Unlikely Martyrs
This is a preview of the coming articles. All material is completely copyrighted in the author's name.
Part One: The Professorby D.S. MatteauWe tend to think of "martyrs" as people who know what they are doing, who believe something so strongly that they will stand up against overwhelming odds and even lose their lives for a cause. In the Catholic Church, many of our most venerated saints were martyrs and we admire them. What is an "Unlikely Martyr"? An "Unlikely Martyr" is someone who, in the course of a normal, not-particularly-religious life finds himself face to face with pure evil and does not flinch in the stare-down. John Manfredi, the author of "The Social Limits of Art" was such a person. He was not Catholic and, as far as I know, not even religious. He was a sociology professor who was asked to change his final work to satisfy a radical political cause, and he refused. This article is about him and his refusal. This is the first in a series that will be appearing in C.A.L. Review from time to time. Other "Unlikely Martyrs" will include James Bernardo, a young Catholic boy who ran away from home in order when street thugs discovered he was going to Confession about the cigarettes and marijuana they had smoked with him. He was murdered by a serial killer who was targetting Catholic and Christian children. A police investigator who became interested in this type of crime died under very suspicious circumstances. He was Capt. Thom White, a Boston animal-cruelty investigator. Another "unlikely martyr" is Immette St. Guillen, a young Catholic college girl who was majoring in criminal justice after having been influenced by Capt. White's work in Boston. She was murdered in an apparently random and gruesome act in Brooklyn. None of these people were prayer-book Catholics, except maybe young James. Capt. White was a cradle-Catholic who may have been dabbling in many forms of religious expermentation in the course of his career. Immette was partying at bars along with her city friends when she was killed. John Manfredi was a "secular Jew" from Philadelphia who was married to a Protestant Anglo-Canadian and probably considered himself agnostic, at best. He probably was not aware of the violent spiritual radicalism of some of the people he faced in the publication of his book. He stood for scientific and intellectual integrity, not religious or spiritual belief. This opening article for this "Unlikely Martyrs" series is about John Manfredi's last stand. Who was John Manfredi?John Manfredi was a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts in the early nineteen-seventies. His work was not ground-breaking in any way, but mainly served to establish a new sociology faculty as a respected academic department of the University. Were it not for the opportunistic interests of some political activists in the 1980's, he would not have written "The Social Limits of Art". He told me this, himself, although he did not use the phrase "political activists".The occasion was during a vacation in western Quebec. I was there with a friend visiting the Manfredis and we all sat around in conversation after supper. Prof. Manfredi was retired and was struggling with diabetes. His book had recently been published, yet he was not happy. His complaints seemed generally affected by his physical pain and disappointment in life, but the talk settled on one topic: he admired the creative capacity of artists and architects and felt he lacked this capacity. I am an artist and I have often sat uncomfortably through this kind of conversation in which someone ascribes a kind of magical quality to the activity of art and expresses jealousy of this immeasurable wealth all artists are thought to possess. I am always financially strapped and could never understand this delusion of non-artists, but there we were. I made a comment to the effect that to choose to be an artist is to choose a life of Bohemian poverty. Prof. Manfredi took that remark as a complaint rather than as a description, and heartily reccommended that upon returning to Massachusetts, I should look up the Unitarians. They were very rich and very generous, he said, and were throwing money at artists. I did not pursue that because he misunderstood me, but he went on to say that they, in fact, had approached him about writing his book. He told me they wanted a sociological treatise on art, and he was surprised to have been chosen. I remembered his classes and was quietly surprised, myself. John Manfredi, frankly, was not a creative thinker as far as I could see and he certainly lacked the wide range of imaginative thinking that one associates with the arts. I remembered him as a teacher who became viscerally hostile when students offered alternative interpretations of data. He told me the Unitarians wanted him to write a strictly scientific study and in fact chose him because of his lack of a personal agenda in the arts. Insodoing, the Unitarians unwittingly had struck a deep chord in John Manfredi's soul. He proceeded to write a densely packed survey of the contributions of the young field of Sociology to our understanding of Art and its role in Society. Distractions and ConnectionsI tried to read his book that summer, but did not understand it. I was reminded only that I had flunked every sociology course I had taken without ever understanding what any of it had to do with reality. During that time, reading something as intellectually demanding as "The Social Limits of Art" was tough on me, anyway. I was a single parent facing a barrage of interference in my private life from people who had decided to involve themselves in my divorce. Total strangers were calling my ex-husband across the state to offer to help him challenge my custody of our 10-year-old child and he did not have the intelligence to wonder why this was going on. I knew that I had refused to allow my artwork to be used by a whole coalition of political activists and corrupt fundraisers, and I also knew that I had several close relatives in my own Catholic family who were, to be polite, "dysfunctional" and who allowed their own religious prejudices to be manipulated against me, as a lapsed catholic and single parent.John Manfredi's son, Louis Manfredi, an old college chum, was a dear friend during that time, and he told me that the craziness that was swirling around my household was very similar to craziness that had swirled around his own household when he faced a kind of cult-assault from some people in Boston. Because of his natural sympathy and understanding of what he had seen with his own eyes, he accompanied me to court numerous times as I successfully fought off each challenge. It was years before I understood the full connection between these events. Before I went to the Manfredis' cabin for dinner, Louis had asked me not to get pulled into any conversations about his work. He complained that his father did not understand that he must not describe his work to other people. This was funny to me because Louis was no secret agent: he was a wind-power engineer. Don Quixote, undercover? Haha... But he insisted, and I did see some of the tension and was glad to get our dinner conversation onto the subject of Prof. Manfredi's book. I did not suspect this secrecy was anything other than some weird father-son competitiveness. But Louis said people, he did not know who, were putting his father up to asking questions and sometimes this could affect patents and such. His father did not seem to appreciate that he was being used, and so Louis had to just shut down those topics of conversation. This was why I had to estrange my own daughter and me from my parents. My mother, like Louis' father, also did not understand that I needed to guard my privacy. We did not grow up in a world where we had to act this way. Louis' marriage ended when his wife announced she was gay and left him for a female lover. During that summer of the Ontario River vacation, he told me that it was not just a breakdown of the marriage, but that whole groups of her "new friends" had been coming to their house and had, in his words "brainwashed" her, sometimes staging "interventions" at him when he would get home from work. When he saw what I was going through with people calling my ex-husband, neigbors, and others, he said it looked like the same thing and he said "this is deliberate, these people are trying to drive you insane like the ones in Boston did to me and Laury." The Role of Art in Social ChangeI am writing this now as if it is all hooked together, but at the time I did not make these connections. When I saw Louis Manfredi again after the Ontario vacation, we parted ways. I left his father's book on my shelf and concentrated on my own work. It was almost another ten years before the Unitarians descended on high-school students across Massachusetts with the exact same kind of assault on their sexual and family relationships Louis experienced in Boston, and it was only then that anyone could see the role of art education techniques in their assaults.A little over a year after our conversation in Canada, some continuous and serious child-stalking incidents happened around my daughter's school and I became heavily involved in protecting her, along with some other parents. Something was terribly wrong with the way the police and other authorities reacted, even considering that this was happening in the late 1980's, before the modern awareness of police agencies had developed. Artists abounded among my friends, including among the other parents of my daughter's age-mates, and when Jimmy Bernardo was snatched almost from under our noses and killed, some of us became obsessed with trying to understand what was going on. This was when I re-read "The Social Limits of Art", and finally understood what John Manfredi had told me that summer in that cabin beside the clear waters of the Ontario River. On page 116, in a simple quotation of the Russian writer Sorokin, John Manfredi encapsulated the entire situation of us artists and our families in Massachusetts in the last years of the twentieth century: we are in the grips of a deliberately genocidal political movement. Prof. Manfredi had bitterly told me, that evening in Canada, that his book would never see the light of day. He said that what he had done was carefully review everything that had been published or discussed in sociological circles about art and had given a simple report of what these thinkers had to say about the role the arts play in society, not about the person of the artist-as-shaman or any of the other romantic conceits that have often been popular. The Unitarians were not happy. They wanted him to remove the section of page 116 and its supporting texts, in which he asserts that if a society relies on the arts as a sensually-based form of education of its young, then the end result will be a generation that inevitably collapses into genocidal violence. He refused to remove that section of his book. He told me the Unitarians were angry and they said then his book would languish in a closet in the University's darkest corner, and so it has. John Manfredi was not a man whose career had broken any scientific ground. Had he co-operated with those censors he would have enjoyed a flurry of professional publicity and celebrity status in his final years; something he clearly would have enjoyed. But he chose to stand his ground in spite of the obscurity this meant because, as he told me, he would have had to deny what he had seen when he applied his own scientific rigour to his research on art and society. Even though it meant spending his last years with a pile of unread copies of his book that his own family and friends did not understand, John Manfredi stood his ground. Unlikely as it seems, when the history of the rise of genocidal violence in the twenty-first century is written, at least one small footnote in that history should record the name of one Professor John Manfredi among the martyrs of this tumultuous era. |
