CHRISTMAS 2023 -- WHITHER THE WISE MEN

It's Christmas 2023.

In the past, I've focused on this as the season of anticipation.  On kids who cannot sleep while listening for Rudolph.  On adults who millennia ago deemed it the day of new beginnings. ("Twas the Night Before Christmas", 12/24/08, 12/24/16, 17, 18 and 19)

In other years, it's been Shillelagh Law's musical catalogue of downtown lights and wrapped presents overcome by a 9/11 Christmas eve prayer.  From the believer (or was s/he a skeptic) who knelt "down in the last pew, right on the aisle" admitting " 'God I know that it's been awhile.' " ("It's Christmas in New York Again", 12/22/14; "A Christmas Carol", 12/15/21)

One year, I channeled John Lennon's plaintive "what have we done".  ("Silent Night", 12/21/10)

This year I cannot get the three Wise Men out of my head.

The story's original source -- the Gospel of Matthew -- creates as many questions as it answers. 

The first is whether they were all that wise.  The Biblical text is all over the place.  It changes depending on which translation you read.  The King James version intones "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem."  Though the New Revised Standard Version dispenses with King James's awkward meter, it too calls the travelers "wise men". That changes, however, in the New International Version.  There, it's "After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem,

So, which is it?

Wise Men or Magi?

And does it matter?

Matthew wrote in Greek and the English "Magi" comes to us from the Greek (transliterated) "magos" that he used in his Gospel. That Greek word, in turn, referred to Zoroastrian priests who, coming full circle now, were deemed reputable astrologers at a time when astrology was considered a science.  More than that, they were also advisers to kings, large in number, and reputedly expert at divining the meaning of dreams. As such, they became important political, administrative  and economic players and veritable king-makers.  

Not surprisingly, therefore, the ancient world thought Magi possessed wisdom. Cicero even said so, calling them "wise and learned among the Persians". Ditto Herodotus, centuries before. And this view survived long enough for King James to put the words "Wise Men" into Matthew's mouth and the English world's Bible.  

Today, of course, astrology and oneiromancy are  closer to sorcery than science.  (Extra points for anyone who even knew the word oneiromancy -- the use of dreams to predict the future -- existed, let alone what it means.) So the ambiguity of Magi is a more useful construction, especially in a world full of atheists and agnostics. That way, the Magi's wisdom can be mediated through the epistemic seas we humans have travelled over the centuries. 

And made real for us.

Put differently, today's Magi would be physicists, counselors and psychologists.

Not astrologers or . . .

Oneiromantics.

In Matthew's Gospel, his Magi come "from the east" bearing gifts of "gold, frankincense and myrrh" for the Christ child. He never tells us how many came but the Christian churches and traditions have conveniently settled upon the number three, largely on account of the three gifts.  

Matthew also does not tell us his Magis' names or precisely where they came from in the "east". This too, however, has not stopped the churches, though here the choice depends largely on which Christian rite one follows. The west decided the three were the Persian Melchior, the Indian Caspar and the Ethiopian or Arabian Balthazar. Other rites settled on different names and origins, some as far east as China.

Almost all of this is historically suspect.

At the time Herod was king, Judea was basically a buffer-state between the Roman west and the Persian-Parthian (present day Iran and Afghanistan) east, the control of which alternated between the two depending upon which contending army had won the latest battle. 

This made Herod's rule inherently shaky. 

Though the Romans made him King of Judea, he was an Edomite (thus not Jewish), had bribed his way to the office, and had by the time of Christ's birth assassinated competitors. Neither fully Roman nor Jewish, he assuaged Rome but also sought favor with the Parthians when the opportunity presented itself. 

In a word, he was cunning.

He was also paranoid.

In Matthew's Gospel, the visiting Magi arrive first in Jerusalem asking "" 'Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?' " "When King Herod heard this," Matthew reports, "he was disturbed, and all of Jerusalem with him." 

No kidding. 

The Magi were king-makers. 

Looking for someone who might replace him. 

How many were there? 

We don't know.  

But as one Biblical observer notes, "The whole city of Jerusalem wouldn't be upset about three guys on camels; no, this is a major Parthian group, or entourage, that has arrived, and Herod is nervous."

The churches' origin traditions make the Magi's visit a form of international worship and approval.  The gifts they gave are used to symbolize the Christ child's godly kingship and human mortality on the one hand, while restricting the number of visiting Magi to three and keeping politics out of the nativity on the other. 

For the Magi, however, politics was the heart of the matter.

Herod sought to use them.  

Matthew again: 

Herod "called together all the chief priests and teachers of the law" and "asked them where the Messiah was to be born. 'In Bethlehem in Judea, they replied' ". He then "called the Magi secretly . . .  and sent them to Bethlehem and said 'Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.' "

The Magi, however, would not be used.

They were looking for a new king.

Not Herod's next victim.

So . . .

Upon arriving in Bethlehem and "coming to the house", Matthew writes that "they saw the child with his Mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshipped him.  They then opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route."

There's an awful lot hanging on that last sentence.  

In the New International translation, the Magi are "warned in a dream".  In the King James version, "God" delivers the warning "in a dream".  Either way, the message is being delivered to a group (Magi) in a form (dream) they get.  Remember, in the ancient world, these guys were the experts on dreams. Empires rose and fell  depending on the meaning they attached to them. 

They figured dreams out.

Shortly after the Magi left, Herod "realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi" and "was furious".  He therefore "gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under".  By then, however, Jesus had been ferried by his parents to Egypt where he stayed until Herod died.

A lot clearly hung on the Magi's "wisdom".  

On their putative expertise.

What if they had misinterpreted the dream?

What if they had said to themselves:

"Yeah, we know Herod is paranoid. And we know he has killed competitors before. And we know he is dishonest and lies. But, let's get real here. This is a just a baby. Not even a kid yet.  And Herod's pretty old. And that star leading us here, they're saying, is a prophet's sign. So, hey, maybe the old man is softening. Gotten religion even. Let's just go back and give him a chance."

The Magi could have gotten it wrong.  

There were probably even some in their entourage who argued for a return. Herod had worked with Parthians in the past. Been an ally of sorts.  Done them some favors. 

Some perceived him to be a pragmatic politician and wily negotiator. 

Not an extremist bent on killing a mere infant.

Others, however, remained steadfast.  

The were unwilling to forget Herod's past. The bribes, the lies.  They weren't taken in by his false promises.  They knew that a man who had killed kings would not pay homage to another who would be king.  They especially knew he would not do so with another who would bear his own title.

King of the Jews.

The steadfast prevailed.

The Magi did not get it wrong.

Neither should we.

Merry Christmas.

DO BOOKS STILL MATTER -- THE CHALLENGE OF OATH AND HONOR

On January 19, 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense. The 47-page pamphlet argued that America's thirteen British colonies should be free and independent.  Though shots had by then been fired at Lexington and Concord and Washington's continental army surrounded the British in Boston, Paine's book lit the fuse for actual independence in an environment where the majority stilled hoped for reconciliation. It became and remains America's all-time best seller.

On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin. Almost all of the book had by then appeared serially starting the previous June. The novel painted a picture of black humanity that refuted the claims of slaveholders and woke-up the somnolent rest. It became both an American and international best seller and turbocharged the abolitionist movement. On meeting her in 1862, President Lincoln is reported (perhaps apocryphally) to have said, "So you're the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war."  Apocryphal or not, Lincoln would have agreed with Langston Hughes's later assessment of Stowe's work.  It was, he said, "the most cussed and discussed book of its time."

On February 26, 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle.  In 1904, he  had spent seven weeks working in the Chicago stockyards meatpacking plants.  His novel, initially published serially between February and November in 1905, tells the story of a Lithuanian immigrant and his family as they are swindled by corrupt landlords and politicians, sickened and killed by the unsafe and unsanitized plants, and impoverished by itinerant work and ridiculously low wages.  Called the "Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery" by Jack London, the book sold 25,000 copies in its first six weeks, has never gone out of print, was praised by Winston Churchill and convinced a skeptical Theodore Roosevelt to champion and Congress to pass The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act.

On September 27, 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. The book attacked the limitless use of pesticides as both dangerous and counterproductive -- dangerous because the pesticides themselves were often fatal to surrounding animal life and counterproductive because limitless use actually hastened pesticide resistance in the very species they sought to eliminate.  Her rigorously scientific analysis and precise and measured conclusions belied the critics who claimed she was advocating a return to the Dark Ages. The book became an international best-seller and laid the foundation for grassroots environmentalism. In 1970 during the Nixon administration, Congress created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); fifteen years later, a journalist called EPA "the extended shadow of Silent Spring."

On February 19, 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. It was an instant best seller. It argued that post-war America was trapped in a "feminine mystique" that classified women as either unhappy careerists or happy housewives. The unhappy housewives (of which there were many) and happy careerists (of which, after the war, there were fewer and fewer) begged to differ.  Though attacked immediately from the right (by those who assumed Friedan was insulting happy moms) and later from the left (by those who correctly noted that the book suffered from a suburban focus that ignored non-whites and the poor), the book nevertheless "pulled the trigger on history" (according to futurist Alvin Toffler) and sparked "second wave feminism".

Last Tuesday, December 5, Liz Cheney published Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning.

It immediately soared to the top of the best seller lists.  By midday, Amazon's stock had run out. Placed days before, my own order was consigned to Amazon's "we'll let you know when we get it" list.  After frantic calls to two independent bookstores came up empty, I found a Barnes & Nobles a few towns over that had it and hurriedly drove there to pick it up.

It is unclear what it means to be a best seller these days.

We live in the age of Instagram and internet.  Two-thirds of America gets its news from social media or streaming services.  And though more actual books are being published and sold each year, fewer are being read.

So . . . 

Centuries after Paine, Stowe and Sinclair . . . and decades after Carson and Friedan . . .

Do books still matter?

Can a book still . . .

Light a fuse?

Change a mind?

Propel a movement?

Enlighten the nation?

We are about to find out.

Because the ability of America to remain a Constitutional and democratic republic  in 2024 may depend on how many copies of Oath and Honor are actually read. 

Cheney presents her "memoir and warning" in five parts.  

The first two lay out Donald Trump's plot to overturn the election of Joe Biden, culminating in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The third, which Cheney accurately labels "A Plague of Cowardice", recounts the impeachment and Senate trial that followed.  And the fourth and fifth report in detail the creation and work of the House Select Committee that investigated the run-up to and  attack on January 6 and the mountain of evidence it unearthed proving Trump intended to stop the electoral count and have himself installed as President despite his defeat at the polls.

Much of this, especially the factual architecture, was known before Cheney put pen to paper.

Here, however, are three things that either were not known or have yet to become obvious enough to overcome America's large amount of apparent blindness.

First, Trump's scheme was a plot to overturn an election.  

It wasn't "truthful hyperbole" or something no one was meant to "take literally".  It also wasn't a matter of opinion on which reasonable minds could disagree.

Given the delays in counting mail-in and absentee ballots, Trump knew early returns on election night  would show him leading. He therefore decided to falsely claim victory that night and demand the counting stop. He was repeatedly told by the end of the week that he had lost, and was also repeatedly told in the weeks thereafter that there was no evidence of any outcome-determinative fraud. Among his lawyers' more delusional claims was the assertion that voting machines had been secretly programmed by foreigners to reduce Trump's numbers or inflate Biden's.He was also told, however, that these claims were bogus and that all but one of his 61 court challenges had failed.

Nonetheless, in the weeks leading up to all fifty states casting their electoral college votes on December 14 and the House and Senate counting those certified electoral votes on January 6, Trump demanded that state officials illegally alter reported vote tallies, approved the creation of fraudulent and illegal slates of fake electors to be delivered to Congress, and demanded that Vice President Pence illegally reject certified electoral votes and send the election to the House (where Trump would have won). 

As part of his plot, Trump also told the Acting Secretary of Defense that he would fire any Pentagon official who claimed the military could and would have no role in the election and was ready to fire the acting Attorney General and appoint a new one to endorse his false claim that  the Department of Justice had found irregularities in the November vote.

On January 6, aware that Pence had rejected his demand, Trump instructed an armed mob to march on the US Capitol and "fight like hell" lest they "lose" their country.   

As the mob ransacked the Capitol, it attacked and seriously injured the police and sought to hang Pence and kill Pelosi. It shut down the electoral count as Senators and Representatives  were hurriedly moved to safety and Congressional staffers hid terrorized in their barricaded offices. Meanwhile, back at the White House, Trump approved of the attack and waited hours before stopping it.

Second, Republican officeholders made Trump's continuing survival possible.  

They knew Trump's election claims were lies.  They also knew he was singularly responsible for the attempted coup on January 6. 

Instead of removing him, 147 of them still voted to object to the electoral count on the very night of the attack. All but ten GOP Representatives later voted against impeaching Trump and only seven GOP senators voted to convict him.  The GOP conference thereafter voted against any investigation of the January 6 insurrection and they later removed Cheney from her party leadership post.  

The sexism that accompanied this last move was transparent.  A number of her male colleagues claimed to be upset by Cheney's "tone" or "attitude" and one explained his anger at her impeachment vote thusly: "It's like you're playing in the biggest game of your life and you look up and see your girlfriend sitting on the opponent's side."  Another claimed she wasn't "riding for the brand." She reminded him that "the brand" was "the Constitution", not Donald Trump.

Some of the GOP betrayals were outright reversals.  

Kevin McCarthy went from condemning Trump on January 6, to refusing to impeach him on January 13, to visiting him for a photo-op at Mar-a-Lago on January 28. Mitch McConnell moved from initially believing Trump should be impeached to delaying the Senate trial until after Trump's departure to voting against conviction because Trump by then was an ex-president.  Though Texas Rep. Chip Roy, a member of the GOP Freedom Caucus, specifically told Cheney that "Every time I think through this . . . I have trouble figuring out how [it] is not impeachable", he nevertheless found a way.

Others just ignored reality or remained silent.

Early on, when Trump et al. were launching and repeating their increasingly nutty election claims, Jim Jordan pretended facts and law were irrelevant. "The only thing that matters," he said, "is winning." In the House Republican cloakroom before the riot on January 6, another GOP member was heard muttering "The things we do for the Orange Jesus" as he signed on to Trump's bogus objections. 

Later, while the Capitol was stormed and the House chamber locked down, Jordan tried chivalry.  "We need to get the ladies out of the aisle," he said, and then offered his hand to Cheney to "help" her.  "You f---ing did this," she said and swatted his hand away.  Thereafter, according to Cheney, although many GOP members investigated and knew Trump had blessed the rioters' conduct, "They lacked courage and patriotism.  They remained silent."

Third, unless Trump is stopped, his election in 2024 will (way) more likely than not end America's experiment as a democratic constitutional republic.

Oath and Honor is an easy book to read but a difficult one to skim.  It has no index.  Those, therefore, who would undertake the infamous "Washington Read" will be stymied.  If, however, you have previously absorbed all things Trump from the ubiquitous daily reporting, the huge number of prior books and the thorough report of the House Select Committee . . .

And you do not need a refresher course . . .

You should still buy the book.

Just to read the Epilogue.

The Epilogue is Liz Cheney's five-page closing argument.

And it is superb.

Here's my (summary) attempt to do it justice.

The peaceful transfer of power is not typical. To the contrary, throughout the world "'in every government and in every age'", changes in government "'have most generally been epochs of confusion, villainy and bloodshed"'.  

For two hundred forty-four years, with one exception,  America was different. 

And then Donald Trump made it two.

"In a just world," writes Cheney, "the man who mobilized a violent attack on our Capitol -- who attempted to overturn an election and seize power -- would have no political future. Donald Trump and those who aided him would be scorned and punished."

But we do not live in a just world.

We live in an imperfect one.

So, today, "none of us can tell if the story of January 6 is nearing its end or is only just beginning." 

"Trump is running for president of the United States once again, and holds a sizable lead among Republican contenders."

"[W]e must take Donald Trump's statements literally."  

He "has told us that he thinks the Constitution can and should be suspended when necessary, that what happened on January 6 is justified, that in a second Trump presidency he would seek retribution." He will "run the US government with acting officials who are not, and could not be, confirmed by the Senate." He will "obtain a bogus legal opinion that will allow him to do it" and "ensure that the Senate confirmation process is no longer any check on his authority." 

"The types of resignation threats that may have kept Trump at bay before . . . would no longer be a deterrent. Trump would be eager for those who oppose his actions at the Justice Department to resign. And, at the Department of Defense (where a single US Senator, one of Donald Trump's strongest supporters, is doing great harm to America's national security by refusing to allow the confirmation of senior civilian and military officials), Trump would again install his own team of loyalists -- people who would act on his orders without hesitation."

"The assumption that our institutions will protect themselves is purely wishful thinking  by people who prefer to look the other way. Those loyalists and lawyers who step up to help Trump unravel our republic would do so knowing that they would be pardoned. That they would face no risk of prosecution. And Donald Trump would not hesitate to pardon himself. Any who step forward to oppose Trump will face the type of threats, retaliation, and violence we have already seen -- but this time with the full power of an unconstitutional American president behind them."

As for "the Republicans currently in Congress", they "will do what Donald Trump asks, no matter what it is." They will not "check his power. A Senate of Josh Hawleys certainly will not stop Trump. Neither will House Republicans led by a Speaker who has made himself a willing hostage to Trump and his most deranged supporters in Congress. Meanwhile, those in the media who have willingly spread Donald Trump's dangerous claims and propaganda for profit will continue to propel him forward."

Next year, if Trump is the Republican nominee,  "we must do everything we can to defeat him . . . As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for four years. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution."

At the end of her book, Cheney focuses on the three words that begin the Constitution -- We the People.

"In the era of Trump, certain members of Congress and other Trump supporters -- many of whom carry the Constitution in their pockets but seem never to read it -- have attempted to hijack this phrase, to claim it gives them authority to subvert the rule of law or overturn the results of elections.  They have preyed on the patriotism of millions of Americans. They are working to return to office the man responsible for January 6."

"We the people must stop them. We are the only thing that can stop them."

That, and nothing less, is the challenge of Oath and Honor.

On New Years Day 2021, Dick Cheney walked to her car as Liz Cheney and her family were getting ready to leave his house. 

He gave her a hug.

And then an order.

"Defend the republic, daughter."

She has.

Now it's up to the rest of us.

Buy the book.  

Read the book.

Gift the book.

Be the book.