Jill Domschot

There is no cure for insomnia. Sure, I’ve heard success stories, but usually the successes are from people who corrected their genuinely bad life habits, such as staring at their phones instead of logging off, being sedentary, or eating a poor diet. When it comes to chronic insomnia with no known cause, I’m here to suggest there isn’t a way out. Pharmaceuticals aren’t a legitimate way out. And no supplement will help, either. I know; I’ve tried them all. So has every chronic insomniac I know.

When a doctor was trying to convince me to take sleeping pills, she explained that it wouldn’t be the same as normal sleep, but I’d get a few hours and get up and drink my coffee and get on with my day. Congratulations, you just reinvented alcohol, I thought. The pep talk reminded me of the mean millennial memes from five or so years ago: Congratulations, you just reinvented the sandwich! To which, I generally scratched my head because if millennials don’t know how to make a sandwich it’s the older generations’ fault. On a serious note, sleeping pills as a whole are more damaging to the health than alcohol, and you might as well glug the vodka if you want to take that route.

This has all been a lead up to my current very bad insomniac episode, and what lengthy bad episodes do to my soul. I can plod along until I can’t. Then I turn nihilistic and skip going to Mass and curse out a human being I shouldn’t and generally let my thoughtlife slip into chaos. Of course, at that point I realize that, more than sleep, I need Confession.

Every time I go to Confession, I receive a different type of penance. This last time, I was quite surprised at the penance; I assume it’s okay to break the seal of confession from my end. It’s only the priest who can’t. Anyway, this is too funny not to share. Or ironic. My priest told me to ask Jesus to speak to me and then just open the Bible and read everything on both pages. I’m going to take a screenshot* of what I opened to, but I also want to pull some quotes. Please remember that this confession was inspired by behavior brought on by intense insomnia. I was also angry with God for not meeting my physical needs — angry and nihilistic and wondering what the point was of life.

First page:

32 “But concerning that day or that hour, (BK)no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, (BL)nor the Son, (BM)but only the Father. 33 (BN)Be on guard, (BO)keep awake.[a] For you do not know when the time will come. 34 (BP)It is like a man (BQ)going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants[b] in charge, (BR)each with his work, and commands (BS)the doorkeeper to stay awake. 35 (BT)Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, (BU)in the evening, or (BV)at midnight, or (BW)when the rooster crows,[c] or (BX)in the morning— 36 lest (BY)he come suddenly and (BZ)find you asleep. 37 And what I say to you I say to all: (CA)Stay awake.”

Second page:

³⁴ And he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch.”^[d]35 And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. 

³⁶ And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” ³⁷ And he came and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour? ³⁸ Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” *

*This is ESV because it was the only physical Bible I could find when I did this penance. Usually, I read RSVCE or NAB (the latter because it’s used in the liturgy).

I’ve heard Protestant pastors mock the concept that God speaks to us this way. They bring up the classic joke of a person opening the Bible to Judas’ suicide, and then turning to the spot where it reads “Now go and do likewise.” But that is a made up story that leaves God out of the picture. It is for this kind of story and more that I’m not a Protestant. True, God doesn’t always give us a direct answer. And when he does, it isn’t always the most clear-cut variety. And sometimes, it isn’t what we want to hear. No doubt, I was hoping for words of comfort. Instead, I received a reminder that I cannot allow my spirit to fall asleep and become complacent.

*I will fix the screenshot when I have time. I only meant for the range of verses to show at the top of the pages, but even that is not readable.

An accordion legend passed away in September. Look, I don’t know what it is lately about life causing death but…oh, wait. The problem is I’m surrounded by death right now, as I must help people plan funeral Masses as a part of my job. There is a pattern to deaths recorded in our registry: a moderate death year is followed by a low death year which is followed by a high death year. However, the deaths in 2021 are significantly higher than preceding years. Oddly, 2020 was a low death year. The deaths skyrocketed after and are concurrent with ___. I’ll let you fill in the blank. I don’t have a good sense of 2022 yet; I don’t know how it fits, though if the pattern continues, it will be end up as the moderate year. That is simply not the way it appears when in the middle of an uptick of funerals. [Yes, I did just use one of the media’s catchwords. Please note that I avoided their rhetorical “surge.”]

Being surrounded by death is quite literally the way we live in this world. It’s inevitable. We’re uneasy with this reality in our culture, which does not like to carry on with lengthy wakes and viewings. I wrote about this years ago when I was examining the corpses of saints that have been displayed for ages in churches. Modern Americans, I’ve read, find that weird. But the truth is death is always there waiting, and it is sad for the living as we lose the people we love. They leave holes in our lives.

This can happen even at the level of celebrity. When a musician or author we love passes, the world loses some of its sparkle. Sorry, I have to digress. My coworker related a story about his special lowrider truck and a woman who complimented him for the “sparkles” he’d incorporated on the back window. Confused, he did a double-take and gasped: “Those aren’t sparkles! That’s broken glass.” His back window had been shattered while he was working. I’m sure there’s a corollary philosophical tie-in with life, death, and broken glass, but I’ll let the poets discover it.

The accordion legend Paulino Bernal passed away in September; his son died only days after him. That family has to be hurting double time right now. However, they were Christian men, and our hope as Christians is in eternal life with our creator. Let me tell you about Paulino Bernal: he was a tejano accordionist who initially went down the path musicians will, of alcohol, drugs, and not enough time with their families. That was before God got a hold of him and turned his life around. He became an evangelist and began to record praise music. Paulino Bernal was not a young man when he died; he was in his eighties. Still, it’s sad for the world to lose a legend such as that. His son was a pastor, which might not be as glamorous as an accordion player (I’m glamorous, right?) but is obviously a vital life role.

It is hard to describe the impact human beings have on one another; just our presence in the world changes things for the good or bad around us. If you know anything about tejano music, you probably know Paulino Bernal was the man who discovered Ramon Ayala’s accordion skills. After he became transformed through Christ, eventually so did Ramon Ayala. And that is a story I know because I read news articles about the musicians I love. Who knows how many non newsworthy lives Señor Bernal affected positively because his heart was transformed through Jesus? Who knows how many lives his son, the pastor, impacted?

When I think of death, and I have done that more than I expected lately, this is what I ponder: what kind of world will I leave behind me? I know that I’ve been petty and have hurt people. We all have. But I don’t want that to be the sum total of my life. I want my heart to cry out instead, “Here I am, Lord. Send me.” I want to be of true utility to the world. Is that selfish? It almost sounds selfish, but it’s actually more childish than it is selfish. Anyone who’s been in a classroom knows there will always be a handful of enthusiastic children who fling their arms in the air because they desperately want to be chosen by Teacher, even if they can’t answer Teacher’s question without help… probably because they were daydreaming instead of paying attention. Well, I am that child, waving my hand up to God. The daydreaming part is sadly true, too.

RIP Paulino Bernal and his son. May their family feel God’s blessings.

If you suspect there will never be a Part II, you are correct. I doubt there will be a simple Part II to my political post, either. That’s what comes from having too many interests and a schedule I force myself to adhere to like a crazy person. I’m a crazy person. Digression on being a crazy person below. It’s wrapped in asterisks so you can skip it if you choose and get to the point.

***It’s crazy to adhere to a schedule so tightly that I allow for no movement in my life. How can I move, though? I had my eyes on specific end goals, and what happens when I change to another end goal? I leave unfinished projects and unmet goals. When I do that, I cease to trust in my ability to follow through. I become a failure.

But what if God is asking me to do something else, and I won’t budge from my goals because I’ve had them for so long? I have three, count them, 1-2-3, fiction books in process; I’ve purchased a $4000-dollar accordion and therefore must play it every day; I can’t stop studying Spanish because I’m addicted and want to be truly fluent; I’m also trying to reach that elusive 100% fit state instead of simply accepting that it’s not necessary to have rock-hard abs.

At a certain point, the tension inside built up so much last night that I couldn’t cope with it any longer. I thought about talking it out with someone but quickly rejected that idea. Instead, I prayed for resolve, drank two shots of vodka, and fell asleep. Vodka alleviates tension — temporarily. Today, though, I sat down to work on what I thought God wanted me to work on and now the tension inside is erased. Of course, it’s a holiday weekend. What will happen when I’m back at work tomorrow, rising before six a.m. to meet my goals?

The truth is God is not asking me to give up my goals. Instead, he’s telling me to do something purposeful and necessary. I just don’t want to do it because it’s more hard work on top of all the other work in my life.***

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I wanted to return to contract law and its moral significance. In my last post, I discussed Scripture and the morality behind debt forgiveness. God commands it. He commands it because, otherwise, no lender is going to forgive debts. Why would he? When people could be indentured servants to pay off their debts, the lender had a laborer he didn’t have to pay. In our modern system, people pay their debts off through any means of work possible, and they are in a sense operating as indentured servants if their earnings are going only toward debt repayment and basic living costs. In a broader sense, it was more beneficial to society in Old Testament days to have a debt jubilee so that all the people in debt slavery could now earn an income and take part in the economy, even paying those pesky little things known as taxes. Times really haven’t changed that much, except in the modern system, when people get overwhelmed, they drop out of the system and cease paying their debts back, as well as not paying much in the way of taxes.

So, God commanded a way for people to be released from their contracts when those contracts were overly burdensome. From the perspective of a debtor, yes, that person should always honor the contracts they sign, and they should consider it a true mercy if their debts are forgiven. Still, God gave a way out of onerous contracts.

It’s a bit crazy to me that in our modern day we are more willing to allow people out of their marriage contracts than we are willing to give them debt relief. In both instances, the contracts should have been signed with utmost seriousness, with an understanding that it’s a grave matter to violate contracts. Again, God did make a way for married people to get out of their marriage contracts through a bill of divorce. Jesus has some strong words to say about that, though: He said it was only for the hardness of men’s hearts that Moses allowed divorce at all. He had more to say than that. Go look it up for yourself, if you don’t believe me.

To reiterate, God commanded a debt jubilee, something we believe is completely wrong, or at the very least unconstitutional, in our modern day, as we believe that people should honor the contracts they entered into. On the other hand, we engage in marriages and divorces and hardly anyone bats an eye over the breaking of contracts. And yet, God didn’t command divorce as he did a debt jubilee. He allowed it; he didn’t command it. Do you see the difference there. I suppose many Christians will claim they’re hardliners on marriage, just as they are with debt, and don’t believe in divorce. I don’t see that around me, though. As a Catholic, I know the official position is that divorces aren’t allowed by church law at all. Catholics are true hardliners…in their words and dogma only. They change the word divorce to annulment and pretend the words mean one and the same thing, while many, many Catholics still get divorces through the court system long before they seek an annulment through the church. They take it just as lightly as the rest of the world in actual practice.

What am I to make of this? It appears we care more about money than we do about marriage. There are a few ways to destroy a society, and an entire population strapped to debt is one of them. When people can’t buy houses, cars, or educations without going into crushing debt, it makes them feel hopeless. They might very well reach a point, as they already have, where they know they will never be able to buy a house and they no longer believe an education is valuable compared to the wages earned at the end. There are still some jobs where the wages earned are commensurate to the amount of university debt, and I don’t mean being an MD — a computer scientist or a nurse, maybe — but not everyone is cut out for that kind of work. So, education no longer makes sense to many young people. I see that in my four children, the two eldest being millenials who have degrees, and my two youngest being zoomers who show no inclination towards college. What will they do? I don’t know.

Another way to destroy society is to no longer value marriage. That one is actually much, much worse. A poor, uneducated society with intact families is more stable than a society in which the young people no longer value marriage and have stopped getting married, even as they’ve stopped hoping to buy a house or improve their lot through higher education. Along with the mix of too-much debt, no hope for improvement, and no faith in marriages, is a complete lack of care or interest in having children. All of these issues plague us, they are all knotted up together in a complex web we’ve created ourselves over the last sixty or so years. And I can guarantee you that the ease of breaking a marriage contract and the ease of signing a debt contract are two big contributors.

Because of the time we’ve spent getting in this mess, I don’t perceive an easy way out. I spent a lot of years in the homeschool community, where many idealists thought they could find a way out by going “traditional” or “patriarchal”. The problem with that is nobody really knows what traditional or patriarchal means any longer, and the manner in which they try to reinvent a system they don’t understand ends up destroying their own attempt at an intact family! It’s truly heartbreaking. By the way, speaking of Catholicism, I’ve seen a new popularity for the patriarchal family system in traditional Catholic circles that mimics the Protestant fundamentalists. Given the state of our society right now, I understand it. It gives purpose to the idea of family — it gives purpose to the man, to the woman, and largely keeps them out of the debt system. From what I’ve seen of families that went this direction, I just hope and pray that the Trad Caths can pull it off. Or do I hope that? I’m not sure. The patriarchal lifestyle is the last-ditch effort of a drowning man, clinging to a phantom life raft and pulling his family down with him.

And yet, sometimes I’m going to tell you, anyway. In general, I’m conservative. I wouldn’t call myself progressive. Progressives are soul-crushers. They crush anything of value. They call evil good and good evil. This is a known reality. Conservatives tend to value goodness more than progressives do. Thus, I align more closely with conservatives. Of course, I’m not defining terms. I’m not defining what is good and of true value. There are some concepts that should be so universal as to not need defining.

But there is one area where I despise both conservatives and progressives, and that is regarding our debt economy. Conservatives love it — I guess. I’m not sure progressives do, but they support people who love our debt economy, such as President Biden. It’s frustrating to realize that progressives will accept what Biden has put on offer regarding the forgiveness of debts without questioning why he isn’t truly erasing debt.

I understand why he isn’t. The erasure of debt is a biblical value, not a value of the international banking syndicate that sacrifices entire nations and their people to Ba’al, or whatever it is they call their ruling legion of demons. And Biden is certainly no Catholic, despite the rosary he wears. He’s not invested in a biblical worldview; that is certain.

Why are conservatives, who often purport to believe in biblical values, not pro debt relief? This is a question I’ve often pondered. From the Old Testament law, which mandated a year of Jubilee for Israelites when all debt was forgiven, to the examples of debt erasure in Jesus’s own parables, it’s quite obvious debt forgiveness is a biblical concept. The conservatives begin to sound like the responsible brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. In case you need a reminder, this is what I mean:

²⁵ “Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. ²⁶ And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. ²⁷ And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.’ ²⁸ But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, ²⁹ but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. ³⁰ But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’ ³¹ And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. ³² It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.’”

The story ends there; it isn’t about the responsible brother. For that reason, we know the younger brother has a change of heart. He repents of his behavior and begs for mercy from his father. We see the father have mercy and chastise the responsible brother for his stinginess and bitterness. Whether he changes his outlook is beyond the scope of the story. In my experience, it’s difficult to convince people who are convinced of their own rightness that they aren’t always right, even when they stand up for what they view as justice and truth. God certainly does have a sense of justice, and his sense of justice is broader than ours. It’s based off the understanding that not releasing the largest debts creates empty seats in society. In a spiritual sense, the father’s table was previously absent of one son. In an economical sense, it means there are people who can’t operate in the normal business of commerce because they can barely pay back what they owe.

While it’s tempting for conservatives to paint all these debtors as irresponsible, this is quite literally not true. Some are no doubt sons (and daughters) who have gone astray as in Jesus’ parable, living off the largesse of loans with no thoughts to the future, but many signed their college loans out of duty and honor to their parents. They were doing what their elders told them was best. The nastiness of you’ve made your bed; now you need to lie in it regarding student loans is no different from the older generation’s disgust for the ignorance of a generation they failed to teach anything of value to. The debt crisis is partly your fault, in other words — if you happen to be the kind of parent who encouraged your children to go to college, all the while knowing that the pricing system was an absolute scam created by universities and lending institutions. You knew that, right, parents? You knew encouraging your children to sign on to inappropriately priced education wouldn’t necessarily mean they’d go on to get a great job and pay it off in a couple years — right? If parents were this delusional once upon a time, how can anyone blame eighteen-year-olds for being delusional, as well?

The only problem is Biden isn’t offering to write off all student loan debt. He’s putting a bit of candy in our mouths to tantalize us. Along those lines, I’ll be astonished if he actually cancels the debt rather than disbursing the debt onto taxpayers. Cancelling the debt, erasing it, pretending as if it never existed, is the only way forward for our economy. Cancelling the debt would be to remove so-called money from the system at the same time that the debt is cancelled. That magic $20k that was created on paper can just as magically be erased, and the crazy part is it doesn’t even require magic. It requires making the lenders hurt and hurt hard. They should hurt hard. The other group that should hurt hard is the universities. Don’t allow them to live off the largesse of the FAFSA system any longer. Make them go bankrupt, for all I care, until a new type of university rises from the ashes that offers competitive prices.

I have zero faith in Biden because he’s immoral. I doubt he cares that much about the economy. His free money to the Ukraine says how much he cares for our economy. He cares nothing for the people here. In other words, he’s not trying balance inflation through erasing debt. I don’t know why he’s doing it. It’s not to buy votes. When even the FBI openly admits they intentionally throw elections, we know votes don’t matter. Perhaps he’s only looking for good media spin to keep up appearances for the time being. I really don’t know. It’s hard for an ordinary sinful person like myself to get in the head of the truly wacked satanic types in power. We should still be asking ourselves why, even if his little sweeties taste delicious in the moment.

Every time I hear political moderates pretend to be very profound and truth telling when they point out that the media is trying to divide us, I want to start singing We Are the World, or at least the handful of lines I remember from it. I actually liked that song when I was elevenish, but mostly for Cindy Lauper. I would listen for her line and get quickly bored.

I get bored with political moderates too, or perhaps just the average wishy-washy conservative. The truth is the media doesn’t have to divide our nation; our nation naturally divides along ideological lines. We have no natural foundation, no basis on which to be aligned, except on meaningless ideals such as “liberty.” But what is liberty to this century was absolutely censored and censured when the Bill of Rights and Constitution were drafted — pornography and homosexuality, for example. Liberty is far too malleable a concept to form a nation.

And so the nation has divided along very natural fault lines between those holding to Christian morality and those who have traded it for drag queen story hour and pornography in public libraries. Librarians are ridiculous. They’re all about freedom of the press for material that would have been illegal to print up until about the 1960s. They’re so full of ideals that they stand for twisted adults with sexual kinks telling our children all about it.

Please just stop with the fits of fainting over “they’re just trying to divide us.” Who is? Our propagandist media organizations? Or perhaps the Holy Spirit will do that all on his own. After all, that’s what Jesus told us in Luke 12: “Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division; 52 for henceforth in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three; 53 they will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against her mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.”

We are divided because Christians can’t stand for evil, and our nation really has nothing to hold it together. We have no common culture, no common religion, no common morality. Call me unamerican; call me any pejorative you want, but I do not seek union with those who call good evil and evil good. I therefore do not seek to repair the divisions except through the only means Jesus gave us, which was to spread the gospel and help those in need. That’s what matters, not pretending that those who oppose the slaughter of children can align with those who support it.

In summary: stop trying to pretend that you are a special kind of truth teller by pointing out that the media creates division. The media is part of the evil deceivers of the world, and apart from that, Jesus told us how it would be 2000 years ago. The only difference is he didn’t tell us to repair the divisions through wishy-washy politics.

This is the title of a short biography of the life of Elizabeth Garrett, written by Ruth K. Hall. It’s no secret that I love biographies and autobiographies because they are, at least since James Boswell, intimate glimpses of people and their stories. Autobiographies are generally more intriguing to me than biographies; I like to see the epoch of history through the bias of a person actually living in it. This particular biography is short, perhaps written for a younger audience, and takes a positive spin on the central character. I’m guessing this is because the author knew the Garrett family. I suppose as far as living in the epoch and being in possession of biases, a biography written by a friend of the subject character is a close second to an autobiography…with one caveat. Most writers of autobiographies are willing to be honest about themselves, even some of the negative parts, but I’m not sure about the autobiographies written by friends. Those might well be a little glossier.

Regardless of this book’s honesty, Elizabeth Garrett is a character for New Mexicans to know. As her last name suggests, she was related to the famous sheriff who took out Billy the Kid. She was, in fact, his daughter, who was born blind. Due to her connections, she was part of the oeuvre of New Mexico, part of its lore and wild history. Through her father, she was part of the Anglo ranching culture, but through her mother, she was a New Mexican who spoke and understood Spanish fluently. She is also emblematic of my local area, where the Lincoln County wars took place. She lies at rest in the historic South Park Cemetery in Roswell, the name of which I have become familiar with, as I help to arrange funeral Masses in my job.

Most people outside the New Mexican world have heard of Pat Garrett, but her daughter also deserves her share of distinction. Her parents had the wherewithal to send her to a school for the blind in Austin, Texas — which was quite a train ride from her home at the time in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Her father desired that she learn to be independent instead of held back by her disability. More important, she learned the obvious skills of reading and writing in Braille, and the not so obvious skills of music. People who grow up blind have heightened senses of hearing, touch, and smell, but not everyone who grows up blind is blessed with a talent for music, as Elizabeth was. Through her musical lessons, she became a proficient singer and piano player, such that she was able to give lessons and support herself once she had graduated from the school.

As an adult, she had less fear than a lot of people who were born with sight, and arranged to sing her way to Chicago, where she wished to take singing lessons from a famous teacher. There was no guarantee the teacher would take her (he did), but that didn’t stop her from the adventure. After studying with him, she ventured on yet more travels and became somewhat famous as a performer. Part of her appeal was her ability to sing fluently Spanish folksongs she’d learned growing up.

But she is really famous in New Mexico for writing our state song, O Fair New Mexico. She used her non-sight senses to describe the landscape of the state and smattered the verses with Spanish words here and there. To be honest, I didn’t appreciate the New Mexico song until I knew more about the writer. It’s not badly written; that’s not it. I didn’t appreciate it as much as I did the Spanish state song (yes, we have that, too: Asi es Nuevo Mejico). Everything sounds better in Spanish. Yes, I’m biased. The writer of that song, Amadeo Lucero, deserves his own post.

Life in New Mexico at the time both these musicians lived was not easy, you see. It was the Wild West. It’s still the Wild West. We’ve barely managed to become civilized in this state, I’m sorry to say. That’s why crime is so high in almost every city and rural pocket. Elizabeth Garrett’s father was murdered, shot in the back, by men who were never convicted of the crime. This left her mother impoverished, and without her musical education, Elizabeth would have had a hard time getting by. Despite the pain and struggles, Miss Garrett and Mr. Lucero, as well, loved the beautiful land they were born in. And it shows in their respective songs. I’ll paste the lyrics to Elizabeth Garrett’s below, as this post is about her.

Under a sky of azure, where balmy breezes blow,
Kissed by the golden sunshine, is Nuevo Mejico.
Home of the Montezuma, with fiery hearts aglow,
State of the deeds historic, is Nuevo Mejico.

[Chorus]
Oh! Fair New Mexico, we love, we love you so,
Our hearts with pride o’erflow,

No matter where we go.

Oh! Fair New Mexico, we love, we love you so,
The grandest state we know — New Mexico!

Rugged and high sierras, with deep canyons below,
Dotted with fertile valleys, is Nuevo Mejico.

Fields full of sweet alfalfa, richest perfumes bestow,
State of apple blossoms, is Nuevo Mejico.

[Chorus]

Days that are full of heart-dreams, nights when the moon hangs low;
Beaming its benedictions, o’er Nuevo Mejico.

Land with its bright mañana, coming through weal and woe;

State of esperanza, is Nuevo Mejico.

[Chorus]

source: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/miscellaneouslyrics/statesongslyrics/newmexicostatesonglyrics.html

I watch every film interpretation of Austen that comes out. Therefore, I was not going to allow social media and very serious news outlets such as Vox and Yahoo to persuade me otherwise. They will try. They hated it, you see. Everyone hated it. But if it’s one message I learned from Austen’s book, allowing others to persuade me away from the right course of action leads to loneliness and anguish.

It was difficult not to enter this film with preconceived disdain for it. What I read about it was actually quite damning, that the producers had tacked modern vernacular and values onto the physical appearance of early nineteenth-century England. Jane Austen is popular for a myriad of reasons, and one of those is that romantic-era values are enticing to a population raised with little sense of value for traditions such as marriage. People also appreciate Jane Austen for her subtlety. Her characters have recognizable personalities that modern-day humans can relate to without having to hear those personalities speak in twenty-first century parlance.

On the other hand, Austen is subtle, and that leads modern humans to adapt her work in their heads any which way they want to. Nearly every Jane Austen fan I knew while studying her work in college lived unironic lives of fornication, while not valuing marriage and family the way Austen did. Rather, they drooled over the male characters and swooned over the dresses without the slightest hint of self-examination. As far as I know, most college students in this older millenial group have yet to do any real self-examination (I went back to school at age 28; hence, my fellow students were older millenials or very young Xers). I enjoyed my friends, but I left college with the sense that they had learned very little from their education, and certainly nothing from Jane Austen.

Bizarrely, I enjoyed this adaptation of Persuasion simply because it provides some self-examination for moderns. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and claim that’s why it gets such a bad reaction from much of its contemporary audience. This film is anything but subtle, and for those playing at a fantasy game of bonnets while doing exactly what the main character does — drinking wine to ward away loneliness — this is going to be an uncomfortable film.

First of all, let it be known that this film adaptation deals in irony and comedy. So does Jane Austen, but as I already stated, Austen is subtle. For example, Austen paints the youngest Elliot daughter, Mary, as self-absorbed and prideful, but weak and sickly at the same time. She is not the kind of heroine a modern audience looks up to — she’s, in fact, not a heroine at all. She’s grossly reliant on others while maintaining a sense of pride in who she is as an Elliot daughter. That’s why it was amusing to me rather than jarring when she and Anne have a conversation in which she talks about needing “me time” to do “self care.” This is the epitome of stereotypical modern women. They are self-absorbed victims looking for attention. That is why media outlets such as Yahoo and Vox feature real-world Marys who self-identify with their “invisible” illnesses, which they proceed to parade visibly all over the internet.

Not only are they like Mary, but they eschew marriage like Anne — except they are persuaded by their surrounding culture to not be traditional, while Anne is persuaded by Lady Russell. It doesn’t matter, though. The result is the same. Moderns end up lonely, unable to have children before it’s too late, and they drown their sorrows in wine. The book version of Anne has an outward calm and inner torment, but in this film version we see the private torment through her downing a glass of brandy or weeping on the bed. Rejecting marriage, and in this case with a man the heroine desperately loves, leads to sorrow. This is apparently not a pleasant sight for young and not-so-young-any-longer women to witness. It’s not subtle at all. It’s painful.

Moving on to Lady Russell, this is a woman who is all about maintaining the Elliot pride. She is shallow and cares for money. She thus advises a young Anne to reject a perfectly good suitor, bloating her protege’s head with all manner of arrogance in herself and her value on the marriage market. This is true in both the book and the film adaptation, which is Austen’s particular irony, as Lady Russell is herself a spinster. In the film Lady Russell admits to Anne that she “goes to the continent” to avoid the inevitable loneliness of spinsterhood. What does this indicate? It indicates that women who end up as spinsters also end up as whores. In Austen’s work, this is shown through the manipulative Mrs. Clay, who is not a spinster but a widow. Again, the book is quite a bit more subtle in its message. Also, I believe it is an anachronism for a woman like Lady Russell to openly admit to Anne that she leads a scandalous life on the sly. I repeat: the film doesn’t even try to be subtle in its message.

Inevitably, I must discuss the least subtle message of the film: most of the cast is composed of black or Asian people. Obviously, this would never have happened in Austen’s time. Mary would not have married a black man. Their cousin, Mr. Elliot, would not have been Asian. Lady Russell would not have been black. Is the film merely attempting an eye-rolling level of diversity, or is there a larger message here? I’m going to guess there is a larger message.

Yeah, about that larger message — the man Anne rejected so many years before the story starts is a navy captain. Navy captains in those days had the ability to become rich, thereby making themselves eligible bachelors to respectable landed gentry daughters. How did they become wealthy? They were mercenaries for the crown. In other words, they helped England colonize the globe. Persuasion was published in 1818, at the start of a colonizing century that would peak at one-quarter of the globe being subject to the crown of England. Therefore, men such as Anne’s Captain Wentworth brought Africans and Asians into the “family” of England, even if they were unwilling subjects. In the concert scene, when the camera slowly sweeps the audience, the diversity sticks out like a sore thumb. Obviously, I can’t get in the mind of the people who made this film, but my interpretation is this: shallow women like Russell (herself an ironically black character) pushed men such as Wentworth into whoring themselves for the crown so that they could find decent wives. This disrupted the social world of the day by raising these men’s statuses, but it also had the result of eventually creating a very diverse society. In a sense, what we are seeing in this film is ghosts of the future. The film barely pulls away from being critical of this now-diverse England through levity and humor and not resting too long in any one scene. The criticism is still evident, however, and this, again, is going to rankle a modern audience. Modern audiences such as readers of Vox do not like diversity being viewed through a critical lens.

Was it a good film, though? Clearly, I found its messaging ironic and amusing, but does that put it on my list of favorite Jane Austen adaptations? Earlier, I said that much of the audience will hate this film because it forces too much self-examination onto a modern audience. There is another subset of people who are going to be critical of this film for the unfortunate reason that nobody has ever made a decent Persuasion film that represents the book. I am one of those people. This film does not satisfy me on that level. I’m still waiting for a stellar version that follows the essence and feel of the book. For a start, this version has a brooding Darcy-esque Captain Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis). While attractive enough to be the captain, he leaves a lot to be desired performance-wise. Anne (Dakota Johnson), Mary (Mia McKenna-Bruce), and Mr. Elliot (Henry Golding) are well acted, but only Anne is given decent screentime. The other characters left zero impression on me. Louisa Musgrove is almost a nonentity. On the plus side, the sets, costumes, and filmography are lovely.

Given the above, I don’t know how to rate this film. I’m pretty sure that after the furor dies down, clips of it will be used in college literature classes to invoke critical readings of the novel. I’m not sure that’s what any filmmaker really desires, though.