Reactionary and Progressive Labels

the evolutionists: the struggle for Darwin's soul (Freeman; New York: 2001) by Richard Morris

Two of my closest friends are McGill psychiatrists. We’ve been friends for forty years. David was born in my hometown, Kingston, Ontario. As psychiatrists working in hospitals, they deal with seriously crazy people. They tend to label everyone. As a consequence of this long close friendship, I try to avoid labeling anyone.

Nevertheless, I would say that in the United States the classic reactionary is a born-again Protestant male. Credo quia absurdum, wrote Tertullian: “I believe what is absurd.” If you claim creationism is true and evolution is false, you will also believe the lies of George Bush. On the other hand, religion can be progressive. I attended a Jesuit high school. In biology, evolution was taught as fact. The Catholic Worker is a progressive movement within the Catholic church, perhaps a political antithesis of Opus Dei. The Catholic Worker helped create Liberation theology.

The progressive seeks to correct injustice. The reactionary perpetuates injustice, for he believes it is God’s plan. The reactionary seems to gloat over the suffering he causes.

Are You Ready?

When Jesus comes
back it’s
not going to be
easy.

He’s
going to want to know
why you never saw that
beam in your eyeball

and why
you never cut
that right hand
off. Maybe

you thought it
was bad the first
time, with all
those devils

getting cast
out, and the dead
brought back,
and people

walking on water and
everything. Well,
this time it’s
going to be

worse;
there’s going to be
shit
flying.

--Richard Morris

[From Assyrians published by The Smith, 1991]

Richard Morris Admiration Society

Richard Morris died in San Francisco 28 August 2003. He was 64. He was widely admired in the small world of alternative presses and daring websites. A witty poet, Richard was the publisher of Camels Coming Press and, more famously and most helpfully, the executive director of COSMEP. The acronym stood for different things in different years but it remained substantially a Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers. Richard edited an invaluable monthly newsletter and answered every query by return mail. I remember him presiding over one meeting smoking a pipe.

Richard was a hard-working writer. Over thirty years we averaged a letter a week. To get the writing going he drank tea. To go to sleep, to kill the jitters, he drank red wine. He was a wine expert. He was also, for instance, a ranked chess player. But he had no teeth. He had been in an automobile accident in the course of a week-long marriage. He had no teeth and many scars.

And then one day the doctor told him he had cirrhosis. And so Richard drank much less wine. When he stayed at my apartment, I made the mistake of saying, yes, he could smoke. When I returned ten days later, there were donuts in the fridge, fancy wine on the counter, and smoke everywhere.

Oh yes he told me about Viagra and, by the way, he was sure glad that whole silly occasional impotence thing was behind him. But then he got a cat-scan for that long-term stomach ache, for that damn cirrhosis, but this time it was abdominal cancer, and soon the cancer was everywhere, in five places, including the esophagus.

Beginning in 1979, Richard became known in the wider world as the author of a series of science books. He had a public. These texts were translated and published to good sales in dozens of countries. His royalties would range from a few pennies from Brazil to many thousands of dollars from Japan. But he continued publishing small-press chapbooks of poetry and drama read mostly by his friends and peers. His first posthumous book, called The Last Sorcerers, followed his death by a few months. Paracelsus was his favorite sorcerer.