In other political history, today is the first appearance of the Elephant as a symbol for the G.O.P. Thomas Nast drew it for Harper's Weekly. In this picture you see a donkey (the Democrats, and not meant in a flattering way) wearing a lion suit and attempting to scare all the other animals and the Republicans (also, not meant in a flattering way) so they won’t vote for a third term of U.S. Grant. Hmmmm …. let’s see, a presidential election where the Democrats are warning the Republicans about a third term of the current president. This rings a bell …
Billy Graham, the Protestant Pope, is 90 today. I don't know what they're going to do when he dies, but I hear Oprah is in the running.
Albert Camus, the French author and existentialist (although he denied that he is one), was born on this day in 1913. He's another one of those guys that somber, black-clad, college students with peach fuzz carry around in their man-purses and discuss in hushed tones. But he's really good! I mean, really! He's written many novels, but I suggest starting with something small, like the essays Absurd Man or Myth of Sisyphus. Here's a very brief explanatory primer to put his writing in context. And, if anyone wants to know what to get me for Giftmas (as the commercials have already started), the Unemployed Philosophers Guild makes this totally rockin' watch. The second hand is Sisyphus, eternally rolling his rock up his hill in Tartarus. Which, I suppose, makes Sisyphus the first rock ‘n’ roller. AHAHAHAHA!!! Sorry.
Speaking of rock ‘n’ roll and Giftmas, today is also the 65th birthday of Joni Mitchell. What does she have to do with Giftmas? Well, she’s from Canada. Actually, that has nothing to do with anything (except to make me wonder why so many great musicians are from Canada). But she did write one of the all-time greatest Giftmas songs, River. She’s an interesting person. Did you know she started smoking at nine? And she put a child up for adoption, which she wrote about in the song Little Green:
Child with a child pretending
Weary of lies you are sending home
So you sign all the papers in the family name
You're sad and you're sorry, but you're not ashamed
Little green, have a happy ending
Mitchell was often accused of being a commie sympathizer. One of the commies she is accused of sympathizing with is Leon Trotsky, born on this day in 1879. Trotsky was the better half of the Trotsky/Lenin duo (pictured here in Diego Rivera’s mural, Man at the Crossroads. You may remember Rivera as the husband of Frida Kahlo with whom Trotsky had “a thing” as they say in Mother Russia.) Trotsky was rendered the ill-fated Snowball in Orwell’s Animal Farm. The West pretty much considered him a demon, while the Russian proletariat, at least at first, considered him a saint. He once said:
As long as I breathe I hope. As long as I breathe I shall fight for the future, that radiant future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness!
That sounds like someone …
Another Russian, whom I like much better, died on this day in 1910. Leo Tolstoy, known for books such as War and Peace and Anna Karenna, is less known for others, like The Kingdom of God Is Within You, in which he argued that Christianity is not compatible with violence in any form. He especially admired the Quakers:
Further acquaintance with the labors of the Quakers and their works--with Fox, Penn, and especially the work of Dymond (published in 1827)--showed me not only that the impossibility of reconciling Christianity with force and war had been recognized long, long ago, but that this irreconcilability had been long ago proved so clearly and so indubitably that one could only wonder how this impossible reconciliation of Christian teaching with the use of force, which has been, and is still, preached in the churches, could have been maintained in spite of it.
He believed in a kind of Christian anarchy:
The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that Anarchy can be instituted by a revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power…There can be only one permanent revolution - a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.
Predictably, most Christians didn’t listen to him. But as he said:
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
Some did, including Mohandas Ghandi. The two men began a correspondence after Ghandi read an essay by Tolstoy entitled Letter to a Hindu. Tolstoy had been influenced by Henry David Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience. He, in turn through The Kingdom of God Is Within You,, led Ghandi to take his stance of non-violent civil disobedience. And Ghandi greatly influenced a young, black, Southern Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. I believe our geography book calls this “movement.”
In another, strange connection, Tolstoy first heard about the Quakers from William Lloyd Garrison, an abolitionist printer in the U.S. Garrison was friends with another abolitionist printer, Elijah P. Lovejoy, who was shot dead by a pro-slavery mob on this day in 1837 while attempting to protect his printing shop from being destroyed a third time.
Tolstoy himself died of the cold (an odd thing for a Russian) while on his way to visit his sister. He was buried in a peasant grave by his own wishes. He is another man with an impressive beard, which you can also appreciate in this colorized version. But I especially love this photo of him with his granddaughter.
Finally, Hannah Szenes died at the young age of 23 on this day in 1944. She was a Jewish woman who had parachuted into Yugoslavia to help save the Jews of Hungary who were, I understand, quite hungry. She was promptly captured and executed. She wrote several poems, capturing her mental state during this time. This was written when she made her decision to go:
My God, My God, I pray that these things never end,
The sand and the sea,
The rush of the waters,
The crash of the Heavens,
The prayer of Man.
אלי, אלי, שלא יגמר לעולם
החול והים
רישרוש של המים
ברק השמים
תפילת האדם
The voice called, and I went.
I went, because the voice called.
The following lines are the last song she wrote after she was parachuted into a partisan camp in Yugoslavia:
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor's sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
The following lines were found in Hanna's death cell after her execution:
One - two - three... eight feet long
Two strides across, the rest is dark...
Life is a fleeting question mark
One - two - three... maybe another week.
Or the next month may still find me here,
But death, I feel is very near.
I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.
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