If you know Maya Angelou’s work and her record as a civil rights activist and chronicler, you are almost certainly mourning her recent passing. Even if you are not a fan of her work, or consider yourself part of a different political or social ideology than the ones she espoused, you almost certainly recognize her enormous talent as a poet, a prose writer, an inspirational speaker, and a human being. She showed us what the best in humanity could look like, and taught us that no matter what you lacked or what you suffered, you could rise above and be a better person for yourself, your family and your community.
However, some people on the far, far right didn’t get that message. And being the spiritual and moral defectives that they are, they chose to “honor” Angelou’s passing by mocking and vilifying her. Our friends at Politicus chronicled their spew in an article that expressed the proper outrage and disgust. I chose to go down a different path. Instead of just waving their hate like a red flag and going, “See? See? See what jerks they are?!” let’s counterpoint their vitriol with some words of wisdom from the great lady herself, all drawn from a lovely compendium shared by our own Tiffany Willis.
First up: Debbie Schlussel. I’ve never been quite sure who Schlussel is besides a professional hate vendor, although in her bio she credits herself with one “achievement” after another, mostly at the expense of innocent Americans who happen to be Muslim. Her “obituary” of Angelou slammed her as a racist, anti-Semitic traitor, and that’s just from the title.
It didn’t get any better. Schlussel mocked everything from Angelou’s name to her race, her writing talent, and her political stance, even accusing her of spending her life and career making “big money” from “attacking America and idolizing the far left.” (Debbie, honey sweetie sugar pie, if you think Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton are members of the “far left,” I have some folks I’d just love for you to meet). She concludes by advising her readers:
“I hope she packed light because it’s very hot where she’s headed.”
Instead of answering Schlussel’s ignorant ranting and slobbering with rants of my own, let’s just let Dr. Angelou speak for herself.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.
If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.”
Tim Cavanaugh at the National Review took a different tack. He may be the first of the far-right contingent to try to co-opt Angelou for the right. They’ve already tried (and failed) to recast Dr. King and Malcolm X as proud, Ayn-Rand loving conservative Republicans, it looks like Cavanaugh is next. After damning her poetry with faint praise — “Older readers may recall that ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ seemed like a slog at the time, but I can tell you it’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ compared to” the works read at President Obama’s two inaugurations — he then claims that Angelou was a staunch Second Amendment supporter, apparently just like Sam Wurzelbacher and the other fine human beings who scream for the right to carry land mines into kindergartens. He “proves” this by citing a story Angelou told about scaring away a burglar from her home by firing warning shots.
Forgetting for the moment that Angelou certainly knew that “stand your ground” gun laws were not written on her behalf, it’s hard to see how Cavanaugh can logically use that one instance to cast Angelou as the right’s new George Zimmerman (logic, of course, has little to do with the entire article). And, somehow, Cavanaugh decided that the best way to end his curious little piece of fluff with some YouTube videos of David Alan Grier’s satirical impersonations of Angelou. I get the impression that Rich Lowry called Cavanaugh late in the evening, after Cavanaugh had already finished off the best part of the box of wine in his fridge, and told him to have a column about Angelou ready by 8 a.m. the next morning. Five minutes of wine-fuddled Googling gave Cavanaugh the quote and the Grier impersonations, and he did the rest, possibly even while conscious.
Cavanaugh might not have Googled the following:
“When we cast our bread upon the waters, we can presume that someone downstream whose face we will never know will benefit from our action, as we who are downstream from another will profit from that grantor’s gift.”
“Each of us has that right, that possibility, to invent ourselves daily. If a person does not invent herself, she will be invented. So, to be bodacious enough to invent ourselves is wise.”
“The devil lives in our mistakes, the Lord lives in our rights. Who lives in our ignorance, and who wins after all?”
Finally, Betsy Rothstein, a journalist for the Daily Caller, decided that the best use of her journalism degree would be to badmouth Angelou’s poetry and attack a rival at Politico, Dylan Byers, in the same piece. “Amateur poet” Byers busted Cavanaugh for trashing Angelou, and Rothstein wasn’t having any of that, no sirree bobtail cat. The best way to approach the entire inside-the-newsroom imbroglio, she decided, was to insult both Byers and Angelou in the same breath, mocking Byers’s literary produce and comparing it to Angelou’s own supposedly low-quality work. It’s not likely that Rothstein and Cavanaugh shared his box of wine before going to their separate laptops to whack out their literary gemstones, but, well, anything’s possible.
What might Angelou have to say about this intramural catfight?
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.”
“Everything has rhythm. Everything dances.”
“Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”
At the end, it’s a lead pipe cinch that people will still be teaching Angelou’s works and carrying on her legacy for decades to come. Her poetry and prose will be taught, chewed over, and dreamed about in high school and college classes for the foreseeable future. I don’t know if Schlussel, Cavanaugh and Rothstein have children, but it’s ironic to consider that their kids will almost certainly be asked to read and discuss Angelou’s work somewhere in their educational future. Their own parents’ work, not so much.
Still we rise, Maya, heedless of what, and who, try to pull us back down. Still we rise.
Edited/Published by: SB
