A Shavian Pope?

First, a disclaimer: while I somewhat embarrassingly call myself an anarchist, I don't put much stock in the label or those who wear it. It is an emblem like any other in a swamp of emblems, like DKNY or Gucci, that say something, but not enough, about a person. Also, I have fierce awe and respect for those anarchists who got their hands dirty and broke things - as opposed to those who climb academic ladders for PhD degrees and marginal think-tanks or those who busy themselves telling us why others are not real anarchists while they build nothing at all. Or those who plod out blog entries!! My thoughts on Pope Francis, like my already published [and scorned] thoughts on Charles Windsor, aka, Prince Charles of the UK, are not written as a thesis defense for that panel of self-appointed, self-righteous radicals who pretend among themselves they care. I simply do not give a damn about them.

No, Francis is not a bomb thrower, but he is causing quite the stir. He is doing the unexpected and the undesired, and this always impresses me. He said, "How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?"

I did not start as a blogger but as a fiction writer. Short stories read after lunch to Mrs Herbert's third grade class - stories I had written in the library during lunch rather than play on the play ground. So character interests me. Many writers do character better than others, like people, who hide their bad character worse than others. I suppose how you respond to character is like how you like your steak cooked.

Anyway, Agatha Christie's characters and Poirot's judgement of them started as my favorite. That was high school.

Then there's Shaw. George Bernard Shaw. Anyone who claims to know me well has heard me quote Shaw. He was a character in himself. When I encounter Prince Charles or Pope Francis I think of Shaw's king in The Apple Cart or the doctor in A Doctor's Dilemma. I think of Candida in the play of that name. I think of St. Joan: "Oh, Lord, when will the world be ready for thy saints?"

I think of the Black girl in his novelette A Black Girl in Search of Her God.

Shavian? I can best define this adjective with a description of the referred-to novelette: the Black girl isn't really in search of God as she is in exposing the lies and hypocrisies in all of them. My Tennessee grandmother might call a Shavian character "contrary" - meaning contentious, irreverent, curmudgeon.

That is Shavian; that is George Bernard Shaw.

Pope Francis is a character ripe for Shaw's hand. He's leaving no false idol unhinged from its base. He's doing the unexpected and not playing to that choir of do-gooders who pretend to care about the poor but want absolutely nothing done.

And he doesn't give a damn about detractors.

To give a little contrast, I've made no secret of my respect for Fidel Castro. But he's not a Shavian character. Maybe he's a Cervantesian Don Quixote. But not Shaw. Fidel did what was expected of him, even if it shocked the sensible people of the US, even if it shocked many Cubans. He meant to do what he said he was going to do, so maybe - just maybe - it's a cautionary tale of be careful what you wish for.

If there were a sequel to The Apple Cart, Charles Windsor would be the central character. In this play, Magnus threatens to abdicate his throne rather than being hog-tied by his prime minister by constitutional niceties, then run as a private citizen in an election against said prime minister. Magnus wants to do something meaningful with his life, not just be a symbol - or a cudgel - used by political parties. Prince Charles wants to do something, and I don't believe a minute in the retraction made recently that he compared becoming king to a prison sentence.

The pope's role in a Shaw play remains to be seen after some more careful simmering. He could be Ceasar in Shaw's Ceasar and Cleopatra, or the vast theme behind Back to Methuselah, where Shaw indicts modern society its pretensions and its technological prowess in the face of such poverty and brutality as was witnessed after World War I.

But Pope Francis is Shaw, that famous writer and social activist who refused the Nobel Prize, declined a knighthood from the king and declined twice induction into the king's Order of Merit, stating that merit was a thing bestowed by history, not kings. The no-nonsense Shaw who wrote in a tiny shack and had his ashes spread as fertilizer in his garden. That is Shaw: taking a little and giving as much back as possible.

"I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security," he wrote.


I will argue to the death those who say you can change institutions from within - institutions, especially government types, are insular and conservative and can if so empowered resort to violence to prove their purity. This not only explains governments of the present and past but also those self-appointed committees I am so bored with. But when I see someone on the inside, as it were, breaking up some of the foundation stones I cannot help but admire the handiwork.