The Jezebel Witch and the Whore of Babylon

I wonder if I'm the only person who is oblivious to these kinds of things:

John Kerry, the New England Senator who ran for president back during the '04 election, is a descendant of John Winthrop, the Puritan founder of Massachusetts Bay.

In 1637 Winthrop & co. famously banished Anne Hutchinson from Boston after a heated persecutory trial, during which Winthrop and Hutchinson butted heads continuously

about religious doctrine. Winthrop even gives her a cute nickname: the Jezebel Witch. Rather than resort to name-calling and fruitless accusations, Hutchinson tries to appeal to logic.

Which was a mistake. She was, of course, condemned. A sorceress she must be.

Winthrop did such a shoddy job of arguing with Hutchinson, a woman, that the Puritans established a little university called Harvard to boost the old Intelligence Quotient of the male population thereabouts.

But here's the fun part: Anne Hutchinson is the witty, charismatic ancestor of none other than George W. Bush.

As Sarah Vowell describes in The Wordy Shipmates:

Winthrop's heir, John Kerry, debate[d] Hutchinson's great-something grandson, George W. Bush. Only in this instance it's the Hutchinson who is flummoxed by his opponents sensical answers. Bush's constant blinking appears on television as if he thinks the answer to the questions he's being asked are tattooed inside his own eyelids. (p.234)

Bush attended Yale, by the way, not Harvard, which would have been fittingly circular Karmic justice. No university wants that bad press. In Yale's defense though, Kerry went there as well. He should have done foremother proud and gone to a liberal arts college in Rhode Island, where Hutchinson was exiled to. But I guess that would be too perfect.

Here's another interesting tidbit I got from Sarah Vowell: The Puritans were downright outlandish with their nicknames. Hutchinson was called the Jezebel Witch...

But the Pope got an even better/worse epithet. To the Puritans, he was known as the Whore of Babylon.

I guess to the minds of the Puritans, an old celibate man can be the embodiment of slut-titude.

English Literature 000:Urban Crime, Black Feminism & New England Puritans

The English Literature 000 segment of this blog will explore books I've sold (as Lawler Books on Amazon Marketplace), books I've read, books I'm reading, books I've bludgeoned folks with, ect.

The accidental theme of the week seems to be events in and about Washington D.C. Seriously, even the Pinkerton book I read last week mostly took place in D.C. And the Capitol was prominent in the news, too, as frat boys lit up the joint in order to celebrate the death of some notorious bearded man or something. Frat boys have a legendary antipathy towards beards, I'm told.

Anyway:

For Mother's Day, I got my NPR-worshipping mother The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell. "I saw her on The Colbert Report/Daily Show," says Mom (To her, they are the same show), "She looks exactly the way I would have expected." She made this comment in approval of Vowell, obvs.

Still more literature on U.S History, because I love to gaze hypnotically at my country's navel. Thus, I've been reading Paula Giddings' When and Where I Enter. Ida B. Wells is now my personal icon. She was a sh*t-stirrer in the best possible way.

I finished Drama City by George Pelecanos this very morning. There is nothing like an operatic shootout between D.C gangsters to get the blood pumping. Pelecanos was a producer on The Wire, and reading this novel makes me want to devour the whole series during a solitary weekend. It is hopeful, human, elegiac, and violent without getting off on violence (although one character does get erect after stabbing women and watching rotwielers shred one another to pieces. Parental Warning).

Finally, Lawler Books sold Etendre y Hablar, a 1961 Spanish Language textbook. It's full of some very nostalgic illustrations, totally demonstrative of a certain conservative era at the tail end of the 50s, I guess. Stylistically, the sketches remind me of the opening credits from Bewitched. I'm guessing this aesthetic is the reason why the book sold. Certainly, it is not the most up-to-date Spanish primer. [Spanish Phrase of the Day: No sé lo que tengo]

Oh, and FYI: Vowell's book is about the East Coast (D.C counts as the East Coast, right? I didn't read the book); When and Where I Enter covers MLK jr's March on Washington; and Pelecanos' novel, as I've said, takes place in "Dodge City" (Pelecanos Note: "D.C don't stand for Dodge City").