Jews, Prots, and "Or Little Ducks Each Day" (1973/1975)

First, let it be understood that I am a very prejudiced man. “Prejudiced” means simply working from prejudgments, from previously acquired information. A juryman in a trial case should be free from prejudice as to that case, but I cannot think of another circumstance where prejudice is a disadvantage, though unfortunately the word has a bad name. It is a distinct disadvantage to have to wake up in a new world every day and to learn it all over again. — Luna #67, interview with Paul Walker

I wrote a story once, “Or Little Ducks Each Day,” about little ducks waking up every morning in a new world as it were, and so being the only unprejudiced creatures there are. — Letter of March 9, 1993

I'm even of the belief that a fair amount of racial prejudice is healthy — Letter of March 9, 1993

"Do you ever go down to Rhineland?"

“Or Little Ducks Each Day” is complex. It invites a naïve reading that takes it as a straightforward condemnation of prejudice. That is certainly how I have seen it treated online. Here is a story that one can easily like. But given what Lafferty argued elsewhere about the nature of healthy prejudice, one would be right to suspect that the picture is complicated.

I’ve recently written about this aspect of Lafferty’s work, noting that the obliqueness of his fiction invites comforting interpretive leaps that glide past relevant contexts. In an earlier post, for instance, I pointed out that Lafferty believed the United States government had, on the whole, treated Native Americans well—a position that, I suspect, would surprise many of his readers, given his profound empathy with Native Americans. This is one area where I believe Petersen’s interpretations need to be carefully qualified. It still isn’t very clear to me how one does the weighing.

In “Or, Little Ducks Each Day,” we get an overreaching WASP and a Jew who both act as agents of control and coordination, always a Lafferty bete noire. The WASP eventually wanders into a Catholic heterotopia and dies. What becomes particularly fraught is the way Lafferty plays with the prejudices within that heterotopia while treating the WASP far more harshly than the Catholics. Maybe this was connected to the distance Lafferty always felt between himself and WASPs. Of his war experience, he once wrote, “It came to me one night that I was much nearer in mind and understanding and everything to the Tagalog-speaking Catholics around me (by that time I could talk Tagalog pretty well) than to the mostly WASP Protestants that I lived with. These WASPs have always been sort of alien to me in a way that Mexicans are not, that Italians are not.”

Jim Snapjudge is a Prejudicial Analyst, a man whose profession and entire worldview are built on absolute certainty. He is "a mind that preyed: not one to be preyed upon," and he moves through the world making snap judgments, which he believes are intelligent predictions about the fates of others based on their physical traits and ancestry. He feels no guilt for the tragedies that follow his forecasts. We are told about the suicide of Cletus Dogwood. Snapjudge thinks he has no blood on his hands. He "merely judged, correctly, that it would happen." For Snapjudge, prejudgment is not a flaw but a science: Prejudice as a Work of Art.

His confidence receives a blow when he meets two people on the street. First, a young man named Godfrey Halskragen, then a lively young woman, Teresa Tuesdaychild, both of whom he assigns grim fates. To his surprise, they seem to challenge his pronouncements telepathically. "Could I not be different from my template?" Godfrey thinks. "May I not escape?" This triggers Snapjudge's memory of an amoebic wink he once saw under a microscope—a tiny, primordial act of rebellion that now resurfaces.

Snapjudge becomes so uneasy that he is driven to the office of his competitor, the Jewish Jonah Hirnbrecher, for a consultation. Jonah confirms that Snapjudge's prophetic faculty is indeed failing. And he delivers a prediction of his own: Snapjudge will die this night. When asked how, Jonah says, "Wet." Then Jonah performs a small ritual, explaining, "I am removing your Prophet's Mantle." He unfastens an invisible garment from Snapjudge's shoulders. Now stripped of his spiritual identity, Snapjudge heads to the one place his day's predictions must still come to pass.

He arrives at the Ruination Bar and Grill in a district called Rhineland, expecting to witness a murder and a young woman's ruin. There, he finds Godfrey and Teresa together just as a man known as the Buckaroo storms in. The man draws a gun and shoots Godfrey, but the violent scene switches to farce. While real murder has happened amongst the shadows on the floor, the gun is a water pistol. Godfrey is covered not in blood but in barbecue sauce. When the pistol then explodes in the Buckaroo's hand, it showers Teresa in a "mélange of writhing red sauce," and the entire bar erupts in "hilarity and happy pandemonium" at the elaborate prank.

Snapjudge is mortified. He frantically tries to force the participants to enact the murder with a real gun. The terrible and ridiculous mistake must be righted. The patrons turn on him. The proprietor throws him out of the bar in a beautiful arching trajectory. Snapjudge stumbles through a broken plank on the boardwalk, falling into a small backwater. He drowns, fulfilling Jonah’s prophecy. The next morning, his body is found by the residents of the pond. They're unprejudiced little ducks.

A summary can’t capture how brutal the violence in the story is when it appears, or how shocking it becomes when Lafferty instantly undoes it. He writes,

The music in the other room had changed its motif. Now it was menace music and it built to a climaxing mood. Then the Buckaroo exploded in voice and action. "Caught the two of you here!" he howled, and a not-quite-right gun was in his left hand. "Die, pig, die." "Shriek!" cried Teresa. "Bang!" cried the explosion. And the gunshot hit Godfrey Halskragen in the face and head. Gore! Bright red gore, dark red gore, serum-colored gore, brain gore all over Godfrey! A moan, probably a death moan, from the bespattered man with the gushing head! Smokey smell of blood and of burnt flesh! What? Here was Fate vindicated indeed. But could so much blood come from one pistol shot? "It’s wrong, something has gone wrong!" Jim Snapjudge was complaining in a voice that had gone reedy. "The blood-smell is wrong, and it’s too clotted. There cannot be that much splattered out of one little bullet hole. And the gun should have cried 'Bang!' The man shouldn’t have cried 'Bang!' Fate will not be mocked.’”

And after Snapjudge names Fate to be his God that will not be mocked (Galatians 6:7), Lafferty deflates of the gore:

“Damn you, Buck!” Godfrey Halskragen howled at the big Buckaroo. “This is my best and only suit. Yeah, and it’s my best and only face.” “Bang! Bang!” Buck cried out the explosion noises again, but the big water pistol with its load of Old Hickory Barbecue Sauce and Vinegar and Ketchup had jammed. Buck applied great power and fervor to it. Then it exploded into the primariest color of them all and completely covered the face and head and hair of Teresa Tuesdaychild with a mélange of writhing red sauce. “Ruined, ruined, now I can never marry!” she whooped. Then there was hilarity and happy pandemonium throughout the Ruination Bar and Grill and Candy-House!”

In thinking about the carnivalesque in Lafferty, I’ve argued that Bakhtin’s ideas are of limited use, and this episode shows why I prefer festive comedy over the carnivalesque. What happens here is that Snapjudge is exposed as a false prophet of Fate; he becomes the real butt of the joke—another fool who gets exactly what he deserves at Lafferty’s hand. Do the staged murder and barbecue gore point toward anything utopian? I don’t think so. They just brilliantly humiliate and expel Snapjudge in order to disclose a deeper moral order beneath his pseudo-science. His death, with his purple-faced corpse bobbing in the water among the little ducks, is a punitive, cyclical restoration of right order, not an opening into emancipatory carnival. What makes this so complicated in “Or, Little Ducks Each Day” is that Lafferty is hard on everyone, but his sympathies are unmistakably asymmetrical.

To get at this, I’m going to focus on two related elements: first, how ethno-essentialism operates in the story, and second, how Lafferty quietly arranges matters so that the “winners” turn out to be Catholics. The clearest way I can see to do this is through the question of the Rhineland and the initial ambiguity surrounding Godfrey’s religious identity. At the start, Godfrey (God’s peace) could plausibly be either Lutheran or Catholic. But once Snapjudge subjects him to prejudicial analysis, he concludes Godfrey must be Catholic. Snapjudge thinks: “Mostly of German-Irish blood. A lapsed Lutheran or Catholic. No, no, his German ears were halsstarrig (stubborn), but not that stubborn. A man with such graceful tragi to his ears could hardly be a Lutheran.”

This judgment reveals Snapjudge’s misreading of the Rhineland weltanschauung, which he believes he understands. He thinks he can classify it—see through it and around it—but he cannot. And at this point it’s worth seeing that Teresa has one of the most conspicuously Catholic names in all of Lafferty. The odds of finding a non-Catholic Teresa in his fiction are about the same as finding a Darwinian treated with kid gloves. Her last name, Tuesdaychild, moreover, is a joke on being “full of grace.” We are told that she is the product of parthenogenesis, a Marian joke about the loose morals of her mother. The two characters who undo Snapjudge will be Catholics.

The Rhineland is important in the history of Catholicism. To give a single example, one of the best-known accounts of Vatican II is Ralph Wiltgen’s The Rhine Flows into the Tiber (1967). It argues that a well-organized bloc of Northern European bishops and theologians—the so-called “Rhine alliance”—shaped the Council’s debates and final documents. But their influence was hardly unprecedented; Catholicism had dominated the Rhineland for centuries.

Even that understates it. This dominance reaches back to Roman-era Christian communities that developed into major medieval centers such as Cologne, Trier, and Mainz, each an influential archbishopric in its own right. Monasteries, cathedral chapters, and pilgrimage sites flourished across the region, embedding Catholic identity deeply into its politics and culture. St. Hildegard of Bingen was from the Rhine. St. Boniface proselytized it. Then there is Charlemagne.

When the Protestant Reformation reached the Rhineland in the sixteenth century, Lutheran and Reformed movements gained footholds mainly on the region’s periphery. The influence was limited. The core Rhineland territories mostly rejected Protestantism, supported by strong ecclesiastical leadership and an effective Counter-Reformation. Catholic institutions stayed central to public life, and Protestantism, while present and historically significant, never eclipsed Catholic predominance.

Then there are the Jews of the Rhineland. Cities like Mainz, Worms, and Speyer (collectively known as the ShUM cities) were major centers of Jewish scholarship, law, and religious life during the early Middle Ages. These communities helped set the foundations of Ashkenazi Jewish tradition. Out of them came famous rabbis, academies, and legal rulings that influenced Jewish practice across Europe. Needless to say, Jews in the Rhineland also played key roles in regional trade and finance.

All this is to say that Lafferty’s choice of the Rhineland is not incidental; it is central to whatever argument the story is making. The way I read it, he places Snapjudge, who stands for a sterile "unhealthy" prejudice, into a landscape that is perfectly fine with the deep-rooted, experiential “prejudgment” Lafferty championed both publicly and privately. This community of pre-judgers is the opposite of the unprejudiced little ducks waking up in a new world every day.

It’s worth remembering that over the course of the story, Snapjudge gets a hell of a lot right. He correctly deduces Godfrey’s Catholicism from the shape of his ears, but he is utterly oblivious to the cultural reality of what this Catholic identity means. For him, "Catholic" is a data point in a deterministic formula. He doesn’t know that in Lafferty's fictional Rhineland, Godfrey’s ethno-essentialized identity is a ticket into a festive world that is fundamentally hostile to his grim, fatalistic prejudice. He is, in short, something like what Lafferty sees in the Protestants. Hence the Jew and the WASP:

“Good afternoon, Jim,” Jonah said, and subvocally he added “Damned Wasp!” “Good afternoon, Jonah,” Snapjudge gave his greeting, and voicelessly he added “Damned Jew-bug!” This subliminal name-calling was only a little ritual knife-whetting that they used. It certainly didn't imply unfriendliness.

Both the Jew and the WASP are driven by business in a way that the Catholic heterotopia isn’t. Lafferty shows the close connection of the two by having Jonah take away Snapjudge’s mantle of prophecy. This links the two, as one becomes Elijah to the other’s Elisha. It’s another example of Lafferty using counterfiguration to show that these two prejudicial prophets are in the same pod. They might look like rivals, but they are on the same spiritual team. The mantle episode alludes the great passage of the mantle in 2 Kings. In fact, it reverses its logic:

"He took up also the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and went back, and stood by the bank of Jordan;" 2 Kings 2:13

"And he took the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and smote the waters, and said, Where is the Lord God of Elijah? and when he also had smitten the waters, they parted hither and thither: and Elisha went over." 2 Kings 2:13

The common denominator business connection becomes overt when the man in the Rhineland district pronounces judgment on Snapjudge, seizing on the trait that links him to the typlogical Jew:

“Lady, I hate him too,” said a man at the next table. “He looks right through you. He's got some kind of business where he gives ratings on people to companies that hire them.”

Linking these two types, Jew and Protestant, might seem odd, but it is an old idea—a perceived structural affinity between Calvinists and Jews. Not all WASPs are Calvinists obviously, but Lafferty seems to be going after what Weber called an ideal type, with double predestination in the background of the social imaginary. Lafferty draws on this long-standing Jew-Prot ethnos parallelism to set up a foil to the Catholics of the Rhineland district. The Jew-Prot idea used to be commoner currency, with both Calvinism and Judaism often being characterized as traditions shaped by strict law, moral discipline, textual intensity, and a strong sense of communal election. The closest we have nowadays might be issue of Christian Zionism and evangelicals. Typlogical ethno-essentialism makes the Jew-Protect resemble each other more than either resembles Lafferty’s typologized Catholics, whether ethno-relatived to the Irish, Mexican, French, Italian, Spanish, etc.

One of the classic anti-semitic statements of this Jew-Prot typology can be found in Werner Sombart, who wrote The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911). He was a critic of the Jewish sociologist Max Weber. Weber keeps his Protestant Work Ethic very far from Jews. Sombart was not having it. He argued that Calvinists and Jews form a single “economic-religious type,” characterized by rationalized ethics, inward cohesion, and a deep confidence in divine favor. As he put it,

Altogether, then, there appears to be sufficient evidence for the deduction of Puritan doctrines from Jewish sources. The specialists must decide. Here I have been able to do no more than give a hint or two. And in conclusion I would draw attention to a little humorous publication, which appeared in the year 1608 and the contents of which would seem to demonstrate the close connexion between Judaism and Calvinism (which is only Puritanism). It is called Der Calvinische Judenspiegel (the Calvinistic Jewish Mirror), and on page 33 a comparison is drawn between the two religions in the following droll fashion. [The old German is delightful.] "If I am to say on my honour why I am become a Calvinist, I shall have to confess that the one and only reason which persuaded me was that among all the religions I could find none which agreed so much with Judaism, and its view of life and faith."

Lafferty taps into this schema, whether deliberately or unconsciously. I would argue it is deliberate, given how it surfaces in “Or Little Ducks Each Day”—and because Lafferty would have known these ideal types like the back of his hand from Hilaire Belloc and others. To give just one example, in Belloc’s 1934 biography of Oliver Cromwell, Belloc writes,

To the Puritan, Abraham setting out to murder poor Isaac was not a prefiguring symbol of the sacrifice on Calvary, but a lesson in family life. To the Puritan the curse of Meroz worked as efficiently as of old. To the Puritan the Jewish Sabbath—oddly advanced by twenty-four hours—was absolute. The same rule applies to the massacre of all those unfortunate small tribes with the odd Asiatic names; they became household words to those who were Puritan among the English; they were identified with Papists. They were, it will be remembered, exterminated by the order of Jehovah at the hands of His Chosen. Cromwell, p. 43.

The fatalistic prejudice that defines the art of Prejudicial Analysis as a satirical target is something Lafferty associates with a detached, business-like WASPish or Judaicized worldview, not with the Catholic and sacramental one. It is outside the Rhineland. And this association becomes weaponized at the end of the story, when Snapjudge is himself taken to be an actual Jew and is pilloried by the Rhineland taverners:

“Godfrey, that man over there, I don't like him at all.” (She meant Jim Snapjudge.) “He eyeballed me this afternoon. I felt that he was trying to read me. I felt that he was reading me all wrong. That long nose of his and those bugged-out eyes, they're intolerable. He should do something about them.” “What could he do? Does not Scripture tell us that, by taking thought we cannot add one cubit to our stature?” “I'm not talking about adding a cubit to his stature. I'm talking about him shortening that damned nose and unbugging his eyes. Don't tell me that he can't do it! He can. He's running a chilly fever now and I hope he dies from it. But whatever kind of fever he runs, he's too cool to go in for hating. I'm not. I hate a guy who won't hate. I hate him. I think he's a Jew or an Armenian or a Limey or one of those.”

This is a deeply complicated moment to interpret, but here’s my take. Lafferty is certainly making fun of and having fun with the Rhineland prejudices, yet in doing so, he also dramatizing the fundamental difference between their form of “prejudgment” and Snapjudge’s. The communal, life-affirming prejudice of the Rhineland is certainly nasty, but it targets something even nastier: the dogmatically predictive prejudice of Jonah and Snapjudge. When Snapjudge's predictions are not simply contradicted but openly mocked by the barbecue-sauce prank, he snaps.

This is the cognitive dissonance Lafferty attacks: a flawed, unhealthy prejudice that, when challenged, devolves into murderous malice versus the Catholic throw-the-bum-out. Instead of reassessing his assumptions, Snapjudge moves into the final stage of his own prejudicial analysis: Fate Enforcement. He wants to inhale the blood smell, see the real gun, watch the gore. In that moment, the tyrannical impulse at the heart of his instrumentalizing worldview is laid bare.

So how should we understand what the Catholic Rhineland community does when it passes its own form of prejudgment on Snapjudge? When it turns Snapjudge into surrogate Jew?

“ That long nose of his and those bugged-out eyes, they're intolerable. He should do something about them.”

As unpleasant as this mock-Judaicizing may be for a reader who wants the story to condemn prejudice, I think Lafferty sees the Rhineland expulsion of Snapjudge as a defense of their sacramental, free-will world against his world of control. They are disordered; he is extremely disordered. Snapjudge is the consequence of a spiritually dead worldview colliding with a living one. He gets to be as dead as that worldview.

The story’s really damning verdict comes in the form of the unprejudiced little ducks. These aren’t exemplars to be imitated. As creatures who, in Lafferty’s phrase, “wake up in a new world every day,” they, too, are an equivocal image. They have their innocence, but it is the innocence born of ignorance. It is dumb innocence, a trait Lafferty saw as the disadvantage of not having healthy prejudice. No one here has healthy prejudice, but it is the symptomatic absence. The ducks do not recognize the human categories that structured Snapjudge’s life and thinking. They're happy to be next to his water-logged corpse.

This is a complicated Lafferty story because it juxtaposes two kinds of non-neutral judgment. On one hand, it affirms the complex, living prejudice that Lafferty values, the festive, communal, destabilizing world others have called his carnival. On the other, it laughs at the simple-minded state of absolutized non-prejudice that Lafferty either pities or finds comically insufficient. The story warns against prejudice's risks and says, you'd be better a little bit prejudiced if you don't want to be a little duck. It is what logicians like to call the exclusive “OR”: prejudice or little ducks each day.

They did not find his nose too long or his eyes too bugged. They did not find his visage too bloated or purpled. And they did not discover him to be either cold or unlikable. They were unprejudiced little ducks.

Or Little Ducks Each Day Notes.pdf

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