Smallpox took a ride on oceangoing, ecosystem-hopping ships and decimated unprepared native immune systems. {slides} Cockroaches, another New York City icon, got to feast on the Big Apple by hitching a ride on slave ships from Africa.
Like Malcolm Gladwell before me—and Steven Levitt and Michael Lewis—I am hoping to make sense of your lives by marrying statistics to simplicity. Statistics will be your new god and probability will become Fate. If Twitter mated with Malcolm Gladwell {slide of Gladwell kissing the Twitter bird} and moved a little to the right—that’s me.
I posit to you that those ships that brought immigrants and rats, slaves and cockroaches, to the New World also brought gods and customs, folktales and superstitions. America is the theological melting pot, the universal stew, gumbo of the gods. You already know that history is appropriation. That our Roman gods first had Greek names. That Jove became Jupiter and Aphrodite, Venus. Issur Danielovitch {slide of Kirk Douglas} became Kirk Douglas became Spartacus. Roberto {slide of baseball card} became Bob Clemente. Albert Einstein became Albert Brooks. {slide/slide, laugh}
To the victors go the nomenclature.
You know that Christ was born on December 25 because the Christian bigwigs were trying to make the pagans’ enforced slide into monotheism as painless as possible, right? And December 25 or thereabouts was already a big holiday throughout organized human society as a winter solstice celebration? {slide of Stonehenge—maybe from Spinal Tap Stonehenge scene? Cheap laugh? Why not?}
And how the Jesus resurrection Easter myth co-opts so many returns from the underworld before it. Osiris, Beowulf, Persephone. {slides} While we’re on the subject of December 25—it’s a perfect example of a foreign god mutating to survive. St. Nicholas or Sinter Claus/Sinter Klass {slide} was a stowaway with the Dutch, who were the first in charge here in Manhattan; well, after the natives, that is.
In 1773, after the Boston Tea Party, old St. Nick was resurrected as a symbol of New York’s non-English past; he was a Dutch middle finger to the British and the patron saint of pre-Revolutionary societies that sprang up calling themselves the sons of St. Nicholas. So St. Nick got up off his deathbed, first to symbolize a non-English identity for the fledgling revolutionaries and then, in an even bolder move, to make himself virtually indistinguishable from Jesus Christ and Christmastime. {slide of Jesus in a red Christmas hat} Arguably, it is the free-spending, gift-giving St. Nick who enabled Christ to assume the mantle of American capitalism and, with the help of Calvinism, confer his holy blessing upon the almighty dollar. You might even argue that St. Nick helped Jesus more than Jesus helped him, since some, and I say some, may still be offended at the sight of Jesus Christ himself enjoying an ice-cold Coca-Cola. {slide}
The return from the underworld, resurrection, was a tune the world’s people already knew, a tune they loved—so St. Paul and the early fathers were just tossing new names around, new lyrics on an old melody. Saul became Paul, solstice became Christmas, the many became the only. It was a brutal, effective, and glorious restructuring of the soul. The first downsizing. A corporate raid on the spirit to make Jack Welch proud and Oliver Stone angry. {slide, laugh} The pantheon became the one. As an aside, ask yourself—what are the myriad saints that are added as objects of worship, to say nothing of the Cult of Mary, except a sop to those depressed converted pagans who missed a bunch of gods, especially the females, missed Baal or Zeus or Mother Nature, after the downsizing? It’s a form of winking, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, my brothers and sisters.
And I posit to you tonight that this shrinking from the chattering discord of many gods to the one Jehovah played out again in miniature and in fast motion in New York City roughly between the years 1800 and 1935. I’m being specific with dates for a reason, and that reason is to make you think I’m being scientific.
That as our immigrant ancestors came through Ellis Island, they were smuggling beliefs, smuggling local gods into the New Ordered World, hopelessly scrambling the smooth gleaming surface of official WASP monotheistic America. Forced to wait in detention to screen out smallpox or other infectious diseases from the decadent continent {slide of young Vito Corleone waiting on Ellis Island in The Godfather}, there was no detention long enough to cure them of the spiritual infestation of their local customs and beliefs. Gods are immortal and therefore patient. Their gods waited with them.
See, the only American religion, the only religion to have sprouted on American soil—and I am willfully excluding Scientology, not even I can stomach Old Mother Hubbard’s moronic Buddhist sci-fi mélange {slide of Tom Cruise or Travolta}—is Mormonism, or the Church of Latter Day Saints. {slide of Mitt Romney} The genius of Joseph Smith was in the “Latter” of Latter Day—the time of miracles ain’t over, we are not belated. ’Cause isn’t there something depressing about old-world Christianity constantly looking back to the good old miracle days of water to wine? Why did the men of the past get proof and all you get is faith? Joe Smith figured that out. No, Joe said, that crazy shit is still happening.
We see a Darwinian struggle in species, we see it in ideas, and, I am suggesting to you, we see it in gods as well. And what if the native gods and the gods of different countries went underground, or intermingled and interbred, just like the peoples of their countries? Imagine what new gods came into the world, hybrids with unforeseen wacky combinations of old powers—how badass would Superman be with Batman’s gadgets? {slide}
And what if those old gods interbred with humans in a template struck by those randy Greek deities—Leda and the swan? Let me quote you Yeats—“A terrible beauty is born.” What other terrible beauties are out there now? Some hybrid Greek Hermes with Beats in both ears instead of wings? {slide of Mercury wearing headphones}
And here’s where you get to boo me, you secular, liberal relativists. I’m telling you this unreal struggle is real. And it has consequences. It’s not “just debate.” I’m telling you that it is possible to judge systems of belief as being better or worse than one another. Just as there has been an evolution of man, there has been an evolution of gods; just as we are superior to the apes, the new god is superior to the old. The old gods are good entertainment {slide from Twilight}, good box office, but inferior soul sustenance. I stand before you tonight, a relativist come to slay relativism, to tell you the Qu’ran is a lesser work than the New Testament, and that all the Greek gods and African folklores that were improved morally and subsumed into the Christ story—that that rewrite was an advancement.
I want to talk about our country now. I want to tell you that there is a separation of church and state, yes, but also that Christianity, the shared belief in the system, was the key to the assimilation of all the poor huddled masses and made it possible for America to be great. And I want to declaim that the deconstruction of that core system into the fragments of our educational and social approach is a real and present, and not just literary, danger.
Because ye olde gods are not dead. They walk among us still, with their pagan ideas and habits, waiting for reanimation. They are lonely. They are bored. And very, very pissed off. They grow tired of waiting, and they sense another historical moment is imminent. There is no wall high enough to keep them out, pace Donald. I’m afraid their time has come again.
GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY PAIN
AS SHE RAN FOR THE Y, Emer slowed by a Pain Quotidien and eyed the pastries in the window. She always marveled that the owners of this particular franchise seemed unaware of their hawking a daily dose of caffeine, bread, and sadness to passersby—their quotidian pain. She settled down with a hot cocoa and a scone, knowing full well Con’s speech was about to begin. Yes, there was resistance in her dillydallying, but the hot chocolate made her feel cozy. She could get on the Versaclimber and work it off tomorrow.
She walked into the Y when Con had about five minutes to go, basically missing the speech. She knew it by heart anyway, had done a lot of research for it, but still. She thought she’d wanted to be there for Con’s moment
. The small auditorium was about half full, and half of that half seemed asleep. The applause at the end was not exactly rapturous, it sounded more like fifteen elderly people were testing the efficacy of the famous Clapper gadget.
She felt bad for Con. Even this tepid reception had been a long time coming. Con had been working full-time on his opus for more than ten years, bringing in very little income, maybe penning the occasional ad hominem book review for a few bucks. And even though Con had dreams of his work “crossing over” (to what? she wondered), how much would a somewhat right-wing treatise on New World pre-Christian deities and folklore (“J. K. Rowling meets Michael Lewis in a London pub, they fuck and have a baby that William Buckley raises”) bring to the coffers?
But really, there seemed to be no way for Con to gain traction in the fractious, attention-deprived intellectual marketplace. He had been unable to score an interview with pre-disgraced, pre- MeToo-ed Charlie Rose, even though he knew one of the producers well and used the pretentious “Joseph Campbell angle” as bait. Feelers sent out to “Jimmy Fallon’s people” at The Tonight Show fell short, as did scattershot flailing to get to Kelly Ripa (Emer had tutored the child of a woman who claimed to be close to the popular morning-show hostess). Con’s work seemed destined to be that lonely tree falling in the forest; he himself said, “I’m afraid now we’re finally going to get the answer to what is the sound of one hand clapping.”
She felt bad for her man because so much of worldly success seemed like timing—in Con’s case, bad timing. The ascension of Trump had made politics the only so-called intellectual entertainment around. Whereas five years ago, Con’s diligent, years-long work might’ve been seen as predicting and prefiguring a hybrid monstrosity like the current president, in the actual age of Trump, Con’s warnings felt belated, coded, impotent. Wine from sour grapes. And this made her feel bad for him as a mind and as a man. Timing. Did it all come down to that? She felt that in another era, maybe a pre-Christian one, Con might’ve been a king, a king like his namesake, even, Yeats’s Cuchulain (Coo-cul-lan)—he had potential heroic qualities of mind and body: he yearned for battle, but he had missed his worthy opponent by a few years, or a few thousand years.
In today’s world he was a nobody. Deprived of his enemy, shrugged to a standstill, still his character needed the fight. And with no worthy opponent, no masculine outlet for his heroism, his kingliness came out sideways in wrong ambitions and seething frustration. His need for that fight warped his soul rightward more than was his nature, she knew. She was afraid that what she loved in him might very well end up being the thing that, unharvested by the world, would pervert and even kill him, or at the very least, take him away from her bed. Such was the fate, she mused, of latter-day kings.
So Emer had worked harder the last handful of years, almost invisibly, to shore up Con as a man and make him appear, to the outside eye, successful and thriving. She herself had always harbored barely conscious ambitions of being a writer, which she neatly silenced and folded into being an unpaid research assistant for Con’s project. And, in addition to teaching first grade at St. Margaret’s School in lower Manhattan, so that Con could spend all his time working on his books, she had supplemented her income by tutoring the kids of wealthy New Yorkers on how to ace the ACT and SAT tests. You could make a living at it. Every year there was a new crop of nervous and coddled offspring of the previous generation’s nervous and coddled looking to jump through the standardized hoops that the Ivies and Near-Ivies required.
Emer’s twenty to forty extra hours a week were enough to eke out a livable existence for the two of them in their rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side. It was obscene what she charged for her services, less obscene when you thought of whom she was charging. When she was ushered into bright, sprawling Fifth Avenue apartments to hold the hand of some third-generation Brearley girl and admired the David Salles, Basquiats, and Schnabels on the walls, the chef in the kitchen, the maid in the hall, and the mom at Pilates, she saw where much of the runoff from the 2008 financial turndown had been smelted and recast. As she sat in these homes of the half percent, chewing on carrot sticks or a delicious gluten-free madeleine, she felt a not unpleasant, disenfranchised resentment.
She was in touch with a hollowness at the center of this second “job,” not because she harbored any great yearning to achieve other glory, and even as she genuinely liked some of the kids she tutored, but because ultimately she was teaching them a useless skill—how to take a test was not far from showing them tips for crossword puzzles or Rubik’s cubes or video games. Still, it was the kids she worked with, even as she accepted the parents’ blood money, and, with none of her own, Emer loved kids, many of them anyway, even these privileged ones.
As she munched on the madeleine, watching her young charge assay her umpteenth practice ACT, Emer kept returning to Con’s thwarted ambitions. He felt that movies could be made of his work. Movies that dressed old folktales and myths in new clothes for a forgetful and fickle generation uninterested in the morality of plagiarism and attribution, and maybe he was right. They got their music for free—is that why they didn’t care about a creator’s ownership? Was this what rap had done? Emer wondered. With its endless sampling having enacted finally the death of the argument over originality? Aside from the occasional multimillion-dollar lawsuit, who cares where that undeniable hook came from when it’s repurposed by Kanye, Kendrick, or Jay-Z? Wasn’t it stolen from the black man to begin with? Doesn’t everything belong to everyone? Isn’t that a positive, democratic trend? Could you write a check to the man who invented the blues?
No, she remained old school on the issue. She liked attribution and accountability. It seemed unfair that something like The Hunger Games, a shameless feminist-TV-era reworking of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, came off unscathed on its leisurely stroll into pop consciousness and to the zillionaire’s bank. Or those Twilight movies that were so important for a couple of years a while back. Just old vampire schtick with beautiful, pouty high school outcasts. Brilliant, yes. Disheartening, yes.
“I don’t wanna be famous, I don’t have the clothes for it,” she joked, protesting while humoring her man with the thought that these fantasies might be within his grasp. He had kissed her and said, “This is my big idea. I don’t know how many I have in me. Maybe this is it. I’m not Thomas Edison, I’m not gonna create the lightbulb AND the phonograph AND the motion picture camera … but the work, the message is legit. Maybe I’m a right-wing George Lucas and this is my Star Wars moment, and we’re gonna ride it as far as I can.”
When she would sometimes interject that his worldview seemed intolerant, he would take her aside, put his arms around her, and say, “Then think of it like professional wrestling. I’m playing a role. Maybe I’m a bad guy, maybe not, but I have to stay on message. You have to be able to sum me up in one sentence. My identity can’t be longer than a tweet. I read somewhere Alice Cooper, né Vincent Furnier, said he and his band got to LA in the late ’60s and they were doing okay, you know, playing the Strip, opening for the Doors, but they weren’t making it big. He looked around and saw it was all peace and love everywhere, hippy dippy, and there were no bad guys on the scene, so he perceived an opening in the market and decided to be the bad guy—and the rest is VH-1 shock-rock music history. So think of us like Alice Cooper. That feel better?”
“It does, actually, a little. Thanks, Alice. But you’re not gonna start biting the heads off of live bats, are you?”
“That was Ozzy, I think.”
“Oh, good.”
She loved it when he said “us” or “we”; she was as alert to his use of pronouns as a drug dog at the airport, her ears pricking and gratified by any use of the first-person plural. At those moments, her one wish rose up: to be acknowledged and spoken of, but she merely sshed it, patted it on its head, and swallowed it like indigestion.
Cuchulain Constance Powers was a good man with a comic-book name; no, what did “good” mean after a
ll anyway? Con was a man, her man. If he was maybe a little weak and insecure, she was no comic-book heroine either. They were well suited. She wanted a victory for him and wanted to feel a part of this victory, part of him; she felt he was part of her. But the thought sometimes occurred to her: Was the corollary true? Did he feel she was a part of him? She didn’t know. Sometimes yes, maybe, sometimes no. Did that mean no? She washed the last of her madeleine down with some green tea almond milk latte.
ANANSI
AFTER CON HAD LEFT THE AUDITORIUM, Emer caught up with him in the backstage “greenroom,” which was really just somebody’s office rechristened for the speaking series. She walked into a space sparsely filled with people she had never met before, wolfing down toast points, scavenging off the obligatory cheese plate, and drinking wine out of plastic cups.
She spied Con speaking with a couple of very tan men in dark suits and fresh haircuts, and a striking young African American woman she had never seen before. The cheese plate wafted by her like a lactose apparition on the outstretched arms of one tuxedo-clad server. The waste at these shindigs, Emer thought, the terrible waste of good food, and she made a note to maybe grab a jagged hunk of forlorn Brie and stuff it in her bag before she left so she and Con could live off it for a couple of days like sharks feeding off a whale carcass. The impulse to stuff food in her bag had blossomed in her after her parents had divorced.
Her mother, always concerned with money, fiscally paranoid as a single mom, would hold her big purse under the lip of the plastic tables at McDonald’s and slip tiny packets of ketchup and mayonnaise off in the crook of her arm. Emer remembered thinking they looked like lemmings falling into the black abyss of her mother’s bag—imagined them screaming as they plunged to their deaths among the gum and keys and loose change.
Miss Subways: A Novel Page 2