BOONDOCK SAINTS VS BEOWULF

As I prepare to start a new year with Beowulf as my headliner, I  am struck my some of  the incongruous ideas that my students and I will share regarding heroes. Beowulf can be a hard sell in 2010, but I usually manage to make them remember it. They will agree that many of the ideas they hold about true heroes probably do come from this 1500-year-old adventure story, without much change once it was written down.  But does Beowulf still represent any kind of hero they would recognize today?

Many of my male students are great fans of the 1999 cult movie BOONDOCK SAINTS. I must admit, it has a certain appeal for me as well.  The heroes are Boston twins who decide that the justice system--nor their religion-- cannot handle the sins of the truly evil anymore, and God tells them to handle it themselves. At the end of the movie, the twin "saints" invade the courtroom where a mafia boss is about to be acquitted of his crimes and take justice into their own hands-violently and irrevocably earning the title "boondock saints" in the neighborhood. This is their pronouncement as they prepare to kill the defendant:

"Now you will receive us.

We do not ask for your poor or your hungry. We do not want your tired and sick. It is your corrupt we claim. It is your evil that will be sought by us. With every breath, we shall hunt them down. Each day we will spill their blood til it rains down from the skies.

Do not kill, do not rape, do not steal, these are principles which every man of every faith can embrace. These are not polite suggestions — these are codes of behavior. And those of you that ignore them will pay the dearest cost.

There are varying degrees of evil, we urge you lesser forms of filth not to push the bounds and cross over into true corruption, into our domain. But if you do, one day you will look behind you and you will see we three and on that day you will reap it. And we will send you to which ever god you wish.

And shepherds we shall be, for thee my Lord for thee, power hath descended forth from thy hand, that our feet may swiftly carry out thy command. We shall flow a river forth to thee, and teeming with souls shall it ever be. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti."

These sound like the words of righteous men, but are they? Our children have grown up in an American world in which it probably seems that  justice is not often served--the unethical practices of Wall Street, dueling political parties who deal in the lowest common denominator when serving their constituents, religious leaders who have betrayed, hurt those they are meant to protect, ridiculous people becoming famous celebrities while true heroes struggle in anonymity, school bullies implementing new, more humiliating ways to denigrate the innocent--so it is no wonder that this kind of  "saint" becomes heroic.

 Sometimes it feels as though I am swimming upstream all day long, just to stay in place, with my discussions of good vs evil or blog prompts that attempt to connect their lives with the novels and poetry we read. And then I wonder if the Boondock Saints have just returned the justice system to its Anglo-Saxon days, where the evil are destroyed.
http://homepage.mac.com/mseffie/assignments/beowulf/beowulf.html

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: new theme for BritLit?

I voraciously cruised twitter this week, grabbing every tweet about ISTE that I found. I was jealous of everyone there, while simultaneously astounded at their intensity only two weeks after school had ended.  I need, really need, the summer weeks to recharge and de-tensify myself. It takes the entire 10 week period—I may be able to teach a course part time or do a ”camp” like last summer’s July PBWiki camp, but mostly I need to spend time sleeping till 8, going to the Y, taking care of my home, enjoying my family and randomly filling my head with books, knitting, hiking, vinho verde, my nieces, swimming and other quotidian ephemera, all of which somehow find their way into next year’s teaching. Random has turned out the operative word.

So, while I yearned for the excitement of hanging out with people who would not look suspiciously at me, English department geek, I also recognized my own style of firing up the muse. And only two weeks into my hiatus, ISTE tweets provided me with my first light bulb idea for the summer. SOMEONE (I was sure I favorited it, but now I cannot find it) noted that we teachers are still the best source of "character education" out there. I still hate the term, but I do acknowledge our power. Reminiscing about my own my path to inspiration and personal morality as a teen, when I fell in love with Anne Shirley and Sydney Carton I recognized that my entire value system, still working hand in hand with my more traditional religious practice today, was cemented sophomore year in college the first time I heard the line “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know and all ye need to know” read aloud. Still gives me chills.

That is still my number one commandment today. I need at little beauty in my life each day—how you choose what is beautiful, or how you define “truth,” well that is another subject for another post. BUT revisiting the concept of teacher as character educator, secondary English teachers are in a particularly useful position. For the past three years, my Brit Lit juniors have walked into a classroom the first day greeted by posters, quotes, and music extolling the myriad ways that the HERO is at the center of all Western culture. Of course we start with Beowulf and almost everything we read subsequently gets the once over from that first look at what makes someone heroic—either his deeds, the community that supports him, or the values he embodies. It works, and provides scaffolding for their eventual understanding of where we all come from—all of us share a piece of British culture, even in this country of immigrants.  But what if I turned the hero archetype on its head and talked instead about what heroes inspire, rather than what they are made of? To introduce respect as a theme for the year and then analyze the topics, characters, values, community by what garnered respect, which inspired it, and what happened to a community-–or a story, or the dialogue, or even the devices used by a writer-- when respect is absent, could bring up some very interesting discussions.

Thanks, ISTE. Back to knitting and working through respect as an anchor for my juniors 2010-2011. I am going to ISTE Philly 2011 even if it uses up my book budget-I'll just record podcasts of all our texts!