At 12 I Fell in Love with Taming of the Shrew

By Robin Bates | Published: October 8, 2026
Taylor and Burton in The Taming of the Shrew (1967)

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. – Henry David Thoreau

Friday Memories of Books That Shook My World

I write today to figure out why I was captivated by a Shakespeare play I encountered in seventh grade. I spent several weeks in bed that year with a case of mono, perhaps brought about by the stress of civil rights battles. (As a sensitive child, I felt the force of the naked racism voiced by some of my peers.) My father brought home Shakespeare recordings from Sewanee’s English Department and two in particular pulled me in.

While I now understand why I loved Twelfth Night–it helped me negotiate gender confusion over my girl side (more below)–I’ve never figured out why I listened multiple times to the problematic Taming of the Shrew. In it, the father decrees that “good sister” Bianca, whom everyone desires, cannot be married until her older sister, shrewish Katherine, is married off. Fortune hunter Petruchio shows up, relieves the father by taking Katherine off his hands, and then proceeds to torture tame her so that, by the end, she is more docile than even her sister. There are few speeches more difficult for an actor to deliver in our feminist era than Katherine’s final admonition. Here’s an excerpt:

Petruchio: Katharina, I charge thee, tell these headstrong women
What duty they do owe their lords and husbands.
Kate: …Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labour both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks and true obedience;
Too little payment for so great a debt.
Such duty as the subject owes the prince
Even such a woman oweth to her husband;
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?

I vaguely remember enjoying this scene, a happy conclusion to lives previously in tumult, but that’s not what most stood out. I was more impressed by Katherine’s battles with her sister, with the men who outwardly insult her, and with Petruchio. Although I was charmed by the secret love affair between Lucentio and Bianca, I was buoyed by Kate’s energy.

Modern audiences don’t like how this energy is quenched.  Shakespeare is Shakespeare in large part because of his complex characterizations, which allow him to find humanity in even such monsters as Claudius, Macbeth, Richard III, and Shylock. He’s also noteworthy for transforming popular genres in spectacular ways, as he does with the revenge tragedy in Hamlet. What, then, are we to make of his trafficking in the popular shrew taming plot, which goes back at least as far as the medieval mystery plays (where Noah’s wife refusing to enter the ark entertained the masses).

The Folger Theater’s website speculates that the wife taming theme was popular in Elizabethan England because a “crisis of order” involving significant economic, demographic and political changes was producing “acute anxiety about conventional hierarchies.” To this can be added nervousness over having a female monarch. We’ve seen how, in repressive societies today, men will sometimes compensate for feelings of social powerlessness by asserting control in the domestic sphere.

In Shakespeare’s England, sometimes shrews were forced to wear iron gags, subjected to dunking stools, or paraded around on carts. In the 1580 English ballad entitled “A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife Lapped in Morel’s Skin for Her Good Behavior,” a man beats his wife with sharp rods until she bleeds and then wraps her in the salted skin of a dead horse to intensify the pain of her wounds. The result is a tamed wife. (Go here for more details.)

Embarrassing as it is to admit it now, I got some enjoyment from watching Katherine get tamed. A shy and effeminate boy, perhaps I could imagine myself as the boy society expected in watching Petruchio. I’ve detected some of this longing in my response to Twelfth Night so let me detour into that for a moment.

I identified fully with Viola in that play and have speculated that it was because she was male on the outside, female within. My favorite scenes were those where she is challenged to duels, which reminded me of encounters with football-playing bullies. But my favorite part of the duel sequence was when Sir Toby, mistaking Viola’s twin brother Sebastian for her, gets the crap beat out of him. (“He has broke my head across and has given Sir Toby a bloody coxcomb too,” moans the effeminate Sir Andrew Aguecheek, with whom I also partially identified). It was like the fantasy in comic book ads where the weakling, by purchasing weights, avenges himself on the toughs that once kicked sand in his face.

So yes, I can see why a drama about a strong man subduing an emasculating woman would have appealed to an American boy in 1963. 

That was not the major reason for my enjoyment, however. Just as I had identified with Viola, so did I identify with Kate. It’s when Petruchio is subjecting her to food and sleep deprivation and humiliating her publicly that I felt closest to her. In the chaotic wedding scene, I remember feeling sorry for her as her father does, even though previously he has been a relentless critic:

Go, girl; I cannot blame thee now to weep;
For such an injury would vex a very saint,
Much more a shrew of thy impatient humor.

Some deep part of me felt that Kate was acting up because no one understood that she was different. At the same time, I was disgusted at how the men feel free to take potshots whenever they want. (Petruchio was an exception; more on him in a moment.) Even Lucentio, whom I liked, turns into a male chauvinist when challenged to bet on how well he can control his new wife. The male fraternity in that contest was alien and distasteful to me. Therefore, I enjoyed those moments when Kate fights back, as she does with her lute instructor:

Father: Why, then thou canst not break her to the lute?
Hortensio: Why, no; for she hath broke the lute to me.
I did but tell her she mistook her frets,
And bow’d her hand to teach her fingering;
When, with a most impatient devilish spirit,
‘Frets, call you these?’ quoth she; ‘I’ll fume with them:’
And, with that word, she struck me on the head,
And through the instrument my pate made way;
And there I stood amazed for a while,
As on a pillory, looking through the lute;
While she did call me rascal fiddler
And twangling Jack; with twenty such vile terms,
As had she studied to misuse me so.

Looking back, I realize that I related to her as I related to Shylock, another play I listened to at the time. It wasn’t only Shylock’s “if you prick me” speech that brought me to his side but also—perhaps more so–the way society gangs up on him. My experience with the civil rights battles familiarized me with how a smug society scapegoats people who don’t fit in, whether African-Americans, Jews, or forceful women. 

I saw Petruchio as the one male exception, perhaps because he also is an outsider. As a result, he can see how Katherine is superior to Bianca. In fact, for all his gaslighting and other torture tactics, I was only disappointed in him when he joins the other men in their dick-waving contest. More important than proving himself the manliest man, I felt, was his special relationship with Kate. Why did he descend to their level?

Thus I unconsciously anticipated contemporary attempts to salvage the play, with some versions imagining Petruchio and Kate secretly or at least implicitly collaborating to mock their society. 

Something about reading Taming at an early age may have entered into my later relationships with women, who were generally closer to forceful Kate than to “sweet Bianca.” Not that my wife and my close women friends are shrews, but they have an energy that sparks. If Petruchio is not just another guy trapped by patriarchy, he would treasure and encourage that spark in his wife, which in turn would allow Kate to shed her defensiveness and have fun with him. They could become Beatrice and Benedict in Much Ado about Nothing.

 I questioned Shakespeare at the beginning of today’s post, wondering whether he serves up a caricature rather than a three-dimensional woman. I’ve talked myself round to a view that I instinctively grasped in seventh grade: that Kate has substance and worth, towering over the other characters and finding a match only in Petruchio. Her taming in this light can be seen as a sop thrown to audiences of the time. The real story is her magnificence.

Previous posts on memorable book encounters
Alice Captured My Childhood Anxieties (Oct. 2, 2026)
How Tintin Gave Shape to My Sense of Wonder (Sept. 25, 2026)
E. Nesbit’s Formative Moral Influence on My Life (Sept. 18, 2026)
Lord of the Rings: Trudging up Mount Doom with Frodo (Aug. 28, 2026)
The Silver Chair and a Childhood Love (Aug. 21, 2026)
My Childhood Encounter with Wind in the Willows April 14, 2026)

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Thoreau on the Classics: They Open Minds

By Robin Bates | Published: October 7, 2026

Thursday

Sometimes a book lands with seismic impact. Our faculty reading group is discussing Walden because Henry David Thoreau’s masterpiece was that book for John Gatta, who used to teach American environmental literature at Sewanee. John first encountered it at (I believe) 18. 

It so happens that Thoreau himself writes about life changing books in “Reading,” Walden’s third chapter:

There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. 

We have all encountered books that seemed “addressed to our condition exactly.” Or put another way, that knew us better than we knew ourselves. Books that, as I sometimes put it, throw us in our own faces.

These books not only know us but use that knowledge to push us deeper into life. “The book exists for us perchance,” Thoreau writes,

which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Alexander Pope discussed authors who utter the unutterable in Essay on Criticism:

True wit is nature to advantage dressed;
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed;
Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find
That gives us back the image of our mind.

“True wit” for Pope is clearly articulating human nature rather than indulging in fancy but empty clichés. Thoreau agrees and then goes a step further, contending that human nature probably has been well expressed before. (“There is no new thing under the sun,” as the Ecclesiastes poet puts it.) Extensive reading alerts us that the same questions that disturb, puzzle, and confound us 

have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life. 

Thus Thoreau is a passionate advocate for a classical education, declaring,

For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. 

If such a study is difficult, it’s because it’s worthwhile:

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

With Thoreau’s emphasis on the classics, I think of those conservative culture warriors in the 1990s who accused liberals of destroying western culture by opening up the canon. Setting aside my belief that their fears were overblown—Dante, Homer, and especially Shakespeare continued to be well represented in English curricula—one wonders how committed they really were to open minds. There’s nothing like reading to send us in unexpected directions. As Barack Obama observed in a New York Review of Books interview,

When I think about how I understand my role as citizen…the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy.

I don’t know if those old culture warriors would side with those current thinkers (I wrote about them Tuesday) who accuse liberals of destroying western civilization with their focus on empathy and diversity. If so, Thoreau is with Obama and not with them. From reading the classics, Thoreau writes, “we learn liberality,” which is to say open-mindedness. If we think our own faith tradition has a lock on the truth, reading widely will reveal that someone else has gotten there first. For an example of a closed mind, Thoreau imagines a born-again Christian:

The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience, and is driven as he believes into the silent gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established worship among men.

It’s worth noting that, as the reference to Zoroaster indicates, Thoreau doesn’t limit himself to the western classics. As he writes at one point,

That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.

Thoreau does not draw on the classics to promote conservative causes or authoritarian talking points. His ideal is a person who refuses to mindlessly follow a leader but instead thinks for him or herself. Some of his resonant pronouncements function as American sacred scripture, helping define the republic we aspire to be. Among them are the following:

— The universe is wider than our views of it.
— The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. 
— Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. 
— While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?

Think of the following as a comment on DJT’s reality-tv presidency:

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence,—that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.

How many Americans have consented to be deceived by shows, regarding shams and delusions as soundest truths? Have been swept up by petty fears and petty pleasures? Have built their lives on purely illusory foundations?

And think of how much better off we would be if we made policy decisions based on “realities only.” If “only great and worthy things” guided us. Perhaps music and poetry would indeed resound along the streets.

Yesterday, I talked about a reading exercise in which I required students were to step out of their own minds and into those of readers who saw books differently. Rather than undermining western values, their empathy showed how differences could be bridged and a better society built.

That was also Thoreau’s project and reading was an integral part of it. 

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A Proposal for Book Banning Parents

By Robin Bates | Published: October 6, 2026

Wednesday – Banned Books Week

Fourteen years ago several of my seniors in Theories of the Reader chose to study “book attacks.” This was before Trumpism had given rise to nationally-coordinated attacks on libraries and school curricula by state legislatures, Moms for America, and other groups. Nevertheless, the parental fears that DJT would feast on and exploit were alive and well.

Parents don’t realize that the books they wish to ban often have messages they agree with, including the need for supportive family structures and the importance of a strong sense of self that can resist noxious peer pressure. When I read books to my children, often our conversations (beginning with “what was your favorite part?) gave me insight into their anxieties. If censorious parents would read and discuss the books with their teens, they could figure out together ways of negotiating the issues raised.

Reprinted from Sept. 23, 2012

In their final project for my Theories of the Reader course, my students had to choose a book that became an “event” and figure out why. A number of them chose books that have been at the center of school censorship battles, namely J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and Stephen Chbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallflower. I suspect that I don’t have to describe the first three but Perks, the most recent, is a young adult novel in which high school freshman Charlie, having just lost his best friend to suicide, is trying to negotiate the high school scene. He encounters students experimenting with sex, drugs, and homosexuality, has a crush himself, and finally (like Holden Caulfield) has a mental breakdown. By the end of the novel, however, he has found his balance and is gearing up for sophomore year.

Catcher, Margaret, and Perks regularly appear on “most banned” lists, and Harry Potter has been the target of some well-publicized book burnings by fundamentalist Christians.  For the assignment, the students had to find attack texts that they could analyze, and they went rummaging amongst old reviews, editorials, internet blogs, and other venues. Craig Wixon found a fascinating attack on Perks put out by Parents Against Bad Books In Schools (PABBIS). Evan Roe temporarily subscribed to a sermon service (two weeks free trial membership) so that he could find out why some preachers find Harry Potter objectionable.

Understanding the different points of view proved to be the most challenging part of the assignment. They wanted to jump to the defense of the books, and, while I told them they could do so in their conclusions, they first had to put themselves in the shoes of the attackers.

A common theme emerged. Children are drawn to the books because (1) they are given narratives that help them understand what they are going through; (2) they feel comforted that someone else feels as they do; and (3) they want information about the world. This third desire is not acknowledged enough. Adolescence is a very confusing time, and Salinger, Blume and Chblotsky directly address a number of the murkiest areas. Meanwhile the Harry Potter books, which commence when Harry is entering puberty, give us a dark fantasy version of the travails of adolescence.

Thus, from the point of view of the students, book-banning parents threaten to deprive them of perspectives that help them make sense of the world. They’re not worried about being corrupted; they just want to survive. Girls want to understand why they are having periods that make them feel miserable every month. Boys are trying to handle their own hormonal rushes. Even the most sensitive and sympathetic parents find it hard to their kids while others simply don’t want to. In such instances, a good novel can become a teen’s best friend.

Teachers and school librarians are often on the side of the students. Frequently constrained themselves from talking to the kids about their anxieties and problems (and besides, who has the time?), they see young adult fiction as a ready aid. Furthermore, if you’re an English teacher who wants your students to become excited about reading, you’ll get more of a visceral response from Perks than from Great Expectations. Perhaps you see yourself as a literary drug dealer: if you can get them hooked on the lighter stuff (Perks), they’ll then graduate to the heavier stuff—like, say, that love story about the 13-year-old and the 16-year-old who buck their parents, make out on a balcony, elope, have sex, get caught up in gang violence, and commit suicide.

Parents are a different story. As they see it, they are losing children who once looked up to them and listened to what they had to say. They panic when their adorable little ones suddenly metamorphose into moody teens who are encountering aspects of life that their parents find daunting—like internet chat rooms, sexting, Facebook, and God knows what else.

It’s bad enough that their children are encountering this world. It’s even worse that the school system is assigning—or at least making available—works that talk about the problems. It sets off their suspicion of governmental institutions, already a deep source of anxiety for a significant portion of our population.

Tiffany Dorsey, when researching Catcher in the Rye, came across a fascinating set of interviews with parents who, 40 years earlier, had fought to ban Salinger’s novel. According to Tiffany, many of them now acknowledge that what scared them most is what also scares Holden: they couldn’t be catchers in the rye for their children. They hated the book for showing them their fears.

It was interesting to talk about these parent-school conflicts with Tiffany since she is studying to be a high school English teacher. As a class we asked her what she will do when she encounters irate parents.

Tiffany noted that many teachers self-censor, steering clear of controversial works. From the perspective of the students, however, this condemns them to boring and irrelevant books, not books that speak directly to their living reality (as Romeo and Juliet did in the late 16th century and as Perks does now). If those older works still touch on sore subjects (say, as Huckleberry Finn does), then they may get dropped as well.

Tiffany is African American and wondered how she would teach Huckleberry Finn, given the resistance to it by members of the Black community. She isn’t entirely sure how she herself feels about it. Could she, we wondered, forestall attacks by sending notes home to parents explaining what she was doing? Could she use the controversy as an educational opportunity? I’m interested in hearing from actual high school English teachers on this topic.

My students came to the conclusion that, if a work touches on controversial topics—or if it is taught in a way that highlights controversial topics—then teachers today will run into parental resistance. If they teach “safe” works, or teach potentially unsafe works safely, the parents are satisfied but the students tune out.

In short, we have to figure out how to talk about volatile subjects when we teach literature, both with students and with their parents. Otherwise, what’s the point?

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The Right’s Attacks on Empathy

By Robin Bates | Published: October 5, 2026
Palma il Giovane, Jesus Heals the Paralytic

Tuesday

People have long praised the power of literature to foster empathy, and in my book I explore the radical ways that novels expanded the franchise in the 19th century (see footnote). If one wants a single example, think of the role that Uncle Tom’s Cabin played in the American Civil War. For this reason, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that certain forces on the right are now attacking empathy itself.

At one point I thought that Elon Musk was a sociopathic outlier when he said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.” I didn’t realize that several rightwing books have recently been claiming this, including Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy, Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy, Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy, and Gail Saad’s Suicidal Empathy. In a review of Saad (gift copy) that mentions the other works, Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig says that suicidal empathy

is when otherwise positive impulses are “hijacked and used to make policy decisions that are best tackled via a sober analysis”—a phenomenon that will lead to nothing less than “the collective suicide of the West.”

An influential Catholic bishop in Minnesota has embraced Saad’s book, contrasting suicidal empathy with Christian charity. He argues that “love, far from mandating kindness, can and often should be harsh.” While this may sound acceptable in the abstract, Bruenig says the actual agenda is to make conservatives “resolve their internal conflicts and ignore their consciences.”

“Arguments about the harms of empathy,” she writes, “help justify personal and political behavior that might otherwise seem wrong or feel bad, such as cutting food-stamp benefits for poor people or tearing immigrant mothers away from their children.”

For instance, Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy 

is at pains to reassure her readers that any dissonance they might feel between their religious duties and political interests is a treacherous mirage generated by the left. The goal of “toxic empathy,” she says, is “to get us to suppress our opposition to a particular issue or point of view by playing upon our desire to be a good person.” By this account, liberals are emotionally exploiting feelings of guilt or shame in conservatives to persuade them to support left-wing goals.

For the anti-empathy folk, Western culture is always under dire threat from liberals and immigrants, “through either the great replacement of white Christians or a grand shift in public opinion.” In actuality, the choice of targets in such books boils down to a laundry list of rightwing grievances. What Saad’s ideas mean in practice, Bruenig writes, “is that every time you pay your taxes, sit through a diversity-training session at work, or interact with a disabled employee at the post office, you are witnessing the collapse of the West.”

Rather than an argument for Christian love, Bruenig concludes that Saad and others are providing conservatives with a guidebook for ignoring human suffering. “Love they neighbor” is getting replaced with “might makes right.”

Which is pretty much how Ayn Rand sees the world, which is why her novels resonate so much with people on the right. As I reported in my recent post on end times fascism, it makes sense to me that Howard Roark in The Fountainhead was based on a murderer who was so lacking in empathy that he could cut up a victim and stick her head on her torso to fool her father at the ransom drop-off. 

But Rand at least didn’t claim to be a Christian: she was a staunch atheist when she celebrated self-centered behavior. Rightwing Christians, on the other hand, must tie themselves into moral knots to justify children being torn away from their parents in ICE deportation raids or families being priced out of healthcare.

I promised, in my end times fascism essay, to show how great literature pushes back against the shallow novels that promote Christo-fascism, technofascism, and ethnonationalism, novels that I described as delivering a sugar high. Since all these groups are caught up in their own grandiosity, cutting themselves off from the rest of humanity, I figure that Shakespeare’s King Lear offers a profound antidote.

Lear, whose similarity to Trump I have noted many times (for instance, here), is a narcissist who thinks the world revolves around him. He’s not entirely wrong since, for as long he holds executive power, it does. But because humans can’t do without other people—that’s what empathy is all about—he reaches out for love, subjecting his daughters to a love test. 

That, of course, is not how love works. He learns the hard way that you can’t have love on your own terms.

In the course of the story, we watch his spectacular meltdown as he arrives at this realization. His breakthrough comes when he discovers that real love—opening oneself fully and unconditionally to another—fills his formerly empty existence with real meaning. Everything else fades into insignificance when he and Cordelia are together in prison:

 Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.

The last few hours that he spends with Cordelia mean more to him than all the wealth and power he possessed as king.

This, I would add, is the “kingdom on earth” that Jesus preached. Those rightwing Christians obsessed with people getting benefits they don’t deserve have to ignore any number of Jesus’s parables, including those about the prodigal son and the laborers in the vineyard. 

If one starts with empathy, reasonable social policy can be worked out. Without it, Ayn Rand’s self-absorption will rule the day.

The radical power of literary empathy: “[With Wordsworth] the door had been opened for poets and writers to use the Imagination to step beyond their own narrow class boundaries in ways that would have been, well, unimaginable in earlier times. Through literature authors have entered the lives of the marginalized (Walt Whitman), the urban poor (Charles Dickens), American slaves (Harriet Beecher Stowe), Dorset dairy maids (Thomas Hardy), French coalminers (Emile Zola), Nebraska pioneers (Willa Cather), Harlem residents (Langston Hughes), African American sharecroppers (Jean Toomer), African American homosexuals (James Baldwin), bankrupted Oklahoma farmers (John Steinbeck), Laguna Pueblo war veterans (Leslie Marmon Silko), transplanted Pakistanis (Hanif Kureishi), West Indian immigrants (Zadie Smith), American lesbians (Alison Bechdel), and on and on.”—Robin Bates, Better Living through Literature

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October’s Brimming Coffers, Lavish Dress

By Robin Bates | Published: October 4, 2026

Monday

Here’s a lovely Paul Dunbar poem to welcome in October. It may owe some of its imagery to Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” which also focuses on the season’s “endless fruitfulness.” Both poems include images of brimming over. And just as Keats treats the season as an eternal present, so Dunbar’s October “heedest not how swift the hours fly,/ But smiles and sings her happy life along.” 

I love Dunbar’s account of how the season, with “youthful lavishness,” “spends all her wealth in gaudy dress” and “decks herself in garments bold/ Of scarlet, purple, red, and gold.” Princely fortunes are there for the taking—pearls of early dew—but October is so focused on celebrating this season of plenty that she doesn’t care that all will soon be lost.

Keats is aware that the onset of winter—and his own death—are in the offing. Twittering swallows preparing to migrate announce this fact. Dunbar’s October too knows that “Frost” is stalking her and will soon turn “her auburn locks to gray.” At the moment, however, what matters is that she live her life out joyously, “whole-hearted, happy, careless, and free.” We are told that “not one regret her calm demeanor stirs.”

There is a stillness in the two poems that seems holy, as though both poets are engaged in contemplative prayer. 

October
By Paul Dunbar

October is the treasurer of the year,
    And all the months pay bounty to her store;
The fields and orchards still their tribute bear,
    And fill her brimming coffers more and more
But she, with youthful lavishness,
    Spends all her wealth in gaudy dress,
And decks herself in garments bold
    Of scarlet, purple, red, and gold.

She heedeth not how swift the hours fly,
    But smiles and sings her happy life along;
She only sees above a shining sky;
    She only hears the breezes’ voice in song.
Her garments trail the woodlands through,
    And gather pearls of early dew
That sparkle, till the roguish Sun
    Creeps up and steals them every one.

But what cares she that jewels should be lost,
    When all of Nature’s bounteous wealth is hers?
Though princely fortunes may have been their cost,
    Not one regret her calm demeanor stirs.
Whole-hearted, happy, careless, free,
    She lives her life out joyously,
Nor cares when Frost stalks o’er her way
    And turns her auburn locks to gray.

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The Last Battle: C.S. Lewis on the Afterlife

By Robin Bates | Published: October 3, 2026
Pauline Baynes, illus. from The Last Battle

Sunday

Last week I wrote about End Times Fascism, a recent book examining three rightwing groups rooting for world-ending cataclysm. I was also in a church group discussing apocalyptic scenarios as we looked at C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, where Aslan replays the Book of Revelation as he separates the sheep from the goats. And then there was a grim-face DJT announcing that we are approaching “the final battle” as he strides toward the camera in an ad illegally paid for by the government and shown during Thursday night football. End of the world dramas have always been a way to capture our attention.

Today I focus on Lewis as I believe he is less interested in end times and more on what happens to us after we die. Novelists create narratives to grapple with life’s big questions, and in Last Battle Lewis has everyone die—and I mean everyone—so as to focus on what’s next.

This is what makes Last Battle the most disagreeable of the Narnia Chronicles. We get a taste of what is to come when we watch a tree spirit die. Then we see Narnian horses slaughtered by nihilistic dwafs, followed by the deaths of Jill, Eustace, King Tirian, and Jewel the unicorn (although Lewis softens the blow for young audiences by euphemistically having them thrown into a shed). Lewis follows this up with killing off the entire Narnia universe, Narnians and Calormenes alike, as flood waters rise, the stars plummet, and the sun swallows the moon and goes dark.

Meanwhile, back in our world, a train crash kills Peter, Edmund, Lucy, and their parents.

Since we move quickly to New Narnia, we don’t have to see any dead bodies. The book seems mainly an exercise in imagining the afterlife, with Lewis drawing largely on Plato and Dante while mixing in his own fantasizing. To convey the difference between the old Narnia and the New Narnia, he invokes Plato’s cave dwellers, who think that the shadows they are seeing on the wall are reality. Lewis changes the allegory by bringing in the imagination:

It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia, as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. Perhaps you will get some idea of it, if you think like this. You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among mountains. And in the wall of that room opposite to the window there may have been a looking glass. And as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking glass. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different—deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.

Tennyson fans may recognize images from “The Lady of Shalott” here:

And moving thro’ a mirror clear 
That hangs before her all the year, 
Shadows of the world appear. 

Whereas the Lady, somewhat like Plato, becomes “half-sick of shadows” and wants to see the deeper country directly, for Lewis one can better glimpse this country through the imagination. His mirror, which Plato would consider shadows, is imaginative storytelling. Just as Paradiso is Dante’s attempt to see God’s own country, so Last Battle is Lewis’s.

In Green Worlds of C.S. Lewis, John Gatta stresses that Lewis’s New Narnia is “an intensely material and nature-encompassed realm” and not merely “a state of spiritualized, mental abstraction.” No “disembodied spirits hovering on clouds (and playing harps)” in this afterlife. All of God’s creation, not just humans, figure in Lewis’s vision as his New Narnia abounds “in real mountains, waters, skies, animals, orchards, grass, and flowers.”

Gatta acknowledges that “the transformed materiality in question cannot be equated with our current notions or experience of material substances—just as the body of the resurrected Christ must be distinguished from the body with which he previously walked the Earth.” Every rock and flower and blade of grass look as if they mean more. As Jewel says, “This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.” Then he cries, “Further up and further in” as he goes charging forward.

For Lewis, Gatta writes, the idea of a “sanctified materiality” was grounded in Christianity’s doctrine of the incarnation. And he notes,

In recent years theologians have reflected further on the ways in which God’s taking flesh as a flesh-and-blood temporal creature, described now as “deep incarnation,” has expansive implication not just for humankind but for the whole of God’s creation.

The most compelling image of the afterlife that I have encountered appears not in Lewis but in an author heavily influenced by him. In The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman has an extended reflection on what happens to us after we die, which I lay out in considerable detail here. 

Although Pullman is critical of Lewis, they share an environmental focus. In Spyglass, those who die, after spending time in the arid world of the dead, finally find heaven by mingling with nature. Will and Lyra, reenacting a version of Jesus’s harrowing of hell, free the dead cut by cutting a window to release them. Rather than a window to an ethereal heaven, however, the window is into our material world.

And yet, the world is the way into heaven because it is a stepping fully into God’s creation. When the window opens up, Will, Lyra, and the dead experience our world as “the sweetest thing they had ever seen”:

The night air filled their lungs, fresh and clean and cool; their eyes took in a canopy of dazzling stars, and the shine of water somewhere below, and here and there groves of great trees, as high as castles, dotting the wide savanna.

The dead souls experience heaven on earth:

The first ghosts trembled with hope, and their excitement passed back like a ripple over the long line behind them, young children and aged parents alike looking up and ahead with delight and wonder as the first stars they had seen for centuries shone through into their poor starved eyes.

The first ghost to leave the world of the dead was Roger. He took a step forward, and turned to look back at Lyra, and laughed in surprise as he found himself turning into the night, the starlight, the air…and then he was gone, leaving behind such a vivid little burst of happiness that Will was reminded of the bubbles in a glass of champagne.

The other ghosts followed Rober, and Will and Lyra fell exhausted on the dew-laden grass, every nerve in their bodies blessing the sweetness of the good soil, the night air, the stars.

At the end of the novel, when Will and Lyra discover that they must be parted forever, they draw on what they have witnessed in the harrowing to find a future for themselves. Will promises,

I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again… I’ll be looking for you, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams… And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight…

In my extended post on Pullman, I discuss how not all his souls choose this heaven, preferring instead to remain in the sterile void that is their version of heaven. Lewis does something similar as he too taps into Dante’s Inferno. Those people who think only in terms of the punishing Calormene god Tash rather than the loving lion Aslan get Tash when they die. For their part, the nihilistic dwarves who believe in nothing end up in what seems to them a black hole, even though they are surrounded by New Narnia. As Aslan puts it, 

You see, they will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out. 

In Lewis’s heaven, there is a place for all faiths, including Muslims Tashites. When the Calormene Emeth meets Aslan in the New Narnia, he expects to be killed but learns that all are God’s children: 

But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of Thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. 

As their conversation continues, we realize that Tash is Lewis’s stand-in for Satan:

Then by reason of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him, for I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. 

When Emeth protests, “Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days,” Aslan replies, “Beloved, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.

I find Pullman’s vision of the afterlife more compelling than Lewis’s, where everyone is in their twenties or thirties and dressed in beautiful clothes. (In George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell, everyone in the afterlife gets to choose their age, with the devil cautioning Ana against choosing 17: “Occasionally we have a rage for 17; but it does not last long. Just at present the fashionable age is 40—or say 37; but there are signs of a change. If you were at all good-looking at 27, I should suggest your trying that, and setting a new fashion.”) Joyously mingling with the elements strikes me as more plausible than remaining more or less our outer, earthly selves.

Lewis partially agrees when he admits that imagining the afterlife cannot help but hit a roadblock. Like Dante, who says that his poetry cannot adequately describe Paradiso, Lewis qualifies his vision even as he makes it. The afterlife, he says, is beyond all imagining. Previously you have dwelt in the Shadowlands, Aslan tells the new arrivals, but now “the term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning”:

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Religious studies professor Robin Collins, whose article on “the greatest story argument” I wrote about last Sunday, includes Lewis in his understanding of the Resurrection. If each of us is a unique expression of God’s infinite being within the constraints of our finite life, Collins writes, then that relationship will not end with our bodily demise. Nor will the afterlife be “a static continuation of early existence.” Rather, we will continue to grow, both in relationship with others and with God. We will experience “an eternal deepening of divine participation”:

Each person, reflecting an inexhaustible aspect of God, will continue to manifest and experience divine beauty in ever-greater ways. This view aligns with C. S. Lewis’s conception of the heavenly state, in which each person will eternally know and praise God, communicating some infinite aspect of divine beauty that no other creature can fully express. Since divine beauty is infinite, this process of knowing, praising, and participating in God’s life will never be exhausted. 

And not only each person, Gatta would add, but each aspect of creation. “Yet not a sparrow will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care,” Matthew tells us, while Pullman includes birds, flowers, dragonflies, pine trees, clouds and “those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams.” And then there’s Gerard Manley Hopkins adding dappled things to the list:

Glory be to God for dappled things—
   For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;
       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings…

Elsewhere Hopkins writes that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” In the final chapters of The Last Battle, Lewis seeks to capture the experience of being so caught up in that world that, to borrow from Dylan Thomas, death shall have no dominion.

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Alice Captured My Childhood Anxieties

By Robin Bates | Published: October 2, 2026
John Tenniel, illustrates. from Alice in Wonderland

Friday Memories of Books That Shook My World

When my brothers and I were growing up we had Australian actor Cyril Richard reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland on a set of records. I must have been 10 or 11 when we got the recordings, and I listened to them so many times that to this day I can recite most of the poems, along with large swatches of dialogue.

I still see myself sitting in our Sewanee living room listening to Alice converse with the Cheshire Cat or to the Griffin and the Mock Turtle reminiscing about their school days. Indeed, looking back I find myself identifying with Alice’s sister at the end of the novel after Alice has recounted her dream:

But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her head on her hand, watching the setting sun, and thinking of little Alice and all her wonderful Adventures, till she too began dreaming after a fashion, and this was her dream:—

First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the tiny hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes were looking up into hers—she could hear the very tones of her voice, and see that queer little toss of her head to keep back the wandering hair that would always get into her eyes—and still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her became alive with the strange creatures of her little sister’s dream.

Sentimentalizing children this way, however, doesn’t do justice to Alice’s intense inner life or to the multiple ways that I processed the story. There’s a constant conflict, for instance, in Alice’s desire to please adults and the effects that her actions and words have on the adult figures she encounters. I remember how she irritates the mouse when talking about her cat:

“[S]he is such a nice soft thing to nurse—and she’s such a capital one for catching mice—oh, I beg your pardon!” cried Alice again, for this time the Mouse was bristling all over, and she felt certain it must be really offended.

Her pet comes up again later when she’s addressing the birds and other small animals that have fallen into the pool of tears:

Dinah’s our cat. And she’s such a capital one for catching mice you can’t think! And oh, I wish you could see her after the birds! Why, she’ll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!

As a child negotiating the complex world of adult expectations, I recognized Alice’s passive aggression, of striving to be outwardly innocent while getting little digs in. I’ve written about how my father wanted his children to remain innocent. My mother says that he was enthralled when I was born in 1951, his first child, and I’ve come to realize that I represented for him the innocence that had been stripped from him by his World War II experiences, especially witnessing Dachau three days after it was liberated.

Later in life he used to tell me that there is nothing as bad as “the desecration of innocence,” and some deep part of me, from the beginning, made me think that I needed to hold on to my innocence so that I wouldn’t disappoint him. This wasn’t easy. Sometimes it meant putting on an act, not cussing (even though all the boys around me cussed), not talking about sex, and pretending not to like rock and roll (although I secretly loved the Beatles).

The origins of my father’s longing can be traced back to the Victorians, who made a fetish of childhood innocence. Children were supposed to offset the horrors of industrialization and laissez-faire capitalism, as a glance at Charles Dickens’s child victims makes clear. My father’s parents had the full Dickens collection and he grew up immersed in Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, Oliver Twist, Smike in Nicholas Nickleby, Sissy Jupe in Hard Times, Jo in Bleak House, Florence Dombey, and Amy Dorrit. 

His mother, meanwhile—who was born in 1885 in Barton, England–was sweet, kind, and as close to Victorian innocence as any adult I have ever known. Granny dressed my father in Fauntleroy velvet with lace collars as a boy, wouldn’t let him say, “Jeepers,” and complained about the bad language in Tom Sawyer. Later in life, I shocked her by playing Simon and Garfunkel on her record player. But because I loved her, I would also watch the Lawrence Welk Show with her as though I enjoyed it.

As the youngest of three boys, my father tried to stay with the program for the longest time. He finally rebelled when he was drafted and, upon returning, shocked the family with his drinking, smoking, and having voted for Roosevelt. Nevertheless, childhood innocence remained important to him, which I understood in a deep way and worked to oblige. 

As does Alice, who is earnest and works hard to be good. At one point we are told that 

sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself…

She also makes a good faith effort to memorize the godawful moralistic poetry that adults are constantly requiring her to publicly recite. Unconsciously, however, she subverts the moral lessons with some of English literature’s greatest parodies. Note, for instance, what she does with “How Doth the Little Busy Bee,” in which Isaac Watts draws the following lesson from industrious bees:

In works of labor or of skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.

In books, or work, or healthful play,
Let my first years be passed,
That I may give for every day
Some good account at last.

The bee becomes a crocodile in Alice’s version:

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
    How neatly spread his claws,
And welcome little fishes in
    With gently smiling jaws!

We see here the fear of being swallowed up by an adult agenda.

Then there is her rebellion against sage advice from elders. Few remember the original to “You Are Old, Father William,” where a young man queries his father about his calm demeanor in the face of impending death. Robert Southey’s poem ends as follows:

I am cheerful, young man, Father William replied,
    Let the cause thy attention engage;
In the days of my youth I remembered my God!
    And He hath not forgotten my age.

Here’s Alice:

I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”
    Said his father; “don’t give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
    Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!

The crocodile and the father may carry out the violence but, in a reversal common in children’s literature (think Green Eggs and Ham), Alice fantasizes occupying the power position and turning the tables on her tormentors.

It’s noteworthy how often violence is mentioned in the book. In addition to the aforementioned examples, there’s the Duchess shaking the baby after each verse of the “lullaby” she sings to him:

Speak roughly to your little boy,
    And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
    Because he knows it teases.

The ultimate example, of course, is the Red Queen ordering decapitations. Strong angry women were plentiful in my world, especially my sixth-grade teacher, who called me a sissy. Perhaps, for both Carroll and myself, the queen triggered emasculation anxieties.

Most terrifying to me, however, was the final scene in which the cards rise up and attack Alice. It occurs because, for the first time in the novel, rather than attempting to assuage grownups or apologize for her words, Alice takes the gloves off. No longer an angelic child, she calls B.S. on the adult world:

“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
“I won’t!” said Alice.
“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
“Who cares for you?” said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time). “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

I found nightmarish how the cards’ assault her, perfectly captured in John Tenniel’s illustration:

At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off…

Then, blessedly, it turns out all to have been a dream:

… and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.

Why was I so frightened? Perhaps the scene captured my fear that, if I ever ceased playing along with adult agendas, I would unleash an uncontrollable anger. 

As background, I should note that my family feared anger, tiptoeing around it. (Anger always looms largest when we pretend it’s not there.) As much as I tried to be accommodating, not only with my father’s desire that I remain innocent but with my mother’s desire to dress me up as a cute little boy (with bowtie and suit jacket), some deep part of me resented it. 

Carroll himself may be panicking over how Alice Liddell is growing up, a panic that is even more evident when Alice, as pawn, becomes a queen herself in Alice through the Looking-Glass. That book ends with him expressing sorrow at the end of innocence:

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

In short, I loved the Alice books because I related to how she seeks to please adults while secretly rebelling. In spite of the repressed anger, she remains innocent through it all. It was a balancing act that could not last but I found comfort in it at the time.

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The Novels That Promote End Times Fascism

By Robin Bates | Published: September 30, 2026

Thursday

Recently I listened to Chris Hayes interview Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor about their book End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, where they contend that three groups have joined forces in their efforts to end the world as we know it: Christian extremists, technofascists, and ethnonationalists. These factions, as an NPR review put it “have come together around their shared conviction that they are part of an elite destined to survive the coming apocalypse.”

I write about the work here because novels—bad novels but novels nonetheless—have played a role in each of these movements. But let’s first look at the phenomenon.

While Messianic movements predicting the end of the world have been with us forever, Klein and Taylor argue that it’s different this time. That’s because “our world is more dangerous than their world: its weapons deadlier, its technologies vastly more potent, its media more connected, its climate more unstable, its concentrated wealth more global in reach than at any point in human history.”

Christo-fascists, known as dispensationalists, endorse Israel taking over the entire Holy Land as a precondition for the Rapture. As an article in Christianity Today explained it,

Until Messiah’s coming God’s earthly people must suffer Gentile domination, prophesied by Daniel. This Gentile hegemony would end at the coming of Messiah, 70 weeks after one of the Gentile rulers issues a decree allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem to repair its broken walls. But when the Jews rejected Jesus as their Messiah, God suspended the prophetic timetable at the end of Daniel’s sixty-ninth week and began building a new and heavenly people—the church.

Dispensationalists were overjoyed when Donald Trump moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which he may in fact have done to curry favor with them.

For their part, technofascists believe they can build bunkers on Earth or flee to Mars or the moon. Better yet, once liberal democracy bites the dust, they can step in and pick up the pieces. For them, AI destroying us all is a consummation devoutly to be wished since coding is a world they understand.

Finally, ethnonationalists see the white race as doomed unless it stops mass migration, which indeed becomes more of an issue every day as climate change leads to ever more extreme weather events.

I haven’t read End Times Fascism yet and so don’t know if the authors talk about overlap. For instance, Palantir’s Peter Thiel talks like a Christo-fascist when it comes to the Antichrist like a Christo-fascist while Tesla and Starlink’s Elon Musk is a white nationalist in addition to being a tech bro. It appears that Musk saw the millions of African deaths caused by DOGE terminating USAID and (temporarily) the Ebola program as a desired result. Nevertheless, identifying the three strands is useful given that each plays a distinctive role in the modern GOP.

The novels I’ve identified all view their protagonists as misunderstood victims who triumph over their tormentors in satisfying ways (or, in Camp of Saints, die as proud, self-righteous martyrs). In the Left Behind novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (I draw here from a previous post), the victims are potential born-again Christians who have been left behind when the Rapture begins. A group calling itself “the Tribulation Force” grapples with the Antichrist, who runs the United Nations, in preparation for the time when the Messiah will return and separate the sheep from the goats. Here’s a member of the Force encountering Jesus:

“Again, Rayford slid to the ground, raising his arms. “My Lord and my God, I am so unworthy.”
“And you, Rayford, who once were alienated and an enemy in your mind by wicked works, yet now I have reconciled the body of My flesh through death to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in God’s sight.” 
“Unworthy! Unworthy!” Rayford cried.
“Justified by faith,” Jesus said, “Justified.” 

The Left Behind plot is similar to many of the conspiracy theories in which MAGA believes, complete with fiendish liberal conspiracies to brainwash and murder the populace. Perhaps this explains why they have sold over 65 million copies and have been read by many more. According to Wikipedia,

multiple books in the series have been on the New York Times best-seller list. Starting in 2000, Books 7 and 8 reached number one on the list followed by book 10, which debuted at number one…. Seven titles in the adult series have reached #1 on the bestseller lists for the New York Times, USA Today and Publishers Weekly.

Failing to distinguish fact from fiction is a theme in several noteworthy novels, including Don Quixote, Northanger Abbey, and Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. And these were all written before AI’s unnerving ability to mimic reality. 

The Bible of the tech bros has long been Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, with Rand’s Fountainhead as runner-up. The title of the first gives away the fantasy: if the billionaires, who are supposedly holding up the world, ever shrugged off their responsibility, our comfortable lives would end and we would be sorry. That’s what happens when various corporation heads, including multi-millionaire John Galt, go to war with the regulatory state. Without their entrepreneurial spirit, society collapses, at which point they return to build a new world on the ruins. It will not, of course, be a republic but a society in which they call the shots. 

The novel is an exercise in libertarian thinking that indulges various infantile fantasies, including that people can make it on their own without help from anyone and that entrepreneurs are not properly appreciated.

I hadn’t fully realized the role that Fountainhead has played in rightwing thinking until reading a fascinating essay by Thom Hartmann. Howard Roark is a visionary architect, one who walks to the beat of his own drummer and who dynamites one of his own buildings rather than allow people to change it. According to Hartmann, Rand based Roark on kidnapper/murderer William Edward Hickman, who perpetrated “the crime of the century” in 1927. The man kidnapped a millionaire’s daughter, strangled her, cut her into pieces, and then “set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.”

While the country was horrified, Ayn Rand was inspired by the “unfeeling, unpitying selfishness.” The unrepentant Hickman, Hartmann writes, would go on to inspire Fountainhead, Rand’s philosophy, and her life’s work:

In Hickman, Ayn Rand wrote that she had finally found the new model of the Superman (her phrase, likely borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche). Only a worldview held by a man like Hickman, she believed, could ever prevent an all-powerful state from traumatizing another generation of small businesspeople and their children as the Bolsheviks had her family.

And:

Hickman’s words, as recounted by Rand in her Journals, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else—even above friends, family, or nation—the result would be utopian.

She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were, “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”

About Roark, meanwhile, Rand wrote, “One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself. Fine!” And also that her protagonist

has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”

To contrast Fountainhead with a great novel, one in which the protagonist also channels Nietzsche’s Übermensch, look at Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov also thinks he can rise above good and evil, only to learn that his conscience and his heart have other plans for him. Contrasting him with Roark makes instantly clear just how much of a cardboard figure the architect is.

That, however, didn’t keep Rand from becoming the darling of conservative libertarianism. In 2017 the Guardian listed many of the public figures identifying themselves as Rand acolytes, including Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, Ronald Reagan, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (who used to give copies of Atlas Shrugged to his staff members), Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, libertarian Congressman Ron Paul, and Trump’s CIA director Mike Pompeo.  Apple’s Steve Jobs, meanwhile, saw Atlas Shrugged as one of his “guides in life,” and Thiel and Musk include it amongst their favorite novels. Oh, and Fountainhead is the only novel on Shark Tank Mark Cuban’s list of his ten favorite books.

Given this, we shouldn’t be surprised at what Thiel and Musk have had to say about ethics. Here’s Thiel, perhaps himself channeling Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil as he muses,

If you’re evil, you’re at least competent. And if you’re evil, you’re not bad. And therefore, maybe you’re actually kind of good because you’re at least getting something done.

Here’s Elon Musk on empathy:

 The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.

So yes, they find a kindred spirit in Rand.

I’ve written about Camp of Saints (1973) before (here) so I’ll just cite Huffington Post’s summary, starting with the response to the third world hoards streaming towards the West:

The French government eventually gives the order to repel the armada by force, but by then the military has lost the will to fight. Troops battle among themselves as the Indians stream on shore, trampling to death the left-wing radicals who came to welcome them. Poor black and brown people literally overrun Western civilization. Chinese people pour into Russia; the queen of England is forced to marry her son to a Pakistani woman; the mayor of New York must house an African-American family at Gracie Mansion. Raspail’s rogue heroes, the defenders of white Christian supremacy, attempt to defend their civilization with guns blazing but are killed in the process.

And now, sure enough, there’s a Muslim in Gracie Mansion. And before him, there was an African American.

Camp of Saint “terribly impressed” Ronald Reagan when as president he was given a copy by the head of France’s Intelligence Services. Trump advisor Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, chief architect of Trump’s draconian deportation policies, are fans. 

I’ll write a post next week on how great literature pushes back against such shallow narratives. Many of our finest works affirm life and the dignity of humanity, not one-dimensional, suicidal fascism. Klein and Taylor point to one of these messages in their book’s conclusion:  “We mortals are one another’s salvation.”

In the meantime, however, we can appreciate just how powerful fiction can be, even (or perhaps especially) bad fiction. Vegetables may make for better health but sugar gives us an instant dopamine high.

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When Threatened, Power Elites Go Ballistic

By Robin Bates | Published: September 29, 2026
Indian-Canadian author Rohinton Mistry

Wednesday

Years ago political commentator David Frum said something that has stuck with me, coming as it did from a former George W. Bush speechwriter. “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism,” he observed. “They will reject democracy.”

My once easy belief that, whatever their differences, Democrats and Republicans alike believe in the democratic project has been seriously challenged by Trumpism’s all-out assault on our republic. While writing recently about Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, set in India in the middle decades of the 20th century, I noted the lengths to which people will go when they encounter threats to their power. In that case we see India’s Brahmin class brutalizing the untouchables when they fail to show “proper” obeisance. This I compared to the way southern whites brutalized African Americans during the same period.

I’m at the point in the book where, thanks to Indian independence, the untouchables have earned the right to vote. Or so Indian law decrees. In actuality, they either vote the way those in power want or all hell breaks loose. When Narayam insists on marking his own ballot, he and two friends are seized and their thumbs are forced to the ink pad so that their registrations are completed. Then they are taken away, hung naked by their ankles from the branches of a banyan tree, and flogged mercilessly. 

Thakur Dharamsi, who has ordered the punishment, keeps his children inside that day so that they don’t see what is happening. He also keeps the news quiet so that the election commission won’t intervene and countermand the results. What follows is even worse:

In the evening, after the ballot boxes were taken away, burning coals were held to the three men’s genitals, then stuffed into their mouths. Their screams were heard through the village until their lips and tongues melted away. The still silent bodies were taken down from the tree. When they began to stir, the ropes were transferred from their ankles to their necks, and the three were hanged. The bodies were displayed in the village square.

Because the three might represent a nascent longing for independence, the horror continues:

Thakur Dharamsi’s goondas, freed now from their election duties, were turned loose upon the lower castes. “I want those achoot jatix to learn a lesson,” he said, distributing liquor to his men before their next assignment. “I want it to be like the old days, when there was respect and discipline and order in our society…”

The goondas began working their way towards the untouchable quarter. They beat up individuals at random in the streets, stripped some women, raped others, burned a few huts. News of the rampage spread. People hid, waiting for the storm to blow over.

The final victims are Narayam’s family. Because his father, a tanner, broke with tradition and had his sons trained as tailors, he, his wife, and Narayam’s children must pay. After all, it was Narayam’s independence as a tailor that gave him the impression that he could vote as he chose. The family are bound and shown Narayam’s corpse, after which the house is burned down:

The sound of grief soon mingled with the family death agony; the house was set alight. The first flames licked at the bound flesh. The dry winds, furiously fanning the fire, showed the only spark of mercy during this night. The glaze swiftly enfolded all six of them.

Are Americans in the 21st century (or, for that matter, Indians) still capable of such horrific violence? It’s hard to imagine so. Then again, it was hard to imagine hundreds of people swarming the U.S. Capitol intending to kill or kidnap the vice president and members of Congress. Before 2025 it was hard to imagine thousands of people being dragged off American streets, deposited in cages, and shipped off to concentration camps abroad. It was hard to imagine ICE agents casually shooting unresisting people, some of them America citizens or immigrants with valid work permits. A failure of imagination meant that many, from Joe Biden on down, failed to take preventative measures.

The question before us, then, is the length to which Republicans will go to maintain power. A recent Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll found that most of them support having federal officials take custody of voting machines or ballots after Election Day; sending National Guard troops to polling places to monitor the election; having the military take custody of voting machines or ballots after Election Day; and sending ICE agents to polling places.

The good news is that most Americans, by significant margins, oppose these measures. Furthermore, Democrats and Independents are working overtime to imagine the worst that could happen and figure out ways to counter it. It helps that DJT’s approval numbers are at an all-time low, that even some of his supporters are turning against him, and that his incompetence sometimes offsets his malevolence. It’s not clear that he could successfully declare a national emergency if he tried or that Speaker Mike Johnson, in a blue wave election, could declare fraud and refuse to seat newly elected Democrats.

In my lifetime, however, teens have been lynched, civil rights activists shot, and Sunday School children blown up in states adjacent to mine. Until recently, my Tennessee county had an active KKK. Mistry helps us imagine what entitled people are capable of when they feel threatened.

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