Thursday’s post needs a title

1. I finished Irrepressible yesterday. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s the biography of Jessica Mitford. Let me just say, it is decidedly odd to be reading a biography of a person who lived in history — you know, all those years before I was born — and then their bio starts talking about events I remember! Can’t they have the decency to die before 1980? (I kid, I kid!) This is a thing I’ve noticed with teaching my kids — the Regan era is history. So is the first Gulf war. So is 9/11. Idek, y’all.

But, in Mitford news, while in her 70′s, Decca Mitford became lead singer in a band that cut a few tracks professionally. Despite being no longer able to sing on pitch or carry a tune. Her friends were often embarrassed on her behalf, but her family supported her. And Decca herself? Completely irrepressible.

2. N brought back a CASE of Bundaberg Ginger Beer for me from a vendor in Madison. This is awesome. Bundaberg Australian Ginger Beer is the best ginger beer I know of, and there are no vendors of it in Minnesota.

3. J and I got an estimate for steaming the roof. It’s fairly expensive. We’re waffling now, trying to decide if we need to get it done or if we can just fight the ice dams ourselves for the next eight weeks. Home ownership kinda sucks sometimes.

4. I watched a BBC movie last night, Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle, about Arthur Conan Doyle and his medical school mentor, Dr. Bell. Bell was an acknowledged inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. The plot was interesting — the story is set at a moment of profound misogyny, as women have been accepted into the medical school for the first time. The film wasn’t bad, with solid acting and a good script. If this is the sort of topic that interests you, I recommend it.

5. I also finished the audiobook The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, Birthplace of the Modern Mind. I did, in fact, cry in my car while driving at all the points where the library and museum were burned or sacked, or the points where incredible scholars were killed. The death of Hypatia essentially marked the end of Western, Christian scholarship for 600 freaking years. (The Muslim world continued on thinking and exploring and learning just fine, thank you very much. As did Europe’s Jews. But both peoples were frequently executed by Western Christians if they displayed any of their fine erudition in Europe. Christianity, you have a LOT to answer for. (Yet, it was the monks who saved what they could, through the Dark Ages, the bishops who tried to educate the gentry, the monks who tried, against all odds, to preserve what little knowledge they had. Every monastery sacked was tantamount to another fall of Alexandria. I find this fundamental internal conflict in the early medieval Christian church to be as frustrating as anything.))

When Hypatia was murdered — the first prominent female scholar, scientist, and philosopher in the Western world — it was not because she was a woman, but because she was not a Christian. And, moreover, because she taught the Alexandrian elite that they should examine Christian doctrine as critically as they would examine anything else. But Christianity was not a movement based on reason, it was a movement based on faith. Any reason that contradicted faith was not merely wrong, but evil. And treasonous.

I don’t say it often, but I think that faith-based cultural movements are some of the most damaging things humans have ever created. I’m not sure their contributions to progress — see the aforementioned monks-saving-books — outweigh the harm.

Mitford in Oakland

I’m reading Irrepressible, the biography of Jessica Mitford. I’m not done with it yet, I’m just up to the 1940s. But I want this part to be made into a tv series.

See, in the 1940s and early 1950s, Jessica — Decca — lived in Oakland, CA, with her lawyer husband and three kids. They were members of the Communist Party, which was an increasingly dangerous thing at the time. Decca’s husband, Bob, specialized in defending blacks who had been victimized by the Oakland police. Oakland at the time recruited its police officers from a pool of southern ex-pats who had migrated west to escape increasing rights for blacks in their home states. Decca got a job with the CRC, the Civil Rights Commission, working to defend blacks and communists who were harassed by officials.

Decca conducted interviews, using her charm and energy and British manner to put people at their ease. She got countless victims of assault to go on the record with their experiences. And on many of these interviews she was accompanied by Buddy Green, a young black reporter from rural Mississippi. Irrepressible says, “The combination was effectively disarming, like a BBC mystery set in a West Oakland bar.”

Oh, my goodness, I want that. Buddy and Decca would get information from Bob, they would head out to interview victims. There would be confrontations with the police, and with hostile residents of the poor neighborhoods. Subplots would include trouble for the Communists party, and investigations of Bob’s office by HUAC flunkies, or a visit from Decca’s mother, Sydney, or Bob’s mother Aranka. There would be the constant mess in the house, and jokes about the laundry, and about the random people who stayed with Decca and Bob. Ezra Pound could visit! There could be an episode about Unity’s death.

Maybe Tim Minear could take it on. (I think it would only really be good as a one-season show, anyway, so no harm when it inevitably got cancelled.) Or, you know, this would make a great HBO series.

I don’t even know, y’all. I want to see this show SO VERY MUCH.