America's Dash from 'The Field' to Victimhood

"The Bull" McCabe: The field is mine.

The American: Well we'll see about that won't we? John B. Keane The Field
"You didn't build that!"  President Barack Obama on the stump 2012

John B. Keane was a brilliant Irish writer, storyteller and pub owner from County Kerry.  In 1965, he wrote a play called  The Field that told the story of a rough farmer by the name of The Bull McCabe.

The Bull McCabe worked land adjacent to his own - a field allowed to grow fallow and useless through neglect.  He made the field grow green and fecund by his labors.  In fact, he neglected his own family to make this once useless field of rocks and weeds flourish and become an asset.

The problem being the field is owned by a widow. It's the law.

When the widow decided not to sell the property to The Bull,  he engaged in rural terrorism to force the poor woman to give up and go away.

If The Bull had a lawyer as every serious victim seems to have, he could have made a case in court for himself under the real estate laws of Adverse Possession - A method of gaining legal title to real property by the actual, open, hostile, and continuous possession of it to the exclusion of its true owner for the period prescribed by state law. Personal Property may also be acquired by adverse possession.

The Bull, like most people, was too busy doing his work to give such thoughts only people with too much time on their hands and a few sparks of cunning between their ears their due.

Like most of us, an injustice real or perceived can race the heart to bitterness.  The Bull was bitter, due to the widow's grasp on the land and the widow, bitter about the pranks and taunts visited  upon her by  The Bull McCabe, his slow-witted son and a sneaky leach called The Bird.

The widow determined to sell the property to a Rich American - The Yank - sight unseen.  The play ends in tragedy.

John Keane's wonderful play concerned human labor and property rights at its most basic. Keane's characters played to the fates without a politician to come to aide of either side.

That was in 1965.  LBJ was President. There was a War on Poverty and War in Vietnam.  Victim hood became the greatest revolutionary tool since anarchists international discovered that fused pyrotechnic could shake Bourgeoisie into submission.  Bomb tossing had little effect. Victim hood won the day for the Masses.

America's greatest essayist, wrote a history of Political American Victim hood in the Weekly Standard.  Epstein writes,

Victims of an earlier time viewed themselves as supplicants, throwing themselves on the conscience if not mercy of those in power to raise them from their downtrodden condition. The contemporary victim tends to be angry, suspicious, above all progress-denying. He or she is ever on the lookout for that touch of racism, sexism, homophobia, or insensitivity that might show up in a stray opinion, an odd locution, an uninformed misnomer. People who count themselves victims require enemies. Forces high and low block their progress: The economy disfavors them; society is organized against them; the malevolent, who are always in ample supply, conspire to keep them down; the system precludes them. Asked some years ago by an interviewer in Time magazine about violence in schools that are all-black—that is, violence by blacks against blacks—the novelist Toni Morrison, a connoisseur of victimhood whose novels deal with little else, replied, “None of those things can take place, you know, without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.”
Public pronouncements from victims can take on a slightly menacing quality, in which, somehow, the roles of victim and supposed antagonist are reversed. Today it is the victim who is doing the bullying—threatening boycott, riot, career-destroying social media condemnation—and frequently making good on their threats. Victims often seem actively to enjoy their victimhood—enjoy above all the moral advantage it gives them. Fueled by their own high sense of virtue, of feeling themselves absolutely in the right, what they take to be this moral advantage allows them to overstate their case, to absolve themselves from all responsibility for their condition, to ask the impossible and demand it now, and then to demonstrate virulently, sometimes violently, when it isn’t forthcoming. (emphasis my own)

We are victims waiting for shoes, bricks, bats, bullets and bombs to drop - unless we have a lawyer in our wallets'

Americans have run from The Field.   John B. Keane's character The Bull McCabe would have none of that -things will go very tragically, I am afraid; unless, we snap out of it.

America's Montaigne -Joseph Epstein Baffles BS in Biography

"I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself." --Essays Montaigne

Learning to write sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime. The only way I know to do it is to read a vast deal of the best writing available, prose and poetry, with keen attention, and find a way to make use of this reading in one’s own writing. The first step is to become a slow reader. No good writer is a fast reader, at least not of work with the standing of literature. Writers perforce read differently from everyone else.  Heavy Sentences -Joseph Epstein New Criterion

Mr. Epstein's ability to capture a subject in a memorable 3,000 words should be the envy of biographers, who write at greater length but sometimes with no greater effect. Biographies are vats of facts that take patience to digest; Mr. Epstein's essays are brilliant distillations. Biographers are rarely as nimble and pithy as he can be, and they labor under constraints he would surely chafe at. Indeed, the author once returned the advance for a biography of John Dos Passos that he had agreed to write, an enterprise that would surely have taxed his desire to say what he really thinks. Wall Street Journal

Yesterday I placed my order with the good folks at Amazon.com for Joe Epstein's 23rd book Essays in Biography (Axios Press $24).

I have been reading Joe Epstein for decades.  I first learned of Mr. Epstein from a professor ( a tag Joe Epstein eschews -"You mean a piano player in a Kankakee Cat House?") at Loyola University in 1974.  Dr. William Hiebel taught American Literature and Prose.  Joe Epstein had a reputation for crafting brilliant and very readable prose, which he practiced upon the contributing authors to American Scholar. Dr. Hiebel introduced me to writers who wanted people to actually understand what they wanted to say and not build verbal labyrinths to themselves -writes like Joe Epstein, Mark Harris and the much too overlooked James Salter.

Joe Epstein writes with an invitingly genuine quality that makes the reader a comfortable guest in his home.  Charm is a lousy word. To call Joe Epstein charming is an affront to his honesty.  Mr. Epstein  is not charming - he is delightful.  Charming, where I come from, is an insult.   Joe comes from the same bungalow, two-flat, raised ranch helot dwelling environs up on the top of Chicago - Rogers Park.

A Charmer is a bullshitter - a charming Billy, a grifter, a sneak.

One who delights is a like a young Dad whose whispered  words to his six year old son elicit a wild display of little-man heroics and infantile wrestling moves in a crowded Mexican fast-food joint at 43rd & Wallace. " What kind of sides you want? "

" Masha Putatahs!"

" Masha Putatahs? This ain't Schallers."

" I want Masha Putatahs!"

Ready!  Wrestle! That is delight.  Dad and lad going at it over menu selection with squeals and giggles from both indicating their delight in one another and this precious time together alone. Joe Epstein does exactly that, he delights a crowd in lunch hour rush waiting for their orders in Mexican fast-food joint.

In his recent book of stories and essays Fabulous Small Jews Joe Epstein presents a variation on Irish Alzheimers Disease* - ''Psychotherapy is what Jews have instead of golf,'' one character says. ''Gentiles try to improve their backswing, Jews their past.'' 

Joe Epstein reads broadly and deeply, be it a Mexican menu or the canon of John Dos Passos and, as a result, gives back better than he gets within his capacity to be himself -monster and miracle.  All of us know the monsters we drag around and keep at bay, for most part, in the company of people.  We do our best to be more miracle worker than monster.  We all want to be Prospero, but manage to be more like Caliban - you should get a load of me in most waking hours.  Over whom do hold dominion, my monster, or my master?  The Monster ( appetites, follies, vanities and foibles) in two falls to a submission! Maybe not.  The more we read of others and the monster we be, perhaps the more we might master ourselves and serve others better. Maybe not.  Joe Epstein helps.

I believe Joseph Epstein to be America's Montaigne ( the Dad of the essay) and it was Montaigne who gave us Caliban and the assorted anthropophagi who dominate literature from Renaissance on. I too, sprout my head below my shoulders on some very bad days.

Joe Epstein succeeds where charlatans only become celebrities.  More people know of our Norman Mailers, Susan Sontags, Michael Eric Dysons, or Gore Vidals because they never question their own personal Caliban and promote Prospero Mailer on Dick Cavet, or Sara Prospero-Paretsky on the Oprah Show ( dec.).

Joe Epstein is the real deal.  He is America's Montaigne.

* Irish Alzheimer's Disease -You forget everything but the grudges!