While I had planned an Earth Day-related post for today, it will have to wait until next week because of how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is using Jesus to justify our attack on Iran. I know what John Milton would say.
Let’s first survey how Hegseth is invoking Christianity. Back on March 15, several members of the military (11 Christians, one Muslim, one Jew) complained that Hegseth regards the attack as a holy war with End Times ramifications. As one non-commissioned officer reported in an email, Hegseth
urged us to tell our troops that this was “all part of God’s divine plan” and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He said that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
More recently, Hegseth compared journalists exposing the war’s failures to the Pharisees who complained about Jesus healing a man on the Sabbath:
“The Pharisees — the so-called and self-appointed elites of their time — they were there to witness, to write everything down, to report,” the Defense chief continued. “But … even though they witnessed a literal miracle, it didn’t matter. They were only there to explain away the goodness in pursuit of their agenda.”
I guess this means that Trump and Hegseth are like the unappreciated Jesus.
Finally there was Hegseth citing the Book of Pulp Fiction in a prayer delivered at the Pentagon. The occasion was the rescue of the downed aviator, with “Sandy” being the call sign that aircraft use in rescue missions:
The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men,” Hegseth prayed. “Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee, and amen.”
In Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino has Samuel Jackson cite Ezekiel 25:17 prior to murdering a man. “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them,” he thunders.
This post wouldn’t be complete without the comparisons that televangelist Paula White-Cain has been making between Trump and Jesus, including this one on April 1:
“Jesus taught so many lessons through His death, burial and resurrection. He showed us great leadership, great transformation requires great sacrifice. And Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life,” she said.
“You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us. But it didn’t end there for Him, and it didn’t end there for you,” she continued.
“God always had a plan. On the third day, He rose, He defeated evil, He conquered death, Hell and the grave. And because He rose, we all know that we can rise. And, sir, because of His resurrection, you rose up. Because He was victorious, you were victorious.”
Perhaps it was such language that prompted Trump to tweet out an image of himself as Jesus healing the sick. If his longtime spiritual advisor and member of his Faith Office sees the resemblance, why doesn’t everyone?
In response to people who abuse the word of God in these ways, Milton cites Matthew 7:15-16, where Jesus predicts that there will be “false prophets” who try to deceive people in his name:
“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they?
In one of Paradise Lost’s angriest passages, Milton also refers to these false prophets as wolves. The archangel Michael, foretelling the future so that Adam will understand the arc of history, tells him what will happen once Jesus’s apostles are no longer around to spread the message. He specifically has in mind authorities in the church establishment but the words apply equally well to anyone who appropriates “the Spirit of God” in joining “the sacred mysteries of Heaven” with “secular power”:
Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous wolves, Who all the sacred mysteries of Heaven To their own vile advantages shall turn Of lucre and ambition… Then shall they seek to avail themselves of names, Places, and titles, and with these to join Secular power; though feigning still to act By spiritual, to themselves appropriating The Spirit of God…
These wolves will ultimately be judged, Milton predicts, and then he too draws on the Ezekiel sentiment:
Truth shall retire Bestuck with slanderous darts, and works of faith Rarely be found: So shall the world go on, To good malignant, to bad men benign; Under her own weight groaning; till the day Appear of respiration to the just, And vengeance to the wicked…
In other words, Hegseth will not be the instrument of God’s vengeance, as he so deliciously fantasizes, but the target.
All this talk of vengeance, however, misses Jesus’s point entirely. As Jesus understood and as Milton demonstrates in his depiction of Satan, we make our own hells. “Me miserable! Which way shall I fly/ Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?/ Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell,” laments the rebel angel.” Elsewhere, realizing that the adrenaline rush that accompanies destruction hollows out the soul, Satan acknowledges, “For only in destroying I find ease/ To my relentless thoughts.”
Hegseth is thoroughly enmeshed in his own mental turmoil although he appears to lack Satan’s self-awareness. Like those who crucified Jesus, he knows not what he does.
Today I look back at the year following what C.S. Lewis calls “the second death,” which is the death of the grieving. As I noted in a previous post, the intensity of my grief over Justin was a means of keeping him present so that diminishing emotions felt like losing him a second time. One should never say to the bereaved that “things will get better” because, in addition to its being a trite cliché, it also fails to acknowledge that those grieving may not want things to get better. The resumption of daily routine after I had been living at a knife edge of perception felt like a surrender to something lesser.
Thankfully, 19-year-old Darien helped shake me out of this state. A year after the death, as we were traveling to Iowa to visit family, Darien exploded as I was talking about Justin, berating me for what he felt had become an obsession. Now Darien, like Toby, had taken Justin’s death very hard, although he dealt with it in his own way. He had a cross and the date tattooed on his ankle—the only tattoo any of us have—and the day after Justin’s death he went swimming in the spot where Justin had drowned (he didn’t tell us) so that the river wouldn’t have power over him. But now, as was only right, he was ready to step into the future and saw me as trying to drag everyone back. And because I had vowed to put family first—to wield Beowulf’s giant sword in the face of troll grief—I heard the message and started the process of letting go.
I did the same for our youngest. For my sabbatical year I had planned to apply for a third Fulbright to Slovenia, but Toby, who had a very strong friend group and was entering his senior year of high school, declared very firmly that he would stay behind if we went. Again I declared to myself that family comes first and that Toby deserved to get what he wanted. I would spend most of my sabbatical year at home working on my book while watching him have what proved to be a stellar senior year. (He starred in soccer and lacrosse, bonded deeply with his friends, had a fun girlfriend, and made a smart and very funny film that entranced his high school.)
There were other ways that the death would continue to dwell with me, however. At the end of the previous year I had received the college’s Teacher of the Year award—the award rotates between Teaching, Scholarship, and Service and I received it for Service—and while my service record was in fact stellar, part of me wondered whether it was a sympathy award. I resolved, as I was thanking the College and my colleagues, that I would make sure there were no doubts. To prove myself worthy—to prove to myself and everyone else that I was “of use” (as John Irving puts it in Cider House Rules)—I took on far too much when I returned from sabbatical.
I’ll tell that story in next week’s post but, for the moment, I note that intense service was already a family characteristic. Both my parents gave their lives to the Sewanee community and I married a woman who had community commitment branded into her by her Moravian upbringing. In other words, the tendency was already there. Justin’s death just pushed it to 11.
Fortunately, however, my sabbatical gave me another year of reprieve, and I threw myself into my book. I would look at nine canonical British works, examining how each addresses a specific life issue. Written more as self-help than scholarship, it would be accessible to a general audience, drawing on my skills as a journalist. Each chapter would contain a plot summary and recommended resources, along with five or six exercises. It took me seven years to write and, as it turned out, never saw the light of day as the financial crisis of 2008 prompted the publisher to rescind his offer.
Here’s what was to have been its table of contents:
Better Living through Beowulf: How the Early British Classics Can Guide You beyond Terrorism Fears, Relationship Anxieties, Consumer Emptiness, Racial Tension, Political Cynicism, and Other Contemporary Challenges
Introduction: Harnessing the Power of Literature Chapter 1 – ANGER & FEAR Using Beowulf to Subdue Your Inner Demons and Find a Lasting Peace Chapter 2 – DEATH Using Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Transform Your Fear of Dying into a Deep Joy Chapter 3 – MARRIAGE Using Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to Save Your Relationship Chapter 4 – SOUL Using Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to Escape Your Private Hell Chapter 5 – GENDER Using William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to Discover Alternate Selves Chapter 6 – RACE & CLASS Using Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko to Negotiate Difficult Friendships Chapter 7 – INJUSTICE Using Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and “Modest Proposal” to Keep Fighting the Good Fight Chapter 8 – BEAUTY Using Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock to Reach beyond Star Worship and Touch the Star Within Chapter 9 – COURTSHIP Using Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Find Your Soul Mate Bibliography
To provide a sense of the book’s exercises, here are a couple. The first draws from Doctor Faustus:
Reflection Exercise – Facing Death When you are dying or know someone who is dying—or even if you know someone with a heightened fear of death—keep an eye out for the following (very common) Faustus behaviors. Acknowledging and examining the behaviors will not necessarily make the fears go away. With awareness, however, comes the possibility of spiritual breakthrough. 1. Resorting to shallow distractions Is there some version of carousing with colleagues and fantasizing about Helen of Troy? 2. Wallowing in regret, guilt, and self-recrimination Is there unhealthy regret and an obsessive fixation on opportunities squandered? (“Wretch, what hast thou done! Damned art thou, Faustus, damned; despair and die.”) 3. Complaining about helplessness Is there despair about being helpless, a Faustus blaming the devil for his inability to repent and find peace? 4. Lashing out against others Are there attacks against others, even those (like the old man) who offer a healing perspective? Are those who seem to have come to terms with death seen as an implicit reproof? 5. Bargaining with death Is the individual, like Faustus, prepared to say and do anything to avoid facing up to the inevitable?
The second applies to Pride and Prejudice:
Bad reasons for getting married As the dream of marriage or committed partnership involves honoring the deepest part of ourselves, we sell ourselves short when we settle for a superficial or compromised relationship. The romance story turns sour for anyone who wants a relationship but won’t undergo the necessary self-transformation. Thus, when seeking a partner, it is good to first ask yourself what your motivations are and how committed you are to the process. Pride and Prejudice presents us with a number of dubious reasons for getting married. They include Security – Charlotte Lucas and George Wickham want someone to support them and will marry virtually anyone with money (Collins, Mary King); Vanity and a desire for power – Caroline Bingley is driven by the dream of becoming mistress of a great estate while Mrs. Bennet vicariously pursues the same dream through her daughters; Custom – Collins marries because Lady Catherine de Bourgh expects her rector to be married. Miss de Bourgh, similarly under the sway of Lady Catherine, might also feel pressured by custom; Sexual desire – Mr. Bennet, to his everlasting regret, has married a once pretty face, and Lydia is attracted to anyone in a soldier’s uniform. Lydia needs marriage if she is to follow her inclinations legally.
As I look back at the book, I’m somewhat relieved it was never published. It always felt vaguely inauthentic as I never entirely bought the self-help genre. After all, how many people sit down with a proposed exercise and follow it? Meanwhile, my intentionally flippant title (it’s an allusion to Dupont’s “Better Living through Chemistry” slogan) seemed to clash at times with my seriousness.
And then there’s the fact that people use literature for lots of different things, many unpredictable. My book, I came to realize, was too prescriptive and too pat. Better to approach literature as my blog does, which cites endless instances of literature impacting lives with no definitive conclusions drawn. The title works better in that case, capturing the playfulness of literature even as it acknowledges its seriousness.
In my book’s defense, however, I was desperately looking for ways to make literature relevant to society at large—we humanities teachers have been in a defensive crouch for a while now–which means that a wrong turn or two were to be expected. Furthermore, writing it supercharged my teaching, providing me with new tools and perspectives with which to engage my students. To cite one instance, it allowed me to encourage an older student to use Pride and Prejudice as a marriage manual.
Ashley was in the process of escaping from a controlling husband who didn’t want her taking college classes, and the novel provided her a forum in which to explore her life options. A courtship novel, she said, is just what she needed given that she had started dating again. Furthermore, realizing that literature could function as a life guide, Ashley would go on to write a senior project for me about three novels by Margaret Atwood, who she said had “saved her life.” You can read about her inspiring story here.
Returning to my sabbatical year, I see how writing the book also helped me deal with the second death. Three of the chapters—the ones on Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Doctor Faustus—deal directly with death, and all are about using crisis to turn one’s life around.
To complete the year, I took a trip to Barcelona to visit the college’s former guitar teacher, Gustavo Thiem, a very spiritual man who had known Justin and who brought his funeral service to a powerful and fitting close by playing “Brahm’s Lullaby.” (I still see him sitting on the steps leading up to the altar.) Although he had been performing with orchestras all over the United States, Gustavo had left that behind to return to Catalonia to take care of his father, stricken with Alzheimer’s, and was remaking his career there. In turn, he introduced me to a close friend, a Franciscan monk, who gave me the best spiritual guidance I received about Justin’s death. The man noted that young people are often in intense spiritual search—he said he loves that about young people his age—and that Justin’s search was no less meaningful for having been cut short. As we walked around Barcelona, I recognized Justin in his words and felt the full force of the life that Justin had actually lived.
I then went on to Slovenia, reconnecting with friends, former students, and colleagues and visiting places that Justin had loved. And then returned to see Toby graduate from high school. Life was set to continue on.
My faculty study group has been discussing Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, a play about a pious but corrupt judge that I’ve never fully appreciated until now. When I think of the rot that has overtaken MAGA Christians, along with the cynical religiosity of its political leaders, it seems all too timely.
The sanctimonious Angelo believes that Vienna’s strict morality laws apply to others but not to himself. He is in charge because his brother the Duke, realizing he has been too lax in his enforcement of these laws, takes a leave of absence.
Angelo’s first act is to condemn to death one Claudio for premarital sex with Juliet. Now, the two of them are fully intending to get married—they have just not yet completed all the legal technicalities—but that matters not the least to Angelo. In his eyes, fornication is fornication.
Claudio’s sister Isabella, a devout woman intent on becoming a nun, goes to Angelo to plead for a pardon. While she doesn’t disagree with the seriousness of the offense, she asks that justice be tempered with mercy. In response, the smitten Angelo makes her a Trumpian offer: her brother’s freedom for her body (although these days Trump demands money in return for his pardons).
Shocked at such a proposition from a supposedly moral man, Isabella—after rejecting the offer—seeks consolation from her brother. He, however, surprises and unsettles her by urging her to accept the offer. After all, he’s about the die. Only the intervention of the Duke, who has been secretly monitoring his brother in the disguise of a friar, brings about a happy ending.
So who are our Angelos? Well, we’ve got a lot of them in the GOP these days. There’s Pete Hegseth, a Christian fundamentalist who has been trying to bring back the Crusades: a Guardian profile reveals that on his arm is tattooed “Deus Vult” (God Wills It), which Crusaders in 1095 chanted as they followed Pope Urbana’s call to reconquer the Holy Land from the infidels. Hegseth “has promised to give ‘no quarter’ to the ‘barbaric savages’ of the Iranian regime and called on the American people to pray for victory ‘in the name of Jesus Christ.’” Claiming that the war is divinely sanctioned and that “Jesus has the final say over all of it,” he has been invoking Matthew 10:
If our Lord is sovereign even over the sparrow’s fallings, you can be assured that he is sovereign over everything else that falls in this world, including Tomahawk and Minuteman missiles …
Like Angelo, however, Hegseth’s personal life has failed to live up to his supposed Christian beliefs:
He was elevated to leadership roles at two different advocacy groups for veterans only to be forced out over what the New Yorker called “serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct”. Twice divorced due to reported infidelity, he is now raising seven children with his third wife, whom he married in 2019. He paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of rape in 2017, though he denies the allegation.
Then there’s Vice President J.D. Vance, who has been proudly proclaiming his conversion to Catholicism, only to criticize the pope for quoting Jesus’s views on war (“Blessed be the peacemakers”). “I think it’s very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance opined. For the vice-president, “theology” means not opposing the things that Trump does.
Trump, meanwhile, has angered even conservative Catholics, first by posting an image of himself as the pope and then, most recently, of himself as Jesus Christ. In one way, however, it makes sense that he would do so as many Christian evangelicals have been seeing him as, if not the messiah, at least as a version of the Persian king Cyrus, who freed the Israelites held captive in Babylon. If your devoted Christian followers are proclaiming you as Christianity’s best and last hope, it’s understandable why you might think of yourself as Jesus.
When I compare these figures to Angelo, I hasten to add (with my eldest son’s critique that such comparisons elevate the real life counterparts) that Angelo is a deeper figure than any of these. That’s because, in private soliloquies, he admits to having qualms. He knows that Isabella is devout and pure but still wants to defile her. In fact, he wishes to defile her because she is pure:
What, do I love her, That I desire to hear her speak again, And feast upon her eyes? What is’t I dream on? O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint, With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous Is that temptation that doth goad us on To sin in loving virtue…
I can’t imagine Hegseth, Vance, or Trump experiencing such inner doubts.
The somewhat naïve Isabella—I’d compare her to the Trump-disillusioned Marjorie Taylor Greene except that Isabella is far superior—fails to pick up on Angelo’s broad hints and initially believes him to be acting out of higher principle. Greene too once believed in Trump, only to be shocked by his threat to obliterate Iran:
Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness. I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.
Greene has accused Trump of “blasphemy” for depicting himself as Christ. Nor is she the only MAGA Christian to do so.
Isabella, when she finally realizes what Angelo wants, is similarly horrified and threatens to expose him. At this point, he plays the card that abuse victims know all too well:
Who will believe thee, Isabel? My unsoil’d name, the austereness of my life, My vouch against you, and my place i’ the state, Will so your accusation overweigh, That you shall stifle in your own report And smell of calumny.
She will pay a price if she goes public, not he.
Interestingly, when she reports the corrupt proposal to her brother, expecting him to back her up, she is similarly horrified to discover that he wants her to take the deal: what is her virtue to his life? We can perhaps put him in the category of those Trump Christians who are willing to excuse immorality if it gives them what they want although, in Claudio’s defense, he’s under far greater pressure than they are.
Fortunately for Claudio and Isabella, the Duke has witnessed all that has happened. While I suppose he could just reveal himself, expose Angelo’s perfidy, pardon Claudio, and set everything right, what would be the fun of that? Instead, he engages in some trickery. The woman who gives her body to Angelo under cover of darkness is not Isabella but Mariana, a woman to whom Angelo was once betrothed but then jilted. Then we learn how little a tyrant’s word is worth: despite having slept (he thinks) with Isabella, Angelo goes back on his bargain and condemns Claudio to death anyway.
To use the framing of authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder, Isabella would have gained nothing from surrendering in advance.
In the end, Shakespeare assures us that justice will prevail. The Duke steps forth, pardons Claudio, and condemns Angelo to death. (Mariana and Isabella plead for his life, however, so he too is pardoned and marries Mariana.) The Duke, meanwhile, marries Isabella and presumably they live happily ever after.
Given how accustomed we have gotten to corrupt officials escaping accountability, I find Angelo getting exposed more satisfying than the marriages.
Further note: I’ve blogged once in the past on a passage in Measure for Measure that only too well describes Trump and Hegseth, who think that their access to military might gives them the right to do anything. It is when Isabella calls out Angelo:
O, it is excellent To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant.
Given how often 19th century poets have played critical roles in the modern liberation movements of various eastern European countries, I’m not surprised to learn that a Hungarian poet played a role in Sunday’s election. In the past, I’ve blogged about Ukraine’s Tara Shevchenko, Belarus’s Vincent Dunin-Martsinkevich, and Slovenia’s France Prešeren, Today’s post is given over Sándor Petőfi, whose poem “National Song (Rise Up Magyar)” provided Péter Magyar with the following stanza as he campaigned against Viktor Orbán.
Beautiful again shall be Hungary’s name Worthy of its ancient fame What centuries past have smeared with blight We shall wash off and set aright. We swear by God we shall be free No longer sons of slavery.
Given the Orbán regime’s staggering level of corruption—“smeared with blight”–the vision of washing off and setting aright resonated deeply with the Hungarian people. They were determined no longer to be the sons and daughters of authoritarian slavery.
Petőfi was a lyrical poet who turned to political poetry in 1848, when revolutions were sweeping through Europe. According to Wikipedia, Petőfi “read the poem aloud on 15 March on the steps of the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest to a gathering crowd, who by the end were chanting the refrain as they began to march around the city, seizing the presses, liberating political prisoners, and declaring the end of Austrian rule.”
Although the revolution would ultimately prove to be defeated by the combined forces of the Austrian and Russian empires, the revolution “initiated a chain of events that led to the autonomy of Hungary within the new Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867.”
Think of the joy Hungarians are currently feeling, not to mention friends of democracy around the world, as you read Petőfi’s poem, translated by Kőrőssy László. “Magyar” essentially means Hungarian, Hungary’s dominant ethnic group:
National Song (Rise Up, Magyar) By Sándor Petőfi
Rise up, Magyar, the homeland calls! The time is here, now or never! Shall we be slaves or free? This is the question, choose your answer! – Bythe God of the Hungarians We vow, We vow, that we won’t be slaves any longer!
We were slaves up til now, Damned are our ancestors, Who lived and died free, Cannot rest in a slave land. By the God of the Hungarians We vow, We vow, that we won’t be slaves any longer!
Useless villain of a man, Who now, if need be, doesn’t dare to die, Who values his pathetic life greater Than the honor of his homeland. By the God of the Hungarians We vow, We vow, that we won’t be slaves any longer!
The sword shines brighter than the chain, Decorates better the arm, And we still wore chains! Return now, our old sword! By the God of the Hungarians We vow, We vow, that we won’t be slaves any longer!
The Magyar name will be great again, Worthy of its old, great honor; Which the centuries smeared on it, We will wash away the shame! By the God of the Hungarians We vow, We vow, that we won’t be slaves any longer!
Where our grave mounds lie, Our grandchildren will kneel, And with blessing prayer, Recite our sainted names. By the God of the Hungarians We vow, We vow, that we won’t be slaves any longer!
Julia and I live by a small lake, which means that, when we eat our suppers on our screen porch these days, we get to hear a full-throated frog chorus, both spring peepers and bullfrogs. Thinking of how the Modern Major General in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance boasts of knowing “the croaking chorus from The Frogs of Aristophanes,” I decided to check out the play.
It turns out that there are relatively few lines in the frog chorus, so the MMG doesn’t have much to boast about. It could also be that he himself is like one of the frogs, croaking out a meaningless list accomplishments that have nothing to do with effective military leadership. In the play, the frogs of Hades are pestering the Greek god Dionysus as he travels to the underworld. His mission is to free one of the great Greek tragedians, either Euripides or Aeschylus, since Greek theater has declined since their deaths.
I’m not clear what thematic role the frogs play or why the play is called The Frogs. Maybe they represent the babble of the modern theater. Emily Dickinson’s frog comes to mind:
I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there’s a pair of us! Dont tell! they’d banish us – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell your name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!
Whatever they represent, their incessant chirping—sound without substance–drives Dionysus crazy. Here they are:
Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax! Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax! We children of the fountain and the lake Let us wake Our full choir-shout, as the flutes are ringing out, Our symphony of clear-voiced song. The song we used to love in the Marshland up above, In praise of DIOnysus to produce, Of Nysaean DIOnysus, son of Zeus, When the revel-tipsy throng, all crapulous and gay, To our precinct reeled along on the holy Pitcher day. Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.
When Dionysus complains, “Hang you, and your ko-axing too! There’s nothing but ko-ax with you,” the annoying frogs reply:
That is right, Mr. Busybody, right! For the Muses of the lyre love us well; And hornfoot Pan who plays on the pipe his jocund lays; And Apollo, Harper bright, in our Chorus takes delight For the strong reed’s sake which I grow within my lake To be girdled in his lyre’s deep shell. Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.
When Dionysus prays for them to “give o’er, sing no more,” the frogs takes this as a challenges to grow louder:
Ah, no! ah, no! Loud and louder our chant must flow. Sing if ever ye sang of yore, When in sunny and glorious days Through the rushes and marsh-flags springing On we swept, in the joy of singing Myriad-divine roundelays. Or when fleeing the storm, we went Down to the depths, and our choral song Wildly raised to a loud and long Bubble-bursting accompaniment.
Finally Dionysus concludes that, if he can’t beat them, he’ll join them, so that both parties are croaking by the end of the scene:
DIO. Go, hang yourselves; for what care I? FR. All the same we’ll shout and cry, Stretching all our throats with song, Shouting, crying, all day long. FR. and DIO. Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax.
Unlike the Greek god, Julia and I enjoy the frogs. In fact, we’ll miss them later in the summer when the katydids drown everything out, from frogs to coyotes. At the moment, however, the frogs capture our excitement over the warm spring nights and the tree foliage bursting out all over.
Hungarians turning out to defeat Viktor Orbán yesterday is hugely consequential, not only for Hungary but for Europe and the world. As commentator Ron Filipowski of MeidasTouch puts it, “Orban has done everything possible to prevent the EU from assisting Ukraine in their struggle against Russian barbarians. The big winners are Magyar, the Hungarian people, Zelensky/Ukraine and all of freedom-loving Europe.” Given how American fascists have been attempting to use the Orbán playbook, it’s good news for us as well.
To celebrate, I share a set of poems by the extraordinary Octavia Butler. In her depiction of a dystopian America in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, she has a religion of hope. Its sacred text is Earthseed: The Books of the Living, in which we learn (among other things) why countries choose authoritarian rulers. Earthseed also instructs us in how to push back.
While I’ve read Butler’s novels, I owe to Maria Popova’s Marginalian blog the particular poems that I cite here.
As Butler sees it, change is both inevitable (“God is change,” Earthseed observes) and unsettling. When one looks at the momentous changes that have occurred in the United States over the past 50 years—starting with the Civil Rights movement and including all the other “woke” movements (feminism, LGBTQ+, Native American, Latino, AAPI, immigrant, and neurodiversity rights)—perhaps it was inevitable that we should experience reactionary blowback. Octavia’s formulation helps explain why Hungary kept electing Orbán and why America elected Donald Trump twice:
When apparent stability disintegrates, As it must — God is Change — People tend to give in To fear and depression, To need and greed. When no influence is strong enough To unify people They divide. They struggle, One against one, Group against group, For survival, position, power. They remember old hates and generate new ones, They create chaos and nurture it. They kill and kill and kill, Until they are exhausted and destroyed, Until they are conquered by outside forces, Or until one of them becomes A leader Most will follow, Or a tyrant Most fear.
Hungary temporarily lost the vision that prompted it to break free from the Soviet Union, and America has lost sight of its founding ideals. When vision fails, Earthseed declares, emotion takes over:
When vision fails Direction is lost.
When direction is lost Purpose may be forgotten.
When purpose is forgotten Emotion rules alone.
When emotion rules alone, Destruction… destruction.
The decent Joe Biden tried to appeal to our better angels but a number of factors—including post-pandemic inflation (which impacted all the world) and his own declining health—did him in. Although he had gotten the economy back on track by the end of his four years, Earthseed has an explanation as to why a plurality of American voters would hasten America’s decline by turning to Trump:
Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers.
Earthseed then provides, with blinding clarity, what Hungarians and Americans have been experiencing:
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.
So how to respond? Earthseed tells us what the moment demands of us. Hungarians rose to the occasion and, increasingly, Americans are doing so as well:
Are you Earthseed? Do you believe? Belief will not save you. Only actions Guided and shaped By belief and knowledge Will save you. Belief Initiates and guides action — Or it does nothing.
Hungary has shown us that authoritarians can be stopped. That should inject a shot of adrenaline into the No Kings and other anti-Trumpism movements.
William McKeachie alerted me to this lovely Easter poem by the Welsh poet and Anglican priest R.S. Thomas. It puts me in mind of the poetry of George Herbert in that the speaker has doubts, even though the night of Good Friday has given way to the twilight of Easter. Why twilight rather than dawn? Perhaps because, even after the resurrection, there are still problems—new problems—that need to be sorted out. I assume the problem that “towers immovable before us” is that of death, despite Jesus’s reassurance.
The speaker mentions spending a long time “on my knees in a cold chancel,” which sounds like the dark night of the soul. As Herbert describes such moments,
“As good go anywhere,” they [my bent thoughts] say, “As to benumb Both knees and heart, in crying night and day, Come, come, my God, O come! But no hearing.”
Along these lines, I love Thomas’s image of passing
our hands over their surface like blind men feeling for the mechanism that will swing them aside.
Yet from our kneeling in prayer, as Herbert too testifies, something marvelous can happen. A stone is rolled from the mind as the old questions become yesterday’s news. The speaker seeing them lying “folded and in a place by themselves” is a reference to Peter seeing “the linen wrappings lying there.” The answer has come after all.
The Answer By R. S. Thomas
Not darkness but twilight In which even the best of minds must make its way now. And slowly the questions occur, vague but formidable for all that. We pass our hands over their surface like blind men feeling for the mechanism that will swing them aside. They yield, but only to reform as new problems; and one does not even do that but towers immovable before us
Is there no way of other thought of answering its challenge? There is an anticipation of it to the point of dying. There have been times when, after long on my knees in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled from my mind, and I have looked in and seen the old questions lie folded and in a place by themselves, like the piled graveclothes of love’s risen body.
Tobias Wilson-Bates, English, Georgia Gwinnett College
Friday
Last week I applied Walter Shandy’s theory of names to my eldest son. According to the protagonist’s father in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, your name determines your destiny, and I found that somewhat to be the case with Darien.
So how about my second son, Toby, who it so happens is a fan of Tristram Shandy? Looking back, I think I named Toby after Uncle Toby in Sterne’s novel, although perhaps I also had in mind Tobias Smollett, the 18th century Scottish novelist and my dissertation subject. I also have long been enamored of the story of young Tobias and the three angels from Tobit, the most fairytale-like book in the Bible. Names are often overdetermined in this fashion.
As I mention Sterne’s Uncle Toby and the Scottish novelist, I hear Toby’s voice: “So Dad, you named me after a character who may have been rendered impotent by a groin wound from the 1695 siege of Namur and who, to recover from his PTSD, becomes obsessed with constructing a miniature model of the fortified city?! And also after a novelist who was so cranky that Sterne nicknamed him Dr. Smelfungus?! What kind of destiny does that set me up for?”
In my defense, however, my major association with Sterne’s Uncle Toby is his kindness, and my Toby is one of the kindest people I know. He evinces such interest in other people, even those with opposite political views, that they come away feeling respected and heard. Here’s Tristram’s description of his uncle:
My uncle Toby was a man patient of injuries;—not from want of courage,—I have told you in a former chapter, “that he was a man of courage:”—And will add here, that where just occasions presented, or called it forth,—I know no man under whose arm I would have sooner taken shelter;… he was of a peaceful, placid nature,—no jarring element in it,—all was mixed up so kindly within him; my uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly.
Tristram isn’t kidding about the fly:
—Go—says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which had buzzed about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time,—and which after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him;—I’ll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going across the room, with the fly in his hand,——I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head:—Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;—go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?——This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.
Tristram talks about the influence:
I was but ten years old when this happened….I often think that I owe one half of my philanthropy to that one accidental impression.
Along with his kindness, my Toby also has an affinity for children (he is finely attuned to the individual personalities of each of his four kids) and for small animals. I mention the latter because the Biblical Tobias, when he goes off with the angels, has an unexpected companion: “So they went forth both, and the young man’s dog with them.” (This strange throwaway detail has delighted at least one novelist although it’s driving me crazy that I can’t remember who. If you know, please write.)
Tobias, incidentally, is Hebrew for “God is good.” When we visited the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, I purchased for my Toby a Francesco Botticini print of Tobias and his angel companions.
For all his kindness, it cannot have been easy for Toby to grow up in the shadow of his two older brothers, who were both straight A students and standout athletes. Toby was far quieter and, unlike Justin and Darien, excelled only in the subjects that caught his attention (like English). His standout qualities were less flashy, and it took a professional-level coach to notice that, when Toby played soccer fullback, no one scored on his side of the field. Even when he was in elementary school, he would amaze the family by his psychological insights into human behavior. I later recall a moment—I think he was a high school junior—when I gave him Beowulf (he wanted to read something I assigned my students) and saw him detect power dynamics that I myself had missed. As a sophomore in college, he once decided he would read every major literary epic and proceeded to immerse himself in Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Beowulf, Orlando Furioso, The Fairy Queene, Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Leaves of Grass, and The Waste Land. (He would write his senior thesis on the last three.)For much of his childhood and adolescence, Toby flew under the radar.
To make sure he didn’t fly under mine, I made sure that we did special things together, including ice cream after soccer and lacrosse games and nightly reading. Also, once a year, I’d pull him out of school and we’d spend the day together, often watching a movie or visiting a park.
Toby and Justin were very close and Justin’s death devastated him. He once reported—I believe when visiting Justin’s grave—of experiencing in a visceral way Justin’s presence, feeling goose pimples all over although the weather was warm and there was no breeze. I don’t believe he was just fantasizing this—he’s too honest about his feelings to do that—and I find it interesting that he is now writing about Victorian ghost stories (including Dickens’s Christmas Carol).
Toby connects ghost stories with time travel literature, the subject of his dissertation, and he recently texted me about how the interest dates back to Justin. He was at home alone when news started to circulate that Justin had drowned and, when the phone began to ring, he started “telling stories that I thought were probably true.” To this day, he says, he has “never stopped having dreams, from then to now, where he talks to me about that very concept. He tells me that they never found him and that he’s been living on the other side of the river.”
Toby adds that this is, in some ways, “the philosophical basis for my entire approach to the idea of a time machine.” In his dissertation Toby wrote about Frankenstein, David Copperfield, Alice in Wonderland, Williams Morris’s News to Nowhere, Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent, and H.G. Wells’s Time Machine, all of which explore different aspects of time, and he says that reading a work that takes one back in time is a form of time travel. As he puts it, it’s a sort of “intentional acceptance of the alienation that happens when we accept the provisional reality of a mediated experience.” In such instances, he believes, narrative “becomes every bit as load bearing as concrete or electricity.”
If I understand this correctly, the fact that Toby’s own experience with death was initially mediated, not only through invented narrative but through a machine (the telephone)–and that there was a time disjunction (Justin alive in the narrative dimension, dead in the physical one)–led Toby to his time machine focus at the University of California at Davis. In Toby’s vision, H.G. Wells’s time machine is only one form that time travel takes, and one can also see the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott as time machines. Of course Christmas Carol also features time travel.
Toby once told me that his favorite Wordsworth poem is “We Are Seven,” which at first surprised me as I’ve never taken it all that seriously. I was deeply moved, however, when I saw it in light of Toby’s experience. After all, it explores the the collision of two different realities. Narrative is indeed “load bearing” for the child:
We Are Seven By William Wordsworth
A simple child, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death?
I met a little cottage girl: She was eight years old, she said; Her hair was thick with many a curl That clustered round her head.
She had a rustic, woodland air, And she was wildly clad; Her eyes were fair, and very fair; — Her beauty made me glad.
“Sisters and brothers, little maid, How many may you be?” “How many? Seven in all,” she said, And wondering looked at me.
“And where are they? I pray you tell.” She answered, “Seven are we; And two of us at Conway dwell, And two are gone to sea.
“Two of us in the churchyard lie, My sister and my brother; And in the churchyard cottage, I Dwell near them with my mother.”
“You say that two at Conway dwell, And two are gone to sea, Yet ye are seven! — I pray you tell, Sweet maid, how this may be.”
Then did the little maid reply, “Seven boys and girls are we; Two of us in the churchyard lie, Beneath the churchyard tree.”
“You run about, my little maid, Your limbs they are alive; If two are in the churchyard laid, Then ye are only five.”
“Their graves are green, they may be seen,” The little maid replied, “Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door, And they are side by side.
“My stockings there I often knit, My kerchief there I hem; And there upon the ground I sit, And sing a song to them.
“And often after sunset, sir, When it is light and fair, I take my little porringer, And eat my supper there.
“The first that died was sister Jane; In bed she moaning lay, Till God released her of her pain; And then she went away.
“So in the churchyard she was laid; And, when the grass was dry, Together round her grave we played, My brother John and I.
“And when the ground was white with snow, And I could run and slide, My brother John was forced to go, And he lies by her side.”
“How many are you, then,” said I, “If they two are in heaven?” Quick was the little maid’s reply, “O master! we are seven.”
“But they are dead; those two are dead! Their spirits are in heaven!” ‘T was throwing words away; for still The little maid would have her will, And say, “Nay, we are seven!”
Toby’s interest in the intersection between machines and narrative helped land him a post-doctoral fellowship at Georgia Tech, where he got along well with his engineering students. He also did some work in the robotics lab, and he understands A-I better than anyone I know. Toby is currently completing a book on time travel literature that, among other things, looks at how conceptions of time changed in the course of the 19th century. His research has somehow plunged him into the origins of calculus, and he only half-jokingly says that, to truly understand Newton, one must read Paradise Lost.
While all this was going on, Toby also married Candice, a Trinidadian woman who teaches Film Studies at the University of North Georgia. Toby himself teaches at Georgia Gwinnett College and they have three girls and a boy. As I mentioned last week, he also maintains weekly contact with his brother Darien and they are currently reading together TheBrothers Karamazov, my own all-time favorite novel. Toby’s latest observation, texted to me yesterday, was filled with his characteristic humor:
Doctor Herzenstube showing up and not understanding anything is one of the funniest reoccurring bits in Karamazov. It’s like a Marx Brothers’ punchline. He always shows up at the end of a scene where there’s been a dangerous sickness or a seizure and then the narrator describes how respected and venerable he is. And every time he says, “I don’t understand,” and the scene ends.
While I don’t think Toby carefully ushers flies out of the house, he remains the kind and thoughtful human being he was as a child. Tragedy, marriage, and fatherhood have only deepened him.
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the following Great Gatsby passage applied to DJT but it’s always worth revisiting:
I couldn’t forgive [Tom] or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made …
Political commentator Ben Rhodes has a great summation of the latest mess, which our president is desperately trying to retreat from:
In the best-case scenario, Trump struck a deal to reopen a Strait that was open before the pointless war he started, with [Iran] demonstrating its control over the Strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief. Thousands of innocents—including hundreds of children—dead in Lebanon and Iran for no reason. U.S. troops killed and wounded. U.S. embassies and bases in the Middle East badly damaged. U.S. standing in the world obliterated. U.S. munitions badly depleted. Hundreds of billions spent. Prices up everywhere. More global economic fallout to come. Putin strengthened and enriched. Just a catastrophic situation even in the best of circumstances. A profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.
In Fitzgerald’s novel, Tom’s infidelity sets off a chain of events that results in three deaths. Daisy has accidentally run down Myrtle, Tom’s lover, after her own fling with Gatsby is ending. Tom then lies to Myrtle’s husband George, telling him that Gatsby did it. (“He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car,” he tells Nick, prompting Nick to observe, “There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.”) Tom’s lie prompts George to shoot Gatsby and then himself.
At the inquest, there are no ramifications for the Buchanans as Daisy’s sister Catherine tells her own set of lies:
When Michaelis’s testimony at the inquest brought to light Wilson’s suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade—but Catherine, who might have said anything, didn’t say a word. She showed a surprising amount of character about it too—looked at the coroner with determined eyes under that corrected brow of hers, and swore that her sister had never seen Gatsby, that her sister was completely happy with her husband, that her sister had been into no mischief whatever. She convinced herself of it, and cried into her handkerchief, as if the very suggestion was more than she could endure. So Wilson was reduced to a man “deranged by grief” in order that the case might remain in its simplest form. And it rested there.
Think of Catherine as those Fox News pundits, who are currently attempting to turn Trump’s acceptance of Iran’s 10-point-plan into a victory. Examples:
Laura Ingraham: It looks like Trump ultimately hits the home run here, takes it to the brink. Iran blinks. Matt Towery: When will the Democrats and some Republicans ever learn that the rhetoric he uses is done for a reason. And it works.
The reality, of course, is that Trump’s entire life has consisted of creating messes that others have tried to clean up, from when his father bailed him out of bankruptcies to the Supreme Court letting him off the hook for his January 6 coup attempt. Whether he has found the offramp he is frantically looking for remains to be seen.
Returning to the book, it’s no surprise to discover that Tom Buchanan, like Trump, is also a white supremacist. Those in positions of privilege, whether class or race, are capable of inflicting immense damage when their preeminence is threatened:
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—”
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
And a little later:
“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”
Cocooned in their privilege and sense of superiority, such men are convinced that only their own needs matter. If a civilization has to be destroyed to salvage one’s ego, then it must be destroyed. As Nick puts it, talking with Tom feels like “talking to a child.”
One other Gatsby passage comes to mind after reading a fascinating article by John Gray in The Statesman. Gray says that “Trump seems driven by an impulse to reimagine the past and reassert American – and his own – greatness,” and then adds, “When an infantile fantasy of omnipotence comes up against unyielding realities, the response is inchoate rage.” That rage, in the words of former Trump supporter Alex Jones, is making him sound “like an unhinged super villain from a Marvel comic movie.”
Fitzgerald understands what’s going on. “So we beat on,” he writes in his famous last sentence, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The beating on is particularly frightening when the party has access to nuclear weapons.
