• Jacob Randolph uses the administered “controversy” over a restaurant chain’s redesigned logo as a hook for discussing the way “tradition” and “traditionalism” has become a commodity and a consumer good in American Christianity: “Cracker Barrel, Anglican Converts, and Tradition’s Aesthetic.”
Some of this is about what is sometimes described as a “conservative” temperament, a stance in which all change is regarded as suspect or in which every change or innovation bears the burden of proof. This is sometimes presented as a prudent and wise virtue, as exemplified through the parable of “Chesterton’s fence.” The popular version of this, paraphrased from G.K. Chesterton, is the idea that “Before taking a fence down, you should first understand the reasons why it was put up.”
Fair enough but also, as I have noted before, a disastrously self-refuting choice of analogy. The analogy is premised on the idea of an abysmal misunderstanding of the nature of fences, as I wrote in the post linked there from six years ago:
Chesterton’s analogy falls apart because, well, it’s a fence and that’s what fences do. They fall apart. Fences have to be maintained, mended, and constantly rebuilt. Fences just don’t work as a metaphor for traditions, laws, and institutions handed down immutable, inviolate, and inviolable from ancient times. There’s no such thing as a multi-generational fence. You don’t build a fence so much as you adopt a perpetual budget for perpetual fence-building. Would-be “reformers” don’t need to propose “destroying” an existing fence, they only ever need to propose that the fence-builders stop rebuilding it.
The title of that post was “Chesterton’s Fence and Frost’s Wall,” because it contrasts Chesterton’s argument with the prior, stronger, truer argument the poet Robert Frost made in his poem “Mending Wall” — a poem that gently mocks an unthinking “traditionalism” that has nothing to do with prudence or wisdom, but a great deal to do with the actual governing principle of conservatism, which is building unloved and unlovely walls between in-groups and out-groups.
Anyway, Randolph is, like me, a Baptist and so, like me, he wrestles with an odd mix of triumphalism and apology when discussing how we’re all Baptists now in the sense that every one of us belongs to whatever “tradition” we belong to because of our personal, individual choice:
The very fact that I can choose to stay at my church or to leave, to accept certain aspects of my theological upbringing or to reject them without any fear of rejoinder or social hardship—this points to a state of affairs utterly unknown to Christians up through at least the 17th century. In modern culture, even the decision to adhere to a tradition in the face of modernizing forces (in the church or in society) is an expression of individualism. And that fact has to have ramifications for how we talk about “upholding tradition” in a liberal society.
This may all seem abstract, or it may seem esoteric and irrelevant to those not directly involved in church disputes over the “worship wars” of musical styles or the “traditionalist” branding of new splinter groups like ACNA, but it gets at what’s going on in the big picture of America right now, as many “traditionalist” white folks who nominally agreed with some notion of pluralistic democracy have lost their damned minds at the prospects of such a thing becoming more than a nominal and notional reality.
They move in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
They will not go behind their father’s saying,
And they like having thought of it so well
• The best death scene I ever got to do on stage was in King Lear, when I played one of Gloucester’s servants. I got to have a sword fight before getting stabbed in the back, saying “I am slain” and falling dead, downstage center.
The second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth-best death scenes I ever got to do were all in the same very short play: David Ives’ surreal “Variations on the Death of Trotsky.” That play involved some very broad comedy and physical slapstick, including a Groucho impression and me wearing a wig with a mountain-climber’s axe sticking out of it like Steve Martin’s old arrow-through-the-head prop.
But mixed in were these tiny moments of genuine, earnest sadness at the reality of our mortality: “Sometime, for everyone, there’s a room that you go into, and it’s the room that you never leave. Or else you go out of a room, and it’s the last room you’ll ever leave. This is my last room.”
That play is why I still, decades later, sometimes head out to the back yard saying to my wife, in a cartoon Russian accent, “Maybe I’ll go look at the nasturtiums.”
I was remembering this play again last week because of the date, August 20. That date is repeated throughout the play as people keep reading the encyclopedia entry on Trotsky’s death — “On August 20, 1940, a Spanish Communist named Ramon Mercader smashed a mountain-climber’s axe into Trotsky’s skull in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City. Trotsky died the next day.”
But I got to thinking about that play again yesterday when reading Donald Trump’s furious rambling in response to losing an argument to Maryland Gov. Wes Moore. He threatened to retaliate by (illegally and maybe impossibly) rescinding the money the Biden administration provided for Maryland to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge. But then Trump’s addled recollection of the bridge’s collapse in March of last year quickly slid into a morbid discussion of his own steadily increasing fear of death:
You know, a boat ran into a bridge, and the bridge came down, like, I’ve never seen anything – the boat was just, it just shows you the mass of that boat, the power of that boat. You know, people were up on that bridge, painters, they were painting the bridge and they were watching it happen, and they thought they were very safe – they all died. They were painting the bridge, can you imagine, and they watched the boat. …
The engines were off and they watched the boat and the power of that boat, the mass of that boat went right through that steel, just like it was nothing. … It’s amazing. It’s called mass, mass is a big deal. But the mass of that boat, those people all died, but they were they thought they were totally safe. … Two of them were eating their lunch, they were, you know, whatever, they were watching it, they could have gotten off.
“Can you imagine?” he says, discussing how those people were alive one moment and then dead the next. And you can almost hear him fearfully and hesitantly considering almost maybe possibly briefly attempting to imagine such a thing, and to imagine that it might also be true for him, some day, or that it must and will be true for him some day.
It might and it must and it will for all of us. And it might and it must and it will for him too. Most of us struggle with what to make of that, but I think he’s struggling more than most. And also that he’s struggling a bit more urgently lately.
We live in hope. (A bell rings.)
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