A New Biography of a Lesser-Known Nazi Confounds the Reader. How to Explain the Evil of Reinhard Heydrich?

 

A New Biography of a Lesser-Known Nazi Confounds the Reader
How to Explain the Evil of Reinhard Heydrich?

 

Who's the most popular Nazi? I thought of asking this as a poll question on Facebook, but I've been in Facebook jail so many times I dared not risk it. I turned to Google. Adolf Hitler gets thirty-one million hits. Eva Braun, two and a half million. Joseph Goebbels, two and a quarter million. Heinrich Himmler, almost two million. Albert Speer, a million and a half. Hitler's dog Blondi, 638 thousand. Reinhard Heydrich is just slightly more represented in my Google search than Hitler's dog. Heydrich racks up 787 thousand hits. The numbers change day by day, but the proportions remain about the same. Heydrich's relatively low profile astounds me, given the immense evil this – entity – I can barely stand to call him a "man" – wreaked upon the world.

 

The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich, is a May, 2022 book published by Knopf. The book is 656 pages long, with 570 pages of narrative followed by notes and an index. There are 110 black-and-white photographs. Author Nancy Dougherty knew Lina Heydrich, Reinhard Heydrich's widow, and interviewed her for the book, as well as other surviving Nazis, including Albert Speer. Dougherty is a gifted writer who can report horror in beautiful prose. I'd recommend this book to anyone curious about Nazism or simply about human evil. 

Netflix Adapts Jane Austen's Persuasion. When Colorblindness is Artistic Blindness

 

Netflix Adapts Jane Austen's Persuasion
When Colorblindness is Artistic Blindness

 

Charlie Ryan took movies as seriously as I do. We used to discuss film in an online community. He was a gay atheist living in L.A. I was a straight Catholic in Indiana. He was a heavy smoker; I'm the type who nags smokers to quit. We had very little in common, but we'd talk for hours.

 

This was the 1990s, and adaptations of novels by Jane Austen (1775-1817) were a trend. The BBC and A&E produced 1995's Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. For many "Janeites" – hardcore Austen fans – this six-part, almost six-hour-long miniseries is the ne plus ultra. Colin Firth in a wet shirt was voted "one of the most unforgettable moments in British TV history." Emma Thompson's Academy-Award-winning Sense and Sensibility also appeared in 1995. There were two Emmas in 1996, one starring Kate Beckinsale, the other Gwyneth Paltrow. Clueless in 1995 moved Emma to Los Angeles. In 1998's You've Got Mail, starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, the main character's favorite book is Pride and Prejudice. A revisionist Mansfield Park came out in 1999. It included a very un-Austen-like scene where a naïve young girl stumbles upon a sketchbook depicting an English lord sexually abusing black slaves.

 

All of these Austen adaptations share similar plots. A young virgin of the landed gentry in Regency England faces obstacles on her road to marriage. These obstacles are gender-specific. In Pride and Prejudice, a couple with five daughters must find five eligible bachelors. Their home is entailed, meaning it can be bequeathed only to a male heir. Without husbands, the girls' economic and social standing will suffer. In Sense and Sensibility, the family patriarch dies. His widow and three daughters move from a grand estate to a small cottage after a male heir occupies what had been their home. One of the daughters falls for the shallow attentions of an insincere suitor. The main character of Mansfield Park is a poor girl named Fanny Price. Fanny's name suggests exactly what it sounds like it suggests. Gentry women were, ever so politely, auctioned off, based on their monetary and sexual value. Obstacles are overcome, and each plot ends with a marriage or two that promises to be happy.

 

The films emphasize highly orchestrated social ritual and speech so specific to its social class and time that it might appear as foreign as hieroglyphics to the uninitiated. For example, in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Collins approaches Mr. Darcy at a party and attempts to speak to Mr. Darcy. A minor scandal ensues because the two men had previously never been properly introduced. Without that background information, Mr. Collins' gauche affrontery and Mr. Darcy's cold arrogance, and, indeed, the wider social world that they inhabit, are utterly incomprehensible.

 

Characters sit, straight backed, in parlors, embroidering, sketching, reading, and engaging in polite chitchat. Characters also attend formal dances, hunt in parties, eat elaborate meals served by liveried servants, and go for long walks. Serious matters are broached only through indirection and allusion. Though the plots are centered around marriage, there are few scenes of intimacy. The BBC Pride and Prejudice features, if I remember correctly, just one, chaste, kiss.

 

Back in the 90s, I saw myself as a leftist, and I was on a leftist website chatting with other leftists. I voiced what I thought would be a certifiable leftist opinion. I was sick of films addressing the concerns of a tiny fraction of the world's population: Regency-Era English gentry. I wanted, I said, to see more films addressing ethnically diverse and working class populations.

 

To my surprise, Charlie reprimanded me. He said that I was voicing a ham-handed assessment of Austen's oeuvre. Austen has been praised, Charlie told me, by great writers like Sir Walter Scott in an 1815 review. Another early reviewer, in 1821, compared Austen to Homer and Shakespeare.

 

Other critics have hated Austen. Ralph Waldo Emerson condemned Austen's novels, which he described as "imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. … All that interests any character: has he or she the money to marry? … Suicide is more respectable." Mark Twain wrote, "Any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book." More recently Salman Rushdie sneered, "The function of the British army in the novels of Jane Austen is to look cute at parties."

 

Charlie said that when I dismissed Austen as "trivial," I was being a misogynist. Austen, Charlie insisted, was inviting me to experience the best that art can offer. Austen was presenting me with a closely observed portrait of an alien human world. Like Austen's gentry, I am a human being. Like them, I live in a culture, a culture created by my fellow humans. What I can say and cannot say, what I can accomplish and what hopes and dreams I have to shelve forever, are, no less than in the case of those English gentry, conditioned by my cultural matrix. No, Austen did not write about titanic battles. She wrote, largely, about women, at home, conversing. Women, at home, conversing is also an historical force. A true feminist, Charlie challenged, would appreciate Austen's focus on women's lives.

 

The gauntlet was down. I had already watched the entirety of the six-part Pride and Prejudice miniseries. I had griped that I found it boring, and that "nothing happened." "I kept waiting for the plot and there was no plot." I respected Charlie enough, and I wanted to meet his challenge badly enough, that I went back and watched the entire miniseries all over again.

 

I did what Charlie told me to do. I quieted down, allowed myself no distractions, and simply paid closer attention. Charlie's lecture had given me new eyes. I realized that when I had first viewed the miniseries, I had missed everything. Yes, Pride and Prejudice invites the viewer into a world alien from modern America. The miniseries' artistry is to recreate that alien world with such detail that the patient viewer can plunge into it and feel what these alien characters feel, think what they think, and rejoice when they rejoice.

 

Watching a reasonably authentic Austen adaptation is like watching an arcane sport. You need to know the foreign rules to understand the athletes' acumen. Sure, basketball players could just mount a ladder and place the ball in the hoop, but that would defy the rules of the game. Just so, Elizabeth Bennet can't walk up to Mr. Darcy and say, "You're hot, but a prig. Loosen up a little bit. Let's go behind the manor and make out." If she did that, she'd sabotage herself, and Darcy would conclude that she's insane. She'd be out of the game, forever. When the viewer submits to the foreign rules, the viewer's experience of the world widens. Suddenly, Elizabeth Bennet, who, on a first viewing, appears to be almost silent and passive, becomes a crafty strategist. Through carefully played silences and minimal speech, she manages to win a wealthy life for herself and her family.

 

As the viewer undergoes this experience, the viewer's soul is expanded. Art brings the viewer to feel compassion for humans very unlike herself. Art teaches the viewer one of the deepest truths usually spoken in church. All humans are dealt the same deck of cards. These cards are in different orders, and they are used to play very different games, but at the end of the day, they are the same cards.

 

In my initial complaint, I had said that there was no plot, just lots of shots of Colin Firth staring. I suddenly realized that Colin Firth, as Mr. Darcy, staring at Jennifer Ehle, as Elizabeth Bennet, was every bit as powerful a cinematic moment as the Burning of Atlanta or the first appearance of the dinos in the first Jurassic Park or the shower scene in Psycho.

 

I realized something else, too. The Sexual Revolution has cheated and betrayed women. Women used to live in a world where they expected courtship from men. Men, ideally, were expected to delay sexual access to women. During that period of delay, men had to show their interest through non-sexual behavior. Men demonstrated their prowess through athletics and skills like fixing cars. Men flattered women. Men opened doors. Men presented women with flowers and candy. Men presented themselves to women's fathers and worked to make a good impression. Men were expected to be financially capable of supporting any children that ensued, and to support the woman's staying at home, caring for these children.

 

This societal demand for men to take on the responsibilities of adulthood before acquiring sexual access to women worked to men's favor, too. If men wanted sex, they had to work for it, and working for what they wanted made them better men. Dope-smoking slackers who never moved out of mommy's basement were losers in the days of Darwinian courtship rituals.

 

Sir David Attenborough narrates the extraordinary courtship rituals of birds of paradise in New Guinea. The males develop extravagant plumage, prepare stages on the forest floor, sing extended songs and dance elaborate routines. The females arrive, assess the males, and if one step displeases them, they fly off. The male does not get to mate. The birds of paradise have yet to have a Sexual Revolution.

 

The demand for males to measure up to a cultural standard before mating allowed women to meet their own, sexually specific needs. Women, as a group, tend to prefer talk and intimacy before engaging in sex. Previous societal norms allowed for an emphasis on conversation and getting to know someone before having sex. Regency romances, taking place, as they do, in a rigid social world, give women what they want.

 

Thanks to Charlie, I branched out and watched another Austen adaptation, Roger Michell's 1995 Persuasion. My initial experience of Persuasion was very like my initial experience of Pride and Prejudice. I popped the cassette into the VCR. Anne Elliot (Amanda Root), struck me as underplayed to the point of invisibility. I was bored and alienated. I had to remove the cassette from the machine and wait for another day. I was determined to give this quiet film, with its mousy heroine, another chance. After the second viewing, the 1995 Persuasion became one of my favorite films.

 

Anne Elliot is a self-abnegating wallflower. She's a doormat to her snobbish family. She wears dowdy clothes and rarely speaks. When a child is hurt, when a woman falls and is knocked unconscious, everyone assumes that it will be Anne who will tend to the needy person. Later, she meets Benwick, a sailor with a broken heart over his fiancée's death. Anne is expected to, and she does, counsel him and heal his emotional wounds.

 

For all of her goodness, you really want to smack Anne. "Stand up for yourself! Speak your mind! Get a better dress! It's the Regency Era! At the very least, do what every other woman is doing and flash your cleavage!"

 

Mopey Anne's inhibitions cost her dearly. When she was younger, she was in love with Captain Wentworth. Note the name. "Went" – gone – "worth" – something of value. That's right. Anne turned down Captain Wentworth's proposal, because he was a simple sailor who had nothing. He is now, thanks to the Napoleonic Wars, a wealthy captain. Anne is a spinster, newly poorer; her father was a spendthrift. Anne missed the boat.

 

Director Roger Michell crafted a film whose tone is faithful to Anne's quiet desperation. The film's palette is beige, gray, and other subdued colors. Anne is thin-lipped and you find her lack of evident vitality hard to like. As the film progresses, though, something lights a fire under Anne, and she decides to go for it, in her own mousy way. She becomes more beautiful. She approaches Wentworth and, in the coded language of the nineteenth century, she says, "Hey, baby." You cheer for the underdog, just as you did in the first Rocky. All ends happily.

 

I shared all this with Charlie. I'm glad I did communicate to him how much his comments meant to me when I had the chance. It surprised me how deeply I could mourn for someone I had never met when Charlie died. Damn cigarettes.

 

It's 2022, and Netflix is so woke that, according to an internet meme, it is planning a new miniseries about Russia's war on Ukraine. In this Netflix treatment, a black Ukrainian soldier will fall in love with a transgender Russian soldier. Another meme depicts "Netflix Original Series: Putin." The "Putin" in the meme is a computer-manipulated photo of Putin made to look black. Netflix's Bridgerton series is one of its most popular productions. Bridgerton is set in the Regency Era and it is a romance centered around rich girls getting married, but it's not Austen. Rather, Bridgerton is all about nudity, sex, including an "erotic" female-on-male rape scene, expensive sets and costumes, and colorblind casting. In the alternative universe of Bridgerton, blacks and Asians are English aristocrats. Bridgerton doesn't ask viewers to forget that its characters are black and Asian; rather, it invites the viewer into a world in which a black woman, Queen Charlotte, has waved a magic wand and included blacks and Asians in the peerage. Bridgerton is so campy, so over-the-top, such an acid-trip fantasy, that the colorblind casting did not detract from my experience of the series. I enjoyed the costumes and the sets and recognized the rest for the lowest-common-denominator, fan-flattering, junk-food that it is.

 

In mid-June, 2022, Netflix released a trailer for its own adaptation of Persuasion. The Netflix Anne Elliot is no mousy virgin; she's a snarky, pratfalling, wine-swilling millennial. The Janeite internet howled in grief and outrage. The trailer is two minutes long; YouTuber "Lady Disdain" took a break from caring for her newborn baby to post a fifteen-minute protest against the "crude," "condescending," "very American," "historically inaccurate" Netflix trailer.

 

Lady Disdain counseled that a worthy Austen adaptation would "Appreciate Anne for what she is, not what we want her to be." Lady Disdain drew a sharp contrast between the values of Austen's time and "millennial" values. "We value people being more abrasive … independent..." That's not Austen's Anne Elliot, who is a self-sacrificing, traditional female. In the trailer (again, only two minutes long!), Lady Disdain pointed out that Anne is depicted as stubborn, self-actualizing, and manifesting something called "authenticity of the self." Anne advocates for completely ignoring the opinions of one's milieu. These personality traits would lead to "atomization of society." That is, people living in their own little worlds, with little contact with each other, and no sense of being part of a wider community. The trailer suggests that Anne's growth involves rejection of her duty to her family and to wider society. The Austen novel makes no such suggestion, Lady Disdain emphasizes. Rather, it advocates for harmonizing duty to the wider society with one's own personal needs. That's a lot to say about a two-minute trailer!

 

Netflix released its Persuasion on July 15, 2022. Three days later, the "most helpful" fan reviews at the International Movie Database tend to award the film one star of a possible ten. Fan reviewers used the word "cringe" frequently. Vox calls the Netflix Persuasion "an absolute disaster." The L.A. Times calls it "awful." "Downright bizarre," says The Atlantic. "Is Netflix's Persuasion the worst film of the year?" asks GQ. The Telegraph accuses Netflix of "Woke-Washing" and "ruthlessly Netflixing" a classic. The dialogue "perpetrates five war crimes per minute." "Your bladder will be loosened by cringing," diagnoses the Evening Standard. "Everyone involved should be in prison," sentences the Spectator. The New York Times called it "curiously excruciating … the unbearable tension between past and present serves as a disarmingly naked window into the anxieties of current Hollywood filmmaking."

 

Many critics focused on the new Persuasion's language use. Gitanjali Poonia writes, "You need to speak Gen Z to watch Netflix’s Persuasion The Jane Austen adaptation mirrors slang seen on TikTok, moving far away from what made the novel remarkable." She quotes director Carrie Cracknell. "We have simplified some of the lines, and taken away some of the fuss of period trimmings, to make the characters and the worlds feel more alive and accessible."

 

Netflix's attempts to "simplify" Austen and render her in "TikTok memes" include the following. A character announces, "I am an empath," and says, "How do I prioritize self-care with everyone around me bidding for my attention? I need to fall in love with myself first." A character is said to be "fashion forward," another is a "narcissist" (a word not coined till 1898). A handsome man is described as a "ten." An improvement is called an "upgrade." A boyfriend creates a "playlist" of love songs for his girlfriend. A woman announces that she dances to music while alone in her room; apparently the writers forgot that before Thomas Edison, one could not both have music and be alone.

 

Netflix jettisons Jane Austen's Christianity and replaces it with Woke religion. "The Universe has a plan," a character confidently announces. "I'm not sure I'm the messenger the Universe has in mind," another says. "Trust me the Universe is never wrong." Later, the "Universe" is validated. The Universe's plan was to bring two characters together in marriage. 

 

Netflix Anne chugs wine straight from the bottle. She keeps up a running series of snarky comments on everyone around her. She pees outdoors and enjoys fart jokes. She blurts out highly personal information to complete strangers. She announces at a dinner party that her brother-in-law, who is present, wanted to marry her before he proposed to her sister, who is also present. At a silent, formal audience with a Viscountess, Anne tells the old woman she's never met about her dreams of an octopus sucking her face.

 

The Wentworth in this version has also been "upgraded." He rescues a whale, an environmentally friendly feat. He debases himself and elevates Anne. "When I felt lost and confused and inadequate I would ask myself, 'What would Ann do here?' It angers me that the world denies you the chance of a public life. You'd make a great admiral."

 

Netflix forces the question. Can you have your cake of Western Civilization and eat it, too? Netflix clearly wants to make money off of Jane Austen. But Netflix wants to violate Austen's bones, previously cozily resting in Winchester Cathedral. And Netflix forces another uncomfortable question. Does Netflix hate real women?

 

In fact, there have been very few blabbermouth, alcoholic, bitchy, self-pitying female admirals in history. But there have been many women like Jane Austen's Anne, the Anne found in the pages of Persuasion. Netflix rejected that Anne. That self-sacrificing, self-abnegating, nurturing, loving, quiet, Christian, domestic Anne. If you want to star in a hit movie on Netflix, you can't be a woman so very like millions of women who have lived throughout history. You have to be a "millennial" woman, a TikTok woman. A woman who would make a great admiral. And she must love a Netflix man. A white male naval officer, to be appealing, must rescue a whale. He must also feel "lost, confused, inadequate." He must ask himself, not, as the popular phrase goes, "What would Jesus do?" or even "What would the Universe do?" but what would a snarky drunken woman do?

 

Fans express outrage at the Netflix Persuasion in YouTube videos like this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one. These videos come from women in the U.S, the U.K., Italy, and Germany. They feature women who are black, white, and Asian. I was especially tickled by this one by "For the Love of Classics," the screen name of a very beautiful Muslima in a hijab who struggled to contain her fury as she spelled out exactly how much she hated the "Woke-Washed" Netflix Persuasion. "For the love of the classics," indeed. I'm with you there, my sister.

 

I read and watched many outraged critiques of Persuasion 2022. I'm about to say something I heard no one else say. Evidently, what I'm about to say is taboo, and must not be said. Persuasion's colorblind casting took me out of the movie. It robbed me of the willing suspension of disbelief that made it possible for me to feel compassion and respect for Austen characters I had previously come to appreciate.

 

English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave us the phrase "suspension of disbelief." To allow art to do to us what we need it to do, we have to temporarily suspend our awareness that art is not real. Tom Cruise isn't really a pilot; Austin Butler isn't really Elvis Presley; Jeff Goldblum is staring at a green screen, not a T-Rex. Art can fail to win us over and we are "taken out of" our willing suspension of disbelief. Some people can't watch musicals because they can't forget that random strangers don't spontaneously burst into song and choreographed dance numbers.

 

Two performances I otherwise greatly admired distracted me because of actors' heights. Kenneth Branagh is 5'10". He was excellent as Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich in Conspiracy, a 2001 film about the Wannsee Conference. Every time Branagh stood up, though, I noted that he did not tower over others. Heydrich was 6'3" and he used his height to intimidate others and enhance his murderous power. Stephen Dillane is superb as Thomas Jefferson in HBO's John Adams. When standing next to Paul Giamatti's John Adams, though, Dillane doesn't tower over him, as the real Jefferson did. John Adams was 5'7". Thomas Jefferson was 6'2".

 

I tried watching the 1940 Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. Greer Garson was 36 years old, about twice as old as Elizabeth Bennet, the character she played. Garson does not wear Regency style dresses; she wears costumes that appear to be leftovers from a previous MGM production, Gone with the Wind. Yes, these departures from verisimilitude make the 1940 Pride and Prejudice unwatchable, for me.  

 

Lady Russell is a perfect Austen character, in that she is so minor, and yet so major. Like so much else in Austen, she is a small person, doing a small thing. She's just a woman, and all she does is talk. She doesn't say anything original; she merely repeats the prejudices of her age and class, in a way designed to be crippling and manipulative. Lady Russell clearly loves Anne, but, because of her petty prejudices against poor people, she is the one who sabotages Anne and Wentworth's love, condemning both to spending the prime of their lives wallowing in lonely regret. Lady Russell is, in short, a frightening character, because she is so believable.

 

In the Roger Michell version, Lady Russell is played by Susan Fleetwood in her final film role before her untimely death. Fleetwood is magnificent, and utterly unsympathetic. I especially like the elaborate and expensive hats Lady Russell wears, out from under which sticks visibly greasy hair. The juxtaposition of outward ostentation and human filth tells you much about the character and her entire class. You can catch a glimpse of Fleetwood's performance here.

 

Nikki Amuka-Bird plays Lady Russell in the Netflix version. Amuka-Bird was born in Nigeria. She looks Nigerian. She is made to play an English aristocrat against Richard Grant, who looks very much like an English aristocrat. Grant could photoshop himself into a group portrait of the current royal family and not look out of place.

 

Grant's character, Sir Walter Elliot, is a snob who goes on and on about the importance of social class and how he can read one's social class by studying a person's face. Sailors, he insists, are lowborn "objects of disgust" because of how sun and surf weather the skin. This man, Netflix would have us believe, is best friends with a woman whose face plainly announces her Nigerian birth.

 

Perhaps because she is played by an African actress, Lady Russell, in the Netflix version, is rendered toothless. Her conventional prejudices and her manipulations are given a chummy gloss. And Lady Russell, according to Netflix, is big into sex tourism. Really.

 

There are many scenes, including crowd scenes, where whites are a minority of actors onscreen. When Anne visits her sister and her in-laws, at one point there are seven people in a small English country cottage room, and only two are white. Henry Golding, who was born in Malaysia, of Iban Dayak ancestry, plays Dakota Johnson's cousin.

 

Colorblind casting can work. Joel Coen's 2021 production of The Tragedy of Macbeth starring Denzel Washington as a Scottish king works well. Coen's version presented the play, not as grounded in Scottish history, but as a universal meditation on power and corruption. Any actor of any race could serve the production's goal. As previously mentioned, Netflix's Bridgerton creates an alternative universe where black and Asian aristocrats in Regency England are explained through an alternative history.

 

What I'm hoping to experience in an Austen adaptation, though, is insight into a very specific time, place, and class. As I watched the Netflix Persuasion, I did not achieve that insight. I didn't see Lady Russell. I didn't even see Nikki Amuka-Bird, a black actress. What I saw was Netflix virtue signaling. As ever with the left, this virtue signaling was heavy-handed, selective, awkward, hypocritical, and, ultimately, gratuitous.

 

Netflix's colorblind casting is selective. Netflix would never, I would hope, make a film about American slavery featuring white actors as black slaves. Nor would it make a biopic about Nelson Mandela with Tom Cruise in the lead. Further, I think Netflix would have to be even nuttier than it is now were it to make a Holocaust movie starring fat actors as concentration camp inmates. In short, colorblind casting's selectivity works only one way. Only white characters can be played by non-white performers.

 

Netflix's colorblind casting is awkward. It results in a scene where Dakota Johnson, a white woman, is lying prone on the ground, while two black boys beat her with sticks. In another scene, Wentworth, a white male, instructs a clueless black woman in how to use kitchen utensils. An Asian actor plays a character who is sneaky and inscrutable. Mary Elliot, played by a white actress, is depicted as a stereotypical "Karen," that is a whiny, privileged white woman. This "Karen" is surrounded by her cheerful, friendly, kindly black husband, black sisters-in-law, and black children, all of whom "do nothing but dance and sing and laugh." Awkward!

 

Netflix wants to create the mirage that it is striking a blow against racism. But Netflix is perfectly happy to cultivate other prejudices. Its new Persuasion exploits class prejudice. Mrs. Clay, a lowborn social climber is … wait for it … obese, oafish, and a slut. Her father eats like an animal. In fact, the prejudice that any Austen adaptation might address, and that Austen's original novel addresses explicitly, is class prejudice. It was class prejudice that kept most of the population of the British Isles, especially during the Regency Era, living short, brutish lives. For a horrifying account of the monstrous inequality between the tiny percentage of those at the top and the masses huddled at the bottom of social class in England during the Regency Era, see here. Netflix's only concern with class differences is to exploit them, to depict lower class Mrs. Clay and her father as disgusting creatures.

 

In Austen's novel, Mrs. Smith is a poor, chronically ill widow. Anne befriends her. Mrs. Smith serves a few functions. She offers insight into the wretched lives of England's poor. Anne's kindness to her demonstrates Anne's good character. And Mrs. Smith is an object lesson. Mrs. Smith, unlike Anne, had no one to advise her on how to marry well. She married a man who could not support her. The presence of Mrs. Smith reminds the reader not to hate Lady Russell too much. Had Anne married a poor man, and had he not turned out to be as successful as Wentworth, Anne, too, could have ended up in a hovel. Netflix completely erases poor, white Mrs. Smith from its production. Netflix would rather parade implausible black faces in Regency England than include one, all too plausible, poor white character.

 

Roger Michell, in his 1995 Persuasion, managed to include lower class working people in frame after frame. In this clip, note that when Sir Elliot takes his ceremonial leave of Kellynch Hall, the camera focuses, not on him, but on the many faces of the stoic servants, some of whom are dressed in rags, who make his life possible.

 

Netflix's flamboyant virtue signaling is gratuitous. They are not liberating anyone. They chose Dakota Johnson as their star; she is Hollywood royalty. Both of her parents were stars, her step-father is a star, her grandmother was a star, and her grandfather was an actor.

 

Black actors and Asian actors do not need, and will not benefit from, Netflix's charitably scattered crumbs. For decades, black directors like Spike Lee, John Singleton, Steve McQueen, Jordan Peele, Tyler Perry, Mario Van Peebles, and on and on, have been making movies with black stars. Asians direct, produce, and star in multi-million-dollar films that play to audiences of billions. The world doesn't need Lady Russell to be black any more than it needs Bigger Thomas, T'Challa, Miss Jane Pittman, or Janie Crawford to be white.

 

I don't just deepen my own capacity for empathy when I watch a film like Roger Michell's Persuasion. The willing suspension of disbelief is serious therapy for me. I escape from my own woes. I lose the sense of space and time. I travel great distances for only the price of a movie ticket. Hollywood put a great deal of technique into crafting films that could do that for the viewer. Golden Age films made use of something called "invisible style." "Invisible style" is an oxymoron; style usually calls attention to itself. In the case of Hollywood Golden Age films, though, filmmakers did everything they could to hide their style from the viewer. Filmmakers wanted the audience to lose themselves in the story. There's a fine, brief discussion of invisible style in this YouTube video.

 

Beginning, largely, in the 1960s, storytelling began to change in response to Marxist-inspired postmodernism. Postmodernism strove to destroy storytelling's ability to transport the reader to another place and time. Rather than "invisible style" that allowed the reader's "willing suspension of disbelief," postmodernism insisted on never letting the reader forget that reading is an artificial activity and that the story the reader was so invested in was not true. Storytelling has power; Marxism is obsessed with power; the masses must not be allowed their brief respites, or the expansion of their compassion to persons, like the English gentry, who deserve no compassion. The masses must be indoctrinated, and storytelling must be subservient to that indoctrination. And on the seventh day, Marxism spawned the Netflix Persuasion. Charlie would not have been persuaded.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

A Marxist, Feminist Poet Thinks I Should be Dead

 

Slovak Mother. Photo by Igor Grossmann 

A Marxist, Feminist Poet Thinks I Should Be Dead
Or, Life Unworthy of Life

 

She was old. Women Lina's age were becoming grandmothers.

 

She was malnourished. During the hungriest days, she learned to get by on black coffee and cigarettes. That was better than picking through discarded food in a garbage dump, something she had tried in childhood, shortly after her family had arrived in America.

 

She had already been pregnant eight times. Three of those pregnancies ended badly. She never wanted to feel that pain again. She never again wanted to pray those desperate prayers to St. Joseph, patron of the home, the family, of expectant mothers and of their unborn children.

 

Her own mother had lost her firstborn, Lina's sister, in the influenza pandemic of 1918. The next child, a boy, was stricken by a raging fever, in a tiny peasant village far from the best healthcare. Her mother had prayed to St. Joseph, and the baby boy survived. Yes, he was suddenly deaf, but he was alive. Lina didn't want, again, to carry a baby that could not live nine full months within her and survive to delivery.

 

Lina had spent decades taking care of kids. Lina's mother and father reunited in America after ten years apart. They immediately created a new, American-born batch of younger siblings for Lina. Lina would be her siblings' babysitter, while her mother sewed dresses for luckier women and her father mined coal. Then, emphysema made it impossible for her father to enter the primitive mines any more, the mines without breathing devices or protections against explosions and collapse. "Who's going to feed the big cow?" her mother asked her. She, Lina, was the cow, and she needed to earn her keep. She was shipped off to Manhattan to serve as a live-in nanny for a rich family. Lina became the family breadwinner. No American school for Lina, though she had been a straight-A student in her natal country.

 

Now the survival of her own five kids rested on her shoulders. Her husband Antek had been a combat officer. Before that, his life as the son of an immigrant family had been a Dickensian gauntlet. Antek's own coal miner father died an early and unspeakably tragic death. Antek tried to use his little boy strength to save his father's life, by carrying his father to safety, but it was too late. Carrying that emotional burden on his shoulders, this little boy, like millions of others during the Depression, rode the rails seeking work. He was a "dumb Polak," an unschooled child who spoke English with a foreign accent. He couldn't make enough to feed his widowed mother and siblings. Antek finally lied about his age. The army recruiters could not have been fooled; military photos capture a boy's naïve smile under an army cap; a boy's underfed body adrift in a man's uniform. But Antek finally grew into manhood in that uniform. When he returned to America after over a decade away, he found comfort only in drink.

 

Antek, lacking any inheritance or collateral, lacking any history of official employment outside of the army and "killing Japs," lacking even a grade-school graduation certificate, turned to the wrong men for loans. Lina was in the scrubby backyard of a tiny Cape-Cod-style house. Lina and Antek had taken out a mortgage and bought the house for $5,000, half the median home price in their state that year. The kids were playing on a swing set Antek had erected. Lina's man was good with his hands, and Lina and Antek wanted the kids to have everything that they themselves never had. Suddenly Lina realized that her sons were staring at someone standing behind her.

 

The men told Lina that they were going to kill her children. If Antek still didn't pay back the loan, they'd eventually kill him, but the kids would go first. That wasn't the men's only visit. Another time, Lina barricaded her children in a bedroom and placed her heavy, wooden, Lane-brand bridal hope-chest against the door.

 

So, yes, someone needed to "feed the cow." Lina was that someone. She had no record of formal schooling, except for crumbling report cards from the Old Country attesting to her as the best student in the class. Though she was highly intelligent, multilingual, and hard-working, the door to white-collar jobs were closed to her. She cleaned. She worked in factories. Her five kids were depending on her. She could, for now, get by on black coffee and cigarettes, as she had so many times before, until enough food for everyone was again available.

 

And now this. She was pregnant. As if that were not enough, one of her bodily organs had just gone haywire. She suddenly needed emergency surgery.

 

The doctor was straightforward. There could be no delay. Without surgery, she would die. The complicating factor was the five-month fetus inside of her, and of course her age. She, or the fetus, or both, might die.

 

The doctor could eliminate some of the risk. All she had to do was say "Yes." Actually, she didn't even have to say "Yes." She just needed not to say "No." Given the extraordinary circumstances, there would be no further questions asked. What's more, there would be no blame. It was life-or-death. This doctor wanted to save her life, rather than focus on a non-viable fetus who would never survive if Lina died first. Everyone would understand. Even God.

 

Lina said "No." She was Catholic, and though she did not want this pregnancy or this child, she couldn't do it, because the Catholic Church told her it was wrong.

 

When I was growing up, I heard all these stories many times. I heard them from my mother and my older siblings. These stories are one of the many reasons, though I'm a devoted movie fan, I have never seen, and never want to see, any Godfather movie. The Mafia – those loan sharks, casually threatening to murder children on a swing set – are scum, not entertainment. I had to hear the stories because I wasn't around when they were happening. Except, I was. I was the fetus.

 

My mother was the first to tell me the abortion-option story. My mother telling me this is one of my most vivid memories of childhood. Our house was tiny – eight people, multiple animals, one bathroom – and yet every tragedy the Greeks ever imagined seemed to have been acted out within those tear-drenched walls. I was standing in one room, near the one telephone, a hefty, mysterious black monolith fixed into the wall. A source of momentous portents from doctors and cops, a jangling Stonehenge. Across a narrow, wood-floored hallway, my mother was in my parents' bedroom, a room not much larger than a closet in my current apartment.

 

I think I remember this so clearly because what my mother said shocked me greatly, and made me very sad. I had no idea that anyone could, or would want to, extract a baby before its time. What was utterly clear was that I was different from my siblings, and maybe different from all other people. My mother not only didn't want me. She had wanted to end me. She didn't, because of that one word: "Catholic."

 

The June 24, 2022, announcement of the Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson decision overruling Roe v. Wade prompted much discussion of abortion on social media. One genre of comments were testimonials from abortion survivors. Claire Culwell's mother was 13 years old. She had a successful abortion – of Claire's twin. The abortionist did not realize that he had left behind a living fetus. Gianna Jessen survived a saline abortion. She was, she said, "burned alive, inside and out, in the womb for eighteen hours." The abortionist signed her birth certificate.  "There's a religion of rights and it's all about me," Jessen says. But a true ethic, she points out, does not focus exclusively on the needs and desires of the more powerful person in an interaction. "Everyday I bear the mark of my biological mother's decision." As a result of surviving a saline abortion, Jessen has cerebral palsy. "I don't want women who have had abortions to hear condemnation, but the redemption of Jesus," she is able to say.

 

There's a lesser degree of abortion survivor. There are people whose mothers were advised to abort, or who came close to abortion, but never went through with it. I suspect that there are many of us.

 

The abortion survivors whose stories I watched or read looked really good. A few are attractive enough to be celebrities. They lead productive lives. The viewer is invited to conclude that abortion terminates the lives of people that the viewer himself would like to have as a friend. The viewer is to conclude that this abortion survivor contributes positively to the world, and that a successful abortion of this person would clearly make the world a lesser place.

 

I cannot provide that testimony. I'm not an attractive or a successful person. Further, my life has been difficult and has entailed significant pain. I haven't made any noteworthy contributions to the world about which I can brag. Should my mother have not said "No" to her surgeon, and should he have ended me?

 

Being suddenly surrounded by a swirl of pro-abortion social media posts was, for me, very much like being back in high school. In high school, a ruthless, Darwinian line separates the winners from the losers. I was never one of the winners. I was "fat," "retarded," and "weird." The abortion discussion was just like that. The "cool kids" were once again bringing down the guillotine between those deserving of life and those nobody would miss if they were pushed off a cliff, into "a chasm at the foot of Mount Taygetus," where Plutarch said the ancient Spartans threw their undesired offspring.

 

Marge Piercy is a Marxist, feminist poet. Her pro-abortion poem "Right to Left" – as opposed to "Right to Life" – was shared frequently on social media. The poem is smug; it presumes to speak for all women. It is not, as the best poetry is, an intimate excursion into one person's experience, written with unflinching honesty that protects no one's BS. Good poetry does not protect the poet; good poetry does not protect the reader. Good poetry shocks through the simple act of telling the truth. Good poetry takes the reader on an excursion that, through the microcosm, the personal and the intimate, brings the macrocosm, the world beyond the self, closer to the reader.

 

Piercy's poem is a thudding dictatorial hammer telling the reader what one must feel if one is correct. If you don't feel as Piercy and her fangirls feel, you are wrong and bad; you are the enemy. Without even getting to the substance, but just focusing on the bullying style, I hate this poem. That Piercy's poem, and those sharing it, make me the enemy because I do not submit to the poem is a Stalinist power grab.

 

Good poetry is not about us v. them. Good poetry is about us, period. About human beings. Piercy overtly creates an "us," the cool kids, menaced by "them," those unworthy of life. "They are inflicting their religion on us," she announced.

 

Beyond the style, the substance of this poem is laughable, repugnant, and also terrifying. Piercy, a Marxist, analogizes sexual intimacy to capitalist exploitation of the earth. Piercy announces that her body is not a pear tree, and one may not "enter" her body without her permission. Piercy assumes a lot. I do not want to "enter" her body. Piercy enjoys the protection of the Judeo-Christian tradition's emphasis on protection of women and she also enjoys the simple protection of police. She does not live in Afghanistan or many other spots on the globe where a girl has virtually no rights at all. She does not acknowledge this.

 

Piercy's poem presumes that her poetry is what protects her from sexual assault. This is self-flattering, delusional, nonsense. And it is worse. Once the Woke get what they want, the destruction of Western Civilization, and they are surrounded with metaphorical and literal rubble, they will learn that their smugness and their poetry was never what protected them. Some feminist artists, like Pippa Bacca, have learned this lesson already.

 

Again, good poetry protects no one's BS, not even the poet's. After June 24th, Piercy posted a new poem. In this new poem, Piercy reports that she performed an abortion on herself when she was 18 years old and "pregnant from a man i no longer trusted or loved" (sic). The normal reader, not the pro-abortion zealot, drunk on hate of "Christofascists" and numb to any normal human reaction, but rather a normal reader, immediately focuses on this line. Why was 18-year-old Marge Piercy having loveless sex with a man she didn't trust? What would that backstory tell us about human nature, about teenage girls, about what steps we can take the lower the number of abortions? A real poet would write that poem. But she'd have to strip herself of the political zealotry and Christrophobic hatred that protects Piercy from any honest confrontation with herself. Worthy poets, and worthy ethicists, own mirrors.

 

"Right to Left" implies that people like me, people who were not wanted, who grow up without love, become Nazis. We, abortion survivors, will set off nuclear bombs. This is high school all over again. The "cool kids," the "wanted" people are telling us, the "unwanted," the abortion survivors, that we are the real threat to humanity. This hateful bit of doggerel has been shared widely by Team Choice, by people who think of themselves as feminist, as kind, as compassionate. Here are Piercy's key lines:

 

"Every baby born

 

unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come

 

due …

 

a synagogue is torched,

 

a firing squad summoned, a button

 

is pushed and the world burns."

 

On her Facebook page, Piercy posts a lot about cats. Cats. The creatures that, unlike me, have a right to exist. On July 12, Iranian women risked prison and torture by removing their hijabs. Piercy posted no support of these women. She posted a lot about her cats.

 

A Facebook page calling itself "One Million Vaginas" posted a meme from Lauren McKenzie. McKenzie's meme said that abortion lowers the crime rate. "Unwanted kids" – me – go on to commit crimes. Eugenicist and Planned Parenthood pioneer Margaret Sanger would approve. In 2008, The Guttmacher Institute wrote that "The abortion rate for black women is almost five times that for white women." One meme, that I will not link here, states simply, "How does a black woman fight crime? She has an abortion." The message of all of these memes, whether from racist fringe groups or from "One Million Vaginas," is the same. It's better, and certainly more convenient, to abort "unwanted children," and indeed black children, than to work, as a society, on making the world a better place for children. Life, like high school, is a Darwinian exercise, and the cool kids have the right to eliminate the losers preemptively.

 

The conviction that I should not exist is not limited to prize-winning poets or a million vaginas. Facebook friend Sandy wrote, "Abortion is good for the ecosystem and the society. Unwanted children are the future psychopaths, mass murderers, and school shooters."

 

One Saturday after the SCOTUS decision came down, I was hiking in a beautiful woodland setting. Tom, a fellow hiker, pointed out that my mother didn't want me, and that I was an abused kid. He said that thanks to the abuse, I am "f---ed up." He said that aborting future unwanted babies will stop "misery" and prevent others from being "f---ed up." Tom said that "We need to abandon this idea of the sanctity of human life. What is discarded in an abortion is no more significant than this," Tom scratched his arm, "than the cells lost when you scratch yourself. Just because those cells are human doesn't make them human life."

 

Human life does not begin, Tom insisted, until consciousness. One study shows that "babies display glimmers of consciousness and memory as early as 5 months old." Of course, researchers picked up only "glimmers" of consciousness, so perhaps even five-month-old babies are not yet life worthy of life, and can be killed with impunity. Tom is a vegetarian; he thinks that meat consumption is immoral.

 

Given what social media was coughing up after the Dobbs decision, I wondered if I had a right to be alive. As with many abused children, a conviction of personal worthlessness is the wallpaper of my life, so Team Choice's insistence that some lives are unworthy of life inspired me to reflect on whether or not I should be here.

 

I thought of a moment from 2011. It was my last day in Krakow and I was rushing over mostly empty dawn sidewalks to get to a train or a bus or something that would take me to the airport. A woman was approaching me; we were the only two persons on the sidewalk. She was oblivious to me; her eyes were focused on her purse, which she held in both hands. Something fell from her purse. Littering? I could not tell. She passed; I looked down. In spite of the heavy backpack on my back, I squatted and lifted the dropped item. "Prosze pani," I called out. "Excuse me, Ma'am." She just continued rushing forward. I had to turn around and chase her. "Prosze pani," said, louder, more urgently.

 

She never looked up at my face. She focused on the paper I thrust toward her. She grabbed it. "Oh!" she exclaimed, in Polish. "How could I have dropped this?" Apparently it was something very important. She moved on.

 

Did this good deed earn my place on the planet? The same planet the cool kids like Marge Piercy enjoy?

 

I can't deny what Tom said. If you abort all unwanted children, those children will never suffer through the nightmare of abuse. Luckier people will never have to endure association with people "f---ed up" by child abuse. Tom wants to eliminate human suffering by eliminating people who suffer. I can't assess Tom's mathematics. I don't own the scale. On one side of the scale rests the pain I suffered as an abused child, and the pain I caused others who have had to interact with flawed me. On the other side, I was aborted; I was never here. I never gave that woman her lost piece of paper. What's the equation that solves that? I'd be lying if I said I knew.

 

But there's more to consider. What happens to the wider society when we start attempting to perform that equation? In chapter four of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, Cain allows envy to eat at him and push him to murder his own brother, Abel. God tries to talk Cain out of this, humanity's first murder. "If you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it."

 

Sin crouches "at your door." Doorways are powerful places in traditional cultures. They are liminal; indeed the very word "liminal" comes from the same root as "lintel." Doorways are the vulnerable borderland between the interior and the exterior world. Doorways represent what we close out, and what we let in. When we decide that some human lives are not worthy of life, what, exactly, are we letting in to our interior world? God doesn't use the term "slippery slope," but it is certainly implied. If I, a "f---ed up," unwanted child, have no right to life, by what basis do many others have a right to life? You know who finds it easy to answer questions like that? People like Himmler.

 

My birth was not the only time Catholic teaching on the sanctity of human life affected my family. Five members of my natal family died slowly of disease. A sixth was killed quickly, which, comparatively, seems almost a blessing. Antek, my father, died of Alzheimer's. He was never in an institution. My mother took care of him. Toward the end, when he was no longer moving, she woke up every two hours – the medically advisable period of time – to turn him in bed so that he never developed a bed sore. He died peacefully, in his own home, in his own bed.

 

My mother died of cancer as I was holding her hand. We were alone in the house together, and she was in the room where her husband died. I played a cassette of fujara music from Slovakia, and said, in English and in Slovak, "I forgive you. I know that you forgive me. I love you. I know that you love me. You can go now, and everyone will be fine."

 

My mother was, if nothing else, a very strong woman, and death had a hard time of it when it came for her. My mother's body had been through so much, but she just kept not dying. It was hard to watch someone hollowed out from multiple surgeries live day after day, long after she had been able to eat her last meal, and receiving large amounts of morphine, but just not dying.

 

Witnessing her final battle changed me; had I not witnessed it, I'd be a different person. So much for the idea that suffering is pointless. I did not believe then, and I do not believe now, that my mother loved me. I said those words because a friend who had done hospice work said that that is what the dying want to hear. I traveled to her bedside determined not to say those words. I said those words to stand between my mother and the pain I was witnessing. I could feel her pulse against her wrist as if it were a captive bird, beating against its cage, and finally breaking free.

 

My brother's consciously chosen suffering changed the people around him. Mike was dying of cancer. His wife was expecting their child. He wanted to stay alive long enough to see his daughter. He dragged his body through hell; at the end, he was a skull suspended over a pile of sticks. Welcoming his daughter to this world was one of the last things he did. At his funeral, his fellow seminarians, choking back tears, told stories of how Mike's willing carrying of his own cross, right up to the moment of his death, was a testimony of Christian faith such as they had never seen.

 

Brittany Maynard was much in the news and on social media sites in 2015. Maynard was a beautiful 29-year-old California girl. She was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a form of brain tumor that is almost always terminal within a year or so of diagnosis. Maynard ended her own life. She was identified as a "Death with Dignity" advocate. Her final internet post read, "I have chosen to pass away with dignity in the face of my terminal illness, this terrible brain cancer that has taken so much from me ... but would have taken so much more." My social media was flooded with praise for Maynard. Heroic Maynard, posts said, had spared her loved ones the "indignity" of watching her suffer, lose her cognitive functions, and, inevitably, soil herself. In comparison, terminally ill persons who did not kill themselves came off as unnecessary burdens on luckier people who weren't dying and didn't really want all the fuss.

 

My sister Antoinette was a nurse so she knew what it meant when, in 2015, she was told that she had glioblastoma. Towards the end, my sister had a lucid moment. She looked at me. "I could have killed myself," she said. "But that is suicide. It's a sin. So I have to go through this."

 

I took as much time off from work and tending to my own medical emergencies as I could. I changed her diaper and spoon fed her. I was rubbing her feet as she breathed her last. She died in her own bed, in her own home. When the hospice nurse came to wash the body before its removal, she invited me to leave the room.

 

"No," I said. "I'll help."

 

"This may be hard for you," she said.

 

"No, it's not hard," I said.

 

I began helping the nurse wash my sister's body one last time. I grew up with that body. I slept with my sister, took baths with her, three of us in one tub – no wasting hot water. I fought with her, and eventually changed her diaper, and was now preparing her for her final trip.

 

"Death with dignity." Brittany Maynard died one way. I applaud her choice. But her choice is not the only way to die with dignity. My sister slowly lost her cognitive ability. She lost control of her bowels and bladder. She needed those who loved her to take care of her and to witness her slow descent. My sister died with supreme dignity.

 

Having been an abused kid is complicated, so complicated that I choose not to discuss it with civilians. I know a couple of people who were abused as children and if I need to talk about it, I talk to them. They understand that you can recognize what is best in your parent while still condemning the abuse. So maybe only those friends, my fellow survivors, will understand what I'm about to say.

 

On November 20, 2021, Cecily Strong, a Saturday Night Live cast member, appeared in a clown costume. In between failed attempts to make balloon animals, squirt water from a plastic flower, and blow a clown horn, Strong said that she had an abortion when she was 23 years old. She said that had she not had that abortion, she would never have risen to being a cast member of Saturday Night Live. Strong is the daughter of a nurse and an Associated Press bureau chief. At the time of her abortion, she was a college graduate and member of the prestigious Second City Conservatory.

 

As I watched Strong's "abortion clown" performance, I felt contempt, but I felt something more, something that surprised me greatly. Cecily Strong and Marge Piercy are successful celebrities. They are the cool kids in the high school of life. People heed their words.

 

My mother cleaned houses, worked in factories, and raised three sets of kids. My mother was one of the smartest people I've ever met, and I've met really smart people. My mother was the very best unpublished writer I've ever read. But she was a cleaning woman. No more than that.

 

As I watched Cecily Strong, I saw her as so small, and my mother, suddenly, as absolutely heroic. A wave of respect and admiration for my mother overcame me. My mother didn't have enough to put together a meal for herself, though she always made sure that her kids were fed, if not especially nutritious and delicious meals, but filling ones. Men with guns were menacing her family. Her husband was a less than perfect ally. She was old, she was told she might die, and that I might be responsible for her death. She believed that abortion was wrong. So she allowed the life she created to continue.

 

"Love" is a difficult word. I have always preferred not to mess with the word "love." But respect, mom. Admiration. Even a little bit of awe. Something you would never have wanted – a little bit of pity for you. But, most of all, huge, huge respect, for you, my mother.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery