Friday Reads: Lords Of Misrule

Good Morning!

We’re coming upon my favorite time of the year marked by 12th night.  It’s a big deal down here in New Orleans because January 5th is the first day of the carnival season.  It’s when we eat our king cake and try to avoid getting the plastic baby!  It’s also one of my favorite Shakespeare Comedies. Even high school English classes didn’t ruin the fun for me!  We still have 12th night masquerade balls down here and it’s just generally a great time because there are only locals.  It’s fun to see folks walking around the quarter in medieval costumes and masks. The art, photos, and tidbits that decorate the post today are all related to the upcoming and past 12th nights which celebrate the 12th day of Christmas which is also known as the eve before the Epiphany.

My favorite thing about 12th night balls is the entire idea of having a time dedicated to the “Lord of Misrule” or the “Abbott of Unreason”. If you have no idea what I’m writing on then we can safely assume you don’t have any old timey Scots, French or Brits in your family because that’s where the old Saturnalia festivals hid out for many years. Boxing Day is also part of this tradition.   Our favorite Abbott presides over the Feast of Fools. 

In Britain, the Lord of Misrule — known in Scotland as the Abbot of Unreason and in France as the Prince des Sots — was an officer appointed by lot at Christmas to preside over the Feast of Fools. The Lord of Misrule was generally a peasant or sub-deacon appointed to be in charge of Christmas revelries, which often included drunkenness and wild partying, in the pagan tradition of Saturnalia. The Church held a similar festival involving a Boy Bishop. The celebration of the Feast of Fools was outlawed by the Council of Basel that sat from 1431, but it survived to be put down again by the Catholic Queen Mary I in England in 1555.

While mostly known as a British holiday custom, the appointment of a Lord of Misrule comes from antiquity. In ancient Rome, from the 17th to the 23rd of December, a Lord of Misrule was appointed for the feast of Saturnalia, in the guise of the good god Saturn. During this time the ordinary rules of life were subverted as masters served their slaves, and the offices of state were held by slaves. The Lord of Misrule presided over all of this, and had the power to command anyone to do anything during the holiday period. This holiday seems to be the precursor to the more modern holiday, and it carried over into the Christian era.

The entire thing, of course, has pagan roots and was morphed into a different celebration by christians or at least those who didn’t try to ban the celebration outright.  He’s also called the King of the bean which is why a bean was placed in King Cake prior to the little plastic babies we find in today’s modern king cakes.

In medieval times, most Europeans adopted the Roman taste for a good time by electing a Lord of Misrule, or King of Fools. This harlequin king went by many names: King of the Bean in England, the Abbot of Unreason in Scotland, the Abbe de la Malgouveme in France. All had the power to call people to disorder. Cross dressing, bawdy songs, drinking to excess, and gambling on the church altar were only a few of the wanton acts reported

In some places the Festival of the Ass was commemorated. A young girl with babe in arms entered a church riding an ass or donkey. During the mock services, prayer responses that would have normally included an ‘amen’ were substituted by a hearty ‘hee-haw’. Parisians had a particularly infamous reputation. By the 15th century, an embarassed Catholic Church finally clamped down on the ‘monstrous’ celebrations in which, centuries later, Victor Hugo wrote of Quasi Modo as the King of Fools in Hunchback of Notre Dame

You can still find hints of the pagan festivities in Philadelphia’s Mummer Parades as well as the rituals down here in New Orleans that deal with the celebration of 12th night.  Of course, cross dressing, bawdy songs, drinking to excess and all those wanton acts actually survive down here and sans tourists which makes it very merry for the lot of us.

So, let me now change the subject.

First up, some statistics on why a woman with out a man today, is like a fish without a bicycle. It came from a Time story with an outrageous headline that I shall ignore here.  Here’s to my theory that women and gay men are the really source of civilization.

Over the last few decades men’s incomes have been slowly declining and women’s have been rising. Last year one in five men were not working, something economists call the biggest social crisis we will face. Party this is because the economy is changing quickly, but men aren’t. As the manufacturing economy gets replaced by a service and information economy, men are failing to adjust or get the skill they need to succeed.

Meanwhile, women are moving in the opposite direction: In 2009 they became the majority of the American workforce for the first time ever. Now in every part of America young single women under 30 have a higher median income than young men, which is really important because that’s the phase of life when people imagine what their future will look like. As one sorority girl put it to me — remember, I said sorority, not someone from the women’s study center — “Men are the new ball and chain.”

It’s the end of men because men are failing in schools and women are succeeding. In nearly every country, on all but one continent, women are getting 60 percent of college degrees, which is what you need to succeed these days. Many boys start falling behind as early as first grade, and they fail to catch up. Many men, meanwhile, still see school as a waste of time, a girl thing.

Be sure to check out the comments because the men are literally revolting.  The term “mansplain” is just inadequate.

Senator Mary Landrieu will be targeted and challenged by Republicans for her seat this year.  How serious will the challenge be?  The most interesting thing may be the primary which could pit the Tea Party and the neoconservative, religious hate groups against Karl Rove’s establishment republicans.

The national publication POLITICO reports that prominent social conservatives are still mentioning former Louisiana legislator andFamily Research Council President Tony Perkins as a potential candidate in the state’s contentious U.S. Senate race this year.

In an article about social conservatives’ plans to raise big money nationwide around issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, writer Kenneth Vogel says activists have floated Perkins, in particular, as a candidate they could get behind.

As a member of Louisiana’s House of Representatives, Perkins passed the state’s convenant marriage law, making it more difficult for people to get divorced. He has been an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage on the national stage.

According to Vogel, several conservatives gathered in Virginia recently to discuss aggressively financing and coordinating political efforts around social issues. The religious right is trying to counter fiscal conservatives, who have raised more money and gained more influence in the Republican Party in recent years.

South Dakota businessman and conservative organizer Bob Fischer was part of the team putting together a strategy for elevating social issues on the national stage. He mentioned Perkins, according to Vogel.

“Fischer in his private conversations has singled out the possibility of a long-shot Perkins 2014 Senate candidacy in Louisiana as just the sort of campaign that the new effort could support,” Vogel wrote in the article.

If Perkins ran for U.S. Senate in Louisiana, he would hardly be the only person trying to unseat Democratic incumbent Mary Landrieu. Landrieu is a top target for the national Republican Party in 2014, and many candidates have already jumped in the race.

U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy, R-La., is largely considered the Republican frontrunner in the campaign. Several fiscal conservatives, such as billionaires Charles and David Koch, have already donated money to Cassidy’s campaign.

Vogel speculated that Perkins’ entry into the Senate race could highlight the split between social and fiscal conservatives within the Republican Party — not just in Louisiana, but around the country.

Vogel wrote in the article: “A Perkins campaign would make an interesting test case, since he would be pitted against Rep. Bill Cassidy, who has been singled out as a rising star by (GOP strategist Karl) Rove’s (American) Crossroads groups and is the GOP establishment’s choice to take on Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu.”

Mary’s always been a mixed bag for me even though I have done fundraising, volunteer work,  and attended misc. women’s fundraiser’s for her in all of her elections.  She is totally captured by the oil and gas industry but tends to support all the decent social justice issues that manage to come up in the Senate.  I will vote for her again but I’m never really happy about it. I’m currently volunteering for her brother Mitch’s re-election as mayor.  He will undoubtedly be a target too and he’s also a mixed bag.  They are the only viable alternatives to the crap we’ve gotten since Bush/Rove basically made it difficult for black people to return here after Katrina so it is what it is.  Louisiana was a purple state before the Rove/Bush purge of people of color. My hope is Jindal has ruined the republican brand so much here that a lot of folks will return to the folds of the Kingfish.  Meanwhile, I’ve been spending the week supporting friends who’ve been lambasted for saying the many of our big post Katrina changes aren’t particularly good ones.   You can find me sticking up for one such friend here.

Happily, I am going to introduce you to HIllary Clinton’s graph of the year via Wonkblog. It’s about reading and singing to your children.

I used to sing to Chelsea when she was a baby — until she was old enough to gently tell me that I couldn’t carry a tune. This graph shows us that about two thirds of our youngest children are fortunate enough to have a family member tell them a story or sing to them regularly, and about half are read to by a family member. That’s a great start. We’ve known for years that singing, reading, and talking to our children helps their brains grow and develop. Now new research is telling us even more about how important this is for our kids as they build vocabularies and prepare for school. Seven hundred new neural connections are formed every second, laying the foundation for learning, behavior, health. What happens to children’s brains in the earliest years shapes the adults they become, the successes they achieve and the contributions they make to our economy and our society.

Every child deserves an equal chance for success. But studies show that by age four, children in middle and upper income families hear 15 million more words than children in lower income families, and 30 million more words than children in families on welfare. So we’ve got work to do. That’s why the Clinton Foundation is focusing on closing this “word gap” through an initiative called Too Small to Fail. We want to help all parents give their kids a good start in school and in life. That’s what this graph is all about.

I love the idea that children should be “Too Small to Fail”.  Run, Hillary, Run!!!!

One last little bit about the duck dick that has made my entire state look like a backwater of haterz. I’m mostly disturbed by the bevy of right wing politicians that say they are supporting his right to free speech when what they are really saying is they agree that women are men’s property, gay people are perverts,  black people should be poor and happily working in the fields, and that any one who isn’t their kind of  christian is some kind of subhuman monster.

Roberts’ initial interview resonated so deeply with conservatives because it fit with the narrative they mutter to themselves daily: “Things used to be better, and once we’re all dead you’ll see we were right all along.” Gay sinners in the closet, darkies picking and grinning on the porch, America the way God (their very particular and peculiar God) meant it to be.

For the Right to reject Robertson now would mean acknowledging that his advocacy of cradle-robbing is of a piece with his comments about the blissful black workers of his youth and his anus-centered eschatology. The thing about marrying off women before they got old enough to know better? It used to be that way, as well. And it was justified with the same paternalistic logic and ruthless rejection of anything that dared to threaten the position of those in power.

For the professional Right – candidates, pundits and the like – this Duck Dynasty flap is a reminder of a different disturbing truth: the gap between what you want voters to believe you stand for and what it’s OK to say out loud. There’s a reason they call it a dog whistle and not a duck call.

So, that’s it for me today.  A little of the old, new, and some hope for future as we move towards the Feast of Fools.   Kinda makes you stop and think about who the real fools are these days.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?