Billy Graham; the joy of reading Jules Renard; and the late Dorothy Parker

That the late Rev. Billy Graham is soon to lie in honor in the nation's capitol says almost everything one needs to know about this country.

Graham, who died Wednesday at age 99, will "lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda on Feb. 28 and March 1", according to the offices of House Speaker Paul. D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) The evangelist Graham is the first religious leader to be honored by the nation this way.

I'm not making this up: I read it in The Washington Post.

How did the evangelical community come to possess such a stranglehold on national public policy? How did the political right so convincingly sweetalk its way into the hearts and minds of these Christians? Who was cooing to who in matters of such great national importance--the country's military might, civil liberties, gun control, sexual orientation, and the mightiest of the mighty, abortion and a woman's reproductive rights. I was there, I saw it all unfolding, but it still dumbfounds me. It further dumbfounds me to hear a religious scholar, from no less an institution than Dartmouth College, say on national tv,  "Billy Graham is far and away the most important religious leader of our time."

Martin Luther King? The Dalai Lama?

It--the public kowtowing of our elected leaders to the Christian right--is a major league headscratcher! Yet I'm old enough now to move forward or backward from what I can't comprehend, but not old enough to completely take Herr Wittgenstein's advice and "pass by in silence what we don't understand."

I'm reading the journal of Jules Renard. He's such a joy. To read Renard (1864-1910) is to be with an intelligent, lively writer you know you would have also admired as a person, and been friends with. To know that a person like Jules Renard once existed in the world helps me to believe that such people still exist, and that I might know one or two of them. One of Renard's entries, neither typical or atypical, but apropos of the tyranny: The ignorance of the peasant consists of what he does not know and what he thinks he knows (p.202). 

This edition of The Journal of Jules Renard was published by Tin House, edited and translated by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget. Louise Bogan was a wonderful American poet, early friend/mentor/possible lover of Ted Roethke. Her book The Blue Estuaries, selected poems, could only have been written by someone who dedicated a life to writing the hard way, on a typewriter--before grants, before poetry workshops, before support groups and social media. I can't find any biographical information on Elizabeth Roget, nor does the Tin House edition provide any, but I'm predisposed to thinking she's related in some way to The Thesaurus.

And finally, I enjoy musing over what long gone American writers might make of America today. Beginning with Poe, then to Twain and Ambrose Bierce, skipping Jack London but going on to Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, I landed yesterday on something actually written by Dorothy Parker: To see what God thinks of money, just look at all the people he gave it to.