“From hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick
The person who spray-painted bright red obscene graffiti on the Lincoln Memorial one dark night earlier this week was succinct, and blunt. The words,“F--- the law” now adorn one of the marble columns that enclose our nation’s monument to its most beloved prairie lawyer.
The message, like the act, was one of seething fury, of a piece with so many furies being unleashed these days all over the country. On cable news and radio … on magazines and websites … at news conferences and awards shows … in our songs and movies and television shows … we are concussed from all directions by the swelling chorus of anger, and unnerved at the increasing cast-off of all restraints.
This week has seen the volume cranked to new levels. In the blinking of an eye, we’ve gone from tsk-tsking at Confederate flags to tearing down Southern statues to talking seriously about demolishing the Jefferson Memorial. Anyone from our history whose career was discolored by racism or involvement on the wrong side of the Civil War is now ripe for abolition from our history and culture.
The urgency of this eradication is revealing. So many desperately need someone to hate right now. So many yearn to strike out at somebody.
But hatred is insatiable. No amount of vengeance will ever – can ever – be enough. Take out the Jefferson Memorial, and the Washington Monument will have to fall. Streets and high schools and cities and even states nationwide will eventually have to change their names … or face the mob. Changing the nation’s capital to Malcolm X, D.C. won’t be enough for some people.
And there are so many factions yet untapped, impatiently waiting their turn at the megaphones, their chance to storm the Bastille. Those grinding axes of gender, sex, religion, age, et.al. are jostling for position in the coming cultural showdowns … ready to loose their own dogs of war.
I’m reminded of Stephen Crane’s classic short story, “The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky,” in which a drunken cowboy, searching the streets for someone to shoot at, comes upon a house that – for all his screams and curses and gunshots – refuses to get out of his way. The louder his yelling, the faster his shots, the more the house just … stands there.
“Presently,” Crane writes, “there came the spectacle of a man churning himself into deepest rage over the immobility of a house.”
That must be the rage fomenting in so many at the immobility of our history. At the unchanging eddies and currents of human nature. At the inevitable limitations of justice, and politics, and democracy.
So, we tear down the statues. We break out the paint cans. We grapple for new invectives to denounce the President. We look frantically for hatreds to match our own – finding vendettas and conspiracies even where none exist. Creating them, in our own minds, if need be, so we’ll have something more to stab and spit at.
And day by day, hour by hour, we give ourselves over to the engulfing darkness.
Not just ourselves. In classrooms and on playgrounds and at kitchen tables, our children are watching, listening.
Learning.
A few feet from the bright red graffiti, carved into the now tarnished marble of the Lincoln memorial, are words he spoke in another time of seething hatred and national upheaval.
“With malice toward none,” he said, “with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds … to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
This, from a man who knew about hatred. Died of it. But knew, too, that the way of freedom always lies along a different path. An exceedingly narrow, uphill path, with no room for the excess baggage of enmity.
“With malice toward none.” The day we embrace that, we’ll see a new birth of freedom in our country. And that will be a true red-letter day for America.
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