Dining with Serial Killers

Sundays

[Revised and updated from an earlier post.]

A couple of years ago, I started to feel like parts of my brain were beginning to atrophy.

During the Onslaught (which is how I sometimes refer to the almost daily waves of bad news and trauma we’ve all been subjected to (if not been directly affected by) since November 2016, I have a hard time concentrating for long stretches, which is something I’ve never had a problem with before. This has been especially the case since COVID, when I stopped reading the kind of books that had always been an integral part of my life—books commonly referred to as “literature” as opposed to “fiction.” Instead, I read murder mysteries. This isn’t an insult—I love murder mysteries—but they don’t feed my soul.

And then, last February I felt like I was losing brain cells and didn’t want to lose more so I decided to re-read Henry James’ novels.

I started with James, because, even though his prose is dense, his narratives are more straightforward and his stories are further removed from our troubled history than those of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, who are my two favorite writers (James is my third favorite).

I fell in love with James’ writing after I read The Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl for fun when I was in college. Since then, I’ve read everything he wrote, with the exception of a few of his earlier novels, and every single one of his short stories, as well as his collected letters.

After a few months. I’d gotten through the first seven novels and then started on the eighth. The Bostonians, which takes place in the years following the conclusion of the Civil War, is ostensibly about a love triangle in which Basil Ransom, a southern confederate, and his cousin Olive Chancellor, a Bostonian feminist who battle for the affections of (and control over) the heiress Verena Tarrant.

Ransom has come north after his family lost its fortune and plantation during the war, in order to jump-start his career as a lawyer. In an effort to gain some traction, Ransom writes half a dozen scholarly articles but

[t]hey were all declined with thanks, and he would have been forced to believe that the accent of his languid clime brought him luck as little under the pen as on the lips, had not another explanation been suggested by one of the more explicit of his oracles, in relation to a paper on the rights of minorities. This gentleman pointed out that his doctrines were about three hundred years behind the age; doubtless some magazine of the sixteenth century would have been very happy to print them. This threw light on his own suspicion that he was attached to causes that could only, in the nature of things, be unpopular. The disagreeable editor was right about his being out of date, only he had got the time wrong. He had come centuries too soon; he was not too old, but too new.

The fundamental problem with the novel, at least for me, is not only that Ransom sided with the Confederacy--he supported secession because his family owned other human beings and they wanted to continue to be able to do so—but that he is accepted by an ostensibly enlightened Boston society.

it becomes clear early on that, as distasteful as his northern counterparts might find his politics, Ransom is going to be welcomed into their drawing rooms and at their dinner parties despite the fact that he is both an unreconstructed racist and was an enemy of America.

I love Henry James’ work in part because of his innate and deep understanding of the complexities and limits of human relationships (including our relationships to ourselves), but once Ransom is accepted and normalized, I had to put the book down.

The man believed thoroughly and unwaveringly in his lost cause—and The Lost Cause (even though that isn’t what it was called yet). He regrets the war not because he has an epiphany about the egregiousness of what he willingly participated in, but because he and his family were ruined by it:

His family was ruined; they had lost their slaves, their property, their friends and relations, their home; had tasted of all the cruelty of defeat. He had tried for a while to carry on the plantation himself, but he had a millstone of debt round his neck, and he longed for some work which would transport him to the haunts of men. The State of Mississippi seemed to him the state of despair; so he surrendered the remnants of his patrimony to his mother and sisters.

There is no repentance here.

The failures of Reconstruction are legion—or, more accurately, the failures of white, mostly Republican northerners to fulfill the vast promise of Reconstruction are legion—and one seed of those failures was the ostensibly simple act of allowing these serial killers a place at the table without question or consequence after the Civil War ended.

I grew up with my own serial killers (using the term loosely and metaphorically, of course), and even if I didn’t know that’s who they were, I had inklings from a very young age. I didn’t know what the racism, and the homophobia, and the misogyny were at first, but I did see the cruelty and I made myself as small as possible so I never became a target of it.

There was no need to bother, of course, because as a girl and as my father’s daughter I was of no consequence to them, but that of course is its own kind of cruelty. As I got older and recognized the extent my family’s bigotry, I still said nothing. I pretended it was all just fine because they were my family and what else was I supposed to do? I even allowed myself to become close with a couple of them long after I knew better.

And that’s how the accommodation starts. We grow up with the unacceptable and the unbearable and accommodation becomes a tool we use to make our lives easier. Accommodating the unacceptable and the unbearable is more often than not easier than doing the right thing—and then it becomes habitual. Eventually, we use it to let ourselves off the hook, because that’s easier, too.

Maya Angelou made doing the right thing look easy. “[The negative] lives,” she said, “And if you allow it to perch in your house, in your mind, in your life, it can take you over. So, when the rude or cruel thing is said—the lambasting, the gay bashing, the hate—I say, ‘Take it all out of my house!’ Those negative words climb into the woodwork and into the furniture, and the next thing you know they’ll be on my skin.”

She would not allow, “poison and vulgarity” in her house. Any racial or sexual pejorative is designed to make a person less than, she said, and that kind of hateful disregard seeps in, leaps from one person to the next.

“One isn’t necessarily born with courage,” Angelou told us, “but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.”

She counseled us to do one courageous thing in a small way. From there, do another, and then another until, finally, you can say, without hesitation, to the bigoted and the cruel, “no, not in my house you don’t.”

This country is our shared home. If right now it feels as though it’s been invaded by vandals, it has. The serial killers aren’t just the people who’ve been pardoned and released from prison—they’re the people currently occupying the seats of power and doing the pardoning.

It’s inexcusable for those who know better to normalize them, but it’s unconscionable to accommodate them. Too many Democrats are playing that game and what we need to do, what we need to admonish them to do, is start saying, “Take it all out of my house!” And then we can move forward.

Like the Boston socialites and suffragettes who invited Basil Ransom into their drawing rooms, we know exactly who these people are. If we remain naive enough to give them the benefit of the doubt or extend them any grace, we will continue to be punished for it. For over a year, our leaders told us how dangerous another Trump administration would be. They warned us about the encroaching fascism that was poised to throttle our democracy. But as soon as our side lost, many of these people relinquished much of the power they still possessed or exited the stage or chose to become accommodationists to one degree or another.

I’ve been calling Donald and his followers, sycophants, and enablers fascists publicly since the 2020 presidential election. It is deeply depressing to have been proven right, but so much worse that over 74 million Americans either did not believe the evidence right in front of them or simply didn’t care. Seventy-eight million made the same choice in 2024. And here we are.

Those who understand the gravity of the situation, who acknowledge that the leaders of the party in power are indeed fascists, should never accommodate them, never lift a finger to make their lives more comfortable, never make their dark work easier.

The Democrats have failed in this from the time the presidential election was called last November. Whether their capitulation and compromise are motivated by weakness or an inability to understand the crisis we’re in or a cynical lack of urgency, I do not know. Yet once again, they seem poised to squander what little advantage they have, as they did when ten Senate Democratics joined with Republicans to pass the appropriations bill in March. You would think, having witnessed the increasingly brazen assaults Donald and others in the Trump regime have launched against our institutions, the rule of law, and our civil liberties, Democrats would have learned some lesson—never make common cause with fascists.

But we seem to be right back where we started from. Last week we learned that Schumer and Jeffries had “demanded” a meeting with Donald to negotiate a compromise to avoid a government shutdown on September 30. Initially, Donald claimed that it would be not be productive to meet with “the Minority Radical Left Democrats” who, he falsely claims, want

over a trillion dollars in new spending to continue free healthcare for illegal [sic] aliens, [and] Taxpayer funded ‘TRANSGENDER’ surgery

And on and on.

The meeting will take place tomorrow after all. The only real leverage Democrats have is to refuse to give this petty tyrant and his openly fascist party the votes they need to keep the government open. Let them suffer the consequences of their horrific governance.

You would think that the least we could ask of them, for the sake of human decency, is that the Democrats would refuse to work with them and never invite them in. I never would.