Compiler’s note: With apologies to The Divine Mother, I reprise in updated form a post from just over four years ago, 6 January, 2006. Some things never change.

Her radiance somewhat dimmed and the Divine Brow furrowed, The Almighty looked up as Archangel Michael hurried into the Celestial Chamber. “Yes, Michael, I know, I am feeling My Haitian children’s suffering. I see and hear and feel it all. Fortunately I also see and hear and feel the charity in the hearts and actions of others of My children, who are gathering all their strength to minister to their brothers and sisters.”

Bowing profoundly, the Archangel hesitantly said, “Yes, Your Awesomeness, many of Your creations are following your Son’s Word, and doing unto their neighbors as they would have done to themselves…but…”

With a dismissive wave, She of Infinite Love wearily interjected, “Yes, yes, I know, that man has jumped into the middle of immense suffering once again to claim knowledge of My purposes, with some nonsense about pacts with the Devil. My creation is compact both of good and evil. All My creatures with free will create their own devils, with which they may torment themselves, if so inclined. And may respond with  evil  – or with good – when events beyond their control visit suffering upon them. Where there is suffering, there may also be great charity, love and sacrifice that mirrors Mine, to the limits of human capacity.” Shaking Her Head, the Divinity sighed, “I keep hoping that this Robertson, who is my Creation, after all, may yet realize his error.”

“Not much sign of that, if I may say so, Your Radiance, although You have sifted the infinite variety of Creation far beyond my poor power. I am afraid such persons strain my patience and my belief in their capacity – a mark of my unworthiness, I know,” bowing his head, Michael looked chastened.

Smiling slowly until around Her, light rose strong and glorious, Her Mercifulness laughed gently, “Oh, Michael, Michael, you are too hard on yourself, just remember that you are only a little higher than these, My human children, but well-beloved of Me.” Rising from the Throne Celestial, Mother of Creation swept towards the Throne Room doors, which swung wide as Cherubim hastened to attend Her departure, “Let us go and hearten the orphaned, encourage the suffering and strengthen those who aid them.”

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for August 07, 2009 is:
smithereens • \smih-thuh-REENZ\ • noun

: fragments, bits

Felix’s Example Sentence:

Leaving breakables on cabinet tops and shelves about the house when you have cats likely will leave those fragile objects in smithereens.

Did you know?

Despite its American sound and its common use by the fiery animated cartoon character Yosemite Sam, “smithereens” did not originate in American slang. Although no one is entirely positive about its precise origins, scholars think that “smithereens” likely developed from the Irish word “smidiríní,” which means “little bits.” That Irish word is the diminutive of “smiodar,” meaning “fragment.” Written record of the use of “smithereen” dates back to 1829.

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for August 06, 2009 is:
demean • \dih-MEEN\ • verb

: to conduct or behave (oneself) usually in a proper manner

Felix’s Example Sentence:

With all the serious issues facing the country, opponents of the administration demean themselves and reasoning people everywhere by pursuing paranoid conspiracies such as the Obama Birth Certificate chimera.

Did you know?

There are two words spelled “demean” in English. The more familiar “demean” — “to lower in character, status, or reputation” — comes straight from “mean,” the adjective that means “spiteful.” Today’s featured word, on the other hand, comes from the Anglo-French verb “demener” (”to conduct”), which in turn comes from Latin “minare,” meaning “to drive.” This verb has been with us since the 14th century and is generally used in contexts specifying a type of behavior: “he demeaned himself in a most unfriendly manner”; “she demeaned herself as befitting her station in life”; “they knew not how to demean themselves in the king’s presence.” As you may have already guessed, the noun “demeanor,” meaning “behavior,” comes from this “demean.”

Like most other Southerners growing up during the early and middle stages of the civil rights struggle, I underwent many adjustments in my attitudes from 1950 to 1960. From a segregated society to the beginnings of mixing with those of color, I became aware of the peculiarity of the customs under which I had formed my opinions of colored folk. Journalism, mostly national but in one instance local, made me aware of how the rest of the country did not resemble the South.

I came to know that the statements I heard daily on the differences between the races and the necessity of segregation were terribly flawed and at bottom, evil. A challenge to my concepts of respect for my elders, these thoughts re-framed my ideas, though I was circumspect in sharing these changes with my parents. My parents were moderate for the times, and enforced respectful treatment by their children of the colored help they, my grandparents, and other family members employed. To utter “nigger,” even out of  the hearing of colored people, was at least equal to the “F” word. My father became involved with a biracial group of businessmen, politicians and ministers who hammered out compromises and phased-in desegregation of public places and eventually the schools.

This did not mean that the attitudes of the past were vanished from my elders’ understanding of society, just that to resist meant disturbances and confrontations which would not be helpful to an orderly and peaceable society. This is what I grew up understanding as “moderate” Southern thinking on the race issue.

An article, “The Courthouse Ring,” in this week’s New Yorker examines this mindset in an earlier manifestation, by analyzing the book and movie, To Kill a Mockingbird, specifically the exact nature of Atticus Finch’s “Jim Crow Liberalism.” The book and movie have become iconic in the national consciousness of racial justice, bigotry and  a largeness of spirit in confronting our history of such defining problems. Atticus is a towering figure in the popular mind. In Malcolm Gladwell’s article, some contradictions and extrapolations from them are made, raising other questions in my mind. I would never have found parallels between Big Jim Folsom, Alabama governor and the apotheosis of the old-style populist Southern politician, who courted colored as well as white votes.

Gladwell’s conclusions regarding Atticus Finch, and Southern liberals of the era, is that differences in color did matter, but so did class, and there was a tri-partite structure to Southern society; colored, polite white, white trash. Those whites in positions of respect and authority felt a responsibility towards their colored coevals, and an obligation to contain the excesses of the trashy whites. Gladwell points out that these layered attitudes, especially regarding the whites who while not “polite,” whose necks were definitely red, but did have self respect, amounted to humanizing the face of Jim Crow.  True. The book takes place in the mid-193os in the rural South. If Atticus and all his class were of this century, in similar positions of prominence, for sure their attitudes would be much more grounded in a just sense of our common humanity. Persons of that time had the baggage of their history, their families’ values and the necessity of dealing daily with persons much more flawed and intransigent than themselves.

To Kill a Mockingbird, then, is a story wrapped in a time and a reality that has gone, and the virtues of our lives now were but  imperfectly foreshadowed then, not even in Harper Lee’s evocative novel.  I understand the points Mr. Gladwell makes, and to the degree outlined here, I can conditionally agree. The one puzzling remark in the article, given its expression of regard for Atticus’s liberalism, is the following quotation from the book, and especially Gladwell’s description of it:

Scout relates, in one of American literature’s most moving passages:

“Miss Jean Louise?”
I looked around. They were standing. All around us and in the balcony on the opposite wall, the Negroes were getting to their feet. Reverend Sykes’s voice was as distant as Judge Taylor’s:
“Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.”

The emphasis I have added marks my puzzlement at Gladwell’s finding this passage so moving, in light of his tempered view of the “Jim Crow Liberalism” of Atticus. More puzzling because I have found that passage so discordant with any likely reaction by the colored spectators at the terrible injustice done to Tom Robinson, more of the same they have witnessed for fifty years and counting. Yes, Atticus has done more than most whites in Maycomb would have, but the result is no different. The scene makes for great drama, written and performed, but I am surprised that Mr. Gladwell praises it so warmly.

So, while the analysis of Southern liberalism has much justice – from a distant perspective of years – Atticus still ranks as someone who did the best he thought he could, given the time and the constraints of his social equals. It is well to remember that thoroughgoing Saints do not often live to raise their children, and the red liturgical color of martyrdom marks their memorial days.

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for August 05, 2009 is:
philoprogenitive • \fill-uh-proh-JEN-uh-tiv\ • adjective

*1 : tending to produce offspring : prolific

2 : of, relating to, or characterized by love of offspring

Felix’s Example Sentence:

The wild hogs of Cumberland Island, philoprogenitive to a remarkable degree, damage plant and animal life from oak trees to sea turtles with their relentless foraging.

Did you know?

“Philoprogenitive” (a combination of “phil-,” meaning “loving” or “having an affinity for,” and Latin “progenitus,” meaning “begot” or “begotten”) can refer to the production of offspring or to the loving of them. Nineteenth-century phrenologists used the word to designate the “bump” or “organ” of the brain believed to be the seat of a parent’s instinctual love for his or her children. Despite the word’s scientific look and sound, however, it appears, albeit not very frequently, in all types of writing — technical, literary, informal, and otherwise.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

This week is “Shark Week” on Poets.org, in partnership with the Discovery Channel.  I liked the following poem, with a Great White beached, unsharked, you might say, for what is a shark without an ocean? Offal.

Ashore
by Ernest Hilbert

The harpooned great white shark heaves onto sand,
Nudged by waves, red cavern of dripping teeth.
A crowd comes. Loud gulls wreathe the booming mist.
Blue flies cloud the fishy sunset, and land.
One, sated, is slapped to a smear beneath
A child’s quick hand and then flicked from his wrist.
Compass and munitions are sunk with skulls
In wrecks beneath old storms, glass angels
And hourglasses, flint of sunlight through motes,
Violence of slit sails, drowned crews, split hulls,
Quiet draw of dust, too, and all that it pulls,
The slow leak and loss of each thing that floats—
Flail and wild eye, flecked spit of crippled horse,
Crust of diamonds on the throat of a corpse.

First published in the Yale Review. Copyright © 2009 by Ernest Hilbert.

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for August 04, 2009 is:
tantivy • \tan-TIV-ee\ • adverb

: in a headlong dash : at a gallop

Felix’s Example Sentence:

Picnickers who had looked on the first Civil War battle at Bull Run as a novel outing, fled tantivy for Washington as real bullets, artillery and advancing troops introduced the civilians to war.

Did you know?

“Tantivy” is also a noun meaning “a rapid gallop” or “an impetuous rush.” Although its precise origin isn’t known, one theory has it that “tantivy” represents the sound of a galloping horse’s hooves. The noun does double duty as a word meaning “the blare of a trumpet or horn.” The second use probably evolved from confusion with “tantara,” a word for the sound of a trumpet that came about as an imitation of that sound. Both “tantivy” and “tantara” were used during foxhunts; in the heat of the chase people may have jumbled the two.

… courtesy of Merriam Webster, with slight modifications by me:

The Word of the Day for August 03, 2009 is:
daymare • \DAY-mair\ • noun

: a nightmarish fantasy experienced while awake

Felix’s Example Sentence:

As his car careened into the intersection out of control, the driver felt he was in a daymare, unable to change his course.

Did you know?

Long ago, the word “nightmare” designated an evil spirit that made its victims feel like they were suffocating in their sleep (prompting physician-botanist William Turner to introduce “a good remedy agaynst the stranglyng of the nyght mare” in 1562). By the early 1700s, the Age of Reason had arrived, nightmares were bad dreams, and “daymare” was a logically analogous choice when English speakers sought a word for a frightening and uncontrollable fantasy, a run-away daydream. And since the 1800s, when Charles Dickens wrote “a monstrous load that I was obliged to bear, a daymare that there was no possibility of breaking in, a weight that brooded on my wits” in David Copperfield, we’ve been using “daymare” figuratively. For example, today we might refer to “a logistical daymare.”