Toad and Trumpian Politics

By Robin Bates | Published: April 24, 2024
E.H. Shepard, Toad Steals a Motorcar

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Thursday

Donald Trump’s election interference trial is reminding us of the ugliness of the 2016 election. Not only did the National Inquirer serve as an arm of the Trump campaign, using its wide reach to savage Hilary Clinton. As editor David Pecker has testified, following an August 2015 meeting with Trump and Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, The Inquirer agreed to publish only positive stories about Trump and only negative ones about his rivals.

This became evident over the course of the following year. With surgeon Carson, it ran a front page story, “Ben Carson butchered my brain!”,  claiming that Carson had left a sponge in a person’s brain during a procedure.  With Cruz it was even worse. At one time the Inquirer baselessly accused him of having multiple affairs, at another of connection with a porn star. But the ultimate insult was when, next to a grainy photo of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, the newspaper printed the headline “Ted Cruz father linked to JFK assassination!”

On the witness stand this past week, David Pecker acknowledged that all the stories were made up.

So how did Cruz react? Well, at first he was outraged, calling  Trump an “amoral pathological liar” and a “braggadocious, arrogant buffoon.” After Trump won the GOP nomination while Cruz was booed by conventioneers for complaining about his treatment, however, Cruz began behaving like Toad. First here’s the moment when a motorcar first makes its appearance, shattering the bucolic silence like Trump upending the GOP establishment:

The “Poop-poop” rang with a brazen shout in their ears, they had a moment’s glimpse of an interior of glittering plate-glass and rich morocco, and the magnificent motor-car, immense, breath-snatching, passionate, with its pilot tense and hugging his wheel, possessed all earth and air for the fraction of a second, flung an enveloping cloud of dust that blinded and enwrapped them utterly, and then dwindled to a speck in the far distance, changed back into a droning bee once more.

Traditional Republicans were taken off guard:

The old grey horse, dreaming, as he plodded along, of his quiet paddock, in a new raw situation such as this, simply abandoned himself to his natural emotions. Rearing, plunging, backing steadily, in spite of all the Mole’s efforts at his head, and all the Mole’s lively language directed at his better feelings, he drove the cart backward towards the deep ditch at the side of the road. It wavered an instant—then there was a heart-rending crash—and the canary-coloured cart, their pride and their joy, lay on its side in the ditch, an irredeemable wreck.

Water Rat, who along with Mole is accompanying Toad on the trip, is outraged. Toad, however, has a different response:

The Toad never answered a word, or budged from his seat in the road; so they went to see what was the matter with him. They found him in a sort of a trance, a happy smile on his face, his eyes still fixed on the dusty wake of their destroyer. At intervals he was still heard to murmur “Poop-poop!”

The Rat shook him by the shoulder. “Are you coming to help us, Toad?” he demanded sternly.

“Glorious, stirring sight!” murmured Toad, never offering to move. “The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here to-day—in next week to-morrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped—always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!”

“O stop being an ass, Toad!” cried the Mole despairingly.

“And to think I never knew!” went on the Toad in a dreamy monotone. “All those wasted years that lie behind me, I never knew, never even dreamt! But now—but now that I know, now that I fully realize! O what a flowery track lies spread before me, henceforth! What dust-clouds shall spring up behind me as I speed on my reckless way! What carts I shall fling carelessly into the ditch in the wake of my magnificent onset! Horrid little carts—common carts—canary-colored carts!”

What Cruz—and Lindsey Graham, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elise Sefanik, J.D. Vance, Ron DeSantis, and others—have learned from Trump is motor car politics. Recklessness and destructiveness are rewarded, especially if one casually ignores or even insults the “horrid little carts” that get in one’s way. To behave like Trump is to experience the joy of trampling on others with impunity. And so, like Toad at the end of the book, they have left plodding horse-drawn caravans far behind:

“Heard the news?” [Rat] said. “There’s nothing else being talked about, all along the riverbank. Toad went up to Town by an early train this morning. And he has ordered a large and very expensive motorcar.”

Wind in the Willows, written in 1908, is a nostalgic journey back into England’s pastoral past, with peace-loving animals rowing on the river, going for picnics, entertaining Christmas carolers, and expelling proletariat weasels and stoats from the local squire’s manor house. The motor car, which intruded upon rural isolation, was a symbol of a way of life that was passing. Trump’s neo-fascism has upended its own set of traditions so that conventional Republican politics may never be the same.

And rather than shy away in horror, even those victimized by his crude tactics have been sitting in Toad’s trance before asking, “Where do I sign up?” Ted Cruz, for one, has gone out and bought his own set of Trumpian politics.

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A Thieves Guild to Manage Crime

By Robin Bates | Published: April 23, 2024

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Wednesday

It may come as a surprise to those who listen to Donald Trump that America’s crime rate has been dropping dramatically in the last few years. According to new FBI statistics released last month, murders have dropped 13% since last year and violent crime is down 6%. Property crime too is down 3%. We apparently are back to pre-pandemic levels.

Crime, while never good, seems to be one of those issues like immigration—which is to say, concern about it rises and falls depending on whether or not we are in an election year. For politicians, it’s largely a matter of managing perception. Which brings me to Terry Pratchett’s Lord Vetinari.

Vetinari is the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, a parody of a great but squalid city. Though it has every ill that one associates with a city, it nevertheless works, in large part because Vetinari is a genius at managing conflict. His answer to crime is to establish a Thieves Guild.

We learn about the Thieves Guild in Guards! Guards!, the first of Pratchett’s Sam Vimes books. The series is a comic parody of hard-boiled detective novels (Vimes, Captain of the Night Watch, is a Sam Spade type), and in it we learn of Vetinari’s approach. As Pratchett explains,

One of the Patrician’s greatest contributions to the reliable operation of Ankh-Morpork had been, very early in his administration, the legalizing of the ancient Guild of Thieves. Crime was always with us, he reasoned, and therefore, if you were going to have crime, it at least should be organized crime.

In Pratchett’s description, the Thieves Guild works somewhat like the Federal Reserve, which is designed to protect society from inflation on the one hand and recession on the other. For its part, the Thieves Guild agrees to maintain crime at a level “to be determined annually”:

And so the Guild had been encouraged to come out of the shadows and build a big Guildhouse, take their place at civic banquets, and set up their training college with day-release courses and City and Guilds certificates and everything. In exchange for the winding down of the Watch, they agreed, while trying to keep their faces straight, to keep crime levels to a level to be determined annually. That way, everyone could plan ahead, said Lord Vetinari, and part of the uncertainty had been removed from the chaos that is life.

I love the phrase “chaos that is life.” And indeed, Vetinari’s policy turns out “very satisfactorily from everyone’s point of view”:

It took the head thieves a very little time to grow paunches and start having coats-of-arms made and meet in a proper building rather than smoky dens, which no one had liked much. A complicated arrangement of receipts and vouchers saw to it that, while everyone was eligible for the attentions of the Guild, no one had too much, and this was very acceptable—at least to those citizens who were rich enough to afford the quite reasonable premiums the guild charged for an uninterrupted life. There was a strange foreign word for this: inn-sewer-ants [insurance]. No one knew exactly what it had originally meant, but Ankh-Morpork had made it its own.

The system, it so happens, leads to defunding the police:

The Watch hadn’t liked it, but the plain fact was that the thieves were far better at controlling crime than the Watch had ever been. After all, the Watch had to work twice as hard to cut crime just a little, whereas all the Guild had to do was to work less.

This is not Vetinari’s only innovation. Figuring that there will always be people who want to overthrow the government, he surreptitiously sets up a number of insurrectionary groups so that they will spend all their time fighting each other. Vetinari knows that the most dangerous citizens are humorless ideologues, and he is endlessly imaginative and counterintuitive in finding ways to counteract them.

Pratchett’s comic genius, akin to Jonathan Swift’s, stems from knowing that perfection is overrated. Attempting to stamp out all society’s flaws only leads to various totalitarian systems that can’t acknowledge that we humans are basically a messy lot. That’s not to say that we should abandon our pursuit of social justice and income fairness. But we need to do so while laughing at ourselves.

In other words, be suspicious of anyone who speaks in absolutes, whether about crime or immigration or abortion or education or political correctness. France’s Republic of Virtue led to the Reign of Terror, Hitler’s pure-blooded Aryans carried out the Holocaust, and Stalin’s and Mao’s visions of a perfect communal society led to the slaughter of millions.

The best we can do is more or less manage the chaos that is our lives. And to do so while not taking ourselves too seriously.

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The House Speaker’s Théoden Moment

By Robin Bates | Published: April 22, 2024
Messick as Théoden in The Two Towers

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Monday

The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser just came up with a good Lord of the Rings analogy in describing the Speaker of the House’s about-face on aid to Ukraine. After spending half a year in thrall to what some are calling the Putin wing of the GOP, Mike Johnson had a Théoden moment and allowed the House to vote on it. It passed 311-112, albeit with more Democratic votes than Republican. (All the no votes were Republican.)

Glasser reports that Johnson’s words were “unexpectedly passionate”:

Invoking this “critical” moment in the world, Johnson said, “I can make a selfish decision”—namely, keeping his job by not moving forward on the aid for Ukraine and, once again, caving to the sort of angry nihilists who have bullied the past three Republican Speakers out of the House. “But I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing.” He talked about why aid for Ukraine was “critically important,” adding, “I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we’ve gotten.” This was yet another heresy for many Republicans, who, following Trump, have spent years tearing down the truthfulness and reliability of America’s intelligence agencies.

Susan says that the scene brought to mind that moment when the king of Rohan breaks free of Wormtongue and “suddenly returns to himself—an accommodationist no more, revivified, ready to fight.” The scene in the book begins with Gandalf functioning as one of these intelligence agencies, although probably with a more dramatic information session than the one Johnson received. Imagine Wormtongue (or Grima) as Marjorie Taylor Greene (a.k.a. “Moscow Marjorie,” as the New York Post called her):

Casting his tattered cloak aside, he stood up and leaned no longer on his staff; and he spoke in a clear cold voice. “The wise speak only of what they know, Gríma son of Gálmód. A witless worm have you become. Therefore be silent, and keep your forked tongue behind your teeth. I have not passed through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a serving-man till the lightning falls.”

He raised his staff. There was a roll of thunder. The sunlight was blotted out from the eastern windows; the whole hall became suddenly dark as night. The fire faded to sullen embers. Only Gandalf could be seen, standing white and tall before the blackened hearth.

As with Johnson, there’s a dramatic difference between before and after. Before, Theoden is a feeble old man leaning on a stick. (In Johnson’s case, a dithering politician sucking up to the MAGA extremists.) After, there’s this:

From the king’s hand the black staff fell clattering on the stones. He drew himself up, slowly, as a man that is stiff from long bending over some dull toil. Now tall and straight he stood, and his eyes were blue as he looked into the opening sky.

“Dark have been my dreams of late,’ he said, ‘but I feel as one new-awakened.”

In Théoden’s case, Saruman has been infiltrating Rohan, with Wormtongue as his chief agent. Donald Trump, of course, has been Vladimir Putin’s chief agent, although he has had plenty of help, both from the GOP caucus (including figures like Greene and Boebert) and from grifters like Paul Manafort, now back on Trump’s campaign. Greene, like Putin, has been calling the Ukrainians Nazis, and the situation became so dire that, two weeks ago, Republican Mike Turner, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said that Russian propaganda has seeped its way to Congress. Hill noted,

“It is absolutely true we see, directly coming from Russia, attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.

As of last week, we have a clearer sense of what Putin is up to thanks to a secret Russian Foreign Ministry document obtained by the Washington Post. The ministry is apparently calling for

an “offensive information campaign” and other measures spanning “the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres” against a “coalition of unfriendly countries” led by the United States.

“We need to continue adjusting our approach to relations with unfriendly states,” the document contends, adding, “It’s important to create a mechanism for finding the vulnerable points of their external and internal policies with the aim of developing practical steps to weaken Russia’s opponents.”

The parallels between Saruman’s infiltration of Rohan and Putin’s of the United States go even deeper when one looks at the historical events that influenced Tolkien’s fantasy. Saruman is partly based on Stalin, who used his non-aggression pact with Hitler (Sauron) to make inroads into Finland, the Baltic republics, and parts of Poland and Rumania. Théoden’s dithering is reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s.

Given these 1930s parallels, it’s interesting that a number of commentators have been applying a famous Winston Churchill quote to Johnson’s change of heart—that “the Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.” Unfortunately, six months of Johnson trying everything has badly damaged Ukraine. As Washington Post commentator Jennifer Rubin notes,

The delay had serious, widespread consequences for Ukraine. Max Bergmann, a former State Department official and director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tells me, “Their power sector has been decimated by lack of air defense, which will be incredibly costly to repair.” He adds that on the front “Ukrainians have lost a lot of soldiers because if you don’t have artillery you have to hold the line with men.” In other words, Ukraine has “lost a lot of people simply because we stopped providing them ammo.”

In Théoden’s case, the situation proves less dire. Although Saruman’s Orcs have made deep inroads into Rohan, with the help of the Ents he is able to defeat them at the Battle of Helm’s Deep and even capture Isengard itself. How much Ukraine can accomplish with the new American aid remains to be seen, but at least they now have a fighting chance.

I fear that Mike Johnson, on the other hand, will return to the darkness after this one bright moment. In the current GOP, sadly, Wormtongue reigns supreme.

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The World Calls to You Like Wild Geese

By Robin Bates | Published: April 21, 2024

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Monday – Earth Day

I recall the first Earth Day, which I covered for the Carleton College student newspaper in 1970. While we understood well that the earth was in trouble, we had no idea then about the damage that hydrocarbons would inflict upon weather patterns, ocean currents, glaciers, coral reefs, etc.

With environmental activism in mind, I have chosen Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” for today’s post. Activists, she tells us, don’t have to operate from some self-flagellating sense of mission, reminiscent of those desert fathers who saw extreme abstinence as a sign of virtue. Sometimes those who care about nature get so caught up in despair that they forget to “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Often, in an attempt to enact earth-friendly policies, we trot out apocalyptic scenarios of an uninhabitable earth. Although the predictions are not inaccurate, it may be more persuasive to take Oliver’s approach and look up at the wild geese that are flying overhead. If we can get people to see themselves in these geese, thereby recognizing their place “in the family of things,” we’re much more likely to get them to join us in our efforts to usher in green policies.

Oliver was America’s most popular poet when she died five years ago, in part because of her passion and her appreciation for the natural world. Don’t underestimate the power of poetry to win hearts and minds when it comes to matters of the greatest urgency.

Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.  

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Ask Not for Whom the Bush Burns

By Robin Bates | Published: April 20, 2024
Chagall, Moses and the Burning Bush

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Sunday – Looking Ahead to Passover

In anticipation of the Passover holidays, which begin tomorrow, I’ve been reading Chaya Lester’s “Lit”—Poetry for the Jewish Holidays. According to her website, Lester is a clinical psychologist and co-director of Jerusalem’s Shalev Center for Jewish Personal Growth, as well as one who has explored “Experiential Torah Learning.”

According to Lester in “Lit” (which you can find here),

The Hebrew name for Passover is Pe-Sach, which is symbolically read as Peh Sach – the mouth that speaks. Indeed, on Seder night the retelling of the story of our people’s enslavement is nothing short of a national therapeutic ritual. Psychology has shown us the necessity of using speech and expression to best process through the pains and traumas of our lives. Our yearly processing through re-telling has been an essential path of healing and empowerment for our people over millennia. At the same time, Seder night also offers us a ritual space for processing through our personal enslavements. Speech is the ideal vehicle for generating our personal freedom in tandem with the national freedom tale.

With that in mind, here’s a poem about the incident that started the ball rolling—which is to say God addressing Moses as a burning bush. If you need reminding, here’s the account in Exodus:

There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.”

And then the instructions:

The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”

In “Hear the Call,” the poet says that the bush will speak to all of us who “simply NOTICE.” If we step aside from our “daily grind,” we will “notice the quiet light that burns inside.” But the daily grind in this case may be trauma that we have surrendered to. As Lester observes, “We can endure most anything we set our souls to.”

If, as Lester goes on to say, we are the “sacred bush of paradox and calling,” the paradox may be that our trauma–that which sears our leaves–also calls us to freedom. Perhaps thinking of people trapped (like the Israelites) in abusive relationships, Lester assures us that we “need not be consumed by life’s smoky plumes.” Rather, when we hear the call, we can “be prepared to leave.”

Hear the Call

They say that the bush burned
not only for Moses
but for anyone
who would simply
NOTICE.

Simply step aside
from their daily grind
and notice
the quiet light
that burns inside.

And know this:
We need not be consumed
by life’s smoky plumes.
We can endure most anything
we set our souls to.

For we are the sacred brush
of paradox and calling.

Sit with the things that sear
your leaves
and when you hear the call –
be prepared
to leave.

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In a Dante-esque Prison of His Own Making

By Robin Bates | Published: April 18, 2024
Trump at his election interference trial

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Friday

Whether or not Trump’s Manhattan trial sends him to prison, there is a way in which he is already experiencing some of prison’s agonies. In that way, he resembles the inhabitants of Dante’s Inferno, whose tormented afterlives are metaphorical versions of the hells they created for themselves while still alive. Hang on while I explain.

Dante’s psychological brilliance lies in the many ways he shows that sin itself causes suffering. People may think they are getting away with their behavior but they live in darkness. Those who are consumed with lust, for instance, are buffeted endlessly by violent winds (Paolo and Francesca) while those in the grip of anger either tear at each other incessantly in a dark marsh (active anger) or gurgle below the surface (sullen or repressed anger).

I owe my understanding of how the trial itself is hellish for Trump to his niece, clinical psychologist Mary Trump, and to fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Mary Trump observes that

even after only two days, it is nearly intolerable for Donald to sit there quietly. As he continues to hear disparaging comments, as he continues to submit to somebody else’s authority, the pressure will build. In some ways, I think this experience might be worse for him than jail.

The disparaging comments are coming in the form of tweets and other social media posts and mock and criticize Trump.

Meanwhile Ben-Ghiat writes that the longer the “confinement” of the trial goes on,

the harder it will be for Trump to restrain himself. The narcissism and the ego needs of the strongman simply cannot bear the feeling of being constrained by others. They need to turn every space and every interaction into an opportunity to dominate and humiliate others and speak for as long as they like (the rambling rallies).

Referencing her own book on fascism, Ben-Ghiat, points out that, in the courtroom,

Trump is surrounded and contained by armed officers and the judge. He is not the master of this space —quite the contrary. If you have read Strongmen or other studies of authoritarian leaders, you will understand the novelty of this situation for Trump, with the judge monitoring his every outburst and warning him that he will be arrested if he violates the rules.

To be sure, Dante would go even further and see Trump, even prior to the the trial, living in a self-created hell. In two past posts (here and here) I have noted all the punishments in Inferno, along with the accompanying torment, that apply to Trump. They are lust (Circle 2), Gluttony (circle 3), waste and hoarding (circle 4), wrath and sloth (circle 5), heresy (circle 6), blasphemy (circle 7), simony or betraying the public trust and putting the government up for sale (circle 8), graft (circle 8), sowing discord (circle 8) and treason (circle 9).

But just because Trump has created a constant inner hell for himself—anyone who watches him even briefly knows that he has turned his back on inner peace, not to mention God’s love—doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t still be held accountable by our justice system. As Yale law school professor Bandy Lee notes (quoted by Ben-Ghiat), the only way to avoid violence in someone such as Trump is to place limits on their behavior. To which Ben-Ghiat adds,

[T]he history of authoritarianism shows that appeasing bullies and not acting due to fear of possible violence merely sets up the conditions for more violence. It allows the bully to feel empowered and righteous in his lawlessness, which triggers more feelings of omnipotence and grandiosity and more reckless actions.

This is why Ben-Ghiat finds it “an amazing and beautiful and never-to-be-taken-for-granted fact that this trial is happening at all.” For Trump’s “bubble of invincibility [to be] punctured with a conviction,” she writes, “would be an unwelcome and yet powerful lesson for his followers.”

In short, it’s not enough that Trump has brought suffering on himself. We must see justice done and, if he is found guilty, punishment meted out.

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Mary Oliver on Frog (and Human) Sex

By Robin Bates | Published: April 17, 2024
Bullfrog at the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center


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Thursday

Today’s essay on two Mary Oliver April poems expands on a previous post. In one, Oliver does all she can to capture the ecstatic feelings that an April evening arouses in her. In the other, she gives up on words and just points at the peeping frogs.

When I’ve taught “Blossom” in my Intro to Lit class, my biology students have often informed me that all the peeping and croaking is designed to attract a mate. Well aware of this, Oliver appears to have written her poem as a series of pelvic thrusts.

I particularly like Oliver’s contrast between sex and death. In a chilling line, she observes that “time/chops at us like an iron/hoe” and that “death/is a state of paralysis.” We cannot deny this reality. Nevertheless, when we are in the grip of desire, “everything else can wait.” Our bodies take over and we “hurry down into the body of another.” Just because we are more than our bodies–“more than blood”–we can ignore the fact that we are also our bodies and, as such, belong to the moon.

As an aside, I note that this is not Oliver’s only explicitly erotic poem. For instance, we get a vivid depiction of lesbian sex at night in a garden in her poem “The Gardens”:

You gleam as you lie back
breathing like something
taken from water,
a sea creature, except
for your two human legs
which tremble
and open
into the dark country
I keep dreaming of. How
shall I touch you
unless it is
everywhere?

In the final image in “Blossom,” Oliver joins John Donne and Andrew Marvell when she shows sex warring with time. In “Good Morrow,” neo-Platonic Donne imagines time standing still when he is making love. At the end of “To His Coy Mistress,” carpe diem Marvell does not see this as possible but declares, “Although we cannot make time stand still, yet we can make him run.” Oliver adds a third possibility: time is shattered at the moment of union.  

Blossom
By Mary Oliver

In April
  the ponds
     open
         like black blossoms
the moon
   swims in every one;
      there’s fire
         everywhere: frogs shouting
their desire,
   their satisfaction. What
      we know: that time
         chops at us all like an iron
hoe, that  death
   is a state of paralysis. What
      we long for: joy
         before death, nights
In the swale—everything else
   can wait but not
      this thrust
         from the root
of the body. What
   we know: we are more
      than blood–we are more
         than our hunger and yet
we belong
  to the moon and when the ponds
     open, when the burning
         begins the most
thoughtful among us dreams
  of hurrying down
     into the black petals,
         into the fire,
into the night where time lies shattered,
into the body of another.

Given how determined Oliver is to capture the experience in language, it’s noteworthy that she gives up on language altogether at the end of another April frog poem. Here it is:

April

I wanted to speak at length about
The happiness of my body and the
Delight of my mind for it was
April, a night, a full moon and—

But something in myself for maybe
From somewhere other said: not too
Many words, please, in the muddy shallows the

Frogs are singing.

Sometimes just mentioning the frogs’ night chorus is enough. Still, it’s nice to have other Oliver poems that go into more detail.

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Poetry’s Role in the 2019 Indian Protests

By Robin Bates | Published: April 16, 2024
Indian Muslims protest new discrimination laws

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Wednesday

Recently I encountered a fascinating article about how Indians are using poetry to protest the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attacks on India’s Muslim minority. Krupa Shandilya, professor of Sexuality, Gender, and Women’s Studies at Amherst College notes that protesters have turned to two poems in particular: “Tum Dekhogey” (“You Will See”), by contemporary poet and Bollywood lyricist and scriptwriter Hussain Haidry, and “Hum Dekhenge” (“We Will See” or “On That Day”) by Pakistani poet (although he was born in pre-partition India) Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Shandilya says that, in 2019, university campuses and Muslim neighborhoods were “packed with people who, day after day, chanted slogans, belted out songs and recited poetry.” The poetry, she observes, “seemed to unsettle the government the most” so that dissenters reciting the protest poems “were accused of spreading hate against India, beaten and arrested by the police.”

As a scholar and translator of Urdu poetry, Shandilya writes that she was moved by the way that Haidry’s “You Will See”” described the state’s violence against peaceful protesters. “For me,” she says, “the poem crystallizes the disturbing turn of events in a country that once prized secularism, democracy and free expression.

“Because poems like Haidry’s directly challenge state power,” she adds, “the government and its supporters seek to portray them as seditious and anti-Indian.”

“You Will See” was inspired by a 101-day sit-in by Muslim women in Shaheen Bagh, a Muslim neighborhood in Delhi. Written from the perspective of those women, the poem “lambastes the silent bystanders who do nothing as hardcore Hindu nationalists – who believe in Hindu supremacy – terrorize religious minorities”:

You Will See
By Hussain Haidry
Trans. by Krupa Shandilya

Yes, you too will see
This night spent on the streets,
this ice in our breath,
This brutal, unjust night,
this too will be your fate 
When the tyrant attacks you, you stifle your screams
When you beg for justice, you are battered instead
When trapped in saffron cages,
eating roti dipped in water – 
Our slaughtered faces will appear before you
We will curse you, we will spit on you
And Hindustan will be but a hollow word –
scared, cowardly
hell, slaughterhouse – and you will lament:
I was there and so were you
Then the tyrant will laugh and say:
I was there and so were you

Shandilya says that the line “This night on the street, this ice in our breath” refers to the frigid winter nights that the women of Shaheen Bagh endured during their sit-in, when they had no access to heat or electricity. The peaceful protesters endured the attacks and the battering of Hindu nationalists. The “saffron cages” can refer either to religious intolerance in general or to the actual jail cells in which the protesters were imprisoned. Saffron is the color used by Modi’s ruling party, the BJP.

The other poem showing up in protests, Faiz’s “On that Day,” was actually written to protest the Pakistani dictator Muhammad Zia ul Haq in 1979 but it has been adapted by Indian Muslim to protest Modi’s Rule:

On That Day
by Faiz Ahmed
Trans. Jennifer Dubrow

That day will come
Yes, that day will come
That day we have been promised
When mountains of tyranny and oppression
will float away like cotton
And the earth will tremble and shake
under the feet of the oppressed
The sky will thunder and roar
on the heads of the arbitrators
False idols will be uprooted
from the Ka’ba of God’s earth
And the pure-hearted will be seated in places of honor
Thrones will be smashed
And crowns overthrown
On that day
Only the name of God shall remain
Who is both present and unseen
Who is both the observer and the perceived
On that day
The cry of “I am God!” will resound
The God that is in you and me
And the earth shall be ruled by those whom God created
The people, who are you and me

Shandilya says that this poem was the most recited poem at Shaheen Bagh and other sites during the 2019 protests. In adapting it to their purposes, she notes, the protesters tapped into a long tradition of reciting poetry as a form of protest so that “poems from the past often evolve to become freshly relevant.” And because the tradition is primarily an oral one—even though the poems appear in print—they are “recited as poems and sung as songs at marches, protests and on university campuses. As a result, they can reside in the popular imagination decades after their publication.”

Reading Shamilya’s account, I am struck by how these poems function as (to draw on Franz Fanon’s classic anti-colonialist work Wretched of the Earth) a literature of combat. Those who draw on them may be disempowered minorities lacking the firepower of the state, but they have language at its most powerful to bolster them.

To be sure, Fanon points out that poetry can’t change politics on its own. Indeed, in dark times (here I draw on Percy Shelley) poetry may be able to do little more than keep the spark of hope alive. But at other times, poetry can become an indispensable ally in the battle for political freedom.

As it was in the 2019 demonstrations, when it helped the protesters accomplish something tangible. According to Shamilya, due to the protests and the widespread outcry, an anti-Muslim law was put on hold.

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Bothsiderism in Lewis’ Last Battle

By Robin Bates | Published: April 15, 2024

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Tuesday

Since I’m currently in the process of setting up a C.S. Lewis symposium for our church, I’ve been rereading the Narnia series. Most of the books, especially The Silver Chair, hold up very well, but I’ve just been reminded how unpleasant The Last Battle is. It’s everyone’s least favorite book and with good reason.

Because Narnia’s inhabitants have been duped by a false Aslan, most have become either cynical nonbelievers or lost souls, which means that King Tirian and his unicorn companion Jewel can’t rally them to fight for their freedom. As a result, everyone dies, with C.S. Lewis reenacting the Biblical Book of Revelations to bring his series to an apocalyptic conclusion.

To be sure, it’s not totally depressing as everyone we like gets to go to Narnia Heaven. Still, we have to wade through a lot of yuk to get there. One of the yukkiest scenes reminds me of the bothsiderism that is characterizing much of the 2024 election coverage.

Bothsiderism in our case is the press giving the fascist who is running for president the same treatment as his opponent. Whatever Joe Biden’s flaws, he is not promising to weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies nor promising to be “dictator on day one” nor giving state secrets to the Russians. Humorist David Sedaris memorably captured the situation when he wrote (this in the final weeks of the 2008 election)

I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I’ll grant that it’s debatable that Sedaris’s illustration applies to Barack Obama running against John McCain. (Then again, Sarah Palin helped tilt it into shit-with-glass territory.) But it’s definitely the situation now, just as it was when Social Democratic and Centre candidates were running against Adolph Hitler in the 1933 German federal election.

Those media outlets treating 2024 as just another election are like the dwarfs in Last Battle.  The Calormenes have used a fabricated god to gain control over Narnia, including to persuade the dwarfs to slave for them in the mines. When Tirian frees the dwarfs and then tries to rally them to his cause, however, they aren’t having any of it. To be sure, at first things appear hopeful as they join with him, helping beat back a Calormene assault. But the aid they provide is illusory:

“Had enough, Darkies?” they yelled [at the Calormenes]. “Don’t you like it? Why doesn’t your great Tarkaan go and fight himself instead of sending you to be killed? Poor Darkies!”

“Dwarfs,” cried Tirian. “Come here and use your swords, not your tongues. There is still time. Dwarfs of Narnia! You can fight well, I know. Come back to your allegiance.”

“Yah!” sneered the Dwarfs. “Not likely. You’re just as big humbugs as the other lot. We don’t want any Kings. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs. Boo!”

This is bothsiderism at its clearest. Rather than seeing Trump as a clear and present danger to a free press, too many journalists see it as their job to treat both sides as equal humbugs. Hillary Clinton gets the same treatment for a minor e-mail violation that Trump does for a clear record of rape and fraud while Biden is hammered for his age.

In Last Battle, the dwarfs treating each side equally leads to the saddest scene in the entire book. Tirian has managed to rally some of the talking animals to his side and has sent off the mice, moles and squirrels to gnaw the ropes of talking horses that have been imprisoned by the Calormenes. Then this happens:

With a thunder of hoofs, with tossing heads, widened nostrils, and waving manes, over a score of Talking Horses of Narnia came charging up the hills. The gnawers and nibblers had done their work.

Poggin the Dwarf and the children opened their mouths to cheer but that cheer never came. Suddenly the air was full of the sound of twanging bowstrings and hissing arrows. It was the Dwarfs who were shooting and—for a moment Jill could hardly believe her eyes—they were shooting the Horses. Dwarfs are deadly archers. Horse after horse rolled over. Not one of those noble Beasts ever reached the King.

When Eustace expresses his horror, the dwarfs respond like newspapers shrugging off liberal critics:

[T]he Dwarfs jeered back at Eustace. “That was a surprise for you, little boy, eh? Thought we were on your side, did you? No fear. We don’t want any Talking Horses. We don’t want you to win any more than the other gang. You can’t take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”

Now, I’m not saying that mainstream media should turn into a leftist version of Fox News. The problem is that, by reporting “Democrats say-Republicans say” in an even-handed manner, the press actually helps the side that traffics most in lying and disinformation. The falsehoods become part of the discourse and are thereby normalized. As NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen points out, while “some lies and acts of disinformation are too important to be ignored, … repeating them in news accounts only helps them spread.”

So what to do? He, along with strategic language expert George Lakoff, argues for a truth sandwich. Rosen describes it as follows:

First state what is true. Then introduce the truthless or misleading statement. Then repeat what is true, so that the falsehood is neither the first impression nor the takeaway.

Too many in the media are seeing it more as their job to balance their coverage than to “state what is true.” By doing so, they could suffer the same fate as the dwarfs, who end up as dead as the Narnians. Or in Lewis’s metaphorical version of death, find themselves thrown into a dark stable.

In other words, Biden is fighting to save a democracy that ensures press freedom no less than free and fair elections.

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