Nancy Mace

Shape Without Form, Shade Without Color

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Certainly, as several cultural critics have pointed out, Yeats’s magnificent poem “The Second Coming” expresses powerfully and concretely our current situation, what TS Eliot abstractly described as “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history.”

Yeat’s poem is brief; therefore, I’ll quote it in its entirety:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

***

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Does the description “a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun” remind you of anyone?

Of course, the Founding Fathers feared the rise of an American despot, so they counterbalanced the executive with Congress and the courts. Unfortunately, the lines “[t]he best lack all conviction, while the worst/ [a]re full of passionate intensity” aptly describe the Republican controlled House and Senate, Nancy Mace, full of passionate intensity, Lindsey Graham lacking all conviction.[1]

The Republican Senate certainly abandoned their responsibility of advising and consenting when they confirmed a vaccine-denying former heroin addict who literally has had worms eating his brain as Director of Health and Human Services and an alcoholic sexual predator who has absolutely no experience running a large enterprise as Secretary of Defense.

This idea of citizens lacking conviction is also powerfully rendered in TS Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” whose final lines have become almost a cliche:

This is the way the world ends 
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The hollow men of Eliot’s poem are scarecrows, heartless, “behaving as the wind behaves,” going with the flow, their “dried voices [. . .] quiet and meaningless.” 

Like Senator Susan Collins, for example. 

At any rate, in both poems we see Christianity breaking down, as the Antichrist slouches towards Bethlehem and in Eliot’s poem when the “Lord’s Prayer” breaks down into gibberish.

Between the idea  
And the reality  
Between the motion  
And the act  
Falls the Shadow 

                                  For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception  
And the creation 
Between the emotion  
And the response  
Falls the Shadow 

                                  Life is very long

Between the desire  


And the spasm  
Between the potency  
And the existence  
Between the essence  
And the descent  
Falls the Shadow 

                                  For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is  
Life is 
For Thine is the 

This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
This is the way the world ends 
Not with a bang but a whimper.

[1] Both hail from a state “too small to be a country, too big to be an insane asylum.” – James Petigru on South Carolina.

Governing as a Performative Art: Nancy Mace Edition

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It seems to me, an admittedly jaundiced observer, that many of our current representatives are attention-starved narcissists who would rather don costumes and bring attention to themselves than plopping down behind a desk and performing the unglamorous work of governance.

Take our director of Homeland Security Kristi Noem dressing up like a border patrol agent, a cowgirl, and an ICE agent.

Of course, her trendsetting boss is no stranger to dressing up and engaging in make believe.  

Unfortunately, this compulsion to commandeer the spotlight isn’t just confined to the cabinet.  House Representatives, particularly Nancy Mace, enjoy incorporating Halloween into their everyday comings and goings as well.

Here’s Mace channeling Hester Prynne in a subliterate misunderstanding of Hawthorne’s classic novel, not seeming to get that the scarlet letter stood for “adultery.”  

She claimed she was wearing the A because she was a woman being demonized for her “voice” and “vote.”  Hester Prynne, on the other hand, stoically bore her persecution silently. Stoicism and silence are certainly not attributes we identify with Mace, who seems to be in the throes of some kind of nervous breakdown, reminiscent of the first scene in Night of the Iguana where clergyman T. Lawrence Shannon goes apeshit in the pulpit and mocks the parishioners, resulting in a mass exit during the course of his rantings.

Here’s a LINK to my post on nervous breakdowns featuring a clip from John Huston’s film Night of the Iguana.

Representative Mace’s venue for her recent Reverend Shannon-like ranting was the House floor of the US Capitol where she flappingly displayed the dirty laundry of her sordid relationship with her ex-fiancé Patrick Bryant for all the world to see, the same fiancé she mentioned at the National Prayer Breakfast a year earlier when she shared with the august worshippers assembled there that she had told Mr. Bryant, “No, baby, we ain’t got time for that,” that being premarital morning sex, because she didn’t want to be late for the Jesus fest.

I’m not going to catalogue the accusations of her screed the other night, which may or may not be true, the hidden cameras, the sexual assaults, etc. but merely suggest we the people would be better served with representatives who focus on our collective good rather than their own personal vendettas, to channel Jimmy Carter as opposed to Caligula, who also had a penchant for cosplaying, who liked to dress up like soldiers, mythological figures, and women.

Oh, Joe Cunningham, our lonely First Congressional District turns its lonely eyes to you.

Nancy Mace’s Scarlet Letter

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I know from personal experience that the Citadel has a pretty good, if not excellent, English Department. I took a topnotch graduate class in Victorian Literature there and used much of what learned in the British survey I taught at Porter-Gaud.

How is it then that Nancy Mace, a famous Citadel alum and representative of South Carolina’s First Congressional District, doesn’t know that the scarlet letter in the famous Hawthorne’s novel stands for Adulteress?

In case you missed it, yesterday Representative Mace had a scarlet A emblazoned on a white tee shirt because after voting against Kevin McCarthy for Speaker, she has received a shitload of criticism from several of her Republican colleagues[1]. After all, McCarthy had, according to the Huffington Post, donated “millions of dollars to Mace’s campaign.” 

Nevertheless, feeling martyred, Ms Mace, an Olympic-grade flip-flopper, whined, “I’m wearing the scarlet letter after the week I just had being a woman up here, and being demonized for my vote and for my voice.” 

She plans to vote for Gym Jordan for Speaker, the firebrand former wrestling coach accused of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse by the team physician at Ohio State. When asked about the allegations on one of the Sunday talk shows, she claimed ignorance, which suggests she’s just as clueless about current events as she is of American literature.

So there she was, strutting around the Capitol Building seemingly advertising her violation of the Seventh Commandment.

However, as I used to tell my students, you have to interpret a symbol in its context. Here the A could very well stand for “ATTENTION!”

“Or asshole.”

[1] A more refined and learned commentator would have substituted “Augean-stable load” for “shitload,” but then if Mace were somehow stumble upon this post, she wouldn’t know what the fuck he was talking about.