Teaching undergraduate literature at second-tier universities in the late twentieth century, I used to get lucky with “The Use of Force,” a short story by a modernist poet who earned his living as a pediatrician. He wrote it in 1938, as a kind of casenote.
“You know,” I’d suggest to the class, “this is a story about rape.”
“No!” the class would roar back. “The man is a doctor! He’s trying to help the little girl!” But then we would start actually reading the words that the doctor actually wrote, and faces would light up.
But after the late twentieth century gave way to the early twenty-first, the lights stayed off. “Big deal,” jeered the 19-year-old healthies seventy years after 1938. “Every male-female relationship is a rape.” So I stopped teaching “The Use of Force.”
And after all, by then there remained few physicians who had ever even seen a case of diphtheria.
But oh, Mr. Secretary Jr.: how wonderful the word “again” may be about to become again.
I didn’t say good.
But I do say wonderful.
