Covid PTSD and the Green Knight

By Robin Bates | Published: October 14, 2024
Illus. from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

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Monday

Thom Hartmann, whose Substack blog I read regularly, contends that MAGA has become a death cult and he has an explanation why: it’s in part due to Covid-caused PTSD. The idea brought to mind Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I believe was written in response to an even worse pandemic, one that spawned its own share of death cults. Although the author would have had either first or second-hand experience with the 1348-50 Black Plague, which killed off a third of Europe’s population (!!), yet his poem advocates a much healthier response.

Hartmann points to PTSD symptoms that may be showing up in members of Trump’s cult:

-— Hypervigilance and threat sensitivity, causing people to experience heightened alertness to potential and often imagined (like Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants) threats.
— Difficulty with trust, which may lead to skepticism of official sources and greater reliance on alternative information channels; vulnerability, in other words, to Trump’s lies and his claims of “fake news” when he’s fact-checked.
— Emotional dysregulation, making individuals like Tina Peters, the hundreds of January 6th rioters now in jail, and other Trump followers more vulnerable to emotionally-charged misinformation and MAGA cult membership.
—Cognitive changes impacting critical thinking skills needed to evaluate information that might contradict the lies Trump and his co-conspirators promulgate.
— Social isolation which may limit exposure to different perspectives and fact-checking from others who try to tell MAGA members how deluded and exploited they really are.
— Seeking explanations causing people to have a heightened need to understand and make sense of their experiences, making them more open to MAGA’s anti-science and politically charged explanatory narratives, even when they’re lies.
—Avoidance behaviors leading people to  avoid exposure to diverse information sources, keeping them trapped in Trump cult bubbles like rightwing hate radio and Fox “News.”

Hartmann cites an article in the National Library of Medicine where researcher Stephen Schwartz writes about the rise of an American death cult:

“[T]his [million-plus Covid] death rate is directly correlated to the politicization and weaponization of anti-science throughout the MAGA world created by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. … Anti-vaxxers, and anti-maskers, usually the same people, have made fidelity to a fact-free but emotionally satisfying reality more important than life itself, and created the first American death cult. …

Writing in February of 2022, Schwartz mentions that, while there was the equivalent of anti-vaxxers during both the Black Plague and the 1918 Spanish Flu, they did not—as Covid did— evolve into a mainstream political movement. After all, those early pandemics didn’t witness people willingly subjecting themselves to a vastly higher risk of contracting and dying of the disease to prove that it wasn’t real. And yet, Schwartz observes, MAGA Americans have been doing this, even in the face of “a million dead, and 2000 people, or more, dying each day.”

In a related incident, I think of the man who reported how his MAGA-obsessed father-in-law refused all help from FEMA after Hurricane Helene wiped away his house, believing Trump when he said the federal agency was hopelessly corrupt.

I’ve long thought that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a 14th century romance that ranks among my top five favorite works of literature, is a poem that deals with PTSD. In it a Camelot knight must grapple with how to respond to what is essentially an immutable death sentence. Confronted by a nature deity that knows him better than he knows himself, he discovers that his coping mechanisms are inadequate. While he initially thinks he can just shrug death off—after all, he is a Christian knight who believes that his faith and his knightly duty should shield him from caring about his life—he discovers by the end of the poem that he cares deeply after all.

In my book I write about how a former student—an Afghan vet who had defused roadside bombs— discovered that the poem spoke directly to his war experience. Matt said that, while he and his fellow marines had thought they didn’t fear death, he realized from reading the poem that they had been in denial. Just as Gawain dons a magical sash that is supposed to save his life, so Matt had religiously donned his Kevlar vest each day before going out into the field. He had thought he was more stoic than he actually was.

The Green Knight, rather than berate Gawain for what Gawain considers an act of cowardice, instead celebrates the fact that he is finally taking life seriously. It’s as though he is celebrating Gawain’s PTSD cure. While Matt never said that he had PTSD so I can’t claim that he did, he spent the entire night reading this 14th century poem (it wasn’t even for an assignment) and came to class awed by what he had read. “That poem is so true,” he told me.

I love Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because it is such a confident assertion of life. It gives us gorgeous nature imagery, even as it simultaneously gives us excruciating depictions of death. (The hunters in the poem don’t just kill animals: we watch them pull their guts out.) When we use ideology as a means of shielding ourselves from death, which is what Gawain does and which many Trump followers have done as well, the Green Knight—in a quirky way that at times is genuinely comic—pushes us back into right relation. Even at the grimmest of times, he reminds us to embrace the vibrancy that is to be found in creation. No holding back.

That a poet with an intimate acknowledge of one the greatest disasters ever to befall humankind can advocate this, surely it is worth our while to listen to him.   

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Don’t Worry, the Heart Knows the Way

By Robin Bates | Published: October 12, 2024
Joy Harjo

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Sunday

As this weekend we celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day (formerly known as Columbus Day), here’s a Joy Harjo poem “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet.” It appeared in her collection Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2105).

 Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that
bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel
the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and
back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were
a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the
guardians who have known you before time,
who will be there after time.
They sit before the fire that has been there without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people
who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought
down upon them.

Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises,
interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and
those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few
years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and
leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the
thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning
by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call yourself back. You will find yourself caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It will return
in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be
happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and
given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who
loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no
place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.

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The U.S. Ignored Kipling’s Cautionary Tale

By Robin Bates | Published: October 11, 2024

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Friday

It doesn’t appear that Afghanistan, the “graveyard of empires,” will play a role in this election, perhaps because neither Republicans nor Democrats have handled it well. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but think of our tragic experience there as I taught Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King.”

I assigned the work in the post-colonial literature class that I’m currently teaching at the University of Ljubljana, and we discussed it after first looking at Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” which features some of the same themes. The story carries a lesson that George W. Bush should have heeded when he first launched the American invasion. Instead of a quick in and out, as some recommended, he tried his hand at nation-building, with similar consequences.

First a note on Kipling’s poem, which frames colonialism as a selfless act on the part of Britain. In understated self-pity, the poet complains about being unappreciated by the “half-devil and half-child” natives. (In the previous class I had cited Edward Said’s complaint that Western Orientalism characterizes the East as irrational, depraved, and childlike and itself as rational, virtuous, and mature.) At one point “White Man’s Burden” compares the natives to Israelites complaining about Moses’s leadership in the desert, which positions the Brits as a legendary prophet that knows what’s best. It’s noteworthy that the poem never once mentions how much wealth the colonies generated for England. (Answer: A lot)

“The Man Who Would Be King” features two conmen who resemble—and were probably inspired by—Mark Twain’s King and Duke. (Kipling actually met with Twain when he was writing “a sequel to Tom Sawyer”). In this case, the rogues actually do go on to become kings, using cunning, superior firepower, and a fair amount of luck to sell themselves as gods, which in turn enables them to carve out a little kingdom of their own.

And if they had kept up this god masquerade, the story informs us, they would have stayed in power—just as the U.S. (or so some argue) could have swooped in, sent a message about 9-11, and left. Instead, Dravot decides he wants to create an enduring nation, complete with dynasty. In other words, he has evolved from rogue to leader. As such, he is a summation of Britain’s imperial ambitions. Here he is making his case before his skeptical partner:

“‘I won’t make a Nation,’ says he. ‘I’ll make an Empire! These men aren’t niggers; they’re English! Look at their eyes — look at their mouths. Look at the way they stand up. They sit on chairs in their own houses. They’re the Lost Tribes, or something like it, and they’ve grown to be English. I’ll take a census in the spring if the priests don’t get frightened. There must be a fair two million of ’em in these hills. The villages are full o’ little children. Two million people — two hundred and fifty thousand fighting men — and all English! They only want the rifles and a little drilling. Two hundred and fifty thousand men, ready to cut in on Russia’s right flank when she tries for India! Peachey, man,’ he says, chewing his beard in great hunks, ‘we shall be Emperors — Emperors of the Earth!

The kicker to all this is that, to form a dynasty, he needs a wife. But having a wife will mean that he will no longer be seen as a god, which is what keeps him in power. Here he is overriding his partner’s objections about finding a woman:

“‘Who’s talking o’ women?’ says Dravot. ‘I said wife — a Queen to breed a King’s son for the King. A Queen out of the strongest tribe, that’ll make them your blood-brothers, and that’ll lie by your side and tell you all the people thinks about you and their own affairs. That’s what I want.’

His planned marriage, however, blows his masquerade, and there is an uprising that ends in his death and in his partner’s crucifixion. Carnehan only barely manages to get back to the narrator to tell his story before dying of his wounds.

In America’s case, George Bush was convinced that he could sell the Afghans on democratic governance and, while some Afghans benefitted, in the end the U.S. was tone deaf to the situation on the ground. Then, in withdrawing, 183 died from a suicide blast (13 American marines, 170 Afghan civilians). For his part, Dravot is marched out on one of his rope bridges and the rope is cut:

Out he goes, looking neither right nor left, and when he was plumb in the middle of those dizzy dancing ropes, ‘Cut, you beggars,’ he shouts; and they cut, and old Dan fell, turning round and round and round, twenty thousand miles, for he took half an hour to fall till he struck the water, and I could see his body caught on a rock with the gold crown close beside.

I don’t know if the Taliban would have gained total control over the country if first the Soviet Union and then the United States hadn’t interfered in their internal affairs. As it is, many people are dead who could have been alive, and Afghanis, men as well as women, are feeling all the tyranny of fundamentalist rule. Kipling may have been an imperialist, but he also had the insight to know how super power arrogance can lead to disaster.

This is why we need our leaders reading literature.

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Orientalizing the Other

By Robin Bates | Published: October 10, 2024

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Thursday

My postcolonial Anglophone literature courage at the University of Ljubljana got off to a good start yesterday as I taught an excerpt from Edward Said’s Orientalism and then applied it to excerpts from H. Rider Haggard’s She and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Tomorrow I’ll report on our discussion of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” as we wrap up the section of the course on the colonialists’ perspective.

To kick off the discussion, I showed the class “The Snake Charmer,” the 1879 painting by France’s Jean-Léon Gérôme that graces the cover of Said’s book and that I used in yesterday’s post. Because I was fortunate to have a Turkish student in the class, I asked her if the painting was at all an accurate depiction of life in 19th century Turkey. Her vigorous dissent drove Said’s point home: the fantasies we impose on other cultures tell us far more about ourselves than they do about those other cultures.

While cultures have been imposing such fantasies on the Other since the dawn of time, Said notes that they become particularly dangerous when there is a power imbalance. Nineteenth and twentieth century politicians could confidently make generalizations about the people whose lives they impacted because “novelists, poets, translators, and gifted travelers” had been describing “the Orient” for years. In other words, they didn’t invent Orientalism to justify their policies but drew on common assumptions about Middle Eastern people and cultures.

So what were some of these assumptions? Said writes that, in British minds, “the Oriental” was irrational, depraved, childlike, and “different” while “the European” was rational, virtuous, mature, and “normal.”

Our discussion of Said set up nicely our incursion into She, Haggard’s 1886 adventure novel where two British explorers, following an ancient map, make their way into deepest, darkest Africa and discover a beautiful but evil queen who has found the secret to eternal life and youth. The novel traffics in various racist tropes: while Ayesha rules over dark-skinned cannibals, she herself is white since who but white people could have built the engineering marvels in which she resides?

The excerpt we read allowed us to see Orientalizing, exoticizing and brutalizing at work. The dark savages make it clear that the country needs British civilization whereas the beautiful queen adds an emotional dimension to conquest: Brits prove their manhood by conquering the feminized landscape. One of the students noted British colonists venturing to the Americas in the 1600s were also fed this drama, seeing the New World almost as a virgin (Virginia) to be mastered. “Oh my America, my new found land,” rhapsodizes John Donne as he watches his lover strip down in his poem “To His Mistress  Going to Bed.”

If our Orientalizing tells us more about ourselves than the colonized, what do we learn about 19th century Brits. Well, being sexually repressed, their sexual imaginations ran rampant when they learned about Middle Eastern polygamy and harems, even though—in real life—those were as tightly regulated as social regulations always are. Here’s Haggard’s own rampant imagining in a scene where She does a virtual striptease for the narrator:

Then all of a sudden the long, corpse-like wrappings fell from her to the ground, and my eyes travelled up her form, now only robed in a garb of clinging white that did but serve to show its perfect and imperial shape, instinct with a life that was more than life, and with a certain serpent-like grace that was more than human. On her little feet were sandals, fastened with studs of gold. Then came ankles more perfect than ever sculptor dreamed of. About the waist her white kirtle was fastened by a double-headed snake of solid gold, above which her gracious form swelled up in lines as pure as they were lovely, till the kirtle ended on the snowy argent of her breast, whereon her arms were folded. I gazed above them at her face, and—I do not exaggerate—shrank back blinded and amazed. I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil—at least, at the time, it struck me as evil. How am I to describe it? I cannot—simply I cannot!

One of the students pointed out that Haggard is engaged in the kind of cataloguing of body parts that earlier poets practiced, most notably Andrew Marvell in “To His Coy Mistress.”

Although Haggard is fairly lightweight while Joseph Conrad is major talent, there are some surprising similarities. Conrad too talks about barbarous savages and beautiful women at the heart of “the dark continent.” First, barbarism. Conrad’s narrator imagines Romans, newly arrived after Julius Caesar’s conquest, gazing about in horrified fascination:

Imagine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the color of lead, a sky the color of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,—precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death—death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here….He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

And then there’s an alluring female, although Conrad’s “wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman” has the same skin color as her subjects. So I guess that’s some progress:

She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.

Notice how Marlow sees her as a personification of “the immense wilderness” itself. She represents “mysterious and fecund life” whereas the “dark continent” possesses a “tenebrous and passionate soul.” For this woman, ivory hunter Kurtz has abandoned his angelic and ethereal fiancé, along with his mission to civilize and convert the heathen.

Back again to how Orientalizing, exoticizing, and barbarizing the Other is a self-reveal. The Victorians had tied their manhood to conquest, which is easy to do if your empire is expanding. The explorers in She are manly men—lion-like Leo Vince is compared to a god—and while Ayesha may dominate others, she falls all over herself to please him. At the same time, back at the home front, the suffragette movement was on the rise and many women were no longer willing to play “the angel in the home” (Kurtz’s fiancé excepted, which is why Marlow admires her so much). Furthermore, doubts were beginning to set in about empire-building itself, especially with the excesses of King Leopold in the Belgian Congo and with the expansionist Boer War in South Africa.

To be sure, Haggard’s novel has no problem with colonialism and doesn’t even mention its monetary benefits. But Conrad saw up close the greed and barbarism of the colonists, which seriously undermined the façade of bringing civilization and Christianity to Africa—just as, in Francis Ford Coppola’s remake of the novel, the on-the-ground reality of the Vietnam War brought into question America’s expressed intention to spread democracy. So where Haggard can treat British colonialism as a boyish lark, Conrad is plunged into existential despair.

There’s a problem, of course, with using another culture as mere backdrop for your anguished self-doubt. In a famous essay that we’ll be reading next week, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe takes Conrad to task for treating Africans as props in an internal drama. But Conrad is at least grappling with substantive issues. As I write in my book, “if you want to understand the crisis of capitalism, Heart of Darkness is a good book to study. Just don’t read it to understand Africa.”

The bottom line here is that literature of various sorts can be used both to support and to question colonialist projects—and also, as we will see next week with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, to push back against them. It’s why courses like this, putting students in touch with literature from different cultures around the globe, are so important.

On a personal note: It so turns out that I am one degree of separation from Cecil Rhodes, the great imperialist who dreamed of a continent-long British railway stretching “from Capetown to Cairo” and for whom Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia) was named. So my own family history is tied up with the colonialist enterprise.

Here’s the story: My great grandfather, Edwin Fulcher, was an accountant for a South African diamond mine when Rhodes was there. Family lore has it that at one time they were the only two Englishmen in the small town where they resided.

This would have been in the 1890s when Rhodes was using his political power to expropriate land from Black Africans. He was also using his monopoly power to take over British-owned mines so I’m thinking it might have been more of a chance encounter, with my great grandfather seeing what Rhodes was up to. He was not a fan. My grandmother, who in some ways was a sweet and very Victorian woman–somewhat like Kurtz’s fiancé, come to think of it–would have been a little girl. 

Eventually Fulcher’s accounting partner would run off with their funds, forcing the family to relocate. They ended up in Evanston, Illinois, where my grandmother met and married Alfred Bates.

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My Course in Postcolonial Literature

By Robin Bates | Published: October 8, 2024
Jean Leon Gerome, The Snake Charmer

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Wednesday

I’m currently teaching at the University of Ljubljana for six weeks and so from time to time will share what is going on in my classes. This also allows me to use the blog for class planning purposes.

Tomorrow I begin teaching a graduate class on Postcolonial Anglophone literature, which is to say, English-language literature produced by the former British colonies. Exempted here is Australian, Irish, Canadian, and American lit (yes, American lit qualifies, even though we broke with Britain almost 250 years ago) because there are special courses devoted to those. Therefore I have been instructed to choose works from south Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.

I’ve also added one Native American work, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, because it is a magnificent example of hybridization—which can happen when two literary traditions clash. More on that in a moment.

Literary issues that arise from studying postcolonial literature include attempts by the colonial power to use literature to frames the colonized in a way that transforms them into a diminished Other—and how the colonized use literature to push back. In the process, the colonized forge new postcolonial identities which, while they may invoke their precolonial past, are something new and different. Or as Salman Rushdie memorably put it, “The empire writes back with a vengeance.”

To get at the process, I will be drawing on some postcolonialist theories, most notably Franz Fanon’s “literature of combat” (I have a chapter on this in my book) and Edward Said’s “orientalism”(which I should have included in my book but embarrassingly forgot). So here’s my syllabus:

Week 1 – The Colonialist Perspective

Literary Texts: Rider Haggard, She (1887); Rudyard Kipling, “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888); Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness (1901)

Theory: Excerpts from Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Said, Orientalism (1978)

She is about a tyrannical queen who lives in the heart of Africa, who appears to be immortal, and who bewitches men with her beauty. She is an instance of how, as Said puts it, the colonial powers exoticized (or in the case of the Middle East, orientalized) those they conquered. The fantasies they had about, say, Turkish harems, had little to do with actual harems but revealed a lot about the Europeans.

The opposite of exoticizing is barbarizing, attraction vs. revulsion. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness engages in both: the Africans are depicted as barbaric savages but there is also a magnificent woman whom ivory-hunter Kurtz finds more attractive than his angelic fiancé back in Europe. But where Haggard sees the journey into the heart of darkness as a thrilling adventure, Conrad sees it exposing Europe’s own emptiness and corruption.

Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, meanwhile, starts off as a romp and ends as an unnerving forecast of what America experienced in its Afghanistan incursion. Not for nothing has Afghanistan been called “the graveyard of empires.”

Week II – Nigeria: The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance

Literary texts: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958); Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Purple Hibiscus (2003)
Theory: Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”  

The Nigerian author’s novel Things Fall Apart, one of the continent’s masterpieces, is a living refutation of Conrad’s vision of Africans as dark savages. Achebe then spells it out for us in his essay on Conrad. Adichie, meanwhile, represents the next generation of Nigerians, who are dealing with postcolonial Nigeria.

Week III – The Caribbean: Caught between Two Worlds

Literary texts: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Dominica, 1966); Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John (Antigua, 1985)

A response to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Sargasso Sea focuses the figure of Rochester’s Creole wife Bertha Mason, who Rhys sees as having gotten a bad deal. Annie John is about a girl growing up in postcolonial Antigua.

Week IV – Laguna Pueblo: Intermixing and Hybridization

Literary text: Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

This spectacular novel grapples with the intermixing of white and Indian culture, along with how each can potentially benefit from the other. Among the beneficiaries is the hybrid novel that Silko writes, which combines traditional Indian storytelling with the novel form.

Week 5 – The Heavy Hand of India’s Past (Colonial and Otherwise)

Literary texts: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

From different parts of India and different religious perspectives, Rushdie and Roy explore the heritage left behind by the British.

Week 6 – The Center Itself Changes

Literary texts: Hanif Kureishi (Anglo-Pakistan), The Buddha of Suburbia; Zadie Smith, Swing Time (Anglo-Jamaican)

The United Kingdom itself is changing as immigrants move to the island and intermarry. Kureishi has a Pakistani father and English mother, Smith an Afro-Jamaican mother and English father. Mixed race identities becomes a powerful lens through which to explore an increasingly global world.

I’ll report regularly on the course’s progress.

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Sane-Washing Vance and Mac the Knife

By Robin Bates | Published: October 8, 2024
William Hogarth, scene from Beggar’s Opera

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Tuesday

By now we’re all becoming aware of the neologism “sane-washing,” which the corporate media has been doing with Donald Trump and which Todd Beeton of The Conversation says is starting to happen with J.D. Vance as well. While the word may be new, however, the phenomenon is not. In fact, it’s the central joke in John Gay’s 18th century musical comedy The Beggar’s Opera.

“Sane-washing,” the Urban Dictionary tells us, involves “attempting to downplay a person’s or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public.” As problematic as it is to sane-wash Donald Trump, however, it may be even more dangerous to do so with Vance given (1) his extreme positions on a variety of issues and (2) the very real possibility that he would rise to the presidency in a second Trump term and more competently carry out such an agenda. There are rightwing billionaires who, confident that Trump won’t survive a second term, are salivating at the prospect of President Vance.

Or as Bill Kristol of The Bulwark puts it, Trump’s selection of Vance

cemented the fact that a Trump second term [will] be a Project 2025 and America First endeavor [and] the somewhat incoherent, anti-liberal and anti-democratic impulses of early Trumpism [will turn] into a far more purposeful and full-blown American authoritarianism.

Vance worked on sane-washing both Trump and himself in his debate with Tim Walz last week. Beeton first points out how he sane-washed Trump:

When Vance said, for example, that Trump governed on “common sense wisdom” as president, or when he suggested Trump somehow saved Obamacare “in a bipartisan way,” or when he claimed that Trump “Peacefully gave over power” in 2021, Vance was gaslighting the American people on behalf of his running mate, all with a straight face. It was quite a performance.

But Vance’s major accomplishment, Beeton believes, was how he sane-washed himself:

Through his slick debate club demeanor, his nods toward moderation and civility, and his bizarre portrayal of himself as seemingly almost pro-choice, Vance was communicating to voters that he’s really not that weird. Forget all that stuff you heard about him, he’s actually Team Normal. 

Vance must sane-wash himself to hide both his ties to authoritarian billionaires and to white Christian nationalists (there’s considerable overlap). Beeton points out that Vance spent this past weekend at a Christian revival event run by Lance Wallnau, who is thought to have coined the phrase “Seven Mountains Mandate.” The goal is to put Christians in control of seven spheres of society: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business and government. In short, to turn us into an anti-democratic theocracy.

“Seven Mountains Mandate” is a project of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), led by the evangelical Wallnau and others, but it also has buy-in from members of the radical Catholic Opus Dei society, which boasts such members as Leonard Leo (largely responsible for stacking and cultivating the Supreme Court) and Kevin Roberts, author of Project 2025. That radical Evangelicals and radical Catholics would be finding common cause at this juncture seems strange, but perhaps it’s a pragmatic alliance in the service of ending American pluralism. Vance, who has written a forward to Roberts’s forthcoming book Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America, is himself a radical Catholic and may be attending the NAR conference to help cement the alliance.

Matthew Taylor, author and religious scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies who has researched the NAR, calls Vance’s appearance at the event an “endorsement of one of the worst, most conspiratorial, Christian supremacist spectacles in the country.” In other words, Vance is in dire need of sane-washing both his relationship with Wallnau and with Project 2025.

Sane-washing is used to comic effect in Beggar’s Opera. The major joke running through Gay’s satiric romp, which Bertolt Brecht would later rewrite as Three Penny Opera, is that the upper class is no different than the criminal underclass; they just make crime look, well, sane and respectable. At one point the Peachams–who make their living fencing stolen goods and, when the moment is right, turning in their employees for the reward money—are discussing murder. When Mrs. Peacham remarks to her husband that it’s fortunate none of their pickpockets has recently killed anyone, her husband shrugs it off:

Peacham. What a dickens is the woman always a whimpring about murder for? No gentleman is ever look’d upon the worse for killing a man in his own defense; and if business cannot be carried on without it, what would you have a gentleman do?

Mrs. Peacham. If I am in the wrong, my dear, you must excuse me, for nobody can help the frailty of an over-scrupulous conscience.

Peacham. Murder is as fashionable a crime as a man can be guilty of. How many fine gentlemen have we in Newgate every year, purely upon that article! 

The play widens its satiric lens in Peacham’s opening song:

Through all the employments of life
Each neighbor abuses his brother;
Whore and rogue they call husband and wife:
All professions be-rogue one another:
The priest calls the lawyer a cheat,
The lawyer be-knaves the divine:
And the statesman, because he’s so great,
Thinks his trade as honest as mine.

Peacham is especially hard on lawyers, whom he lambastes in another bouncy song:

A Fox may steal your Hens, Sir,
A Whore your Health and Pence, Sir,
Your Daughter rob your Chest, Sir,
Your Wife may steal your Rest, Sir.
A Thief your Goods and Plate.

But this is all but picking,
With Rest, Pence, Chest and Chicken;
It ever was decreed, sir,
If lawyer’s hand is fee’d, Sir,
He steals your whole estate.

To which Peacham then adds, “The lawyers are bitter enemies to those in our way. They don’t care that anybody should get a clandestine livelihood but themselves.”

As I watched Vance’s smooth presentation at the debate—between his gaslighting and his effortless lying, it was a tour-de-force—I thought of Gay’s first mention of Mac the Knife, the colorful highwayman at the center of the play. Mac has borrowed money from the Peachams, which he repays with bad checks:

Peacham. Was Captain Macheath here this morning, for the banknotes he left with you last week?

Mrs. Peacham. Yes, my dear; and though the bank hath stopt payment, he was so cheerful and so agreeable! Sure there is not a finer gentleman upon the road than the captain! 

“Upon the road” refers to highway robbery. But sure, there is not a finer presidential ticket than Trump and Vance.

Further thought: I’ve compared Trump to Mac the Knife several times in the past (for instance, here) over how both manage to escape accountability time and again. On the steps of the gallows, the highwayman is saved by a royal reprieve, specially ordered up (in a meta-fictional moment) by the opera’s beggar author so that his play won’t have an unhappy ending. Much of the fun of the play lies in Mac’s escapes.

Of course, Mac never has the power to pardon himself, a power Trump will undoubtedly exercise if he is returned to office.

The other difference between Mac and Trump is that only one of them is a good-natured, open-hearted thief. The other is just a thief.

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J.D. Vance Is No Barbara Kingsolver

By Robin Bates | Published: October 7, 2024

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Monday

Here’s a tidbit of literary history I’ve just picked up. Apparently Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Demon Copperhead is in part a response to J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. Asked about Vance’s book in an interview with The Guardian, Kingsolver said,

I can tell you that Appalachian people felt betrayed by that book a long time before he became a Republican politician. I’ll begin by saying: anyone is entitled to write a memoir. That’s his story, fine. But for him to say that his story explains all of us – I say, no, I resent that, because it’s very condescending. There’s this subtext all the way through it that suggests we’re in a boat that’s sinking because we’re lazy, unambitious and uncreative, which I resent.

Kingsolver knows whereof she speaks, having been raised in Appalachia herself. If Hillbilly Elegy was well received, she believes, it’s because “it simply confirmed well-worn stereotypes”:

I’ve dealt with this condescension, this anti-hillbilly bigotry for a lot of my life I didn’t realize it was a problem until I left Kentucky and went to [Indiana’s Depauw University] and people made fun of my accent, and said things like: ‘Look at you, you’re wearing shoes, ha ha!’” [Pause] “You know, it’s more insidious than that. Even as a writer, I feel like my whole life until Demon Copperhead I was snubbed because I’m rural, I’m from this place that’s considered backward. I’m quite used to it. But [Vance’s book] really made a lot of us angry that this became the explanation for us.”

She adds that her neighbors saw through Vance immediately: “The hollowness, the fact that he isn’t really one of us.” In his book, she says, “There was no analysis, and no compassion. It was just: if I can survive, anyone can survive.”

And indeed, Vance was not “one of us.” According to Professor Lennard J. Davis, Vances engages in “poornography,” which is writers who are not poor themselves conducting literary sightseeing tours through poverty:

Vance himself was never actually impoverished. His family never had to worry about money; his grandfather, grandmother and mother all had houses in a suburban neighborhood in Middletown, Ohio. He admits that his grandfather “owned stock in Armco and had a lucrative pension.”

Davis points out that Vance introduced himself at Yale as “a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia,” and then used his mother’s addiction to painkillers to cement his credentials. As Davis puts it, “In the book, Vance searches for an explanation for his traumatic relationship with his mother, before hitting on the perfect explanation: His mother’s addiction was a consequence of the fact that her parents were “hillbillies.” 

One gets a far deeper grasp of the culture by reading Prodigal Summer, Flight Behavior, and Demon Copperhead, all of which are set in Appalachia and the last of which does a deep dive into the problem of opioids. There the protagonist, after being bounced from one abusive foster home to another, finally finds (he thinks) stability in the home of a football coach, who sees his potential—but who then introduces him to painkillers after an injury threatens to sideline him. From there he is plunged into the netherworld of addiction and barely manages to escape. He does so, not by pulling himself up by his bootstraps, as Vance recommends, but through the support of others. Demon gets his life back in order after attending a rehab center, where he draws on his artistic skills to write a graphic novel about the history of the Appalachian people.

I’ve taught Prodigal Summer and Flight Behavior as well as The Bean Trees and all refute Vance’s characterization of people as shiftless and looking for a government handout. Although having said that, I can think of one character in Flight Behavior who does get handouts, even as he trashes the federal government. “Who do you think sends you your disability checks,” the sassy narrator shoots back at him after one of his anti-government rants. “Santa Claus?”

Tellingly, this character sounds like J.D. Vance, who in fact has had his own Santa Claus: rightwing billionaire Peter Thiel set him up as a venture capitalist and then financed his senate campaign. His hillbilly act is just a grift.

Read Kingsolver if you want the genuine article.

Relevant passage from Demon Copperhead: I imagine Kingsolver directing the following Demon observation to Vance’s putdown of hillbillies:

There’s this thing that happens, let’s say at school where a bunch of guys are in the bathroom, at the urinal, laughing about some dork that made an anus of himself in gym. You’re all basically nice guys, right? You know right from wrong, and would not in a million years be brutal to the poor guy’s face. And then it happens: the dork was in the shitter. He comes out of the stall with this look. He heard everything. And you realize you’re not really that nice of a guy. This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.”

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And Took from Thence a Rib

By Robin Bates | Published: October 5, 2024
Creation of Eve (marble relief, Orvieto Cathedral)

Sunday

I’d never noticed before the similarities between the rib episode from Genesis (today’s Old Testament reading) and Plato’s allegory of how desire came to be. In The Symposium, a drunk Alcibiades tells a story to capture the nature of sexual longing. In his recounting, human beings were once complete in themselves, having two heads, four arms, and four legs. The gods, fearing that this perfection would make them independent, split them in half—with the effect that the two halves, yearning for their lost completeness, spend all their time searching for the other rather than competing with the gods.

Before the great divide, there were men, women, and androgynes. After, men spend all their time searching for their missing man half, the women for their missing woman half, and androgynes for their missing member of the opposite sex half. Thus was desire born, both same sex and opposite sex desire.

The Greek story is a bit more egalitarian than the Genesis story since men and women are raised to the same plane (although they weren’t in actual Greek society). It also regards homosexual desire as natural, which was fine with Socrates and Plato.

As an aside, I note that I see Alcibiades’s allegory at the core of Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night, where two twins are separated by a lightning bolt (which splits their ship in half). The play goes on to explore various desires, including a man who desires female characteristics (Orsino), two women who desire male characteristics (Viola, Olivia), a man who desires a man (Antonio), and a woman who desires a woman (Olivia, although she thinks Viola is a man).

But back to the Adam and Eve story, which goes as follows:

The Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,
for out of Man this one was taken.”

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. (Genesis 2:18-24)

In Milton’s version of the story in Paradise Lost, it appears to be not God but Adam who thinks that “it is not good that the man should be alone” (although we learn later that this was God’s plan all along). Not wanting to be critical of God’s apparent plan that he remain single, Adam asks for a helpmate in the most diplomatic way possible. After God asks Adam why he isn’t satisfied with having been given dominion over all creation, Adam replies,

Let not my words offend thee, Heavenly Power;
My Maker, be propitious while I speak.
. . .  Of fellowship I speak
Such as I seek, fit to participate
All rational delight: wherein the brute
Cannot be human consort:  They rejoice
Each with their kind, lion with lioness;
So fitly them in pairs thou hast combined:
Much less can bird with beast, or fish with fowl
So well converse, nor with the ox the ape;
Worse then can man with beast, and least of all.

God, Milton tells us, is not displeased at the request but, like a good teacher, tests Adam a little further until finally telling him he has been in favor of the idea all along; he just wanted Adam to reason it out:

                      I, ere thou spakest,
Knew it not good for Man to be alone;
And no such company as then thou sawest
Intended thee; for trial only brought,
To see how thou couldest judge of fit and meet:
What next I bring shall please thee, be assured,
Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self,
Thy wish exactly to thy heart’s desire.

He then proceeds to perform a local anesthetics operation in which Adam is aware of what is going on as it happens (and so is able to report on it):

Mine eyes he closed, but open left the cell
Of fancy, my internal sight; by which,
Abstract as in a trance, methought I saw,
Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape
Still glorious before whom awake I stood:
Who stooping opened my left side, and took
From thence a rib, with cordial spirits warm,
And life-blood streaming fresh; wide was the wound,
But suddenly with flesh filled up and healed:

Adam also gets to watch what God does with his rib:

The rib he formed and fashioned with his hands;
Under his forming hands a creature grew,                         
Man-like, but different sex; so lovely fair,
That what seemed fair in all the world, seemed now
Mean, or in her summed up, in her contained
And in her looks; which from that time infused
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,
And into all things from her air inspired
The spirit of love and amorous delight.

Then comes the desire of which Plato writes:

She disappeared, and left me dark; I waked
To find her, or for ever to deplore
Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure…  

This being the Garden of Eden, however, there are only seconds between desire and fulfillment. Or as John Wilmot, making use of a lewd pun, puts it in his poem “The Fall,”

Naked beneath cool Shades they lay,
Enjoyment waited on desire;
Each member did their wills obey:
Nor could a wish set pleasure higher.

Here’s Milton:

When out of hope, behold her, not far off,
Such as I saw her in my dream, adorned
With what all Earth or Heaven could bestow
To make her amiable:  On she came,
Led by her heavenly Maker, though unseen,
And guided by his voice; nor uninformed
Of nuptial sanctity, and marriage rites:
Grace was in all her steps, Heaven in her eye,
In every gesture dignity and love.

Unable to remain silent, Adam bursts into a hymn of thankfulness and praise:

This turn hath made amends; thou hast fulfilled
Thy words, Creator bounteous and benign,
Giver of all things fair! but fairest this
Of all thy gifts! nor enviest.  I now see
Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, myself
Before me:  Woman is her name; of Man
Extracted: for this cause he shall forego
Father and mother, and to his wife adhere;
And they shall be one flesh, one heart, one soul.

Feminists point out (legitimately in my view) that the rib story is a means for men to regain primacy over women in the critical issue of giving birth: it was first men who birthed women, we are informed, not the other way around. Milton, while he creates an extraordinary three-dimensional character in his Eve, is nonetheless somewhat guilty here. At one point in Book IV he says, in a passage that always makes my students cringe,

Not equal, as thir sex not equal seem’d;
For contemplation hee and valor form’d,
For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace,
Hee for God only, shee for God in him…

It’s worth noting that this is not the only version of creation to be found in Genesis, and the other is a bit more egalitarian:

So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)

But for all its patriarchal faults, there’s some fabulous love poetry going on in Paradise Lost. The Puritan Milton, one might say, was no puritan. Milton’s articulation—”bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, myself before me”—captures for me how Julia and I have become, after all these years and despite our undoubted singularity, a single being. Milton’s body imagery captures this unity.

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Jack London Predicted January 6

By Robin Bates | Published: October 4, 2024

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Friday

Over at the website Literary Hub, author Ken McGoogan describes Jack London’s 1908 novel The Iron Heel as “one of the most prescient dystopian works ever written.” In it he describes how the governing party, even after losing an election, refuses to leave office:

The incumbents refused to get out. It was very simple. They merely charged illegality in the elections and wrapped up the whole situation in the interminable red tape of the law. The Democrats were powerless. The courts were in the hands of their enemies.

McGoogan then admits to having changed the word “Democrats”—in the novel it appears as “Grangers”—but the rest of the passage is quoted verbatim.

News of the book is especially timely given Special Counsel Jack Smith’s recently released indictment–updated in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent presidential immunity decision–which lays out in more detail than we’ve previously seen the the many different ways Donald Trump attempted to remain in power. By immunizing Trump for all “official acts,” the Supreme Court forced Smith to limit his case to “unofficial acts.” While overthrowing the government shouldn’t be regarded as an official act, the Supreme Court will make the final determination, and it has been, if not in Trump’s hands, then at least leaning heavily in his favor.

For the record, here’s an excerpt from Smith’s charges:

When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (the “targeted states”). … The through-line of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud.

McGoogan provides the following summary of London’s novel:

The story covers the period from 1912 to 1932 and treats the evolution of the powerful “Oligarchs” in the US into the ruling dictatorship of the Iron Heel. The Oligarchy comprises a few massive and growing “trusts” run by individuals who have become obscenely rich and powerful by squeezing small and middle-sized businesses into capitulation. The contemporary reader cannot help but think of the top 1 percent of Americans, billionaires said to control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth—though some say that figure is much higher.

McGoogan points out that the novel appeared three decades before Upton Sinclair’s It Can’t Happen Here, which lays out a similar scenario, and he observes that George Orwell was a fan. As Orwell saw it, Iron Heel is “a very remarkable prophecy of the rise of Fascism.” Whereas many socialists (Jack London was a socialist) used to believe that the working class would eventually displace the capitalist class, Orwell saw in London a hard-nosed realist who realized that the capitalist class would counterattack with maximum force before letting that happen. McGoogan notes that “neither London nor Orwell would be surprised to see Donald Trump and far-right Republicans manning the barricades for the billionaire class.”

We can only hope that London’s other prediction is wrong. Once the Oligarchy in The Iron Heel seizes power, it holds on to it for three centuries.

London’s insightfulness about rightwing brutality, Orwell added, comes from the fact that he himself was tough, having experienced the rigors of the fishing industry and the Alaska gold rush. “With his love of violence and physical strength, his belief in ‘natural aristocracy’, his animal-worship and exaltation of the primitive,” the British author wrote, “he had in him what one might fairly call a Fascist strain.”

In other words, he knew fascism when he saw it, having himself traveled to the dark side. Then he came back to warn us.

This article on London is excerpted from McGoogan’s Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of Dictatorship. According to the book’s description, in addition to London Shadows of Tyranny references Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Sinclair Lewis, and Philip Roth, all authors of dystopian novels envisioning democracy’s collapse. The last ten years, sadly, have given us ample reason to go back and read or reread their works.

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