Poetry an Ally in Times Like These

By Robin Bates | Published: April 2, 2025
Adrienne Rich

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Thursday

The horrors of being baselessly deported and imprisoned are becoming a daily occurrence in America, with one of the latest instances being an “administrative error.” Apparently Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a El Salvadoran man here under protected legal status and the father of a U.S. citizen, has been sent to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, even though he is innocent of any wrongdoing.

According the the Associated Press, Abrego Garcia “was arrested in Baltimore on March 12 after working a shift as a sheet metal apprentice in Baltimore and picking up his 5-year-old son, who has autism and other disabilities, from his grandmother’s house.” Although ICE was looking for someone else, they are now, predictably, claiming that Abrego Garcia is a gang member. His lawyers point out that the U.S. Government “has never produced an iota of evidence,” and Trumpism’s history of lying to cover up its crimes undoubtedly means that the charge is fabricated..

I wonder if, in her 1991 poem “What Kinds of Times Are These,” Adrienne Rich anticipated such seizures. After all, she talks about our country having “its own way of making people disappear.” So maybe, even 25 years ago, she sensed we had the potential. “Our country,” she writes, “is moving closer to its own truth and dread.”

The poem is responding to a fine Bertolt Brecht lyric where he writes that, when times are dark, “a conversation about trees is almost a crime.” The dark times he was referencing were Hitler coming to power. His point is that talking about anything else seems an indulgence:

Truly, I live in the dark ages.
What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!

Brecht doesn’t like this state of affairs but appears to find it inevitable. While it’s necessary to focus on the evil in the world, he laments that doing so distorts us:

For we knew only too well: 
Even the hatred of squalor 
Makes the brow grow stern. 
Even anger against injustice 
Makes the voice grow harsh. 
Alas, we 
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness 
Could not ourselves be kind.  

Rich’s counter-response is that perhaps, at such moments, talking about trees is exactly what we need.

What Kind of Times Are These
By Adrienne Rich

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

As I read the poem, Rich seems to be saying that talking about trees is a necessary counter to authoritarianism and oppression. In the growth and hope of trees, there is an implied reproof to the forces of death. Talking about trees, in other words, isn’t an avoidance of fascism but a way of connecting with the life force necessary to fight it. In this way, Rich hopes to avoid the trap that Brecht identifies.

Years ago, I attended a symposium on Iran, held at my old college (St. Mary’s College of Maryland). In one session we discussed Reading Lolita in Tehran, and one political activist was critical, wondering why we were talking about literature—and why Azar Nafisi was receiving so much publicity—when there were much more pressing issues.

My response was that if the prospect of a society in which art could flourish was not one of the goals of revolution, then what was the point? It was a version of a quote attributed to Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Rich is suggesting that, by listening carefully to poetry, we discover an essential ally in times like these.

I’m certainly finding it an ally in writing this blog. Whereas most of my posts these days are about our own dark times, I find my spirits lifted by the application of literature. It functions as a stable base and a guiding compass.

Emma Goldman quotation: The Goldman quote was her wisdom nicely distilled to a tee shirt slogan by anarchist printer Jack Frager in 1973. What she actually wrote was the following:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it.

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Shakespeare on Trans Rights

By Robin Bates | Published: April 1, 2025
Stubbs, Carter, Stephens in Twelfth Night (1996)


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Wednesday

In these dark times, we look desperately for points of light where we can find them, and one positive development has been all the judges ruling against Trump’s egregious executive orders. Recently, one court overturned his ban on transgendered people serving in the military and an appeals court upheld that ruling.

When it comes to transgender rights, we can count on William Shakespeare, who understood in a deep way the fragility of gender distinctions. Plays like Twelfth Night and As You Like It are critical for exploring why some feel compelled to change genders that don’t correspond with their birth anatomy.

That being said, Shakespeare also has a warning that progressives should heed given the outsized role that trans women competing in women’s sports has played in electoral politics. It’s an issue that alienates some liberals who otherwise have no problem with bathrooms or pronouns, partly because sports and domination are so connected. In the figure of Twelfth Night’s Orsino, the Bard shows what male entitlement looks like when it crosses gender lines.

But let’s look first at how Shakespeare challenges gender distinctions. To borrow from my book, in Twelfth Night

we encounter a man who discovers he has an inner woman, a woman who discovers she has an inner man, two men who are attracted to other men, and a woman who is attracted to another woman. Count Orsino gets to marry someone he once thought was a man; Lady Olivia makes overtures to another woman (although technically she thinks he’s a man); Viola, under the flimsiest of pretexts, passes herself off as a man; and Orsino for a time mimics behavior that he regards as feminine.

“Understanding humans as well as anyone ever has,” I go on to write, “Shakespeare knew that we are more complex than the gender labels foisted upon us by tradition, and he found an artistic vehicle to explore our complexity.”

We can regard the twins in the play, Viola and Sebastian, as stand-ins for all of us—we all have a male and a female side, and the lightning strike that splits their ship and separates them is symbolic of how, from the beginning, society assigns one gender and all the characteristics traditionally associated with it to each of us. For some, it feels as though the universe has played a terrible joke: a bolt of lightning out of the blue has separated them from an essential part of themselves.

Sometimes this ambiguity even shows up in the biological realm. There are people born with ambiguous sexual organs (“easier to dig a hole than erect a pole” has often been society’s surgical response), and there are people whose chromosomes don’t fall into either the xx or xy categories. As University of Hawaii biologist Milton Diamond succinctly puts it, “Nature loves diversity; society hates it.”

Thank goodness we have a society that is somewhat willing—at least so far—to allow people to openly cross the gender divide. Society is the beneficiary because people can serve in ways that otherwise would have been closed to them. From what I understand, trans members of the armed forces have made tremendous contributions. One reason America as a nation has flourished is because it has granted people the freedom to follow their genius, even when doing so breaks with past practice.

To voice my one concern, however, I offer up a personal story. To begin with some background, I was a small and shy boy when I was growing up, one who didn’t engage in roughhouse or play football (a religion in rural Tennessee). Although I am cis-gender, I vividly remember thinking that a mistake had been made somewhere, that I was actually a girl. I was riveted by stories of boys who looked like girls (Little Lord Fauntleroy) or actually were girls (Tip/Ozma in The Land of Oz), and when I encountered a recording of Twelfth Night in seventh grade, I listened to it over and over. I identified especially with Viola, with her male exterior hiding a female interior.

Here’s my story: once, at fifth grade recess, I left the boys and inserted myself in a girls’ dodgeball game. While I wasn’t athletic, my boy’s physiology meant that, for once in my life, I was the best player on the field. I still remember the satisfaction I felt. And I also remember the fury of Tootsie Green, the most athletic girl in the class, at how I had invaded her turf. She did everything she could to get me out of the game, ignoring all the other girls in the ring.

Of course, I had a testosterone advantage. If males are stronger and faster than women, it is because we have more muscle mass, larger frames, and larger lung and heart capacity. Weak though I was compared to other boys, I could dominate over girls, something males have a history of doing (to say the least). My reservation about trans women playing female sports is that there is not a level physiological playing field, giving them a built-in advantage.

Martine Navratilova, a pioneering lesbian athlete, got into trouble in 2019 when she made this point. Male athletes who transition to become female athletes but decline to undergo gender reassignment surgery, she said, are “cheating” and should not be allowed to compete against women. As a result of her comments, she was called transphobic, dismissed as a TERF (trans-exclusionary feminist), and dropped by Athlete Ally, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group.

Decades later, I remembered the brief sense of superiority I felt on that dodgeball pitch after seeing the movie Tootsie, where an unemployed actor (played by Dustin Hoffmann) passes himself off as a woman in order to get a job. An English colleague of mine expressed her fury about the film, which she said contends that it takes a man to be a superior woman.

Orsino certainly believes this. At the beginning of the play, he has discovered love and sweetness, which he regards as women’s domain. “If music be the food of love, play on,” he commands, lolling around rather than (as his attendant desires) going out deer hunting. Learning that Lady Olivia won’t consider his suit until she has spent seven years mourning her brother, he is overcome with admiration. Women, with their deep sensitivity, are far superior to men, he concludes. If she can love a brother that much, he muses, just think how much she will love a husband.

Note how his gender stereotyping locks both him and Olivia into a life-denying behavior. He admires her decision to mourn for seven years and she herself feels obligated to do so. It takes a figure like Viola, who refuses to conform to gender expectations, to free the two from these mental prisons.

But before that happens, we see what happens when someone with Orsino’s male privilege starts mimicking what he regards as female behavior. When Viola, in the guise of Cesario, tries to argue him out of his Olivia fixation—Olivia, she implies, is shrugging Orsino off the way Orsino would shrug off a woman who loved him—Orsino won’t accept the equation. Now that he has ventured into women’s territory, he wishes to control it. Love for women, he asserts, is merely an appetite whereas, for men like him, it involves the liver. (Note: The liver in the 17th century was considered the site of the soul, the vital organ and the central place of all forms of mental and emotional activity. Since then we have shifted the symbolism from liver to heart.) He doesn’t acknowledge that he earlier he attributed to Olivia a great liver:

There is no woman’s sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart
So big, to hold so much; they lack retention.
Alas, their love may be called appetite,
No motion of the liver but the palate,
That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt;
But mine is all as hungry as the sea,
And can digest as much. Make no compare
Between that love a woman can bear me
And that I owe Olivia.

So take that, women. Now that I’ve entered your domain, I can inform you that you are merely emotional when you think you are in love whereas men in love are having an oceanic experience.

What’s my point? In addition to having qualms about trans women playing women’s sports, I guess I’m also advising humility in the transitioning. Patriarchal arrogance, the very thing that some transitioning men are seeking to escape, strikes deep. At the very least, Orsino’s behavior can help us understand why some TERFs are hostile to trans women. Perhaps talking about the character may pave the way for more productive interactions.

Goodness knows we need such conversations at the present moment. Radical feminists find themselves targeted by Trumpists no less than trans folk. And then there are all those other letters in LGBTQ+–not only the “T”–that find themselves in jeopardy. The time has come for strategic alliances.

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An April Fools’ Day Poem

By Robin Bates | Published: March 31, 2025
Randolph Caldecott, illus. from “Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog”

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Tuesday – April Fools’ Day

Oliver Goldsmith’s “An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog,” with its wonderfully unexpected reversal, works as an April Fools’ joke. In the spirit of the day, I also share a group chat about what war plans would look like if Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth worked for Sauron.

I recalled Goldsmith’s poem, which is a satire on sanctimonious, holier-than-thou Christians, when I was reading stories of how Trump spiritual advisor Paula White-Cain is promising spiritual blessings for a mere $1000 donation. With contorted reasoning the televangelist is telling potential clients, “You’re not doing this to get something, but you’re doing it in honor to God, realizing what you can receive for your special Passover offering of $1,000 or more as the Holy Spirit leads you.”

And if you can’t afford $1000? Well, for $125 people can obtain an “Olive Wood communion set from the Holy Land,” including “unleavened bread and grape juice from the Holy Land.”

Meanwhile, Trumpist Christians, even while claiming to be born again and washed in the blood of the lamb, show few signs of following Jesus. I think especially of how many are reveling in Trumpism’s sadistic handling of immigrants. One could say, with Rappaccini’s daughter in the Hawthorne story, “Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?”

But that’s a heavy message to attach to this comic tour de force. So set aside politics for a moment and enjoy.

An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog
By Oliver Goldsmith

Good people all, of every sort,
    Give ear unto my song;
And if you find it wond’rous short,
    It cannot hold you long.

In Isling town there was a man,
    Of whom the world might say,
That still a godly race he ran,
    Whene’er he went to pray.

A kind and gentle heart he had,
    To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad,
    When he put on his clothes.

And in that town a dog was found,
    As many dogs there be,
Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,
    And curs of low degree.

This dog and man at first were friends;
    But when a pique began,
The dog, to gain some private ends,
    Went mad and bit the man.

Around from all the neighboring streets,
    The wondering neighbors ran,
And swore the dog had lost his wits,
    To bite so good a man.

The wound it seemed both sore and sad,
    To every Christian eye;
And while they swore the dog was mad,
    They swore the man would die.

But soon a wonder came to light,
    That showed the rogues they lied,
The man recovered of the bite,
    The dog it was that died.

And now for the group chat, which of course is a parody of the discussion carried out by the “Houthi PC Small Group.” The on-line conversation, which included such top government officials as the Vice President, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense, also inadvertently added the editor of The Atlantic. Jeffrey Goldberg, who originally thought the chat was a hoax, learned about planned air strikes on Yemen shortly before they were launched. And who knows what other foreign entities were listening in?

The parody was authored by r/NonCredibleDefense (MilesLongthe3rd) and appeared on Reddit:

Gondor assault small group

Witch King: My lord, shall I launch the attack on Gondor?
Sauron: As soon as possible!
Gothmog: THE AGE OF MEN IS OVER
Gandalf: Looks like I’d better light the beacons 🔥 🔥 🔥
Sauron: Is that fucking Gandalf in our Mordor chat? Who the fuck added a wizard? ANSWER ME!

To riff off of Mark Twain’s legendary remark, “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Trump’s Cabinet. But I repeat myself.”

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Trumpism as the Hamlet Story

By Robin Bates | Published: March 30, 2025
Coke Smyth, Hamlet Stabs Polonius

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Monday

As awful as recent developments may be with regard to the Trump administration grabbing people off the streets and sending them to prison camps in El Salvador and Louisiana, I find a tiny degree of comfort that great writers of the past have recognized such reprehensible behavior and called it out in memorable poetry. Esquire’s Charles Pierce has applied Hamlet to Karoline Leavitt, White House spokesperson, after she jeered at Trump’s victims.

Here’s the sweet-smiling Leavitt commenting on the horrific video, promoted by the Trump administration, of Salvadoran soldiers and police officers brutalizing people who have been sent there, many because of misinterpreted tattoos. Asked whether the purpose of the sadistic recording is to persuade migrants to self deport, Leavitt replied, “We are encouraging illegal immigrants to actively self-deport to maybe save themselves from being in one of these fun videos” (Pierce’s italics).

To which Pierce responds, “The woman is the living embodiment of Hamlet’s conclusion that ‘one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.’”

Hamlet is referring here to Claudius. The prince has just learned from his dead father’s ghost that Claudius poured poison into his ear while he was sleeping. Hamlet, who it appears has been filling manuscripts with various observations, resolves from this moment on to devote his note taking to a single subject: the “smiling, damnèd villain” that is his uncle:

I’ll wipe away all trivial, fond records,
 All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
 That youth and observation copied there,
 And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
 Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!
 …
 O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!
 My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile and smile and be a villain.
 At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.

We should all have Hamlet’s focus at the moment. Thinking of the play, I can’t help but think of Hamlet, Sr. as our great presidents of the past—say, a combination of Washington and Lincoln—coming to warn us that our democracy has been taken over by a usurper. American democracy, for all its drawbacks, has been a jewel in Enlightenment’s crown, and now it is being sold to the highest bidder by a money-grubbing huckster. Trump has seduced America as Claudius seduces Gertrude, who is failing to appreciate the man she so casually forgets:

The Ghost: Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wits, with traitorous gifts—
 O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power
 So to seduce!—won to his shameful lust
 The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen.

We, meanwhile, are like Hamlet, stunned by the contrast between the greatness of America’s past and its shabby present. It’s a contrast comparable to that between Hamlet’s father and his uncle, which Hamlet sets forth for his mother:

Look here upon this picture and on this,
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See what a grace was seated on this brow,
 Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,
 An eye like Mars’ to threaten and command,
 A station like the herald Mercury
 New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill,
A combination and a form indeed
 Where every god did seem to set his seal
 To give the world assurance of a man.
 This was your husband. Look you now what follows.
 Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear
Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes?
 Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed
 And batten on this moor? Ha! Have you eyes?

Trump as a mildewed ear? A moor compared to a mountain? And not only when set against the towering figures of Washington and Lincoln. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are mountains compared to this narcissistic braggart.

Meanwhile, Trump sycophants like Leavitt are the Poloniuses in this drama and should take heed what happens to him. “A rat, a rat,” shouts Hamlet as he stabs Polonius through the tapestry. Or in the immortal words of NeverTrumper Rick Wilson, “Everything that Trump touches dies.”

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Her Maker’s Maker, Her Father’s Mother

By Robin Bates | Published: March 29, 2025
Fra Angelico, The Annunciation

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Sunday

John Donne, who believes that God loves for us to use our imaginations—especially when we engage in playful paradoxes and witty wordplay—brings the full power of his intelligence to celebrate St. Gabriel’s visit to Mary, supposedly on or around March 25. (After all, March 25 is nine months before December 25.) In Donne’s poem “Annunciation,” the paradoxes include:

–Jesus “cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear”;
–Jesus “cannot die, yet cannot choose but die”;
–Jesus is at once son and brother to Mary;
–Mary is her “Maker’s maker” and her “Father’s mother”;
–in the darkness of her womb she has light:
–cloistered in the smallness of that womb is immensity

Donne also has fun with the double meaning of the word “conceived”: God conceived that this moment would happen (“In the beginning was the Word”), which led Mary to conceive the baby Jesus. And the poet goes crazy with the word “all” in the first two lines.

Annunciation
By John Donne

Salvation to all that will is nigh;
That All, which always is all everywhere,
Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear,
Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,
Lo! faithful Virgin, yields Himself to lie
In prison, in thy womb; and though He there
Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He’ll wear,
Taken from thence, flesh, which death’s force may try.
Ere by the spheres time was created thou
Wast in His mind, who is thy Son, and Brother;
Whom thou conceivest, conceived; yea, thou art now
Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother,
Thou hast light in dark, and shutt’st in little room
Immensity, cloister’d in thy dear womb.

I’m struck by how Donne’s sonnet (iambic pentameter with an abba-cddc-efef-gg rhyme scheme) can’t easily accommodate words like “salvation” and “immensity”– just as Mary’s mortal womb can’t contain Jesus’s immortality.” Donne at once locks his subject into a tight verse form and has his subject explode the container.

The lesson? God is always bigger than our attempts to reduce Him/Her/It to the measure of our understanding. When people attempt to employ God to advance their own narrow agendas, God won’t play along. After all, God is “that All, which always is all everywhere.”

Oh yes, and God is also accessible “to all.”

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Trump, Hitler: Two Storytelling Narcissists

By Robin Bates | Published: March 27, 2025
Channeling Evita and Mussolini, Trump poses in the Kennedy Center

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Friday

Much has been made—and some comfort found—in the fact that the Trump-Musk administration resembles the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Inadvertently inviting a reporter into a high-level meeting discussing battle plans for an about-to-be-launched attack is only the latest example of many.

It’s less comforting to learn, however, that the same could be said of Adolph Hitler’s administration. As Tom Phillips’s recent book HUMANS: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up observes, Hitler was actually “an incompetent, lazy egomaniac and his government was an absolute clown show.”

Phillips points this out to counter our impression that the Nazi machine was ruthlessly efficient. In actuality, it resembled what we’re currently seeing from Trump:

[Hitler’s] government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was actually in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would often end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans. His “unreliability had those who worked with him pulling out their hair,” as his confidant Ernst Hanfstaengl later wrote in his memoir Zwischen Weißem und Braunem Haus. This meant that rather than carrying out the duties of state, they spent most of their time in-fighting and back-stabbing each other in an attempt to either win his approval or avoid his attention altogether, depending on what mood he was in that day.

Phillips notes that there is debate amongst historians about “whether this was a deliberate ploy on Hitler’s part to get his own way, or whether he was just really, really bad at being in charge of stuff.” He himself concludes that, “when you look at Hitler’s personal habits, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was just a natural result of putting a work-shy narcissist in charge of a country.”

What Germany’s elites failed to realize, however—and what many Americans failed to realize—is that just because you’re incompetent doesn’t mean that you can’t take over a country.

Furthermore, although lazy idiots, Trump and Hitler knew/know how to put on a show. In my book Better Living through Literature I talk about Jonathan Gottschall’s Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, which looks at Hitler’s genius in this area. Gottschall examines “how he used story in his rise to power, and how he suppressed countervailing stories”:

Starting off with the Fuhrer at 16, Gottschall says that Hitler’s megalomania was triggered by Richard Wagner’s opera Rienzi and that he relied on Wagner ever after. The opera tells a story about a populist hero who rises to power and then is betrayed by his former allies and dies in a glorious last stand. In other words, Wagner’s work operatically fed both Hitler’s megalomania and his narcissistic self-pity. Gottschall argues that Hitler essentially “ruled through art, and he ruled for art.” Citing Frederic Spotts’s Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, he notes that Hitler’s goals were more “broadly artistic” than military or political. According to Spotts, “Hitler’s interest in the arts was as intense as his racism; to disregard the one is as profound a distortion as to pass over the other.”

Because of his interest in art, Hitler, along with his chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels, paid special attention to literature, targeting books they claimed were “un-German in spirit.” His ban, however, worked as an indirect compliment, as Bertolt Brecht observes in his poem “The Burning of the Books.” By consigning to the flames such writers as Heinrich Mann, Brecht, Ernst Glaser, Erich Kastner, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Heinrich Heine, and Thomas Mann, the Nazis implicitly acknowledged, as Gottschall puts it, that “ink people are among the most powerful and dangerous people in the world.”

I thought of Gottschall’s book and Hitler’s fixation on culture as I watched Trump assume directorship of the Kennedy Center and pose, Evita-like, from the upper balcony. (He may also have been channeling Mussolini.) If everything is about showy narratives, then it makes sense that he would become excited over staging musicals. (Apparently he wants to bring back Evita, Cats, and Phantom of the Opera.) We saw this in his first administration when he fantasized about Red Square-style military parades, worried about his hair getting wet when visiting Normandy Beach cemeteries, and criticized his chief of staff General John Kelly for inviting a disabled vet to sing the national anthem. His policy positions may be an inch deep, allowing subordinates to dictate his agenda, but he knows how to spin a narrative.

Because Hitler had similar skills, he was able to launch a war that led to between 70 and 85 million dead. Trump will never achieve that level of “success,” but between his Covid response, his attacks on USAID, his order to halt funding childhood vaccinations abroad (a program that has reportedly saved 18.8 children’s lives since its inception in 2000), and his support for Russia in the Ukraine conflict, he’s tallying an impressive number of deaths on his own.

But hey, if he can lord it over our cultural institutions, it will all have been worth it. Unlike Evita, however, he will not be cried for when he falls.

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Kafka and America’s Disappeared

By Robin Bates | Published: March 26, 2025

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Thursday

In a conversation I had last week with author Maggie Thrash, I learned that dystopian science fiction, long a bestselling genre, is less popular these days. The major reason makes sense. Why read dark warnings about the future when the future is here, when George Orwell’s 1984 appears to be an operations manual for the current administration and Handmaid’s Tale is a step away from becoming reality?

I mention this latter example in light of terrifying developments regarding female reproduction. I recommend subscribing to Jessica Valenti’s free substack blog Abortion, Every Day  if you want a full rundown. There you can read about women being arrested for miscarriages, Texas midwives being charged with felonies, and pregnant women dying of sepsis when they could have received life-saving abortions. The situation worsens by the day.

In today’s post, however, I want to focus on those people who are being disappeared, a development reminiscent of Kafka’s Trial. The Guardian has an account of a Canadian entrepreneur who, for two weeks, found herself in ICE custody and then two private prisons after she entered the country legally. Fortunately Jasmine Mooney, as she notes in the article, is one of the lucky ones, thanks to various support systems she could draw on.

Others have not been so fortunate. Many of the Venezuelans sent to the notorious El Salvador prison have little legal recourse, even though they are not in fact gang members (apparently ICE has been misinterpreting their tattoos). These misidentifications haven’t prevented the State Department under Marco Rubio from cheering their horrific treatment. The U.S., it appears, is several steps into our version of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem, “First they came for the communists.”

At the very end of Kafka’s Trial, we watch as K is disappeared. I won’t get into K’s psychological drama here, how he’s so beaten down that he practically accedes to his execution. Rather, I focus on the fact that he’s innocent of all wrongdoing. For no reason at all—certainly no reason that anyone in the book gives—he has been singled out to be killed.

In a scenario that is becoming increasingly common in the States, two men show up at K’s door and, without any explanation, escort him out:

[T]hey took his arms in a way that K. had never experienced before. They kept their shoulders close behind his, did not turn their arms in but twisted them around the entire length of K.’s arms and took hold of his hands with a grasp that was formal, experienced and could not be resisted. K. was held stiff and upright between them, they formed now a single unit so that if any one of them had been knocked down all of them must have fallen. They formed a unit of the sort that normally can be formed only by matter that is lifeless.

The men escort K to an abandoned quarry, where they prepare for the execution:

After exchanging a few courtesies about who was to carry out the next tasks—the gentlemen did not seem to have been allocated specific functions—one of them went to K. and took his coat, his waistcoat, and finally his shirt off him….[Then he took him under the arm and walked up and down with him a little way while the other gentleman looked round the quarry for a suitable place. When he had found it he made a sign and the other gentleman escorted him there. It was near the rockface, there was a stone lying there that had broken loose. The gentlemen sat K. down on the ground, leant him against the stone and settled his head down on the top of it….Then one of the gentlemen opened his frock coat and from a sheath hanging on a belt stretched across his waistcoat he withdrew a long, thin, double-edged butcher’s knife which he held up in the light to test its sharpness. The repulsive courtesies began once again, one of them passed the knife over K. to the other, who then passed it back over K. to the first. K. now knew it would be his duty to take the knife as it passed from hand to hand above him and thrust it into himself. But he did not do it, instead he twisted his neck, which was still free, and looked around. He was not able to show his full worth, was not able to take all the work from the official bodies, he lacked the rest of the strength he needed and this final shortcoming was the fault of whoever had denied it to him.

And finally this:

But the hands of one of the gentleman were laid on K.’s throat, while the other pushed the knife deep into his heart and twisted it there, twice. As his eyesight failed, K. saw the two gentlemen cheek by cheek, close in front of his face, watching the result. “Like a dog!” he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.

The “like a dog” thought points to how he has been stripped of his humanity and reduced to such a state that he sees himself as an animal. When a society starts descending to that level, we are in Nazi territory. Throughout the novel, K has attempted to do everything society has instructed him to, only to end up here. The allegorical “K” stands for all of us.

America has become Amerika.

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Trump’s Pecksniffian Trans Ban

By Robin Bates | Published: March 25, 2025
Joseph Clayton, Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit

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Wednesday

It’s not every day that one comes across a public allusion to Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens’s sixth novel, so my literature scholar’s heart leaped when a Washington Post columnist described a Trumpian pronouncement as “Pecksniffian.”

I’ll explain what the descriptor means in a moment but first see if you can figure it out for yourself by reading this passage from Trump’s executive order (probably penned by a subordinate) banning trans individuals from the U.S. military:

[A]doption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.  A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member. 

To which the Washington Post’s Monica Hesse responded,

Hoo boy, we could do a whole column just on that one Pecksniffian paragraph — but it turns out maybe we don’t need to, because earlier this week a federal judge blocked the order. It was full of “illogical judgments based on conjecture,” the judge wrote, calling the government’s arguments “totally, grossly misleading.”

Webster’s Dictionary defines “Pecksniffian” as “unctuously hypocritical; pharisaical,” and the idea of Trump attempting to take the moral high ground on any issue at all, especially with regard to the military, is indeed hoo-boy laughable. Pecksniff is a particularly slimy Dickens villain who puts on sanctimonious airs as he runs an “architectural school.” I use quotation marks because the education is worthless, a means for Pecksniff to rob his pupils of every cent they have. (Sounds like Trump University.) Dickens’s sarcasm goes into overdrive as he describes the man:

It has been remarked that Mr Pecksniff was a moral man. So he was. Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr Pecksniff, especially in his conversation and correspondence….He was a most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous precept than a copy book. Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there; but these were his enemies, the shadows cast by his brightness; that was all.

Pecksniff, it turns out, knows as much about architecture as Trump knows about governing (or, for that matter, business):

The brazen plate upon the door (which being Mr Pecksniff’s, could not lie) bore this inscription, ‘PECKSNIFF, ARCHITECT,’ to which Mr Pecksniff, on his cards of business, added, AND LAND SURVEYOR.’ In one sense, and only one, he may be said to have been a Land Surveyor on a pretty large scale, as an extensive prospect lay stretched out before the windows of his house. Of his architectural doings, nothing was clearly known, except that he had never designed or built anything; but it was generally understood that his knowledge of the science was almost awful in its profundity.

Like Trump, Pecksniff is a genius when it comes to conning people out of their money:

Mr Pecksniff’s professional engagements, indeed, were almost, if not entirely, confined to the reception of pupils; for the collection of rents, with which pursuit he occasionally varied and relieved his graver toils, can hardly be said to be a strictly architectural employment. His genius lay in ensnaring parents and guardians, and pocketing premiums.

What is most grating about Pecksniff, however—and what is grating about Trump’s executive order—is the sanctimoniousness. When John Westlock, one of Pecksniff’s former pupils and now an adult, returns to accuse him of fraud, Pecksniff magnanimously forgives him:

‘No, John,’ said Mr Pecksniff, with a calmness quite ethereal; ‘no, I will not shake hands, John. I have forgiven you. I had already forgiven you, even before you ceased to reproach and taunt me. I have embraced you in the spirit, John, which is better than shaking hands.’

Note how, like Trump, Pecksniff casts himself as the victim. Westlock will have none of it:

‘As to your forgiveness, Mr Pecksniff,’ said the youth, ‘I’ll not have it upon such terms. I won’t be forgiven.’

‘Won’t you, John?’ retorted Mr Pecksniff, with a smile. ‘You must. You can’t help it. Forgiveness is a high quality; an exalted virtue; far above your control or influence, John. I will forgive you. You cannot move me to remember any wrong you have ever done me, John.’

‘Wrong!’ cried the other, with all the heat and impetuosity of his age. ‘Here’s a pretty fellow! Wrong! Wrong I have done him! He’ll not even remember the five hundred pounds he had with me under false pretenses; or the seventy pounds a year for board and lodging that would have been dear at seventeen! Here’s a martyr!’

Just as Trump talks of “humility and selflessness required of a service member,” Pecksniff pushes his sanctimoniousness up a notch:

“Money, John,” said Mr Pecksniff, “is the root of all evil. I grieve to see that it is already bearing evil fruit in you. But I will not remember its existence. I will not even remember the conduct of that misguided person”—and here, although he spoke like one at peace with all the world, he used an emphasis that plainly said “I have my eye upon the rascal now”—”that misguided person who has brought you here to-night, seeking to disturb (it is a happiness to say, in vain) the heart’s repose and peace of one who would have shed his dearest blood to serve him.”

Yes, Pecksniff and Trump are bullshit artists of the highest order and neither ever experiences the least bit of remorse. The difference is that, in the final chapters, Pecksniff is a groveling bankrupt, with the terms “hang-dog,” “scoundrel,” and “ghoul” applied to him by the wealthy benefactor who makes all things right. Even Tom Pinch, for twenty years a loyal Pecksniff apprentice and assistant, eventually sees through him. By contrast, Trump continues to flourish and nothing appears to shake the faith of his followers, despite him corrupting everything he touches.

Still, kudos to Hesse for making the comparison. I just wish I had Dickens’s confidence of someone stepping in to restore order and dispense justice.

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To Resist Trump, Be Like Odysseus

By Robin Bates | Published: March 24, 2025
Heinrich Dahling, Odysseus Killing the Suitors (1801)

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Tuesday

This past weekend, when Julia and I were visiting our grandchildren in Georgia, we discovered that Esmé, Etta, and Eden have all fallen in love with the new musical version of The Odyssey. It’s a dark show but, then again, it’s a dark story. As I listened to them talk about it, I thought of the difficult position in which Telemachus finds himself. It’s not unlike what Congressional Democrats and principled Congressional Republicans (if there are any left) are undergoing at the moment.

While, like Telemachus, they reside in the king’s palace and supposedly have power, they are actually in thrall to a group of thugs who are busy ransacking the place and gobbling up the wealth.

I’ve written in the past about how the words that Odysseus uses to summarize the suitors could be applied to Trump, Musk & Company. Odysseus delivers the assessment after throwing off his beggar’s disguise and addressing them directly:

You yellow dogs, you thought I’d never make it
home from the land of Troy. You took my house to plunder,
twisted my maids to serve your beds. You dared
bid for my wife while I was still alive.
Contempt was all you had for the gods who rule wide heaven,
contempt for what men say of you hereafter.
Your last hour has come. You die in blood.

Before Odysseus returns, however, Telemachus must figure out other ways to resist. If he shows himself too bold, they will kill him, and indeed they attempt to ambush his ship as he returns from a voyage. We therefore watch him thrashing around impotently, somewhat like Democrats Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House.

Telemachus, who at this point is 19 or 20, turns to the general populace for help, calling for a counsel of the island’s elders. Appealing to their sense of what is right, he describes what the suitors are doing to his property:

No; these men spend their days around our house
killing our beeves and sheep and fatted goats.
carousing, soaking up our good dark wine,
not caring what they do. They squander everything.
We have no strong Odysseus to defend us…

Then he admits his impotence:

and as to putting up a fight ourselves—
we’d only show our incompetence in arms.
Expel them, yes, if I only had the power;
the whole thing’s out of hand, insufferable.
My house is being plundered: is this courtesy?
Where is your indignation? Where is your shame?

While he gets their sympathy, however, that’s all he can get and he ends by feeling sorry for himself:

And in hot anger now he threw the staff to the ground,
his eyes grown bright with tears. A wave of sympathy
ran through the crowd, all hushed…

Those assembled are too cowed to come to his aid, just as Congress is cowed by Trump, Musk and MAGA. When the old men witness what appears to be an omen and interpret it–a pair of fearsome eagles could represent Odysseus and Telemachus wreaking vengeance upon the plunderers—the suitors will have none of it. Eurýmakhos, for instance, responds to the interpreter in words reminiscent of Trump threatening to send people who criticize him to El Salvador’s notorious prison:

You should have perished with him—
then we’d be spared this nonsense in assembly,
as good as telling Telemakhos to rage on;
do you think you can gamble on a gift from him?
Here is what I foretell, and it’s quite certain:
if you, with what you know of ancient lore,
encourage bitterness in this young man,
it means, for him, only the more frustration
he can do nothing whatever with two eagles—
and as for you, old man, we’ll fix a penalty
that you will groan to pay.

The same thing happens when another of the old men, Mentor, speaks up to complain about the assembly’s inaction. First, Mentor:

I find it less revolting that the suitors
carry their malice into violent acts;
at least they stake their lives
when they go pillaging the house of Odysseus—
their lives upon it, he will not come again.
What sickens me is to see the whole community
sitting still, and never a voice or a hand raised
against them—a mere handful compared with you.

To which another suitor, Leókritos, points out that, even were Odysseus to return, he wouldn’t stand a chance against the young men. It’s like Trump saying that, even if the courts rule against him, he’s the one that has all the power:

“Mentor, what mischief are you raking up?
Will this crowd risk the sword’s edge over a dinner?
Suppose Odysseus himself indeed
came in and found the suitors at his table:
he might be hot to drive them out. What then?
                                    …he’d only bring down
abject death on himself against those odds.

Having laid out the situation, Leókritos then essentially tells the assembled old men to get lost—”Now let all present go about their business”—on which note all “were quick to end the parley.” Telemachus may have called the meeting but the suitors end it and return to the house of Odysseus.

Unfortunately, we have no Odysseus to come save us. But we can learn from him the importance of being strategic. Odysseus figures out who he can count on as allies and whom he should see as enemies. He also figures out which venue gives him the greatest chance of success.

And in the end, he overcomes the odds and reestablishes legitimate rule. No wonder my grandchildren like the story.

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