Follow Me on Twitter!

Yeah, I'm going to try microblogging as a means of communicating with various constituencies from now till 30 June 2010, when I step down as chair of the SUNY Fredonia University Senate. While CitizenSE won't become an all governance all the time blog, it may get updated slightly more regularly than it was last academic year. We'll see!

All Future Assignments Must Be Facebook Pages...at Least in '09

Be sure to check the comments, too. Seriously, if all of us assign this every course we teach in '09, we'll have populated teh intertubes with so many entertaining plot summaries that no college student will be inclined to pad an analytical or interpretive essay with needless plot summary...evah!

Cell Phone Novels: Medium, Genre, Movement, or Fad?

Enquiring minds want to know! (That's "all the news that's fit to text" for you Grey Lady fans.)

Have mobile phone novels become a phenomenon in the English-speaking world yet, or are they still popular only among innovators in Japan, South Korea, and China? Looks like India may be the leading edge for the Anglophones of the world.

I think Hawthorne would approve. Even his sketches tended to be long, though, with complex sentences. Maybe not.

Dear New Readers via Inside Higher Ed

Yes, this blog is "chiefly about Hawthorne matters." Just not lately.

But I can say that Hawthorne would have appreciated the writing in the latest J-Drama that the Full Metal Archivist and I have been watching together on Veoh. So much of Bara no nai Hanaya reminds me of The Scarlet Letter--in particular, its plot compression and dramatic economy, its probing of the ethical tensions within and between different forms of love, its bending of the conventions of the romance to address the social tensions of its day--but it puts a dead mother in the place of the vacated seat of the patriarch. Come to think of it, if The Wire is tv's best modernist novel, then Bara no nai Hanaya may well make a case for the superiority of Hawthornean romance for television today. (How's that for a provocative thesis about the relative value of one show I haven't seen at all and another whose final episode I literally can't wait to be fansubbed? Who says evaluative criticism is dead?)

Once the semester is over, I promise to return to research blogging, which mostly means Hawthorne blogging. Looking over my posts from the first few months of CitizenSE's existence, I'm surprised--and delighted--at how many threads I left hanging. But until then, this will remain the academic/family life blog it has morphed into since our return from Japan last August. Feel free to look around the place and leave a comment, and thanks for dropping by.

Speaking of Storytelling...

What kind of mental state do you have to be in to believe that the consequences of doing this won't be worse than just taking the damn test?

Maybe I should be assigning "Fancy's Show Box" in my Postcolonial Hawthorne class to help my students deal with the trauma of getting an afternoon off on a nice sunny day. We've already read "Young Goodman Brown," which seems relevant in a different way.

Born on the 4th of July...

...was one Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1804. Happy Birthday! I really wonder what you'd make of the state of the union.

[Update 7/9/07: and Ralph Luker didn't note it. For shame! But he did point us to this Joseph Nye piece earlier, so I take that back. By the way, I will return to CitizenSE blogging as soon as I finish my last talk. I have to deliver it Saturday and get it to the translator before then, so hopefully that will be sooner rather than later.]

What Would Hawthorne Say About YouTube?

Seeing as how he didn't put his older kids in school almost the entire time his family was in England, only intermittently hired someone to watch/teach them, and that he and Sophia's "home schooling" efforts were desultory by today's standards, I think he would have appreciated it as a way to broaden his kids' horizons. Onechan certainly does and it's fun to watch with her.

What Would Hawthorne Say to Aaron Barlow and Scott McLemee?

Aaron, sorry for what I said about your ancestor in "P's Correspondence"--I was trying to do a Poe send-up, and, well, it took on a life of its own. Actually, I was just trying to answer Scott's question about 9/11 novels by reference to the impossibility of treating the Mexican War in epic poetry. Things happened. No hard feelings?

What Would Hawthorne Say about the War on Newspaper Book Reviews?

I think Hawthorne would find the current campaign to save book reviewing (and book review sections in U.S. newspapers) at once inspiring and ironic. In his day, after all, before a national literary canon was established or instituted in high schools and higher education (particularly at the start of his career in the 1820s), critics' and reviewers' role was chiefly to call for a national literature, make suggestions as to subject matter (such Puritans, Indians, the Revolutionary War) and mode (especially Scott-inspired historical romances), and judge the latest entries. Even by 1850, however, Herman Melville could hyperbolically claim, in "Hawthorne and His Mosses," that "There are hardly five critics in America, and several of them are asleep." So the fact that there are so many courses devoted to American literature, so many awards for American authors, so many American book reviewers in print and on-line, and so many American books published each year would be of great satisfaction to the author who three times interrupted his literary career for government posts to better support his family. As an editor, reviewer, and contributor to the "little magazines" of his day (and some of the bigger ones, too), Hawthorne would understand well how all the nodes in the literary publishing network need to be working together for authors' efforts to be properly distributed, appreciated, evaluated, and analyzed. So he no doubt would have signed any petition put in front of him. But he would have marvelled at how far American literature, criticism, and book reviewing have come since the mid-19th C.

Hawthorne Would Approve

No time for serious posting, but I did want to encourage you to point your browsers toward The Joy of Text, Part I, in which the Hobgoblin has cast Hawthorne in a leading role in a smashing romantic comedy. Looks like the start of a series--next episode may star Melville. Stay tuned!

It's a particularly pleasant counterpoint to this Hawthorne/Melville pairing from Robert Farley that I can't bear not to link to again. Hawthorne would encourage his more paranoid wingnut readers to check out "The Devil in Manuscript" and his second preface to The Scarlet Letter if they really want to get scared about the power of words and texts.

He'd also approve of student blogs, like "the air of ideas is the only air worth breathing", Dave Lester's Finding America, and Katie Rice's post on "The Birth-mark."

Conversations with Grandpa Jack, Part Two

Last Sunday, I closed a rambling piece by suggesting that Hawthorne would have problems with critics who excused his racial politics by reference to what Hug the Shoggoth scholar-blogger Daniel Gall criticized from a major Lovecraft scholar as "the temper of the times." Or, as I wish I would have told my grandfather--who raised similar concerns about my race and Hawthorne dissertation project--when I had the chance, "'Everybody was doing it' is no excuse, and, anyway, they weren't--and Hawthorne knew this better than anyone."

Well, as I read Gall's ongoing critiques of fan/scholarly attempts to canonize Lovecraft without adequately engaging his racism, I was reminded of the way I opened my manuscript's first chapter, "At Hawthorne's Tomb." For even though Hawthorne's canonization hasn't been in doubt for decades, the case for it was shakier for the first 50 years after his death than critics like Jane Tompkins and Richard Brodhead have argued. So first I'll give you all the first few paragraphs from that chapter and then come back around to other things I wish I could have told my grandfather on Hawthorne and race.

Not long after Nathaniel Hawthorne’s funeral on May 24, 1864, in Concord, Massachusetts, a trans-Atlantic discussion of the man, his works, and his legacy--a discussion, begun in the 1820s with the first review of Fanshawe, that has continued to this day--entered a new phase. In fact, there was an edge to this discussion that is not often recalled today. To be sure, eulogies and tributes from friends and colleagues that attested to Hawthorne’s genius poured out almost immediately. Arlin Turner reports in his biography of Hawthorne that, in addition to the printing of a letter by Hawthorne’s wife Sophia,

Holmes wrote for the July Atlantic a tribute, along with an account of his last interview with Hawthorne . . . saying in conclusion that in Hawthorne’s works he had “left enough to keep his name in remembrance as long as the language in which he shaped his deep imaginations is spoken by human lips.” Lowell declared afterward that Hawthorne’s was “the rarest creative imagination of the century, the rarest in some ideal respects since Shakespeare.” Longfellow sent Mrs. Hawthorne a poem, to be published in the Atlantic for August, with the title “Concord, May 23, 1864,” in which he echoes their forty years of mutually generous friendship. . . .

And in the nearly two decades before the 1883 Riverside Edition of Hawthorne’s collected works was to appear, a host of other tributes, reminiscences, retrospectives, and reviews appeared in the American and English intellectual press, many of which were occasioned by the posthumous publications of Hawthorne’s letters, notebooks, and unfinished romances. Perhaps it is the success of these early efforts to canonize and institutionalize Hawthorne that leads us to forget how contested his literary status was in the midst of the Civil War. Indeed, a mere day after his funeral, Hawthorne and his politics were attacked in obituaries in the Providence Journal and the Springfield Republican. Uppermost in many minds in the summer of 1864, that is, was the question of Hawthorne’s attitudes toward slavery and abolition. In fact, nothing threatened his literary reputation more at the time of his death than what Ralph Waldo Emerson in his notebooks referred to as Hawthorne’s “perverse politics and unfortunate friendship for that paltry Franklin Pierce.”

To understand the source of Emerson’s vehemence, we must turn to the publication of Hawthorne’s 1852 campaign biography Life of Franklin Pierce, which revealed to a national audience what his family, close friends, and careful readers of “Time’s Portraiture” (1837), “Jonathan Cilley” (1838), “The Sister Years” (1839), “The Hall of Fantasy” (1843), “Earth’s Holocaust” (1844), “The Snow-Image” (1850), and The Blithedale Romance (1852) already knew: not only was Hawthorne highly skeptical toward the myriad reform movements of his day, but he was also a staunch anti-abolitionist and supporter of the Compromise of 1850. Consider these passages from the Pierce campaign biography:

[I]t was impossible for [Pierce] not to take his stand as the unshaken advocate of Union, and of the mutual steps of compromise which that great object unquestionably demanded. The fiercest, the least scrupulous, and the most consistent of those who battle against slavery, recognize the same fact that he does. They see that merely human wisdom and human efforts cannot subvert it, except by tearing to pieces the Constitution, breaking the pledges which it sanctions, and severing into distracted fragments that common country, which Providence brought into one nation through a continued miracle of almost two hundred years, from the first settlement of the American wilderness until the Revolution. In the days when, a young member of Congress, he first raised his voice against agitation, Pierce saw these perils and their consequences. He considered, too, that the evil would be certain, while the good was, at best, a contingency, and (to the clear, practical foresight with which he looked into the future) scarcely so much as that;--attended as the movement was, and must be, during its progress, with the aggravated injury of those whose condition it aimed to ameliorate, and terminating, in its possible triumph—if such possibility there were--with the ruin of the two races which now dwelt together in greater peace and affection, than had ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf.

Of course, there is another view of all these matters. The theorist may take that view in his closet; the philanthropist by profession may strive to act upon it, uncompromisingly, amid the tumult and warfare of his life. But the statesman of practical sagacity--who loves his country as it is, and evolves good from things as they exist, and who demands to feel his firm grasp upon a better reality before he quits the one already gained--will be likely here, with all the greatest statesmen of America, to stand in the attitude of a conservative. Such, at all events, will be the attitude of Franklin Pierce. . . .

Those Northern men, therefore, who deem the great cause of human welfare as represented and involved in this present hostility against southern institutions--and who conceive that the world stands still, except so far as that goes forward--these, it may be allowed, can scarcely give their sympathy or their confidence to the subject of this memoir. But there is still another view, and probably as wise a one. It looks upon Slavery as one of those evils, which Divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream. There is no instance, in all history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end; but the progress of the world, at every step, leaves some evil or wrong on the path behind it, which the wisest of mankind, of their own set purpose, could never have found a way to rectify.

Hawthorne himself was certainly aware of how controversial his views were in a New England that was becoming increasingly anti-slavery following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. In October 1852, in a letter to Horatio Bridge, he acknowledged that “the biography has cost me hundreds of friends, here at the north, who had a purer regard for me than Frank Pierce or any other politician ever gained, and who drop off from me like autumn leaves, in consequence of what I say on the slavery question. But they were my real sentiments, and I do not now regret that they are on record.” And in the following decade Hawthorne would not publicly acknowledge any significant change of heart or mind on “the slavery question,” as the 1853 publication of “The Pygmies,” the 1860 publication of The Marble Faun (particularly its controversial preface), the 1862 publication of his travel narrative “Chiefly About War Matters” in The Atlantic Monthly, and the 1863 dedication of Our Old to Franklin Pierce indicated. His composition of acerbic, purportedly “editorial” commentary in footnotes to the most controversial passages in “Chiefly About War Matters” dramatizes the extent to which he expected his views would be condemned as treasonous.

By the summer of 1864, then, to assess Hawthorne’s life and works was to assess his racial politics. As we shall see, this issue has resurfaced several times since then. In order to make sense of its most recent reappearance on the critical horizon since the 1960s, it is crucial that we familiarize ourselves with the terms of debate in the midst of the Civil War, for it is surprising how influential they have remained long after most people have forgotten them. Thus, in this chapter, after examining one key moment in the Civil War-era debates over Hawthorne’s racial politics and their relation to his literary status, I survey the ways that contemporary critics have approached similar questions and problems, and consider what happens when different protocols for reading Hawthorne’s racial politics collide in interpretations of “Roger Malvin’s Burial.” My aim in doing this is twofold. First, I wish to provide a preliminary map of the terrain on which different positions for understanding Hawthorne’s politics and poetics have contended. Second, I wish to focus our attention on what is at stake in such contentions over Hawthorne’s racial politics and broach something of the complexities that emerge when a given tale is read in relation to antebellum racial formations and projects.

This chapter, then, is more about how decades of criticism and scholarship have tried to make sense of Hawthorne’s racial politics than it is about what his politics actually were. The latter is a task I take up in the next chapter. Here, I consider what it is that readers do when they set out to analyze Hawthorne’s racial politics. What results is a chapter that falls somewhere between a polemical review of the literature and a historicized study of the racial politics of Hawthorne’s literary reputation as it has changed since the 1830s. At a time when we are still trying to ascertain the extent of Paul de Man’s collaboration with Nazi occupation forces in World-War-II-era Belgium and figure out what, if anything, his actions then have to do with his subsequent literary theorizing, it is particularly important that we reconsider the case of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Doing so just might provide a means of acknowledging the particularly American scandals of supplantation, enslavement, and conquest.

I'll avoid going all the way to lazy blogging Chapter 1 as I've been doing Chapter 2, but I do want to build on what I'm doing in both chapters here. For my original idea for this post was to argue that Hawthorne would have argued that certain historical figures' beliefs and actions are noteworthy in the present for what they reveal about their times--and that Lovecraft scholars who wish to see him treated alongside rather than beneath the modernist canons of early twentieth-century American literature would do well to analyze him in this way rather than defend the indefensible or seek to quarantine it off from the main body of his work (as the critics Gall criticizes seem to be doing).

But then I had a second thought--is this move possible only for authors who, like Hawthorne, have already been canonized? To say, as I argue throughout my intro and first two chapters, that Hawthorne is most interesting to me precisely for what his writings reveal about his times and the critics who attempt to analyze both, is, after all, not the strongest case that can be made for why others should be interested in Hawthorne in the first place. To some extent, I am depending on others already having an interest in Hawthorne--and those interests being institutionalized for long enough that I can count on them to persist.

And yet, I do think this move has a good chance of working for my manuscript's primary audience--people who have dismissed Hawthorne as a Dead White Male Author No Longer Worth Engaging and who have taken part in dismantling the idea of canonicity, constructing new canons, or were educated in either tradition--that is, a good portion of the academic book-buying public. If I'm right, then my original advice for aspiring Lovecraft scholars still holds.

And it turns out this is, after all, particularly Hawthornian advice. For when faced with critical injunctions to help construct a new American literature based on American history, models, and matters, he attempted to avoid writing patriotic pap or antiquarian trivia--he selected figures who, he felt, would illuminate their times and his. By focusing my manuscript's first half on an antebellum figure who is in some ways marginal to the key concerns of those working in Black Studies, multiethnic studies, critical race studies, and postcolonial studies--and who doesn't present nearly as many possibilities for inspiring examples as the overlooked writers who have been recovered or the canonized writers who have been reexamined by Americanists of the past two generations, I'm trying to focus our attention on what we still don't understand well about antebellum racial politics, and our own.

This is actually territory I mapped out in my Kyushu American Literature Society talk from last December and it takes me back to the reasons why I started this blog in the first place around the same time. There was so much I had to leave out of that talk that I wanted to explore further, I decided to put it in the blog, instead. So it might be time to unveil my plans for the manuscript and discuss how they have changed from the early '90s, when I first conceived this race and Hawthorne project whose incubation and delivery have been so, uh, long in coming. But as the second week of classes starts tomorrow and I have to do some blogging this week for my Postcolonial Hawthorne students, I will have to do some two-a-days or otherwise fiddle with my programming schedule to fit my teaching and research needs in the same virtual space. Seems unavoidable, as the timing is right for both.

What Would Hawthorne Say About "The Temper of the Times"?

Back when I was still writing my dissertation--actually, even earlier, as I was formulating the project and beginning my research--my grandfather and I began a series of conversations on it. "It's on race and Hawthorne," I would say, and eventually we would get around to the questions of presentism and relativism, of blame and responsibility, of my goals and my methods. No matter how many ways I would try to argue the point, he would never quite move away from his position that it was unfair for us today to judge Hawthorne for his racism. I was reminded of these conversations as I was reading Hug the Shoggoth's first full-length race and Lovecraft post, in which Daniel Gall takes on the rhetorical evasions of a representative moment in Lovecraft scholarship. The critic he responds to sounds remarkably like my grandfather, so I was quite interested in the manner of the take-down. You should be, too--in case you haven't noticed, I've been linking to HtS often enough lately to probably have caused google page rank to start discounting my links--so go back and click on that first link if you must choose only one.

OK, now that you're back, let me first recap some of my standard responses to my grandfather. I didn't use these exact words, but I don't remember my exact words from the time, and as I have now for several years been forced to carry on these conversations on my own, I'll never be able to get him to remind me of them.

1) How far are you willing to take your historical relativism? To the point where it becomes a moral relativism? Because a lot of philosophers would have a problem with your doing that--including your son. (Yes, my dad is a philosopher. And I responded to my mom's "Whatever you choose to do, don't become a philosopher" [probably not an exact quotation, come to think of it] by getting as close as I could in college with an English and Math double major, and then getting into literary and political theory in a big way in grad school, and then by debating philosophers on my political blog, but, yes, mom, thankfully I am not a philosopher. Which reminds me of my dad's joke about the reactions he gets when he tells people he is a philosopher: long pause, then, "So what are some of your sayings?" His version of the "Well, I guess I'd better watch my language, then," that I tend to get when I come out as an English professor off-campus.)

2) Even by the standards of his time, Hawthorne's racism was being judged. It takes a very reductive view of a past age to posit unanimity on any major social issue--and what was more tense than racial politics in the antebellum era?

3) And speaking of "his time," is it really so different than ours that we can't attempt to evaluate it? Isn't such an attempt also an attempt to evaluate our own time, as well? It's not like I'm trying to let us off the hook by positing racism as a past problem--quite the opposite, in fact.

Did I mention that these conversations were taking place in the wake and shadow of my first long-term relationship, with an Afro-Caribbean immigrant whom my grandmother was vehemently opposed to my dating? Not to mention the nativism and anti-semitism my grandparents surely weathered since their arrival in the States before the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act shut down immigration from southern and eastern Europe and Asia, or the fact that they lived through what Matthew Frye Jacobson writes about in Whiteness of a Different Color....

Well, Sunday is almost over, so let me just quickly mention a tack I never took: Hawthorne himself never bought into using the times to excuse the individual for his beliefs and actions. At least I don't think I took it. I wish my grandfather were still around so I could be sure.

What Would Hawthorne Say About The Blogocalypse Carnival?

Why, "read it," of course!

[Update: Oh, and "You're an idiot for not linking to this gem in it." My only excuse is I'm behind on my bloggy visiting and too caught up in not-quite-live-blogging the LPGA's first major to take time to figure out how to fit it in my Douglas Adams meta-epic simile there.]

[Update 4/3/07: Plus, "You should just give up blogging and leave it to those who are incapable of writing a bad post."]

What Would Hawthorne Say About This?

Pandagon Weekend Blogging: sweetness and light from Berube.
WAAGNFNP Weekend Blogging: defeat and despair from JP Stormcrow.

Just wondering.

Hawthorne on the WAAGNFNP

It's hard to say what Hawthorne would say about the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party. I suspect part of him would have enjoyed it and part of him would have condemned it. As the author of "Earth's Holocaust" and "Chiefly About War Matters," he may well have earned himself a proleptically posthumous membership, though.

In Which My Self-Nomination for Father of the Year Is Not To Be Taken Literally

Following Bitch Ph.D., I have a story to tell y'all about the onechan and me. We were at the mall in Kashii--the place where last time we went, we all got seriously sick for the first time in Japan that I remember--and had quite the scare. I lost our sansai onechan for about 15 minutes in a large clothing store. No harm done--a nice lady working there saw her crying, calmed her down, took her to the bathroom (because she said she told her to go oshiko), got her name and age out of her (thank you, yochien, for helping us drill that into her!), and paged us. So here's what Hawthorne would say--exercising his usual artistic licence--in his nomination speech for my Father of the Year Award, describing the first words the tsuma said to me upon catching up with her and the onechan:

"Ethan, meet Wakefield."

Thank you, thank you. Next show at 9:30.

Seriously, it would have been the worst 15 minutes of my life, but during a crisis--like, say, last week when the juukagetsu imoto was choking on a slice of cabbage that onechan and I were grating for their mama that had fallen from the grater onto the floor and gone straight into her mouth when we weren't looking--I'm scarily calm, I've discovered to my relief (better than panicking, right?) and dismay (why so many crises?). Still, the one distracting thought that slipped through my crisis mode this afternoon was the mental image of onechan wandering off (to look at some of those skirts we had just gone to the changing room to tell her mama she liked, I thought, while I was fumbling with the mall stroller and our stroller and agreeing with the tsuma that imoto and I would chase onechan down--but no!) and the thought that that would be my last sight of her.

Phew. Thank god Japanese workers take service so damn seriously and that Fukuoka is so family-friendly. I am truly baka.

What Would Hawthorne Say About a Two-Week Blog Hiatus?

Not much. Nothing compared to the dents on his writing schedule caused by Brook Farm or his various political appointments. Don't sweat it. (He'd probably appreciate the irony that CitizenSE's average daily hit count didn't decline all that much over the past two weeks, as well.)

Mrs. Hutchinson, Anyone? Or, Another View of Amanda

Shorter "What Would Hawthorne Say About L'Affaire Marcotte?":

Conclusion 1: The Latter-Day Puritanism of the right-wing critics of John Edwards's new bloggers (ably led by such fair and balanced sources as Michelle Malkin and Bill Donohue), with their attempts to affix such scarlet letters as AC (anti-Catholic), IH (intolerant hypocrite), and PM (potty mouth) to them, are part of a long-standing yet ever-more-efficient smear machine of "public women" (cf. Anita Hill, Lani Guinier, Patricia Williams....);

Conclusion 2: The Concern Trolling stance taken in the course of the national media's transmission of the right-wing noise machine (in such beacons of journalistic integrity and quality as The New York Times and Time) are a repetition of Hawthorne's narrators' strategies of representing Anne Hutchinson in "Mrs. Hutchinson" and Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter;

Conclusion 3: Lauren Berlant's analysis of the "Another View of Hester" chapter of Hawthorne's novel in The Anatomy of National Fantasy suggests that, as easily mockable as both Greater Wingnuttia and the corporate media are, the traditions they are drawing on run all the way back to the antinomian crisis, if not further, so we need to call attention to this bigger picture as we continue to beat down the manufactured scandal du jour.

Now to see about recovering the original post that new Blogger ate when I tried to save it!

What Would Hawthorne Say About the Mooninite Invasion of Boston?

Besides my AP Chemistry final project--a science fiction/detective story set on one of the moons of Jupiter--and a brief Far Side-induced cartooning stint in high school and college that went by the name of The Gray Area, I have little to show in the area of creative endeavors and less potential. So rather than risk Seiglering any of Hawthorne's tales, I'm offering "shorter" versions here for your reading pleasure, because, as you know, CitizenSE is nothing if not a small finger taking the pulse of the American Dream. And, no, it's not the same finger that Ignignokt uses.

Shorter "My Kinsman, Major Molineux": One of Ted Turner's younger relatives comes to Boston and, after some enigmatic encounters with various natives, witnesses him being paraded through town "in tar-and-feathery dignity"; a "shrewd youth," he eventually follows an onlooker's advice to "rise in the world, without the help of your kinsman."

Shorter "Little Annie's Ramble": Young girl wanders through the streets of Boston oblivious to the panic and gridlock caused by authorities' overreaction to a guerrilla marketing campaign for an animated movie, is announced as kidnapped by a terrorist cell on Fox News, but soon returns home unharmed.

Shorter "The Gray Champion": A mysterious old man rescues the city of Boston from Mooninite invaders ("With this night, thy power is ended--to-morrow, the prison!--back, lest I foretell the scaffold!"), for "whenever the descendants of the Puritans are to show the spirit of their sires, the old man appears again."

Shorter "Fancy's Show Box": Hawthorne's inquiry into the nature of guilt and guilty thoughts, now applied to the case of those who authorized the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie guerrilla marketing campaign, and, indeed, created the Mooninites in the first place.

Shorter "Endicott and the Red Cross": Boston Mayor Thomas Menino personally rips Mooninite Lite Brite displays from various public places and pledges to extraordinarily render Err and Ignognikt.

Shorter "Young Goodman Brown": Boston Mayor Thomas Menino is tempted to believe the spectral images Ted Turner shows him of his city subjugated to the depradations of Mooninite invaders, decides to trust no one, and calls on Homeland Security.

[Gong sounds; big hook drags me offstage. Boston Chief of Police appears and says, "Move it along, people. Nothing to see here."]

What Would Hawthorne Say about "Young Goodman Bush"?

OK, so first go read Trevor Seigler's "Young Goodman Bush" (21 Sept. 2004)--I'll wait.

Now, skip this disclaimer. I don't know Trevor Seigler. "YGB" is the only thing of his I've read--although if you want to read more, and more recent, go here or here, or just go straight to his blog, Surf Wax America. I don't read Democratic Underground. When I want to survey what Left Blogistan is thinking about, I'll visit Hullabaloo, TomDispatch, Glenn Greenwald, the talking dog, Orcinus, Pandagon, and firedoglake. More often, I get my political fix through the stylings of The Poor Man Institute, Sadly, No!, Happy Furry Puppy Story Time, Jesus' General, Opinions You Should Have, and (although "often" is not quite the right word) fafblog!. Since I've started CitizenSE, I've been reading its blogroll more regularly than anything else. But I know from experience how tough writing quality political humor is. So I'm sympathetic to what I can see of Seigler's overall project, and I understand "YGB" is one of his earlier efforts at satire, but...but...but...it's so bad that I can't keep trying to ignore it.

OK, forget that "Young Goodman Bush" is terribly written. Or that its plot is a thin and incoherent excuse for making bad jokes about Bush's Yale and Texas years. Or that casting Laura Bush as Faith and Dick Cheney as the Black Man leads nowhere but the obvious, and pointless, literalization of "infidelity." Or that Hawthorne's 1862 essay, "Chiefly About War Matters," with its satirical portrait of Lincoln, may have been a better literary model. No, what's worst about "Young Goodman Bush" is its failure to do anything with its Hawthorne allusions.

Not that it's easy to connect "Young Goodman Brown" to George W. Bush. You have to take your readers away from the Brown of the end of the tale: "A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man" whose "dying hour was gloom" is not the first description of Bush that would spring to one's readers' minds less than two months before the election (unless you were hoping to predict his psychology after a loss to Kerry). You also have to make sure your readers don't think about Brown's despairing comment--'My Faith is gone!' cried he, after one stupefied moment. 'There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil! for to thee is this world given.'--for Bush himself would repudiate this kind of moral relativism. Moreover, the entire problem of specter evidence needs to be dealt with in some way: the devil's words have to contain some truth, but overall be deceptive and manipulative; Bush's reactions have to lead to a radical doubt as to everyone else's capacity to resist the devil's temptations. So if "Young Goodman Brown" is a story about how and where someone goes wrong, the choice of situations to put Bush in is quite crucial. Seigler's story is an object lesson in what not to do.

His first mistake was making Cheney the devil. The devil should be the devil, and Bush, like Hawthorne's Goodman Brown, should be going into the forest in order to face him, repudiate him, and return to Faith, so that, like Hawthorne's narrator, you could condemn Bush's simplistic notions of good and evil at the start of the war on terror (when your cause is just, the ends justify the means; doing evil to fight evil is justified because we're so good and they're so bad that we can never become evil like them): "With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose."

Similarly, following the initial plot of Hawthorne's story provides opportunities for making serious accusations about the Bush family and its allies' past and present actions (both Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud and Kevin Phillips's American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush had been out for months when "Young Goodman Bush" was written, so it's not like there was a shortage of material): think especially of the devil's "I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem. And it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip's war."

But where the devil needs to go for the Brown-Bush analogy to really work is to cast his net wider than the Republican Party and insinuate that the Democrats and the American people, like al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, are on his side (you know, where Greater Wingnuttia has been since 9/11). To really be like Goodman Brown, Bush has to be tempted to despair that everyone else has lost faith in America.

This is why Seigler's decision to cast Laura Bush as Faith was so mistaken. Faith needs to be the American people or the American way of life or American traditions. Bush needs to drink the devil's kool aid and really believe everyone's out to get us, even us--or rather, spend the rest of his life doubting whether we are really out to get us or are sufficiently vigilant against the threat we pose to us. This is the only way I can see to make the Brown of the end of Hawthorne's tale relevant to a satire of the Bush administration, although doing so would require more overt attention to the consequences of his administration's profound distrust of American institutions, traditions, and people than Hawthorne gives to Brown's actions at the end of his tale.

So in the end, I don't know if Seigler's story is salvageable, or if the Brown-Bush analogy is really worth trying to establish, but I would be curious to see what a rewrite would look like. Anyone want to take a shot at it? Or offer pointers on doing so?