Beowulf’s Advice for Battling Depression

By Robin Bates | Published: March 5, 2025

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Thursday

Back in 2012 I wrote the book How Beowulf Can Save America: An Epic Hero’s Guide to Defeating the Politics of Rage. While I knew the title was hyperbolic, I wanted people to realize that poets in the past had recognized and provided powerful responses to problems we continue to face. A question I have for myself is whether my optimism still holds up 13 years later, given the dark turn that American politics has taken.

The same monsters continue to plague us: troll resentment (Grendel), troll desire for revenge (Grendel’s Mother), and dragon depression. The weapons that Beowulf uses to counter these monsters still have some effectiveness although Trumpian fascism is providing a stiffer challenge than I anticipated in 2012. For instance, I’m no longer as confident that the giant sword used by Beowulf to slay Grendel’s Mother is as readily available.

Grendel’s grieving mother was embodied in the Tea Partiers at the time that I wrote the book and can be found in Trump’s supporters. Grieving over their vision of a lost America, they demand that others suffer to assuage their hurt. In 2012 I thought that America’s sword was made up of such foundational documents as “The Declaration of Independence,” The Constitution, “The Gettysburg Address,” Emma Lazarus’s words on the Statue of Liberty, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech—and that it could withstand the anger. In the poem, that sword comes to Beowulf’s aid when he is being subjected to relentless attacks of vengeful rage. I didn’t anticipate that, in our case, the attacks would be directed at those very ideals.

I don’t think Americans have entirely abandoned those ideals, so there’s reason for hope in that quarter. I want to focus in today’s post, however, on the third monster in the poem. The Dragon visits a country that has been safe and prosperous for 50 years. Geatland under Beowulf is so secure that no invader dares attack, and unlike some of the bad kings in the poem, Beowulf is a good and generous king. But he does have an existential crisis: he looks back over his past history and, instead of a glorious trajectory, he sees one meaningless death after another. There is no forward-looking idealism, none of the youthful bravado we saw in the young Beowulf. He is aging out and we learn that, once he dies, the country will be swarmed over by Geatland’s enemies—the Frisians, the Franks, the Swedes, and others.

For a while after Trump’s election, Democrats and liberals like myself became dragon depressed, hunkering down in our caves and feeling sorry for ourselves. This is the Dragon that gets Beowulf in the end.

Only—and this is important—Beowulf goes out fighting the Dragon rather than surrendering to it. Although he dies in the effort, as we all must, he is able to prevail. That’s because he learns to accept the help of another. He and his nephew Wiglaf fight the dragon together. Prior to this collaborative effort, Beowulf has thought he must fight the enemy alone, which is itself a dragon trait.

In my book, which was partly an attempt to persuade readers to coalesce behind Obama’s candidacy, I wrote the following. To update it, substitute “Democratic Party” for “leaders.” What matters is a collective response:

We can learn from Wiglaf, a young warrior witnessing his first fighting, that the important thing is not our disillusionment but the battle itself. Regardless of how our leaders have disappointed us, Wiglaf teaches us that it is still our responsibility to engage with them against a common enemy. That enemy’s destructive power, after all, is far more significant than any mistakes our leader might have made.

Like many Obama supporters, Wiglaf knows that his leader has brought some of his problems on himself. He even points out that the king has insisted on going his own way, which has had serious consequences:

Often when one man follows his own will
many are hurt.

Nevertheless, Wiglaf goes to Beowulf’s rescue anyway, seeing it as his job to bolster the man who leads his people. Wiglaf’s speech shows the potential for youthful idealism to reinvigorate reinvigorate the elderly:

Go on, dear Beowulf, do everything
you said you would when you were still young
and vowed you would never let your name and fame
be dimmed while you lived.  Your deeds are famous,
so stay resolute, my lord, defend your life now
with the whole of your strength.  I shall stand by you.

The message of Beowulf-Wiglaf’s victory is that neither leader nor allies can defeat the dragon alone. We must do it together.

There’s every temptation, when one is feeling discouraged, to become a dragon. One can withdraw, feeling bitter and sorry for oneself, but that only concedes the battle to the enemy. Better to find others who are similarly concerned and join forces. Together you can remind each other why the battle is meaningful and achieve goals that would be unreachable had you ventured out by yourself.

In short, we’re all together in the business of saving democracy. If we do so our legacy, like Beowulf’s funeral shrine, will be like a shining beacon serving to guide future generations over “dark seas.”

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Böll on Desperately Clinging to the Past

By Robin Bates | Published: March 5, 2025
A German family Christmas

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Wednesday

A few weeks ago I led a discussion about the enjoyable German film Goodbye, Lenin. In it, a loyal believer in the East German Communist Party (at least people think she’s a believer) suffers a heart attack and goes into a coma. The wall comes down while she’s out of it, and upon her coming to, the doctor warns her family that a second shock will kill her. As a result, her family works to create an alternative reality, going to extraordinary lengths to assure her that nothing has changed.

The film, I believe, owes something to the Henrich Böll short story “Christmas Not Just Once a Year,” written six years after the end of World War II. I bring it up today because I think it helps explain Donald Trump’s continuing hold on his followers. Even though it appears that the president’s measures will hurt everyone who isn’t wealthy, Böll’s story makes it clear that people will endure a great deal of pain to keep an illusion alive. While liberals are hoping that people will turn from the president as inflation soars, people lose their jobs, and entitlement programs are slashed, “Christmas Not Just Once” cautions that disenchantment will not come easily or quickly.

In the story, which can be regarded as a black comedy parable, a beloved aunt insists on maintaining beloved Christmas rituals despite the war. Eventually, however, the apologetic narrator—apologetic because he doesn’t like to revive unpleasant memories—relates how the ceremonies come to an end:

Again at the risk of making myself very unpopular, I must mention in passing that the number of air raids on our city was indeed considerable, to say nothing of their violence. At any rate, my aunt’s Christmas tree fell victim—the thread of my narrative forbids my mentioning other victims—to modern warfare; foreign ballistic experts temporarily snuffed out its existence.

Once the war is over, however, the ceremony resumes:

I well remember the day we were invited to my uncle’s home. It was in January 1947, and bitterly cold outside. But indoors it was warm, and there was no shortage of things to eat. And when the lights were put out, the candles lit, when the dwarfs began to hammer, the angel whispered “Peace,” and again, “Peace,” I felt transported back into an era that I had assumed to be past.

This longing for the past, however, becomes a real problem. Even though times change, Aunt Milla can’t change with them, and the ending of Christmas precipitates a crisis:

When my cousin Johannes, on Candlemas Eve, after the tree had been lit for the last time, began to detach the dwarfs from their clips, my aunt, until then such a gentle soul, set up a pitiful wail, a wail so violent and sudden that my cousin was startled, and lost control over the gently swaying tree. Then it happened: there was a tinkling and a ringing, dwarfs and bells, anvils and all-surmounting angel—everything crashed to the floor, and my aunt screamed.

Nor does the screaming stop, even though neurologists and psychiatrists are brought in:

Only the strongest medication yielded a few hours of quiet; however, the dose of Luminal that can be given daily to a sixty-year-old woman without endangering her life is unfortunately rather small. But it is torture to have in the house a woman screaming at the top of her voice; by the second day the family was already totally distraught. Even the comforting words of the priest, who always celebrated Christmas Eve with the family, had no effect: my aunt screamed.

It so happens that she can be calmed only by a resumption of Christmas festivities. Before long, the family finds itself celebrating Christmas every day.

Despite the uncle’s firm hand, which insists on everyone participating in the charade, eventually the strain becomes too great, tearing the family apart. By the end of two years, two members have fled the country, one has been institutionalized, the uncle is engaging in shady business practices to finance the operation (he has also taken a mistress), and a nephew has joined a monastery.  Meanwhile, professional actors have taken the place of the older family members. At one point the narrator stops by and witnesses the following scene:

It was a warm summer’s evening when I passed by there, and even as I turned the corner into the chestnut avenue I could hear the words “Christmas glitter decks the forests …” …I crept slowly up to the house and looked through a gap in the curtains into the room: the resemblance of the playactors to the relatives they were representing was so startling that for a moment I could not make out who actually was in charge—as they call it—that evening. I could not see the dwarfs,
but I could hear them. Their chirping tinkle is on wavelengths that penetrate every wall. The whispering of the angel was inaudible. My aunt seemed genuinely happy…The children were playing with dolls and toy wagons in a corner of the room: they looked pale and wan. Perhaps something really should be done about them, after all. It occurred to me that they might be replaced by wax dummies, the kind used in drugstore windows to promote milk powder and skin cream.

When Böll wrote his story, many Germans wanted to pretend that World War II had never happened and that they could return to the good old days. Watching the narrator slide around the facts of the war is like watching Trump voters pretend that he never instigated an attack on the Capitol or that he is not currently assaulting the Constitution and handing the country over to Russia. Note the narrator’s hurried insistence to get back to what interests him:

During the years 1939 to 1945 there was a war on. In wartime there is a lot of singing, shooting, talking, fighting, starving, and dying—and bombs are dropped, all disagreeable things with which I have no intention of boring my contemporaries. I must merely mention them because the war had a bearing on the story I wish to tell. For the war was registered by my Aunt Milla merely as a force that began as early as Christmas 1939 to jeopardize her Christmas tree. 

Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

A number of Americans are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to push back the clock and pretend that the last 60 or so years never happened. Some are still traumatized that we had a Black president and almost had a second one. Their dream is to return to an America where white men are in charge, where everyone goes to Christian churches, where abortion and homosexuality are illegal, where women and people of color and Jews know their place, and where gas is 30 cents a gallon. They will scream—and scream and scream—until Daddy steps in and gives them back the reality they long for.

Meanwhile, thanks to their determined efforts, the nation falls apart around them. But at least they’ve won the “War on Christmas.”

Historical note: My father, who was a translator during World War II, spent several months in Munich after the Germans surrendered. (He saw Dachau three days after it was liberated.) A very sweet man, I saw him express anger only twice in his letters home and once was over the refusal of everyday Germans to take any responsibility for what they had done. Böll captures this evasiveness in his story.

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What Musk’s Favorite Books Reveal

By Robin Bates | Published: March 3, 2025

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Tuesday

Unlike our titular president, our actual president (i.e., Elon Musk) is a reader. Or at least he has informed us which books are amongst his favorites. (I’ve already written about his love for Lord of the Rings.) Because favorite books can tell us a lot about someone—apparently the only book Trump’s first wife ever saw him read was a collection of Hitler’s speeches—I examine what Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide of the Galaxy, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot tell us about the man who has set his goons upon our governmental agencies, firing people willy nilly while sucking up private information.

Oh, and did I mention steering governmental contracts into his own pockets?

Atlas Shrugged is predictably to be found on the list, as it is on the list of many who think they are too smart for the rest of the world. It’s worth noting that the novel has been paired with Lord of the Rings in a memorable blog comment by one John Rogers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

In Atlas Shrugged, various corporation heads, including millionaire John Galt, are at war with the regulatory state. Feeling victimized, they shrug off social responsibilities and go on strike. Without their entrepreneurial spirit, society collapses, at which point the billionaires return to build a new world on the ruins. The work is an exercise in libertarian thinking that indulges in such infantile grievances as that they are not properly appreciated, and that the world will miss them when they’re gone.

Musk is currently busy making sure there are plenty of ruins to build on. Actually, the dynamic of his destruction is probably more like that described by activist Naomi Klein in her work The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. As she describes it, the “disaster capitalism complex” exploits moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies. Where the current situation is slightly different is that Musk is actually creating a crisis where there weren’t crises before. You can be sure, however, that he’ll take full advantage of the mayhem he is creating.

The other fantasy in Ayn Rand’s novels is of the self-made man who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps. Of course, as the son of wealthy South Africans Musk had plenty of help along the way, including from the United States government. In his search for “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government, he reminds me of the father of Major Major in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, who is a farmer paid for not growing alfalfa:

Major Major’s father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle, and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could. He was a devout man whose pulpit was everywhere.

“The Lord gave us good farmers two strong hands so that we could take as much as we could grab with both of them,” he preached with ardor on the courthouse steps or in the front of the A&P as he waited for the bad-tempered gum-chewing young cashier he was after to step outside and give him a nasty look. “If the Lord didn’t want us to take as much as we could get,” he preached, “He wouldn’t have given us two good hands to take it with.” And the others murmured, “Amen.”

Major Major’s father had a Calvinist’s faith in predestination and could perceive distinctly how everyone’s misfortunes but his own were expressions of God’s will . . .

Ayn Rand’s novels empower people like Musk to run roughshod over others. From reading them, libertarian billionaires can imagine themselves as protagonists in an heroic drama.

I’m not intimately acquainted with those works from the so-called “golden age of science fiction” mentioned by Musk—The Foundation Trilogy and Stranger in a Strange Land—but I’m not surprised that they would have attracted him. Foundation is about a galactic empire falling apart and about one man’s attempt to save the future. One can see how it would feed into Musk’s megalomania.

Stranger, meanwhile, is about a Martian-raised immigrant (Valentine Michael Smith) who, upon coming to earth, founds a new religion that will reorganize society and culture. He is not appreciated for his contributions and ultimately killed, but his followers prepare to carry out his vision. The only part of the novel that Musk doesn’t care for is the ending (“it kind of goes off the rails at the end”), with its hint that Smith is an incarnation of the archangel Michael. Why venture into spirituality, one can imagine Musk asking, when the rest of the novel describes his aspirations for the strange land to which he immigrated at 21.

Science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s was very technologically oriented, with scientific engineers—always men—seeking way to impose their will on their surroundings. It would change later under the influence of such authors as Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel Delaney, who were more interested in sci-fi as a metaphor for interior states of mind. But although Musk would have started reading sci-fi when they were in their heyday, he appears have preferred the earlier technocratic stuff.

His preferences here help explain why he likes Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While I too love Adams’s satire, this satire is aimed at 1950’s style sci-fi, and there is very little about the intricacy of human relationships in it. I wonder if Musk identifies at all with Zaphod Beeblebrox, a character with an ego the size of the universe. (My post asking whether Zaphod or Trump has a bigger ego can be found here.)

Waiting for Godot is also an emotionally barren work. In fact, all of the works mentioned by Musk lack human complexity and love. And yes, this goes for Lord of the Rings as well, at least when it comes to male-female relationships.

In the final analysis, Musk has been drawn to literature that doesn’t challenge him emotionally and that encourages him to indulge in conquest fantasies. And as I noted in my post on his Tolkien fixation, he fails to take away the author’s main point, which is that power without humility and without compassion corrupts.

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Trump as Putin’s Luca Brasi

By Robin Bates | Published: March 2, 2025
Brando, Montana as Don Corleone, Luca Brasi

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Monday

If you want to understand how apparatchiks in George Orwell’s 1984 operate, look no further than South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. How is it that one can be singing the praises of Eurasia one week and attacking them as evil incarnate the next? Well, check out Graham’s response to Zelensky after Donald Trump and J.D. Vance ambushed him this past weekend.

First, however, the passage in 1984:

[T]o trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

Now to Graham, who in 2022 was calling Zelensky “the Winston Churchill of our time.” As recently as two weeks ago, he said that Zelensky “is the ally I’ve waited for my whole life.” Then, after the White House meeting,” he accused the Ukrainian president of disrespect and said, “I don’t know if we could ever do business with Zelensky again… He either needs to resign and send somebody over that we can do business with or he needs to change.”

What changed? After decades of being at odds with Eurasia, now we have a president who embraces it, with the result that his cultish followers fall in line. Graham believes whatever it’s in his interest to believe.

My theory of what happened in the White House meeting is that Putin, nervous about the deal for Ukrainian metals that Trump and Zelensky were about to sign, flexed his influence over the president and his vice-president. In response, they found a way to blow up the meeting in the most public way possible and to kick Zelensky out of the White House. Longtime foreign policy experts report they’ve never seen such a thing.

David Rothkopf of the Daily Beast notes that Trump imagines himself as Don Corleone in The Godfather, pressing “for a deal to squeeze mineral assets out of Ukraine in exchange for some ill-defined level of continued support for that country that could only be described as extortionate.” But Rothkopf says that it is actually Putin who is Don Corleone. Trump is just Luca Brasi, his enforcer:

[W]hile some on the right may be quietly cheering this new era of mafia-inspired testosterone-poisoned non-diplomacy, it would be a mistake to think of the Don in the White House as the Don Corleone of U.S. foreign policy. Considering where he gets his ideas and talking points and whose interests he serves, Trump is more the Luca Brasi of Putin foreign policy. Moronic muscle. An ignoramus with nukes.

And:

Trump is a paper tough guy. That was never more clear than on this infamous last Friday in February, when Trump revealed his decision to ally the United States with the most nefarious global criminal of our generation, Vladimir Putin, and to declare himself a lieutenant to the monstrous criminal enterprise on which Putin has focused throughout his two decades of dictatorship in Russia.

The comparison with Brasi doesn’t entirely work since the godfather’s henchman is a cold-blooded and very accomplished killer whereas Trump is just, well, “paper tough.” But one scene, which appears both in the book and in the movie, suggests that Rothkopf has gotten the parallel exactly right.

Brasi, despite his swagger, is so awed by the godfather, just as Trump is awed by Putin, that he falls all over himself to win his approval. At the wedding of the godfather’s daughter, he sucks up to Corleone by begging to be able to present the newlyweds with a large monetary gift. As you read the passage, imagine Brasi as Trump and Don Corleone as Putin:

Luca Brasi did not fear the police, he did not fear society, he did not fear God, he did not fear hell, he did not fear or love his fellow man. But he had elected, he had chosen, to fear and love Don Corleone. Ushered into the presence of the Don, the terrible Brasi held himself stiff with respect. He stuttered over the flowery congratulations he offered and his formal hope that the first grandchild would be masculine. He then handed the Don an envelope stuffed with cash as a gift for the bridal couple.

Trump’s own gift to godfather Putin is America’s leadership in the world. To which Putin responds (as does the godfather) with patronizing superiority:

The Don received Brasi as a king greets a subject who has done him an enormous service, never familiar but with regal respect.

Brasi, like Trump, falls all over himself in gratitude:

Hagen saw Luca Brasi’s face lose its mask of fury, swell with pride and pleasure, Brasi kissed the Don’s hand before he went out the door that Hagen held open.

So there you have it. Trump has chosen to grovel before Putin when it comes to foreign policy and before Elon Musk when it comes to domestic. He’s Luca Brasi times two and the intimidated GOP applauds.

Further thought: Another read on Lindsey Graham is that he’s not only a soulless apparatchik (although he is that) but also someone outraged that Zelensky is doing what he himself doesn’t have the guts to do, which is stand up to Trump. Driving his anger as the Ukrainian president is his shame.

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Erdrich, Snakes, and the Transfiguration

By Robin Bates | Published: March 1, 2025
Giovanni Batista Tiepolo, The Immaculate Conception

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Sunday

I’m currently on a Louise Erdrich kick, having just reread The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse after immersing myself in LaRose and The Watchman. Last Report, maybe the most spiritual of the Ojibewe author’s novels, features a woman disguising herself as a Catholic priest in order to serve the Little No Horse reservation. Agnes/Father Damien is not so much a trans man as a woman who has chosen to cross-dress for practical purposes. If the Catholic church allowed women priests, she would remain a woman.

The sensitivity she brings to her role dramatizes how much the Catholic church has lost by having only male priests. While the Indians themselves would have no difficulty with a woman priest—we are given examples of Ojibwe men acting as women and Ojibwe women acting as men—Agnes/Father Damien knows that she must keep her identity secret from the church authorities. She even finds a way to hide her death so that the secret won’t be revealed when her dead body is inspected.

The passage I have chosen today involves her “Sermon to the Snakes.” Damien has commissioned a new church, which is set upon a rock that shelters an ancient snake nest. A passionate piano player when she was a woman, Damien finds herself playing to the snakes when an old piano is donated to the church.  Then, emulating St. Francis, she delivers a “Sermon to the Snakes” (below).

Today we celebrate the Transfiguration of Christ, which “encourages us to view creation as a continuously evolving transformation of matter and energy” (John Gatta, The Transfiguration of Christ and Creation). In other words, all of nature is luminous, and this includes snakes. The ones in the novel are caught up by Chopin, Schubert, and Debussy.

At first, Damien doesn’t realize he has them as an audience:

She played in the embrace of that special sense of being heard, that expectancy, but when she finally set her hands in her lap and looked up to acknowledge the listener, no one was there. Only the still new leaves faintly twitching between the studs and the haze of gold light through the tremulous scatter of clouds. It wasn’t until she saw a twist of movement from the corner of her eye that she looked down and saw the snakes.

Damien figure that that must be at least a hundred or more:

 Another moved, quick as a lash. Yet another seeped forward and Agnes put her fingers back upon the keys. A third uncoiled in a question mark that she answered with a smooth barcarolle, which seemed the right thing to play for snakes. She watched them out of the corner of her eyes. They were motionless now, their ligulate, black bellies flat against the stone. Parallel gold stripes down the center of their backs seemed to vibrate in the fresh June light. The snakes looked polished brand-new. Perhaps they’d shed their skins at the door, she thought, and even as her fingers rippled she imagined a pile of frail husks. Their heads were slightly raised off the floor and if they weren’t actually listening to the notes, they were positively fixed on the music. They were suspended, somehow, by whatever means were available to their senses.

And finally:

Growing weary, Agnes at last hit upon the Kinderscenen from Schubert and finally, playing “Sleep” repetitively and with all the kindness of a good parent, she succeeded in driving the snakes, the ginebigoog, back to their beds.

Damien’s Ojibwe mentor, Nanapush, explains the significance of “the ginebigoog” to the community. He observes that

the snake was a sign of great positive concern among the old people, for the snake was a deeply intelligent secretive being, and knew all the cold and blessed spirits who lived under stone and deep in the earth. And it was the great snake, wrapped around the center of the earth, who kept things from flying apart.

The vision isn’t entirely negated by a statue the church commissions, a “Madonna of the Serpents,” in which Mary is depicted as crushing the serpent that tempted Eve. But as someone notes about the statue, “The snake that writhed beneath the Virgin’s feet not only was too realistic, but did not look at all crushed down by her weight.”

In her sermon to the snakes, delivered only to test out the new acoustics, Damien asks, “What is the whole of our existence but the sound of an appalling love?”

In response, the snakes “slid quietly among the feet of the empty pews.” Here are the answers she explores:

What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given—children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps—we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our powers, our innocent misfortunes—those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?

“Divine love may be so large it cannot see us.

“Or it may be so infinitely tiny that it works on a level where it directs us like an unknown substance buried in our blood.

“Or it may be transparent, an invisible screen, a filter through which we see and hear all that is created.

“Oh my friends…”

The snakes lifted their bullet-smooth heads, flickered their tongues to catch the vibrations of the sounds the being made somewhere before them.

“I am like you,” said Father Damien to the snakes, “curious and small.” He dropped his arms. “Like you, I poise alertly and open by senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.”

The snakes coiled and recoiled, curved over and underneath themselves.

“If I am loved,” Father Damien went on, “it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.”

He lifted his hand, blessed the snakes, and then lay down full length in a pew and slept there for the rest of the afternoon.

This comes close to capturing my own vision of God, a force woven into our very being and yet vast beyond comprehending. We “poise alertly”—to nature, to the arts, to each other—hoping to detect God’s love. And then we go on as though it is there because it is only through this belief that life makes sense.

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Trump vs. Zelensky, Harpy vs. Eagle

By Robin Bates | Published: February 28, 2025
Gordon Grant, Old Ironsides

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Saturday

I’m so appalled by what I saw yesterday in the White House, with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance throwing their lot in with Vladimir Putin as they ambushed and bullied Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, that I’ve written a special Saturday post. What comes to mind is Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1830 poem “Old Ironsides.”

The poem was written to save the historic ship U.S.S. Constitution, which was destined for the scrap heap after once having played key roles in both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. The poem generated such support for the ship that it was preserved, and you can still visit it today in Boston.

The actual Constitution is under all-out assault today, as is America’s long-standing position as leader of the free world. I am well aware that the U.S. hasn’t always deserved that moniker—after all, I got arrested in 1971 protesting the Vietnam War—but never has America sided so openly with a dictator against a freedom movement. Trump is desecrating our most cherished ideals.

He and Vance are indeed harpies of the shore, trying to take down an eagle of the sea.

Old Ironsides

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar;—
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more.

Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood,
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
Or know the conquered knee;—
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!

Oh, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightning and the gale!

As Trump attempts to tear down the tattered ensign of freedom—both ours and Ukraine’s—we must defend our core ideals, just as people once defended Old Ironsides. Blood has been shed so that the eagle could soar, and the least we can do today—in whatever ways we can—is resist Trump’s fascist takeover. At stake, here and abroad, is government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

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Cixin Liu Predicted Musk-Style Takeover

By Robin Bates | Published: February 27, 2025
Chinese sci-fi author Cixin Liu

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Friday

Sometimes I think our greatest prophets are our authors of dystopian sci-fi. Figures like Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood (who prefers the term speculative fiction), and Octavia Butler have proved remarkably accurate in their predictions. And then there’s George Orwell, whose 1984 captures Trumpism so well that some rightwing book banners have been targeting it.

Recently joining these luminaries is Chinese engineer and novelist Cixin Liu. As described by the website The.Ink, Liu has disturbingly anticipated an Elon Musk style takeover in his novel The Three-Body Problem.

The novel is about an advanced society that must leave its collapsing planet and so sets out to take over Earth. To make sure that they don’t meet effective resistance, the inhabitants “monkey wrench human progress by distributing viral propaganda, recruiting allies in the gaming community, cutting sweetheart deals with oligarchs, and interfering with scientific research.” 

This pretty much describes Musk’s DOGE initiative, which is treating the federal government like a video game, even as it steers lucrative contracts to Musk enterprises. Scientific research is especially taking a hit as funds are being cut off and people fired by Musk’s youthful tech vigilantes.

Having described the book, the article then quotes physicist Michael Lubbell from City College of New York to show the depth of the Musk attacks:

Musk has access to all the data on federal research grantees and contractors: social security numbers, tax returns, tax payments, tax rebates, grant disbursements and more. Anyone who depends on the federal government and doesn’t toe the line might become a target. This is right out of [Hungarian prime minister] Viktor Orbán’s playbook.

According to the article, Three-Body Problem “was received (and possibly intended) in China as a critique of the forced transformation of Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution.” Americans, however, are applying it to their own situation:

It’s as if the tech oligarchs who’ve journeyed from South Africa to remake America — the guys who, as therapist Daniel Shaw remarked, “read Orwell’s 1984 and decided the hero was Big Brother” — read Liu’s trilogy and decided the San-Ti (the alien invaders) were the heroes.

I haven’t read Three Body Problem but came across one passage that explains how the extraterrestrials—and how Donald Trump—have managed to scam the public and seize power:

You must know that a person’s ability to discern the truth is directly proportional to his knowledge.

No wonder Trump and Musk want to close down the Department of Education.

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The Chainsaw-Wielding Doge of America

By Robin Bates | Published: February 26, 2025
Elon Musk at CPAC

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Thursday

A reader has just reminded me that DOGE—the acronym that Elon Musk invented for his “Department of Government Efficiency”—was also the word that the Republic of Venice once used for its head of state. I’m sure Musk knew this when he came up with the acronym since he aspires to be America’s unofficial head. That fact leads me to two passages, one comic, one not.

The comic one appears in the The Court Jester, a 1956 Danny Kaye comedy that was the first videotape owned by our family. (To this day, my sons can quote large swatches of it by heart.) The scene I have in mind has Kaye, a Robin-Hood type spy named Hawkins who is masquerading as an Italian jester, covering up the fact that he knows nothing of the Doge of Venice, even though he supposedly has been sent by him. King Roderick, who has usurped the throne, asks about the doge, prompting Hawkins to dodge, deflect, and finally launch into the kind of tongue twister for which the actor Kaye was famous. The imagined scenario he invents could describe the bumbling incompetence of Musk’s DOGE team, where everyone has the knives out for everyone:

King Roderick: The Duke. What did the Duke do?
Hawkins: Eh… the Duke do?
Roderick: Yes. And what about the Doge?
Hawkins: Oh, the Doge!
Roderick: Eh. Well what did the Doge do?
Hawkins: The Doge do?
Roderick: Yes, the Doge do.
Hawkins: Well, uh, the Doge did what the Doge does. Eh, uh, when the Doge does his duty to the Duke, that is.
Roderick: What? What’s that?
Hawkins: Oh, it’s very simple, sire. When the Doge did his duty and the Duke didn’t, that’s when the Duchess did the dirt to the Duke with the Doge.
Roderick: Who did what to what?
Hawk: Oh, they all did, sire. There they were in the dark; the Duke with his dagger, the Doge with his dart, Duchess with her dirk.
Roderick: Duchess with her dirk?
Hawkins: Yes! The Duchess dove at the Duke just when the Duke dove at the Doge. Now the Duke ducked, the Doge dodged, and the Duchess didn’t. So the Duke got the Duchess, the Duchess got the Doge, and the Doge got the Duke!

So DOGE Musk is going after essential government employees, thereby sinking Trump’s popularity ratings—which might, if history is any indication, ultimately result in Trump going after Musk. It would be comical if there weren’t thousands of people having their lives upended, not to mention the beneficiaries of the services they administer.

Essentially Musk is aiding Trump in turning the government into one large grift machine, one in which bribes, nepotism, conflict of interest, and corruption will play increasingly large roles. Already it appears that Musk is going after those watchdog agencies that were monitoring him. At the same time, he is steering new goodies towards himself, including government orders for his Tesla cybertrucks and a special FAA contract for Starlink.

All of which leads me to the other great northeastern Italian city, Florence, in which the doge equivalent was the podesta. (I acknowledge that I’m cheating by moving on from “doge,” but I think you’ll find it worth it.) In Lord Byron’s poem The Prophecy of Dante, we hear about Cante dei Gabrielli da Gubbio driving out men of genius like Dante and replacing them with “gilt chamberlains.” After years of service to his beloved Florence as a member of the White Guelph party, Dante never returned because of threatened execution.

While government employees aren’t Dantesque geniuses, they are certainly superior to their replacements. Over just this past week, we’ve seen a Donald Trump, Jr. hunting buddy chosen as the nation’s top food regulator, a three-star Trump-supporting general replacing the far more qualified Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., and rightwing podcasting shock jock elevated to Deputy Director of the FBI. All of these Trump sycophants, as Byron puts it, stand “sleek and slavish, bowing at his door.”

For all the GOP mantra of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” the current federal workforce, which is chosen through a merit-based system, is actually well-qualified, hardworking, and committed to serving the public. A Washington Post in-depth study debunks the myth federal workers are lazy, concluding that “they work longer hours than their private-sector peers.” The reason, the study’s author thinks, is because of “dedication to their mission.”

This certainly fits the profile of every government employee I know, including a number of former students. Without exception, their major reason for going into government service was “to make a difference.”

 Back to the poem. Byron’s Dante describes a man of genius such as himself as

                         the meanest brute
To bear a burthen, and to serve a need,
To sell his labors, and his soul to boot…

But although “toil[ing] for nations” may leave him poor, it also means that he is free. I think of how so much freer those Republicans are who have broken with Trump than those who continue to grovel before him.

Still it’s hard, and Byron notes the difference between the adulation that nations may bestow upon their “sons of fame” and the wretched state they leave them in:

And how is it that they, the sons of fame,
Whose inspiration seems to them to shine
From high, they whom the nations oftest name,
Must pass their days in penury or pain…

The speaker contrasts these geniuses with governmental suck-ups (“he who sweats for monarchs”), describing such people as

                                                                    no more
Than the gilt chamberlain, who, clothed and fee’d,
Stands sleek and slavish, bowing at his door.

Dante observes that their earthly power, while it resembles God’s power “in outward show, “ is least like God’s “in attibutes divine.” These people tread on people’s necks—or in Musk’s case, fire them—and then assure us that their rights come from God:

Oh, Power that rulest and inspirest! how
Is it that they on earth, whose earthly power
Is likest thine in heaven in outward show,
Least like to thee in attributes divine,
Tread on the universal necks that bow,
And then assure us that their rights are thine?

There you have it: self-righteously citing a great cause and higher mission (“waste, fraud, and abuse”), those unleashed upon us by Donald Trump are rampaging through the federal workforce and our constitutional order. They’ll emerge from the experience with a tidy profit after having degraded life for the rest of us.

Their souls will have been hollowed out as a result. But that appears a tradeoff they’re willing to make.

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Singing the Song of Angry Men

By Robin Bates | Published: February 25, 2025
Enjolras (Tveit) in Les Misérables

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Wednesday

Living under the shadow of a fascist takeover, sometimes one takes encouragement where one can find it, such as in small acts of rebellion. My recent favorite has been when the Marine chorus entertained a White House function singing the well-known lyrics from Les Misérables: “Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men? It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again!” I don’t know whether or not a message was being sent but it brought a smile to my face.

Twice over the past four years I’ve turned to Victor Hugo’s 1862 classic to characterize people’s hunger for freedom. The first time occurred in March 2021 when the world was witnessing Russian, Belorussian, and Hong Kong protesters courageously confronting tyrannical authorities. The second time was after Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky had delivered an inspiring New Year address to welcome in 2023. In each instance I compared those resisting tyranny to Enjolras, the idealistic activist who leads an 1832 rebellion against monarch Louis Philippe and who is then, along with his comrades, gunned down by the French military.

I never thought that I would be repurposing those posts for Americans but here we are.

In the novel, Enjolras’s dream is something like the vision the American republic has long had of itself: that it provides a model for the rest of the world. Here’s Hugo:

[F]or some time past, he [Enjolras] had been gradually emerging from the narrow form of dogma, and had allowed himself to incline to the broadening influence of progress, and he had come to accept, as a definitive and magnificent evolution, the transformation of the great French Republic, into the immense human republic….

Addressing his fellow revolutionaries, Enjolras notes that this vision honors all humanity:

Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves? The streets of cities inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds, nations sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past loving the present, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on terms of full equality, for religion heaven, God the direct priest, human conscience become an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop and the school, for sole penalty and recompense fame, work for all, right for all, peace over all, no more bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers!

Then comes the declaration that should have us all applauding:

 From a political point of view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty.

Following a mini lecture on the social contract, Enjolras sets forth a Jeffersonian vision of the importance of education. Think of such education as a guard against the constant mendacity and brainwashing that Trump and his minions are engaging in:

[L]egally speaking, [equality] is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity; politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight; religiously, it is all consciences possessed of the same right. Equality has an organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet, that is where the beginning must be made. The primary school imposed on all, the secondary school offered to all, that is the law. From an identical school, an identical society will spring. Yes, instruction! light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns.

Yes, light! light! everything comes from light!

Enjolras’s high hopes for the 20th century will, to a degree, come to pass, although not until the second half and with some notable exceptions (Serbia’s Milosevič, Russia’s Putin). Thanks to the European Union and NATO, Europe has experienced the longest period of peace and prosperity since the Roman Empire:

Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old, we shall no longer, as today, have to fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events. One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy. The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet around the light.

And now Trump wants to destroy it all. Enjolras might have had difficulty imagining how once, after achieving something approaching his dream, Europe and America would be so ready to backtrack. Far too many people appear to prefer autocracy to democratic rule.

People like Enjolras gave their lives so that we could have freedom. We spit on their sacrifice when we fail to protect it.

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