eroded her resistance to Jesus’ embrace.

Regardless of the reasons, she’s pretty firmly ensconced where she is now. And it troubles me. I’d like to think that the march of secularism and the death of religion are inevitable—but my aunt’s example shows that they’re anything but. Adversity is part of the human condition, and most likely always will be. It’s tough to contest Jesus’s prediction that the poor will always be with us, or the Preacher of Ecclesiastes’s assertion that man is born to trouble as the sparks rise. And adversity has a tendency to send people running back to the arms of the Lord, to take refuge in what they once didn’t pay attention to, or didn’t believe in.  It troubles me because I wonder if, as concrete as my own nonbelief is now, I too might suffer a relapse one day. And it troubles me because...  well, Christ, who knows? She might actually be right.

In any case, examples of people like my aunt ought to humble us nonbelievers, and knock a little of the smugness out of us. Our way is not so absolute that people can’t find their way out of it, nor so invincible that it cannot be eroded.

Why Ebonics Shouldn't Be Dissed.

Mention the word “ebonics” around most (white) people, and you’ll generally get either sneers or passionate denunciations of it. They’ll call it ghetto-talk, and tell you that they only want black people to succeed, but that that degraded, vulgar, debased mutation of English that they speak is keeping them from doing that.

Well, maybe, but I doubt it. I bet that Rosa Parks could have talked like Winston Churchill, and they still wouldn’t have let her sit in the front of the bus.

Regardless, anti-ebonics is bigotry, even if those who express it claim good intentions. In essence, when white people say that when black people should speak “proper English,” what they’re saying is “Be less black. You may not be able to do anything about being black, but for God’s sake, try not to SOUND like it. Try to sound more like us, instead.”

It’s not only bigoted, it’s hypocritical as hell, too. White people mangle English just as badly as any ebonics speaker ever did. The next time I hear someone say “Me and him went to see Toby Keith last week,” I’m going to throw the speaker through a plate glass window. Why is how black people speak any worse than how white people abuse English?

Knee-jerk anti-ebonics also originates in the mistaken, yet pervasive, notion that it was once proposed as an alternative to teaching standard American English in public schools. This isn’t true. Replacing standard English was not what Afrocentric thinkers of the 60’s and 70’s proposed. They proposed codification of Black English (which they named ebonics, the language of ebony-colored people) and its development as a literary language. This was not a new or radical idea, as we’ll see later. But somehow, it got around that militant blacks wanted to use our hard-earned tax dollars to pay for teaching kids bad English—an untruth that, nonetheless, met with fierce resistance and withering derision. Now ebonics is a joke—a punchline for dialect jokes of the lowest kind. Because the word “ebonics” has been so thoroughly derided, and because the associations are so completely negative, I’m going to ditch the term and refer to it as “Black English.”

Attacking and deriding Black English is, regardless of the stated intentions of those who do it, a personal attack. To deride someone’s language is to devalue the speaker, because language is an integral part of who we are. It is intimately tied to our very identity, as Andre Aciman describes in his memoir Out of Egypt, as he discusses Ladino, the Spanish-Jewish dialect spoken by his grandmothers:

“It was the language of loosened neckties, unbuttoned shirts, and overused slippers, a language as intimate, as natural, and as necessary as the odor of one’s sheets, of one’s closets, of one’s cooking. They returned to it after speaking French, with the gratified relief of left-handed people who, once in private, are no longer forced to do things with their right.”

Attacking Black English is not only hateful and harmful. It also indicates ignorance of both the nature of language itself, and of the history of peoples and languages.

It should be by now a truism that no language is superior to any other. All languages have the same capabilities and limitations. Because there is so little genetic variation among humans as to be absolutely negligible, all humans, which we now know thanks to Noam Chomsky, are born with the same cognitive/linguistic capability—universal grammar is part of the human genetic endowment, regardless as to what kind or color of person you are. Essentially, we’re all genetically hardwired to speak the same pan-human language, with minor variations. Thus, there’s no reason to believe that any language is of lesser or greater value.

I would also argue that Black English isn’t a degraded or incorrect form of English, but that it is the distinctive language of a discrete nationality. African Americans are in America, but not entirely of America. They have been, historically, excluded from the mainstream, sequestered to enclaves and, within those enclaves, speaking a language embedded in which is a distinctive culture and history.

Black English, like all languages, is a product of the history of its speakers. English, for example, is the Celtic/German/Latin/Norman French mishmash that it is because of all the things that happened to the English people—and, like Black English, it was once the derided language of a downtrodden people. 

After the Norman invasion of 1066, English was the language of conquered peasants. Norman French was the language of the overlords. Even though English persisted (albeit with some modifications—we use English, “cow” and “pig,” to describe the animal, but French, “pork” and “beef”, to describe the meat. The peasants raised them, but the aristocrats ate them), French was still the language of the court. It took a Shakespeare—a genius of low birth, writing in the common, vulgar vernacular for the amusement of the common, vulgar masses—to show that English could be used to express the most sublime ideas and the most eloquent description of the human condition, and in doing so, to prove that English had as much value as French.

Black English is no different. It reflects the unique history of African Americans. Its vocabulary is, pretty much in its entirety, English. Slave traders broke up groups who spoke the same languages and sold them in different locations, on the not inaccurate assumption that it would be more difficult for people who weren’t able to talk to each other to organize and rebel.

Accordingly, English words were transposed on top of African ones. But because most American slaves originated in western Africa, they spoke languages that belonged to the West African language family, which all share a similar grammar. The verb “to be,” for example, is not conjugated in the West African language family. Whereas we conjugate the verb (“I am,” “she is,” “they are,”) the West Africans don’t bother. There’s no good reason why they should, either. Conjugation adds little to language in either clarity or expressiveness.

Displaced Africans, upon arriving here, replaced African words with English ones—but the underlying West African grammatical structure of their native languages persisted. Thus, when African Americans use sentences like, “I be tired,” or “They be at the store,” it’s not lazy English—it’s an example of the persistence of West African grammar. This persistence argues for its robustness and resilience. Black English has a remarkable level of cohesion with surprisingly little regional variation. In every major American city, Black English is more or less the same—it retains the same cadence, syntax, vocabulary, and even accent whether it’s spoken in New York, Chicago, Memphis, Detroit, St. Louis, New Orleans, or Atlanta.

It wasn’t just grammar that persisted, either. Africans brought with them a rich folklore which, like their language, morphed in reaction to their new surroundings, but survived. Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus” stories, for example, originate in Africa. Anansi, the Trickster Spider of West African folklore, became Brer Rabbit in this country: African folklore, adapted to an American context.

These and other examples argue for Black English’s status as a language in its own right. And those thinkers who coined the term “ebonics” and attempted to codify it and to develop it as a literary language weren’t the first to try this. It’s an idea with lots of historical precedent.  

Take Czech, for example. Originally, it didn’t even have a name. It was the language of the peasants of Bohemia, which itself was an unfashionable backwater of the Hapsburg Empire—just another regional variant of the garbled jumble of Slavic soup of East Central Europe.

But in 1846, the Czech intellectual Frantisek Palacky decided that Czech wasn’t just a ragbag collection of grunts and gutturals spoken by uneducated pig farmers or the illegitimate cousin of Russian and Polish. It was the language of a people, with their own unique history and culture. He began writing in Czech, founded journals in it, and used it to tell the story of his people. A century later, it is the language of Milan Kundera, of Vaclav Havel, of Nobel Prizewinner Jaroslav Seifert, and of Jaroslav Hacek, the author of Good Soldier Svejk, one of the truly towering works of comic literature in the human canon.

Yiddish is another example. In the 19^th century, damn near no one liked it, including those who spoke it. It was the ebonics of German, a degraded form of German written in a degraded form of Hebrew, the language of a despised and persecuted people.  

German Jews, who’d abandoned it a long time ago, were deeply embarrassed by their Eastern coreligionists’ Yiddish, calling it a “piggish jargon.” The “better class” of Russian Jews also detested their own mother tongue, and called for their brethren to abandon it and start speaking Russian. Hebraists and Zionists, embarrassed by its ghetto/shtetl associations, called for Hebrew—the language of Moses, the Prophets, King David, and a bunch of other people who may well have never existed—as the “official” Jewish language.

But writers like Mendele Mocher Sforim, S. An-Sky, Y.L. Peretz, Sholem Asch, and ultimately, Nobel Prizewinner Isaac Bashevis Singer thought differently. They recognized its value as the language of the Diaspora, reveled in its pungent expressiveness, and began writing in it.

Black English hasn’t yet found its Shakespeare—that writer who uses it to create works of such power that it cannot be ignored. There are plenty of artists working in it and using rap as a medium, but I’m fearful that rap’s too-rapid commercialization and subsequent bowdlerizing will bastardize it and sap its vigor before its potential is realized. And in any case, Black English is going to need a novel or thirty before most people admit that, like English, Czech, and Yiddish, it’s an appropriate vehicle for expression and a language of its own, and worthy of respect.

In the meantime, however, neither Black English nor its practitioners should be mocked. It’s not a zero-sum game—African American children can, and should, learn standard English—but the development of Black English does not have to come at the expense of teaching proper English. Its development as a literary language should be encouraged. And those of us who don’t speak it should consider ourselves fortunate to live in a time when we might actually witness the flowering of a new literary language coming into its own.