Courage to face down evil
Kathleen Parker
October 27, 2006

When a news item crossed my desk a few days ago noting the 39th anniversary of the federal verdicts in the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, I was reading a novel about the same period.

Seven men were convicted on federal charges of conspiracy to deny civil rights, but none served more than six years. That travesty of justice, combined with insight that only fiction can reveal, prompted one of those rare moments of lucidity when one sees clearly what was -- and what needs to be.
The novel is Doug Marlette's "Magic Time." The story is about a newspaper columnist Carter Ransom, who is drawn from his present-day job in New York City -- where a terrorist bomb has just destroyed an art museum -- to his Southern past in Mississippi during the civil rights era. Through Ransom's eyes, we see the affinity between those who murdered civil rights workers and those who blow up art museums. Or fly airplanes into buildings. Fueled by resentment, both wrap themselves in a mantle of religion.
It so happens that Marlette, who is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, spent part of his childhood in Laurel, Miss. He went to school with the children of those charged with killing Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney.
When Marlette saw the planes hit the World Trade Center five years ago, his first association was to the "bitter, resentful, powerless religious fanatics of the American South" who waged war on the civil rights movement of his youth.
Marlette wanted to examine what effect the big moral issues have on people, how their lives are transformed, how they live the rest of their lives. This is a consistent theme for Marlette, whose family, like Forrest Gump, often seems to be present in the cross hairs of history. His previous novel, "The Bridge," concerned the Carolina mill strikes during which his own grandmother was bayoneted by National Guardsmen. Speaking recently at a meeting of the Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance, Marlette remarked on his family's "Gumpian" obliviousness to the significance of their roles in major historical events.
That obliviousness speaks to us all. We read the headlines and somehow it all seems to be happening to someone else, says Marlette. That sense of history in the everyday, and that what we do matters, is what he captures in his new novel.
Marlette is especially riveted by the "Good German phenomenon" -- how good people can avert their gaze from horror. How did decent people look the other way when Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, young men in their 20s, were savagely beaten and shot to death?
We don't have to ask what the terrorists will do. We've seen their work and witnessed their zeal. The religious fanatics who wage war against the West are no less certain of their cause than were the Ku Klux Klanners who bombed black churches and believed the Jews were destroying civilization.
It seems that every generation is doomed to test itself or be tested, and evil is ever resourceful. The trick is recognizing evil for what it is, and having the courage to face it down.
Southern white Christians abdicated their moral responsibility and demonstrated their cowardice and complicity by allowing Klansmen to hijack their religion and terrorize blacks in the name of their Jesus. If Muslims want theirs to be taken seriously as the religion of peace they claim it to be, they will have to marginalize and condemn those they insist have hijacked their religion.

Parker is a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group. Contact her at kparker@kparker.com.
Copyright 2006 IndyStar.com. All rights reserved

October 27, 2006

Kathleen Parker
Courage to face down evil
When a news item crossed my desk a few days ago noting the 39th anniversary of the federal verdicts in the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, I was reading a novel about the same period.

Seven men were convicted on federal charges of conspiracy to deny civil rights, but none served more than six years. That travesty of justice, combined with insight that only fiction can reveal, prompted one of those rare moments of lucidity when one sees clearly what was -- and what needs to be.
The novel is Doug Marlette's "Magic Time." The story is about a newspaper columnist Carter Ransom, who is drawn from his present-day job in New York City -- where a terrorist bomb has just destroyed an art museum -- to his Southern past in Mississippi during the civil rights era. Through Ransom's eyes, we see the affinity between those who murdered civil rights workers and those who blow up art museums. Or fly airplanes into buildings. Fueled by resentment, both wrap themselves in a mantle of religion.
It so happens that Marlette, who is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, spent part of his childhood in Laurel, Miss. He went to school with the children of those charged with killing Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney.
When Marlette saw the planes hit the World Trade Center five years ago, his first association was to the "bitter, resentful, powerless religious fanatics of the American South" who waged war on the civil rights movement of his youth.
Marlette wanted to examine what effect the big moral issues have on people, how their lives are transformed, how they live the rest of their lives. This is a consistent theme for Marlette, whose family, like Forrest Gump, often seems to be present in the cross hairs of history. His previous novel, "The Bridge," concerned the Carolina mill strikes during which his own grandmother was bayoneted by National Guardsmen. Speaking recently at a meeting of the Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance, Marlette remarked on his family's "Gumpian" obliviousness to the significance of their roles in major historical events.
That obliviousness speaks to us all. We read the headlines and somehow it all seems to be happening to someone else, says Marlette. That sense of history in the everyday, and that what we do matters, is what he captures in his new novel.
Marlette is especially riveted by the "Good German phenomenon" -- how good people can avert their gaze from horror. How did decent people look the other way when Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, young men in their 20s, were savagely beaten and shot to death?
We don't have to ask what the terrorists will do. We've seen their work and witnessed their zeal. The religious fanatics who wage war against the West are no less certain of their cause than were the Ku Klux Klanners who bombed black churches and believed the Jews were destroying civilization.
It seems that every generation is doomed to test itself or be tested, and evil is ever resourceful. The trick is recognizing evil for what it is, and having the courage to face it down.
Southern white Christians abdicated their moral responsibility and demonstrated their cowardice and complicity by allowing Klansmen to hijack their religion and terrorize blacks in the name of their Jesus. If Muslims want theirs to be taken seriously as the religion of peace they claim it to be, they will have to marginalize and condemn those they insist have hijacked their religion.

Parker is a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group. Contact her at kparker@kparker.com.
Copyright 2006 IndyStar.com. All rights reserved