Hurricane
Sendler and the Nobel Committee
A few years ago I visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem with a group of Presbyterians. “God’s frozen people” or not, a lot of tears were shed by those Calvinists, especially as we walked through the room dedicated to the children who were killed, whose names were continuously read through the speakers. I dreaded hearing the name Samelson because I had heard from an older brother how their mother had chosen to go and die with her five-year-old girl rather than let her die alone at Treblinka.
One of the first “Righteous Gentiles” to be honored at the memorial was a Polish lady named Irena Sendler. She had been a public health official in Warsaw during the Second World War, and so had access to the ghetto on account of an outbreak of tuberculosis or typhoid; sources differ. She convinced many of the Jewish families to let her smuggle their children out and place them with Catholic families or in Catholic institutions, removing them in burlap sacks, caskets or whatever came to hand. (Just imagine the terror of those children.) She gave them new names and identity papers, but papers with their true identities were hidden under an apple tree in her yard.
Unfortunately, in the nature of the case not many of the parents survived to find those children.
Eventually—no doubt inevitably—she was caught by the Gestapo, imprisoned and mercilessly tortured, yet she refused to reveal the names of those working with her. She managed to escape when a sympathetic organization bribed some guards. One wonders how those guards managed to elude execution for letting prisoners go. In all she managed to save some 2500 Jews, but she confessed that every day of her life she agonized over not having saved more.
One of the beautiful things that came out of her dedication was that when she was in a hospital later in life she was cared for by one of the people whose lives she had saved.
To my knowledge, hypocrisy first entered the scene when, in 1965, she was asked to visit Jerusalem to be honored at the Yad Vashem Memorial, and the Communist government of Poland refused to let her go. Only years later was she finally able to travel there and receive the award. Perhaps more tellingly, she was nominated for a Nobel Prize. She did not win the prize. It was won by Al Gore for a film he made of a slide show.
Those of us who work with the literature of Latin America are accustomed to hearing of such injustice by the Nobel Committee with regard to the prize for literature. Sometimes it has been won by third-rate writers, and we wondered why. Then we realized that several Latin American authors in a row who won the prize had exactly one thing in common: they had attacked the United Fruit Company. Yes, there were a couple of excellent writers in there, namely Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez. But who in his or her right mind would award the Nobel Prize for Literature to a Miguel Angel Asturias when Jorge Luis Borges, who influenced the literature of much of the world, was ignored?
The fact is that Borges was relatively conservative in his political views, and thus was among those essentially blacklisted by the committee. The same is true of a writer I have mentioned before in this column, Alvaro Mutis, who, according to García Márquez, has been writing better than he has for a couple of decades now. Mutis, as I have noted, is a monarchist. Don’t ask for Vegas odds on whether a snowball has a better chance in hell than Mutis has of winning a Nobel.
At some point one might come to believe that the prestige of a given prize just might be compromised by its consistent political bias when dealing with artists. Or one of the greatest of the real heroes of World War II, for that matter.
Let’s Talk American Good
In the Middle Egyptian language there is one verb that means “to fare upstream” or “to fare southward,” and another bear
s the meaning, “to fare downstream” or “to fare northward.” Those verbs worked perfectly well in the vicinity of the Nile, but when an Egyptian general issued an order using one of them as his troops were deployed next to the Jordan River, they didn’t know which way to go, since the Jordan flows south. Military operations require unequivocal language.
The demise of the League of Nations was caused in part by the mistranslation of an expression from French into English. The original stated that “la France demande . . . ,” which was translated as “France demands . . . .” Many Americans felt that if, after we had bailed them out in World War I, the French were inclined to make demands, we weren’t interested in obliging them. Demander in French actually means “to request.”
These are just a couple of examples of foulups in language that have made some difference in world history. It should go without saying that great civilizations must take great care with their languages, using them with precision. In fact, it has been noted that great civilizations tend to have complex languages—the Russians, the English and the Americans, for example. The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges remarked that he would have preferred to write in English because, with both Latin and Anglo-Saxon roots, it lends itself to more subtlety of expression than does Spanish.
But at the present time it appears that precision in language is strictly optional. The problem with this is that language structures thought, and if language is illogical or otherwise sloppy, thought too becomes chaotic. I’ve noticed that the phase “just might” is almost always inverted today. “Charlie might just wear a tie to the dance” has quite different connotations than “Charlie just might wear a tie to the dance.” Or what about the tendency, perhaps based on the song, Nobody Does It Better, to say, “No gasoline cleans your car’s engine better than Chevron with Techron”? That leaves open the possibility that every other gasoline on the market does it just as well. “No other gasoline cleans your car’s engine as well . . . ” is not the same thing.
And then there are those lovely dependent clauses floating in space, looking for something to hang onto. The best one I’ve come across was in a program on Russian rocketry. In speaking of a particular rocket, the narrator said, “Launched into space three times, the factory that built it still exists.”
“Man, oh, man!,” I said to myself. “Those Russian factories are formidable.”
Political correctness has also polluted the language, so that singular and plural become mixed up: “Every person has their own viewpoint.” Again I submit that when language becomes that dull, the thought expressed in it is not likely to be any sharper. This goofiness has gone so far that the grammatical error in question is used even when there is no PC purpose for it: “Each individual species has their own way of dealing with this challenge.”
Oh, but it gets better. Sometimes an egregious error is made in an attempt to sound sophisticated. I heard a college president with a Ph.D. in English begin a speech with “This has been an interesting summer for my wife and I.”
That is about as bad as a classic I heard uttered by a first grade teacher: “Me and her was gonna do that.” There are four errors in the first four words.
Then there’s my personal favorite: “these kinds of things” when “things of this kind” would be appropriate. I get tired of shouting at the TV screen, “How many kinds of things are you referring to, idiot?”
Or how about what I call chain-link sentences?: “That’s the problem with this team is that it has no running game.”
Many books have been sent to me with requests that I review them for one journal or another. Some of them have interested me a great deal. I recall one in particular, produced by a Jewish writer about the experience of his people in Colombia in the 1930s, when that country was one of two in the Americas that had concordats with the Vatican pledging that they would be purely and perpetually Roman Catholic. I started reading the book with relish. One image stuck out. The narrator told of the Jews’ being so poor that the children were admitted free to a movie theater—but were only allowed to sit behind the screen. This was their reality, the reverse of the accepted point of view in Colombia.
The problem with the book was that, despite the fact that the author was a native speaker of Spanish and held a Ph.D. degree in that language from an Ivy League university, the book contained thousands of errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation. At one point a character wants to deny something, and says, “No, es verdad” (No, it’s true) instead of “No es verdad” (It’s not true). I stopped reading and sent the book back to the book review editor of the journal in question. Still, when I took a book manuscript of mine to a highly recommended typist and she introduced several thousand errors of the same kind (those kinds of errors?) I began wondering whether that had happened to the Colombian writer as well. But if so, where was the copy editor in all this? Someone should have edited those errors out of the book.
Ours is an age when it seems accuracy is optional. If “Me and her was gonna do that” gets the thought across, it’s acceptable—except in the business world, that is. One growth industry is straightening up executives’ English usage. Perhaps it’s time for primary school teachers to stop telling their pupils that grammar, punctuation and spelling don’t matter, that what matters is that they express themselves. And it may also be time for university professors of English to stop claiming that there is no such thing as standard English. Are we really to believe that “Me and her was gonna do that” is as correct as “She and I were going to do that”? Just try speaking that way in your interview for a position in a serious business firm.
And, if I may be permitted just one business cliché, the bottom line here is that sloppy language does tend to reflect sloppy thinking. We can’t afford that in a world of this kind.
Feel free to pick my little essays apart in search of errors in English usage. However, if you find that I’ve ended a sentence with a preposition and call me on it, I’ll quote Winston Churchill: “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.”
Dictators and Dialectics
The celebrated Colombian poet and novelist Alvaro Mutis once received a wild ovation from a university crowd in Puerto Rico by announcing, “I w
ant you to know that I support the separation of Puerto Rico from the United States.” When the applause and cheering settled down, he continued, “ . . . so that it may be returned to its rightful owner, the King of Spain.” Mutis is a monarchist and, while he freely admits that myriad abominations have come out of the monarchies of history, he also maintains that they are far fewer and have caused far less harm to the common people than those of the dictatorships that have often replaced them. “Who,” he asks, “would replace a Czar Nicholas with a Joseph Stalin?”
Untold gallons of ink have been spilled over the question of what to do with countries that manage to rid themselves of pernicious governments but are clearly not ready for democracy. At one point in the nineteenth century, Mexico, having gained its independence from the Spanish monarchy, felt it wasn’t happy about US-style democracy and wanted to install another king. The resulting sad case of Maximilian and Carlotta is well known, and Mexico went from bad to worse and from worse to terrible. Even the dictator Porfirio Díaz lamented, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” Following its revolution, the country ended up with the cockeyed absurdity of rule by the “Institutional Revolutionary Party.”
Is Mutis right about this, that the world was too quick to toss aside its monarchies? Someone has commented that France’s government still consists of monarchy punctuated by strikes. (Another opinion has it that California’s government consists of apathy punctuated by petitions). An application of Hegel’s dialectic may be instructive. Let’s say monarchy is the thesis and some form of government by the people is the antithesis. What has been happening in many countries is that the synthesis turns out to be a form of absolute, king-like rule by a dictator sprung from the people. Think of Mussolini. One would be hard-pressed to summon up a more revolting image of vulgarity than that stock footage of him finishing a speech, crossing his arms and thrusting his chin and lower lip forward in a gesture of swinish arrogance.
Russia under the Bolsheviks, of course, was supposed to implement the Marxis
t dialectic: capitalism as t
he thesis, the communist state as the antithesis, and the final synthesis being the withering-away of the state, leaving the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” What happened in practice was a move directly from a monarchy into the monstrous dictatorship of a new Soviet elite.
In contrast to the Mussolini phenomenon, I had the privilege of being present when Alvaro Mutis was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature in historic Oviedo, Spain. As a student of Spanish history, I sat in amazed wonderment at the sight of the handsome and elegant Crown Prince Felipe, the future Philip IV, presenting Yehudi Menuhin with the prize for music. (Mstislav Rostropovich received one on that occasion as well.) To be sure, Felipe’s ancestors, Ferdinand and Isabella, had expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492, at least in part in order to take possession of the property of many of them. Christopher Columbus is said to have stood at the port of Seville watching them leave, knowing that their departure would finance his trip to the west. But now, 505 years later, the crown prince of Spain made it up to a representative of the Jewish race, at least in some small measure, as Queen Sofía, a good friend of Menuhin’s, sat in the balcony beaming.
One thinks too of St. Louis, king of France. On his deathbed in the home of a compassionate Muslim scribe, his last words were reported as “Beau Sire Dieu, gardez-moi ma gent” (roughly, “Good Father God, take care of my people for me”). Not “Oh, Lord, am I good enough to go to heaven?” or “Lord God, cut short my time in purgatory,” but “Take care of my people for me.”
I don’t know of anyone who believes it is possible any longer to restore the institution of absolute monarchy anywhere in the world, even though we love our monarchies as a symbol of the good that used to be in them. On being told that the queen mother of Denmark walked out of the palace grounds every day to buy fresh flowers, travel writer Bill Bryson asked in surprise, “Well, who watches out for her?”
The Dane whom he was talking with answered, “Why, we all do.”
What sort of solution might there be in all this? George Washington firmly rejected what would have been the irony of his having defeated King George of England only to become King George of America. However, even as he was very open to receiving the common people into his presence, he was insistent that the president must be treated with the utmost respect. Perhaps his was the best synthesis. Perhaps the new dialectic is this one: Thesis: monarchy; antithesis: democracy; synthesis: democratic government with the dignity of a monarchy.
This solution, though, leaves open the question of what would be best for a people who have just been freed from an unjust form of government. Many feel it would be a benevolent dictatorship, but those are hard to come by simply because, with few exceptions, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I’ve been told to choose my battles wisely, and frankly, I don’t have an opinion I’d feel comfortable fighting for.
Hypocrisy Is Good
We Gentiles miss the point of some passages in the Hebrew Scriptures because we fail to understand the Jewish sense of humor. The Book of Jonah, for example, is meant to be taken as the very funny story of a man who tries to escape from God by leaving the territory he thinks God is limited to, but then is very happy to learn that even the belly of a submerged fish is within God’s domain. At the end Jonah is grumpy because, even though his preaching has resulted in wholesale repentance (and who wouldn’t listen to a prophet in rags who smells like the belly of a fish?), he’s afraid God is going to spare the hated Ninevites. You see, if the destruction you foretell doesn’t take place, you’re to be stoned as a false prophet. So God has to give Jonah a lesson in perspective. Funny stories often have 
a serious point to them.
The Book of Judges, though, is a comic masterpiece, matching genre to subject matter. For the author, everything is topsy-turvy in Israel, and he writes accordingly. We read about a long series of judges, none of whom ever does any judging. You have a crack regiment of left-handed slingshot artists from the tribe of Benjamin, which means “son of my right hand.” There is Gideon, whose astounding military victory leads the people to ask him to be their king. He says, “Naw, I don’t think so. God is supposed to be our only king.” Then he goes home and names his son Abimelech, which means “my father is king.”
Chapter four of Judges has the story of a dramatic victory of God’s people over the Canaanites, but again everything is out of kilter. It seems the obvious choice of a man to lead the Israelite army in battle against them is Barak, whose name means “thunderbolt.” Barak doesn’t like the odds of a bunch of foot soldiers going out against 900 iron chariots, though, so a prophetess named Deborah, which means “bee,” stings him hard, essentially calling him a wimp, which he is. Finally he agrees to attack, but only if Deborah goes with him. 
Well, sir, this is the age of male dominance, and she says, “Fine, but I’m warning you that a woman will get the credit.”
The Lord fights for Israel and gives them so great a victory that even muy macho General Sisera of the Canaanite army flees for his life. His people have been on friendly terms with a segment of the Jews known as the Kenites. Their name is a little strange, because it seems to mean they were descended from Cain, who murdered his brother Abel. For this reason they were somewhat marginalized from mainline Israelite society. The Kenites were blacksmiths and did contract work for the Canaanites on their iron chariots and the like, so Sisera felt he would be safe in the tent of a lady named Jael. Well, Jael’s name means “mountain goat” (whose idea was it to put that on her birth certificate?), but it also sounds like “Yahweh is God.” Along with her family history of bashing people’s heads in, that should have been a clue for Sisera about where his friend’s ultimate loyalties 
lay.
Jael invites the exhausted Sisera in and says, essentially, “You look all in, Sisera honey. Lie down here and I’ll give you something to drink.” Well, it seems she gives him fermented goat’s milk, which on an empty stomach knocks him cold, whereupon this presumed descendant of the killer Cain takes a tent peg she has handy and drives it through his . . . temple. That’s what all the translations say, but the word is used only once in the Hebrew Bible and no one knows for sure what it means. The commentators are befuddled about why the author chose that puzzling term.
I’m convinced, though, that it’s one more play on words by the author of Judges, who would have made it big in the Borscht Belt. I think that, before this story was written down, it was told to soldiers sitting around their campfires on the nights preceding battles. Here’s the scene: Implicit in the narrative is the fact that General Thunderbolt is madly trying to catch Sisera and dispatch him. The phrase “through his ______” in Hebrew is b’raqoth, which sounds very much as if it contains Barak’s name. This woman has literally stolen his thunder. I’m sure the storyteller would pronounce b’raqoth with a knowing smile, and the troops would howl with laughter at the joke on the wimp. They would also be expected to get the message about the courage that was expected of them.
Actually, she probably caught him in the jugular.
So Jael the super-hero is a hypocrite. Pretending to be a friend of the Canaanite general who gives her and her husband employment, pretending to render him that famed Middle Eastern hospitality, offering him the sustenance that guarantees that she will protect him forever, she treacherously kills him. In time of war, hypocrisy can be useful.
Bottom-Line Hypocrisy
Religious hypocrisy is nothing new, of course, nor is it a rare aberration, since religion represents power, and power attracts the unscrupulous.
That does not mean religion itself is at fault. Asked about hypocrites in the church, Billy Graham confronted his questioner with the fact that, if he learned he had been given a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, he probably wouldn’t reject twenty-dollar bills from then on; he would just be more careful not to take the phony ones.
The fact is, it’s pretty hypocritical to reject religion because the church has phonies in it. That’s like rejecting democracy because a lot of politicians within the system are corrupt. (As Sir Winston put it, democracy is the worst form of government in the world—except for all the rest.)
Perhaps the greatest example of hypocrisy in the Hebrew Scriptures is the case of King David in his sordid 
affair with Bathsheba. When asked by the prophet Nathan what should be done about a rich man who has stolen a poor man’s beloved, and only, lamb, David explodes in fury, promising severe punishment. Nathan coolly tells him, “You are the man.” Perspective is a hard thing to have to face when you’re guilty of adultery and a cover-up involving murder.
The New Testament too has plenty of hypocrisy to tell us about. How about Jesus’ enemies, who, hearing that Jesus has raised Lazarus from the dead, decide to kill him? No challe
nging the veracity of the story, no questions about how God might want them to respond to such a miracle, just a decision to kill, as Peter expresses it soon afterward, the author of life. That makes about as much sense as some of the blather coming out of this presidential campaign. Did you know, for example, that Sarah Palin studied in Moscow? (Never mind that it was Moscow, Idaho.)
And isn’t it touching to hear the proponents of abortion on demand feigning concern about whether Palin would have enough time to care for her baby if she were vice president?
Still, it seems much of today’s most ground-shaking hypocrisy is coming out of what Christians tend to call the visible church (as opposed to the true church within it). A pastor I know was forced to deal with a conspiracy to convert his Presbyterian church into—get this—an Arminian dispensationalist charismatic Baptist church. (If you don’t know what those terms mean, suffice it to say they are quite foreign to Presbyterian tradition and would make John Knox turn purple.) The pastor asked one of the leaders of said conspiracy, “When you became a member of this church you swore to uphold its constitution, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“You lied, didn’t you?”
“Well, yes.”
“When you became an elder you again swore to uphold that constitution, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“You lied again, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What does that make you?”
. . . . . . . . . . .
Here’s an a fortiori argument: How shall we then classify the majority of delegates to the recent General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) (hereinafter PCUSA), who, having sworn that same oath, bypassed the neat Aristotelian chain of authority that is supposed to structure the denomination’s decisions and procedures? The Book of Order clearly states that authority moves up the scale from the local church sessions to the presbyteries to the synods to General Assembly to the constitution (consisting of the Book of Confessions and the Book of Order) to the Bible, and finally to Christ himself.
This year General Assembly chose to jump over at least two levels of authority above it and pass legislation forbidden by both the constitution and the Bible. That is, local churches are now free to perform marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples and ordain practicing homosexual pastors. What one thinks of homosexuality is not the primary issue here. The issue is that a body properly constituted as being under a higher authority has violated its constitutional position and behaved like some sort of autonomous council of bishops. The fact that a committee is now excising from the Book of Confessions a passage in the venerable Heidelberg Catechism
that forbids what they did does not excuse them. One wonders whether they will next begin cutting passages from the Bible that offend their postmodern sensibilities.
Incidentally, the story running around is that this order will not go into effect unless and until the presbyteries vote to abolish the section of the Book of Order that demands faithfulness in marriage or chastity in singleness. As I understand it on good authority, that vote is irrelevant, since the order in question is already in effect.
Presbyterians have always prided themselves on being the denomination of democratic order, but the body charged with maintaining that order has hypocritically shunted aside its responsibility in favor of being politically correct.
Before all this flap began, I was informed by a high official of the PCUSA that some presbyteries would not even speak to me about ordination for the simple reason that I graduated from a conservative seminary, more specifically a seminary known for espousing a theology in line with the PCUSA’s Book of Confessions.
Can you spot what’s wrong with this picture, children?
In short, the PCUSA’s General Assembly has in effect ceased to be truly Presbyterian. Furthermore, the very Greek word for “church,” ecclesia, means “called out,” specifically called out of the ruling world order. When a church body instead allows the value system of that world order to force it away from its own highest principles, can that body even call itself a church?
Or are they going to define “called out” as meaning called out of their own founding doctrines?