Inherit The Wind

He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.

-- Proverbs (11:29)

I'm about to take off on vacation for a week, so naturally, I watched the 1960 Stanley Kramer dramatization of the Scopes Monkey Trial this morning. I love Spencer Tracy's performances, especially his later ones, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone get the "grilling" scene right, when Henry Drummond (aka Clarence Darrow) coaxes Matthew Harrison Brady (William Jennings Bryan) onto the witness stand to offer expert testimony on the Holy Bible. Drummond sets up Brady perfectly, Tracy and Fredric March are energetic and powerful, and Harry Morgan is wonderful as the judge. But there wasn't quite enough play to the crowd, not enough sense of Drummond's ability to sway it just as easily as Brady, when opportunity permits, to fully represent this moment on the screen.

In my vision of this scene, Drummond turns to the crowd, and the jury, with his "Brady Brady Brady Almighty" mockery, and is completely successful at turning the audience against Brady, at least momentarily. They laugh raucously at the ridiculous image of the man who hands down his Revealed Word from God, like Moses come down from the mountain to his children. Brady is visibly affected by the laughter, looking confused and small, and cries out, barely audible, but enough that the crowd now remembers Brady their Savior, and becomes hushed and ashamed. It's in this silence that Mrs. Brady retrieves her dazed husband and leads him outside.

Perhaps the full impact of such mockery of religious smugness was softened for 1960, but the remake with George C. Scott and Jack Lemmon still fell short, as I recall. I would love to see this scene fully realized, because I think it's chock full of all the human elements surrounding some of our most enduring questions, and it's really brilliantly written. The right to think was on trial, and the scriptwriters, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (really!), exposed the subjectivity, the all-too-human stamp upon any reading of Revelations that calls deeply into question all claims of authority over each individual's personal relationship with the miracle of creation. The depths plumbed in this climactic encounter will be radical, I imagine, as long as human society endures.

The right to think has always been on trial, and court is back in session. There's a new Executive Order floating around now, crafted by our President last week. It purports to lend legitimacy to the notion that the government can seize all property and assets of anyone it deems insufficiently beneficial to the Iraq War Effort. In the meantime, Sen. Clinton had made a request to the Defense Department that Congress' Armed Service Committee be briefed regarding Iraq withdrawal plans. I'm sure it's only a coincidence that, immediately following news of this order, Eric Edelman, Undersecretary of Defense, responded to Sen. Clinton brusquely to the effect that "Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia". When the freedom to think and ask questions is opposed even for those in Congress charged with overseeing defense, one has to cast a wary eye at all the monkey trials that persist all over the country.

The old proverb is itself very Zen. We still trouble our own house, our own hearts, and until we are wise of heart, we are servants to those whose hearts are full of wisdom. Read carefully, its meaning bears no resemblance to that implied by Matthew Brady. It is like Socrates saying that the unexamined life is not worth living.

But back to the scene. Matthew Brady is revealed as a fraud when Drummond lifts the crowd, ever so briefly, into the rarified ether of independent thinking. It is the same fate for anyone who tells you what to think, once all the lights are switched on. The Zen master reveals the shocking truth to his pupil that "I have nothing to give you; and if I did, it wouldn't be your own." In much of life, we have each other, and we work together. But for the ultimate questions, we're absolutely, inescapably, on our own.

Oh, by the way, the Pope says Catholicism is the Only True Religion. Thanks, Pope!

I'll be away for a few days. Hope everything's still here when I get back.

Here's a little dark humor from GoLeft TV and Head Zup: