Time for the United States to do a “DoubleTake”

January 6th hearings and why poetry matters to writers, thinkers and citizens

Watercolor by Mary

I’m not a political writer, but instead a literary fiction, memoir writer and teacher who appears here with “Essays on the arts film, answers to q’s and a course: Write it!, This Writing Life and (Re)Making Love: a serial memoir

But on July 21st, 2022, as the January 6th hearings proceeded in prime time, I felt I must speak out as a citizen of my country:

It is time for the United States of America to do a “DoubleTake”.

In the January 6th hearings in Congress on June 16, 2022, J. Michael Luttig, a retired conservative judge, appointed by Republican president George H. W. Bush in 1991, gave a powerful statement. He is the judge that Vice-President Mike Pence’s team reached out to when President Donald Trump pressured Pence to challenge the legality of the vote count that elected President Joe Biden. The judge’s advice was that such a step would not only be illegal but would imperil our democracy.

Here is part of what he said on June 16, 2022, shortly after Memorial Day:

“Members of the House Select Committee – A stake was driven through the heart of American democracy on January 6, 2021, and our democracy today is on a knife’s edge. America was at war on that fateful day, but not against a foreign power. She was at war against herself. We Americans were at war with each other – over our democracy. January 6 was but the next, foreseeable battle in a war that had been raging in America for years, though that day was the most consequential battle of that war even to date. In fact, January 6 was a separate war unto itself, a war for America’s democracy, a war irresponsibly instigated and prosecuted by the former president, his political party allies, and his supporters. Both wars are raging to this day.

…

“The war on democracy instigated by the former president and his political party allies on January 6th was the natural and foreseeable culmination of the war for America. It was the final fateful day for the execution of a well-developed plan by the former president to overturn the 2020 presidential election at any cost, so that he could cling to power that the American People had decided to confer upon his successor, the next president of the United States instead. Knowing full well that he had lost the 2020 presidential election, the former president and his allies and supporters falsely claimed and proclaimed to the nation that he had won the election, and then he and they set about to overturn the election that he and they knew the former president had lost. 2 The treacherous plan was no less ambitious than to steal America’s democracy.”

The full statement can be found online via CNN and other publications.

Now is the time for not only our legislators, but, indeed, our attorney general and all Americans to do a “DoubleTake”.

This word “Double-take” not only appears in Seamus Heaney’s long book-length poem The Cure at Troy but also became the title of a well-known and now, sadly, long-gone, as of 2005, literary magazine DoubleTake, established in 1995 by child psychiatrist, Harvard professor and prolific author Dr. Robert Coles.

When I studied the magazine closely, David Parker, the magazine’s publisher, told me that after giving the magazine its title, Robert Coles’ son showed him the poem The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney. Parker then went to Farrar Straus and got permission to quote the poem. Robert Coles told me, however, that he’d been friends with the poet for a long time and that Seamus Heaney was quite pleased.

That excerpt from The Cure at Troy opened every issue of the magazine.

I offer here that Heaney was prescient and he needs to be heard along with Judge Luttig—and everyone else who has testified.

At the January 6th hearing, Judge Luttig closed his statement with these words:

“In order to end these wars that are draining the lifeblood from our country, a critical mass of our two parties’ political leaders is needed, to whom the remainder would be willing to listen, at least without immediate partisan recrimination. The logic for reconciliation of these wars being waged in America today dictates that this number needs to include a critical mass of leaders from the former president’s political party and that those leaders need to go first. All of these leaders then need to summon first the moral courage and then the political courage, the strength, and the patriotic will to extend their hands, and ask of the others – and of all Americans – ‘Can we talk? America needs us.’

“While Memorial Day is still fresh in our minds, we would all do well to remind ourselves of the immortal words spoken to the West Point cadets at the United States Military Academy a half century ago: “Duty, Honor, Country.” Those three sacred words of profound American obligation were spoken on that occasion to reassure those who had given their lives for their country in the past, and who would give them in the future, that their sacrifice would not be in vain. Those words are as apt today for this occasion as they were on that day for that occasion, if not more.

“Then we need to get back to work, and quickly. We need to get back to the solemn business of preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution of the United States and the United States of America.

“The hour is late. God is watching us.”

I close with the excerpt from Seamus Heaney’s poem that the magazine titled as follows:

Doubletake

Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
or lightning and storm
and a god speaks from the sky.

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.

Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate 1995, excerpt from The Cure at Troy

I close with this note for readers of my newsletter: If you don’t agree with me, feel free to say that. What we need is not only action, but also reasonable exchanges.

And this: I will be adding a lesson on why writers of prose (memoir, fiction) should read poetry and a lesson on why literary magazines matter. Look for them both!

Or

credit: Flag watercolor by Mary L. Tabor