The 20-Year-Old Video Gamer
His braces and pimples have fled–
His face is now handsome instead–
Yes, and now it appears,
But for all his teen years,
We’ve seen only the back of his head!
20-Year-Old Video Gamer
A Review: Go Set a Watchman
by Emily Hedges*, September 3, 2015
Fans of To Kill a Mockingbird have already heard—Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman (Harper Collins July 2015) doesn’t reflect well on everyone’s hero, Atticus Finch. The timing couldn’t be worse. With the Charleston shootings still on our minds and the phrase “black lives matter” as a rallying cry instead of an obvious truth, we needed him. We needed Atticus’s courage and ethics to be a sign of hope. Maybe that’s why we were all so ready to accept the story of a found manuscript after all these years. We felt the gods were sending us a sign, like Mockingbird was for the Civil Rights South.
Watchman was written and set in the mid-1950’s in the aftermath of Brown vs. Board of Education. Atticus, who was willing to sacrifice everything to defy the racist establishment in Mockingbird, set in 1936, now sees a different threat looming over the South. Grown up Scout returns home and finds Atticus part of the Macomb County Citizens’ Council, an organization he knows is racist, but feels is their only protection against the federal government (and organizations like the NAACP) usurping the community’s right to determine what and how institutional changes are made.
The fact that Watchman is more about state’s rights than civil rights was always going to be disappointing to me and many fans of Mockingbird, but it’s the preachy way it’s done that makes the novel unpalatable. I think this happens because the story is more about groups than individuals. Where Watchman gives us “negros,” Mockingbird gave us Tom Robinson; where Watchman gives us racists, Mockingbird gave us Bob Ewell; where Watchman gives us the Old Sarum folks (poor whites), Mockingbird gave us Mr. Cunningham. I think this lack of compelling, fully developed characters is what forced Lee to resort to long stretches of didactic dialogue to carry her political message. This is particularly evident in Parts V, VI, and VII where Atticus’s brother, Dr. Jack, is portrayed as a two-dimensional interlocutor, a patient, patriarchal figure that forbears Jean Louise’s passionate tirades about race, guiding the exchanges with patronizing questions and long-winded homilies. There is nothing of the tender charm found in interactions between Scout and Atticus from Mockingbird.
For all its faults and disappointments, it’s almost worth reading Watchman just for Scout’s childhood flashbacks, a few precious scenes where we can once again romp through a lazy, hot summer afternoon with Scout, Jem and Dill. It’s like watching deleted scenes from your favorite movie. In these moments especially, and throughout the novel, Lee’s voice visits you like an old friend. Passages like this:
“Alexandra had been married for thirty-three years; if it had made any impression on her one way or another she never showed it. She had spawned one son, Francis, who in Jean Louise’s opinion looked and behaved like a horse, and who long ago left Macomb for the glories of selling insurance in Birmingham. It was just as well.”
I think it’s obvious that Watchman was the place Lee fine-tuned her characters and worked through plot and point-of-view. For that, we should appreciate that Watchman helped make Mockingbird a masterpiece. Appreciate it, but don’t publish it.
There was just too much money to be made. More than 1.1 million copies sold in the first week. As a recent New York Times op-ed pointed out, it’s no coincidence the manuscript was “discovered” within months after the death of Lee’s old protector (her sister Alice Lee) by her new protector, a woman who worked in Alice’s law office. Supposedly Lee, 89 years old and suffering from dementia in a nursing home, granted consent.
Since publication everyone has wondered, and worried, how Go Set a Watchman will taint the legacy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Many have said they don’t think it will, but I don’t agree. I can’t help feeling like a character from my other favorite American novel, The Great Gatsby, a character whose “count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.” I wish I could go back and un-read this book. Maybe then I wouldn’t feel guilty of shooting a mockingbird, because Atticus was right—it is a sin.
*A native of Muskogee, OK, Emily Hedges is a published writer in a master’s program at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. Emily lives in Lebanon, NH with husband Joe and three beautiful children. Thank you, Emily, for setting the bar for insightful literary criticism and for trusting Views from the Edge to publish your work. – Gordon
“Jesus states that we cannot serve two masters, God and wealth. … Jesus tells us what the ‘protocol’ is, on which we will be judged: I was hungry, I was thirsty, I was in prison, I was sick, I was naked and you helped me, clothed me, visited me, took care of me. (Matthew 25) Whenever we do this to one of our brothers, we do this to Jesus. Caring for our neighbour; for those who are poor, who suffer in body and in soul, for those who are in need. This is the touchstone. …Poverty takes us away from idolatry and from feeling self-sufficient. …the Gospel does not condemn the wealthy, but the idolatry of wealth, the idolatry that makes people indifferent to the call of the poor. …
‘The Church [is] everyone’s Church, and particularly the Church of the poor.’ (Pope John XXIII)
In the following years, this…
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Eugene Field
is Spinning in his Grave
The computer, smartphone, and iPad too
Are all that this child could want.
With Clash of Clans, and Auto-Theft 2,
I’ll always be so smart
School studies can suffer–no homework tonight–
I might watch a little TV,
But my brain is exploding, I’m feeling all right,
There’s nothing the matter with me,
I’m happy as I can be:
With computer,
Smartphone
And Pad.
Now Mother and Father will sputter and fuss–
They don’t understand at all.
For Granny and Gramps said, “Read! You Must!
Or all your grades will fall!”
But we take exams on computers at school,
No notes, but txts we snd!
The Principal axed the No Gizmos rule
So our school-wide strike would end–
“Unions Forever, my friend!”
With computer,
Smartphone,
And Pad!
John Franklin Stephens
The following is a guest post in the form of an open letter from Special Olympics athlete and global messenger John Franklin Stephens to Ann Coulter after this tweet during last night’s Presidential debate.
Dear Ann Coulter,
Come on Ms. Coulter, you aren’t dumb and you aren’t shallow. So why are you continually using a word like the R-word as an insult?
I’m a 30 year old man with Down syndrome who has struggled with the public’s perception that an intellectual disability means that I am dumb and shallow. I am not either of those things, but I do process information more slowly than the rest of you. In fact it has taken me all day to figure out how to respond to your use of the R-word last night.
I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied…
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Urgent partisan e-mail messages from “The War Room” arrive regularly, rallying me against the enemy.
Interesting choice of words in a democratic republic.
Playing MahJong on my iPad, ads featuring a seductive woman in a white dress pop up coaxing me to play Medieval “War Games” complete with castles, knights, spears, and armor. Lately the ad has turned to entice me to “Come conquer the world with me“.
Allusions to war, military images that prey on fear with the illusion of conquering whatever we’re afraid of are increasingly prevalent. So are subliminal messages that liken the United States to a walled Medieval castle, like Donald Trump’s southern border wall and maybe, a northern wall, as well, which Scott Walker called “a legitimate issue for us to look at” yesterday on Meet the Press. Just think of it – a country completely secure with an impenetrable wall, just like a medieval castle.
Next comes the moat outside the castle wall.
Meanwhile, inside the castle, our citizens rush to the gun shows while we kill each other at an alarming rate. A 90 year-old homebound man on oxygen sits all day in his Barco-Lounger allowing nothing else on his television than old Westerns and World War II documentaries. In other homes children play “War Games”on their Wii, iPhones and iPads while the parents play soldier in their partisan War Rooms.
“You dwell in whitened castles with deep and poisoned moats and cannot hear the curses that fill you children’s throats.” – Maya Angelou
In a world where what passes for news are articles about the megalomaniac Donald Trump, the Kardashians, and the Jenners, we occasionally find something worth consideration.
On August 25 a funeral mass was celebrated in the Italian town of Montefortino at the chiesa della Madonna dell’Ambro. The recipient of the mass was a Capuchin friar, Padre Pietro Lavini who lived as a hermit in the Sibylline Mountains near Rubbiano Montefortino and along the Gola dell’Infernaccio, the Gorge of Hell. A thousand people attended the service of the man who died two weeks prior, on August 9, 2015.
Why did they come to this mass? What did Padre Pietro accomplish with his life as a hermit?
Padre Pietro Lavini, photo from Santuario Madonna dell’Ambro
In 1971, Padre Pietro discovered the ruins of the Eremo di Santo Leonardo, an abandoned 12th century Benedictine monastery in the wilds of the Sibyllines. All…
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Question Mrk
Sending a son or daughter off to college is hard for a parent.
Steve captured the sentiment in this piece “written in 1988 when my son, Daniel, left home to go to Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.”
To choose a title first is such an act
of pride (as if one knows just where a thought
will go.) Is “Saying Goodbye to Our Son”
a better choice than “Letting Go?” And when
is specificity superior
to breadth? Do only parents know the fear
of being left behind when children leave?
Is every parting death, a tiny grave?
A title should invite…entice…alert
the reader to the text. But what comes next?
That is the question. Eyes will open wide
and see new truth. Will truth lead to the good?
We hug and hope and wave goodbye. The path
twists back and then away (“A Brand New Birth?)
We used to pass notes while in school,
The teachers said “No! There’s a rule!”
But students today
Will have their own say:
A smart phone helps them play the fool!
We hope these lines, shared by a friend, bring a chuckle.
“When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it.” – Clarence Darrow
“If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates.” – Jay Leno
“The problem with political jokes is they get elected.” -Henry Cate, VII
“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.” -Aesop
“If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these State of the Union Speeches, there wouldn’t be any inducement to go to heaven.” -Will Rogers
“Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.” –John Quinton
“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.” -Oscar Ameringer
“I offer my opponents a bargain: if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them.” -Adlai Stevenson, campaign speech, 1952
“A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country.” -Tex Guinan
“I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.” -Charles de Gaulle
“Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.” -Doug Larson
“If you want a real friend that you can trust in Washington – get a dog.” -Harry Truman
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