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I must confess that my secular-humanist education sure had me fooled.
When I was a junior at Greeley West High School, our class was assigned The Tragedy of Macbeth by Wllllam Shakespeare. As a foolish and lmpresdonable youth, I considered the homework mereIy another adolescent annoyance. Reading about those thanes and lairds got in the way of the lmportant parts of a 16-year-old's life -- drinking beer, chasing girls and racing cars.
Not-until this week did I learn the tenable truth from the Jefferson County members of Citizens for Excellenee In Education. Macbeth is evil. It promotes the occult. It is un-American.
I should have figured that out sooner, I suppose. The drama wA written by an Englishman and is set in Scotland. Since Macbeth is not some uplifting domestic drama written by a wholesome American like Tennessee Wllllams or Eugene O'Neill, then Macbeth must be un-American.
This discovery makes me glad I took a logic class in college. Knowing how to identify enthymematic disjunctlve sylloglsms means I can now protect my wife and children from all those un-Amencan forces lurking everywhere on wooden shelves: Irish satirists, Welsh poets, Greek bards, Danish grammarians, German philosophers, French essayists and even Russian novelists and Hebrew prophets.
Protecting children from the occult is going to be more difficult, though.
Such fundamentalist literature as I can find amid all the un-American drivel warns that astrology is part of the occult.
Something like 180,000 tons of paper were consumed last year in the promotion of astrology, because just about every dally newspaper in America wastes space on a horoscope. An astrology book, Linda Goodman's Sun Signs, for a long time held the record for the publlsher's advance paid on a non-fiction book -- $2.25 million. It was on the best-seller list for a long time, along with Sidney Omarr's Astrological Guide.
Given that the occult is such good business and
remembering how Calvin Coolidge said the business of
America is busiess,
it should be un-Amerlcan not to
promote the occult. But the Citizens for Educational
Excellence don't see it that way.
Macbeth apparently promotes the occult because three witches show up sporadically on stage.
Macbeth listens to them at first, and then starts murdering rivals, which makes their prophecy of his kingship come true. As his administration runs into problems, a troubled Macbeth seeks out the witches, who bring up spirits from the past. Macbeth comes to a bad end, dying by Macduff's sword.
There are, of course, other classic works which deal with the occult.
For instance, in I Samuel 28, King Saul of Israel is
troubled by enemies, foreign and domestic. Like Macbeth, he
consults a witch. Like the crones in the Scottish cave,
the woman that bath a familiar spirit at Endor
summons up a ghost from the past, in this case the prophet
Samuel.
Samuel predicts a bad end for Saul, which comes to pass in the next battle against the Philistines as the king of Israel falls on his own sword and dies.
If Macbeth promotes the occult, then so does the Old Testament.
Forgoing the occult means going without the Bible and Shakespeare, the two works our English-speaking forebears considered most indispensable. Their influence shows in everything from Ronald Reagans' speeches to Bob Dylan's song lyrics. You can't really enjoy politics or literature without knowing something of these occult works.
Yet the Citizens for Excellence in Education want to eliminate all classroom references to the occult. I can't see that as any reasonable way to instill excellence In education.
But maybe they're right, and I was led astray in my youth, so that I just can't think the proper way -- the way they do. If that's the case, it wasn't the 11th-grade English class. Nor was it the years of Bible lessons in Sunday school. It was the logic class.
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