A Poem for Heroes and Mass Murderers

Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon in Invictus

Since the World Cup is underway in South Africa, I watched Clint Eastwood’s Invictus last week, about the 1995 World Cup Rugby Tournament held in South Africa.  Based on a true story, the film notes that, while in prison, Nelson Mandela, like many black South Africans, would root against the South African rugby team, beloved of white Afrikaners. (Rugby was seen as a white sport, soccer as a black one.)  When he became president, however, as one of his reconciliation moves Mandela bucked his supporters and embraced the team wholeheartedly—and in the process, won over many of his white opponents.  The country was brought together when the underdog South African squad reached the World Cup finals and . . .  But you’ll have to watch the film to find out what happens.  The entire affair demonstrates the symbolic power of sports.

I will focus here on the William Ernest Henley poem “Invictus,” which provides the film with its title.  Mandela drew strength from the poem during his 27 years in prison, some of it spent in hard labor.  He gave a copy to the rugby team for inspiration.

But what are we to make of the fact that the poem was also quoted by mass murderer Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, prior to his execution?  (While I’m making lists, it is also the favorite poem of James Caldwell, Indianapolis Colts coach, for reasons I discuss here. )  A hero and a figure of pure evil are drawn to the same words.  Why?

First of all, here’s the poem:


Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

 The men are seeing two different poems.  In Mandela’s case, the black pit was a prison cell and his seemingly hopeless case.  He literally was bludgeoned, his head literally was bloodied, and he needed to believe that he had control over something to stay upright.  The idea that he was master of his fate and captain of his soul helped him hold on to his dignity.

It seems an abomination for McVeigh to cite this poem.  After all, this is a man who referred to the 19 children that died in the blast as “collateral damage.” 

In his case, I suspect that the poem fed a sense of grandiosity, the illusion that he was a hero.  We saw this same inflated self-image recently in Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber who tried to present himself to a New York judge as a martyr for Islamic justice.

McVeigh’s appropriation of “Invictus,” while pathetic, does reveal some of the limitations of this belief in will power.  People like McVeigh think they can be rigid and rock hard.  They see the federal government as a threat to their self-sufficiency, even though this self-sufficiency is a myth because we can only survive through interdependence with others.  In fact, a recent essay by J. M. Bernstein in the New York Times argues that Tea Party rage is to some extent directed at the fact that people are upset at how dependent they in fact are upon the federal government.  This would explain such contradictions as hating the government but loving Medicare.  Their American individualism balks at the realities of living in a complex world.

I hasten to note I am not saying that Tea Party followers are Timothy McVeighs.  But there are McVeigh types who are drawn to Tea Party anger.

Henley’s poem bears some responsibility for lending itself to the McVeighs of the world because it doesn’t sufficiently explore its belief in mastery and will power. For a contrasting example, I offer up a Victorian poem that voices similar sentiments.  You may recognize it.  Here’s its concluding passage:

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

In “Ulysses” Tennyson, unlike Henley, qualifies his speaker’s heroic assertion of self.  First of all, it is not clear that Ulysses is doing the responsible thing in setting out, once again, to “sail beyond the sunset.”  One can make arguments for and against his decision.  More tellingly, Tennyson has Ulysses echo (of all characters) Satan in Paradise Lost.  Here is the passage from Milton’s poem that Tennyson is alluding to:

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost—the unconquerable will
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield . . .

Now, I’m not arguing that Tennyson believes that anyone stirred by Ulysses’ words is Satanic.  The issue is more complex than that.  Rather, he is indicating that there is a dark side as well as an inspirational side to belief in “the unconquerable will.”

Mandela, who was genuinely oppressed, used “Invictus” to keep himself going.  But if he had really been Milton’s Satan, he would have become Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, grasping for dictatorial power.  As the film Invictus makes clear, however, he believed in reaching out to others.  His vision stretched beyond self. 

McVeigh, by contrast, was a lone wolf who saw others as a threat to his self-sufficiency.  His black night was the rage within which he moved, and he took out his anger against the world.  Then, like Milton’s Satan, he tried to portray himself as a heroic victim.

One last note: Some have claimed that Milton makes a hero of Satan, but I have to disagree.  First of all, Milton subtly undercuts him throughout.  In fact, even when Satan makes ringing statements like the one above (after all, he is the archangel and has a way with words), they are invariably compromised by the words that come after. Satan tends to go on too long.  He is so full of himself, he does not know when to stop.

Second, the more we see of Satan, the smaller he becomes.  I think the same thing happened with Faisal Shazad when he had his day in court.  American justice proved to be bigger.  One problem with executing people is that it can play to their inflated sense of self importance.  They can go out big, quoting heroic Victorian poetry.  

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