Biden and Harris as Earthsea Characters

By Robin Bates | Published: July 25, 2024

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Friday

As I think about the Democrats’ transition from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris, a literary torch-passing novel comes to mind. In Ursula Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore, the third work in her Earthsea series, the young prince Arren finds roles reversed when he must carry his beloved mentor, the archmage Ged, to safety. The novel provides us insights applicable to this year’s election.

By discovering the secret of eternal life, the dark wizard Cob has become the world’s most powerful force, but in doing so he unleashes a blight that robs humanity of magic, song, and story. In response, the revered archmage has enlisted the aid of an untested youth, and together they travel to a shadowy realm between life and death that exists at the end of the world. Ged triumphs over Cob but, in the process, he uses up all his magic, forcing Arren into a leadership role.

Cob has amassed his power by giving the world what it thinks it wants: which is perpetual stasis and no death. But such an existence pulls us out of the cycle of life, with its highs and lows, its beginnings and endings. To deny our participation in nature’s rhythms is to opt for an existence bereft of color and light. Ged and Arren restore the balance by defeating Cob, and in the end Arren proves to be the king of the Western Isles that the fractured world has needed. Ged serves as the bridge to this new order.

Think of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance as the dark wizard Cob in that they are promising their followers a return to 1950s America. This is an America run by straight, white, Christian men in which everyone else (people of color, Jews, Muslims, women, LGBTQ+ folk, workers) accept their subordinate status. Like the shadowy world presided over by Cob, this America lacks the rich diversity that in fact makes up our present reality. Their vision is as monochromatic as the one described by Le Guin, who is talking of a dragon ally that Cob has just killed:

His death did not diminish life. Nor did it diminish him. He is there—there, not here! Here is nothing, dust and shadows. There, he is the earth and sunlight, the leaves of trees, the eagle’s flight. He is alive. And all who ever died, live; they are reborn and have no end, nor will there ever be an end. All, save you. For you would not have death. You lost death, you lost life, in order to save yourself.  

As a bi-racial woman (half Afro-Caribbean, half south Asian) who early embraced same-sex marriage and has her own interracial marriage with a Jewish man and two stepchildren, Kamala Harris taps into the American promise that all should have equal access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Arren has his own vision of a rejuvenated society in Farthest Shore:

How long has it been, seventeen years or eighteen, since the Ring of the King’s Rune was returned to the Tower of the Kings in Havnor? Things were better for a while then, but now they’re worse than ever. It’s time there was a king again on the throne of Earthsea, to wield the Sign of Peace. People are tired of wars and raids and merchants who overprice and princes who overtax and all the confusion of unruly powers.

The book’s drama lies in how one gets from stasis to renewal. Dark wizard Cob can be seen as Ged’s shadow, the side of us that wants to keep things as they are rather than embrace the uncertain world of change. I myself was rooting for Biden (I trusted those political scientists that predicted he would win) because I feared an uncertain succession. But while most of us like the safety of the familiar, Trump and Vance—with their call to return America to its racist and sexist past—embrace a particularly noxious variant of this desire.

In the final showdown, Ged tells Cob that, in embracing a vision that elevates power over love and darkness over light, he has robbed the world of its richness. Le Guin borrows imagery from T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” to convey the dead that Cob is keeping alive:

Behind [the man] stood others, all with sad, staring faces. They seemed to speak, but Arren could not hear their words, only a kind of whispering blown away by the west wind.

And later:

[H]e saw the mother and child who had died together, and they were in the dark land together; but the child did not run, nor did it cry, and the mother did not hold it or ever look at it. And those who had died for love passed each other in the streets.

There are no loud Kamala laughs in this world, no boisterous celebrations.

Early in the novel on the gated island of Roke, some of the great wizards in residence refuse to acknowledge the danger. An emergency council meeting is held in which some argue for staying put. One wizard opines that “to raise a great fear on so little a foundation is unneedful. Our power is not threatened only because a few sorcerers have forgotten their spells.” A second wizard agrees:

 Have we not all our powers? Do not the trees of the Grove grow and put forth leaves? Do not the storms of heaven obey our word? Who can fear for the art of wizardry, which is the oldest of the arts of man?

Like Biden, however, Ged realizes that staying the course is not an option and sets out on a quest, surprising everyone with his selection of the young prince as companion. In the end, Arren proves his worth, carrying Ged out of the land of the dead after the wizard has exhausted his powers:

“Thy way, lad,” Ged said in a hoarse whisper. “Help me.”

So they set out up the slopes of dust and scoria into the mountains, Arren helping his companion along as well as he could. It was black dark in the combes and gorges, so that he had to feel the way ahead, and it was hard for him to give Ged support at the same time. Walking was hard, a stumbling matter; but when they had to climb and clamber as the slopes grew steeper, that was harder still. The rocks were rough, burning their hands like molten iron.

Endurance carries them through the ordeal and then a dragon flies them back to the capital city of Havnor, just as an eagle saves Frodo and Sam after they have accomplished their mission. Upon arriving, Arren learns that he is the change the world has been waiting for:

Then [Ged] turned to Arren, who stood tall and slight, in worn clothes, and not wholly steady on his legs from the weariness of the long ride and the bewilderment of all that had passed.
In the sight of them all, Ged knelt to him, down on both knees, and bowed his grey head.

Then he stood up and kissed the young man on the cheek, saying, “When you come to your throne in Havnor, my lord and dear companion, rule long and well.”

Ged here is like Biden, putting the welfare of the world before his own egotistical desires. As the president said in his Wednesday night address, “I revere this office, but I love my country more.”

Returning to our own story, Joe Biden, in 2020, saved the country from an authoritarian grifter with a Christian nationalist following that was threatening to upend the American Constitution and to usher in a vision of America where only straight white Christians have rights. Then, having saved America, Biden engineered a situation in which the antithesis of Donald Trump, a biracial woman who embraces LGBTQ+ and worker protections, would have a chance at succeeding him. We can safely anticipate that on January 6, 2025—like Ged relinquishing his position and returning to the island where he grew up—the president will turn over the keys to his successor and return to his Delaware.

As the Doorkeeper of the wizards’ city puts it, “He has done with doing. He goes home.”

Hopefully our story will also end happily with Arren, not Cob, stepping into executive authority.

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Biden, Macbeth, and Passing the Torch

By Robin Bates | Published: July 24, 2024
Biden and Harris


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Thursday

Following Joe Biden’s address yesterday about why he’s choosing not to run for a second term, some MSNBC commentator—I can’t remember who—cited a line from Macbeth: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” And indeed, there was something magnificently Shakespearean about a man putting the needs of the country over personal ambition. As he put it,

I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future, all merited a second term,” the president said. “But nothing, nothing, can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition. So, I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation. That’s the best way to unite our nation. You know, there is a time and a place for long years of experience in public life. But there’s also a time and a place for new voices, fresh voices, yes, younger voices. And that time and place is now.

And further on:

I revere this office, but I love my country more. It’s been the honor of my life to serve as your president. But in the defense of democracy, which is at stake, I think it’s more important than any title.

The Macbeth passage is not entirely appropriate since it refers to a traitor whom Macbeth has defeated in battle and then executed. Macolm reports to King Duncan on the execution of the Thane of Cawdor:

Malcolm: But I have spoke
With one that saw him die; who did report
That very frankly he confessed his treasons,
Implor’d your Highness’ pardon, and set forth
A deep repentance. Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it.

While some in the Democratic party, prior to Biden stepping down, were accusing him of—not treason, exactly—but of putting his ego over the needs of his fellow Democrats, in the end he transcended politics in a George Washington-type moment. To be sure, it’s not true that nothing in his life became him like how he left the presidency—Joe Biden has had many memorable moments in his career—but this is one that will go down in history.

Looking at the play, it’s worth mentioning the man who takes Cawdor down. Macbeth will go on to commit his own act of treason, pulling off a successful coup by murdering Duncan. Trump’s own treasonous coup attempt was unsuccessful, and whether he would have succeeded in defeating Biden in November as Macbeth defeats Cawdor we will never know.

What we do know, however, is that Biden exited with grace and dignity whereas Trump, in January 2020, went down like a screaming and cursing Macbeth:

Macbeth: I will not yield
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet
And to be baited with the rabble’s curse.
…Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries “Hold! Enough!”

The play ends with Malcolm brandishing Macbeth’s head on a pole. Pray that Malcolm bests Macbeth in our own election and that it is not democracy’s head on that pole.

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Shakespeare Stood Up for Immigrants

By Robin Bates | Published: July 23, 2024
2024 Republican Convention

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Wednesday

With Donald Trump promising “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” and calling for deportation camps that would hold a million people, we are sure to encounter much immigrant bashing in the upcoming weeks. Recall that Trump sabotaged a bipartisan Senate bill addressing immigration issues earlier this year so as to ensure the issue stayed hot and that delegates to last week’s GOP convention held up signs calling for “Mass Deportation Now.”

With this in mind, I share a Shakespeare passage on immigrants that my friend Russ Heldman alerted me to. It appears in the banned play The Book of Thomas More–written mostly by someone else—and shows More, then a London undersheriff, addressing anti-immigrant rioters.

On May 1, 1517—which became known as Evil May Day—apprentices claiming that foreigners were taking their jobs and changing the culture attacked immigrant residents and looted their houses. These foreigners, who made up around two percent of London’s population, ranged from “Flemish cobblers” to “French royal courtiers.”

No author has ever entered the minds of other people, including the marginalized, as fully as Shakespeare, and in this speech we see a character engaging in this very exercise: to talk down the rioters, Thomas More asks them to put themselves in the immigrants’ shoes.

The passage begins with More asking the rioters to imagine themselves in the place of a king who has sent the immigrants packing. They are to think of themselves “in ruff of your opinions clothed”—in proud majesty—watching these “wretched strangers” heading for the coast:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silenced by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got?

More warns that if rioting (“insolence and strong hand”) should win out, then “not one of you should live an aged man.” Anticipating what Thomas Hobbes would write fifty years later (when there is no ruling authority, “every man is Enemy to every man”), More says that the rioters’ violence will boomerang. “Other ruffians,” he warns, will “shark on you and men like ravenous fishes feed on one another”:

I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reason, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Feed on one another.…

Although a number of the May Day rioters were hanged, Henry VIII pardoned a few at the urging of queen Catherine of Aragorn. More, however, points out that these lucky ones could face an ironic situation, becoming refugee immigrants in their turn:

Alas, alas, say now the King,
As he is clement if th’offender mourn,
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you: whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers.

If they indeed become strangers, they will experience the same attacks that they themselves are directing against strangers. Would you want such “mountainish inhumanity” coming your way, he asks:

Would you be pleas’d
To find a nation of such barbarous temper
That breaking out in hideous violence
Would not afford you an abode on earth.
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owned not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But charter’d unto them? What would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case
And this your mountainish inhumanity.

In having a character remind us that immigrants are God’s creatures and should not be spurned like dogs, Shakespeare is centuries ahead of his time. Then again, some people want to return to the bad old days.

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Trump Allies Dream of Unbouncing Tigger

By Robin Bates | Published: July 22, 2024
E.H. Shepard, Tigger

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Tuesday

Even as we focus on Sunday’s monumental political developments, Republicans have been trying to convince us—and perhaps themselves—that last week’s attempted assassination has resulted in a kinder, gentler Trump. Or at least they did so in the early days of the GOP convention. Their efforts remind me of Rabbit’s desire to “unbounce” Tigger in A.A. Milne’s House on Pooh Corner.

Fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat alerted me to a Natalie Allison article in Politico that cited Trump allies voicing the desire:

Republicans would seem to have a vested interest in projecting Trump as a more reflective, subdued version of himself, after his polarizing rhetoric during his presidency turned off many swing voters.

And later:

GOP allies, in roughly a dozen interviews, used words like “emotional” and “serene” — even “spiritual” — to describe Trump in the days since the attempt on his life. A person close to the former president’s family described him taking on “humility, in the biblical sense.” In moment after moment at the Republican National Convention this week, Trump’s usual resting face — a scowl with squinted eyes — was replaced by a more subtle expression. One Republican who spoke with Trump, granted anonymity to describe private discussions, said he seemed “existential.”

A number of news organizations, meanwhile, appeared to have indulged in their own fantasies about Trump. Trump’s niece Mary Trump shared some of the headlines:

The Boston Globe went with “In departure, Trump calls for unity, healing in America.”
The Dallas Morning News claimed, “Trump emphasizes unity.”
The Pioneer Press chose “Trump takes a unity tone.”
And USA Today asked credulously: “After attempt on life, can Trump unite US?”

Perhaps these people thought their fantasies had been realized in the early moments of Trump’s acceptance speech, when he momentarily sounded reasonable. Of course, it all went south just minutes later. As Washington Post’s Dana Milbank summed up the final hour or so of the speech,

Trump himself, after a feint toward unity — “the discord and division in our society must be healed” — soon reverted to type. He complained about the “fake documents case against me” and the “partisan witch hunts.” He denounced “Crazy Nancy Pelosi” and invoked the “China virus.” He said Democrats “used covid to cheat” and called the United States a “nation in decline” with “totally incompetent leadership,” where there is “cheating on elections.”

Will those Republicans and news organizations fantasizing about an unbounced Trump end up as chastened as Rabbit? Here’s what happens in the story, starting with Rabbit’s plan, which he shares with Pooh and Piglet:

“Well, I’ve got an idea,” said Rabbit, “and here it is. We take Tigger for a long explore, somewhere where he’s never been, and we lose him there, and next morning we find him again, and—mark my words—he’ll be a different Tigger altogether.”

“Why?” said Pooh.

“Because he’ll be a Humble Tigger. Because he’ll be a Sad Tigger, a Melancholy Tigger, a Small and Sorry Tigger, an Oh-Rabbit-I-am-glad-to-see-you Tigger. That’s why.”

When Piglet expresses concern about Tigger becoming sad, Rabbit reassures him:

“Tiggers never go on being Sad,” explained Rabbit. “They get over it with Astonishing Rapidity. I asked Owl, just to make sure, and he said that that’s what they always get over it with. But if we can make Tigger feel Small and Sad just for five minutes, we shall have done a good deed.

It’s not clear that his brush with death made Trump feel Small and Sad for even five minutes. Nor does Rabbit’s plan work. In fact, like the GOP, it is Rabbit himself who ends up diminished.

That’s because he manages to get himself thoroughly lost. Like many a campaign consultant and political pundit, however, he never lets the others see his uncertainty but always exudes an air of confidence:

“Come on,” said Rabbit. “I know it’s this way.”

They went on. Ten minutes later they stopped again.

“It’s very silly,” said Rabbit, “but just for the moment I——Ah, of course. Come on….”

“Here we are,” said Rabbit ten minutes later. “No, we’re not….”

“Now,” said Rabbit ten minutes later, “I think we ought to be getting—or are we a little bit more to the right than I thought?…”

“It’s a funny thing,” said Rabbit ten minutes later, “how everything looks the same in a mist. Have you noticed it, Pooh?”

Pooh said that he had.

“Lucky we know the Forest so well, or we might get lost,” said Rabbit half an hour later, and he gave the careless laugh which you give when you know the Forest so well that you can’t get lost.

The companions separate, with Pooh and Piglet finding their way home on their own. (Once he is no longer overwhelmed by Rabbit’s incessant chattering, Pooh is able to hear his honeypots calling to him.) Tigger, meanwhile, takes on the task of search party:

Tigger [tore] round the Forest making loud yapping noises for Rabbit. And at last a very Small and Sorry Rabbit heard him. And the Small and Sorry Rabbit rushed through the mist at the noise, and it suddenly turned into Tigger; a Friendly Tigger, a Grand Tigger, a Large and Helpful Tigger, a Tigger who bounced, if he bounced at all, in just the beautiful way a Tigger ought to bounce.

“Oh, Tigger, I am glad to see you,” cried Rabbit.

Many years ago members of the Republican establishment thought they could unbounce Trump. Then they drank the Kool-Aid and came to see Trump’s bouncing as beautiful, despite January 6, the Big Lie, his defamation and felony convictions, his jokes about Paul Pelosi getting attacked with a hammer, and his remarks about immigrants as vermin poisoning the blood. That they used words like “serene” and “spiritual” to describe him following the shooting indicates that the earlier dream has not entirely died. Trump’s reformation, however, has proved to be short-lived and MAGA Republicans have reverted to blind acceptance of Trump as he is, reassuring themselves that he is “a Friendly Tigger, a Grand Tigger, a Large and Helpful Tigger.”

Meanwhile, Tigger continues on doing what Tigger has always done.

Further thought about Rabbit: Try applying the following observations about Rabbit to these Trump-excusing politicos and pundits. They appear in the story about the windstorm, which begins with Pooh and Piglet visiting their friend:

We’ve come to wish you a Very Happy Thursday,” said Pooh, when he had gone in and out once or twice just to make sure that he could get out again.

“Why, what’s going to happen on Thursday?” asked Rabbit, and when Pooh had explained, and Rabbit, whose life was made up of Important Things, said, “Oh, I thought you’d really come about something,” they sat down for a little … and by-and-by Pooh and Piglet went on again. The wind was behind them now, so they didn’t have to shout.

“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully.

“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.”

“And he has Brain.”

“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.”

There was a long silence.

“I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.”

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Beowulf Biden Steps Down

By Robin Bates | Published: July 21, 2024
Joe Biden announces he is stepping down

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Monday

Three weeks ago I made a “Beowulfian Case for Keeping Joe Biden.” The post focused on how the poem explores the problem of dragon kings, a serious issue in king-dependent warrior society. I noted that there are three different kinds of kings that show up in this drama: kings who lash out at those around them, kings who become depressed and retreat into themselves, and kings shoulder all their society’s burdens, thereby disempowering those around them.

Heremod is the most noteworthy of the paranoid kings and the one who most resembles Donald Trump. The poem describes him as follows:

He vented his rage on men he caroused with,
killed his own comrades, a pariah king
who cut himself off from his own kind,
even though Almighty God had made him
eminent and powerful and marked him from the start
for a happy life. But a change happened,
he grew bloodthirsty, gave no more rings 
to honor the Danes.

Among the depressed kings is Hrethel, who retreats into his bed after his eldest son is killed in a hunting accident and never recovers; the “last veteran,” who withdraws into a funeral barrow with all his wealth after having lost everyone around him; and potentially the Danish king Hrothgar, whom Beowulf has to pull out of gloom after his best friend is killed by Grendel’s Mother.

Beowulf is the best of these dragon kings and the one who most resembles Biden.  Here’s what I wrote in my previous post:

Beowulf has had a spectacularly successful 50-year reign, but when dragonhood begins to descend, he makes what some consider to have been Biden’s mistake. Instead of passing the kingdom along to a successor, he insists on remaining king, thinking that only he can defeat the foe. Biden, some of his critics have charged, thinks that only he can defeat Trump, while Beowulf thinks the same about the dragon. As he instructs his warriors,

Men at arms, remain here on the barrow, 
safe in your armor, to see which one of us
is better in the end at bearing wounds
in a deadly fray. This fight is not yours,
nor is it up to any man except me
to measure his strength against the monster
or to prove his worth. I shall win the gold
by my courage, or else mortal combat,
doom of battle, will bear your lord away.  

One reason for Beowulf’s confidence, and for Biden’s, is his past record. And yes, there is some hubris involved. Thinking that one can defeat the dragon by oneself is itself a dragon trait:

Beowulf spoke, made a formal boast
for the last time: “I risked my life 
often when I was young. Now I am old,
but as king of the people I shall pursue this fight
for the glory of winning, if the evil one will only
abandon his earth-fort and face me in the open.”

Beowulf is able to go out a hero, not a dragon, because he accepts help from another. His nephew Wiglaf disregards his order to stay away and wades into the battle, distracting the dragon enough that Beowulf is able to kill it. In my post, I argued that Biden is surrounded by Wiglafs—the presidency is not a one-person job, after all—and I thought that the quality people that Biden has chosen in his administration and the competent state administrators that come to power because of his sterling presidency could carry us through. It did not matter, I believed, that Biden had lost a step. As I saw it, the advantages of incumbency outweighed the fact that he has lost a step.

But I suppose we could also see, as Wiglafs, those who persuaded the president to step down. If they are right—if Kamala Harris stands a better chance of saving American democracy than Biden—then they should be seen as heroes in their own right. Willing to brave Biden’s dragon fire, they pressured him to do the right thing, saving Biden from dragonhood. As Tom Nichols of Atlantic puts it,

My colleague Franklin Foer (who has written a biography of Biden) noted today that the Biden of the past few weeks was a less than admirable figure: He was a defensive, brittle old man who didn’t want to be told he could no longer lead the party on the field of political battle. 

And then the heroic part:

Biden’s decision reflected a determination to put the fate of his country ahead of his personal vanity, a choice Trump is inherently incapable of making.  

These Wiglafs had better be right, however—because if they are not and if Democrats lose an election they could have won, then we will face a version of what happens to Beowulf’s people. Wiglaf forecasts the future, which he’s able to do fairly accurately as the poet, looking back at the time the poem is set, knows that the Geats will eventually be vanquished by the Swedes:

Now War is looming
over our nation, soon it will be known
to Franks and Frisians, far and wide,
that the king is gone….
Nor do I expect peace or pact-keeping
of any sort from the Swedes.
[T]hey will cross our borders
and attack in force when they find out
that Beowulf is dead.

But not to end on a dark note, here’s the wealth that Beowulf and Wiglaf, working together, liberate through their joint effort:

[Wiglaf] saw beyond the seat
a treasure-trove of astonishing richness, 
wall-hangings that were a wonder to behold,
glittering gold spread across the ground, 
the old dawn-scorching serpent’s den
packed with goblets and vessels from the past…

And he saw too a standard, entirely of gold,
hanging high over the hoard,
a masterpiece of filigree; it glowed with light 
so he could make out the ground at his feet
and inspect the valuables.

The policies that Biden set in motion and that Harris will continue has made America the economic envy of the world. Isolationist Trump, with his anti-immigrant threats and his promise of billionaire tax cuts, hunkers down in an America that he wants to turn into a dragon’s cave.

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Hearing the Celestial Voices

By Robin Bates | Published: July 20, 2024
Nicolaes Pietersz Berchem, The Annunciation to the Shepherds

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Sunday

As two of today’s lectionary readings employ the shepherd metaphor, as does the psalm, I share two poems about shepherds. To set them up, here’s Jeremiah decrying Israel’s bad leaders:

Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord.

And now Jesus:

As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.

We’ll also be reading the 23rd psalm, which you all know and which is one of the Bible’s great poems. I always prefer the gorgeous King James version, in part because my sophomore English teacher had us memorize it in the Episcopalian prep school that I attended:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

The sense of peace in the face of adversity is one of the striking aspects of the psalm. William Blake taps into this same well of comfort in “The Shepherd,” which appears in Songs of Innocence:

How sweet is the shepherd’s sweet lot!
From the morn to the evening he strays;
He shall follow his sheep all the day,
And his tongue shall be filled with praise.

For he hears the lambs’ innocent call,
And he hears the ewes’ tender reply;
He is watchful while they are in peace,
For they know when their shepherd is nigh.

Note the shift in focus from the shepherd who worships to the sheep who know “when their shepherd is nigh.” As the psalmist puts it, “Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

Poet Malcolm Guite alerted me to the second poem, which is by Richard Bauckman. In “The Song of the Shepherds,” the shepherds recall the light they witnessed when Jesus was born, describing it as

a song of solar glory,
unutterable, unearthly,
eclipsed the luminaries of the night,
as though the world were exorcised of dark
and, coming to itself, began again.

Since then, however, they have seen only darkness:

Later we returned to the flock.
The night was ominously black.
The stars were silent as the sheep.
Nights pass, year on year.
We clutch our meagre cloaks against the cold.

The use of the word “clutch” signals that the poet is referencing T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” where the wisemen feel similarly bereft in the years since they witnessed the miraculous birth:

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.

Here’s Bauckman’s poem

The Song of the Shepherds
By Richard Bauckman

We were familiar with the night.
We knew its favorite colors,
its sullen silence
and its small, disturbing sounds,
its unprovoked rages,
its savage dreams.
 
We slept by turns,
attentive to the flock.
We said little.
Night after night, there was little to say.
But sometimes one of us,
skilled in that way,
would pipe a tune of how things were for us.
 
They say that once, almost before time,
the stars with shining voices
serenaded
the new born world.
The night could not contain their boundless praise.

We thought that just a poem —
until the night
a song of solar glory,
unutterable, unearthly,
eclipsed the luminaries of the night,
as though the world were exorcised of dark
and, coming to itself, began again.
 
Later we returned to the flock.
The night was ominously black.
The stars were silent as the sheep.
Nights pass, year on year.
We clutch our meager cloaks against the cold.
Our aging piper’s fumbling fingers play,
night after night,
an earthly echo of the song that banished dark.
It has stayed with us.

Although they are clutching their meager cloaks against the dark cold, the shepherds can still hear the celestial music, even if only faintly, and they attempt to echo it with fumbling fingers. The idea that one can catch only a glimpse of revelation is also an Eliot theme, such as is to be found in “The Hollow Men.” Seeking for the souls in Dante’s Paradiso, the hollow speaker hears only voices

In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

A more positive way to think of this revelation, however—one that points a way forward toward hope—can be found in Lucille Clifton’s poem “the man who killed the bear.” Remembering, at news of her father’s death, how he sexually abused her when a child, Clifton reveals her way of dealing with the darkness. Speaking to the moon, which witnessed the crime but did nothing, she notes that she is not entirely without aid. When she recalls that the moon “catches the sun and keeps most of him/ for the evening that surely will come/ and it comes,” she writes,

only then did i know that to live
in the world all that i needed was
some small light and know that indeed
i would rise again and rise again to dance.

Distant recollection of the song of solar glory, in other words, does not merely stay with her, as it does with Bauckman’s shepherds. It leads to joyful celebration.

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Tourist Reenacts Euripides’s Bacchae

By Robin Bates | Published: July 18, 2024
Worshipping Giambologna’s Bacchus (Bargello Museum, Florence)

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Friday

My English professor son Toby, who knows me very well, recently alerted me to a CNN article that put us in mind of Euripides’s 405 BCE play The Bacchae. Here’s the headline:

Italian officials slam tourist who ‘mimicked sex acts’ on a statue of Bacchus in Florence

If you want further graphic evidence, click on the link, which shows two shots of a young woman “kissing, humping and grinding” against Giambologna’s 1560 statue of the god of wine and sensuality. Whether or not you find it shocking, it’s thoroughly in the spirit of Dionysus’s followers. Here’s Euripides’s account of the Bacchae worshipping their god:

Oh, Thebes, Semele’s nurse,
crest your walls with ivy.
Burst into greenness, burst
into a blaze of bryony [ivy],
take up the bacchanalian beat
with branches of oak and of fir,
cover your flesh with fawnskin
fringed with silver-white fleece
and lifting the fennel,
touch God
in a fit of sanctified frenzy.
Then all at once the whole land will dance!
Bacchus will lead the dancing throngs to the mountain,
the mountain,
which is home to that mob of women,
who rebelled against shuttle and loom
answer the urge of Dionysus.

And further on:

Your ground flows with milk,
flows with wine, flows with nectar from the bees.
Like smoke from a Syrian incense,
the fragrant God arises with his torch of pine.
He runs, he dances in a whirl of flame,
he rouses the faithful
crazing their limbs with his roar,
while he races the wind,
his soft hair streaming behind.
And his call resounds like thunder:
“Go, my Bacchae, go!
Let Tmolus with its golden streams
reverberate with songs of Dionysus,
and the vibrant crash of drums.
Sing out in joy
with loud Phrygian cries,
while the holy sweet-throated flute
climbs the holy scale and the scaling maenads climb
up the mountain,
up the mountain.”

And finally, in a lovely conclusion:

It is then, that a girl like me
knows happiness. When she is free,
like a filly playfully prancing
around its mother,
in fields without fences.

Predictably, Italy’s culture ministry and Florence officials “have expressed their fury over the incident after pictures went viral on social media, with the Florence mayor’s office calling it an act that ‘mimicked sex.’” If they identify the young woman, whom they are presuming was inebriated at the time, they are threatening to ban her from the city for life.

Their reactions are not unlike those of Pentheus, king of Thebes, when he returns home from a voyage and discovers that his mother and aunts have all gone out to join the Bacchae:

Our women, I am told, have left their homes,
in a religious trance—what travesty!–
and scamper up and down the wooded mountains, dancing
in honor of this new-fangled God, Dionysus,
whoever he may be.
In the middle of each female group
of revelers, I hear,
stands a jar of wine, brimming! And that taking turns,
they steal away, one here, one there, to shady nooks,
where they satisfy the lechery of men,
pretending to be priestesses,
performing their religious duties. Ha!
That performance reeks more of Aphrodite
than of Bacchus.

And further on:

Take my word,
when women are allowed to feast on wine, there is no telling
to what lengths their filthy minds will go!

King Pentheus first shackles the women and Dionysus and then, after Dionysus breaks the chains and destroys the prison, turns voyeur and sneaks out to watch the women. (in other words, he’s like those “family values” politicos who are revealed to have slept around and/or paid for abortions.) As one witness reports, the Bacchae are quite a sight:

First, they let their hair fall down their shoulders
and those whose fawnskins had come loose
fastened them up, while others girdled theirs
with snakes that licked their cheeks. Some,
mothers with newborn babies left at home,
cradled young gazelles or wild wolf cubs in their arms
and fed them at their full-blown breasts
that brimmed with milk.
They they wreathed their heads with shoots
of ivy, oak and flowering bryony.

When they discover the peeping Tom, however, the women turn savage and proceed to rip Pentheus apart. Try to impose strict controls over women’s sexuality and women’s bodies, in other words, and they’ll react with fury.

Hmm, maybe the Supreme Court, J.D. Vance, and Trump’s GOP should take note.

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J.D. Vance Dreams of Gilead

By Robin Bates | Published: July 17, 2024

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Thursday

I’m wondering, in thinking about my forthcoming book Better Living through Literature (release date August 22), whether I should have spent more time talking about Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. This classic work of dystopian or speculative fiction (Atwood prefers the latter description) is increasingly proving its worth at clarifying the misogyny that is at work in certain parts of our culture.

Trump choosing J.D. Vance to be his running mate makes the novel even more timely given that Vance, amazingly, is even worse than Trump when it comes to women. Or at least, policies concerning women. (Trump has him beat in the rape department.) Democratic pollster Simon Rosenberg describes Vance  as coming out of “the pro-Putin, pro-oligarch, Handmaid’s Tale wing of the GOP,” while Trump niece Mary Trump noted that “American women will know misery if by some great tragedy Donald and Vance get into the White House because those two will make The Handmaid’s Tale our reality.”

Among the extremist positions Vance has taken concerning women are the following:

–that women should remain in abusive marriages:

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term. And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.”

–that there should be an end to no-fault divorce on the grounds that it “undermines family stability”;

–that there should be no abortion exceptions for rape or incest because “two wrongs don’t make a right”:

“It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term; it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient” (my italics).

–that the police should have access to the records of women who cross state lines to have abortions:

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Donald Trump’s pick for vice presidential nominee, pressured federal regulators last June to kill a privacy rule that prevents police from accessing the medical records of people seeking reproductive services, according to documents reviewed by The Lever. The rule was designed to prevent state and local police in anti-abortion states from using private records to hunt down and prosecute people who cross state lines in search of abortion services.

–that there shouldn’t be a federal right to accessing contraception or in vitro fertilization (he, along with most Republican members of Congress, voted against Democratic attempts to protect these rights);

–that women shouldn’t choose career over motherhood:

“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”

–that women are effectively running and ruining the country. Vance describes these women as

 a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. and its just a basic fact if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?

—-that there should be some sort of national abortion ban:

I want Ohio to be able to make its own decisions, and I want Ohio’s elected legislators to make those decisions. But I think it’s fine to sort of set some minimum national standard.”

It’s clear why he would want such a “minimum national standard” given that he sees “something sociopathic about a political movement that tells young women (and men) that it is liberating to murder their own children.”

As Jessica Valenti, who runs the blog Abortion, Every Day has put it,

Vance’s anti-abortion beliefs are driven by a broader desire for traditional gender norms and a world where women didn’t have choices about anything, not just their bodies. Like so many men obsessed with the “trad” movement, however, Vance shrouds his old-school misogyny as concern for women’s happiness.

So could Trump and Vance impose such a country on us? In Atwood’s novel, Gilead comes to power in part because of complacency, with people figuring that their own lives will not be impacted. While the narrator notes that, in the days before the fundamentalist takeover, there were some reports of atrocities by Christian terrorists—just as we have seen multiple mass shootings by rightwing gunmen—the women in Atwood’s novel shrug them off as involving “other women”:

But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual…We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

There’s a reason why conservative school boards throughout the country are banning Handmaid’s Tale. And why it’s important to get the novel into as many hands as possible. And to vote blue.

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A New Trump Is Like a New Pap Finn

By Robin Bates | Published: July 16, 2024
Illus. from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Wednesday

Hope springs eternal in the hearts of certain journalists and political moderates when it comes to Trump. For years they told themselves he would grow into the presidency, and now they are hoping that his recent brush with death will soften him up. For instance, journalist Elliott Ackerman recently wrote in an Atlantic piece, “Trump has called his enemies ‘bad people’ in the past, but now he’s suffered a near death experience. Sometimes, that changes people.”

To which Digby of the blog Hullabaloo, referring to the Alan Sorkin television series about an idealized president, sarcastically replied, “I loved the West Wing so much.”

And then there’s this from Axios:

[H]e could unify America. Imagine he gave a speech featuring something he rarely shows: humility. Imagine him telliing the nation that he has been too rough, too loose, too combative with his language–and now realizes words can have consequences, and promises to tone it down and bring new voices into the White House if he wins.

After all we’ve seen of Donald Trump, to think that he would suddenly put country first is delusional. He’s more likely to respond like Hitler, who after the bomb attempt on his life just became more erratic, paranoid, and unhinged.  The literary passage that comes to my mind when encountering such fantasizing is the attempt to reform Pap in Huckleberry Finn.

Pap is back in town after learning that Huck and Tom have chanced upon a treasure and is threatening to “cowhide” Huck “till I was black and blue.” Judge Thatcher and the Widow Watkins go to the local judge to see if one of them can become his guardian, but the judge is a “family values” kind of man. (He’s reminiscent of Trump’s V-P pick, who believes that women should remain in abusive marriages.) Being new in town and not knowing Pap, he states that

courts mustn’t interfere and separate families if they could help it; said he’d druther not take a child away from its father. So Judge Thatcher and the widow had to quit on the business.

The new judge then follows up his decision with action, determining to “make a man” of Pap:

So he took him to his own house, and dressed him up clean and nice, and had him to breakfast and dinner and supper with the family, and was just old pie to him, so to speak. And after supper he talked to him about temperance and such things till the old man cried, and said he’d been a fool, and fooled away his life; but now he was a-going to turn over a new leaf and be a man nobody wouldn’t be ashamed of, and he hoped the judge would help him and not look down on him. The judge said he could hug him for them words; so he cried, and his wife she cried again; pap said he’d been a man that had always been misunderstood before, and the judge said he believed it. The old man said that what a man wanted that was down was sympathy, and the judge said it was so; so they cried again.

Then we get Pap delivering his version of Trump’s promise to focus on unifying the country:

[W]hen it was bedtime the old man rose up and held out his hand, and says:

“Look at it, gentlemen and ladies all; take a-hold of it; shake it. There’s a hand that was the hand of a hog; but it ain’t so no more; it’s the hand of a man that’s started in on a new life, and’ll die before he’ll go back. You mark them words—don’t forget I said them. It’s a clean hand now; shake it—don’t be afeard.”

So they shook it, one after the other, all around, and cried. The judge’s wife she kissed it. Then the old man he signed a pledge—made his mark. The judge said it was the holiest time on record, or something like that. Then they tucked the old man into a beautiful room, which was the spare room…

So how does it work out? About as you’d expect:

…and in the night some time he got powerful thirsty and clumb out on to the porch-roof and slid down a stanchion and traded his new coat for a jug of forty-rod, and clumb back again and had a good old time; and towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler, and rolled off the porch and broke his left arm in two places, and was most froze to death when somebody found him after sun-up. And when they come to look at that spare room they had to take soundings before they could navigate it.

It appears that Trump isn’t doing much better. Two days after the shooting, he was on Truth Social giving his version of unifying the country–which is that everyone should do what he wants:

As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida [by judge Aileen Cannon] would be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts–the January 6 Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponents, ME. Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!

As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted, “He appears to be once again calling E Jean Carroll a liar in his ‘unity’ statement.” Trump is already on the hook for $83.3 million for defaming Carroll.

One wonders whether fantasizing journalists will wake up to reality as quickly as Pap’s reformist judge does:

The judge he felt kind of sore. He said he reckoned a body could reform the old man with a shotgun, maybe, but he didn’t know no other way.

Given the current climate, I suppose I must add that the judge is joking. The only way to reform Donald Trump—or at least bring an end to his behavior—is to defeat him at the voting booth and hold him accountable in the courts.

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