The Reckonings

by Lacy M. Johnson

  According to the Department of Justice’s Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, between 2011 and 2014, out of all the “failure to comply” charges issued by the Ferguson Police Department, 94 percent were lodged against the city’s black residents. Sarah Bufkin, writing in Bustle, asks readers to add to that a list of the seemingly “black-specific offenses of ‘Manner of Walking’ (95 percent), ‘Resisting Arrest’ (92 percent), ‘Peace Disturbance’ (92 percent), and ‘Failure to Obey’ (89 percent),” and it becomes clear that the “officers misunderstood their role and the obligations that these communities owed to them. . . . Rather than aiming to bolster community trust and work for the best interest of the African American residents, the Ferguson police officers seemed more bent on disciplining them and bringing them to heel.”

  The rage is not pathological: “If rage is not an appropriate response to injustice, I don’t know what is” writer Claudia Rankine has said. This echoes a line from bell hooks’s Killing Rage: “rage is an appropriate response to injustice.”

  “See whose face it wears”: I thought of this line again recently at the Women’s March in Washington, DC, in 2017: the sea of pink pussy hats, of white women taking selfies and holding tone-deaf signs with slogans like “Let’s Get in Formation” without any indication of concern for the actual experience of the women of color who were also at the march and to whom that song more likely refers. No one was arrested that day; police wore pink hats instead of riot gear, high-fived protesters even as they marched outside the established route. Where are these white women when black and brown men and women are being slaughtered, kidnapped, deported? Why aren’t these white women using whatever power and privilege they do have to fight the oppression of people of color every single day?

  something I was afraid to lose: See bell hooks, Killing Rage. She writes, “All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity. What does our rage at injustice mean if it can be silenced, erased by individual material comfort?”

  GOLIATH

  President Bush addresses a joint session: Earlier that same day, one thousand Muslim clerics had issued a fatwa recommending a full investigation of the attacks, that the United States not invade Afghanistan, and if it did invade Afghanistan, the clerics order that “jihad become an order for the Muslims of that country.”

  he is told that he won’t recognize evil: A few choice quotes from Anderson Cooper’s March 9, 2016, interview with Donald J. Trump on CNN:

  “I think Islam hates us. There’s something there. There’s a tremendous hatred there. We have to get to the bottom of it. There is an unbelievable hatred of us.”

  “We have to be very vigilant. We have to be very careful. And we can’t allow people coming into this country who have this hatred of the United States and of people who are not Muslim.”

  “And it’s hard to define. It’s hard to separate because you don’t know who’s who.”

  I heard my first stories about evil: I have learned from my son that the idea of evil creates fear, but I have learned from religion that the reverse is also true. The first incentive to worship is often fear, and evil looms in the remotest past of almost every faith. In the third millennia BCE, ancient Accadians worshipped what we might now call evil gods in their pantheons—destructive deities who exacted terror as much as tribute. Ancient Egyptians paid tribute to the god Set, the embodiment of the scorching sun, the enemy of life, the drought of the desert and feverish thirst, who destroys with merciless heat. In ancient Mesopotamian mythology, Tiamat is a creator goddess before her husband is slain in war, and in her sorrow she becomes a sea dragon bent on murderous revenge. The storm god hero Marduk kills her, and the blood he spills becomes the visible heavens and creates the Earth.

  This myth too—of the hero who saves the world by defeating evil single-handedly—is one that has been constantly reinventing, reviving, evolving, and resurrecting itself. In ancient Babylon, Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, saves his kingdom by slaying not only the evil demon Humbaba, a monstrous guardian of the Cedar Forest, but also Gugalanna, Ishtar’s Bull of Heaven, who devastates Uruk by drinking the Euphrates River, drying up the marshes, and opening enormous pits that swallow hundreds of men. Millennia later, the early teachings of Christianity, especially the Gospel of Nicodemus, recount a story of Christ descending after his death on the cross to battle with and conquer the devil in hell. This story isn’t considered canon, but it follows the model of the story of David and Goliath, which is.

  In the New Testament, evil goes by many names: Satan (which means adversary in Hebrew), Beelzebub, the Devil, the prince of this world, the great dragon, the old serpent, the prince of the devils, the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that works in the children of disbelief, the Antichrist. Satan is represented as the founder of an empire that struggles with and counteracts the kingdom of God on Earth.

  the ritual sacrifice of their children: Maybe the deacon’s wife thought I had forgotten that one time God asked Abraham to sacrifice his own son Isaac.

  if they are different in all of these ways: This is a perfect example of the Manichaean allegory, which Abdul R. JanMohammed has postulated as an economy “based on a transformation of racial difference into moral and even metaphysical difference.” He continues: “Though the phenomenological origins of this metonymic transformation may lie in the ‘neutral’ perception of physical difference (skin color, physical features, and such), its allegorical extensions come to dominate every facet of imperialist mentality.” See “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature” in Henry Louis Gates Jr. Race, Writing, and Difference.

  any story that cannot accommodate nuances: That picture book, for example, left out the part where David overthrows his king and usurps the throne and then struggles throughout his reign to earn the allegiance of his kingdom and unify the myriad tribes and families of Israelites together in an idea of common identity and shared moral goodness. Like so many of us, he turned to the power of stories, which are at least partially immortalized in the Davidic Psalms—stories that were meant to be set to music, to be chanted by the group, to stir the heart, to rouse the crowd, to affirm the community and establish its boundaries.

  Although seventy-three of the Psalms are attributed to David, biblical scholars argue there is no hard evidence that David himself authored any of them. In particular, Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler note in The Jewish Study Bible that “Davidic authorship . . . is not accepted as historical fact by modern scholars, but is viewed as a way the ancients linked biblical writings with the appropriate inspired well-known biblical figure, thereby confirming the divine inspiration and the authority of those writings.” Despite this consensus among biblical scholars, there is also no hard evidence that he didn’t write them.

  “Evil” in particular is a recurring theme in the seventy-three Psalms attributed to David. Psalm 23, for example, is perhaps the most often-quoted scripture about evil, invoked regularly at funerals, but also by President Bush in his address to the nation on the evening of the attacks on September 11: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me.” Elsewhere in the Davidic Psalms the idea of evil appears, as in Psalm 15, in order to establish an idea of shared virtue:

  Lord, who may dwell in your sacred tent?

  Who may live on your holy mountain?

  The one whose walk is blameless,

  who does what is righteous,

  who speaks the truth from their heart;

  whose tongue utters no slander,

  who does no wrong to a neighbor.

  That word neighbor is important, I think. It’s also important that the translation of this Psalm from Latin into Old English in the middle of the eighth century in a monastery in what is now England marks the introduction of the word evil into the English language. Twelve centuries before my son was born, before President Bush appeared on television to address a grieving nat
ion, yfel entered our language at another historical moment when everyone had their minds on terror—in particular, the brutal surprise sacking of the monastery of Lindisfarne by Vikings invading from the eastern shore. The Vikings were England’s terrorists, its savage invaders, and the monks translating the Psalms experienced this invasion and the slaughter of their neighbors as an unqualified evil that escaped explanation beyond the fulfillment of biblical prophesies of the end times, and the story of Vikings as evil, horned-helmeted barbarians is the one that still survives today. Alcuin, a scholar in Charlemagne’s court at the time, wrote when he heard news of the sacking: “Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race.”

  And yet even as Alcuin wrote these words, Charlemagne was engaged in a decades-long war against evil on the mainland. The story we have of Charlemagne imagines him as a kind of archetypal hero who slaughtered evil single-handedly: a romantic king; the father of modern Europe, a virtuous savior of the Holy Roman Empire. But the truth is more complicated than that. His holy war became a brutal lifelong campaign to torture and terrorize pagans into converting to Christianity. At Verden, for instance, Charlemagne ordered the beheading of nearly five thousand Saxons who had been caught practicing pagan rituals. In praise of these executions, his court poet, author of the Paderborn Epic, writes, “What the contrary mind and perverse soul refuse to do with persuasion, / Let them leap to accomplish when compelled by fear.”

  We hear the word evil applied to anyone who opposes us: There was a time when even left-handedness was considered a sign of evil nature. The word sinister comes from sinestra, meaning “left,” an association that perhaps comes from the story in Greek mythology of Cronus castrating Uranus and grasping his genitals with his left hand: “Which has ever since been the hand of ill-omen,” writes Robert Graves in The Greek Myths.

  Hitler was evil: Hannah Arendt has written at length about how Hitler would have basically been powerless were it not for low-level functionaries like Eichmann who followed along. In an interview with Joachim Fest on Das Thema SWR TV, Germany, on November 9, 1964, Fest asked Arendt to what extent we should tell the truth about all of this, even when legitimate interests and people’s feelings come into conflict. Arendt responded:

  Well, I think that such is the historian’s task, as well as the task of people who live at that time and are independent—there are such people, and they need to be guardians of factual truths. What happens when these guardians are driven out by society, or driven into a corner or put up against a wall by the state—we’ve seen this happen in the writing of history, for example in Russia, where a new history of Russia comes out every five years. Does the state or society, with their legitimate interests that may come into conflict with the truth, still have an interest—in principle—with these guardians of factual truth? In this case I’d say yes. What then happens is of course that a whole series of apologias are brought out and put onto the market just to cover up the two or three truths that are actually quite marginal to this book. It won’t succeed, as something of this kind never does.

  hear it from the lips of the president of the United States: Six days into his presidency, Donald J. Trump sat down for an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox:

  HANNITY:

  One of the problems we have is evil in our time.

  TRUMP:

  True.

  HANNITY:

  Winston Churchill dealt with evil in his time. Roosevelt dealt with evil in his time. My father fought in World War II.

  TRUMP:

  But they had evil with uniforms on.

  HANNITY:

  That’s true. This is different.

  TRUMP:

  We have evil that lurks around the corner without the uniforms. Ours is harder because the people that we’re going against, they don’t wear uniforms. They’re sneaky, dirty rats. And they blow people up in a shopping center. And they blow people up in a church. These are bad people. When you’re fighting Germany, they had their uniforms, and Japan, and they had their uniforms and they had their flags on the plane and the whole thing. We are fighting sneaky rats right now that are sick and demented. And we’re going to win.

  The following day, Trump signed the executive order commonly referred to as “the Muslim ban,” but officially titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” which states in part: “The United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles. The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law.”

  we are fighting a global existential war: Michael Flynn, who was briefly the national security adviser to Donald J. Trump, wrote in his book with Michael Ledeen, The Field of Fight, “We’re in a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people, most of them inspired by a totalitarian ideology: Radical Islam.” White House aide Stephen Miller, while an undergraduate at Duke University, started the Terrorism Awareness Project as an effort to make “students aware of the Islamic jihad and the terrorist threat, and to mobilize support for the defense of America and the civilization of the West,” he wrote in a blog post. Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to Donald J. Trump, has frequently claimed that Islam is not a religion but a “political ideology.” While a guest on Bannon’s radio show, Trump surrogate Roger Stone warned of a future America “where hordes of Islamic madmen are raping, killing, pillaging, defecating in public fountains, harassing private citizens, elderly people—that’s what’s coming.”

  And, we are told, we are losing: See demagogue: “a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.”

  Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it: See First and Last Notebooks. In a list from 1933 Weil writes:

  LIST OF TEMPTATIONS (to be read every morning)

  Temptation of idleness (by far the strongest)

  Never surrender to the flow of time. Never put off what you have decided to do.

  Temptation of the inner life

  Deal only with those difficulties which actually confront you. Allow yourself only those feelings which are actually called upon for effective use or else are required by thought for the sake of inspiration. Cut away ruthlessly everything that is imaginary in your feelings.

  Temptation of self-immolation

  Subordinate to external affairs and people everything that is subjective, but never the subject itself—i.e. your judgement. Never promise and never give to another more than you would demand from yourself if you were he.

  Temptation to dominate

  Temptation of perversity

  Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.

  “the first idea a child must acquire”: See “Chapter V” in The Montessori Method.

  hate crimes are on the rise again: In February 2016, Trump told supporters at a rally in Charleston, South Carolina, a widely debunked story of how General Pershing allegedly dipped fifty bullets in pig’s blood and then shot forty-nine of fifty Muslims he had lined up. The fiftieth person was spared, Trump said, but Pershing gave him the blood-soaked bullet and told him to go back to his people and tell them what happened. “He went back and said what just happened, and for twenty-eight years there was no terrorism,” Trump claimed. “So I’m not saying that’s a good thing, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. This is history, folks. We’re either going to win or lose.”

  a mosque under construction near Austin, Texas: After the 2016 election, the following letter was sent to mosques around the country:

  To the children of satan,

  You muslims are a vile and filthy people. Your mothers are whores and your fathers are dogs. You are evil. You worship the devil. But, your day of reckoning has arrived.

  There’s a new Sherriff in town—President Donald Trump. He is going to cleanse America and make
it shine again. And he is going to start with you muslims. He’s going to do to you muslims what Hitler did to the jews. You muslims would be wise to pack your bags and get out of Dodge.

  This is a great time for patriotic Americans. Long live President Trump and God bless the USA!!

  Americans for a Better Way

  What wouldn’t we all give to be carried to safety by someone we love?: Leo Tolstoy writes in “A Letter to Hindu”:

  The recognition that love represents the highest morality was nowhere denied or contradicted, but this truth was so interwoven everywhere with all kinds of falsehoods which distorted it, that finally nothing of it remained but words. It was taught that this highest morality was only applicable to private life—for home use, as it were—but that in public life all forms of violence—such as imprisonment, executions, and wars—might be used for the protection of the majority against a minority of evildoers, though such means were diametrically opposed to any vestige of love. And though common sense indicated that if some men claim to decide who is to be subjected to violence of all kinds for the benefit of others, these men to whom violence is applied may, in turn, arrive at a similar conclusion with regard to those who have employed violence to them, and though the great religious teachers . . . foreseeing such a perversion of the law of love, have constantly drawn attention to the one invariable condition of love (namely, the enduring of injuries, insults, and violence of all kinds without resisting evil by evil) people continued—regardless of all that leads man forward—to try to unite the incompatibles: the virtue of love, and what is opposed to love, namely, the restraining of evil by violence. And such a teaching, despite its inner contradiction, was so firmly established that the very people who recognize love as a virtue accept as lawful at the same time an order of life based on violence and allowing men not merely to torture but even to kill one another.