Jesse Owens Story, Righteous Sufferer, The Proof of the Pudding, Priestess of the Household, Evil

1. For Black History Month today, I watched The Jesse Owens Story, a 1984 film that won a Primetime Emmy Award, and was nominated for other Emmys. Jesse Owens was an African-American athlete who competed in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, winning four gold medals. Adolf Hitler hoped to showcase the alleged superiority of the Aryan race, but Jesse Owens shot down that dream, as did other African-Americans who competed in Berlin that year (such as Jackie Robinson's brother).

In the movie, Jesse Owens is accused of tax evasion, and the African-American assigned by the court to investigate Owens' past has an ax to grind against Jesse. Jesse was in the public eye for thirty years, and he did not speak out in favor of the Civil Rights movement. Rather, he traveled the country giving speeches about patriotism and family. When two African-American athletes gave the black power salute at the 1968 Summer Olympics, the Olympic authorities dispatched Jesse Owens to express their displeasure. As far as the investigator was concerned, Jesse Owens was an Uncle Tom, a traitor to his race.

But the investigator changes his mind as he talks with people who knew Jesse, as well as Jesse himself. He learned that Jesse Owens had a reason for being a Republican, for Franklin Roosevelt (like Adolf Hitler) did not shake his hand after the Olympics, whereas FDR's Republican opponent, Governor Alf Landon, did. The investigator never fully accepted Jesse's approach of dialogue as opposed to confrontation (a la Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Power movement), but he saw that Jesse tried to help African-Americans advance by assisting troubled youths (sometimes at ungodly hours of the night), getting Union Teamster Jimmy Hoffa to push for more African-American cab drivers in Chicago, and giving money to those who needed it. The investigator learned that Jesse Owens was a man of integrity, but he was puzzled as to why he cheated on his taxes. He finds that, with all Jesse's talk about dialogue, Jesse had a lot of deep-seated resentment about the racism he had experienced throughout his life. Jesse decided to keep money back because he felt he had paid his dues to an unappreciative country.

The movie is about different generations' reactions to racial discrimination. Jesse thought that racism was the way things were and that confrontation accomplished little---only a lot of trouble. He tried to get what he could for himself and his race within the system, which he thought was gradually changing. In one poignant scene, Jesse is talking with his family about the 1968 Olympics. His daughters are taking him to task for opposing the athletes who gave the Black Power salute, whereas he replied that it only caused trouble, threatening the advancements that African-Americans had made. Jesse tells his daughters the story of how he returned from the 1936 Summer Olympics and went to Alabama to speak at a banquet given in his honor, yet he couldn't eat at that banquet because he was black. He was laughing at that, as if it were a funny story, but his daughters thought that was horrible. And it turned out that, deep down, he thought so too.

The movie has a lot of actors who were in Roots and Roots: The Next Generation: Levar Burton, Ben Vereen, Debbie Morgan, Lynn Hamilton (who was also Verdie on the Waltons), Dorian Harewood (Simon Haley on Roots: The Next Generation) as Jesse, and Georg Stanford Brown (Tom Harvey on Roots and Roots: the Next Generation) as the skeptical investigator. Tom Bosley plays Jimmy Hoffa (though it was hard for Tom Bosley to appear sinister and calculating, as much as he tried). And George Kennedy---Carter McKay from Dallas---was Jesse's encouraging white coach, but he was nothing like his Dallas character because of his accent, his likeability, and his financial destitution (though Jesse changed that for him after winning at the Olympics!).

I love this movie. Jesse Owens had a different approach from other black leaders I've discussed here: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcom X. Yet, his goal was still to do good.

Here's an excellent article, which includes information on Jesse's political beliefs. Jesse was a Republican who was critical of the Great Society, and he admired Booker T. Washington, who encouraged African-Americans to improve themselves rather than confront white society. Jesse eventually changed his position on the Civil Rights Movement, however, concluding that it played a significant role in the advancement of African-Americans. The movie somewhat chronicles that change. At the end of the movie, Jesse still held on to his approach of reaching one person at a time through dialogue (as he learned from his coach, "If we walk enough and talk enough, we'll eventually reach an understanding"). But he helped a legislator friend of his pass a law banning racial discrimination in public places. Maybe both approaches are important.

2. In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Paul Hanson's "Israelite Religion in the Early Post-Exilic Period." On page 505, he refers to "the theme of the righteous sufferer found already [by the time Job was written] in ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Canaanite sources..." I referred to one possible source for that in my post, Roots 5, Josiah the Nationalist, Immortal King, Old Traditions?, Plato’s Leap?: Ugaritic literature mentions a King Khirta, who, like Job, loses his entire family. James Crenshaw's article on the Book of Job in the Anchor Bible Dictionary discusses other sources. Some of them date to the second millennium B.C.E., which is before the Book of Job was written.

The narrative I've often gotten is that, before books such as Job and Ecclesiastes came on the scene, there was a belief that God consistently rewarded the righteous and punished the wicked. The universe was orderly, in short. We see this sort of belief in Deuteronomy, the Deuteronomistic History, Proverbs, and Psalms. In Psalms, there are righteous people who suffer, but they trust that the universe is orderly and that God will deliver them and punish the wicked. In Job and Ecclesiastes, however, there is doubt that God even operates that way.

I've often wondered why Job and Ecclesiastes emerged, and why people didn't notice before that life is unfair. The answer I sometimes tell myself is that much of the Bible came from an elite scribal class, which could believe in an orderly cosmos because it was insulated from disorder. But the "righteous sufferer" stories in other cultures probably came from a scribal class as well, so being in an elite doesn't mean one has to promote an orderly and fair cosmos.

But the Egyptian Admonitions from Ipuwer refers to social turmoil, and that may have been what prompted its author to question Egyptian gods. Scholars have said that a catastrophic event touched the nation of Judah, including the elites, and that's why books like Job and Ecclesiastes emerged. For Paul Hanson, that event was the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E.

3. In Psalms I: 1-50, I read Mitchell Dahood's comments on Psalm 47. On v 9, which states that God is king, Dahood says: "What the phrase probably means is that Yahweh had proved himself to be a king by his victories over his rivals; hence he is king now."

Is the proof of the pudding in the eating? If God has not proven himself to be king, should we accept him as such? In the Bible, there is a lot of waiting, as people struggle to trust in God when he does not appear to be king, on account of all the evil and chaos around them. But, sometimes, they have stories of God's mighty works in the past, and that encourages their faith. Similarly, we have the testimonies of people whom God has brought through trials. Or, if we struggle to believe in that, we hopefully have their support!

4. In Theodore Mullen's Narrative History and Ethnic Boundaries, Theodore Mullen states (on page 142): Despite the dominant patriarchal emphasis of the Israelite culture and society, the deuteronomistic writer is careful to include the female half of that society in the projection of this ideal ethnic community. Victory and prophecy could be realized through female as well as through male leadership.

Why was the Deuteronomist egalitarian, at least compared to other biblical authors? Could that have been his way of coping with the exile? In the exile, there was no temple cult, and the family became the center for religious instruction---or at least one of the centers. And, in the family, the woman is prominent. Did the Deuteronomist want to encourage women to do their part in the religious and moral education of their children?

5. The second century C.E. philosopher Albinus says the following about evil (the quote is on page 302 of John Dillon's The Middle Platonists):

If someone turns himself towards vice, first of all it will not be as vice that he will be turning to it, but as to some good; and if someone comes to be in a state of vice, it can only be that he is deceived, in that he believes that he can derive from some lesser evil a greater good, and in this way he comes to vice without willing it.

I talked some about this issue in a post a while back, Evil. Often, we're in pursuit of some good when we do evil, whether that good be sexual pleasure, money, or a view we may have about protecting the good of society from people we consider villains (I'm thinking here of the motivations of Hitler and the KKK). But, when we end up hurting somebody else for our own pleasure, how could we consider that good?