Bless your heart as they say in the South. It’s a kind of diss. Verbally it acknowledges the possibility, even the likelihood, of your good intention—the same intention that is the road to ruin. Or to hell—I can’t at the moment quite remember the proverb, if it is a proverb, and not simply a saying. What is a saying? Very simply, something people say. Whereas a proverb has or is supposed to have some wisdom inside it, some kernel of truth. A proverb is purposeful, if I have the etymology right—pro, to be for something, to advocate, as in to profess, to be a professor (I am a professor). Verb means word—and action—a word for action. Proverb. The road to hell is paved with good intentions—I just remembered the proverb (proverbs are biblical, I now recall), or the saying. It means that good intentions are not only insufficient as a basis for right conduct, but that they are positively detrimental to right conduct and lead—not inevitably but surely very often, as a paved road is likely to be a well-traveled one—to hell. Hell is other people, Sartre said, other people and their good intentions—bless their hearts.
People in the South say Bless your heart—they kill ‘em with kindness, another saying that curiously inverts and ironizes the benevolence of intentions. Although “to kill them with kindness” is like an oxymoron in its uniting of opposites—a paradox. Whereas “Bless your heart” sounds entirely benign, and you have to infer the irony from the context, which is usually in the South. In the time of plague, a plurality of Southerners refuse to follow basic public health protocols in the name of an ill-defined if not spurious freedom. I find myself wanting to say to these people, Bless your hearts! Not that I actually want to bless them, or even to soften their hearts as Moses with his words is supposed to have attempted to soften the heart of Pharaoh. We all know how that turned out. God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and it took plagues and miracles to get the Israelites out of Pharaoh’s clutches. We have the plagues now, thanks to COVID and to climate change, but as yet no miracles. The people who will literally die for the sake of owning the libs go on owning us, holding us in bondage to their caprice, as the Israelites were held in bondage by Pharaoh for the sake of building the Pyramids, etc. Or maybe not—we use a progressive hippy-dippy Haggadah in my house and I may not have the biblical details right.
All I know is that Bless your heart is a blessing with the force of a curse, and I’d like to say it now to all the people whose profound and profoundly American selfishness prolongs our American predicament, and to hear them maybe say it back to me, a Christ-killing Northerner (did I mention that I was a professor?). Call it an exchange of views. Call it the dialogue of repetition, by which we advance by repeating the same phrase in every available context. Call it wishful thinking. Every Passover we count the plagues. There are ten of them, I think, concluding with the Death of the Firstborn, an act of surpassing and unjustifiable cruelty that persuades Pharaoh, at last, to change his mind and let the Israelites go. (Later he changes his mind again and sends his soldiers after his fleeing slaves; we all know how that turned out.) The Angel of Death passes over us in the night and every day, everywhere, touching here and there with the tip of his long bony finger. He doesn’t say anything. What does he need to say?
