Wild About Writing

Yep, I mean it. That’s a brilliant cover The New Yorker magazine has this week. The one showing Barack Obama in Muslim garb and his wife Michelle as a gun-toting black anarchist.

It’s brilliant because it taps into the powerful imagery of satirical comment in a way that the written word alone never can.

It’s brilliant because it’s shot down Republican hopes of slandering, either overtly or covertly, Obama as some kind of Muslim sympathizer, or as soft on the war on terrorism. I can’t imagine John McCain ever going this route himself. But there are uncounted numbers of his right-wing supporters who wouldn’t hesitate to do so. McCain’s comment that the cover is “totally inappropriate” is helpful, under the circumstances.

Obama supporters who are causing a furor — some calling for a boycott of the magazine — should reflect more thoughtfully on the nature of political journalism. But what can you expect in a society drenched in “political correctness”?

As New Yorker editor David Remnick says, “The idea is to attack lies and misconceptions and distortions about the Obamas, and their background and their politics.”

Political strategizing aside, the controversial cover serves as a useful reminder that freedom of expression cannot be curtailed — ever — if democratic societies are to retain their core values. Just as Canada’s Western Standard magazine had every right to publish the Danish cartoons about Mohammed, the New Yorker must be able to present this stunningly original political perspective without facing such extreme verbal abuse.

Of course, people also have the right to say what they think of anything they see or hear, in print or any other media. But let’s all relax a bit. Perhaps James Carville put it best: “I don’t know what the big deal is.”

On TV today, I watched the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain just after putting down William White’s wonderful collection of Ernest Hemingway dispatches, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway.

It was a fitting concidence because the book contains some great stuff Hemingway wrote on bull fighting for the Toronto Star Weekly back in 1923.

Here’s a bit of what Papa wrote:

“In Pamplona, a white-walled, sun-baked town high up in the hills of Navarre, is held in the first two weeks of July each year the World’s Series of bull fighting…

“Every morning during the bull fighting festival of San Fermin at Pamplona the bulls that are to fight in the afternoon are released from their corrals at six o’clock in the morning and race through the main street of the town for a mile and a half to the pen. The men who run ahead of them do it for the fun of the thing. It has been going on each year since a couple of hundred years before Columbus had his historic interview with Queen Isabella in the camp outside of Granada.”

White’s collection is wonderful to dip into. Another coincidence is that I’m reading it in the month of Hemingway’s death – July 1961. He’d tried electric shock treatments for depression. They destroyed his ability to write, and so he shot himself.

There’s a wonderful piece from the Transatlantic Review of 1924, in which Hemingway writes of the death of another great writer, Joseph Conrad.

“What is there you can write about him now that he is dead?” Hemingway begins.

He goes on with a Canadian angle:

“In Sudbury, Ontario, I bought three back numbers of the Pictorial Review and read The Rover, sitting up in bed in the Nickle Range Hotel. When morning came I had used up all my Conrad like a drunkard, I had hoped it would last me the trip, and felt like a young man has blown his patrimony. But, I thought, he will write more stories. He has lots of time.”

I’ve stayed in the Nickle Range Hotel. But wow, we all wish we could write like that!

It is marvellous how conventional wisdom can be harnessed to turn facts upside down.

I was in Salt Lake City last week, checking out some of the historic sites maintained by the Mormons – the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It’s a movement that’s spawned thousands of books.

Attractive young ladies of different races and nationalities are there to guide you through places like the Mormon Tabernacle and the Beehive House lived in by Brigham Young. Of course, unless you’re Mormon (and I’m not) you’re not permitted into the grandest edifice of all, the LDS Temple.

I was eager to see everything I could to help me get it right in the historical adventure novel I’m working on. (A branch of my family headed by Joseph Argyle walked 1,300 miles across the Great Plains as members of the Mormon First Handcart Company in 1856.)

The great controversy that’s always dogged the Mormon church is of course polygamy. Officially disowned for over 100 years, polygamy is still a sore point because some have refused to give up the practice.

Like any religion, Mormonism has trouble facing up to facts. Founder Joseph Smith promoted polygamy (the more kids a man fathered, the higher he’d rank in Heaven), claiming he’d been told in a revelation that “if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, then he is justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him.”

That’s not the way the young lady guiding us through the Beehive told it. Her version was that Joseph Smith had “received a revelation telling him that some men were called upon to support other families in need. Later, there was another revelation that this was no longer necessary.” She added, for good measure, that anyone who practices polygamy is not acceptable as a Mormon. The conventional wisdom of the LDS today suggests that polygamy was merely a historical anomaly, without religious significance.

Polygamy aside, you can’t travel in Utah without being tremendously impressed at the achievements of this once-persecuted sect. Mormons have managed to cling to a primitive religion while also embracing modernity. Their focus on education, work, and family — all causes espoused by Brigham Young — turned a desert into an American Zion.