My family got rid of cable a couple of weeks ago, so it's time to get re-acquainted with an old friend called Netflix. Over the years, I've developed the habit of reading multiple books at the same time, which allows for the ideas in each to cross-pollinate one another in weird and productive ways. The same thing can happen with TV.
Witches: A Century of Murder
Suzannah Lipscomb is a telegenic British historian (with a nose stud, no less) who is going back to original documents to reconstruct the British witch trials that started during the reign of King James I of Scotland (yes, the guy who later commissioned the Bible translation). Sea travel at that time was extremely dangerous because there was little way to predict storms. One especially bad storm forced James's new queen to return home to Denmark. A second assailed him on his way there to get her. During his visit, the Danes burned two witches responsible for the magical assassination attempt. That's got to be pretty freaky, even for a king, to arrive somewhere and hear from the local authorities that the Devil himself has taken out a hit on you. I'm trying to think of a modern equivalent, and I can't. Obama? No. Putin? No. Lightning and waterspouts would be so much scarier than watching a drone take out the car next to you on the highway.
Still, James Stuart was a pre-Enlightenment kind of guy. He took one look at the propaganda in the German witch-hunters' manual, the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”) and wrote his own tract, Demonologie, which he imagined to be more moderate and balanced. The very first witch trial in Scotland, in which the king got directly involved, ended with the accuser in jail for three years. Unfortunately, things went downhill from there, and once Elizabeth I died and James became king of England as well, people took his book as free license to cleanse the land. Still, England never had anywhere near the level of madness as Germany and other eastern European countries.
Dr. Lipscomb presents as a professional, trying to explain how this madness could have happened, while at the same time trying to generate empathy for the victims. It's all very earnest, but the dirt and the old clothes on the reconstruction actors place a certain amount of distance between us and those victims. Another way to go would be to include modern examples. Scarily, this is not just a historical problem. These things are still going on today in rural India,
The veil of superstition, others said, only hides the true motive behind the killings. “Superstition is only an excuse,” Pooja Singhal Purwar, a social welfare official, told The Washington Post’s Rama Lakshmi in 2005. “Often a woman is branded a witch so that you can throw her out of the village and grab her land, or to settle scores, family rivalry, or because powerful men want to punish her for spurning their sexual advances. Sometimes, it is used to punish women who question social norms.”
and in other places, too.
Ali Wong's Baby Cobra
Witches left a bad taste in my mouth, which I dealt with by watching some raunchy standup comedy. Ali Wong is young (33), beautiful, pregnant, fashionable, and spoiled rotten. Whereas Amy Schumer and Kristen Schaal tend to play dumb, Wong projects what I think of as the most poisonous stereotypes about women – promiscuous, manipulative gold-diggers, petty and judgemental. At the same time, her stage persona is smart and articulate. She whiplashes the audience from the most juvenile bathroom humor to very smart John Stewart-style pop culture allusions, all in the service of educating people about Human Papilloma Virus, which the CDC says, "is so common that nearly all sexually active men and women get it at some point in their lives," and which Wong puts in a different way.
"If you don't have HPV, you're a loser!"
In other times, or even now in other cultures, I could totally see that stage persona being accused as a witch. It's a sign of real progress that we don't do that kind of thing any more in Western culture. Or do we?