Why Don't We Do Right?

William Blake, "Jacob's Ladder"

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I began "Why Don't We Do Right?" sometime in 2022, for by the end of the year I thought it good enough to consider submitting for publication. It reached its present form in the summer of 2023, but I have continued to make small changes since then. It is not, as some readers may conclude, a response to the events of October 7 of last year.

The poem treats three situations—a writer in occupied France who, despite the pangs of conscience, writes antisemitic works to give him the freedom to pursue his sexual adventures; the celebrated French composer, Olivier Messiaen, who during Occupation took over a prestigious post in the Conservatoire de Paris after a Jew was ousted; and Billy Wilder, the Austrian born screen writer who fled Austria to escape the Nazis: he represents all those who fled, hid, or suffered to save their souls in the Nazi era. As the speaker—a high school teacher—tells his students, our choices in the end may not be much better. We must step into the fire laid for us.

The poem is in the form of the teacher’s lecture at the end of the school year in May 1968. In my youth, world and American history classes rarely got beyond World War 2. When I graduated in 1970, only twenty-five years had passed since the end of the war, many veterans were alive and occupied prominent public and corporate positions, and the war loomed large in popular consciousness.

The teacher, Mr. Jones, is rather more interested in the juxtapositions and dark meanings of history than in communicating with his students. There was a lot to ponder at the time. May 1968 was the month of the uprising in France; a delayed effect was the resignation of De Gaulle the following year. It was also the month that peace talks began between North Vietnam and the US. Neither of those events are reflected in the poems, but these are: it was just five years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a month after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, and the month before Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in LA (here, I give the teacher a bit of prophetic power).

A key term in the poem is the slang word mahaha. It could mean “nonsense” (a meaning noted in the 30’s; a variation was mahoula) or “silly talk,” a meaning from 1947. Currently it means a laugh by someone planning evil deeds, like bwahaha in cartoons. I hope the poem reflects all three meanings.

Why Don’t We Do Right?
American History Class, May 1968
 
The wise men are ashamed, they are dismayed and taken: lo, they have rejected the word of the Lord; and what wisdom is in them?—Jeremiah 8:9
 
1941!—a hole in history—a  year in which all the visible gods had abandoned us, in which god was really dead or gone back into his non-revealedness.--Emanuel Levinas
 
Today, class, the Second World War continues
with us at peace: Whirlaway wins the Preakness;
the Giants start wearing plastic batting helmets.
The Einsatzgruppen are cleaning and loading weapons.
The self-selected wise define the world,
from Abram to Zapruder, but a gunsel grumbles,
“Your mixed-up talk is giving me a headache;
it’s mahaha.” He settles the argument
by shooting up the globe to make it move.
His slugs shatter Memphis and LA.
Where’s Jeremiah when you need him?

     [A hand shoots up.] Your mixed-up talk is giving
us a headache! What does mahaha mean?
Let’s see how it’s used. [Another hand.]
Teach, we’re so confused. This isn’t in
the book. Congratulations! You’re getting the point.
Like love and chickenpox, history comes
at us hard, off-script, and when it’s done
the world’s been rearranged.

     So what was and was not mahaha
in that year, some say of grace, 41?
At four of a summer morning, the joyful
noising of the birds, the mockingbird’s
improvisations are not mahaha;
they are antonyms of nonsense, the reaching
for light and grace in jubilating song:
now you know what isn’t it.

     Mr. Jones, will this be on the test?

     But class, this is mahaha: in October,
a French raciste de plume visits Munich
on Goebbels’ invitation. Walking the streets,
he sees a mustached man in black serge
and a little hat. He looks like a sacristan,
but on his chest an emblem has been stitched,
two and a half inches wide, a yellow star.
The writer follows the little man down
the street, but only a little way, till
he comes to himself: I’m not the same
as that little man! Oh, he looks vulnerable
and anxious, but he carries the diseases
of Moscow and Wall Street. Our clever writer
buys in to antisemitic mahaha,
scribbles Le Péril Juif to purchase
the freedom to write unmolested
his sexual adventures with a Nazi
poet, a Wehrmacht Sonderführer.

     Class, we are like him. Like which one, Teach?
Pop quiz: Which one are we—victim, victimizer,
collaborator? Explain in complete
sentences.

                    The writer’s full of himself,
and self is mahaha. He should have gone the way
of dispossession, become the great soul
paraded in his journal: o his frisson
of pity for the little man facing
extermination: how exquisitely it
sharpens cruelty! It makes one feel
clean and jubilant. It certifies
the superiority of the Übermensch.  

     [Most of the children doze off, a few cry.]
Why are we studying this beast? To help us
cage or kill our own mahaha beasts.

     Here’s an instructive case: a composer
in Stalag VIII recalls the angry Panzers
rolling across his France. He will become
famous, but in his myth certain inaccuracies
will arise, for his is not “a concentration
camp,” the instruments that play his great
Quatuor are not “decrepit,” his work
of composing and performing is assisted
by his German imprisoners. Released,
he will become professor of harmony,
a post from which a Jew has been ousted.
And if he does not know this? In evil times,
to prosper is to be complicit. To serve
truth and save their souls, some choose to suffer,
flee, or hide, like Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil,
and Voegelin: heroes, whatever their flaws.

     Dear class, your choices may not be much better.

     Mr. Jones, will we be tested on this?

     Consider Billy Wilder, the writer who fled
Austria for Paris, then the US.
In the week of Pearl Harbor, his Ball of Fire
lit up screens smoking with the Arizona.
The actors in his comedy—Homolka
and Sakall, who escaped the Nazis, Kinskey
who fled the Reds and the Whites—remind us
of the divinely light-footed worlds we lost
where ballerinas giggled up and down
iron staircases, whirling round and round
Jacob’s ladder wearing tights and smelling
of rice powder on nude shoulders. As
Spade says to Wonderly, it’s not always
easy to know what to do—not easy
to improvise righteous song while history’s
demons chase the angels weeping down
the iron staircase. Not easy in our republic
of lies to do justly, walk unself-
deceived, speak uprightly.

                                           Teach, we’re lost
and sad and don’t know why. I thought
we won the war. So let’s watch Ball of Fire
and laugh: “The mouse is the dish. We’ll be stepping,
me and this smooch. I mean, the dish, I mean,
the mouse.” Let’s leap into the fire laid for us
and make a joyful noise unto the Lord.
 
NOTES: The poem relies heavily on Billy Wilder’s and Charles Brackett’s slang-filled screenplay for Ball of Fire and on François Dufay, Le voyage d’automne. Other sources include Kansas Joe McCoy (title); the screenplay for Casablanca by Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein, and Howard Koch; the notes of Olivier Messiaen for his Quatuor pour la fin du temps: John Huston’s screenplay for The Maltese Falcon; Psalm 100.

• Einsatzgruppen clean and load--In preparation for invasion of Russia in June 1941.
• self-selected wise--The teacher repeatedly refers to, and quotes, the 1941 movie, Ball of Fire, a screwball comedy released around the time of Pearl Harbor. The screenplay is by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. The “wise” in the movie are writing an encyclopedia.
• from Abram to Zapruder--Abraham Zapruder is famous for having accidentally captured the assassination of John F. Kennedy while filming the presidential motorcade.
• Your mixed-up talk--A scene near the end of Ball of Fire. The gunsel is holding the encyclopedists hostage to ensure that the leading lady, a nightclub singer named Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck), marries a mob boss so she can’t testify against him. She’s in love with the leader of the encyclopedists (Gary Cooper).
• whole world rearranged--from The Intruders’ hit, “Cowboys to Girls,” hitting number 4 for the week of May 11, 1968.
• Goebbels’ invitation--Based on real events involving Marcel Jouhandeau, as described by François Dufay in Le voyage d’automne: Octobre 1941, des écrivains français en Allemagne. Goebbels had invited writers from around Europe to participate in a conference. The French sent more representatives than any other occupied country.
• composer in Stalag VIII— The composer in is Olivier Messiaen. I first became interested in him because of the legend that this stanza debunks.
• Homolka, Sakall, Kinskey— These actors play encyclopedia writers in Ball of Fire, and two of them—Leonid Kinskey and S. Z. Sakall—are in Casablanca, set in 1941 but released in 1942.
• Spade and Wonderly— Sam Spade (played by Humphrey Bogart, also the star of Casablanca) and Ruth Wonderly /Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) are characters in the 1941 movie, The Maltese Falcon.

 
Posted 6 July 2024