Two houses (being the first part)

 In one sense, all history is revisionist history in the sense that every new piece of historiography seeks to revise our understanding of that which we previously knew. There would be no point in writing a new biography of Abraham Lincoln, for instance, if one had absolutely no original insights to offer (other than as a cynical ploy to gain tenure at a university, but we will not speak of such things).

In that manner, and as one long exhausted by my homeland's willful ignorance of the felt experience of racism on our shores, I was intrigued by The 1619 Project's stated goal of reframing American history through the lens of the black experience. I found much of its contribution to the American historical project rewarding, but sadly, some of its least helpful arguments seem to have gained the most traction. The one which most irks me is the contention that the creation of a Senate alongside a House of Representatives was primarily a scheme to permanently  invest political power in slave-holding interests.

Really? A bicameral legislature because racism? Not because every European nation, including and especially Great Britain, which just happens to have been the nation of which the original 13 States were a part, has a bicameral legislature? (Not to mention Virginia, whose form of government was basically copied wholesale by the 1787 Constitution, which I am obliged to mention because I graduated from a Virginian public high school and university.) At this point, The 1619 Project goes from completely reasonable lower-case-r revisionism to 1984 memory hole upper-case-R Revisionism which is plausible only to those operating with utter ignorance of the foundations of our form of government. Which is to say, Americans who have attended elite private universities.

I am particularly irked because this narrative seems to have gained a great deal of traction with a class of Americans (i.e., Americans who live in overpopulated cities on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts) who are dismayed that states with remarkably few residents (looking at you, Wyoming) get just as many Senators as do California and New York. While my listening habits may be unusual, I'm hearing an increasing number of complaints that this arrangement is not only suspect (because racism), it is anti-democratic.

To which I can only say: That's the point.

The peculiar genius of the American experiment in self-government is not a bicameral legislature: everybody has one of those (except for Nebraska, about which the less said the better). Instead, it is in composing its upper legislative house not from a political/social class (as in Great Britain, about which the less said the better), but from a conscious recognition that political decisions are driven as much by lived experience as by ideology. Westerners understand the value of water in a way that easterners never can. (Having recently relocated from Colorado to Ohio, I am constantly appalled by how much water the locals here waste. It's as though they think it falls from the sky.) The House of Representatives gives full weight to our nation's massed populations, but the Senate exists to ensure that the majority cannot unilaterally impose its will on States in which they do not live.

That might frustrate those with majoritarian instincts, but as a citizen who remains sympathetic to my friends in the West, I think it a good thing. Along with the separation of powers, it not only makes us a republic, but the greatest Republic which this sad world has yet seen. 

And that is a very good thing.

Fantasyland

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire (A 500-Year History) is an entertaining presentation of the thesis that the culture of these United States tends to encourage the citizenry to entertain views and lifestyles not well-tethered to reality. In broad strokes, Kurt Andersen makes his case.

As a researched document, though, "Fantasyland" disappoints. Andersen has an annoying tendency to mention persons without giving their names. For example, this occurs twice on page 333, where he cites a "Pentecostal Christian author" and "the co-host" of the television program 20/20 without naming either. Obviously, these omissions make it difficult to check on his use of sources.

With regard to my areas of expertise (things Biblical, Christian and Church historical), Andersen disappoints still more. In footnote 12 to chapter 31, he describes Ephesians as having been "translated from ancient Hebrew to ancient Greek to Old Latin to New Latin to Middle English to Modern English…," which demonstrates breath-taking ignorance of Bible translation methodology and of the New Testament itself. In an earlier chapter, he identifies Jonathan Edwards, a Congregationalist, as an Episcopalian. Because his errors are so gross and unnecessary in this area, I suspect him of similar problems in the other fields he discusses.

Andersen has a provocative and fun argument to make, but I doubt he has backed it up very well. I'll continue to mull over his descriptions and ideas, but am not persuaded he writes from the realitiy-based perch which he seems to think he occupies. American may not actually be as haywire as he believes.

You say you want an eschaton

I can't be the only reactionary hard-shell Calvinist who misses Marxism's rhetorical domination of the educated elites. I enjoyed having a vocabulary in common with my opponents on the left. In particular, I really liked talking about what would happen when the Revolution comes (as in, "When the Revolution comes, the Republicans will be the first with their backs up against the wall." Ah, the good old days.). In the Marxist cosmos, "the Revolution" is that glorious impending moment in which the proletariat will rise up against their bourgeois oppressors, seize the means of production, and usher in an age of harmony and peace in a finally-classless society.

As a (nearly-)infinite number of Christian critics have noted, the Revolution is Marx's eschaton, his endpoint of history and new golden age. In that sense, Marxism is just another Christian heresy. In Christian orthodoxy, human history ends in Christ's return, the end of the present evil age, and our Lord's establishment of the new heavens and earth in which peace and justice reign. Marx (conveniently) removes Jesus and divine intervention from the scenario, but he does teach his students to look forward to an age of peace and justice.

Marx's vision will never, ever be achieved until the Revolution comes. (For what it's worth, I rather doubt it will.) Conversely, while the Christian eschaton is utterly dependent on the Lord's good pleasure to inaugurate it, it nonetheless is manifested in the present by the Christian's faith. "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1) Along with the Old Testament saints, we are called to live in the present as though we already live in the age to come, according to the values of the city which has foundations (Hebrews 11-12). In other words, we are to live according to the Biblical principles of peace and justice now, even though they will not be rightly, fully, or permanently established until our Lord returns in glory.

Which brings us (at long last) to my point: an inaugurated eschatology requires the Christian to maintain a commitment to social justice. The perfect social justice of the new heavens and earth is not yet, but must be already present in the political agenda which the Christian pursues. Christians may, and certainly will, disagree as to how to pragmatically and prudentially pursue social justice in this present age; indeed, they often disagree as to what social justice even looks like. Nonetheless, whether they find themselves on the left or right of the political spectrum, whether they are politically active or inactive (or, in my case, only a reluctant voter), they must be bound by a desire to bring about as much social justice as is possible in this fallen world.

Accordingly, it is wrong, bordering on eschatologically heretical, to assert that Christians ought not be concerned with or driven by social justice. At their very best, such critiques evidence a rather poor grasp of Biblical eschatology.

The word of the day is "sherd"

I just learned from a footnote on page 83 of The Book that while a "shard" is a fragment of glass, a "sherd" is a fragment of pottery.

Now I finally understand the book of Job.

Regarding "American War"

American War: A Novel by Omar El Akkad. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. Clothbound, 352 pages.

For me, reading American War was an exercise in cognitive dissonance. Though Omar El Akkad's intended audience clearly includes Americans, he is not a citizen of these United States, and so his depiction of our future is designed to make us reconsider our world's present, not my nation's past. I, however, have only ever been an American, steeped in reflection on our history and the meaning of the Civil War since high school, and so a novel about the Second Civil War must read, for me, as a commentary on my nation's past.

By 2075, rising waters have drastically altered this country's geographical and political landscapes, driving coastal populations inland and the nation's capital to Columbus. South Carolina, as is its wont, threatened secession and so was subjected to a viral agent by the national government which led to a quarantine of the entire state. Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama actually did secede, with Louisiana and east Texas hotly contested. Secession's pretext, apparently, was the criminalization of fossil fuels, but one gets the impression it had just as much to do with all our old grievances.

That's where my cognitive dissonance settled in. The politics of American War have enough echoes of our past that I kept looking for analogies to the 1860s. However, El Akkad tells a story of refugees and radicalization, presumptuous interference by foreign governments, and the cultivation and molding of terrorists. In other words, he tells the story of the wars America has created in the rest of the world, particularly the Middle East. He sets it in my country, apparently, in order to draw from us a deeper sympathy than we might otherwise give to persons from foreign lands with foreign-sounding names.

Read that latter way, it's a fairly effective book. The dialogue is a little clunky, and I think he failed to get inside the heads of his female characters in a believable way. At the same time, all his characters and their choices make sense, including the one who commits the worst terrorist attack in history. I was reminded of the inherent offensiveness of the American presumption that we may interfere in other nation's affairs in order to gain what our leaders think to be an advantage. 

Despite what one of our presidents liked to say, they don't hate us because of our freedoms. They hate us because we've colonized their countries. If you don't understand that, then maybe it's time for you to read American War.

The questions we face

In the words of Lancellotti, Del Noce understood that “we cannot just rely on a mechanical repetition of [religious] formulas, because what we received from our forebears is conditioned by the questions they faced, and we ourselves can only think in terms of the questions we are facing.”  

In his critical review of Augusto Del Noce's The Age of Secularization (translated by Carlo Lancelloti), Francis X. Maier focuses on Del Noce's thought with regard to technological change. The above quote of course has theological implications, and presbyterian implications especially.

On the one hand, I'm reminded of John Frame's frequent admonition that theology must be done by every generation because every generation must apply the Bible to its own time. As I've argued elsewhere, this even extends to a Church's confessional standards; I continue to believe the Orthodox Presbyterian Church's confession needs to speak much more robustly and clearly on the Biblical doctrine of anthropology (especially with regard to sexuality and marriage). In the same vein, I'm reminded of the error of puritanolatry, which often renders its practitioners incapable of dialogue with  citizens of this present age.

On the other hand, the more subtle, and accordingly more profound danger, warned against in the above quote is that of thinking that answers to our forebears' questions are answers to our own. One way in which this error manifests in conservative reformed and presbyterian Churches is the belief that the best defense against theological liberalism is to maintain, unchanged, centuries-old confessional standards. (Looking at you, Westminster and Three Forms of Unity.) On this view, there are no new questions, only ones which have been answered by our forebears. In practice, of course, our generation faces its own questions, and the temptation is to repress or ignore them because our traditions are silent. Here again, the Church runs the risk of irrelevance by denying the valid concerns of our own day (for example, race relations and gender power dynamics). 

We are obligated by the 5th Commandment to receive the traditions of our forebears with respect and honor. The same commandment also obligates us to build on those traditions for the sake of our generation and those who follow. We must identify the questions we face, and seek answers on the basis of the only true source of all religious formulae, which of course is the Bible itself.

A word to the historically ignorant

Perhaps you, like I, have heard it asserted that yesterday was the first time ever a Vice-President broke a tie vote in the U.S. Senate to confirm a Cabinet nominee.

To which I can only say, balderdash and folderol! First time ever, my foot!

That is precisely the determinative plot point in Advise and Consent! (The film version, at least. I think the book had somewhat different conclusion.) What are they teaching in high school civics classes these days?

Oh, wait. There are no high school civics classes these days.

Because America

I visited Graceland when I was 19 years old, and that experience was so monumental, so mind-blowing, that I no longer felt the need to make pilgrimage anywhere else. (It took another 15 years and the careful study of Peter Guralnick's hefty two-volume Elvis Presley biography before I was able to let go of my obsession with the magnetic charms of the King.) Honestly, once you've gazed upon the Jungle Room, all the antiquities of the Ancient Near East have nothing to offer.

Despite my enduring dedication to Abraham Lincoln, that disinterest applies to Civil War sites as well. Maybe coming of age in Virginia, where you can't turn around without running into a battlefield marker, has something to do with that. However, I now have a reason, nay, a need, to journey to Gettysburg: the Civil Wars Tails at the Homestead Diorama Museum.

I know other nations have their fair share of quirky, obsessive personalities, but I am absolutely confident that none of them have a pair of sisters who create exquisitely detailed and perfectly scaled dioramas of Civil War battles in which all the combatants (wearing accurate uniforms) are cats. Cats.

Because America, people. Because America.

1x

While I now listen to almost all my podcasts at twice normal speed, a couple employ such carefully constructed soundscapes that their meaning would be obscured, and their impact radically diminished, if their playback were sped up.

One, of course, is Nate DiMeo's The Memory Palace, a faithful celebration of the human beings who populate history books. Every episode is, honestly and truly, beautiful. DiMeo has begun listing credits at the end of the show, but his original practice was to simply let music fade out each story, giving the listener a moment to reflect on the human experience he has just heard. You can't rush The Memory Palace. You have to give heed to every beat, every carefully constructed sentence, and then think. And think.

The only other, at least so far, is The Truth, an anthology of radio drama for the podcast age. In this case, the story is not simply content, but a construct built of sound, pacing, and style. Rush it, and you won't get it.

I'm not sure what would get me to slow down to 0.5 speed. A pharmaceutical advertisement?

The Amazing Spider-Man

If you care a bit more than you should about these things, you've almost certainly seen the trailer for Captain America: Civil War in which Spider-Man shows up at the very end. (An aside: perhaps the actual movie will be about the Captain and his close personal allies, but the trailers make it look much more like the next Avengers installment. I go to a Captain America movie to see Captain America. And maybe the Falcon.) This has Thing 1 giddy with excitement, but me not so much.

Back when I was an avid comics reader, my favorite Spider-Man period was when Jim Owsley was editing those titles for Marvel during the 1980s. Thereafter, it seemed to me that Marvel was exploiting the character's popularity for cash value, putting him through countless wrenching changes and cross-overs for little reason other than boosting sales. That said, I thought the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies were fun, but by the third installment began suffering the same bloat which afflicted the first run of Batman movies after Tim Burton and Michael Keaton left the series. 

And then came The Amazing Spider-Man.

If you know any comic book history at all, you know the stories about how the Stan Lee-, Jack Kirby- and Steve Ditko-led Marvel Comics of the 1960s up-ended the industry. Spider-Man, we read, was revolutionary for having a secret identity which was not only as well-developed as his costumed role, but which was a nebbishy high-school student. We read about the excitement he generated among readers, offering a hero whom they could not only idolize, but to whom they could intimately relate (because you see, children, back in our day all comic book readers were irredeemable doofuses). I read about that Spider-Man, but I didn't experience him other than in the occasional anthology. The Spider-Man of my youth had aged, was in his late twenties, and even married Mary-Jane Watson. All of which was fine, but didn't exactly carry on the legendary magic of Stan Lee's 1960s Spider-Man.

I got that, finally, when Andrew Garfield took on the character in 2012. His portrayal, and the way the two films set his universe, finally landed me in the sheer joy of an adolescent climbing walls and the pathos of a teenager losing the man who had raised him while finding his first serious girlfriend. The Amazing Spider-Man movies gave me the opportunity to experience Stan Lee's original vision. Unlike any number of other recent superhero movies (looking at you, Man of Steel and the X-Men franchise), those films had an emotional heft which has stuck with me.

As much I've enjoyed the Marvel cinematic universe thus far, and the Avengers in particular, I'm not interested in seeing Spider-Man join it. To me, he's always been at his best when he is alone, struggling (and often failing) to figure out his place in the world . At the same time, I don't really object to him snatching away Captain America's shield, either. It's just too bad that moment had to come at the expense of ending Andrew Garfield's take on Spider-Man, the only one in which I've been interested for years.

The case for reparations

Quite some time ago, I concluded, with Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address, that the Lord has already determined, and wrought, the reparations owed for the years of American chattel slavery. Credit is owed to Ta-Nehisi Coates for accomplishing the near-impossible feat of making me reconsider an opinion with his Polk-prize-winning 2014 essay, "The Case for Reparations." He powerfully demonstrates that systematic oppression of African-Americans continued long past the formal end of chattel slavery, effectively countering my assumptions regarding that for which African-Americans might be owed reparation. It's a long read, but Coates' arguments are thoughtful and deserve thoughtful engagement.

What reparations, then? How might they be gathered, administered, and distributed? Is money even the issue? At the end of section IX, Coates writes,

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

Amen.

But how to effect such a spiritual renewal? Nate DiMeo, creator and producer of the elegant and wonderful The Memory Palace, has a suggestion in "Notes on an Imagined Plaque to be Added to the Statue of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, Upon Hearing that the Memphis City Counci has Voted to Move it and the Exhumed Remains of General Forrest and his Wife, Mary Ann Montgomery Forrest, from their Current Location in a Park Downtown, to the Nearby Elmwood Cemetery." DiMeo and Coates agree that in order for our nation to truly change, we must first become historically aware.

But that, in turn, must be a spiritual renewal. Our nation must want to become historically aware, to know its sins in order to make amends for them. Those who want to know their sins are those who want to repent of them because they long to lay them at the foot of the Cross of Christ.

Both Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nate DiMeo speak eloquently of the persistent and evil problem of race relations in these United States. Perhaps unwittingly, the case they make is, ultimately, a case for the preaching of the Gospel.

The Great Interpreter

In a powerful argument for Abraham Lincoln as a strict constructionist whose interpretation of the Constitution has become the standard one in these United States, Michael Stokes Paulsen and Luke Paulsen advance another provocative thesis: Lincoln's de facto repudiation of the Dred Scott decision, through executive action, demonstrates that other branches of the federal government, equally bound to defend the Constitution, cannot be held to illegitimate interpretations offered by the Supreme Court.

Provocative and, in light of recent history, well worth pondering.

What is marriage?

You may have an answer to that question, but it may not be the correct one. In "What is Marriage to Evangelical Millennials?," Abigail Rine helpfully points out that a revisionist definition of marriage (marriage is a formalized romantic attachment) took root in our culture, and in evangelical circles, several decades ago, and has rather completely usurped the much older understanding of marriage which is rooted in Bibilical, natural, and common law.

It's an extremely helpful explanation of both the origin of today's same-sex marriage debate and why evangelicals seem unable to speak coherently to, much less against, it. It's also a helpful reminder that what the modern mind assumes takes for granted as the natural order of things is, in fact, often only a philosophical fashion of very recent vintage.

And those of us who are dismayed by recent cultural trends may be heartened by the realization that fashions change.

The New Noncomformist Conscience

Over at the First Things website, Helen Andrews examines the recent trend of "shame campaigns" against those who do not hold to the recently established establishment line on homosexual marriage by offering a brief history of similar efforts in Great Britain in the 19th century, along with a helpful discussion of why they defeat the Church's Gospel agenda but may very well be the essence of "cultural progressivism." Recommended.

Have I mentioned the Memory Palace?

The Memory Palace is a kind-of monthly podcast of varying length in which Nate DiMeo tells a story from American history. Each is elegant and evocative and a profound reminder that the people who lived in the past were people, and though their lives are now complete, they were utterly contingent and surprising as they were lived. The current episode, "We've Forgotten James Powell," is a brief survey of race riots in the 20th century and the persons whose mistreatment provided their impetus. DiMeo says, "We remember the fire, but we forget the match."

I wept. So should you.

So very, very wonderful

A week late for Independence Day, but marvelous nonetheless.

Cleansing history

I just did a little mental math, subtracting 1989 from 2014, and realized one need not be so very young to not have a lived memory of the Soviet Union. Thus, today's youngsters may not know that while the USSR's consumer products were notoriously shoddy, it was nonetheless quite advanced in photo manipulation technology. In the West, a whole subset of Soviet-watchers were experts in studying old group portraits of communist party members. By comparing older with newer printed accounts, they discovered when individuals had fallen out of favor with the party hierarchy because their faces had disappeared from the photographic record.

The USSR was brought to mind by a report by another pastor in my presbytery, Shawn Mathis, on "the disappearing works of Doug Phillips." As an internet search will quickly inform you, Doug Phillips was a prominent leader in the family-centric and patriarchial segments of evangelicalism until discredited by revelations of an adulterous affair. As Mr. Mathis reports, "Doug Phillips' lectures, sermons, articles and interviews are disappearing from... the website of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches (NCFIC) (which organization he founded)" and also from the websites of other former Phillips associates.

One can empathize readily with the shock felt when a friend is exposed as a hypocrite and a liar, and can understand why shame might motivate one to disavow the relationship entirely. However, the impulse is strange among Christians. As many critics of our faith have noted, some of the more prominent Biblical figures, such as the patriarch Jacob and King David, behaved quite shamefully (the former a deceiver and the latter an adulterer and murderer). The mature believer, of course, understands these men are not in the Bible in order to be admired and emulated, but instead to give testimony to God's grace to sinners through Christ. Such a Christian can sing David's psalms without feeling any need to deny or cover up David's sins.

Some people once admired Doug Phillips and commended his teachings, but now are attempting to remove their assocation with him from the internet's historical record. Such actions lead one to wonder whether such people lead their lives on the basis of Christian grace or on something more like the principles of the old Soviet Union.

black odyssey

Finally.

Regular visitors to this virtual space will know Theatre Companion and I have been sorely disappointed with the new plays mounted by the Denver Center Theatre Company this season. Our most frequent question following these productions has been "Why?" Why, of all the new plays being churned out by all those MFA-holding playwrights throughout this great land of ours, produce these mediocrities? Why, if these mediocrities are the best a producing artistic director can find, not revive one of the classics from the great American stage canon? Why subject a hopeful theatre-going public to works which make a strong argument against any public funding for the arts?

Why, oh why?

It was thus with some trepidation I escorted Mrs. Curmudgeon, who holds a master's degree in  the classics, to the world premiere of black odyssey (now through February 16 at the Space Theatre). In Marcus Gardley's new work,

Classic Greek characters and themes meet modern African-American culture in this twist on Homer’sThe Odyssey. Centered on a black soldier’s homecoming, this compelling new play fuses modern reality, humor, and song with ancient myth.

One can easily imagine how this might go badly wrong: the Odyssey's narrative stretched to the breaking point along with the audience's patience for overly wrought Negro spirituals. Instead, the playwright and cast nailed it. Gardley's Ulysses, as did Homer's, tries to make his way home after a war only to find himself manipulated by the gods ("Deus" for Zeus and "Paw Sidon" for Poseidon) and faced by traps at every turn. (An actual chess board hangs over the stage and is lowered for the gods' debates.) By making his Ulysses Lincoln an orphan, Gardley superimposes on the quest for home a simultaneous quest for identity and personal history, a history which is interwoven with the African-American experience in these United States. In this way, Gardley makes Ulysses Lincoln a black everyman as the staging of his journey becomes an appeal to the African-American community at large to hold on to and perpetuate its historical memory.

The cast is stellar, drawn from across the country: nearly every actor has a deep background on stage and screen, and all have marvelous singing voices. (This probably reflects the fact there just aren't that many all-black professional stage productions around the land.) The play does have weaknesses: the symbolism of the statue from the Lincoln Memorial, which came on stage in the second act, was entirely lost on me, and while Ulysses Lincoln served in the U.S. Navy, he was involved in land combat operations and consistently refers to himself as a "soldier." As Mrs. Curmudgeon pointed out, Nella Pee's vacillating loyalty to Ulysses toward the end of his odyssey was a disappointing departure from the steadfastness of Homer's Penelope. (However, this vacillation was motivated by a desire to provide a father figure to her son, Malachi; sadly, the struggles of single motherhood are a common theme in the modern African-American experience.) Also, Homer managed to work in a dog.

Nonetheless, this production delivers the goods. Here's a new play which tackles a big, big American subject through the frame of an ancient and universal narrative and makes the mystifying particulars of both Greek myth and African-American culture accessible and pellucid to a broad audience. It's a triumph: finally, a new play worthy of many more productions. I look forward to taking my black daughter to see one someday.

The Lost History of Global Christianity

This lecture by Philip Jenkins, featured on last week's Beeson Divinity School podcast, does precisely what good history is supposed to do: it offers a radically different way of seeing the world simply by pointing out what has always been on record. He gives a brief summary of the influence of Christian patriarchs in China and the ancient Near East, and points out ways in which Christianity influenced the emergence of both Buddhist and Muslim Scriptures. An eye-opening thirty-seven minutes which offer a number of avenues for further study and reflection.

Jackie & Me (42)

Jackie & Me (playing at the Denver Center Theatre Company's Space Theatre through December 22), is an adaptation of the second novel in author Dan Gutman's series for children in which young Joey Stoshack has the power to visit baseball greats during times past by holding a baseball card. In this installment, Joey goes back in time to Jackie Robinson's rookie year with the Brooklyn Dodgers. 

According to the production notes, the adaptation of the first novel in the series was produced by a children's theatre company, and this play clearly is intended for a similar audience. As one might expect from the genre, Joey meets a baseball great, learns an important moral lesson, and goes back to his life a person changed for the better. The trope is tired and trite, but relatively harmless when applied to Honus Wagner. In this case, it has the unfortunate effect of turning Jackie Robinson into the magical negro who is significant because of the character development he inspires in the play's white protagonist. Once again, the narrative of persons of color is mediated through a white perspective. (As part of his time-traveling gift, Joey magically becomes African-American. Yes, it was painful and slightly embarrassing to watch a white actor pretend he was black.) Set alongside the premiere of Just Like Us, Jackie & Me makes one wonder whether the DCTC wouldn't do well to attend one of those consciousness-raising seminars to which major corporations subject their executives.

Once again, I question the DCTC's production choices. While this play makes for fine children's theatre, that's not what the DCTC is. What family can afford to take their children to a show which charges $50 a seat? (I suppose I can picture such a family, which, given the close relationship of race to class in this country, probably would need a white mediator in order to appreciate a facet of the black experience.) With the fine company and excellent resources available to it, the DCTC would be better advised to choose more challenging adult fare, even if it's not from a new or minor playwright. Please don't tell me there are too many professional productions of Shakespeare or Mamet these days.

A far more thoughtful examination of the same historical period is the recent film 42 (now available on DVD). It has the decency to treat Jackie Robinson with dignity, tracing his story from his own point of view and not from that of a white interpreter. It's not a great movie, but nonetheless a worthy sports film which capably sets Jackie Robinson's rookie year in its historical and cultural context. Thereby, it demonstrates his significance for both baseball and race relations in these United States.

While we're on the subject of history, Jackie & Me features a galling moment of ahistorical nonsense. Unfortunately, in order to discuss it, I may offend some of my readers, so feel free to quit your browser now. In one scene, Jackie Robinson shows Joey a stack of hate mail, which includes several death threats towards Robinson and his young family. However, they clearly feel the worst of these letters is one which calls Robinson a "nigger," a word which young Joey is barely able to make pass his lips. (This is its sole pronunciation in the play.)

Now, I happen to have a black daughter, and that's not a word I want directed at her or any other person of color. However, "nigger" has taken on its greatest power to offend only in the last decade or so. In Jackie Robinson's time, it was an unwelcome epithet, but hardly taboo or unexpected. To import today's delicate sensibilities to an earlier era is not only silly, it destroys the ability of the past to speak clearly to the present.

Here's what I mean by that: when one reads The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, one is shocked by many of the characters' racism precisely because it is commonplace, unremarkable, and, to the characters themselves, entirely invisible. A plain presentation of the past allows us to see just how alien its environment is to us. That, in turn, prompts us to reflect on the differences between our time and theirs, and perhaps even encourages us to question what atrocities are invisible to us in our day. (In all seriousness, what do you think future generations will think of the thousands of abortions perpetrated in this country each year?)

I took Thing 1, now aged 10, to this production, and he seemed unfazed by the dramatic unveiling of "the 'N' word." Believe it or not, there were warnings posted in the lobby, but he was able to accept the moment as just another element in the torrent of abuse which Jackie Robinson in particular, and all black people of his day in general, faced on a daily basis. I think my son would have been better served by an unvarnished and unsantized presentation of the full ugliness of the racism his sister's people faced in this great country not too long ago. It's a reality with which all my children will have to contend, as all our nation's people still do.