No Pun in Ten Did

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them all at once?

-- Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government

Unlike Thoreau, and perhaps like you, I am related to no Aunt who will bail me out of jail, have no relative who will lend me money to build a pond side shack, and have no friend who will grant me squatting rights to that shack by the pond. I have utterly failed my ambition to be a trust fund baby.

-- Dan Krotz, Henry David Thoreau, Henry David Catch?

I'm a little peeved. Way back when I was in high school there was a line of greeting cards that made verbal and visual puns on famous people's names. There was the card with impressionist flowers that said "'Tis the Cezanne" and opened up to say "And Manet more!" Then there was the card with the over-inflated checker that was labeled "Chubby Checker". But my favorite was the one of a man in 19th-century garb throwing a ball labeled "Henry David Thoreau" - when opened, it showed another man trying to catch the ball & said "Henry David Catch". I know: GROAN!!

I wanted to title this post "Henry David Catch" and wanted to use that card as my illustration, but when I googled the phrase, I found that not only Dan Krotz, but several others had beaten me to the punch (including an edublog dated yesterday)! In fact, this picture here is apparently a famous painting by artist Paris Pierce:


(I am left to wonder if my British friends will be offended by the catcher's leering expression combined with his vulgar hand gesture....)

So I'm peeved that I don't get to re-cycle the Thoreau/Catch pun, but I'm glad I had the idea because it led me to Dan Krotz's lovely post about Thoreau, Transcendentalists, and Douglass. I'm happy to have found it because I was thinking the same thing.

As I was reading Resistance to Civil Government, I found myself nodding along to most of what Thoreau was saying. Yes, "a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice" (and then the zinger: "even as far as men understand it" SNAP!); yes, "it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right"; and oh very much yes, "when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize," which happens to fall at the end of a right-hand page, leaving the real meat of that paragraph to appear at the top of the next, sure to startle awake any reader who may be comfortably agreeing, thinking that Thoreau refers to some other totalitarian regime: "What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact, that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army."

These things are all very well and good - and I agree with them whole-heartedly - but I couldn't help but think that here Thoreau is exhibiting his Class Privilege in full force. It's easy to say "the only new question [money] puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it" when you yourself have a roof over your head and food in your belly.

True, Thoreau spent one night in jail for failure to pay his poll-tax, but from his description of the jail, it certainly sounds like he could have had it a lot worse - and may have, had he been of lower social status. One night in jail does not erase a lifetime of privilege; and while Thoreau claimed that "a change had to [his] eyes come over the scene,-- the town, and State, and country" and that he "saw yet more distinctly the State in which [he] lived," I had to wonder, with Krotz, "if [Thoreau], or any of the Transcendentalists for that matter, were at all prepared to catch and handle the ordinary stuff that most folks go through."

Does the ordinary working stiff really have the opportunity for the type of civil disobedience that Thoreau was encouraging in this essay, when their main concern is putting food on the table and shoes on their kids' feet? Should they be vilified for attending to their own very real, very earthly needs?

It was therefore heartening to see that Thoreau seems to have some inkling of this quandary, as he writes, "if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly and at the same time comfortably in outward respects."


Perhaps Thoreau wasn't -- and isn't -- talking to the poor and downtrodden here, but instead to the people of his own social position, those who place their property above all else, those who are "more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity."

I sure hope so.

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