Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered

Reflections on history while writing my book, American Hero
Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered       

Good Times, 1692

How could a 13 year-old girl bring down an entire village of proper and prosperous Puritans? Only someone who hasn’t spent much time around 13 year-old girls would even ask that question. I would rather face an army of Orcs than one Abigail Williams. But what really destroyed Salem in 1692 and put a full grind stop on the Puritan Movement was not the hysterical rantings of one confused and bi-polar adolescent who convinced herself, her friends, and almost everyone else that harmless and lonely widows danced the sky-clad tango with the goat-footed devil under the pale moonlight—which for those who know witches already smacks of ridiculousness because Wiccan is a pagan (wo)manifestation of primal feminine forces that does not recognize the Judeo-Christian God or the Manichean Devil due to their masculine-based subordination of the Eternal Mother, duh—but something much more piercing than the sharpest pitchfork of any hell-spawn demon. In a word, what destroyed the Puritans was guilt.

    Of what would such God-fearing Pilgrims have to be guilty about? First, don’t believe that people didn’t know any better back in the 17^th century and so we can understand, if not excuse, their racism, sexism, intolerance, and the “is that a crowbar inserted into your lower intestines or are you just unhappy to see me?” attitude about anything not seared with the Puritan Seal of Approval. We already downed a few pints with jolly old Thomas Merton at Merrymount. He was unmatched for his drinking skills, but wasn’t alone in his open-mindedness. Roger Williams founded the Providence Plantation in what would become Rhode Island based on the idea of separation between church and state. William Penn actually worked with Indians and refused to treat non-Christian natives, Catholics, or Jews any differently than the Christian immigrants. Of course, the Dutch in New Amsterdam were aggressively heterogeneous. You could walk down Wall Street and hear as many languages then as you might now. Thanks to Adriaen van der Donck, with a last minute assist by the ornery Peter Stuyvesant, human rights survived the change in ownership from Dutch New Amsterdam to English New York.

    Despite these bastions of common sense, most white colonists in the late 17^th century condoned the extermination of Indians, the enslavement of Africans, and the war on women. At the same time, some still small voice within them warned against the Dark Side.

    When Anne Hutchinson, who advocated for women to lead spiritual services, was banished from New England, and later killed, the guilt grew like a canker among the Puritans. They already had the ghosts of murdered Indians on their conscience. Perhaps worse, the prosperity of New England, and Salem in particular, came from the slave trade. The slave ships during the Middle Passage, just beginning now, were built in New England. The ships’ captains and crews were from New England. The main income of the families in Salem in the 1690s came from slavery, both in British North America and in their interests in slave auction houses in Barbados.      

   To minds twisted into justifying the inhumanity of slavery with Christian compassion for the downtrodden, believing in witches and talking cats must have come as a relief. How easy it must have been to hang a few mentally imbalanced people rather than deal with the imbalance of your own morality.

    In the hysteria of the witch-hunts, over twenty people were executed, many more lives were ruined, including the accusatory girls who took on the guilt of their society. As for Abigail Williams, she disappeared into history, last seen walking the streets of Barbados, a scorned and bitter woman.

    The Salem Witch Trials soon made the Puritans ridiculous in their own eyes. It was a self-destructive act, subconsciously motivated to erase the guilt they felt for their involvement in slavery and other forms of oppression. After that, it took a long time for religious fundamentalists to be taken seriously again, enough time to give Ben Franklin and other freethinkers some space to develop the ideas that would change the world in the 18^th century.

Interviews: Elvis Costello Writes The Book

Elvis Costello Writes The Book

The Other King

Oh, I just don’t know where to begin.

While preparing for my interview with my absolute, palm-itchingly, hands up choice for most acerbically sarcastic, lyrically fearless, and crafty—in every admirable sense of the word—songwriter, Elvis Costello, by jumping back and forth between the twin beds in my hotel room until the springs plink through the mattresses and the neighbors clobber against the cardboard walls, I go through my mental Cliff Notes on E.C.’s oeuvre like a Yeshiva boy cramming for his first test on Talmudic tongue-twisters—and, by the way, impress myself with how clever I am about his cleverness. I psych myself up like I’m going into a word rumble. He’ll pull out a sharp-edged double-entendre and I’ll be ready to counter with an analytical allusion.  I’ll match him jab for jab, barb for barb, pun for pun. Listen, here’s the thing about interviews. Politicians, you put on the tape recorder, leave the room, get a sandwich, take a nap, and they’ll fill 45 minutes. Movie stars—Wow, you are so amazing—and that gets them interviewing themselves enough for you to think about last night’s episode of Battlestar Galactica. But Rock Stars can either be non-existent or out to mess with your head.

I thought Elvis would definitely be out to mess with my head. After all, for those who twist words like balloon animals, he’s the Master Clown.

For those waiting to be seated after the intermission, Elvis Costello erupted onto American radio out of London in 1977, along with the Clash and the Sex Pistols in that first wave of British punk. However, he was exponentially more melodic and reverent of diverse music styles, including jazz and country. His jukebox includes “Alison,” “Watching the Detectives” (a film noir masterpiece, without the film), “This Year’s Girl,” and “Accidents Will Happen.” He’s collaborated with Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach, T-Bone Burnett, and his wife, jazz swan, Diana Krall. Just Google him.

But bollocks to all that. Here we are, me and Elvis, before and after he and the Attractions hit the stage at, of all places, the Pennsylvania State Fair. He’s wearing a black suit, trademark glasses, and spanking cool checkered boots, the non-ironic wearing of which may be the whole reason one aspires to become a rock star in the first place. So much of life is about the shoes (and angels wanting to wear them). Elvis Costello:

“I never explain songs. I write songs about something I care enough about to want to write about, subjects that conjure up a feeling or an emotion. They’re generally about human matters, whether in the form of a relationship, the government, or my next-door neighbor. I hate the idea of political songs, because unless they’re ‘We Shall Overcome’ or ‘People Get Ready,’ they’re bloody boring. If you want to make a speech, don’t sing it. For the same reason, I hate the idea of rock music as a category. I suppose having all these labels in music—rock, country, urban, jazz, classical, what have you—I suppose it stops you from buying songs that you don’t like, so you don’t accidentally buy Ray Coniff instead of Roy Orbison. But I don’t see rock music as being more important than any other so-called label. That’s a very limiting idea. When rock ‘n’ roll replaced swing, they said, ‘this is the end of music.’ They burned Elvis Presley records! They broke Chuck Berry records! And rock music was very important in 1955. It shook up young people and led to rethinking the grey Eisenhower establishment. It was important again in 1964. It suggested that peace, love, and understanding were options. And in 1977, it gave young people power over cynical hypocrisy—though for a very brief time only. Other than that, it never exactly brings down the government, does it? There’s more power to me, say, in ‘The Kid’s Are Alright’ than in ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.’ It’s important to take your work seriously, else you do it badly, but to take yourself seriously, you become an absolute buffoon. I’m less interested in writing about issues than I am in writing about trust and betrayal and love and people’s stories. These are the things that interest me the most. Only the most pompous people write songs thinking they’re going to change anything with them—whether politically or personally. An artist is primarily of an observer of him or her self in the world. Far too much emphasis is placed on aggression and mistrust and bitterness and anger and all of the negative things people read into my work. I always assumed that that was because it made better copy to project me as aggressive. And I wouldn’t say I hadn’t written songs like that. But maybe I just have high hopes. I am disappointed quite a lot, not least of all in myself, most of all in myself. Most of the vitriolic songs were really aimed at me, some weakness, some foolishness. Sometimes I don’t even know what the song is about until after I’ve been performing it for a while. I’ve often found myself singing and thinking, my God, was I really this depressed when I wrote this or was I just being too clever and messing about with words?”