More Cartoons for January

I recently did a painting for a coworker on the Obama Inaugural. I did two different versions, because I wasn’t really satisfied with the upper left corner of the first painting. I really wanted to show the people who made Obama’s election possible, people like Martin Luther King Jr., Sojourner Truth, Malcolm X, W.E.B. DuBois and all those who fought for the rights of African Americans and paved the way for the opportunities that all Americans have today. The struggle continues, but it was good to celebrate how far our country has come.

I struggled a bit with the cartoon I did below and I’m still not sure how much I like it. I had the first two panels then I really didn’t know where to go from there. For about a week, my mind was a blank while I stared at the unfinished cartoon. Then I heard from someone that Rush Limbaugh said that he hoped that Obama would fail. That flabbergasted me. So it gave me the ideas I needed to finish this cartoon.

Instead of hand-lettering the cartoon, I decided to try using Adobe Illustrator for the dialogue captions. It was really fun, and it allowed me to edit the dialogue balloons. I struggle a lot with words and dialogue to make them sound natural. It makes me admire cartoonists like Jules Feiffer or Charles Schulz more, as their dialogue is so natural sounding and really helps define the cartoon characters.

January Cartoons

This January I’ve been kind of depressed about the news headlines, but hopeful as well. In spite of the bad news, I still look forward to seeing Barack Obama become President. At my work a coworker asked me to do a picture of Barack, so I did a picture of Barack surrounded by people who have been important in African American history. Barack couldn’t have become President without the work of those who came before him. It was fun to do. While I was watching Obama during election night when he won the Presidency, I was deeply touched by a scene where Jesse Jackson was crying. Jesse Jackson had been at the scene where Martin Luther King Jr. had died, he was a part of the Poor People’s Campaign, he ran for President twice in 1984 and 1988. He was a good reminder that Obama is following in the footsteps of Frederick Douglass, Soujourner Truth, Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and others who came before him.

Here is another one of my cartoons with my character Elmira. I got the idea for this cartoon from a party my wife and I hosted to get to know people in my new church. We had checked out a Jack Black movie called Tenacious D and a woman related a story on how she sat in an airplane with a woman who looked exactly like her (footnote: Tenacious D is not the movie to show if you invite a group of church people to your home). Her story stuck to my mind.

I’ve always loved history and some of my favorite writers are historians. Doris Kearns Goodwin. Gordon Wood. Joseph Ellis. One of my favorite historian is Howard Zinn. His most famous book is A People’s History of the United States, a history of our country from the point of view of the slave, of women, of workers, of Native Americans, and of the poor and marginalized. It’s a wonderful book. My favorite books of his are You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, The Zinn Reader, and Artists In TImes of War. I just bought the book Voices of a People’s History. I look forward to reading it when I find the time.

Cartoons of the Political Season

As a struggling cartoonist, I often mail in cartoons that get rejected by editors and publishers. Often there’s a good reason for it. The cartoon is not funny. Or it makes an ambiguous point. Even so, I often fall for a cartoon that no one else seems to care for. I usually work a few days drawing and inking the cartoons, and it’s often hard to let go of these cartoons. So I hope you indulge me as I show some of these cartoons at this post. I submitted these cartoons to a few political magazines and newspapers with no takers.

I submitted these cartoons to a few political magazines and newspapers with no takers. I’ve always loved the Thin Man movies of the 1930s and the fun interplay between Nick and Nora Charles. So I had this idea of making an older couple in that mold, but as activists. It has always bothered me that activists are stereotyped as wild eyed and naive idealists, so I wanted to create two activists who are older and whose activism was spurred by their experiences in the world. My main focus was an older woman named Elmira, and Elmira was inspired partly by Grace Paley (the short story writer) and partly on Doris Hadock (who at the age of 90 walked across America for reform). I actually hadn’t thought of a name for Elmira’s husband yet. I gave them a dog like Nick and Nora’s Asta.

One of my favorite books of the past 2 years is Grace Paley’s collection of essays Just As I Thought. It chronicles her experience in marches against the Vietnam War and El Salvadore, her work with the Quakers and the War Resisters League. They are not dogmatic, but they are personal observations of the people she meets and I enjoy this type of writing more than a theoretical work. A similar author that I discovered is Ann Lamott, who is a Christian and a radical leftist activist.

During the primaries, I accumulated a lot of cartoons that never saw the light of day. I was really focused on the Democratic primaries and especially the Hillary/Obama fight in the Spring. I started out as a Biden supporter, but he dropped out early and I found myself having to choose between Hillary and Obama. I eventually chose Hillary, because she was informed, experienced and most of all, she was tough. I liked Obama, but his lack of experience bothered me. I loved the debates between Hillary and Obama because Hillary was so knowledgeable that she forced Obama to really articulate his positions in detail. I loved the debates between those two better than the general election debates between Obama and McCain. For me, the fight between Hillary and Obama was the real elections, while the general elections was more a weak aftermath.

McCain is one of the few Republicans that I respect, I think because of his independence in the 2000 Republican primaries. But I really didn’t like the McCain of this year. It seemed that he was selling his soul to the conservative Republican base to get their allegiance, so his talk of being a maverick seemed very hollow to me. But I never had it in me to hate him as some of my fellow Democrats have. I just had this sense that McCain wasn’t really being himself in this campaign and I kind of felt sorry for him. This cartoon was in the September 24, 2008 edition of the Tri-City Voice .

One of the things that I noticed among Democrats is the hatred that many of them have for Ralph Nader. Many of them blame him for Al Gore’s loss to George Bush in 2000. I’ve always been a bit skeptical of that, but I’ve learned that arguing with a Democrat about it is a futile endeavor. Over the past 8 years I’ve felt more sorry for Nader as he’s gotten more bitter at the way he’s been treated by angry Democrats. As his influence has waned, he’s gotten to saying outlandish things to get attention. He tells people that he runs for President to influence the Democrats to take a stronger stand against corporations, to get out of Iraq, and to focus on the working class and the poor. I think it’s rather futile, because too many Democrats are angry at him to really listen to him. And I think there are many people both within the Democratic Party and outside it who hold similar positions against corporate power and for getting out of Iraq whom people might actually listen to. In the primaries, Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards fought for progressive causes, and Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party could enunciate an anti corporate position during the general elections. This cartoon is in the October 29, 2008 edition of the Tri-City Voice.

When Obama won Tuesday night, I felt very happy. It touched me to see the faces in the crowd in Chicago, many of them with tears of joy. And I loved Obama’s speech. He’s a great orator, probably the best to come along since Jesse Jackson, Mario Cuomo, and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Though I was happy, in the back of my mind was the huge tasks that Obama would have to face as he became President: a struggling economy; huge budget deficits; two wars overseas; hostile countries and terrorists; global warming; and a dangerous dependence on foreign oil. I give Obama all my best wishes as he becomes President this January, for the sake of this country that we all love.

The Boondocks and Dissent in Comics

I’ve always enjoyed reading comic strips. Since I discovered Peanuts as a five year old, I would enthusiasticly get the latest newspapers just to read the latest of my favorite comic strips. In the late 1980s, though, I stopped regularly reading the comics page as my favorite 3 comics retired early: Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes, and The Far Side. So during the following years, I missed some really good comic strips. One of the best comics of the past 10 years is Aaron McGruder’s “The Boondocks”. Many people have recommended that I read it, so I bought a few months ago the book All The Rage: The Boondocks Past and Present. It’s a great collection of incisive cartoons.

The Boondocks concerns two children, Huey and Riley Freeman, who live with their grandfather in a predominantly white neighborhood. Huey Freeman is named after Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and he frequently makes cynical insights about the latest news while watching t.v. or walking with his friends. His grandfather Robert Jebediah Freeman seems to be Huey’s main counterpoint, a rather conventional thinking senior citizen who frequently takes offence at Huey’s more radical observations. Jazmine DuBois is a biracial girl who seems to like Huey in spite of his coldness to her.

Since The Boondocks debuted in the nation’s major newspapers in April 19, 1999, Aaron McGruder has dealt with many major controversies due to the radical left wing views of the comic strip and its critiques of certain elements of African American culture. His comic has made fun of Whitney Houston, Bill Cosby, and Cuba Gooding Jr., but it saves its most scathing humor for Black Entertainment Television. The special significance of the Boondocks for me has been its willingness to voice a leftwing point of view in a fairly conservative mainstream news media.

The Boondocks is has been one of the strongest voices of dissent in the mainstream newspapers during the Bush years. In the September 2003 edition of the Comics Journal, R.C. Harvey quotes Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist Joel Pett:

“There are a lot of newspapers where Aaron’s comic strip is the only consistent voice of dissent…. He’s getting ideas out to people who don’t always read the opinion pages. He’s influencing a lot of young people about how it’s okay to question the government and the media. When you think about it, what he has done since September 11 has just been incredible.”

Boondocks had been one of the most consistent critics of the past Bush administration policies in Iraq, in domestic affairs, and in the economy. McGruder has compared Bush to Hitler, has portrayed Condeleeza Rice as Darth Vader, and named Reagan as an accomplice to terrorism. For these comics, the Boondocks has often been dropped from jittery newspapers. But McGruder’s courage has also elicited much admiration from alternative cartoonists and members of the Left. In the book Attitude 2: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists by Ted Rall, alternative cartoonist Mikhaela B. Reid said of the Boondocks influence on her in the early 2000s:

“The flag started popping up everywhere and I felt like everyone had lost their minds. Altie political cartoons- and my favorite comic strip ‘The Boondocks’- were one of the few things comforting me at the time. I was like ‘Oh, I’m not insane.’ So then and there, I decided I had to start cartooning.”

 The Boondock’s dissenting voice also found admiration from the progressive magazine, The Nation. In a January 28, 2002 issue of The Nation, John Nichols writes:

“But the cartoonist knew that the controversy he would stir in the weeks after September 11 would be different from any he had provoked before. What he did not know was that, unlike Trudeau in the Watergate era, he and his preteen characters would challenge a popular President and his policies with little cover from allies in the media or Congress. “Sometimes I do look around and say to myself, ‘Gee, I’m the only one saying some of these things.’ That can make you a little paranoid. But I don’t think that’s a reflection on me so much as it is a reflection on how narrow the discussion has become in most of the media today. The media has become so conglomerated that there really are very few avenues left for people to express dissent,” says McGruder. Well aware that he is a young cartoonist- as opposed to a senator or veteran television commentator- McGruder is the first to note, “I should not be the guy right now. I should not be the one who is standing out here saying, ‘Hold it. this doesn’t make any sense’… There are a lot of people who do this so much better than I do. I just have the distribution and the opportunity.”

Aaron McGruder’s left wing politics was heavily shaped by the Hip Hop culture that he grew up with in the early 1990s. In an interview with R.C. Harvey for the September 2003 Comics Journal:

“My political perspectives as a young adult was shaped by hip hop’s political era, which was 1987 to 1992, roughly when I was in junior high and high school. We had Public Enemy, KRS-One, X-Clan, Brand Nubian and all of those very overtly political groups… It was actually Black Nationalism; it was radical socialism. There was no black leadership supplying these political ideals to the next generation, and what few people there were, a lot of us- discovered that through hip hop.”

I never was a big fan of hip hop, but in reading McGruder’s comments, I realized I missed something important in the hip hop culture. In reading “All the Rage” I see a cartoonist who is very skilled at creating differing personalities and who has the courage to rile some very important feathers. Though I have come late in my admiration of The Boondocks, I see a comic that follows the traditions of dissent of past strips like Pogo, Li’l Abner, Doonesbury, and Bloom County. I read in the book that McGruder has stopped doing his strip to concentrate on The Boondocks television show. It would’ve been interesting to see how Boondocks would’ve handled the Obama administration. Though I think it’s a loss for the newspaper comics page, I’ll have to take some time to watch the television show.

A Church Cartoon

I was influenced to do this cartoon after reading some graphic novels that some friends have asked me to read. For several years now I’ve struggled to reconcile the feelings of anger and sadness over some church conflicts that I had a few years ago.  Creating these cartoons in some ways helps. I’ve notices how cartoonists are using the graphic novel format for personal expression that is not necessarily purely humorous or about superheroes. As usual I struggle a bit with my writing, but I enjoy drawing the pictures. This is a fictionalized account of my time at a church, so it loosely depicts my experiences. I’m a bit too cowardly to confront people the way the main character does in my cartoon, but it’s what I wish I did. My cartoon is not really political, but I remember reading how feminists in the 1970s said that the personal is political. So maybe in that sense, it is a political cartoon.

I went to an evangelical church for 8 years, from around 1993 to 2001. And in the beginning it was a wonderful experience. I made friends, was a part of the community, and generally felt happy. People were sincerely trying to get a relationship with God.

 Those beginning years were wonderful, but even then I saw things that bothered me. I saw individuals harassed for not conforming to the strictest biblical teachings.   In the mid 1990s I watched a woman named Christina get pressured by a group of Christians because she was dating someone who was Catholic. I remember that he attended Our Lady of Peace, the same church my parents went to.   At around the same time, a teenage girl went out of the closet in the San Jose Chinese Alliance Church. A few church people stayed close friends with her and tried to shield her from any negative gossip or harassment. But there were quite a few people who said the cruelest things about this girl behind her back because of her homosexuality. And a few just shunned her and gave her dirty looks whenever she was around.

This happened periodically towards any individual who didn’t totally conform to their ideas of living a biblically correct life. During that time, I’m ashamed to say, I didn’t help these individuals out when they were being harassed. I made quite a few friendships at that church and didn’t want to lose those friendships. So I learned to keep quiet about my opinions.

My own estrangement from the evangelical church started from two seemingly minor conflicts. The first conflict involved two friends who were after an exgirlfriend of mine. One of them wound up dating my ex and the other friend was furious. That friend gave me the ultimatum to stop associating with the guy who wound up with the girl, and this caused a lot of friction.

 The other conflict involved my own romantic life.  Around 8 guys in my church started pressuring me to go out with a woman named Jennifer. Jennifer was a new member of Grace church and she was very pretty, so I was really quite open to dating her and getting to know her better. When I asked her out, though, she was usually busy. During the week, she was busy at her work. During the weekends, she was going to L.A. to help prepare for her brother’s wedding. These same guys persisted in telling me to go after Jennifer, and when I told them that she was busy, they just kept telling me to ask her out. Since they were so persistent, I figured they knew something that I didn’t know, so I kept asking her out. The results were the same. Eventually, Jennifer’s friends started attacking me, and none of those guys were there to help defend me.   None of what was going on made any sense to me, so I started asking questions. Why were a bunch of guys pressuring me to go out with a woman who had no time to spend with me? When Jennifer’s friends started attacking me, why did these friends abandon me to fend for myself? When I confronted the 8 people who had put pressure on me, they denied knowing anything that I was talking about.  It was at that time that  people started saying things behind my back.

I stayed at Grace Community Covenant Church for two more years, but a place that I once had fond feelings for became a place that I felt miserable being at.   When I started dating Lisa, some of the same guys who had pressured me to go out with Jennifer began contacting me and telling me that I should not be dating Lisa. There’s this idea that a Christian should not be unequally yoked, meaning that a Christian should not get into a romantic relationship with a nonChristian. By this time, I had gotten fed up with the way people were telling me what to think and who to date, so I left the church.

 In all this time, I still don’t know all the answers to all the conflicts I got involved with at that church. But I figure that any situation where people are saying things behind other people’s backs and no one is honestly confronting each other is a situation where misunderstandings and conflicts are inevitable. Those conflicts made me realize to what extent was I allowing other people to do my thinking for me.   I’d seen how a group of people would use peer pressure to try to get individuals to conform. And I’ve seen individuals get hurt and disillusioned from that experience.  A lot of the harassment occurred because no one was willing to speak out and help the individual who was being harassed.

I channeled the hurt and sadness from that particular experience into this cartoon.  Many cartoonists have used their own personal experiences as fodder for their comics and graphic novels.  In sharing of their experiences, it helps me to realize than I’m not alone in my own struggles with life. 

American Splendor (http://www.amazon.com/American-Splendor-Times-Harvey-Pekar/dp/0345468309/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234041755&sr=8-2) is a graphic novel about the life of its writer Harvey Pekar. I first heard about this from the movie American Splendor, starring Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis. American Spendor takes vignettes of Harvey’s life, sort of like how Seinfeld depicts the mundane aspects of life. In many ways American Splendor is like Grace Paley’s short stories in that both show how heroic are the struggles of average everyday people. Several different cartoonists illustrate Harvey Pekar’s stories, but my favorite is Robert Crumb. I never really appreciated Crumb’s work until I started reading American Splendor. But in seeing his work on American Splendor, I see how good a storyteller he is. I love his scratchy pen and ink style of cartooning. Before I was always put off by his sometimes violent depictions of women, but I look at his work now and appreciate his skills as a writer who’s willing to write about his own neurosis and about things that other people do not want to admit that they think about. Many cartoonists today appreciate Crumb for opening up the subject matter that comics can deal with.

If you like Robert Crumb’s artwork you may be interested in looking at the cartoons of Harold Gray (http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Little-Orphan-Annie-v/dp/1600104061/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234042631&sr=1-3).  Harold Gray is the creator of Little Orphan Annie, a popular comic strip that started in the 1920s. I don’t much care for Gray’s conservative politics, but I overlook it because he’s a wonderful storyteller and he has such a wonderful way of inking his cartoons. If you compare Harold Gray’s comics in the 1930s and 1940s to Robert Crumb’s artwork, you will see the same scratchy ink work. I think that Gray’s art was a big influence on Crumb, and it’s a big influence on me as well.

Persepolis (http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Persepolis-Marjane-Satrapi/dp/0375714839/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247235826&sr=8-2) is the creation of Marjane Sartrapi. It chronicles her childhood in Iran as the Shah fell and Islamic revolutionaries take over the Iranian government and forces its religious doctrines on their countrymen. Sartrapi is from a family of leftist Iranians and the family looks on in horror as their lives become more circumscribed by the fundamentalist doctrines of the Iranian rulers. Sartrapi’s independence and outspokeness increasingly becomes a danger to herself and her family in a country that tries to stamp out those qualities from Iranian women.

I haven’t read this graphic novel yet, but I hear that Maus (http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Maus-Survivors-Tale-No/dp/0679406417/ref=pd_sim_b_3) is a great graphic novel to read. It came out during my time in college and it concerns Art Spiegelman’s parents experiences in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. The Jews, Germans and other characters are depicted as mice, cats and dogs, and it is universally acknowleded as one of the great literary accomplishments of the graphic novel medium.

A last recommendation is Ethel and Ernest (http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Maus-Survivors-Tale-No/dp/0679406417/ref=pd_sim_b_3) a graphic novel by Raymond Briggs. Raymond Briggs is the creator of the children’s book The Snowman. Ethel and Ernest is a wonderful novel about Raymond Brigg’s parents and their marriage of over 30 years. It’s a sweet marriage, depicting the joys and arguments and forgiveness that come with a long marriage of two people who deeply love one another. The artwork is wonderful. It looks like Brigg’s art is a combination of pen and ink and watercolor. After reading the book, I began to appreciate my own parents more.

 

Politics in the Books of Dr. Seuss

Some parents may protest if they find their children reading about racism, nuclear war or the evils of fascism.   Yet their children may have already read about such weighty topics without their knowledge of it.  If their children have read a lot of Dr. Seuss books, it is more than likely that these kids have been exposed to such adult subjects in books like Yertle the Turtle, The Lorax, the Butter Battle Book, or even Horton Hears A Who!  Dr. Seuss has always expressed his opinions in any of his works, and his books show a clear liberal political bent.

Dr. Seuss had never been shy about expressing what he felt.  His wife Audrey Geisel said in the December 14, 2008 issue of the L.A. Times, “He did not play to the audience.  They could take it or leave it.  He had something he wished to say and he said it.”

This fierce outspokeness first manifested itself when Dr. Seuss did editorial cartoons for the left wing magazine P.M. during World War II.  Since they were understaffed, the P.M. staff gave Dr. Seuss free reign to express his contempt of the Nazis and the Axis powers, and he caste a critical eye towards America’s own racism and antisemitism.  Art Spiegelman noted in the book Dr. Seuss Goes to War that Seuss’s cartoons were the only editorial cartoons  outside of the communist and black press that railed against the military’s Jim Crow policies and Charles Lindbergh’s anti-semitic remarks.  Dr. Seuss was very proud of working at P.M. and he said this about his cartoon work:  “I was intemperate, un-humorous in my attacks… and I’d do it again.”

Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories was the first of Dr. Seuss’s books with an explicit political message.  This book, originally published in 1950, has a collection of stories that all, in one way or another, celebrates individualism.  The first and best story is about Yertle the Turtle, the king of a pond of turtles.  At first he is satisfied with the small pond that he rules.  Then Yertle becomes dissatisfied with the pond and decides he must rule over everything he sees.  So he gets the turtles to stand on top of each other, so he could see more of the world and thus rule more.  The bottom turtle, named Mack, is sore from the weight of all the turles on his back and gives a classic dissent:

“Your Majesty, please… I don’t like to complain,
But down here below, we are feeling great pain.
I know, up on top you are seeing great sights,
But down at the bottom we, too, should have rights.
We turtles can’t stand it.  Our shells will all crack!
Besides, we need food.  We are starving!” groaned Mack.

Yertle the Turtle  was written 5 years after World War II ended and the memories of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were still fresh.  Dr. Seuss had been especially angry at the way totalitarian regimes would run roughshod over individuals and the way egomaniacal dictators would try to get countries to satisfy their every whim.

Horton Hears a Who is another tome for the importance of the individual.  Written in 1954, Horton was partially influenced by Dr. Seuss’s travels in postwar Japan.  In the 1940s Dr. Seuss had made some documentaries of postwar Japan for the military.  After he left the military, Life Magazine assigned Dr. Seuss to go to Japan to see how the American occupation of that nation had changed the aspiration of Japanese children.  He found that a society that had always valued conformity were being influenced to adopt some Western values.   Horton is dedicated to Mitsugo Nakamura of Kyoto, Japan, whom he might’ve met on his Life assignment.  Dr. Seuss may have also been influenced by the McCarthy hysteria of the early 1950s.  A story about an elephant that resists the pressure of the community to speak out for the little people he found in a speck of dust may have been Dr. Seuss’s way of registering his disgust at the witch hunt that was going against leftists in America.

Horton fights a moralistic kangaroo and a jungle of animals who do not believe the elephant’s assertion that an entire world of creatures lives within a tiny speck of dust.  Near the end of the book, the kangaroo leads a posse of monkeys to tie up the elephant and to dunk the speck in Beezle-nut juice.  The only way to save the citizens of Who-ville in the speck is to shout as loud as they can.  And they shout, and they are finally heard when the smallest citizen of all shouts “Yopp!”  Dr. Seuss writes:

“And that Yopp…
That one small, extra Yopp put it over!
Finally, at last!  From that speck on that clover
Their voices were heard!  They rang out clear and clean.
And the elephant smiled.  ‘Do you see what I mean? …
They’ve proved they ARE persons, no matter how small.
And their whole world was saved by the Smallest of All!’”

The Sneetches and Other Stories was written in 1961, at a time when the Freedom Rides and other Civil Rights protests were gathering steam in the South.  In the back of the book is written, “Four wild stories that are not only humorous and entertaining but teach valuable lessons about human nature.”  They are indeed four wonderful stories that explore morality themes that have always been found within Dr. Seuss’s work.  One story is about an empty pair of pants that follows a little creature around, scaring him out of his wits.  Another story is about a pair of creatures each named Zax who wouldn’t make way for the other person and wind up standing in the same place for eternity. 

The best story is the first story.   It concerns a group of creatures called the Sneetches, and the one trait that seperates one group of Sneetches from the other.  Dr. Seuss introduces them by writing:

“Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches
Had bellies with stars.
The Plain-Belly Sneetches
Had none upon thars.

Those stars weren’t so big.  They were really so small
You might think such a thing wouldn’t matter at all..”

But, because they had stars, all the Star-Belly Sneetches
Would brag, ‘We’re the bestkind of Sneetch on the beaches.’
With their snoots in the air, they would sniff and they’d snort
‘We’ll have nothing to do with the Plain-Belly sort!’
And whenever they met some, when they were out walking,
They’d hike right on past them without even talking.”

This story goes on to tell how this prejudice affects both the star-bellied Sneetches and the Sneetches without stars.  They are eventually taken advantage of by a salesman named Sylvester McMonkey McBean, who makes a profit by making a machine that makes stars for Sneetches with plain bellies.  It is an effective allegory for the stupidity of racial prejudice and it was brave of Dr. Seuss to come out with this tale in 1961.  The story ends on an optimistic note.

“But McBean was quite wrong.  I”m quite happy to say
That the Sneetches got really quite smart on that day.
The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches
And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches.
That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars
And whether they had one, or not, upon thars.”

The Lorax, published in 1971, was Dr. Seuss’s ode to environmental protection.  He struggled in the beginning to write the story.  Then he took a trip with his wife Audrey to Kenya in September 1970, and the experience with the Mt. Kenya Safari Club let loose his creative imagination.  In their book, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel, Judith and Neil Morgan wrote:

“The Lorax was a polemic about pollution, impassioned and bristling with confrontation and name-calling.  Ted unleashed some of his most magical language, phrases that defied rational criticism and enraptured a generation:  the cruffulous croak and smogulous smoke, the snergelly hose, rippulous pond, gruvvulous glove and miff-muffered moof.  His palette shifted from his usual primary colors to mauve, plum, purple and sage-green.  Audrey cheerfully accepted credit for this change, and technical advances in high speed lithography made the colors possible;  up on the walls of Ted’s studio were computer color charts offering him a huge array of possiblities.”

The Lorax is about a creature called the Once-ler who finds a forest of Traffula Trees, which is inhabited by a wide variety of Seussian creatures.   The Once-ler starts cutting down the Traffula Trees to make Thneed sweaters that make him a great profit.  But a creature called the Lorax warns the Once-ler that as he cuts down more trees, it destroys the environment for the creatures who live within the Traffula forest.  Gradually the creature leave as the trees disappear, until the last Traffula Tree is cut down and the land is now barren and lifeless.  The Once-ler gives one last message to the reader:

“SO…
Catch!” calls the Once-ler.
He lets something fall.
“It’s a Traffula Seed.
It’s the last one of all!
You’re in charge of the last of the Traffula Seeds.
And Traffula Trees are what everyone needs.
Plant a new Traffula.  Treat it with care.
Give it clean water.  And feed it fresh air.
Grow a forest.  Protect it from axes that hack.
Then the Lorax
and all of his friends
may come back.”

The Butter Battle Book was created in 1984 as a story against war and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.  It  was published in the cold war, when the Reagan administration and the Soviet Union were developing weapons like the MX missile and the Star Wars space defense program as a deterrence against each other.   In November 1983 The Day After had just aired in ABC television as a t.v. special that depicted the aftermath of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.  People all over the world were worried about nuclear war and this influence Dr. Seuss.

The Butter Battle Book is about two groups, the Yooks and the Zooks, who like on opposite sides of a winding wall and are in constant conflict against each other.   The source of the conflict is simple that the Yooks eat their bread with the butter side up while the Zooks eat their bread with the butter side down.   They cannot live with this small difference, and they build larger and ever more dangerous weapons to hurt the other side.  Finally a  small but extremely destructive red bomb called the “Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo” is created, that can destroy both sides if it is ever used.    Like The Lorax, The Butter Battle Book ends with a warning:

“Be careful Grandpa,
Be careful! Oh gee!
Who will drop it, will you or will he?”
“I don’t know,” Grandpa replied,
“We’ll see.
We shall see.”

Dr. Seuss was one of America’s greatest children’s book writers and illustrators, and he was also one of our great satirists.  The satirical aspects of his work often get little notice, but his social commentary is timeless and speak to the eternal foolishness of all human beings, whether they be adults or children.  A.O. Scott wrote in the November 26, 2000 article in the New York Times Magazine:

“Anarchy, linguistic or otherwise, flourishes alongside another, equally pronounced strain in Seuss’s work- not of preachiness, exactly, but of unabashed moral seriousness.  ‘He’s sometimes pegged as a nonsense writer,’ argues Leonard Marcus, ‘but most of the time he used nonsense as a device for holding the interest of the reader while he said something that was important to him.’  Barbara Bader, in her encyclopedic history of American children’s books, writes that Seuss, like children themselves, is ‘a natural moralizer… it come to him as unselfconsciously (and unambiguously) as rhyming lines from an engine’s beat.’ 

…Seuss’s moralism was a vision not just of how children should behave, but also how the grown-up world should be.”

I end this post with a verse that Dr. Seuss spoke to a commencement at Lake Forest College outside Chicago in June 1977.  His commencement poem was greeted with cheers from the students who grew up with the books of Dr. Seuss.  This poem is called “My Uncle Terwilliger on the Art of Eating Popovers“.

My uncle ordered popovers
from the restaurant’s bill of fare.
And when they were served,
he regarded them
with a penetrating stare…
Then he spoke great Words of Wisdom
as he sat there on that chair:
“To eat these things,”
said my uncle,
“you must exercise great care.
You may swallow down what’s solid…
BUT…
you must spit out the air!”

And…
as you partake of the world’s bill of fare,
that’s darned good advice to follow.
Do a lot spitting out of the hot air.
And be careful what you swallow.”

My Murals

During college, my artistic heroes were Diego Rivera and Thomas Hart Benton. They were the premiere muralists of the 1920s and 1930s in the United States and Mexico. Their way with composition, the use of color, and their subject matter all had a lasting effect on the way I view art. In their subject matter, both artists tried to put in pictorial form the legends and culture of the people of their nations. Rivera and Benton both wanted their art to connect to the concerns and traditions of the average person. I’ve had a few chances to do a few murals, and these were opportunities for me to paint on a large scale and try to emulate my heroes.

My first mural opportunity was in 1995 for the Berryessa Branch of the San Jose Public Library. A really nice librarian named Ruth Phebus gave me the opportunity to do two large canvasses for the Children’s Department. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot. Since I had never painted anything that big before, a lot of the process was just trying to figure out how to do things. Who sells 8 ft. by 13 ft. canvases? I called around and found a place in Palo Alto, California called Accent Arts. A very knowleadgable person named Gil was able to give me the canvas and he was a great source of information on how to prime the canvas, how to patch up a hole on the canvas, and other things that I never thought that came up when I was painting such a big canvas.

I painted the mural inside the garage of some friends’ place. It was one of the most enjoyable times of my life, probably just behind my senior prom and my wedding and honeymoon. I had free access to the garage and I spent a lot of time just painting and talking to friends who would help me paint. I remember one time coming to the garage after a rain, and seeing how clean the air was. For some reason, everything seems to glow after a rain. After I finished, there was a reception for the murals and most of my friends attended. It was great.

During the time I did the murals, I was always checking out books by Diego Rivera and Thomas Hart Benton and just staring at the pictures of their murals and trying to emulate them. I would also drive to San Francisco and spend hours just staring at the Coit Tower murals. In my imagination, I would pretend I was this revolutionary muralist. Both Benton and Rivera were strongly progressive: Benton was briefly a Marxist and became a strong New Deal liberal; Rivera was a communist who took part in many protests for the poor and workers.

My next murals were in the school library at Lester Shields Elementary School in San Jose, California in 1999. I’m not sure how I got that job, other than that someone perhaps saw my murals at the Berryessa library. I would come after my work at 5:30 p.m. and paint on a ladder until probably 9:30 or 10 p.m. I would talk to the janitor who cleaned up at night and she was a very nice lady. Once, she brought her 3 kids, and they helped me mix paints and would hand me different brushes. When I finished the murals, I went to each class and talked to the students about art and murals.

It’s been several years since I last saw those two murals. I hope they’re still standing. Even if the murals have been painted over, it was still a wonderful experience to have painted them. I hope people found some pleasure in looking at the murals. My last mural was the entrance of the Sunnyvale Public Library’s Children’s Room. My nieces and I painted an arch for the entrance of the Children’s Room and I had a nice time painting it with them. We would go to the administration office and paint on the floor. I had children make paper art that I would glue on the mural and use as a collage. My nieces were in charge of putting the collage where they thought best. When it was done I made sure to put their names with mine on the bottom right of the painting.

I’m just an amateur muralist, but I found it being the most enjoyable kind of art to make. Most artwork is rather solitary to make. Murals however, require some help from others, and it offers the opportunity to talk to other people. Benton and Rivera both liked the mural the best of all the arts because the mural was accessible to the average person and it didn’t require a person to go inside a museum to see it. When I made my murals, it was a creative process that I got to collaborate with other people. I hope people do not mind me sharing my murals and sharing my experiences in making them. It was partly a bit of self promotion, but it is also something I’m very proud of.

Benjamin Banneker, Thomas Jefferson and the Question of Racial Equality

In the year 1791 an unusual correspondence took place.  Benjamin Banneker, a free African American and an astronomer, mathematician, surveyor, almanac writer and farmer, wrote a letter to then Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.  Banneker’s letter was a plea for justice for African American slaves and a statement of racial equality and it challenged Jefferson’s suppositions of the inferiority of blacks.  At a time when most Americans shared Jefferson’s racial views, men like Benjamin Banneker were around to show the wrongness of such views.

Benjamin Banneker was born on November 9, 1731 to Mary and Robert Banneker.  Mary’s parents were Molly Welsh, a European, and Banneka, a member of the Dogon tribe in Africa that had knowledge of astronomy.  Banneka was originally a slave of Molly, but Molly freed and married him and they lived in a small farm to the west of Baltimore, Maryland.  This place was out of the way from the more mainstream South, so attitudes towards African Americans were more tolerant.  Mary received her learning from her parents, and she taught Benjamin how to read, farm, and interpret the sky.  This information is from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Banneker).

As a teen, Benjamin Banneker was taught by Peter Heinrich, a Quaker farmer who built a school near the Banneker farm.  The Quakers were leaders of the antislavery movement in colonial America and its members were advocates of racial equality, which made them perfect neighbors for a free African American who needed friendship and access to education.  The Ellicotts, another Quaker family, supplied Banneker with books so he could learn more about astronomy and sent the family his astronomical calculations predicting solar and lunar eclipses.   In 1791, Banneker surveyed for Major Andrew Ellicott the 100 mile area that would later become the District of Columbia.   He created the Benjamin Banneker Almanac, which had his astronomical calculations.  An anti-slavery society published Banneker’s almanac from 1792 to 1797.  This almanac was the basis of Banneker’s initial correspondence between himself and Thomas Jefferson. 

Thomas Jefferson needs no introduction to most Americans.  The author of the Declaration of Independence, our third President, a champion of religiuos tolerance and of the values of the Enlightenment, Jefferson was one of the most influential of our Founding Fathers.  On the pressing question of slavery, one can judge Jefferson based on two parts of his life:  Jefferson’s actions before the 1780s, when he was an active leader in trying to abolish slavery;  and Jefferson after the 1780s, when he receded from a leadership role and tried to avoid the issue.  Joseph Ellis, in his insightful book, American Sphinx, wrote about Jefferson’s early activist role in trying to abolish slavery:

“If Jefferson had a discernible public position on slavery in the mid-1790s, it was that the subject should be allowed to retire gracefully from the field of political warfare, much as he was doing by retiring to Monticello.  This represented a decided shift from his position as a younger man, when he had assumed a leadership role in pushing slavery onto the agenda in the Virginia Assembly and the federal Congress.   His most famous formulations, it is true, were rhetorical:  blaming the slave trade and the establishment of slavery itself on George III in the Declaration of Independence;  denouncing slavery as amorally bankrupt intitution that was doomed to extinction in Notes on Virginia.  His most practical proposals, all of which came in the early 1780s, envisioned a program of gradual abolition that featured an end to the slave trade, the prohibition of slavery in all the western territories and the establishment of a fixed date, he suggested 1800, after which all newly born children of slaves would be emancipated.  To repeat, up through this stage of his political career, he was a member of the vanguard that insisted on the incompatibility of slavery with the principles on which the American republic was founded.  Throughout this early phase of his life it would have been unfair to accuse him of hypocrisy for owning slaves or to berate him for failing to provide moral leadership on America’s most sensitive political subject.  It would in fact have been much fairer to applaud his efforts, most of them admitedly futile, to inaugurate antislavery reform and to wonder admiringly how this product of Virginia’s planer class had managed to develop such liberal convictions.”

In 1769 Jefferson proposed unsuccessfully that the Virginia House of Burgess emancipate the slaves of Virginia.  In 1778 he successfully passed a bill through the same legislature for the banning of future slaves to Virginia.  Jefferson authored on April 1784 a proposal to the Continental Congress that would’ve abolished slavery in the Northwestern Territory of the U.S.  that failed to pass by a single vote.   As President, he signed a bill abolishing the slave trade in 1807. 

As Joseph Ellis noted, after the mid 1780s, Jefferson stopped taking the lead in the fight for the abolition of slavery.   Two reasons stand out.  At around the mid 1780s, Jefferson began to realize how deeply in debt he was.   A large amount of Jefferson’s wealth depended on the value of his slaves, through either the selling or renting out of his slaves.  This was one way in which Jefferson could raise capitol to fend off his creditors.  So Jefferson wanted an emancipation plan that would compensate the slaveowners, and he felt that the U.S. government just didn’t have the money to do so. 

Also, Thomas Jefferson wanted to free the slaves, but he also wanted a way for the black population to be separated from the white population.  He gave his reasons in his Notes on Virginia:

“Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites;  ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained;  new provocations;  the real distinctions that nature has made;  and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race”

Unlike some of the other Founding Fathers who were against slavery, Jefferson shared some of the same racist assumptions as many whites at the time.  Some of the Founders, like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, felt that any perceived inferiority of African Americans was due to the degrading instititution of slavery and was not inherent in their race, which enabled them to see a time when freed African Americans could be integrated with whites in American society.   While Jefferson deplored slavery, he felt that African Americans were inferior in certain areas and he noted those areas in his book Notes on the State of Virginia.  This made him very pessimistic about any integrated racial society.

Even with the prejudiced atmosphere of the time, however, there were many African American accomplishments that could contadict Thomas Jefferson’s racial assumptions.  Phillis Wheatley was a famed African American poetess who was producing poems as good as any white poet.  Henry Wiencek, in his book, Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America, notes that 5,000 African Americans fought in George Washington’s army, and George Washington handpicked the Rhode Island unit, which happened to be 75 percent black, to carry out the most important military assignment that eventually won the war.  Benjamin Banneker, with his proven accomplishments in astronomy, surveying, mathematics, and writing, directly challenged Jefferson in his letter of August 19, 1791 (http://afroamhistory.about.com/library/blbanneker_letter.htm).

Benjamin Banneker begins his letter with a plea to Jefferson to help relieve the sufferings of those African Americans living under the yolk of slavery.  Banneker wrote:

“Sir,
I am fully sensible of the greatness of that freedom, which I take with you on the present occasion ; a liberty which seemed to me scarcely allowable, when I reflected on that distinguished and dignified station in which you stand, and the almost general prejudice and prepossession, which is so prevalent in the world against those of my complexion.

 I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here, that we are a race of beings, who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world ; that we have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt ; and that we have long been considered rather as brutish than human, and scarcely capable of mental endowments.

 Sir, I hope I may safely admit, in consequence of that report which hath reached me, that you are a man far less inflexible in sentiments of this nature, than many others ; that you are measurably friendly, and well disposed towards us ; and that you are willing and ready to lend your aid and assistance to our relief, from those many distresses, and numerous calamities, to which we are reduced. Now Sir, if this is founded in truth, I apprehend you will embrace every opportunity, to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions, which so generally prevails with respect to us ; and that your sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are, that one universal Father hath given being to us all ; and that he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but that he hath also, without partiality, afforded us all the same sensations and endowed us all with the same faculties ; and that however variable we may be in society or religion, however diversified in situation or color, we are all of the same family, and stand in the same relation to him.

 Sir, if these are sentiments of which you are fully persuaded, I hope you cannot but acknowledge, that it is the indispensible duty of those, who maintain for themselves the rights of human nature, and who possess the obligations of Christianity, to extend their power and influence to the relief of every part of the human race, from whatever burden or oppression they may unjustly labor under ; and this, I apprehend, a full conviction of the truth and obligation of these principles should lead all to. Sir, I have long been convinced, that if your love for yourselves, and for those inestimable laws, which preserved to you the rights of human nature, was founded on sincerity, you could not but be solicitous, that every individual, of whatever rank or distinction, might with you equally enjoy the blessings thereof ; neither could you rest satisfied short of the most active effusion of your exertions, in order to their promotion from any state of degradation, to which the unjustifiable cruelty and barbarism of men may have reduced them.”

Benjamin Banneker directly repudiates the racist notions that somehow African Americans have inferior mental endowments that whites and that they are a more brutish race.   It seems that Banneker has heard of Jefferson efforts as a young man to abolish slavery through legislation and his outspoken criticism of the institution, and he hopes that Jefferson shares also Banneker’s belief on black’s intellectual equality with whites.  The purpose of Banneker’s letter seemed to be to persuade Jefferson, as Secretary of State of the U.S., to continue his efforts to fight for the emancipation of African Americans and to fight the prejudices that have grown around this race.   Banneker used Jefferson’s own words to try get Jefferson to continue in his fight.

“This, Sir, was a time when you cleary saw into the injustice of a state of slavery, and in which you had just apprehensions of the horrors of its condition. It was now that your abhorrence thereof was so excited, that you publicly held forth this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy to be recorded and remembered in all succeeding ages : “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Here was a time, in which your tender feelings for yourselves had engaged you thus to declare, you were then impressed with proper ideas of the great violation of liberty, and the free possession of those blessings, to which you were entitled by nature ; but, Sir, how pitiable is it to reflect, that although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of Mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of these rights and privileges, which he hath conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves.”

Banneker used the words of the Declaration of Independence to show Jefferson to show the contradictions between the high ideals of freedom and equality of America and the practice of slavery within its borders.   Jefferson’s attempts of abolishing showed that he was well aware of those contradictions, but having an African American point out those contradictions to him must have been jarring.    Banneker’s letter was a direct reproach towards Jefferson’s own racist beliefs and I hope it had the effect of changing them.  As proof of the intellectual prowess of Afrian Americans, Banneker offered the example of his own almanac, which he sent along with this letter.  He wrote:

“And now, Sir, although my sympathy and affection for my brethren hath caused my enlargement thus far, I ardently hope, that your candor and generosity will plead with you in my behalf, when I make known to you, that it was not originally my design ; but having taken up my pen in order to direct to you, as a present, a copy of an Almanac, which I have calculated for the succeeding year, I was unexpectedly and unavoidably led thereto.

 This calculation is the production of my arduous study, in this my advanced stage of life ; for having long had unbounded desires to become acquainted with the secrets of nature, I have had to gratify my curiosity herein, through my own assiduous application to Astronomical Study, in which I need not recount to you the many difficulties and disadvantages, which I have had to encounter.

And although I had almost declined to make my calculation for the ensuing year, in consequence of that time which I had allotted therefor, being taken up at the Federal Territory, by the request of Mr. Andrew Ellicott, yet finding myself under several engagements to Printers of this state, to whom I had communicated my design, on my return to my place of residence, I industriously applied myself thereto, which I hope I have accomplished with correctness and accuracy ; a copy of which I have taken the liberty to direct to you, and which I humbly request you will favorably receive ; and although you may have the opportunity of perusing it after its publication, yet I choose to send it to you in manuscript previous thereto, that thereby you might not only have an earlier inspection, but that you might also view it in my own hand writing. “

Jefferson replied to Banneker in August 30, 1791.  He wrote a gracious letter which stated:

“Sir,
I thank you, sincerely, for your letter of the 19th instant, and for the Almanac it contained. No body wishes more than I do, to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men ; and that the appearance of the want of them, is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America. I can add with truth, that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced, for raising the condition, both of their body and mind, to what it ought to be, as far as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstances, which cannot be neglected, will admit.

I have taken the liberty of sending your Almanac to Monsieur de Condozett, Secretary of the Academy of Sciences at Paris, and Member of the Philanthropic Society, because I considered it as a document, to which your whole color had a right for their justification, against the doubts which have been entertained of them.

 I am with great esteem, Sir, Your most obedient Humble Servant,

THOMAS JEFFERSON.”

I don’t know if Jefferson changed his views on race after reading Banneker’s letter, but I hope it did.  Jefferson is one of my heroes, and I have other heroes, like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Malcolm X, who held racist views as young men but had the capacity to outgrow those racist views.  Banneker did a service to directly challenge the prejudice of his times with his letter to Jefferson and the example of his intellectual accomplishments.

A Year Back At Church

About a year ago I started attending St. Thomas Episcopal Church. It’s a wonderful church in the heart of the city of Sunnyvale. At the time I was trying out different churches to see where I would feel comfortable being at and where I could find God again. Since that time I’ve been reading what I can about the Episcopal church and getting to know the people at St. Thomas better. They have been very kind to me. I asked the pastor if I could submit some cartoons for the church bulletin to illustrate some of their weekly passages and she agreed. I’ll illustrate this post with a few of those cartoons.

One of the things that struck me was how similar the Episcopalian service seemed to the Roman Catholic service. I grew up Catholic, so it was in some ways like returning home to a service that was so similar to those of my childhood. I think the only major difference was that the pastor was a woman. That didn’t really bother me, as I’ve always thought that women are just as good spiritual leaders as men. Another thing that I noticed was the care that they had for their Book of Common Prayer. The Book of Common Prayer was created in 1549 and has over the centuries been revised periodically. It’s a book that has various prayers, services and modes of worship of the Episcopal Church and as I’ve read through it, many wonderful prayers. Each Sunday, our service is based on the services starting on page 323. Over the past year, we’ve had various prayers for the elections, for our veterans, for the safety of people who’ve gone through natural disasters, and I admire this congregation for bringing the worries of this nation in prayer.

After the worship we usually have donuts and coffee and talk to each other about our week. A group then goes out for morning coffee, while another group goes for a discussion on their sermon. I enjoy the talks and listening to the very different opinions that people hold. We all have different experiences and it’s a learning experience to hear how those experiences shape how we understand the bible readings and the sermon of the week. The pastor, Reverend Wendy Smith, has very insightful sermons and during the discussions, she is a good listener who makes sure that everyone is heard and their opinions are respected. That has been one of the things that I most like about this church.

Several years ago I had been involved in a series of conflicts at another church, and I wanted to find a place where one could ask questions and express a difference of opinion without fear of retaliation. When I attended an evangelical church, I learned to be quiet about my views because I knew people would not approve of how liberal I am. But I didn’t want to attend a church with the opposite problem, where people who weren’t liberal felt afraid to speak. Though St. Thomas is a fairly liberal church, more conservative voices are not afraid of speaking out, and they seem to have friends and are not shunned.

I think this tolerance for differing views is due to the Episcopal Church’s idea of the Via Media and the history of the Elizabethan Settlement within the greater Anglican Church, of which the Episcopal Church is a member. Diana Butler Bass wrote a good definition of the Via Media in her book Strength for the Journey.

She wrote:

“Episcopalians pride themselves on one particular aspect of their tradition: they are the church of the via media, the middle way. Forged in the decades following the Protestant Reformation, Anglicanism defined itself as Protestant in its theology and Catholic in its worship. Its two foundational documents- the Thirty-Nine Articles, with their Protestant doctrines, and the Book of Common Prayer, with its medieval liturgical practices- present the vision of a comprehensive church.”

In finding St. Thomas, I found a place where I could ask questions, make friends, and learn from a group of believers. I can’t say that I’m a strong and faithful Christian, but I can say that I’m in a place that can help me to find God again. In looking through the Book of Common Prayer, I found a prayer that I thought could end this post.

“O God, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and light riseth up in darkness for the godly: Grant us, in all our doubts and uncertainties, the grace to ask what thou wouldest have us to do, that the Spirit of wisdom may save us from all false choices, and that in thy light we may see light, and in thy straight path may not stumble; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen”

 

The Elizabethan Settlement occured in 1559, during the early part of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. During the previous reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I, the Church of England had been in a constant battle between Christians over its severing its ties with the Roman Catholic Church and attempts to reestablish the ties to Rome. When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, she had to find some way to settle the religious conflicts brewing in England. So in January 1559, Queen Elizabeth’s first parliament passed two act, the “Act of Supremacy” and the “Act of Uniformity“. These acts abolished any foreign jurisdiction in England, made Elizabeth the Supreme Governor of the British church and state, and established the Book of Common Prayer of 1552 as the official prayer book. It had elements to try to pacify both sides of the Protestant and Catholic divide, and though Puritans and some Catholics were not supportive, the Elizabethan Settlement had the support of the vast majority of England and it led to a period of religious peace and tolerance during most of her reign.

I admire the via media because of my experiences in both Protestant and Catholic Churches. There are things in the Catholic Church that I admire and there are things in the Catholic Church I dislike. And the same goes for my feelings of the Protestant, or Evangelical, Church. The Episcopal Church seems to combine the best of both worlds.

One of the things though, that has caused a lot of pain within the Episcopal Church has been the recent controversies involving the ordination of women and gay clergy and bishops. In 1974 women began to be ordained within the Episcopal Church for the first time, followed by the ordination of women bishops in 1988, and this caused great controversy within its ranks. The conflicts within the church grew more heated with the ordination of openly gay priests, culminating in the consecration of Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.

Episcopalians have a lot of sadness and anger at the recent controversies. Some people want the church to remain neutral on these social issues as they feel that a church should be a place where people could put aside their political differences and come together to worship God. They support gay rights and women’s rights, but believe that such issues should be debated in the political realm and not within the church walls. Those who hold an opposite view believed that the church’s stance is an attempt to be inclusive of groups that have historically been marginalized within the church community. If women and gays are going to be equal members of the church community, they should be treated equally in all matters.

Though I am firmly on the side of having women and gay clergy, I sympathize with the anguish that long time Episcopalians have over seeing the Anglican Church being divided by these issues. I’ve only been an Episcopalian for about a year, so I don’t have the emotions invested in the church the way long time Episcopalians have. Though it’s been painful for the church, I admire the Episcopalians for their courage in debating these issues out in the public. It seems that whenever Christian churches have tried to stifle debate or to cover things up, it has always had a bad effect on the church in the long run. Though I admire the Catholic Church, for instance, I think their decision to try to cover up the pedophilia problem of some of their priests was a big mistake that only made the problem worse.

One of the most admirable things of St. Thomas is their commitment to social services. They run a program called Our Daily Bread that prepares lunches for needy people 3 times a week. The church also takes part in a rotating shelter program with other churches in the area, where for a month they get to shelter and feed homeless men. St. Thomas also provides English classes for those trying to learn the language.

I’ve truly enjoyed becoming an Episcopalian. Whenever I travel, nowadays, I always look for an Episcopalian church in the area and try to attend a service or to just take a picture of the building. In San Francisco there is a church called St. Gregory’s of Nyssa Episcopal Church that has these wonderful murals of various reformer in history, from Jesus to Mother Theresa to Eleanor Roosevelt to Malcolm X. In Kauai, I attended All Saints Episcopal Church and my wife and I met the pastor and his large dog. In Sedona, Arizona is St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, which was across the street from our hotel. 

Emmett Till, Joseph Smith, Matthew Shepard and the Results of Prejudice

A week or so ago,  an insightful person wrote a post to me telling how prejudice affects the way a person lives out their daily lives.  Instead of walking in confidence, people who are discriminated against often live in fear of being harassed.  After reading her comment, I tried to think of examples of where prejudice eventually leads.  In societies that embrace a prejudiced view of a group of people, they often take harsh measures to keep a member of a marginalized group in their place.  In extreme cases, this may even result in lynchings and murder.  The deaths of Emmett Till, Joseph Smith and Matthew Shepard are examples of where prejudice eventually leads.

Emmet Till was a fourteen year old boy in August 1955.  He was raised in Chicago, a city with over five hundred thousand African Americans and opportunities for blacks were greater than for the southern states where Till’s great uncle Mose Wright lived.  The south had, since the end of Reconstruction in the late 1800s, been ruled by Jim Crow laws that segregated whites from blacks.  It was a deeply racist society, and African Americans lived with discrimination, inferior services, and limited economic opportunities.  They were also circumscribed in the social realm as well, as racial prejudices put them in a lower social footing than whites.   Lynchings were common in that area as a way of keeping blacks in fear of challenging the social norms of the time. Though Chicago was not free of racism, it was a far more open culture for African Americans like Emmett Till to live in, with jobs, education opportunities and entertainment that was not open to African Americans in the south.

When Emmett Til visited his great uncle Mose Wright, he did not know of the strict racial rules that governed all of southern life.  So Till broke one of the South’s strongest taboos:  a black male flirting with a white woman.   One morning, Emmett’s cousins dared Emmett to ask a white woman in Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippe.  So he accepted the dare and asked the woman out on a date.  As he and his cousins ran out of the market, he yelled at her “Bye, baby,” and gave her a two-note wolf whistle.  Three days later, Roy Bryant, the woman’s husband, and another white man took Emmett Till from his grand uncle’s home in the middle of the night.  Chris Crowe, the author of Getting Away With Murder:  the True Story of the Emmett Till Case, wrote what happened to Emmett:

“Willie Reed, the son of a sharecropper, testified in court that he saw Emmett sitting in the back of a pickup truck carrying two other Blacks and four white men, one of whom Reed identified as J.W. Milam.  Reed said that later that morning he heard sounds of a beating and cries of “Mama, Lord have mercy.  Lord have mercy!”  coming from inside the shed, and saw Milam, carrying a pistol, leave the shed to draw water from a well.  Three other white men were with him.

After the cries stopped, Reed watched as a truck backed up to the shed and three Black men helped the white men lead something wrapped in a tarp into the truck.  Later that day he saw the Black workers hosing blood out of the pickup’s bed.

It’s not known if Emmett was dead or alive when they left the shed.  According to Bryant and Milam, after beating Emmett, they took him to the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to strip.  Milam claimed that even after the beatings, Emmett showed no remorse for what he had done at Bryant’s Market.  That’s when Milam ‘decided it was time a few people got put on notice,’ and he made up his mind to kill Emmett, ‘just so everybody could know how me and my folks stand.’  When their evil deed was finished, Bryant, Milam, and whoever else was involved returned to the plantation, burned Emmett’s clothes and shoes, and then went home to bed.”

On August 31, Emmett Till’s body was found in the Tallahatchie River.   It was horribly disfigured, the result, as one deputy said, of “torture, horrible beating.”  The head had been severely beaten, with one side of the forehead crushed.  An eye had been gouged out.  The skull had a bullet hole just above the right ear.  The neck had been ripped raw by barbed wire wrapped around it.  The body was so disfigured that the only way that Mose Wright could identify it to the police was a ring that was on the corpses finger that belonged to Till’s father.  Mamie Till Bradley, Emmett’s mother, insisted on an open casket viewing to show the world what racists did to her son.

Mormons have faced persecution throughout their history as well.  From beginning they were subject to harassment, violence, intimidation and group lynchings.   Their leaders were often tarred and feathered by hostile crowds, as was the case of Mormon Bishop Edward Partridge in Independence, Missouri on July 20, 1833.  In Missouri on October 30, 1838, a militia of 240 men attacked a group of 30 Mormon families, killing seventeen and injuring twelve.  Near Nauvoo, Illinois in September 10, 1845, a Mormon settlement is burned to the ground by marauding horsemen.  In Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton’s book The Mormon Experience, it gives a quote by Liburn W. Boggs, the governor of Missouri in 1838, that conveys they feeling of hatred that many felt towards Mormons:  “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary, for the public peace.”  Even today, Mormons face vandalism of their church property and violence in Latin American countries.  According to Wikipedia, The MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base lists 149 individual attacks that have been carried out against Mormon targets in Latin America since 1983.

One of the most famous victims of anti-Mormon violence was the death of Joseph Smith, the prophet of the religion.  Anti-Mormon feelings were running high in Illinois and a controversy developed over the publication of a newspaper called the Nauvoo Expositor.  The Expositor made inflammatory accusations against Mormon leaders , which led Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum, who were the mayor and vice mayor, to shut down the paper to keep the peace.  Anti-Mormon groups charged the Smiths with suppressing freedom of the press, and had them jailed in Carthage, Illinois.   According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Joseph_Smith,_Jr.), a mob of about 200 armed men, their faces painted black,tormed the jail in the late afternoon of June 27, 1844.  Wikipedia describes the death of Joseph Smith as follows:

“The mob fired shots through the door and attempted to push the door open to fire into the room. Hyrum Smith was shot in the face, just to the left of his nose. He cried out, “I am a dead man!” and collapsed. His body received five additional gunshot wounds.

“…Smith, Taylor, and Richards attempted to defend themselves. Taylor and Richards attempted to use walking sticks in order to deflect the guns as they were thrust inside the cell, from behind the door. Smith used a small pepper box pistol that Cyrus Wheelock had given him when Wheelock had visited the jail earlier that day. Three of the six barrels misfired…

Joseph Smith made his way towards the window. As he prepared to jump down, Richards reported that he was shot twice in the back and a third bullet, fired from a musket on the ground outside, hit him in the chest.

Taylor and Richards’ accounts both report that as Smith fell from the window, he called out “Oh Lord, my God!”. Some have alleged that the context of this statement was an attempt by Joseph Smith to use a Masonic distress signal.

There are varying accounts of what happened next. Taylor and Richards’ accounts state that Smith was dead when he landed after his fall. One eyewitness, William Daniels, wrote in his 1845 account that Smith was alive when mob members propped his body against a nearby well, assembled a makeshift firing squad, and shot him before fleeing. Daniels’ account also states that one man tried to decapitate Smith for a bounty, but was prevented by divine intervention. There were additional reports that thunder and lightning frightened the mob off. Mob members fled, shouting, “The Mormons are coming,” although there was no such force nearby.”

Gay people also have faced much harassment and discrimination.  This includes assault, rape, torture and murder.  Various religious groups have condemened homosexual behavior as being immoral, and different cultures look down upon LGBT people.  Christian Europe and Muslim countries had in the past enacted codes that punished homosexual behavior with mutilation, ostracism and death.  According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_LGBT_people):

“In the United States, the FBI reported that 15.6% of hate crimes reported to police in 2004 were founded on perceived sexual orientation. 61% of these attacks were against gay men, 14% against lesbians, 2% against heterosexuals and 1% against bisexuals, while attacks against GLBT people at large made up 20%.  Violence based on perceived gender identity was not recorded in the report.

In the United States, the FBI reported that for 2006, hate crimes against gays increased to 16%, from 14% in 2005, as percentages of total documented hate crimes across the US. The 2006 annual report, released on November 18, 2007, also said that hate crimes based on sexual orientation are the third most common type, behind race and religion.”

One of the worst instances of violence occurred on October 7, 1998 in Laramie, Wyoming.  Matthew Shepard was a gay student attending the University of Wyoming.  In a bar, he met Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson.  After confiding to them that Matthew was gay, the two men deceived Shepard to leave the bar with them.  McKinney and Russell drove him to a secluded area, where they began to beat Shepard with a pistol.  They then proceeded to tie him to a buck fence, torture and beat him some more, then robbed him of his credit card, wallet, and his shoes.  The two men left Shepard tied to the fence, and they had planned to go to Shepard’s house to burglarize his home.  A boy found Aaron Shepard 18 hours later.  Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard)  wrote about Shepard’s condition:

“Shepard suffered a fracture from the back of his head to the front of his right ear. He had severe brain stem damage, which affected his body’s ability to regulate heart rate, body tempature and other vital signs. There were also about a dozen small lacerations around his head, face and neck. His injuries were deemed too severe for doctors to operate. Shepard never regained consciousness and remained on full life support. As he lay in intensive care, candlelight vigils were held by the people of Laramie.

He was pronounced dead at 12:53 A.M. on October 12, 1998 at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins.”

In the aftermath of the beatings, Moises Kaufman and member of the Tectonic Theater project went to Laramie and conducted over 200 interviews with the townspeople.  These interviews were the basis of their play, The Laramie Project, which chronicles the opinions and insights of 60 people of Laramie.  They showed a community of complex human beings trying hard to deal with the atrocity that took place in their midst.  Jeffrie Lockwood said something that most of the townspeople probably hoped about the identity of the killers:  “My secret hope was that they were from somewhere else, that then of course you can create that distance:  We don’t grow children like that here.   Well, it’s pretty clear that we do grow children like that here…”

All of us as human beings have certain prejudices that we try to overcome.   Without any restraints, prejudice of any sort can lead to the type of violence that Matthew Till, Joseph Smith and Matthew Shepard suffered through.   Even if a person does not experience outright violence, the threat of violence and the oppressive atmosphere of prejudice often makes a discriminated group live in fear.   Lola Wheeler wrote a comment (http://www.everydaycitizen.com/2008/11/mormons_catholics_and_evangeli.html) about the fear that gays go through:

“Gay bashing often includes violence and terrorism. For many gays, a loud bump in the night is more startling than it may be for straight people like you and me. Many (if not most) gay people actually live in fear of real danger. They fear for their jobs, their health, the security of their possessions, the safety of their loved ones and – even – they fear for their lives. “

Lola is right about the quiet violence that prejudice inflicts upon discriminated people.  Hitler was able to exploit the antisemitism that already existed in Germany and push those feelings to horrific extremes.   Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (www.splcenter.org),  Soulforce (http://www.soulforce.org/article/7), Call To Action (http://www.cta-usa.org/), and the National Council of La Raza (http://www.nclr.org/) are fighting prejudice in society and in churches. 

Though these were horrific deaths, they helped galvanize communities and inspired people into activism.  The death of Emmett Till was considered by many people to be one of the galvanizing events that started the modern African American Civil Rights movement.  The death of Matthew Shepard had a similar effect upon the LGBT community.  To know about the ways in which their memories help fight prejudice, you can go to the Emmett Till Foundation (http://www.emmetttillmurder.com/Foundation.htm), the Matthew Shepard Foundation (http://www.matthewshepard.org/site/PageServer), and Equality Utah (http://www.equalityutah.org/).